Ed Morrissey (over at HotAir) interviewed a business owner about something that was hidden in the Obama-Care (Leftist-Care) bill that passed that will kill jobs and limit growth of the small business person:
Yesterday, I spent a little time at a local pizzeria to find out more about the impact of the new federal menu mandate in the real world. Davanni’s has 21 locations throughout the Twin Cities, a smaller, local chain that suddenly must now comply with this federal requirement to publish the caloric content of each of its menu items on all of its printed presentations. However, these restaurants have a problem when they offer their customers a wide range and high number of options — as most pizzerias do. Ken Schelper, a Vice President of Davanni’s, sat down with me yesterday to explain just how costly this new mandate is, and how difficult compliance will be:
Not only does this new health bill effectively put another layer of mandatory layers onto the business man at his personal expense, but this new layer doesn’t work, like Obama-Care:
….But when the researchers checked receipts afterward, they found that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect, in July 2008.
The findings, to be published Tuesday in the online version of the journal Health Affairs come amid the spreading popularity of calorie-counting proposals as a way to improve public health across the country….
And what is the most important thing for an economy to boom? JOBS! Another hidden tax (cost to the small business owner) was in the bill as well, which affects jobs:
Self-styled “investigative journalist” James O’Keefe has released his latest undercover project. He took a hidden camera into a meeting of the New Jersey Education Association, and heard some pretty astounding things. Check out the video below the fold (WARNING: explicit and vulgar content).
What a difference seven months — and an election — makes! Joe Manchin told Chris Wallace on yesterday’s Fox News Sunday that he would have voted against ObamaCare if he had taken the time to read the bill before casting a vote. A year ago, though, Manchin was cheerleading its passage, telling people that no bill is ever perfect but that the time had come to pass this particular government grab of authority. Did he bother to read the bill first before giving that advice, or was Manchin just acting as a rhetorical rubber stamp for Obama? The Daily Caller reports on the flip-flop:
In the final days before the midterm elections, Democratic Senate candidate and West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin doubled down on his opposition to parts of the health care law, legislation he supported when it was being debated in Congress last spring.
Manchin said on “Fox News Sunday” that he would not have supported the bill if he had been made aware of everything that was in it at the time. While he still fully supports “the concept” of the health care overhaul, he called the final product “overreaching,” citing the new tax mandate on businesses and the lack of protection against government-subsidized abortions.
“Knowing that, I would not have supported that or voted for that at that time,” he said.
Manchin added that he still supports parts of the bill that halt insurance companies from discriminating against customers with pre-existing conditions and the ability for young people to stay on their parents’ health care plan until they are 26-years-old.
“There’s a lot of good parts to it,” he added. “Why don’t we fix what’s wrong with it and make it better?”
Here’s Manchin a year ago, giving the argument that we needed to pass a bill that he apparently never bothered to read:
This is just a bit from a Gateway Pundit post that should infuriate the voter! The Democrats typically view politics as with the same fervor as a religious fundamentalist. Giving up their “religious” power is not in their pervue… they will cheat, steal, and destroy to get their way. As Gateway points out in Maricopa County GOP Website Alleges Massive Voter Fraud in Arizona and Colorado:
Yuma County is located in Arizona’s 7th District. Currently, far left Arizona boycotter Rep. Raul Grijalva is caught in a tight race with Republican rocket scientist Ruth McClung. A few thousand votes could change the outcome of the race between the popular rocket scientist Ruth McClung and the socialist boycotter Raul Grijalva.
Today Russell Peirce the Maricopa County GOP alleged that massive voter fraud is being waged by leftist groups in Arizona and Colorado. The Maricopa County GOP website reported:
Friends,
There has been an accusation that 65% of 5000 voter registration forms, submitted by Mi Familia Vota and One Vote Arizona, in Yuma County on the last day of filling are invalid due to the registrant not being a citizen, wrong/invalid address, false signature, etc. I also understand that these 2 groups have signed up 20,000 states wide and they have requested that 45,000 be put on the permanent early ballot. If 65% of these last minute registration forms in Yuma are invalid, which may be more as they are still checking the rest, then what is the percentages of invalid in Maricopa, Pima and other counties.
A new study warns that a value-added tax would kill 850,000 jobs in a year and cut retail spending by $2.5 trillion over 10 years. Sounds too bad for Washington to pass up.
An analysis for the National Retail Federation by Ernst & Young finds that adding a VAT to the U.S. tax system would reduce GDP for years, causing the loss of “850,000 jobs in the first year,” plus “700,000 fewer jobs 10 years later.”
If you are not aware of what the Value Added tax is (VAT), Dick Army explains it a bit:
….“But, I always believed that when the Democrats got the majority in both the House and the Senate – and I’ve told this to people for years – when they get the House and the Senate and the White House, they’re going to add a Value Added Tax to the existing income tax,” said Armey.
“It’s not going to be a VAT instead of – it’s in addition to, and, of course, they are doing exactly what I predicted. Why? Because they’ve got gluttonous spending habits, and they want to spend more, and they need to raise money to do it, and they can’t raise the money out in front of God and everybody for the taxpayer to recognize what they’re doing,” he said.
“So they are looking at that best instrument to hide the tax from the taxpayer. And that’s why the VAT tax is attractive. The VAT tax has never been attractive to anybody except tax leviers,” Armey added.
The VAT is a general sales tax added to the price of goods and services at each step of production whenever value is added to those goods and services. According to the Tax Policy Center, the VAT was first imposed by France in 1948 and then by the European Community (EC) in 1968. To date, over 100 countries impose some form of a VAT except Australia and the United States.
…(read more)…
VAT is a good idea (flat tax is the best) if you abolish the income and state taxes all-together. But the Democrats want to add this tax ON TO the already existing tax matrix, thus, hurting the poor the most. Charles Krauthammer has been saying almost immediately after liberal-care (Obama-care) passed. Here is his article on the issue:
…We are now $8 trillion in debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects that another $12 trillion will be added over the next decade. Obamacare, when stripped of its budgetary gimmicks — the unfunded $200 billion–plus doctor fix, the double-counting of Medicare cuts, the ten-six sleight-of-hand (counting ten years of revenue and only six years of outflows) — is, at minimum, a $2 trillion new entitlement.
It will vastly increase the debt. But even if it were deficit-neutral, Obamacare would still pre-empt and appropriate for itself the best and easiest means of reducing the existing deficit. Obamacare’s $500 billion of Medicare cuts and $600 billion in tax hikes are no longer available for deficit reduction. They are siphoned off for the new entitlement of insuring the uninsured.
This is fiscally disastrous because, as President Obama himself explained last year in unveiling his grand transformational policies, our unsustainable fiscal path requires control of entitlement spending, the most ruinous of which is out-of-control health-care costs.
[….]
What will it recommend? What can it recommend? Sure, Social Security can be trimmed by raising the retirement age, introducing means testing, and changing the indexing formula from wage growth to price inflation.
But this won’t be nearly enough. As Obama has repeatedly insisted, the real money is in health-care costs — which are now locked in place by the new Obamacare mandates.
That’s where the value-added tax comes in. For the politician, it has the virtue of expediency: People are used to sales taxes, and this one produces a river of revenue. Every 1 percent of VAT would yield up to $1 trillion a decade (depending on what you exclude — if you exempt food, for example, the yield would be more like $900 billion).
It’s the ultimate cash cow. Obama will need it. By introducing universal health care, he has pulled off the largest expansion of the welfare state in four decades. And the most expensive. Which is why all of the European Union has the VAT. Huge VATs. Germany: 19 percent. France and Italy: 20 percent. Most of Scandinavia: 25 percent.
[….]
Ultimately, even that won’t be enough. As the population ages and health care becomes increasingly expensive, the only way to avoid fiscal ruin (as Britain, for example, has discovered) is health-care rationing.
It will take a while to break the American populace to that idea. In the meantime, get ready for the VAT. Or start fighting it.
NewsBusters comments on the article by Maureen Dowd’s ad hominem attack two-weeks before voting commences:
…The architect of this truly bizarre neo-feminism, Ms. Maureen Dowd, proudly wrote in her October 17 column, “We are in the era of Republican Mean Girls, grown-up versions of those teenage tormentors who would steal your boyfriend, spray-paint your locker and, just for good measure, spread rumors that you were pregnant”:
These women — Jan, Meg, Carly, Sharron, Linda, Michele, Queen Bee Sarah and sweet wannabe Christine — have co-opted and ratcheted up the disgust with the status quo that originally buoyed Barack Obama. Whether they’re mistreating the help or belittling the president’s manhood, making snide comments about a rival’s hair or ripping an opponent for spending money on a men’s fashion show, the Mean Girls have replaced Hope with Spite and Cool with Cold. They are the ideal nihilistic cheerleaders for an angry electorate.
For the record, that’s Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, California senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina, Nevada senatorial candidate Sharron Angle, Connecticut senatorial candidate Linda McMahon, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and Delaware senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell.
There was a time when America’s feminists would have celebrated and cheered such successful women entering politics and standing up to male rivals.
When the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute’s “Pretty in Mink” calendar was released, you had a torrent of visceral hatred from the left start in earnest. Here is some commentary on this event:
(get your 2011 calendar)
The ladies are “sexy loudmouth whores” according to a blogger. Another claims the calendar is “an attempt to make erections lean to the right.” The women, they complain, “aren’t even remotely attractive.”
Some insist the calendar women aren’t actually women at all, but are in reality men in drag. Others say they’re not even people. One blogger says the ladies “look like cyborgs trying their best human impersonation.” Another calls them “mutts.”
Still another finds it incredible and “offensive” that “even one person would want to look at all these [expletive] for twelve straight months.”
[….]
The overall consensus in the left-wing blogosphere? The calendar is “weird,” “creepy,” “pathetic,” “disturbing,” “repulsive,” “revolting,” “terrifying” and “tacky as sin.” Many simply can’t understand how it wasn’t a “joke.”
An interesting list from 2009 shows how Maureen Dowd conveniently forgets the history of ad hominem attack against women. Most were against conservative women!
Playboy magazine writer Guy Cimbalo released his list of top ten conservative women against whom he’d like to commit violent sexual acts last June. Calling these acts a “hate f—” in his “So Right It’s Wrong” article, Cimbalo explained that he “might despise everything” about women like Michelle Malkin, Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, “The View’s” Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Mary Katherine Ham and Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann, “but g–dammit, they’re hot!”
Cimbalo listed the physical attributes of each woman along with short explanations of why a self-respecting liberal male shouldn’t be attracted to them. A “hate-f— rating,” presumably to tell others just how good the sex would be, accompanied each listing as well.
Hasselbeck was described as “the clean-cut American sweetheart who elicits our filthiest thoughts.” Cimbalo labeled Bachmann the “lusty congresswoman from the Twin Cities who’s got some great twins of her own.”
As for the rating each woman received, they ranged from “chemical castration would begin to sound more appealing” to “you get this one pregnant, she stays pregnant.”
Cimbalo’s list was a disgusting example of low the media will stoop to malign conservative women. And it caused such a firestorm that Playboy removed it from its Web site.
2. Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi Uses Graphic Sexual Language to Discredit Michelle Malkin and the Tea Party Movement
In a Tax Day 2009 blog post, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi claimed “he really enjoying this whole teabag thing” and that “it’s really inspiring some excellent daydreaming.”
Taibbi let his readers in on the nature of his daydreams that involve conservative pundit Michelle Malkin in incredibly vulgar ways.
“[T]his move of hers to spearhead the teabag movement really adds an element to her writing that wasn’t there before,” he wrote. “Now when I read her stuff, I imagine her narrating her text, book-on-tape style, with a big, hairy, set of b—- in her mouth. It vastly improves her prose.”
Nothing brings out liberals’ inner juvenile thug like an outspoken conservative woman.
3. U.S News and World Report’s Bonnie Erbe Takes Issue with Playboy List – Except for Inclusion of Michelle Malkin
It’s bad enough that liberal men don’t hesitate to speak of women in offensive, sexualized terms, but it’s beyond outrageous when a woman claims they deserved it.
But that’s just what U.S. News and World Report’s Bonnie Erbe did in the wake of the Playboy “hate f—” list.
“I’m also a firm believer in supporting all members of my gender when attacked due to their gender. I am supporting these women herewith,” Erbe maintained before noting that her “support” carried limits.
Erbe continued, “I also want to note that at least one woman on the list is so venom-spewing, she unfortunately invites venom to be shot back at her: Michelle Malkin. Her posts and her ‘routine’ are so venomous and predictable in fact, I stopped paying attention to her years ago.”
Malkin struck back at Erbe and explained the true meaning behind Erbe’s words.
“Translation: It’s not okay to talk about “hatef**king” conservative women…unless they are rowdy, incivil conservative women who don’t behave nicely enough to be on my obscure PBS show,” wrote Malkin. “In which case, they deserve all the vulgar misogynist attacks they get!”
4. Keith Olbermann Compares Michelle Malkin to a ‘Mashed-Up Bag of Meat With Lipstick on it”
MSNBC personalities reserve a special level of vitriol for conservative woman, and none more so than Keith Olbermann.
Olbermann compared Michelle Malkin to a “big, mashed up bag of meat with lipstick on it” during his Oct. 13 “Countdown” show because he believed she encouraged death threats made to a woman who posted a video of singing their praises to President Barack Obama.
“She received death threats and hate-filled voicemails all thanks to the total mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk fascistic hatred, without with Michelle Malkin would just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it,” Olbermann stated.
Olbermann’s comments were deemed offensive enough to warrant a response from editor Megan Carpentier, an editor at liberal and now-defunct Air America Radio.
“A liberal, progressive critique of Malkin need not and should not resort to an attack on her looks or her gender or rely on silly stereotypes or imagery that brings to mind victims of domestic violence,” wrote Carpentier.
You know Olbermann went too far when even liberals are calling him out on his remarks.
5. Comedian Chuck Nice Compares Sarah Palin to Herpes
Sarah Palin is no stranger to negative media attention, but comparing her to a sexually transmitted disease takes the criticisms over the line.
During a June 9 discussion on NBC’s “Today” show about Palin’s role in the GOP, comedian Chuck Nice told his co-panelists, NBC’s chief legal analyst Dan Abrams and Politco’s White House reporter Nia-Malika Henderson, “But, Sarah Palin to the GOP, this is what I’ve got to say, she is very much like herpes, she’s not going away.”
Abrams simply responded, “That’s the advantage of being Chuck Nice. You can say that and there’s no repercussions.” Henderson did not respond. Before hosts Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb moved on to other topics, Nice informed viewers, “Everybody is laughing. I don’t care. The band is cracking up.”
Unfortunately, that’s the typical response when it comes to insulting conservative woman.
6. Toronto Star Columnist Tweets a Death Wish for Michelle Malkin
Unfortunately, as Erbe proved, it’s not only liberal men who have it out for conservative women. Antonia Zerbisias is another one.
The Toronto Star columnist expressed deep hatred for Michelle Malkin in an April 2009 Twitter message that read, “Forget the Marxists, I wish the marksmen would take @MichelleMalkin. I’m thinking Dick Cheney. He’s such a good shot.”
Apparently Zerbisias’s employer is okay with these types of remarks, as evidenced by her bio at the Star.
“Antonia Zerbisias, columnist for the Toronto Star’s Living section, has been telling people what she thinks ever since she could open her mouth,” the bio said. “Her opinionating career dates back to Grade 9 when a cartoon commentary on a teacher resulted in her suspension from high school. The principal sent her home with a note calling her ‘rude, obstreperous and bold.’ Her parents were neither amused, nor surprised. Once she was punished for being that way. Now she makes it pay.”
7. Sarah Palin = Vice-President Barbie?
ABC reporter David Wright couldn’t keep himself from comparing Sarah Palin to Barbie during his Feb. 16 “Nightline” segment on the doll’s 50th birthday.
“[Barbie’s] been an astronaut and a rock star. Pop icons Beyonce and Shakira. She’s won ‘American Idol’ too,” he began. “Some would argue she also ran for vice-president in 2008,” quipped Wright, after showing various clips of Palin.
“Caribou Barbie” was a characterization many in the media used to deride Palin throughout the 2008 election. Wright’s attack on the former Alaskan governor in a segment that had nothing to do with politics and aired three months after the election, illustrated that the media weren’t planning to back off sexist comments about Palin anytime soon.
8. Rosie O’Donnell ‘Humanized’ Conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck
Apparently to Rosie O’Donnell, conservative women are less than human.
The former “View” moderator outlined how she tried to “humanize” her former colleague, Elisabeth Hasselbeck during the Feb. 8 broadcast of her Sirius XM radio show, “Rosie Radio.” O’Donnell’s comments stemmed from a discussion about the conservative backlash to her recent HBO documentary about families, “A Family is a Family is a Family.”
“It’s sort of what I thought about Elisabeth Hasselbeck, too. I’m going to love her, regardless of what she says, I’m gonna love her and the love, then, is going to win through in the end,” O’Donnell explained to her current colleagues. “I was positive of this, and we sort of started to humanize her. Remember, after she came to my house, she actually said on television how she thought our family was so great? Can you imagine the amount of hate mail she got from her constituency?”
9. David Letterman’s “Top Ten” List of Sarah Palin Insults
Late night talk show host David Letterman couldn’t let an opportunity to go by without trashing Sarah Palin during his June 8 show.
The usual “jokes” about Palin’s intellect appeared on Letterman’s “Top Ten Highlights of Sarah Palin’s Trip to New York,” alongside a knock on her looks. “Number Two: Bought make-up from Bloomingdale’s to update her ‘slutty flight attendant look,” read the comedian.
Then he went further, with a crude joke about her 14-year-old daughter being impregnated at Yankee Stadium. Letterman eventually was forced to apologize for that joke, but not for carried on the tradition of painting Palin as a complete bimbo, not a governor or a former vice-presidential candidate.
10. Liz Cheney, Daddy’s Little Girl?
MSNBC and liberal talk radio host Ed Schultz labeled Liz Cheney, daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney, nothing more than a daddy’s girl during his Sept. 29 MSNBC program, “The Ed Show.”
“There’s a couple of gals who’ve been riding the wave of crazy that’s been sweeping the nation’s right-wingers: ‘Shooter’s little girl, Liz Cheney, has been hitting the lecture circuit, parroting daddy’s fear-mongering rhetoric,” stated Schultz.
Of course, Liz Cheney is no simple “daddy’s girl.” She holds a law degree from the University of Chicago, and served as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.
A liberal woman with the same qualifications as Cheney would never be categorized as a “daddy’s girl” but as an empowered woman in her own right.
Which is why SGP (Smart Girl Politics) is asking conservative women to join a list:
But over the next 19 days, the liberal media will do everything in their power to put conservative women in a bad light.
That’s why Concerned Women for America — America’s largest women’s public policy organization — is rallying thousands of women across the nation to say…
“I’m Conservative and I WILL VOTE!”
Already, our campaign has reached tens of thousands of conservative women. But we must do more to counter the efforts of the liberal media and groups like EMILY’s List
that are rolling out multi-million dollar campaigns to sway women voters.
As a first, vital step, I’m asking you to join me in making a simple yet powerful statement. Go here to join me and thousands of conservative women who are taking a stand in this election year:
This is one of those stories that make you wag your head and it is found over at Big Government. But before we get to that, listen to Dennis Prager commenting on this trip at the time:
Here is part of the larger post:
On October 12, Scott Swett at the American Thinker reported that Senator Barabara Boxer (D-CA) along with Representatives Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) and Henry Waxman (D-CA) secured diplomatic courtesy letters that allowed anti-American Code Pink activists to travel to Fallujah, Iraq. The radicals traveled to Fallujah in late 2004 to donate $600,000 worth of humanitarian aid to the people who had just killed 51 Americans and wounded 560 more earlier that month. Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah was the heaviest US urban combat since the Vietnam War.
Later in this post over at Big Government, we read this:
Code Pink’s leaders had just returned from Fallujah, Iraq, where 51 Americans had been killed and 560 wounded in the US Marines’ heaviest urban combat since the Vietnam War. Code Pink delivered $600,000 in cash and supplies to the very insurgents the Marines had been fighting against – quite literally giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies in a time of war. As noted in Islam Online, a diplomatic courtesy letter from Barbara Boxer helped make the trip possible.
