Obama Declares war On The Middle Class

July 25, 2009

(I wish some of these millionaire liberals who want to tax everyone to “help out the less fortunate” would send me a few bucks.)

Like a PacMan gobbling up everything in sight, going after folks making more than $250,000 a year is not enough to satisfy Obama’s insatiable appetite for money and power. He wants more. Although it means breaking a campaign promise to only tax the “rich,” Obama’s mad rush for revenue to fund his social engineering has transformed his agenda into a war against the middle class.

While Obama rides his luxury 747 around the globe, glad-handing with other world leaders discussing “healing the planet” and other grandiose plans, the average American is struggling to find work. As Michelle Obama totes around a $6,000 Italian alligator-skin clutch, the only thing most Americans are “clutching” is their wallets, trying to figure out how to get by this month. Obama is out of touch with Middle America. However, even worse than his overt elitism…Read the rest of this entry

Obama’s Health Scare Tactics Won’t Work This Time

July 23, 2009

Back when we “absolutely needed” the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 to save us from impending doom in the financial markets, I wrote that the crisis was being overblown in order to shove that enormous spending bill down the voters’ throats. That analysis has held up to this point and I believe history will show this is exactly what happened.

President Obama is now trying to cash in on his remaining political capital with a health care bill that will enable the federal government to take over one fifth of the U.S. economy. Beat that Hugo Chavez!

Predictably, President Obama with his chief-of-staff Rahm “never waste a crisis” Emanuel, are looking for some new imminent disaster they can use to scare the public into backing their health care plan before fully understanding what it involves and what the alternatives are.

Many people have been asking of the president, “Why the rush?”  If we are going to pass a health care bill that allows for government takeover of 20% of the economy, shouldn’t politicians be taking their time to make sure they get it right? The public should know up front what it is that the government is proposing, what it will cost, and what the alternatives are in order to make an informed decision on whether or not to support it. Members of Congress and the president will at least have time to read the bill, right?

The question has prompted radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh to speed up all of his sound bites of politicians trying to get a health care bill pushed through the Congress. I guess if the politicians are in such a hurry, Rush wants to make sure that all of their sound bites are played in time to inform the public as much as possible before the president’s deadline for legislation (now up in the air). If you tuned in to Rush over the past week and didn’t know any better, you’d get the sense that Alvin and the Chipmunks really want health care reform passed, but they can’t logically explain how it will be paid for and why it is better than health insurance reform. What is clear now, however, is what the president has chosen to be the pressing crisis that is prompting the momentous health care move.

Obama has long whined that he “inherited” a trillion dollar annual deficit. A false statement that denies his and the Democrat controlled Congress’s responsibility for the deficit. The $1.3 trillion deficit that Obama is “inheriting” this year is due to the enormous bailout bill, mentioned above, that Obama lobbied for during the presidential elections and that was pushed through the Democrat Congress to be signed by President Bush. That is Obama’s definition of inheriting a deficit. He scares the hell out of the citizens – who lobbied Congress to vote down the first bailout bill – and pushes the bailout bill to the president’s desk. Then when Bush signs the bill, Obama says now he has “inherited” the deficit the bailout bill caused.

But if you listen to Obama you would think that health care costs are somehow responsible for this year’s deficit and that “rising costs of health care” will lead to a projected deficit increase of $9.3 trillion between 2010 and 2019. To get an understanding of how the Obama Administration explains this, you can read Peter Orszag’s column in the Wall St. Journal. The basic gist of their claim is that Medicare and Medicaid expenses stand to increase from 5% of GDP – where it is now – to 20% of GDP by 2050. Ok, but that just says to me that Medicare and Medicaid are failed entitlement programs that should be ditched. It says that these programs are part of the problem in the health industry and expanding them to generally cover the entire population is NOT the answer to our problems.

In addition to the claim of health care costs being the principle driver of the skyrocketing deficit, Obama has also decided to scare people into supporting him by claiming that if we don’t pass this legislation now, our health insurance premiums will double over the next ten years. Those numbers are likely coming from Obama’s Ministry of Truth.

The real problem here is that consumers of health care never see what they are being charged in the first place. The bill goes to the insurance company, they decide what they are responsible for and what the consumer is responsible for and the consumer gets their bill. Consumers never see an itemized bill showing what they and the insurance company paid for. There is almost zero ability for consumers to bargain and shop around for their health care. The health care industry is the only industry in our economy that behaves this way.

Not to mention the desperate need for tort reform in the medical industry. But instead of addressing these issues, Obama would rather just control the whole thing and force out private insurance companies.

If Obama cannot get anything passed through Congress without using scare tactics, then Senator Jim DeMint could very well be right. This could be Obama’s last stand. The citizens do not appear to be falling for the scare tactics and sob stories this time, which is a very good sign. It looks like the deadline will be pushed back on this legislation for now, but make no mistake; when Congress is back in session Obama and Emanuel will be right back in their faces trying to get a bill through. We all need to stay on top of our Reps and Senators to make sure they do not cave and sacrifice our country for their own political ambitions. And we need to show Obama that we will not be fooled into believing that the end of the world is around the corner if we don’t do what he wants us to do anymore.

The Broken Promises Of Barack Obama

June 28, 2009

Recently, one of our reader’s asked if we would do an article outlining how many of his campaign promises President Obama has already broken.

Being responsive to our reader’s wishes is one of our top priorities, but we did ask her to give us some time to compile the information, as chances are it would prove to be quite a task.

We had no idea what an understatement that was.

To list them all would cause you to lose your eyesight before you finished reading them, so we will list, in no particular order, what we consider to be the major ones.

1. Reforming Of “Earmarks.”
Obama said “When I am President, I will go through a spending bill line-by-line to make sure we are not spending money unwisely.”
I guess the hundreds of millions of dollars in the “Porkulus” economic stimulus package failed to catch his eye.
He also missed the almost 7 billion dollars in earmarks in the 2009 Omnibus spending bill for 2009 that he signed.

2. No Jobs For Lobbyists.
“Lobbyists have not funded my campaign,  and they will not run my White House.”

Well, they may not be running it, but there are quite a few former lobbyists working there. Just a few are:
Attorney General Eric Holder
Mark Patterson, Chief of Staff for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
Cecilia Munoz, Director of Intergovernmental Affairs
Ron Klain, Chief of Staff for Vice-President Joe Biden
Mona Stuphen, Deputy White House Chief of Staff

The list goes on. Click here to see more former lobbyists that are members of the Obama administration

3. Sign the “Freedom of Choice” Act
This is one all of us here at the Freedom Medium are glad he hasn’t followed through on.
However, keep in mind that, although he hasn’t mentioned this legislation since he took office, he did appoint a pro abortion advocate, Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services.

4.”I Will Eliminate Capital Gains Taxes For Small Business Investment.”

This is one, with the economy being the way it is, should have been one of the first items on Obama’s agenda.
Instead of doing something to encourage the small firms that are making it through the recession to expand and create jobs, Mr. Obama seems to be more focused on laying the groundwork fo a job as a service manager at a General Motors dealership once he leaves office.

5. The Rescue Plan For The Middle Class.

This one was going to eliminate penalties for early withdrawals from 401k retirement accounts.
This would have allowed people to withdraw up to $10,000 from their 401’s to meet everyday expenses.
There are two problems with this one.
The first one is that this is another one that should have been at the top of the list, given the state of the economy.
The second one is, despite promises of HOPE and CHANGE, in spite of promises after promise of the creation of new jobs, and fleecing the American taxpayer out of almost 800 billion dollars in a hair-brained scheme to make it happen, our economy, as well as the stock market, is still in the toilet.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter that he broke this one.
Regardless of Obama’s vow to turn the economy around, most people probably don’t have ten grand left in their 401k.

We could keep going on and on with this, but I think you get the idea.
However, we did save the best for last.

6. “When I am President, when a piece of legislation reaches my desk, you will have days to examine it online to see what is in it before I sign it.”

That quote may not be the exact wording, but the bottom line is that he did promise the American public the chance to look at a bill before he signed off on it.

There is a logical expanation as to why Obama dropped the ball on this one.

Number one, if the members of Congress aren’t given enough time to read a piece of legislation before voting on it, why the hell should we, the average taxpayers, expect to be treated any better?

The second one is, given the nonsense that is being signed into law, if most of us had a chance to look at it first, we would probably cause the White House switchboard to melt from the amount of irate phone calls we would be making.

Obama Should Leave GM Alone & Beat Up ON North Korea For A While

June 19, 2009

When Joe Biden predicted during the 2008 campaign that, if elected, Barack Obama would quickly be tested by the world, many people (some for the first time) took Biden seriously. And yes, it is more likely that it was not Biden’s prediction but rather something he was warned of and should have kept quiet about, but that’s just Joe being Joe.

So far President Obama has had two very challenging tests and he has chosen two very different ways of handling each of them.

The first test was the global financial crisis which has its roots in the U.S. housing markets. President Obama chose to handle this crisis by completely immersing himself (and the federal government) into the situation. He passed the largest spending bill in history, after sufficiently scaring the public and the private sector into paralysis, telling the public that we needed to act right away or we may never fully recover. He also said his bill was designed to create jobs and thaw the frozen credit markets, something which still hasn’t happened yet. President Obama then continued the bailout mania which started toward the end of the 2008 election season, and the government now owns much of the failures in the auto and banking industry.

The second test has to do with the brazen nuclear missile launches by the North Korean government. Obama has decided to handle this a little differently than his first crisis, using more of a hands-off approach. Instead of the panic-inducing rhetoric that Obama used to take action on the financial crisis, Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have been generally quite about the actions of North Korea. There have been no addresses to the American people from the oval office speaking of the “dangers of doing nothing” and there have been no press conferences held on what the Obama administration intends to do about Kim Jong Il’s consistent disregard of the agreements North Korea has made with the rest of the world.

Instead all we hear from Secretary Clinton is that the Obama administration is considering putting North Korea back on the list of states that sponsor terrorism, and that she takes the actions of North Korea “very seriously”. An explanation of how weak and ineffective such a response is won’t be necessary since the North Koreans are demonstrating it all the time with new missile tests. In fact the latest test of their Taepodong-2 missile, which is planned for July 4th, will be directed toward Hawaii. That’s right, while Americans are celebrating our independence; North Koreans will be testing ways to take it away from us. But don’t worry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton take this stuff seriously…

The solutions President Obama has been promoting for the problems this country faces seem to be backwards.

Take General Motors for example. The federal government propped-up GM to the point where we-the-people are now majority owners in the company. The government kept sending money to GM in order for the company to somehow avoid bankruptcy. Failing to do so, the government is now the biggest influence on the company’s Chapter 11 proceedings much to the dismay of GM bondholders and to the delight of union bosses. This is the most profound example of where “doing nothing” would have been the best option for the government to take.

In the case of North Korea, the United States is faced with an extremely volatile regime that now has nuclear weapons capabilities. North Korea is testing the extent of their nuclear capabilities in order to refine and improve upon them, eventually enabling North Korea to threaten the interests of the United States. The problems that North Korea has provided for the U.S. have become increasingly worse since Bill Clinton and Madeline Albright were in office, and now they are only a few years away from being able to reach the Hawaiian Islands with nukes. Some might say that this is a situation where “doing nothing is not an option,” but the Obama response so far has amounted to pretty much just that.

Fighting North Korea with words and pieces of paper is not going to stop the progress toward their nuclear goals. Kim Jong Il has already forfeited the war of words a long time ago when he lied about his nuclear intentions and broke the treaties and agreements of the past. North Korea is now only interested in a war of actions and the Obama administration with Secretary Clinton must recognize that and act before it is too late.

The primary role of the federal government is to keep this country’s citizens safe, yet President Obama seems resistant to inject himself into the North Korean crisis. Kim Jong Il will view this as weakness and he will be emboldened to do what he wishes. At the same time the federal government’s role in the private sector economy is strictly limited on purpose by design of the founding fathers, yet Obama insists on injecting himself into the economic crisis. In both instances he is making the problem worse, instead of better. The only way to reverse the troubling course we are on is if Obama starts employing a more hands-on strategy with North Korea like he did with the financial crisis, and he abandons his assault on free market capitalism.

Joe Biden may have been right about the tests that Obama would face when elected President, but he appears to be wrong about one thing: President Obama is not passing his test with “flying colors”.

Meet The Man Responsible For Obama Being President…As Well As Our Economic Crisis

June 18, 2009

So who or what was the deciding factor behind Barack Obama’s election victory over John McCain?

ACORN?

David Axelrod?

Voter fraud?

Media bias?

These are just a select few of the multitude of theories posed by various political pundits as the reasons behind McCain’s defeat.
And they all carry a certain degree of validity.

However, we here at The Freedom Medium are of the opinion that McCain lost the Presidential election in large part due to the actions (and lack of action) of one man.

This guy.

kanjo3

The man pictured is Paul Kanjorski, a member of the U.S. House Of Representatives from Pennsylvania’s 1tth Congressional District.

So how did this man become a factor in Obama’s election victory?

It happens that there are a number of political analysts who believe that America’s economy going into a tailspin during the primaries, and carrying on into the election cycle itself, was one of the major factors in McCain’s defeat.

One of the favorite slogans of the Democrats, with the whole-hearted support of the mainstream media, was that a vote for McCain would simply be a continuation of the “failed economic policies” of George Bush.

And millions of American voters, who did not bother to learn who and what was truly behind the economic downturn were gullible enough to swallow this propaganda, were concerned enough to turn the tide in Obama’s favor.

Which still leaves the question of what part Congressman Kanjorski play in this dual debacle?

The Congressman is a senior ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee.

The Committee oversees the aspects of the nation’s housing and financial services sectors, including banking, insurance, real estate, public and assisted housing, and securities.

The Committe reviews laws and programs relating to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and international development and finance agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Another duty of the committee is to ensure enforcement of housing and consumer protection laws such as the U.S. Housing Act, The Truth In Lending Act, The Fair Credit Reporting Act, as well as numerous other tasks related to the housing markets.

He is also the Chairman of the Capitol Markets, Insurance and Government Sponsored Enterprises Subcommittee.
The primary duty of this position is the review and oversight of the very government agencies at the root cause of our current economic situation, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

If all of this wasn’t enough, Kanjorski also spearheaded the efforts to enact the New Markets Initiative, one aspect of which was to enhance the availability of and reduce the cost of credit to targeted borrowing sectors.

Even though most of us have never heard of Congressman Kanjorski, the evidence of how much attention he paid to his duties is all around us.

To say that his job performance left a little something to be desired would be a short-sighted statement.
About 787 BILLION DOLLARS short!

So how was the Congressman such a dismal failure in carrying out the duties of his office?

It cannot be blamed on inexperience, he has been a member of Congress for more than 24 years.

Perhaps he didn’t have time to pay attention because he was too busy counting the campaign contributions he received from the National Association of Realtors PAC.

These folks sold a lot of houses, and made a ton of money before the tide started to turn.
Hell, they are still making money re-selling the foreclosed homes they sold in the first place!

And the way I read the data from federal election filings, they saw fit to repay the Congressman by spending more money on mailings and political ads during the last election cycle on behalf of Congressman Kanjorski than they did for any other member of Congress.

This may have been a factor in Kanjorski winning re-election to a 13th term in spite of a serious challenge from Hazleton Pennsylvania mayor Lou Barletta.

So there you have it.

Congressman is asleep at the switch, the housing market goes into the toilet, and the rest of the American economy starts to fall like a house of cards.

His fellow Democrats, never admitting to their part in this travesty, play upon the fears of the American public, and use these failures on their part to help ensure the election of a man who every day seems destined to go down in history as America’s first socialist President.

Mr. Kanjorski, you can be proud of yourself, you did a hell of a job.

China Warns Federal Reserve: Stop Printing Money!

June 11, 2009

Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, said: “Senior officials of the Chinese government grilled me about whether or not we are going to monetise the actions of our legislature.”

“I must have been asked about that a hundred times in China. I was asked at every single meeting about our purchases of Treasuries. That seemed to be the principal preoccupation of those that were invested with their surpluses mostly in the United States,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

His recent trip to the Far East appears to have been a stark reminder that Asia’s “Confucian” culture of right action does not look kindly on the insouciant policy of printing money by Anglo-Saxons.

Mr Fisher, the Fed’s leading hawk, was a fierce opponent of …Read the rest of this entry

Barack Obama Is Loosing Some Of His Biggest Supporters

May 20, 2009

Wealthy Wall Street financiers and other business figures provided crucial support for Mr Obama during the election, backing him over the Republican candidate John McCain as the right leader to rescue the collapsing US economy.

But it is now dawning on many among them that Mr Obama was serious about his campaign trail promises to bring root and branch reform to corporate America – and that they were more than just election rhetoric.

A top Obama fundraiser and hedge fund manager said: “I’m appalled at the anti-Wall Street rhetoric. It was OK on the campaign but now…Read the rest of this entry

A Blatant Misuse Of Federal Bailout Funds

May 18, 2009

Salvaterra and I have been working the staff here at Freedom Medium pretty hard.

They all put in long hours, and each and every day show their dedication to broadcasting the truth to the American people.

And many is the time that their life outside away from here suffers for it.

Hell, we have one guy on staff who has been sitting in a corner for so long he is starting to think he is a gopher.

And if all of that isn’t enough, we will soon be moving the entire operation to new and bigger offices.

So one day Savaterra and I decided that we need to do something really special to show our staffers just how much we appreciate their hard work, and we came up with a plan.

The only drawback was, with the move to the new offices costing more than we had planned for, our funds were stretched pretty thin.

And we did briefly think about applying for some federal bailout money.

We figured that the way the feds were handing out cash with little or no accountability, getting the money for our purchase wouldn’t present much of a problem.

We soon discarded that idea.

Being dedicated capitalists, we just couldn’t see our way clear to asking the taxpayers of America to fund a private enterprise.

And even if we could have justified such an action, upon further reflection we decided that we may not have qualified for any federal bailout funding after all.

You see, the plan that Salvaterra and I came up with was to have a weekly cookout for the Freedom Medium staffers, and we were looking to purchase a BBQ grille.

It is probably just as well that we decided to dig into our own pockets and buy the grille ourselves.

We couldn’t help but feel that the current administration would have a problem with this acquisition on numerous levels.

You tell us, do you think asking for federal funding for this purchase would have been the wrong thing to do

manlygrill

Glenn Beck On Obama’s First 100 Days

May 1, 2009

President Barack Obama, the man who promised us change, has been in office for 100 days.

So what changes has he brought about? Well, let’s see:

We are still fighting two wars.

The economy is still in the toilet.

The stock market, 401k’s, etc. are still down.

Millions of people are still out of work.

And we are still giving General Motors billions of taxpayer dollars so that they can continue to build cars that no one wants to buy.
Which is why they needed the bailout money in the first place.

Of course, there are some folks who are still holding out hope.

My buddy Glenn Beck doesn’t appear to be one of them.

My Liberal Friends Were Right

April 8, 2009

This is why we welcome and appreciate reader feedback here at Freedom Medium.
One of our subscribers sent us the following:

Subject: I have to admit it.
My liberal friends were right

They told me if I voted for McCain, the nation’s Hope would deteriorate, and sure enough there has been a 20 point drop in the Consumer Confidence Index since the election, reaching a lower point than any time during the Bush administration.

They told me if I voted for McCain, the US would become more deeply embroiled in the Middle East, and sure enough tens of thousands of additional troops are scheduled to be deployed into Afghanistan.

They told me if I voted for McCain, that the economy would get worse and sure enough unemployment is approaching 8.8% and the new stimulus packages implemented recently have sent the stock market lower than at any time since 9-11.

They told me if I voted for McCain, we would see more “crooks” in high ranking positions in Federal government and sure enough, several recent cabinet nominees and Senate appointments revealed resumes of bribery and tax fraud.

Well I ignored my Democrat friends in November and voted for McCain. And they were right… all of their predictions have come true.

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