Egads. Did President Obama really say, “If not now, when?” during the debt ceiling negotiations with Republicans yesterday?

In what context, I wonder?

Was it “if not now, when” as in: You better agree to take another trillion in would-be workers’ wages out of the hands of their would-be employers (who at "some point" have “made enough money”) because, “if not now, when?”

Or this: Sure I tripled the deficit in two years with a failed stimulus and wasteful pork barrel projects, and it didn’t work; which clearly means I should have quadrupled it instead. So pay up, losers, because, “if not now, when?”

I suspect both.

I still remember when Reagan said “If not us, who? If not now, when?” in his Second Inaugural Address. It struck a chord with me at the time, because Reagan had backed up the words with action: sacrifice, integrity, and good old-fashioned elbow grease.

Unfortunately with Obama, it’s just words.

It’s not exactly a shocker, that when the debt ceiling negotiations are going south, Obama would pull out his old Gipper suit. He’s done it before. Obama and his tax-and-spend accomplices are quite prone to create their very own Reaganstein imposter when it suits their agenda. Never mind that the zombie Reaganstein is a counterfeit, cobbled together to advance everything that the true Reagan fought against.  

And of course that means trotting out that old Gipper suit, draping it over failed socialistic policies and nipping and tucking until it looks like a fit – at least to those who know little about the real thing.

That’s why Obama was channeling zombie Reaganstein yesterday and by implication lying about Reagan’s record. Reagan was all for raising taxes! And that’s because taxes stimulate the economy. And that’s what Reagan did, he raised taxes, and the economy recovered!

Come on. Don’t make me sick.

Reagan took a big ole chainsaw — kind of like the one he used to clear brush on his ranch — to chop back government, lopping income taxes across the board down by a quarter. The top rate was 70% when he took control of Carter’s wheezing economy, and eight years later the economy was doing cartwheels while the top bracket was only paying 28%

That took courage and guts. For Obama to invoke Reagan’s words in his drive to stick job-producing taxpayers with the bill for his failed stimulus scheme and madcap spending is tantamount to a draft dodger flaunting a dead hero’s Medal of Honor. 

Because when Reagan was clearing the deadwood out of government, Obama was sitting at the feet of his “Marxist professors” and, later, Reverend Jeremiah Wright – opposing everything Reagan stood for.

So why quote Reagan? Why not quote his good buddy Wright?

Silly me. What was I thinking? Everybody knows you can’t say “G*d d*amn America” in the White House.

Can you?

Hat tip to Bill McKee with the Clackamas, Oregon, chapter of Americans for Prosperity.

This is interesting. A majority of American households paid no federal income taxes in 2009… and 30% of households actually got refunds on funds that were never withheld in the first place. (Pardon me for just a moment while I go find a dictionary. I need to confirm the definition of the word "refund.")

Am I the only one who finds this whole thing vaguely problematic? Because I have a gut feeling that this just isn't healthy – sociologically and demographically or something – and just plain no fair. 

Because what I see is that we have become a nation of givers and takers… and voters. So maybe I'm being simplistic, but with the takers starting to creep over the midline and into the majority, aren't we heading toward the day when they can tell their givers: "We can plan policies very well and your input isn't needed, thank you very much. Now shut up, butt out, and get back to work so you can keep paying for our roads, bridges, educations, meals, medical care, national defense and so on. Oh, and by the way, the disability check for my anxiety disorder better not be late again this month.   

Seriously, can a democracy stay healthy when one group of voting households is forced to pick up the tab for a second group which also happens to call the shots because they have the numbers and clout to sway public policy toward their own interests through the power of the ballot-box?

Bill McKee's take:

This explains a lot. Americans have been sold the idea that they can use government as their own "mafia".. an agent that will use force to collect from 1/2 of the American households, to pay the other 1/2… after taking a cut to cover cushy salaries, vacations, retirement plans, etc. Government has become, for many, a convenient extortion. It reduces the amounts available to the truly needy. At the same time, it taxes quite heavily the very best ideas, services, product innovations… I think we have re-examine what it means to be America and what is the American Dream. A land of equal opportunity.. unburdened by complex and unjustifiable regulations.. or are we going to become another failed nation that turned it's back on the causes of our historic rise to prosperity, liberty, and beacon of hope for mankind?

Simcha Fisher has little kidlets and morning sickness, plus a broken fluorescent light bulb… and Al Gore needs to pay.

Then the CFL bulbs came out, and I discovered that I am the snob to end all snobs . . . when it comes to light.  Fluorescent lighting makes me feel like I’m dead, and am just haunting whatever room I happen to be in.  It makes me feel like the top of my head has been replaced with something clammy and toxic.  It makes me feel like filling up my 15-passenger van with overpriced gas and barreling nonstop to Al Gore’s house and smacking his silly, fat face around until he admits that his main goal is and always has been to make each and every day for the entire human race a little less bearable.

Heh, heh:

MY KIDS:  Ooh, a lamp!  Let’s kick it until it’s dead!
LAMP:  Smash.
ME: (lying on the couch dying with morning sickness):   . . .I didn’t hear anything. . . [promptly manages to actually forget about everything]
LAMP:  I guess I’ll just lie here and bleed poison all over your house, you dirty breeders.
KIDS:  Yay, let’s throw stuff around!
HUSBAND:  Hi, I’m home!  Hey, there’s broken glass all over the room.  There’s mercury mixed in with the six bags of winter clothes you were sorting, and it’s all over the portacrib.  Okay, well, you lie there, I’ll take care of it.

Tee hee:

So, thanks, Al Gore.  Thanks for ruining my marriage.  When my baby is born with mercury poisoning, we‘ll be sure to name one of its heads after you.  Because of you and your fearless activism, I’ve decided to replace all the light fixtures in the house with little brass lamps that burn polar bear blubber; and for heat, I’m going to get one of those generators that’s powered by powerful surges of indignation. 

I expect the coming winter to be toasty warm.

I hope it turned out okay.

Sniffle.

I bet Ezra Klein's graphs weren't created while talking on the phone in his jammies.

Wow the battle over the debt ceiling sure has sparked some interesting and revealing reports in the media and blogosphere. For example, did you know that the Reagan Revolution proved that prosperity always increases in direct proportion to the amount of wealth the populace is forced to hand over to their benevolent bureaucratic overlords for safekeeping?

And then this week Ezra Klein jumped in with a colorful graph that appears to prove that Reagan was a tax-hiking tornado. Never mind that the numbers tend to be a tad, shall we say, selective. If he and his lefty friends can convince you and me that Ronald Reagan pulled the country out of one of its worst economic quagmires with massive tax hikes — not cuts — we might fall for the con and pressure the Republicans in congress to cave on the debt ceiling negotiations going on right now.

Of course, Klein would like that because it would lurch the Land of the Free a lot closer to his very own Lefty Nirvana, where there is no “veneration for the Founders,” the “Constitution has no binding power on anything,” and prosperity flourishes when government desk jockeys are finally allowed to swipe whatever they please from us and run our lives.

This is what the lefty bloggers would have you believe, and Klein even has the chart to prove it. And in Lefty Nirvana, Klein is always right. Which of course means that the Republicans are clearly insane for insisting that the private sector be allowed to keep their wealth, so they can do things like… I don’t know… buy equipment and pay workers.

Because, they say, Reagan’s record proves that the road to prosperity involves thwarting the job-creators by shoving big chunks of wealth out of their factories and stores and toward Harry Reid and Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi and President Obama, so they can buy things like swine odor research and turtle bridges and your neighbor’s 1993 Cutlass for $24,000 and… um… what else… Oh yeah. Re-election.   

Sure, sure. Reagan was such an ardent believer in high taxes and government interference, that if he was alive today, he would storm Capitol Hill and smack Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor for opposing President Obama’s valiant efforts to keep alive the Reagan legacy of bloated, busybody, wealth-confiscating pork-barrel government.

Steve Benen in the Washington Monthly actually declared last week that Reagan was “slightly” to the “left” of Obama on taxes, and then taunted the austerity-minded congressional Republicans with this remark: “doesn’t it bother Republicans, just a little, that Barack Obama is more in line with the Reagan legacy than they are?” 

Slightly to the left of Obama? On taxes? Reagan? Really? I must not have been paying attention when Obama enacted historic watershed cuts, chopping back income tax rates across the board by a quarter, and eventually slashing the top rate from 70% to 28%.

I can’t figure out why else Benin would say that. Unless he thinks no one will notice if he bases that outrageous statement solely on the Reagan-era increases and ignore the cuts. Which, incidentally were diluted by the subsequent hikes by about a third – which reduced them, I suppose, from gargantuan to merely gigantic.  

So in light of that, maybe we should re-evaluate whether it was Reagan’s tax cuts or tax hikes that goosed the economy and rescued us all from his predecessor’s madcap lurch toward Zimbabwe-style economics. But then that might require a truth hike for a change, instead of tired lies about tax hikes. Because these guys are not honest opinion journalists. Benen's has written other pieces riddled with misleading statements about the Clinton and Bush economic records, as well as Reagan's.

And in the meantime, here we are back on the fast train to Zimbabwe (That’s right… in case you haven’t noticed, we’re stuck in a garish remake of the Carter years — a low-budget horror flick entitled “The Revenge of the Peanut Farmer.”) and Klein and Benin and their buddies are buzzing about, busily cherry-picking historical facts to hoax their readers into believing that the train is really heading to Palm Beach — but we’ll only make it if we can pressure the Republicans into exchanging our economic liberty for a cardboard Margaritaville.

This latest tactic of assigning Reagan’s economic success to tax hikes and forgetting to mention his massive cuts, could be compared to losing weight on a one-thousand-calorie diet and then still losing weight after increasing the intake to 1500 calories. Never mind that you used to eat 3000 calories. If gluttony somehow advanced the cause of socialism, you can bet that Klein and Benen would be waving nifty graphs and hollering for everyone to slim down by porking out. But of course they would only tell you about the 500 calorie increase and leave the rest of the story out.

Well, as I said before, Reagan warned us when he left office that the “other party” would “do everything in their power to rewrite history.”

And, yes, he was right about that, too.

Imagine an over-rated bubble-gum pop musician who was elevated to the mountainpeaks of ill-deserved musical savant status, just because he also happened to be a charismatic evangelist for hallucinogenic communism.

That earned him the undying devotion and promotion of the social-engineering commies in the music industry, and that's why many today still believe the carefully crafted narrative that Lennon and the Beatles revolutionized American music. Or in other words saved us from a wasteland dominated by the mediocre succession of tuneless hacks that preceded him… like the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Glen Miller, Louis Armstrong, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Benny Goodman, etc., etc., etc.

Thank goodness Lennon and McCartney finally wrote "I wanna Hold Your Hand" and ended our suffering.

Pardon my sarcasm, but I was there. Throughout my childhood the Beatles were shoved down my generation's throats as these worship-worthy musical Messiahs. Believe me, they were only spoken of in hushed, respectful tones.

I still remember how ticked off I was when I actually became aware of pre-Beatles music. Stuff that actually involved orchestras and choirs and jazz pianists, and mind-blowing talent. Oh, and more than four guitar chords.

But, as usual, I digress. Anyway, now can you imagine that same over-rated bubble-gum pop musician chucking all those halluconegenic and communistic ideals that brought him so much undeserved adulation for… Ronald Reagan?

I don't know if this is a crock or not, but it's still kind of fun to… well… Imagine. 

John Lennon was a closet Republican, who felt a little embarrassed by his former radicalism, at the time of his death – according to the tragic Beatles star's last personal assistant.

Fred Seaman worked alongside the music legend from 1979 to Lennon's death at the end of 1980 and he reveals the star was a Ronald Reagan fan who enjoyed arguing with left-wing radicals who reminded him of his former self. [...]

John Lennon was a closet Republican, who felt a little embarrassed by his former radicalism, at the time of his death – according to the tragic Beatles star's last personal assistant.

Fred Seaman worked alongside the music legend from 1979 to Lennon's death at the end of 1980 and he reveals the star was a Ronald Reagan fan who enjoyed arguing with left-wing radicals who reminded him of his former self.

I just wonder what Yoko has to say about all this.

That's funny. I thought it was caused by Democrats bullying banks into abandoning sound business plans and forcing them to extend credit to the uncreditworthy. That doesn't sound like"cutbacks in government" to me.

But that doesn't stop Baker from manufacturing his very own parallel reality where "big on the free markets" President Bush, along with Alan Greenspan "ignored the build-up of an 8 trillion dollar housing bubble that collapsed" and so naturally are the culprits behind everything that happened from then on.

Ignored? Dost my ears deceive me? Ignored?

Is this some new Democrat strategy? Throw as many lies as you can against the wall in the hopes that some of them will stick? Oh well, I guess  that's all you have left when the truth isn't an option.

Unfortunately, there's always the risk that the deceit will be exposed. Kind of like now. 

Here is a list of attempts by the Bush Administration to sound the alarm on the housing bubble. (Thanks to Gateway Pundit) I would list it all here, but it's too long. It seems that President Bush tried many many times to ward off disaster, but he was thwarted by the Democrats on Capitol Hill.

And here's a video overview of Bush's and the Capitol Hill Republicans' unsuccessful efforts to avert disaster

:

I guess it's just part of the human mosaic represented in any society. There will always be hardworking innovators, and there will always be lazy con artists. There are givers, takers, gossips, and rubberneckers. And then there is the seemingly omnipresent control freak who believes so strongly in his own pre-eminence, that he thinks it right and fitting to confiscate and spend his neighbor's paycheck for him — because the hard-working old dunce can't be trusted to buy the things that he should if left to his own devices.

No surprise there. Those types have been around forever. What never ceases to amaze me, though, are the number of workers who actually buy into the socialist lie that surrendering their economic freedom will eradicate homelessness, poverty, and disease. 

With socialism's track record, you would think by now it would be nigh on impossible to con the proletariat, especially with each successive power grab leading to the inevitable train wreck. I mean, don't these people think to ask for references or something before just turning in the American dream for a sanctimoniously touted better idea? Wouldn't they check out a contractor's work before hiring him to remodel their kitchen? Or peruse Consumer Reports before buying a new car? Doesn't it strike them odd that there are no references or good reports attached to President Obama's big fat government, big fat spending, wealth redistribution schemes? And that maybe that's because there aren't any!

I swear these people would buy diet pills from Michael Moore!

People! Keep your paychecks! It's your own hard-earned money, and it's your patriotic duty to buy whatever you damn well please with it! And, strange as it may sound, the homeless, elderly, and afflicted are depending on you, because history has proven over and over that economic freedom for you is their best hope, not wealth redistribution and busybody, mommy-government with a bunch of over-inflated narcissists intent on spreading the misery around just because they want run everyone else's lives.

This video makes the point very well. And I have weak hope that it might educate some. But I also suspect that the wealth spreaders already know the score, and don't care. And if Six-Pack himself has lived in this world for more than two decades and still buys the lie that confiscation and redistribution of income reduces poverty and disease, he's clearly blind and deaf and has been for a some time.

Hat tip to Hot Air.

Last night on the O’Reilly Factor, Bernie Goldberg and Juan Williams mused about whether Jon Stewart’s use of a “Negro dialect” while ridiculing presidential candidate, Herman Cain, was racist. Which, of course was a pointless discussion based upon a false premise. Everyone knows Jon Stewart can’t be a racist, because he’s a lefty. And you can’t be both.

Incidentally, “Negro dialect” is Senate Majority leader, Harry Reid’s (D-NV) pet phrase, not mine. But no worries. Harry Reid is a lefty, too, so he’s okay. Really. Ask the lefties in the media. He could have said much worse, and the mainstream media would have yawned and then resume shrieking at some Republican for saying “watermelon” or something. That’s because lefties advocate policies that disintegrate black families and trap black children into generational tar pits of dependence upon leftist programs and an endless cycle of misery, discontent, and bales of Democrat votes. And one out of three is okay. At least it is if you’re an opportunistic U.S. Senator or a complicit news reporter.

But I digress. Anyway, Goldberg told Williams that Stewart is not a racist, but he was going to call him one anyway:

I’m calling on all the media people on the conservative side to call every liberal a racist if they criticize Herman Cain for anything, because that’s what they do when we criticize Barack Obama for the stimulus or for Obamacare — they call us racist. It’s slanderous, so we’re going to slander them until they stop.

So here we have it. Conflagration meet inferno in the left-dominated slaughterhouse of public discourse… at least that’s what Bernie Goldberg is pushing for.

Well Jon Stewart breaks into his Amos and Andy routine to mock Herman Cain, but of course Jon Stewart isn’t a racist, because as we all know liberals can’t possibly be racists. However, if Rush Limbaugh, if Sean Hannity had done that — if Bill O’Reilly had done that or if I had done that — it would take about three seconds before liberals in and out of the media would yell racist at us. So here’s my solution, Juan. Starting right now conservatives have to throw around the word “racism” as cavalierly as liberals have been doing it for years and years. So tonight I’m going to tell you that Jon Stewart, because of what he did, is a racist. I don’t believe that, but I’m going to tell you that anyway. I’m also going to tell you that anybody who criticizes Herman Cain, a black man, for any position that he has… any liberal who criticizes him for his foreign policy, his domestic policy, or anything, I’m going to tell you that they’re also racist.  I don’t believe that either, but maybe, maybe if conservatives repeatedly call liberals racists in this unfair way maybe they’ll finally see how cheesy and cheap and unfair and slanderous it is what they’re doing, and maybe they’ll stop playing this race crapola card at long last. I don’t think they will, but I’m hoping they will . 

UPDATED, because I forgot to run the spellchecker or insert the links. Sigh. That'll teach me to hit "publish" while in caffeine deficit and talking on the phone.

Somebody better run and roust up Janeane Garofalo, Jimmy Carter, Bob Schieffer, Norah O'Donnell, and Charles Ogletree pronto. I don't know why they aren't at their usual posts, vigilantly guarding the president from the narrow-minded boors lurking in his midst.  Maybe they all needed to get their tattered race cards cleaned, blocked, starched, and ready to beat the next hapless conservative about the head for daring to question the president. 

Newt Gingrich got it for suggesting that Obama plays too much basketball, Donald Trump got it for wondering why Obama's school records are more classified than our exit strategy in Afghanistan. Oh, and Sarah Palin got it for referencing Obama's previous job as a college professor (because that's "code" for "uppity").

But so far, Dowd has gotten nary a whack for calling Obama "bi."

This may be a symptom of a much larger problem. Polls have recorded an uptick in bigoted swinishness in the U.S., and it's getting worse — with Dowd being the latest major media figure to succumb. This increased intolerance is scientifically documented, of course, by measuring the president's approval  – which, contrary to popular opinion, doesn't measure how well the public thinks Obama is doing his job, but the number of ignorant, haters who dwell among us.

And if you find that notion farfetched, crazy, paranoid, or just plain idiotic, don't look at me, It was Vice President Joe Biden's idea.

The New York Times is reporting that, while there is "no smoking gun," the U.S. was an unwitting member of a duplicitous daisy-chain that included Pakistani militants, Pakistani intelligence, and Osama bin Laden himself.

The speculation surrounds contact information found on the seized cell phone of Obama's "trusted courier," probably around the time that the greasy old coot was giving some poor reef fish acid indigestion. Here is what we know from examination of the phone.

1. Obama's "trusted courier" was talking to both Bin Laden and a militant group called Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen.

2. In turn the Harakat commanders were talking to what the NYT calls "Pakistani intelligence officers."

3. And then I only presume that the Pakistani intelligence officers were talking to our guys, since they were supposed to be on our side, right?

At least that's what I'm getting from the this: (Or read the whole thing here:)

In tracing the calls on the cellphone, American analysts have determined that Harakat commanders had called Pakistani intelligence officials, the senior American officials said. One said they had met. The officials added that the contacts were not necessarily about Bin Laden and his protection and that there was no “smoking gun” showing that Pakistan’s spy agency had protected Bin Laden.

But the cellphone numbers provide one of the most intriguing leads yet in the hunt for the answer to an urgent and vexing question for Washington: How was it that Bin Laden was able to live comfortably for years in Abbottabad, a town dominated by the Pakistani military and only a three-hour drive from Islamabad, the capital?

Hat tip to The Other McCain.

To be fair, however, I'm not sure what arrangement is really most appropriate for those inevitable "I'm sorry for being an exhibitionist, lying pervert" moments. 

I'll have to check with Emily Post and get back to you.

Hat tip to JammieWearing Fool.