Worcester County Freedom Trail

When I moved to Boston almost 30 years ago, I was shocked at how much talk there was on the news that pitted skin colors against each other. I came from a quiet little town of 5000 in the Adirondacks. Yes, we were mostly white, but not entirely. Race was a non-issue. Seriously…no one cared about color…not the blacks or the whites or the Native Americans. Then I got to Boston.

What was surprising was that the race issue seemed mostly media generated. It’s as if the reporters were still living in the 1950’s. And I think they still are today. They continue to frame issues in terms of color, even when color isn’t the issue. Like the case of Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge police. Did you notice that there were a number of policemen on the scene, black as well as white? And then the leader of the free world stands up and calls the police stupid after he admits he doesn’t know the whole story? Sorry, Mr. Obama, but that was really stupid and the impact of your days of listening to Rev Wright rant about “whitey” are showing.

Here’s some interesting insight from one of the greatest minds of our day, Thomas Sowell. If you haven’t read his book, Basic Economics, I highly recommend it. One of the most useful and understandable economics books out there. Given the mess our economy is in now, it should be required reading for all…especially the administration in DC!

From National Review:

Many people hoped that the election of a black President of the United States would mark our entering a “post-racial” era, when we could finally put some ugly aspects of our history behind us.

That was quite understandable. But it takes two to tango. Those of us who want to see racism on its way out need to realize that others benefit greatly from crying racism. They benefit politically, financially, and socially.

Barack Obama has been allied with such people for decades. He found it expedient to appeal to a wider electorate as a post-racial candidate, just as he has found it expedient to say a lot of other popular things — about campaign finance, about transparency in government, about not rushing legislation through Congress without having it first posted on the Internet long enough to be studied — all of which turned to be the direct opposite of what he has actually done after getting elected.

Those who were shocked at President Obama’s cheap shot at the Cambridge police for being “stupid” in arresting Henry Louis Gates must have been among those who let their wishes prevail over the obvious implications of Obama’s 20 years of association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Anyone who can believe that Obama did not understand what the racist rants of Jeremiah Wright meant can believe anything.

With race — as with campaign finance, transparency, and the rest — Barack Obama knows what the public wants to hear, and that is what he has said. But his policies as president have been the opposite of his rhetoric, with race as with other issues.

As a state senator in Illinois, Obama pushed the “racial profiling” issue, so it is hardly surprising that he jumped to the conclusion that a policeman was engaging in racial profiling, when in fact the cop was investigating a report received from a neighbor that someone seemed to be breaking into the house that Professor Gates was renting in Cambridge.

For those who are interested in facts — and these obviously do not include President Obama — there has been a serious study of racial profiling in a book titled Are Cops Racist? by Heather Mac Donald. Her analysis of the data shows how this issue has long been distorted beyond recognition by politics.

The racial-profiling issue is a great vote-getter. And if it polarizes the society, that is a price that politicians are willing to pay in order to get votes. Academics who run black-studies departments, as Prof. Henry Louis Gates does, likewise have a vested interest in racial paranoia.

For “community organizers” as well, racial resentments are a stock in trade. President Obama’s background as a community organizer has received far too little attention, though it should have been a high-alert warning that this was no post-racial figure.

What does a community organizer do? What he does not do is organize a community. What he organizes are the resentments and paranoia within a community, directing those feelings against other communities, from whom either benefits or revenge are to be gotten, using whatever rhetoric or tactics will accomplish that purpose.

To think that someone who has spent years promoting grievance and polarization was going to bring us all together as president is a triumph of wishful thinking over reality.

President Obama’s first nominee to the Supreme Court is, like Obama himself, someone with a background of years of affiliation with an organization dedicated to promoting racial resentments and a sense of racial entitlement.

An 18th-century philosopher said, “When I speak I put on a mask. When I act I am forced to take it off.” Barack Obama’s mask slipped for a moment last week but he quickly recovered, with the help of the media. But we should never forget what we saw.

We’ve been reading quite a bit about the proposed Obamacare universal health plan. But a picture says a thousand words. Unfortunately, the organization chart that depicts the interactions in the proposed plan is a nightmare. You’ve gotta see this. Remind you of “Where’s Waldo?!?”

The nightmare org chart of Obama's universal health care

See a full view and read the interesting post on this from blogger, Kicking Over My Traces.

Great article by Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post. Now that President Obama has to get more specific about his universal health care plan — the plan that is supposed to make health care more affordable — we find out that it isn’t going to solve the affordability problem at all. In fact, according to the CBO, it’s going to make health care extraordinarily expensive! So now Obama has retreated to saying the new plan has to be revenue neutral. Neutral?!?! The whole point of this massive change in health care was to make it cheaper. If he can’t do that, then please leave it alone! I don’t want to be paying more just for the privilege of having the government decide I’m too old to be treated!

What happened to Obamacare? Rhetoric met reality. As both candidate and president, the master rhetorician could conjure a world in which he bestows upon you health-care nirvana: more coverage, less cost.

But you can’t fake it in legislation. Once you commit your fantasies to words and numbers, the Congressional Budget Office comes along and declares that the emperor has no clothes.

President Obama premised the need for reform on the claim that medical costs are destroying the economy. True. But now we learn — surprise! — that universal coverage increases costs. The congressional Democrats’ health-care plans, says the CBO, increase costs on the order of $1 trillion plus.

In response, the president retreated to a demand that any bill he sign be revenue-neutral. But that’s classic misdirection: If the fierce urgency of health-care reform is to radically reduce costs that are producing budget-destroying deficits, revenue neutrality (by definition) leaves us on precisely the same path to insolvency that Obama himself declares unsustainable.

The Democratic proposals are worse still. Because they do increase costs, revenue neutrality means countervailing tax increases. It’s not just that it is crazily anti-stimulatory to saddle a deeply depressed economy with an income tax surcharge that falls squarely on small business and the investor class. It’s that health-care reform ends up diverting for its own purposes a source of revenue that might otherwise be used to close the yawning structural budget deficit that is such a threat to the economy and to the dollar.

The president is therefore understandably eager to make this a contest between progressive Democrats and reactionary Republicans. He seized on Republican Sen. Jim DeMint’s comment that stopping Obama on health care would break his presidency to protest, with perfect disingenuousness, that “this isn’t about me. This isn’t about politics.”

It’s all about him. Health care is his signature reform. And he knows that if he produces nothing, he forfeits the mystique that both propelled him to the presidency and has sustained him through a difficult first six months. Which is why Obama’s red lines are constantly shifting. Universal coverage? Maybe not. No middle-class tax hit? Well, perhaps, but only if they don’t “primarily” bear the burden. Because it’s about him, Obama is quite prepared to sign anything as long as it is titled “health-care reform.”

I love this blog, Political Math. They do a great job making complex numbers meaningful. In this case, take a look at their analysis of wait times under the Obama administration’s proposed universal health care. They compare Georgia with Massachusetts as we started down the path of universal health care a few years ago under Governor Romney. Warning: you’re not going to like what you see. We pay at least 3 times as much in monthly premiums and have to wait 4 times as long!

And here are the numbers behind the simulation.

It always puzzles me why we don’t require some form of ID to vote. Are we trying to encourage people to scam the system? I’m happy to see there are efforts underway to get a handle on the voting process here in Massachusetts. There will be a hearing on these bills on Wednesday, July 15, on Beacon Hill.

On Wednesday, July 15, at 1:00 pm in Room A-1 of the State House, the Committee of Election Laws is holding a public hearing on just 12 bills. These bills are in basically two categories: (1) to require proof of citizenship when registering to vote; and (2) to require identification when voting.

The problem is that Massachusetts does not require proof of citizenship to register to vote, nor does it require any identification to vote in an election. In some towns it’s not too difficult to vote several times, if you had the inclination to do so, especially if you knew of people who weren’t likely to vote that day.

It’s amazing that you have to give positive identification to get on an airplane (or a hundred other things) but not for voting, the most important duty we have as citizens. And cities and town politicians are often the strongest to resist making that a requirement.

Here is a list of what’s up for discussion.

H.579, Paul K. Frost, An Act relative to the identification requirements of persons registering to vote

H.583, Bradford R. Hill, An Act for legislation to further regulate the identification process of persons registering to vote

H.565, Stephen R. Canessa, An Act relative to voter identification at election polls

H.569, Vinnie deMacedo, An Act relative to establishing voter identification procedures

H.578, Paul K. Frost, An Act relative to the showing of photo identification when voting

H.668, Karyn E. Polito, An Act relative to the identification requirements for voters

H.581, Colleen M. Garry, An Act relative to the identification requirements for voters

H.587, Bradley H. Jones, Jr., An Act for legislation to require photo-identification for persons voting in elections

H.663, Alice Hanlon Peisch, An Act relative to establishing identification requirements for voters who registered to vote by mail

H.670, Michael F. Rush, An Act relative to requiring voters to furnish identification

S.335, Scott P. Brown, An Act for legislation to require photo identification to receive a ballot

S.360, Richard R. Tisei, An Act for legislation relative to voter identification

As if the Obama administration’s national health care plan wasn’t scary enough on its own, now we find out the Democrats are planning a major tax increase to help fund it. This will affect individuals making $200,000 or more, and couples making $350,000 or more. So much for incentivizing people to reach for the American dream. It just got too expensive.

From CNS News:

Despite a still-lagging U.S. economy and rising unemployment rate, House Democrats announced late yesterday that they will seek a massive increase in federal income taxes to help pay for the national health-care reform proposal that President Obama is urging Congress to enact this summer.

“Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel of New York said the tax would raise $540 billion over 10 years” the initial AP story reported.

Democratic sources as saying that the massive new tax increase would come in the form of a “surtax” on people filing taxes in the upper brackets of the income tax code.

The upper tax brackets are already set to increase after next year when the income-tax cuts signed into law by President Bush in 2001 expire. President Obama and the Obama Treasury Department have indicated they intend to let those tax cuts expire for the upper two income brackets—meaning any individual or small business earning more than $200,000.

In 2001, President Bush signed tax reform legislation that cut income tax rates across the board. People who were then paying a 15% federal income tax rate had their rate cut to 10%. The higher income tax rates of 39.6%, 36%, 31%, and 28% were cut to 35%, 33%, 28% and 25%.

President Obama’s Treasury Department has indicated that the administration will seek to increase the current 33% rate to 36% and the current 35% rate to 39.6%.

Under Obama’s tax-increase plan, individuals making $200,000 or more would be subject to the new 36% rate. The income “surtax” House Democrats now plan would come on top of Obama’s tax increases.

We’ve had some time to see how the new Massachusetts health care requirements are working. Not surprisingly, the news isn’t good. I’m not sure why Gov Romney insisted on wrangling with this mess, but it wasn’t a good idea. Here is our first indication of things going awry. (And now I know why my small company’s health insurance premiums are way out of line with other states.)

From the Wall Street Journal:

In a rational world, the prognosis for ObamaCare would wait on the evidence in Massachusetts, given that the commonwealth’s 2006 program closely resembles what Democrats are trying to do in Washington. If the results were widely known, it might be dead on arrival.

The Massachusetts law, which was championed by former GOP Governor Mitt Romney, imposed an individual mandate, requiring nearly all residents to buy health insurance or else pay a penalty. (The exceptions are those who qualify for the state’s public program.) This was supposed to cover everybody and save money too. We’ve written before about how costs have exploded, but it also turns out that consumers have other ideas.

For 15 years Massachusetts has also imposed mandates known as guaranteed issue and community rating — meaning that insurers must cover anyone who applies, regardless of health or pre-existing conditions, and also charge everyone the same premium (or close to it). Yet these mandates allow people to wait until they’re sick, or just before they’re about to incur major medical expenses, to buy insurance. This drives up costs for everyone else, which helps explain why small-group coverage in Massachusetts is so much more expensive than in most of the country. Mr. Romney argued — as Democrats are arguing now — that the individual mandate would make that problem disappear, since everyone is always supposed to be covered.

Well, the returns are rolling in, and a useful case study comes from the community-based health plan Harvard-Pilgrim. CEO Charlie Baker reports that his company has seen an “astonishing” uptick in people buying coverage for a few months at a time, running up high medical bills, and then dumping the policy after treatment is completed and paid for. Harvard-Pilgrim estimates that between April 2008 and March 2009, about 40% of its new enrollees stayed with it for fewer than five months and on average incurred about $2,400 per person in monthly medical expenses. That’s about 600% higher than Harvard-Pilgrim would have otherwise expected.

Well, duh! I’d laugh if the whole situation wasn’t so horrifying. Job losses, reduction in buying power of the dollar, companies going out of business… We cannot sit idly by and let the government further damage what is fundamentally good about the US economy. Nice to see someone in Congress realizes how this latest problem arose. But I’m not holding my breath that the legislators will admit their culpability.

From Townhall.com:

According to a report released from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Tuesday, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the leading culprits in the housing crisis because they encouraged people to borrow money, despite the fact they might not be able to pay it back. Duh.

It took 9 months and a 26-page government report to realize this?

Conservatives have long been warning that federal programs like the Community Reinvestment Act would build an inflated housing market resting on shaky foundations.

In fact, the report explains how Fannie and Feddie–government programs exempt from the oversights governing other publicly-traded firms–”privatized their profits but socialized their risks.”

CNSNews reports.

You know the system is out of control when legislators sit around thinking up repressive bills that will put control of airline carry-on size in the hands of the federal government. For goodness sake, the airlines can take care of this themselves.

From Townhall.com:

Three-term U.S. Congressman Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.) this month introduced a bill that would impose a federal limit on the size of baggage allowed to be carried by passengers boarding aircraft. It sounds like while jet-setting to and from the nation’s capital, the Congressman has been somewhat inconvenienced in the past: “The passengers who board the plane last often don’t have any place to stow their carry-ons because the people who got on first fill the overhead bins with oversize roll-on bags,” Lipinski said.

Instead of arriving for flights earlier to secure overhead space, let’s introduce some legislation! While we’re on the subject, can we ban carry-on luggage from being stowed beneath seats? Air travelers should have a right to overhead compartment space and adequate leg room!

If you’re interested, get out your tape measure and read the full story to see if Rep. Lipinski would deem your carry-on acceptable.

Surprised I’m just seeing this now for the first time, but I really like it so thought I’d share it with you all. Pastor Joe Wright from Central Christian Church in Kansas, delivered this prayer on the floor of the Kansas House of Representatives in 1996. Somehow this got attributed to Billy Graham, but it’s actually Wright’s.

Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and seek your direction and guidance.

We know your Word says, “Woe to those who call evil good,” but that’s exactly what we’ve done.

We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and inverted our values.

We confess that we have ridiculed the absolute truth of your Word and called it moral pluralism.

We have worshipped other gods and called it multiculturalism.

We have endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.

We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery.

We have neglected the needy and called it self-preservation.

We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.

We have killed our unborn and called it choice.

We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.

We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building esteem.

We have abused power and called it political savvy.

We have coveted our neighbors’ possessions and called it ambition.

We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression.

We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment.

Search us O God and know our hearts today; try us and see if there be some wicked way in us; cleanse us from every sin and set us free.

Guide and bless these men and women who have been sent here by the people of Kansas, and who have been ordained by you, to govern this great state.

Grant them your wisdom to rule and may their decisions direct us to the center of your will. I ask it in the name of your son, the living savior, Jesus Christ.

Amen.