Should Hennepin County Medical Center Services Be Free to Illegal Immigrants?

Jeff Johnson is a member of the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners.   He has been the lone vote against illegal immigrants receiving free health service at the Hennepin County Medical Center…..which means all service is provided at tax payers’ expense.

He writes:

“My argument is simple: Hennepin County resources are finite and, consequently, HCMC has come before us seeking to exclude those who don’t live in the county from receiving free, non-emergency healthcare services.

Why then, would we continue to provide those same free services to those who are not living in the country legally?

The most common response I received to my proposal: “What do you propose we do with these people?”

A couple of thoughts on that:

First, we are talking about non-emergency care, essentially elective health care procedures. We are not throwing dying people out on the street (and we never will).

Second, non-profit organizations in Minnesota (which receive tens of millions of dollars each year from Hennepin County) are not prohibited from using tax dollars to serve anyone they choose, including illegal immigrants. I’m not sure that is how it should be, but it is how it is.

Third, we are choosing as a government to exclude many legal, taxpaying citizens from receiving free non-emergency healthcare services in favor of illegal immigrants. It is an equally valid question to ask: “What do we propose to do with THESE people?” And, what are we going to do with everyone else in Minnesota or Hennepin County who does not receive something from the government that they want or need?

Government does not provide everything to everyone. We don’t provide homes for all of our citizens. We don’t assure that everyone has three square meals per day. That, of course, is because it’s not the job of government to be everything to everyone AND because the pockets of our taxpaying citizens are not bottomless.

Finally, and most importantly, we are talking about people who are in the United States illegally. Illegal immigration is not a small problem in this country and to provide non-essential services to illegal immigrants for free – no questions asked – does not bode well for ever solving the problem.

In 2005, the Office of Strategic Planning and Results Management reported that unauthorized noncitizens cost Minnesota health assistance programs approximately $35.5 million. That is completely separate from whatever amount Hennepin or any other county is spending.

No one can even estimate how much it costs to provide free non-emergency healthcare services to illegal immigrants at HCMC because no one is keeping track.

Hence, once my first proposal failed, I offered a second amendment to the policy, requiring HCMC to track the uncompensated care costs to the hospital of those patients who cannot pay and do not have a social security number or alien registration number so we could determine in the future whether this is costing taxpayers a few hundred thousand dollars, a few million dollars or more. After about thirty minutes of back and forth and picking the language apart (which was partly my fault as the resolution was not as tight as it could have been), I withdrew the amendment. I will attempt to get this information on my own.

Let me finish by saying that I believe HCMC is a great hospital. It is an asset to Hennepin County and its residents and it does crucial work. But providing free non-emergency taxpayer-funded healthcare to those here illegally at a time when we are heavily subsidizing the hospital and cutting back our spending elsewhere is wrong. Period.”

Democrats Maneuvering Their 2010 Voter Fraud Agenda Already?

Illinois latest state to violate MOVE Act?

“First New York failed to meet federal regulations in getting ballots to military personnel serving abroad.  Now the Dept. of Justice will investigate whether Illinois also violated the MOVE Act, which Congress passed in the wake of a series of elections where military absentee ballots got left out of the count:

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether the state of Illinois missed the deadline for mailing absentee ballots to members of the military and other overseas American voters as part of a new federal overseas voting law.

Cris Cray, Director of Legislation at the Illinois State Board of Elections, says not all of Illinois’ 110 jurisdictions were compliant with the 2009 Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (MOVE). …

Illinois was required to have all of its absentee ballots mailed by Sept. 18, the national deadline. Election officials have until Nov. 15 to count the absentee ballots, which must be postmarked by midnight Nov. 1 to be eligible.

In an e-mail response, Justice Department spokeswoman Xochil Hinojosa confirmed that Illinois is being investigated for the absentee ballot infraction.

New York had an excuse of sorts; the state held its primary on September 14th.  The ballots couldn’t be printed until each primary race was certified.  For that very reason, the DoJ pressured states into moving their primary dates back, and a few complied, such as Minnesota.  Those states that didn’t reschedule their primaries either requested waivers or insisted they could get their ballots out on time.

In contrast, Illinois had its primary in … February.  The candidates have been certified for more than half a year.  They could have had ballots written out by hand and still have made their deadline for getting absentee ballots to men and women in the armed forces.  Instead, those serving their country abroad may find themselves unable to have a voice in this election.

How should Illinois and other states get penalized?  Glenn Reynolds suggests reducing federal funds going to the state by a certain percentage as a fine, but Congress would find ways to work around that.  I’d suggest that states that don’t comply with their obligations to protect the franchise for men and women serving our country lose half of their Electoral College votes in the next presidential election.  In the meantime, the voters in Illinois and New York ought to toss out their current leadership and find people who put more of a priority on meeting deadlines, especially in Illinois, where a seven-month lead time apparently wasn’t enough to overcome the incompetence of Pat Quinn’s administration.

Update: How did the DoJ manage to miss this for so long — when Pajamas Media had already been reporting it?”

The above article was written by Ed Morrissey at HotAir.

Comment: Fifty years ago some 50,000 votes or more of dead people and felons  were counted to help John Fitzgeral Kennedy win the state of Illinois to propel the Kennedy dynasty into the political big time.  

Voter fraud since then is endemic in the inner city black communities of the country. 

Americans no longer have faith in the credibility of the ballot box AND THIS IS THE RESULT OF A DELIBERATE MOVE BY DEMOCRATS OVER THE PAST SEVERAL ELECTIONS TO INCREASE THEIR CHANCES OF WINNING BY VOTER FRAUD. 

If anyone doubts the accuracy of the above emphasized statement, please volunteer to be a certified observor at some polling place in inner city areas representing conservative interests.

Republicans better win by more than 5% margins because of calculated voter fraud primarily and the precinct and county levels.  

If there are questions why only Democrats win the razor thin contested races, one needs to remember that most county employees are Democrats and union members.  They are supposed to manage the ballots, not lose those from Republican districts.

Military ballots are usually overwhelmingly support  conservative candidates.  Why are so many either lost, or are challenged by Democrats to disqualify military votes?

It’s only October and Democrats have managed to lose military ballots already.

Obama Quotes Reveal More Obama

Allahpundit at HotAir gives us the following Obamatalk:

In a seeming twist on the post-1994 midterm calculation made by President Bill Clinton — when Republicans pummeled Democrats in the congressional election — Obama said he thinks Republicans will have to move in his direction no matter the outcome of the Nov. 2 vote.

“‘It may be that regardless of what happens after this election, they feel more responsible,’ he is quoted saying in the Sunday edition of The New York Times Magazine, ‘either because they didn’t do as well as they anticipated, and so the strategy of just saying no to everything and sitting on the sidelines and throwing bombs didn’t work for them, or they did reasonably well, in which case the American people are going to be looking to them to offer serious proposals and work with me in a serious way.’

“Accusing the public of mistaking his abilities, the president also told the magazine that he’s a little taken aback that voters are disappointed with the current turn of events in his administration.”
“There were no ‘boxers or briefs’ questions at this MTV town hall.

“Rather, President Obama faced challenging, informed and thought-provoking questions over the course of his hour-long town hall MTV hosted with CMT and BET in Washington today…

“One person responded to a question on what their greatest fear is, saying, ‘My greatest fear is that Obama will be reelected.’

“‘Oh no,’ Obama responded with a smile.”

Comment:  I worry that Obama even now has no clue what so many folks are not only angry about the economic troubles, but they are angry at Barack Hussein Obama.   Talking about being detatched from reality and having an obsessive love of ones voice, is this all there is to  Obama?

Court Challenge to ObamaCare Moves Closer to Supreme Court Review

Allahpundit reports from HotAir”

“Arguably the biggest story of the day, even though it’s barely a story at all. One way or another, the mandate will end up before the Supreme Court. Maybe it’ll get there via this suit in Florida or maybe it’ll get there via the one pending in Virginia or just maybe it’ll get there on appeal from last week’s ruling in Michigan that the mandate is constitutional. There are a lot of roads to the high court being traveled right now; the chief point of interest in all these lower-court decisions is seeing which one will get ObamaCare there the fastest.

A federal judge ruled Thursday that parts of a lawsuit by 20 states seeking to void the Obama administration’s health care overhaul can go to trial, saying he wants hear additional arguments from both sides over whether the law is unconstitutional.

In a written ruling, U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson said it needs to be decided whether the plan violates the Constitution by requiring individuals to have health insurance or be penalized through taxes and by overburdening the states by expanding their Medicaid programs. Another federal judge in Michigan threw out a similar lawsuit last week…

The administration’s attorneys had told Vinson last month that without the regulatory power to ensure young and healthy people buy health insurance, the health care plan will not survive. They also argued it’s up to an individual taxpayer — not the states — to challenge the section requiring health insurance when it takes effect in 2015.

Here’s a list of the six counts alleged in the complaint. The first three dealing with the mandate are the sexy ones, but counts four, five, and six — arguing that the feds are basically trying to “commandeer” the states in enforcing this — are interesting as a federalist appeal to the conservative majority on the Court. One of the most famous federalist decisions of the Rehnquist Court is Printz v. United States, which announced the anti-commandeering doctrine; Scalia, Thomas, and most importantly Kennedy all joined in the majority opinion. The state attorneys general who filed this suit obviously are hoping that even if the Court finds the mandate okay on Commerce Clause grounds, the Printz case and the Tenth Amendment will ride to the rescue and give them a reason to find it unconstitutional anyway. In theory, the fact that those arguments are present in this suit but not the one in Michigan last week makes today’s ruling important: If this one gets to the Supremes rather than that one, they’ll have more arguments against ObamaCare to consider. Problem is, no one seriously believes that the Court is going to be bound on a subject as momentous as the constitutionality of universal health insurance by whatever happens in the lower courts. Yes, in theory, they’re supposed to follow whatever the factual findings are at the district court level, etc, but in practice of course they’ll deal with this as a matter of first impression. No big deal really, then, about today’s ruling. Although moral victories are certainly always nice.

Update: Here’s a passage from the decision for the Supremes to consider quoting if the conservatives end up in the majority on this one.

In his ruling, Vinson criticized Democrats for seeking to have it both ways when it comes to defending the mandate to buy insurance. During the legislative debate, Republicans chastised the proposal as a new tax on the middle class. Obama defended the payment as a penalty and not a tax, but the Justice Department has argued that legally, it’s a tax.

“Congress should not be permitted to secure and cast politically difficult votes on controversial legislation by deliberately calling something one thing, after which the defenders of that legislation take an “Alice-in-Wonderland” tack and argue in court that Congress really meant something else entirely, thereby circumventing the safeguard that exists to keep their broad power in check,” he wrote.

Vinson ruled that it’s a penalty, not a tax, and must be defended under the Commerce Clause and not Congress’ taxing authority.”

Comment:  This is good news for the good folks of America….the ones who want to preserve American democracy and restore citizen adulthood.   

Jonah Goldberg Assesses Obama’s Arrogance

“That’s all right, all of you know who I am,” President Obama joked last week when the presidential seal fell off his podium during a speech in Pittsburgh.

Even though the incident made headlines for no discernible journalistic reason, it was noteworthy as a succinct example of Obama’s arrogance problem. Rather than make a self-deprecating joke, he opted to make a self-inflating one, as if to say that the title mattered less than the man.

The good news is that it’s apparently not racist to call Obama arrogant anymore. Not long ago, Keith Olbermann and other gargoyles on the parapets of establishment liberalism insisted that if you were to call attention to the fact that Obama ostentatiously holds himself in very high regard, you were really calling him “uppity,” if you know what I mean.

Now, what was once taboo has become undeniable. Even the New Yorker’s David Remnick, author of a loving biography of Obama, tells Der Spiegel, “Obama has a considerable ego.”

And here’s Time’s Mark Halperin: “With the exception of core Obama administration loyalists, most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusion: The White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters.”

Halperin’s diagnosis was inevitable, given Obama’s conviction that he represented a movement that was larger than politics or even the presidency. After all, this was the man who, as a candidate, descended on Berlin as the leader of a worldwide cause that transcended national borders. And when asked in a debate what his greatest weakness was, he plumbed his soul and answered that he was disorganized. “My desk and my office doesn’t look good,” he said. When a man runs as a national redeemer and says his biggest failing is a messy desk, that should be a warning sign that he likes himself a bit too much.

Of course, all presidents have healthy egos. You cannot become president, or even think you’re qualified to run, if you don’t think highly of yourself. Obama’s arrogance problem isn’t a matter of psychology but of strategy.

When Arkansas Democratic congressman Marion Berry complained that health-care reform felt like a replay of the Hillarycare debacle, Obama explained that the big difference between then and now was “me.” In other words, the White House’s plan for making everything work out was an unyielding confidence in the power of Obama’s own cult of personality. That’s why that cult’s high priest, David Axelrod, pursued a strategy of greeting every problem as if it were an excuse for Obama to give another big speech.

Now that the strategy has proved catastrophic, the self-pity is pouring out. Joe Biden, in a rare interregnum of lucidity, assailed his own base as whiners. Rahm Emanuel, as he was fleeing for the healthier and more civic-minded political environment of Chicago’s backrooms, said, “I want to thank you for being the toughest leader any country could ask for in the toughest times any president has ever faced.”

Really? The times have been rough, we can all agree, but if memory serves, the Civil War was no cakewalk either. And that Pearl Harbor thing – not to mention 9/11 – might compete with the miserable economy Obama inherited and then ignored as he pursued his own “transformational” vanity projects.

There’s an irony to occupying the Oval Office. When presidents think they’re bigger than the job they hold, they shrink in office. When they think they’re smaller than the honor that has temporarily been bestowed upon them, they grow into it. Obama has done nothing but shrink.

Last week, the president of the United States attacked Karl Rove by name – twice! – in a speech. He recently begged a crowd of black supporters not to “make me look bad” by staying home from the polls. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he scolded young voters that if they don’t vote, it will be proof they “weren’t serious in the first place.”

It never dawns on him that were it not for the unseriousness of those voters, he might still be a one-term junior senator from Illinois.

“You know, I actually believe my own bull-,” Obama told the author of Renegade: The Making of a President, Richard Wolffe.

Exactly. And that’s why he’s gotten into this mess.”

Comment:  What can I add.  Obama is so driven by conceit,  he’d be  syleless without it. 

The trait  is fairly common among loners for life.

Jonah Goldberg writes for the Los Angeles Times

Obamaland’s War Against the Jews

I admit I am leading the witness here, but it is intentional.  This is a good read from Powerline’s Scott W. Johnson,  regarding the Obama battle against his enemies, in fact and in fiction.  Jews are always a good target, especially if one has an Arabic name, and has matriculated for 22 years at the Jeremiah “Goddamn America” Wright’s church in Chicago.

“The Obama administration’s first enemy may have been Fox News, but we have seen it widen the circle of love to Rush Limbaugh, the insurance industry, the banking business, the Tea Party movement, Karl Rove, Ed Gillespie, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. At this point it’s almost a badge of dishonor to be left out. What are we doing wrong?

Last night Rupert Murdoch reminded us why the administration has singled out Fox News. It is run by a man with a spine, a man who does not mince words. Commentary has posted Murdoch’s speech at the Anti-Defamation League dinner in New York yesterday evening. It is a speech, according to Commetary, “in which he revealed, yet again, that he is a true and selfless friend of the Jewish people and of Israel.” Here is the text:

You [the ADL] were founded a century ago against the backdrop of something we cannot imagine in America today: the conviction and then lynching of an innocent Jew. In the century since then, you have fought anti-Semitism wherever you have found it. You have championed equal treatment for all races and creeds. And you have held America to her founding promise. So successful have you been, a few years ago some people were beginning to say, “maybe we don’t need an ADL anymore.” That is a much harder argument to make these days. Now, there’s not a single person in this room who needs a lecture on the evil of anti-Semitism. My own perspective is simple: We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews. For the first decades after Israel’s founding, this war was conventional in nature. The goal was straightforward: to use military force to overrun Israel. Well before the Berlin Wall came down, that approach had clearly failed.

Then came phase two: terrorism. Terrorists targeted Israelis both home and abroad – from the massacre of Israeli athletes at Munich to the second intifada. The terrorists continue to target Jews across the world. But they have not succeeded in bringing down the Israeli government – and they have not weakened Israeli resolve.

Now the war has entered a new phase. This is the soft war that seeks to isolate Israel by delegitimizing it. The battleground is everywhere: the media … multinational organizations … NGOs. In this war, the aim is to make Israel a pariah.

The result is the curious situation we have today: Israel becomes increasingly ostracized, while Iran – a nation that has made no secret of wishing Israel’s destruction – pursues nuclear weapons loudly, proudly, and without apparent fear of rebuke.

For me, this ongoing war is a fairly obvious fact of life. Every day, the citizens of the Jewish homeland defend themselves against armies of terrorists whose maps spell out the goal they have in mind: a Middle East without Israel. In Europe, Jewish populations increasingly find themselves targeted by people who share that goal. And in the United States, I fear that our foreign policy sometimes emboldens these extremists.

Tonight I’d like to speak about two things that worry me most. First is the disturbing new home that anti-Semitism has found in polite society – especially in Europe. Second is how violence and extremism are encouraged when the world sees Israel’s greatest ally distancing herself from the Jewish state.

When Americans think of anti-Semitism, we tend to think of the vulgar caricatures and attacks of the first part of the 20th century.

Today it seems that the most virulent strains come from the left. Often this new anti-Semitism dresses itself up as legitimate disagreement with Israel.

Back in 2002 the president of Harvard, Larry Summers, put it this way: “Where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.”

Mr. Summers was speaking mostly about our university campuses. Like me, however, he was also struck by alarming developments in Europe.

Far from being dismissed out of hand, anti-Semitism today enjoys support at both the highest and lowest reaches of European society – from its most elite politicians to its largely Muslim ghettoes. European Jews find themselves caught in this pincer.

We saw a recent outbreak when a European Commissioner trade minister declared that peace in the Middle East is impossible because of the Jewish lobby in America. Here’s how he put it: “There is indeed a belief–it’s difficult to describe it otherwise–among most Jews that they are right. And it’s not so much whether these are religious Jews or not. Lay Jews also share the same belief that they are right. So it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about what is actually happening in the Middle East.”

This minister did not suggest the problem was any specific Israeli policy. The problem, as he defined it, is the nature of the Jews. Adding to the absurdity, this man then responded to his critics this way: Anti-Semitism, he asserted, “has no place in today’s world and is fundamentally against our European values.”

Of course, he has kept his job.

Unfortunately, we see examples like this one all across Europe. Sweden, for example, has long been a synonym for liberal tolerance. Yet in one of Sweden’s largest cities, Jews report increasing examples of harassment. When an Israeli tennis team visited for a competition, it was greeted with riots. So how did the mayor respond? By equating Zionism with anti-Semitism – and suggesting that Swedish Jews would be safer in his town if they distanced themselves from Israeli actions in Gaza.

You don’t have to look far for other danger signs:

The Norwegian government forbids a Norwegian-based, German shipbuilder from using its waters to test a submarine being built for the Israeli navy.

Britain and Spain are boycotting an OECD tourism meeting in Jerusalem.

In the Netherlands, police report a 50% increase in the number of anti-Semitic incidents.

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by these things. According to one infamous European poll a few years back, Europeans listed Israel ahead of Iran and North Korea as the greatest threat to world peace.

In Europe today, some of the most egregious attacks on Jewish people, Jewish symbols, and Jewish houses of worship have come from the Muslim population.

Unfortunately, far from making clear that such behavior will not be tolerated, too often the official response is what we’ve seen from the Swedish mayor – who suggested Jews and Israel were partly to blame themselves.

When Europe’s political leaders do not stand up to the thugs, they lend credence to the idea that Israel is the source of all the world’s problems – and they guarantee more ugliness. If that is not anti-Semitism, I don’t know what is.

That brings me to my second point: the importance of good relations between Israel and the United States. Some believe that if America wants to gain credibility in the Muslim world and advance the cause of peace, Washington needs to put some distance between itself and Israel. My view is the opposite. Far from making peace more possible, we are making hostilities more certain. Far from making things better for the Palestinian people, sour relations between the United States and Israel guarantees that ordinary Palestinians will continue to suffer.

The peace we all want will come when Israel feels secure – not when Washington feels distant.

Right now we have war. There are many people waging this war. Some blow up cafes. Some fire rockets into civilian areas. Some are pursuing nuclear arms. Some are fighting the soft war, through international boycotts and resolutions condemning Israel. All these people are watching the U.S.-Israeli relationship closely.

In this regard, I was pleased to hear the State Department’s spokesman clarify America’s position yesterday. He said that the United States recognizes “the special nature of the Israeli state. It is a state for the Jewish people.” This is an important message to send to the Middle East. When people see, for example, a Jewish prime minister treated badly by an American president, they see a more isolated Jewish state. That only encourages those who favor the gun over those who favor negotiation.

Ladies and gentlemen, back in 1937, a man named Vladimir Jabotinsky urged Britain to open up an escape route for Jews fleeing Europe. Only a Jewish homeland, he said, could protect European Jews from the coming calamity. In prophetic words, he described the problem this way: “It is not the anti-Semitism of men,” he said. “It is, above all, the anti-Semitism of things, the inherent xenophobia of the body social or the body economic under which we suffer.”

The world of 2010 is not the world of the 1930s. The threats Jews face today are different. But these threats are real. These threats are soaked in an ugly language familiar to anyone old enough to remember World War II. And these threats cannot be addressed until we see them for what they are: part of an ongoing war against the Jews.

(Emphasis added.) Murdoch is being diplomatic in crediting the mealymouthed State Department spokesman (P.J. Crowley) for his clarification yesterday. One cannot miss the object of Murdoch’s critique of the Obama administration in the words above that I have placed in italics.”

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George Will Previews Upcoming Election…….Stirs Memories of My DFL Days

George Will previews the November 2 mid term elections:

“Voters seem to think Congress is like a weedy lot — that anything done to it will improve it — so they seem poised to produce something not seen since 1981-82. Then, for the first time since 1952, a majority of senators were in their first terms. This was the result of three consecutive churning elections — 1976, 1978 and 1980.

There certainly will be new senators from 14 states: Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah and West Virginia. Furthermore, Alaska’s incumbent, Lisa Murkowski, whom the American Conservative Union ranks as the fourth-most liberal Senate Republican and who already has been rejected by Republicans in the primary, may lose her sore-loser write-in candidacy. Democratic incumbent Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas is behind by 20 points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. Democratic incumbent Russ Feingold of Wisconsin is behind by an average of 6.7 points. And Democratic incumbent Michael Bennet of Colorado, appointed to the seat vacated when Ken Salazar became secretary of the interior, trails by a RealClearPolitics average of three points.

So there could be at least 18 freshmen senators in January. And several other incumbents — all Democrats — could lose. Since popular election of senators became mandatory in 1913, the largest crop of freshmen, 20, resulted from the 1978 upheaval that presaged the 18 new senators produced by the 1980 election.

If senators in their first terms are a majority of the body in 2011, there might be an anomalous condition that would have perplexed and perhaps vexed the Founding Fathers: The average seniority of House members might be higher than the average seniority of senators.

The Senate, with indirect election of its members (by state legislatures) and six-year terms, was designed to be Congress’s more stable half. If there is a majority of first-term members in 2011, many new members will have won by expressing disgust with Washington’s mores. This will challenge even the formidable leadership skills of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

After November, Republican eyes will turn to the prize of the presidency in 2012. Concerning which, McConnell sees cautionary lessons from three other years — 1946, 1954 and 1994.

In 1946, President Truman’s party lost control of both the House and Senate. In 1948, however, Truman won an improbable reelection running against the “do-nothing 80th Congress.” In 1954, President Eisenhower’s party lost control of the House and Senate. But two years later, Eisenhower was resoundingly reelected. In 1994, President Clinton’s party lost control of the House and Senate. In 1996, Clinton cruised to reelection, partly because of reckless behavior — e.g., the government shutdown of 1995 — by congressional Republicans.

Regarding House races, Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard notes that the Democratic Party has “an inefficiently distributed base of voters.” It “consists mostly of union workers, upscale urban liberals, and minority voters, many of whom are clustered in highly Democratic districts.” In many other districts, Democratic candidates depend on “independents and soft partisans,” the very voters who have defected from the Obama coalition of 2008.

If Democrats lose control of the House by a small number of seats, this might be condign punishment for a practice they favor and that Republicans have cynically encouraged — racial gerrymandering. It concentrates African American voters in majority-minority districts to guarantee the election of minority candidates.

On Nov. 2, there will be 37 gubernatorial elections. On Wednesday, Nov. 3, when the 15-month dash to the Iowa caucuses begins, Republicans may be savoring gains of eight or more governors, to a total of at least 31. They also may have gained 500 seats in state legislatures, mostly by retaking seats lost in the last two elections. This would expand Republican power over the redistricting that will be based on the 2010 census. Polidata Inc. estimates that states carried in 2008 by John McCain will gain a net of seven seats (and electoral votes) and that states Barack Obama carried will lose seven.

Finally, Curtis Gans, director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate, reports that this year, for the first time since 1930, more Republicans — nearly 4 million more — than Democrats voted in midterm primaries. This “enthusiasm gap” favoring Republicans may close somewhat by Nov. 2, but that may be too late for many Democratic candidates:

Voting began in seven states in September. By Nov. 2, almost 40 percent of all ballots will have been cast.”

Comment:  I am wary, not that it is impossible for Republicans to win, but that for many years now, voter fraud is omnipresent in America’s big cities, including in my own, Minneapolis.  The Democrat Party of Minnesota, called DFL, Democratic-Farm-Labor has encouraged manipulation everywhere regardless of  taste and honesty.  Both leaders and followers  believe themselves good people, and so, shouldn’t lose elections.  No one knows how many votes in each major election, including the mid-terms are fraudulent.

Democrats in Minnesota, by religion are no longer  churched, they are unionized and governmented.  Being deep rooted socialists is chic, and therefore gives them feelings to do godly government’s work.  Dishonest partisanship is  merely a tool for success.   Anything is righteous when doing godly government things, like permitting everyone to vote at least once or twice during a tight election.   For the most important area of DFL corruption is not generally financial but in the numbers of whose vote is counted, especially counted multiple times as occurred to elect  the  chameleon, Al Franken. 

Republicans are genrally cursed for being Christian here in our metropolitan Northland.   Candidates learned their “facts”  at the University when they went through “social science” indoctrinations.  A Muslim candidate is fine, especially if he’s black and looks American.  The robe wouldn’t at all do.  Gopherland bigotry is carefully directed.  It is proudly displayed in doing “good” government’s work, strengthening the Party.

Didn’t used to be that way.   A generation ago I was quite active for a number of candidates who were honorable in an honorable political party, (mine, the DFLers),  our honorable opponents, the Republicans, (We DFLers allowed them to admit they went to Church or Mass in those days.)   Don Fraser, Art Naftalin, Gerry Dillon, Alpha Smaby, and Fritz Mondale when he was young, were good people.   Dems who hated the Christian crowd cropped up mightily in the 1960s and 1970s and never looked back, as they say. 

I remember the name Charlie Stenvig.  He was a Democrat, and I believe he was chief of police, at one time.   He didn’t fit the mold…..a cop who went to church, as I recall.   He didn’t talk university.   He was a decent guy, but not one of the Star-Tribune chosen.   By his time running for the mayorship, the city had pretty much became one party rule.  Everyone pleased with themselves in the Twin Cities, then and ever since, would become fixed, voting Democrats, the more lefty types,   and become a powerful tribe led by the University Left’s marriage to the  Democratic-Farm Labor Party,  and included the local pretender colleges, Macalaster, Hamline,  Augsburg, even, eventually, St. Thomas.   All graduated a single kind of student from its halls of  Marxist social science religious certitude.  No, Charlie Stenvig didn’t fit in.  

Collectively, the rulers  developed a primary membership requirement; people  of the  community’s more conservative and traditional Christian organizations would be ostracized from civil leftwing society.  Such groups could not measure up to the qualities of thinking the leftwing think-alikes  permitted. 

Communities throughout the Minneapolis and its suburban area would create quality neighborhoods where everyone would talk leftwingese, think leftwing, hire left wing, finance leftwing, and, above all, vote left wing.   The good people had banded against “those others”.

Whatever  George Will might be forcasting for the nation may have some value.  I live in the Twin Cities, a community of people whose religion is socialism-labor-union-university bonded.   Nothing is going to change this crowd.   It is in their faith they believe they are superior because they are pleased with themselves for graduating university and so, have become more qualified to care more about others and to know what is right from what is wrong.

Did Capitalism Save Los 33 in Chile? Yes, Indeed It DID!…..Long Live the Free Market!

……insists Dan Henninger at the Wall Street Journal.  I agree.  Everyone should agree if we all knew the real story.   The evidence is overwhelming.  Imagine America succumbing to Marxism fifty years ago and being run by Obamacare type directives.  and the narrowing, ever narrowing of knowledge and understanding incumbent in  a government run agency  and nation.  One studies politics for survival.   There is no time left  for discovering, for  new opportunity, satisfying the male drive to explore into the unknown and to achieve success.

Dan Henninger writes a great column in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Capitalism Saved the Miners”, and explains clearly how it did.   Read this once or twice and then some more to others.

“It needs to be said.  The rescue of the Chilean miners is a smashing victory for free market capitalism.

Amid the boundless human joy of the miners’ liberation, it may seem churlish to make such a claim.  It is churlish.  These are churlish times, and the stakes are high. 

In the United States, with 9.6% unemployment, a notably angry electorate will go to the polls shortly and dump one political party in favor of the other, on which no love is lost.  The president of the U.S. is campaigning across the country making this statement at nearly stop:

“The basic idea is that if we put our blind faith in the market ane we let corporations do whatever they want and we leave everybody else to fend for themselves, then America somehow automatically is going to grow and prosper.”

Uh,yeah.  That’s a caricature of the basic idea, but basically that’s right.  Ask the miners.

If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead.  What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?

Short answer:  The Center Rock drill bit.

This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners.  Center Rock, Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa.  It has 74 employees.  The drill’s rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa.  Seeing the disaster, Center Rock’s president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill.  Chile accepted.  The miners are alive.

Longer answer:  The Center Rock drill….is in fact a piece of tough technologhy developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit.  That’s why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling.  If they make money, they can do more innovation.”

Comment:  America, BECAUSE OF FREE ENTERPRISE, has come to the rescue once again.  The human mind is capable of so many wonderful thoughts and  creations from thoughts IF IT IS LEFT FREE FROMS  DICTATORSHIP SUCH AS GOVERNMENT AND UNIVERSITY AUTHORITARIANISM!   The mind is highly motivated when those thinking and accomplishing the results of thinking are rewarded for  the quality and intensity of their work.

Obama is an opponent of free enterprise…..a proponent of government authoritarianism over thought both public and personal.  He is college manufactured.

Back to Henninger:      “This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine.  The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany.  Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.

A remarkable Sept. 30 story about all this by the Journal’s Matt Moffett was a compendium of astonishing things that showed up in the Atacama Desert from the distant corners of capitalism.

Samsung of South Korea supplied a cellphone that has its own projector.  Jeffrey Gabbay, the founder of Cupron Inc. in Richmond, Va., supplied socks made with copper fiber that consumed foot bacteria, and minimized odor and infection.

Chile’s health minister, Jaime Manalich, said, “I never realized that kind of thing actually existed.”

That’s right.  In an open economy, you will never know what is out there on the leading developmental edge of this or that industry.  But the reality behind the miracles is the same:  Someone innovates something useful, makes money from it, and re-innovates something useful or someone else trumps  their innovations.  Most of the time, no one notices.  All it doe4s is create jobs, wealth and wellbeing.  But without this system running in the background, without the year-over-year progress embedded in these capitalist innovations, those trapped miners would be dead.

Comment:  Make no mistake our America is in a battle for its freedom…Obama is devoted to the college leftwing utopian concept of others being forced into equality managed by college folks who are certain, as is the president, they know how to manage people better than do the citizens.  Every election, these leftwingers bribe more and more numbers of citizens with divide and conquer benefits in return for their voting reliability.   The majority of those who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 pay NO FEDERAL taxes, making it exceptionally easy for Mr. Obama to soak those who voted against him. 

This is not the American way.  It is the way to the Marxist world Mr. Obama was trained to entertain.

2009 + 2010! Your Obama Government Grabbed $7,000,000,000,000 of Tax Payers’ Money!

(to be paid, don’t forget, by the 55% who actually pay federal taxes as opposed to the majority of Obama voters who pay none….

This article was presented at National Center for Policy Analysis:

“Late last week the Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary budget tallies for fiscal year 2010, and the news is that the U.S. government had another fabulous year — in spending your money, says the Wall Street Journal.

• Spending rolled in for the year that ended September 30 at $3.45 trillion, second only to 2009’s $3.52 trillion in the record books.
• The costs of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) declined by $262 billion from 2009 as banks repaid their bailout cash, payments to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were $51 billion lower (though still a $40 billion net loser for the taxpayer), and deposit insurance payments fell by $55 billion year over year.
• “Excluding those three programs, spending rose by about 9 percent in 2010, somewhat faster than in recent years,” the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says.

What did Washington spend more money on?  Once again domestic accounts far and away led the increases, says the Journal.

• Medicaid rose by 8.7 percent and unemployment benefits by an astonishing 34.3 percent — to $160 billion.
• The CBO adds that if you take out the savings for deposit insurance, funding for all “other activities” of government — education, transportation, foreign aid, housing and so on — rose by 13 percent in 2010.

By far the biggest percentage-gain revenue winner for the taxpayer in 2010 was the Federal Reserve.  Thanks to the expansion of its balance sheet with riskier assets, the Fed earned $76 billion during the year, a 121 percent increase.  

The Fed’s windfall is a perfect symbol of our current economic policy.  The government is making money because it now controls so much capital, but it is robbing that money from the private economy in the process, says the Journal.”

Source: “The 2010 Spending Record,” Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2010.

For text:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703358504575544351734226956.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Comment:  Not a bad system…….not very democratic,  the Obama people work it  very well.   Vote for Obama and his Democrats  to ‘privilege’ their  voters to get guaranteed retirements, higher pay raises, protected salaries, or to sit around and do nothing except smoke pot or sit in Leavenworth and play pool all being paid by the tax payer class they’re told  to hate at university, the folks who work AND pay their taxes…..(the ones the Leftists call “racists, homophobes, xenophobes, sexists, bigots, and pronounce  too dumb to know they’re being taken!  After all, they’ve been getting robbed for years.  Why stop now when the nation has its biggest spender of all time running the scam?

Anger at the Polls: The 55% of Those Who Do Pay Federal Taxes Don’t Like the Imprisonment of Owing Money for Those Who Pay None

Hoover Insitute’s Victor Davis Hanson is the author of the article below which is a RealClearPolitics:

“We will learn in November just how angry the public is about a lot of things, from higher taxes to massive unemployment.

But the popular uproar pales in comparison to the sense of humiliation that we Americans are quite broke. In 2008, the public was furious at George W. Bush, not because he was too much of a right-wing tightwad, but because he ran up a series of what were then thought to be gargantuan deficits. The result was that under a supposedly conservative administration, and despite six years of an allegedly small-government Republican Congress, the deficit nearly doubled from $3.3 trillion to $6.3 trillion in just eight years.

Barack Obama apparently never figured out that he had been elected in part because that massive Republican borrowing had sickened the American people. So in near-suicidal fashion, he took Bush’s last scheduled budget deficit of more than $500 billion — in a Keynesian attempt to get the country out of the 2008 recession and financial panic — and nearly tripled it by 2010. Obama’s new red ink will add more than $2.5 trillion to the national debt — with near-trillion-dollar yearly deficits scheduled for the next decade. All of that will result in a U.S. debt of more than $20 trillion.

What exactly is it about big deficits and our accumulated debt that is starting to enrage voters?

First, the public is tired of the nonchalant way that smarmy public officials take credit for dishing out someone else’s cash without a thought of paying for it. Each week, President Obama promises another interest group more freshly borrowed billions, now euphemistically called “stimulus.” But the more public money he hands out to states, public employees, the unemployed or the green industry, the more voters wonder where in the world he’s getting the cash. The next time a public official puts his name on yet another earmarked federal project, let him at least confess whether it was floated with borrowed money.

Second, there is a growing sense of despair that even vastly increased income taxes cannot cover the colossal shortfalls. At least the old Clinton tax rates of the 1990s balanced the budget. But should we bring them back, we would still run a deficit of more than $1 trillion in 2011 — given the vast increases in federal spending.

That bleak reality creates hopelessness — and anger — among voters, who feel they are being taken for fools by their elected officials. The public opposes tax hikes not because they don’t wish to pay down the debt, but because they suspect the increased revenue will simply be a green light for even greater deficit spending.

Third, it does no good for Beltway technocrats to explain how deficits are good at “stimulating” the economy, or why they do not really have to be paid back. Voters know that such gibberish does not apply to their own mortgages and credit card bills.

Voters feel relieved when they can pay off debt and become chronically depressed when they cannot. When the government last balanced the budget in 2000 under the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress, the country collectively experienced as much of a psychological high as it is now collectively experiencing humiliation over being ridiculed as a spendthrift borrower.

So national reputation and sense of self also matter. Americans are tired of hearing about inevitable Chinese ascendency and American decline. They know China is still in many ways a repressive developing country facing huge political, environmental and demographic challenges. But Americans also concede that China’s huge budget and trade surpluses result in trillions of dollars in cash reserves — and hence global clout, world respect and a promising future that seems not likewise true of spend now/pay later America.

Fourth, there is real fear that something terrible will soon come from this unsustainable level of spending. Interest rates are at historic lows. But if they should rise, just servicing the current debt would cost even more hundreds of billions in borrowed dollars. Soon, we will face a bleak choice of either slashing national defense or Social Security — or both — just when the nation is graying and the world is becoming more dangerous than ever. Will the Chinese lend us the money to deploy an aircraft carrier off their coast, or finance new American health-care entitlements that they cannot afford for 400 million of their own people?

In this upcoming election, all the old political pluses — years of incumbency, entrenched seniority and pork-barrel earmarks — are proving to be liabilities. Instead, the more public officials admit to being in control when trillions of dollars were run up, the more Americans want them gone.

We are humiliated by what we owe. If we cannot pay it back, we at least want political payback.

It’s that simple this year.”

Comment:  However offensive it might be to the Modern Leftwing Democrats….the Obama chic  socialist kind, that all things must be forced to become EQUAL…..some articles are better than others.

This article regarding voter sentiment by Mr. Hanson is better than others on the subject…..don’t you agree?   “It’s that simple this year.”