Archive for July 2009
Palin’s Legal Defense Fund & Clinton’s Legal Defense Fund
On July 21, 2009, the Associated Press reported,
“An independent investigator has found evidence that Gov. Sarah Palin may have violated ethics laws by trading on her position as she sought money for lawyer fees…
“The report obtained by The Associated Press says Palin is securing unwarranted benefits and receiving improper gifts through the Alaska Fund Trust, set up by supporters.”
“The fund aims to help Palin pay off debts stemming from multiple ethics complaints against her, most of which have been dismissed. Palin says she owes more than $500,000 in legal fees…”
“State Personnel Board investigator Thomas Daniel conceded that if the trust was created completely independent of any actions of the governor, it would be difficult to conclude she used her position to solicit the donations.”
So who was it paid the millions of dollars in legal fees incurred by Bill Clinton? Oh yeah, I remember. It was the Clinton Legal Defense Fund. Isn’t that something kind of like the Alaska Fund Trust, aka the Palin Legal Defense Fund.
According to the Washington Post:
The trustees of President Clinton’s legal defense fund said yesterday that they have raised more than $4.5 million to help pay his legal bills and may eventually be able to cover most of the cost of the president’s legal defense in the Whitewater investigation, the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit and Congress’s impeachment inquiry and trial.
At a news conference, Anthony F. Essaye, a New York lawyer who is a trustee and the executive director of the Clinton Legal Expense Trust, said the trust received 29,500 contributions totaling about $2.2 million from last August through the end of last year. He said that so far in 1999 the trust has taken in another 11,000 contributions totaling more than $800,000.
Essaye said that as of the end of October Clinton’s legal bills totaled $9 million. The trust has paid $3 million in legal expenses on top of $800,000 paid by a previous trust, leaving an unpaid balance of $5.2 million, he said.
Sharing the Cost of Obamacare
Denver Post columnist and Nanny State author David Harsanyi has a great idea. “If government-run care holds such wondrous possibilities for the nation, why don’t we all “invest” in this magical cure? Why only the rich?”
Obama and the Democrats want to soak the rich to pay for health care. Its part of Obama’s “distribute the wealth” philosophy. So unless we’re going to stage George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” where some pigs are more equal than other pigs, shouldn’t we also “distribute the responsibility?”
The Democrat Party is a heterogeneous faction comprised primarily of special interest groups each seeking their own special entitlements, often to the detriment of one another. To bring a disparate group like this together requires unifying agents. Common hatred unites the heterogeneous elements and the Democrats have two such evils – the “rich” and George Bush. If Bush had not existed, Democrats would have had to invent him.
Hitler used anti-Semitism as the evil to unify the German nation in a common hatred. Democrats use the “rich” in the same manner. Dismissing the inconvenient fact that none of us ever got a job from a poor person, Democrats portray the rich as “an eternal tool of Satan.” We have been told the wealthy “normally attain their largesse via human misery, corporate plundering and the raping of the environment, but they also tend to be smart. They tend to calculate their taxes and make up any losses by investing less, opening fewer businesses, hiring fewer people and spending less money.”
“Tap a typical democratic member of the House of Representatives on the knee with a rubber hammer and he or she will say: “Tax the rich!” said George Will. Last week Democrats decided to solve the problem of finding $1 trillion for health care by increasing taxes on the 1.4 percent of taxpayers who already pay over 45 percent of the income taxes.
In the United States, the top 20 percent of income earners pay 70 percent of all federal taxes. At the same time, 40 percent of Americans do not pay any federal taxes. Therein lays the problem. With half the nation paying little to no federal taxes, Obama’s utopian health care plan carries no risk. Let the “rich” pay for their health care. Unfortunately for the non-tax payers, this idea is contradictory to Obama’s oratory of “shared sacrifice.”
“But if Americans truly have fallen in love with the idea of expansive federal government, so be it. Let’s all start chipping in to pay for the costs associated with Hope,” says Harsanyi.
As Joseph Thorndike, a historian with the Tax History Project, explained to USA Today recently, a broadening of the tax base would be healthy for the nation. “If you ask people to pay something then they have an ownership stake in it,” Thorndike said. “The narrow, soak-the-rich approach is real short-sighted politics.”
So if the Obama and the Democrats will rewrite their health care proposal so that everyone chips in and everyone has a stake in its success, I’m all for it…all for it with just a few additional caveats:
- Congress and the Administration must give up their current blue-ribbon health care plan and enroll in Obamacare.
- All federal, state and local government employees must also give up their current health care plans to be replaced with Obamacare.
- All union workers including labor union leaders are also required to drop their current health care packages and sign up for Obamacare.
- All retired union workers must also relinquish their generous medical care plans and enroll in the new Obamacare program.
Democrats are “furious” CIA was planning to kill terrorists
According to the New York Times, Congressional Democrats are “furious” that they were not told about a secret CIA program developed after 9/11 to kill senior al-Qaeda leaders. The CIA plan was to send operatives to assassinate these terrorists.
Seems to me Democrats should have been even more furious if the CIA had not been planning on killing terrorists.
House Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats are of course blaming their long-time nemesis… Darth Vader, a.k.a. former Vice President Dick Cheney. The top secret plan was allegedly kept from Congress initially on instructions from Cheney.
It’s no wonder Cheney didn’t want to let Congressional Democrats in on the plan. If Cheney had chosen to whisper them the plan, he would have been reading all about in the New York Times at breakfast the next morning…along with Osama bin Laden and the rest of the world. We know that to be true because no sooner had CIA Director Leon Panetta advised the Congressional Intelligence Committees on June 24, 2009, that he had scrapped the plan, it was splashed all over the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post.
Democrats are outraged they were never told about a plan that never got off the drawing board and never became operational. The rest of us are disturbed that apparently in eight years time the CIA couldn’t figure out how to train and insert operatives to kill terrorists.
That the Democrats are once again trying to make a scandal out of a Bush-era policy intended to kill or capture terrorists speaks volumes to the state of the Democratic Party when it comes to national defense.
The Real Cost of "Free" Obamacare
As humorist P.J. O’Rourke famously said, “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free.” New Yorkers are not laughing.
“Congressional plans to fund a massive health-care overhaul could have a job-killing effect on New York, creating a tax rate of nearly 60 percent for the state’s top earners and possibly pressuring small-business owners to shed workers,” reports the New York Post today.
New York’s top income bracket could reach as high as 57 percent — rates not seen in three decades — to pay for the massive health coverage proposed by House Democrats this week.
Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, an umbrella organization representing the city’s major businesses, said that the estimated top marginal tax rate of 57 percent for New York actually underestimates the potential impact on businesses.
That’s because it doesn’t include the city’s burdensome unincorporated-business tax, which snares many entrepreneurs.
“It could be between 62 and 63 percent,” she said.
If the House plan passes, Wylde said, “There literally, at this point, is very strong reason to relocate your family and your business outside New York.”
For those who support Obama and the Democrats radical health care “reform” package, I have only one question.
If you don’t want to pay for your own health care coverage, what makes you think I do?
Organizational Chart of the House Democrats’ Health Plan
Nothing to worry about here. Just a little old $1,500,000,000 health care administration obfuscation from the same good folks who run such efficient organizations as AMTRAC, the Post Office and the IRS.
The omniscient, omnipresent Obama says there are 45 million people in the U.S. without health care coverage. The equates to about 15% of the population which means 85% of us are covered by some type of health care coverage. And recent polls find that 70% of insured Americans rate their health care coverage good or excellent.
The problem with Obama’s 45 million uninsured is that its a static number in a dynamic culture. As George Will said, the number is a “snapshot” of a nation in which more than 20 million working Americans change jobs every year. John Kerry used the same 45 million number of uninsured in his 2004 presidential campaign. Obviously the 45 million uninsured today is not the same 45 million John Kerry talked about.
About 21% – almost 10 million – of the uninsured are not U.S. citizens, but illegal immigrants. Some 14 million others are eligible for existing government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, V.A. benefits, etc., but have not enrolled. And over 9 million of the uninsured have household incomes of at least $75,000, but for whatever reason, have chosen not to purchase insurance even though they can well afford it.
The last two groups of uninsured – those who already qualify for some type of health care coverage and those whose incomes are over $75,000 and could purchase insurance – account for over half of the 45 million uninsured.
To provide health care coverage for less than 4% of Americans, some 12 million citizens – Obama’s great plan is to dump the health care system that covers 85% of the nation and replace it with a government-run, single-payer, socialist monstrosity that is the bane of every country it has been imposed upon.
