Michelle Obama: “This year’s elections are just too important to sit out. There’s so much at stake right now for our future and our children’s future.”

Thanks, Michelle. We couldn’t have said it more succinctly.

Unintentionally validating Gingrich, Nancy Pelosi responded by stating that food stamps and unemployment insurance are what it takes to end to the recession and grow the economy. “It is the biggest bang for the buck when you do food stamps and unemployment insurance – the biggest bang for the buck,” said Pelosi.

If we follow that line of reasoning, wouldn’t it be a good idea to put everyone on unemployment and give them food stamps? Think of the robust economy we could have then.

Debating Sharon Angle to retain his Nevada Senate seat, Harry Reid said raising the minimum wage increases employment. If that is indeed true, and with unemployment at a staggering 9.6%, why don’t we just raise the minimum wage till everyone has a job. Who knew the answer was so simple. Any time unemployment starts to go up, we’ll slash it by just raising the minimum wage.

With such poorly framed economic solutions coming from the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House, it’s no wonder Democrats are headed for a train wreck next month.

Related Articles

• Letters: Unemployment checks for everyone (knoxnews.com)
• Newt Gingrich: 2010 Election Is About Paychecks v. Food Stamps (politics.usnews.com)

As mystifying as Nixon’s victory was for Pauline Kael in 1972, it is equally as mystifying in 2010 to find a Democrat running for re-election who voted for Obamacare.

According to Michael Barone, surveys of ads run by candidates indicate that not a single Democrat has run an ad bragging about the health-care bill since Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did last April. At least five House Democrats are running ads bragging about their votes against Obamacare. Another handful of candidates are running campaigns that do not even identify themselves as Democrats.

Ironically, this may be the first election in American history where Republicans and a majority of Democrats are campaigning on the same issues – the debacle of Obamacare and the Stimulus, runaway spending, soaring deficits, government bailouts and fiscal recklessness.

Related Articles

• Some Democrats Not So Hopeful About ObamaCare (reason.com)
• Dems running away from killer bunny ObamaCare; officials in DC can’t identify a single House member who’s running an ad boasting of a “yes” vote (theblogprof.blogspot.com)
• Strassel: Why Democrats Can’t Win on Taxes (online.wsj.com)

From The Wall Street Journal:

“MEXICO CITY (Dow Jones)–U.S. automobile giant General Motors Co. said Tuesday it plans to invest close to $500 million in its Ramos Arizpe plant in northern Mexico to produce a new line of engines as well as a new vehicle.

“We estimate that these technologies allow for a 9% improvement in fuel efficiency from current engines,” Lieblein said, adding that the investment will directly create 390 jobs in Coahuila state, where Ramos Arizpe is located.

Another $215 million will go toward upgrading the factory’s production lines to build a new vehicle for the domestic and international markets, she said, noting that the investment will be key to maintaining 400 jobs.

Assembly of the vehicle, which wasn’t named, is set to begin in the last quarter of 2011. GM plans for it to “give long-term viability to this plant by gradually substituting some production volumes.”

Lieblein said General Motors has invested $4.1 billion in Mexico over the last four years.”

From Information Week:

“Despite President Obama’s pledge to retain more hi-tech jobs in the U.S., a federal agency run by a hand-picked Obama appointee has launched a $36 million program to train workers, including 3,000 specialists in IT and related functions, in South Asia.

Following their training, the tech workers will be placed with outsourcing vendors in the region that provide offshore IT and business services to American companies looking to take advantage of the Asian subcontinent’s low labor costs.

Under director Rajiv Shah, the United States Agency for International Development will partner with private outsourcers in Sri Lanka to teach workers there advanced IT skills like Enterprise Java (Java EE) programming, as well as skills in business process outsourcing and call center support. USAID will also help the trainees brush up on their English language proficiency.”

If tax breaks are so good for expensive, lame government-made cars and ten-year old washers and dryers, why can’t we get genuine tax breaks that would actually stimulate the economy and create jobs?

With a sticker price of $41,000, the government is offering a $7,500 tax credit to purchasers of a Chevy Volt. What a deal! Government Motors will show the full $41,000 sales price on their income statement and book the additional taxpayer handout of $7,500 as profit.

Since the government owns GM – along with the labor unions – why don’t they just sell the Volt for $33,500 and save the taxpayer $7,500 per car?

The $41,000 price tag on the Volt puts it in the same class as luxury cars like Mercedes Benz and BMW. Beemers and Benzes are the cars of choice for the wealthy.

The Democrats standard of “taxes for thee, but not for me” is in full bloom. Thanks to Congress, we Joe Six-Pack, hard-working Americans, still driving our used Chevys and Fords, will now be subsidizing the wealthy to the tune of $7,500 to buy an Obamamobile.

Obama rocketed to the White House in 2008 on a “change you can believe in” slogan. With double-digit unemployment and trillions of dollars wasted in deficit spending, Obama and the Democrats are now telling voters they shouldn’t change a thing.

Stumping for Democrats in Democrat enclaves, Obama preaches to the choir with taunts more appropriate to a 6 year-old, telling Republicans,

“You say you want the keys back? No, you can’t have the keys back. You don’t know how to drive! “And I want to point out, when you get in your car, when you go forward, what do you do? You put it in ‘D.’ When you want to go back, what do you do? You put it in ‘R.’ We don’t want to go into reverse back in the ditch. We want to go forwards. We got to put it in ‘D.’”

That is just so clever…except when you’re at the edge of a cliff. Then you want to put the car in ’R.’

It’s also stupid. Would you rather have Obama’s 10.8% unemployment; projected to go even higher, or the worst unemployment of 7.6% under the eight years of George Bush?

"They mention that he once had a fleeting association with the Ku Klux Klan, and what does that mean? I’ll tell you what it means," Clinton said. "He was a country boy from the hills and hollows of West Virginia. He was trying to get elected. And maybe he did something he shouldn’t have done, and he spent the rest of his life making it up. And that’s what a good person does. There are no perfect people. There certainly are no perfect politicians."

In other words, the country boy from the hills and hollows of Arkansas argues it was perfectly fine for the country boy from the hills and hollows of West Virginia to join an organization that lynched blacks and Jews. After all, Clinton explained, “He was just trying to get elected,” as if that legitimizes something so heinous

Clinton said that Byrd’s Ku Klux Klan affiliation was merely “a fleeting association.” That “fleeting association” seems to have lasted nearly a quarter of a century. Shortly after joining the KKK in 1942, Byrd was elected “Kleagle,” an officer whose role in the Klan is to recruit new members. In a letter to the Klan’s Imperial Wizard in 1946, Byrd wrote that the KKK was “needed today as never before.” Byrd was still practicing blatant discrimination and racism 22 years after joining the KKK when he filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Byrd was the only senator to vote against both Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court.

Clinton’s shameless white-washing of Sen. Byrd’s history of racial discrimination was as spurious and phony as his teary-eyed, “I feel your pain” whimpers. Too bad the senate’s other long-term racial segregationist, the late Sen. Strom Thurmond, left the Democratic Party to become a Republican. Clinton could have explained how a country boy from the hills and hollows of South Carolina only practiced racial discrimination to get elected.

Pelosi wants to play “Let’s Pretend” the Senate bill has passed. This makes about as much sense as the old “Assume a Can Opener” joke.

Even though House Democrats outnumber Republicans 256 to 178 – a 78 seat margin, there are difficulties. Unable to find enough Democrats to walk the plank and commit political suicide by voting for the Senate version of the trillion dollar a year entitlement boondoggle called “health care reform”, Pelosi & Company are trotting out a nefarious ruse known as a “self-executing rule”, also known as a “hereby rule.” Under this shifty stunt, House Democrats would pretend [deem] the Senate bill was passed and vote only on reconciliation corrections.

As long as we’re going to pretend and “deem” something to have been done, let’s take it a step further. Assuming, and that’s not much assuming, Republicans win back the House in the 2010 mid-term election. Doesn’t it make just as much sense for the Republicans to “deem” the health care bill never passed as it does for Democrats today to “deem” health care has passed? Neither one has an up or down vote as Article 1, Section 7 of the United States Constitution stipulates. I call it the “self-canceling rule.”

Poor little Dennis Kucinich…all the diminuative Ohio Democrat got was an airplane ride with the president for his ObamaCare vote.

Kucinich told Obama that he wants a full ERISA waver and a public option in exchange for his vote.  And if he actually gets an ERISA waver, it will be the biggest victory of the entire health care debate.   As Jon Walker says, “ERISA is the 900 pound Gorilla that has fucked up America’s health care system something good.”

ERISA prevents states from telling employers or labor unions what kind of insurance they must offer. Not having an ERISA waiver would make adopting a true state-based single payer system incredibly difficult, if not impossible, and make implementing a strict employer mandate system impossible in other states.

If on the other hand he settles for some worthless reassurances that “Obama will work toward it in the future” (which nobody but Lynn Woolsey is dumb enough to actually believe), or a meaningless symbolic vote that achieves little more than 15 minutes of futile grandstanding, good luck to him.  A thousand people have donated over $16,000 to Dennis since yesterday to thank him for standing up for what he believes in. We’ll be asking him to return it.

I wonder if Dennis knows he is now a bona fide member of the Mile High Club.