WIsconsin Lefties: New York City Money

From the indispensable Sykes Site:

...One Wisconsin Now Action is required to file reports with the Internal Revenue Service that show its funding has come from handful of large contributors: New York media mogul Joseph Rosenmiller gave $139,000, for example, while New York philanthropist Alida Rockefeller Messinger gave $75,000, and Epic Systems CEO Judith Faulkner and her husband Gordon gave $24,000.

(Faulkner's really large money went to ObozoCare lobbying, of course.)

If you don't think that New York money is laden with social-disease microbes, then think again while looking at the agenda of the new Mayor of NYC.

Best Insight of 2013

Sorry to say that I temporarily dis-recall the author.  Regardless, whoever it was captured the essence extremely well.

The Insight:  Washington, D.C., is an area largely populated by ex-high school Student Council Presidents.

(The same goes for Madistan, by the way.)

Yahoo!? Nope. SBC

Nice play, SBC.

After we were told by an SBC techie that only Yahoo!! could remedy the problem, Yahoo!! referred us back to SBC due to "contract terms."

Thankfully, after laboring through SBC's automated phone/response tree twice, we found a competent and professional techie who cleared up the mess in about 10 minutes.

He would have been very helpful 6 days ago.

Now we're off to see what can be done about our bank's "online service" which is also inoperative and has been so for about 4 weeks.  Seems that the bank went through a conversion and their "a few days" is directly comparable to ObozoCare's online steaming pile.

Pajama Boy's Pals

Pajama Boy wouldn't know which end of the AR is up.  But his pals do.

By the way:  are you warehousing incandescent lightbulbs?  Did you mention it in your emails or phone calls?

HT:  Zippers

It's STILL the Spending, Wisconsin

Prestegard tells us what we should have suspected.

In Wisconsin it's not the taxes.

It's the spending.

...The Tax Foundation’s figures show that, had CPI and population-growth limits been in place since the late 1970s — the last time Wisconsin’s per capita personal income growth exceeded the national average — state and local government would spend half as much as state and local government does today....

Doh.

Cassandra McCarthy

I wish he were wrong.

...The radical shock troops seeking to “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” as their pied piper puts it, make up a distinct minority of the country. To advance their transformative program, they need the mob — and a president who knows how to use the mob’s “peer pressure,” who knows that telling a room full of jittery bankers that “my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks” is akin to Don Corleone making them an offer they can’t refuse.

Consequently, we are not in ordinary times — times when speech competes with speech in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “marketplace of ideas,” and when we are simply trying to arrive at the best policies within an agreed-upon constitutional framework. We are in an us-versus-them time when the radicals are out to annihilate traditional culture and constitutional principles.

There are no Marquess of Queensbury Rules for confronting such a threat, since a fair fight is not what the mob has in mind. The threat and the aggressors making it need to be exposed, debated, mocked, and otherwise discredited whenever the opportunities present themselves. Nothing else will do, for the mob is immune to peer pressure and it has no shame.

Not a bright-and-sunshine-y forecast, is it?

By the way, this 'annihilation' movement is also operative within certain religious communities. 

Buy.  More.  Ammo.

Continuing Yahoo!! Mail Server Outage

Something blew up Yahoo!!'s mail server and the story doesn't get better.

It began getting glitchy on the 23rd and by 10AM the 24th it was blown.

Yesterday, their 800 number was too busy to take calls (but be sure to send an email and we'll respond!)

Yah, that works.

Today, one can get through to the 800 number, but after 5 minutes in queue, the line goes to a busy signal and drops the call.

During the wait, Yahoo!! apologizes.  I wonder if their "monitoring for quality" includes monitoring for just cutting off phone calls.

Back to Basics: Home and Family Econ

Not only is this old wisdom, it's not even disputed by the Left.

Only Obozo and his Statists are stupid enough to try reversing gravity.

...growing up outside of a two-parent family means lower income, less social mobility, and less “human capital” — is not controversial among social scientists. It is affirmed, Barone says, by undoubted liberals such as Harvard’s David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks.

Yet this fact seems vastly underappreciated in public policy debates. For example, President Obama is now avowedly focused on addressing income inequality and lack of upward mobility. But neither he nor anyone else of his political persuasion (or even much closer to the center) seems very interested in focusing on the relationship between these phenomena and the breakdown of the American family.

The reasons for this reticence are obvious. First, Obama does not want to offend unmarried parents, an important portion of his base. Second, Obama does not want to open up a discussion about the extent to which liberal policies and attitudes have contributed to family breakdown.

Nonetheless, the numbers demonstrate the centrality of family breakdown in the lack of social mobility....

Yup.  But attacking Christians for believing in monogamy, fidelity, marriage-before-kids, and all that stuff?

First on Obozo's list.

Merry Christmas

May the Christ child bless you and all of yours today and during the New Year.

Yahoo! Mail Server Exploded

The Yahoo! mail server has been down for about 30 hours.  Hmmmm.

The Farce: Obama

One wonders how many suns shine on Obozo's planet.

Reacting to multiple press inquiries, Obozo condescended to enroll in ObozoCare.

On the very last day for enrollment.

He delegated his staffers to actually do the work of enrollment because he didn't have the time while checking in to his vacay digs in Hawaii.

 Let's quote one of his minions:

...“Like some Americans, the complicated nature of the president’s case required an in-person sign-up,” the official said. “As you’d expect, the president’s personal information is not readily available in the variety of government databases HealthCare.gov uses to verify identities.”

(Not available?  What?  His birth certificate??)

The cheap-ass community organizer didn't bother to cover Moochie and the kids, so he's only paying $400.00/month for the ultra-cheapest plan available.

If he actually pays, of course.

This is what passes for "leadership" on Obozo's planet.

Paying the Pied Piper, Obozo

Wooopsie!!

.....[Insurance i]ndustry consultant Robert Laszewski told Ornstein that one of the insurers he works with said just 15% of people have paid and activated their plan so far. Another consultant, Kip Piper, put the figure even lower.


“So far I’m hearing from health plans that around 5% and 10% of consumers who have made it through the data transfer gauntlet have paid first month’s premium and therefore truly enrolled,” said Piper, who previously served at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “I’m hearing it’s a small portion so far. And that, of course, is a fraction of an already comparatively small number of people who have made it through setting up an account.”


As CNN notes, “enrolling” on Healthcare.gov means nothing until you actually pay. The Obama administration claims a million people have “enrolled” for Obamacare but remains silent on how many of those individuals have cut their first payment check and truly gained coverage....

Whaddya wanna bet that Obozo issues another Regal Proclamation to the effect that nobody has to pay at all for the coverage?

"Ordered" Liberty? Nope. "Libertine"

You've read about the Utah same-sex marriage case.  Some black-robed twit decided that gay "marriage" is permissible.

You haven't read the alleged 'reasoning.'

Seems that the (Federal) judge--appointed by Obozo--has declared that state-licensed marital perversion is 'deeply rooted in the nation's history and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.'

We must have missed something in our history books.

“The alleged right to same-sex marriage that the State claims the Plaintiffs are seeking is simply the same right that is currently enjoyed by heterosexual individuals: the right to make a public commitment to form an exclusive relationship and create a family with a partner with whom the person shares an intimate and sustaining emotional bond,” wrote the judge.
“This right is deeply rooted in the nation’s history and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty
- See more at: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/federal-judge-right-same-sex-marriage-deeply-rooted-nation-s-history#sthash.F7iHP7m4.dpuf

The Prissification of NRO

It all started with a Sinatra/Martin gag:

How do you make a fruit cordial?
Be nice to him.

Sinatra and Martin are barely cold in their graves, and the above is now 'puerile'--so declared by some twit at NRO who has a title.  He uses that word, 'puerile', to establish his adulthood, which was not in question until he raised the issue.  He's also straining at the gnat.

Actually, the joke is a sort of 'rough masculinity' thing, fitting many of the characters played by Sinatra in his movie years, and at home in Las Vegas and Army barracks of yesteryear.  Wouldn't surprise me if those guys purchased that joke from a gay joke-writer, either.  It is certainly not elevated discourse, but it's not a body-slam either.

It's possible that the NRO twit has never broken a fingernail, used GoJo, or had to piss in the woods.  Goody for him.  It's certain that he'll never engage in hand-to-hand combat.

"Adults" of his type just don't do that sort of thing.

HT:  Vox

DHS, the Criminal Co-Conspirator

Seems that DHS is deliberately and knowingly assisting criminal enterprises in smuggling illegals into the country.

...one wonders: why does Obama want to partner with these inhuman mass murderers? Why did he ship them thousands of lethal weapons through the Fast and Furious program? Why has he ordered his Department of Homeland Security not to arrest the cartel members who traffic in small children, but rather, to partner with those criminals to achieve the goals of their illegal conspiracies, and to assure that the cartels will be paid, even though countless U.S. laws are broken along the way? Why has Obama transformed DHS, which was supposed to be a law enforcement agency, into a collaborator with the world’s most homicidal gangs? Maybe there is an innocent explanation for Barack Obama’s conduct, but I can’t think what it might be. We may need to reassess our charitable judgment of Obama’s character....

No s*&^, Sherlock.

Paul Ryan, the New Evangelism, and Economics

It should be clear that I am no fan of Ryan's budget cave, nor the '1/2 of 1/3rd' line used by Ryan and Boehner while funding ObozoCare, continuing enormous deficits, and growing the Statist enterprise by default..

But it is true that Ryan, in his situation, has the problem of herding cats, specifically the 230+ other (R) members of the House. 

Now it appears that Ryan is going to make his Catholicism a lot more apparent in his work.  This is good.

...Ryan echoed the sentiment in a commencement speech in May, putting the message in more distinctly Republican terms. “Concern for the poor doesn’t demand faith in big government,” Ryan told the graduates of Benedictine College. “It demands something more from all of us. If we continue to believe that the war on poverty is primarily a government responsibility, then we will continue to weaken our communities. We will drift further apart as people.”

Ryan, whose father died when he was 16, envisions the kind of civil society his family leaned on in the years after his passing — local networks of churches, charities, and concerned neighbors looking out for each other, with the state playing only a supporting role. It’s a vision he finds support for in Francis’s teachings. ...

That's the "subsidiarity" pull-quote from a lengthy essay--which is worth the read (link above.)

There's no question that the radical secularist Progressive project will try to attack Ryan's efforts.  It will be interesting to see exactly how they do so.  Can they attack 'demanding more' from us, if such 'more' is charity and/or personal volunteer effort?  Can they attack subsidiarity as a principle?

Heh.

Paul Ryan, evangelist.  Whodathunk?

ObozoCare v. Travel and Entertainment

If you're forced to sign up for ObozoCare--like 5 million Americans and far more to come--you should fuggedabout either travel OR having a second home out-of-state.

Unless you're rather wealthy.

And as Belvedere indirectly highlights, this could have an impact on all those "traveling Broadway productions", and road-shows of various bands.  Not to mention solo acts.

Oh, well.  It's for the children.

HT:  Grim

Seventy-Two Percent in Syria??

Was the Gallup poll taken in Syria?

Smooth Move, Rep. Ryan & Sen. RoJo

Seems that the 'really responsible' budget deal papered together by Ryan smacked disabled combat veterans' pensions.  Not by much, to be sure; and it's "only" a rate-of-increase reduction. 

Turns out that doesn't play well where the voters live (you may remember those places, Paul and Ron).

And by the way:  what's the "rate of growth" of Congressional pensions?

A Home Run From Ace

Yah, I point to the guy's blog a lot.  But here's one that really hits it out of the park.

In a discussion of the ObozoCare advertising campaign (which YOU paid for, thankyouverymuch), Ace concludes this way:

...no man wants to think of himself as either a shouty, drunken meathead or, alternatively, as a twee goof in footie pajamas. And I don't think women want to think of themselves as so terribly shallow as to, quite literally, only care about a major health care law to the extent it buys them birth control pills so they can fornicate with "hot guys."

Feminist leftists spend half of their time insisting that women are more than their reproductive functions and, it seems, the other half insisting they are only that.

It's very strange seeing the imagery and messages that the mutants of the political left think that young people will respond to. Because when someone guesses "This will appeal to other people," their first guide is what will appeal to they themselves.

So this, then, is how Obama's minions think about themselves, first of all.

Indeed.  It's precisely that and it has a name in psychiatry, too:  projection.

There's another application, of "projection" by the way.  The gun-grabbers have railed about "wild west" shootouts and have worked VERY hard to find a 'rightist' in every recent mass shooting.  They've not been very successful.

That's because (in addition to the broken-family factor noted below), there's this:  from Oswald to present, almost every "mass shooter" or assassin has been a Lefty or a crazy.  Gerry Ford's wannabee shooter-babe?  Lefty.  The Boston bombers?  Lefty/Muslims.  The most recent Colorado shooter?  Lefty.  The Connecticut school-shooter?  Crazy.  The Arizona shooter?  Crazy.  The California parent-shooters?  Lefties.

It's also possible that Crazy = Lefty, I know.