Hey Obama, About Those "Tax Cuts" and "Bi-Partisanship"

Obama Renews Call for Bipartisanship, Takes Jab at Tea Partiers

"I've been a little amused over the last couple of days where people have been having these rallies about taxes," the president said, noting the numerous tax cuts pushed by his administration. "You would think they'd be saying thank you."

Hey jackass, "cutting" my taxes just enough to buy a Whopper each month, all the while allowing for a monetary policy that is pushing commodities, including oil, higher, and passing a "Healthcare Reform" that in reality will COST me money (and possibly my job), and you want me to thank you??

I've got a different gesture for that:


You want Bi-Partisanship? You can start by resigning. Then, and only then, will we come to the table.

FBI Able to Read Emails Stored on Servers

Yahoo, Feds Battle over E-Mail Privacy

The legal dust-up, unsealed late Tuesday, concerns a 1986 law that already allows the government to obtain a suspect’s e-mail from an ISP or webmail provider without a probable-cause warrant, once it’s been stored for 180 days or more. The government now contends it can get e-mail under 180-days old if that e-mail has been read by the owner, and the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections don’t apply.

Yahoo is challenging the government’s position and defying a court order to turn over some customer e-mail to the feds. Google, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy & Technology and other groups late Tuesday told the federal judge presiding over the case that accessing e-mail under 180 days old requires a valid warrant under the Fourth Amendment, regardless of whether it has been read.

“The government says the Fourth Amendment does not protect these e-mails,” Kevin Bankston, an EFF lawyer, said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “What we’re talking about is archives of our personal correspondence that they would need a warrant to get from your computer but not from the server.”

I learn something new every day. Sometimes, I wish I didn't.

Quick note to my fellow Threepers - if you're in the habit of keeping communications on a server such as GMail or Yahoo, Hotmail, etc, be aware that someone without a warrant might be watching.

Of course, none of you would put anything that might incriminate you into email now would you? OpSec and CommSec friends.

My Stance on Healthcare

Longtime lurker Cheddar (and you're welcome to lurk, I encourage it!), an always good questioner of my rants, asked on this post:

Would health care be so bad if it were provided to only citizens and immigrants (please don't confuse immigrants with aliens).

The short answer is "yes", because we *still* can't afford it.

This isn't about "pre-existing conditions". There are two issues with that:

1. If you as a person were able to get a tax deduction for paying your own healthcare, we wouldn't have the problem where you lose your coverage every time you changed jobs. The Government and its regulations CREATED pre-existing condition issues by only allowing businesses to receive credits for insuring employees' health.


2. You can't wreck your car, and call Allstate the next day and demand insurance can you? Why not? Because the premiums you DID NOT pay over the last 5 years CAN NOT ensure that Allstate can afford your coverage. You understand that what this idiotic law has done is ring the death knell for private health insurance? No one can be profitable in that situation - not without tripling, quadrupling, or MORE the premiums of anyone stupid enough to continue paying for healthcare.

This isn't about who gets it. Ultimately (and Mark Levin has proved a number of times), we're talking about less than 20mil people that "need" healthcare - the rest are foreigners, wealthy folks (making more than $75k a year) that choose not to carry coverage, and also younger folks who are generally healthy and don't feel they need insurance.

This IS about NOT reforming medical tort laws, where Doctors must still pay exorbitant amounts of money to cover frivolous malpractice lawsuits, and order all manner of extra and unnecessary tests to try and prevent same, increasing the costs to insurance companies.

This IS about a Nation that somehow believes that they deserve the latest, most expensive treatment that has a low success rate, even if they can't afford it. I'm sorry, but if you can't pay for a plan that can cover it, you don't deserve the latest in whizbang tests and surgeries.

This IS about not having to wait four or more months for cancer tests, MRIs, etc. This IS about not having to ration care because people overuse the system since...after all, it's free!
This IS about not losing many of your Doctors because, shock, they don't feel like putting up many thousands of dollars only to be told they make too much and should work for peanuts.

Here is basic human behavior as I channel Joe and Jane Everyman:

If my choice (after my company drops my insurance plan because the premiums just doubled - and THEY ALREADY ARE DOUBLING), is to pay $1k a month (or more!) for health insurance (and I have always kept myself covered up until now), or to save $12k up (12 months, $1k saved per month by not enrolling in Obamacare), pay the fine for not having coverage at the end of the year ($2k), and if anything happens in the mean time, fuck it, I'll go DEMAND coverage since they can't turn me down for pre-existing conditions, what do you think I (and 99.5% of the rest of the country) is going to go do?

And when we all drop our plans (after our employers drop them as well), and start showing up demanding coverage all of a sudden when we get cancer, break something, have a heart attack, etc, what's going to happen to Insurance Companies - right, out of business. That'll just leave Uncle Sam to take care of it. Just like they took care of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the Post Office, etc. etc. etc.

Please read the articles I've linked. They're not about politics, they're about simple economics, human behavior, and basic math.

Healthcare as it stood before this bill was DEFINITELY broken - no one disputes that. What this new law has done, though, is put Government in charge of the broken system because somehow (and they NEVER EVER EVER EVER HAVE IN THE PAST), they're going to lower costs, increase coverage, and improve services.

That'll be the day.

Obamacare - A Synopsis of Fail by Karl Denninger

All of this is required reading. It passes the smell test (hell, it even passes the common sense test).

To put it succinctly, we're fucked.

Karl Denninger:

If Health Care Is A Human Right...

... then why is it that the Chinese who make all our cheap plastic trash that we allow to be imported here without tariffs don't get it?

And... shouldn't we impose tariffs that add up to the cost of said health care - a "Congressionally acceptable package" costing $15,000 a year per worker - to everything that is imported from China until they do?

After all, if it's a human right, it doesn't begin and end at our borders, right?

Just an inconvenient little question for Madame Pelosi....

Health Care: Arbitrage Obama And The Dems

It's Gonna Be Like Christmas! (Health Care)

That Didn't Take Long

Please read 'em all and understand just what the National Socialists have accomplished.

What Could Go Wrong? Hacker Disables 100 Vehicles

Hacker Disables More Than 100 Cars Remotely

More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilization system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments.

Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots.

Ahh, so often we hear the old "well, they'll only use [insert stupid people controlling device here] if you're doing something wrong!!"

Look, any system, whether it's a web cam in your kid's school issued laptop computer, the cell phone in their pocket, or a system such as OnStar being used to wiretap your car, systems such as this can be, and are, abused.

We seem to allow the Government and others to do things to us because technology allows them to. Little thought is given by the sheep as to how those systems might be abused, rather, they bleat about how it will make them safer and then go about their daily business.

The next time you hear about the latest and greatest convenience system, give a thought to how that system might be abused or exploited.

Denninger - A Very Serious Warning to Nancy Pelosi

Every time I think I've managed to adequately convey my feelings on the latest travesty or tyranny to come out of our "betters" in Washington, Denninger goes and states the case in far more elegant, informed and dire terms.

I'll remind you, Karl Denninger is not a Threeper, a Truther, a Birther, or even a Tea Partier so far as I can tell, rather, he is someone who lives, breathes, and makes a living on the Economy (though I stop short of calling him an Economist). He doesn't spend his days stocking up on ammunition and weapons, or survival supplies, and his weekends aren't spent raiding surplus stores and gun shows for gear that we all hope we may not need. He simply sees the fraud in our system and wants to shine a light on it and stop it.

He's laid it out today, and he has done so with a certainty and completeness that should chill anyone reading it.

There is a bright white line for every person in this country who has taken an oath to uphold our Constitution. It is in different places for each of those individuals, but you had better believe it exists.

For some it will be crossed if you try to disarm Americans, as was attempted after Katrina.

For some it will be crossed if you try to occupy their homes.

And for some, it may be crossed if you attempt to "deem" this bill passed, when The House has not actually passed it.

I pray this evening I am wrong, and that for no material number of people - indeed, for no one person - that is where their personal line is.

But I am reasonably certain that this prayer will be offered in vain.

Please go and read the whole thing. When people who understand stock markets (and make a living from them) are noticing the powder keg that many of us in the Threeper world see as well, we can't be all that far from the precipice.

Social Security Ponzi Collapses

Social Security to Start Cashing Uncle Sam's IOUs

For more than two decades, Social Security collected more money in payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits — billions more each year.

Not anymore. This year, for the first time since the 1980s, when Congress last overhauled Social Security, the retirement program is projected to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes — nearly $29 billion more.

Sounds like a good time to start tapping the nest egg. Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs — in the form of Treasury bonds — which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg's municipal offices. (emphasis mine)

The money that the Government put away for you (remember - you pay into a fund that is supposed to pay your money back to you when you retire) is gone. It doesn't exist. All of those funds they were collecting for all those years - YOUR FUNDS - has been pissed away on unneeded inferior widgets produced by inferior companies that just happen to have connections in Congress. It's official, it's ALL GONE.

The national debt — the amount of money the government owes its creditors — is about $12.5 trillion, or nearly $42,000 for every man, woman and child in the country. About $8 trillion has been borrowed in public debt markets, much of it from foreign creditors. The rest came from various government trust funds, including retirement funds for civil servants and the military. About $2.5 trillion is owed to Social Security.

The Government takes in about $2 trillion a year in taxes, payments, or what have you. That's the "salary" of the Federal Government, ALL of it each year. That's your money out of your paycheck, when you buy gas, food, alcohol, make a profit on stocks, etc. etc. etc. We owe SIX TIMES that much to various entities, much of it to foreign nations hostile to the United States. And yet Obanana and his useful idiots in Washington are spending $1.5 trillion MORE this year than they could even hope to take in. That's like a family making $50,000 a year spending $75,000 in a particular year when they ALREADY owe creditors over $300,000 (and we're not talking mortgage debt on a house here)! How can anyone POSSIBLY think that the Feds can EVER pay that back?

Look in your bank account and ask yourself the following:
Do you have $42,000 for EACH of your family members (yes, that includes 6-month old Trevor) to just give to the Government? Because that is what it's going to take to clear the books out RIGHT NOW. Give those bastards in Washington a few more years and it will be far more than that.

It's time for the States United to say "NO MORE" and cut the Federal Government loose. Repossess their properties among the States, including all of that land they just like to up and grab when they feel like it (National Parks anyone?), and see how long they last with the District of Columbia as their only source of material income.

I don't know about you, but I'm tired of our currency being treated as funny money, our children, childrens' children, and childrens' childrens' children reduce to nothing more than cows to be milked at will by corrupt and evil people, as well as slaughtered when those people get the urge to exert their "authority".

Screw 'em. Let their empire burn. It's time for the States to save themselves before things get really bad.