Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Pretty good summary of how our economy has fared under Obama, and it's not pretty.

Obama's stimulus boondoggle may have educated voters enough that they won't allow government to pull the stimulus scam for years.

TAX AND SPEND:

Hypocrite Warren Buffet says rich people like him should pay more taxes, but his firm hasn't paid its taxes for a decade. This is why Democrats always call for raising taxes: they don't pay them. They cheat.

Tax increases in Illinois leads to job losses.

The idea of a VAT tax may be back on the table, but if Republicans go for it, there's going to be a blood bath in the 2012 primaries.

Entitlements are not the cause of our current, huge deficits. Discretionary spending increases are.

REGULATIONS:

Obama regulates goat herders.

"These new special procedures issued by the Labor Department must be followed by employers who want to hire temporary agricultural foreign workers to perform sheep herding or goat herding activities.  It describes strict rules for sleeping quarters, lighting, food storage, bathing, laundry, cooking and new rules for the counters where food is prepared."

It would be funny if it wasn't so destructive.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

Bernanke was wrong again.

"“[I]t is clear that the recovery from the crisis has been much less robust than we had hoped,” Bernanke said. “From the latest comprehensive revisions to the national accounts as well as the most recent estimates of growth in the first half of this year, we have learned that the recession was even deeper and the recovery even weaker than we had thought; indeed, aggregate output in the United States still has not returned to the level that it attained before the crisis. Importantly, economic growth has for the most part been at rates insufficient to achieve sustained reductions in unemployment, which has recently been fluctuating a bit above 9 percent.”"

I don't understand how a person who is wrong every time he opens his mouth is considered an expert.

HEALTH CARE:

Republican heavy weight confirms what I've said all along: Republicans won't repeal Obamacare.

Doctors forced to write prescriptions for over the counter medicines because Obamacare added a tax to them unless the customer has a prescription. This drives up costs.

I hate those TV commercials for power wheelchairs paid for by Medicare. I see fat, lazy people all over the place using those things and getting fatter because of it. They're obviously scamming our money and becoming more unhealthy. Now we have a study that backs up those observations.

"A new study released by the Office of the Inspector General shows hundreds of millions of Medicare dollars are wasted each year on medically unnecessary power wheelchairs.More than 61 percent of Medicare-funded power wheelchairs were either medically unnecessary or lacked sufficient documentation to determine medical necessity during the first half of 2007 alone, the Inspector General’s report said."

No kidding.

"One power wheelchair supplier, the Texas-based Scooter Store, in 2007 was fined $4 million and agreed to give up more than $13 million in pending Medicare claims for fraudulently billing the government and private health care insurers for power wheelchairs."

That's the company that runs those commercials. Naturally it's the most fraudulent.

"Griffith said Medicare is phasing in a competitive bidding program for durable medical equipment such as power wheelchairs and power-operated vehicles in an effort to bring market forces to bear on pricing.“Of course, because the program would bring payment rates for the equipment subject to the bidding program in closer alignment with the market, it has met with persistent opposition from the industry,” Griffith said."

Of course. Companies want government to protect them from competition. That's what all regulations are for.

Letter from Rick Perry to Hillary Clinton praising her for Hillarycare. Too funny.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Politically charged government money is literally corrupting the scientific method, not just the peer review process.

You know how Al Gore and his fellow global warming frauds try to scare people about rising sea levels? Sea levels are falling. The bad news is, this is most likely cyclical, so at some point in the future, sea levels will return to where they were, and Gore and Co. will claim they were right.

WAR:

Updated cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: about $5 trillion.

POLITICS:

President Obama likes to rail against fat cats, but then he goes and vacations with them.

The liberal agenda is being rolled back in Wisconsin, and liberals fear it will be rolled back at the federal level too. But the filibuster makes it hard to roll back anything in Washington.

Perry strongly courts evangelicals. This is a really bad sign.

Ron Paul takes credit for forcing Obama to reschedule his speech so as not to conflict with the Republican debate.

Ron Paul rejects the theory of evolution. You've got to be kidding me.

MISC:

Ron Paul tells some of the truth about FEMA but not very clearly. I much prefer it when he writes than when he speaks. One of the ways FEMA makes disasters worse is by sucking resources out of the private economy where they could be used by people to prepare for and mitigate disasters, leaving people more vulnerable to disasters. Then they try to centrally plan the application of those resources after the disaster, further wasting them. FEMA also creates moral hazard, convincing people they don't have to take care of themselves. And of course FEMA is a police force.

""FEMA is not a good friend of most people in Texas," Paul said. "All they do is come in and tell you what to do and can't do. You can't get in your houses. And they hinder the local people, and they hinder volunteers from going in.""

That's all government ever does.