Thursday, February 12, 2009

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing

Benjamin Franklin, Inventor

QN: I haven't had many comments from the group. Either you are content to catch up when you can, or aren't sure how to comment. Two approaches, you can dig out an old quotes email and send comments to the group, or you can go to the website http://www.quotefish.blogspot.com/, go to the post and click comments at the bottom and post. Since the blog is public, the comments are moderated. I check daily and post.

Bruce has sent me articles in the past from Human Events and this one showed up in my inbox today. If you don't like Ann Coulter at all, you will hate this. If you are part of the conservative underground, you will probably like this. If you still have an open mind in a increasing polarized, secular, world, you may see some good points and some areas when the message is diluted with sarcasm. Still interesting points.


Maybe it would be a good time to check out how to post comments.


Goodbye, America! It Was Fun While It Lasted
by Ann Coulter
02/11/2009


It's bad enough when illiterate jurors issue damages awards in the billions of dollars because they don't grasp the difference between a million and a billion. Now it turns out the Democrats don't know the difference between a million and a trillion. Why not make the "stimulus bill" a kazillion dollars?

All Americans who work for a living, or who plan to work for a living sometime in the next century, are about to be stuck with a trillion-dollar bill to fund yet more oppressive government bureaucracies. Or as I call it, a trillion dollars and change.

The stimulus bill isn't as bad as we had expected -- it's much worse. Instead of merely creating useless, make-work jobs digging ditches -- or "shovel-ready," in the Democrats' felicitous phrase -- the "stimulus" bill will create an endless army of government bureaucrats aggressively intervening in our lives. Instead of digging ditches, American taxpayers will be digging our own graves.

There are hundreds of examples in the 800-page "stimulus" bill, but here are just two. First, the welfare bureaucrats are coming back.

For half a century, the welfare establishment had the bright idea to pay women to have children out of wedlock. Following the iron laws of economics -- subsidize something, you get more of it; tax it, you get less of it -- the number of children being born out of wedlock skyrocketed.
The 1996 Welfare Reform bill marked the first time any government entitlement had ever been rolled back. Despite liberal howling and foot-stomping, not subsidizing illegitimacy led, like night into day, to less illegitimacy.

Welfare recipients got jobs, as the hard-core unemployables were coaxed away from their TV sets and into the workforce. For the first time in decades, the ever-increasing illegitimacy rate stopped spiraling upward.

As proof that that welfare reform was a smashing success, a few years later, Bill Clinton started claiming full credit for the bill.

Well, that's over. The stimulus bill goes a long way toward repealing the work requirement of the 1996 Republican Welfare Reform bill and rewards states that increase their welfare caseloads by paying unwed mothers to sit home doing nothing.

Second, bureaucrats at Health and Human Services will electronically collect every citizen's complete medical records and determine appropriate medical care.

Judging by the care that the State Department took with private visa records last year, that the Ohio government took with Joe the Plumber's government records, that the Pentagon took with Linda Tripp's employment records in 1998, and that the FBI took with thousands of top secret "raw" background files in President Clinton's first term, the bright side is: We'll finally be able to find out if Bill Clinton has syphilis -- all thanks to the stimulus bill!

HHS bureaucrats will soon be empowered to overrule your doctor. Doctors who don't comply with the government's treatment protocols will be fined. That's right: Instead of your treatment being determined by your doctor, it will be settled on by some narcoleptic half-wit in Washington who couldn't get a job in the private sector.

And a brand-new set of bureaucrats in the newly created office of "National Coordinator of Health Information Technology" will be empowered to cut off treatments that merely prolong life. Sorry, Mom and Pop, Big Brother said it's time to go.

At every other workplace in the nation -- even Wal-Mart! -- workers are being laid off. But no one at any of the bloated government bureaucracies ever need fear receiving a pink slip. All 64,750 employees at the department of Health and Human Services are apparently absolutely crucial to the smooth functioning of the department.

With the stimulus bill, liberals plan to move unfirable government workers into every activity in America, where they will superintend all aspects of our lives.

Also, thanks to the stimulus bill, the private sector will gradually shrivel and die. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost of servicing the bill's nearly trillion-dollar debt will shrink the economy within a decade.

Robert Kennedy famously said: "There are those who look at things the way they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and ask, 'Why not?'"

The new liberal version is: There are those who look at things and ask, "Why on earth should the government be paying for that?" I dream of things that never were funded by the government and ask, "Why not?"

http://www.humanevents.com/




Boldly going where no economy has gone before



http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=30665




2 comments:

  1. I sense the fish is about to go postal. This damn thing reads like Atlas Shrugged. It's coming true right before our eyes. The FDA has taken many generic drugs off the markets because of failure to adhere to strict guidelines, the result is there are not enough name brand drugs to fill the need. The DEA has taken the feed stock required to make Oxycontin, this will prevent abuse but cancer patients suffer. sighhhhhh....

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  2. I wish I trusted Coulter's fact-checkers enough to be able to comment on the article... but I just don't. She tends to make things up in order to find a story.

    But... I thought a lot of the stimulus was quick spending... not long-term policy. Based on the bubble chart (somewhere down below this post), the spending does taper off. It's not permanent.

    When the private sector stops spending and lays people off, in order to stop the spiral, the government steps in to take up the slack and keep people working (and thus off worthless welfare, hopefully learning a new skill on 'working' welfare). Once the private sector gets moving again, it will be up to us as citizens to make sure the governement emplyees are shifted back to the private sector again.

    But, if we tell the government to stop spending now, too... wouldn't that cause the economy to collapse? That's what "They" keep telling us...

    I don't know who to trust anymore.
    But, I do know I don't trust Coulter any further than I could throw her.

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You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.

Harlan Ellison