November 11th, 2013
Time for another roundup of Texas vs. California:
California’s high tax, high regulation government, and its resultant high cost of living, has given the state the nation’s worst poverty rate. How’s that blue State model working out for you?
Fresno is completely broke. “Now the city doesn’t even have a day’s worth of cash in its general fund.”
Given the tough economy, CalPERS cuts back on staff bonuses. Ha, just kidding! They doubled them.
Desert Hot Springs is the next California city eyeing bankruptcy.
Stockton’s Lavish pensions contributed to it’s bankruptcy. But guess who doesn’t have to take a haircut?
The message Stockton’s bankruptcy has for other California cities is obvious: Just screw taxpayers.
Bankrupt San Bernardino throws the bums out. And the new team looks like they’re willing to take on CalPERS. A case of mixed messages.
Covered California, California’s ObamaCare agency, is hair plugs and fat camp.
There’s a magazine called Time that says that Texas is the nation’s future. (There’s a longter story, but I don’t feel compelled to obtain a login to read it.) I’m sure Texas has a much brighter future than Time…
Your tears, Lakers fans! Let me taste them! (Missing from that piece: Dwight Howard will no longer give 10.3% of his income to the state of California, and Texas has no state income tax.)
Tags: bankruptcy, basketball, Bell, California, Desert Hot Springs, fraud, Fresno, San Bernardino, Stockton, Texas, unions, waste, Welfare State
Posted in Budget, Crime, Texas, unions, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »
November 9th, 2013
You can check out Ted Cruz’s performance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno yourself:
Tags: Jay Leno, Ted Cruz, The Tonight Show, video
Posted in Media Watch, video | No Comments »
November 8th, 2013
If you hadn’t heard, Ted Cruz will be chatting with Jay Leno tonight, November 8, 2013.
Obama’s promises were going to appear, but they all had to cancel at the last minute.
I wonder what the over/under is for Cruz guest-hosting Saturday Night Live.
Tags: Jay Leno, Media Watch, Republicans, Ted Cruz, TV
Posted in Media Watch, Republicans | No Comments »
November 8th, 2013
Time for another LinkSwarm, still top-heavy with ObamaCare failure news:
Have insurance through your employer? Don’t worry, ObamaCare will screw you as well.
“Can the Obama-loving media really bring itself to report that their Beloved is simply lying about every single aspect of his signature program?” Beyond a few iconoclasts like Sheryl Atkinson or Chris Wallace, I think we all know the answer to that one.
ObamaCare was bad enough to start out, but the Obama White House intentionally made it worse.
Short and no doubt woefully incomplete list of businesses that have already cut back hours and hiring due to ObamaCare.
ObamaCare demonstrates “timeless demonstration of the failure of central planning, government regulations, and the entitlement state. It is a failure so total, so comprehensive, and so multifaceted that it will be studied by schoolchildren 50 years from now when their teachers explain to them why the giant welfare and regulatory state built up in the second half of the 20th century collapsed in the first half of the 21st.”
Krauthammer on ObamaCare’s continued unpopularity: “And unless they stop the avalanche here, the Democrats are going to get buried in this.”
And now the ObamaCare website is dishing out gibberish?
A quarter million Coloradans have their health insurance ObamaCared.
I’m shocked, SHOCKED to find Chicago’s Democratic machine abusing bonds to paper over deficits.
Having Dana Milbank say that Obaama lives in a reality bubble is like the guy who just mugged you saying “Man, this is really a high crime neighborhood! You should watch out!”
Philadelphia man adds two more to the dead goblin count.
If you’re the son of the most famous Fascist* in British history, maybe it’s best not to participate in Nazi-themed S&M sex orgies.
Voters in Amarillo and Houston rejected spending money for sports complexes.
Another hammer drops on Prenda Law.
Things to make you furious: Cops killing puppies.
And speaking of dogs, I missed this from a week ago: Giant George, RIP.
Heh.
*Real Fascist, not just in the liberal name-calling sense.
Tags: Charles Krauthammer, Chicago, Colorado, Country Music Awards, Crime, Dana Milbank, dogs, fraud, Max Mosley, Media Watch, ObamaCare, Prenda Law, self-defense, video, Welfare State
Posted in Budget, Crime, Media Watch, ObamaCare, video, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | No Comments »
November 7th, 2013
National Review is reporting that evangelical historian David Barton is considering a primary challenge to John Cornyn?
Can he take out Cornyn?
I don’t see it:
Barton is well known in evangelical circles, but not outside of them. Despite the endorsements of various Tea Party groups, I don’t see him playing well among fiscal conservative, business conservatives, or libertarian-leaning Republicans, and he can’t win the nomination without significant support from those groups.
Despite the media’s love of a good Republican primary fight, Barton has the profile of someone they would enjoy attacking a whole lot more. Imagine them dragging every “fundamentalist Dominionist” panic attack piece out of the closet.
Most historians, including many conservatives, have been extremely critical of Barton’s history. Greg Foster at First Things (hardly a hotbed of liberal thought), writes of a Barton piece on Locke that it “contains a number of incidental factual errors that don’t even advance his thesis, indicating that his inability to write reliable history stretches beyond ideological cheerleading and into outright incompetence.”
Barton strikes me as a figure that would be divisive among Republicans (much less among regular voters) for all the wrong reasons. He also strikes me as the only name floated as a possible Republican challenger to Cornyn who could actually lose to a Democrat in 2014.
Update: A day late and a dollar short. Barton announced yesterday he’s not going to run. D’oh!
Tags: 2014 Senate Race, David Barton, Elections, John Cornyn, Republicans, Tea Party, Texas
Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »
November 6th, 2013
I hadn’t been planning on doing another ObamaCare roundup one day after the previous one, but the tsunami of ObamaCare bad news just keeps flowing in, carrying the flotsam and jetsam of Obama’s many lies atop it.
ObamaCare numbers: Thousands enrolled, millions cancelled.
After two weeks of failure, Democrats are starting to sing a different tune on ObamaCare. (Via Instapundit.)
And ObvamaCare is hurting Democrats far more than the shutdown is hurting Republicans. Plus: Millennials are finally starting to wise up to how thoroughly they’ve been screwed.
The Obama Administration is intentionally playing games with the legal definition of “federal health care program” in order to prevent ObamaCare from being covered by laws that prevent bribes and kickbacks.
Obama’s attack machine hauls out the knives for a stage 4 cancer patient.
Another case of ObamaCare sticker shock: 315% premium increase, to $1,198.45 a month.
It’s federal mandate vs. state regulations for California ObamaCare cancellations.
Barack Obama is a lying little weasel:
“Millions are losing their health insurance policies directly because of the Affordable Care Act, and I am one of them.”
Tags: Democrats, fraud, ObamaCare, video, Welfare State
Posted in Democrats, video, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | No Comments »
November 5th, 2013
ObamaCare is the failure that keeps failing.
How many Americans might lose their insurance coverage due to ObamaCare? Try 68% of privately insured Americans.
Republicans tried to fix the rule that’s causing so many insurance companies to cancel policies due to ObamaCare. Democrats said no. Mary Landrieu, Jeanne Shaheen, Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan and Mark Begich all voted against grandfathering in insurance policies that didn’t have ObamaCare’s precious taxpayer-funded abortions.
Stage 4 cancer survivor Edie Sundby is among those having their policies cancelled due to ObamaCare:
Everyone now is clamoring about Affordable Care Act winners and losers. I am one of the losers.
My grievance is not political; all my energies are directed to enjoying life and staying alive, and I have no time for politics. For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2% after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31.
My choice is to get coverage through the government health exchange and lose access to my cancer doctors, or pay much more for insurance outside the exchange (the quotes average 40% to 50% more) for the privilege of starting over with an unfamiliar insurance company and impaired benefits.Countless hours searching for non-exchange plans have uncovered nothing that compares well with my existing coverage. But the greatest source of frustration is Covered California, the state’s Affordable Care Act health-insurance exchange and, by some reports, one of the best such exchanges in the country. After four weeks of researching plans on the website, talking directly to government exchange counselors, insurance companies and medical providers, my insurance broker and I are as confused as ever. Time is running out and we still don’t have a clue how to best proceed.
Two things have been essential in my fight to survive stage-4 cancer. The first are doctors and health teams in California and Texas: at the medical center of the University of California, San Diego, and its Moores Cancer Center; Stanford University’s Cancer Institute; and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
The second element essential to my fight is a United Healthcare PPO (preferred provider organization) health-insurance policy.
Since March 2007 United Healthcare has paid $1.2 million to help keep me alive, and it has never once questioned any treatment or procedure recommended by my medical team. The company pays a fair price to the doctors and hospitals, on time, and is responsive to the emergency treatment requirements of late-stage cancer. Its caring people in the claims office have been readily available to talk to me and my providers.
But in January, United Healthcare sent me a letter announcing that they were pulling out of the individual California market.
ObamaCare is great at one thing: Revealing your personal information. (Via Ace.)
ObamaCare is estimated to increase premiums about 41% across 49 states. State with largest hike? Nevada, at 179%. How’s that decision to reelect Harry Reid working out? (Also via Ace.)
That map shows Texas rates rising 26%, but for some Texans that hike will be as much as 158%.
Here’s notice to a man whose monthly premiums doubled to $934.99 thanks to ObamaCare.
Flowchart of President Obama’s “You can keep your plan, period” defenses. (Via Instapundit.)
The Humanitarian Tragedy of ObamaCare: “Before passage of the ACA, we had no free market in insurance or medical care. Both industries had long been cartelized in the states through licensing and other regulatory barriers to free competition. When people say that the medical market failed, they really should say that a government-business partnership failed. In light of that failure, it makes no sense to expand the partnership further under the central authority of the federal government, as the ACA does.”
Hey, lets put some liberal policy wonks in charge of a complex technical project. What could possibly go wrong? It’s like putting the guy who writes shipping regulations in charge of designing and building an aircraft carrier.
Like his employer, Paul Krugman is too dumb to admit he’s wrong.
Tags: Democrats, Jeanne Shaheen, Kay Hagan, Mark Begich, Mark Pryor, Mary Landrieu, Media Watch, Nevada, ObamaCare, Paul Krugman, Texas
Posted in Economics, Media Watch, ObamaCare, Texas | No Comments »
November 4th, 2013
Just a reminder that tomorrow is election day. Several state constitutional amendments and local bond issues are on the ballot. Now would be a good time to find your voter registration card and look up your polling place.
Tags: Elections, Texas
Posted in Elections, Texas | No Comments »
November 1st, 2013
A small LinkSwarm this time out, as I was busy with Halloween and other stuff this week:
How many Americans will lose their coverage under ObamaCare? Would you believe 93 Millions? And those are Obama Administration estimates.
30-something figures out he’ll be screwed by ObamaCare.
Awesome (real) image via David Freddoso on Twitter:
Obama Administration insists that inflation you see is just imaginary.
“New Poll Shows Democratic Incumbents in Big Trouble.”
We have a winner for Worst Bath Salts Freakout Not Involving Face-Eating:
Not sure if this needs a language warning or not, since I don’t Crazy High Redneck.
I was out of town, so I missed this tiny race riot at Highland Mall. (Hat tip: UrbanGrounds)
Cool story of World War II bomber heroism.
Links to annual Fark Scary Story Threads for this and previous years.
Day of the Dead Memes.
Happy Diwali! I’m not Hindu, but I’m always in favor of holidays where you blow things up.
Tags: Austin, Democrats, Fark, inflation, ObamaCare, pic, video
Posted in Austin, Democrats, ObamaCare, video | No Comments »
October 31st, 2013
OK, I’m exaggerating a bit, since the least I could possibly write is nothing. But instead of trying to cover every bill, I’m going to point you at Blue Dot Blues, where the indefatigable MJ Samuelson is covering each amendment, so at least I don’t have to write much. Go over there and keep scrolling. Empower Texas also has a handy scorecard. I may disagree on an amendment or two, but not strongly.
I do want to go ahead and urge a No vote on Proposition 6, which authorizes taking money out of the rainy day fund for various ill-defined water projects. This one is getting a big direct mail push from realtor and business PACs and is favored by Rick Perry, Joe Straus, Gregg Abbott and Wendy Davis. Opposing it is an odd coalition of fiscal conservatives and green party types, including Save Our Springs Austin. Some of what is covered is probably needed, but the rest has the smell of a construction boondoggle/slush fund. And what is needed should be allocated from the general fund, not raiding the rainy day fund.
Arlene Wohlgemuth at TPPF has a bit more.
The election is Tuesday, November 5th.
Tags: Arlene Wohlgemuth, Blue Dot Blues, Budget, Elections, Greg Abbott, Joe Straus, Rick Perry, Texas, Wendy Davis
Posted in Budget, Elections, Texas | No Comments »