Archive for December 26th, 2009
Question of the Day: Will the Healthcare Rationing Bill be a "Great Tipping Point"?
Here’s an interesting article by Jay Ambrose that has us wondering if a “Great Tipping Point” is upon us.
This is a phrase we hear used a lot lately — and even employed by Bill Daley in an Op-Ed letter written this week as a warning to Democrats that the nation is set to turn against them, in a big and irrevocable way, because the Democrat Party is defining itself as the party of:
* profligate spending
* race-baiting
* irresponsibility
* invasive government
* freedom stealing
* socialism
* enemy of small business
We are an interesting point of argument for a “Great Tipping Point” ourselves. One of the reasons we have kept this site going is that this is a journal, of sorts, of the political evolution of a set of diehard, lifelong, take-no-prisoners Democrats who now look upon the Democrat Party as a foreign and alien thing we want nothing to do with.
All of this happened in less than two years.
We went from being guys who walked out on blind dates if we found out the person in front of us was a Republican, to being people who have more Republican and Independent friends today than Democrats. In fact, the majority of people we know who used to call themselves “Democrat” now identify as Independent. The course the DNC set in backing Dr. Utopia and forcing his nomination alienated more lifelong Dems than the party chooses to realize.
We still call ourselves “Democrat” when pressed, out of cultural memory and nostalgia we guess. It’s the same way, when pressed, we’d say we’re “Catholic”, because that’s how we grew up, that’s the school we went to, though we haven’t set foot in a church in a great while. We loved John Paul the Great as Pope, but never listen to a damn thing Pope Benedict says. We don’t like him, don’t have any priests or nuns here in Chicago we especially like, and don’t feel compelled to come running whenever church bells ring in our neighborhood.
It’s the same with the Democrat Party. We love the Clintons, and we will do anything for them as long as we live. We do not like or support the current Democrat president, however. We don’t back his agenda, and we truly believe he is driving this country into the ground on his narcissistic quest to become “President of the World”. As of the latest vote on Healthcare Rationing, there are also no longer any Democrats in the Senate or House that we support, either.
Frankly, the whole lot of them can take a flying leap for all we care. We’d love to see each and every one of them lose their seats in upcoming elections, because that Healthcare Rationing bill is unconstitutional as written, and one of them should have had the guts to stand up to the current president, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi to shut it down so things could start over and the bill could be written properly.
Because Democrats in the Senate, especially, rushed through a bill they didn’t have time to read, when they have no idea how this is really going to impact Americans, just so they could run home for Christmas and declare victory, we intend to do everything we can to see to it all of these people lose their jobs.
The reason for that is clear to us, in one word: incompetence.
Never in our lives did we dream we would be at this juncture, wanting to see Congress swept clean of Democrats at the first available juncture.
What was once a centrist party is now the party of corruption, the party of backroom deals and massive, in-your-face bribes. Anything in Nebraska currently named after Ben Nelson needs to be re-named, pronto. The Great Whore of the Senate has brought massive shame to his state. We’d say the same thing about Mary Landrieu, but with people like Ray Nagin in elected office in Louisiana, her bribe was pretty much business as usual.
The Democrat Party is revealing itself as a collection of crooks who want to steal as much money from the hardworking as possible, to hand it out as welfare to the lazy and incompetent, and to reward loyal voting blocs. There is zero concern whatsoever for the country itself.
Just as Nelson struck a deal so Nebraska would stop paying its fair share for Medicare, foisting that bill onto other states, so Democrats want hardworking people to pay to cover the bills incurred by the laziest members of their voting blocs.
That’s shameful, and unacceptable in our eyes. We want no part of a party that operates this way, and rewards such bad behavior.
We do not, however, think Republicans are tough enough. They aren’t fighting socialism hard enough. The GOP is not offering up a solid enough rebuke of Democrats’ behavior, with a firm battle plan to take back the country and set us all on a course towards prosperity again.
If Republicans did that, we don’t know where we’d end up on the spectrum, but think we’d be able to culturally stop calling ourselves Democrats at all if things reached that point.
What’s interesting to us, in thinking about our own journey these last two years, is the fact that we WERE such partisan Dems, and now we look upon the Democrat Party with great disgust.
So, what about all the Americans truly in the middle, who had no strong allegiance either way?
How do THEY feel about Democrats now?
Are things bad enough that they’re ready to run to the Republicans in droves like they did in 1980?
Have we reached that cultural tipping point?
What do you think?
Action Item of the Day: Where have presidents spent Christmas?
More and more people keep asking us where other presidents spent Christmas, stunned the current president and his family are burning through tens of thousands of dollars A DAY renting three mansions, side-by-side, on the islands of Hawaii, dragging hundreds of staff members thousands of miles from their families at Christmas, all at massive taxpayer expense.
Where’s the outrage from the same peanut gallery that scolded the RNC for spending money on a campaign wardrobe for the Palins? Which, incidentally, is the same peanut gallery that said not a word about the fortune dropped on Dr. Utopia and Joe Biden’s tailored suits during the campaign, and all the upholstery fabric and garbage bags used to make the current First Lady’s campaign wear (assembled by kindergartners’ and schools for the blind).
We don’t know if we’ll have time to get to it today, but we would like to solve the mystery of where each president since at least Kennedy spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. If we can get this table filled in, then we can go back further as well:
Where did the First Family spend Christmas in the year:
2009 = Obamas went on lavish $12,000+/day Hawaiian luxury trip, renting three side-by-side-by-side mansions on a beach “favored by Hawaiian royalty”
2008 (Bush) = Camp David (article says Bush spent 12 Christmases at Camp David, which includes his father’s 4 years in office too)
2007 (Bush) = Camp David for Christmas Eve and Day, then on to Crawford, Texas
2006 (Bush) = Camp David
2005 (Bush) = Camp David
2004 (Bush) = Camp David
2003 (Bush) = Camp David
2002 (Bush) = Camp David
2001 (Bush) = Camp David
2000 (Clintons) = White House
1999 (Clintons) = White House, preparing for the Y2K changeover
1998 (Clintons) = White House, then Hilton Head for Renaissance Weekend and New Year
1997 (Clintons) = Sarajevo, the former Yugoslavia, with our troops
1996 (Clintons) = White House
1995 (Clintons) =
1994 (Clintons) =
1993 (Clintons) = Hilton Head, South Carolina (borrowed house from friend)
1992 (Bush) = Camp David
1991 (Bush) = Camp David
1990 (Bush) = Camp David
1989 (Bush) = Camp David
1988 (Reagan) = White House *NOTE: Reagan did this so agents could be with family at Christmas and his staff wouldn’t be pulled away from loved ones during the holidays.
1987 (Regan) = White House
1986 (Reagan) = White House
1985 (Reagan) = White House
1984 (Reagan) = White House
1983 (Reagan) = White House
1982 (Reagan) = White House
1981 (Reagan) = White House
1980 (Carter) = Plains, Georgia
1979 (Carter) = Camp David
1978 (Carter) = Plains, Georgia (as noted in his book, Christmas in Plains, p. 188)
1977 (Carter) = Plains, Georgia (as noted in his book, Christmas in Plains, p. 109)
1976 (Ford) = Vail, Colorado
1975 (Ford) = Vail, Colorado
1974 (Ford) = Vail, Colorado
1973 (Nixon) =
1972 (Nixon) = Key Biscayne, Florida
1971 (Nixon) = White House
1970 (Nixon) = White House
1969 (Nixon) = White House
1968 (Johnson) = White House
1967 (Johnson) = White House
1966 (Johnson) = Texas, personal ranch
1965 (Johnson) = Texas, personal ranch
1964 (Johnson) = Texas, personal ranch
1963 (Johnson) = Texas, personal ranch
1962 (Kennedy) = Hyannis Port, MA (family palace)
1961 (Kennedy) = Hyannis Port, MA (family palace)
1960 (Eisenhower) = White House (per book, Christmas in the White House by Alberto Menendez, he worked for several hours in the Oval that day, too)
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* One way to do this would be to search old newspapers for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day of each year, looking for a story about the president at the time, which would most likely say where he and his family was that day
* Add what you find to this thread and we will update the table above, and build it out to show where previous presidents have spent Christmas
* PLEASE include link to your source so this list can be as accurate as possible, as it appears no one else has thought to assemble something like this for reference
* We don’t remember any president spending as lavishly or pulling staff away from their families on the holidays as much as the current president and his “fashion icon” wife, especially not in a time when so many are suffering in a prolonged recession (which this president promised he’d solve by now)
How to solve terrorism in one easy step
Sitting here thinking about the latest attempt Muslims made to destroy a commercial airliner and murder everyone aboard, with whatever they were up to on the Northwest Airlines flight from Holland to Detroit, we’ve realized how easy it would actually be to solve terrorism if Western governments had any backbone — or if a Western, non-government, pan-national movement arose to counter Al Queda and other Muslim terrorist groups on its own.
Terrorism could actually be solved in one easy step, that should go something like this:
* every time Muslims attack an embassy, an airliner, a hotel, or any other Western target, a prominent mosque somewhere will be demolished.
* one such mosque will be leveled to the ground for every 100 people killed in any terrorist attack by a Muslim; since there were close to 300 people aboard the Northwest flight, if the Muslim terrorist aboard had been successful in his plot, that would have been 3 mosques somewhere in the world that would have been burned to the ground in retaliation.
* mosques in shopping centers or in the suburbs aren’t high-profile enough: we’re talking these lunatics’ most holy, sacred sites…leading all the way up to the Dome of the Rock, Haggia Sophia, and all the sites in Mecca and Medina ultimately, if these people don’t get the message and stop hitting Western targets.
Currently, there’s no real downside for Muslims in blowing things up, aside from the loss of their lives. It appears these suicide bombers are certifiably insane, believing they are going to be rewarded for their murder spress with scores of virgins and all the hummas and grapes they can eat in the afterlife. The carrot Islam gives them is much, much greater than the stick they fear in terms of laying down their own lives.
But, we’ve been told that in Islam, it’s taught their sacred sites will never be destroyed, because Allah loves them all so much. Taking out their mosques and the shrines in Mecca and Medina should definitely rattle them – since their Koran swears to them this would never happen. So, once it happens, the Koran will be proved fallible. If the Koran’s wrong about one thing, even the most zealous of these murderers has to see the Koran could be wrong about other things too — and those promises of scores of virgins as rewards for martyrdom might not be true either.
Would Muslims be so quick to bring down airliners if they knew doing so would mean three or four mosques somewhere would be smashed to bits in retaliation?
Would Muslims at large continue to tolerate, if not aid and abet, terrorists if mosques were destroyed every time terrorists struck?
Currently, there’s no real detriment to terrorism for these people. It costs relatively little for them to carry out their terrorist attacks: the price of the weapons used, an airline ticket or two, whatever housing and food went to raise the terrorist bomber, and minimal logistical costs. The costs to the airlines attacked are in the hundreds of millions, including not only the cost of the planes lost, the insurance claims from victims’ families, and other direct costs of the attack itself, but the lost revenue in the months afterwards when many would-be passengers are too afraid to fly.
For terrorism to stop, Muslims need to feel that financial smackdown, too. They need to know, to a person, that when Muslims attack the West, that Muslims will lose the millions they’ve invested in these mosques worldwide, starting with the ones that have special meaning to them.
As special as all those dads and moms are to the children orphaned by Muslims.
As special as all those friends are to those who are left on the ground still trying to process that loss of life a decade later.
As special as everyone ever killed in a Muslim bombing truly is.
We lost a good friend on 9/11 named Jane, when Muslims hijacked planes and turned her office into a crime scene. Another family friend died over Lockerbie, Scotland when Muslims took terror to the air in the 80s.
We want the West to fight back. If governments won’t do this, then the marketplace demands an answer to Al Queda in the form of a new Knights Templar, or something of that sort. Kind of an A-Team that’s summoned into action after a terrorist attack, doing what the US, Israel, and other political entities are seemingly prevented from doing by liberals. It can be totally rogue, and governments can threaten its existence and despise all who are a part of it, but just imagine if Muslims feared a boogeyman out there just waiting to punish them for their evil deeds.
Like spoiled, evil children raising Hell with no fear of punishment, Muslims need to be afraid of something — there’s currently no effective “Wait ’till your father gets home”, when they really and truly do appear to need one.
Too bad there’s not a George Soros type radical billionaire out there on the side of good who can undermine Islam and Muslim terrorism the way these people are continuously and effectively undermining the West.
If you have ever dreamed of seeing Boystown, watch "Tabatha's Salon Takeover" on BRAVO December 29th
Just a quick programming note for you: “Tabatha’s Salon Takeover” on BRAVO is finally airing the episode they shot in Boystown last summer. Tabatha Coffey, the host, traveled here to makeover Chicago Male, a salon where some of us used to get our hair cut (until she remade it, oddly enough). The shop’s right on Halsted, near the corner of Halsted and Roscoe, diagnal from Pie Hole (which has the pizza we love), and right across the street from the 7/11 we talk about sometimes (where all those horrible kids who hang out all day at the Center on Halsted go to start more trouble when the Center closes at night).
We got to meet Tabatha when she was in town filming. A friend of ours lived in the building that houses Chicago Male, and we’d see her in the courtyard out back smoking all the time. She is funny, smart, kind, and SO FRIENDLY. We’ve been excited to see this episode because Tabatha is so great in person, even if we didn’t like what she did with the salon.
Previously, Chicago Male had a really comfy, cozy vibe to it: they used reds, greens, and lots of leather and marble to make the place feel sort of like an upscale ski lodge. We would get there early for appointments just so we could read magazines and hang out. The staff there, however, was TERRIBLE: rude, snotty, wispy little twinks at the reception desk and stylists so flamboyant and full of themselves even we rolled our eyes, as immune to this behavior as we usually are in Boystown. They used to have a great biker chick lesbian named Renee working there, and that’s who used to cut our hair, but she had some health problems and moved back to Toledo, we think, so we stopped going there when she was gone. As comfy as we thought it was in there, we just didn’t want to deal with the twinky staff and attitude in the place.
Well, Tabatha stripped all the warm colors and made the place look like a generic New York City salon: cream walls, lots of black, going for sleek and high-end instead of comfy cozy. A lot of people like it, but it’s not our cup of tea (or coffee, as it were, if we wanted to go for the easy Tabatha Coffey pun, which apparently we just did).
They’ve got a new receptionist too, but just walking past the shop every day, he doesn’t seem to be much of an improvement from the Miss Thang they had before.
Welcome to Boystown!
We’re excited to see the episode, and are going to a Watch Party at Halsted’s Grill on December 29th to see it premiere, where we think they’re going to have a drag queen impersonate Tabatha.
You can watch the show yourselves at home, if you get BRAVO, and have a little Boystown in your own homes as well, where you can dress up like Tabatha yourselves if you want to.
Reminder: buy up as many marked down Christmas ornaments as you can to make Hillary and Sarah ornaments for Iowa
All of the Christmas ornaments will go on sale today — reaching 75% at some point.
We buy up as many of the round red and blue bulbs as we can find — really, any color will do but we think the red and blue look the nicest for political purposes.
Then, we find nice pictures we like of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin and print them off the computer, using our finest decoupage skills to make little Hillary and Sarah Christmas ornaments.
We started doing this in 2007 when we went to Iowa for the first time and campaigned for Hillary Clinton in the primaries. In our hotel room, while we were watching all the biased coverage the MSM provided, pushing Dr. Utopia and Mike Huckabee to win in their respective fields, we made dozens of Hillary ornaments that we handed out to families we met while canvassing in Waterloo, Des Moines, Clinton, Dubuque, you name it. People really enjoyed receiving them, and almost every person we gave one to immediately walked over to the tree in the living room and hung the ornament with pride in a prominent position.
We’d bet more than a few of those ornaments are on trees again this year.
Palin supporters, in particular, should pay particular attention to this posting — there is now under two years until campaigning will start in Iowa. More likely than not, Palin will declare her candidacy in early 2011…and we do not want to see her make the mistake Hillary Clinton made and wait too long to start working Iowa. As much as we hate this reality: because of the nature of the nominating contests, Iowa is everything. If Palin wins there, she’ll win New Hampshire and South Carolina right after that, and become the nominee.
On a grassroots level, just imagine what we could accomplish if we started prep work for her campaign now, and had two years of crafting time to make as many little goodies like Christmas ornaments as we could, so that we could hit the ground running in Iowa early, blowing Mitt Romney, John Thune, Charlie Crist, Bobby Jindal, or whomever else the MSM tries to run against Palin right out of the water.
We’re going to buy up as many ornaments as we can here in Chicago and will start crafting for Palin. We’ll even make trips into Iowa in November/December 2010 to start passing these out, using our old Hillary Clinton campaign lists of moderate Democrats to canvass for Palin in Iowa. Good thing we saved all those names and addresses from 2008; some of those people will have moved, obviously, but 70% of the lists should be good.
Our job will be, as always, to encourage moderate Dems and independents to defy the DNC and deny Dr. Utopia a second term. Conservatives have the job of getting your own members off their lazy, lazy butts and actually making it to the polls to vote this time. Dr. Utopia’s presidency is all their fault, in our opinion, because they decided to sit 2008 out.
As of the new year, we have just two years to make sure that does not happen again.
Together we can do it, but we have to start now…and starting with Christmas ornaments seems as good a place to start as any.
Saturday Open Thread: December 26th, 2009
What’s on your mind this Saturday?
Can you give us a recap of your Christmas?
What we’re most interested in hearing about (besides how good the food was) are the political bits that came up in conversation. Do you have any Utopians in your families? Are they still kneeling before their Lightbringer, awaiting unicorn delivery, or are they questioning “The Golden Age of Hope and Change”?
How angry were your relatives at Ben Nelson, the shameless whore of the Senate?
Please share.
We’ll have our own holiday roundup ready sometime today, so you’ll get all the scoop on what Christmas was like here in Boystown. No surprise here, we’re sure, but there were indeed Naughty Elves and Holly-Jolly Strippers.
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Here’s something that should get a lot of 20-30 something Utopians up in arms: their Lightbringer is taking away their Flex Spending Health accounts.
Few of us have ever worked anywhere with Flex Spending accounts, but in the rare instances when we worked in offices full-time and had benefits packages, this was our favorite perk. Flex Spending accounts let you buy over-the-counter health items without having to pay income tax on that. It’s amazing, really. Some companies let you allot up to $5,000/year into your Flex Spending account. You get a little Flex Spending credit card that you then use to purchase whatever you need from the drug store, pay for doctor visits, cover your dental procedures, etc. You can also pay with cash or another credit card and then fax your receipts into your Flex Spending provider and have them covered.
It’s, in a word, wonderful.
You still pay the tax on the products at the point of purchase, but the money you put into your flex spending account is deducted from your pay BEFORE income tax is taken. So if you put $5,000 into your Flex Account and spent it all in a year, and you made $30,000, then at income tax time you only show $25,000 for the government to pillage. We’ve known people who had their teeth fixed (as braces aren’t covered in any plan we’ve seen after age 19), had other medical procedures they needed that insurers also weasled out of covering, and who have families that break the bank in over-the-counter eye and allergy purchases save themselves a great deal of money in this program.
But, the White House is now taking this away. Only insulin and prescription medication will be allowed in Flex Spending Plans. That means no braces for you, snaggle-tooth.
Remember: Republicans who sat out the 2008 election because “McCain wasn’t good enough” need to accept responsibility for what happens when a radical socialist takes power who wants to snatch as much of your money as possible and make it harder and harder for you to live a decent life.
This is the change that was promised; hope you like it.
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Nevadans are asking Harry Reid: “Where’s our Christmas present?”.
If shameless whore of the Senate Ben Nelson bent over and smiled big for Reid, abandoning whatever principles he had regarding abortion funding, after getting an ETERNAL exemption from Medicaid increases for Nebraska (which is unconstitutional, by the way), then what has Reid brought home for Nevada?
We hope Sue Lowden really, really clobbers Reid with this one.
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