Obama’s Auto Company Takeover a Job Killer

At the time of the government takeover of GM and Chrysler much, if not all of the criticism was centered on the debate over jobs.

Everyone in support on injecting billions into the two companies were doing their best Chicken Little impressions saying without taxpayer money the entire auto industry would fail at the cost of millions of home-grown jobs.

That was then, this is now and an inspector general report

Treasury Department’s Special Inspector General for the Toxic Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) contends that President Obama’s push for General Motors and Chrysler to close thousands of dealerships across the country as part of their government bailouts “may have substantially contributed to the shuttering of thousands of small businesses and thereby potentially adding tens of thousands of workers to the already lengthy unemployment rolls, all based on a theory and without sufficient consideration of the decisions’ broader economic impacts.”

The SIGTARP report will further contend, according to Rep. Darrell Issa, the ranking minority member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that it is questionable whether the closings were “either necessary for the sake of the companies’ economic survival or prudent for the nation’s economic recovery.”

Issa, who has been a vocal critic of the Obama administration’s handling of the GM and Chrysler government takeovers, said the SIGTARP report should “serve as a wake-up call as to the implications of politically-orchestrated bailouts and how putting decisions about private enterprise in the hands of political appointees and bureaucrats can lead to costly and unintended consequences.”

The California Republican also said the fothcoming report will say “GM did not consistently follow its stated criteria and that there was little or no documentation of the decision-making process to terminate or retain dealerships with similar profiles, or of the appeals process” and that “making termination decisions with little or no transparency and making a review of many of these decisions impossible…”

So, thousands of additional people are collecting unemployment due to ill-advised political meddeling in privates business.

Who’d a thunk it?

Accept those of us that saw it comming.

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You Know it’s Bad When Picketers are Outsourced!

We all know how it goes, some union is outraged over some percieved, or real slight by the company their due-paying members work for.

Whatever the issue the unions first-line of defense (Offense actually) is the picket line.

Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters claim non-union workers are being used on a project inside the McPherson Building located in Washington D.C.

So they did what unions do, they hit the bricks outside the McPherson Building.

Unfortunatly those pounding the pavement for the most part aren’t members of the union.

They are what most unions would call scabs.

Unless you’re the union that has hired non-union workers, at minimum wage, to walk the line.

“For a lot of our members, it’s really difficult to have them come out, either because of parking or something else,” explains Vincente Garcia, a union representative who is supervising the picketing.

In other words, they’re too damn lazy, or enthroalled with their Nintendo WII, to get off their collective asses to picket.

The article goes on to say that a lot of protest groups and advocacy groups have hit a bonanza with the unemployed. They can hire them at min. wage and swell their groups and pad their numbers in public.

But keep that in mind the next time numbers are quoted at a protest or rally for something.

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Drug Submarine Siezed in South America

The U.S. government announced Saturday afternoon that for the first time ever a fully operational submarine used by drug traffickers has been seized in the waters of South America.

This 100-foot-long operational submarine was discovered in a jungle tributary of Ecuador leading to the Pacific Ocean.

The craft, which could move multi-ton loads of cocaine, was seized in a jungle tributary of Ecuador leading to the Pacific Ocean by the Drug Enforcement Administration and Ecuadoran authorities.

The sub is diesel-powered, has a periscope and air conditioning and measures 100 feet long and 9 feet tall.

At least one person was arrested and an investigation continues, according to a news release from DEA.

Although traffickers have used so-called “narco subs,” low-slung boats that are fully covered and ride low in the water, this is the first full-on submarine ever found in their hands.

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Speaking of Oil Rigs – Venezuelan Ones

Houston, Texas based oil company Helmerich and Payne owns and operates numerous oil rigs off the coast of Venezuela.

Venezuelan government refuses to pay them for $49 million for past services and said rigs have been out of production for months.

Enter Dear Leader Hugo Chavez.

With the dictators oil revenues falling, and a privately owned U.S. company trying to collect on its debt, there’s only one thing a dedicated communist can do – Nationalize the company.

Venezuela will nationalize a fleet of oil rigs belonging to U.S. company Helmerich and Payne, the latest takeover in a push to socialism as President Hugo Chavez struggles with lower oil output and a recession.

[…]

The 11 drilling rigs have been idled for months following a dispute over pending payments by the OPEC member’s state oil company PDVSA. Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez said on Wednesday the rigs, the Oklahoma-based company’s entire Venezuelan fleet, were being nationalized to bring them back into production.

Of course Hugo has devised an excuse, a shitty one but an excuse none-the-less, for his actions.

Ramirez said companies that refused to put their rigs into production were part of a plan to weaken Chavez’s government,

“There is a group of drill owners that has refused to discuss tariffs and services with PDVSA and have preferred to keep this equipment stored for a year,” Ramirez told reporters in the oil producing state of Zulia. “That is the specific case with U.S. multinational Helmerich and Payne.”

The irony is Hugo is seizing assests of a private company to gain oil production, while Obama is taking millions of barrels of oil out of production by disregarding a judges order and doing so by executive fiat.

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ObamaCare is Unsustainable? – The Hell You Say!

The amount of lies, distortions and outright Bovine Excrement flung around prior to ObamaCare being passed would have filled-up every landfill on Earth if it were toxic waste.

Come to think of it, it may have actually been toxic waste – but I digress.

More to the point the chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, has released a report (pdf file) that lays out the actual cost of ObamaCare.

Note, that’s “actual cost,” as opposed to the Fairy Tale issued by the Congressional Budget Office. You know the one where everything was Unicorns and Lolly-pops where 30 million people could be added to the healthcare rolls at the low, LOW price of – Nothing!.

Now that reality has set-in, and Obama’s bullshit walks, the professional Beancounters have their say:

President Obama’s health care overhaul law will increase the nation’s health care tab instead of bringing costs down, government economic forecasters concluded Thursday in a sobering assessment of the sweeping legislation.

How can this be?

During the health care debate President Obama argued that we couldn’t afford not to pass health care reform bill.

Without getting too deep into the weeds here are the main bullet points of the report:

• By delaying the major spending provisions until 2014, Democrats hid the true 10-year cost of their legislation: “Because of these transition effects and the fact that most of the coverage provisions would be in effect for only 6 of the 10 years of the budget period, the cost estimates shown in this memorandum do not represent a full 10-year cost for the new legislation,” CMS says.
• Medicare cuts are unlikely to materialize: The CMS report cautions that “it is important to note that the estimated savings shown in this memorandum for one category of Medicare provisions may be unrealistic.” The reason is that if the proposed cuts to payments to hospitals, nursing facilities, and home health agencies go into effect, “roughly 15 percent of Part A providers would become unprofitable within the 10-year projection period…” The only way to resolve this problem would be to prevent the cuts, which in turn would eat up some of the projected savings from the legislation.
• You can’t double count the Medicare savings: While in theory Medicare Part A cuts would extend solvency of the program by 12 years, the actuary writes, “In practice the improved (Medicare hospital insurance) financing cannot be simultaneously used to finance other Federal outlays (such as the coverage expansions) and to extend the trust fund, despite the appearance of this result from the respective accounting conventions.”
• The CLASS Act is a ponzi scheme: One of the most under-reported aspects of the new health care legislation was that it creates a smaller new entitlement within the massive entitlement – a program pushed by Ted Kennedy that would allow individuals to purchase long-term care insurance through the government. But the program begins collecting premiums before paying out benefits, making it produce surpluses in the early years that Democrats claimed as deficit savings. However, CMS notes that, “After 2015, as benefits are paid, the net savings from this program will decline; in 2025 and later, projected benefits exceed premium revenues, resulting in a net Federal costs in the longer term.”

Do any of you ObamaBots still want to argue this health care “reform” was about cutting costs as opposed to taking over a large section of the U.S. economy?

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Gov. Kathleen “NIMBY” Sebelius

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius has endorsed closure of the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba that holds at least 250 suspected Islamic radicals.

In a Statehouse news conference Wednesday, the Democratic governor also said she wasn’t a fan of moving detainees to Fort Leavenworth’s disciplinary barracks in Kansas.

“I do support the president-elect’s intention to close Guantanamo Bay and discontinue what I think has been a huge black eye for this country around the world,” Sebelius said. “Closing Guantanamo Bay doesn’t mean that the prisoners come to the heartland of America.”

The military prison is believed to be on a short list of sites under consideration.

In other words governor you favor their transfer as long as they aren’t headed your way. In some circles, including mine, that’s called being a NIMBY.

Funny, but sad at the same time.

Funny because she’s a NIMBY, which truth be told, is par for the course for many of her political persuasion.

Sad because she is apparently afraid of 250 terrorists yet thinks nothing of vetoing a bill that would regulate abortion procedures in the state that is infamous for its high number of late-term abortions, many of which are performed by Dr. George “Killer” Tiller

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Obama: Corrupt is, as Corrupt Does!

Wonder if The ObamaMessiah can find out where Hoffa is buried?

Sen. Barack Obama won the endorsement of the Teamsters earlier this year after privately telling the union he supported ending the strict federal oversight imposed to root out corruption, according to officials from the union and the Obama campaign.

It’s an unusual stance for a presidential candidate. Policy makers have largely treated monitoring of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters as a legal matter left to the Justice Department since an independent review board was set up in 1992 to eliminate mob influence in the union.

Looking the other way seems to be The ObamaMessiah’s modis operandi.

20 years of “hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil” while sitting in the Reverand Wright’s church pew and now we learn he is playing endorsement patty-cake with one of the historically corrupt organizations on the planet.

That’s some candidate the Dimocrats have!

As the video clearly shows The ObamaMessiah’s lunacy is hardly surprising when you’re IQ level fails to get you past the the staffers that vet contestants for Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader.

Instapundit reader Jeff Cauthen suggests: “Somebody should ask him to name all 114 US Senators.”

That about sums it up, he’s definitely a couple chickens short of a church picnic.

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Who Ya Gonna Call? – Ambulance for Organs

Ethicists and emergency medicine experts are raising concerns over New York City’s plan to dispatch the first ambulance service in the country equipped to preserve the organs of the newly deceased.

They question whether the organ-preserving ambulances will create tension among EMTs who may be charged both to save lives and to preserve organs for reuse.

So, what follows closely behind the Rapid Organ Recovery Ambulance?

A hearse with the rest of the body? Accompanied by a plethora of cop cars and bringing up the rear the Ghostbusters hearse with any “residuals” leftover?

These people are nuts, and even more so when you consider the program is getting federal funding.

Thankfully someone is clanging a warning bell: “Will raising organ donation follow pronouncement of death, or will people come to know that the organ donation ambulance has been sent, making them wonder if their relative got a full press of rescue care?” said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “This is called violating the dead donor rule — no organ donation [discussion] raised prior to pronouncement of death.”

Exactly, and there’s nothing like opening up a very large can of lawsuits in the most litigious society on the planet is there?

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Lesbos Unite!

Well… unite if you’re not a lesbo and living on the Greek island of Lesbo.

In that case, man – if you’ll pardon the expression – your lawyers!

Three residents of the Greek island Lesbos are suing a group over its use of the word “Lesbian,” the Associated Press reports.

They want a judge to order the “Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece” to change its name.

“My sister can’t say she is a Lesbian,” Dimitris Lambrou, one of the plaintiffs, tells the Associated Press. “Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos,” he says.

The group he’s targeting says it will defend itself in court. “This affair is totally ridiculous,” spokeswoman Evangelia Vlam tells The Telegraph.

Damn, what’s this world coming to when a respectable carpet muncher can’t even be called by the name they have used for decades?

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Does CSI Have an Irony Department?

LOS ANGELES – A California asbestos awareness group sued CBS Corp, a toy maker and several retailers on Friday, claiming they sold toy crime-scene kits based on the hit CBS series “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation“ that contained the cancer-causing substance.

The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleges that laboratory tests revealed the fingerprint dusting powder in the kits contained “substantial quantities of tremolite asbestos … one of the most lethal forms of asbestos.”

A spokesman for CBS’ consumer products division declined to comment on specifics of the suit, but cited the findings of tests commissioned by Planet Toys and major retailers showing no asbestos hazard in the fingerprint kits.

“Nevertheless, out of an abundance of caution, three months ago we demanded that Planet Toys issue an immediate recall of the product,” he said, adding that CBS also had ended its licensing agreement with Planet Toys for the kits.

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