Author Archive

Artist Jon McNaughton is a man who has a message for America . . .

“Wake Up America!”: Jon McNaughton’s painting on what our national debt is doing to America’s soul . . .

Jon McNaughton explains his “Forgotten Man” Painting . . .

Here Jon McNaughton explains his “One Nation Under God” painting . . .

Here Jon McNaughton explains his “Wake Up America!” painting” . . .

Jon McNaughton is a patriot who is using his great skill as an artist to remind Americans what made our nation great and why America is quickly disappearing as the “land of the free.”

It’s fun to read what liberals like Rachel Maddow have to say about this. To Maddow, conservative are just on another planet.  She really has no clue what patriots like Jon McNaughton are so concerned about. It’s as if conservatives and liberals are different life forms living in different universes, in two completely separate realities. There are just no common frames of reference between the liberal world and the conservative world.

I really have no interest in voting for Mitt Romney — Obama Lite.

Seriously, what’s the point? We now have a choice between getting on a train that’s speeding rapidly toward the Socialist Cliff of Bankruptcy, Poverty and Misery . . . and the Romney train that’s moving at a slower pace toward that same cliff.

We are still moving in the same direction.

Not much of a choice. I guess the slow train to destruction of America is better than the fast train.

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There’s really no way Newt can win in a big media market with this kind of advertising spending imbalance

ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSTITUTION: Juiced by super PACs, this year’s presidential contest has seen a 1600 percent increase in interest-group sponsored ads over 2008, according to a study by the Wesleyan Media Project of Middletown, Conn.

At 8:00:01 EST, Fox News and CNN both will race to declare Florida for Mitt Romney, the re-annointed frontrunner. (This assumes some discretion on the part of the networks, given that some of the state’s Panhandle is on Central time.) While you wait, consider the following – also from the Wesleyan Media Project:

Even though Romney has not been on the airwaves as much as he was in 2008, his campaign and its allies have dominated the airwaves in Florida, airing almost 13,000 ads on broadcast television across the state, as of Wednesday, the 25th…[Newt] Gingrich and his interest-group allies have aired only about 200 spots, with [Ron]Paul and [Rick] Santorum out of the broadcast television game.

That’s a 65:1 ratio. Unless that disparity closed in the final six days, 20 percent might be pretty good for Gingrich tonight.

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ZERO HEDGE: What do the NAR, Consumer Confidence and CBO forecasts have in common? If you said, “they are all completely worthless” you are absolutely correct. Alas, the market needs to “trade” off numbers, which is why the just released CBO numbers apparently are important… And the fact that the CBO predicted negative $2.5 trillion in net debt by 2011 back in 2011 is largely ignored. Anyway, here are some of the highlights.

• 2012 Deficit: $1.1 trillion; 2013 Deficit: $0.6 – yes, we are cackling like mad too…
• Unemployment to remain above 8% in 2012 and 2013; will be around 7% by end of 2015; to drop to 5.25% by end of 2022.
  • This forecast is utterly idiotic and is completely unattainable unless the US workforce drops to all time lows and the US economy generates 300,000 jobs a month for 10 years
• Needless to say, CBO assumes the best of all worlds in this meaningless forecast
• But here is the kicker: “Had that portion of the decline in the labor force participation rate since 2007 that is attributable to neither the aging of the baby boomers nor the downturn in the business cycle (on the basis of the experience in previous downturns) not occurred, the unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of 2011 would have been about 1¼ percentage points higher than the actual rate of 8.7 percent” translation: CBO just admitted that the BLS numbers are bogus and real unemployment is 10%.

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ART LAFFER-WALL STREET JOURNAL: If we judge both leading contenders in the Republican primary, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, by what they’ve done in life and by what they propose to do if elected, either one could be an excellent president. But when it comes to the election’s core issue—restoring a healthy economy—the key is a good tax plan and the ability to implement it.

Mr. Gingrich has a significantly better plan than does Mr. Romney, and he has twice before been instrumental in implementing a successful tax plan on a national level—once when he served in Congress as a Reagan supporter in the 1980s and again when he was President Clinton’s partner as speaker of the House of Representatives in the 1990s. During both of these periods the economy prospered incredibly—in good part because of Mr. Gingrich.

Jobs and wealth are created by those who are taxed, not by those who do the taxing. Government, by its very nature, doesn’t create resources but redistributes resources. To minimize the damages taxes cause the economy, the best way for government to raise revenue is a broad-based, low-rate flat tax that provides people and businesses with the fewest incentives to avoid or otherwise not report taxable income, and the least number of places where they can escape taxation. On these counts it doesn’t get any better than Mr. Gingrich’s optional 15% flat tax for individuals and his 12.5% flat tax for business. Each of these taxes has been tried and tested and found to be enormously successful.

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RICHARD MINITER-FORBES: Romney has never won a majority (50% or better) of Republican primary or caucus voters. And, two-thirds of the time, he has had to spend vast sums just to claim the number two spot.

Tomorrow’s GOP primary in Florida may change that—but it won’t settle the issue of Romney’s electability. Romney enjoys leads in polls ranging from between five to 15 points. But he and his super-PACs had to spend more than $15 million in television advertising and millions more in radio spots and targeted mailings. If anything, Romney’s price per vote is rising—an unsustainable model given campaign-finance limits.

Meanwhile, Romney’s heavily negative advertising only drives Tea Party activists and other conservatives from one non-Romney candidate to another. Divide and conquer is a storied strategy; it may well work in Florida. But it doesn’t build votes for Romney. The non-Romney vote–despite millions of dollars, months of media coverage and dozens of debates—remains stubbornly north of 60% among Republican voters. If Romney is going to defeat Obama, he will have to unite the Grand Old Party behind him. So far, there is no evidence is any state that he can do just that.

Indeed, Romney’s nomination presents the real risk of a third-party presidential challenger, a candidate who hopes to hoover up libertarians, Tea Partiers and conservatives disaffected with Romney. Sure, that candidate would win, at most, 2% of the vote—but that percentage would be enough to swing the election to Obama.

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THOMAS SOWELL: The Republican establishment is pulling out all the stops to try to keep Newt Gingrich from becoming the party’s nominee for President of the United States — and some are not letting the facts get in their way.

Among the claims going out through the mass media in Florida, on the eve of that state’s primary election, is that Newt Gingrich “resigned in disgrace” as Speaker of the House of Representatives, as a result of unethical conduct involving the diversion of tax-exempt money. Mitt Romney is calling on Gingrich to release “all of the records” from the House of Representatives investigation.

But the Wall Street Journal of January 28, 2012 reported that these records — 1,280 pages of them — are already publicly available on-line. Although Speaker Gingrich decided not to take on the task of fighting the charge from his political enemies in 1997, the Internal Revenue Service conducted its own investigation which, two years later, exonerated Gingrich from the charges. His resignation was not due to those charges and occurred much later.

Do the Romney camp and the Republican establishment not know this, a dozen years later? Or are they far less concerned with whether the charges will stand up than they are about smearing Gingrich on the eve of the Florida primaries?

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Poll Sample Size: 2,567 likely voters (a larger sample than all other polls)

Romney’s over-confidence and lies might be wearing thin

GANNETT POLL: The spate of Florida Republican presidential primary polls released over the past two days have consistently shown Mitt Romney with an 8-9 point lead over Newt Gingrich. The lone exception is the Dixie Strategies/The News-Press/First Coast News poll.

Our poll has Gingrich leading Romney by an eyelash — 35.46 percent to 35.08.

Could our poll be right and all the others wrong? Maybe.

In polling terminology, our poll is what’s called an outlier (for a set of numerical data, any value that is markedly smaller or larger than other values).

However, there is one factor that works in our favor. The News-Press poll’s sample size (2,567 likely voters) is three to four times larger than that of other pollsters and thus our poll has a very small margin of error (1.93 percent) with a confidence level of 95 percent.

In other words, the confidence interval associated with the sample in our poll is such that 95 percent of the time results will be within 1.93 percent of the “true values.” True values refer to the results obtained if it were possible to interview every “likely” voter in the state.

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BETSY MCCAUGHEY: Presidential aspirant Mitt Romney may not have intended that the mandatory health insurance law he signed in 2006 would look like the Obama health law. But the Massachusetts law does a lot more than cover the uninsured (a worthy goal). The law broadens the powers of government to dictate treatment decisions and even interferes in where and how patients die. The result will be a breathtaking shift of decision-making from the doctor at bedside to the state.

The Massachusetts law has come under fire for soaring premiums, now the highest in the nation. A 2011 Beacon Hill Institute study concluded that 18,000 fewer people were employed in the state, because employers required to provide coverage left the state or stopped hiring to avoid the cost. But the cost cutting has begun, and the results are alarming.

Chapter 305 of the 2006 law created councils and regulatory bodies charged with cost-cutting, and after several years they have produced a plan. Here are key components:

Mandatory electronic medical records: All physicians must comply by January 2015 as a condition of keeping their medical license.

Comparative effectiveness: A state board — with unions, consumers, employers and other nonphysicians on it — will synthesize medical research into guidelines and ensure that all insurers and doctors follow them. These guidelines will lay out what care is “medically necessary” and include “how to address individual patient cases and circumstances.” Massachusetts says it and its bureaucrats can make better decisions than highly trained physicians at bedside. (Roadmap to Cost Containment pp. 10, 21,36)

Massachusetts’ End of Life Program: Sec. 41 of Chapter 305 of the Massachusetts law creates an expert panel to deal with how and where people die. The state will launch an aggressive public relations campaign to get hospitals and doctors to encourage palliative care, hospice care, and death at home. In Massachusetts, only 24 percent of people die at home. The state says that is too low. (Roadmap, pp.32,33, 41,90,)

Sometimes a patient doesn’t die at home because the doctor doesn’t foresee that death is imminent. A 2006 Emory University study found that doctors treat patients who are expected to die less intensively than patients who are expected to survive, but often doctors can’t predict who is near the end.

The benefits of hospice care are obvious. But physicians also worry that some patients will break down at the mention of hospice care and lose the will to fight their disease. Ultimately, the question is how involved should government be in how we die, especiall when the goal is to cut costs?.

Ending fee-for-service insurance options: Massachusetts will push patients into “medical homes,” to limit access to costly specialists and diagnostic tests, and substitute nurse practitioners and physicians assistants for doctors.

A 2008 Congressional Budget Office report noted that. if cost control is the priority, medical homes are likely to present the same problems as those  HMOs of 20 years ago.

HMOs would withhold physicians’ fees until the end of the year and give it back only to the physicians who met targets for limiting referrals or diagnostic tests. Ultimately, what a doctor prescribed for a patient came out of the doctor’s own pocket at the end of the year, setting up a conflict between you and your doctor. (Roadmap, p. 14)

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