A Rasmussen Poll that was published yesterday showed that 56% of New Yorkers support repeal of the Health Care Reform Bill.

Fifty-six percent (56%) of New York voters favor repeal of the new national health care bill, according to a new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey in the state.

Considering that New York is a pretty liberal state (due to Downstate dominance), I was surprised at the percentage of people that favored repeal. According to Rasmussen, the percentage of people who favor repeal has risen by 6% since April. People are finding out what’s actually in the bill and are finding out that it really doesn’t reform, but does add mandates and more government regulations that will end up costing us, not only in the wallet, but also our liberties.

The mandate that forces people to buy health insurance in the Health Care Reform (NOT!) Bill is un-Constitutional and violates the Commerce Clause. Fourteen States are suing the Federal Government to block the bill.

Nationally, Rasmussen reports that 58% of Americans support repeal of the Health Care Reform (NOT!) Bill.

Remember in November and vote out everyone in the House and Senate who voted for the Health Care Reform (NOT!) Bill!

The Heritage Foundation is reporting that peoples dependence on the government has jumped. This from Waterbury Republican-American:

The Heritage Foundation has released its annual estimate of how much people in the United States have come to rely on government. In 2009, the index rose from 239 to 272, an increase of 13.6 percent. It was the largest percentage gain since 1975, and the largest increase in index value on record.

Heritage looks at five aspects of people’s lives — housing; health and welfare; retirement; education; and rural and agricultural services — to derive its Index of Dependence. The calculation uses 1980 as a base year, when the index equaled 100, and interpolates to 1962 when the index stood at about 19.

It’s really no surprise hearing of this. We have a President that believes “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody” a super majority Democratic Congress that believes in the same thing and a sycophant MSM that acts as his propaganda arm.

The editorial from the Waterbury Republican-American goes on to say:

Last year’s rapid rise calls to mind the story of what caused New Haven native Al Capp, famed as the creator of the Lil’ Abner comic strip, to revise his political outlook late in the 1960s.

Until then, Capp was a liberal icon, routinely applauded and honored by the liberal establishment. He lived in Metro Boston and said that one day, a “Liberal Lady” came to him with some photographs she had taken.

She said she could get them published if he would write captions for them. He agreed, and they worked together amiably until she showed him what she described as the most poignant of the batch, a photo that she said would break his heart. As Capp remembered years later:

“It was mid-afternoon, the sun was shining. Garbage cans were tipped on the sidewalk. Bottles lined the gutters. On a porch sprawled a half-dozen teenagers, drinking and smoking. The caption, I said, should be ‘Get up off your (butts) and clean up your street!’”

Capp said the Liberal Lady was outraged. She stormed out, and “I guess that was when I began leaving what liberalism had become. … What began to bother me, privately, was that, as things grew better, the empire of the needy seemed to grow larger. Somehow they became entitled to government gifts other people couldn’t get, such as people who worked.”

Bingo!

It’s my hope that more people are waking up, as Al Capp did and recognize the folly that the liberal “progressives” (aka socialists) are foisting on our country. It’s been a full court press for the last 50 years and its origins go back to FDR’s New Deal. We can’t keep going down this path and need to cut government spending because it’s unsustainable:

Heritage further notes the International Monetary Fund “predicts financial devastation for the U.S. by 2015 unless drastic cuts are made in the deficit immediately. …. An impending tipping point for the structure of American government and civil society is tangible.”

Remember in November and vote for fiscal and political conservatives who will cut government spending and pare down the size of government to its Constitutional limits!

The University of East Anglia, home of the now infamous Climatic Research Unit (CRU), recently commissioned an investigation of itself. From the Wall Street Journal:

Now a supposedly independent review of the evidence says, in effect, “nothing to see here.” Last week “The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review,” commissioned and paid for by the University of East Anglia, exonerated the University of East Anglia. The review committee was chaired by Sir Muir Russell, former vice chancellor at the University of Glasgow.

Mr. Russell took pains to present his committee, which consisted of four other academics, as independent. He told the Times of London that “Given the nature of the allegations it is right that someone who has no links to either the university or the climate science community looks at the evidence and makes recommendations based on what they find.”

No links? One of the panel’s four members, Prof. Geoffrey Boulton, was on the faculty of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences for 18 years. At the beginning of his tenure, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU)—the source of the Climategate emails—was established in Mr. Boulton’s school at East Anglia. Last December, Mr. Boulton signed a petition declaring that the scientists who established the global climate records at East Anglia “adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity.”

I speculated about when the Climategate scandal was breaking in my post, Post Climategate, How Long Will “They” Allow the Ruse to Continue? These investigations by supposed “independent” review boards are a joke, especially this latest one with Prof. Geoffrey Boulton, who had been a faculty member of the School of Enviromental Sciences for 18 years and was there when the CRU was created. How independent could he be, for gosh sakes.

There’s a lot of money to be made off of the Climate Change scam, but more importantly, a lot of power over we the people that can be gotten from perpetuating the human induced global warming hoax. Obama and the Democrats are still keeping Cap and Tax alive and Obama used the BP Oil Spill disaster as an excuse to further the bill. These people perpetuating the scam are power hungry control freaks and even the evidence of the Climategate scam will not deter them.

Vice President Joe Biden was in Milwaukee, Wis. this past weekend and visited Kopp’s Frozen Custard and ordered an ice cream cone. Check out the following video to see yet another incident of his nastiness:

Yup, you heard that right. When Biden went to pay for the cone, the manager said, “Don’t worry, it’s on us”. When Biden insisted on paying, the manager replied, “Lower our taxes and we’ll call it even.” Talking about seizing the opportunity, a classic “Joe the Plumber” moment! Rather than just rolling with it, Biden fires back a little while later with, “say something nice instead of being a smart ass all the time.” and according to the manager, was clearly irritated.

Biden, very well known for his gaffes, makes yet another one. This is the second time that Biden was caught on video using profanities. If you recall, back on March 23, when the Health Care Reform (NOT!) Bill signing ceremony was being held, Biden was caught on an open mic telling Obama “You did it! It’s a big f—ing deal.” Obama recently used profane language concerning the BP oil spill in the form of wanting to know “whose ass to kick”. Although I don’t have virgin ears, we should expect better from our President and Vice President as far as the language they use, especially in public.

BTW, I want lower taxes too, so that must make me a smart ass in Joe Biden’s eyes.

Even though human induced (anthropogenic) global warming has been exposed as a hoax, the Obama administration will not give up on instituting legislation to tax Americans for it. This from Ben Lieberman of the NY Post

President Obama has a solution to the Gulf oil spill: $7-a-gallon gas.

That’s a Harvard University study’s estimate of the per-gallon price of the president’s global-warming agenda. And Obama made clear this week that this agenda is a part of his plan for addressing the Gulf mess.

So what does global-warming legislation have to do with the oil spill?

Good question, because such measures wouldn’t do a thing to clean up the oil or fix the problems that led to the leak.

The answer can be found in Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s now-famous words, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste — and what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

Even though Cap and Tax was withering on the vine in Congress, especially after Climategate broke, the Obama administration is continuing to push legislation that will cost every American dearly. In his speech on the Gulf oil spill, Obama said:

“We can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy, because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security and our environment are far greater,”

Even a liberal such as Sen. Diane Feinstein had this to say:

“the climate bill isn’t going to stop the oil leak.”

Obama is persistent in pushing his global warming agenda and is using the BP Oil spill in the Gulf to push it. We can only hope that both sides of the aisle will see the folly of passing Cap and Tax as it will absolutely ruin our economy and hurt Americans, across the board!

Bloomberg reported some disturbing news recently on the state of US debt:

President Barack Obama is poised to increase the U.S. debt to a level that exceeds the value of the nation’s annual economic output, a step toward what Bill Gross called a “debt super cycle.”

The CHART OF THE DAY tracks U.S. gross domestic product and the government’s total debt, which rose past $13 trillion for the first time this month. The amount owed will surpass GDP in 2012, based on forecasts by the International Monetary Fund. The lower panel shows U.S. annual GDP growth as tracked by the IMF, which projects the world’s largest economy to expand at a slower pace than the 3.2 percent average during the past five decades.

Here’s the chart:

We here at rochesterconserative.com have been warning that you can’t spend yourself out of a recession, it only makes matters worse. Keynesian economics don’t work. Look at what happened during the Great Depression. FDR’s spending lengthened the Depression years beyond what it should have been.

A while back, I posted an article, “What’s Happening in Greece Could Happen in the US”. Unfortunately, I need to rescind the title to read, “What’s Happening in Greece Will Happen in the US”.

The Health Care Reform (NOT!) Bill, also known as Obamacare, is already showing it’s true face that we’ve warned you about. This from Terence P. Jeffrey of Human Events:

Remember the health care issue? Well, the fiscal consequences of the socialized medicine scheme enacted by President Barack Obama and Congress just two months ago are already beginning to snowball.

Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, was one of the key architects and advocates of Obamacare. He was back on the House floor on Friday delivering an urgent plea to fellow Democrats that inadvertently — or, perhaps, unavoidably — revealed the fraudulent nature of our new national health care regime.

It was supposed to save the taxpayers money, remember?

“This legislation will lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government, reducing our deficit by over $1 trillion in the next two decades,” Obama said when he signed the bill.

On Friday, Waxman declared that the sky is about to fall on the Medicare system. He went to the House floor to “urge” his colleagues to vote for a bill that includes $102 billion in new federal spending and would add $54 billion to the national debt over the next 10 years — $25 billion of it in the few months remaining in this fiscal year.

Why did Waxman believe this new borrowing-and-spending was necessary?

“It’s absolutely critical to do this if we are going to keep doctors in Medicare and keep the promise to Medicare beneficiaries that they will have access to physicians’ services,” said Waxman. “This provision will provide a moderate increase in physicians’ fees, 2.2 percent for the rest of the year. If we don’t act, doctors’ fees will be cut by 21 percent from where they are today. This would be unconscionable.”

This was totally predictable! My blogging partner phantomlord posted about Medicare’s insolvency back in 2009. The government takeover of our health care system and it’s accompanying mandates will cost us dearly and drag down the system and NOT improve it.

As we’ve all come to know, Obama will make promises and say anything to advance his agenda and when things start coming apart, he’ll trot out one of his lackeys, such as Waxman, to take the heat.

We can’t afford Obamacare and it does nothing to reform healthcare, it will cost us dearly.

This just takes the cake. Check out the following video from CNS News, where the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, assures aspiring artists that they can quit their jobs and concentrate on their art and taxpayers will pay for their health care coverage.

“We see it as an entrepreneurial bill, a bill that says to someone, if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care.”

This is not the first time Pelosi has made this proclamation. Back on March 11, 2010, she said this on the Rachel Maddow Show:

Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance..

Imagine if all of us decided to quit our jobs to pursue our artistic dreams. Heck, I’ll quit my job so I can write the next Great American Novel. Who’s going to pay for all of our health care if nobody is working?

What Pelosi is describing is Utopia. That’s a socialist dream that’s unattainable.

To think that this woman is second in line of Presidential succession.

Hat tip to Bob M for the heads-up on this video!

For over 25 years we’ve had various administrations and various legislatures promulgate regulations. It’s made a lot of lawyers rich and the state hasn’t collected a nickel,” said Syracuse attorney Joseph Heath, who represents the Onondaga Nation.

Non-Indian convenience stores, health-related organizations, state legislators and even major cigarette companies all support the latest effort to collect taxes on Indian cigarette sales to non-Indians. Their arguments include the need to create a “level playing field,” provide financial incentives that discourage smoking and generate much-needed tax revenue.

The Seneca Nation of Indians is leading the campaign against the effort, citing federal treaties that arguably prohibit the collection of state taxes on Indian lands.

“We have our treaties with the United States that guarantee us certain rights. It doesn’t matter whether a treaty was made in 1842 or 1794, or New York state is $8 billion in the hole,” said Seneca, who is a member of the Seneca Nation’s council and the son of a former Seneca Nation president. “It doesn’t say in the treaty ‘until New York state needs money from you.’”

The Seneca Nation alone is already paying the state more than $500 million a year from its gambling operations, Seneca noted. “For them to say we have to pay our fair share — it’s insulting and ridiculous.”

Yet again, Albany will try to break treaties with the Senecas that have been in existence for hundreds of years, in order to shake down the Senecas for taxes on cigarettes. I remember the last time Albany tried it, in the late 1990’s when Pataki, a Republican, was governor. Now we have another governor, David Paterson, a Democrat, trying to break treaties and extort taxes from the Senecas. Party lines make no difference when it comes to the greed and corruption of Albany!

I felt like standing with the Senecas that last time that Albany tried to tax them. At the time, I smoked cigarettes. I’ve since quit, but that doesn’t change my opinion that Albany needs to back off and honor the treaties and leave the Senecas alone. As one of the founders of the Rochester Tea Party Movement, I’d like to float the idea that we stand in solidarity with the Senecas on this issue.

What do you think?

Lorrie Goldstein wrote an informative article in the Toronto Star, “The ‘truthiness’ of those GM ads”. She starts her article explaining the origins of the word “truthiness”:

Political pundits owe a huge debt of gratitude to comedian Stephen Colbert for coining the word “truthiness” on The Colbert Report in 2005.

Because “truthiness,” defined by the American Dialect Society as “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than the concepts or facts known to be true” describes so much of the blather fed to us these days by politicians, business leaders and the media.

Goldstein then goes on to connect “truthiness” to the GM TV ads that have been airing as of late:

Take those television commercials by General Motors Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre boasting GM has “repaid our government loans, in full, with interest — five years ahead of the original schedule”.

Ditto his simultaneous April 21 op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, headlined “The GM Bailout: Paid Back in Full — The investment of U.S. and Canadian tax dollars worked.”

That’s pure “truthiness,” as was the subsequent crowing by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty this vindicated their decision to give GM billions of our tax dollars to bail out the company in late 2008, at the height of the global recession.

To be fair, “truthiness” isn’t lying. Technically, what Whitacre said is true, combined with a huge dose of what he hopes will be true. It’s just not the whole truth, as explained by Forbes.com columnist Shikha Dalmia, a senior policy analyst with the Reason Foundation.

What GM has actually repaid is only a small portion of the taxpayer bailout Harper and McGuinty engineered, along with U.S. President Barack Obama — a $6.7 billion loan from American taxpayers and $1.4 billion from us. (This at low interest rates GM couldn’t have obtained anywhere else, as the company was virtually worthless at the time.)

But most of the taxpayer-funded aid the U.S., Canada and Ontario gave to GM wasn’t through loans, but by purchasing an equity stake in GM. American taxpayers bought 60.8% of the company for about $43 billion, while we bought 11.7% for $8.1 billion.

I’ve seen that TV ad and my BS meter goes off every time I see it. I knew that GM CEO Ed Whitacre wasn’t being totally forthcoming and he comes off like his company is totally out of hock and the truth is, they aren’t.

I have to wonder if the Obama Administration was behind this deceptive ad campaign. Just as they claim that the Porkulus Package is working and creating jobs, when in reality, it did not stimulate the economy nor did it create jobs.

Remember this axiom, governments do not create wealth, they take wealth!

We’ll be hearing a lot of spin coming out of the White House as well as from those who are “owned” by the Obama Administration, as they attempt to justify their massive expansion of government and debt. Keep in mind the “truthiness” of the spin as well as who’s delivering the spin and their motivations for doing so and keep your BS meter handy!