Obama Bows Before Mighty Putin's Steel Hard Gaze

I thought these Chicago community organizers were tough. It seems that KGB strongmen are even tougher.

The main reason for President Barack Obama's decision was "Russia's uncompromising position on the issue," said the clearly pleased Russian foreign policy expert Mikhail Margelov, chairman of the foreign policy committee of the Federation Council of Russia, the country's upper legislative chamber. And Konstantin Kosachev, head of the Duma's foreign relations committee, said he sees evidence that today's American government has a better understanding of the Russians' concerns.

I guess Poland and the Chech Republic know exactly who their so-called "friends" stand on their defense. Now the Russians have a free hand when it comes to their sphere of influence. If they want to annex the Ukraine or attack Georgia again the Russians now know that Obama will do nothing to stop them.

The problem is that backing down will gain us nothing since Russia probably won't do anything to reign in Iran's nuclear ambitions. They know that Obama is a lightweight on the world stage and can can act with impunity if they want to. It would be nice to see Obama not turn into another Jimmy Carter but we might be headed that way whether we like it or not.

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Lack of Insurance Kills 45,000 Americans a Year!

You have to be kidding me. This is the same smoke-and-mirrors that the left uses all the time.

Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.

No these people die because they do not take good care of themselves and end up dying from heart disease and diabetes. The lack of insurance has nothing to do with it. Also what do they term as not having insurance? If you are between jobs and are hit by a car are you counted as dying uninsured? I think you will get all you needed to know from who funded this "study."

The Harvard study, funded by a federal research grant, was published in the online edition of the American Journal of Public Health. It was released by Physicians for a National Health Program, which favors government-backed or "single-payer" health insurance.

I'm shocked that they didn't put this number at 10 million or 20 million or something. I mean 45,000 people is only .0001 percent of the population. There is no way such a small number will be able to sell a trillion dollar invasion of the insurance industry.

I wonder if their next study will be to find out the amount of people who will die on a waiting list for the Post Office Insurance to treat them. Rich people don't have to care because they will just by gold plated insurance that will jump the line. How is that fair?

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Pelosi Scared By Angry HealthCare Rhetoric

She says it is somehow reminding her of San Fransisco in the late 70s.

"I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw this myself in the late '70s in San Francisco," Pelosi said, suddenly speaking quietly. "This kind of rhetoric was very frightening" and created a climate in which violence took place, she said.

The problem with Pelosi's recollection of the 70s is that was the man who killed Harvey Milk and George Moscone in San Fransisco was a fellow Democrat named Dan White and not some far right wing hate monger. Is Pelosi afraid that her own party might do something violent?

I also love how she gets in this dig against people opposing ObamaCare as well.

"I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made," Pelosi said. Some of the people hearing the message "are not as balanced as the person making the statement might assume," she said.

Yes, ObamaCare opponents, the Speaker of the House just called you unbalanced. I think she needs to resign already. She already smeared the CIA and now she is slandering "people hearing their message" i.e. the American public by calling them crazy. She is just too far left and polarizing a figure to lead the House.

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How the Community Reinvestment Act Created the Housing Bubble

It is good to read in one place on how groups like ACORN and the Carter experiment known as the CRA planted the seeds that formed into the mortgage bubble. This was an interesting fact that everyone should know:

Of course, these loans weren't actually safe, and as far back as the early 1990s it was clear that mortgages made under affordable housing standards had a significantly higher default rate. But the facts weren't allowed to get in the way of the housing juggernaut, and so the quantity of risky loans increased. By 2005 HUD required that 45 percent of all loans purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had to be from low and middle income borrowers, with no sense whatsoever of whether such a quota was advisable or doable.

Now that we see the extent of ACORNs "counseling" we can see that most of these buyers probably duped by these "counselors" trying to game the system. I mean those ACORN workers were talking about claiming child sex slaves as dependents like they were ordering take-out food or something. I feel even worse for low income neighborhoods seeing as people like ACORN are their advocates.

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More about the Pair that Destroyed ACORN

Yup they are only in their early 20s and did something that CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, or even Fox News was not able to do. They were able to pull off a sting operation on a corrupt organization with $1300 and a chinchilla coat borrowed from someones grandmother.

In real life, Hannah Giles, 20, isn't a lady of the night. She's a minister's daughter studying journalism at Florida International University.

And James E. O'Keefe III, 25, a Fordham MBA student from New Jersey, isn't a pimp so much as a provocateur -- determined to expose what he sees as the hypocrisies and moral lapses of liberals by employing their own tactics against them.

The pair met last year on Facebook after O'Keefe posted his own gotcha videos, showing Planned Parenthood employees agreeing to his request to earmark his donations for the abor tions of African-American babies.

I think this statement is going to be prophetic:

O'Keefe contends their tactics are "the future of activism and investigative reporting."

"This is now my full-time job," he said.

Yup I think the far left needs to watch their back. A couple of college kids with a hidden camera has done more damage to their agenda then a 100 special prosecutors and 10,000 news media members and the entire GOP. I hope they go after the hate-mongers at the SEIU next.

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ACORN and the Legacy Media Just Lost Jon Stewart

I think you can now write ACORNs obituary now that Jon Stewart has now turned against them full force. This is the sort of thing that I enjoyed about Stewart before he morphed into a mouthpiece for the far left.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Audacity of Hos
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Healthcare Protests

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Dems Run from Carters "Rep. Joe Wilson is a Racist" Comments'

Poor Jimmy Carter the Dems have thrown him under the bus yet again.

�The president does not believe that criticism comes based on the color of his skin,� White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters in his Wednesday briefing. �We understand that people have disagreements with some of the decisions that we�ve made and some of the extraordinary actions that had to be taken by both this administration and the previous administration.�

I hope bookmark this set of remarks whenever someone plays the race card against someone disagreeing with Obama. I think the true racists are people like Maureen Dowd with this statement.

And New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that �fair or not,� she heard �an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!�

She hears phantom things out of the bad old days of the 50s when her party was doing everything it could to keep blacks from attaining civil rights. I mean Jim Crow Laws were not passed by the GOP. It was Democrats that kept these things going for more than a century. It was GOP Minority Leader Everett Dirksen that was instrumental in getting the Civil Rights Bill passed in 1964.

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Baucus HealthCare Bill Might Actually Save Money?

It seems that the Baucus Bill might be just what health care reform needs to pass. It might even save some money:

Congressional budget experts estimated the proposal would reduce the ranks of the uninsured by 29 million over a decade. They also predicted the plan would trim federal deficits by $49 billion over the same period and suggested savings in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars might result for the decade that follows.

Many of the bill's major provisions would be delayed until 2013, after the next presidential election.

I think the 29 million covered is more then sufficient to say as many Americans as possible will have their health insurance. That 2013 time table though really takes some of the air out of all the people saying "the problems are getting so bad we have to ram it through by July 31st"

Also the bill has the cooperatives added in instead of the "government-run insurance company." If these coops are able to compete nationally then it would be a great idea. If they are state by state it won't save much money in the long run. The CBO director agrees

"They seem unlikely to establish a significant market presence in many areas of the country," wrote Douglas W. Elmendorf, head of the Congressional Budget Office.

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ACORN tries to Go for an Independent Investigation

It seems that ACORN is trying to finally clean up its act. Too bad they are going to the wrong source for the investigation.

ACORN will work with its advisory council, which includes prominent supporters of President Barack Obama, such as John Podesta, president of the nonprofit Center for American Progress, and Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, to name an independent auditor and investigator, ACORN chief executive Bertha Lewis said in a written statement.

Who are they going to convince they are clean if the go directly to a lefty group and the president of the hate-crime committing SEIU for its "independent" investigation. If they were serious about cleaning up their image they would go directly to the Justice Department and have them investigated. Instead, the SEIU will just say ACORN is "clean" and the organization will go back to advising potential under age sex slavery operators.

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Jimmy Carter Calls Rep. Joe Wilson a Racist

I guess Carter sees racism whenever you call Obama out on parts of his policy agenda.

"I think it's based on racism," Carter said at a town hall held at his presidential center in Atlanta. "There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president."

The Georgia Democrat said the outburst was a part of a disturbing trend directed at the president that has included demonstrators equating Obama to Nazi leaders.

"Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on health care," he said. "It's deeper than that."

Um, no President Carter, it isn't any deeper then that. People don't trust Obama because he is black but because he plays fast and loose with the truth. Obama keeps repeating "if you like your doctor you can keep him" while the House Bill does not have any such guarantees. He promised that the unemployment rate won't go above 8% if the stimulus was passed and it is now nearly 10%.

Rep. Joe Wilson may have been off about illegal immigrants not being covered by ObamaCare but there are no protections in the bill that will prevent that from happening. In fact Obama was supposed to be the the post-racial President that transcended race and its only 8 months and Carter has to drag him back down into that mess again.

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Obama's HealthCare Speech to Congress Not a "Game Changer"

It seems that the speech only gave a small, temporary bump to his poll numbers that has since evaporated.

Forty-five percent (45%) of all voters nationwide now favor the plan while 52% are opposed. A week ago, 44% supported the proposal and 53% were opposed. (see day-by-day numbers).

I think if he came out strongly in opposition to a public option he would breeze just about any other change through and his poll numbers would quickly improve. I think most insured people see only pitfalls in a public plan and don't trust the government enough to run the thing correctly.

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Seth Klarman of Baupost Has a Large Postion in PDL Biopharma?

One thing that jumped out at me when I was doing research on take-over talk is how Seth Klarman of Baupost has 11% of his portfolio in PDL BioPharma (PDLI)

No. 2: PDL BioPharma Inc. (PDLI), Weightings: 10.91% - 15,559,608 Shares

Protein Design Labs Inc. is a biopharmaceutical company focused on the research, development and commercialization of novel therapies for inflammation and autoimmune diseases acute cardiac conditions and cancer. PDL BioPharma Inc. has a market cap of $855.39 million; its shares were traded at around $7.16 with a P/E ratio of 7.09 and P/S ratio of 2.91. The dividend yield of PDL BioPharma Inc. stocks is 13.97%.

Klarman assumed a small position (461,600 shares) in 1Q08 and then quickly build a large position (14.8 million shares) in 2Q08. His ownership has since maintained at a high level and in 1Q09, he bought about 800,000 share, bringing the total to 15.6 million shares.

That is quite a large part of a portfolio of an investing guru that has brought in big returns for decades. I wonder if he is looking for a takeover by Roche or is just investing heavily in an undervalued company. I mean a biotech that pays such a substantial dividend seems very rare and maybe Klarman understands that.

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Obama Supports Extending Patriot Act

It must be tough for a Progressive to support Obama. This flies directly in their face but he continues to go with it to keep our country safe.

The Obama administration supports extending three key provisions of the Patriot Act that are due to expire at the end of the year, the Justice Department told Congress in a letter made public Tuesday.

Lawmakers and civil rights groups had been pressing the Democratic administration to say whether it wants to preserve the post-Sept. 11 law's authority to access business records, as well as monitor so-called "lone wolf" terrorists and conduct roving wiretaps.

The wiretaps thing was what the leftists hated Bush for and Obama just wants to keep them going. I always thought they are a good idea for the most part as long as they are directed at terrorists. I feel that if they were in place prior to 9/11 we would have had a chance of stopping Atta in his tracks.

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Obama Offers Health Care Cost Savings: It will Only Take 3,634 Years

It seems that Obama just can't get these numbers right for some reason. Here is Obama's cost savings plan strait from his speech:

And if we can successfully slow the growth of health care costs by just one-tenth of one percent each year, it will actually reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the long term.

On Saturday, when I first featured this, I showed this spreadsheet from my favorite economist, King Banaian, which showed that the long term would have to be defined as 3,634 years:

In other words sometime in 5643 AD we will get that $4 trillion in health care cost savings that Obama promised us. Perhaps it will go to reducing the budget deficit for our new 538th State which happens to be the Powys Regio on Europa.

Maybe the government can use it toward improving health care for farmed clones since humans will no longer need health care due to advances in android brain transplantation. I guess you could always use it to buy processing plants for vat grown soy pork for poor offworlders. Obama the technocrat strikes again.

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Senate Votes 83-7 to Strip ACORN of Federal Funding

Now this is one show of Senate bipartisanship that makes me proud.

Senator Mike Johanns (R-NE) introduced an amendment to the HUD and Transportation appropriation bill to strip ACORN of all federal funding. A week ago, Johanns wouldn�t have gotten the amendment to the floor. Today, however, after three straight days of BigGovernment.com�s video expos�s of ACORN offices in Washington DC, New York City, and Baltimore offering assistance to pimping, tax evasion, and trafficking in underage Salvadorean girls, Johanns not only got his vote � but he got an impressive bipartisan showing. The Senate passed the Johanns amendment 83-7.

I think ACORN's days are numbered now that they have been shown to support tax evasion, promotion of prostitution, and even human trafficking underage prostitutes. I think how they were laughing about the whole thing on the hidden video is what got people to turn on them so fast. It was as if they promote the exploitation of child sex workers day-in-and-day out or something. I'm glad these people are finally getting exposed. Now is time for Obama to throw them right under the bus.

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