Congressional Democrats are using several budget gimmicks to disguise the cost of their health care overhaul, claiming the House and Senate bills would cost only (!) about $1 trillion over 10 years. Now that critics have begun to correct for those budget gimmicks, supporters of ObamaCare are firing back.
[…]When we correct for both gimmicks, counting both on- and off-budget costs over the first 10 years of implementation, the total cost of ObamaCare reaches — I’m so sorry about this — $6.25 trillion. That’s not a precise estimate. It’s just far closer to the truth than President Obama and congressional Democrats want the debate to be.
Like for most feminists, it was a no-brainer for me to become a Democrat. Liberal men, not conservatives, were the ones devoted to women’s issues. They marched at my side in support of abortion rights. They were enthusiastic about women succeeding in the workplace.
[…]Then along came Sarah, and the attacks became particularly heinous. And I realized something even more chilling about the Left. Leftists not only sacrifice and disrespect women, but it’s far worse: many are perpetuators.
The Left’s behavior towards Palin is not politics as usual. By their laser-focus on her body and her sexuality, leftists are defiling her.
[…]The Left has declared war on Palin because she threatens their existence. Liberals need women dependent and scared so that women, like blacks, will vote Democrat.
And so the Left must try to destroy her. And they are doing this in the most malicious of ways: by symbolically raping her.
Just like a perpetuator, they dehumanize her by objectifying her body. They undress her with their eyes.
They turn her into a piece of ass.
Liberals do this by calling her a c__t, ogling her legs, demeaning her with names like “slutty flight attendant” and “Trailer Park Barbie,” and exposing her flesh on the cover of Newsweek.
And from Atlantic Magazine’s Andrew Sullivan “Sarah Palin’s vagina is the font of all evil in the galaxy.”
Nothing is off-limits, not actress Sandra Bernhard’s wish that Palin be gang-raped or the sexualization of Palin’s daughters.
As every woman knows, leering looks, lurid words, and veiled threats are intended to evoke terror. Sexual violence is a form of terrorism.
Conservatives think that men and women should make good choices and do good things. That is why on this blog hardly a moment goes by without me praising women like Michele Bachmann, Marsha Blackburn, Jennifer Roback Morse and Trayce Hansen for making good choices and doing good things.
For example, here’s Michele Bachmann speaking out about National Adoption Day.
Adoption is a good thing. Conservatives support the choice to love and nurture vulnerable children. We don’t support the choice to kill an unborn person. Conservatives support good choices, and oppose bad choices.
After the cascade of economic disasters that began in the housing markets in 2006 and spread into the financial markets in Wall Street and even overseas, people in the private sector pulled back. Banks stopped making so many risky loans. Home buyers began buying homes they could afford, instead of going out on a limb with “creative”– and risky– financing schemes to buy homes that were beyond their means.
But politicians went directly in the opposite direction. In the name of “rescuing” the housing market, Congress passed laws enabling the Federal Housing Administration to insure more and bigger risky loans– loans where there is less than a 4 percent down payment.
A recent news story told of three young men who chipped in a total of $33,000 to buy a home in San Francisco that cost nearly a million dollars. Why would a bank lend that kind of money to them on such a small down payment? Because the loan was insured by the Federal Housing Administration.
The bank wasn’t taking any risk. If the three guys defaulted, the bank could always collect the money from the Federal Housing Administration. The only risk was to the taxpayers.
Does the Federal Housing Administration have unlimited money to bail out bad loans? Actually there have been so many defaults that the FHA’s own reserves have dropped below where they are supposed to be. But not to worry. There will always be taxpayers, not to mention future generations to pay off the national debt.
Very few people are likely to connect the dots back to those members of Congress who voted for bigger mortgage guarantees and bailouts by the FHA. So the Congressmen’s and the bureaucrats’ jobs are safe, even if millions of other people’s jobs are not.
Congressman Barney Frank is not about to cut back on risky mortgage loan guarantees by the FHA. He recently announced that he plans to introduce legislation to raise the limit on FHA loan guarantees even more.
Congressman Frank will make himself popular with people who get those loans and with banks that make these high-risk loans where they can pocket the profits and pass the risk on to the FHA.
So long as the taxpayers don’t understand that all this political generosity and compassion are at their expense, Barney Frank is an odds-on favorite to get re-elected. The man is not stupid.
Can you guess which political party Barney Frank represents?
WINTERY KNIGHT 