Nanny State in Action

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Alan Caruba reports on one of the latest intrusions of government over at his blog - Warning Signs

While watching a television commercial for some prescription medication, have you ever wondered why something it states may kill you or cause serious side effects ever was permitted to be marketed to the public?

For decades I have taken a full range of vitamins, minerals and herbal supplements every morning. I don’t get head colds or any unwanted side affects. In my seventh decade, I enjoy exceptional good health. An annual physical check up is always the same. I am fine.

Millions of Americans benefit from a daily regimen of vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplements. Athletes use whey protein powders. Body builders take amino acids. Others augment food products that lack sufficient nutritional value. Their health and wellness is now threatened by the Obama administration’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Banning Health!

On the Friday before the Fourth of July weekend, the FDA published a 47-page document, the Codex Alimentarius, that would ban all nutritional and supplemental ingredients by requiring them to file documentation involving multi-million-dollar testing and the regulations would be retroactive to 1994!

This will destroy the manufacturers of these products because most are small companies that could not afford such costs. It’s not like there is a vast body of information that demonstrates any threat to health from vitamins and minerals. Quite the contrary. There is ample information on their benefits. There are libraries filled with books devoted to this.

Who would benefit from such regulation of the natural supplement industry? Big Pharma. The same pharmaceutical companies that have a long record of putting forth FDA-approved medications that later prove to be lethal are looking to use the regulatory powers of FDA to literally increase levels of illness.

In the same way Obamacare has been demonstrated to not only be unconstitutional, but also a threat to the health of millions—especially senior citizens—this callous administration now threatens to remove from the shelves of stores that sell nutritional supplements, from pharmacies, and from supermarkets and other outlets, the vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplements on which millions depend for wellness.

This constitutes a criminal conspiracy and Congress, which has ceded its law-making authority to the FDA, must hear from everyone in order to stop this assault on everyone’s health.

Frank Murray, the former editor of Better Nutrition, Great Life, and Let’s Live, is the author and co-author of fifty books on health and nutrition. They include Natural Supplements for Diabetes, Health Benefits Derived from Sweet Orange, and 100 Super Supplements for a Longer Life. He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences.

One of Murray’s books, Sunshine and Vitamin D, notes that “With the hundreds of clinical trials published on Vitamin D in recent years—I read one study with 132 references—it is obvious that the ‘sunshine vitamin’ no longer has to play second fiddle to the other vitamins.” The same can be said for vitamins A, B, C, and E. All have amply demonstrated their value. Add to them, zink, potassium, selenium, and other mineral supplements. All those prostate advertisements are about herbal supplements!

The Obama administration that has made obesity its pet project is also famous for photos of the President eating every kind of fast food. It is rank hypocrisy, but the proposed FDA ban is literally life threatening.

Write, email, and fax your Representative and Senator to ensure that Congress intervenes with the FDA in the same fashion it is struggling to protect us against an out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency. In particular, contact the members of  the House Oversight and Government Reform committee.

Your life and the lives of your loved ones literally depend on stopping this attack on real nutrition.

Americans are losing the freedom they take for granted as Big Government intrudes on every personal choice they make. The Obama administration has demonstrated its total indifference to America’s senior citizens' access to affordable medical care and now all Americans' ability to access nutritional supplements.

You are being “protected” into an early grave!

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On the Backs of the Poor?

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John Hawkins over at Right Wing News explains our current financial situation in a way that even a liberals should be able to comprehend:

In Real Terms, What Does if Even Mean to Say, "We Shouldn't Balance the Budget on the Backs of thePoor?"


In real terms, what does it even mean to say, “We shouldn’t balance the budget on the backs of the poor?” The poor already pay no income tax and since they have very little money, taxing them wouldn’t do much to balance the budget. So, it’s not that.

If it means that we should tax the rich, we already have an even more progressive tax code than Western Europe. Moreover, if we abandoned the country’s love of capitalism and free enterprise, embraced communism, and decided to take every dime of income the indisputably rich, the people who make more than 10 million a year, bring in per year, it would only amount to about 240 billion dollars. On one hand, that’s a large sum of money, but on the other hand, it amounts to about 1/6 of the deficit we owe JUST THIS YEAR, 1/56 of the debt, and 1/400 of our unfunded Social Security/Medicare liabilities. Moreover, if we were taking EVERYTHING the rich made, they’d have no reason to continue to work, which would put tens of millions of people out of work and dramatically reduce the amount of money we could bring in after this year. So, that doesn’t seem like what the term means.

Does it mean that we should never cut anything from any program that benefits the poor? Unfortunately, that’s not even an option at this point. We have 100 trillion dollars in unfunded Social Security/Medicare liabilities. We will not be able to even come close to borrowing that much money and to actually pay it, we’d eventually have to tax not just the rich, but the entire working population at a rate 80% higher than we pay today — FOREVER. That’s never going to happen. So, that can’t be it.

The simple reality is this: We are borrowing much, much, much more than we’re taking in and while raising taxes on the rich could erase a small fraction of the deficit, over the long haul, we’re going to either have to dramatically cut back what we’re spending or we’re going to have to dramatically raise taxes on everyone, including the middle-class.

The reason we’re going to have to make that choice is not because people are mean or because they don’t care about the poor; it’s because we simply can’t afford to continue to borrow massive amounts of money from other countries to give it away to people who aren’t earning it. Truthfully, we’ve already let this problem go unaddressed for far too long and it’s putting the entire country in an increasingly desperate position.

It’s fine to call for cuts to defense and for higher taxes on the rich. My guess is that the people calling for those things, one way or another, will eventually get their way. But, the reality is that even if you sliced our $529 billion defense budget to the bone and dramatically increased taxes on the rich, we would suffer greatly for it and we STILL wouldn’t even be to the halfway mark in paying off our deficit for just this year.

So, when people say “We shouldn’t balance the budget on the backs of the poor,” what do they mean? Do they even know what they mean? Do they have any magical solution to this problem — because if they do, now might be a great time to clue the rest of us in on what it may be.

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Is It Possible to Satisfy a Liberal?

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David Limbaugh posted this excellent commentary over at Human Events. He a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Crimes Against Liberty, Bankrupt: The Moral and Intellectual Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party, Absolute Power and Persecution.

There Is Just No Satisfying Liberals
by  David Limbaugh
08/14/2011

What is 2011 if not a dramatic global outworking of the abysmal failures of liberalism? Their failures are everywhere, but liberals are no closer to abandoning their political theology than they were, say, five years ago.
       
Every marginally intelligent person must know that events unfolding in Britain are a likely foreshadowing of what's in store for us if we don't radically alter our ways. Unchastened and undaunted, liberals keep their collective foot on the big-government accelerator. There's no governor on the liberal golf cart.
      
For years, the more responsible among us have been warning about spending and unsustainable entitlements, and the left has mocked. But this past year, it's as if God has been trying, with increasingly urgent alarms, to get our attention, to no avail.
       
Tea partyers tried to hold the line during the debates of the continuing resolutions and debt ceiling, only to be vilified. But the national debt continues to explode as if to resoundingly validate conservatives as reasonable and their spending-addicted opponents as extremists. For liberals, too much government is never enough.
       
We were told that unless we lifted the debt ceiling, our credit rating would be downgraded and the markets would collapse. Most Republicans signed on to the deal under duress, which ended up neither preventing nor delaying the downgrade or the market free fall. But that was no problem for liberals, who simply changed their warnings after the fact, now saying it was the wrangling over the ceiling, not the underlying debt, that was responsible. Liberals are not to be held to account for what they said yesterday.
       
In a move ostensibly aimed at containing the plummeting market, Obama bounced out once again to his trusted prompter. But instead of acknowledging his culpability for the unfolding national nightmare -- for which he, at the very least, is blocking remedial action -- he wagged his skinny finger of blame, saying it is everyone's fault but his. Being a liberal means never having to say you're sorry.
       
Meanwhile, we got another stern jolt of reality from across the pond as one of Europe's primary poster nations for the grand socialist experiment implodes into abject violence before our eyes. We witnessed the very beneficiaries of government largesse exhibiting their gratitude as they stole from an already beaten and bloodied man and forced people to strip naked to prove they'd not withheld any assets.
       
It was unnecessary to speculate as to the causes of this unrest. Audiotapes of the inebriated women justifying the despicable behavior on the basis of income inequality told us all we needed to know.
       
But British liberals are as impervious to proof as their American counterparts. A video linked on National Review Online featured a British Labour Party liberal condemning the protesters' violence through one cheek and sympathizing with their plight on the other, thereby further excusing and enabling their behavior. Her party injected the addict with addictive substances yet castigates conservatives who call for an intervention.
       
There is just no satisfying liberals. No amount of money thrown at a project can ever be enough, because you can't solve problems by throwing money at them, especially when that money comes with federal demands attached and leads to diminished local control. They'll always demand more -- even when we are wholly bankrupt. Always. No exceptions.
       
Indeed, if there were ever a test case to see whether exceptions exist, whether there are some limits to the rapacious liberal appetite for spending, our current debt picture and economic malaise provide it. But they won't even countenance the thought of counseling, much less patient rehab.
       
Like their addicted wards, liberals remain in perpetual denial, continually giving themselves a pass for their disastrous policies because of their allegedly good intentions. But how noble is it to stoke the dark human passions of greed, jealousy, envy and covetousness? How commendable is it to foment resentment among the races, genders and different income groups? How virtuous is it to promote policies that rarely, if ever, live up to their promises?
       
Should we lavish praise on President Obama for his simulated compassion when his press secretary, Jay Carney, insists that extending unemployment benefits creates jobs, willfully ignoring both common sense and empirical evidence, which contradict the claim? Must we laud Obama for his unrelenting demands for more "stimuli" that not only don't work but also will further impoverish us and our posterity?
       
It must be easy to be a liberal. When your policies don't work, you just change the goal posts and say we haven't done enough -- and then demand more.
       
Honestly, close your eyes and try to imagine a scenario in which liberals would ever say that enough money has been spent, enough federal government power exerted. You will fail -- because there is just no satisfying liberals.

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Snake Oil Salesman in Chief

Image by DonkeyHotey via FlickrMy friend Alan Caruba hit the nail on the head again today.

President Blah, Blah, Blah

President Blah, Blah, Blah got in front of the television cameras midday on Monday to say the usual meaningless things he has been saying since he was elected, none of which are true and none of which have been able to hide the fact that he has driven the nation into the ditch with a lot of help from Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

Over the weekend he unleashed the White House attack dogs to blame the nation’s problems on the Tea Party when, of course, it was his administration that added three trillion to our debt.

After a while we just stop listening to what a president says; especially if we have concluded he is either clueless or has a hidden agenda.

“If his lips are moving, he’s lying” is an old cliché, but it fits President Barack Hussein Obama because it is quite likely that no one believes him any more with the exception of the usual brain-dead liberals who still think he is a genius. So far he has shown a genius for increasing the debt and the unemployment numbers.

This is a man who was still talking about electric cars, high speed trains, and renewable energy while the price of gas continued to increase along with everything else.

On Monday he was still talking about the nation's infrastructure as a source of jobs even after recently admitting there were few "shovel ready" projects. Tired ideas, ideas that don't work, repeated over and over again.

President Obama has been boring people from the day he took office. “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” The oceans have been rising a few centimeters every century and the planet is just fine. His election did not transform either the laws of nature or physics.

Instead, all that transformational gibberish turned out to be about a nation already in financial trouble as the result of the September 2008 bursting of the housing bubble. His response was to waste a great deal of time forcing Obamacare on everyone. Americans want to feel that they have a say in what the government is doing and, when they don’t, they organize.

The emergence of the Tea Party was the legacy of Obamacare. A movement without leaders, but one that made itself felt in the 2010 elections that transferred the power of the nation’s purse from Democrats to Republicans in the House and reduced their majority in the Senate.

It may just be my imagination, but President Obama seems to believe he can just stand at the podium, read from the Tele-Prompters, and convince Americans that all our problems have to do with “millionaires and billionaires”, “corporate jets”, and the folks who provide the sources of all real energy; coal, oil, and natural gas.

Nobody is buying those idiotic electric cars (except government agencies) and nobody believes the Green grifters who have been living off federal largesse with their pathetic wind and solar farms, and ghastly ethanol. If it were not for government mandates they would all have been out of business long ago.

Politico recently reported that “people and households earning more than $1 million annually made up just 0.1 percent, or just over 235,000, of the 140 million tax returns filed in 2009.” Meanwhile, there are now a record 45.8 million Americans using food stamps, nearly 15% percent of the population. You do the math.

As for those awful oil companies, the top three paid $42.8 billion in income taxes in 2010. Moreover, according to the American Petroleum Institute, oil and natural gas companies employ 9.2 million Americans and account for 7.5 percent of GDP.

If the Obama administration had not set out to thwart any new oil exploration and a US-Canada oil pipeline, and to shut down active coal mines while punishing coal-burning utilities, the economy would be looking a lot better.

In a recent column, former Reagan speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, said, “But the president is supposed to be great at speeches. Why isn’t it working? One answer is that it never ‘worked.’ The power of the president’s oratory was always exaggerated.”

“The debt-ceiling crisis revealed Mr. Obama’s speeches as rhetorical kryptonite. It is the substance that repels the listener.”

In an effort to look as if he was truly engaged in finding room for compromise during the debt ceiling debate, Obama seemed to be on television with either a prepared or impromptu speech every other day. He does not do “impromptu” well. The casual “eat your peas” remark was received as it should have been, as someone pretending to be the only adult in the room, lecturing the rest of us as children.

I am beginning to sense that even in Congress, a lot of Democrat Senators and Representatives are beginning to do the calculus of getting reelected if they continue to vote the straight party line or are even seen on the same stage as Obama.

None of Congress’s solutions to our economic doldrums are working because of the sharp partisan divide that ignores the problems millions of Americans are encountering. They were all tried in the 1930s and they all failed.

Now that Obama has hit the campaign trail, it would be nice if the mainstream media began to report on how many or how few people turn out to listen to President Blah, Blah, Blah. How many of them are union members? How many are minorities?

How many will have been out of work for so long that by November 2012 they will vote for Bugs Bunny if he is on the Republican ticket?

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The Rise of Capitalism

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David Hines penned a great piece that was posted at Renew America.

Porky and the Barrel

When and why did greedy capitalist pigs arise?

The guy who built the first plow was a capitalist. Instead of hunting or foraging for immediate gratification, he created a capital good. With it he could produce more at a much later time, enriching his entire community. He wasn't the first; earlier capital goods included the bow and arrow and the dugout canoe.

The additional wealth produced by the ploughman was often taxed and redistributed to friends of the ruling regime. The investor and producer was to be kept poorer than his kleptocratic masters. The power of sword and spear — capital goods producing no useful commodities, instead producing only coercion — dominated plows and pottery wheels. It still does, which is a reason we are in a recession.

The Black Death democratized wealth. With the untimely demise of as much as a third of Europe's population, labor could command a premium. Peasants could afford more goods and better lifestyles.
The additional flow of money changed taxation by enabling lords and kings to demand coin rather than payment in goods. The greedy capitalist peasants could take pride in the opulent lifestyles in places such as Versailles that redistribution provided for the elite — so much pride that they revolted.

For centuries most people had to be content with plain-looking fabric. Fancy patterns were beyond their reach. Then a capitalist named Jacquard invented a distant ancestor of the computer. The Jacquard loom brought fancy patterns within reach of lower-class budgets. Naturally, the silk weavers opposed a capital good that could challenge their hegemony on fancy weaving. No doubt their objections mirrored many arguments used against "capitalism" today.

Even many defenders of "capitalism" don't get it right. Many think that savers are not necessary to the process, and instead government can merely print money for investment. This is not capitalism; it's corporatism. It penalizes savers as well as consumers. It removes the reward for delayed gratification, fostering a culture of conspicuous consumption. No real resources are created by politicians. Instead, resources are removed from the general economy and directed into malinvestments concocted by their fantasies, and those of their constituents.

Who gains from this cheap government money? Not the family saving for a big-ticket item such as a house or a car. Not your retirement account. Not the middle-class person's rainy day fund. No, the ones benefiting are those who first get the newly-created money — the bailed-out CEOs; the banksters; the bureaucrats. It's no accident that the DC area is largely immune from the recession hitting everywhere else.

Many people mistake government for a magical cornucopia, dispensing wealth arising from the ether. Thus they support the friends of politicians getting the tenderloins while they themselves settle for chitlins — if even that. Savers — the creators of capital — are called "greedy pigs," but it's the politicians delivering the pork. I guess that makes them butchers.

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