Clipping blog

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Who Won the First Obamacare Payoutpalooza? Not You. Posted: 02 Apr 2011 12:38 PM PDT If you had any doubt that Obamacare was a huge scam, let Jamie Dupree blast it away like an oyster cracker before a sandstorm. Facing questions from both parties in the Congress, the Obama Administration has now revealed how it has spent over $1.7 billion on part of the Obama health law, known as the Early Retiree Reinsurance Program. This plan is intended to help companies pay the cost of health care for their early retirees, but lawmakers say it is wrongly benefiting companies like AT&T and General Electric, who have billions in profits on their bottom lines. The list that follows is like a Who’s Who of big campaign donors, unions, and public employee groups. Six of the top ten recipients are pension systems for public employees. The United Auto Workers, already $3.4 richer from the auto bailout, topped the list with an award of almost $207 million. General Electric, which paid no taxes at all in 2010 and whose CEO is a darling of the White House, received $36.6 million, good for 11th place on the list. AT&T, which placed second on the list, spent slightly under $15.4 million on lobbying efforts in 2010 and will rake in over $140 million from just this portion of Obamacare. Verizon, third on the list, will make $91.9 million on its $16.75 million 2010 lobbying investment. Melissa Clouthier has the right of it. This has to stop. Let us set aside the obvious fact that we simply can’t afford Obamacare and focus on the message the ERRP sends. Companies now have a crystal-clear example that if they pony up a few million dollars to Washington politicians, they can expect to see their money returned to them multiplied many times. Most of us who have watched Washington politics know this has been true for a while but I can’t recall a time when our government was this blatant about paying back its corporate and union supporters. If ever there was a time for the taxpayers to push back hard against the rent-seeking and paybacks, it’s now. If not, well, we deserve everything we get. (Cross-posted to The Greenroom)

The New Civility Arrives in Michigan Posted: 02 Apr 2011 11:15 AM PDT At least one group of state employees will reap some rewards from the left’s full-throated assault on anyone who has even hinted that they’d like to take a crumb of power from the wealthy and powerful public sector union heads: police officers. There have been so many serious death threats in the past few weeks that police officers are going to see some pretty fat overtime checks because of all the hours they’ll have to put in to investigate them. Today we can add one more threat to the ever-increasing list. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy received numerous death threats and bomb threats in the aftermath of national publicity about a Freedom of Information Act request it sent to three public universities. The messages were left on the Center’s voice mail Thursday night and early Friday morning, but it is unclear at this point if one or two women were responsible for the threats. [...] There were five messages left containing death or bomb threats. Four of them appear to be from the same caller. A fifth message was from a woman who left a death threat and, unlike the previous caller, left her name and indicated she lived in a neighboring state. It was unclear if the second caller was the same as the first caller. In one message, a female voice said: "Scotty Walker is dead. So are you. We know where you live." The woman then recited the Mackinac Center's address and said, "We are coming up to destroy you." In another message, a female who left her name said: "You are on Main Street. You are the first place to be bombed." I shouldn’t have to say this is vile behavior from the so-called tolerant left. I also shouldn’t have to say that such behavior as we’ve seen from the incredibly powerful public sector unions, not only in Wisconsin and Michigan, but around the country puts paid to the lie that what they crave most is civility in our public discourse. What they crave most is power and they will allow no one — not even you — to oppose them without a storm of hate and venom. UPDATE: The Lonely Conservative has some thoughts on the matter.

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