• Did you, or are you now, working for a union?
• Do you cheat on your taxes, or occasionally forget to do them?
• There is no third qualification requirement.

A former top official for a huge New York union who is now the White House political director failed to disclose more than $37,000 in income from the union last year, it was reported yesterday.

As the former public-affairs executive for Service Employees International Union Local 1199, Patrick Gaspard earned $37,191 in carried-over pay while on the White House payroll.

He failed to disclose the income on financial-disclosure forms, Politico reported. Where arrangements for payment by a former employer must be listed on the form, he checked a box indicating he had nothing to report.

via Obama aide ‘forgot’ 37G in union pay – NYPOST.com. h/t Tam.

Internal administration documents reveal that up to 51% of employers may have to relinquish their current health care coverage because of ObamaCare.

Small firms will be even likelier to lose existing plans.

The “midrange estimate is that 66% of small employer plans and 45% of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfathered status by the end of 2013,” according to the document.

In the worst-case scenario, 69% of employers — 80% of smaller firms — would lose that status, exposing them to far more provisions under the new health law.

via Leaked ObamaCare Docs: Majority of Employer Health Plans Won’t Be ‘Grandfathered’ | NewsBusters.org.

YouTube – Obama’s Gulf Oil Spill.

But I have found a reason to love the Cash for Clunkers program: it is a fabulous demonstration project for just how utterly pointless government stimulus programs can be. Stimulus programs tend to be hard to evaluate in our complex economy — sort of like trying to calculate the effect of a butterfly flapping its wings on world climate. But since cash for clunkers only lasted a few weeks and hit only one industry, we can learn a lot about the effectiveness of government stimulus.

via Coyote Blog » Blog Archive » Stimulus Was a Clunker.

The attached infographic shows that Cash for Clunkers — at best! — only hastened a few purchase decisions.

Not shown:

• The overall cost per clunker
• The cost per union vote bought with the stimulus money

You can imagine my response to this arrogance. Finally, once again, having had it Up To Here (UTH) with their insults and rude laughter, I explode in their faces “Inflation is still going up, you morons! Prices are still increasing! Watch my lips, morons! Prices are going up! The stupid CPI may show that the rate of inflation decreased by a lousy tenth of a percent lately, which I don’t believe for a second, but prices are still increasing by 2.2%! So what in the hell are you gloating about when the buying power of your money is being destroyed?”

Well, the conversation got pretty heated after I told them that this discussion about inflation was the perfect opportunity to tell them that I was, again, forced to cut expenses so that I could get a little more money to buy a little more gold, silver and oil.

and

So, I will say that I think that the real reason that the CPI is merely rising 2.2%, and not soaring as a result of all of this money being created around the world, is because the cost of housing constitutes a full 40% of the index, but now that the housing bubble has bust, the glut of housing on the market is causing the cost of housing to plummet, taking the CPI abnormally down.

via Inflation Still a Problem, Despite “Evidence” to the Contrary.

I will also add that the government “adjusts” the CPI, changing what is included and how it is counted, whenever the CPI shows that prices are increasing at a rate that they do not want to report.

After all, if the CPI goes up too quickly or too high, they have to adjust all sorts of things and benefits and payouts, like Social Security, which put the government (meaning us, the taxpayers,) even deeper in debt than it (we) already is (are).

I would like to know the truth of the matter.

YouTube – SA@TAC – Forgetting the Troops.

At a time when Barack Obama is getting heat for stonewalling information about an alleged administration bribery scandal, a new poll shows more Americans than ever suspect the president is hiding information about his own background and want him to come clean.

Questions about Obama’s eligibility to be president, exacerbated by his refusal to answer questions, release ordinary background documentation and his extraordinary legal maneuvers to keep his background hidden, have been on the radar of a number of top-level investigative reporters and news organizations since before his election.

via Poll shocker! Majority wants Obama records.

Case In Point #1:

It happened for Marc Edwards, a lean, intense Virginia Tech environmental engineering professor. Drawing on what he called his own “world-class stubbornness,” he mounted a six-year campaign that succeeded last week in forcing the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to admit that it had misled the public about the risk of lead in the District’s drinking water.

The CDC, which is the nation’s principal public health agency, made the confession in a “Notice to Readers” published in an official weekly bulletin Friday. It came a day after a scathing House subcommittee report said the agency knowingly used flawed and incomplete data when it assured D.C. residents in 2004 that their health hadn’t been hurt by spikes in lead in the drinking water.

via Virginia Tech professor uncovered truth about lead in D.C. water.

Case In Point #2:

Rotavirus vaccines are commonly given to children, and this year’s batch of vaccines made by GlaxoSmithKline and Merck are contaminated with a pig virus, the FDA recently discovered. So the FDA called a meeting to determine whether injecting a pig virus into the bodies of young children might be some sort of problem requiring a recall of the vaccines.

Can you guess what conclusion the agency reached? As reported by Reuters, the FDA concluded “…it was safe for doctors to resume giving patients Glaxo’s Rotarix and continue using Merck’s Rotateq. The agency said there was no evidence the contamination caused any harm…”

In other words, as long as they can bury the evidence and deny any link between vaccines and health problems — which has been the standard excuse of the FDA for decades — they can continue to claim the vaccines are safe enough to inject into little children.

via Pig virus contaminates rotavirus vaccines, but FDA says no problem

No one will care more about your health and well-being than you do.  Unless, of course, you’re the sort of fat, lazy slob or genetically skinny minny or otherwise healthily-apathetic person who doesn’t care about your health, in which case at least one of  your parents care more about you than you do.

However, excepting those exceptions, all the government really cares about is expanding its power over you and your life, and helping their partners in business from competition.

As an example of the government’ hands-on approach, Obama said that BP had wanted to drill a single “relief” well in an effort to eventually stop the leak in several months if all else failed. Instead, the administration insisted on two relief wells, Obama said.

Over and over, the president sought to counter criticism that the administration was giving too much leeway to BP PLC. “Make no mistake, BP is operating at our direction,” he said.

via Fixing oil spill my responsibility, Obama says – Yahoo! News.

Anyone suspect that, perhaps, this is part of the problem?

“This company is a great example of the stimulus act doing what it was supposed to do,” Ecotality spokeswoman Jeanine L’Ecuyer said.

“ETEC was teetering. It was a company trying very hard to stay in business. This grant has created jobs and put this company back on track.”

ETEC had 23 employees before the grant. It already has hired 50 people in Phoenix and San Diego, and Oregon, Tennessee and Washington to coordinate the rollout and find contractors who will install the chargers.

via Massive stimulus grant boosts electric-car charging company, creates jobs.

In other news, taxpayers reported $99.8 million in losses, and employers across the nation reported the elimination of 50+ positions throughout the economy.  Millions of Americans saw the value of their savings decline due to inflation caused by the Federal Reserve allowing Congress to throw money from helicopters over Arizona.

Henry Hazlitt already covered how this works.  See:

1. There is no more persistent and influential faith in the world today than the faith in government spending.
2. Credit Diverts Production
3. Saving the X Industry