The one-day increase for June 30 totaled $165,931,038,264.30 – bigger than the entire annual deficit for fiscal year 2007 and larger than the $140 billion in savings the new health care bill will produce over its first 10 years. The figure works out to nearly $1,500 for every U.S. household, or more than 10 times the median daily household income.

Daily debt calculations jump and fall, and big shifts are common. But all three of the biggest one-day debt increases have occurred under the tenure of President Obama, and all of the top six have been in the past two years – an indication of just how quickly the pace of deficit spending has risen under Mr. Obama and President George W. Bush.

This sort of spending would not be possible without a central bank that can create money out of thin air and loan it to Congress and charge interest on it.  And the more money Congress and the Fed create, the more inflation there is, and the less the dollar is worth.

This is exactly what we do not need in the middle of an extreme recession. But until some congressmen get a spine or some voters learn a little more about proper government, it’s an inevitable spiral downward until the next crash.

Returning to the Constitutionally mandated gold standard would quickly put an end to all this irresponsible spending.

via U.S. marks 3rd-largest, single-day debt increase – Washington Times.

Berwick explained that there are three steps to “comparative effectiveness research.” The first is to determine whether a therapy works or not. The second is to determine how well the therapy works compared to other therapies. The third is to do a cost-benefit analysis.

“If a new drug or procedure is effective, and has some advantage over existing alternatives,” Berwick said, “then does the incremental benefit justify the likely additional cost?”

Now, in a free country where people freely chose to pay for their own health care with their own money, this is a good question for any prudent consumer. It is exactly that “free market force” that Berwick implored the British socialists not to put their faith in.

But in a country where the government has taken regulatory and fiscal control of the health care system—where the state is subsidizing most people’s care—and where government bureaucrats make the decisions about who gets what treatment, this question is not the animating moving force behind the invisible hand of the market, it is the dark materialistic spirit behind the iron hand of a life-and-death tyranny.

Berwick went on to say, “any health care funding plan that is just must redistribute wealth.”  Meaning, of course, the wealth must be redistributed to the government which pays for the care.  You and I will be taxed into poverty, with the hope that this will make us more reliant and subservient to our bureaucratic overlords.

via CNSNews.com – Obama Names Rationing Czar to Run Medicare.

The Obama administration’s top science advisor, John Holdren, was caught on tape advocating for global wealth redistribution back in 2008. In this clip, unearthed by Eyeblast.tv, Holdren says that we should use tax revenue from a cap and trade type bill to pay other countries in the global south.

via [Video] Obama Advisor: Lets Use Cap-and-Trade Taxes to Give Money to Other Countries | NewsBusters.org.

But why must we support this with taxpayer dollars?

In the video below, Charles Bolden, head of NASA, tells Al Jazeera that the “foremost” task President Obama has given him is “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.” Thus, NASA’s primary mission is no longer to enhance American science and engineering or to explore space, but to boost the self-esteem of “predominantly Muslim nations.”

via Power Line – Obama tasks NASA with building Muslim self-esteem.

It is well past time to disband all unconstitutional branches of the federal government, put those people back into the private sector, and shrink the government down to the minimum size necessary.

If the agreement with BP was an isolated event, perhaps we might hope that it would not be a precedent. But there is nothing isolated about it.

The man appointed by President Obama to dispense BP’s money as the administration sees fit, to whomever it sees fit, is only the latest in a long line of presidentially appointed “czars” controlling different parts of the economy, without even having to be confirmed by the Senate, as Cabinet members are.

Those who cannot see beyond the immediate events to the issues of arbitrary power — vs. the rule of law and the preservation of freedom — are the “useful idiots” of our time. But useful to whom?

via Is U.S. Now On Slippery Slope To Tyranny? – IBD – Investors.com.

Few things are more illustrative of the need for an informed electorate than a timely episode of Jaywalking.

YouTube – Jaywalking – 4th of July (Embarrassing!).

Probably unbeknownst to Comcast, the company had fallen afoul of an organization with an animosity toward free enterprise, and thus to corporately controlled, privately owned assets. The organization Free Press was co-founded by University of Illinois professor Robert W. McChesney. From 2000 to 2004, McChesney served as editor of the Marxist/socialist journal Monthly Review, published in New York City. Monthly Review was founded in 1949 to speak “for socialism and against U.S. imperialism.”

This is no idle matter — McChesney views the media as a battleground in the socialist revolution. In a revised version of chapter seven of his book The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the Twenty-First Century, published online by Monthly Review, he writes: “Progressives need to work on challenging the corporate domination of media as part of the broader struggle for social justice. If changing media is left until ‘after the revolution,’ there will be no revolution, not to mention fewer chances for social reform.”

A chance to “change the media” apparently existed in the case of Comcast’s management of its network access. But the case finally ended up in the courts, where it found its way to the federal D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in April that the FCC could not regulate Comcast’s network management policies. The court found that the FCC “has no express statutory authority” over an Internet service provider’s network management practices.”

That came as a blow to the FCC. In its press release announcing that the agency would begin to “seek best legal framework for broadband Internet access,” the agency complained that the “recent decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit cast doubt on prior understandings about the FCC’s ability to ensure fair competition.” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski put it more bluntly. The Court’s findings, he said in a statement, amounted to an “unwelcome decision” and “a curveball.” The setback was also viewed unfavorably by FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, “a self-described New Dealer,” according to McChesney who had already tangled with Comcast earlier in the decade when he “was the one vote against approving Comcast’s takeover of AT&T’s cable systems in 2002.” In other words, Copps was familiar with using the power of government to thwart free enterprise.

The FCC is another agency that should never have existed, and exerts a continual drain on the economy and production of our nation.

via FCC Moves to Regulate the Internet.

An advisory panel to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that every person be vaccinated for the seasonal flu yearly, except in a few cases where the vaccine is known to be unsafe.

[...]

The H1N1 swine flu scare of the past year played a major role in the committee’s about face, both because the disease killed many people falling outside the current recommended vaccine demographic and because it raised public awareness of and demand for vaccines.

Truthfully, it was the government’s propaganda that raised public awareness and demand for vaccines.  H1N1 was actually less dangerous than the normal seasonal flu, and it’s difficult to really say how many people were affected by it, because early in the season, the CDC instructed caregivers to stop testing for H1N1, and to just call every instance of “flu-like symptoms” another “swine flu case.”

via U.S. government panel now pushing “vaccinations for all!” No exceptions….

In recent days and weeks, for reasons that BP has never explained, many fishing boats hired for the cleanup mostly have been waiting around. At the same time, there is mounting frustration over the time that the government has taken to approve offers of help from foreign countries and international organizations.

The Coast Guard said that there have been 107 offers of help from 44 nations, ranging from technical advice to skimmer boats and booms. But many of those offers are weeks old, and only a small number have been accepted, with the vast majority still under review, according to a list kept by the State Department.

via BP, U.S. blasted for ignoring aid offers.

About a quarter of the swine flu vaccine produced for the U.S. public has expired — meaning that a whopping 40 million doses worth about $260 million is being written off as trash.

[...]

About 30 million more doses will expire later and may go unused, according to one government estimate. If all that vaccine expires, more than 43 percent of the supply for the U.S. public will have gone to waste.

Federal officials defended the huge purchase as a necessary risk in the face of a never-before-seen virus. Many health experts had feared the new flu could be the deadly global epidemic they had long warned about, but it ended up killing fewer people than seasonal flu.

[...]

The new H1N1 swine flu emerged in April last year, hitting children and young adults particularly hard. It was difficult to predict how deadly it might be or how easily it might spread. Federal health officials pushed five vaccine manufacturers to produce a vaccine as quickly as possible. What’s more, they wanted a lot of it — many experts thought most people would need two doses for it to work.

[...]

In Europe, where nations also found themselves with millions of unused doses, some commentators have attacked the World Health Organization, which declared swine flu a global epidemic, or pandemic.

The critics have questioned the motivation of some WHO advisers who had links to the pharmaceutical industry.

[...]

“Each time the so-called experts told us that millions of people would be killed worldwide by the respective viruses. We have learned that the experts were utterly wrong,” said Dr. Ulrich Keil, a professor at Germany’s prestigious University of Muenster and a WHO adviser.

via 40 Million Doses of H1N1 Vaccine Will Be Burned – H1N1 – FOXNews.com.

• 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.