Do Democrats have any plan but to destroy Trump?

"Fight, fight, fight." Donald Trump said after being almost assassinated in Butler, PA. So now the Dems think that's the magic. Yell fight, fight. That's the trick. Put on matching t-shirts paid for by Soros, cover your faces like the KKK and yell. But the only thing they know how to fight is Donald Trump. They don't fight the drug cartels, they don't fight the human trafficking, they don't fight Big Pharm or Big Farm. They don't know how to fight entrenched bureaucracy, they don't know how to fight for better food, or how to not kill the next generation. What kind of a fight are Democrats offering? Only chaos, my dear.

Government bureaucracy drowning in failed programs and thousands of reports--Head Start

While I've been watching the Soros' funded fascist professionals create chaos on our campuses, I've been digging deep into the reports about Head Start, which so far has hit us up for over $1 trillion since its beginning as small test group in the LBJ era to improve the academic and life trajectory of poor children. All evaluations at 40, 50 and now almost 60 years have shown it to be a huge failure to help children succeed, but an outstanding success in providing a good living for millions of academics and government workers.

Here's one example. The culture of the TANF office. I'm pretty jaded about government waste--after all, I was a university librarian buried in task force reports and minutiae of information, data and knowledge. But this one really stunned me. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/opre/project/understanding-poverty-childhood-and-family-experiences-and-tanf-office-culture-2016 

It's a long, long way from helping a 3 year old get ready for kindergarten in the hope he'll do better in math in high school. (Yes, that's what they believed in 1965). We already know what gives kids the best chance to avoid poverty--married parents who have finished high school and have jobs. It's not the culture of the office that hands out the checks.

ACF stands for Administration for Children & Families, and I think it was created to push Head Start back into infancy since it had failed so miserably to help pre-school aged children. But the genealogy of government agencies and bureaus is fuzzy and fat so I could be wrong. It happens.

Investing in your retirement and other boring topics

I got a late start in preparing for retirement. I was in my mid-40s with a full time tenure track job at Ohio State University and a put and take savings account. When I read the pension forms that came with all the other forms I might as well have been reading Russian, Распишитесь, пожалуйста. I began reading the Wall St. Journal--which was delivered to the Veterinary Medicine Library. I was trying to figure out the difference between a stock and a bond, learning about long term gains, what is a mutual fund, figuring out defined benefit and tax deferred annuities. And I'd call my Dad or talk to my brother who was a stock broker. We still made horrible mistakes by anyone's gauge of naivete.

 
But early on I know I decided I didn't like certain stocks, and that some investments weren't worth the return because they were in violation of my core beliefs. I didn't know what it was called but I wouldn't invest in tobacco, alcohol, certain food, health and beauty products (animal testing), and viaticals (insurance plan cash out, like for people with AIDS). Eventually, because large corporations eat up smaller ones, if I liked a snack product it later would be owned by a tobacco company (R.J. Reynolds and Nabisco or Philip Morris and Kraft). And then that group would split or merge into an even larger blob. But still, for awhile I could feel smug and self-righteous--I was a Democrat then and that's what they do.

 
That's the principle when talking people into accepting ESG--environmental, social and governance investing. Most of us do want to be moral, upright and kind to the poor and patriotic. The rub is who gets to decide, and who is pushing this? At this point in our history, the left is moving from the locker room pep talk to a full court press. This is how a Republican study committee looks at ESG:

"A small handful of leftist bureaucrats and board members are behind ESG. Americans never voted for it, but ESG is still making the entire country poorer, more reliant on foreign oil, and less free. ESG is a cornerstone of Democrats’ Green New Deal agenda and one of the most serious long-term threats to energy independence and Americans’ pocketbooks. The Republican Study Committee will push to make combatting ESG a priority after 2022."

In other words, we won't be able to make the choices and mistakes I made in the 1980s about what values and products I wanted to take care of me in my old age. However, if you google, bing, brave or duck-duck-go the term ESG, you'll find several pages of only the most wonderful, positive and downright religious sounding explanation. But if you start or own a company, you won't be able to invest, expand or even use a bank to pay your employees if you don't meet the government (or United Nation's) ESG goals for climate, equity, sustainability (never defined), science, gender, guns, abortion, etc.

The Left’s ESG Movement Is Coming After All Americans (dailysignal.com)

What Is Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Investing? (investopedia.com)

And as far as retirement goals? Nothing has hurt us as badly as Biden's inflation and killer green economy, or helped us as much as Trump's Make America Great Again ambitious plan.

The bureaucratization of the killers and the dehumanization of their victims

I noticed this phrase in a City Journal article about the Russia vs. Ukraine war: "Russian atrocities against Ukrainians rely on the bureaucratization of the killers and the dehumanization of their victims." Re-read that carefully. Read it again. Let it sink in. In a less bloody form, that's the battle we are experiencing in the U.S. A huge bureaucracy, wealthy, powerful, masked and murky is battling their imaginary foe made up of their brothers and sisters of the same culture, history and language with demeaning, dehumanizing name calling like "deplorable," "racist," "terrorist," and "you-name-it phobics." More recently and with just a veneer of benign slurs, Colleen Shogan, Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the National Archives and Records Administration (the agency going after Trump), was questioned about a paper in which she disparaged every two-term Republican president since World War II as being not too bright--perhaps too stupid to run the country. See the slant? Demean and diminish. Divide and conquer. Just a change in flag and uniform. Methods are the same.

"In all these cases, in circumstances as distinct as those in Germany, Rwanda, Armenia, or Ukraine, we find a machinery of barbarism with no particular relation to one or another culture. It has been perfectly demonstrated and analyzed during trials for genocide, particularly in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. The barbarism always stands on two foundations: the bureaucratization of the killers and the dehumanization of the victims."

Russia's Machinery of Barbarism | City Journal (city-journal.org)

New findings about bureaucracy

Exciting new findings are shedding a light on the nature and structure of bureaucracy:

Dead Horse Theory

Dakota Native American tribal wisdom, passed on from generation to generation, says: “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount and get a different horse.”
However, in educative, corporate and governmental projects more advanced strategies are often employed, such as:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride dead horses.
5. Lowering the standards so that the dead horse can be included.
6. Reclassifying the dead horse as “living impaired”.
7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed.
9. Providing additional funding, and /or training to increase the dead horses’ performance.
10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance.
11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overheads and therefore, contributed substantially more to the bottomline of the economy than do some other horses.
12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.
AND of COURSE….
13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position!

Benign fascism

“In the Twentieth Century, a nation of great beauty and culture embraced Fascism, and a backward peasant society embraced Communism, and the most evolved civilization in Europe embraced Nazism. And observers still wonder why the great anglophone democracies were almost alone in not going down this path. I think the reason's simpler than it seems: No one - Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Franco - had devised a form of totalitarianism appealing enough to seduce them. Now they have. As the Bundy example illustrates, a free people will cheerfully abandon bedrock principles like equality before the law if state power is being used to torment a racist or a homophobe or someone whose very presence offends against the citizenry's sense of its own virtue. Whether or not this is a middle-of-the-road fascism, it's certainly a very flattering strain: what, after all, is wrong with benign despotism in the cause of preventing  "climate change" or transphobia - or ensuring that Nevada's desert tortoise has an area the size of the United Kingdom to gambol and frolic in?” Mark Steyn

What a shocker—Obamacare will cost much more than estimated!

Charles Blahous of Mercatus Center at George Washington University has some news about Obamacare that Republicans already knew and Democrats will deny, and the White House will find a way to blame on Republicans. Realistically, have you ever known a government program that didn't cost way more than estimated or confirmed, whether it be a war or a welfare program? Right now, the WH is hiring thousands of IRS agents which are part of Obamacare. How will that help your health? It's the Full Employment for Government Workers Act.

Let's cut to p. 45 of the report--the conclusion: ". . . despite the fondest hopes of its supporters, the passage of the ACA unambiguously darkens a dim fiscal picture. . . expected to increase federal spending obligations by more than $1.15 trillion. . ."

People—listen up.  This was never, ever ever about saving money on health, or providing better health care, or covering people who currently don’t have health insurance.  It was always about the government taking over a huge segment of the economy.  Period.

http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/publication/The-Fiscal-Consequences-of-the-Affordable-Care-Act_1.pdf

Cost of the IRS agents: Half a billion dollars, paid for off-the-books by taxpayers through a massive $1 billion Health and Human Services slush fund that got tucked into the bill. Investors.com

If the IRS and Medicare had a baby

it would look like this

Democrats didn't read it; Republicans did

The House Republican Conference has compiled a list of the new boards, bureaucracies, commissions, and programs created in H.R. 3200, “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act.” These bureaucrats will control every aspect of our nation’s health care system – and these bureaucrats will destroy the best health care system in the world. Here is what the Democrat’s health care bill monstrosity will create (HT Traditional Values Coalition):

53 new federal bureaucracies

Health Benefits Advisory Committee (Section 123, p. 30)
Health Choices Administration (Section 141, p. 41)
Qualified Health Benefits Plan Ombudsman (Section 144, p. 47)
Program of administrative simplification (Section 163, p. 57)
Retiree Reserve Trust Fund (Section 164(d), p. 70)
Health Insurance Exchange (Section 201, p. 72)
Mechanism for insurance risk pooling to be established by Health Choices Administration Commissioner (Section 206(b), p. 106)
Special Inspector General for the Health Insurance Exchange (Section 206(c), p. 107)
Health Insurance Exchange Trust Fund (Section 207, p. 109)
State-based Health Insurance Exchanges (Section 208, p. 111)
“Public Health Insurance Option” (Section 221, p. 116)
Ombudsman for “Public Health Insurance Option” (Section 221(d), p. 117)
Account for receipts and disbursements for “Public Health Insurance Option” (Section 222(b), p. 119)
Telehealth Advisory Committee (Section 1191, p. 380)
Demonstration program providing reimbursement for “culturally and linguistically appropriate services” (Section 1222, p. 405)
Demonstration program for shared decision making using patient decision aids (Section 1236, p. 438)
Accountable Care Organization pilot program (Section 1301, p. 443)
Independent patient-centered medical home pilot program under Medicare (Section 1302, p. 462)
Community-based medical home pilot program under Medicare (Section 1302(d), p. 468)
Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research (Section 1401(a), p. 502)
Comparative Effectiveness Research Commission (Section 1401(a), p. 505)
Patient ombudsman for comparative effectiveness research (Section 1401(a), p. 519)
Quality assurance and performance improvement program for skilled nursing facilities (Section 1412(b)(1), p. 546)
Quality assurance and performance improvement program for nursing facilities (Section 1412 (b)(2), p. 548)
Special focus facility program for skilled nursing facilities (Section 1413(a)(3), p. 559)
Special focus facility program for nursing facilities (Section 1413(b)(3), p. 565)
National independent monitor pilot program for skilled nursing facilities and nursing facilities (Section 1422, p. 607)
Demonstration program for approved teaching health centers with respect to Medicare GME (Section 1502(d), p. 674)
Pilot program to develop anti-fraud compliance systems for Medicare providers (Section 1635, p. 716)
Medical home pilot program under Medicaid (Section 1722, p. 780)
Comparative Effectiveness Research Trust Fund (Section 1802, p. 824)
“Identifiable office or program” within CMS to “provide for improved coordination between Medicare and Medicaid in the case of dual eligibles” (Section 1905, p. 852)
Public Health Investment Fund (Section 2002, p. 859)
Scholarships for service in health professional needs areas (Section 2211, p. 870)
Loan repayment program for service in health professional needs areas (Section 2211, p. 873)
Program for training medical residents in community-based settings (Section 2214, p. 882)
Grant program for training in dentistry programs (Section 2215, p. 887)
Public Health Workforce Corps (Section 2231, p. 898)
Public health workforce scholarship program (Section 2231, p. 900)
Public health workforce loan forgiveness program (Section 2231, p. 904)
Grant program for innovations in interdisciplinary care (Section 2252, p 917)
Advisory Committee on Health Workforce Evaluation and Assessment (Section 2261, p. 920)
Prevention and Wellness Trust (Section 2301, p. 932)
Clinical Prevention Stakeholders Board (Section 2301, p. 941)
Community Prevention Stakeholders Board (Section 2301, p. 947)
Grant program for community prevention and wellness research (Section 2301, p. 950)
Grant program for community prevention and wellness services (Section 2301, p. 951)
Grant program for public health infrastructure (Section 2301, p. 955)
Center for Quality Improvement (Section 2401, p. 965)
Assistant Secretary for Health Information (Section 2402, p. 972)
Grant program to support the operation of school-based health clinics (Section 2511, p. 993)
National Medical Device Registry (Section 2521, p. 1001)
Grants for labor-management programs for nursing training (Section 2531, p. 1008)

Note from Norma: GW Bush was certainly no slouch when it came to expanding the federal government, but Obama's current cycle makes him look like he was in training wheels. Have you ever wondered why, if the government can deliver such great health care at a reasonable cost that 1) Congress and the White House aren't going to use it; and 2) why is Medicare and Medicare which are gov't plans are in such terrible financial shape?

The GIVE Act. Does it violate the 13th amendment?

The bill, HR 1388: The Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act otherwise known as the "GIVE Act," has already passed. Here’s the roll who voted for it.



Did Congress read this bill? What was missing in VISTA, AmeriCorps, Peace Corp, Foster Grandparents, and the bazillion of local opportunities, funded by government, non-profits and churches? Is there an area not already covered by Sertoma, or American Legion, or the Lung Association, or Rotary or AARP? I never had the feeling that Points of Light was mandatory, did you? And didn't Democrats ridicule Bush I or is that why--because he didn't make it mandatory?

Did we really need another massive stack of federal dollars bundled in acres of paper co-opting volunteerism? Surely, they can't call this a "stimulus." Something like $22,000 per volunteer--but then, it takes a bunch of bureaucrats to run a program like this. And what in the world is a "social entrepreneur?" More people to join the unions that get out the Obama vote. More people to look to Obama has their savior in the White House. It makes them that much more dependent on the government.

The bill, promoted by the Obama administration as a means of “encouraging America's youth to participate in voluntary community service,” (if you read it, you’ll see it goes far beyond “encouraging,” that it opens the door to conscription) has received little scrutiny from Congress or the public. It provides funding for Obama’s favorite leftist organizations, especially ACORN, but starves out the churches that have traditionally been vehicles for volunteerism--in fact, the almost 50 year old Peace Corps was modeled after what the Mennonites, Brethren and Quakers did after WWII.

Did the RINOs read this bill before they voted for it? Time to call them home. Next time the Republican Party head guy sends out that envelope pleading for money, ask about the voting records of the RINOs. Senator Voinovich voted Yay, as usual; when anything wasteful or socialist comes along, he's all for it.

So the Senate will allow funding to ACORN, but they won't allow any religious expression in the "youth brigades?" Gateway Pundit And to think we spent American lives and money to free the women of Afghanistan from the fundamentalist Taliban, only to conscript our own.

Oh yes, “Requires states to develop comprehensive plans for volunteer and paid service by Baby Boomers and older adults.” (from summary of text)