Billoblog ®

Obama’s hatred of success in America is bearing fruit.  After deciding to socialize the banks and promulgate hatred against successful bankers, the strangest thing happened on the way to the gulag.  All those talented bankers are now leaving to work for folk who value them — foreign banks. 

Socialists never seem to learn.  As Margaret Thatcher once said “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”  The other problem is that talented people will go where they have the best opportunities.  For decades, the US has benefited from a global “brain drain,” where the best and brightest have come to the US where they know that hard work and talent will bring them success.  Obama and the Dems have redefined that.  The US is now the place where the best and the brightest can come to be demonized and where success is considered evil.  Not surprisingly, the US is starting to become the victim of a brain drain, not the beneficiary.  Good work Obama.  Obama’s vision is that of enforced mediocrity — the old Soviet idea of “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”

It’s not surprising that the recent trip by the Dems to the worker’s paradise of Cuba resulted in such raves for Castro’s success.  It matches Obama’s vision of political success — oppressive government, destruction of liberty, and trickle-up poverty.

What a disaster.

I gotta get one of these.

The race in New York is close.  So what’s the Democrat solution?  Don’t let people in the military vote!  That’s how Democrats support the troops.  What a disgrace.  Hat tip Blackfive.

NASA reports historic solar minimum.  Better get some warm clothing for that global warming.  Of course, that won’t stop Obama from using “global warming” to destroy individual liberty and install his fascist social engineering programs.  When we end up freezing while still paying for cap and trade, he’ll probably claim that his taxes saved humanity.  What a disaster.  A pretentious disaster.

Obama officially threw his claim that he would not raise taxes on the poor under the bus with the new tobacco tax.  It was a huge increase in the tax, and will fall disproportionately on those with less income.  But that’s OK.  We all knew he was lying.  Obama was not elected because we thought he was telling the truth.  We all knew he was lying — we all just felt he was lying to the *other* guy.

Besides, it’s all to save lives, right?  Wrong.  Like all of Obama’s programs, it will merely shift the pain from those who are responsible to those who are not.

Here’s the official Billo prediction.  The draconian artificial tax on tobacco is now high enough to make it worthwhile to break the law to bypass the tax.  As with Prohibition, there will now be a grey and black market in tobacco.  Eventually, people will die — not because of the ill effects of tobacco, but because of the money involved in smuggling and black-marketeering.  Tobacco will kill fewer people, but people protecting illegal profits will kill more.

It’s the same old story.  Marijuana doesn’t kill people.  Marijuana growers with machine guns guarding clandestine fields kill people.   I am not afraid of someone on cocaine.  I’m afraid of the guy stripping the copper pipes out of my house at midnight to fund the black market.  Obama has created a new artificial economy to go along with the government-created illegal drug economy.  Obama will make it profitable to break the law to smuggle tobacco and evade taxes.  In response, Obama will create new task forces and police powers to crack down on the new tobacco black market menace — which will become an entrenched interest group in the government fighting for its share of the taxpayer dollars.  The smugglers will make tons of money smuggling; federal employees will make tons of money protecting the profit margins of the smugglers, and everybody will be happy.  Except those poor innocent shmucks caught in the middle.

And the crime that destroys property, destroys lives, and kills innocent people — like the tobacco tax itself — preferentially hurts the poor.  But screw the poor.  That’s all secondary to keeping the narrative pure.

My personal philosophy is that the person who makes the choice should pay the price.  It’s horrible that smokers get bad diseases, and I wish everybody would quit smoking.  But, you know, if someone has to die because of smoking, it should be the smoker — not some innocent kid who gets a bullet in the brain because he happened to get in the way of the new artificial economy Obama has just created.

Obama — what a freaking disaster.

John Hinderaker reviews the results of the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change.  Rather than copy everything he’s written, go read his post.  Here’s a teaser.  My God, the *Sun* warms the earth?  Who’d a thunk it?

The Obama administration has already begun its war on the Second Amendment.  First, it directed the military to destroy spent brass to stop reloaders.  Since that’s a major source of sport ammunition, it essentially dries up the supply of civilian sport ammunition in the US.  Then it had the National Parks ban common ammunition.

Now it is instituting procedures that shut down the arming of pilots.  Because, after all, it’s the pilots we have to fear, not the terrorists.  The terrorists he wants to let loose.

It’s a sad thing that his bumbling of the economy is the high point of his accomplishments.  This guy is a disaster.

From GatewayPundit via Stop the ACLU:

Arctic sea ice growth finished the year in 2008 at the same level as 1979.
The oceans have been cooling since 2003.
Sea ice is growing at the fastest pace on record.
Greenland’s glaciers are stabilizing.
There are growing fears of a coming freeze worse than the ice age.
Alaskan Sea Glaciers are advancing for the first time in 250 years.
And, for the second straight year the Earth is, in fact, cooling… not warming.

But, you know, Obama still wants the federal government to suck you dry to pay for his science-free attacks on those evil corporations.  Obama’s cure for depression:  print money and destroy companies that hire people.  What a ride we’re in for.

… at least when it comes to their welfare versus benefitting the socialist ideal.  As noted in Powerline, the Democrat budget bill kills the DC voucher program that allows low-income African-American kids to attend the same schools as rich liberal Democrats.  Can’t be having the leadership’s kids rubbing elbows with the great unwashed.  Like liberalism, Obama’s candidacy was founded on a lie, and is being expressed as a lie.  He’s thrown everybody else under the bus, why not the kids?

The first 100 days of the Obama administration has been a circus.  From the abandonment of any sense of fiscal responsibility, the laughingstock appointments, the ludicrous gaffes of Clinton as Secretary of State, the abandonment of ethics, petty targeting of political commenters, and embracing earmarks, I am now only waiting to see how low Obama can sink.

Pretty low, it seems.  Turns out Obama wants to show his respect for those who step into harm’s way to protect those civil liberties he holds in such contempt by making them personally pay for treatment for their war wounds.  What a guy.