Obamapocolypse Now

I hope all the Sandra Flukes of the world can rest easy knowing they enjoy free birth control at the expense of a young boy with a life-threatening milk allergy who can now barely afford his EpiPens, the family of ten who now live on ramen noodles with limited utilities in a futile attempt to afford medical supplies for their two children with Type 1 Diabetes, the self-employed chiropractor who can no longer afford his home and had to move his family of five into a friend's house, the families who are proactively quitting their jobs and declaring bankruptcy to qualify for Medicaid rather than face even more devastating financial ruin, the small business owners who are closing their doors because their healthcare plans will now negate their profits, the single mothers who now must work two part-time jobs because government regulations slashed their hours, and the doctors who are seeking early retirement or considering leaving the country because they feel the new government standards of limited care violate the Hippocratic Oath.

What a wonderful enlightened world we live in.  Many thanks to Matt Walsh for putting this compilation together.  People need to be aware of the real human cost.  For some reason, the Affordable Car Act has left millions of Americans out of work, out of money, out of options, and still unable to afford what used to be basic healthcare.

It used to be an option to just do without what you cannot afford.  Now if we try to do without, we are fined for our trouble.  They will get you either way.  Unless you actually quit trying to make ends meet, give up attempting to maintain a legitimate income, you will be hounded for everything you have.  I've been saying for a while that the real collapse won't come until the average American realizes he has nothing left to lose.  This could very well be the final ruin of the middle-class.

In the words of Emily from Iowa:

Recently our 2 year-old daughter had an ear infection. Went to the doc, got a prescription for an antibiotic. Went to the pharmacy to fill said prescription. I was expecting it to cost around 5 dollars because that’s what it cost the last time we had it filled. Wrong. It now costs 75 dollars. I paid 75 dollars for an antibiotic that used to cost us 5 dollars. When I asked the pharmacist, “Why the huge increase?” She replied, “Obamacare. And this is just the beginning.”

For more stories which will be detrimental to your blood-pressure, follow the link to The Matt Walsh Blog.  I read each and every one.  We're still covered by military health insurance, and I dread the day we'll have to face off with Obamacare.  With any luck, maybe we could join one of those religious co-ops if they're still exempt.  Shoot, at this point I'm considering settling in on welfare in an attempt to pull the whole edifice down sooner.  If we all give up at once, maybe we could just burn this administration to the ground and start from scratch.

This is one of the very few things that can make me stop and think, "Thank God we don't have kids."

America is essentially dead.  What on earth do we have now?

• The Matt Walsh Blog : The Definitive Guide to How Obamacare is Destroying American Lives

• Also, if you aren't put off by a bit of crude humor, see what Jon Stewart had to say about the unqualified disaster that was just the Obamacare website.  I love a dark and cynical laugh now and then.

The D-word

We've been talking about it for a long time.  We pretend we can actually avoid it indefinitely.  I've been hearing it a lot more often lately.  It's the D-word.  DEFAULT.

Based on everything I've read, the United States of America will inevitably default on it's enormous financial obligations some day.  Forgive us for being human, but Dave and I are really hoping that day isn't Monday.  We have just under $13,000 in personal debt left after cars, student loans, and credit cards, and - all things being equal - I'd rather face the catastrophic economic downturn with no debt at all.  But I guess we're better prepared than most.

All the same, I'd rather eek out another year . . .

I keep posting this trailer, but it is an excellent documentary.  If they raise the debt ceiling again, all that will buy us is time.  Use it wisely.

My Business, Nipped In the Bud

Just for the record, if congress passes this Internet Sales Tax bill, I will be officially shutting down whatever official bits of my business I have been able to construct.

I was willing to jump through all these hoops and wait all this time and pay these fees for one state.  I will never do it for fifty.  I keep hearing about all these tiny "brick and mortar" stores who feel disadvantaged because they're losing business to the internet.  Tough beans; that's the free market.  Maybe these little brick and mortar shops should get websites.  At the most basic level, it doesn't take much to set up an Ebay store.  In fact, it takes almost no effort at all.  Sorry, no sympathy.

In the meantime, the solution seems to be to let all fifty states charge sales tax on internet transactions.  When you have a license to collect and hold sales tax, you have to file every month regardless of whether you owe anything.  Imagine little Etsy stores being required to file with FIFTY different offices EVERY MONTH.  It's a paperwork nightmare.  Never mind the fiscal imbalance in time, manpower, and record-keeping required to collect chump change from thousands of individuals each month.  Can you imagine, as an infinitesimally small business owner, being audited by some random state for those $3 you allegedly owe?  What a pain in the butt.

Apparently the states will be required to provide software that will be embedded in every American retail website to calculate these taxes.  Is every state going to embed it's own program?  Is it going to be some strange conglomerate?  Will these websites appreciate having strange code embedded in their design?  We've all seen how slick and efficient government websites can be (*sarcasm*).  It seems to me that if they want to collect sales tax on all online transactions, the onus should be on them to collect it from their own citizens who are doing the buying.  But they would, of course, have to come up with some invasive and inconvenient way to doing that as well, so there really is no great alternative.

I sent my form letter to all my elected officials (though I elected none of them), proposing Ebay's solution.  The idea is to exempt from these new internet sales taxes all sellers who generate less than $10 million in income each year.  The popular statistic is that Amazon does $10 million every ninety minutes.  Or maybe we could just pay a flat rate percentage income tax across the board and do away with this pesky sales tax altogether.  But nobody asked me.

I suppose the last option for me would be to exclusively attend craft fairs within the state.  What a lovely way to squelch free enterprise.

Runaway Slave

More documentaries!  "Runaway Slave" by Rev. C. L. Bryant focuses on the detrimental effects of the welfare state on African-American communities.  I love productions like this, because they say everything that I think but am not allowed to say, or that would never be taken seriously if I said them.

Money and Medicine

I'm watching Netflix again.  At 2:30 in the morning, I'm too tired to do much else.

Today's recommendation, "Money and Medicine" by Roger Weisberg.  More interestingly to me, they didn't talk about the cost of heathcare so much as the much pooh-poohed risks and side-effects of unnecessary treatment.  It's a worse problem than I thought.

Because of my bicornuate uterus, it has been medically recommended that I get a CT scan to investigate whether or not I was born with only one kidney.  The impetus behind this recommendation seems to be no more serious than curiosity and general information, and after hearing what sort of radiation punch those machines are packing, I think I'll pass.  My kidney(s?) has never bothered me in the past, so I really don't see the urgency.

Whoop-dee-do

Why the heck is everything Obama does automatically "historic?"  Technically, everything every president ever did is historic, but so what?  Are we going to hear about Obama eating a historic sandwich while on a historic vacation during his historic second term?  How about his historic mismanagement, his historic debts?

There's a reason why I don't watch the news.  The talking heads make me want to throw things.

The Ugly Truth

My dad posted this.  I will never be very politically articulate, but I know what I think, and apparently this guy thinks it, too.  So I'll let him do the talking.

Media Malfeasance

In a word, inexcusable.

Realities of Obamacare

The unintentional effects of Obamacare are starting to rattle my workplace, and those apolitical creatures who usually take no notice of such things are having a rude awakening.

Here's the breakdown of the situation.  Almost all of us in the store are part-time.  That isn't a problem.  As part-timers, we regularly work anywhere between 20 to even 40 hours a week (when payroll is good).  If we have time to spare, we pick up shifts for other people or stay a little later than scheduled as the need arises.

Obamacare will now put a stop to that, as of February 1.  The way the government sees it, these evil retail companies are taking advantage of us by giving part-timers full-time employment without full-time benefits.  To some degree, I see their point.  At my previous job, I was working 40 hours solid every week with no benefits.  So, in an effort to put a stop to this shameless exploitation of the American worker, it has been decreed that no part-time employee will be permitted to work more than 30 hours a week or the company will be subjected to a $161 fine per team member per hour.

THE HOPE:  This will force these greedy corporations to create more full-time positions and everyone will have benefits and be happy and prosperous.

THE REALITY:  The company only has so many full-time positions that it can afford.  Rather than create any new ones, the solution will be to simply hire more part-timers to fill the shifts its current workforce will no longer be able to cover.  AND, in an effort to absolutely avoid those crushing fines for accidental overwork, the company policy has changed to reflect a maximum of 25 hours per week per employee.

Hours are being cut across the board.  Some of my coworkers who rely on those extra hours to make ends meet have begun looking for second jobs or entirely new jobs.  In the end, people will have to work the same number of hours as part-time employees but now juggle two different jobs.  Nobody is happy.

Thanks for nothing, federales.

Vocabulary Lesson

Mr. President, the word of the day is the·sau·rus.

While we're at it, let's drag out some other goodies the English lexicon has to offer, such as in·sip·id, ba·nal, dis·in·gen·u·ous, and con·de·scend·ing.

         In a word, em·bar·rass·ing.

Commentary Break

While I'm crazy busy with work and Christmas crafts, please consider this latest offering from Molotov. :)

A Different Sort of Hopeful Audacity

The more I find out about Werner von Haeften, the more I like him.  For those who don't recognize him, he was adjutant to Colonel Claus von Stauffenburg, a longtime member of the German resistance, and a key participant in the July 20th plot to assassinate Hitler in the  Wolfsschanze.  Despite the best laid plans, the whole attempt quickly unraveled when the bomb failed to kill its intended target.  Von Haeften, Stauffenburg, Friedrich Olbricht and Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim were executed by firing squad in the early hours of the following morning in Berlin.  Apparently at the last moment, von Haeften moved to take the bullets meant for Stauffenburg.  He was thirty-five years old and left a fiancée, Reinhild von Hardenberg, also active in the resistance.

Unfortunately, I think we might need role models like this in the future.  I don't know what may happen, but that particular strain of selfless courage and loyalty will be a necessity, regardless.

I'm not too keen on "Werner," but having a son named Haeften would be awesome.

Hello! This Is Reality Calling . . .

Wednesday I was trapped for an hour in the waiting room of the Hyundai dealership while my car was serviced.  The widescreen TV was of course tuned to MSNBC.  It was a long hour.

There aren't any liberals in my house.  There really isn't any liberal media in my house.  I know they're out there, but watching their programming was like stepping through the looking glass.  Are they serious?

This isn't a political race, it's a schoolyard war.  The commentary amounted to little more than "Hey, stupid!" and "Yeah, your mama!"  Maybe the conservative networks are the same way these days.  I don't really watch any of it.  The whole democratic process has become a farce.  People are either slaves of the media zombies or have no idea what is really going on.  And the two are not mutually exclusive.

I found myself sitting there feeling sour and thinking, "Yeah, well we'll just see how all your precious government programs fare when hyperinflation strikes and the currency implodes.  Suckers!"  For a second, I was actually hoping the crash would happen sooner rather than later just so we could have a big "TOLD YOU SO!"  Not very Christian, I know.  Sorry.

But, seriously, it's coming!  The party is over.  We have bigger problems than tax hikes or free condoms.  Don't like it?  Shut up and take a number.

The End of the Road

It will keep you awake at night, but everybody needs to see this.  It confirmed what I already knew and painted an even bleaker picture than I expected.  In hindsight, I wish I'd been bringing in a second income all this time to pay down these debts faster.  I'm a little frantic now.  Is there a patron saint of bad currency?

Despair: It's Catching

I'm not a huge fan of Romney by any means, and when I heard about the huge gaffe he allegedly made, I was expecting something juicier than the fact that he was caught despairing of certain blocs of voters.  Seriously, can you blame him?  People barely know which way is up, but they can recognize the difference between red and blue.  And I thought I was uninformed.

Conservatives and Reverse Boycotts

Sadly, we did not participate in "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day" because I already had plans for dinner.  Also, I could not help but feel a twinge of sympathy for the employees on what must have been a crazy busy day for them.  However, we are already die-hard fans of the place, and we were just there last Saturday for no other reason than to spite the liberals of the world.  We will probably be back sometime this week to spread the appreciation around.  Apparently a relation of mine recently overheard some of these liberals whispering amongst themselves as they ate their chicken sandwiches, admitting that "We really shouldn't be eating here."  You can't argue with a good product.

These attempts by the "progressive" community to blackball this or that business always seem to backfire.  We conservatives can be a quiet bunch, but we're always willing to take reverse recommendations from liberals when it comes to which establishments to patronize.  Just yesterday I was reading about a cake shop which was boycotted for refusing to provide a homosexual wedding cake.  Despite the boycott, or perhaps because of it, the owner says business has never been better.

Tea Party vs. Occupy Wallstreet, Illustrated

My husband put me onto these videos.  I love the drawings.

The Gaffe Heard 'Round the World

Just Google "somebody else made that happen," and a host of goodies will turn up.

Another Catchy Tune

Check out Ryan Bomberger.  Cool stuff.

Buckle Up

He always says it better than I can.