We Won’t Have His Nostrils To Kick Around Anymore

His ears remind me of a bat’s ears, his bald head is scaly, his nostrils so ginormous you could drive a Mack truck through them and his moustache was the model for Mr. Potato Head.

Rep. Henry “Nostrildamus” Waxman, the 20-term monument to government overreach and overregulation announced on Thursday that he won’t run for re-election.

One of Nancy Pelosi’s closest allies is calling it quits.  Good riddance you lying sack-o-shit and take the hedge clippers you use to trim those gnarled nose hairs with you.

Performing The Miracle Of Turning Unlimited Debt Into Unimaginable Prosperity

Alright gang, Christmas is over.  Time to face the music.

If you haven’t read Kyle Becker’s The Progressive Bible: Obama’s Genesis, you really should.  Here’s just some of his parody:

In the beginning Obama promised to create a heaven on earth. 

And his believers’ minds were without form, and void; and awe-struck looks were upon the faces of the asleep. And the Spirit of Obama moved upon the faces of the believers. 

And Obama said, Let there be debt: and there was debt.

We learn today that the Chicago Messiah plans to return early from his annual vacation to Hawaii in order to take part in talks to avert the fiscal cliff.  Congress is also due to return to the capital on Thursday.

“God only knows” how a deal can be reached now, said Speaker John Boehner.

If negotiations between His O’liness and Congress collapse completely, 2013 looks like a rocky year.

Taxes would jump $2,400 on average for families with incomes of $50,000 to $75,000, according to a study by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. Because consumers would get less of their paychecks to spend, businesses and jobs would suffer.

At the same time, Americans would feel cuts in government services; some federal workers would be furloughed or laid off, and companies would lose government business. The nation would lose up to 3.4 million jobs, the Congressional Budget Office predicts.

Several tax breaks begun in 2009 to stimulate the economy by aiding low and middle-income families are also set to expire at the beginning of 2013.  For example, the alternative minimum tax would expand to catch 28 million more taxpayers, with an average increase of $3,700 a year. Taxes on investments would rise, too. More deaths would be covered by the federal estate tax, and the rate climbs from 35 percent to 55 percent. Some corporate tax breaks would end.

If the nation goes over the fiscal cliff, budget cuts of 8 percent or 9 percent would hit most of the federal government, touching all sorts of things from agriculture to law enforcement and the military to weather forecasting. A few areas, such as Social Security benefits, Veterans Affairs and some programs for the poor, are exempt.

The New York Times has an article in today’s paper that cites noted research economists at the Bank for International Settlements, Stephen Cecchetti and Fabrizio Zampoli.  They say, “The United States, along with the rest of the industrialized West, has been on an unsustainable fiscal path for decades.”  They predict that unless radical reforms are adopted the public debt will exceed 400% of GDP.

Such debt levels are wildly implausible, as creditors would likely stop lending to Western governments long before such levels are reached. Some politicians and economists may want to put a fig leaf on it, but the projections by Cecchetti and others mean that the West is effectively bankrupt.

I’d like to personally thank all those f%#king low-information voters for perpetuating this financial morass by re-electing The Protector of the People as Long As They Know Their Place and Belong to The Right Unions.

Here’s A Pen, Sign Your Surrender

I loved that line so much; I pinched it from John Gordon Steele’s piece at Commentary Magazine for the title of this post.

Steele concludes his post with this pearl of wisdom: 

“Obama’s utter disdain for any ideas but his own is going to be the ruin of this president and that ruin might not be that long in coming. Too bad it is the country, along with his place in history, that has to suffer for his hubris.”

Obama’s budget plan is “mainly tax hikes,” House Speaker John Boehner told reporters today in Washington. “We’ve got some serious differences,” he said. During a phone call yesterday, Boehner said, he and the president were “frank” about “how far apart we are.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), said Obama’s focus on higher tax rates for top earners has made a deal tough to reach.  “The president and his allies have taken so many things off the table the only thing left is varnish,” McConnell said.

When I conceived this Photoshop™, I considered Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol because he loved money more than life itself.  Obama loves money; your money—my money—our children’s’ and our grandchildren’s money.

The second character in the ‘shop is of the bitter, grouchy, cave-dwelling Grinch who had a heart two sizes too small.  He’s there because Obama “seems to think that if all he talks about are taxes, and that’s all reporters write about, somehow the rest of us will magically forget that government spending is completely out of control.”

The third character, Uncle Sam wearing handcuffs, represents a helpless country unable to fend off the significant negative economic, employment, and social consequences of going over the fiscal cliff—the effects of which, in many cases, would mean long-lasting if not permanent damage.

And finally, the errand boy sent by grocery clerks himself, laughing his ass off as he warns Republicans against using the debt ceiling as a bludgeon in this debt battle.  In the spring, when the Chicago Messiah seeks to raise the debt ceiling, we can only hope they refuse to pay him any attention.

The U.S. Economy Shuts Down In 2027? Had You Heard About That?

Graph used in embedded video below.

Now we will. If the American people vote for the no-plan team, they can’t say they weren’t warned.

Transcript from video:

Congressman Paul Ryan: Let's show Slide 8. I know you didn't necessarily want to see this chart. The red is the status quo, that's the baseline we're on. 

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner: You could have taken it to 3,000 or 4,000...

Congressman Paul Ryan: Yeah, right. We cut it off at the end of the century because the economy, according to the CBO, shuts down in 2027 on this path.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner: I like this chart; I looked at this chart yesterday. You're talking about I think more than half a century. But if you look at the gap between us—

Congressman Paul Ryan:  I understand the gap.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner: —between 10 and 20, it's a pretty small gap. In that gap though—that 10 to 20 gap, which is all we're debating today—is a gap where you’re achieving that slightly diminished path.

Congressman Paul Ryan: Here's the point, if you'll allow me. This is your time, so we'll just take a long time. Here's the point. Leaders are supposed to fix problems. We have a $99.4 trillion unfunded liability. Our government is making promises to Americans that it has no way of accounting for. And so you're saying yeah, we're stabilizing it but we're not fixing it in the long run. That means we're just going to keep lying to people. We're going to keep all these empty promises going.

So what we're saying is, in order to avert a debt crisis—you're the Treasury Secretary, of all people—if we can't make good on our bonds in the future, who is going to invest in our country? We do not want to have a debt crisis. It comes down to confidence in trajectory. Do we have confidence that we're going to get our fiscal situation under control and prevent the debt from getting to these catastrophic levels?

If we go back to the preceding chart, Chart 13, you're showing that you have no plan to get this debt under control. You're saying we'll stabilize it but then it's going to shoot back up. So my argument is, that's Europe. That is bringing is toward a European debt crisis because we're showing the world, the credit market's future seniors—people who are organizing their lives around the promises that are being made to them today—that we don’t have a plan to make good on this.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner: Mr. Chairman, as I said, we're not disagreeing in that sense. I made it absolutely clear that what our budget does is get our deficit down to a sustainable path over the budget window.

Congressman Paul Ryan:  And then it takes off.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner:  Let’s ask ourselves why they take off again.  Why do they do that?

Congressman Paul Ryan: Because we have 10,000 people retiring everyday and healthcare costs going up.

The Fine-Toothed Comb That’s Missing A Few Teeth

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) released his annual “Wastebook” detailing $6.5 billion in ludicrous government spending including $765,000 to subsidize “pancakes for yuppies” in the nation’s capital.

Would you like a smoke and a pancake? You know, flapjack and a cigarette? No? All right. Cigar and a waffle? No? Pipe and a crepe? No? Bong and a blintz? No? Oh, well, then there is no pleasing you.

The items on Coburn's list include $10 million for a remake of "Sesame Street" for Pakistan and $764,825 to examine how college students use mobile devices for social networking.

The "Wastebook" also claims $550,000 was spent for a documentary about how rock music contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as $48,700 for a festival promoting Hawaii's chocolate industry.

Coburn said, “This is not a Christmas wish list, these are just some of the ways the federal government spent your tax dollars.”

"Instead of cutting wasteful spending, nearly $2.5 billion was added each day in 2011 to our national debt, which now exceeds $15 trillion," Coburn said adding, "perhaps there was no bigger waste of the taxpayer's money in 2011 than Congress itself."

Maybe those subsidized yuppies in D.C. can invite the shrimp on the treadmill over to IHOP for a bong and blintz.  Just sayin’…