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Barack Obama Shows His Birth Certificate

For several years people, called "Birthers" have been clamoring to see Obama's birth certificate. They'd done this because, in order to be President, the man, or woman, must have been born in the United States.

Obama, son of an American mother and a Kenyan father, raised in Indonesia for a while with an Indonesian step father, had the kind of unsettled childhood that would lead one to ask, "Where's your birth certificate."

Well, after many years of resisting this request, President Obama has finally shown it.

I can't really call this a "Rush Limbaugh rebuttal" as Limbaugh was never a birther. His comments about the birth certificate were along the lines of, "What's he hiding that he wont' show his birth certificate?"

Well, apparently nothing.

But one does have to wonder why, if he had it, he's never shown it before. (One wonders why Presidential candidates, just as a matter of formality, aren't required to turn this over before they even begin their candidate fund-raising. But then, Obama - and this has nothing to do with his race, as if would have been just the same as if he'd had a white father who was German, English or French) has been the only Presidential candidate to date with a parent who was not born in the United States.

President Obama asks Congress to eliminate tax breaks for the oil industry

You do have to wonder...why does the mulit-billion oil industry need tax breaks?

On the other hand, considering the fact that they're pretty soon not going to be allowed to drill anywhere in the US, they won't need tax breaks, as they'll be drilling and selling all their gas overseas...

Los Angeles Times: President Obama asks Congress to eliminate tax breaks for the oil industry
President Obama wrote a letter Tuesday to leaders on both sides of the aisle to start solving the pressing issue of rising energy costs.

In a letter to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), Obama followed up on a statement Boehner made Monday when the speaker agreed that ending billions of dollars of tax breaks for hugely profitable oil companies is "certainly something we should be looking at".

"We're in a time when the federal government's short on revenues," Boehner told ABC News. "They ought to be paying their fair share. Everybody wants to go after the oil companies and frankly, they've got some part of this to blame."

Obama began his letter by saying that he wants the leaders to "take immediate action to eliminate unwarranted tax breaks for the oil and gas industry, and to use those dollars to invest in clean energy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil."

The president blamed the spike in gasoline prices on increased demand and Middle East unrest. He added that old laws that benefit companies earning billions a year in profits aren't helping the average citizen or the recovery.

"Our outdated tax laws currently provide the oil and gas industry more than $4 billion per year in these subsidies, even though oil prices are high and the industry is projected to report outsized profits this quarter," Obama wrote. "In fact, in the past, CEO’s of the major oil companies made it clear that high oil prices provide more than enough profit motive to invest in domestic exploration and production without special tax breaks. As we work together to reduce our deficits, we simply can’t afford these wasteful subsidies, and that is why I proposed to eliminate them in my FY11 and FY12 budgets."
Obama's letter came on a day when the national average for unleaded gasoline rose by a penny to hit $3.87 per gallon. It was the 35th straight day that gasoline prices have risen in the U.S. Since March 22, prices nationally have risen 32 cents a gallon.

In California, New York, Michigan, Illinois, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Alaska and Hawaii, motorists pay over $4 a gallon on average.

"The speaker wants to increase the supply of American energy and reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and he is only interested in reforms that actually lower energy costs and create American jobs," Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said in a statement Tuesday. "Unfortunately, what the president has suggested so far would simply raise taxes and increase the price at the pump."

California drivers last week saw the average price of a gallon of gas climb closer to the state's all-time high of $4.588 a gallon, increasing 1.2 cents to $4.217.

Is Talk Radio Racist?

Rush Limbaugh, on his program today, was talking about the fact that Obama never misses a chance to commemorate Muslim holidays, but apparently never gave out an Easter proclamation:

RUSH: Obama, March 20th of this year had a video message to the Iranian people for the Muslim holiday in Nowruz.

OBAMA: Today I want to extend my very best wishes to all who are celebrating Nowruz around the world. With the coming of a new season, we're reminded of this precious humanity that we all share, and we can once again call upon this spirit as we seek the promise of a new beginning. Thank you, and (speaking Arabic).

RUSH: (trying to speak Arabic) No, Mubarak's gone, you dispatched him. But there is something about Nowruz. Here was Obama, a Nowruz message for the Iranians. So this afternoon in the White House, the press secretary Jay Carney held a daily press briefing. An unidentified female infobabe said, "Hey, quick question. You guys traditionally put out statements or proclamations on various religious holidays. I don't think I saw one from the president on Easter yesterday. And I was just wondering if there was any reason that the president didn't have an Easter proclamation yesterday."

CARNEY: You know, the president went to church yesterday. It was well covered. I'm not sure if we put out a statement or not, but he obviously personally celebrated Easter with his family and went to church to celebrate that and --

TAPPER: It's the highest Christian holiday and you don't know if he put out a statement? Come on, Jay, come on.

CARNEY: I'm glad you're asking me key important questions, guys. The fact is the president took his family to church in a very high-profile way to celebrate Easter. I think it was highly visible to most Americans. And as a devoted Christian, he believes it's a very important holiday for him personally, for his family and for Christians around the country.

RUSH: Wow. Did you hear the press guy say, "Jay, come on, Jay, the highest Christian holiday and you don't know if he put out a statement? You're in the press office, Jay, come on." "I'm glad you guys are asking me these key questions." Carney is clearly ticked off here. So, yeah, the president went to church.

He then points out that Obama's new pastor compared Talk Radio to the KKK:

I got The Blaze website story wrong. Obama's minister did not mention me in yesterday's Easter sermon as a modern equivalent of the KKK. That was back in January of 2010, and Cookie has the bite. She's editing it now. I don't know if we'll have it before the program comes to a screeching halt.

Now, while this blog is entitled Rush Limbaugh Rebuttal, I don't think he is a racist.

If you listen to his program on a regular basis - he wants everyone - blacks, latinos, whites - to do well. It is his belief that they can best do well by standing on their own two feet and eschewing government welfare, government affirmative action, etc. He points out that welfare has destroyed the black family - well, hasn't it? He's against abortion - and apparently more black women than white have abortions. What's racist about that, therefore?

He despises people on welfare - not those that need to be on welfare, but those who are on it because it's easier to let the government take care of them then for them to take care of themselves. The Democrats, according to Limbaugh, want everone dependent on them, whereas Republicans want people to be successful on their own.

Limbaugh has a fundamental philosophical difference to what the Democrats have, but that in itself doesn't make him racist.

Booklist: Who Killed Health Care?: America's $2 Trillion Medical Problem-and The Consumer-Driven Cure, by Regina Herzlinger

American Health Care: I'll be sharing the titles, descriptions and Tables of Contents of all the books written in the last decade or so on Health Care in America. No one denies that it doesn't work as well as it should, but the various political parties - and radio talk show hosts - are divided in how to fix the problem.

Who Killed Health Care?: America's $2 Trillion Medical Problem-and The Consumer-Driven Cure by Regina Herzlinger
McGraw-Hill, 2007
258 pages plus notes,and index. No photos
Library: 362.1 HER

Description
One of the nation's most respected health care analysts, Regina Herzlinger exposes the motives and methods of those who have crippled America's health care system-figures in the insurance, hospital, employment, government and academic sectors. She proves how our current system, which is organized around payers and providers rather than the needs of its users, is dangerously eroding patient welfare and is pushing costs out of the reach of millions.

Who Killed Health Care? then outlines Herzlinger's bold new plan for a consumer-driven system that will deliver affordable, high-quality care to everyone. By putting insurance money in the hands of patients, removing the middleman in the doctor-patient rellationship, and giving employers cost relief, consumers and physicians will be empowered to make the system work the way it should.

Herzlinger describes in precise detail how her innovative program will provide:

-Smaller, disease focused medical facilities that provide complete care for patients
-A national system of medical records that provides privacy with confidential access by approved practitioners
-Mandatory performance evaluations of all hospitals and all other medical organizations
-Mandatory health insurance with subsidies for those who cannot afford it.

Who Killed Health Care? is a call to arms that must be answered; the welfare of every American hangs in the balance.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: Who Killed Health CAre?
1. The Day Health Care Died

Part 2: Death By a Thousand Cuts
2. Killer Number 1: The Health Insurers (Death at the hands of a dysfunctional culture)
3. Killer Number 2: The General Hospitals (Death at the Hands of Empire Builders)
4. Killer Number 3: The Employers (Death at the Hands of a "Choice" of One)
5. Killer Number 4: The US Congress (Death at the Hands of those Elected to Represent Us)
6. Killer Number 5: The Academics (Death at the Hands of the Elite Policy Makers)

Part 3: The Right Medicine - Consumer-Driven Health Care
7. Hoe it Works
8. Consumer-driven benefits:Lessons from other countries and industries

Part 4: How to Make it Happen: The Carrots, The Sticks, the Laws
9. The Carrots (Let medical business entrepreneurialism bloom)
10. The Sticks (Let information flow)
11. A bold new consumer-driven health care system (The laws and their legislators)

Shared Sacrifice

President Obama was at Northern Virginia Community COllege in Annandale, talking to students about shared sacrifice... or more to the point, pointing out that he wanted to raise the taxes on the wealthy.

Limbaugh of course scoffed at everything he had to say.

RUSH: Obama, where was he? He was at the Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale. Let me just give you one sound bite of this. This audio sound bite number 24. I think we can squeeze this in just to set the stage 'cause there's more of this to come.

OBAMA: This is not because we want to punish success. I suspect there are a bunch of young people in this gym that are gonna end up being wealthy, and that's good.

RUSH: Yeah.

OBAMA: But we are gonna have to ask everybody to sacrifice -- and if we're asking community colleges to sacrifice, if we asking people who are gonna see potentially fewer services in their neighborhoods, then we can ask millionaires and billionaires to make a little sacrifice. I'll tell you what I'm not gonna do. We're not gonna reduce the deficit by sacrificing investments in our infrastructure.

RUSH: When are you gonna start?

OBAMA: We're not gonna allow our roads and our bridges to grow more and more congested while places like China are building new roads and new airports and thousands of mile of high-speed rail.

Booklist: THe Health Care Mess, by Julius Richmond and Rashi Fein

American Health Care: I'll be sharing the titles, descriptions and Tables of Contents of all the books written in the last decade or so on Health Care in America. No one denies that it doesn't work as well as it should, but the various political parties - and radio talk show hosts - are divided in how to fix the problem.

The Health Care Mess: How We Got Into It And What It WIll Take To Get Us Out, by Julius Richmond, MD and Rashi Fein, PhD
Harvard University Press, 2005
263 pages, plus notes and index. No photos
Library: 362.1 RIC
Description
If we can decode the human genome and fashion working machines out of atoms, why can't we navigate the quagmore that is our health care system?

In this important new book, Julius Richmond and Rashi Fein recount the fraught history of health care in America since the 1960s. After the advent of Medicare and Medicaid and with the progressive goal to make advances in medical care available to all, medical costs began their upward spiral. Cost control measures failed and led to the HMO revolution, turning patients into consumers and doctors into providers. The swelling ranks of Americans without any insurance at all dragged the United States to the bottom of the list of industrialized nations.

Over the last century medical education was also profoundly transformed into today's powerful triumverate of academic medical centers, schools of medicine and public health, and research programs, all of which have shaped medical practice and medical care.

The authors show how the promises of medical advances have not been matched either by financing or by delivery of care.

As a new crisis looms, and the existing patchwork of insurance is poised to unravel, American leaders must once again take up the question of health care. This book brings the voice of reason and the promise of compromise to the debate.

Table of Contents
Foreword by Jimmy Carter
Introduction
Part 1: The Early Years - 1900-1965
1. The Educational and Scientific revolution: Higher standards and changing priorities
2. The Consumer revolution: Increasing Access to Medical CAre

Part II: In the Wake of Medicare and Medicaid - 1965 to 1985
3. Emerging Tensions between Regulation and Market Forces: Dealing with Growth
4. Education for the Health Professions: the Impact of GRowth

Part III: Moving to the Presence - 1985 to 2005
5. The Rntreprenurial Revolution: A Changing Face for Medicine
6. Beyond the Dollars: Progress in Health and the Role of Public Health

Part IV: Anticipating the Next Revolution- 2005 and Beyond
7. Medical Challenges and Oppurtunities
8. Increasing Equity: Achieving Universal Health Insurance

Notes
Index

Is Donald Trump a better Businessman than Mitt Romney?

Here's what Rush had to say about Donald Trump today:

Here's the audio sound bite. This is at a Tea Party deal on Saturday in Boca Raton, but this happened to be with Candy Crowley on Sunday's State of the Union. She said to Trump, "You're a better businessman, you think? It's a selling point for you over Romney?"

TRUMP: I'm a much bigger businessman and have a much, much bigger net worth. I mean, my net worth is many, many, many Mitt Romney. I would love to put that ability to work for this country. So I don't do it for myself, I'll be doing it for the country -- and guess what? That's what this country needs.

RUSH: This country needs me. Well, now, you can laugh at that. I'm just gonna tell you something: Everybody that's serious about running for office thinks that. Why else run? You almost have to. To put up with what that entails, you have to think the country can't get along without you. The country needs you. You have to have something driving you. Trump is just verbalizing it here -- and he didn't actually say (laughing) that Romney is not rich enough. That's a caption to a picture of Trump from Boca that the New York Post runs. That's how they interpret it.

In fact, the New York Post story: "I'm Better for Prez Because My Net Worth's Bigger Than Romney's -- Vote for me 'cause mine's bigger. Donald Trump yesterday fired the opening salvo in a macho battle of bank accounts with rival presidential contender Mitt Romney, dismissing the former Massachusetts governor as a 'small business' person and saying his own assets are 'much, much' larger than [Romney]'s. Trump, whose approval ratings have rocketed upward since he started hammering President Obama, yesterday turned his fire on Romney, considered by many the front-runner..."

The problem with Trump slamming Mitt Romney is that I don't think Romney ever had to declare bankruptcy. Nor did he have to call all his wealthy friends together and say - "Okay, you better restructure my debt so that I don't lose my millions, because if you do, you won't get anything."

Trump's still rich only because he has a lot of rich friends who came to his rescue...much as the goverment came to the rescue of the banks, the heads of whom were their friends...

OT: Consequential Strangers by Melinda Blau and Karen Fingerman

This book is off-topic, but it's so interesting that I thought I'd share it.

There's an old saying, "I shall only pass this way but once, so any little good I can do, let me do it now, for I shall only pass this way but once."

We pass strangers every day - each one of them has their own problems and preoccupations. A smile from you might change their life - so might a frown or a casual insult (such as sneering at their weight, or something of that nature.)

It costs nothing to give someone a friendly smile, and you never know what it might accomplish as the stranger at whom you smile goes on to struggle through his or her day.

Consequential Strangers: The Power of People who Don't Seem to Matter, but Really Do, by Melinda Blau and Karen Fingerman
W W Norton and Co, 2009
219 pages, plus Appendices, notes and index. No photos
Library: 155.927 BLA

Description
They punctuate our days, but we take them for granted: our barista, our car mechanic, a coworker, a fellow dog lover. Yet these are the consequential strangers who bring novelty and information into our lives, allow us to exercise different parts of ourselves, and open us up to new opportunities. They keep us healthy and are invaluable when we're sick. They fuel innovation and social movements. And they are vital in times of uncertainty.

In their unprecedented examination of "people who don't seem to matter," psychologist Karen L. Fingerman, who coined the term "consequential strangers" collaborates with journalist Melinda Blau to develop an idea sparked by Fingerman's groundbreaking research. Drawing as well from Blau's more than two hundred interviews with specialists in psychology, sociology, marketing, and communication, this book presents compelling stories of individuals and institiutions, past and present.

A rich portrait of our social landscape-on and off the internet-it presents the science of casual connection and chronicles the surprising impact that consequential strangers have on business, creativity, the work environment, our physical and mental health, and the strength of our communities.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction - The Birth of a Notion
1. The Ascendance of Consequential Strangers
2. The View From Above
3. Beyond the Confines of the Familiar
4. Good for What Ails Us
5. Being Spaces
6. The Downside
7. The Future of Consequential Strangers
Epilogue: The Postscript is Personal
Appendix I: 20 Questions
Appendix II: The Occupation Test
Notes
Index

Booklist: Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, by Robert Hughes

Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, by Robert Hughes
Oxford University Press, 1993
203 pages, plus notes. No index, no photos
Library: 700.103 HUG

Description
The best-selling author of The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore and Barcelona delivers a withering polemic aimed at the heart of recent American politics and culture.

Culture of Complaint is a call for the reknitting of a fragmented and over-tribalized America-a deeply passionate book, filled with barbed with and devastating takes on public life, both left and right of center.

To the right, Hughes fires broadsides at the populist demagogy of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms and especially Ronald REagan ("with somnambulistic efficiency, Reagan educated America down to his level. He left his country a little stupider in 1988 than it had been in 1980, and a lot more tolerant of lies.")

To the left, he skewers political correctness ("political etiquette, not politics itself"), Afrocentrism, and academic obsessions with theoet ("The world changes more deeply, widely, thrillingly than at any moment since 1917, perhaps since 1848, and the American academic left keeps fretting about how phallocentricity is inscribed in Dickens' portrayal of Little Nell.")

PC censoriousness and "family values" rhetoric, he argues, are only two sidesof the same character, extrusions of America's puritan heritage into the present-and, at root, signs of America's difficulty in seeing past the end of the Us-versus-Them mentality implanted by four decades of the Cold WAr.

In the long retreat from public responsibility beaten by America in the 80s, Hughes sees "a hollowness at the cultural core"-a nation "obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal politics: skeptical of authority and prey to superstition; its language corroded by fake pity and euphemism." It resembles "late Rome...in the corruption and verbosity of its senators, in its reliance on sacred geese (those feathered ancestors of our own pollsters and spin-doctors) and in its submission to senile, deified emperors controlled by astrologers and extravagant wives."

Culture of Complaint is fired by a deep concern for the way Hughes sees his adopted country [he's originally from Australia] heading. But it is not a relentless diatribe. If Hughes lambastes some aspects of American politics, he applauds Vaclav Havel's vision of politics "not as the art of the useful, but politics as practical morality, as service to the truth."

And if he denounces PC, he offers a brilliant and heartfelt defense of non-ideological multiculturalism as an antidote to American's difficulty in imagining the rest of the world-and other Americans.

Here, then, is an extraordinary cri di couer, an outspoken call for the reconstruction of America's ideas about its recent self. It is a book that everyone interested in American culture will want to read.

Table of Contents
Introduction
Lecture 1: Culture and the Broken Polity
Lecture 2: Multi-Culti and its Discontents
Lecture 3: Moral in Itself: Art and the Therapeutic Fallacy
Notes

Obama Reveals His Anger at Republicans During "Open Mic" moment

What does Obama really think of the Reublicans? First - bear in mind that his policy, and that of the Democrats, is diametrically opposed to that of the Republicans, and the Republicans have been standing in his way in his attempts to turn the US into a Socialist country...

The only time we get to hear anything even approximating what Obama really thinks is when he thinks nobody will find out. "In the candid remarks, Mr. Obama complains of Republican attempts to attach measures to the budget bill which would have effectively killed parts of his hard-won health care reform program." Here's what he said. Last night in Chicago, closed-door campaign fundraiser, this a portion of what he said when he didn't think anybody would hear it.

OBAMA: I said, "You want to repeal health care? Go at it. We'll have that debate. You're not going to be able to do that by nickel-and-diming me in the budget. You think we're stupid?" We're happy to have the debate. We'll have the debate on the floor of the Senate or the floor of the House.

[The Planned Parenthood defunding bill] Put it in a separate bill. We'll call it up -- and if you think you can overturn my veto, try it. But don't try to sneak this through.

Frankly, I don't see what's so bad about that. He's angry. Who wouldn't be?

The GOP Criticism of President Obama's Budget Speech

Limbaugh and the other Conservative talk show hosts were upset with Obama because he invited a few Republican leaders up to sit in the front row - and then "insulted" them - or rather pointed out that the Republicans were going to have to do some work on the budget - as are the rich.

Here's a bit of what Limbaugh had to say:

He invites Ryan and a couple other Republican leaders up there to sit in the front row, and then proceeds to insult 'em. Now, I'm gonna tell you, the real reason he did it. There are two real reasons he did it. One is he's not this cool, calm, collected guy. He just, folks, umm... He's not a good guy. You hear people say, "He's such good guy." Obama's not a good guy. He's a mean, vindictive little guy. He's very cold.

The second thing he was doing yesterday was shoring up his base. I kid you not. There are a lot of factors that went into the makeup of the type of speech Obama gave yesterday. But certainly in the mix is the fact of who his base is. His base is made up of people even more vile than he is. I mean, you've got the genuine... I mean, a lot of it is just walking human debris on the Democrat base side, and they've gotta be stoked. And you can go through earlier this week and all of last week when the Drive-Bys had a whole series of stories about how the left is not happy with Obama. He's moderating too much for 'em. You look at the all the stuff: Gitmo still open. We're at war as much if not more.

He extended the Bush tax cuts last December. That bunch of people, those savages that make up the Obama base, are fit to be tied. He had to get 'em back, and the one way to do it is to go out and savage us. That's what they love. That's what they get off on. That is their orgasm ('cause these people can't find willing mates). So their orgasm is for Obama and Democrat Party leaders to really take it to us. So that's one of the things was that involved what he was doing. The second aspect is it's just his nature. That's just who he is: Community organizer, agitator. There was nothing presidential. I told you the day before he was gonna come lie to you; he was gonna give a campaign speech, campaign kickoff speech.

"Those people can't find willing mates." That's Rush at his most personal. In the same way he criticized Assange (the Wikileaks guy) - not for his actions at Wikileaks, but for being "waif-like." And his term for guys these days who aren't quite neanderthalish is "the new Castrati."

Rush Complains About Hoax News Reports Today...

A bunch of pranksters apparently sent out a message saying that GE was going to give its entire tax refund back to the government to help pay down the US debt.

Turns out it was a hoax.

Rush said:

RUSH: There was a hoax perpetrated on the media today about General Electric and Jeffrey Immelt. CNBC ran with the story but it was the AP. AP ran a story that Jeffrey Immelt and GE had decided because of all the bad PR they're getting to give the government the entirety of their $3.2 billion tax refund. It's a hoax. AP was totally taken by it. It's just a bunch of guys with a fax machine. It's like the Center for Science in the Public Interest. It's just a bunch of professional pranksters, and they're called the Yes Men. "The Yes Men often impersonate corporate executives in an attempt to embarrass companies and draw attention. Andrew Boyd, who founded the satirical group Billionaires for Bush and says he is a member of the Yes Men," and they just sent out a fake GE fax, and AP ran with it.

You know, I was talking to some people this morning, "Well, why did AP run it?" Because they wanted it to be true.

One could ask the same thing about Rush and the Boston University story he ran with yesterday. He knew it was a hoax - the link provided in the story said that it was a hoax, yet Rush read it like it was the truth.

Because he wanted it to be true...or he wanted the rest of the country to think it was true...

Tit for tat...

Wisconsin May Be Broke - But Not Because of Union Pensions

Madison.com:

Is Wisconsin 'broke'? Answer is in the eye of the beholder, experts say
In his inaugural budget address, Gov. Scott Walker stood before a joint session of the Legislature and delivered the somber news: We're broke.

"Too many politicians have failed to tell the truth about our financial crisis," he said. "The facts are clear: Wisconsin is broke and it's time to start paying our bills today so our kids are not stuck with even bigger bills tomorrow."

The governor has repeated the message time and again, from his Inauguration Day speech to a "fireside chat" to discuss his proposal to limit collective bargaining for most public employees. It is usually followed by calls for budget cuts.

Trouble is, many experts say Wisconsin isn't really broke.

"That is not correct," said Andrew Reschovsky, a professor of public affairs and applied economics at UW-Madison's La Follette School of Public Affairs. "Wisconsin has a range of options other than cutting spending."

There are a number of ways to judge whether a state's finances are in order.

Economists often look at a state's pension funds, and whether they have more liabilities to be paid than money saved. They also typically look at the imbalance between the money coming in and money going out in any given budget, known as the structural deficit.

Pension outlook good

When it comes to its pension system, Wisconsin is far from broke. Current assets in the Wisconsin Retirement System total about $80 billion, expected to cover its obligations promised to current workers and retirees, making Wisconsin's retirement system one of the largest and most solvent pension funds in the country.

"Wisconsin gets a gold star," Reschovsky said. "We have a strong pension system."

The state is in especially good shape compared to our southern neighbor, Illinois, which has one of the worst pension shortfalls in the United States.

Another common measure of a state's bottom line is how much of its budget is already spoken for because of commitments made in prior budgets, the structural deficit.

Before Walker introduced his budget, the state faced a $3.6 billion deficit for the two years ending July 2013. That's close to 13 percent of its budget, putting it in the middle of states nationally, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Eye of beholder

Even so, Wisconsin hasn't been bouncing checks or defaulting on loans.

"Wisconsin is Republican broke, but it's not broke," said Mordecai Lee, a UW-Milwaukee political science professor and former Democratic state lawmaker. "Broke suggests near bankruptcy."

Using the word "broke" helps Walker frame the debate around his controversial budget plans on his terms, Lee said, suggesting spending cuts are the only option and any tax increases are out of the question.

He cited Walker's business tax cut laws, passed during a special session on the economy, as an example. The legislation could end up costing the state about $116 million in the next budget.

"We weren't too broke to do tax breaks for corporations," Lee said.

Walker makes no apologies for using the term. "I've never said we stand alone," he said. "But if you have a budget deficit, you're broke."

Walker said he is not only concerned about balancing the upcoming budget but is thinking in terms of balancing the one after that.

Other budget options

Most agree this is not going to be an easy budget, especially without the option of tax increases. Walker's proposal includes $1 billion in cuts to education in addition to Medicaid cuts and less money going to counties and municipalities.

Walker and Republican leaders have said the law to dramatically limit collective bargaining for public workers, currently on hold because of a legal challenge, would help local governments make up for cuts in state aid by raising pension and health care contributions on employees. Many of those municipalities say it won't be enough to cover the cuts.

Of course, there are other options. Other governors, Democrats and Republicans, have raised taxes and fees, raided money from segregated funds such as the transportation fund, or used one-time sources of revenue to balance the budget.

Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, D-Kenosha, said he supports targeted tax relief tied to job creation. But he said proposed tax breaks could create tax loopholes for large corporations.

For example, changes to a current state law requiring large, multistate companies that do business in Wisconsin to be considered one company for tax purposes, a policy known as combined reporting, could mean millions of dollars less in tax revenues, Barca said, at the cost of key programs such as education.

"Education is your seed corn," he said.

He added Democrats faced a much larger deficit, about $6 billion, two years ago and addressed it while protecting things such as education and health care.

'Acting broke'

But to do that, Republicans say, Democrats and then-Gov. Jim Doyle used short-term fixes, causing the problem to reappear this year.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, said in recent years, budgets have been patched together by multiple "budget repair" bills, numerous fund raids and federal money to mask the continuous deficit. And he pointed to a November 2009 Pew Center report that named Wisconsin one of the top 10 states "in fiscal peril."

This budget will end those money tricks and create greater financial stability, he said.

"Do we have a responsibility to put in place an honest and legitimate budget? Yeah," Fitzgerald said.

He added the state has other obligations that need to be taken into account, including $1.6 billion in unemployment insurance money owed to the federal government.

But are we broke?

Maybe not. But when he looks at the increasingly desperate measures governors and lawmakers have taken to get from one budget to the next, Fitzgerald said, "we've been acting broke."

Rush Gives Already Discredited Story to His Listeners

On his Tuesday, April 12 show, Limbaugh reads out a report that Boston University had offered Laurent Gbagbo a job as a lecturer. The link Limbaugh provides is to a story that says that BU is denying this story. But Limbaugh reads it as if its true!

Shame on you, Limbaugh!

But one really has to wonder what was the point. Anyone interested in the story is going to do research and read further - and if they follow Limbaugh's own link they'll be brought to the story which gives what Rush read the lie, so Limbaugh is just harming his own credibility here.

It will be interesting to see if he points out today that BU has refuted the story....

Story #5: Murderous Dictator Offered University Teaching Job?

RUSH: This next story -- he-he-he-he-he -- is perfect. This dictator in Ivory Coast, the president of Ivory Coast, his name is Gbagbo. How does he really pronounce it? It needs a couple vowels. G-b-a-g-b-o, Gbagbo, Gbagbo. I'll pronounce it Gbagbo, because it sounds funnier. Laurent Gbagbo was offered a professorship at Boston University if he would quit as president of the Ivory Coast. (laughing) No, he's holding out for Harvard! He was "offered the chance to teach at Boston University in the United States if he would renounce his claim to be president of Ivory Coast and end the country's civil war, sources familiar with the negotiations told CNN Tuesday. The United States gave permission for him to lecture at the university and teach anywhere else in the country as a visiting professor, a senior African diplomat told CNN Tuesday."

Now, who pays him? American taxpayers would pay the guy, or your tuition fees for your young skulls full of mush would pay. So here you have a killer, right? He's a murdering president, he's offered a professorship if he'll leave -- (laughing) -- at Boston University.

Balancing the Budget is a Process

Rush Limbaugh spent a great deal of time today discussing the US's budget problem - and there's no denying that we do have a budget problem. Frankly, the US is bankrupt - and several states are bankrupt - and yet that doesn't seem to be stoppig us from continuing to send money to practically every country under the sun, and fund ridiculous programs and studies that have no value.

But how can Obama - or any President - fix the budget problem, when it's the Senate that fixes that budget?

RUSH: During the campaign for the November elections, the pledge was to cut $100 billion -- and when that pledge was made, folks, I have to tell you, that's largely symbolic. It's a good step, I guess, but $100 billion, we're be still talking pennies. This was not an election that was eked out in the final moments. This was a tsunami, and it's gonna take a whole bunch of tsunamis to continue to roll this back. We're not gonna roll this back with baby steps. We need a series of tsunamis, like the November election.

Okay, but, anyway, during the November election the pledge was to cut $100 billion, and then when there wasn't a budget and we went to a continuing resolution format, that got reduced to $61 billion on a prorated basis because we lost five months there; and then $61 billion became too much and we ended up at $38 billion. My question is, why promise $100 billion, and then why reduce the hundred billion to $61 billion and reduce that to $38.5 billion? What changed during all of this? Where did we start losing leverage? Where did we start losing ground? Obama's poll numbers didn't start skyrocketing upward. What happened?

This is what I don't understand: Why even promise $100 billion if you don't mean it and then reduce it to $61 billion? Okay, we'll go for that on a prorated basis, but then that's too much. So we're down to $38 billion. What changed? There was a great opportunity here because of leverage and these opportunities don't come along very often. The Democrats and the left didn't get us to where we are today by compromising. Pelosi never compromised. Tip O'Neill never compromised. It's not even a word in their vocabulary. Thanks to the RINOs and other wishy-washy politicians, the Republican Party has almost been compromised out of existence.

This is often a refrain from Rush Limbaugh - the Democrats never compromise, but the Republicans always do.

Booklist: The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, by David Remnick

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, by David Remnick
Alfred A. Knopf, 2010
586 pages, plus Debts and Source, Notes, Bibliography and Index, 16 pages of both b&w and color photos
Library: B Obama B

Description
No story has been more central to America's history this century than the rise of Barack Obama, and until now, no journalist or historian has written a book that fully investigates the circumstances and experiences of Obama's life or explores the ambition behind his rise. Those familiar with Obama's own best-selling memoir or his campaign speeches know the touchstones and details that he chooses to emphasize, but now-from a writer whose gift for illuminating the historical significance of unfolding events is without peer-we have a portrait, at once masterly and fresh, nuanced and unexpected, of a young man in search of himself, and of a rising politician determined to become the first African-American president.

The Bridge offers the most complete account yet of Obama's tragic father, a brilliant economist who abandoned his family as a beaten man; of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who had a child as a teenager and then built her career as an anthropologist living and studying in Indonesia; and of the succession of elite institutions that first exposed Obama to the social tensions and intellectual currents that would force him to to imagine and fashion an identity for himself. Through extensive on-the-record interviews with friends and teachers, mentors and disparagers, family members and Obama himself, David Remnick allows us to see how a restless unaccomplished and confused young man created himself first as a community organizer in Chicago, an experience that would not only shape his urge to work in politics but give him a home and a community, and that would propel him to Harvard Law School, where his sense of a greater mission emerged.

Deftly setting Obama's political career against the galvanizing intersection of race and politics in Chicago's history, Remnick shows us how that city's complex racial legacy would make Obama's forays into politics a source of controversy and bare-knuckle tactics: his clashes with older black politicians in the Illinois State Senate, his disastrous decision to challenge the former Black Panther Bobby Rush for Congress in 2000, the sex scandals that would decimate his more experienced opponents in the 2004 Senate race, and the story-from both sides-of his confrontation with his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. By looking at Obama's political rise through the prism of our racial history, Remnick gives us the conflicting agendas of black politicians: the dilemmas of men like Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and Joseph Lowery, heroes of the civil rights movement, who are forced to reassess old loyalties and understand the priorities of a new generation of African-American leaders.

The Bridge revisits the American drama of race, from slavery to Civil Rights, and makes clear how Obama's quest is not just his own but is emblematic of a nation where destiny is defined by individuals keen to imagine a future that is different from the reality of their current lives.

Contents
Prologue: The Joshua Generation
Part One
1. A Complex Fate
2. Surface and Undertow
3. Nobody Knows My Name
Part Two
4. Black Metropolis
5. Ambition
6. A Narrative of Ascent
Part Three
7. Somebody Nobody Spent
8. Black Enough
9. The Wilderness Campaign
10. Reconstruction
11. A Righteous Wind
Part Four
12. A Slight Madness
13. The Sleeping Giant
14. In the Racial Funhouse
15. The Book of Jeremiah
Part Five
16. "How long? Not long."
17. To the White House
Epilogue
Dents and Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Obama Had to Tell Us He'll Run for Reelection?

Rush Limbaugh, on his show on April 4, 2011, had a very brief snippet to say on Obama announcing that he would be running for re-election in 2012.

RUSH: You know, there's a scientist out there that's working on a new theory about the sun. Who was it, Copernicus that finally settled it and said the earth revolves around the sun? The State-Controlled Media is convinced everything resolves around Obama. He announced his reelection intentions. Is that news? Was anybody thinking that he might not run for reelection?

The article he is quoting from is:
Latino Fox News: Obama launches reelection campaign

Washington – President Barack Obama launched his campaign for reelection Monday, 20 months before voters go to the polls in November 2012.

"We're doing this now because the politics we believe in does not start with expensive TV ads or extravaganzas, but with you - with people organizing block-by-block, talking to neighbors, co-workers, and friends. And that kind of campaign takes time to build," Obama said on the video announcing the start of his campaign.

The president seems unlikely to face a challenge in the Democratic primaries.

Despite the difficulties of a presidential term marked by wars and economic crisis, most Democrats continue to view the first black president as a good bet.

Perhaps his strategists hope that the "fourth day of the fourth month" for the reelection of the 44th president will mean the announcement is made under a lucky star, but for Republicans it comes at a bad time.

Some called the announcement ironic because it was made at a very difficult time for the nation, with unemployment at 8.8 percent and many unanswered questions about concerns like America's military intervention in Libya.

Republicans don't see this as the best moment to say "Yes, we can," the slogan popularized by the president in his first campaign.

Starting now, all of Obama's electoral machinery will be in motion and, more important, so will the process of collecting funds for what is expected to be the first $1 billion political campaign.

This month the president plans to take part in fund-raising events in Chicago, which will again be the campaign's base, as well as in San Francisco and Los Angeles, two important Democratic strongholds.

Obama, as he himself said in the video launching the campaign, will continue to be "focused on the job you elected me to do," but will alternate his duties as head of state with events of this kind.

Republicans, meanwhile, are struggling with internal tensions that are more obvious with a Democrat in the White House, and has a dozen politicians weighing their chances of successfully entering the electoral battle.

Among these are Alaska's Sarah Palin, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who promoted the "Contract with America" campaign that in 1994 managed to unify a Republican Party as demoralized as it is today, and erstwhile Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who lost the 2008 Republican presidential nomination to John McCain.

None of them seems strong enough to overshadow Obama, who, though he did not achieve economic recovery and has the nation bogged down in 2 1/2 wars, appears to be a more reliable vote-getter than any of his potential rivals.

Obama seeks to preserve the changes made during his first term and raise his followers' awareness of the fact that these achievements can be lost.

"We've always known that lasting change wouldn't come quickly or easily. It never does," he said Monday.

Just another example of the fact that Limbaugh won't let any opportunity go by to slam Obama. Every politian who decides to run for re-election has to announce it, and news media have to report it.

So yes, Obama did have to tell us he was running for re-election.

Manifesto

Rush Limbaugh is the most popular political commentator on the radio. He is a Conservative, and in his program routinely rips the Democrat Party, in particular President Obama, his wife, and the top Democratic leaders - Hilary Clinton, Harry Reid, and so on.

He invariably gives only one side of any story - his side. In this blog, I provide "the rest of the story" - the elements of the stories Limbaugh covers, that he leaves out, thus influencing his listeners to believe the worst of the Democrat side.

For example, whenever Limbaugh speaks of the Harry Gates affair - the event where the black professor was arrested in his own home (for verbally abusing the police officer who had come to the house in response to a call that a burglar was breaking into the home), Rush (and Sean Hannity) always quote President Obama as saying, "The police acted stupidly."

But that's just the first phrase of one sentence of what President Obama said. What he said in its entirety was:

"Now, I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry. Number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And number three, what I think we know, separate and apart from this incident, is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. And that's just a fact."

So Obama wasn't saying the police acted stupidly in investigating whether a black man was breaking into a home, but rather, once the man had proved that he was in his own home, it was rather over-the-top to arrest him just because he was being rude to the police officer.