Clint Eastwood, Hollywood Legend, told Barrack Hussein Obama to make his day, which thousands of Conservatives, Libertarians and Republicans in Tampa at the Republican National Convention cheered. 

In a moment that will be remembered for conventions to come, the
gunslinger came out shooting.   A steady aim at the Administration and
the policies of the last four years. The Eastwood speech was steady and
grit filled. 

The convention fell to a fever-pitch as the mega-tron screen went black and a massive silhouette of the iconic cowboy appeared behind a western canyon.
 
Eastwood began by assuring the crowd that there were conservatives in Hollywood.  It’s just that ”they don’t go around hotdogging it.”

The Cowboy then reminisced about the current President’s election “I remember three and a half years ago when Mr. Obama won the election…people were lighting candles…Oprah was crying, I was even crying.”
 
But Eastwood got serious really fast. “I haven’t cried that hard since I found out there was 23 million unemployed in this country. That is something to cry for because that is a disgrace, a national disgrace.”
 
“I think possibly now it may be time for another person to come along and solve the problem” he said to cheers.

Click here with more and video from The Blaze. 

Updated Editorial:  Recently 29 of 280 members of the Tulsa Republican County Committee voted against the Vision2 infrastructure proposal and passed a censure resolution against two Tulsa County elected Republican officials.  That was an illegal vote according to the rules of the Party.  As a result and as a member of that Committee, I call for the resignation or forced removal of Tulsa County Republican Chairman J.B. Alexander and Vice Chairman Mike McCutchin.  This article details the reasons for that call.

Tulsa County has apparently had irreconcilable differences between two camps of Republicans for several years.  All Republicans are conservative as Ronald Reagan defined it, but “The Faction” that sets itself aggressively apart by anger is led by lies, distortions, and increasingly personal attacks on other Republicans.  They are often referenced as the John Birch Society, Ron Paul folk, angry Libertarians, the 9.12 group and a few of the several T-Party groups.

Left or Right it matters not.  Sane or insane matters greatly.  Ambition addicts will destroy regardless and civility doesn’t work with the uncivilized.  Thus those who have long been silent must rise at this time within the Tulsa County Republican Party.

Continue reading →

Expansion of Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will either result in long-term savings worth millions to Oklahoma taxpayers, or will cost state taxpayers an additional $11.4 billion.
 
While the experts disagree, history says you can bet President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act will become more expensive than anyone predicts.

Oklahoma “can’t afford the Medicaid expansion. Health and Human Service spending by the state, which includes Medicaid spending, is already the largest portion of the total state budget and continues to grow,” said Jonathan Small of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a free market think tank.
 
Not so fast, said David Blatt of the progressive Oklahoma Policy Institute in Tulsa. He argued revenue hikes and cost savings will offset increased government expenditures on health.
 
“Focusing only on new outlays while ignoring new revenues and cost savings is like saying that making the playoffs cost the Oklahoma City Thunder an additional $5 million for staff and building expenses, while ignoring the additional revenue brought in by ticket sales and concessions for playoff games,” Blatt said.
 
Confused?  Even experts aren’t sure who’s right.
 
“It’s a very difficult task to estimate revenues for the next year, much less several years down the road,” state finance director Preston Doerflinger said.
 
Recent state history suggests that government health programs tend to become more expensive.
 
Oklahoma’s 2001 Medicaid spending totaled $2 billion, of which the state contributed about $495.5 million. Last year, that program ran $4.4 billion, of which the state contributed nearly $1.3 billion.
 
Health care is now the state’s top budget expense, ahead of No. 2 education. Even in the pre-Obamacare era, Oklahoma relied on federal stimulus dollars to cover some Medicaid costs.
 
Mike Fogarty, CEO of the Oklahoma Health Care Authority (OHCA), said increased costs for taxpayers will be offset through better personal health for newly insured individuals, reductions in the number of uninsured hospital payments, and state government savings through Medicaid expansion that “could be matched federally.”
 
OHCA rated well in a 2011 assessment of Medicaid error rates, and Fogarty contends administrative costs are low compared to other states.
 
“Relative to potential benefits gained,” said agency spokesman Carter Kimble, “the state’s investment is minimal.”
 
At the heart of Small’s Medicaid conclusions are assumptions about the ACA in its entirety — drawn from analysis of other federal programs. He views state and federal tax burdens holistically, asserting “a tax is a tax” and “a dollar spent is a dollar spent.”
 
OCPA focused on the first full decade of ACA implementation, costs Small contends could reach $11.4 billion over a decade. He points out, “On a per year basis, that’s about 20 percent of the current appropriated budget. Already, without Obamacare, the maintenance of effort provisions of Medicaid result in annual state match increases of $50-$70 million a year.”
 
In support of his view that federal programs nearly always cost more than anticipated, Small points to historic analyses showing that when established in 1966 Medicare’s cost was $3 billion — projected to reach $12 billion by 1990. The program’s real costs were $107 billion in 1990.
 
Rather than implement the new federal law, including Medicaid provisions, Small wants Oklahoma to follow the leads of Florida, Louisiana, Rhode Island and Kansas in seeking waivers from the mandates of “ObamaCare.”  Small says Oklahoma needs waivers to allow the Medicaid program to charge higher co-pays for risky behaviors, and for unnecessary emergency room visits. He advocates encouraging uninsured workers to be placed on employers’ private plans.
 
Small criticized past Legislatures for diversion of at least $161 million from the Insure Oklahoma fund, the program administered by Fogarty’s agency which subsidizes private insurance for the working poor. The structure of the U.S. Supreme Court decision, he says, allows Insure Oklahoma’s individual participants to remain in the program, and not be forced into Medicaid.
 
In 2011, after working on a health exchange required under the ACA, Gov. Mary Fallin reversed field and was among the first governors to defy the mandate. After the Supreme Court upheld law, Fallin saw no hurry to address the issue.
 
Doerflinger said she’ll decide on Medicaid policy after November’s election, and will listen to “all the stakeholders.”
 
He told CapitolBeatOK, “The problem is that the state would have to begin picking up part of the tab three years after implementation.” On Medicaid, budget concerns might force Fallin to participate in the other “exchange” – the one already underway among Small, Blatt and Fogarty.
 
Fallin was an ally of U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin during her two terms in Congress, and has explicitly endorsed a Ryan-style block grant approach to state Medicaid funding. Ryan has brought his budget-cutting agenda to the Republican party’s national ticket as presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s running-mate. 
 
The state Legislature has its own wait-and-see approach. The House-Senate Joint Committee on Federal Health Care Law studied the issue, but took no action. Neither the House nor the Senate has Interim Studies focused on Medicaid policy and spending.
 

About the Author: Patrick B. McGuigan is editor of CapitolBeatOK, an online
news service, and senior editor at The City Sentinel, a weekly newspaper in
Oklahoma City. He is the author of "The Politics of Direct Democracy: Case
Studies in Popular Decision-Making" and of "Ninth Justice: The Fight
for Bork." His essays appear regularly in Perspective, the monthly
publication of the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. McGuigan once served as
Capital Editor for Tulsa Today where his work frequently appears.

Editorial:  Did you know that since The Smartest Man in the Room took office in 2008, the federal debt, as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product, has gone from 69.7 percent to 104.8 percent (estimated). This means that we are spending more than we produce, and the forecast is for it to continue for the next decade.  Unprecedented!  Historic!  But, as he is so fond of pointing out, he didn’t do it alone.  He had LOTS of help.

For starters, the 80 plus members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus have been with him 100 percent, spending like there’s no tomorrow. 

These are the primary culprits that Rep. Allen West (R-FL) was referring to when he said Congress was full of communists.
The Caucus tries to cover it up, but it was just a few years back that
they were openly affiliated with the Socialist International.

Formed in 1991 by openly socialist Bernie Sanders, now a senator from Vermont, its co-chairman is Muslim Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), and its membership includes such stellar intellects as Maxine “Socialize the Oil Companies” Waters (D-CA), socialist Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), the cowwupt, awwogant,  and inept Barney Frank (D-MA), the ever-so-stable Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL), and its Whip, Hank Johnson (D-GA), the man who in a public congressional hearing worried that stationing more Marines on Guam would cause it to capsize. The list contains the worst of the worst in Congress, for ignorant, out of control tax and spenders.

The rest of the Democrats, like good little Nazis, simply do as they are told, voting in lockstep with their misleadership. During the eight years of Republican (RINO) president George Bush, a man, BTW, who never encountered a spending bill he couldn’t sign, the Democrats increased the national debt $3.78 trillion. Since 2008, in just three-and-a-half years, they have increased the debt by another $6.36 trillion. Unprecedented! Historic! And disastrous.

The truly tragic and frightening part of this is that the misleadership of the Republican Party has gone along with all of it, voting to raise the debt ceiling time after time, and then wondering why things just keep getting worse. We are at a point where all of the taxes collected by the federal government cover only 65 percent of what they are spending, falling $1.33 trillion short. Even if they eliminated everything the federal government does, every department, agency, office, and military installation, every employee, including soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, outside of its mandatory obligations – Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and a variety of welfare entitlement programs – they still would come up $8 million short.

The debt they have run up currently works out to about $51,000.00 for every man, woman, and child in America today. Thus, Barack Barry Hussein Obama-Soetoro and his mindless Marxist minions have put that ideal American family of four on the hook for some $204,000.00. In truth, it’s twice that for the 51 percent of Americans who actually work and pay the taxes. Unprecedented! Historic! And outrageous.

Back in the Middle Ages, when there were basically two classes, the feudal aristocrats and the serfs, the general rule was that in return for protection from enemies, the serfs turned one-third of what they produced over to the feudal lord.

In modern America, we have what is called “Tax Freedom Day.” This is the day when Americans have produced enough taxes to pay for government. This year, when calculated to include paying for TARP and ARRA bailout/”stimulus” money and adding in the cost of all the government regulation, it turns out that the serfs of America worked until July 15, over half the year, to pay the debt the government claims we owe them. Unprecedented! Historic! Devolution in action.

So here we are, a nation of serfs, pushed to the edge of a nation-killing economic precipice by the Marxist Fraud in the White House, the Marxist/neofascist Democrats and their neo-fascist RINO running dogs, with no way out that isn’t going to make what’s happening in Europe look like a Sunday School picnic.

The Senate, led by the corrupt Harry Reid (D-NV) has absolutely and adamantly refused to propose, much less pass, a budget for almost four years. In addition, they have, with malice aforethought, killed every single budget and jobs creation bill that has come out of the House. They rammed Obamacare, with its billions in new taxes and even more billions in new spending, down the throats of Americans, even though a large majority of voters has been against it from the start.  Come January, when the new taxes kick in, America, as a viable, solvent, sovereign nation, will begin the process of ceasing to exist. Unprecedented! Historic! Unless.

This WILL occur unless We, the People, rise up and vote in unprecedented and historic numbers and throw these treasonous, would-be New Aristocrats out of office and into the garbage where they belong.

The mainstream media has been repeating–without any criticism, context, or opposing view–Sen. Harry Reid’s claim that Mitt Romney could not be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve in the Cabinet–or even to serve as "dog catcher"–because he has only released his most recent tax returns, not his entire tax history. The story currently leads major news websites, including National Public Radio’s hourly news update. So it seems appropriate to do what the media will not: apply Reid’s "dog catcher" standard to Barack Obama.

Let us first take the question of whether Barack Obama would have been confirmed by the Senate for any position, Cabinet or otherwise. If his lack of experience was not a sufficient obstacle, his past history of serious drug use–which is even worse than the admissions in his memoir, Dreams from My Father–would have barred his nomination. So, too, would his radical past, including his associations with Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi, Derrick Bell, and a host of extremists with whom he made common cause.
 
On the tax issue, it is worth reminding Sen. Reid (and the media) that several of President Obama’s nominees for the Cabinet did, in fact, have very serious tax problems–and were confirmed anyway (though at least one, with a sense of humility lacking in her colleagues, withdrew). The most notorious is "TurboTax" Tim Geithner, who outrageously blamed a computer program for his failure to pay self-employment taxes while he was working for the International Monetary Fund. He was confirmed anyway, under considerable pressure from the mainstream media (and after an inexcusable capitulation by Senate Republicans), which painted Geithner as the only person who could possibly be qualified to run the U.S. Treasury in crisis.
 
It is also worth noting that Sen. Reid’s best hope for maintaining his job is to see Elizabeth Warren unseat Republican Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts. But Warren’s candidacy is only possible because she could not receive confirmation from the U.S. Senate for the leadership of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to which Obama desperately wanted to appoint her–not just because Republicans oppose the agency’s powers, but because of her own radicalism. Now that she has been revealed to have lied, apparently about her Native American heritage, there is no possible way she could be confirmed for a Cabinet position, or any other requiring the approval of Congress. Yet Reid and Obama are counting on her.
 
So the "dog catcher" standard that Sen. Harry Reid has sought to apply to Romney–and which he has, with the mainstream media’s help, succeeded in applying to Romney–would have prevented Obama and his own nominees from taking office. But the media has not applied Reid’s standard to Obama, because the media almost always applies a double standard to Democrats and Republicans–especially so with Barack Obama. (Update: And would a man who confessed to eating dog meat be made dog catcher? I think not.)
 
To take only one of hundreds of examples of that double standard, in the 2000 campaign, Republican Sen. John McCain released thousands of pages of his medical records; he did so again (albeit only for a few hours) in 2008. But then-Senator Obama released a single page–the equivalent of an elementary school "doctor’s note"–and the media meekly accepted his release gratefully.
 
Case closed–and a man who had never held any position of serious responsibility in the public or private sector–neither dog catcher nor anything else–went on to win.

Click here for the original report from Breitbart.com.