40 GOP House Members Join Lawsuit That Could Give Justice Roberts an Obamacare 'Do-Over'

From: Breitbart.com

by - Michael Patrick Leahy - 20 Nov 2013


On November 8, Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ) and thirty-nine other Republican members of the House of Representatives filed a "friend of the court" brief in support of a legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") based on the Origination Clause that will be heard by the District of Columbia Federal Court of Appeals in early 2014.

The case, Sissel v United States Department of Health and Human Services, was filed in the Washington, D.C. District Federal Court by the Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of Matt Sissel, an Iraq war veteran who lives in Iowa, where he owns a small business, on July 26, 2010.

The Origination Clause of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 7, Clause 1 states "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills." Not a word of the Affordable Care Act originated in the House of Representatives. Instead, using a legislative trick, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) took an innocuous bill that had passed the House unanimously on October 8, 2009 by a 416-0 vote, the Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009, removed every word of its text following the first sentence, and replaced it with the Affordable Care Act language.

On June 28, 2013, Judge Beryl Howell, an Obama appointee, ruled against Sissel, dismissing his complaint using reasoning that required a rejection of Chief Justice John Roberts' controversial and even ridiculed majority opinion in the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in the 2012 NFIB v Sebelius case. In that opinion, Roberts declared Obamacare constitutional based upon his opinion that the law's individual mandate was, in fact, a tax.

Judge Howell ruled that the type of revenue raised by the act that Justice John Roberts deemed to be a tax was not the type of revenue that constituted a tax under the Origination Clause.

Specifically, Judge Howell made two assertions in her ruling that conservative critics believe are belied by the facts:

1. The individual mandate is not a "Bill for raising Revenue."

2. The individual mandate was an amendment to a bill that originated in the House of Representatives.

Even though Justice Roberts declared that the individual mandate was a tax in NFIB v Sebelius, Judge Howell ruled that the revenue raised by Affordable Care Act was "incidental" to the law, and therefore was not covered by the Origination Clause.

Equally baffling, Judge Howell ruled that the tactic of "gutting and replacing" a bill, which Majority Leader Reid used to push the Affordable Care Act through, was in fact merely the issuing of an amendment, despite the fact that not a single word of the original bill was kept in the so-called "amendment."

On July 9, 2013, the Pacific Legal Foundation appealed Judge Howell's dismissal of Sissel v United States Department of Health and Human Services to the District of Columbia Federal Court of Appeals. On filing the appeal, Timothy Sandefur, one of the two principal attorneys on the case for Pacific Legal Foundation, said "[t]he district court wrongly held that the individual mandate is not a 'bill for raising revenue.' " The district court's ruling "misses the point of what the individual mandate is and what it does," he argued.

"While some kinds of taxes have been held not to be 'bills for raising revenue' and not subject to the Origination Clause, this is only where the tax is really just a penalty or a fine used to enforce compliance with some other constitutionally valid law," he stated."Such logic," he concluded, "doesn’t apply to the individual mandate, because the Supreme Court itself, in its Obamacare ruling last year, explicitly denied that the individual mandate is a 'penalty.' Therefore it must be a ‘bill for raising revenue’ subject to the Origination Clause."

Paul J. Beard II, the second principal attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, disputed the district court's claim that the Affordable Care Act was a true amendment added in the Senate to a bill that originated in the House of Representatives. "The problem with that analysis is that the House bill had no connection to health care," he said. "It was about helping veterans buy homes. Moreover, it didn’t raise revenue. Its tax credits for veterans and corresponding tax increases on corporations were designed to be revenue neutral. Finally, Obamacare wasn’t added as a true amendment. Rather, Obamacare was substituted for the provisions of the House bill, which were totally stripped out."

The filing of the "friend of the court" brief by the forty House Republicans adds an element of constitutional legitimacy to Sissel's case. As the Washington Times reported on Sunday, the brief noted that "given that an Origination Clause challenge against a taxing bill of this magnitude has never before been mounted, it is imperative that this Court not sanction the lower court’s superficial analysis of the Origination Clause."

The Pacific Legal Foundation's Beard told the Times, "this support from members of the House is especially significant because PLF’s lawsuit defends the constitutional authority of the lower chamber, the legislative body that is closest to the people."

Regardless of the decision made by the Court of Appeals, it seems likely that the losing party will appeal the case to the Supreme Court, which might take the case for consideration in the fall of 2014. This would set up the announcement of a decision in June 2015, three years after the NFIB v Sebelius decision, but still a full year and five months before the 2016 Presidential election.

The potential Supreme Court decision in the Sissel v Department of Health and Human Services case could offer Justice Roberts, as Josh Blackman, Assistant Professor at the South Texas College of Law wrote on Sunday, an opportunity for the greatest "legal mulligan" in history. Golfers use the term "mulligan" to describe "do-overs" on bad shots.

"If you asked me several months ago about the likelihood of a court striking down the law on origination clause grounds, I would not have pegged it very high," Blackman wrote. "But the events of the last few months have altered my thinking. The events of the last week have crystallized it."

Blackman argued that "in light of massive, and widespread unpopularity, and tepid opposition from vulnerable Democrats, the thinking has changed. Considering the President decided to unilaterally waive one of the most significant features of the law . . . the legitimacy and finality of this law is far from settled. If the law was settled . . . there would be no need for waivers."

Blackman noted that "[t]he D.C. Circuit is not full of shrinking violets. Although Judges Kavanaugh and Silberman upheld the ACA, a panel of the Court found the President’s recess appointment power unconstitutional. Factoring in the widespread opposition, and dissatisfaction with this law, and an increasing level of support from the Republican party, this case may yet have legs."

Blackman concluded that "perhaps Chief Justice Roberts can get a mulligan, when there is not a presidential election around the corner. Or maybe he’ll decide because it’s not actually a tax, the origination clause doesn’t apply."

Constitutional conservatives across the country are in agreement that NFIB v Sebelius is a Supreme Court decision desperately in need of a do-over. Members of Congress may have just increased the likelihood that it will get just such an opportunity.


God bless,
JohnnyD

Too much incompetence from Obama to believe it’s not intentional

From: Allen B. West


I’m back in DC for three days and therefore did my usual early morning run. As I ran past the Capitol and along the mall, I had an interesting thought. Since everyone has Oprah on the mind right now, remember when she referred to then-Senator Barack Obama as “brilliant”?

While running, I thought about the Obamacare disaster and if President Obama is so brilliant, how do you explain this abject failure? I began to ask myself, is this truly incompetence or possibly intentional — or both?

Obamacare is facing countless issues and the website is not really the most critical of the issues. The whole plan is based upon the flawed premise of forcing more young and healthy into exchanges to actually fund and subsidize, lower income and less healthy Americans.

More and more it appears that Obamacare has an intentional purpose of destabilizing and destroying the insurance market. There seems to be evidence of full knowledge of the adverse effects of millions of Americans being dropped from their individual healthcare plans, even as the President was stating Americans could keep their plans.

We know the true goal of progressive socialists is a single-payer system under complete government control. That can only be possible if there is no private sector competition. It becomes Medicaid for all.

As a matter of fact, part of Obamacare includes the government takeover of college student loans and the elimination of private sector financial institutions for this purpose.

I don’t believe this to be purely abject incompetence, although it’s part of the equation. But this just seems intentional and follows the Cloward-Piven strategy to overload the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis leading to a government takeover of basically everything.

There are too many instances of destabilization of our economy – not to mention our national security — to believe this is just incompetence. It’s getting too easy to connect the dots between our foreign policy of snubbing allies and courting enemies, slow dismantling of our military readiness, money-printing, and control of education through Common Core. How can an entire administration be that incompetent? What do you think? Is there is an intentional nefarious design at play?


God bless,
JohnnyD

Census ‘faked’ 2012 election jobs report

From: New York Post

by - John Crudele - November 18, 2013

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington.

The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.

And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.

And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.

“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.

The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census.

Ironically, it was Labor’s demanding standards that left the door open to manipulation.

Labor requires Census to achieve a 90 percent success rate on its interviews — meaning it needed to reach 9 out of 10 households targeted and report back on their jobs status.

Census currently has six regions from which surveys are conducted. The New York and Philadelphia regions, I’m told, had been coming up short of the 90 percent.

Philadelphia filled the gap with fake interviews.

“It was a phone conversation — I forget the exact words — but it was, ‘Go ahead and fabricate it’ to make it what it was,” Buckmon told me.

Census, under contract from the Labor Department, conducts the household survey used to tabulate the unemployment rate.

Interviews with some 60,000 household go into each month’s jobless number, which currently stands at 7.3 percent. Since this is considered a scientific poll, each one of the households interviewed represents 5,000 homes in the US.

Buckmon, it turns out, was a very ambitious employee. He conducted three times as many household interviews as his peers, my source said.

By making up survey results — and, essentially, creating people out of thin air and giving them jobs — Buckmon’s actions could have lowered the jobless rate.

Buckmon said he filled out surveys for people he couldn’t reach by phone or who didn’t answer their doors.

But, Buckmon says, he was never told how to answer the questions about whether these nonexistent people were employed or not, looking for work, or have given up.

But people who know how the survey works say that simply by creating people and filling out surveys in their name would boost the number of folks reported as employed.

Census never publicly disclosed the falsification. Nor did it inform Labor that its data was tainted.

“Yes, absolutely they should have told us,” said a Labor spokesman. “It would be normal procedure to notify us if there is a problem with data collection.”

Census appears to have looked into only a handful of instances of falsification by Buckmon, although more than a dozen instances were reported, according to internal documents.

In one document from the probe, Program Coordinator Joal Crosby was ask in 2010, “Why was the suspected … possible data falsification on all (underscored) other survey work for which data falsification was suspected not investigated by the region?”

On one document seen by The Post, Crosby hand-wrote the answer: “Unable to determine why an investigation was not done for CPS,” or the Current Population Survey — the official name for the unemployment report.

With regard to the Consumer Expenditure survey, only four instances of falsification were looked into, while 14 were reported.

I’ve been suspicious of the Census Bureau for a long time.

During the 2010 Census report — an enormous and costly survey of the entire country that goes on for a full year — I suspected (and wrote in a number of columns) that Census was inexplicably hiring and firing temporary workers.

I suspected that this turnover of employees was being done purposely to boost the number of new jobs being report each month. (The Labor Department does not use the Census Bureau for its other monthly survey of new jobs — commonly referred to as the Establishment Survey.)

Last week I offered to give all the information I have, including names, dates and charges to Labor’s inspector general.

I’m waiting to hear back from Labor.

I hope the next stop will be Congress, since manipulation of data like this not only gives voters the wrong impression of the economy but also leads lawmakers, the Federal Reserve and companies to make uninformed decisions.

To cite just one instance, the Fed is targeting the curtailment of its so-called quantitative easing money-printing/bond-buying fiasco to the unemployment rate for which Census provided the false information.

So falsifying this would, in essence, have dire consequences for the country.


God bless,
JohnnyD

U.S. general: Let's make Obama resign

Cites Nixon resignation, urges citizens 'to save republic' from Washington leadership

From: World Net Daily 

by - F. Michael Maloof - November 19, 2013


WASHINGTON – A retired Army general is calling for the “forced resignations” of President Obama, other administration officials and the leadership of Congress for the direction they’re taking the nation, his list of grievances including the systematic political purge of hundreds of senior military officers in the U.S. military.

Retired Maj. Gen. Paul E. Vallely told WND he is calling for nationwide rallies and protests to demand the resignations and added that a peaceful “civil uprising is still not out of question.”

In his capacity as chairman of the organization Stand Up America, Vallely issued what he termed a “National Call to Action” to force the resignations of Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Vallely, formerly the deputy commanding general of Pacific Command, said the current crop of leaders must be forced to resign by the “demand resignation” process, which he explained requires massive grass-roots protests and social networking. As an example, he cited the public and media pressure that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Impeachment, Vallely said, is not a viable option because of “partisan politics.”

“Our federal government continues down the path of destroying America,” he said. “Americans must now stand up and put America back on the right track.”

In issuing his national call to action, Vallely said the federal government has not subsided in “sucking the oxygen” out of America.

“And we call to action all branches of government to do your constitutional duties and not be led astray in the cultural and moral decay of America. We have witnessed far too many lies,” he said, as well as “deception and the corruption of the republic.”

Vallely reminds Americans that the Declaration of Independence itself states that whenever “any Form of Government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem more likely to affect their Safety and Happiness.”

Vallely said the nation he long defended is self-destructing “before our very eyes,” because of “our inept and incompetent leadership in Washington.”

“The battle is on,” he added, “and we shall not retreat.”

Vallely, who has also served as a Fox News military analyst, claimed the Obama administration and leadership of Congress have been leading the nation down a road of “progressive socialism.”

The retired general said the U.S. faces a battle that is unknown to generations of Americans, and that the fate of the nation is “now in our hands” to enforce the Constitution and “severely limit the federal government and its out-of-control spending.”

He said conditions today are approaching those of the time of the inaugural address of President Abraham Lincoln, who said at the time that people have a “right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one.”

“Shake off,” said Vallely, “means replacing government leaders.” He argued America today bears “many similarities to the fall of Rome.” America, he added, is not immune to collapse or even revolution, which he notes “has happened many times in history. … External and internal threats could precipitate this as well as any financial collapse.”

Vallely added that “politics as usual will not be effective or sufficient enough to turn the country around.”

“We are in a war for America,” he told WND, adding that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Dr. Ben Carson, the noted brain surgeon and author of “America the Beautiful” and other bestselling books have made similar observations.

Americans have had enough, he said, and the Obama White House and identifiable members of Congress “must now depart from a progressive socialist and treasonous death march and bankrupting the country beyond expectations.”

“A civil uprising is still not out of the question as ‘pain’ grips the country more each day,” Vallely said, adding that there is time to change the country in a peaceful way.

“This means raising your voice now to your neighbors, family, co-workers and friends,” he said. “Be the captains of your souls. I pray for another George Washington to appear within the year and lead us.”

One of the issues that alarms Vallely is the high number of senior officers in the U.S. military who have been fired under the Obama administration, a toll estimated at one officer per week. Indeed, Vallely has been very outspoken to what he calls a “purge” of the U.S. military by the Obama administration — with a stunning nine generals and flag officers relieved of duty this year alone.

WND has been reporting on the surge of firings, suspensions and dismissals, for which Vallely has assigned a good portion of the blame to Obama’s close adviser, Valerie Jarrett. Rampant “political correctness” due to her influence, Vallely tells WND, is now permeating the military and negatively affecting everyone from top generals to the ranks of the enlisted.

According to Vallely, Obama is “intentionally weakening and gutting our military, Pentagon and reducing the U.S. as a superpower, and anyone in the ranks who disagrees or speaks out is being purged.”

Vallely equated the current treatment of U.S. senior military officers watching over what is said and done among mid-level officers and enlisted ranks to that of the “political commissars from the Communist era.”

He also told WND that the White House won’t investigate its own officials, but finds it easy to fire military commanders “who have given their lives for their country.”

“Obama will not purge a civilian or political appointee because they have bought into Obama’s ideology,” Vallely said. “The White House protects their own. That’s why they stalled on the investigation into Fast and Furious, Benghazi and Obamacare. He’s intentionally weakening and gutting our military, Pentagon and reducing us as a superpower, and anyone in the ranks who disagrees or speaks out is being purged.”

He’s far from alone in his concerns about the military purge, as J.D. Gordon, a retired Navy commander and a former Pentagon spokesman in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, says the Obama administration is rushing to unload senior officers whom he believes have become “political pawns” dismissed for questionable reasons.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Patrick Brady, a recipient of the U.S. military’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor, similarly has told WND that Obama needs to apply the same standards to his political appointees as he does to the military.

“Just when you thought the leadership of this government could not get any worse, it does,” Brady said. “Never in history has an administration spawned another scandal to cover the current one.”

This was a reference to the recent firing of a number of generals to mask “Obama’s serial scandals, all prefaced by lies – Fast and Furious, Benghazi, NSA, IRS,” among others, said Brady, former president of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.

Retired Army Lt. Gen. William G. “Jerry” Boykin, who was a founding member of Delta Force and later deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence under President George W. Bush, tells WND it is worrying that four-star generals are being retired at the rate that has occurred under Obama.

“Over the past three years, it is unprecedented for the number of four-star generals to be relieved of duty, and not necessarily relieved for cause,” Boykin said. “I believe there is a purging of the military. The problem is worse than we have ever seen.”


God bless,
JohnnyD

Costco -- the Bible is fiction

From: Fox News

By Todd Starnes  - November 18, 2013


What do the Bible, "The Hunger Games" and "Fifty Shades of Grey" have in common? All three are works of fiction, according to the booksellers at Costco.

Pastor Caleb Kaltenbach made that shocking discovery last Friday as he was shopping for a present for his wife at a Costco in Simi Valley, Calif.

“All the Bibles were labeled as fiction,” the pastor told me. “It seemed bizarre to me.”

Kaltenbach is the lead pastor at Discovery Church, a non-denominational Christian congregation in southern California.

He thought there must be some sort of mistake so he scoured the shelf for other Bibles. Every copy was plastered with a sticker that read, “$14.99 Fiction.”

The pastor knew something must be amiss so he set off in search of a Costco employee hoping for an answer. Unfortunately, he couldn’t find anyone willing to answer his question (which is not all that surprising if you’ve shopped at Costco).

Since no one in the store was willing to offer assistance, the good shepherd of Discovery Church snapped a photograph of the Bible and tweeted it to his flock.

“People are pretty shocked and upset,” he told me. “We are supposed to be living in an era of tolerance, but what Costco did doesn’t seem too tolerant.”

I doubt they would label the Koran as fiction, Pastor Kaltenbach said. Heaven help us if they did.

“If they don’t believe in the Bible, that’s fine – but at least label it as ‘religion’ as some bookstores do, or ‘inspiration’,” he said.

So does the warehouse store that sells laundry detergent by the gallon have a problem with the Word of God?

I called Costco headquarters in Issaquah, Wash. hoping to get answers. The nice lady who answered the phone told me she was aware of the issue and chalked it up to a “human error at a warehouse.”

“It’s all fixed,” she said.

But actually, it’s not fixed – because there’s a boatload of Bibles in the Simi Valley store still marked as fiction.

At that point, the nice lady on the phone became not-so-nice and promptly informed me that Costco doesn’t talk to the press.

“Nothing to report,” she said curtly.

With all due respect, perhaps they should leave the reporting to the professionals and we’ll leave the bulk purchases of toilet paper to Costco.

Pastor Kaltenbach said he’s not one to speak out on such slights, but seeing the Good Book labeled as fiction was bit too much to take.

“On the one hand Christians should not yell out ‘persecution’,” he said. “We aren’t living in Iraq or Iran. But on the other hand, I believe that we do need to stand up for our faith and we need to be vocal about our concerns.”

That’s a message that resonates with pastor and author Robert Jeffress.

“Let’s hope Costco’s explanation is true and not the result of having been caught attempting to marginalize the very foundation of Christian beliefs, the Bible,” Pastor Jeffress told me. “Christians need to call out organizations like Costco whose actions undermine Christianity – regardless of whether those actions are accidental or intentional.”

Steven Smith, of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, said the fiction label identifies the thinking of the labeler more than the content of the book.

“To label the Bible fiction is a practical front for an ideological foundation that assumes things spiritual are unreal,” he told me. “What is odd about this choice is the glut of books in the "religion and spirituality" sections in mainstream book stores. However, as large as "spirituality" sections are, there must not be any room for Christianity. Modern thinking on spirituality is too exclusive to allow for the Bible.”

Of course, this entire episode could have been cleared up had a Costco employee simply answered Pastor Kaltenbach’s question.

And that’s the Gospel Truth.


God bless,
JohnnyD

Andrew Huszar: Confessions of a Quantitative Easer

We went on a bond-buying spree that was supposed to help Main Street. Instead, it was a feast for Wall Street.

From: The Wall Street Journal


By - Andrew Huszar - Nov. 11, 2013


I can only say: I'm sorry, America. As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed's first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I've come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.

Five years ago this month, on Black Friday, the Fed launched an unprecedented shopping spree. By that point in the financial crisis, Congress had already passed legislation, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, to halt the U.S. banking system's free fall. Beyond Wall Street, though, the economic pain was still soaring. In the last three months of 2008 alone, almost two million Americans would lose their jobs.

The Fed said it wanted to help—through a new program of massive bond purchases. There were secondary goals, but Chairman Ben Bernanke made clear that the Fed's central motivation was to "affect credit conditions for households and businesses": to drive down the cost of credit so that more Americans hurting from the tanking economy could use it to weather the downturn. For this reason, he originally called the initiative "credit easing."

My part of the story began a few months later. Having been at the Fed for seven years, until early 2008, I was working on Wall Street in spring 2009 when I got an unexpected phone call. Would I come back to work on the Fed's trading floor? The job: managing what was at the heart of QE's bond-buying spree—a wild attempt to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage bonds in 12 months. Incredibly, the Fed was calling to ask if I wanted to quarterback the largest economic stimulus in U.S. history.

This was a dream job, but I hesitated. And it wasn't just nervousness about taking on such responsibility. I had left the Fed out of frustration, having witnessed the institution deferring more and more to Wall Street. Independence is at the heart of any central bank's credibility, and I had come to believe that the Fed's independence was eroding. Senior Fed officials, though, were publicly acknowledging mistakes and several of those officials emphasized to me how committed they were to a major Wall Street revamp. I could also see that they desperately needed reinforcements. I took a leap of faith.

In its almost 100-year history, the Fed had never bought one mortgage bond. Now my program was buying so many each day through active, unscripted trading that we constantly risked driving bond prices too high and crashing global confidence in key financial markets. We were working feverishly to preserve the impression that the Fed knew what it was doing.

It wasn't long before my old doubts resurfaced. Despite the Fed's rhetoric, my program wasn't helping to make credit any more accessible for the average American. The banks were only issuing fewer and fewer loans. More insidiously, whatever credit they were extending wasn't getting much cheaper. QE may have been driving down the wholesale cost for banks to make loans, but Wall Street was pocketing most of the extra cash.

From the trenches, several other Fed managers also began voicing the concern that QE wasn't working as planned. Our warnings fell on deaf ears. In the past, Fed leaders—even if they ultimately erred—would have worried obsessively about the costs versus the benefits of any major initiative. Now the only obsession seemed to be with the newest survey of financial-market expectations or the latest in-person feedback from Wall Street's leading bankers and hedge-fund managers. Sorry, U.S. taxpayer.

Trading for the first round of QE ended on March 31, 2010. The final results confirmed that, while there had been only trivial relief for Main Street, the U.S. central bank's bond purchases had been an absolute coup for Wall Street. The banks hadn't just benefited from the lower cost of making loans. They'd also enjoyed huge capital gains on the rising values of their securities holdings and fat commissions from brokering most of the Fed's QE transactions. Wall Street had experienced its most profitable year ever in 2009, and 2010 was starting off in much the same way.

You'd think the Fed would have finally stopped to question the wisdom of QE. Think again. Only a few months later—after a 14% drop in the U.S. stock market and renewed weakening in the banking sector—the Fed announced a new round of bond buying: QE2. Germany's finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, immediately called the decision "clueless."

That was when I realized the Fed had lost any remaining ability to think independently from Wall Street. Demoralized, I returned to the private sector.

Where are we today? The Fed keeps buying roughly $85 billion in bonds a month, chronically delaying so much as a minor QE taper. Over five years, its bond purchases have come to more than $4 trillion. Amazingly, in a supposedly free-market nation, QE has become the largest financial-markets intervention by any government in world history.

And the impact? Even by the Fed's sunniest calculations, aggressive QE over five years has generated only a few percentage points of U.S. growth. By contrast, experts outside the Fed, such as Mohammed El Erian at the Pimco investment firm, suggest that the Fed may have created and spent over $4 trillion for a total return of as little as 0.25% of GDP (i.e., a mere $40 billion bump in U.S. economic output). Both of those estimates indicate that QE isn't really working.

Unless you're Wall Street. Having racked up hundreds of billions of dollars in opaque Fed subsidies, U.S. banks have seen their collective stock price triple since March 2009. The biggest ones have only become more of a cartel: 0.2% of them now control more than 70% of the U.S. bank assets.

As for the rest of America, good luck. Because QE was relentlessly pumping money into the financial markets during the past five years, it killed the urgency for Washington to confront a real crisis: that of a structurally unsound U.S. economy. Yes, those financial markets have rallied spectacularly, breathing much-needed life back into 401(k)s, but for how long? Experts like Larry Fink at the BlackRock investment firm are suggesting that conditions are again "bubble-like." Meanwhile, the country remains overly dependent on Wall Street to drive economic growth.

Even when acknowledging QE's shortcomings, Chairman Bernanke argues that some action by the Fed is better than none (a position that his likely successor, Fed Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen, also embraces). The implication is that the Fed is dutifully compensating for the rest of Washington's dysfunction. But the Fed is at the center of that dysfunction. Case in point: It has allowed QE to become Wall Street's new "too big to fail" policy.


Mr. Huszar, a senior fellow at Rutgers Business School, is a former Morgan Stanley managing director. In 2009-10, he managed the Federal Reserve's $1.25 trillion agency mortgage-backed security purchase program.


God bless,
JohnnyD

There is no ‘fix’ for ObamaCare

From: Human Events

By: John Hayward  - 11/14/2013


I think – well, to be forthright, I know, with actuarial certainty – that any of the various “Keep Your Plan” legislative fixes floating around Congress would kill ObamaCare.  President Obama and the rest of the Affordable Care Act con artists know it, too.  There’s a reason he told the biggest lie in modern history, over and over again.  More to the point, there’s a reason ObamaCare includes the insurance-slaying regulations and requirements Obama kept lying about.  This bill, like all socialist failure, is a massive exercise of compulsive force.  It won’t work if there’s an escape valve.

Not many people will voluntarily line up to pay absurdly inflated premiums to buy lousy high-deductible policies, crammed with mandated benefits they won’t use, because they desire the warm, glowing satisfaction of knowing that they are subsidizing a handful of lucky “winners” who had trouble getting insurance in the old days.  And these aren’t small, easily-overlooked surcharges, like the little nibbles our glorious welfare state takes out of your monthly cell phone bill to provide “free” phones through an easily-defrauded, widely-abused system.  ObamaCare is an incredibly expensive, easily-defrauded, sure-to-be-widely-abused system.  The “losers” are encountering premium increases that run into thousands of dollars per year.  Even the people who were supposedly hungry for health insurance in the pre-ObamaCare days turn tail and run for their lives when they see the premiums they would be expected to pay.  There would never be enough voluntary “losers” to sustain the system.

This isn’t just a matter of those now-infamous “grandfather” rules that end up killing almost every policy that might otherwise have been allowed to continue.  Those are Administration rules written by the Department of Health and Human Services.  Barack Obama could hold one meeting with HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and make them go away.  But he hasn’t, and he won’t.  He needs those old policies dead.  He’s not going to call off the hit.  And even if he did, the mandates built into those endless thousands of pages of ObamaCare rules inflate the cost of insurance so much that providers can’t continue offering the old plans at the old prices. Congressional legislation to keep HHS from aggressively destroying grandfather policies would buy maybe a year of time, at most – conveniently just long enough for Democrats to limp past midterm elections that should be a meat grinder for their Party.  Simple business sense will then lead providers to drop the old plans over the coming years.  Unhappy Americans will end up in the same place, but the Democrats will have more time to weasel out of responsibility for their plight, and trick voters into believing their ire is more properly directed at the Little Partners of private industry who are obeying the foolish laws Democrats passed..  They’re pretty sure they can win that spin game, given enough time to play.

That’s the likely future under Republican Fred Upton’s bill in the House.  Democrat Mary Landrieu in the Senate has a bill (which Rep. Upton has said he likes!) that would force insurance companies to keep offering their old plans, even when they no longer make economic sense.  Not only is that an outrageous offense against the U.S. Constitution, economic liberty, and the principles of free-market capitalism, it’s politically foolish – all Democrat bills to “fix” ObamaCare should be one hundred percent dead on arrival, absolute non-starters – and it will just kill the insurance industry faster.  Instead of a long slog into misery, we’d have providers declaring bankruptcy – or, more likely, demanding gigantic taxpayer bailouts – with horrific speed, probably less than a year.

The insurance industry is already muttering uneasily about insufficient numbers of young healthy types buying overpriced policies.  Those horrendously low ObamaCare enrollment numbers released yesterday – only 106,000 nationwide, not even ten percent of the first month target numbers – were absurdly inflated.  The Administration admitted, in advance, that it would lie about the numbers, tossing in every half-completed scrap of data left in an online shopping cart, in a frantic effort to pump up the totals.  They’re still trying to live from one news cycle to the next, buying a few weeks with lies so they keep the headlines out of apocalypse territory.  By the time Republican congressional investigators have subpoenaed the real month-one enrollment numbers out of this flim-flam Administration, they’ll be on to the next distraction.  Absurdly, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius insisted yesterday that she doesn’t actually know how many people have paid for policies, an admission that would have gotten her arrested if she was a private-sector accountant.  I seriously doubt that the true enrollment numbers are much more than half of the panic-inducing cooked figures released yesterday.

That’s just not enough people to sustain this disastrous system, no matter what “fixes” are implemented to alleviate the political pressure of Obama’s Big Lie unraveling.  None of these “fixes” would address the other critical flaws in the scheme, such as its offenses against personal and religious liberty.  They won’t stop the flood of lost jobs from employers desperate to avoid those onerous ObamaCare mandates – which, despite frantic liberal efforts to wish it away, is a very real phenomenon, as a yet another survey recently established.  Addressing the mass cancellation of insurance policies will do nothing to save Americans from the wave of computer crime that awaits them as they’re forced to use a computer system the Administration knows - thanks to suppressed memos – will have critical security flaws for at least a year to come.  If you think the current user numbers for HealthCare.gov are bad now, wait until the first headline-grabbing security breach.

If ObamaCare survives, it will consume even more piles of taxpayer money, on top of the existing billions in wasted, irresponsible spending.  We can’t even seem to get numbers from the Administration about how much it’s costing to rebuild the garbage web system they already blew hundreds of millions of dollars on.  No fiscally responsible Republican can possibly vote to rescue a system he knows will bleed red ink for decades to come…. and if the “fix” leads to an insurance-industry bailout, the money wasted so far will look like small change in retrospect. Also, further money poured into the ObamaCare rat hole diverts precious resources from reforms that really would improve health insurance and accomplish the goals many voters say they support.

President Obama’s horrendous crime - and it is a crime, because lying to an electorate in order to force them into a compulsive, inescapable scheme is an offense against the principles of liberty and self-government – has dealt a possibly mortal blow to the health insurance marketplace.  We have to heal this wound, quickly, before it can do any more damage to the health care industry, which is separate but related, and in terrible jeopardy.  ObamaCare has torn through muscle, and threatens to puncture vital organs, if the blade is not swiftly removed.

From a political standpoint, it is fitting and satisfying to watch terrified Democrats scrambling for “keep your plan” legislation to mitigate the wrath of voters, their week-old talking points about “red herrings” and mercy-killing crummy old junk policies already discarded and forgotten, covered with the dust of political aeons.  But the Republicans should offer them no such escape.  ObamaCare is Carrie White covered in pig blood; the GOP should do nothing except bar the gym doors to keep Democrats from escaping her wrath.  They deserve what’s coming to them.  Those who were in office when ObamaCare passed knowingly voted for a bill that they didn’t read, on a fabulously corrupt party-line vote spiced with kickbacks and payoffs, in a mad grab for power.  Saying “Oops, my bad” as the headlines fill with stories of outrage and anguish three years later doesn’t cut it.  America needs them to suffer an existential crisis. It’s part of the healthy democratic process of an electorate recovering its balance after a disaster, and painfully reforming the party that inflicted it.

So yes, I know that a “keep your plan” bill will initiate the protracted demise of ObamaCare… but that demise should not be protracted.  We need to get rid of this garbage right now.  Barack Obama’s ego and “legacy” are a small price to pay for preventing the cancellation of millions of insurance policies, and that’s the only deal that should be put on the table for Democrats to consider.  It is ludicrous to drag out the pain and chaos of an inevitable process, just to give Democrats a fighting chance of surviving their next encounter with voters.  I certainly can’t see why any Republican would want to do that, but really, it’s just the wrong thing to do from the standpoint of our representatives’ bipartisan responsibility to the people they serve. The first “offer” to Democrats should be full ObamaCare repeal; the second offer should be repeal; the bottom-line offer Republicans are willing to negotiate down to should be repeal.  It would be relatively inexpensive to provide for the tiny number of people who have bought insurance under the program so far.

It’s time to be honest with the American people, and that simply will not happen, ever, while ObamaCare exists.  Everything about it has been a lie, right up to the phony enrollment numbers released yesterday.  End this now, and let freedom ring.  Coercive Big Government tactics cannot fix a disaster created by Big Government, but we the people – entrepreneurs and the willing customers they pursue – can make things right.  We deserve to regain a trust that never should have been taken from us.


God bless,
JohnnyD

The American People Rose Up to Repeal a Health Care Law Once Before. They Can Do It Again.

From: The Heritage Foundation

by -Jim Weidman -November 18, 2013

The law that promised health coverage for all has so far stripped 3.5 million Americans of their insurance. Meanwhile, fewer than 27,000 people merely “selected” plans—without necessarily purchasing them—on HealthCare.gov.

To date, then, Obamacare keeps creating more coverage losers for every Obamacare “winner.” And many of those “winners” have been dismayed to discover that their trophy coverage is far more expensive than their former plans, or denies them access to the doctors and hospitals they’ve come to rely on—or both.

The White House promises things will improve—but most analysts outside government insist the problems are so severe that a “fix” won’t come for months … if it comes at all.

Far from making America’s health system better, Obamacare is making it worse. In this kind of situation, the logical thing to do is to stop the destruction. That means pulling the plug on Obamacare.

Of course, the Administration doesn’t want you to entertain that notion. To discourage Americans calling for repeal, defunding, or scrapping this intrusive health law, liberals have taken to repeating President Obama’s assertion that Obamacare is not just the law of the land, but “settled” law that is “here to stay.”

The assertion is nonsense, of course. Far from being “settled,” numerous challenges to the law are still winding their way through the courts. And just because something is “the law of the land” doesn’t mean it can’t be changed.

Representative Dan Rostenkowski (D-IL) learned that lesson the hard way nearly a quarter of a century ago. On August 17, 1989, a group of senior citizens chased the Ways and Means chairman from a town hall meeting in protest of the new Medicare Catastrophic Health Care Act. It had been enacted into law just 14 months earlier, with the promise that it would help seniors cope with medical expenses.

It was a classic case of “Washington knows best.” Lawmakers assured seniors the law was for their own good. After all, they noted, it established a ceiling on hospital and doctor bills, expanded benefits for nursing home care and prescription drugs, etc. What’s not to like? As Rostenkowski complained while fleeing his aged pursuers, “These people don’t understand what the government is trying to do for them.”

Unfortunately for Rostenkowski, they knew all too well what the government—and the law—was doing to them. Once the law took effect, seniors discovered that these “new” benefits were extremely expensive. Worse, many already had the newly guaranteed benefits under their old coverage plans—and weren’t at all happy about having to pay higher taxes just to keep them.

The saga ended sadly for Rostenkowski but beneficially for seniors. Their protest gathered steam, and Washington—at last—listened. Just three months after that fateful protest, Congress repealed the Medicare Catastrophic Health Care Act.

When “the law of the land” doesn’t work for the people, the people—through their elected representatives—can change it. The “fix” for Obamacare won’t come from tech gurus. It will come from the American people who want alternatives to government-run health care. Fortunately, Heritage has issued several commonsense solutions that give the American people power over their health care decisions and dollars.

God bless,

JohnnyD

There’s Something Happening Here

STOP! trying to put lipstick on this pig, ObamaCare is socialism 

From: Canada Free Press

 

By Fredy 'Brooklyn' Lowe - November 17, 2013 

Have you ever had a song or maybe just a few lines from an old song pop into your head seemingly out of nowhere, but then wouldn’t go away?  Crazy as this sounds, I can’t seem to shake the lead lines of a 1966 song written by Steven Stills for his group at the time, Buffalo Springfield, with its haunting melody:

       There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear…

While you groove ahead about ..the man with a gun over there.. allow me to say there is a very good reason for these lines to keep popping up, ‘cause without a doubt - something’s happening here, and what it is, ain’t even close to being clear. ‘Cause the president is -   

       Telling me I’ve got to beware. 

Most regular readers here at CFP have known since 2009 or so that the name Affordable Care Act (ACA) was nothing more than political marketing baloney, and being affordable was never even a consideration.  And, you also knew that the name his health care law is better known as, ObamaCare, had even less to do with care than it did affordability. So, knowing what we know, aren’t you a little surprised that so many people are just now realizing, he lied when he said, “You can keep your doctor.. your insurance plan.. while saving $2,500 per family.”

It’s not that you and I are any more accustomed to his lies, but we all know that his biggest lie by far had nothing to do with healthcare, and started with the words, “I do solemnly swear…” I must also admit, with a Cheshire Cat smile, that the hope he was referring to was that one day in our not too distant future, the name Obama will become synonymous with lying;  like “Come on, that was a bald-faced obama, you can’t expect us to believe that.” Now wouldn’t that be poetic justice for a disciple of Saul Alinsky to allow We The People to get the final - ridicule!    

       I think it’s time we stop, children. What’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.

Interestingly, these same people who are just now waking up wanted to believe that their President, the Leader of the Free World, would not intentionally mislead them,  that he wouldn’t lie to us just to win an election. The operative words are - to us - because they are now the ones who just had their health insurance policy - cancelled. Now they have to turn away, be it momentarily during a commercial break from The Good Wife, and say - Damn! A new policy is going to cost me twice what we were paying with these outrageously high deductibles, AND, our children are grown so we don’t need under 12 year old dental; my wife doesn’t need maternity or abortion coverage; or end-of-life counseling.   The newly-awoken will soon find out what being on the giving end of the redistribution of wealth equation feels like.

Paranoia strikes deep. Into your life it will creep. It starts when you’re always afraid. You step out of line, the man comes and takes you away.

On October 1st, after spending the past 4 years as an unpopular concept, his signature achievement met the unpopular, light-of-day reality, as the untested healthcare exchange website - healthcare.gov - unbeknownst to anyone in his administration - went live - well, went almost live. Numbers and statistics have never been my strong suit, so it’s understandable why my favorite report on the number of signups in the early days was that more Americans had landed on the Moon than signed up for a new ObamaCare compliant health insurance policy, with 76% of that number, I’m told, placing their insurance order in a shopping cart, as they had to watch the end of The Good Wife. As October turned to November the lies as cover for the earlier lies almost got down to defining the word ‘is’, as Bill Clinton did so slyly.  But, Steny Hoyer came close when he said, he didn’t mean “You can keep it - PERIOD, what he meant to add was “..so long as the policy didn’t change.” But, Steny conveniently omitted that to be compliant, all health insurance policies had to ‘change’ because ObamaCare mandated it. Thank you, Steny, you can sit down now.  And, as everybody ...started to look at what’s going down - Obama panicked!    

Battle lines being drawn. Nobody’s right, if everybody’s wrong.

There seems to be a fundamental battle, with lines being drawn between the policies written into the law and the political showmanship necessary for selling the law to the masses. Now, you can keep your healthcare plan. Period! Well, kinda, but maybe we should have used a small ‘p’ and without the exclamation point.  President Obama told us - again - the other day that, “If you like your insurance policy, you can keep it - For A Year! But, surprise! He can’t make this promise work either, because what he just promised is out of his control, it’s now up to the insurance companies to make that promise work. But, nobody’s right, if everybody’s wrong. Have you ever noticed, how it takes a man with Barack Obama’s integrity to one day refer to all the insurance companies as “Bad Apples” for not meeting his standards and requirements of ObamaCare; but the next day, when he needs them for shifting the blame away from himself, they are - Good Apples.  And, as we’ve come to expect from Dishonest Barack, being in his Good-Apple-Graces may be short lived.  You see, insurance companies don’t want the risk of being his fall guys either; but, they are also smart enough to realize that his latest fix was put in play primarily to shift the blame for policies being cancelled away from ObamaCare and right at them - the mean ‘fat cats’ insurance corporations - aka Bad Apples.

But, even if his latest fix works - it won’t!  What happens if by the end of November healthcare.gov is still not working? How ‘bout the end of December? Since the only way people can receive their federal subsidies on their healthcare policy is through the ObamaCare exchange, if it’s not working, millions who were not able to sign up, will end up paying a fine (or is it a tax?) to the IRS, or say it isn’t so, they will be left with nothing but getting health insurance the old fashioned way by calling an agent on the phone and deciding freely on a policy that works best for them; and then go out to dinner and a movie, in America, with the money that they just saved. 

By the way, this latest promise in no way helps those five million citizens.  Like collateral damage their policies were cancelled, and as one commentator, wittily using the medical metaphor said, “You can’t get those shots back in the syringe.” Except for one small problem, they’re not collateral damage or shots - they are American people - who got screwed. The Democrats are in chaos and will try to offer - something - because that’s a lot of votes they could lose - which sadly is their only motivation. I have never been aware of such reversals of fortune since The Republican Shutdown, to today’s Democratic Signature Healthcare Implosion. Meanwhile, one industry specialist noted: “Changing the rules after healthcare plans have already met the requirements of the law could destabilize the market and result in higher premiums for all of our customers.”  The federal government telling a privately owned company what products it can or cannot sell is like them telling us we can’t buy a Pontiac. Oh Wait! They already did that, never mind.

Young people speaking their minds. Getting so much resistance from behind.

It seems that President Obama has gotten everyone, including Congress, so used to his dictatorial tactic of using EO’s to change or amend any part of a law that doesn’t fit his ever evolving agenda, so he threw the old ‘enforcement discretion’, out there, and why not? It worked so well to keep the illegal aliens ‘corralled’ while he works the back-room-deals for their amnesty voting rights. This is basically telling insurance companies to break the law, and we’ll use ‘discretion’ (wink) in enforcing it’.  But, this time there is a Problem! (w/a capital ‘P’) Indiscriminately changing laws on his own violates the Constitutional separation of powers, usurping the power of Congress to exercise its own independent judgment. Now Speaker Boehner must come out of the smoking lounge long enough to say more than, “I don’t see within the law how they can do this administratively… to keep his pledge that would be both legal and effective.”  Someone must get a note to Johnny B. that clearly states, “You debate the legality of ‘amendments’ to the law in the House of Representatives!” Signed - We The People.  

But, truly I think .. it’s time we STOP! Children, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down. It’s an overthrow of our Constitutional Republic; it’s socialism destroying our freedoms, that’s what’s going down. 

The definition of socialism includes the denial of individual rights - by force. That force used doesn’t always imply a gun-in-ya-face, but it can easily lead to that as we witnessed in Watertown, Massachusetts after the Boston Marathon bombing.  Because, force can also be by overly burdensome taxation, mandates, and regulations.  ObamaCare is by force. There is an old humorous saying that says socialists don’t care what you do as long as it’s mandatory, but it’s not that humorous, when the joke is on us.

STOP! trying to put lipstick on this pig, ObamaCare is socialism, with its 2,000+ pages and tens of thousands of regulations written or to be written by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.  ObamaCare is control.  ObamaCare is power over America’s freedoms.  Before ObamaCare, five million people chose their healthcare policies - freely. But, since ObamaCare became ‘the law of the land’ mandating that all insurance ‘products’ meet his new federal standards, while our freedom to choose was taken away or better yet - cancelled!

We are well aware that ObamaCare is only the first step in their ultimate utopian goal of a single-payer, government run/controlled healthcare system. Our job is to STOP! them. We say - I want my country back.  This may well be our final chance at - getting it back. It’s not going to be easy either, as they say, politics is a blood sport, some of us may get ‘scarred’ a little.  But, here is the choice: we either become - One Nation under Obama with Poverty and Unemployment for All - or between now and November, 2014 we work our ‘no-ifs-ands-or-butts’ off, to send the ultimate message to - Cancel the employment of every Democratic Representative and Senator who nullified their oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America by voting in favor of ObamaCare.  PERIOD.


God bless,
JohnnyD

 

A 1% tax on all bank transactions

ON JANUARY 1, 2014, THE US GOVERNMENT WILL BE REQUIRING EVERYONE TO HAVE DIRECT DEPOSIT FOR SS CHECKS.



A 1% tax on all bank transactions is what HR 4646 calls for.

Do you receive a paycheck, or a retirement check from Social Security or a pension fund and have it direct deposit??

Well guess what ... It looks as if the Obama administration wants to tax it 1% !!!

This bill was put forth by Rep. Chaka Fattah (D-PA).

YES, that is 1% tax on all bank transactions - HR 4646, every time it goes in and every time money goes out.

Ask your congressperson to vote NO.

1% tax on all bank transactions ~ HR 4646 - ANOTHER NEW OBAMA TAX SLIPPED IN WHILE WE WERE ASLEEP. Checked this on snopes, it's true! Check it out yourself ~ HR 4646.

President Obama's finance team is recommending a one percent (1%) transaction fee (TAX). His plan is to sneak it in after the November elections to keep it under the radar.

This is a 1% tax on all transactions at any financial institution - banks, credit unions, savings and loans, etc.. Any deposit you make, or even a transfer within your own bank from one account to another, will have a 1% tax charged.

If your paycheck or your Social Security or whatever is direct deposit, it will get a 1% tax charged for the transaction.

If your paycheck is $1000, then you will pay the government $10 just for the privilege of depositing your paycheck in your bank. Even if you hand carry your paycheck or any check in to your bank for a deposit, 1% tax will be charged.

You receive a $5,000 stock dividend from your broker, the government takes $50 just to allow you to deposit that check in the bank.

If you take $1,000 cash to deposit at your bank, 1% tax will be charged.

Mind you, this is from the man who promised that, if you make under $250,000 per year, you will not see one penny of new tax.

Keep your eyes and ears open, you will be amazed at what you learn about this guy's under-the-table moves to increase the number of ways you are taxed.

Oh, and by the way, if you receive a refund from the IRS next year and you have it direct deposited or you walk in to deposit that check, you guessed it. You will pay a 1% charge of that money just for putting it in your bank.

Remember, any money, cash, check or whatever, no matter where it came from, you will pay a 1% fee if you put it in the bank.

Some will say, oh well, it's just 1%. Are you kidding me? It's a 1% tax increase across the board. Remember, once the tax is there, they can also raise it at will. And if anyone protests, they will just say, "Oh,that's not really a tax, it's a user fee"!

Think this is no big deal? Go back and look at the transactions you made from last year's banking statements. Then add the total of all those transactions and deduct 1%. Still think it's no big deal?


The following is copied from Snopes:

1. snopes.com: Debt Free America Act••• Is the  U.S.government proposing a 1% tax on debit card usage and/or banking transactions?

It is true. The bill is HR-4646 introduced by US Rep Peter DeFazio D-Oregon and US Senator Tom Harkin D-Iowa. Their plan is to sneak it in after the November elections.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/taxes/debtfree.asp


God bless,
JohnnyD