It looks like John Kerry will soon be our next Secretary of State. The initial nominee, Susan Rice, went down as a sacrificial lamb so that the Republicans can say that they got their pound of flesh and President Obama can get the person he probably wanted in the first place without the same intense scrutiny. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that this was the same thing that President G.W. Bush did with his nomination of Harriet Meyers to the Supreme Court, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m not even going to focus on how many ways Kerry’s past statements on foreign policy make him incredibly unqualified for this position. While I don’t like the idea of Kerry representing the United States in this role, just like potentially appointing Anna Wintour as our ambassador to the U. K. I think that Kerry is a perfect representative for the Obama administration and how it sees the United States’ role in the world. There is one small problem – John Kerry belongs in jail.
Back in December in an effort to try to boost Al Sharpton, MSNBC managed to find one of the few people who could make Sharpton look intelligent by comparison and booked Harry Belafonte as a guest. Belafonte went on to make some… interesting comments:
“That there should be this lingering infestation of really corrupt people who sit trying to dismantle the wishes of the people, the mandate that has been given to Barack Obama, and I don’t know what more they want,” he said. “The only thing left for Barack Obama to do is to work like a third world dictator and just put all these guys in jail.”
This got some attention from the political junkie class, but not much else. Such blatant stupidity is only newsworthy when it’s spoken by a conservative. Belafonte is asserting that opposing the president’s Obamacare mandate and the higher taxes needed to fund it is a crime that warrants imprisonment. Well, you can add John Kerry to that category. You can also add Al Franken, Elizabeth Warren, and Joe Lieberman among 18 Democrats who signed a petition to Harry Reid asking for a delay in the implementation of the medical device tax that was scheduled to kick in on January 1st. Their complaint is that the deferment is needed because the medical device industry had been given insufficient guidance as to how to comply with the new medical device tax. You read that correctly – a delay was requested because clarification was needed for a bill that was signed into law nearly two years ago.
AP writer Bob Salsberg helped to clarify the reason for the request: The tax, scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, is expected to raise $20 billion over 10 years. It’s one of several taxes imposed on segments of the health care industry to help pay for President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.
Lobbyists for medical device makers say implementation of the tax could jeopardize about 43,000 jobs nationwide in a $64.7 billion industry. They say companies have shed about 6,000 jobs in the past year, some in anticipation of the tax, while others might scuttle expansion plans or cut back on research that can lead to medical breakthroughs.
So now we have a group of Democrats who want to delay part of the greatest piece of legislation signed into law by the most brilliant president in American history and and are opposing the revenues needed to fund it? I’m scratching my head over this one, as every lefty I know has been arguing that higher taxes and increased regulation don’t have any negative impact on companies’ hiring or expansion plans, and on a larger scale don’t hurt economic growth. So why on Earth would there be this kind of opposition? Since there is no rational explanation, as much as it pains me to say this I can only reach this conclusion. We already know that Kerry is unpatriotic. But even worse still:
Cross posted from Brother Bob’s Blog
