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Hope n' Change Cartoons just reached our 150th follower, daily readership has reached all-time highs, and we couldn't be more delighted!
Hope n' Change was created to give conservatives something to laugh about each and every day...as well as links to important news stories and thought-provoking (if frequently tongue-in-cheek) commentary.
The growth of the strip owes everything to you, the readers. You're the ones who continue to spread the word to friends, copy cartoons into emails, post cartoons on your own blogs, and make this whole crazy enterprise worthwhile!
My sincerest thanks for making this a party...and here's hoping we can make it even bigger!
-Stilton Jarlsberg, MD
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In order to present Obamacare as "deficit neutral," the Democrats had to find fictitious sources of money to pay for it. So they proposed taking a half-trillion dollars out of Medicare, and cut other funds which were intended to pay doctors and hospitals who treat seniors. According to the president's own advisors, these cuts would drive 1-in-5 Medicare providers into bankruptcy.
To keep that from happening, the Democrats have planned all along to add a whole new form of taxes to help pay for their vast, unfunded social programs. The "Value Added Tax" is essentially a national sales tax on everything...making every dollar you've scrimped, saved, and paid taxes on worth less in the marketplace.
As an added bonus, the VAT tax will also slow the economy, discourage job growth, and give bureaucrats in Washington additional power as they trade favors to determine exactly who and what will be taxed.
A VAT makes it easy for politicians to raise taxes a little at a time...rather like slowly raising the flames under a pot of water with a frog in it. Only in this case, it's not a frog who's going to get cooked.
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Barack Obama just signed a treaty with Russia to reduce the size of the US nuclear arsenal, and cease development of any new American nuclear weapons. Of course, you don't give all that away without getting something substantial in return...which is why Russia has said that they "can not rule out that the UN Security Council will not revisit the question of (Iranian) sanctions."
Translators are still trying to figure out what this means in English, but in the interim the president is simply thrilled with his own accomplishment, calling the Russian statement "an enormous shift" in policy.
There is, however, a little sticking point that the president is more reluctant to talk about. While Russia might agree, in principle, to perhaps reconsider the possibility of maybe discussing sanctions, they have made it exceedingly clear that they won't accept an embargo of refined oil products to Iran...which is widely believed to be the only sanction which Iran might actually care about.
In other words, Iran will remain free to develop nuclear weapons...while the United States is forbidden from doing the same thing.
We're not entirely sure why the president believes this to be a great diplomatic victory, but we'll have the translators keep working on it...
