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Faced with a budget crisis of his own making (with implicit collaboration /leadership from Joe Hoeffel), Jim Matthews is looking for politically expedient ways to get Montco out the mess and still get re-elected. Peggy Gibbons has the story at The Intelligencer:

“What we are looking for over the next several months is ideas, solid ideas,” said Matthews. “What is not tolerable is second guessing after the fact. That is not helpful to anyone.”

How to pass a tax increase to pay for your cronyism without making it look like you are passing a tax increase to pay for your cronyism? Crony Jim Maza, who makes $90,000 a year in his capacity as a part time county employee, has an idea:

If the county labeled the tax a “public safety” tax, most would not object to paying higher taxes, said Deputy Chief Operating Officer James W. Maza. But when it is listed as just a tax increase for government, most would object “because they think government is a waste,” said Maza.

As usual, Commissioner Bruce Castor is being especially “unhelpful” in solving Matthews’ and Hoeffel’s image problem caused by the budget crisis, caused by they themselves:

While Republicans across the country snapped to attention when the economy collapsed and realized our country could not spend its way to prosperity, and that the times called for austerity, Jim Matthews teamed up with Joe Hoeffel to oversee a massive expansion of our county government spending fueled by borrowed dollars.

Sound familiar? Sounds a lot like the way Barack Obama is running the Federal Government. Flashback to the 1990s, a time I referred to during the 2007 campaign as “Hoeffel I.” We find ourselves in exactly the same place we were when Hoeffel was commissioner before: broke. You see, in the 1990s, Hoeffel pushed the sham “bipartisan” government against the wishes of the voters and the result was a disaster. In fact, when Jim Matthews announced his run for Commissioner in 1999, he said he was running to oust the “traitor” who aligned himself with Democrat Hoeffel to bring the county to the brink of financial ruin. Ironic, isn’t it? In 2007, I said we couldn’t afford “Hoeffel I” and we can’t afford “Hoeffel II.” Well, thanks to Jim Matthews, we got “Hoeffel II.” And the results, predictably, were the same. Some say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Welcome to the asylum.

My guess is that a new “public safety tax,” will indeed be coming to your Montgomery County household soon.

These Philadelphians and their crafty money making schemes….

Fear not, cupcake connoisseurs. The Philadelphia cupcake truck wasn’t out of business long.

Buttercream cupcake truck owner Kate Carrara says the city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections confiscated her truck Tuesday in the University City neighborhood, saying she was vending in a prohibited area.

She did have a license to do business in Philadelphia though, unlike those pesky bloggers.

Carrara says inspectors cornered her truck to prevent her from leaving before driving it away themselves. She says they gave her a removal report and a violation for vending in a prohibited area and left her on the street.

It cost her $200 to get her vehicle / bakery back.

So the city treasure is up overall.

Friends of business, that city.

Friends of business.

Believe it or not, I understand and sympathize Chairman Jim Matthews’ reasoning here, which basically amounts to this: If Montco funds prenatal care for the uninsured—most of which are illegal aliens—they will end up saving the hospitals money, since the cost of of a complicated birth can be triple that of a normal birth. Prenatal care can head off most of those complications.

Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not going to bash Matthews, or the rest of the commissioners, for their stance on this issue; instead I’d like to take this opportunity to point out the very real economic consequences of illegal immigration. Times Herald:

In recent years, Norristown area hospitals have been inundated with Latina women, many of whom have no medical insurance. This year, Montgomery Hospital is projected to deliver more than 1,000 babies, though that number could climb higher, according to local officials. Births skyrocketed this year at the Norristown medical center after Mercy Suburban Hospital in East Norriton closed its obstetrics department.

Why did Mercy Suburban close it’s Obstetrics department?

On average, Montgomery Hospital loses $2,500 for every baby born there and could rack up a total of $16 million in uncompensated care in 2010, according to a hospital official in June.

The statistics on illegal births are elusive and can only be estimated, but those estimates are staggering:

“There’s been anecdotal discussions that nationally right now, as high as 15 percent of all births in the United States are from undocumented mothers, and it is bankrupting out hospitals,” Matthews said.

An estimated 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the United States in 2008 were the offspring of “unauthorized immigrants,” according to a new analysis of Census Bureau data by the Pew Hispanic Center released in August.

The figures are based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s March 2009 Current Population Survey, augmented with the Pew Hispanic Center’s analysis of the demographic characteristics of the illegal immigrant population in the U.S.

The analysis finds that nearly four in five, or 79 percent, of the 5.1 million children under the age of 18 of unauthorized immigrants were born in this country and therefore are U.S. citizens. In total, 4 million U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrant parents lived in this country in 2009 alongside 1.1 million foreign-born children of unauthorized immigrant parents.

Accurate estimates of how many Hispanic people live in the Norristown area are elusive, though recent estimates are between 10,000 and 20,000. And though the Norristown medical center is burdened with increasing numbers of uninsured mothers in its obstetrics program, the hospital claims it does not gather data on birth mothers’ immigration status.

“We have births running eight to 12 on a daily basis in Montgomery County in Montgomery Hospital,” Matthews said. “Two weeks ago, there was 13 one day, and the previous Thursday nine or 10, and there’s no (insurance) money.”

Anyone who says that opposition to illegal immigration is rooted solely in bigotry should read this article as many times as it takes to have it sink in. Uninsured illegals are not only bankrupting our hospitals, but they are driving up the cost of insurance for the responsible members of society who are here legally and are insured, since health care providers need to make up the lost revenue somehow. It is federal law that anyone who shows up in a hospital emergency room cannot be turned away from care, yet we are supposed to believe that rising healthcare costs are the fault of greedy insurance companies.

Perhaps if illegal immigrants were denied free healthcare, they wouldn’t be so quick to come to this country. Yet denying healthcare to anyone in need would be inhumane and go against our basic American altruistic spirit. So what is the answer? The Montco Commissioners are stuck between a rock and a hard place, opting instead for the lesser of two evils in order to minimize the economic impact to taxpayers.

Yet our federal government, the very organization that is specifically charged with protecting and enforcing our borders, chooses to ignore this crisis, demonize those who want it addressed, and instead, expand into the healthcare business precisely because of a “crisis” that it helps to create by ignoring and abetting illegal immigration. 

This, not bigotry, is the reason that there is a movement afoot to amend the 14th amendment. 

Nice.

One by one, the Phillies players walked up to Roy Halladay and shook his hand. Halladay’s smile was the widest it has been since he joined the team.

The righthander purchased around 60 Baume & Mercier watches to commemorate his perfect game May 29. He gave out the watches as gifts to everyone in the clubhouse — all of the players who were on the active roster then, the entire coaching staff, all clubhouse personnel (including bat boy Rob DiClementi), training and video staff as well as public relations officials.

The watches were enclosed in brown boxes with an inscription on the front: “We did it together. Thanks, Roy Halladay.”

            Much has been made about the new “Blogger Tax” that Philadelphia has put in place recently. Many people have stated how this tax is malicious in the fact that typically this tax is taking 6x’s the amount of money that any person has made from their individual blog. What’s also been said is how this is just another way to show how a city that is incapable of creating anything even remotely looking like a balanced budget is just trying to figure out how to shake more money loose from people’s pockets, just like a bully in your old school yard from when we were kids.

            What most people are not recognizing though is that this isn’t about money. This isn’t about taxes. This isn’t about trying to balance a budget or receiving the proper tax money that the city feels entitled and owed. This is about control.

            Anyone that has ever experienced the wrath of a bully, like myself (I mean seriously people…how could I not with a name like Ian), knows that the point of what a bully is doing to you has nothing to do with your lunch money, or wanting to really hear you scream Uncle when your arm is wrenched behind your back, or calls you names in front of the whole school to make people laugh at you. The whole point of what a bully does is to make you dance to their tune and do as he says. He wants to flex his muscles and hurt you because he can, and because it gives him power over someone that he believes is weak or powerless to stop them. Control. “I can make you do what I want and there’s nothing you can do to stop me!” That’s the credo and mantra of the bully clan, and Philadelphia just showed its true colors.

            When you decide that the voice of another person is somehow subjected to an erroneous and outrageous fee on their thoughts and words, you’re doing this not to collect the maybe couple of thousands of dollars that a city could make from such a tax, but to specifically target those individuals that have the courage to make their voices heard and speak against the wrongs of an out-of-control government. It doesn’t matter what side of the aisle that the voice speaks from, the point is to shut them up or make them pay. What do you think is the likelihood that a stay-at-home mom with no extra income, and certainly none made from her blog, is going to do when the city comes along and tells her that you need to pay us $300 right now or cease and desist speaking your mind. She’s going to stop speaking her mind, and the bully will have won. This is the government version of “Gimme your lunch money or I will punch you in the face!”

             Whether this is a local borough, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the US Federal government, the City of Philadelphia, or a big dumb jerk in the playground, a bully is still a bully.

              In my younger days, when I was a small, four-eyed, scrawny little kid, I was at the mercy of these types of bullies at first. Mine was a boy by the name of Scott. After a while though, there’s only so much pain, fear, and teasing a boy can take. It wasn’t until I stood up to Scott one day on a spring morning in 4^th-grade and fought back that the teasing stopped. Sure I lost that fight, after all he was bigger and stronger than me, but it was from that moment forward that the veil of fear was lifted from him and everyone saw that even a little pipsqueak like me could make a bully bleed. Once that happens, a bully becomes nothing. A bully becomes something to have contempt and pity for, not fear.

             This is Philadelphia’s version of the bully wrenching your arm and telling you to scream Uncle. We need to stand against this intimidation, all of us who write on the web and have people who read us. We need to focus our attention on the City of Brotherly Love, like that fits right now or has for years, and verbally punch the bully in the face and make him bleed. Once that happens, he will lose all the power of a mean boy on the playground and become what he really is, a pitiful child with no self-control and something that we “Little Pipsqueak’s” should not tolerate any longer.

The city’s official position, which isn’t much better…

The city says no.

It has a business-privilege license that is required of any business operating in the city. The license costs $50 a year or $300 for a lifetime license.

Well, some bloggers who make a few dollars from Web ads were informed recently that they had to obtain a license. Not because they were bloggers, the city says. But because they made money.

Something about small-time bloggers getting hit up for money by the government got a lot of blog writers and readers fired up.

“Unbelievably stupid,” wrote a commenter on BuzzFeed. “Even if you look past the issues of free speech and excessive regulation, no city progresses economically by making its young, tech-savvy residents move away.”

Philebrity, a local blog that makes money and has a business-privilege license, declared: “Philly brain drain is so drastic and wild that any sort of news story that runs anywhere about how the City, in an official capacity, discourages creativity or free speech feels like a punch in the face.”

I think the city has a sound position. It’s not about free speech or liberty or whatever. It’s about money.

Some blogs run as a business (very little, but some income), and the city isn’t business friendly.

50 years of a Democrat run city has led them to scrape the bottom of the bottom of the barrel for any possible source of income.

That’s the message that needs to sent.

Business people (of all kinds) have no friends in City Hall.

Just wait till they decide they can charge some kind of city-wage tax on blogs too.

Toleration is a two-way street. In order to be tolerated, you must be tolerant and tolerable. But what if one of the disputants has no interest in  being tolerant and is making irresponsible demands that are profoundly offensive? Christopher Hitchens has a nice piece in Slate on the problem:

As Western Europe has already found to its cost, local Muslim leaders have a habit, once they feel strong enough, of making demands of the most intolerant kind. Sometimes it will be calls for censorship of anything “offensive” to Islam. Sometimes it will be demands for sexual segregation in schools and swimming pools. The script is becoming a very familiar one. And those who make such demands are of course usually quite careful to avoid any association with violence. They merely hint that, if their demands are not taken seriously, there just might be a teeny smidgeon of violence from some other unnamed quarter …

As for the gorgeous mosaic of religious pluralism, it’s easy enough to find mosque Web sites and DVDs that peddle the most disgusting attacks on Jews, Hindus, Christians, unbelievers, and other Muslims—to say nothing of insane diatribes about women and homosexuals. This is why the fake term Islamophobia is so dangerous: It insinuates that any reservations about Islam must ipso facto be “phobic.” A phobia is an irrational fear or dislike. Islamic preaching very often manifests precisely this feature, which is why suspicion of it is by no means irrational.

Read the whole thing here.

Hitchens is absolutely right on this matter. This is why the demands of the Iman Rauf and his backers must be resisted and why his supporters are acting shamefully by branding opposition “Islamophobic”.

Everybody knows that only Democrats actually live in Philly. All local Republican bloggers actually write their blogs out of my home in Montgomery County, regardless of where they receive their mail.

I’m sure all the liberal Philly bloggers will welcome this opportunity to be a part of keeping the liberries open and keeping City Hall denizens in tasty perks. I salute them with a tip of my tax-free sugary soda.

Seriously, can we dress up as Indians and dump laptops into the Delaware River in protest?

Blogger Tax Gouges Free Thought

Just sayin’….

Iowahawk tweets:

Unlike many conservative bloggers, I refuse to trade my integrity for GOP cash. Also, I always enjoy the rich menthol flavor of Kools.