King Barack's Magical Thinkers

October 25, 2013 6:30 PM

 

Obamacare’s Magical Thinkers

 
Not even the coolest president ever can conjure up a national medical regime for 300 million people.

 

By  Mark Steyn

If you’re looking for an epitaph for the republic (and these days who isn’t?) try this — from August 2010 and TechCrunch’s delirious preview of Healthcare.gov:

“We were working in a very very nimble hyper-consumer-focused way,” explained Todd Park, the chief technology officer of the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, “all fused in this kind of maelstrom of pizza, Mountain Dew, and all-nighters . . . and, you know, idealism. That kind of led to the magic that was produced.”

Wow. Think of the magic that Madison, Hamilton, and the rest of those schlubs could have produced if they’d only had pizza and Mountain Dew and been willing to pull a few all-nighters at Philadelphia in 1787. Somewhere between the idealism and the curling slice of last night’s pepperoni, Macon Phillips, the administration’s director of new media, happened to come across a tweet by Edward Mullen of Jersey City in which he twitpiced his design for what a health-insurance exchange could look like. So Phillips printed it out to show his fellow administration officials: “Look, this is the sort of creativity that is out there,” he said. “One thing led to another and he left Jersey City to come to D.C. and helped push us through an information architectural process.”

Don’t you just love it! This is way cooler than the decline and fall of the Roman Empire: The only “architectural process” they had was crumbling viaducts. I think we can all agree that Barack Obama is hipper than all other government leaders anywhere, ever, combined.

Unfortunately, the dogs bark and the pizza-delivery bike moves on, and, in the cold grey morning after of the grease-stained cardboard box with the rubberized cheese stuck to it, Obamacare wound up somewhat less hipper and, in fact, not even HIPAA — the unpersuasively groovy acronym for federally mandated medical privacy in America. Appearing before Congress on Thursday, the magicians of Obamacare eventually conceded that, on their supposedly HIPAA-compliant database, deep in the “information architectural process” is a teensy-weensy little bit of “source code” that reads, “You have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding any communication of any data transmitted or stored on this information system.”

Democrat members of the House committee professed to be bewildered at why anyone would be either surprised or upset to discover that his information can be shared with anyone in the federal government, including a corrupt and diseased IRS that uses what confidential information it can acquire to torment perceived ideological enemies. And at a certain level the more blasé of the people’s representatives such as New Jersey’s Frank Pallone have a point: If Obama thinks nothing of tapping Angela Merkel’s cell phone (as she had cause to complain to him on Wednesday, in what was said to be a “cool” conversation, and not in the hepcat sense), why would he extend any greater privacy rights to your Auntie Mabel?

Incidentally, do you think we need a congressional oversight committee to look into the effectiveness of congressional oversight committees? Every time I’m stuck at Gate 37 and glance up at the 24/7 Wolf Blitzer channel there’s somebody testifying about something: Benghazi . . . Lois Lerner . . . Obamacare . . . No one gets fired, no agency gets closed, nothing changes.

The witness who coughed up the intriguing tidbit about Obamacare’s exemption from privacy protections was one Cheryl Campbell of something called CGI. This rang a vague bell with me. CGI is not a creative free spirit from Jersey City with an impressive mastery of Twitter, but a Canadian corporate behemoth. Indeed, CGI is so Canadian their name is French: Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique.

Their most famous government project was for the Canadian Firearms Registry. The registry was estimated to cost in total $119 million, which would be offset by $117 million in fees. That’s a net cost of $2 million. Instead, by 2004 the CBC (Canada’s PBS) was reporting costs of some $2 billion — or a thousand times more expensive.

Yeah, yeah, I know, we’ve all had bathroom remodelers like that. But in this case the database had to register some 7 million long guns belonging to some two-and-a-half to three million Canadians. That works out to almost $300 per gun — or somewhat higher than the original estimate for processing a firearm registration of $4.60. Of those $300 gun registrations, Canada’s auditor general reported to parliament that much of the information was either duplicated or wrong in respect to basic information such as names and addresses.


Sound familiar?

Also, there was a 1-800 number, but it wasn’t any use.

Sound familiar?

So it was decided that the sclerotic database needed to be improved.

Sound familiar?

But it proved impossible to “improve” CFIS (the Canadian Firearms Information System). So CGI was hired to create an entirely new CFIS II, which would operate alongside CFIS I until the old system could be scrapped. CFIS II was supposed to go operational on
January 9, 2003, but the January date got postponed to June, and 2003 to 2004, and $81 million was thrown at it before a new
Conservative government scrapped the fiasco in 2007. Last year, the government of Ontario canceled another CGI registry that never saw the light of day — just for one disease, diabetes, and costing a mere $46 million.

But there’s always America! “We continue to view U.S. federal government as a significant growth opportunity,” declared CGI’s chief exec, in what would also make a fine epitaph for the republic. Pizza and Mountain Dew isn’t very Montreal, and on the evidence of three years of missed deadlines in Ontario and the four-year overrun on the firearms database CGI don’t sound like they’re pulling that many all-nighters. Was the government of the United States aware that CGI had been fired by the government of Canada and the government of Ontario (and the government of New Brunswick)? Nobody’s saying. But I doubt it would make much difference. Asked by Mother Jones to explain why Obama the candidate uses the Internet so effectively but Obama the government is a bust, his 2008 tech maestro Clay Johnson put it this way: “The first person that you need in order to start a Web company would be a Web developer; the first person you need to start a government-contracting firm is an attorney.” The problem with Obamacare isn’t the website design, it’s the nature of government procurement in an unaccountable bureaucracy serving 300 million people.

Despite the best efforts of President Obama and doting tweeters in Jersey City, government isn’t groovy. The standard rap on Obamacare is that it’s turned America’s health system into the DMV. If only. I had cause to go to the DMV in Twin Mountain, N.H., the other day. In and out in ten minutes. Modest accommodations, a little down-at-heel, nothing cool about it at all. But it worked just fine. Friendly chap, no complaints. Government can do that at the town level, county level, even (more sparingly) at the state level.

But a national medical regime for 300 million people? Not in a First World country. And, when you’re mad enough to try it, the failure is not the insignificant enrollment numbers, but the vaporization of the existing health plans of 119,000 Pennsylvanians, 160,000 Californians, 300,000 Floridians, 800,000 in that tech tweeter’s New Jersey . . . That’s the magic that happens when you disdain the limits of prosaic, humdrum, just-about-functioning government. Perhaps things will get so bad the coolest president ever will no longer seem quite so hip. But, alas, you’ll have to wait three years for a hip replacement. That’s government health care for you.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

ObamaCare Taking on Water - Peggy Noonan

ObamaCare Is Taking On Water: It’s not just a buggy website, it’s a disaster of Titanic proportions.

We should not lose The Headline in the day-to-day headlines. This is big history, not small. The ObamaCare rollout is a disaster for the White House, not a problem or a challenge or an embarrassment, not a gaffe or a bad few weeks. It is a political disaster, and the only question is whether it is partially recoverable, meaning the system can be made to work in a generally satisfactory way in the next few weeks. But—it has to be repeated—they had 3½ years after passage of the Affordable Care Act to make the program into something the American people could register for and feel they were benefiting from. Three and a half years! They had a long-declared start date: It would all go live Oct. 1, 2013, and everyone in the government, every contractor and consultant, knew it.
The president put the meaning of his presidency into the program—it informally carries his name, it is his brand. It was unveiled with great fanfare, and it didn’t work. For almost anybody. Crashed systems, frozen screens, phone registration that prompted you back to the site that sent you to the 800 number, like a high-tech Möbius strip.
All this from the world’s greatest, most technologically sophisticated nation, the one that invented the computer and the Internet. And from a government that is able to demand and channel a great deal of the people’s wealth.
So you’d think it would sort of work. And it didn’t. Which is a disaster. . . . It was Bill Daley — accomplished political player, former commerce secretary and, most killingly, former chief of staff of President Obama — who Thursday, on “CBS This Morning,” admitted the scale of the problem. Asked whether Kathleen Sebelius should be fired, he said: “To me that’s kind of like firing Captain Smith on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg.”
The Titanic. Some will see his comments as disloyal. Actually they were candid and realistic. Although in fairness, the Titanic at least had three good days, and Edward Smith chose to go down with the ship.

We used to launch men to the Moon. Now the U.S. government can’t launch a website.
Plus:

And there is the enduring mystery of why the president, who in his career has attempted to persuade the American people to have greater faith in and reliance on the federal government’s ability to help, continues to go forward with an astounding lack of interest in the reputation of government.
He talks but he doesn’t implement, never makes it work. He allows the IRS under his watch to be humiliated by scandal, waste, ill judgements prompted by ideological assumptions. He allows his signature program, the one that will make his name in the history books, to debut in failure. In response he says bland, rounded words that leave you wondering what just got said.
We’re all reading of Jack Kennedy. He stayed up nights with self-recrimination after failure. “How could I have been so stupid?” he asked about the Bay of Pigs. A foreseeable mistake and he’d blown it, listened to the wrong people, made the wrong judgments. That man suffered over his missteps. He worried about his reputation, and the reputation of his government, and of America.
It is disorienting to not see this in a president. It is another thing about this story that feels not only historic, but historically strange.

Our president is historically strange, and I predict that future historians will find themselves marveling at just how strange.

A Shoking Number

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          www.nationalreview.com           PRINT

October 26, 2013 1:00 AM

 

A Shocking Number

 

The average African-American family is poorer than the average family in India.

 

By  Kevin D. Williamson

The phrase “waving the bloody shirt” grew popular in the South as a description of Republicans’ alleged exaggeration of the crimes of the Ku Klux Klan, the paramilitary division of the Democratic party. It is an irony of history that waving the bloody shirt has in the Age of Obama become the Democrats’ primary mode of discourse. Oppose the Affordable Care Act? Racism. Like the Second Amendment? Racism. Black Barbie is on sale for half off, but white Barbie is full price? Racism. Black holes sucking the energy out of your quadrant? Why single out the black ones? Racism!

Waving the bloody shirt is not only about making an emotional appeal — it’s a strategy for distraction. It became a bitter joke in the Soviet Union — whether the issue was the crimes of Stalin or the fact that the Lada was a piece of junk, the answer was always the same: A u vas negrov linchuyut. The same principle is at work in today’s Democratic commentariat: As Americans start to notice what a fiasco Obamacare is . . . Oh, look! A Confederate flag! There is really nothing more satisfying to liberals than a Confederate flag sighting, though I wonder what they’d make of the fact that in my corner of Texas it is not unheard-of to see black men wearing Dixie belt buckles or T-shirts. (All of our necks are just different shades of red.) When Brad Paisley sings about the Confederate flag, it’s like Christmas morning for Touré. Yet, despite the daft insistence of Joan Walsh and the Affiliated Suburban Pearl-Clutchers of America, there is no neo-Confederate revanche just around the corner. The idea is, however, a useful distraction. But a distraction from what?

From $4,955.

Fifty years into the Democrats’ declaration of a war on poverty and President Kennedy’s first executive order for affirmative action, while spending $300 million a year on worthless diversity workshops and singing endless verses of “We Shall Overcome,” after enduring endless posturing from Barack Obama and the moral preening of his admirers, that is what black American families have to show for themselves: an average household net worth of $4,955. The average white household in these United States has a net worth of $110,729. Black Americans’ median net worth is less than 5 percent that of white Americans.

By way of comparison, black South Africans under apartheid had a median net worth about 6.8 percent that of white South Africans. Repeating: Black Americans are worse off relative to their white countrymen than black South Africans under apartheid were to theirs, a fact to which former Washington Post reporter Jon Jeter has drawn attention and from which he has drawn all the wrong conclusions. (Muppet News Flash: Washington Post straight-news reporter turns out to be a garden-variety liberal.) Philadelphia mayor John Street used to brag that “the brothers and sisters are running the city,” which would be more of a boast in a city with less criminal governance. Mayor Ray Nagin, whose fraud/conspiracy/money-laundering/bribery/tax-evasion trial should be getting under way any moment now, liked to promise that New Orleans would remain a “chocolate city.” A generation of one-party rule based on racial politics was enough to doom Detroit. Outside of the womb, the most dangerous place for a black American to be is in a city run by Democrats.

But somebody, somewhere, is flying a rebel flag.

And black Americans still have a median household net worth of less than half the price of a 2011 Ford Fiesta with 28,000 miles on it.

The median black American household is poorer than the average household in India, which has a net worth of about $5,500, according to the Economic Times.

Forty acres and a mule? Have you checked the price of a good mule lately?
‎

Everywhere it has been tried, the Democrats’ dependency agenda has been a social and economic catastrophe for black Americans — and a full-employment program for Democratic apparatchiks. This is not a conspiracy — it’s right out there in the open, every time a

Democratic politician knows that he can count on 90 percent of the black vote without lifting a finger, winning the opportunity to add four more years to the 50 years of broken promises Democrats have made to black Americans, who lag their fellow countrymen on practically every social indicator. “These Negroes,” said alleged civil-rights hero Lyndon Baines Johnson, “they’re getting pretty uppity these days, and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up their uppity-ness. We’ve got to give them a little something — just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”

So far, the LBJ plan seems to be working perfectly.

Black Americans did not leave the party of Lincoln for the party of Joe Biden; they left the party of Herbert Hoover for the party of Franklin Roosevelt. Or at least they thought they did. What they got instead was the party of sky-high crime, dangerous and dysfunctional schools, a joblessness rate for black men that is more than twice the rate for white men at 14 percent and rising. Twice the unemployment, twice the high-school dropouts, four times the abortions, four times the HIV, seven times the prison sentences, twelve times the babies born with congenital syphilis, fourteen times the murder victims, and nineteen times the gonorrhea.

All that and $4,955.
— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.

Crony Capitalism, Obamacare, Michelle

Cradle of Crony Capitalism:

NO BID CONTRACT: Michelle O's Princeton classmate is executive at company that built Obamacare site

First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website.

Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/25/michelle-obamas-princeton-classmate-is-executive-at-company-that-built-obamacare-website/#ixzz2ipwMSiyO

Delaying From Beind

Delaying From Behind

Bowing to the inevitable, Democrats think the unthinkable.

By

James Taranto

October 25, 2013

Our younger readers--those who were born yesterday--may not remember when delaying ObamaCare was considered a wild idea, its exponents limited to crazy right-wing terrorists. Times have certainly changed since--oh, the beginning of this week.

Obama and Shaheen in 2010. Associated Press

"Democrats facing difficult reelection campaigns in 2014--Sens. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mark Begich of Alaska--came out on Wednesday evening in support of extending the open enrollment period of the law, as first proposed by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, who is also up for reelection in 2014," Politico reports. All these senators were elected or re-elected in 2008, when Barack Obama topped the ticket.
Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia isn't up for re-election until 2018, but he is proposing a bill "to delay for a year the individual mandate's enforcement mechanism--a $95 fine for anyone who doesn't enroll in health insurance by March 31." (That's an incomplete description, for reasons we'll get to below.)
The Obama administration itself "confirmed to The Washington Post a little bit ago that it is indeed tweaking the way the individual mandate works," writes Sarah Kliff of the Post's Wonkblog. This change amounts to a six-week delay: People who've enrolled in a health-insurance plan by March 31 won't be subject to the mandate tax. The previous requirement was that one had to be covered by March 31, which as a practical matter meant the deadline for enrollment was Feb. 15.
"It's not quite right to describe this as a delay of the individual mandate, or an extension of open enrollment," Kliff writes. She's correct on the latter point--enrollment still ends March 31--but mistaken on the former. Because of Chief Justice John Roberts's convoluted construction of the law, the "mandate" is nothing more than the tax on noncompliance--a tax that will now be imposed six weeks later than had been the administration's intent.
A six-week delay, or even a year's delay, isn't much. But it is something, which makes it a significant change from the Democrats' previous position, which was to insist that no concessions were acceptable. Of course it's easier to hold out when the party demanding concessions is a political adversary as opposed to reality itself.
But it's also easy to lose sight of reality when focused on political adversity. A quote in today's New York Times illustrates that point beautifully. It seems that in the days immediately before HealthCare.gov's disastrous launch, "top White House officials were excitedly briefing lawmakers, reporters, Capitol Hill staff members and Washington pundits" about the "shiny new Web site that was elegantly designed, simple to use and ready."
Even now, the Times reports, "some Democrats said that, given the Republican assault on the measure, the White House was right to deliver upbeat presentations promoting it":

"To downplay expectations would have fed into the Republican narrative," said Jim Manley, a former top aide to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, who attended a session in the Roosevelt Room of the White House with other allies of the administration.

"The White House was right" is the Times reporter's phrase, so it's possible Manley meant his comment as an explanation rather than a justification. In any case, there is no sense in which the White House could have been "right" to put on deceptive presentations. The understandable desire to undercut a political adversary's "narrative" does not relieve one of the moral obligation to be truthful. And even if you think it does--if you imagine the Republicans to be so evil that deception is morally justified in the service of defeating them--the deceptions here were bound to be quickly and embarrassingly revealed. They were self-defeating.
So now Democrats--and even the administration itself, ever so incrementally, are embracing the idea of saving ObamaCare by delaying the individual mandate. But that is unlikely to be sufficient, and could even make matters worse. Bloomberg's Megan McArdle argues that it "solves a problem for individuals but destabilizes the insurance market as a whole":

If it's a tedious pain to buy insurance, the only thing standing between us and a death spiral is the fairly hefty penalty that folks who don't buy it may have to pay. Delaying the individual mandate makes the problems created by the malfunctioning exchanges worse--which, I reiterate, will ultimately mean more uninsured people, not fewer. This is a terrible idea, which is being seized upon by the administration and Republicans not because it makes any sense, but because it is politically expedient.

The individual mandate tax can indeed be a "fairly hefty penalty." It isn't just $95, as that Politico piece asserted, but $95 or 1% of income, whichever is higher. (Both the minimum and the rate are set to rise, reaching $695 or 2.5% in 2016.) McArdle concludes: "If we're going to delay, then we need to delay the whole thing--guaranteed issue, community rating and so forth. Otherwise, we're just asking for, well, a quagmire." Hey, Megan, your lips to Obama's ears.
Whether not delaying the mandate will be sufficient to avert a quagmire is a different question, and color us skeptical on that one. For one thing, for political reasons the authors of the ObamaCare law made the mandate less than fully enforceable, as Avik Roy explained in an August Forbes piece:

Section 1501(g)(2) of the Affordable Care Act specifies that the IRS cannot subject taxpayers to "any criminal prosecution or penalty" for refusing to pay the mandate fine. Also, in contrast to normal tax levies, the IRS cannot "file notice of lien with respect to any property of a taxpayer by reason of any failure to pay the penalty imposed by this section."

Basically, the only thing the IRS can do to make you pay the mandate fine is to take it out of your withholding, or withhold it from your tax refund, if you're due one. So if you don't participate in the withholding process, the IRS has no way to collect the mandate fine.

To put it another way, if you owe the IRS money when you file your return, you can't be penalized if you decline to pay any amount of the debt up to the mandate tax. How much of an obstacle this is isn't clear. Presumably the IRS will develop countermeasures to increase subsequent years' withholding when a taxpayer avoids the mandate. And perhaps organizing one's finances so as to avoid the mandate will be too complicated for most taxpayers. Then again, it's not as if getting insurance from HealthCare.gov is simple.
And therein lies perhaps a greater challenge to the mandate's viability. If people can't buy insurance because the government failed to fulfill its promise of making it available, taxing them for lacking insurance violates basic fairness. If the ObamaCare website is nonfunctional in another month, calls to delay the mandate will be much harder to resist--and, as we've seen, they already aren't that easy to resist.
Further, as we've written, it seems to us there's a legal case to be made that the tax is, or soon will be, unconstitutional. A law that taxes individuals for failing to purchase an unavailable product fails even the relatively undemanding "rational basis" test.
How likely is it that the ObamaCare website will be fixed expeditiously? We know that the administration is inclined not to "downplay expectations" for fear of "feeding the Republican narrative." Keep that in mind as you read this report from the Hill:

Federal health officials said Thursday that three-and-a-half years was not enough time to assemble and fully test ObamaCare's online enrollment portal.

On a call with reporters, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) spokeswoman Julie Bataille said that a "compressed timeframe" precluded sufficient end-to-end testing of the sign-up system.

Time pressure also led the CMS to abandon a website feature allowing consumers to comparison shop without creating an account, Bataille said.

If three and a half years are insufficient, why should we think three and two-thirds years--the initial period plus October and November--will be sufficient? In a Politico column, Rich Lowry notes that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius "told The Wall Street Journal the website ideally needed five years of construction and one year of testing and instead had only two years of construction and almost no testing":

That means with the proper development time, HealthCare.gov would have had a flawless launch . . . on Oct 1, 2017. Needless to say, had Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) suggested a four-year delay in Obamacare as his fallback in the defunding fight, he would have been scorned as an unbending fanatic, although he just might have been giving Sebelius the breathing room she needed.

As recently as Monday, the president himself was delivering a "narrative" about the wonders of ObamaCare. Now he's delaying from behind, bowing ever so slightly to reality. But the gap between the administration's narrative has continued to widen. It will keep doing so absent a sudden, and in our view wholly unexpected, display of competence.
The Buck Stops Over There
Donald Berwick, an architect of ObamaCare, is running for governor of Massachusetts. What does this "health guru"--head of CMS from July 2010 through December 2011--have to say about the debacle? Don't look at him:

Berwick is at a loss to explain the failures. He said he was not involved in crucial strategy and contracting decisions made during his tenure that dictated how his agency, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, would build the computer network. . . .

Berwick said in an interview this week that he did not see launching the marketplace computer network as a major part of his role as chief of the agency.

"Those were staff level functions," Berwick said. "My leadership investment was in the vision of CMS as a major force of improvement of care for the nation."

Berwick said he does not remember any discussion, for instance, of a decision that is the focus of intense second-guessing in Congress: having agency administrators oversee development of the online marketplace, rather than hiring an outside management company with stronger technical expertise to coordinate the complex project.

"It certainly wasn't me who made the decision. It must have been lower down in the organization. I don't recall," Berwick said.

Yet Berwick says "the decision to keep it a CMS function makes sense," because "it's a highly competent agency accustomed to managing data and data systems."
You mean it could have been worse?
Sure, We're Down 51-0, but It's Early in the Game
"Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is again pushing back against calls for her resignation over the rocky rollout of the Obamacare website, saying 'we are determined to make it perfect.' . . . People are going through every day,' she said. 'It's better today than it was on October 1, but it's a long way from perfect and we are determined to have it be perfect. But what we are is three weeks into a 26-week open-enrollment period, in football terminology early in the first quarter.' "--CNN.com, Oct. 24
Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate
"An Oct. 14 Style article about access to the prison camp for terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, incorrectly referred to Navy Capt. Robert Durand as 'thickset.' He should have been described as muscular."--Washington Post, Oct. 23

That Looks Bad - Bill Whittle 7.17.12 (pre-election)

That Looks Bad

Ladies and Gentlemen, Bill Whittle is proud to present just a few of the 1001 REASONS TO VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA. At least, he thinks he is. Hang on a sec -- there might be a misprint in there somewhere...

Well, as we head into the pre-convention summer, I thought we might take a quick look back at Barack Obama’s first term, as a way to drum up our enthusiasm for getting him re-elected for another four years of the kind of successes we have come to expect from this historic candidate!

Kyle Becker over at CDN has compiled a helpful list: 1001 reasons to vote for Barack Obama! So let’s do a couple of victory laps before we spike the re-election ball, shall we?

In his first day as President, he signed an order fulfilling his campaign promise to close Guantanamo Bay within one year. And he very successfully… hasn’t done that yet. Three years later. That looks bad.

But in the same breath, fortunately, he promised to end George W. Bush’s vicious assault on habeas corpus… although he just recently signed the Defense Authorization Act vastly expanding the President’s personal power to arrest American citizens, on American soil -- at whim. Which looks a little bad, I do admit.

But when Honduras moved – legally – to remove socialist President Zelaya, who tried for a third term contrary to the Honduran constitution, President Obama called the Honduran defense of Honduran law “a coup” and “not legal” and ordered Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to cut off 30 million dollars in aid to Honduras. Is that true? Did that really happen? Well, that looks awful.

But when pro-freedom Iranian protestors took to the streets in Tehran, President Freedom said nothing for ten days. When just the tiniest bit of rhetorical support looked like it might topple our number one enemy in the world, President Obama refused to “intervene.”

Well that sucks! That looks terrible!

The Smartest President since Jefferson, though, graduated from Columbia University – where no one remembers ever seeing him. He became President of the Harvard Law Review, becoming -- historically! – the first Law review President not to write any, you know, actual law reviews. His academic records are so brilliant, so astonishingly historic and smart and historic and stuff, that he spends a great deal of money making sure that they remain sealed to this day. Which looks kinda bad, actually...

However, his autobiography, Dreams from My Father, has many moving passages from people that don’t… you know… actually exist – but it does contain a very moving family struggle against racism and colonialism that didn’t – you know – actually happen.

He’s got a sweetheart deal on his house from convicted felon Tony Rezko, which looks… you know, I admit, kinda bad. And even though that we know that he was a member of the Socialist New Party and has appointed open Maoists, Communists and Socialists like Van Jones and Donald Berwick and Anita Dunn and Ron Bloom and Cass Sunstein and David Axelrod and John Holdren and Elizabeth Warren to high positions in his administration, and even though he has the enthusiastic support of the American Socialist Party and the American Communist Party, calling Obama a Socialist is absolute slander caused by mean anti-Communist Republicans who don’t like him because he’s black.

President Obama also promised us that if we’d just let him hold 850 billion dollars for the Stimulus, unemployment would stay under eight percent. It’s actually been over eight percent ever since he took the money – he probably meant to say that it would stay under eighteen percent. Which it has done! Unless you’re an African-American teenager.

He got Osama Bin Laden, which looks GREAT! Only he was, you know, on the golf course at the time, and so that’s why he’s sitting off in the corner like the kid who delivered the pizza, which looks bad, I admit. Still, it was a gutsy call. It was the kind of gutsy call that he apparently took weeks to decide on, the kind of gutsy call enthusiastically supported by his entire cabinet, military advisors and every single last member of the American people, who would have made the exact same, difficult, torturous, gutsy call – only, you know, without the weeks of agonized contemplation. Which looked great! Except for the part where he claimed all the credit for the information which was gotten from Gitmo – which he promised to close – under the Bush interrogation protocols, which he campaigned against. Which ended up looking so bad that the SEALS had to kind of publically ask him to back off. And those guys never say anything. Which looked kinda bad.

My GOD! Look at the time!

He refused to secure our southern Border against armed, drug-running murderers, and directed his Justice Department to sue Arizona for trying to do the Feds job and protect its citizens… which looks bad, I admit. But he did put up signs warning American citizens to keep clear of those parts of American soil where these Mexican cartels operate, which is a very nice thing to do when you think about it.

He told the Russian Ambassador he’d sell out our missile defense shield if only they would leave him alone until after the election. My God…

He supports public sector unions, and while he was too busy golfing and fundraising to actually go to Wisconsin and actually fight for the things he believed in – which looked really, really, really bad – he did tweet that is one hundred percent in support of Unions… which looks… you know…

Then he threw the invisibility cloak of executive privilege over the Fast & Furious scandal, in which the Department of Justice sent hundred and hundreds of untraceable automatic weapons to the murderers in the Mexican drug cartels. And even though at least 300 Mexican civilians, and certainly one if not two American border patrol agents are dead because of it, the fact is that Barack Obama and Eric Holder had nothing to do with this… which is why they’re, you know, covering it up.

And finally, his signature legislation – Obamacare – which was written by others and voted on by others who are no longer in office (which looks bad) was found to be Constitutional! Which looks GREAT! Constitutional as a tax. The biggest tax on the middle class in history? Is that right? Really? Well that would mean that he lied to us when he promised this was NOT a tax, which looks awful….

Let me see that headline again?
((DISSOLVE from 1001 FOR to 1001 AGAINST))

Ha! You guys! Psych! You got me!

I was all set to re-elect the guy, but now I just look like… you know. An idiot.

Non-Essential - BillWhittle

Non-Essential - Bill W (Afterburner

Some of you may remember those thrilling days of yesteryear, When President Temper Tantrum told the American people that the sequester – not a budget cut, but rather a very limited reduction in the increase of spending by the Federal Government – was the end of Life as We Know It.

White house tours were cancelled. Easter Eggs went unhidden. Federal Parks closed. And air traffic control shut down flights into major cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles – I was on a flight that cancelled due to a sequester-related “shortage of essential personnel” – and all the rest.

Well, Congress – by that, I mean the House of Representatives – held their ground, told the Obama administration that while White House chefs MAY have been essential personnel, Air Traffic Controllers certainly were, and then, after a great deal of moaning and complaining, things got immediately back to normal. And have been ever since.

They said the same thing about welfare reform back in the Clinton days, by the way: cut one dime of Federal Spending and children will be dropping dead of rickets and scurvy on every street corner of America.

They fear this, you see: they fear this above all else. Back to that in a second.

Now, for the – what, 12^th? 19^th? 102^nd? time in the last thirty years – including almost yearly under Tip O’Neill as a means to get at President Reagan, who O’Neill obviously hated simply because he was white – the Government has been “shut down” again.
Seventeen percent – round numbers – of Federal Employees are furloughed as Non-Essential Personnel. We’ll come back to that in a moment as well.

But meanwhile, the goal of this tyrannical administration, and the street thugs, hoods, communists, agitators, grifters and idiots that make it up from the bottom of the top to the top of the bottom, have set themselves the same goal they had before: namely, MAKE IT HURT.
 
MAKE it hurt. Not “allow” it to hurt. And if you don’t understand the difference here you are missing the entire point.
“Allowing” a government shutdown to hurt means… well, shutting down the non-essential parts of the government and allowing the chips to fall where they may. Once the American people realized that this meant electricity went out, traffic lights no longer functioned, universities closed, etc. then they could make that displeasure known to their Representatives.

None of that happened of course. None of that happened, because electricity is mostly provided by private companies, for profit. Street lights are maintained by municipal and county governments. Universities are privately funded, or run by the states.

So now we are back to what these small people, these pathetic, genetically-defective control freaks in Washington in general and this
administration in Best of Show level pathology, really and truly and genuinely FEAR.

They FEAR that if the government shuts down its non-essential personnel, no one will really notice. 

What does that number look like?

Well, right now it’s approximately 17% -- that’s the percentage of the Federal Government that is “non-essential.” You could look at that 17% not as the Sequester, which simply meant we gave the Federal Government a slightly smaller RAISE then they asked for. No, this is a CUT.

If the American people become fully aware of the fact that they can get along just fine without the non-essential 17% of the Federal Government, then they may start asking why they cannot have 17% of their taxes returned to them. I’d like to know the answer to that myself.

Some people have said that Obama is being petty and adolescent by deploying the new Gestapo – the Smokey-the-Bear-hat wearing National Park Service – as his primary weapon in making things hurt for the American people. It’s not just barricades erected by supposedly furloughed Rangers to keep the American patriots that kept this country free from freely walking through the monument erected to their dead friends and to they themselves. It’s things like keeping people on buses to prevent them from even taking photographs of the national parks THAT WE THE PEOPLE, not King Obama, actually own. It’s things like removing the handles from taps on hiking trails so that people can’t get a drink. And the list of shameful, shocking, eye-opening, jack-boot tactics to make sure this pain is felt – not allow it to be felt, but to make it to be felt – goes on and on and on.

And of all the things I have seen that have worried, depressed and angered me since this Hope and Change huckster came to the Oval Office, nothing has disgusted and worried me so much as the willingness, the ease – in fact, in many cases, the relish and the joy -- at which formerly innocuous-seeming people like Park Rangers have taken to kicking the American people in the groin. I will never forget this. Not ever. And while I used to wonder where a dictator’s private army would come from among formerly free people… well, I wonder no more.

So anyway, who’s non-essential? Well, the facts are that it’s about 800,000 of the 2.1 million Federal employees. That’s about the same number of people in San Francisco. At the Department of Commerce, 15,641 employees at the Census Bureau were told to stay home.

It was the same story for all 169 people at the U.S. Economic Development Administration, as well as for the 49 workers at the
Minority Business Development Agency.

How many other Federal employees are “non-essential?”

Hard to say. But I will say this:

Barack Obama despises the American people. Time and time and time again he has wistfully assured us he is not a dictator and does not wish to be one. I don’t recall Ronald Reagan – or even Bill Clinton – assuring us constantly that he was not a tyrant or a socialist. But it is clear that what he is doing is not, in fact, petty or adolescent. It is reasoned, and it is critical, and it is desperate. Because if it fully dawns on us that we can do without most of this stuff, we might start asking for our money back. And without money to buy votes with, where would these losers be?

Every single government worker is essential, you see, and if you dare question the King on this, he will see to it that you, the American people, are punished for your insolence. Government workers are essential: what is not essential is the money you have to part with in order to pay for them.

Got that straight? Cut a dime of the money you send them, and they will evict you from your private homes and try to close the ocean.

You’ll just have to work harder, and do with less. You’re the ones who are non-essential. Not them. Not him.

Democratic Disasters Yet to Come

The Democratic Disasters to Come

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On October 20, 2013 @ 7:26 pm In Culture,Immigration,Politics,The War | 75 Comments

The defunding wars are over. The accusations are fading. We are back to reality. Of course, America’s long-term prospects, at least in comparison with other countries’ futures — whether in terms of demography, military power, food-production, constitutional stability, energy sources, or higher education — are bright.

But short term, we are walking over landmines that threaten to blow up the normal way of doing business, and pose far more harm for Democrats than for Republicans.

Zero Interest

The real story about the debt is that by the end of Obama’s eight years, he will have matched the borrowing of all previous presidents combined.  Yet incredibly, the present huge sum of $17 trillion in debt is serviced at the same cost that we paid over 15 years ago. Such free use of money without raging inflation is almost historically unprecedented — and it won’t last.

Indeed, we are paying today about the same amount in aggregate annual interest payments, in non-inflation-adjusted dollars no less, as in 1997 — even though the 2012 figure of $17 trillion in debt is about three times larger than it was a decade-and-a-half ago. That anomaly is possible only because today’s interest rate of about 2.2% is only a third of what it was back then.

If interest ever returned to 1997 levels, at say 6.6%, we’d be paying over a trillion dollars a year in debt service. In crude terms, the winners of this Ponzi scheme are the very wealthy connected to Wall Street, which is flooded with foreign and domestic capital. It need not do much of anything more than outperform a pathetic 1% return on savings accounts.

The poor benefit from the vast increase in federal spending ^[1] and exemption from federal income taxes. In contrast, the middle class still pays high interest on its student loans, credit card, and, to a lesser extent, car debt, receives almost no interest on its meager savings accounts, and is not so ready, after 2008, to dabble in real estate and the stock market.

In some sense, holders of U.S. Treasury debt and passbook savers are giving up hundreds of billions of dollars in interest returns (cf. the difference, say, between 1% and a more normal 5%) to subsidize the redistributive policies of the federal government.

The lack of interest, or de facto negative interest, keeps the near-retired working and hampers job prospects of the young; discourages thrift, savings and investment; and plays an underappreciated role in the slow economic recovery. The Democrats must deal with the contradiction of needing zero interest rates to service their recent extra $6 trillion in debt, and higher interest to encourage savings, investment, and job growth.

Obamacare

While the glitches and sign-up problems of Obamacare may soon ameliorate, the program’s damage and unpopularity won’t go away soon.

All the president’s promises will stay broken: health-care premiums will go up, not down. Young people, who can least afford a new burden, will have to be taxed to pay for others and so resist ^[2]. The deficit will not be helped. Obamacare more likely will make it go up. Premiums will climb. Existing plans will be altered. Doctors will be less, not more accessible. Businesses will not enjoy a new competitiveness. Exemptions for administration pets will continue. Again, the wealthy will find ways to navigate around Obamacare, and the middle class will pick up the tab in higher costs and worse care.

In short, over 300 million people are going to find their health care analogous to a DMV visit ^[3]. The logic of Obamacare was always redistributionist; those who had health care were obligated to give up some of it so that others might share the same benefits, regardless of the circumstances, fair or unfair, under which such differences first arose. Washington has decided that, with more money and employees, it can decide who has too fine a health care policy and who too little insurance, and then make the necessary redistributive adjustments ^[4].

The shutdown may have temporarily sidetracked the Republicans, yet Obamacare threatens much worse for the Democrats. By 2014 the former will be ancient history, while the latter will be an ongoing mess.

The Debt

All the old liberal pretexts for the debt are now questionable. Foreign wars are over in Iraq and about over in Afghanistan.

Sequestration already made radical cuts in spending. New taxes on the top brackets were passed. The economy is supposedly recovering, bringing in new revenue.

Why, then, are we still borrowing $700 billion annually?

Obama will probably not get GDP growth up to 4-5%. He won’t be able to raise taxes again, above the new 39% rate, on “fat cats.”

There are no more wars to blame for the borrowing. Instead, he faces always higher entitlement costs, Obamacare, and possible hikes in interest rates. This paradox has no answer other than spectacular economic growth, the repeal of Obamacare, an extension of the private-energy revolution onto federal lands, and vast cuts in entitlements. I don’t see any of that happening in the next three years, and so the deficits will continue to hover between $600 billion and $1 trillion per year. “Bush did it” will not excuse a president who in eight years borrowed more than did all previous presidents put together.


“Comprehensive” Immigration Reform

Ramming through amnesty will be an Obamacare-like disaster. With even cursory scrutiny, the public will learn that the effort is far more than giving “dreamers” who played by the rules a fair shot. Instead, “legal” immigration-reform proposals will still inordinately favor family and ethnic considerations and proximity to the border, not racially blind educational and skill-set criteria. The public still does not trust government claims about border security. The pathway to citizenship provisions will still extend green cards to those with criminal records, including DUIs, and past residence on public assistance.

In short, the bill is not about giving the Korean engineer a chance to become a legal skilled employee, or allowing the Romanian doctor to practice without fear of deportation.

It is not about giving the Mexican national, who is a National Merit Scholar, a chance to attend MIT without worry of deportation. At least not entirely.

Instead the bill is politically and ethnically chauvinistic. Indeed, comprehensive immigration reform is the most illiberal legislation in a generation: it favors Latin American nationals over others entirely on the basis that they have already broken federal immigration laws, are residing here illegally, and share the same ethnic background as their leaders in the Democratic Party.

It hurts the lower classes ^[5], many of them minorities, who compete with cheap labor of foreign nationals. It burdens state budgets that must allot hundreds of billions in entitlement costs to allow rough parity to the vast majority who arrive from Mexico and Latin American illegally, without a high school diploma and without English.

It will ensure Democratic majorities in the American Southwest for a generation and turn Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and perhaps Texas into something akin to the politics of California. The bill is ethnocentric, championed by corporate elites and ethnic chauvinists, and central to Democratic Party strategy.

Anyone who worries about a melting-pot, ethnically blind tradition of immigration and assimilation, the wages of entry-level workers, fairness to middle-class taxpayers, the truly needy who depend on a solvent government, or the need for skilled and educated legal immigrants should be worried by the legislation.

So What?

In contrast to all of the above, there are all sorts of conservative opportunities that focus on the welfare of the middle class. Take the 2012 stalled farm bill. It is a gift to agribusinesses (at a time of record high commodity prices, no less) not small farmers, to the degree there are any left of the latter, and should be opposed as corporate welfare. More gas and oil drilling on federal lands is also a naturally winning issue. Fracking and horizontal drilling will help lower energy and fuel costs for the public and offers the quickest way to provide more good jobs. Luring energy-intensive industries back to the U.S. should also be a conservative cause.

In contrast, zero interest, Obamacare, more borrowing, amnesty, and using government to hinder federal energy leases and Keystone are not popular issues, and do not appeal to the working classes.  Will Republicans finally grasp that?

O'care & What MSM Won't Cover

Top Five ObamaCare Catastrophes the Media Refuse to Cover

by John Nolte 21 Oct 2013, 11:39 AM PDT 129 post a comment

The media are doing a good job covering the ObamaCare launch problems. But like their coverage of President Obama's disastrous performance in his first presidential debate with Mitt Romney, there is a partisan motive at work here. The media want ObamaCare to succeed and believe that pounding away at the site problems  will motivate the White House to get the site fixed.

While the tech problems are real and worth covering, so are five other ObamaCare catastrophes. But the media won't cover those because to do so might further undermine the program:

1. Millions are Losing Their Health Insurance

About 14 million Americans (not enrolled in Medicare or Medicaid) purchase their health insurance privately as opposed to through an employer. Because a large percentage of these plans do not cover everything ObamaCare mandates a policy cover -- among other things: birth control, mental health, maternity, vision, dental -- these plans are being cancelled -- no matter how happy people might be with them. We learned today that in just one state just one provider dropped 300,000 customers.

Now these 300,000 (and millions more, including spouses being dropped by UPS and other organizations) have not only lost the health insurance they were happy with, they have also been thrown into the nightmare of these ObamaCare exchanges. Moreover, because their old insurance plans were dumped for not covering everything the government now demands be covered, you can bet that the new plans will be more expensive.

And let's not forget that with a new health insurance plan, you can lose the doctor you had and liked under the old one. Repeatedly,
President Obama promised the American people that his health care reforms would not cost people their doctors or force them off the health insurance plans they like. Now we know that was nothing more than a bald-faced lie.

2. Premium Increases on Working and Middle Class

President Obama hosted a Rose Garden event Monday where he incessantly repeated a talking point about health care now being more affordable. Certainly, for some, it will be, especially those joining the expanded Medicaid rolls.

But for many more millions among the working and middle class,  premiums are going up, sometimes by as much as 50% to 150%.

 We are not talking about taxing the wealthy here, we are talking about everyday people, families, and small businesses.

Millions are about to have their standard of living hit and their ability to save for college and retirement undermined -- mostly because the government is forcing them to give up a health care premium they were happy with, and purchase another loaded with services they neither need nor want.

Keep in mind that all of this is happening to these families in a no-growth economy.

3. Obama's One-Year Delay On Business Mandate Strands the Middle and Working Class

In 2015,  and in an anemic job growth-era that is entering year five of creating mostly part-time jobs, ObamaCare will sock small business owners with a massive tax. If a company has more than 50 full-time employees, they are either required to provide them with ObamaCare or pay a fine of $2000 a year per employee.

Why would a small business owner add another full-time employee if it means being socked with the kinds of costs associated with paying for health insurance or paying the fine?

Obviously, these fledgling businesses are going to either hire part-time workers or go to a temp agency.

The most cynical part of this mandate, though, is that this is the employer mandate Obama delayed for a year. But he didn't delay it to help business as much as he did it to increase the number of people who would be forced to enroll for ObamaCare during this crucial first year.

With no carrot or stick, businesses already at or above the 50 employee threshold are a lot less likely to offer their employees health insurance until the mandate kicks in the following year. This leaves who-knows-how-many employees stranded for a year without health insurance and facing a penalty if they don't sign up for ObamaCare.

This was a ruthless move by Obama to artificially bump his all-important first-year numbers by removing the incentive for employers to offer health insurance, which cornered employees into enrolling in ObamaCare.  

4. ObamaCare's Effect On the Unemployed and Under-Employed

While it is a sad thing that ObamaCare means that who-knows-how-many small businesses can't expand their workforce in a way that benefits everyone, the real victims are the who-knows-how-many unemployed and under-employed who won't be hired for full-time jobs by these companies.

ObamaCare has been the law of the land for three-plus years , and for just as long our economy has been adding 7 part-time jobs for every full-time job. This can't be a coincidence.  As soon as ObamaCare was passed, employers saw the writing on the wall and planned accordingly.

5. The Working Poor are Getting Hammered

The stories of the hundreds of thousands among the working poor losing their employer-based health insurance and having their hours cut, all due to ObamaCare, are everywhere. But the media intentionally refuse to do anything other than dutifully cover these individual stories. Were they to focus on this horrific consequence that is disproportionately affecting the working poor, it would likely turn even more people against ObamaCare -- something the media just aren’t going to allow to happen.
--
While the media's coverage of the rolling disaster that is the ObamaCare launch is both welcome and appropriate, what the media will not cover is what is now and is always going to be the real ObamaCare disaster: the economic chaos ObamaCare is forcing millions upon millions of everyday Americans to needlessly pay for and deal with.

And the people callously being thrown into this maelstrom aren't The Wealthy, aren't Mitt Romney, aren't the Top 1%, aren’t even Tea Partiers -- they are the very people Obama repeatedly promised could keep their insurance and that he would never tax: the working poor and the middle class.

Follow  John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC   

War on Women (and Genocide) - (Is Not Republican)

What the International Gendercide Crisis Must Teach America About Abortion

Posted By Paul Cooper On October 14, 2013 @ 3:00 pm In  

Abortion,Boys,Children,Documentaries,Economics,Evil,Family,Feminism,Girls,Movies,Parenting,PJ Lifestyle Columns,PJ Lifestyle Lists,Pregnancy,Race,Uncategorized,Women | 9 Comments

One month ago my wife and I did something that would be illegal in some parts of the world. We had our third child, and for the third time we had a girl.

It was one of the most joy-filled moments of our lives, but for millions of parents, having even a second or sometimes a first daughter is an impossibility. In China, India, and other parts of the world, girls are unwanted. They are viewed as having no value to the government and little value in society or even to their own families. The result has been widespread gendercide, the systematic and deliberate destruction of girls, typically through abortion. Sometimes through infanticide.

Some estimates say the world is missing over 200 million girls thanks to the practice of gendercide. Most of those come from China and India, where they eliminate more girls every year than America has births.

Since 1979, China has had a one-child policy, and boys are the preferred of the two choices for mostly economical reasons. The government penalizes families monetarily for having more than one child and also takes part in forced abortion and forced sterilizations if the women don’t take care of it themselves. This obviously has created an unbalanced male population, and some of the side effects have been increased child abuse and sex trafficking.

In India the government officially frowns on gendercide, yet they turn a blind eye to it. They outlawed using ultrasounds to determine gender because it led to so many abortions of girls. However, they ignore that the practice still goes on.

One study of 8000 abortions in India, for example, showed that 7999 of the aborted babies were girls.

In India, the problem is plain economics for families. Arranged marriages work in a way where the parents of the bride have to pay a large dowry to the parents of the groom. Having boys creates wealth, while having girls diminishes it. The girls who do manage to live often are born into a family that rejects them. In fact, one of the most common names for girls in this situation in India is a Hindi name that means “unwanted.”

The once ignored problem of gendercide is just starting to get attention in media, culture, and even among a few politicians. In fact, a new documentary was recently released called It’s a Girl! that looks at sex-selective abortions and infanticide of girls in depth. The movie is a heartbreaking expose, painfully declaring that the three most deadly words in the world are “it’s a girl.”

The film is sparking a growing conversation in America. The filmmaker has even screened the film to feminist and pro-choice groups in hopes of getting everyone unified against gendercide. But we should take this conversation a step further: we should be asking if the elimination of female babies in other nations can teach us about abortion right here in America.

By asking questions about the commonalities gendercide shares with abortion in America, we might all learn something. Following are five thought-provoking questions, the answers to which require pro-choice Americans to question how they can support abortion in America while being against gendercide elsewhere.

You may find the first question and quote along with it a bit disturbing.

5. If gendercide is wrong, then why is abortion in America also promoted to poor and minority communities?

Gendercide affects all incomes, but it is felt hardest among the poor and minority communities in many parts of the world. Poor families in India will become poorer when they try to marry off their girls, but wealthier if they marry off boys. So gendercide is more frequent among the poor and traditionally lower-caste minorities in India.

In China, men carry on their family’s wealth and are expected to take care of their family as their parents grow old. There is no social security from the government, so the only real retirement security is sons. Therefore, poor families desperately need their one government-allowed child to be a boy and not a girl. If the legal one child is not a son, it could lead to utter ruin for the poor in their elder years.

In America, abortion is also connected to being poor or a minority.

According to the pro-abortion-funded Guttmacher Institute, even though African-Americans make up only 12% of the population, they account for 30% of abortions. Hispanics make up 16% of the population, but 25% of abortions. And other minorities make up another 9%.

These are a pro-abortion group’s numbers. The unbiased CDC’s numbers are even a little higher.

At least 64% of all women getting an abortion in America today are minorities. And while non-Hispanic white abortion rates are decreasing, abortion among black and Hispanic Americans is continuing to go up.

Abortion is also linked to poverty. A whopping 42% of women obtaining abortions live below 100% of the federal poverty level.  Another 27% live at 101-200% of the poverty level. So more than two-thirds of all American abortions are obtained by poor women.

Over the last decade as abortions dropped in America by 8%, they grew by 18% in poor communities.

Of course, abortion providers like Planned Parenthood target their facilities at both poor and minority communities — terribly disturbing considering Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger was a virulent racist, a proponent of eugenics. She believed in eliminating the poor and minority communities in America through contraception and sterilization. Today, Planned Parenthood targets those very communities with abortion services (though they obviously reject that it has anything to do with eugenics).

Consider: abortions have decreased in America the last few years, yet Planned Parenthood’s abortion numbers continue to rise.

In 2005, CNS News’ Randy Hall wrote about his research on the location of Planned Parenthoods:

In nearly two-thirds (62.5 percent) of the comparisons, the communities with a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic had a higher percentage of blacks than the state did as a whole.

It appears the biggest abortion provider is purposefully focusing on poor and minority communities. Returning to international gendercide — one of the reasons it is disturbing is that it unfairly affects the poor and minorities. Well, abortion in America has that same problem.

Shouldn’t all of us be disturbed that so many of the children we are losing are from these communities?

The following question is related to this one in terms of economics.

4. If gendercide is wrong, then why is low income or lifestyle hardship an acceptable reason for abortion in America?

The vast majority of Americans are against sex-selective abortion: a 2006 Zogby poll revealed that 86% of Americans believe abortion based on gender is wrong. Even pro-choice groups have declared they are anti-gendercide.

But why does gendercide exist? Why do families or governments kill off the girl babies in these countries? Is it because they just hate girls?

Economics is a major, perhaps primary, cause of gendercide. If a Chinese couple knows they will have no financial security in their old age without having a boy, then their choice to abort girls is based on economic hardship. In India, poor families will only become poorer with girls; boys lead to wealth.

Girls equal poverty, and that is why we see so much sex-selective abortions.

To put it simply, these mothers can’t afford to have a baby girl. So why are we against gendercide if it helps these families financially?

If you still feel gendercide is wrong, then why is abortion ever acceptable if the main reason people give for having an abortion is economics?

According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, at least 75% of abortions are obtained by women who say they simply can’t afford having another child.

If you add in other reasons women give — like inconvenience, pressure from parents/others, job issues, etc. — the number is actually much higher. So, by far, the number one reason for abortion among American women — and this data comes from a pro-abortion research group — is economics.

Keep in mind that unlike China and India, America has social security, America has welfare, America has Medicaid, and America has countless charities and organizations to help the poor. And the poor in America are already wealthy compared to the poor in China or India.

If gendercide is wrong when gendercide exists because of financial burdens, isn’t it fair to argue that financial burdens are no excuse to allow abortion in America? If girls shouldn’t be killed in China or India because they make families poor, then should girls and boys be killed in America because they make finances a little tighter for American parents?

The next question is about human equality.

 

3. If gendercide is wrong, then why is aborting babies with potential special needs right in America?

Remember, almost 9 in 10 Americans believe that abortion based on gender is wrong. Why? Girls do not have less intrinsic value than boys. The most left-wing feminist or progressive will loudly declare that you shouldn’t abort girls (or boys for that matter) because you think they are of less value as a human being.

In fact, the term “gendercide” was coined by American feminist Mary Ann Warren in the 1980s. Warren was a devout pro-abortion activist and writer. She died three years ago, spending the last 30 years of her life defending abortion. However, she understood the evils of gendercide and was one of the first people to write about it:

Gendercide would be the deliberate extermination of persons of a particular sex (or gender). Other terms, such as “gynocide” and “femicide,” have been used to refer to the wrongful killing of girls and women. But  … sexually discriminatory killing is just as wrong when the victims happen to be male. The term also calls attention to the fact that gender roles have often had lethal consequences, and that these are in important respects analogous to the lethal consequences of racial, religious, and class prejudice.

Warren believed gendercide was wrong because it eliminated  boys or girls (usually through abortion, mind you) based on gender roles, racism, religion, or economics. The idea was that all humans are equal. So to abort or kill a girl or boy based on perceived inequalities is wrong.

I wonder what Warren would say about the prevalence of aborting children in America with potential disabilities or handicaps today.

Aren’t those with disabilities or special needs of equal value to humans without physical or mental handicaps?

If the answer is yes, then how can we allow the genocide of such children in the womb in America today?

Today’s medical technology has given parents the ability to test and see if there is a strong likelihood that their baby may have some form of disability or special needs. The result of such technology has led to a startling number of abortions. We don’t have all the statistics, but where we do, the numbers are shocking: there is an 80% to 95% abortion rate for children who are predicted to have Down Syndrome.

In Northern California, Kaiser Permanente has admitted that when parents learn their child probably has cystic fibrosis, there is a 95% abortion rate.

It is quite easy to see similarities between China’s view on girls in the womb and American views of the disabled in the womb. While the most dangerous words in South and East Asia are “it’s a girl,” in America they are “your baby might be born disabled.”

I have discussed these issues with Marc Sherman, program director for AccessABILITY Center for Independent Living, Inc. Sherman has been diagnosed with C5/C6 quadriplegia. He makes the clear connection between international gendercide and American abortions of the disabled:

The disabled have rights just like women or minorities. (It’s the) same as if these parents wanted to abort a child because of gender or race. It’s the same thing as in China where you have women aborting children because they are females and not males.

Many parents in the United States who are told that their child may have a disability are even encouraged to abort. This logically amounts to a new form of eugenics.

Doctors and medical staff often urge moms to abort their potentially disabled children because they are seen as less desirable. And we’ve even seen parents win multi-million dollar lawsuits because they weren’t told their child was disabled, and they missed the opportunity to abort their now-living child.

In 2003, a Gallup poll revealed that over 55% of Americans believe abortion should be legal if the reason is physical or mental
impairments.


Such a view exactly equals the statement: “the disabled have less value.”

It’s the exact same reason gendercide exists elsewhere. If it’s wrong with gendercide, then how can it be right for the disabled?

You will likely find the next question to be most disturbing.

2. Did you know gendercide exists in America today, and abortion providers allow it?

Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers and featured in the film It’s a Girl!, bluntly told the Washington Times last month:

Gendercide is happening in many places all over the world, including the United States.

Obviously we do not see gendercide in the millions like in India and China, but it is shocking to realize that it appears to be happening in the thousands here in America.

You may be surprised to learn that though almost 9 out of 10 Americans oppose gendercide, it is legal in the United States. You can abort based on gender in almost every state. There is no federal law against it. (Recent attention has led to new laws being proposed.)

Part of the reason for gendercide in America appears to be due to increased immigration of Chinese and Indian women into America the last thirty years. One recent research article showed that statistically, at least 2,000 women are missing in California due to gendercide.

Most of these sex-selective abortions were by Chinese and Indian women in California between 1991 and 2004.

A major growing area for sex-selective abortions is IVF (in vitro fertilization). It is becoming more and more common for clinics to have their customers pick out only male embryos and kill the female embryos. It is impossible at this point to know how many embryos have been destroyed because of parents’ desire for one gender over the other. However, it appears the vast majority would choose males over females, and that this will become a growing problem in America. A Duke law report reveals:

One survey reported that 34% of geneticists stated that they would perform sex selection for families seeking to have a son, and another 28% said that they would refer the couple to a doctor who would. Dr. John Stephens’s clinics in California, Washington, and New York already offer couples the opportunity to undergo prenatal testing for sex selection. Twenty-five percent of American couples surveyed have said that they would utilize these sex selection techniques. And although Western societies attitudes towards women differ significantly from other parts of the world, the demand for male offspring is still apparent with 81% of men and 94% of women stating that they would desire to ensure their first child was a boy.

Last year, the pro-life group Live Action did an undercover video expose showing multiple Planned Parenthoods helping patients figure out how to get abortions based on gender. Lila Rose, the founder of Live Action, said:

The search-and-destroy targeting of baby girls through prenatal testing and abortion is a pandemic that is spreading across the globe. Research proves that sex-selective abortion has now come to America. The abortion industry, led by Planned Parenthood, is a willing participant.

Here is a video of one such example:

Planned Parenthood says they don’t agree with sex-selective abortions officially, and fired the employee in that Live Action video. Yet they promise they won’t judge women who get them and will be happy to provide the service. The Huffington Post reported that response in an interview with a Planned Parenthood spokeswoman last year:

This spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Federation of America also told The Huffington Post that the organization condemns seeking abortions on the basis of gender, but its policy is to provide “high quality, confidential, nonjudgmental care to all who come into” its health centers. That means that no Planned Parenthood clinic will deny a woman an abortion based on her reasons for wanting one, except in those states that explicitly prohibit sex-selective abortions (Arizona, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Illinois).

If our nation clearly stands against gendercide, then we should be wary of the fact that it is a growing problem in America.

We should support legislation outlawing it, and we should question why America’s biggest abortion providers aren’t condemning the practice in their own clinics.
This leads to the final question.

1. Why aren’t more American feminists and progressives standing up against gendercide?

Gendercide should be one of those rare issues that we can all agree on — and we do in theory, but not in practice.

Most American feminists and progressives either remain silent or even slip up and sound supportive of gendercide at times. Why? It may be because they too realize the very links mentioned here that international gendercide shares with abortion in America.

In the summer of 2011, Vice President Joe Biden took an official trip to China. He spoke at a university and then made a public statement of support for the one-child policy in China which has led to gendercide. He said:

Your policy has been one which I fully understand — I’m not second guessing — of one child per family.

Biden would later backtrack on that statement, but it revealed something in the heart of some on the Left. To be consistent with their pro-abortion views, they can’t speak too loudly against gendercide. In fact, they may even agree with certain parts of it.

One of the biggest tells regarding the Left’s desire to support abortion no matter what, and the link that stance has with gendercide, is found in a recent Slate article by Sital Kalantry. Kalantry realized a lot of pro-choice groups and progressives were responding positively to the gendercide documentary It’s a Girl!. Kalantry picked up on the clear connections between gendercide and abortion, so she attempted to dissuade progressive and pro-choice groups from supporting the film.

In her article It’s a Trick, Kalantry tells of her frustration that pro-choice groups haven’t caught on to the “pro-life message” that “is subtle enough” that they almost “got away with it.” She notes that the filmmaker is pro-life and has worked with pro-life people before, and therefore Kalantry believes the message and the film should be rejected. She warns pro-choice and liberal groups to stay away from this film, even though she admits there is nothing overtly pro-life in the movie.

So what’s wrong with the film? Kalantry recognizes that the connections from gendercide to abortion in America are there. And it scares her. And she warns other liberals that it should scare them. Therefore, according to Kalantry, progressives and feminists should stand against anti-gendercide legislation in America. She writes:

Although no one supports sex-selective abortion, pro-choice groups correctly worry that such laws could be misused to restrict abortion more broadly.

And there you have it. Those who proclaim they are committed to helping the poor, women, and the abused are choosing to be silent on a problem that strikes the poor, women, and the abused.

Why? Because it’s logically impossible to defend abortion while being against gendercide. So her suggestion is to not oppose gendercide.

If you are truly anti-gendercide, then consistency requires that you cannot be pro-choice in America.
Time will tell if the pro-abortion Left can continue to silence or at least lessen public outcry against gendercide, and specifically sex-selective abortions. As our world continues to grow smaller and we learn of more injustice in other nations, we may just wake up to our own injustices right here at home.

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images courtesy shutterstock /  Pitroviz /  joyb0218 / Angela Waye

There Is NO Media Bias - Charles CW Cooke

Here are the first three paragraphs of the New York Times story on Bob Filner, the ex-mayor of San Diego who pleaded guilty to charges of sexual harrasment. The headline is, “Ex-Mayor of San Diego Pleads Guilty to Charges of Sexual Harassment”:

Bob Filner, the former San Diego mayor forced out of office in a storm of sexual harassment allegations, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a series of false imprisonment and battery charges involving three women.

The episode for Mr. Filner and the city he led for less than a year ended at a swift 16-minute court hearing in Superior Court, where Mr. Filner, dressed in a crisp blue suit and a gold tie, entered his plea with a series of “yes, sirs” as the judge described the scope of the one felony charge and two misdemeanor charges.

It was a sharp contrast from his resignation speech in August, when the mayor said he had been the victim of a “lynch mob.” His lawyer, Jerry Coughlan, said afterward that the once-defiant Mr. Filner, who faced sexual harassment allegations from 17 women, had “learned to get beyond denial” during his treatment for sexual disorders at a facility in Los Angeles in September.

So, what do we know about Filner? We know that he was the mayor of San Diego. We know that he has admitted that he is guilty of “false imprisonment and battery charges.” We know that he wore a “crisp blue suit and a gold tie.” We also know that he denied the allegations initially.

What don’t we know about Bob Filner? Well, we don’t know which political party he represents. This must be because it isn’t relevant, right?

Here is the New York Times’s story on Senator Larry E. Craig, who resigned after he was outed by an undercover sex sting. This story is titled, “Republicans Say Senator Will Resign Over Sex Sting”:

Senator Larry E. Craig, Republican of Idaho, plans to resign his seat on Saturday after Republican leaders put intense pressure on him to leave in the aftermath of an undercover sex sting, Republican Party officials said Friday.

Through intermediaries and unusually harsh public statements and actions, party officials made it clear they wanted Mr. Craig to quit before Congress returned from its summer recess next week, hoping to quickly conclude an embarrassing episode that threatened to complicate an already difficult election cycle for Senate Republicans.

Republican Party officials said Friday evening that they had been notified of Mr. Craig’s intention to give up his seat as of Sept. 30 and that Gov. C. L. Otter, a Republican, would name a replacement.

There are six references to the Republican party in the first three paragraphs. The rest of the piece, meanwhile, takes us on a wild ride through every possible wider implication. In the course of 1200 words, the authors refer to: a “setback suffered by Republicans,” “National Republican officials,” “Republican officials,” “the Republican leader,” the “National Republican Senatorial Committee,” “the Republican National Committee,” “Idaho Republicans,” “the Republican leadership,” “Republicans,” “Republican of Louisana,” a “scandal that hurt Republicans last year,” a “Republican of Mississippi,” “prominent Republicans,” more “prominent Republicans,” “Republicans,” the “Republican brand,” “Republicans in 2006,” “Republicans . . . at a disadvantage,” things “trending against Republicans,” “Republican strategists,” “Republican-leaning states,” and, for good measure, “the National Republican Senatorial Committee.”

The piece on Filner, meanwhile, mentions that the man is a Democrat once, and confirms that the “Democratic City Council president” has replaced him. This cannot be chalked up to Filner’s being “just a mayor.” Filner, remember, was in Congress for 20 years as a representative, not only serving on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs but serving as chairman and then as the ranking Democrat after Republicans took the House in 2010.