YouTube Caused OCare Failure

Susan Rice for HHS: A YouTube video caused the next ObamaCare failure.

“We’re probably heading for a turning point in the health reform discussion,” writes former Enron adviser Paul Krugman. No, he doesn’t see congressional Democrats as revolting imminently against ObamaCare. Quite the opposite: “The facts on the ground are getting better by the day, and Obamacare will turn into a Benghazi-type affair where Republicans are screaming about a scandal nobody else cares about.”

One is tempted to observe that if Benghazi is the standard of success, ObamaCare must be an even worse disaster than its harshest critics imagine. But that’s not Krugman’s meaning. His analogy has nothing to do with “the facts on the ground,” and it reveals more about Krugman’s values than about either Benghazi or ObamaCare.

In neither the above-quoted post nor the earlier one in which he first put forth the analogy does the erstwhile adviser make any reference to what happened at Benghazi. To him, Benghazi is purely a phenomenon of partisan politics: “The [Republican] party has convinced itself that there must be a . . . winning issue hidden in there somewhere, and that if only it keeps flogging the thing, long after the public has moved on, it will eventually score big.”

The analogy is flawed even if you accept Krugman’s amoral partisan terms. Krugman may shrug off four murdered

Americans, but he can’t claim the Obama administration accomplished anything at Benghazi. The administration’s success consisted only in a propaganda effort in which a designated liar, then-U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, created enough confusion to neutralize the attack as a potential threat to Obama’s re-election and set the stage for the administration, at least so far, to evade accountability (though Rice herself perhaps paid the price of not being nominated secretary of state, a position requiring Senate confirmation).

Well, maybe Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius should swap jobs with Rice, who could then be sent out to blame ObamaCare’s failure on a YouTube video.

You may think that’s a joke, but even our wit isn’t always quick enough to keep up with this crowd. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and Organizing for Action, the nonprofit organization that sells access to the president, has produced a

YouTube video titled “Health Care for the Holidays.” The completely functional OFA website urges Obama supporters to spend the holidays urging their kin to buy ObamaCare insurance.

In all but a handful of states, of course, that’s not even possible, given the failure of HHS and some states even to build functional exchanges.

2016

November 27, 2013

Democrats Should Be Afraid, Very Afraid 

Democrats have good reason to be skittish about the ACA. As CNN reports, Democratic strength in next year’s midterm elections has just taken a ten point hit:

Democrats a month ago held a 50%–42% advantage among registered voters in a generic ballot, which asked respondents to choose between a Democrat or Republican in their congressional district without identifying the candidates.

That result came after congressional Republicans appeared to overplay their hand in the bitter fight over the federal government shutdown and the debt ceiling.

But the Democratic lead has disappeared. A new CNN/ORC poll indicates the GOP now holds a 49%–47% edge.

This is big news. In 2010 the GOP trailed by six on the generic ballot question and picked up 60 seats, but now it holds a lead on the generic ballot. Democrats, in other words, have taken a greater hit from the health care fiasco than the GOP did from the government shutdown. Things could still turn around before November 2014, and in the meantime there will probably be various mini-surges in public support, website functionality, and other areas.

But the terrible first impression of the law has been deeply damaging, and Democrats will have a hard time putting it behind them. Part of what’s happening is that voters unhappy with the slow economic recovery are probably feeling the health care mess as a trigger event that finally convinces them that the Obama administration has been a disappointment. And there’s going to be enough noise from the continuing cancellations, doc shock, and rate shock—whether history ultimately considers them speed bumps or signs that the wheels were falling off—to sustain much of the anger the rollout has generated.

That anger could have two consequences next fall: upscale voters turn out more in midterms, and their turnout is going to be higher than usual because of the intensity of their feelings about health care. As the CNN poll notes, upscale voters are the ones least likely to be affected by good news about the uninsured who the law ends up helping, so the spikes and network restrictions affecting them directly could wind up being more determinative of their position on the ACA than whatever ends up happening with those previously uninsured.

Things change, but right now the outlook favors bad weather.

IRS - Oversight Cmmt. Testimony

William Wilkins, IRS Chief Counsel, Testifies on Targeting of Tea-Party Groups

         

          By  Eliana Johnson

Behind the scenes and nearly six months after the scandal first made headlines, the House Oversight Committee is quietly continuing its investigation of the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of tea-party groups. Since May, congressional investigators have interviewed over 30 witnesses and examined thousands of pages of documents.

The latest official called to testify before committee investigators is an important one: IRS chief counsel William Wilkins. Wilkins is one of just two political appointees at the IRS, a generous donor to Democratic candidates and causes, and once represented Jeremiah

Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Evidence of his involvement in the targeting would spell trouble for the White House and bring renewed focus to a scandal that has largely receded from public consciousness.

The Oversight Committee has furnished none, to date, but it is expressing gross dissatisfaction with Wilkins’s testimony and, in a letter sent to him on Wednesday, offering him the opportunity to amend it. “In your testimony, you stated ‘I don’t recall’ a staggering 80 times in full or partial response to the Committee’s questions,” committee chairman Darrell Issa and Ohio representative Jim Jordan wrote. “Your failure to recollect important aspects of the Committee’s investigation suggests either a deliberate attempt to obfuscate your involvement in this matter or gross incompetence on your part.”

The most pertinent subject on which Wilkins’s memory failed him was the nature of his communications with Treasury Department officials: in particular, whether he discussed the applications of tea-party groups with anybody at the Treasury Department, whether he discussed with Treasury Department officials regulatory guidance for 501(c)(4) entities engaged in political activities, and whether he discussed with them the inspector general’s report that blew the lid off of the targeting scandal in mid May. 

In the summer of 2011, former IRS official Lois Lerner and her senior adviser sought guidance from lawyers in Wilkins’s office on the processing of two “test” applications from conservative groups, whose treatment was intended to guide how Cincinnati agents would process the bulk of the tea-party cases. Wilkins told the committee he was unaware of their involvement in the issue but did know about the draft guidance on the treatment of tea-party applications that, on April 25, 2012, emerged from Lerner’s meetings with lawyers
reporting to him. (The guidance was never finalized.)

Wilkins met with President Obama on April 23, two days before the guidance was provided. Whether he had a hand in drafting those rudimentary guidelines that emerged in April 2012 or whether he tipped off his superiors at the Treasury Department to what was going on, we do not know.

Lawles in DC

An outbreak of lawlessness

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: November 28 E-mail the writer

For all the gnashing of teeth over the lack of comity and civility in Washington, the real problem is not etiquette but the breakdown of political norms, legislative and constitutional.

Such as the one just spectacularly blown up in the Senate. To get three judges onto a coveted circuit court, frustrated Democrats
abolished the filibuster for executive appointments and (non-Supreme Court) judicial nominations.

The problem is not the change itself. It’s fine that a president staffing his administration should need 51 votes rather than 60. Doing so
for judicial appointments, which are for life, is a bit dicier. Nonetheless, for about 200 years the filibuster was nearly unknown in blocking judicial nominees. So we are really just returning to an earlier norm.

The violence to political norms here consisted in how that change was executed. By brute force — a near party-line vote of 52 to 48 .

This was a disgraceful violation of more than two centuries of precedent. If a bare majority can change the fundamental rules that govern an institution, then there are no rules. Senate rules today are whatever the majority decides they are that morning.

What distinguishes an institution from a flash mob is that its rules endure. They can be changed, of course. But only by significant supermajorities. That’s why constitutional changes require two-thirds of both houses plus three-quarters of the states. If we could make constitutional changes by majority vote, there would be no Constitution.

As of today, the Senate effectively has no rules. Congratulations, Harry Reid. Finally, something you will be remembered for.
Barack Obama may be remembered for something similar. His violation of the proper limits of executive power has become breathtaking. It’s not just making recess appointments when the Senate is in session. It’s not just unilaterally imposing a law Congress had refused to pass — the Dream Act — by brazenly suspending large sections of the immigration laws.

We’ve now reached a point where a flailing president, desperate to deflect the opprobrium heaped upon him for the false promise that you could keep your health plan if you wanted to, calls a hasty news conference urging both insurers and the states to reinstate millions of such plans.

Except that he is asking them to break the law. His own law. Under Obamacare, no insurer may issue a policy after 2013 that does not meet the law’s minimum coverage requirements. These plans were canceled because they do not.

The law remains unchanged. The regulations governing that law remain unchanged. Nothing is changed except for a president proposing to unilaterally change his own law from the White House press room.

That’s banana republic stuff, except that there the dictator proclaims from the presidential balcony.

Remember how for months Democrats denounced Republicans for daring to vote to defund or postpone Obamacare? Saboteurs! Terrorists! How dare you alter “the law of the land.”

This was nonsense from the beginning. Every law is subject to revision and abolition if the people think it turned out to be a bad idea. Even constitutional amendments can be repealed — and have been (see Prohibition).

After indignant denunciation of Republicans for trying to amend “the law of the land” constitutionally (i.e. in Congress assembled), Democrats turn utterly silent when the president lawlessly tries to do so by executive fiat.

Nor is this the first time. The president wakes up one day and decides to unilaterally suspend the employer mandate, a naked invasion of Congress’s exclusive legislative prerogative, enshrined in Article I. Not a word from the Democrats. Nor now regarding the blatant usurpation of trying to restore canceled policies that violate explicit Obamacare coverage requirements.

And worse. When Congress tried to make Obama’s “fix” legal — i.e., through legislation — he opposed it. He even said he would veto it. Imagine: vetoing the very bill that would legally enact his own illegal fix.

At rallies, Obama routinely says he has important things to do and he’s not going to wait for Congress. Well, amending a statute after it’s been duly enacted is something a president may not do without Congress. It’s a gross violation of his Article II duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

A Senate with no rules. A president without boundaries. One day, when a few bottled-up judicial nominees and a malfunctioning health-care Web site are barely a memory, we will still be dealing with the toxic residue of this outbreak of authoritative lawlessness.

How to Block Appointments - Despite Filibuster Limits

Despite Filibuster Limits, a Door Remains Open to Block Judge Nominees

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The decision by Senate Democrats to eliminate filibusters for most judicial nominations only marginally enhanced 

President Obama’s power to reshape the judiciary, according to court watchers from across the political spectrum, because Republican senators can still veto his nominees to most currently vacant appeals court seats.

The new Senate rule clears the way for eight appeals court nominees who have already had confirmation hearings to win approval with simple majority votes, including three on the powerful Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which reviews federal policies and regulations. But it left unchanged the Senate’s “blue slip” custom, which allows senators to block nominees to judgeships associated with their states.

“It is hard to overstate the change’s importance for the D.C. Circuit, which has a disproportionate impact on the world, but it won’t have overwhelming impact elsewhere,” Kathryn Ruemmler, the White House counsel, said in an interview. “The blue slip rule for judges has been more problematic than the filibuster, in part because it is a silent, unaccountable veto.”

Twelve more appeals court seats are either vacant or will be by the end of 2014. All but one are in states with at least one Republican senator. As a result, Mr. Obama still lacks unrestricted power to swiftly appoint a flurry of more clearly left-of-center judges than he has done to date, despite the fears of conservatives and the hopes of liberals, specialists said.

The use of the filibuster to require a 60-vote supermajority to confirm an appeals court nominee arose out of the bitter aftermath of the disputed 2000 presidential election, when Senate Democrats used the tactic to deny lifetime appointments for several of President George W. Bush’s nominees who were particularly outspoken conservatives.

After Mr. Obama was elected, Senate Republicans escalated the practice, routinely delaying the confirmation of executive branch and judicial nominees and blocking up-or-down votes on four District of Columbia Circuit nominees. Now, a simple majority of senators will once again be able to confirm nominees to the executive branch and lower courts; filibusters of Supreme Court nominees remain permitted.

Edward Whelan, the president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, said the change effectively reset the balance of power between presidents and opposition-party senators back to how things were before the Bush years — with other political constraints still in place.

“What is being ignored in the discussion of how much free rein the administration will have is that there are political costs to selecting wackos,” Mr. Whelan said. “So the question is, how much will this change really be worth? It may well not be as transformative as people claim.”

And Ms. Ruemmler said that Mr. Obama had been looking for “smart and thoughtful” judges who had the “potential to persuade” conservative colleagues, rather than outspoken liberals. She suggested that the strategic approach, with Justice Elena Kagan as a model, was unlikely to change much.

What remains unclear is whether the landmark rule change has established a new equilibrium, or whether more changes may follow. If there is additional fallout, specialists said, Mr. Obama’s power to swiftly appoint the judges of his choice — and the power of his successors of either party — may yet be expanded significantly.

In particular, the blue slip rule could come under additional scrutiny. Under the prerogative, both home-state senators must sign off on a blue slip allowing a confirmation hearing for a nominee. Facing that obstacle, presidents generally do not make nominations without such senators’ consent.

“The blue slip is still a very powerful tool,” Mr. Whelan said. “Indeed, we may get Republicans, realizing that they no longer have the minority power of the filibuster, becoming more aggressive in using the blue slip.”

Already, according to a recent study by Russell Wheeler of the Brookings Institution, vacancies without nominees are disproportionately likely to be in states like Texas that are represented by Republican senators. That suggests, he wrote, that they are “objecting to nominees floated by the administration, insisting on nominees unacceptable to the administration, or simply slow-walking the process.”

Any change to the blue slip rule would be up to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont. So far, however, he has enforced the rule broadly, even blocking a Kansas nominee to a federal appeals court because both Kansas senators changed their minds after clearing the nominee.

Sheldon Goldman, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said that if Republican senators used the blue slip rule to “gum up the works” and Mr. Leahy decided to allow confirmation hearings without their approval, Mr. Obama — and future presidents — would be freer to appoint more ideologically outspoken judges across the country.

After the vote to change the filibuster rule, Mr. Leahy reiterated his support for the blue slip rule. Still, he also said he could change his mind if it were abused — without defining “abuse.”

“I assume no one will abuse the blue slip process like some have abused the use of the filibuster to block judicial nominees on the floor of the Senate,” he said in a statement. “As long as the blue slip process is not being abused by home-state senators, then I will see no reason to change that tradition.”

The new Senate policy could also shape the career decisions of sitting judges. While the change did not affect the rules for Supreme 

Court nominations, it set a precedent that could be used to shut down any filibuster for such a nominee as well. Several observers suggested that the prospect might influence decisions by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 80, and Stephen G. Breyer, 75, about whether to retire in 2014. Still, neither has publicly indicated any desire to time an exit strategically.

The Senate change also opened a political window to fill judgeships over which Republicans do not wield blue slip power with the support of just 51 Democratic senators — a window that will close in 2015 if Republicans retake a Senate majority in the midterm elections. That prospect could prompt additional Democratic-appointed appeals court judges who are, or soon will be, eligible for senior status to move up their semi-retirement. It allows judges to keep hearing cases at a reduced workload, while enabling the president to appoint a successor.

There are 18 such judges in seats from states with two Democratic senators, and two more on the District of Columbia Circuit, according to data compiled by Mr. Wheeler.

“Some Democratic appointees may be more attracted to retiring in this window because they have more confidence that Obama will be able to appoint a young successor,” he said.

 

Hillary in 2016 (Sec State Clinton Did What?

Hillary Clinton Supporters Slowly Realizing She Didn’t Do Anything as Secretary of State

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On November 28, 2013 @ 6:12 pm In The Point | 90 Comments

But that’s okay since Hillary Clinton also didn’t do anything in the Senate. It could actually be a good slogan for her campaign. “Vote for Hillary: She Won’t Do Anything as President Either.”

But some people close to Mrs. Clinton worry that, because of the high profile given to her work for women’s rights, and the headlines now being generated by the hyperkinetic Mr. Kerry, her efforts on trickier diplomatic situations have been eclipsed.

What exactly did Hillary Clinton do for women’s rights? I mean besides give speeches about it.

What about her 13 trips to Libya in 2011 to build the coalition that led to the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, they ask. Why is no one talking about how she brokered a cease-fire in Gaza? Anyone remember that she furthered economic sanctions on North Korea?

Seriously?

Libya is on fire. Its cities are run by armed Islamist militias. Some of whom murdered 4 Americans in a diplomatic mission that Hillary and her staffers failed to provide security for while they were blowing millions on overpriced Kindles, art in embassies and a YouTube channel for Afghanistan.

Does anyone in her right mind want to give Hillary credit for Libya?

Negotiated a ceasefire in Gaza? You mean the one that consists of Hamas attacking Israel and Israel fighting back?

North Korea? The brutal Communist tyranny that keeps expanding its nuclear power base despite the useless sanctions?

In contrast, even when members of Mrs. Clinton’s own party describe her achievements, they tend to point to a lot of miles traveled (956,733 to be exact).

Her biggest chance to shape how she is viewed may be through her memoir, which is due out next summer. Dan Schwerin and Ethan Gelber, who both worked under Mrs. Clinton in the State Department, are assisting with the book.

The New York Times means they’re writing the book. Apparently it takes two people to write one Hillary memoir.

Former State Department officials say Mrs. Clinton and her advisers need to do a better job of highlighting how her work on women’s issues ties into national security efforts and the progress now underway.

Also they need to explain what she did on women’s issues.

“There’s a direct correlation between countries that pose direct threats to our national security and those where the mistreatment of half the population is a root cause,” said Philippe I. Reines, a longtime adviser who served as deputy assistant secretary of state. Mr. Reines said that while Mrs. Clinton often made this point, her team failed to articulate that connection publicly.

Yes, it’s called Islam.

That’s why you’re 1. Not articulating the connection 2. Doing anything about it.

He added that “people should not confuse the unique tools and attributes only she could bring to the job as a replacement for being a hard-core diplomat.”

Translated from Diplospeak… Hillary is a special unique sunflower. But she’s not a diplomat.

While at the State Department, Mrs. Clinton enjoyed generally positive media coverage and some of her highest approval ratings. She was often portrayed as a pantsuit-wearing globe-trotter, hitting the dance floor in Pretoria, South Africa, and partying in Cartagena, Colombia.

This is sadly an actual paragraph.

She took on the job at a time when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had given rise to widespread anti-Americanism abroad. In 2006, favorable opinions of the United States had fallen in most of the 15 countries surveyed, including France, Germany, Russia and Japan, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

President Obama’s victory in 2008 and Mrs. Clinton’s frequent personal visits helped mend tensions, and by mid-2009 favorable opinions of the United States in Western Europe, Asia and Latin America were almost as high as before President George W. Bush took office.

And they dropped sharply before she left office. It’s called the Honeymoon Effect.

Whether the public will ultimately embrace that view of Mrs. Clinton’s role is unclear. But the fact that her supporters are eager to defend her tenure — and connect her work to Mr. Kerry’s — suggests a level of concern about her legacy should she decide to run for president in 2016.

Hillary supporters are actually so desperate and neurotic that they’re already trying to take credit for Kerry’s disastrous bungling.

But at least Kerry did something. Bad, bad things. But he did them. Still, what difference does it make?

---

Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://www.frontpagemag.com

America's Coastal Royalty

America’s Coastal Royalty

 
The real national divide isn’t between red and blue states.

 

By  Victor Davis Hanson

The densely populated coastal corridors from Boston to Washington and from San Diego to Berkeley are where most of America’s big decisions are made.

They remind us of two quite different Americas: one country along these coasts and everything else in between. Those in Boston, New York, and Washington determine how our government works; what sort of news, books, art, and fashion we should consume; and whether our money and investments are worth anything.

The Pacific corridor is just as influential, but in a hipper, cooler fashion. Whether America suffers through another zombie film or one more Lady Gaga video or Kanye West’s latest soft-porn rhyme is determined by Hollywood — mostly by executives who live in the la-la land of the thin Pacific strip from Malibu to Palos Verdes.

The next smart phone or search engine 5.0 will arise from the minds of tech geeks who pay $2,000 a month for studio apartments and drive BMWs in Menlo Park, Palo Alto, or Mountain View.

The road to riches and influence, we are told, lies in being branded with a degree from a coastal-elite campus like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, or Berkeley. How well a Yale professor teaches an 18-year-old in a class on American history does not matter as much as the fact that the professor helps to stamp the student with the Ivy League logo. That mark is the lifelong golden key that is supposed to unlock the door to coastal privilege.

Fly over or drive across the United States, and the spatial absurdity of this rather narrow coastal monopoly is immediately apparent to the naked eye. Outside of these power corridors, our vast country appears pretty empty. The nation’s muscles that produce our oil, gas, food, lumber, minerals, and manufactured goods work unnoticed in this sparsely settled fly-over expanse.

People rise each morning in San Francisco and New York and count on plentiful food, fuel, and power. They expect service in elevators and limos that are mostly made elsewhere by people of the sort they seldom see and don’t really know — other than to influence through a cable-news show, a new rap song, the next federal health-care mandate, or more phone apps.

In California, whether farms receive contracted irrigation water, whether a billion board feet of burned timber will be salvaged from the recent Sierra Nevada forest fires, whether a high-speed-rail project obliterates thousands of acres of ancestral farms, whether gas will be fracked, or whether granite should be mined to make tony kitchen counters is all determined largely by coastal elites who take these plentiful resources for granted. Rarely, however, do they see how their own necessities are procured. Instead, they feel deeply ambivalent about the grubbier people and culture that made them.

In Kansas or Utah, people do not pay $1,000 per square foot for their homes as they do on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They do not gossip with the people who write their tax laws, as is common in the Georgetown area of Washington. Those in the empty northern third of California do not see Facebook or Oracle founders at the local Starbucks any more than they bump into the Kardashians at a hip bistro.

The problem is not just that the coasts determine how everyone else is to lead their lives, but that those living in our elite corridors have no idea about how life is lived just a short distance away in the interior — much less about the sometimes tragic consequences of their own therapeutic ideology on the distant, less influential majority.

In a fantasy world, I would move Washington, D.C., to Kansas City, Mo. That transfer would not only make the capital more accessible to the American people and equalize travel requirements for our legislators, but also expose an out-of-touch government to a reality outside its Beltway.

I would transfer the United Nations to Salt Lake City, where foreign diplomats would live in a different sort of cocoon.

I would ask billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and the Koch Brothers to endow with their riches a few Midwestern or Southern universities. Perhaps we could create a new Ivy League in the nation’s center.

I would suggest to Facebook and Apple that they relocate operations to North Dakota to expose their geeky entrepreneurs to those who drive trucks and plow snow. Who knows — they might be able to afford a house, get married before 35, and have three rather than zero kids.

America is said to be divided by red and blue states, rich and poor, white and non-white, Christian and non-Christian, old and new.

I think the real divide is between those who make our decisions on the coasts and the anonymous others who live with the consequences somewhere else.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book is The Savior Generals, published this spring by Bloomsbury Books. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Random Thoughts 11-30-2013

Random thoughts on the passing scene:

Many people take pride in defying the conventions of society. Those conventions of society are also known as civilization. Defying them wholesale means going back to barbarism. Barbarians with electronic devices are still barbarians.

After the government shutdown crisis, the one thing that Congressional Democrats and Republicans finally agreed on was to kick the can down the road a few more months, so that we can go through all this again -- and perhaps again after that.

One of the best peace speeches I ever read was one delivered back in the 1930s -- by Adolf Hitler! He knew that peace speeches would keep the Western democracies from matching his military buildup with their own, or attacking him to prevent his buildup from continuing. Peace speeches by Iran today serve the same purpose of buying time -- until they can create a nuclear bomb.

President Obama really has a way with words, such as calling the problems that millions of people have had trying to sign up for ObamaCare "glitches." When the Titanic sank, was that a "glitch"?

Among the painful signs of our time are TV programs built around paternity tests. Apparently the way these women live, it is anybody's guess who their child's father might be.

Don't you love it when a politicians says, "I take full responsibility"? Translated into plain English, that says, "Now that I have admitted it, there is nothing more for me to do (such as resign) and nothing for anyone else to do (such as fire me)." Saying "I take full responsibility" is like a get-out-of-jail-free card in the Monopoly game.

No one seems as certain that they know what the Republicans need to do to win presidential elections as those Republicans who have lost presidential elections, such as Mitt Romney, John McCain and Bob Dole. Moreover, people take them seriously, and seem not to notice that what the losers advocate is the opposite of what won Ronald Reagan two landslide election victories.

If you believe in equal rights, then what do "women's rights," "gay rights," etc., mean? Either they are redundant or they are violations of the principle of equal rights for all.

One of the painfully sobering realizations that come from reading history is the utter incompetence that is possible among leaders of whole nations and empires -- and the blind faith that such leaders can nevertheless inspire among the people who are enthralled by their words or their posturing.

The one thing that the national debt ceiling does not do is put a ceiling on the national debt. It just provides political melodrama when the existing ceiling is repeatedly raised to accommodate ever higher spending.

Those who want to "spread the wealth" almost invariably seek to concentrate the power. It happens too often, and in too many different countries around the world, to be a coincidence. Which is more dangerous, inequalities of wealth or concentrations of power?

President Obama said to the world that Bashar Assad's days as ruler of Syria are numbered. All our days are numbered but Assad will probably still be ruling Syria on Obama's last day in the White House.

Parole is just another way of lying to the public -- in this case, lying about the time that convicted criminals will spend behind bars.

Suspended sentences are another form of make-believe punishment to mollify the public.

Writing about the Habsburg Empire, distinguished British historian Paul Johnson said, "Every reform created more problems than it solved." That was not peculiar to the Habsburg Empire. The same could be said of modern welfare states, and especially our own ObamaCare.

Because many of us make mistakes that can have bad consequences, some intellectuals believe that it is the role of government to intervene and make some of our decisions for us. From what galaxy government is going to hire creatures who do not make mistakes is a question they leave unanswered.

One of the reasons it has taken so long for some people to finally see through Barack Obama is that people do not like to admit, even to themselves, that they have been played for fools by a slick-talking politician.

King Barack's ACA "Fix" Stuns DC and Nation

The bad consequences of the President’s ACA ”fix” just keep getting clearer. The Christian Science Monitor has a good summary of the stunned reactions from industry experts to Obama’s announcement that insurance companies will now be able to extend pre-existing plans for another year, if they choose to do so:
In blue Washington State, where, unlike HealthCare.gov, the state-run exchange has rolled out with great success, the insurance commissioner rebuffed the president and announced his state would not be reissuing old policies.
“I do not believe his proposal is a good deal for the state of Washington,” Mike Kreidler, the commissioner, said in a statement. “In the interest of keeping the consumer protections we have enacted and ensuring that we keep health insurance costs down for all consumers, we are staying the course. We will not be allowing insurance companies to extend their policies. I believe this is in the best interest of the health insurance market in Washington.”
Insurance companies and commissioners aren’t the only ones getting an immense headache from this “fix.” In the White House also people are coming to grips with the huge mess created by the President’s desperate maneuver, and in the Beltway wonks are panicking. The American health and insurance system, badly flawed as it is, is as complex a web of interests and institutions as you will find. It can’t be uprooted and overturned by casual comments and presidential decrees—not without serious side effects.
This miscalculation is sadly entirely consistent with the long series of miscalculations this President has made about health care going back all the way to 2010. Obama is in trouble because he did not fully understand the interplay of forces in the American health care system, and is trying to reform it via a clumsy set of fixes, off-sets, mandates and subsidies. Imposing a new and even less well-considered decree is not going to end his troubles.


By Harry Bruinius, Staff writer / November 16, 2013 at 8:28 am EST
New York

Health insurers across America woke up Friday to confront a looming administrative nightmare.

For more than a year or longer, they meticulously crunched the numbers for their 2014 health plans, conforming them to the new mandates of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). They navigated the labyrinths of Obamacare’s regulations, including the 10 essential benefits required for all plans, and they applied new rules that governed how they could calculate their costs.

Then they sent these plans to state regulators. Hosts of state actuaries throughout the country reviewed the calculations, approving some, requiring revisions for others. After this long and often tortuous process, insurance carriers finally presented their suite of 2014 plans to their customers – complete with approved yearly premiums.

But now, with less than 2 months to go before what was supposed to be a new era in American health care, President Obama is telling insurers that if their customers want to keep their old plans, they can keep them.

“It’s a whirlwind, my friend,” says David Oscar, communications chair of the New Jersey Association of Health Underwriters. “I’ve been dealing with Jan. 1 renewals since the beginning of November. Now I’ve got to go back? For me as a broker, as a person who represents insurance carriers, I have egg on my face, because now I have everybody sending me an e-mail saying, ‘Hey, Dave, I heard on the “Today” show this morning that I can keep my old plan.’ ”

Bowing to intense political pressure Thursday, Mr. Obama announced he would allow carriers to offer customers their old plans for one year, after millions of Americans received notice that their plans had been canceled. The cancellations had produced an uproar, and members of Obama’s own party were forced to scramble to defend the ACA, which had already been plagued by a disastrous rollout of its centerpiece exchange, HealthCare.gov.

The uproar stems, really, from the now-infamously emphatic words that the president spoke, among other times, in July 2009: “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”

Now, this seemingly reassuring statement is threatening to unravel the signature legislation of his presidency – and perhaps his legacy, too. And Thursday’s rule change, meant to honor these words, is threatening to unravel the controversial law even more.

“I think it was a political move that undermined the objectives of Obamacare,” says Eric Raymond, chairman of BenefitVault, a Philadelphia tech company providing payment solutions for insurance brokerages. “I do think it created havoc for the individual carriers and employers – and for a purely political move.”

To reoffer old plans means to go through the whole process again – and some states may simply say no to that. Insurers cannot simply reissue old plans: They must recrunch numbers, refigure the benefits and rates for a complex array of populations, and then resubmit them to state regulators.

“Now you have to have the 50 states and Puerto Rico agree to offer the old plans,” says Thom Mangan, CEO of United Benefit Advisors, an employee-benefits advisory firm in Chicago. “And that’s not very easy to do. You’re going to have the more-liberal states say, nope, we agree with Obamacare, this is the way we’re going, even as the red states – who never wanted to be part of it anyway – say, fine by me.”

Indeed, in blue Washington State, where, unlike HealthCare.gov, the state-run exchange has rolled out with great success, the insurance commissioner rebuffed the president and announced his state would not be reissuing old policies.

“I do not believe his proposal is a good deal for the state of Washington,” Mike Kreidler, the commissioner, said in a statement. “In the interest of keeping the consumer protections we have enacted and ensuring that we keep health insurance costs down for all consumers, we are staying the course. We will not be allowing insurance companies to extend their policies. I believe this is in the best interest of the health insurance market in Washington.”

Allowing people to keep the plans they liked, many insurers worry, would be catastrophic for the new numbers they have already worked hard to crunch.

One key component of Obamacare, insurers point out, is getting younger and healthier Americans to pay for health insurance. This is necessary to help subsidize the higher costs of other individuals, who will be putting more pressures on a system already exploding in costs.

In the previous system, rates for the young and healthy were generally much lower: Since they generally don’t get sick as much, they were able to pay less, in a setup similar to safe-driver discounts. Indeed, it is many of these Americans who have seen their cheaper health plans canceled and have seen their rates increase.

Now, they can go back to these old plans – assuming states will allow insurers to offer them. But this will undermine the cost structure for those already on new Obamacare plans – those with preexisting conditions, say, who now cannot be denied coverage. These new plans were designed with the assumption that more premiums would be paid by the young and healthy.

“And here we are now, with no effective subsidy for those who cost the system more,” Mr. Mangan says. “I am absolutely terrified that the increases [in claims] that will come for the insurance companies in the next year ... will be monumental.”

In other words, Obama’s move to allow people to keep their old plans could put this year’s number crunching out of whack. “Let’s just say that there’s a 50 percent increase in [insurers’] costs, if that’s what the claims show. When they submit their numbers [to the states], insurance commissioners will say, absolutely not,” Mangan says.

The result, he emphatically predicts, will be that insurers will leave the exchanges altogether. “There will be very, very few commercial, publicly traded insurance companies ... that will be able to afford to stay in this if they have to be regulated.”

What’s more, the president’s move Thursday may lead many Americans to believe they can keep their previous rates, too.

“Now the consumer is going to have unrealistic expectations,” says Mr. Oscar of the New Jersey association. “They are going to be surprised, thinking, I was supposed to keep what I have, which to them might mean they can pay what they had been.”

Others see Obama’s move as undermining what he has long said – that the new plans replacing the old would be better, and in most cases cheaper, since millions would qualify for a subsidy.

“[Most] of those who lost their previous plans would have legitimately been better off, both individually and for the program as a whole,” says Mr. Raymond of BenefitVault. “And many of them will not even realize it now.”

All this might have been avoided had the president not made what most insurers already knew was an obviously misleading statement about keeping plans and doctors.

“I have to say, I wish the president had called the people who have boots on the ground,” says Oscar. “Every change they've made has caused us more grief, because we have to fix what the news puts out there on a daily basis.”

Racers with Oprha

November 15, 2013 3:00 PM

The Moral Decline of Oprah

              By  Victor Davis Hanson

Multi-billionaire Oprah Winfrey, after her surreal $38,000 handbag “racism” encounter in Switzerland, has just weighed in again on race and the presidency, as yet the nth way of hyping her new film: “There’s a level of disrespect for the office that occurs. And that occurs in some cases and maybe even many cases because he’s African American. There’s no question about that and it’s the kind of thing nobody ever says but everybody’s thinking it.”

Nobody ever says? Has she read a newspaper columnist or turned on MSNBC lately?

Aside from her historical ignorance, Oprah Winfrey has increasingly turned to the race card to explain the president’s plummeting polls.
In her race-obsessed world, Syria, Benghazi, the NSA, IRS, AP, and ACA messes do not explain why a reelected president crashes from a recent 60 percent approval rating to less than 40 percent in less than a year.

Instead, in Oprah’s no-win, racialist world, to the degree that Obama is popular, Americans are considered for the time being as not racist; to the degree that he is not, the country suddenly is collectively under suspicion (e.g., “everybody’s thinking it”).

That Obama might be utterly inexperienced in the manner of Jimmy Carter, less than veracious in the manner of the impeached Bill Clinton, or suffering the same second-term blues of Ronald Reagan during Iran-Contra or popularity crash of George W. Bush after Katrina simply cannot for Oprah be true of an African-American president, who for some reason must not suffer the same fate and treatment as almost all who have held the highest office. Instead, in this raciallyobsessed world of Oprah, that Obama is faring no different from his predecessors is now the country’s fault. And as remedy, he must be given deference if the country wishes to avoid the latest therapeutic rant from Oprah.

In fact, Oprah has no record of worrying about the level of disrespect shown the office. If she did, she might have said something a few years ago when her president was routinely being compared to a Nazi, and often by her own fellow celebrities, writers, politicians, civil-rights activists, and filmmakers. That she said nothing then, but now says a lot, explains not America’s problem with race, but her own race obsessions, which have blinded her to her own prejudices and hypocrisies.

I don’t recall Oprah objecting when Bush was routinely shouted down. Did she deplore Al Gore calling the Bush team “digital brownshirts”? Or maybe John Glenn invoking the Nazis (“It’s the old Hitler business”) to talk about her president? Nor do I remember her weighing in on Linda Ronstadt’s claim that the Bush administration was “a new bunch of Hitlers.” Harry Belafonte and Julian Bond both routinely labeled their conservative opponents as little more than Nazis or KKK racists. Nor did Oprah note that “there’s a level of disrespect for the office that occurs” when Barbra Streisand compared Bush to Hermann Goering. Was she worried when Alfred A. Knopf published a novel about musing how to kill Bush? Or by a prize-winning docudrama film imagining the killing of Bush? What was her reaction a New York play, “I’m Gonna Kill the President,” was produced? Did Oprah once give a similar BBC interview about the office of the president and disrespect shown it in 2004 when a guest columnist in the Guardian, Charles Brooker, wrote: “On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod’s law dictates he’ll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr. — where are you now that we need you?”

What might explain her outrage now about criticism shown Obama, but silence just recently when abject hatred and dreams of violence were voiced against her president? That answer may explain a lot about what Oprah has become.

Tony Katz owns Contessa Brewer, ‘race-ers’ on MSNBC

               Posted By Bryan Preston On April 30, 2011 @ 2:25 pm In Culture,Politics | No Comments

PJTV host, radio host and Tatler blogger Tony Katz got a turn at bat on MSNBC, and hit a home run.

CONTESSA BREWER, MSNBC HOST: That’s what a lot of people are saying it’s not a laughing matter. They say that there are questions about him, not because there really are questions about where he is born, but because he is black. […]

KATZ: But this whole idea of race, you know what, if there are birthers and they’re all crazy and silly for actually wanting to see a birth certificate, well let’s talk about the racers, the people who believe that everything is a conspiracy about race. It’s Obama’s race that people want to see the birth certificate. It’s Obama’s race that people don’t like the out of control spending. It’s not his race. It’s that he’s awful. The policies are terrible. ObamaCare is a lie and a failure. QE1 and QE2 didn’t work. It’s crazy.

As you’ll see in the clip, Brewer tried to make the case that the quest for the birth certificate was all about race because, hey, Bush’s critics didn’t ask him for one! No, they just called him “Hitler” and fabricated a smear on his military service.

The obvious answer to Brewer’s accusation: Bush’s father wasn’t a Kenyan communist, and Bush didn’t end up living in Indonesia for years. The Bush history, which was already very well known before he ever ran for president (he’d been governor of Texas and owned a baseball team, for goodness sake) doesn’t beg any sort of questions about citizenship, while Obama’s does. Pretty simple, not about race, but that’s not good enough for Brewer. Katz sends it into the bleachers.

KATZ: They didn’t say it was race. Everything that comes out of the racers, and they exist – the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Huffington Post”, some people at your very network, and you know I enjoy having these conversations with you. They are so focused. Everything is about race. It’s not about race. When we talk about Obama and the policies, it’s about the awful policies. It’s about the inability to bring down debt. It’s about the inability to tackle the deficit. And when everybody says, “Oh, they’re just after this because of race,” it is nonsense. It’s a way to stop people from having conversation. Political correctness at its worst. If we want to talk about the issues, let’s talk about the issues.

Well done, Tony.

---

Article printed from The PJ Tatler: http://pjmedia.com/tatler
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011/04/30/tony-katz-owns-contessa-brewer-race-ers-on-msnbc/

America's Wilderness Years

America’s Wilderness Years

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On November 11, 2013 

Most two-term presidents leave some sort of legacy. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. George W. Bush prevented another 9/11, and constructed an anti-terrorism protocol that even his critical successor embraced and often expanded.

Even our one-term presidents have achieved something. JFK got Soviet missiles out of Cuba. LBJ oversaw passage of civil rights legislation. Jerry Ford restored integrity to the White House. Jimmy Carter finally issued the Carter Doctrine to stop Soviet expansionism at the Persian Gulf. George H.W. Bush won the first Persian Gulf War and got Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.

And even our impeached or abdicated presidents at least left some positive legacies. Richard Nixon went to China and enacted détente.

Bill Clinton through compromise balanced the budget and incurred budget surpluses.

But Barack Obama?

The economy is anemic. We have never seen unemployment dip below 7% in the last five years [1]. Real jobless rates that include those who have given up on working are perhaps double the official figures. By 2017 the national debt will have doubled. The stimulus did not lead to a “summer of recovery.” [2]

Near zero interest rates, vast expansions in the money supply, and huge increases in federal redistributive payouts have not jump-started anything — except to end entirely the cherished American idea of receiving a modest interest rate on lifelong passbook savings accounts. The middle class has been squeezed as never before, lacking the administration’s romance of the poor and its crony-capitalism connections of the rich.

Even with new taxes on top incomes, the end of the war in Iraq, sequestration, and a supposed recovery, the 2013 annual deficit will still near $700 billion — a bragging point for Obama, given that this is the first year of his administration that we did not borrow over $1 trillion. To the degree that Obama has made headway — the sequestration forcing cuts and reducing the 2013 budget deficit somewhat, or gas and oil production soaring on private lands — success has come despite his opposition, not because of his advocacy.

Not since Richard Nixon have we seen such a record of scandal. The disclosures of wrong-doing and cover-ups now come so often that they become mind-numbing — Fast and Furious, Benghazi, and the IRS, AP, NSA, and ACA messes. After the president’s flips and flops over Syria, confusion about Egypt, and leading from behind in Libya, no one believes him — which is why also that no one was surprised at home about the untruth about Obamacare. In such a context, misdeeds like the Pigford payouts or Solyndra do not even raise an eyebrow.

Foreign policy is likewise in shambles. No one in the administration brags of “leading from behind” in Libya, or of “reset” with Russia, or of “red lines” and “game changers” in Syria. On most foreign policy issues, Obama is to the left of the current French socialist government. A Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s legacy is trying to bypass the UN about Syria, exceeding the UN mandate in Libya, and now ignoring it with Iran.

I know of no major Democrat figure who claims a foreign policy success for this administration — unless estrangement from Israel, or the courting of Islamists in Turkey and Egypt, or open mic promises [3] to go easy on Russia after the election count. The irony is that the more the Obama administration has courted our enemies — Venezuela, the Islamist Middle East, Iran — the more they have disliked us, as our appeasement earned contempt rather than appreciation of magnanimity. There is no longer an American-led West.

Germany is becoming the world’s fiscal arbitrator, France the Western bulwark against radical Islam, Japan the impediment to Chinese expansionism, Israel and the Persian Gulf the last chance to stop an Iranian bomb [4].

The Obama cabinet is the weakest in modern memory. Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress. By his polarizing rhetoric (“my people,” “cowards,” etc.), he has helped to set back racial relations a generation. Kathleen Sebelius [5] oversaw the most disastrous rollout of a federal program of the modern era. Chuck Hagel is becoming irrelevant at Defense.

John Kerry at State will be known for his promise of an “unbelievably small” [6] bombing campaign to come against Syria — that in itself was explained by Obama as a non-pinprick. Hillary Clinton had declared Assad a “reformer,” scoffed off Benghazi as “what difference does it make?” and tried to parlay “Bush did it” into a foreign policy.

Steven Chu proved a sort of idiot-savant at Energy, reminding us that Nobel Prize winners can lack even an iota of common sense [7]. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s chief task was finding ways to grant election-time amnesties without being caught at it, while inventing adolescent euphemisms [8] for terrorism.

The less said about the quotes about a peaceful and secular Islamism from James Clapper [9] and John Brennan [10] the better. Citigroup’s Peter Orszag [11] and Jack Lew [12] were refutations of the Obama promises to end the revolving door between big money and big government.

Lisa Jackson at EPA quietly left, after fabricating a fake email identity of “Richard Windsor.” [13] Press Secretary Jay Carney has made Ron Ziegler’s tenure appear veracious in comparison. Thomas Perez and Hilda Solis at Labor saw their job as the promotion of unionism at all costs.

Obama, the self-described constitutional lawyer, has done more to endanger personal liberty and the rule of law than any president since FDR put Japanese-American citizens into camps. Associated Press reporters were monitored. The NSA tapped personal communications. The IRS went after Obama’s opponents [14]. An innocent video maker was jailed on trumped-up charges of parole violations after being falsely accused by the president and the secretary of State of inciting the Benghazi attacks. When a law was deemed inconvenient, Obama simply either overrode or ignored it, whether Obamacare’s employer mandate or federal border enforcement statutes.

The president’s “signature” legislation was supposed to be Obamacare, a federal takeover of health care only dreamed of by past liberal presidents, but pushed through on a strictly partisan vote by the charisma of Barack Obama. The problem with the more than 2,000 pages of Obamacare — frontloaded two years ago with freebies — was not just that its web-based delivery system was inoperative, but that its entire concept of supposedly supplying superior insurance to more people at less cost was fiscally impossible, while its central assumption that young healthy people would be willing to pay more for health care that they would rarely use to subsidize older people who would pay less for more coverage was ridiculous.

Is there an Obama legacy?

In a way, yes. He has mesmerized the media in a manner entirely unknown in past presidencies. No matter the scandal or policy failure, it will be almost impossible for Obama’s popularity to dip much below 40%. Yet even more importantly than hypnotizing a once-free press into a Ministry of Truth [15], Obama has redefined the scope and purpose of federal redistributive entitlements, turning them into the political means of creating a permanent dependent constituency.

For the Democratic Party, Obama has been a disaster [16], discrediting the professed liberal commitment to socialized medicine [17], civil liberties [18], lead-from-behind foreign policy, Keynesian economics, and an open transparent government skeptical of Wall Street big money [19] and federal overreach. He also managed to pass almost no new initiatives with large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate in his first two years of governance, before losing the former in 2010 and perhaps the latter in 2014.

Obama has been compared to almost every out-of-his-league figure in mythology (Phaethon at the reins of his father’s out-of-control sun chariot, Icarus flying too high on frail waxen wings, Narcissus transfixed at a reflecting pool of his own image), cinema (Chauncey Gardiner of Being There [20], or Bill McKay of The Candidate), or literature (Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Orwell’s pigs prancing on two legs). In that regard, the Obama presidency, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton, requires a suspension of disbelief, and a “what difference does it make?” at each new unfolding scandal.

His tenure will be known as the Wilderness Years — nothing gained, much lost.

Article printed from Works and Days: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/americas-wilderness-years/

Clunker Progressivism (note:Commom Core)

By George F. Will, Published: November 6

Barack Obama’s presidency has become a feast of failures whose proliferation protects their author from close scrutiny of any one of them. Now, however, we can revisit one of the first and see it as a harbinger of progressivism’s downward stumble to HealthCare.gov.

“Cash for Clunkers” was born with Obama’s administration as a component of his stimulus. Its fate is a window into both why the recovery has been extraordinarily weak and what happens when progressives’ clever plans collide with recalcitrant reality.
Consumers could trade in older vehicles and receive vouchers toward the purchase of a new, more fuel- efficient car. The vouchers were worth $3,500 or $4,500, depending on the difference in fuel economy between the trade-in and the new purchase. The program’s purposes were economic stimulation and environmental improvement.

Now a study by Ted Gayer and Emily Parker, published by the Brookings Institution, a mildly liberal think tank, concludes: “The $2.85 billion in vouchers provided by the program had a small and short-lived impact on gross domestic product, essentially shifting roughly a few billion dollars forward from the subsequent two quarters following the program.”

Most of the 677,842 sales were simply taken from the near future. That many older vehicles were traded in — and, as required by law, destroyed. Gayer and Parker accept as reasonable an estimate that the cost per job created by the program was $1.4 million. Although the vouchers did not come close to covering the cost of the new cars, voucher recipients seem not to have reduced their other consumption. This, say Gayer and Parker, suggests that participants in the program “were not liquidity constrained,” which is a delicate way of saying “there was no change in other consumption patterns,” which is a polite way of saying that “cash for clunkers” merely caused people to purchase vehicles “slightly earlier than otherwise would have occurred.”

Because the program was not means-tested, it had only a slight distributional effect of the sort progressives favor: Voucher recipients had lower incomes than others who bought new cars in 2009. Against this, however, must be weighed the fact that the mandated destruction of so many used vehicles probably caused prices for such vehicles to be higher than they otherwise would have been, meaning a redistribution of wealth adverse to low-income consumers.

As for environmental benefits from Cash for Clunkers, the reduction of gasoline consumption was small and “the cost per ton of carbon dioxide reduced by [the program] far exceeds the estimated social cost of carbon.” But it was — herewith very faint praise — more cost-effective than the subsidy for electric vehicles or the tax credit for ethanol.
Cash for Clunkers lasted 55 days and ended with confusion that was a preview of things to come. The New York Times explained in


August 2009 the final surge of demand for clunker funds:


“Around the country, dealers had put off the laborious task of applying for the rebates . . . which requires entering the 17-character identification numbers of each vehicle to be scrapped, scanning images of proof of insurance and filling out other paperwork. The computer system was overloaded, according to the dealers. They said they would finish one page in the application, hit enter and nothing would happen. Eventually a message would appear notifying the dealer that the page had ‘timed out.’ Tom Frew, the business manager at Galpin Motors in Los Angeles, said that he needed 35 tries to register just one of the company’s 11 dealerships on the day that the program opened because of problems with the government Web site. On Friday, he spent an hour processing just one rebate application, he said.”

The recovery from the recession began in June 2009; 53 months later, vehicle sales still have not yet reached the pre-recession peak. Cash for Clunkers was prologue for the government’s vastly more ambitious plan to manage health care’s 18 percent of the economy.

The present, too, is prologue. There is heated debate about Common Core, whose advocates say it merely involves national academic targets and metrics for primary and secondary education. Critics say it will inevitably lead to a centrally designed and nationally imposed curriculum — practice dictated by targets and metrics. Common Core advocates say, in effect: “If you like your local curriculum, you can keep it. Period.”

If you believe this, your credulity is impervious to evidence. And you probably are a progressive.

Krauthammer Nov 10, 2013

 FAST FACTS ABOUT DR. CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER , MD
 
1. Born: March 13, 1950
 
2. Birthplace: New York City, New York
 
3. Raised in Montreal, Canada
 
4. Attended Mc Gill University and Harvard Medical School
 
5. 1972 diving accident left him paralyzed from the neck on down.
 
6. Directed psychiatric research for the Carter administration
 
7. Began writing career in 1981 with The New Republic
 
8. Helped develop the "Reagan Doctrine" in the 80's
 
9. Appointed to Presidential Council on Bioethics in 2002
 

Dr. Krauthammer is frequently on the Fox News Channel. He is an M.D., a lawyer and is paralyzed from the neck down. A friend went to hear Charles
Krauthammer. He listened with 25 others in a closed room. What he says here is NOT 2nd-hand but 1st. The ramifications are staggering for us, our
children and their children.
 
Last Monday was a profound evening. Dr. Charles Krauthammer spoke to the Center for the American Experiment. He is a brilliant intellectual, seasoned
& articulate. He is forthright and careful in his analysis and never resorts to emotions or personal insults. He is NOT a fear monger nor an extremist in
his comments and views. He is a fiscal conservative and has received a Pulitzer Prize for writing. He is a frequent contributor to Fox News and
writes weekly for the Washington Post.
 
The entire room was held spellbound during his talk. I have summarized his comments, as we are living in uncharted waters economically and
internationally.
 
Even 2 Dems at my table agreed with everything he said! If you feel like forwarding this to those who are open minded and have not drunk the
Kool-Aid, feel free....
 
Summary of his comments:
1. Mr. Obama is a very intellectual, charming individual. He is not to be underestimated. He is a cool customer who doesn't show his emotions. It's
very hard to know what's behind the mask. The taking down of the Clinton dynasty was an amazing accomplishment. The Clintons still do not understand
what hit them. Obama was in the perfect place at the perfect time.
 
2. Obama has political skills comparable to Reagan and Clinton. He has a way of making you think he's on your side, agreeing with your position, while
doing the opposite. Pay no attention to what he SAYS; rather, watch what he DOES!
 
3. Obama has a ruthless quest for power. He did not come to Washington to make something out of himself but rather to change everything, including
dismantling capitalism. He can't be straight forward on his ambitions, as the public would not go along. He has a heavy hand and wants to level the
playing field with income redistribution and punishment to the achievers of society. He would like to model the USA to Great Britain or Canada .
 
4. His three main goals are to control ENERGY, PUBLIC EDUCATION and NATIONAL HEALTHCARE by the Federal government. He doesn't care about the auto or
financial services industries but got them as an early bonus. The cap and trade will add costs to everything and stifle growth. Paying for FREE
college education is his goal. Most scary is his healthcare program because if you make it FREE and add 46,000,000 people to a Medicare-type
single-payer system, the costs will go through the roof. The only way to control costs is with massive RATIONING of services, like in Canada .. God
forbid!
 
5. He has surrounded himself with mostly far-left academic types. No one around him has ever even run a candy store. But they are going to try and
run the auto, financial, banking and other industries. This obviously can't work in the long run. Obama is not a socialist; rather he's a far-left
secular progressive bent on nothing short of revolution. He ran as a moderate but will govern from the hard left.
Again, watch what he DOES, not what he says.
 
6. Obama doesn't really see himself as President of the United States but more as a ruler over the world. He sees himself above it all, trying to
orchestrate & coordinate various countries and their agendas. He sees moral equivalency in all cultures. His apology tour in Germany and England was a
prime example of how he sees America as an imperialist nation that has been arrogant, rather than a great noble nation that has at times made errors.
This is the first President, ever , who has chastised our allies and appeased our enemies!
 
7. He is now handing out goodies.  He would like to blame all problems on Bush, from the past, and hopefully his successor in the future. He has a
huge ego and Dr. Krauthammer believes he is a narcissist.
 
8. Republicans are in the wilderness for a while but will emerge strong.  Republicans are pining for another Reagan but there will never be another
like him. Krauthammer believes Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty & Bobby Jindahl (except for his terrible speech in February) are the future of the party.
Newt Gingrich is brilliant but has baggage. Sarah Palin is sincere and intelligent but needs to really be seriously boning up on facts and info if
she is to be a serious candidate in the future. We need to return to the party of lower taxes, smaller government, personal responsibility, strong
national defense and State's Rights.
 
9. The current level of spending is irresponsible and outrageous. We are spending trillions that we don't have. This could lead to hyperinflation,
depression or worse. No country has ever spent themselves into prosperity.  The Media is giving Obama, Reid and Pelosi a Pass because they love their agenda. But eventually the bill will come due and people will realize the huge bailouts didn't work, nor will the stimulus package. These were trillion-dollar payoffs to Obama's allies, unions and the Congress to placate the left, so he can get support for #4 above.
 
10 When Lehman brothers failed, fear and panic swept in, we had an unpopular President, and the war was grinding on indefinitely without a clear outcome.
The people are in pain and the mantra of change caused people to act emotionally. Any Dem would have won this election; it was surprising it was
as close as it was.
 

Heros of the Left (Darlings on the Left: Eugenicists & Theophobes)

Since the 1960's, Hollywood and the mainstream media have reaped an abundant harvest off the seeds of right-wing extremism while simultaneously capitalizing on such noble traits as: enlightenment, generosity, compassion, and most of all...tolerance.
Between chauffeuring Jimmy to his soccer practice, lending their ears to Sally's piano lesson, and fireproofing their kitchens from baby Steven, all while sweating the check they wrote at last night's pizza parlor, the average American just doesn't have the time to research beyond media spoonfed sound-bites of hypocritical pastors preaching homosexual genocide and neo-confederates hijacking rallies.
By continuously parading extremists before America's collective conscious, the left can label conservatives as racist, sexist, homophobes while side-stepping the hypocrisy in their own back-yard. Below are just a few examples of many leftist darlings united under two causes: anti-theism and eugenics.

 

Richard Dawkins
After the release of his wildly popular manifesto "The God Delusion" in 2006, this famed British Evolutionary Biologist became the poster-child for radical atheism when he mockingly characterized religion as an anachronistic "viral plague" on layover from its neolithic inception. Though adored by UCLA pre-meds, Dawkins doesn't get pigeonholed into one demographic, move over Bill Nye, this science guy really cares about the kids. What greater joy could a child have this Christmas than to see buried under those pine needles, a thick, hard covered brochure outlining the true transformation(s) of Santa Claus as he makes the unfathomable journey from plant to gorilla to reindeer to North Pole. As long as parents don't gift that doltish anthology of talking snakes and magic apples, he'll refrain from calling social services on them. According to Dawkins, religion poses such a major threat to a child's psyche, that even "mild pedophilia" gets a higher grade on his moral relativity scale.

 

Christopher Hitchens
Since his pre-mature passing in 2011, no atheist dare label this "popinjay" a charlatan. For on his deathbed he made it clear, there'd be no Oscar Wildes here. Despite his later alignment with the pro-life cause, Hitchens never altered his "God is Not Great" view toward religion. Where Dawkins had the scientists, Hitchens had the youth. Like Friedrich Nietzsche, if you're seen reading Hitchens around campus, chances are you're "hip". Hit him with any examples of atheism's genocidal history and he had just the right anecdote to somehow blame it on religion. Stalin? Religion. Mao? Religion. Pol Pot? Religion. For Hitchens, religion and atheism simply shaking hands won't satisfy his vision as he openly stated on the Dennis Prager show, "I don't want peace with Christians or their apologists, I want war." Given that Dawkins now advocates for atheist to "mock and 





ridicule" people of faith, he just might get his wish.

Stephen Hawking
Behind those solemn eyes of stoicism, calculating the trajectory of black body radiation, one senses a kinship between Hawking and the universe, or better yet "Hawking's Universe". After decades of scientific research confirmed our universe's uniquely fine-tuned properties pointed to God's existence, strident atheists like Richard Dawkins were doomed to re-enact a modern ensemble of The Emperor's New Clothes if not for the valiant efforts of this world famous physicist. In his bestselling book, "The Grand Design", Hawking resurrected the atheist cause by asserting the universe can miraculously create itself from absolutely nothing based on the unobservable, untestable, and nearly farcical Multiverse Theory. After 12 honorary degrees from Cambridge accompanied by a PhD, his only trump card for atheism's supremacy rests on an invisible sea of infinitely floating star bubbles, capable of any and all things imaginable, including universes where Richard Dawkins is the Pope and Christopher Hitchens the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  

Peter Singer
Currently serving as Decamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, the Australian-born "moral philosopher" took his cues from Ernst Haeckel's playbook when he argued for legalized infanticide for up to 28 Days after delineating a child's pre-mature self-awareness excludes it from being considered truly human. Don't think too bad of him though, his avid veganism and advocacy for income redistribution means he's both a friend to the animals as well as to the poor.

Mary Elizabeth Williams
Unlike Peter Singer, this Salon columnist wastes little time on long winded essays pontificating the unborn's personhood when advocating infanticide. Bearing the torch of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, Williams opts to "own it," as shown in her article "So What If Abortion Ends Life" where she openly admitted life begins at conception and couldn't care less. In her words, "A fetus can be a human life without having the same rights as the woman in whose body it resides. She’s the boss. Her life and what is right for her circumstances and her health should automatically trump the rights of the non-autonomous entity inside of her." For any future "fetuses" out there hoping to be famous, Williams just might be your ticket as you can become "The World’s Greatest Abortion" on her dime. Just a small price for fame.

Derek Humphry
The spirit of Jack Kevorkian lives on in the cult known as the Hemlock Society founded by this British-born American journalist. Like the "pro-choicers", the "death with dignity" folks rarely admit the Malthusian motives beneath their self-described humanitarian crusade until a Peter Singer or Derek Humphry comes along and lets the cat right out of the bag. For anyone out there suffering from Schizophrenia or Down Syndrome, Derek Humphry can save you a bundle in Psychiatric care if you simply march down to your local clinic and fill out a few forms. The kindly nurse will then lead you into an air-conditioned room, complete with butterfly wallpaper and scented candles, where she'll hand you cold glass of kool-aid right before the latest philharmonic rendition of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata serenades you to sleep. If you get scared, here's some friendly advice, just think of all the people you won't be burdening.

Margaret Sanger (Founder of Planned Parenthood)
Take a walk through America's inner-cities and you'll see Margaret Sanger's utopian vision at work in that cozy, beige building on the corner of every pre-dominantly black neighborhood. Don't be fooled by that bright blue "Planned Parenthood" sign emblazoned over its cream coat, the 13 million black babies in their fridge should be indication enough that no (black) parents will be coming out of this joint. Her lifelong dedication to the "negro project" would've laid waste behind Bull Connor's pipe-dreams, if not for her disciples brilliant play on Confucius semantics with the word "choice". Thanks to the fine leadership of Rev. Al Sharpton and Michael Eric Dyson, her prey have long stopped resisting that iron-clad grip of white-supremacy now personified by razor sharp teeth nestled inside a suction tube, because instead of directing their rage where it really belongs, they keep it focused on stalky, white-hispanic "boogeymen" lurking in the bushes somewhere near 'Godot went lost'. Of course, the left felt such shame in colluding with Margaret Sanger's racist agenda, they even made an award in her name, and in 2009, honored yours truly...Hilary Clinton.

So the next time Jon Stewart writes off the grievances of angry tea-partiers as mere side-effects of paranoid delusion, remember one thing: the people listed above are not just mere wing-nuts waving Confederate Flags at tea party rallies, but rather well-respected, well-established, and all around heroes for many leftists whose philosophies are responsible for some the most destructive evils known to man, and there's plenty more where they came from...

The White House attacks a cancer patient

How Low Can They Go?

The White House attacks a cancer patient. 

By

James Taranto

connect

 

November 4, 2013

It's been just over a month since ObamaCare's disastrous launch, and it's just over three years until the scheduled election of Barack Obama's successor. It's going to be a long three years. The exposure of Obama's signature "achievement" as both incompetent and fraudulent (with its economic inviability yet to be realized) is also showing the administration's true face. It is an ugly one, and we can expect to see a lot more of it while Obama remains in office.

This morning the White House went on the attack against a cancer patient who is also a victim of ObamaCare. Edie Littlefield Sundby of San Diego explains in today's Wall Street Journal that she's been managing a case of stage 4 gallbladder cancer, an affliction whose five-year survival rate is just 2%. Having survived the diagnosis by seven years so far, she beat very long odds--and she did so with the help of an excellent insurance plan that covered care at three hospitals, two in California and one in Texas.
In touting ObamaCare, Obama asserted at least two dozen times (in slightly varying language) that if you like your health plan, you can keep it. As Sundby explains, she is a victim of Obama's fraudulent sales pitch:

Since March 2007 United Healthcare has paid $1.2 million to help keep me alive, and it has never once questioned any treatment or procedure recommended by my medical team. The company pays a fair price to the doctors and hospitals, on time, and is responsive to the emergency treatment requirements of late-stage cancer. Its caring people in the claims office have been readily available to talk to me and my providers.

But in January, United Healthcare sent me a letter announcing that they were pulling out of the individual California market. The company suggested I look to Covered California starting in October.

Covered California is the state ObamaCare exchange, one of those that, unlike the administration-built federal one, has some degree of technical functionality. Thus Sundby was able to log in and check out her options, which--contrary to Obama's "new and improved" sales pitch, that people whose policies are canceled will get better insurance--were unsatisfactory. No plan available to her would cover both her primary-care doctor at the University of California, San Diego, and her oncologist at Stanford.
 
Sundby asks: "What happened to the president's promise, 'You can keep your health plan'? Or to the promise that 'You can keep your doctor'? Thanks to the law, I have been forced to give up a world-class health plan. The exchange would force me to give up a world-class physician."

This morning Dan Pfeiffer the fast-talking flack tweeted out a piece from ThinkProgress.org, a leftist propaganda outfit. Titled "The Real Reason That the Cancer Patient Writing in Today's Wall Street Journal Lost Her Insurance," the piece, by one Igor Volsky, claims that "Sundby shouldn't blame reform." Volsky instead blames United Healthcare, which, he writes, "dropped her coverage because they've struggled to compete in California's individual health care market for years and didn't want to pay for sicker patients like Sundby":

"The company's plans reflect its concern that the first wave of newly insured customers under the law may be the costliest," UHC Chief Executive Officer Stephen Helmsley told investors last October. "UnitedHealth will watch and see how the exchanges evolve and expects the first enrollees will have 'a pent-up appetite' for medical care. We are approaching them with some degree of caution because of that."

Get that? The company packed its bags and dumped its beneficiaries because it wants its competitors to swallow the first wave of sicker enrollees only to re-enter the market later and profit from the healthy people who still haven't signed up for coverage.

Sundby is losing her coverage and her doctors because of a business decision her insurer made within the competitive dynamics of California's health care market.

All this may be true, but it begs the question. The addition of a phrase to that last sentence shows why: Sundby is losing her coverage and her doctors because of a business decision her insurer made within the competitive dynamics of California's health care market under the regulatory structure established by Obama's comprehensive "reform."

Obama did not qualify his pitch by stating that if you like your health plan, you can keep it unless your insurer makes a business decision to the contrary within the competitive dynamics of your state's health care market.

To the contrary, he represented ObamaCare as protecting consumers from precisely that sort of cruel business decision, and he has not backed away from that fraudulent promise: At a speech last Wednesday, he asserted that the only policies being canceled were "substandard" ones offered by former "bad-apple insurers" whose practices ObamaCare reformed.

Over the weekend a New York Times editorial parroted that line, claiming that "insurers are not allowed to abandon enrollees" and that "people forget how terrible many of the soon-to-be-abandoned policies were." But even the Times editors can't quite defend the if-you-like-your-plan-you-can-keep-it fraud. The best they can do is equivocation: "Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that."

To misspeak means to express oneself imperfectly or incorrectly. It implies either a careless choice of words or an unintended candor (as in a "Freudian slip"). Obama did not misspeak. As The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend, the slogan was the result of careful deliberation. Whereas "some White House policy advisers objected to the breadth of Mr. Obama's 'keep your plan' promise," "political aides" insisted upon it. The latter prevailed. In an interview with the Journal, one unidentified former official "added that in the midst of a hard-fought political debate 'if you like your plan, you can probably keep it' isn't a salable point."

The story closes by quoting a "policy expert" who shrugs off the deception:

Jonathan Gruber, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the law's impact on existing insurance arrangements was "a social policy decision the government made" and the president's description of it was "pretty low on the totem pole of political overstatements."

Suppose the deliberations the Journal describes had taken place in a corporate suite rather than a government one and had concerned a commercial rather than a political advertising slogan. In that case, we'd be talking about a criminal conspiracy to defraud consumers.

Yes, it's unrealistic to expect politicians to be held to the same standard of honesty as corporate executives. But what does astonish us about the Obama administration is the relentlessness and aggression of its efforts to blame others and evade political accountability. The tone is set at the top by a president who, at age 52, retains an adolescent's aversion to adult responsibility.

Still, you'd think a political professional would recognize that Edie Sundby's story calls not for an attack but for a show of compassion, even if one lacks the capacity for the real thing.