Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Today's Political News


An Old 'New' Program. By Thomas Sowell
Excerpt: For example, when confronted with the fact that millions of Americans stand to lose their existing medical insurance, as a result of ObamaCare, defenders of ObamaCare say that this is true only when those people have "substandard" insurance.
Who decides what is "substandard"? What is older than the idea that some exalted elite know what is good for us better than we know ourselves?

Excerpt: President Barack Obama told his enthusiastic supporters Monday night that he never promised what video recordings show him promising at least 29 times. The videos show Obama promising 300 million Americans that “if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan, period.” But that’s not what he really said, Obama announced Monday in a speech to about 200 Organizing for Action supporters, gathered at the St. Regis hotel in D.C. (Lying about the lie. Par for the course. ~Bob)

I Like My Plan, and I Want to Keep It: Are you listening, Secretary Sebelius? 
Excerpt: Do you like your health-care plan? Do you think you should be able to keep it? We think you should, too.

Better walk this lie back too: Remarks by the President on the Affordable Care Act
Excerpt: Now, five days from now -- five days from now -- on October 1st, millions of Americans who don’t have health insurance because they’ve been priced out of the market or because they’ve been denied access because of a preexisting condition, they will finally be able to buy quality, affordable health insurance. 

Blue Cross NC: No payments made through health care exchange
Excerpt: Blue Cross Blue Shield has more than 3.7 million customers in our state, but internal emails obtained by WNCN show that as of last Friday, only one person had enrolled for health insurance through the Exchange and that person hasn't paid.

49-State Analysis: Obamacare To Increase Individual-Market Premiums By Average Of 41%
Excerpt: One of the fundamental flaws of the Affordable Care Act is that, despite its name, it makes health insurance more expensive.

Good Column: Obamacare and Cronyism: A free-for-all of special interests is having catastrophic results. By James V. DeLong
Excerpt: Sometimes this theory analogizes the political jostling of interest groups to the rough-and-tumble of the free market, but in fact it represents a dark parody. In a market, people promote their self-interest by providing goods and services that other people value and buy voluntarily. In interest-group liberalism, players make shifting power alliances so as to loot other players, or more often to loot those not in on the deal, which is usually the public.

Obama’s Numbers Racket: Thousands of enrollees is impressive, and millions of canceled plans is a rounding error. By Charles C. W. Cooke
Excerpt: What a difference a week has made. Now, the administration is apparently unable to decide what constitutes a Big Number and what is merely loose change. Pushing back against the increasingly common realization that Obamacare’s achievements have thus far been to expose the president as an incorrigible liar and to corrupt the individual health-insurance market in precisely the way that critics were lambasted for suggesting it would, Jay Carney complained last Tuesday that reporters were blowing out of proportion the number of people whose health insurance is being canceled.

Lying to Save Their Skins. By Matthew Vadum 
Excerpt: Mendacity, stalling, and stonewalling have worked well as part of a public relations strategy for the Obama administration over its first five years, so there is no point in changing a winning formula now. Besides, extravagant healthcare subsidies begin to kick in next year, and all that free money floating around is bound to calm irate consumers.

Yes: Obamacare: The Unimaginable Suffering That Awaits Us. By John Perazzo 
Excerpt: There is a vital reason for all Americans to take a close look at how, specifically, the various government-run, single-payer healthcare systems around the world have already affected the lives of the people living under them. This is vital because Barack Obama and the Democrats actually have their sights set on creating precisely such a system here in the United States. For them, Obamacare is, and always has been, nothing more than a stepping stone toward their ultimate goal of a single-payer leviathan administered entirely by the federal government. Indeed, they’ve been quite clear about their intentions:

Reader comment on Obabadon't Care
The Madison Chamber of Commerce offered two programs to its employer members, one through GHC and one through DeanCare, neither of which complies with Obabadon't Care. The GHC program included over 400 employers, and an unknown number of employees, who now are in limbo, including my own firm. This doesn't count an unknown number of employers using the DeanCare option and all of their employees. The leftstream media is catching on a little, but seems to be focusing on the individual plans which have been dropped. These group plans for businesses will affect tens of millions of people, greatly overshadowing the impacts on individual policies. Regards, RS.

Obamacare Destroying Lives, Killing Businesses. By Daniel Horowitz
Excerpt: Last week, we asked for your personal Obamacare horror stories, as more and more middle class families are forced to surrender their dignity and grovel before government for their health insurance. Here is the latest from Charles in Alabama. You can email me your story at daniel@madisonproject.com. ... We received our Affordable Care Act letter from Blue Cross Blue Shield this week, and were informed that our new monthly premium starting January 1, for much reduced benefits, will rise from $735 to $1,114.61, with our yearly deductible tripling; this monthly premium is more than my house payment. 

Excerpt: Last November Barack Hussein Obama was able to bring in his dumb sheep to once more give him an electoral victory. He won it by assuring his sheepies that employment was right around the corner, that the economy was a hair's breath away from booming, that he knew nothing about Benghazi and the NSA and IRS scandals had not yet been revealed. And he promised they would love Obamacare...and if they didn't, they could keep their old policies. And he got just enough women who lusted after free birth control, gays grateful for Obama's blessing on gay marriage, and sheepies who swallowed the Obama kool-aid en masse to win the election. A year later we find the Fed is still pumping $70 billion dollars a month to keep the economy inflated, unemployment has not gone up higher, only because a few million more people have left the work force forever, women are finding that getting free birth control pills is not a fair trade-off for financing the medical needs of millions of life's losers who found it charming to quit school, breed like rabbits and embark on a career in green check tit-sucking. And now some 15 million sheepies, and their families, have now had their health care policies cancelled and are left without coverage on the side of the road, or forced to pay as much as three times the costs of their old policies. And the sheepies are scattered over hell and over and they are now paying the price for being an Obama sheepie.

In wake of botched rollout, Obama to seek IT procurement reforms

http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/189224-in-wake-of-botched-rollout-obama-to-seek-it

Excerpt: President Obama said Monday he would seek reforms to the federal IT procurement process following the botched rollout of the ObamaCare website. Blasting the technical glitches as “inexcusable,” the president said he had personally been “very frustrated” with the problems plaguing HealthCare.gov.“There are a whole range of things we're going to need to do once we get this fixed, to talk about federal procurement when it comes to IT and how that's organized,” Obama told a group of top donors and supporters at an Organizing for Action dinner in Washington. (Marxist command economic systems do not work. Selecting FLOTUS college chums and POTUS campaign bundlers in a no-bid contract…well, they do not get what we paid waaayyy to much for. --Barb)

Obamacare's critics justified: Our view. USA Today
Excerpt: Obamacare is starting to resemble a patient bleeding from self-inflicted wounds.
A month after launch, the online health exchanges where individuals are supposed to shop for insurance remain slow or unusable, except in states that opted to run their own marketplaces and did a more competent job than the administration.

Good Column: Obama’s Catastrophic Victory. By Peggy Noonan
Excerpt: The problem now is not the delivery system of the program, it’s the program itself. Not the computer screen but what’s inside the program. This is something you can’t get the IT guy in to fix. They said if you liked your insurance you could keep your insurance—but that’s not true. It was never true! They said if you liked your doctor you could keep your doctor—but that’s not true. It was never true! They said they would cover everyone who needed it, and instead people who had coverage are losing it—millions of them! They said they would make insurance less expensive—but it’s more expensive! 

Obama in 2009: We Will Call Out Those Who Lie About Obamacare. By Katie Pavlich 
Everything he said about Obamacare was a lie. ~Bob

Excerpt: American Crossroads is out with a set of videos and a press release showing how Senators Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Kay Hagan (D-North Carolina) and Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) ”joined with President Obama to lie to the American people about Obamacare.”

Sorry David’s Bridal employees: Obamacare forces company to move workers to part time
Excerpt: Thanks to Obamacare, employees at more than 300 locations of David’s Bridal now have a tough choice to make: either accept their new 30-hour work week — sans health insurance — or find somewhere else to work.

Aetna CEO explains why Obamacare is causing insurance premiums to skyrocket
Excerpt: Bertolini explained that there are three factors that are behind the skyrocketing premiums, taxes and fees, Obamacare’s “minimum essential benefits.” “The largest factor is that the essential benefits requires a minimum of a 60% actuarial benefit,” noted Bertolini. “For most Americans and more than half of Americans who buy individual coverage, there current benefit plan is below 50%. So if you just move up to 60%, that’s a 20% increase out of the box.”

Guest Post: Government Shutdown—FY 2014. Samuel L. Skogstad, Ph.D.

Gallup Daily: Obama's Approval Rating Plummets Into the 30s. By Katie Pavlich
True, but 39%, so a little spin in the headline. ~Bob. Excerpt: According to the latest from Gallup, President Obama's approval rating has plummeted into the 30s as millions of people continue to lose their health insurance.

Excerpt: The Sunni reactionary establishment of the Gulf is right to deplore Obama’s incoherent flip-flop-flips in Egypt and Syria. The oil lords logically conclude that a directionless president will do nothing to stop Iran’s race to get a bomb — and all the subsequent Middle East WMD catch-ups to match it. Even Obama’s pet Turkey seems confused that its favorite administration is now nowhere to be seen. 

White House embraces issue roulette
Excerpt: President Barack Obama has a busy schedule this week, jumping from health care to immigration to the economy at events across three different cities.
All these disparate messages add up to one unifying theme for a White House on the defensive: HealthCare.gov will not paralyze the president’s second term.

Food-Stamps Folly: Donna Brazile says Republicans’ proposed cuts are “cruel,” but who’s really heartless? By Rachel Campos-Duffy
Excerpt: Here are the facts: Over the last ten years, the number of people on SNAP has more than doubled, from 21 million to 47 million recipients. However, the total amount of benefits paid has nearly quadrupled, from $21 billion to $75 billion. Republican measures would decrease SNAP funding by 5 percent over ten years — a rate much lower than the rate by which it has increased over the past decade. In addition, Republican reforms will help ensure that the program is sustainable by limiting it to only those who truly need it, and ending SNAP benefits for traditional college students and lottery winners.

The American Iron Curtain. By Daniel Greenfield 
Excerpt: Today a new iron curtain is descending. It encloses the small Missouri town where Churchill gave his speech and all the great capitals of a great nation. Behind the iron curtain lie New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and countless others. ... It is a wall of words, of laws, regulations and mandates.

Islamist rebels in Syria use faces of the dead to lure the living
Excerpt: In his death portrait, the young rebel’s bearded face is fixed with a broad, unearthly grin. The Saudi man had been killed in fighting, and his corpse, with its beatific smile, was photographed and displayed in a Twitter posting inviting others to celebrate his martyrdom.

Unemployment Caused by Increased Unemployment Benefits
Excerpt: The researchers exploit this policy discontinuity at U.S. state borders to identify the effects of unemployment insurance policies on unemployment. Their estimates imply that most of the persistent increase in unemployment during the Great Recession can be accounted for by the unprecedented extensions of unemployment benefit eligibility. The researchers find that an increase in unemployment due to benefit extensions is similar in magnitude to the decline of employment. Also, border counties with longer benefit durations have much higher unemployment, despite the potential beneficial effects of spending. (Liberals are happy to pass legislation that helps thousands and hurts millions of people, as long as the thousands know why they were helped and the millions can't figure out what caused their suffering. ~Bob)

Raising the Minimum Wage Is No Free Lunch. By Antony DaviesJames R. Harrigan
Excerpt: For some of these people, an increase in the minimum wage is clearly a good thing – but not for everyone. This is the point that many politicians never fully grasp. Raising the minimum wage does not increase the value of the worker's labor. It increases the cost of the worker's labor. And as everyone knows, the more something costs, the less of it we buy. This is as true of workers in the labor market as it is of anything else. The money for an increased minimum wage has got to come from somewhere, and there are only three places from which it can come: investors, in the form of lower profits; customers, in the form of higher prices; or workers, in the form of fewer jobs.

Comic Jackie Mason Tears Into President Obama
Excerpt: Over the last few months we’ve been watching the culture tide shift against President Obama and the liberal Democrat machine. With every new destructive policy and idiotic personnel decision they make, the Democrats prove to be less and less worthy of leading our nation. For those of us on the right, it simply proves what we’ve always known – the Democrat Party is filled with listless, immoral, power hungry usurpers who simply crave control and position. Is that too harsh? Maybe… but don’t tell that to famous funny man Jackie Mason. His words for them are even more bellicose.

Hundreds will protest Islam lovefest history textbook foisted on high school students
Excerpt: On Florida’s Atlantic Coast, some 200 or more local parents and activists have announced plans to show up at Tuesday’s Volusia County school board meeting to protest the public school use of a world history textbook that devotes a whole chapter to Islam but exactly zero chapters to any other religions.

Excerpt: I had been working for the FBI for 16 years and domestic terrorism for 12 years. What I understood was that the rules that are designed to protect privacy also help the government focus on people who are real threats. … This idea that we trade our privacy for more security is just false.

Excerpt: The Common Core national reading recommendations are based on Lexile methodology — a complicated formula that scores texts on vocabulary and sentence length. Texts receive a score between 0 and 1,600. “The Sun Also Rises,” for instance, scores 610 under the Lexile algorithm…. Under Lexile methodology, “Sports Illustrated for Kids’ Awesome Athletes!” is a suitable read for ninth graders, but “Jane Eyre,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” are not. 

Who said what?
I whiffed this test badly! ~Bob

UAE: Islamists on trial over Muslim Brotherhood claims
Excerpt: Thirty Islamists have gone on trial at a state security court in the UAE, accused of illegally setting up a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The 20 Egyptians and 10 Emiratis are also charged with stealing secrets from the security services and collecting donations without permission.

Report: Brazil spied on embassy personnel
Excerpt: The Brazilian government confirmed Monday that its intelligence service targeted U.S., Russian, Iranian and Iraqi diplomats and property during spy activities carried out about a decade ago in the capital Brasilia.

Excerpt: It’s a sign of just how fast the balance of world power is shifting, that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin oversaw a huge exercise of Russia’s nuclear forces this Wednesday, involving — as the AP reported – “multiple test launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles, a formidable demonstration of Russia’s resurgent military power.” This follows the entry of Russian warships into the Mediterranean, concurrent with the Russia-brokered deal to relieve Syria’s Assad regime of its chemical weapons, at the cost of relieving the U.S. of any real influence in what might come next.

Excerpt: Many years ago, the writer Ayn Rand noticed a curious kind of backpedalling from the political Left. First, they’d claim that socialism would provide enough shoes for the whole world. But when economic reality caught up with them, and they failed to deliver on their promises, they’d turn around and claim that going barefoot was superior to wearing shoes.

The News in Zingers. By Argus Hamilton
Excerpt: The Washington D.C. City Council ordered the police to set up prostitution-free zones in ten city blocks during major U.S. government events and protest rallies. You can't make it up. Washington is so corrupt we just rope off areas where people actually follow the law.

Woman in legal limbo over refusal to cover hair
Excerpt: Amira Osman Hamid faces a possible whipping if convicted of violating Sudan’s laws governing morality, which took effect after the 1989 Islamist-backed coup by President Omar Al Bashir.

you'd think thy'd teach the students that "Islam is a Religion of Peace." ~Bob. Excerpt: An unregistered religious seminary was gutted as a result of an explosion that occured allegedly after explosive materials prematurely went off in the Eastern Bypass, an outskirt of Quetta valley, on Sunday morning.

Pakistan: Islamic seminary gutted as explosives that seminary students were preparing go off prematurely
Excerpt: You'd almost think these Islamic schools actually had bomb-making classes: July 2009: Bomb kills nine at imam's house used as Islamic school in Pakistan April 2007: 22 arrested for bombmaking in Islamic religious school raid in Afghanistan July 2006: Jihadist killed by his own grenade at religious school in Afghanistan September 2004: Nine prosecuted for bomb-making at Qur'an recital class in Indonesia Even if they did, however, no one would care. What about those right-wing extremists?

Islamists kill 27, burn houses in Nigerian village attack

Better Late than Never: Questioning Benghazi: Will a disillusioned media investigate Obama’s claims about the 9/11/12 attacks? By Mona Charen
Excerpt: Even if he were brilliant, capable, and wise (and he isn’t), it wouldn’t make a particle of difference. One of the central delusions of progressives is that government is efficient and effective and that complex human societies are amenable to centralized control and direction. We on the right presume government ineptitude. 

Hillary Clinton: From Senator Clinton’s tergiversations on Iraq to Secretary Clinton’s lies on Benghazi. by Victor Davis Hanson
Excerpt: Hillary Clinton is no doubt a talented speaker. She recently went into what the left wing sees as the heart of darkness of the American 1 percent at Goldman Sachs, purportedly gave two brief chats, and walked away with a reported $400,000 in fees. Such compensation is almost as profitable as Hillary’s long-ago cattle-future trading, in which as a talented rookie speculator she beat one-in-several-million odds by parlaying an original $1,000 investment into a $100,000 profit.

Obama Official: US is an Islamic Country. Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council member tweets controversial opinion of US.
Excerpt: Mohamed Elibiary, a member ofthe Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council, is under fire for tweeting that America is “an Islamic country," reported the Washington Free Beacon. After a Twitter user asked Elibiary on Thursday to “show me just ONE example of an Islamic country where non Muslims are treated with equality,” he responded with the tweet: “America and yes I do consider the United States of America an Islamic country with an Islamically compliant constitution. Move On!”

Kerry tries to soothe relations with Saudi Arabia but tensions evident
Excerpt: Secretary of State John Kerry met King Abdullah on Monday and praised the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia as strategic and enduring, but strains in the nearly 70-year-old relationship were apparent over Syria and other issues

India launches spacecraft to Mars
Excerpt: The Mars Orbiter Mission took off at 09:08 GMT from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the country's east coast. The head of India's space agency told the BBC the mission would demonstrate the technological capability to reach Mars orbit and carry out experiments. The spacecraft is set to travel for 300 days, reaching Mars orbit in 2014. (Still another country seeking to take advantage of the possibilities of exploiting space. If you aspire to be an astronaut and can't learn Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or Russian, here's another opportunity for you. --Ron P.)

U.S. District Judge: Open Carrying a Handgun is Reasonable Suspicion of a Crime

Excerpt: These kinds of cases always outrage me. There are countless videos on the internet of police encounters with people open carrying their weapon. Most of them don’t end well for the citizen, even though in the vast majority (if not all) of the encounters, the citizens themselves were never doing anything illegal. They were just carrying a gun in the open. That’s something police do all the time. But when a “civilian” does it, it constitutes probable cause for a crime.

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