op ed review 9/29
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
House Republicans will vote to pass a one-year delay of
Obamacare in exchange for funding the government, a plan that drastically
increases the chances of a government shutdown this Tuesday. Republicans will
also pass a separate bill to fund U.S. troops if the government shuts
down.
For daring to put conditions on raising the debt limit,
White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer compared Republicans to arsonists,
hostage-takers and suicide bombers.
http://www.businessinsider.com/debt-ceiling-republicans-obama-terrorist-hostage-deadline-2013-9#ixzz2g6RlSlfl
Obamacare Will Increase Avg. Individual-Market Insurance
Premiums By 99% For Men, 62% For Women
Obama on Obamacare: “We did raise taxes on some things.”
Some things means uninsured families, medical devices, flex accounts, small
businesses, people with high medical bills and even charitable hospitals.
“(Sen. Ted Cruz’s) 21-hour
pseudo-filibuster was an immensely stylish endurance stunt — a feat made all
the more impressive by the rhetorical fluency that did not flag, the clarity of
argument that was present in the first hour and the 21st and the unflappable
demeanor…….. In the last hour (Cruz) found himself in a debate with Democratic
Sen. Dick Durbin on the Congress’s generous health-care plan……Despite his
marathon of speaking and standing and arguing, after nearly a day on his feet,
Cruz — there is no other term for it — squashed Durbin like a bug….”
Cruz and his allies notched up the fourth longest occupation
of the floor since precise record-keeping began in 1900.
Following the epic, 21-hour speech by Sen. Ted Cruz, either
voters made so many calls to establishment Republicans that their phone lines
melted, or those GOP leaders took their phones off the hook.
Americans Turn on Washington,
68% Say Wrong Track in Poll
Six in 10 Americans (60%) believe the federal government has
too much power, one percentage point above the previous high recorded in
September 2010.
Once the United
States was among the most economically free
nations on the planet, but now we barely crack the top 20. Now ahead of us: Canada,
Finland, Australia, Jordan,
Denmark, Estonia, United
Kingdom, United Arab Emirates
and Bahrain.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has no Catholic right to
be granted Communion, said the leading cardinal of the highest court at the Vatican. Mrs.
Pelosi should be denied Communion until she changes her advocacy views on
abortion, Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke said.
That’s canon law, not opinion, he said.
Secretary of State John Kerry plans to sign a controversial
U.N. treaty on arms regulation despite warnings from lawmakers that the Senate
will not ratify the agreement.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/09/24/kerry-to-sign-un-arms-treaty-despite-senators-opposition/
Scary: Why are
interest rates so low? Because we’ve reached the point that if they went back
to a more historically normal level, all personal income taxes collected would
go to servicing the debt. “One thing is clear: Based on CBO projections, if
interest rates just rise to their 20-year average, we will have an untenable,
unacceptable interest rate bill whose beneficiaries are China, Japan, and others who own our
bonds. And if Americans find out that the lion's share of their income tax
payments are going to service the debt, prepare for a new American revolution.”
So much for handshake diplomacy. President Obama’s bid to
mellow 30 years of hatred and hostility blew up in his face at the United
Nations when Iran’s
new leader, Hassan Rouhani, snubbed him three times — and wouldn’t even meet
him for a much-anticipated grip and grin.
An 800 lb. stone monument of the Ten Commandments that sits
on a street behind the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington DC
was toppled by vandals.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/23/10-Commandments-monument-toppled-in-Washington
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/23/10-Commandments-monument-toppled-in-Washington
Vandals also set fire to a life-size statue of Ronald Reagan
at a Southern California sports park that
bears his name http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/23/vandals-torch-ronald-reagan-statue-california-park/#ixzz2fp3hZSCj
A California
youth football league has established a $200 fine and possible suspension of a
any coach who allows his team to win a game by 35 points or more.
Isn’t that special? The
fifth-season premiere of ABC's Modern Family features a gay marriage proposal.
A New York
teacher fired earlier this year for possessing a stash of heroin could get his
job back after a judge found his firing to be “unduly harsh.” “The penalty
of termination is excessive and shocking to the court's sense of fairness."
The number of Dutch people killed by medical euthanasia has
more than doubled in the 10 years since legislation was changed to permit it,
rising 13 per cent last year to 4,188.
_______________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Joe Ashby, American Thinker, 9/25
"Dumbest idea I've ever heard." "Can't
happen." "Picket had a better chance." So say some of the
right's sharpest and most experienced political minds of the defund ObamaCare
effort……The defund gambit carries risk; there is no way around that. As
long as Harry Reid and Barack Obama are willing to shut down the government
rather than spare people from the added expense, reduced choice, and invasions
of privacy that ObamaCare brings, things will get dicey. Ironically,
however, it will be the Democrats themselves who serve as the catalyst for
conservative success. Here's how it can happen.
In order to score a political win in a government shutdown,
Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and others must portray the situation as intolerable.
That portrayal stimulates an incentive within the Beltway crowd, the
media, and (to a lesser extent) the citizenry to end the shutdown. Once the
demand to open non-essential government services reaches a fever pitch, the GOP
(who have no incentive to extend the shutdown) can simply say, "Great,
let's hammer out a deal and reopen government." Once Obama's party
comes to the table, the GOP will have won, because any negotiations will mean
repealing, delaying, and/or de-funding ObamaCare -- not a 100%
repeal/delay/defund, but something higher than 0%.
Certainly the Democrats will realize that negotiation will
mean giving away some of their precious domestic "achievement," and
thus they will resist coming to the bargaining table. But Obama, Reid, et
al. will be trapped by their own rhetoric. If the shutdown is so bad, and
the GOP want to end it, then the pressure to negotiate a deal becomes more and
more intense.
Making matters more advantageous for Cruz, Lee, John
Boehner, etc. is the long-arching media narrative that compromise is the
holiest of all political rites. This standoff puts the
eager-to-compromise GOP against the Democrat position of "No way. No
how. Not even going to talk about it." That political ground
becomes increasingly difficult to hold as time passes.
Despite the potential viability of this course of action,
many on both left and right believe that a government shutdown is a guaranteed
disaster for the GOP. Shutdown-phobia has been the conventional wisdom in
Washington
for nearly two decades. A close look at the evidence, however, reveals a
not-so-shocking truth: Washington
is wrong. There is zero measurable historical evidence that suggestions of
shutting down the government will be electorally damaging to the Republican
Party. None. Republicans held the House and Senate before the last
partial shutdown. They held it after. Bill Clinton's approval
ratings cratered from 53% when the first shutdown began to 42% by the tail-end
of the second (a period of about seven weeks)….
Besides the utter absence of electoral damage done by the
prolonged 1995-1996 shutdown, the Newt Gingrich-led Congress successfully
wrested the agenda-setting power in Washington
away from the presidency. As then-Majority Whip Tom Delay said on the Mark Levin Show last week, "[the
shutdown] was the most important thing we ever did," adding, "The
result of that was for six years Bill Clinton did not get to sign one major
bill that he initiated."
Looking past the politics of the next election, we must
recognize that there may be no "next time" for stopping ObamaCare.
Once the main subsidies begin, there is little doubt that the law's
politics will only get more difficult. And while some welcome the coming
"train wreck," the do-it-and-see-how-bad-it-is approach is a
satisfying retort but a poor practical theory.
Government programs don't come and go based on performance.
Social Security, for example, is popular not because it's a good way to
provide for retirement; the opposite is true. Social Security is popular
because ending it would put people without other means of income in a dire
situation. Yes, those people could have made other provisions in the
absence of the program (which would serve them better than Social Security),
but the reality is that the program wasn't absent, and now many can't make
other provisions.
The ObamaCare subsidies will lead to the same brand of
dependency. ObamaCare will be poorly run, unable to fulfill the promises
made at its passing, but as long as millions of people are receiving billions
of dollars based on the law's provisions, history cautions us that repeal
becomes virtually impossible. Given a concrete path to victory and the
shrinking prospects of future success, the defund effort is not only winnable,
but the most urgent and realistic attempt yet at stopping the law. It's
time for the establishment to get in line. It's time for conservatives to
unite. We are not guaranteed a win, but we have a strong game plan.
Now we need the whole team to buy in.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/why_the_establishment_is_wrong_and_the_defund_gambit_can_work.html#ixzz2furQKDpg
More
wisdom from Dr. Ben Carson, professor emeritus of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins
University. “Today, the freedom of Americans to control
their own health care needs is being threatened by massive governmental
interference. Those attempting to fundamentally change America are
attempting to take control of the most important thing any of us possesses: our
health……..Those representatives and senators who insist on pushing through
Obamacare against the will of the people should be clearly identified so they
can be appropriately dealt with by their constituents. The authority of
officeholders, after all, is dependent upon the ballot box……We have an
opportunity to re-establish a government in which freedom of speech is
cherished. As Thomas Jefferson once famously said, “When the people fear their
government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is
liberty.” We must remember that our representatives work for us; we don’t work
for them. Whenever they forget that, we must act to re-establish proper order. Those
who wish to fundamentally change America are happy with the trends
we see. However, those of us who love the Judeo-Christian values upon which our
country was founded and under which it flourished in the past, must not dwell
on past mistakes, but learn from them. We must not capitulate to secular
progressives, and unlike them, we should be loving and kind. But most
importantly, we must never give up.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/25/carson-the-grit-and-gumption-to-resist-obamacare/#ixzz2g1d1S3Nw
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“[Y]ou would think that Republicans will sweep in 2014 –
increase their hold on the House, and take the Senate. But that isn’t what
voters have in mind. Rasmussen … finds that currently, Democrats lead
Republicans in the generic Congressional preference poll by 40%-37%. It’s a
paradox: voters prefer Republicans on the issues, but still lean toward voting
for Democrats. One could speculate about why that is true; I think it is
obvious that the press’s ceaseless attacks on Republicans are part of the
explanation. That is a longstanding problem, but the numbers suggest that
Republicans will do best if they keep pounding away on the issues, especially
the ones where voters are predisposed to favor them.”
-John Hinderaker
________________________________________________________________________
BOOKS, FILM, TV
Groundbreaking books about the history of communism are
never written by "professional" historians. Indeed, historians
typically meet those books with remarkable hostility. Yet, non-academic history books certainly have
their advantages. For one thing, they are readable. More often than not, they
are better researched too. Above all, they are intellectually honest, free from
the unspoken taboos of the academic world and from allegiances to theories and
to colleagues that tie the hands of many an academic. Where a professional
historian pursues an academic career, the amateur seeks after the truth.
Ignorant of taboos, the amateur can follow the trail of evidence to wherever it
leads and discovers things which, according to the academic conventional
wisdom, are best left untouched and unsaid. That is what Diana West does in “American
Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character.” By her own admission,
she started that book with no intention of writing much about the Cold War. She
started not as a historian, but a simple mortal puzzled and disturbed by the
obvious question: how on earth could this great civilization of ours have
degraded into such a hypocritical nonsense as political correctness? Having written
her previous book about the death of the civilization of grown-ups, now Mrs.
West, in her own words, attempts a post mortem--only to discover
unmistakable signs of a murder.
__________________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
An exhaustive United Nations report that claimed with 95%
certainty that humans are responsible for global warming left out data that
found the planet has stopped warming over the last 15 years, because it did not
fit with the climate change agenda it wanted to advance. Judith Curry,
professor and chair of the School
of Earth and Atmospheric
Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said if the "if the pause
continues beyond 15 years they are toast.”
________________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
Muslim terrorists behind the Kenya
shopping centre massacre planned to attack high-profile British targets
including The Ritz hotel and Eton public
school. Members of the Al Shabaab terror group also set their sights on London suburbs such as
Golders Green and Stamford Hill. They listed targets in a training manual which
contained a blueprint for this week’s gun and bomb rampage at Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall.
“The West´s strange silence on the martyred Christians of the Muslim world”
In Western news-making and opinion-forming circles, there’s
a palpable reluctance to talk about the most noteworthy thing about modern
Islamist violence: its barbarism, its graphic lack of moral restraint. Across
the commentating board, people are sheepish about pointing out the historically
unique lunacy of Islamist violence and its utter detachment from any recognizable
moral universe or human values. We have to talk about this barbarism; we have
to appreciate how new and unusual it is, how different it is even from the
terrorism of the 1970s or of the early twentieth century.
__________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
President Obama lied to us. It wasn’t a white lie. It wasn’t
a fib. It wasn’t a half truth. It was a bold-faced lie. “No matter how we
reform health care, we will keep this promise,” President Obama told the
American Medical Association in 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.” That statement turned out to be a lie. Period.
Liberals hold that “hate crimes” are worse than crimes
involving the same conduct but not the same attitude. But the application of
this doctrine may depend on which group the perpetrator hates. If he hates a
group that liberals desire for their political base, his crime will be viewed
as particularly heinous. If he hates a group that liberals dislike, it may earn
him an expression of ideological solidarity from the sentencing judge and
perhaps even a break on the sentence.
An adult at 18? Not
any more: “Adolescence now ends at 25 to prevent young people getting an
inferiority complex.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2430573/An-adult-18-Not-Adolescence-ends-25-prevent-young-people-getting-inferiority-complex.html#ixzz2fupduTTQ
___________________________________________________________________________
OBAMACARE
The GOP is factionalizing, with the conservative base
backing the Cruz-Lee strategy to defund Obamacare, and the GOP establishment
attacking it directly but mostly indirectly. It is a remarkable moment,
crystallizing the long-simmering revolt against the leadership for its failure
to fight on the principles the base cares about passionately. They seek a champion,
and Ted Cruz grabbed what he saw as the opportunity to spearhead the opposition
to Obamacare, a new program which the public also dislikes and fears. By
mobilizing the base, Cruz was able to overcome the resistance of Speaker
Boehner, pillar of the GOP establishment…..
Another view from an unimpeachable source: “Though we fully support Sen. Ted Cruz, he
now appears unable to see the battle beyond his trench, and he keeps digging
himself into procedural holes.”
“Options are not a luxury we
conservatives have. We have been under siege, and are now surrounded,
awaiting the coming salvos of Obamacare implementation which will decimate
American liberty. Government bureaucrats stand ready to sign up millions
of new dependents to the government healthcare rolls, whose only job will be to
vote for Democrats in the coming elections to ensure continued benefits --
which by hook, crook, or Democrat-organized bussing to the polls, they will
do. IRS agents are standing by, ready to lay down the fiscal hammer of
"social justice" on small business owners and individuals with the
audacity to not conform to a bill so convoluted that no member of Congress read
it before passage, and navigating its intricacies is the subject of a New York
Times bestseller.”
One man's ObamaCare nightmare
Henninger: “Let
Obamacare Collapse” “What the GOP´s
Defund-ObamaCare Caucus is failing to see is that ObamaCare is no longer just
ObamaCare. It is about something that is beyond the reach of a congressional
vote. As its Oct. 1 implementation date arrives, ObamaCare is the biggest bet
that American liberalism has made in 80 years on its foundational beliefs. This
thing called "ObamaCare" carries on its back all the justifications,
hopes and dreams of the entitlement state. The chance is at hand to let its political
underpinnings collapse, perhaps permanently. If ObamaCare fails, or seriously
falters, the entitlement state will suffer a historic loss of credibility with
the American people. It will finally be
vulnerable to challenge and fundamental change. But no mere congressional vote
can achieve that. Only the American people can kill ObamaCare.
It is mindboggling that so many people are totally unaware
of ObamaCare, have no interest in discussing it, and are dismissive and rude if
someone attempts to have a rational conversation about a law that will
drastically change the landscape of this country. This deliberate ignorance
continues to beget denial. Consequently, we find America on the verge of a system
that apparently only African and Eastern European acquaintances of mine instantly
understand, since they ran away from the very draconian worldview that we will
all face in a matter of days if ObamaCare is not stopped dead in its tracks.
Daily, one
_______________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
“The champions of socialism call themselves progressives,
but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of
routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves
liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves
democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves
revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise
the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a
gigantic post office.”
-Ludwig von Mises
"If the federal government should overpass the just
bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the people …
must appeal to the standard they have formed, and take such measures to redress
the injury done to the Constitution as the exigency may suggest and prudence
justify."
-Federalist No. 33
_________________________________________________________________________
LATE NITE
Leno: President Obama is now making his case for
raising the debt limit. He said raising the debt limit does not increase debt.
You know, like raising the speed limit does not increase speed… …Tomorrow night
AMC will begin airing a "Breaking Bad" marathon that will show every
episode of the show leading up to Sunday's series finale. This is how it ends:
Walter White dies in a hospital waiting room while filling out all the
paperwork for Obamacare.…. There's a new issue of "Cosmopolitan" that
explains Obamacare to women. The article is called "10 pre-existing
conditions to drive your man crazy."
posted by gary at
9:24 AM
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