op ed review 10/13
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
We now know where we stand:
Janet Yellen is to take over the US Federal Reserve, the world's
monetary hegemon, the master of all our lives. The Fed will be looser for
longer. The FOMC will continue to print money until the US economy creates enough jobs to
reignite wage pressures and inflation, regardless of asset bubbles, or
collateral damage along the way.
”Rejoice: the Yellen Fed will print money forever to create jobs”
Top Internal Revenue Service Obamacare officials discussed
confidential taxpayer information with senior Obama White House officials,
It’s long been known that America’s school kids haven’t
measured well compared with international peers. Now, there’s a new twist:
Adults don’t either. In math, reading and problem-solving using technology –
all skills considered critical for global competitiveness and economic strength
– American adults scored below the international average on a global test,
according to results released Tuesday. Adults in Japan,
Canada, Australia, Finland
and multiple other countries scored significantly higher than the United States
in all three areas on the test.
Government officials deny the price tag on the troubled
ObamaCare website is as big as $634 million, as widely reported on Thursday. Nonetheless,
a close look at the cost of HealthCare.gov and the overall architecture of this
giant federal program reveals no real bargain for the American taxpayer.
"What a train wreck. How can we tax people for not buying a product from a
website that doesn´t work?" Speaker of the House John Boehner demanded on
Wednesday, as report after report indicated that the software problems
experienced by the online portal were nowhere near being resolved. Computer
experts who spoke with
“MSNBC President Wants ´Investigation´Into Fox News´
´Impossible´ Ratings Gain”
The Federal Disability Insurance Program could become the
first government benefits program to run out of money. When it began back in
the 1950s it was envisioned as a small program to assist people who were unable
to work because of illness or injury.
Today, it serves nearly 12 million people -- up 20 percent in the last six
years -- and has a budget of $135 billion. That's more than the government
spent last year on the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department,
and the Labor Department combined. It's been called a "secret welfare
system" with it's own "disability industrial complex," a system
ravaged by waste and fraud.
In the UK,
doctors have been informed that they can carry out sex-selective abortions in
certain circumstances.
Updated: The list of things unnecessarily shut down by Obama
to inflict public pain
But he takes care of his friends: Illegal immigrants rally at the National Mall
for immigration reform even though the site is closed due to the government
shutdown.
Just a week before the government shutdown kicked in on
October 1, the State Department awarded a five-year, maximum $5 million
contract to provide 20 different styles of custom handcrafted stem and barware
to the State Department for use in American embassies around the world.
You just wish lightning would strike this guy when he says
things like this: In an interview with
Politico, Senator Harry Reid argued that the media is being unfair to Democrats
in its coverage of the shutdown. “Democrats have had almost nothing to do with
the problems here. It’s all Republicans.”
Too many lawyers. A school in New York has instituted a ban on footballs,
baseballs, lacrosse balls, or anything that might hurt someone on school
grounds.
In Illinois, applicants for state jobs will no longer be
asked about their criminal past. That would be prejudicial and unfair.
A two-year investigation by the Senate Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations has found widespread fraud in the Social
Security Administration´s Disability Program. The fraud is so rampant, and
disability cases have so proliferated in recent years, that the Social
Security´s Disability Trust Fund may run out of money in only 18 months,
_______________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
“The Threat We Face”
Very important article, from a speech by Horowitz at the Kohler
conference of the Bradley Foundation. Horowitz is a former student radical of
the 60s who saw the light and switched sides.
Excerpted below, the original is long but well worth the read:
David Horowitz 10/10
I was born at the beginning of the Second World War into a
family of high school teachers who were members of the Communist Party, and
therefore were actually part of a vast conspiracy dedicated to the destruction
of this country, although they would never have looked at it that way, and
so-called liberals would be the first to deny it.
In those days, the schools were old fashioned enough that my
parents did not use their classrooms to indoctrinate students as tens of
thousands of university professors and even more K-12 teachers regularly do
today. It is also an unhappy but hugely important fact that the conspiracy to
which my parents belonged has steadily migrated into the heart of the
Democratic Party until it now occupies the Oval Office in the person of our
president, Barack Obama, and his closest advisors.
Instead of calling themselves communists or socialists they
call themselves liberals and progressives. This camouflage is very old. I never
once heard my parents and their party friends refer to themselves as
Communists. They were progressives – and registered Democrats.
……Today the Obama juggernaut is systematically bankrupting
our country, and undoing our constitutional arrangements. Its contempt for
consultative and representative government is relentlessly on display. This
week Senate Majority leader Harry Reid defended his refusal to negotiate with
Republicans over Obamacare and the debt in these words: “We are here to support
the federal government. That’s our job.” End quote. Forget about representing
the people whom our Founders made sovereign. Forget what America is about.
The fact that I had a radical past allowed me to see much of
this coming. But even I never thought we would be looking so soon at the
prospect of a one-party state. Those words may sound hyperbolic, but take a
moment to think about it. If you have transformed the taxing agency of the
state into a political weapon – and Obama has; if you are setting up a massive
government program to gather the financial and health information of every
citizen, and control their access to care; and if you have a spy agency that
can read the mail and listen to the communications of every individual in the
country, you don’t really need a secret police to destroy your political
opponents. Once you have silenced them, you can proceed with your plans to
remake the world in your image.
As a sometime Jonah freed from the whale let me offer some
intelligence about the political forces arrayed against us. Do not make the
mistake of thinking that progressives and conservatives are people who merely
differ about practical agendas. There are four defining features of the left,
which distinguish it as a movement of individuals who approach politics quite
differently from pragmatically-minded conservatives.
The first of these features is their alienation from
country: If you ask progressives about their patriotic feeling, they will tell
you that they don’t think of themselves first as Americans but as “citizens of
the world.” This is perhaps the hardest
feature of their progressive adversaries for conservatives to comprehend. It is
difficult to imagine that people as privileged by America’s generosity as
Barack Obama and his entourage of despoilers should be so alienated from their
country as to feel themselves in it but not of it. And there is
no more shocking example of this than Benghazi.
No matter what your politics, or what solutions you propose to the problems
that confront this nation, ask yourself this: Could you have done what Barack
Obama did that night? Could you as commander-in-chief abandon three Americans
fighting for their lives under your command? These men had served their country
for more than a decade. For seven hours they cried out for help from their
government, but you refused to give it. How, as a fellow American, could Obama
have just left these men to die? No one with an ounce of patriotic feeling
could. But he did……When the attack on our embassy in Benghazi
began, he hung up the phone and went to bed, and then on to a fundraiser with
Beyonce and Jay-Z in Las Vegas
in the morning. This, with four Americans including our ambassador dead.
The second feature of the progressive left that is key to
understanding it is its instinctive, practiced, and indispensable dishonesty.
As I previously noted, the Communists in the circles I frequented in my youth
never identified themselves as Communists but always as “progressives” and
“Jeffersonian democrats” (which is the last thing they were)…..
A third feature of progressives that defines their politics
is that they regard the past, which is real, with contempt, and are focused exclusively
on a future, which is imaginary……To understand why this is important, think of
progressives as a species of religious fundamentalists planning a redemption.
Like fundamentalists they look at the world as fallen – a place corrupted by
racism, sexism and class division. But the truly religious understand that we
are the source of corruption and that redemption is only possible through the
work of a Divinity. In contrast, progressives see themselves as the
redeemers, which is why they are so dangerous. Because they regard those who
oppose them as the eternally damned.
Progressives are on a mission to create the kingdom of heaven on earth
by redistributing income and using the state to enforce politically correct
attitudes and practices in everyone’s life. They want to control what you do,
and who you are, and even what you eat. For your own good, of course.
The fact that they see themselves as saving the world – or
“saving the planet” as they would prefer — results in a fourth key
characteristic of their politics, which is that they regard politics as a
religious war. This explains why they are so rude and nasty when you disagree
with them or resist their panaceas (and of course if they had the power, the
punishments would be more severe); that is why the politics of personal
destruction is their favorite variety, why they are verbal assassins and go
directly for the jugular, and why they think nothing of destroying the
reputations of their opponents and burying them permanently……To sum this up:
Progressives see themselves as an army of the saints, and their opponents as
the party of Satan; and that will justify almost anything you can get away
with.
If you want to fight the left you have to fight fire with
fire. That means first and foremost you have to hold them to account for
hurting the people they are pretending to help. Whose opportunities are going
to be wrecked by Obamacare? Health care taxes will go up for those who pay
taxes – the middle class — while their incomes will go down. Already Obamacare
is cutting the workweek to 30 hours. Whose pocket books do you think that is
hitting?
They claim conservatives are conducting a war against
minorities; we need to throw the truth back in their faces. We need to tell the
people that progressives are the principal oppressors and exploiters of
minorities and the poor in this country. Progressives control the inner cities,
which are teeming with the nation’s minorities and poor; and they run the
broken public school systems that have become dumping grounds for those who
cannot afford a private education…..
Conservatives need to put the human disasters of progressive
policies in front of people every chance they get. We need to confront
progressives with the misery they have created in America’s bankrupt cities,
Detroit and Chicago, Philadelphia and Cincinnati, St. Louis, and the nation’s
capital, and every city they have controlled for 25, 50 and 100 years, without
interruption…..
Conservatives need to talk less to the voters’ heads and
more to their hearts. Government debt is not just an accountant’s nightmare.
Debt is a form of economic slavery. If you add up all the taxes Americans pay —
federal, state, local, income, sales — Americans already work half the year for
government rather than for themselves. Like Obamacare and the political use of
the I.R.S., debt is a threat to individual freedom.
Freedom is what our cause is about not just fiscal
responsibility. Fiscal responsibility has no emotional appeal except to people
who already understand what it means. Fiscal responsibility is a means to an
end. The end is freedom, and that is what inspires commitment and sacrifice and
the passion necessary to win. Because it speaks to the heart.
Conservatives need to speak up as champions of the little
guys, the underdogs, whose lives are being steadily constricted – made less
free — by the ongoing destruction of a system that once afforded more
opportunity for more people than any other in the history of the world.
Conservatives need to speak up for the young whose future horizons are being
rapidly diminished as the trillion dollar Obama deficits pile higher and
higher. Conservatives need to speak for all Americans whose security under
Obama has been degraded to the most dangerous levels since the end of the Cold
War.
This is the threat we face, and the sooner we grapple with
it the greater our chances to survive it. The most important battle in the
world today is not being waged in the Middle East but here at home in the United States.
If we lose this battle, everything is lost. But if we will take the measure of
the enemies of freedom and prepare ourselves to fight them, we have a better
than even chance to win.
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says that he wants a
‘clean’ bill from the House of Representatives, and some in the media keep
repeating the word ‘clean’ like a mantra. But what is unclean about not giving
Harry Reid everything he wants? If Senator Reid and President Obama refuse to
accept the money required to run the government, because it leaves out the
money they want to run ObamaCare, that is their right. But that is also their
responsibility. You cannot blame other people for not giving you everything you
want. And it is a fraud to blame them when you refuse to use the money they did
vote, even when it is ample to pay for everything else in the government. …
Unless the Republicans get their side of the story out – and articulation has
never been their strong suit – the lies will win. More important, the whole
country will lose.”
-Thomas Sowell
________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
On health care, the president's pile of broken promises
keeps getting higher. Consider this gem from Aug. 20, 2009: “Let's be clear
about the fact that nobody has proposed anything close to a government takeover
of health care.” Well, yes, somebody did.
President Obama is now well on his way to orchestrating the federal
government's takeover of Americans' health care. Commandeering the resources of major federal
departments, particularly the Department of Health and Human Services and the
IRS, the administration and its allies in Congress have created numerous
federal bureaus, commissions and programs and have issued thousands of pages of
rules, regulations, guidelines and directives, all reinforced by unprecedented
mandates and new taxes, fees, fines and penalties. Central planning and
coercion holds this sprawling thing together.
Virtually all key health care decisions will be made by government
officials. Not you. Not your employer. Not your insurance company……You will get
what government officials say you will get. Meanwhile, the president and his
allies will insist that what you are witnessing firsthand is not a “government
takeover” of health care. http://triblive.com/opinion/featuredcommentary/4859597-74/health-care-government#ixzz2hWZq8GxB
A Conversation With Antonin Scalia
PBS's Tavis Smiley made a comment Thursday that every
African-American as well as liberal media member should sit up and take notice.
Appearing on Fox News's Hannity, Smiley said, "The data is going
to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over, black people will
have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category"
“Obama as Chaos” by Victor
Davis Hanson
___________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
“There is all the difference in the world between treating
people equally and attempting to make them equal.”
-Friedrich Hayek
"The principle of
spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but
swindling futurity on a large scale."
-Thomas Jefferson
“No pecuniary consideration is more urgent, than the regular
redemption and discharge of the public debt.”
-George Washington
_________________________________________________________________________
LATE NITE
Leno: The other day California's health
insurance exchange said that over 5 million people went to their website on the
first day of Obamacare. It turns out they were off by 4.4 million. It got only
645,000 hits. It turns out those were from the same guy just trying to log on
over and over…….California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill that allows
illegals in California to practice law. You thought a lot of Americans wanted
to close the border before? Wait until lawyers start sneaking across.
posted by gary at
10:45 AM
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