Saturday, November 23, 2013

op ed review 11/24



THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid invoked the “nuclear option”, disposing of filibuster rules that have guided the Senate since 1789.
“…the biggest change to the institutional character of the Senate since the ratification of the 17th Amendment.”
Democratic pollster Pat Caddell calls it an “institutional act of coup de etat.”

CBS Poll: 84% of Democrats Want ObamaCare Changed or Repealed

A new and independent analysis of ObamaCare warns of a ticking time bomb, predicting a second wave of 50 million to 100 million insurance policy cancellations next fall -- right before the mid-term elections. (update:  the administration has moved this event until just AFTER the election)
 “(Obamacare) is the most amazing spectacle of mayhem and meltdown anyone has seen in politics since Watergate.”

It’s an old marketing maxim — sex sells. And since nothing else is helping Obamacare sell, supporters in Colorado have decided to give this notion a try. A raunchy ad campaign by ProgressNow Colorado and the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative shows an excited woman holding a packet of birth-control pills next to a man with his arm around her waist……

Chutzpah:  President Obama told a gathering of business executives that the federal government was not "lavishly spending" on social programs.
?? President Barack Obama told a conference-call audience of progressive volunteers that 'more than 100 million Americans' – in a nation of less than 314 million – have successfully signed up for health insurance via the Affordable Care Act.
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D- Mo.) says Republicans are “misleading people” about ObamaCare, which she calls a “free market solution".

Census ‘faked’ 2012 election jobs report. In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington. The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.

A draft rule from the EPA proposes expanding which waterways are federally protected under the Clean Water Act to include virtually any stream or ditch, and hand environmentalists another way to sue property owners. “…the government might soon be able to declare jurisdiction over a seasonal stream in your backyard.”

The Federal Election Commission declined to grant a tea party group the same exemption from disclosure that it has long granted to left-wing political parties. The panel voted 3-2 against a proposal that would have allowed the Tea Party Leadership Fund to shield the names and information of their donors from public scrutiny.

Seattle’s newest socialist councilmember urges Boeing workers to seize factories…

More fundamental transformation:  President Obama omitted the words "under God" from the Gettysburg Address when reciting the great speech for a Ken Burns documentary.  
“President Obama awards Gloria Steinem the Medal of Freedom for Abortion Advocacy.”   “The male-bashing, anti-family, anti-American Steinem beamed as the guy who voted three times against a partial-birth abortion ban while in the Illinois state Senate placed the medal around her neck.”
Secretary of State John Kerry just scrapped 190 years of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, casually declaring the Monroe Doctrine is over.

“Women of MSNBC Silent on Martin Bashir´s Palin Comments”

Socialized medicine news:  “Britain´s cancer shame was exposed last night as a major report showed our survival rates are still no better than Eastern Europe. Women with cervical cancer in the UK are less likely to be alive after five years than their counterparts in Slovenia and the Czech Republic, a major international study found.

Duck Dynasty-endorsed Republican wins La. House seat
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THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Obamacare and Liberal Cruelty
Karin McQuillan  11/22

No one has the right to sacrifice your life to save someone else's life. No one has the right to harm your family to help someone else's family. That's a bedrock principle in America.  Until Obamacare. The Democrats want a different America. In the new America, you are expendable. Your life, your health, your family's financial well-being, can be taken away if the government decides that other people's lives, health and finances will benefit. You do not get to know about the law in advance, so you do not have the option of using your vote to stop it. This is the basic meaning of the transformational change to America that Obama and his Democrat supporters dreamed of. They are upset it hasn't worked, but they are unrepentant about their vision, their values and their tactics.

In a standard academic test of moral reasoning, people are asked to imagine a scenario: you see that a runaway trolley is bearing down on five strangers.  The only action you can take to save those people is to push the stranger standing next to you onto the tracks, to be killed by the trolley.  Ninety percent of Americans say they would not kill one person to save five. The numbers don't change the morality. We do not have the right to choose who lives and who dies. It would not matter if one is old and one is young, one is male and one is female, one is rich and one is poor. We do not have the right to play God by actively sacrificing another's life.
Until Obamacare. Obamacare privileges the poor over the rich, the middle aged over the young, women over men, and everyone else over the elderly on Medicare. In order to extend more government control over private insurers, doctors and hospitals, Democrats have chosen to sacrifice the financial well- being and even the lives of other Americans. They justify it because they want to offer government subsidized insurance to those they deem needier.

People who watch Fox News or read the Wall St. Journal have seen the faces and heard the voices of cancer patients who have lost the doctors and hospitals who are keeping them alive. Families working as hard as they can to maintain themselves find their insurance bills jumping to calamitous rates. We have heard from quietly desperate mothers saying their family cannot afford these rate hikes and that they don't know what they are going to do. The government has taken the power to divert the train. It is morally wrong…….

Americans until this generation were raised from childhood to celebrate Columbus, the Pilgrims, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The Biblical primacy of the individual was learned through our Pilgrim and Founding generations. Our precious gifts of limited constitutional government and free enterprise were understood as a living legacy, protected by our Constitution, sacrosanct….Until now.

The generation that voted in Barack Obama as president is new in American history. They were raised to mistake support of grievance-mongering for caring, special treatment for justice, and self-indulgence for sacred rights. They were taught to reject and be ashamed of our national values of freedom and responsibility. Freedom makes those who are irresponsible look bad, because they fail. Millennials mistake conservatives' love of freedom and responsibility for cruelty and racism. They have been taught people's problems are always society's fault, not that people learn from mistakes and grow strong by solving their own problems. They've bought the Big Lie that government can and should solve people's problems.

So we have the Obamacare Democratic Party that earned the respect and loyalty of most people under thirty, most unmarried women, and most minorities. They want the government to help them and everyone with everything -- jobs, school, health care, food, arts, science, what you are allowed to drive and wear and eat and do, even what light bulb to buy. They think government is capable of doing these things. Worse, they think government can be trusted to do a capable and a fair job. And they are willing to pay for it with their freedom.
They want the government to take over more and more of our lives, in order to take care of more and more able-bodied adults. They want the government to have the power to throw people off the bridge, because it will be for the greater good……

These liberals believe that helping some sick and some poor makes it okay to harm other people. The needs of the masses trump individual rights, so they keep talking about 30 million uninsured (never mind that the same number will remain uninsured after Obamacare). The ones who have lost their insurance or can no longer afford it are dismissed as, on average, healthier and middle class. If you were able to afford insurance before out of your own pocket, it's your turn to suffer now……

Democrats love to think they're taking care of the needy. Integrity?  Democracy?  Clearly not very important. The lying was okay, because once the subsidies kick in, think of all the people the government is helping. And if Obamacare destroys the entire private insurance system, so much the better; they really wanted socialized medicine, so the government can be in charge of everybody's health care.

Democrats believe that the benefit of government subsidies justify the lies and the sacrifice of strangers.
These liberals have indeed rejected American values, although they do not admit it to themselves. They are the 10% in those experiments on moral reasoning who say you should push a stranger in front of a train. They are proud to assert that groups of people they select should be sacrificed for the poorer and sicker. They think these are superior morals.

For conservatives who love and treasure America's core values, morality does not go by numbers, by salary levels, by race or by age. Our right to life and liberty and our own pursuit of happiness is not on government sufferance. It cannot be abridged by progressive policies. We are all equal. And we are all protected from tyranny. That is what the Tea Party is talking about when we say we want to take back our country. The government has no more right than an individual to choose who will be hit by the train.

Obamacare has exposed the ugly reality of government running our lives. People are upset and angry. How deep will the lesson go?  Will single women, millennials and minorities stop selling their birthright for government potage?  It is too soon to tell. After pulling down Obamacare, conservatives need to demonstrate that smaller government and larger free enterprise are the best and only way to increase fairness and excellence. Then we will have won our country back. Things seem more hopeful than they have in a long time.


Another good read:  Andrew McCarthy explains “The Scheme behind the Obamacare Fraud”
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FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“A free society requires the free flow of information. In any public policy dispute, if only one side is heard from, we are likely to get further and further away from the truth. The attackers will find there is no penalty for getting minor facts wrong or shading the truth. That will embolden them to make more serious errors, eventually resorting to downright lying. If the only entity providing any push back is the Washington Post fact checker, we are in real trouble. …”
                    -John C. Goodman

“[O]n ABC’s ‘This Week’ on Sunday, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., outright admitted that Obama’s ‘keep your plan’ promises were false. She said: ‘We all knew. The whole point of the plan is to cover things people need, like preventive care, birth control, pregnancy.’ So, you see, the entire national Democratic Party apparatus has conspired to deceive Americans about a vital matter – their own health care – in order to advance its agenda. You still think this is just about health care? Well, another Democratic leader, Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, admitted that with Obamacare, what Democrats are ‘trying to do is change a values system in our country.’ That pretty much sums up modern liberalism as embodied in the Democratic Party. Come hell or high water, Democrats will coerce us, via the power of the federal government, into thinking and believing as they do and living under their utopian Leviathan state.”
                     -David Limbaugh

“If you are obsessed with equality, as they are in Europe, what you end up with is chronic unemployment. Because the real engine of growth is low regulation, low taxation and you allow the golden goose, meaning the private economy, to go ahead and to flourish. And when you over-regulate and you over-tax it, especially if you are doing it in the name of reducing inequality, you are going to get the opposite effect.”
                    -Charles Krauthammer
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GLOBALONEY
Global warming' protest greeted by snowstorm -- only 50 protesters show up...
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LEFTIST WATCH
Modern-day America is civilized in that, while we conduct plenty of witch hunts, we do at least stop right before the burning-at-the-stake part. That’s progress! But it’s not much consolation for Mark Regnerus, whose scholarly research questioning same-sex parenting has drawn a seemingly unprecedented level of ire from left-wing activists and their academic allies. The Washington Times reported last week that Regnerus’s foes are still at it, having acquired the university e-mails of his editor in order to conduct a fishing expedition.

In the wake of MSNBC host Martin Bashir’s inflammatory comments in which he recommended graphic and excessive slavery-era punishments for former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin after the former vice presidential candidate equated America’s national debt to enslavement, the fallout continues to mount. Discussing a recent column on Fox News Channel’s America’s Newsroom on Wednesday, Mediaite columnist Joe Concha said that the editorial “culture” at MSNBC “almost encourages” Bashir’s level of discourse. “It’s a problem with the culture over there,” Concha said.
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ARTICLES
Does the Obamacare debacle mean the death of the American liberal dream? Thomas Edsall, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, thinks that it might. In a strongly worded and closely reasoned piece, Edsall asks what, for many loyal Times readers, is the unthinkable question: [I]s the federal government capable of managing the provision of a fundamental service through an extraordinarily complex system? Sounding like some kind of Fox News contributor, the left-leaning Edsall goes on to point out that the Obamacare dream ignores some basic realities about the way the world and the government work.

It was not the Tea Party that stabbed Ken Cuccinelli in the back but the establishment of his own party. Once a real conservative candidate gets nominated, the party loses interest. And because they lose interest, they hold back funds, thus assuring their own prediction that this candidate can’t win.  Cuccinelli lagged in total funding by $14 million. In the early months of the campaign, because of lack of funding, he was brutally attacked in ads that went unanswered.

VDH:  What is the common denominator of the Obama administration’s serial scandals — the Justice Department’s spying on AP, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, the NSA surveillance, the lies about Benghazi and the ACA — and much of the White House damage-control rhetoric? In a word: the advancement of postmodern notions of justice at the expense of traditional truth.

With the astonishing ineptitude of his all-pervasive statism, the president is manufacturing libertarians everywhere he goes. And it’s not just the massive Obamacare boondoggle, although that’s the worst and most public example at the moment. Every aspect of the administration from the extraordinary (and growing) deficits to the clueless foreign policy is an advertisement for the overweening incompetence of big government.

Conservative Points Against Gay Marriage
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NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released video showing an Obamacare navigator conspiring to release private data for political purposes.
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LATE NITE
Leno:  President Obama and his top aides met with insurance company CEOs at the White House on Friday. So we've got politicians meeting with insurance salesmen. You know, if you throw in a couple of used car dealers, you have the trifecta of professional lying right there…… The ratings for Al Jazeera America has now dipped even lower than Al Gore's Current TV, which it replaced. That's how you know you're boring, OK? When Al Gore is considered more entertaining to people than what you have…….The Dow Jones average hit 16,000 for the first time. How about that? The bad news?  It took us going $17 trillion in debt to get there……
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WISE WORDS
“Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue … presents a new harvest to those who watch the change and can trace its consequences; a harvest reared not by themselves but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few not for the many.”
                         –James Madison


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