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Repealed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
_________________________________________________________________________
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”
________________________________________________________________________
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
________________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
Global warming' protest greeted by snowstorm -- only 50
protesters show up...
_____________________________________________________________________
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.
_______________________________________________________________________
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
___________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released video showing an
Obamacare navigator conspiring to release private data for political purposes.
__________________________________________________________________________
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……
________________________________________________________________________
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
posted by gary at
1:01 PM
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