Friday, November 29, 2013

op ed review 11/30



THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Former President Ronald Reagan has edged out Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy as the nation’s greatest president in over a century, and President Obama was rated the biggest failure by a sizable margin over George W. Bush, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, according to a new poll.

“Obama Approval Falls to 50 Percent in Home State, Collapses in Ohio”
If voters had been aware last year that they might lose their health-care plans when Obamacare went into effect, Republican President Mitt Romney would be sitting in the White House today, according to a poll released Friday.

Almost 80 million people with employer health plans could find their coverage canceled next year because they are not compliant with ObamaCare, several experts predicted.
With the roll out of Obamacare being as disastrous as possible for the Obama administration, one group was given a $1 million grant to gather “success stories” of Americans dealing with Obamacare and distribute them to the media who often refer to them as an “independent” group.
“Obamacare Event Hands Out Free Condoms as Prizes….The condom give-away was a training event with young Democrats.”
“Cancer Patient Who Spoke Out Against ObamaCare Now Being Audited”
Boy with cancer loses coverage after Obamacare launch……Bureaucrats won't help unless he is 'pregnant or an illegal alien'”

“For the first time in nearly a decade we have halted parts of Iran’s nuclear program” announced a jubilant Barack Obama after the news of the just-signed Geneva six-month interim agreement with Iran. But the American goal for the accord was that the Iranians not “advance their program” of building a uranium nuclear bomb (and perhaps a plutonium bomb too); the apparent deal exactly permits such advancement, plus sanctions relief to Tehran worth about $9 billion. This wretched deal offers one of those rare occasions when comparison with Neville Chamberlain in Munich in 1938 is valid.
John Bolton:  “Abject Surrender by the United States”
Elliot Abrams:  “This agreement rewards Iran for a decade of lying to the IAEA and hiding its nuclear program, because it essentially accepts Iran’s enrichment program.”
For many of the Americans who were held hostage at the start of the Iranian revolution, "It's kind of like Jimmy Carter all over again.”

National Labor Relations Board lawyers okayed a major union's practice of paying people to protest against Walmart in a legal memorandum earlier this month. The federal labor law enforcement agency said the practice of paying workers $50 apiece to join protests “did not constitute unlawful … coercion of employees.” the NLRB lawyers determined that the UFCW's offer of $50 gift cards to anyone who showed up to protest “was a non-excessive strike benefit.”

The Supreme Court agreed to referee another dispute over President Obama's health care law: whether businesses may use religious objections to escape a requirement to cover birth control for employees.

In Colorado, efforts to recall a third anti-gun politician ended with the news that Senator Evie Hudak will resign. Hudak apparently decided that the election, which if lost could have flipped control of the state’s senate, was not worth the risk.
Actor Richard Dreyfuss: "The NRA is Not the Enemy, They Should Be Thought of as Heroes" saying that they are best group to turn to for solutions on gun violence while noting they are experts and were founded in order to education people about firearms.

Happy holidays from the Obama administration. Federal agencies are currently working on rolling out hundreds of environmental regulations, including major regulations that would limit emissions from power plants and expand the agency’s authority to bodies of water on private property. http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/27/epa-preparing-to-unleash-a-deluge-of-new-regulations/#ixzz2ly1wcRqH

Seattle goes to pot……On the first anniversary of legal weed in Washington State, Seattle will permit a big pot party on the site of Seattle Center’s old Fun Forest amusement park.  “…..a free, adults-only event, open to the public….light music, light catering and outdoor pot smoking by up to 500 people behind a double fence…”
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THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Investors Business Daily  11/27

After spending three years promoting ObamaCare lies, the media elite now scramble to get out of the way of a train wreck they helped cause. Their backpedaling would be funny if so many lives weren't at risk.

As the redistributive mechanics of ObamaCare rear their ugly head, the president's propaganda puppets are suddenly sounding like conservative critics. Take the New York Times. In a fit of candor, it now agrees with what we've said all along — "redistribution of wealth lies at the heart of" the Affordable Care Act.

The paper reported that "economic justice" was Obama's real goal in taking over a sixth of the economy. But to make his plan "palatable" to "middle-class voters," he had to mislead them into thinking nothing would be taken from them. He had to assure them, in a "semantic sidestep," that ObamaCare was a win-win for all Americans, when in fact it created "losers as well as winners" — tens of millions of losers, as it turns out.

"Hiding in plain sight behind that pledge — visible to health policy experts but not the general public — was the redistribution required to extend health coverage to those who had been either locked out or priced out of the market," the Times said. "Now some of that redistribution has come clearly into view."

Of course, it was visible to Times correspondents as well. But they're just now getting around to informing voters, after flooding them with pro-ObamaCare stories during the 2012 campaign. Time magazine has had its own miraculous conversion. After defending ObamaCare, its senior political analyst, Mark Halperin, now agrees with Sarah Palin that ObamaCare does in fact contain "death panels." Appearing on Newsmax TV's Steve Malzberg Show, Halperin said death panels are "built into" ObamaCare as part of the Independent Payment Advisory Board.

Malzberg: The death panels will be coming, call them what you will. Rationing is part of it.
Halperin: I agree. It's going to be a huge issue, and that's something else about which the president was not fully forthcoming and straightforward.
Malzberg: Alright, so you believe there will be rationing, aka death panels?
Halperin: It's built into the plan.

Oh, now you tell us. Just this past September, his magazine said Palin was wrong about the death panels and even insisted IPAB won't ration care. No doubt chastened by colleagues, Halperin clarified his remarks on White House propaganda arm MSNBC. "I said something imprecisely," he said.

Although he pointed out he never actually used the words "death panels," he reiterated that the government will have a role in deciding how much end-of-life care people get. "ObamaCare does that," Halperin said.
Such media honesty is likely just a temporary spasm.

White House-tied groups already have been paid to find and feed positive ObamaCare stories to the national media. Judging from past behavior, they'll report them unfiltered.

FROM OTHER COLUMNS
"The real solution to America's healthcare problems can be reduced to two ideas: liberty and free-market capitalism. We need a patient-centered system where the patient-doctor relationship comes first, not last. The ability of Americans to maintain health savings accounts on their own, to pick and choose what they want any insurance policy to cover, and the elimination of laws that prevent insurance companies from selling policies across state lines. We need a system in which a 900 page bill, and 11,000 pages of regulations -- not one word of which talks about tort reform -- is tossed on the ash heap of history. That's a viable beginning. I have no doubt there are experts in the field who can couple these ideas with a system in which people with chronic and/or pre-existing conditions can access the kind of safety net Americans would be more than happy to underwrite. One based on genuine need -- and genuine virtue."
                         -Arnold Ahlert
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BOOKS
Star Parker:  I have lined up my Christmas presents this year for President Obama and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. I will send them both a copy of the last book written by one of greatest economists of the last century, and winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, F.A. Hayek. The book is called The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism.  (Hayek) noted the critical importance that we know what we don’t know. Thinking you know what you don’t and can’t know, the illusion that men can plan, organize, and control things far beyond their understanding is the “fatal conceit” of socialism.
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LEFTIST WATCH
Eighty million Americans are losing health insurance, and 26 million are jobless. But lefty Rep. Linda Sanchez has made oppression of gay and transgender Latinos her priority. Seems the smaller the cause, the better. At a field hearing attended by all of 20 people in Los Angeles on Monday, the California Democrat bemoaned all the time spent on matters such as the slow economy, runaway government spending, the millions losing their insurance under Obama-Care and the 7.8% unemployment rate. Such issues, the congresswoman believes, are diverting attention from problems experienced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Latinos and Latinas.
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ISLAM
Fifty-six women have been killed in Pakistan this year for giving birth to a girl rather than a boy, human rights activist IA Rehman said at a symposium here on Monday
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ACTIVISM
AFA is calling for a limited one-month boycott of Radio Shack over the company's censorship of the word "Christmas."   For years, Radio Shack has refused to use the word Christmas on its website, in television commercials, newspaper ads and in-store promotions, despite tens of thousands of consumer requests to recognize Christmas and in spite of repeated requests from AFA to do the same.

“Religious liberty is front and center on the nation´s Thanksgiving table. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. The family-owned craft store company is intrepidly challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare´s abortion coverage mandate. Hobby Lobby´s faithful owners deserve our thanks and praise as they defend freedom of conscience for all Americans.”
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ARTICLES
Interesting ideas from the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson:  “Mr Johnson, who last week called for the ten biggest taxpayers to be handed knighthoods, acknowledged that growing inequality was creating ‘resentment’.
He said ministers needed to do more to promote social mobility. ‘Though it would be wrong to  persecute the rich, and madness to try and stifle wealth creation, and futile to try to stamp out inequality, we should only tolerate this wealth gap on two conditions.  ‘One, that we help those who genuinely cannot compete; and, two, that we provide opportunity for those who can.’  Delivering the annual Margaret Thatcher Lecture – staged by the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank – he insisted the rich had a duty to help the poor and embrace philanthropy. And he urged the Government to do much more to help bright children from poor homes to get a good education.”
But let’s not paint a target on our back with “greed is good”:  “Conservatives clearly must defend free markets against the fatal conceit that big government knows best — that collectivism and redistribution are somehow more moral alternatives. History proves they are not. But in the process of defending capitalism, we must also avoid even the appearance of a “greed is good” mentality — both in our hearts and in our rhetoric. This begins at home. Just as we have a corporate responsibility, as individuals we must strive to be generous and compassionate. And while I don’t want to blame the victim, but the truth is that some of the liberal overreach has been invited by conservative people of faith who haven’t always acted according to their values.”

It’s no secret that President Obama was behind the push to end the filibuster as a means of blocking nominees for U.S. appeals court judgeships. At a fundraiser earlier this month, he told liberal donors that he is “remaking the courts.” Recognizing that the filibuster stood in the way of a full radical makeover, Obama personally lobbied three Democratic Senators who were undecided about whether to eliminate it. Obama reportedly told them “how important this was to him and our ability to get anything done for the rest of the term.”

Larry Elder:  The "knockout game" -- and the media underreporting of it -- combines the breakdown of the family with the media's condescending determination to serve as a public relations bureau for blacks…..Both National Public Radio and The New York Times say these reports of the "knockout game" being widespread are overblown and do not represent a trend. Really?  According to Colin Flaherty, author of "White Girl Bleed A Lot: The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It," the knockout game has gone national. He describes "knockouts" in Philadelphia, Atlantic City, St. Louis, Birmingham, Chicago, Charlotte, Milwaukee, Denver, Minneapolis, Georgetown, New York City, Greensboro, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Kansas City, Miami, Cleveland, Nashville, Peoria, Seattle, Saratoga Springs, Atlanta and a host of others towns and cities…..From a distance, the media can spot some lone idiot holding up an offensive sign at a tea party rally. But when it comes to black perp/white victim crime, there is a very different attitude. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/11/28/the_knockout_game_--_nytnpr_say_no_big_deal_120802.html#ixzz2ly0nCTCt
Remember the crowd at the Democrat convention booing Jerusalem? Obama is lifting sanctions on Iran for them. He wants to give Democrats a happy feeling over their morning cup of coffee, instead of another stomachache reading about those 5 million people who have lost their health care and will be voting Republican in 2014. With the fracking revolution bringing down the worldwide price of oil, Iran was finally feeling the economic pinch from sanctions, and facing a restive population. By lifting sanctions, Obama has saved the mullahs, without getting a halt to their nuclear weapons program in return.

Push for minimum wage hike led by localities, Democrats…….Supporters and opponents of the $15 proposal in SeaTac, Wash., spent more than $2 million on advertising, mailings and polling — in a city with just 12,106 registered voters. The measure passed by 77 votes out of just more than 6,000 cast, meaning supporters and opponents spent about $327 per vote.

“A health care lemon” by Dr Ben Carson
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NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
MyCancellation.com is a new website devoted to collecting health insurance cancellation notices and stories from Obamacare’s victims.

Thanksgiving 2013: ObamaCare Talking Point Survival Guide

A newer conservative website, run by insiders but with an outsider appeal, has rocketed past its better-known competitors in traffic by aiming intensely at social sharing and taking advantage of a massive and accelerating shift toward Facebook as the key source of traffic to publishers.

10 Spectacular Images That Could Change the Way You Look at Snowstorms
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LATE NITE
Leno:  When President Obama was in Los Angeles, he visited the DreamWorks Studios. Now don't confuse DreamWorks with Obamacare — that was a dream that didn't work….. President Obama's approval rating is at 37 percent, the lowest point of his presidency. Here's how bad it is. You know the Thanksgiving turkey he's pardoning this week? The turkey said: No pictures. It didn't want to be seen.
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WISE WORDS
"[I]t is appropriate that we recall the first thanksgiving, celebrated in the autumn of 1621. After surviving a bitter winter, the Pilgrims planted and harvested a bountiful crop. After the harvest they gathered their families together and joined in celebration and prayer with the Native Americans who had taught them so much. Clearly our forefathers were thankful not only for the material well being of their harvest but for this abundance of goodwill as well. In this spirit, Thanksgiving has become a day when Americans extend a helping hand to the less fortunate. Long before there was a government welfare program, this spirit of voluntary giving was ingrained in the American character. Americans have always understood that, truly, one must give in order to receive. This should be a day of giving as well as a day of thanks. ... Let us recommit ourselves to that devotion to God and family that has played such an important role in making this a great Nation, and which will be needed as a source of strength if we are to remain a great people."
                       -Ronald Reagan


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