op ed review 12/15
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Oregon,
once touted as a model for President Obama's health care law, signed up just 44
people for insurance through November, despite spending more than $300 million
on its state-based exchange. The state’s exchange had the fewest sign-ups in
the nation, according to a new report today by the Department of Health and
Human Services.
New poll shows 4 in 10 would rather pay fine than buy
Obamacare health insurance
New Obamacare health plans will exclude top hospitals
The new Obamacare deal:
If you want to keep your doctor, you might have to pay more..
70% Of Calfornia's Doctors Expected To Boycott Obamacare
Generation Opportunity
Takes ‘Opt-Out’ of Obamacare Message to College Students
"Nice little insurance company you’ve got there. Be a
shame if anything happened to it." In essence, that´s the message just
delivered to the health care insurance industry.
Krauthammer on new Obamacare rules: ‘This now approaches banana republic
lawlessness”
It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the budget deal.
“Embrace the suck,” House minority leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi told fellow
Democrats Thursday morning. Democrats
are fuming that the bipartisan budget deal doesn’t extend unemployment benefits
any further. The deal, negotiated by
conservative House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and Senate Budget chair Patty
Murray (D-Wash.) puts off most of the looming “sequester” budget cuts. It
shaves about $23 billion from the deficit, but provides for $85 billion in new
spending over a decade, funded through cost savings and fees slapped on air
travel and Medicare providers.
“It's war! Senate gears up for epic battle as ZERO
Republicans line up to support budget agreement (Democrats need at least 5)”
"More than 20 conservative leaders signed a statement
released Tuesday opposing any deal that raises spending levels or increases
revenue. They included the leaders of the Family Research Council, the Tea
Party Patriots, the tea party-aligned FreedomWorks and the American
Conservative Union." And as commentator George Will wryly observed,
"saving" $23 billion over 10 years "is a rounding error on the
[$17 trillion] debt. ... It's trivial."
California
has long been a union stronghold, but voters in the strongly Democratic state
are gradually taking a more negative view of organized labor, a poll released
Friday suggested. The
independent Field Poll said that by a narrow margin, more voters said unions do
more harm than good, as opposed to those who see organized labor as generally
beneficial.
Colorado
has been taken over by Democrats over the past few election cycles. But
left-leaning PPP’s latest poll suggests that the Democrats are losing their
grip on the state.
“Air Force Base Takes Down Nativity Scene Following
Complaint”
ESPN has reportedly rejected a Christmas commercial from a St. Louis area Catholic
hospital because the network found the mention of "Jesus" in the ad
to be "problematic."
On Friday ESPN changed its mind and decided to allow the ad
referencing “the birth of Jesus” and “God’s healing message.”
God bless Texas: “The Grinch — and anyone else trying to
dampen the holiday spirit — should stay away from Texas this year. A group of Texans is coming
out in full force to protect Christmas, Hanukkah and other holiday celebrations
and to make sure students, teachers and parents have the right to observe their
holidays at school. “It’s time to end the war on Christmas and stop forcing our
schools to bow at the altar of political correctness,” said Jonathan Saenz,
president of Texas
Values….”
“Dem Pollster Shocked to Find No
Racism in Tea Partiers, So They Invent
Some”
The Michigan Education Association is going to arbitration
to try to force a school district to pay a former teacher who was convicted of
molesting a student a $10,000 severance buyout.
"Documents filed by other groups show that two labor
organizations, the International Union of Operating Engineers and the Laborers´
International Union of North America, directed a combined $400,000 to the
Republican group [the Defending Main Street super PAC] in September and
October." The Defending Main
Street super PAC has very publicly declared war on
the Tea Party.”
Not only is liberal MSNBC host Ed Schultz paid for his TV
show and radio show, but he received at least $177,000 from labor unions in
2012 for “representational activities”. Yes, you read that right.
Planned Parenthood’s 2012-2013 annual report is out, and a
pro-life group has already found that the pro-abortion group received nearly
$1.5 million a day in government funding over the year.
The top 40 percent of households actually paid 106.2 percent
of the nation’s net income taxes in 2010, according to a new study by the
Congressional Budget Office. At the same time, households in the bottom 40
percent took in an average of $18,950 in what the CBO called “government
transfers” in 2010.
“Under Obama, troops forced to
rely on welfare, holiday charity to make
ends meet.”
_______________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Washington
Examiner 12/1
Liberal activists across the nation have since 1994 demanded
a “living wage,” which, depending on who is doing the defining, means the
amount required to cover the basic needs of an individual or family. As with so
many arguments made by the Left, the living wage appeal sounds reasonable.
After all, why shouldn't an employer pay employees at least enough for them to
have decent housing, clothes, food, transportation and educational
opportunities?
But there is a big lie behind this seemingly reasonable
argument, namely that the employer is responsible for providing a person's
basic needs, not the individual himself. The falsehood is further illuminated
by this question: Who is responsible for providing for the employer's basic
needs? If the answer is the employer, then society has two classes and equality
is just a politically convenient myth.
The practical reality is that when employers are responsible
for providing a living wage, sooner or later, it becomes the government’s duty
to guarantee it. The choice then is between the dependence society encouraged
by the living wage or the free society that results when individuals are
primarily responsible for themselves.
The stark truth that liberal activists never want to discuss
is that a society that requires employers to pay the living wage is
economically unsustainable and traps individuals and families in permanent
dependence upon the government with no hope of ever improving their
circumstances.
There are hard numbers that make clear that these
considerations are not just theories. The numbers are crunched by the Heritage
Foundation's Center for Data Analysis and published in the conservative think
tank's annual Index of Dependence on Government. Using 1980 as the baseline for
the index, there was a 3.3 percent increase in dependence from 2010 to 2011,
the most recent year for which data is available, according to Heritage.
The long-term trend illustrated by the index is increased
dependence upon what Heritage describes as “federally funded programs that were
chosen for their propensity to duplicate or replace assistance -- shelter,
food, monetary aid, health care, education, or employment training--that was
traditionally provided to people in need by local organizations and families.”
At a time when it is commonly believed that defense accounts
for most federal spending, in fact social welfare spending programs account for
just under 70 percent of the federal budget, including both discretionary and
non-discretionary categories. A parallel trend in this growing dependence is
the steady long-term decline in the number of people who pay no net federal
income taxes. There was a decline from 48.6 percent to 44.7 percent in this
data point from 2010 to 2011 but the long-term trend is clearly in the other
direction.
In short, the dependent society is a hopeless society
because, as Heritage explains, “government programs not only crowd out civil
society, but too frequently trap individuals and families in long-term
dependence, leaving them incapable of escaping their condition for generations
to come.”
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
"There is a sense of unraveling that
transcends the normal ideological disagreements that have roiled this nation to
varying degrees throughout our history. Both sides of the ideological divide
have endured presidents with whom they disagree, sometimes vehemently. Yet I'm
getting the sense that millions of Americans of every stripe are now aware that
we are in uncharted waters. We are being led by a man who is at once so very
full of himself, even as virtually everything that goes wrong is either
something he is unaware of, or someone else's fault. It is remarkable that in
the entire five years after this president promised to fundamentally transform
the United States of America,
not a single reporter has asked the ultimate question: Transform it into what,
Mr. President? We have three more years to learn the answer. For millions of
Americans, it doesn't get any creepier than that."
-Arnold Ahlert
"Obama spoke about income inequality
in a recent address but failed to mention one of the most significant
contributors to rising inequality in America: the marriage gap. ...
Unlike trust funds, marriage is available to everyone and confers the same
benefits on the rich and poor. There is no substitute for two married parents
who care for each other in sickness, spell each other in child and elder care,
watch the kids while a spouse takes night classes and contribute to thriving
communities. ... Without the basics of security and permanence in their
personal lives, people find it much more difficult to rise out of poverty or
maintain middle class lifestyles. They are also far less happy. If you care
about the poor and the middle class, you ought to worry about marriage."
-Mona Charen
"We have spent $15 trillion
'fighting' poverty since 1965 and we are currently spending $ trillion a year
-- an amount equal to about $22,000 per poor person or $88,000 for a family of
four. Yet our poverty rate today (16%) is higher than when we started (14%)! If
there has been a War on Poverty, poverty won. Is it not obvious that we are
subsidizing and enabling a way of life? To put it bluntly, we are paying young
women to have children out of wedlock. We are paying them to be unemployed. And
we are paying them to remain poor."
-John C. Goodman:
_______________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
Chris Matthews is crazy. Nevertheless, when left-wingers
talk openly with one another, their craziness can be revealing. That is the
case, I think, with this remarkable MSNBC clip. Matthews, fresh from his
kneepad interview with President Obama, praises what he terms a uniquely
brilliant insight by Al Sharpton: South Africa’s white politicians of
the apartheid era were more patriotic than today’s Republicans.
“When I first heard the claim, I thought it was a mistake or
hoax. A talking head was describing a raging war in the Democratic Party
between progressives and centrists. Centrist Democrats? Aren’t they already
extinct?”
__________________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
Over 2000 cold and snow records set in the USA this past week
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/13/over-2000-cold-and-snow-records-set-in-the-usa-this-past-week/
Temperatures in Chicago
hit an 18-year low.
Snow in Cairo
for the first time in 100 years.
In August, Earth set a new record for the coldest
temperature ever recorded, minus 135.3 degrees.
A Swedish study found that the planet was warmer in ancient
Roman times and the Middle Ages than today, challenging the
mainstream idea that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are the main drivers of
global warming.
________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Important read: “What
Will It Take? Americans still seem willing to give a pass to the disaster in
the White House.” Sample: “Obama is a historic disaster of the first
magnitude and, if not restrained, he will see to the irrevocable decline of the
country which foolishly elected him, leaving the world on the brink of a
conflict — or in the midst of one — whose repercussions cannot be
underestimated.”
Lifson “The GOP
establishment is loath to admit it, but the government shutdown is turning out
to be a brilliant political chess move on the part of Senators Ted Cruz and
Mike Lee. The Obamacare disaster, fully predictable by anyone who understands
the effect of incentives and the fundamental incompetence of academic theorists
and left wing ideologues, has made the go-for-broke attempt to stop it an
obvious profile in courage.”
Thomas Sowell disagrees:
“….in trying to defund ObamaCare without the Congressional votes to do
so, the Tea Party made a major tactical mistake. Polls show that this mistake has already hurt
the Republican Party, the only party that has any chance of repealing
ObamaCare. To have any realistic prospect of repealing ObamaCare may require
the Republicans to win both the 2014 and 2016 elections….. The question is
whether the Tea Party itself still has its eye on the ball -- the goals it was
formed to serve -- or is letting itself get preoccupied with its battle against
other Republicans.
“Please Pray for Me… I Am Losing My Insurance….Why is our
government doing this to us?”
Megyn Kelly, Fox News’s brightest star.
“A Fox in every sense of the word” In November, her first full
month in prime time after years in daytime, Kelly was second only to O’Reilly
in the overall ratings, which means she’s the No. 2 person on cable news’s No.
1 channel. http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/megyn-kelly-foxs-brightest-fastest-rising-star/2013/12/11/e4987dec-5dee-11e3-be07-006c776266ed_story.html
Earlier in the year, as the gun-control movement tried
clumsily to transform an abomination into a cudgel, the Washington Post’s
Kathleen Parker distilled its problem into a single sentence. “Nothing proposed
in the gun-control debates would have prevented the mass killing of children at
Sandy Hook Elementary School,” Parker contended
plainly, “and everybody knows it.”
WASHPOST asks public for 'gun violence' stories for Sandy Hook anniversary...
Common Core: One new
lesson teaches our children that Obama is indeed the messiah. A language-arts
lesson plan for third-, fourth- and fifth-graders has been developed around the
book “Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope,” in which the author, Nikki
Grimes, paints the 44th president as nothing short of a messianic
figure.
For those who believe in human rights and liberty, the sight
of our president bounding up some stairs to energetically shake hands with Raul
Castro, dictator of Cuba,
was more than a little unsettling -- regardless of the circumstance. But that´s
what President Obama seemed to go out of his way to do at Nelson Mandela´s
memorial service Tuesday.
How do you get your arms around the catastrophe known as
Obamacare? Is it even possible? At this point, I’m not sure it is. The list of
individual disasters which threaten to ruin one-sixth of the U.S. economy
and what has been, up until now, the best healthcare system in the world is
exhaustive, and exhausting. The examples I will identify here barely scratch
the surface. First but by no means foremost, we have the supposedly new and
improved HealthCare.gov. Except it’s not, even the visible part. Stories still
abound of people still failing to get in or to get through the enrollment
"Once the employer mandate kicks in they'll be hunting
Democrats with dogs in this country."
___________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
The Air Force Band provides a delightful flash mob concert
at the Air and Space
Museum.
Funny series of pictures:
“Did an irate Michelle make misbehaving Barry switch seats at Mandela's
funeral?”
In order to arm Californians with accurate information about
the California Healthcare Exchange, the California Republican Assembly launched
a website this past August called CoveringHealthcareCA.com -- clearly setting forth what you have to do,
the date by which you have to do it and the consequences if you don't.
MoveOn.org and their media pals are trying to shut down the website.
__________________________________________________________________________
LATE NITE
Leno: Kanye West said
he wants to be the "Obama of clothing." To achieve his goal, he's
designing fashions that nobody wants and offering them on a website that
doesn't work…….This winter storm has left thousands without electricity. It's
as if President Obama had taken over the power companies.
________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
“We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.”
-Thomas Jefferson
posted by gary at
2:50 PM
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