op ed review 1/5
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
40,000 new laws take effect in 2014
Eleven GOP attorneys general say the Obama administration is
breaking the law by repeatedly making changes to ObamaCare without going
through Congress
Obamacare confusion reigns as frustrated patients walk out
of hospitals without treatment. 'They
had no idea if my insurance was active or not!'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2532869/They-no-idea-insurance-active-not-At-Virginia-hospitals-Obamacare-confusion-reigns-frustrated-patients-walk-out.html#ixzz2pLj9ZVXH
Sign of things to come: Hospitals
missing or delaying payrolls.
Even Howard Dean now gets it: “The individual mandate……is going to hurt the
Democrats because people don’t like to be told what to do by the government no
matter what party they’re in.”
On the last day of 2013 four different federal appeals
courts issued temporary injunctions against enforcement of the Obamacare
contraceptive mandate.
Obamacare may have promised health insurance for the masses.
But on its first day, it’s left more Americans without coverage than before the
law was passed.
Massachusetts, the model
for Obamacare, has highest health costs in the United States
Supporters of President Obama’s health care law had
predicted that expanding insurance coverage for the poor would reduce costly
emergency room visits because people would go to primary care doctors instead.
But a rigorous new experiment in Oregon
has raised questions about that assumption, finding that newly insured people
actually went to the emergency room a good deal more often.
A new scholarly study reveals that most convicts in jail
register as Democrats.
Colorado
is the first state allowing stores to sell marijuana for recreational use. Former Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., said Colorado and Washington
State are "canaries
in the coal mine." "There are a lot of ´unintended consequences´...
that will make them ponder whether this was the right decision," Kennedy
said, predicting more traffic accidents, increased school truancy, higher
drop-out rates and a general decrease in public health.
Nobel Peace Prize-winning former president of Poland, Lech
Walesa: “….the Obama administration has
been a dangerous disappointment”
“Sen. Rand Paul to Lead Class-Action Lawsuit Against Obama
over NSA Spying”
Viewers who are “not prepared” to be critical about what
they are seeing on screen were more likely to experience a “leftward shift” in
attitudes when watching Hollywood movies with
an underlying liberal message.
How political correctness humiliated Navy SEALs who caught
Qaeda killer…….”no shots were fired, but the SEALs faced another kind of
ambush: a humiliating, baffling, infuriating struggle with the military-justice
system……because the man those SEALs captured somehow sustained a bloody lip on
the night of his capture”
New York Times helping Hillary out by whitewashing Benghazi: “Al-Qaeda
had no direct involvement in the September 2012 attack on the US consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi”
Sources who were on the ground that night in Benghazi say the NYT
report is “completely false.”
Regal R&R: Obamas live like royalty on lavish Hawaiian holiday
According to a detailed report, Kim Jong Un fed his Uncle
Jang Song Thaek to a pack of hungry dogs, a deviation from the traditional
method of execution by firing squad. "Jang was stripped naked and thrown
into a cage, along with his five closest aides. Then 120 hounds, starved for
three days, were allowed to prey on them until they were completely eaten up.
This is called "quan jue", or execution by dogs."
Detroit Police Chief James Craig says “if more citizens were
armed, criminals would think twice about attacking them.” Urban police chiefs are typically in favor of
gun control or reluctant to discuss the issue, but Craig on Thursday was candid
about how he’s changed his mind.
Liberals who like guns have started their own organization:
the Liberal Gun Club.
The nanny state: In
the UK,
authorities are removing overweight children from their families “who overfeed
them”.
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/450907/Social-workers-take-children-from-families-who-overfeed-them
_______________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Walter Williams 12/18
The Pope and Capitalism
Pope Francis, in his apostolic exhortation, levied charges
against free market capitalism, denying that "economic growth, encouraged
by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and
inclusiveness in the world" and concluding that "this opinion ... has
never been confirmed by the facts." He went on to label unfettered
capitalism as "a new tyranny." Let's look at the pope's tragic
vision.
First, I acknowledge that capitalism fails miserably when
compared with heaven or a utopia. Any earthly system is going to come up short
in such a comparison. However, mankind must make choices among alternative
economic systems that actually exist on earth. For the common man, capitalism
is superior to any system yet devised to deal with his everyday needs and
desires.
Capitalism is relatively new in human history. Prior to
capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and
enslaving their fellow man. With the rise of capitalism, it became possible to
amass great wealth by serving and pleasing your fellow man. Capitalists seek to
discover what people want and produce and market it as efficiently as possible
as a means to profit. A couple of examples would be J.D. Rockefeller, whose
successful marketing drove kerosene prices down from 58 cents a gallon in 1865
to 7 cents in 1900. Henry Ford became rich by producing cars for the common
man. Both Ford's and Rockefeller's personal benefits pale in comparison with
that received by the common man by having cheaper kerosene and cheaper
transportation. There are literally thousands of examples of how mankind's life
has been made better by those in the pursuit of profits. Here's my question to
you: Are people who, by their actions, created unprecedented convenience,
longer life expectancy and a more pleasant life for the ordinary person -- and
became wealthy in the process -- deserving of all the scorn and ridicule heaped
upon them by intellectuals, politicians and now the pope?
Let's examine the role of profits but first put it in
perspective in terms of magnitude. Between 1960 and 2012, after-tax corporate
profit averaged a bit over 6 percent of the gross domestic product, while wages
averaged 47 percent of the GDP. Far more important than simple statistics about
the magnitude of profits is its role in guiding resources to their
highest-valued uses and satisfying people. Try polling people with a few
questions. Ask them what services they are more satisfied with and what they
are less satisfied with. On the "more satisfied" list would be profit-making
enterprises, such as supermarkets, theaters, clothing stores and computer
stores. They'd find less satisfaction with services provided by nonprofit
government organizations, such as public schools, post offices and departments
of motor vehicles.
Profits force entrepreneurs to find ways to please people in
the most efficient ways or go out of business. Of course, they can mess up and
stay in business if they can get government to bail them out or give them
protection against competition. Nonprofits have an easier time of it. Public
schools, for example, continue to operate whether they do a good job or not and
whether they please parents or not. That's because politicians provide their
compensation through coercive property taxes. I'm sure that we'd be less satisfied
with supermarkets if they, too, had the power to take our money through taxes,
as opposed to being forced to find ways to get us to voluntarily give them our
earnings.
Arthur C. Brooks, president at the American Enterprise
Institute and author of "Who Really Cares," shows that Americans are
the most generous people on the face of the earth. In fact, if you look for
generosity around the world, you find virtually all of it in countries that are
closer to the free market end of the economic spectrum than they are to the
socialist or communist end. Seeing as Pope Francis sees charity as a key part
of godliness, he ought to stop demonizing capitalism.
_____________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
"In our just concluded Christmas
season, we recalled a different kind of Magi: wise men who came to worship and
bring gifts to the Christ child. Now MAGI stands for Modified Adjusted Gross
Income. How appropriate with a president who was called a messiah figure by
some and to whom we are being forced to bring 'gifts' in increasing amounts to
be misspent on bloated and dysfunctional government. There's only one way to
fix this and it comes in the next two elections."
-Cal Thomas
_______________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
Socialist French President Hollande Gets Court Approval for
75% Millionaire Tax.
The palpable embarrassment of the Left over Obamacare has
led to an odd and disturbing reaction. Following the creation of the
now-infamous Pajama Boy tweet from Barackobama.com, embodying so much that is
wrong with Obamacare and socialism in general - the infantilization of adults,
the smirking know-it-all attitude of the nanny state, and the inappropriate
intrusions in our private lives - conservatives erupted with a wave of
hilarious mockery. The resulting sting obviously has psychologically wounded
the Left. How else to explain this article?
"Pajama Boy´ Controversy Wrapped in Anti-Semitism."
“Perhaps the question has entered your mind. It’s entered mine
many times: “Who are these people who think Thomas Friedman is smart?” Not to
specifically pick on Thomas Friedman (not that this wouldn’t be richly
deserved), but the question really has to do with a whole culture of generally
left-wing people who gravitate around ideas, events and notions that can be
shown to be quite empty when you really examine them…”
It used to be unacceptable for national news shows to
broadcast race hatred as commentary. No longer. So extreme is the loathing of
white Republicans that black commentators on two cable news channels have
uttered patently ridiculous and shameful comments on a Romney family photo that
shows the former presidential candidate with his black adoptive grandson on his
knee…… race hatred trumps human feeling and the need to nurture the next
generation.
We all knew we were in for something completely different
when the inauguration of self-described “progressive” Bill de Blasio as New York’s mayor began
with a keynote from pro-Communist activist Harry Belafonte. The 86-year-old
singer has a history of extremism. He has been an infamous house guest of Fidel
Castro, called Colin Powell and Condi Rice “house slaves” of the Bush
administration, and last year compared the free-market Koch brothers to the Ku
Klux Klan. “We will be no longer a divided city,” he proclaimed as he compared
today’s New York
to a “Dickensian” nightmare.
de Blasio has laid out an ambitious, far-left agenda as he
begins what is destined to be a disastrous reign as New York’s 109th mayor. Leveling
left-wingers, with their perverse obsession with income equality, are looking
eagerly to the city in the hope that the new mayor will “morph New York City’s municipal machinery into a
closely watched laboratory for populist theories of government that have never
before been enacted on such a large scale,”
________________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
“One of the (UK) Woolwich killers decided to convert to
Islam after being inspired by a hate preacher who advocates killing gays and
beating women, he has revealed in a letter. Michael Adebowale, 22, said that
lectures posted online by notorious firebrand cleric Sheikh Khalid Yasin taught
him the ‘purpose of life’.
__________________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
HOW many global warming scientists does it take to get stuck
in Antarctic ice? “.......expedition
trapped by record ice while trying to prove the east Antarctic ice sheet is
melting.”
MSNBC: "The
right wing had a field day, pointing and laughing at the global warming
believers, who just to be clear, are only a group of scientists risking their
lives…to help save the planet…”
98% of mainstream media stories about the rescue ignore that
the ice-bound ship was on global warming mission
Antarctic ice shelf melt ´lowest
EVER recorded, global warming is
NOT eroding it´
U.S.
ushers in 2014 with record-low temps, snow
Winnipeg deep freeze as cold
as uninhabited planet: “Winnipeg's temperature as cold as surface of
Mars”
Up to 30 inches of new snow for New
England.
“Americans Spent $7.45B in 3 Years Helping
Other Countries Deal With ‘Climate Change’” (global warming)
Malcolm Gladwell´s great book The Tipping Point presents the
case that sudden seismic shifts in society can result from small events, if the
right factors are present. Tipping points happen when momentum toward an idea
builds and finally crosses a threshold where it is evident that a major
cultural change has occurred. The global warming tipping point is coming, but
not the one anticipated by climate change "experts."… Al Gore, the
high priest of AGW theory, has closed all of his Alliance for Climate Protection field
offices, and laid off 90% of his staff. Contributions have all but dried up.
Solar electricity is growing, promoted, and most
importantly, heavily subsidized. The promoters of solar electricity claim that
it is close to being competitive with conventional sources of electricity. That
is a fantasy. Solar electricity is expensive and impractical. If it weren’t for
government subsidies, some explicit and some disguised, the solar industry
would collapse.
________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
The prize for most provocative op-ed of the year goes to Pat
Buchanan: “Is Putin one of us?” Probably
not, but it’s sure food for thought if you worry about the cultural decline of
the West:
This generated some vigorous debate at Free Republic.
Must read: “The
Straight Dope on Homosexuality” by Elizabeth
McCaw
If you make $15/hr, ($34,000/year) you would be in the world’s top 1
percent of wage earners.
“Back in the seventies when I was a lefty……we used to speak
of “el enemigo principal,” the principal enemy. …..The principal enemy for the
right and the center-right is now Hillary Clinton, the vastly favored
frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. She is so far in
front, in fact, that her competitors are not even in hailing distance. Hillary
is the one who can consolidate and solidify the “gains” of the Obama era…..”
Camille Paglia: “A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues” Why ignoring the biological differences
between men and women risks undermining Western civilization. 'What you're
seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia. The
military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter
male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and
women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our three-hour
conversation.
'There's no room for anything manly now': Paglia speaks out
AGAINST the loss of masculine virtues and its negative impact on society.
"We will keep this promise to the American people: If
you like your doctor you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like
your healthcare plan, you will be able to keep your healthcare plan.
Period." (Barack Obama, June 15, 2009, with variants repeated many times
since). Today, any American who isn´t willfully blind knows this
"promise" is a very big lie. A lie which was deliberately told by
fundamentally-dishonest pushers of Obamacare, because if the truth were widely
known at that time the Affordable Care Act would never have become law.
The breathtaking ineptitude with which the Obama
administration has implemented the Affordable Care Act provides the Republican
Party a very real opportunity to make major gains in the upcoming midterm
elections……According to a CNN/ORC survey released last week, the GOP has
improved its standing among registered voters by 13 points…… This is good news
indeed, but some of the commentary offered by pundits and conservative
activists concerning this trend threaten to infect Republican politicians and
donors with a deadly strain of overconfidence.
Obamacare faced a very tough year in 2013, but that could
pale in comparison to what happens in 2014.
Here are the stories to watch:
GOP Establishment Remained Neutral on 'Duck Dynasty'
Controversy
All things considered, it was a year without shame. It was
the year that Miley Cyrus….made us yearn for the good taste and restraint of
the era of Lady Gaga, not to mention the golden age of classic Britney Spears. It
was the year the president of the United States posed in a selfie
with other foreign leaders at a memorial service for Nelson Mandela. It was the
year Anthony Weiner admitted in the midst of his New York City mayoral campaign that he had
continued to sext after resigning from Congress for sexting. It was the year
that Toronto mayor Rob Ford denied smoking crack, before admitting smoking
crack — probably “in one of my drunken stupors.” It was the year Dennis Rodman
nominated himself as goodwill ambassador to North Korea, touchingly pronouncing
himself Kim Jong Un’s “friend for life.” It was the year Lance Armstrong
confessed to cheating in every single one of his Tour de France victories,
after attempting for years to destroy anyone who had blown the whistle on his
doping. It was the year something truly outlandish happened on The Real
Housewives of Somewhere or Other. It was the year Mob Wives got
crazy. It was the year that 16 and Pregnant descended into moral chaos.
They all made us remember a time when Jersey Shore represented a more
decorous, elevated form of reality television.
So good riddance to a year of shamelessness. It is sure never to be
excelled — except by 2014.
___________________________________________________________________________
REPUBLICAN CIVIL WAR
The establishment GOP in Washington hates the Tea Party and the
conservative wing of the party more than they do the Democrats. They will make
very clear that instead of riding a conservative wave to a landslide victory in
the 2014 midterms, they will do everything in their power to sabotage
conservative and Tea Party candidates for their own personal benefit.
David Limbaugh: Establishment GOP Biting Its Feeding
Hand?
Dick Morris: “House Speaker John Boehner would not
be House Speaker John Boehner if it were not for the tea party and the other
conservative groups he now criticizes. He says that they “lack all credibility”
and accuses them of “using our members [Congressmen] and the American people
for their own goals.”
__________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
The Five Biggest Myths About Income Inequality
5 Ways the Liberal Obsession With Income Inequality Hurts
the Poor
The funniest thing you will see today:
These images of the Palouse Grasslands, in rural Washington
State, were painstakingly
harvested over a period of days, then overlaid on one another to give the
sharpest and most stunning quality to the whole area of the image. Ms Wood….would drive for up to 12 hours to
find the perfect vantage point for her images.
A new viral video showing an
“amazing T-Rex illusion” has gone viral, achieving nearly 3.5-million YouTube
views in the days since it was posted. Try as you might to avoid it, the video
will mess with your mind.
________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"The cause of America is in a
great measure the cause of all mankind."
-Thomas Paine
posted by gary at
8:13 AM
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