op ed review 3/2
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Republicans looking to take the Senate: A favorable map, public opinion against the
president, and a glut of outside spending are boosting GOP fortunes across the
country. The nonprofit, conservative group Americans for Prosperity has dumped
tens of millions into North Carolina, Louisiana, and Alaska,
beating up incumbents who now have--at best--50/50 chances of retaining their
seats.
The federal government spent more on broken state-run
healthcare exchanges than it did on its own troubled system. Of the 14 states,
plus the District of Columbia,
that established their own health insurance coverage under Obamacare, seven
remain dysfunctional, disabled, or severely underperforming.
IRS Warns: Obamacare Tax Must Be Paid with Tax Return…..Agency employs
Orwellian term “Shared Responsibility Payment” to describe Obamacare individual
mandate tax.
Air Force One cost jumps 27%: “The president spent over $7.3 million on
just three trips in 2013, including $2.1 million to appear on “The Tonight Show
with Jay Leno” in August.”
Whispers persist that Hillary won’t run: Health may be worse than disclosed
The Obama administration regularly cuts a break for
businesses that hire illegal immigrants, reducing their fines by an average of
40 percent from what they should be, according to an audit that suggests the
government could be doing more to go after unscrupulous employers.
Former world chess champion and political activist Garry
Kasparov intimated that if Barack Obama had been president instead of Ronald
Reagan, the Soviet Union would still exist.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it was OK to ban
high school students from wearing American flag t-shirts on Cinco de Mayo
because it “might lead to racial violence.”
Less than half the public support a sharp boost in the
minimum wage when told that it could cost the economy half a million jobs,
according to the latest IBD/TIPP Poll out Thursday.
The Obama administration is launching an “attack” on the
Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D programs as part of Obamacare that will
result in higher costs and fewer health care options for seniors, according to
a U.S. House subcommittee. The administration is quietly introducing “policies
that would undermine the integrity and success of the Medicare Part D program”
according to the subcommittee.
President Obama has ordered his officials to step on the gas
and clear as much of his regulatory agenda as possible during the twilight of
his time in office. The clock is ticking, creating a sense of urgency in the
administration to crank out his new rules without delay.
Vice president Biden’s latest blunder, handed down during an
appearance on “The View,” has raised the hackles of several women who say his
1950s-era image of what women want is degrading, offensive and ridiculously stereotypical.
Biden says new laws requiring ID to vote are inspired by 'hatred'.
This won’t improve his standing: “Vice President Joe Biden has revealed that
the President assigned him ‘every s*** job in the world’ but he still wasn’t
able to win Obama’s full support and began being effectively frozen out after
one of his infamous gaffes.”
In a witty, optimistic, and passionate speech that showed
why he is the politician in D.C. that most resonates with the Tea Party and
conservative grassroots, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Thursday said "I am
absolutely convinced that we are going to repeal every single word of
Obamacare,"
Marco Rubio lit the Senate on fire Wednesday with a powerful
statement about Cuba´s stranglehold on Venezuela. He didn´t need to dig
deep to prove it: His evidence was as abundant as Cuba´s shortages
Noonan: “What a
great, myth-destroying statement from Marco Rubio, on the floor of the U.S.
Senate yesterday afternoon, on the facts about Cuba and their connection to
events in Venezuela. We have pressed in these parts for American political
figures to speak clearly and with moral confidence about American sympathies in
various international disputes. Rubio’s speech is honest political indignation
successfully deployed.
_______________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Charles Krauthammer
2/21
I repeat: I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a
global warming denier. I’ve long believed that it cannot be good for humanity
to be spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I also believe that
those scientists who pretend to know exactly what this will cause in 20, 30 or
50 years are white-coated propagandists.
“The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist in chief Barack
Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.”
Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science
is settled, static, impervious to challenge. Take a non-climate example. It was
long assumed that mammograms help reduce breast cancer deaths. This fact was so
settled that Obamacare requires every insurance plan to offer mammograms (for
free, no less) or be subject to termination.
Now we learn from a massive randomized study — 90,000 women
followed for 25 years — that mammograms may have no effect on breast cancer
deaths. Indeed, one out of five of those diagnosed by mammogram receives unnecessary
radiation, chemo or surgery. So much for settledness. And climate is less well
understood than breast cancer. If climate science is settled, why do its
predictions keep changing? And how is it that the great physicist Freeman Dyson,
who did some climate research in the late 1970s, thinks today’s climate-change
Cassandras are hopelessly mistaken?
They deal with the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere and
oceans, argues Dyson, ignoring the effect of biology, i.e., vegetation and
topsoil. Further, their predictions rest on models they fall in love with: “You
sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your
model as being real.” Not surprisingly, these models have been “consistently
and spectacularly wrong” in their predictions, write atmospheric scientists Richard
McNider and John Christy — and always, amazingly, in the same direction.
Settled? Even Britain’s national weather service
concedes there’s been no change — delicately called a “pause” — in global
temperature in 15 years. If even the raw data is recalcitrant, let alone the
assumptions and underlying models, how settled is the science? But even worse than the pretense of
settledness is the cynical attribution of any politically convenient natural
disaster to climate change, a clever term that allows you to attribute anything
— warming and cooling, drought and flood — to man’s sinful carbon burning.
Accordingly, Obama ostentatiously visited drought-stricken California last Friday.
Surprise! He blamed climate change. Here even the New York Times gagged,
pointing out that far from being supported by the evidence, “the most recent
computer projections suggest that as the world warms, California should get wetter, not drier, in
the winter.” How inconvenient. But we’ve
been here before. Hurricane Sandy
was made the poster child for the alleged increased frequency and strength of
“extreme weather events” like hurricanes.
Nonsense. Sandy wasn’t even a
hurricane when it hit the United
States. Indeed, in all of 2012, only a
single hurricane made U.S.
landfall . And 2013 saw the fewest Atlantic hurricanes in 30 years. In fact, in
the last half-century, one-third fewer major hurricanes have hit the United States
than in the previous half-century.
Similarly tornadoes. Every time one hits, the climate-change
commentary begins. Yet last year saw the fewest in a quarter-century. And the
last 30 years — of presumed global warming — has seen a 30 percent decrease
in extreme tornado activity (F3 and above) versus the previous 30 years.
None of this is dispositive. It doesn’t settle the issue.
But that’s the point. It mocks the very notion of settled science, which is
nothing but a crude attempt to silence critics and delegitimize debate. As does
the term “denier” — an echo of Holocaust denial, contemptibly suggesting the
malevolent rejection of an established historical truth.
Climate-change proponents have made their cause a matter of
fealty and faith. For folks who pretend to be brave carriers of the scientific
ethic, there’s more than a tinge of religion in their jeremiads. If you whore
after other gods, the Bible tells us, “the Lord’s wrath be kindled against you,
and he shut up the heaven, that there be no rain, and that the land yield not
her fruit” (Deuteronomy 11). Sounds like California.
Except that today there’s a new god, the Earth Mother. And a new set of sins —
burning coal and driving a fully equipped F-150.
But whoring is whoring, and the gods must be appeased. So if
California burns, you send your high priest (in carbon -belching Air Force One,
but never mind) to the bone-dry land to offer up, on behalf of the repentant
congregation, a $1 billion burnt offering called a “climate resilience fund.”
Ah, settled science in action.
Some environmental activists are so outraged at Krauthammer,
they launched a petition urging the Post not to publish his column.
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“We thought we had
heard every lofty platitude about ObamaCare, but then Barack Obama went and
took the cake. Speaking to the national meeting of his perpetual campaign arm,
Organizing for Action, he blessed the volunteers who are working to persuade
more Americans to sign up for ObamaCare. "The work you're doing is God's
work," he said. As The Wall Street Journal observed, "The irony is
particularly rich given that under a mandate issued under the Affordable Care
Act, Mr. Obama is still trying to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to
violate their religious beliefs." That's over-the-top hypocrisy for a man
we were told was the Messiah.”
-Mark Alexander
________________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
Four of the five authors responsible for drafting an
invasive Federal Communications Commissions media study seemingly designed to
regulate news coverage donated to Barack Obama’s campaigns for president.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says that all the
ObamaCare "horror stories" being circulated are untrue.
Vandals have targeted one of the Bay Area’s wealthiest
communities and their handiwork has gotten the attention of the FBI. Many of
the messages said “F*** the 1%”.
Planned Parenthood President: ‘When Life Begins Is Not ‘Really Relevant’ in Abortion
Debate’
________________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
NY Times publishes cartoon about
killing global warming ´deniers´.
____________________________________________________________________________
ARIZONA
Ending a day that cast a glaring national spotlight on Arizona, Gov. Jan
Brewer, a Republican, vetoed a bill on Wednesday that would have given business
owners the right to refuse service to gay men, lesbians and other people on
religious grounds. Her action came amid mounting pressure from Arizona business
leaders, who said the bill would be a financial disaster for the state and
would harm its reputation.
Tammy Bruce: “As a
gay conservative woman, I supported Arizona’s
religious freedom bill, which was just vetoed this week by Gov. Jan Brewer. I
supported it because it embodied the values every American civil rights
movement stood for: the freedom to live our lives without being punished for
who we are. In this case, it was a bill making sure people of faith would not
be forced to violate their religious beliefs in the event someone demanded they
do so.”
___________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
“It’s time for both Democrat and Republican U.S. governors to call Barack Obama’s bluff…..On
Monday, it was revealed that the Obama regime plans on gutting the U.S.
military to pre-World War II levels. On Tuesday, it became clear that the
National Guard is next on his hit list.”
Alexander: Trading
Defense for Welfare, Cutting DOD to fund socialism. “We're not talking about some per-capita
inflation-adjusted level, but the lowest absolute level since 1940.”
“If college students listened to Mark Levin or Rush
Limbaugh, they would receive a better American history education than they are
getting from their professors. I recently spoke at Emory University,
where one student defended all of President Obama’s unconstitutional actions by
invoking the Elastic Clause of the Constitution. Citing the Elastic Clause
could indeed justify a wide range of administration actions, except for one
problem – it doesn’t exist….”
Obamacare has become so unpopular that entertainment
industry stars are discovering that speaking out in favor of it comes at a
cost. Take Will Ferrell for example. Ferrell’s #GetCovered post on Facebook on
Monday led to an acidic sea of comments — over 4,000 and counting at press
time, almost all of them negative. The actor’s followers lambasted both Ferrell
for wading into politics, interspersed with links to anti-Obamacare articles
from Townhall and World Net Daily. Farrell is not the only person depending on
the goodwill of the public to discover that Obamacare support comes at a cost.
The great virtue of the Congressional Budget Office´s recent
report on the minimum wage is that it injects a much-needed dose of reality
into the debate over job creation. The Obama administration and its
congressional allies have taken the position that raising the minimum wage
almost 40 percent would have little, if any, adverse effect on jobs. The CBO
rejects this view as unlikely.
Interview with the elusive Charles Koch:
posted by gary at
12:25 PM
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