op ed review 3/16
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
President Obama and his Democratic Party are facing
difficult political headwinds less than eight months before November´s midterm
elections, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
3 numbers in the poll that should worry Democrats
Republican David Jolly defeated Democrat Alex Sink in a Florida district where
Obamacare got its first test ahead of November's midterm elections and both
sides spent millions auditioning national strategies.
Flashback two months:
: “It’s rare in politics that
anything other than a presidential contest is viewed as a “must win” — but the
special election in Florida’s
13th District falls into that category for Democrats. A loss in the competitive
March 11 contest would almost certainly be regarded by dispassionate observers
as a sign that President Barack Obama could constitute an albatross around the
neck of his party’s nominees in November.”
“Florida
loss exposes Democrats' disarray on Obamacare”
“…the loss….was….“devastating” to Democrats. It’s a district
Ms. Sink carried in her unsuccessful race for governor against Rick Scott, a
district that Barack Obama carried in his two elections, and a district that
demographically now favors Democrats. In addition, Ms. Sink raised more money
and ran a better campaign than Jolly. Even Bill Clinton lent his efforts to her
campaign. And yet she lost.
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews is already bracing
for a disappointing November for Democrats, and he sees little that can be done
to change that outcome.
The election is coming, the election is coming! That’s the
message coming from President Obama as he tries desperately to rouse Democrats
out of a midterm election stupor that could cost his party control of the
Senate — and bury his agenda once and for all.
ObamaCare´s implementers continue to roam the battlefield
and shoot their own wounded, and the latest casualty is the core of the
Affordable Care Act—the individual mandate. To wit, last week the
Administration quietly excused millions of people from the requirement to
purchase health insurance or else pay a tax penalty. This latest political
reconstruction has received zero media notice.
“Obamanomics Is Ticking Time Bomb
For Millennial Generation”
A national union that represents 300,000 low-wage
hospitality workers charges in a new report that Obamacare will slam wages, cut
hours, limit access to health insurance and worsen the very “income equality” President
Obama says he is campaigning to fix. Huge Union's report entitled,"The Irony of ObamaCare:
Making Inequality Worse”
Making Inequality Worse”
Feds drop $3.2 million on Obamacare ads in Oregon featuring guitar-strumming hipsters
Oklahoma
Man Loses Insurance Due to Obamacare, Owes $100K in Bills
A new survey confirms that Obamacare has failed to achieve
one of its most important goals — making health coverage accessible to the
uninsured. As the Washington Post reports, “Just one in 10 uninsured people who
qualify for private health plans through the new marketplace have signed up for
one.” Why so few?....the most common reason cited by uninsured respondents was
lack of affordability.
A commission has concluded there “is no compelling medical
reason” for the U.S.
armed forces to prohibit transgender Americans from serving in the military.
The Democratic chairman of the Senate Health, Education,
Labor, and Pensions Committee declared that cabinet secretaries do not have to
answer GOP questions at hearings if they don’t feel like it.
“Koch brothers donate $100 million to New York hospital…….liberals protest.” Seriously.
Despite Hillary Rodham Clinton’s promise that she had
scrubbed illegal cash contributions from her 2008 presidential campaign,
prosecutors revealed Monday that the mastermind of Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s
“shadow campaign” also funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to aid Mrs.
Clinton’s bid for the White House.
Sen. Rand Paul and Gov. Chris
Christie placed first and second in a straw poll held during this weekend´s
Northeast Republican Leadership Conference, but Dr. Ben Carson may have stolen
the show without being a candidate for anything. He emerged in third place with
11 percent support, tied with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Sen. Rick
Santorum.
“Gun control supporters turn to new
front: Corporate America”
CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson has
reached an agreement to resign from CBS News ahead of contract, bringing an end
to months of hard-fought negotiations, sources familiar with her departure told
POLITICO on Monday. Attkisson, who has been with CBS News for two decades, had
grown frustrated with what she saw as the network´s liberal bias, an outsized
influence by the network´s corporate partners and a lack of dedication to
investigative reporting, several sources said. She increasingly felt like her
work was no longer supported and that it was a struggle to get her reporting on
air.
“CBS News has lost its strongest claim to be a fair and
non-partisan news source with the departure of Sharyl Atkisson from the
network. The award-winning reporter has been squeezed-out because of her
reporting on investigative themes inconvenient to the Obama administration…”
_______________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Walter Williams 2/19
Evil acts are given an aura of moral
legitimacy by noble-sounding socialistic expressions, such as spreading the
wealth, income redistribution, caring for the less fortunate, and the will of
the majority. Let's have a thought experiment to consider just how much
Americans sanction evil.
Imagine there are several elderly widows
in your neighborhood. They have neither the strength to mow their lawns, clean
their windows and perform other household tasks nor the financial means to hire
someone to help them. Here's a question that I'm almost afraid to ask: Would
you support a government mandate that forces you or one of your neighbors to
mow these elderly widows' lawns, clean their windows and perform other
household tasks? Moreover, if the person so ordered failed to obey the
government mandate, would you approve of some sort of sanction, such as fines,
property confiscation or imprisonment? I'm hoping, and I believe, that most of
my fellow Americans would condemn such a mandate. They'd agree that it would be
a form of slavery -- namely, the forcible use of one person to serve the
purposes of another.
Would there be the same condemnation if,
instead of forcing you or your neighbor to actually perform weekly household
tasks for the elderly widows, the government forced you or your neighbor to
give one of the widows $50 of your weekly earnings? That way, she could hire
someone to mow her lawn or clean her windows. Would such a mandate differ from
one under which you are forced to actually perform the household task? I'd
answer that there is little difference between the two mandates except the
mechanism for the servitude. In either case, one person is being forcibly used
to serve the purposes of another.
I'm guessing that most Americans would
want to help these elderly ladies in need but they'd find anything that openly
smacks of servitude or slavery deeply offensive. They might have a clearer
conscience if all the neighbors were forced (taxed) to put money into a
government pot. A government agency would then send the widows $50 to hire
someone to mow their lawns and perform other household tasks. This collective
mechanism makes the particular victim invisible, but it doesn't change the fact
that a person is being forcibly used to serve the purposes of others. Putting
the money into a government pot simply conceals an act that would otherwise be
deemed morally depraved.
This is why socialism is evil. It employs
evil means, confiscation and intimidation, to accomplish what are often seen as
noble goals -- namely, helping one's fellow man. Helping one's fellow man in
need by reaching into one's own pockets to do so is laudable and praiseworthy.
Helping one's fellow man through coercion and reaching into another's pockets
is evil and worthy of condemnation. Tragically, most teachings, from the church
on down, support government use of one person to serve the purposes of another;
the advocates cringe from calling it such and prefer to call it charity or
duty.
Some might argue that we are a democracy,
in which the majority rules. But does a majority consensus make moral acts that
would otherwise be deemed immoral? In other words, if the neighbors got a
majority vote to force one of their number -- under pain of punishment -- to
perform household tasks for the elderly widows, would that make it moral?
The bottom line is that we've betrayed
much of the moral vision of our Founding Fathers. In 1794, when Congress
appropriated $15,000 for relief of French refugees who had fled from
insurrection in San Domingo to Baltimore and Philadelphia, James Madison rose
on the floor of the House of Representatives to object, saying, "I cannot
undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a
right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their
constituents." Tragically, today's Americans -- Democrat or Republican,
liberal or conservative -- would hold such a position in contempt and run a
politician like Madison
out of town on a rail.
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“Billions of dollars and billions of hours are spent
campaigning for this or that candidate in our national elections. You can bet
that people are not making those expenditures so that politicians will uphold
and defend the Constitution; they’re looking for favors. The Constitution’s
framers gave us reasonably fair and neutral rules of the game. If our
government acted, as the framers intended, as a referee or night watchman, how
much difference would it make to any of us who occupies the White House or Congress?
It would make little difference, if any….Any government official who knew and
enforced the rules would do. But increasingly, who’s in office is making a
difference, because government has abandoned its referee and night watchman
function and gotten into the business of determining winners and losers.
Unfortunately, for our nation, that’s what most Americans want.”
-Walter Williams
_______________________________________________________________________
BOOKS, FILM
“Rush Revere and the First
Patriots: Time-Travel Adventures With Exceptional Americans”
A new film poses the question: What if America didn’t
exist? Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza (under indictment by the Obama administration)
and producer Gerald Molen discuss the film. D’Souza, who immigrated to the United States, says he “chose America because
it’s a place where I can be the architect of my own life.” Molen calls the film
a love story about America.
“Today we have kids who can’t find America on a map,” Molen said. “We
have kids who probably can’t find
America on a map….We have kids who probably can’t even spell America, and I
think that we have, you know, left them out, we have done them a great
disservice by not [… ] showing our patriotism a little more.”
_______________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
“Sean Hannity introduced last night’s climate change
all-nighter session in the Senate by calling it a “waste of time” for
Democrats. He then invited Fox’s Bob Beckel and Greenpeace co-founder turned
climate change skeptic Patrick Moore to hash it out over what Hannity called
“propaganda and a hoax.” After accusing Beckel of saying everyone in the South
believes “crap,” Hannity moved on to Moore, asking him “where is the evidence
to suggest this is real and not a political agenda?” “There is no scientific
proof that we’re causing climate change,” Moore
declared, stressing that he does believe the planet is getting warmer, just not
that humans are primarily responsible.
______________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) wowed the beltway elite and even
Democrats during Saturday´s annual Gridiron event, showing why the Ivy Leaguer
has confounded and been vilified by many with whom he shares the same
intellectual pedigree. The annual D.C. roast is hosted by the exclusive
Gridiron Club, which is composed of D.C.´s mainstream and "elite"
journalists. Cruz has degrees from Princeton
and Harvard, which those in the permanent political class covet, and he can do
their social rituals better than they can. Yet Cruz refuses to be co-opted by
them politically, instead choosing to be a staunch conservative who represents
Politico's Mike Allen said that Cruz, "crushed
his speech – even Dems said he knocked it out of the park." In an
appearance with Secretary of State John Kerry and
Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat Charlie Crist, the Florida gubernatorial
candidate who wants to be loved by the permanent political class, Cruz called
himself the "anti-Crist" in what could be the perfect description of
Cruz's brand of politics. [I]n front of conservative and tea-party
audiences, I am hailed as the anti-Obama. But tonight, I’m the anti-Crist.
Cruz also blasted Obama's executive orders and his disregard
for the law: "We are still a nation of laws. You just have to check with
Barack Obama every day to see what they are."
You have probably seen all of the ridiculous speculating
about the GOP nomination in 2016. This is still speculating, but my sincere
hope is you don’t think it’s ridiculous too. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is
laying the foundation for his presidential bid in concrete and steel. First,
forget about Jeb Bush unless you want to hand Hillary eight years in the White
House. The latest Rasmussen poll shows her leading Jeb in a general election 47
percent to 33. His name is Bush and to the general public the specifics of how
smart he is doesn’t matter one iota. Then there’s Ted Cruz,
Former Arkansas
governor and 2008 Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said that
donors are rushing him with offers of big-dollar support, clearing away his
highest hurdle to entering the 2016 GOP primaries. The biggest difference
between 2008 and this year, he said, is that supporters and well-financed
contributors are urging him to run and pledging to fund his effort. One of the
main reasons why: He has the best knowledge of the Clinton campaign machine, knows Bill and
Hillary Clinton and their tactics well, and has run and won against two female
candidates. “I certainly know the Clintons;
I know
In his remarks at the conference over the weekend, the
chairman of the group that runs CPAC said that conservatives and establishment
Republicans should not spend "one more minute" fighting about
candidates, policies, and for the soul of the party. Translation: Unite on the
terms favorable to establishment Republicans that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) pointed
out has cost Republicans in three of the last four national elections. Cardenas said that
conservatives "must stand against this dark loss of freedom" the
country is facing by recognizing that threats are "not coming in the form
of other conservatives."
___________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
“All theory is against freedom of
the will; all experience for it.”
Dr. Samuel Johnson
posted by gary at
7:12 AM
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