Another Way

Bjorn Lomborg (London Times):

The last twenty years of international climate negotiations have achieved almost nothing and have done so at enormous economic cost. Japan’s courageous announcement that it is scrapping its unrealistic targets and focusing instead on development of green technologies could actually be the beginning of smarter climate policies.

Japan has acknowledged that its previous greenhouse gas reduction target of 25 per cent below 1990 levels was unachievable, and that its emissions will now increase by some 3 per cent by 2020. This has provoked predictable critiques from the ongoing climate summit in Warsaw. Climate change activists called it “outrageous” and a “slap in the face for poor countries”.

BTW: These activist want to redistribute the wealth of “wealthy nations” to “developing nations” for the cost. Sounds familiar somehow? 🙂

Yet, Japan has simply given up on the approach to climate policy that has failed for the past twenty years, promising carbon cuts that don’t materialise – or only do so at trivial levels with very high costs for taxpayers, industries and consumers. Instead, almost everyone seems to have ignored that Japan has promised to spend $110 billion over five years – from private and public sources – on innovation in environmental and energy technologies. Japan could – incredible as it may sound – actually end up showing the world how to tackle global warming effectively.

Unfortunately the Japanese model is not even on the agenda in Warsaw. The same failed model of spending money on immature technologies remains dominant. That involves the world spending $1 billion a day on inefficient renewable energy sources — a projected $359 billion for 2013. But a much lower $100 billion per year invested worldwide in R&D could be many times more effective. This is the conclusion of a panel of economists, including three Nobel laureates, working with the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think-tank that publicises the best ways for governments to spend money to help the world.

If green technology could be cheaper than fossil fuels, everyone would switch, not just a token number of well-meaning rich nations. We would not need to convene endless climate summits that come to nothing. A smart climate summit would encourage all nations to commit 0.2 per cent of GDP – about $100 billion globally – to green R&D. This could solve global warming in the medium term by creating cheap, green energy sources, that everyone would want to use.

Instead of criticising Japan for abandoning an approach that has repeatedly failed, we should applaud it for committing to a policy that could actually meet the challenge of global warming.

“climate activists” like most liberals have a set way of doing things because they are so superior that questioning their superiority is not allowed. You are not allowed to doubt them or change your mind or “find another way”.

Of course they are right 100% of the time.

Never doubt them.

“Under my plan, if you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your healthcare plan, you’ll be able to keep your healthcare plan. Period. Nothing changes, except your health insurance costs will go down.”

It was just a couple of renegade IRS agents in Cincinnati. Benghazi was a spontaneous protest that got out of control in direct response to an inflammatory video posted on the internet. During September 2012, our rebounding economy created an astonishing 873,000 jobs. And on and on.

If we have learned anything about President Obama and his administration, it is that they are compulsive, practiced prevaricators – determined to advance their agenda of “fundamentally transforming” America and imposing greater government control over our lives, living standards and pursuit of happiness. When caught, they dissemble, say they were “not informed directly,” issue false apologies, or fire back with “What difference, at this point, does it make anyway?!?” (Paul Driesen)

Not Thankful for

The principles America was founded on have paved the way for the freedoms and privileges each citizen is thankful for today. At the heart of conservatism, is the recognition that many of these founding ideals are worth fighting to preserve.

In the words of John Quincy Adams: “Posterity–you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.”

So in the spirit of preserving today’s blessings for tomorrow’s Americans, let’s take a look at ten things the Founding Fathers would be fighting against in the 21st century.

1. President Obama’s Power Grabs

 

“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.” – Thomas Jefferson

 

2. Increased Taxation

 

The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. — James Madison

 

3. Adult Children

 

Congratulations, 26-year-olds today can now stay on their parents health insurance and prolong adolescence. By the age of 26, George Washington had already worked as an official surveyor for Virginia, fought in the French and Indian War and climbed to the rank of Colonel.

 

4. Breakdown of the Family

 

Marriage is an institution, which may properly be deemed to arise from the law of nature.…It distributes the whole of society into families, and creates a permanent union of interests, and a mutual guardianship of the same. It binds children by indissoluble ties, and adds new securities to the good order of society, by connecting the happiness of the whole family with the good behavior of all. It furnishes additional motives for honest industry and economy in private life, and for a deeper love of the country of our birth. – Joseph Story 

5. Foreign Involvement

 

“It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them.” -George Washington

But we’ll fix Iran’s planes and they’ll agree not to build Nukes. Isn’t that special!

6. Chicago’s Gun Laws

 

“To disarm the people is the most effectual way to enslave them.” -George Mason 

7. Religious Intolerance

 

“The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right.” -James Madison 

8. Direct Election of Senators

 

“The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, chosen by the legislature thereof for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.” U.S. Constitution Article I, section 3. 

9. The National Debt

 

“No pecuniary consideration is more urgent than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt; on none can delay be more injurious, or an economy of the time more valuable.” -George Washington 

10. The Federal Reserve

 

“Paper is poverty…it is only the ghost of money, and not money.” -Thomas Jefferson 

Happy Thanksgiving! (Townhall)

Now, you can go “Awwww!” isn’t that so cute. Nothing wrong here. The 800 pound gorilla that wants to play “knockout games” with you is just so cuddly…:)

 

Obama Air

You knew there’d be cronyism.

A senior Democrat is lashing out at a provision of the nuclear deal with Iran that could make it easier for the country to repair its aging fleet of civilian aircraft.

A little-noticed provision of the deal paves the way for U.S. companies such as Boeing and General Electric (Major Obama Donors, remember Jeffrey Imhelt of GE :)) to inspect and repair Iran’s American-made planes inside Iran. But Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.), a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs panel and a hawk on Iran, says the planes could be used to promote terrorism and support Syria’s Bashar Assad.

“America should exploit some of the vagaries in the agreement’s language and prevent Boeing from repairing Iranian aircraft until we have a final deal,” Sherman said in a statement Tuesday. “Otherwise we will have made a permanent irreversible concession in a ‘temporary’ agreement.”

He said he opposes “licensing parts and services needed to repair Iran’s American-made planes because they have been used to support some of Iran’s worst activities.”

The deal reached over the weekend in Geneva calls on the United States and its negotiating partners to “license safety related inspections and repairs” as well as the “supply and installation … of spare parts for safety of flight for Iranian civil aviation and associated services” inside Iran. The deal stipulates that sanctions relief “could” apply to the national carrier, Iran Air, which has been singled out for carrying military equipment, and to other airlines that haven’t been designated.

The Treasury Department says the details of the aircraft provision need to be finalized by the negotiators – the U.S., China, Russia, France, Great Britain and Germany – and possibly by federal regulators. Current U.S. sanctions allow Iran to apply for special licenses to fix failing aircraft but this would be the first time the repairs could take place inside Iran.

Iran blames the sanctions for a surge in crashes that have killed many passengers and aircrew in recent years. Sherman however is worried that the deal will allow Iran to try to refurbish its entire fleet – it can’t afford to buy a new one – instead of seeking piecemeal repairs, as it has in the past.

He pointed out that the Obama administration itself has singled out Iran Air for providing support to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and identified it as a key part of the military procurement network for Assad’s forces in Syria, as well as a conduit of aid to Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese terrorist ally. A 2011 UN report has also accused Iran of using the airline to transport missile parts and other illegal trade between Iran and North Korea, and Iranian agents allegedly used an Iran Air flight to escape Geneva after murdering a dissident there in the early 1990s.

“Iran should ground its unsafe planes until they are properly repaired, which requires American parts and service,” Sherman said. “American corporations should not repair these until a final deal is reached.” (Julian Pacquet)

Hotair: When you dig into the details of this arrangement, there’s a lot of frosting and not much cake. First of all, this is not a permanent agreement in any way shape or form. It’s a six month “arrangement” which Iran could simply walk away from at the end (or at any point, really) after receiving a massive fiscal injection in the form of sanction relief. It is also simply a “suspension” of certain enrichment activities, with no dismantling of any of Iran’s facilities. The entire show can be started back up at any time. There’s additional transparency, with more inspectors allowed into additional facilities, which is good, but much like the suspension of enrichment this can be terminated any moment Iran decides not to honor the deal. (As they have done numerous times in the past.) The deal also allegedly limits the level of uranium enrichment the Iranians can reach, but that’s the same bone we’ve been chewing on for years. And finally, we have the Iranians on every cable channel doing an end zone dance saying this is “formal recognition” of their right to enrich uranium, while Kerry and his team are saying the opposite. It’s hard to imagine how solid any “deal” can be when the two sides are announcing essentially 180 degree opposite conclusions on basic terminology.

So it’s like Iran Air, a flying disaster waiting to happen.

Sounds like an Obama foreign policy decision…

Bassackwards

Watch the Orwellian spin in terms discussed in this Walter Williams’ piece. Mr. Williams is a conservative so he’s pointing them out but watch how to liberals Positive is Negative and Negative is Positive.

Because Americans still retain a large measure of liberty, tyrants must mask their agenda. At the university level, some professors give tyranny an intellectual quality by preaching that negative freedom is not enough. There must be positive liberty or freedoms. This idea is widespread in academia, but its most recent incarnation was a discussion by Wake Forest University professor David Coates in a Huffington Post article, titled “Negative Freedom or Positive Freedom: Time to Choose?” (11/13/2013) (http://tinyurl.com/oemfzy6). Let’s examine negative versus positive freedom.

Negative freedom or rights refers to the absence of constraint or coercion when people engage in peaceable, voluntary exchange. Some of these negative freedoms are enumerated in our Constitution’s Bill of Rights. More generally, at least in its standard historical usage, a right is something that exists simultaneously among people. As such, a right imposes no obligation on another. For example, the right to free speech is something we all possess. My right to free speech imposes no obligation upon another except that of noninterference. Likewise, my right to travel imposes no obligation upon another.

Positive rights is a view that people should have certain material things — such as medical care, decent housing and food — whether they can pay for them or not. Seeing as there is no Santa Claus or tooth fairy, those “rights” do impose obligations upon others. If one person has a right to something he did not earn, of necessity it requires that another person not have a right to something he did earn.

If we were to apply this bogus concept of positive rights to free speech and the right to travel freely, my free speech rights would impose financial obligations on others to supply me with an auditorium, microphone and audience. My right to travel would burden others with the obligation to purchase airplane tickets and hotel accommodations for me. Most Americans, I would imagine, would tell me, “Williams, yes, you have the right to free speech and travel rights, but I’m not obligated to pay for them!”

What the positive rights tyrants want but won’t articulate is the power to forcibly use one person to serve the purposes of another. After all, if one person does not have the money to purchase food, housing or medicine and if Congress provides the money, where does it get the money? It takes it from some other American, forcibly using that person to serve the purposes of another. Such a practice differs only in degree, but not kind, from slavery.

Under natural law, we all have certain unalienable rights. The rights we possess we have authority to delegate. For example, we all have a right to defend ourselves against predators. Because we possess that right, we can delegate it to government, in effect saying, “We have the right to defend ourselves, but for a more orderly society, we delegate to you the authority to defend us.” By contrast, I don’t possess the right to take your earnings to give to another. Seeing as I have no such right, I cannot delegate it.

The idea that one person should be forcibly used to serve the purposes of another has served as the foundation of mankind’s ugliest and most brutal regimes. Do we want that for America?

The Liberals do. They are authoritarians/totalitarians. Especially the Homo Superior Liberalis variety. They are after all, so vastly superior to you that’s why they think you’re stupid and need to be condescended to. You must be controlled. If they let you do what you want all you’ll do is evil.

Welcome to the world of the Liberal.

 

 

The Blessed

I don’t normally have Glenn Beck on the radio, but I was driving to a movie when I heard about this story.

An appreciation for Glenn Beck, Ted Cruz and a well-known Bible verse appears to be the main reasons an aspiring professional golfer was abruptly cut off from his main source of income by his sponsor.

After Tea Baggers like Ted Cruz are evil for wanting less government in our lives and a redress of 17+ Trillion dollars of debt!

I am not what people should call a Christian, either. So I don’t make it a regular habit.

That said…

How Neanderthal Am I!! 🙂

The golfer’s name is Jeff Cochran and until a few weeks ago, it appeared that he may have finally gotten the big break that would help him achieve his goal of having a shot to play on golf’s elite PGA tour. Cochran claims he was contracted in January by Virginia-based businessman Brian McMahon to help promote Nebraska Golf Card (NGC), a budding promotional operation that says it’s “designed to give golfers reduced rates and access to private clubs.”

After playing most of the year for Nebraska Golf Card, Cochran alleged his sponsorship was abruptly terminated. The initial reason given seemed quite surprising — his support for Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz; Cruz’s father, Raphael; and Glenn Beck — but faith, and specifically a Bible verse, also played a big part in the termination of the contract.

The verse in question? Philippians 4:13, which reads, ” I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (shown as a cross and Phil 4:13 on the bag).

Ah, the loving nature of the left wing, known for their coexistence and tolerance for those with a different belief in life.

The compassionate, toleerant and vastly superior Left. 🙂

In late October, Cochran, his agent David Reynolds and NGC’s Brian McMahon both claim they were at a dinner and the conversation turned to Cruz. Cochran says he praised Cruz and his father, Raphael, mentioning that he had seen the elder Cruz on an episode of “The Glenn Beck Program.”

Cochran told TheBlaze that his sponsor was taken aback by this statement and was also troubled by the fact that his business associate was a fan of Beck. Following his pro-Cruz statement, Cochran said McMahon asked him, ”Would you be willing to give up our support to stand with that wackjob (Beck)?” Cochran answered “yes” and said the dinner continued without any additional tension or drama.

But the next morning, Cochran’s agent said, he received an email from NGC announcing that it was pulling all financial and product support from Cochran.

The email, a copy of which was provided to TheBlaze, demanded immediate return of all equipment and that Cochran stop using their logo as well. The initial email from McMahon to Cochran’s agent was quite specific as to the reason for the split (emphasis added):

David, I have never had an issue with you or really Jeff for that matter, but this situation is very disturbing. I have been tolerant of his religious views and even supported his off course speaking. However, I just can’t allow my company to be associated with these radical political views. The idea that Jeff would line up with the likes of Glenn Beck or Ted Cruz or any other individual interested in destroying America, just isn’t something I can swallow.

Cochran and Reynolds said they immediately complied with the demand and returned the equipment, they told TheBlaze. That quick response triggered the email thank-you from McMahon shown below, but that note also contained a few parting shots (emphasis added).

“I looked up the verse Jeff put on the bag and had to laugh,” the email said. ”How can someone so smart be so gullible? The idea of trusting or believing that someone has control over your future is the definition of insanity. I will continue to trust people I’ve actually met and trust to help chart my course.”

McMahon’s email continued (emphasis added): “Tell Jeff if he ever decides to relinquish these childish and uneducated views, we might be willing to renew our relationship.” He ended the email, “In me I trust, Brian.”

After all, he’s obviously Homo Superior Liberalis and you’re an ignorant monkey.

But doesn’t he sound like your typical HSL from Huffington Post or elasewhere on the Progressive side of things?

Yep. Very Typical. Childish, bombastic, narcissistic and so full of their “superiority” that you have to be a moron to be anything other than “enlightened” as they are.

It was shortly after the second email was sent that Cochran and his agent reached out to TheBlaze.

McMahon did not mince his words and almost immediately attacked TheBlaze, writing, “I spent a little time on your website this morning and you should be ashamed of what you’ve created.”

He didn’t hold back, mocking Cochran for listening to Beck: “Jeff is the perfect target for someone like Beck. He believes he has been forgiven for past indiscretions by a mystical power who lives in the clouds, so why wouldn’t he be gullible (sic) enough for the Tea Baggers.”

The email closed with a particularly angry and personal attack on Beck (emphasis added): “He is a lousy drunk who should be led to the nearest border, given a big toss and told to never return. And if he hates the government as much as he says, that should be a welcome event for him too.”

In it’s entirety:

From:

Sent:

 Thursday, November 21, 2013 10:36 AM

To:

 Opelka, Mike

Cc:

 agentdavid******@gmail.com

Subject:

 Jeff Cochran

Mr. Opelka, It has been brought to my attention that your website or radio station is considering doing a story on my relationship with Jeff Cochran. I spent a little time on your website this morning and you should all be ashamed of what you’ve created. I don’t listen to Glenn Beck often, unless I need a good laugh, but the idea he has influence over people is a scary thing. Making people believe the “big nasty government” is only looking to ruin their lives is nothing short of brain washing. You prey on the weak and simple minded, who don’t have the ability to think on their own.

I make no apologies for how I handled my relationship with Jeff. I was willing to overlook the continual religous  jargon, but when I learned he was a “follower” of Beck, I couldn’t swallow anymore. Beck’s political party has done   more damage to this country than anything in the last 20 years. Jeff is the perfect target for someone like Beck. He believes he has been forgiven for past indiscretions by a mystical power who lives in the clouds, so why wouldn’t he be gulible enough for the Tea Baggers.

I am more than willing to concede that Jeff is a powerful public speaker and a very talented player. I wanted him on my team because people are drawn to him, but I just can’t tolerate the weak minded. He has worked hard to overcome some massive road blocks and I just wish he knew it was him and not some spirit.

I can only assume you are one of Beck’s minions, so please feel free to forward this to him. He is a lousy drunk who should be led to the nearest border, given a big toss and told to never return. And if he hates the government as much as he says, that should be a welcome event for him too.

B.L. McMahon

You see, unlike Liberals I understand that “hate speech” not matter how vile is protected speech. But can you imagine having a “rational” discussion about logic or facts with such ranting ball of hatred and derision??

Responding to McMahon’s email, we tried to correct some of his misconceptions (Beck doesn’t have or represent a “political party”), learn more about his organization (Nebraska Golf Card), and further understand the reason, or reasons, he terminated Conchran’s sponsorship. He did reply to our email. According to him, Nebraska Golf Card “is run by me alone.” He addressed a question about the ability to terminate someone for religious and political reasons by stating, “Jeff was not an employee but rather a private contractor.”

McMahon ended his email by saying,  ”the only people who will care what happened to Jeff are the same religous (sic) zealots. Finally, my character might not be what you like, but I think for myself.”

EXTERMINATE!

EXTERMINATE!

You will do as I say or else! You will believe what I believe or else!

You might as well try arguing with a Dalek.

Cochran told TheBlaze in a telephone interview that he met McMahon at a “pro-am” tournament about a year ago. The two struck up a friendship that turned into a business relationship. According to Cochran, beginning in 2013 he was contracted by McMahon to play golf under the NGC logo and would be paid an annual salary large enough to support him and his family. Jeff also stated that in January he made a conscious decision to dedicate his life to his Christian faith.

Telling TheBlaze that he had been “less than genuine” in the past, Cochran talked about making a total commitment to God. Asked whether that meant problems with alcohol or drugs, the answer was an emphatic, “no, but I wasn’t a good guy.” Cochran said the only dark spot in his past was an arrest “three or four years ago over an unpaid hotel bill.” That arrest was in 2007 and the issue ended up with Cochran being found guilty of a misdemeanor for skipping out on a hotel bill. He made restitution, but also worries that “anyone can find my mug shot online.”

When asked if McMahon ever told him to stop talking about his faith or not to put “Phil 4:13″ on his golf bag, Cochran said, “no.” And McMahon’s emails seem to back up his initial tolerance for the golfer’s faith. In his initial email to us, he seemed more upset with Jeff’s appreciation of Beck: “I was willing to overlook the continual religous (sic) jargon, but when I learned he was a ‘follower’ of Beck, I couldn’t swallow anymore.”

Cochran’s explanation of the events that led up to his termination from NGC matched the reasons given to TheBlaze by McMahon in emails. The pro golfer appears to have lost his source of income mainly because he is a fan of Beck and Cruz, but his faith wasn’t overlooked.  McMahon’s initial email to TheBlaze also praised Cochran’s speaking abilities as well as his prowess on the golf course, but took a shot at his beliefs, stating, “He has worked hard to overcome some massive road blocks and I just wish he knew it was him and not some spirit.”

TheBlaze requested a telephone interview with McMahon, as we were hoping to learn more about Nebraska Golf Card and asked if there will be a faith or political litmus test for any future pros contracted to represent the company. Brian McMahon declined our offer, stating: “I have no desire to do an interview or draw anymore attention to this issue. Of course EVERYONE will be welcome to participate when we begin the program.”

He also added, ” I have no problem with anyones (sic) views. The problem comes when they try to push them on other people. Jeff makes it a point to share his religous (sic) views at every moment. When he is representing other peolple (sic), those views should be kept private. I don’t have any interest in going back and forth on this. I am free to associate with anyone I choose and Jeff is no longer on that list.”

Curiously, after sending the above comments to TheBlaze, Cochran says he received a call from McMahon. McMahon appeared to be encouraging Cochran to stop this story from being published on TheBlaze or even in local papers. According to Cochran, McMahon told him over the phone, “You do realize that if this goes public, everyone will know everything about you.”

Cochran did go through with it. And seems to be at peace with that.

“I hope this story can be one of redemption and willingness to stand up and say ‘Yes I am flawed, yes I’ve had struggles, but God is still good,’” he said at the end of our conversation.

McMahon?

“You talk as though you are representing Jeff and investigating legal matters,” he ended his last email to TheBlaze. “Should I contact my attorney?”

Author’s note: Golf Card International is not affiliated with Nebraska Golf Card.

But I wouldn’t encourage membership in that Card lest ye be judged. 🙂

Homecoming

I’m Back!

And you know what I learned after 10 days in the UK?

There politicians are just as scummy and narcissistic as ours.

I didn’t get a chance to watch BBC News because I was too busy with other things but you still had a guy who was the head of a bank who got busted for doing cocaine and was largely unqualified but had the job because of connections. (“FORMER Co-op Bank chairman Paul Flowers has been arrested in connection with a drugs supply investigation, police said“)

You have the Deputy Prime Minister who is Labour Party (Liberal) running against his own brother for Party Leader supreme.

And so on…

I come home and Obama strikes a deal with Iran to get HIM out of that Foreign policy hole, for now. You are incompetent or naive to believe anything Iran’s leaders say. So he was just trying to fix HIS OWN problem. Not actually do anything.

And then he told the biggest lie he’s ever told, which for him is saying something: “I’m not a particularly ideological person,” Obama said.

BWAH hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

He’s NOTHING BUT IDEOLOGICAL.

Obama added Sunday that while he’s still passionate about giving people a fair shake, about the environment, and working for peace and national security, he’s also “pretty pragmatic about how we get there.”

You are either a no-conscious liar or delusional , which is Mr. President??

And what does it say about anyone who’d believe him??

Take DWS, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the DNC Mouthpiece Extradonaire:

“At the end of the day, Americans were not only, not meyezled by the president….”

Say what? “….not meyezled by the president”? Imagine msnbc viewers running to look up that word.

Like a good liberal, the chairwoman was simply not thinking. And she misread “misled.” (IBD)

How Ironic. 🙂

Meyezled is a perfectly good yiddish word meaning in effect “we are all screwed”.

IBD: In another naked attempt to protect Democrats from ObamaCare, the administration plans to delay next year’s exchange enrollment until after the elections, so they can hide another round of rate shocks from voters.

Health and Human Services announced on Thursday that next year’s open enrollment period won’t start until Nov. 15, which conveniently puts it after the midterm elections. An administration official said the delay “will give issuers the benefit of more time to evaluate their experiences during the 2014 plan year.”

Please. This is nothing more than a political move designed to minimize ObamaCare’s damage to Democrats.

By delaying open enrollment until Nov. 15, the administration can keep consumers in the dark about the prices they’ll have to pay in the ObamaCare exchanges before they go to the polls. That, in turn, could spare Democrats another round of rate shock stories in the run-up to the elections.

This is hardly the first time Obama has tried to mask the dark side of ObamaCare for political reasons.

Just before the 2012 elections, for example, the HHS announced an $8.3 billion “demonstration project” for the privately run Medicare Advantage plans. It paid just about every one of them “quality improvement bonuses.”

When the Government Accountability Office looked into it, auditors couldn’t find any reasonable justification for the payments.

But this phony demonstration project did manage to paper over steep cuts to the Medicare Advantage program that ObamaCare is imposing. And by doing that, Obama prevented any backlash from seniors.

Since then, Obama has delayed the employer mandate, verification rules and out-of-pocket caps, all to keep the ultimate costs of ObamaCare hidden from view.

The very law itself was designed to hide the pain — and the costs — from taxpayers as long as possible.

The Hippocrite’s Oath

Going on Vacation today.

So this blog may be offline for a bit.

‘Substandard” and “cut-rate” is what President Obama calls the health plans that millions of Americans have lost, even though they wanted to keep them.

Backpedaling on his promise that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” Obama is now telling Americans another whopper: The insurance they can get on ObamaCare exchanges is a better deal.

Don’t believe him.

On the exchanges, you may no longer be able to use the doctors and hospitals you prefer. Many exchange plans exclude the top-drawer academic hospitals like Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles, the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and New York Presbyterian in New York City.

Instead, the law says exchange plans must cover care at “essential community providers … that serve predominantly low-income, medically underserved individuals.”  (Sec. 1311c(1)C)  That means clinics, public hospitals and hospitals largely serving the Medicaid community.

The law’s authors reasoned that exchange plan customers should be able to shift back and forth between their plans and Medicaid, as their earnings fluctuate, without changing doctors and hospitals.

That’s reasonable, but it’s bad news for consumers who had access to esteemed hospitals and doctors under their old plans and then got pushed into the exchanges.

Medicaid-level care is, sadly, “substandard,” to use the President’s word. A review of the experiences of nearly 900,000 patients undergoing eight different surgical procedures found that Medicaid patients were 50% more likely to die in the hospital after surgery than patients with private coverage.

This review, by researchers at the University of Virginia, is one of several studies proving that Medicaid patients get worse care than patients with private insurance.

But many of the plans being offered on the exchanges are Medicaid with a private label slapped on them. The McKinsey Center for U.S. Health System Reform reports that Medicaid insurers are playing a large role in the exchanges.

Just as many doctors refuse to accept Medicaid, they are also refusing to accept exchange insurance. In California, a Blue Cross plan on the exchange covers 47% fewer doctors than Blue Cross subscribers in California currently get. In New York, only a quarter of physicians have decided to take exchange insurance, because the payments are so low.

Why so low? Because insurers know the low-cost plan will be king in nearly every exchange. All the plans offer the “essential benefit package.” Customers currently have no other way to compare than on price.

That’s despite the law’s promise that exchanges would list each plan’s quality rating and disclose which hospitals and doctors are covered. (Sec. 1311d(4)D) and (Sec. 1311c(1)B).  Why isn’t this information provided, as the law requires?  We can only guess that it’s because ObamaCare administrators don’t want us to see the truth.

Cancer patients whose plans are canceled are getting whacked hardest. They are losing access to the specialized cancer hospitals and oncologists treating them. And they will get meager help, if any, paying for innovative cancer drugs that cost thousands of dollars.

The most troubling provision in ObamaCare’s Section 1311 gives the secretary of health and human services blanket authority to control how doctors and hospitals treat patients. All in the name of improving “quality.” That could mean everything in medicine, such as when your OB/GYN should do a Caesarean.

What that means for you is that if you enroll in an exchange plan, with or without getting a subsidy, your care will be standardized by the federal government with an eye to reducing what you consume and how much it costs.

Your doctor may have to choose between doing what’s right for you and avoiding a penalty. Exchange plans can pay only those doctors who obey whatever regulations the Secretary imposes.

Yet the President claims that people losing their health plans and having to sign up on the exchanges will be getting a better deal. Losing your doctor, shopping blind for a health plan, settling for Medicaid-level care and government controls, all for a premium 41% higher than before and with a deductible that’s doubled? Sounds substandard to me.

Right now, most people getting cancellations bought plans in the individual market. Wait until the other shoe drops in 2014, and millions of people who had on-the-job coverage lose it. The truth about ObamaCare will become so painfully obvious that even the White House lie machine can’t cover it up. (BETSY MCCAUGHEY)
But don’t worry, The Ministry of Truth is here to save you from this so don’t worry, be happy!

Obama Explained

Brilliantly written piece. With, may I say, many ideas and concepts I have said in this blog. 🙂

Wayne Root: Remember when Geraldo opened Al Capone’s vault live on national TV? Well I’m about to solve the mystery of Obama. I’m about to break “the Obama code.” I’m about to tell you everything about the way Obama, and the people around him, really think. I’m about to rip open the true Obama plan to destroy our country. Because I was there when the plan was hatched.

How do I know all this? Because I was Barack Obama’s college classmate at Columbia University, Class of 1983. I was easy to recognize – the lone outspoken conservative in a class of 700 students. I knew I was in trouble when my first political science class at Columbia was “Communism 101″ taught by Professor Trotsky in the Fidel Castro Building, at the corner of Marx Blvd. and Lenin Drive.

I’m only half-kidding. My experiences at Columbia were not far off.

Everyone needs to hear my story because what Obama and I learned at Columbia explains EXACTLY what Obama is doing to America today.

The economy in deep decline; the disappearance of jobs; the annihilation of the middle class; the demonization of business owners; the destruction of small business with onerous regulations and taxes; the overwhelming debt and spending of out-of-control government; the millions of Americans losing their health insurance; and the unimaginable increase in dependency through welfare, food stamps, unemployment, disability, and now free  health care.

It’s all easily explained when you hear what Obama and I learned at Columbia.

America’s decline under Obama isn’t due to mistake, ignorance, or incompetence at the hands of a community organizer. It’s a purposeful, brilliant plan hatched at Columbia University to destroy capitalism, American exceptionalism, Judeo-Christian values, and the American Dream.

I never met Obama at Columbia. We were both Political Science majors, both Pre Law. We graduated on the same day. There were perhaps 100 to 150 of us in the Political Science department. And I thought I knew all of them.

As the token big-mouthed conservative patriot, I know they all knew me. But not Obama. I never met him, saw him, or even heard of him. Not one of my friends at Columbia ever met him either. At our 30th class reunion last May, I could not find a single classmate who had ever met him. Strange story, but I digress.

What matters is what Obama learned and experienced at Columbia. My classmates hated America. They spoke with glee about one day  ”taking the system down.” They blamed America for “unfairness, racism, inequality, and lack of social justice.”

Recognize those words?

My classmates proudly called themselves socialists, communists, and Marxists. Even though almost all of them came from wealthy families (or perhaps because of it), they hated the rich and despised business owners. They talked about how the “white power structure” had to be dismantled, business owners bankrupted, and capitalism destroyed. Everything in their minds was based on “social justice.”

Sound like the policies of anyone you recognize in the White House? Does “We have to spread the wealth around” ring a bell? How about “If you own a business, you didn’t build that.”

How about Obama’s hatred of Republicans and refusal to negotiate with Congress? It’s clear he thinks he’s “morally superior” to conservatives. That attitude was born at Columbia too.

In 1981 when a student burst through the doors to our political science class and screamed  “The President has been shot. They’ve assassinated Reagan”… my classmates yelled, hugged, high-fived, and jumped up and down cheering the death of a Republican. Today most of my classmates are either in government with Obama, or controlling the mainstream media. They talk about “moderation and compromise,” but always remember 30 years ago they cheered for the death of a Republican.

But, there’s more. We were all taught a simple, but brilliant plan. My classmates discussed it 24/7. It was their “American Dream.”

By the time the middle class realizes he’s the killer and they’re the prey, they’ll already be dead.

It was called “Cloward-Piven,” after former Columbia professors Richard Cloward and Frances Piven. To bring down America and our capitalist system, they were taught to overwhelm the system with massive spending, entitlements and debt. That would cause the economy to collapse, wipe out the middle class, and bring Americans to their knees, begging government to save them.

It’s the exact plan Obama has been implementing. The centerpiece is Obamacare.

Obamacare isn’t about health care. It’s about bankrupting the middle class and addicting it to government dependency. It’s about redistributing wealth from the middle class and small business to Obama’s voters (the poor and unions). Its goal is to wipe out the last vestiges of middle class America, creating a two-class society: the super rich and the poor (both beholden to Obama).

Obama learned well, it’s working to perfection.

So that explains the plan. But how do you implement it? We were taught that at Columbia too.

A key component of the plan involved fooling the voters by calling yourself “moderate” and a “uniter,” even though you are a radical Marxist. We were taught to never admit what you really believe in. It involved demonizing your opponents, calling them “evil, greedy, extreme, radical, and terrorist.” Look in the mirror and call your opponents the very things you are.

Obama learned well.

The plan taught us to hide your true intensions (in other words- lie, misrepresent, commit fraud). So Obamacare is about “saving the uninsured,” as opposed to income redistribution.

Government regulations are to “protect us from global warming,” as opposed to wiping out small business.

Amnesty for illegal immigrants is about “fairness,” as opposed to creating 12 million new Democratic voters.

High taxes are to “create equality,” as opposed to starving Obama’s political opposition.

Obscene spending is always about “helping widows and orphans,” as opposed to bribing Obama’s voters.

Higher teacher salaries to reward terrible performance are “for the kids,” as opposed to enriching teachers unions so they can funnel hundreds of millions to Democrat politicians.

Bailing out GM was to “save jobs,” as opposed to saving bloated auto union pensions.

It’s always about lying to coverup the Marxist agenda of destroying the middle class, redistributing wealth, and putting big government in control of our every move. Why the lies? We were taught at Columbia that “It’s for the greater good” and “We know what’s best for those people” and ”The ends justify the means.”

Obama learned well.

But the key to it all is to “boil the frog slowly.” We learned at Columbia to set the fire low, so the frog wouldn’t complain. By the time he realized what was happening, he’d be cooked.

That’s why every Obama speech starts and ends with “I’m here to save the middle class,” while his actions are annihilating them. He’s boiling the frog slowly. By the time the middle class realizes he’s the killer, and they’re the prey, they’ll already be dead.

The root (excuse the pun) of every Obama policy, everything Obama does, and everything happening to the U.S. economy, all started at Columbia. The entire Obama agenda to overwhelm the system, wipe out the middle class, bankrupt small business, and destroy capitalism, was hatched at Columbia. Obama may not have attended class, but he learned well.

He should have received the Karl Marx Award for “Student Most Likely to Destroy America.”

And a Nobel Prize for Peace! 🙂

Government will save you!

A record high 91,541,000 Americans did not participate in the labor force this October.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 932,000 people dropped out of the labor force last month, from at total of 90,609,000 in September to 91,541,000 in October.

The BLS defines a person “[n]ot in the labor force” as age 16 and older who are not employed and not considered to be unemployed as they have not looked for work in the four weeks prior to the survey.

The labor force participation rate — or all employed and unemployed people — in accordance with the decline, also hit a record low at 62.8 percent.

When President Obama took office in January 2009, the labor force participation rate was 65.7 percent.

From January 2009 to October 2013, more than 11 million people have dropped out of the labor force — from 80,507,000 to October’s 91,541,000.

The economic blog Zero Hedge notes that at the current rate, the number of people not participating in the labor force could exceed those working in about four years.

But don’t worry The Government of Homo Superior Liberalis will save you!  🙂

Washington is moving to ban trans fats. The obvious question, of course, is what will it ban next? If it can outlaw trans fats, it can outlaw anything. Is taking away choice what we want government to do?

Trans fats, also called partially hydrogenated oils by many, have been in our foods for decades. These artificial fats help extend shelf life and in some cases simply make food taste better. Activists, though, tell us they’re not healthy.

We’re not going to debate the issue. The health concerns of trans fats are not the point.

But this is: Where does government get the raw power to ban trans fats, or any other substance that Americans voluntarily and peacefully ingest?

The list of food items that governments have banned or regulated to save Americans from themselves is growing.

New York, for instance, has targeted salt for termination and banned big sugary soft drinks before a court said no. San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors has voted to run McDonald’s Happy Meals out of town, while raw milk sellers are raided more than terrorist cells.

The Washington Post reported in 2010 the administration was “planning an unprecedented effort to gradually reduce the salt consumed each day by Americans.”

And even before the federal government began its nanny-state campaign against trans fats, efforts to outlaw them were being waged at the state and local levels.

So what’s next? At what point will elected officials and bureaucrats regulate our intake of red meat for our own good? What about cheese? And butter? Should they be limited by public policy due to their fat content?

Then there are the dangers of potato chips, corn-based sweeteners and adult beverages. Surely there are some busybodies in Washington who believe another shot at alcohol prohibition is a fine idea.

In a nation filled with law enforcement agencies, a food police force is neither needed nor welcome. Yet some out there have appointed themselves as our protectors.

At the top of that list would be the Center for Science in the Public Interest. It is a driving force behind the current effort to ban trans fats, which it promoted at one time as a replacement for the animal fats it was campaigning against.

Choice? To these people it’s an archaic notion.

In their minds, and in the minds of many elected officials and bureaucrats, the only choice is that which government makes for its subjects. That’s a frightening power and not one government should have. (IBD)

Pants? Fire? Where?

Obama is sorry Americans aren’t smart enough to grasp what he really meant

President Obama carefully apologized for something Thursday. But not for lying.

the Democrat granted an exclusive interview to NBC News’ Chuck Todd. (After all NBC NEWS Is the lead in The Ministry of Truth)

“Exclusive” is what politicians grant 1) to get extra oomph from their interview with one media outlet and 2) to avoid the news conference’s reportorial feeding-frenzy that accompanies the scent of political blood in the water.

First, what Obama didn’t do. He didn’t apologize for misleading the entire country for three-plus years by saying without qualification dozens of times that if Americans like their existing health insurance plan, they can keep it. “Period.” The Real Good Talker didn’t admit any mistake there, not even an inadvertent one based on his enthusiasm for what he believes is best for his countrymen.

Such bald statements, which documents show he knew were false in mid-2010, played a key role in calming latent fears about his massive federal government plan to reshape nearly a fifth of the country’s economy.

That soothing claim also helped convince the majority Democrats in both houses of Congress to pass the bill in 2010 without a single Republican vote. Obama showed no sympathy when early ObamaCare opposition overwhelmingly turned the House over to the GOP that year.

With their Senate margin of control slim heading into the 2014 midterm balloting, Obama now hears worried Democrats whining about polls showing voter opposition threatening their reelections. Why should he care? As Obama told the Russian president last year, 2012 was his’ final election.’

In his NBC interview Obama, who like Congress is exempt from ObamaCare’s provisions, said the usual feel-good non-specifics about asking “my team” to examine ways to ameliorate the pain for millions of Americans losing their existing plan.

And he even emphasized his belief that ultimately the new forced policies would be upgrades. No sedative now for anyone saying goodbye to their existing, affordable plan, unable to shop on Obama’s crippled, half-billion-dollar website, facing much higher prices for plans including options they don’t want and facing federal financial penalties for non-compliance.

“I am sorry,” Obama said, “that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me.” (Andrew Malcolm)

But Not really.

Obama insisted anew Thursday that the problem is limited to people who buy their own insurance. “We’re talking about 5 percent of the population who are in what’s called the individual market. They’re out there buying health insurance on their own,” he told NBC.

But a closer examination finds that the number of people who have plans changing, or have already changed, could be between 34 million to 52 million. That’s because many employer-provided insurance plans also could change, not just individually purchased insurance plans

Administration officials decline to say how many employer-sponsored plans could change. But those numbers could be between 23 million to 41 million, based on a McClatchy analysis of estimates offered by the Department of Health and Human Services in June 2010.

Obama aides did acknowledge around the time the law was enacted in 2010 that some people could lose their coverage if their plans changed after the law was passed. Those people would in turn receive what the administration described as superior coverage. But in the years since the law’s passage, HHS officials have downplayed that consequence of the hard-fought law.

“If health plans significantly raise co-payments or deductibles or significantly reduce (them) . . . they’ll lose their grandfather status and their customers will get the same full set of consumer protections as new plans,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said at a June 15, 2010, news conference.

Many changes in the old insurance plans could trigger the loss of the protected status. Regulations issued by HHS state that the grandfathered status would be lost if the policies eliminate coverage for a particular condition, reduce the annual dollar limit on benefits, increase co-payments by as little as $5 or 15 percent, or increase out-of-pocket maximums by more than 15 percent or premiums by more than 5 percent.

Later in June 2010, Sebelius’ department published estimates in the Federal Register that 39 percent to 69 percent of employers’ fully insured plans would relinquish the coverage they had prior to the March 2010 passage of the ACA and thus would have to cancel or change policies.

About 60 million people are covered in fully insured plans, which make up about 40 percent of employer-provided health plans. Fully insured plans are usually offered by large employers. These plans have the insurance company rather than the employer assume the financial risk of annual health care expenses exceeding expectations. The rest of employers self-insure. (MCclatchy)

No wonder the employer part of it was put off until AFTER 2014. :)I guess that will be Hilary’s problem to bury along with Benghazi…

 

For Good

With his agenda in a mess. Lets Regulate instead. Where he doesn’t need Congress.

The EPA: Climate Change Controls.

FDA: Control of what you eat.

This is where he’ll get his satisfaction. His succor for now.

“He may be able to do more through climate change [rules] because the EPA has the authority,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told The Hill on Thursday.

The most far-reaching piece of Obama’s climate plan is carbon emission standards for the nation’s fleet of existing power plants, by far the largest single source of industrial carbon emissions. The EPA is also writing standards for new plants.

So he can make your energy costs skyrocket. Yeah, that will take care of the Middle Class.

For good. 🙂

Chain restaurants and their customers will soon feel the pinch of an expensive ObamaCare requirement that has been flying under the radar until now.  ObamaCare mandates that “restaurants and similar retail food establishments” print nutritional information on their menus.

The restaurant industry is extremely competitive. If consumers demand menu labeling, restaurants will meet that demand. In fact, many restaurants already do provide nutritional labeling.

But private solutions aren’t enough for menu labeling proponents. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which is implementing the menu labeling requirement, tries to justify its rule by claiming that the public (poor fools) are misinformed and simply don’t request “sufficient” information.

In other words, since many people patronizing restaurants are not purchasing the most nutritious meals on offer (as determined by the government), this must be a market failure. One that government must fix. Hence, information mandates must be imposed and expanded until the desired actions are achieved. For the nation’s nutrition czars, if information mandates don’t work, then there must be bans, such as the New York City soda ban.

The entire approach rests on a faulty assumption: that customers fail to select the most nutritious meals available only because they lack information about nutritional content.

In the real world, nutritional information is the last thing most people want to think about when ordering at a restaurant. Going out for a meal is usually an escape, and often an indulgence. Few go to a fancy steakhouse and just order a side salad.

Those who are nutrition-conscious may choose a less healthy option at the restaurant, recognizing that their meal will be offset by other dietary and exercise choices they make during the day. Also, meal decisions at restaurants are usually not an all-or-nothing proposition. Nutrition may be one factor in selecting a meal.

Menu labeling mandates put the cart before the horse. The research on menu labeling is, at best, unclear when it comes to caloric intake. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, “The mixed results of these and other small-scale menu labeling studies suggest it is still too early to tell how restaurant calorie labeling will affect caloric intake.”

The ObamaCare menu labeling provision is modeled after a New York City law. New York University and Yale researchers found that individuals ordered more calories after the New York law went into effect. As is often the case when information mandates don’t work, true-believers attempt to blame the failure on insufficient information.

These findings were echoed by another set of researchers studying the NYC law. They recently reported in the American Journal of Public Health:

Providing calorie recommendation benchmarks-such as calories per day or calories per meal-did not reduce calories purchased, nor did it appear to help participants to better use the calorie information posted on menus. In fact, we found some evidence that recommendations may even have promoted purchase of higher-calorie items.

If you thought such findings would give pause to the mandaters, think again. Indeed, their proposed rule — which could be finalized this fall or even earlier — embraces a very expansive reading of the law. The relevant ObamaCare provision calls for a labeling requirement to fall on a “restaurant or other similar retail food establishment.” According to the FDA, their rule will apply to grocery stores and convenience stores as well. In practice, the regulatory power-mongers at the FDA have decided simply to ignore the inconveniently limiting word “similar.”

As the FDA sees it, a grocery store which devotes 99.9 percent of its floor space to packaged goods and 0.1 percent to a deli counter is pretty much indistinguishable from a restaurant. Hey, it’s selling food that’s prepared and processed on site, isn’t it?

Also according to the FDA, the first year compliance costs for all regulated parties could be as high as $537 million, with recurring annual costs of up to $64 million. There’s reason to believe the agency may be lowballing here. But the Food Marketing Institute, which represents supermarkets, asserts that first-year compliance costs for supermarkets alone would be over $1 billion.

But what about the benefits arising from the rule? The FDA didn’t try to answer that question. “Food choice and consumption decisions are complex,” the agency explained, “and FDA is unaware of any comprehensive data allowing accurate predictions of the effect of the proposed requirements on consumer choice and establishment menus.”

What we’re left with, then, is a rule that imposes huge, recurring costs without promising any quantifiable benefits.

This costly new menu-labeling mandate should be repealed, and until such time, no money should be appropriated to the FDA for its implementation, including through the complete defunding of ObamaCare. Americans are more than capable of demanding nutritional information, if they so choose. They don’t need the food police to arrogantly dictate what information they need to make decisions at restaurants. (American Thinker)

But, boy does it make Liberals feel good, and Powerful. 🙂

 

For The Greater Good of Government

The government thinks you’re stupid, or at least ignorant.

And they want to keep it that way. 🙂

This isn’t just an indictment of the current government or an indictment of government itself. It’s simply a statement of fact. At its core, the government exists to do certain things that people aren’t equipped to do on their own. The list of those things has gotten longer and longer over the years. In 1776, the federal government’s portfolio could have easily fit in a file folder: maintain an army and navy, a few federal courts, the post office, the patent office and maybe a dozen or two other pretty obvious things.

Now, the file folder of things the federal government does is much bigger. To paraphrase Dr. Egon Spengler from “Ghostbusters,” let’s imagine that the federal government in 1776 was the size of this Twinkie (take my word for it, I’m holding a normal-sized Twinkie). Today that Twinkie would be 35 feet long, weighing approximately 600 pounds. Or, if that illustration doesn’t work for you, consider this: The number of civilians (i.e., not counting the military) who work for the executive branch alone is today nearly equal to the entire population of the United States in 1776. The Federal Register, the federal government’s fun-filled journal of new rules, regulations and the like, was about 2,600 pages in 1936 (a year after it was created). Today it’s over 80,000 pages.

And that’s just at the federal level. Each state government is a pretty giant-sized Twinkie, too. In Massachusetts, all kids in daycare are required by law to brush their teeth after lunch. In Texas — Texas! — if you don’t have an interior design license, you can’t call yourself an interior designer, lest some unsuspecting consumer trust your opinion on throw pillow placement without the backing of the state. Almost everywhere, Americans need a license to open a business — sometimes even a lemonade stand — but in Milwaukee, you even need a license to go out of business.

The justifications for all of these laws and all of these workers — the good, the bad and the ugly — have one thing in common: the assumption that the rest of us couldn’t get by without them, whether we like it or not.

This week the feds took the first steps to ban trans fats. Why? Because trans fats are bad for you and you can’t be trusted to avoid them on your own. I bring this up not because it is such an outrageous illustration of my point, but to demonstrate how typical it is. This is what the government does, day in, day out.

That’s what makes the reaction to Obamacare so interesting. Several times now, the president has endeavored to explain that it’s not that big a deal millions of Americans are losing their health insurance plans against their will. The people who had plans they liked didn’t understand that the plans they liked were no good — they were the actuarial equivalent of trans fats, don’t you know? The fact that the people who held them liked them, thought they were good and wanted to keep them doesn’t count for much, because the government knows best.

The president can’t say it as plainly as he would like, because to do so would be to admit not only that he lied to the American people, but that he thinks the complainers are ignorant about their own needs and interests.

The president’s more intellectually honest defenders have said exactly that. “Vast swathes of policy are based on the correct presumption that people don’t know what’s best for them. Nothing new,” tweeted Josh Barro, politics editor for Business Insider.

Barro’s fairly liberal, but I’d be dishonest if I said that he was wrong from a conservative perspective. The difference, however, is that conservatives tend to see government as a necessary evil, and therefore see policymaking with some humility. Liberals tend to see government as a necessary good, and see ordering people to do things “for their own good” as a source of pride, even hubris.

From a conservative perspective, telling people how to run their lives when not absolutely necessary is an abuse of power. For liberals, telling people how to run their lives is one of the really fun perks of working for the government.

You can see the frustration on the president’s face. It’s almost like the ingrates who refuse to understand that his were necessary lies for their own good are spoiling all his fun. (Jonah Goldberg)

AMEN!

 

Feeding The Bulldog

President Obama said Thursday that he is “sorry” that some Americans are losing their current health insurance plans as a result of the Affordable Care Act, despite his promise that no one would have to give up a health plan they liked.

“I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me,” he told NBC News in an exclusive interview at the White House.

“We’ve got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them and we are going to do everything we can to deal with folks who find themselves in a tough position as a consequence of this.”

Insincerity is so him.

The fact that it was in the law back when it was a bill means nothing to him, just like you, you filthy peasants. You will do as I want or else.

“Obviously we didn’t do a good enough job in terms of how we crafted the law,” Obama said in the interview Thursday. “And, you know, that’s something I regret. That’s something we’re gonna do everything we can to get fixed … We’re looking at a range of options.”

You mean like it You read it before we find out what’s in it?

Options? The only options you’re looking for is how to blame all of this on the Republicans/Tea Party.

Sorry, you have to sell your house to pay form the increase insurance costs. But hey, it’s “better” for you. 🙂

Sorry, you’re going to die now because the Specialist you had can longer work with your new plan.

Sorry, you have to go on welfare and food stamps to pay for your insurance (not really, it’s what I wanted).

Break every piggy bank you have.

Sorry, doesn’t feed the bulldog, but it does feed my need for government to control you.

So keep working on it. That’s a good slave.

Let’s start with the particularly galling declaration Obama made after Congress’ partisan passage of Obamacare on March 21, 2010: “We proved that this government — a government of the people and by the people — still works for the people. … Tonight’s vote … is a victory for the American people.”

Never mind that the American public was manifestly against passage of the bill (and have been since day one) , as shown in poll after poll and further demonstrated by Obama’s inability to get the bill passed — despite overwhelming Democratic majorities in both chambers — without, in my words in the book, “legislative trickery, executive deception, political bribes, arm-twisting, and a meaningless executive order to supposedly negate the bill’s abortion funding provisions.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander, no raging conservative, then observed that Obama’s behavior on Obamacare was “the most brazen act of political arrogance since Watergate … in terms of thumbing your nose at the American people and saying, ‘We know you don’t want it, but we’re going to give it to you anyway.'”(townhall)

Senator Harry Reid: “Obamacare is a wonderful piece of legislation,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said on the Senate floor Thursday. “Let’s make it better. Stop carping about this. Get over it. It’s the law. It’s the legacy of Barack Obama and always will be.”

Shut up. Sit down. Do as you are told!

Period.

End of Story.

The Lying King

Let’s clear up some foggy prevarications polluting President Obama’s ongoing snow job for ObamaCare:

If you tell a spouse you’re going to Sam’s Club when you really mean Costco, that’s no big deal. Those membership stores are the same, except one peddles better hot dogs. That’s called misspeaking.

However, if you’re president of the United States peddling a legislative tumor like ObamaCare, one that you know will drastically change almost one-fifth of the nation’s economy, one that openly claims to help a few million uninsured Americans while secretly disrupting the lives, families, finances and medical care of more than 100 million Americans, and you say things like this:

“No matter how we reform health care, 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 health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away, no matter what.” — Pres. Barack Obama to the American Medical Assn., June 15, 2009.

Or, if you say something like this:

“And if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it. No one will be able to take that away from you. It hasn’t happened yet. It won’t happen in the future.” — Pres. Obama, April 1, 2010.

Or if you say something like this:

“If you like your plan, you’ll be keeping your plan. No one’s taking that away from you. Three months from now, six months from now, you’re gonna look around, be sitting in your doctor’s office, reading the old people magazines, you’ll be saying, ‘Hey, same doctor. Same plan. It wasn’t Armageddon.'” — Pres. Obama, Sept. 25, 2010.

Or maybe even like this:

“I want to speak plainly, clearly, honestly about what (ObamaCare) means for you and the people you care about. Let’s start with this fact that even before the Affordable Care Act fully takes effect, about 85% of Americans already have health insurance either through their job, through Medicare or through the independent market.

“So, if you’re one of these folks, it’s reasonable you might worry whether healthcare reform is gonna create changes that are a problem for you, especially when you’re bombarded by all sorts of fear-mongering. So, the first thing you need to know is this: If you already have healthcare, you don’t have to do anything.” — Pres. Obama, Sept. 26, 2013.

And then he rewrites rhetorical history with something like this:

“What we said was, you could keep (your policy) — if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.” — Pres. Obama, Nov. 4, 2013.

Now, you don’t need Thor’s super-powers to detect the dramatic difference between what Obama has been saying some two dozen times over three years and what just now he claims he was saying.

Too much to expect this guy to admit anything. In Dallas today, he’ll bluff his way through another pitch.

Which has left Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, struggling to explain his boss’ remarks: “Look, I, as I said last week, accept that communications are challenging here. The President — I mean, look, you have to remember that the Affordable Care Act promises….What the President was referring to was the broader promise of the Affordable Care Act.”

Nice try. Americans don’t always pay attention to politics. Who can blame them? And, actually, that’s what Obama has successfully counted on, that his live-streamed snippets of falsehoods blared by a largely complicit media would trump critics’ negative natterings.

But the broken promises, false claims and tortured truths have reached a critical mass now. Bludgeoned by Benghazi, IRS revelations, FBI probes, NSA disclosures, Fast and Furious, Solyndra, Syria’s slips and now ObamaCare’s sticker shock and outright whoppers, more Americans detect the odor of betrayal, however reluctantly. Gallup reported Tuesday that for the first time Obama’s daily job approval sank below 40%.

But wait! There is one more thing. Do you remember when Obama unveiled his healthcare “reform” scheme? That was way back on Sept. 9, 2009, in a speech to a joint session of Congress.

Ironically, the president that night warned opponents against saying that his plan to ultimately centralize American healthcare in the federal government would do things that it wouldn’t do. “If you misrepresent what’s in this plan,” Obama threatened, “we will call you out.”

Now, today we have Obama having destroyed his own credibility by repeatedly claiming ObamaCare will not do things that it clearly will do.

That night on Capitol Hill, however, became more notorious for another quote. The president’s remarks on national TV were interrupted by a Republican representative, Joe Wilson of South Carolina. He shouted out, “You lie!” The breach of decorum raised quite a stir at the time.

Turns out, Rep. Wilson wasn’t just rude. He was prescient. (Andrew Malcolm)

President Obama was overheard bragging to administration aides about his ability to kill people with drones, a new book about the 2012 campaign season that’s due for release on Tuesday claimed.

The president’s specific words: I’m “really good at killing people,” authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann write in “Double Down: Game Change 2012,” The Daily Mail reported. They get their claim from a Washington Post report that buries the statement as a brief anecdote in an article, in which the president is described as speaking to aides about the drone program and then making the claim.

I wonder if that includes MEDIA drones on ObamaCare… 🙂

Numbers Game

Putting on a brave face and opting for defiance rather than contrition, the president boasted on October 21 that his new website had been a hit after all. “Turns out, there’s a massive demand for it,” Obama said. “So far, the national website, Healthcare.gov, has been visited nearly 20 million times. [Applause.] Twenty million times.”

Twenty million is a large number — such a large number, in fact, that it was deemed worthy of dramatic repetition in the president’s speech, and chosen, too, as the basis for the White House’s initial PR campaign. “The number of people who’ve visited the site has been overwhelming,” Obama claimed in the course of his defense, and this “has aggravated some of these underlying problems.” This message was quickly seized upon by the White House’s ideological allies: The problem with Obamacare, we were told until it was no longer credible, is that it was too damn popular, and no computer system could be expected to deal with the “massive” number of people visiting. At Wonkblog, Ezra Klein went so far as to claim that the significant interest was exactly “what the Republicans were afraid of.”

What a difference a week has made. Now, the administration is apparently unable to decide what constitutes a Big Number and what is merely loose change. Pushing back against the increasingly common realization that Obamacare’s achievements have thus far been to expose the president as an incorrigible liar and to corrupt the individual health-insurance market in precisely the way that critics were lambasted for suggesting it would, Jay Carney complained last Tuesday that reporters were blowing out of proportion the number of people whose health insurance is being canceled. “In some of the coverage of this issue in the last several days,” Carney griped, “you would think that you were talking about 75 percent or 80 percent or 60 percent of the American population!” Instead, he noted bitterly, “the universe we’re talking about” is only “5 percent of the population.”

Out of context, “5 percent of the population” does not sound especially impressive. But 5 percent of the population is 15 million people — or the collective population of Alaska, Delaware, Montana, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, West Virginia, Nebraska, New Mexico, and both the Dakotas. Fifteen million people is 300 Yankee Stadiums or two New York Cities. It is twice the number of Germans who died during the Second World War. It is, in another words, a lot of people.

With this in mind, one almost feels sympathetic toward the administration’s crack team of liars. By now, they must be realizing that they have been given an impossible mission: to argue simultaneously that 20 million people’s visiting a website is worthy of our awe and admiration and that 15 million living, breathing rebuttals to the president’s incessant “if you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health-care plan” promise are but an insignificant rounding error.

This will prove to be an almost impossible feat. Even if the sign-up numbers have improved dramatically by mid November, the deadline by which the White House has promised to finally divulge them, they will almost certainly be dwarfed by the numbers of those who have lost their insurance. Fear of such comparisons explains the administration’s reticence. Healthcare.gov may have experienced “massive demand” in its first few hours, but it has evidently failed to convert that demand into hard sales. The president claims that, on its first day, the site had 4.7 million unique visits; a leaked memo, meanwhile, shows that only six people signed up. Providing that the White House is telling the truth, Obama’s “really good product” thus achieved a visit-to-sign-up ratio of just 1:783,333. By way of contrast, direct mail — almost universally loathed — has a conversion rate of around one in 25, which means that the Smartest President Ever’s signature law is running around 31,000 times behind unsolicited copies of the Sears catalogue.

Even in states where the websites have been running marginally better, the promise of a surge in private insurance is looking more and more like a pipe dream. In Maryland, there have been 82,473 enrollments in Medicaid and 3,186 enrollments in private insurance; in Oregon, a state whose performance was proudly touted by the president on August 21, 62,000 people have been added to the Medicaid rolls while not a single person has signed up for private insurance; and in Washington State, the ratio of Medicaid to private insurance enrollees is 1:7. So far, it seems, the result of the federal government’s biggest expansion in 50 years has been hundreds of thousands of people added to a program that doesn’t work. The GI Bill this is not.

“When we first saw the numbers, everyone’s eyes kind of bugged out,” Matt Salo, the head of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, told the Washington Post last week. “Of the people walking through the door, 90 percent are on Medicaid. We’re thinking, what planet is this happening on?”,

I’m not entirely sure why Mr. Salo is so stupefied that a federal law intended to expand Medicaid is yielding a significant increase in the number of people enrolled in Medicaid, nor why he is shocked that forcing people to buy a commercial product that they didn’t want from a store that doesn’t work has been met with anger. Nevertheless, his essential question is one that I have asked myself. From the very start, Obamacare has struck me as a particularly protracted and boring episode of The Twilight Zone — an episode in which a hopeless charlatan tries to explain to a skeptical public that if they just run with him, human nature will be altered by good intentions, the laws of mathematics will be suspended, and government will finally end its long run of failure to be reinvented as an Aston Martin. “What planet is this happening on?” is the exact question that conservatives have been asking for five years.

The first rule of crisis management is that if you have something that makes you look good, you share it. It is fair to assume that the administration does not have anything that makes it looks good. As David Freddoso notes on ConservativeIntel, “the Obama administration is in fact receiving a daily update on enrollments — and there’s no reason they can’t share the numbers.” Actually, there is an extremely good reason: The numbers are terrible. I know it; you know it; and the Obama administration, which has access to a real-time dashboard, knows it, too.

For the first time in his presidency, Barack Obama must be genuinely scared, for numbers are funny things. On the one hand, as Ned Land quips dismissively in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, “you can make figures do whatever you want.” On the other hand, if you’re going to try that game, you had better be sure that you’re playing on more solid ground. Electorates can be fooled some of the time but there is a limit to their credulity, especially when they can see with their own eyes that they were lied to, and lied to good. No amount of trickery can turn 6 into a large number, nor 15 million into a small one — even when the man who got the most votes insists contumaciously upon pretending to the contrary. (NRO)

Teleprompter One is a Liar!

The New York Times:

Congressional Republicans have stoked consumer fears and confusion with charges that the health care reform law is causing insurers to cancel existing policies and will force many people to pay substantially higher premiums next year for coverage they don’t want. That, they say, violates President Obama’s pledge that if you like the insurance you have, you can keep it.

Mr. Obama clearly misspoke when he said that. By law, insurers cannot continue to sell policies that don’t provide the minimum benefits and consumer protections required as of next year. So they’ve sent cancellation notices to hundreds of thousands of people who hold these substandard policies. (At issue here are not the 149 million people covered by employer plans, but the 10 million to 12 million people who buy policies directly on the individual market.)

But insurers are not allowed to abandon enrollees. They must offer consumers options that do comply with the law, and they are scrambling to retain as many of their customers as possible with new policies that are almost certain to be more comprehensive than their old ones.

Teleprompter One Lied 40 or 50 times, repeatedly and with malice afterthought when it told the President to promise “if you like you insurance you can keep it”.

It’s not his fault. He “misspoke” so cut him some slack and you cut your wrists trying to figure out how to pay for your shiny new insurance that cost up to 400% more!

It’s not his fault.

It’s the Republican’s Fault for causing the confusion. But Obama just “misspoke” 40 or 50 times over the last 4 years!

No big deal. Get over it.

Yeah, and GW Bush “misspoke” about WMDs. 🙂

Scooter Libby “misspoke” on one occasion and ended up with a felony conviction for it. Obama turned that promise into a mantra.  He  deployed it against critics on every occasion by insisting that people who pointed out the obvious — that coverage mandates will make risk pools more expensive and that plans would have to get cancelled to manage them — were just scaremongers, and that the ACA would just mean more people would get insurance.  “No one will take away your plan,” Obama promised repeatedly.

The motto of the New York Times is “All the news that’s fit to print.” Apparently, they misspoke when they wrote that.(Hot air)

All the lies that are fit to print more likely. 🙂

The NYT called the loss of insurance plans an “overblown controversy.”

Valerie Plaime was an overblown controversy. This is just the worst, and most cynical case of CYA for the Liberal Agenda yet.

After all, it’s the insurance companies fault for dropping you, not the ridiculous mandates and regulations imposed on them by ObamaCare and the subversion of Adverse Selection.

Nope, the Liberals are the saviors. The Angels of Mercy. The Sainted Ones!

So you should bow down and kiss their ring. They are from the Liberal Agenda and they are here to save you from any responsibility for yourself!

Remember: Liberal Lies= “misspoke”

Non-Liberal Truths Liberals don’t like= “lie”.

Liberal BS is “clear”

Clear Truth (not approved by a Liberal) is “confusing” and “fearful”

Liberal Fearmongering is “truth”

Non-Liberal Approved Truth is “fearmongering”

“What We Said Was You Can Keep It If It Hasn’t Changed Since The Law Passed”-Obama

No. It isn’t but I bet you think so now. YOU WILL BE UPGRADED!

Your plan was inferior to us. So who care if you liked it, or it was cheaper!

We don’t.

Black is white and white is black. Up is down Down is Up.

Good is Bad. Bad is Good.

Blackwhite is defined as follows:
“    …this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.

And you’re a dirty rotten liar for calling my dirty, rotten lies– Lies! 🙂

 

 

 

Food For the Sowell XIV

Thomas Sowell: Polls indicate that the public is so disgusted with Washington politicians of both parties that a surprisingly large proportion of the people would like to get rid of the whole lot of them.

It is certainly understandable that the voters would like to “throw the rascals out.” But there is no point in throwing the rascals out, if we are just going to get a new set of rascals to replace them.

In other words, we need to think about what there is about current political practices that repeatedly bring to power such a counterproductive set of people. Those we call “public servants” have in fact become public masters. And they act like it.

They squander ever more vast amounts of our tax money, and still leave trillions of dollars of national debt to be paid by our children and grandchildren. They intrude into our private lives with ever more restrictions, red tape and electronic surveillance. And they turn different groups of Americans against each other with class warfare rhetoric and policies.

None of this is inevitable. In fact, this pattern is largely the culmination of political trends set in motion during the 1930s, and reaching a climax today. During the 1920s, the national debt was reduced and the role of government scaled back. Unemployment went as low as 1.8 percent.

President Calvin Coolidge, with every prospect of being reelected in 1928, declared simply: “I do not choose to run.” Later, in his memoirs, he explained how dangerous it is to have anyone remain too long in the White House, surrounded by flattery and insulated from reality. What a contrast that attitude is with the attitude of the current occupant of the White House!

The contrast extends beyond these two presidents. What we have today that we did not have in the early history of this country is a permanent political class in Washington — a Congress and an ever growing federal bureaucracy composed of people who have become a permanent ruling class.

The United States was not founded by career politicians but by people who took time out from their regular professions to serve during a crucial time in the creation of a new nation, and a new kind of nation in a world ruled by kings and emperors.

In the nineteenth century, there was a high rate of turnover in members of Congress. Many people went to Washington to serve one term in Congress, then returned to their home state to resume their lives as private citizens.

The rise of the permanent political class in Washington came with the rise of a vast government apparatus with unprecedented amounts of money and power to control and corrupt individuals, institutions and the fabric of the whole society.

The first giant steps in this direction were taken in the 1930s, when the Great Depression provided the rationale for a radically expanded role of government that Franklin D. Roosevelt and his followers had believed in before there was a Great Depression.

There are now people in Washington whose entire adult lives have been spent in government, in one role or another. Some begin as aides to politicians or as part of the sprawling empires of the federal bureaucracy. From this they progress to high elective or appointed offices in government.

Turnover in Congress has been reduced almost to the vanishing point. Political alliances within government and with outside special interests, as well as the gerrymandering of Congressional districts, make most incumbents’ reelection virtually a foregone conclusion.

The ability to distribute vast amounts of largess to voters, at the taxpayers’ expense — President Obama’s giving away free cell phones during an election year being just the tip of the iceberg — further tilts the balance in favor of incumbents.

This kind of government must constantly “do something” in order to keep incumbents’ names in the news. In short, big government has every incentive to create bigger government.

Throwing the rascals out will not get rid of this political pattern. The first step in limiting, and then scaling back, government itself must be limiting the time that anyone can remain in office — preferably limited to one term, to make it harder to become career politicians, a species we can well do without.

Trading one wolf for another wolf is still a wolf.

 

The Oncoming Storm…

FYI last night at the Great Falls Grange debate, Democrat delegate candidate Kathleen Murphy said that since many doctors are not accepting medicaid and medicare patients, she advocates making it a legal requirement for those people to be accepted.  

After all, if you defy a Liberal they will try and use trickery or regulations to make you do what they want.

She did not recognize that the payments are inadequate to cover the doctors’ costs.  She also did not recognize there is a shortage of over 45,000 physicians now and that it is forecast to be 90,000 in a few years.  

Democrats appear to want to make physicians slaves of the state, but Democrats don’t admit they would just drive more doctors out of practice into retirement and other occupations.  The Obamacare law and regulations are causing millions of people to lose their health insurance, drop many doctors and hospitals. The HHS internal forecast is 93 million Americans would lose their health insurance due to the Obamacare law and rules about adequacy of insurance.

Many more people will be uninsured.   The penalties for being uninsured start at $95 per year, but the penalties can’t be collected by the IRS if a person does not have a tax refund to attach.  (Mason Conservative)

The Agenda is the Agenda!

And these are the next steps. They are years away, but the biggest storm starts with but a single breeze.

Ann Coulter

Liberals never give up. Nothing is ever the same until they get their way, much like two-year-olds. That’s why we have to go back every few years and remind everyone that we already had this argument, and liberals lost. There’s a reason our Party’s symbol is the elephant — we never forget — and the Democrats’ is a jackass.

American Spectator: Coulter follows this opening by pointing out that liberals spent the 1970’s insisting “the Earth was going to freeze in two years.” That Hubert Humphrey “said he eat his hat if civil rights laws ever led to racial quotas” — and now liberals call conservatives “‘racist’ for opposing racial quotas.” Reminds that “Teddy Kennedy assured us his immigration bill would not alter the country’s ethnic mix” and that since the Kennedy immigration bill passed (back in 1965) the nation’s ethnicity has changed “from nearly 90 percent white in 1965 to about 63 percent white in 2013.”

And their new mission: Control every aspect of your left from Before you are conceived and until well after your dead.

Health Care, Global Warming, etc. And they can wait, like water cutting the Grand Canyon. They can wait. They never give up. They will relentless grind you down.

Coulter: Most people barely pay attention to what’s happening now, much less two years ago — and much, much less a few decades ago. That’s how the liberal version of history becomes accepted fact. It’s not that history is written by the victors. History is written by the pushy. When one side cares MUCH more about the historical record, there’s not a lot you can do about it. Especially when the pushy have tenure.

American Spectator:This is, of course, why liberals expect to be recognized as the Party of Civil Rights — when in fact a more racist party has never existed in all of American history, over the years being determined supporters of slavery, segregation, lynching, the Klan, racial quotas and now race-based illegal immigration. This is why, with the collapse of the Soviet Union — which the Left believed would never happen — and all the liberal legends featuring martyrs to the Red Scare have in fact been revealed as Soviet spies, the storyline about those martyrs never changes. Liberal martyrs from the Rosenbergs to Alger Hiss continue to be celebrated as just poor, persecuted souls victimized by that mean Joe McCarthy.

Coulter asks who can forget the rewriting of the successful Iraq War as a failure? And to use the topic of the day, the Left demands to be seen as the Pro-Choice Party — while deliberately and decidedly willfully denying health care choice to millions who are losing their health-care plans of choice. All in the cause of appeasing the bureaucratic gods of ObamaCare, not to mention the insatiable desire for control over your life.

Whether consciously or not they like to define the terms of world in their vision, but they want you to view the world in their vision and will happily tell you how to (or force it on you).

She understands that when dealing with liberalism and its advocates “facts and evidence are useless.”

Yes. Emphatically if frustratingly so.

VOTE FOR ME! The Other Guys an Asshole! 🙂

VOTE FOR ME! The Other Guys want you to Starve & Die! 🙂

Freedom

May I ask this question: Why is it that Americans don’t have the freedom to choose their own health insurance? I just don’t get it. Why must the liberal nanny state make decisions for us?

We can make them ourselves, thank you very much. It’s like choosing a car, buying a home or investing in a stock. We can handle it. So why must the government tell me and everyone else what we can and cannot buy?

Charles Krauthammer noted here Friday that this whole ObamaCare business represents the greatest-ever expansion of the liberal entitlement-state dream.

But I don’t want that dream. And you shouldn’t either.

BUT THEY DO! They’ve wanted it for 90 years! And now that they got it, they want EVEN MORE! Not less.

Here’s what else I don’t want: As a 60-something, relatively healthy person, I don’t want lactation and maternity services, abortion services, speech therapy, mammograms, fertility treatments or Viagra. I don’t want it.

BUT YOU MUST HAVE IT! It’s Only “fair”! 🙂

So why should I have to tear up my existing health care plan, and then buy a plan with far more expensive premiums and deductibles and with services I don’t need or want?

BECAUSE THAT’S MAKES EVERYONE EQUAL. 🙂

Why? Because Team Obama says I have to. And that’s not much of a reason. It’s not freedom.

NOT SUPPOSED TO BE.

Fortunately, NBC News pulled the plug this past week on President Obama’s promise that “if you like your own plan, you can keep it.” Ditto for keeping your own doctor.

WAS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN ANYHOW. Right from the start.

The plug was pulled because NBC learned that Team Obama knew — for three years — that stiff new regulations would prevent the grandfathering of existing health care plans. And not just a few plans. But plans that could affect as many as 15 million individuals.

The day after that bombshell hit, the president tried to blame insurance companies — rather than regulatory overkill — for this ObamaCare shortfall.

OF COURSE! Is he ever at fault for anything? And isn’t ever evil in the word the fault of evil capitalist pigs!!

Yet both the public and the mainstream media were having none of it. In what may turn out to be a landmark moment, Americans and the media at large have turned against the president and ObamaCare.

BUT will it matter in the end. Will it produce any positive results? I doubt it.

Incidentally, equally punitive regulations will hit more than 90 million employer-sponsored health plans next year. It’s the same problem as the individual plan. Grandfathering won’t work.

YEAH, but that’s AFTER the mid-term election. So the Democrats have a whole year to lie about that first.

Mind you, you should buy their lies anyhow. But a campaign built on “Vote for Me! The other guy’s an Asshole” requires you to lie and lie constantly.

Moreover, replacing these plans with much more expensive substitutes is going to constitute a major tax hike on the entire economy.

Damn those Capitalists! (Republicans!) 🙂

This point shouldn’t be lost as Americans worry about being kicked from their plans. Not only is ObamaCare anti-freedom, it’s anti-growth as well.

But it’s the Republican’s Fault! 🙂

As for the grandfathering lie, Obama’s HHS staffers were the saboteurs. They undoubtedly acted with full knowledge of what they were doing, and thus trapped the president in three years of falsehoods that were essential to selling ObamaCare.

So, like they care. The Agenda is the Agenda.

And I just love it when they tell me that so many of these existing plans are substandard “bad apples.” Do the president and his people not know that insurance at the state level is one of the most regulated areas of the economy? They’re blaming insurance companies, not their own new regulations.

Yeah, because that’s the easiest lie for them to tell. Oh, well, you didn’t need that Cadillac after all, here’s a Smart Car. 🙂

The stupidity of that is hilarious. Do they really think salesmen are out selling these policies off the back of trucks? No, this is federal coercion at its worst. And that’s why the public is turning against it. It’s not freedom.

Tell a Lie often enough and it becomes the Truth. Don’t vote against them, they could care less what you think.

Of course, there are other structural problems to ObamaCare that are both unfair and unaffordable.

The whole thing. 🙂

Mainly, younger healthy people are not going to subsidize older sicker folks. We should take care of the latter with transparent government subsidies, and not by trying to redistribute resources (again) from the young to the old.

And they get to inherit the massive debt this going to pile up too!!!

Then there’s the Medicaid entitlement. It’s already out of control and close to bankruptcy.

It will be bankrupt by the time they get anywhere near it.

But in the early days of ObamaCare, Medicaid sign-ups are exploding, all while sign-ups for private plans on the new exchanges are minuscule.

I guess we’ll just have to have more of it! 🙂

Between the president’s broken promises, the millions of policy cancellations, the continued website breakdowns and the unaffordable, unfair con game between the healthy young and the sicker old, this ObamaCare monster is well on its way to collapsing of its own weight.

But it’s not their fault! 🙂

But here’s the bigger point: All this is the inevitable result of massive central-planning exercises to control the economy. That’s not freedom.

No, but it was The Agenda!

No amount of rescue legislation is going to change this. It’s the elections of 2014 and 2016 that will allow the American people to reject this Soviet-style planning.

If they are allowed to. 🙂

But I’ll reference Krauthammer once again:

ObamaCare represents the greatest-ever expansion of the liberal entitlement-state dream. And you know what? That dream is crumbling and dissolving before our very eyes.

And that is freedom. (Larry Kudlow)

But it’s so much more secure…<<snicker>> and you stick it to those greedy capitalists and the “extremist” Republicans… 🙂

After all, Rep. McDermott (D) on GOP: “They Simply Do Not Care About People”

Rep. Grayson (D), 2009 during the debate: “Republicans just want you to die”.

Now you don’t want that now do you? 🙂

 

Most Shocking…Not Really

“You like your doctor, you get to keep your doctor!”– Obama

Not if you read it all those years ago. Unlike Congress (which didn’t want to read it).

It was by design.

‘Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.’ –George Washington

“I give you bitter pills in sugar coating. The pills are harmless: the poison is in the sugar.”-Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (Polish writer, poet and satirist 1906-1966)

Obama administration knew that Obamacare would disrupt private plans

MY BLOG Sept 4, 2009 (https://indyfromaz.wordpress.com/2009/09/04/the-wisdom-and-the-fear//): HR3200: Page 16 says quite clearly in Lawyerese that you can keep it and it is grandfathered in for 5 years but if your plan changes  at all by your hand or the employers at any time for any reason, NOT MATTER WHAT, it’s no longer qualified and it has to be qualified to be “acceptable”.

And if it’s not “acceptable” it is out of compliance and you and/or your employer will be fined and taxed.

So any change at all, and the plan is dead. And you get chucked out.

That’s reality. Deny it all you want. It’s in the Bill.

It was always there. It was just covered in mountains of sugar and spice and Political deceit.

If you read the Affordable Care Act when it was passed, you knew that it was dishonest for President Obama to claim that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” as he did—and continues to do—on countless occasions. And we now know that the administration knew this all along. It turns out that in an obscure report buried in a June 2010 edition of the Federal Register, administration officials predicted massive disruption of the private insurance market.

On Tuesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney attempted to minimize the disruption issue, arguing that it only affected people who buy insurance on their own. “That’s the universe we’re talking about, 5 percent of the population,” said Carney. “In some of the coverage of this issue in the last several days, you would think that you were talking about 75 percent or 80 percent or 60 percent of the American population.” (5 percent of the population happens to be 15 million people, no small number, but let’s leave that aside.)

By “coverage of this issue,” Carney was referring to two articles. The first, by Chad Terhune of the Los Angeles Times, described a number of Californians who are seeing their existing plans terminated and replaced with much more expensive ones. “I was all for Obamacare until I found out I was paying for it,” said one.

The second article, by Lisa Myers and Hanna Rappleye of NBC News, unearthed the aforementioned commentary in the Federal Register, and cited “four sources deeply involved in the Affordable Care Act” as saying that “50 to 75 percent” of people who buy coverage on their own are likely to receive cancellation notices due to Obamacare.

I’m not shocked?

Just like I have said repeatedly, there was no way in hell or Earth that subverting Adverse Selection was going to make your premium go down. No Chance.

But the real question is: As the ObamaCare stink gets stronger will any of the low-information media-brainwashed morons have a light bulb moment and want to do something constructive about it!

Unlikely.

After all, the Ministry of Truth is doing a “pox on both of you” strategy where they can still focus the blame on “Congress” (aka the Republicans) but not go all they way and point out it was the Democrats and Obama who passed it!

But it keeps the uninformed morons from acting. They just go “oh well” and go back to watching “The Housewives of Orange County”.

Section 1251 of the Affordable Care Act contains what’s called a “grandfather” provision that, in theory, allows people to keep their existing plans if they like them. But subsequent regulations from the Obama administration interpreted that provision so narrowly as to prevent most plans from gaining this protection.

So you get stories of a middle-aged unmarried man who has his health care plan cancelled because they don’t offer MATERNITY leave which mandated by ObamaCare.

The plan can’t change .00000000000000001% of it’s invalid. So how likely is that?

That was the point of this fake-out.

“The Departments’ mid-range estimate is that 66 percent of small employer plans and 45 percent of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013,” wrote the administration on page 34,552 of the Register. All in all, more than half of employer-sponsored plans will lose their “grandfather status” and become illegal. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 156 million Americans—more than half the population—was covered by employer-sponsored insurance in 2013.

Another 25 million people, according to the CBO, have “nongroup and other” forms of insurance; that is to say, they participate in the market for individually-purchased insurance. In this market, the administration projected that “40 to 67 percent” of individually-purchased plans would lose their Obamacare-sanctioned “grandfather status” and become illegal, solely due to the fact that there is a high turnover of participants and insurance arrangements in this market. (Plans purchased after March 23, 2010 do not benefit from the “grandfather” clause.) The real turnover rate would be higher, because plans can lose their grandfather status for a number of other reasons.

How many people are exposed to these problems? 60 percent of Americans have private-sector health insurance—precisely the number that Jay Carney dismissed. As to the number of people facing cancellations, 51 percent of the employer-based market plus 53.5 percent of the non-group market (the middle of the administration’s range) amounts to 93 million Americans.

But it’s better right? 🙂

Now, supporters of the law are offering a different argument. “We didn’t really mean it when we said you could keep your plan,” they say, “but it doesn’t matter, because the coverage you’re going to get under Obamacare will be better than the coverage you had before.”

Yeah, so what if we lied, AGAIN!. Our Agenda is still superior! 🙂

But that’s not true. Obamacare forces insurers to offer services that most Americans don’t need, don’t want, and won’t use, for a higher price. Bob Laszewski, in a revealing blog post, wrote about the cancellation of his own health coverage. “Right now,” he wrote, “I have ‘Cadillac’ health insurance. I can access every provider in the national Blue Cross network—about every doc and hospital in America—without a referral and without higher deductibles and co-pays.”

But his plan is being canceled. His new, Obamacare-compatible plan has a $500 higher deductible, and a narrower physician and hospital network that restricts out-of-town providers. And yet it costs 66 percent more than his current plan. “Mr. President,” he writes, “I really like my health plan and I would like to keep it. Can you help me out here?”

NO. The Agenda is The Agenda!!