Paul Greenberg
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
The cynics say there are no more heroes, but a brief glance at the obituaries is enough to refute any such claim. For example:
Vincent Owens, 21, of Fort Smith, Ark. promoted posthumously to sergeant after he died of wounds suffered when his unit came under fire March 1, 2010, at Yosuf Khel, Afghanistan,. He'd already been nicknamed Sergeant Major by his men -- in honor of his drive and determination. His men didn't realize how badly he'd been wounded. He didn't let them know. First he had to get them and their truck out of the line of fire. Later there would be time to die.
Back home in Fort Smith -- and earlier in Spiro, Oklahoma, just across the state line -- Vincent Owens could have been taken for just another good old boy who liked to work with his hands. In Afghanistan, he'd even tried souping up his Army truck. He had a thing for motorcycles. His blue Suzuki GSRX 1000, still waiting for him, was parked in the church foyer for his funeral service in Spiro, his helmet and a bouquet of flowers in the seat. The funeral procession from the church in Spiro to the Fort Smith National Cemetery included more than a hundred of his fellow bikers.
Still a newlywed, he'd married just this January while on leave after one tour of duty in Iraq. He'd shipped out to Afghanistan in February.
Adam Lee Brown, 36, originally of Hot Springs, Ark., was a veteran Navy SEAL, as his decorations, including a Bronze Star with a combat V for valor, attested. He, too, would die of wounds received in Afghanistan after having served in Iraq. He'd enlisted in the Navy after graduating from Lake Hamilton High in Pearcy, Ark., and attending Arkansas Tech in Russellville, where he played football. He is survived by his wife, Kelley, their two children, his parents and a grateful nation.
At the other end of life's spectrum, Modesto Cartagena, 87, of Guayama, Puerto Rico, U.S.A., has died more than half a century after his outfit landed at Pusan, Korea. Allied forces would be reduced to a toehold, 80 by 50 miles, after North Korean forces attacked across the 38th Parallel.
Over the next three years, Army Sgt. Cartagena would participate in nine major battles, including one to protect the escape route for the Marines' famous retreat ("an advance in a different direction") from the Chosin Reservoir.
The sergeant would leave Korea with a Distinguished Service Cross for "extraordinary heroism" during a battle for a key hill during which his rifle was shot away from him. That didn't prevent him from using grenades to wipe out five of the enemy's gun emplacements.
Over the course of a military career that would include action in the European theater during the Second World War as well as the Korean Conflict, he would also earn Silver and Bronze Stars.
The general who was first given command of the 65th Infantry Regiment in Korea had hesitated to accept it. He'd heard it was just a "rum and Coca-Cola outfit" from Puerto Rico. He soon learned better thanks to men like Sgt. Cartagena. Some 3,800 members of the 65th would be killed or wounded in Korea. Soon enough the general would conclude that the men in his command were "the best damn soldiers in that war." Modesto Cartagena was one of the best of the best.
Andrée Peel, 105, has died in the English village of Long Ashton outside Bristol, but when France fell in the crushing spring of 1940, she was Andrée Virot, and running a beauty salon in Brest. France had been conquered, but not Mlle. Virot. She started her own war by circulating an underground newspaper--journalism always was a subversive trade--and soon graduated to the Resistance. As Agent Rose, she kept track of German shipping in the harbor and troop movements in Brittany. Soon she was escorting downed Allied airmen to safety, 102 of them before she was caught.
The mademoiselle would be arrested shortly after D-Day, the Sixth of June, 1944, with the usual, predictable consequences: imprisonment, torture, deportation to a concentration camp. First Ravensbruck, then Buchenwald, where she was due to be shot just before the Americans arrived like the U.S. Cavalry just in the nick of time in April of 1945.
Andrée Virot would live to make good on a wartime vow: to offer thanks for her survival at Sacre-Coeur in Montmarte. It was in Paris that she would meet her English husband. Mr. Peel lived till 2003, and she celebrated her 105th birthday February 3, wearing all 11 of her decorations from various countries, including the Medal of Freedom from the United States, and the King's Commendation for Brave Conduct from Great Britain. It was quite a birthday party. She sang the Marseillaise and, asked for a comment by the press, replied: "You don't know what freedom is if you have never lost it."
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Liberals In Vitriol Denial
Brent Bozell
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
When the Republicans shocked the liberal media elite by winning back Congress in 1994, they had been demonized for months. But it took the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995 for Bill Clinton and all of his "objective" media devotees to really pull the violence card and smear that mass murder all over Newt Gingrich and conservative Republicans, blaming it on their "anti-government" rhetoric.
In 2010, our partisan liberal media aren't waiting for the elections to arrive. An arrest of "Christian militia" activists in southern Michigan led Washington Post columnist (and former reporter) Eugene Robinson to proclaim implausibly on March 30: "The danger of political violence in this country comes overwhelmingly from one direction -- the right, not the left. The vitriolic, anti-government hate speech that is spewed on talk radio every day -- and, quite regularly, at Tea Party rallies -- is calibrated not to inform but to incite."
Robinson wrote this in the very same edition of the newspaper where on page A-8 -- not on page A-1, but A-8 -- the Post reported a Philadelphia man was charged with threatening to kill House Minority Leader Eric Cantor and his family. Norman Leboon posted a YouTube video in which he said Cantor was "pure evil" and "you and your children are Lucifer's abominations."
In an online chat later in the day, Robinson dismissed the threat: "A crazy, anti-Semitic wacko can do terrible things. That said, I don't think that's the same thing as heavily armed militia groups training for war against the state."
A few days before on NBC's "Meet the Press," Newsweek editor Jon Meacham denied reality by claiming there is no gap in political passion: "I would say it's a pretty close call." Liberals, after all, succeeded in ramrodding the bill through to passage, and conservatives only stood out because their passion was "raw, and tragically unfortunate. When John Lewis can't walk across Capitol Hill without being spit on and called the worst thing he can be called, a man who helped change America, then we're out of whack."
That was a pretty shoddy charge for such a prestigious journalist to make. First, John Lewis was not the man who claimed he was spit upon. That was Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, and he later told Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy that he felt a man angrily yelling at him didn't so much spit as "allowed saliva to hit my face." In other words -- and video confirms it -- this conscious spitting never happened.
Milloy should be better known as the ranter that doubly ruined Robinson's claim that today's leftists never incite. Here's how Milloy responded to the tea party protests on Capitol Hill: "I want to spit on them, take one of their 'Obama Plan White Slavery' signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads."
Robinson somehow missed that article in his own newspaper, too.
This absolute tunnel vision about which side is ferocious was almost comical on NBC. John McCain came on NBC's "Today" on March 25 and was assaulted by Ann Curry about the "incendiary" language of his old running mate, Sarah Palin. But when Barack Obama showed up five days later, Matt Lauer "balanced" it -- by talking about the ferocity of the Republicans. "The vitriol, the rhetoric, the sniping, the threats. How are you possibly going to continue with any kind of legislative agenda when your opponents have said to you, 'I'm not gonna cooperate with this president, with these Democrats, unless it's a matter of national security.' How do you move on?" This allowed Obama to joke that "no asteroid had hit the planet" since he signed his health bill passed. But Lauer never raised the Cantor death threats with Obama, and they didn't appear anywhere else on "Today."
This anti-"vitriol" stance is most comical for this network because MSNBC churns out vitriol and ferocity against conservatives and Republicans on a daily and nightly basis. Do Curry and Lauer never watch it?
All these people -- from Robinson and Meacham to Curry and Lauer -- are knowledgeable people who cannot deny that the left is deeply stocked with rabid bloggers, talk-radio hosts and cable-TV shouters. Their ability to pretend that these voices do not exist is quite an acting job.
How one-sided is their reporting? Imagine the media reaction if Rep. Steny Hoyer, the second most powerful Democrat in the House, were targeted for death by a tea partier. Eric Cantor is the No. 2 House Republican. When the arrest of his would-be killer was made, how much coverage did it receive? A brief mention on NBC on the evening of March 29, a brief mention on ABC on the morning of March 30, and CBS never touched it.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
When the Republicans shocked the liberal media elite by winning back Congress in 1994, they had been demonized for months. But it took the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995 for Bill Clinton and all of his "objective" media devotees to really pull the violence card and smear that mass murder all over Newt Gingrich and conservative Republicans, blaming it on their "anti-government" rhetoric.
In 2010, our partisan liberal media aren't waiting for the elections to arrive. An arrest of "Christian militia" activists in southern Michigan led Washington Post columnist (and former reporter) Eugene Robinson to proclaim implausibly on March 30: "The danger of political violence in this country comes overwhelmingly from one direction -- the right, not the left. The vitriolic, anti-government hate speech that is spewed on talk radio every day -- and, quite regularly, at Tea Party rallies -- is calibrated not to inform but to incite."
Robinson wrote this in the very same edition of the newspaper where on page A-8 -- not on page A-1, but A-8 -- the Post reported a Philadelphia man was charged with threatening to kill House Minority Leader Eric Cantor and his family. Norman Leboon posted a YouTube video in which he said Cantor was "pure evil" and "you and your children are Lucifer's abominations."
In an online chat later in the day, Robinson dismissed the threat: "A crazy, anti-Semitic wacko can do terrible things. That said, I don't think that's the same thing as heavily armed militia groups training for war against the state."
A few days before on NBC's "Meet the Press," Newsweek editor Jon Meacham denied reality by claiming there is no gap in political passion: "I would say it's a pretty close call." Liberals, after all, succeeded in ramrodding the bill through to passage, and conservatives only stood out because their passion was "raw, and tragically unfortunate. When John Lewis can't walk across Capitol Hill without being spit on and called the worst thing he can be called, a man who helped change America, then we're out of whack."
That was a pretty shoddy charge for such a prestigious journalist to make. First, John Lewis was not the man who claimed he was spit upon. That was Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, and he later told Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy that he felt a man angrily yelling at him didn't so much spit as "allowed saliva to hit my face." In other words -- and video confirms it -- this conscious spitting never happened.
Milloy should be better known as the ranter that doubly ruined Robinson's claim that today's leftists never incite. Here's how Milloy responded to the tea party protests on Capitol Hill: "I want to spit on them, take one of their 'Obama Plan White Slavery' signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads."
Robinson somehow missed that article in his own newspaper, too.
This absolute tunnel vision about which side is ferocious was almost comical on NBC. John McCain came on NBC's "Today" on March 25 and was assaulted by Ann Curry about the "incendiary" language of his old running mate, Sarah Palin. But when Barack Obama showed up five days later, Matt Lauer "balanced" it -- by talking about the ferocity of the Republicans. "The vitriol, the rhetoric, the sniping, the threats. How are you possibly going to continue with any kind of legislative agenda when your opponents have said to you, 'I'm not gonna cooperate with this president, with these Democrats, unless it's a matter of national security.' How do you move on?" This allowed Obama to joke that "no asteroid had hit the planet" since he signed his health bill passed. But Lauer never raised the Cantor death threats with Obama, and they didn't appear anywhere else on "Today."
This anti-"vitriol" stance is most comical for this network because MSNBC churns out vitriol and ferocity against conservatives and Republicans on a daily and nightly basis. Do Curry and Lauer never watch it?
All these people -- from Robinson and Meacham to Curry and Lauer -- are knowledgeable people who cannot deny that the left is deeply stocked with rabid bloggers, talk-radio hosts and cable-TV shouters. Their ability to pretend that these voices do not exist is quite an acting job.
How one-sided is their reporting? Imagine the media reaction if Rep. Steny Hoyer, the second most powerful Democrat in the House, were targeted for death by a tea partier. Eric Cantor is the No. 2 House Republican. When the arrest of his would-be killer was made, how much coverage did it receive? A brief mention on NBC on the evening of March 29, a brief mention on ABC on the morning of March 30, and CBS never touched it.
Border Murder Highlights Administration's Failure
Ken Blackwell
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Editors' Note: This column is co-authored by Ken Klukowski.
The tragic murder of a Good Samaritan rancher in Arizona has people yelling for an effective response to this outrage. Although most illegal immigrants are just human beings that are desperately seeking to provide for themselves and their families, this murder shines a spotlight on the Obama administration’s utter failure to secure our borders and uphold the rule of law.
A top story on March 30 is that Arizona rancher Robert Krentz was apparently gunned down by an illegal immigrant. Krentz’s family has maintained a ranch in southern Arizona since 1907, and he was known as a compassionate man who gave water and medical care to illegal immigrants crossing his land from Mexico.
Krentz was found shot to death, slumped over his vehicle on his ranch. Police dogs tracked the shooter to the Mexican border 15 miles away, indicating that the shooter was almost certainly someone in this country illegally from Mexico.
The murder of this good man casts in stark relief the outrageous failure of President Barack Obama and Secretary Janet “the system worked” Napolitano to deal with the enormous problem America faces as a result of illegal immigrants. Perhaps if they weren’t so busy taking over the economy (which the Constitution forbids them from doing), they’d actually secure the border (which the Constitution requires them to do).
This outrage occurred just as the Obama administration plans on pivoting to the immigration issue, at the perfect time to try to create a wedge issue to scare Hispanics into voting Democrat in 2010 in order to mitigate the massive losses in Congress that Democrats are sure to suffer after more than a year of ramming through a far-left agenda with extreme partisanship.
Immigration is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed. There are approximately 12 million foreigners in this country illegally, creating serious problems for a whole host of issues, from education, to healthcare, to employment, to law enforcement.
And this issue must be addressed in a humane and compassionate manner. Most illegal immigrants don’t want to break the law. They’re just desperate to find work to provide for themselves and their families, and they know that America is a land of opportunity. So they break our laws to get here and stay here because they’re focused on making a better life for their families.
In tackling immigration, we need to always remember that most of these people don’t want to harm Americans; they just want to help themselves and their loved ones. And they’re desperate to do so.
But the United States is a prosperous land of opportunity only because we live by the rule of law. We’re a country that respects property rights and business contracts, and that encourages free markets and private businesses (at least until President Obama took office).
We’re also a country where lawbreaking is punished, and where violent criminals are held to account. Foreigners who murder innocent Americans in cold blood should receive the ultimate punishment, as a clear statement that such crimes shall be met with swift and sure justice in the United States.
Ronald Reagan once said, “A nation that cannot control its own borders is not a nation.” The Constitution tasks the federal government with controlling our borders, to maintain an effective immigration policy and to protect the property, rights, and lives of American citizens.
The tragic murder of Robert Krentz shows just how abysmally the federal government has failed us all in this regard. Secretary Napolitano needs to admit that the system did not work. And President Obama had better drop the hyper-partisanship to address immigration in a way that meets Republican demands to uphold the rule of law and not reward illegal behavior.
This is not the time for far-left pandering or promises of amnesty in the galling hopes of political gain. Nor is this the time for cramming through a law instead of beginning a long, slow, deliberate conversation with the opposition party and the American people. This is the time for addressing a serious problem for this country, a problem that quite clearly includes a deadly threat to our citizens.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Editors' Note: This column is co-authored by Ken Klukowski.
The tragic murder of a Good Samaritan rancher in Arizona has people yelling for an effective response to this outrage. Although most illegal immigrants are just human beings that are desperately seeking to provide for themselves and their families, this murder shines a spotlight on the Obama administration’s utter failure to secure our borders and uphold the rule of law.
A top story on March 30 is that Arizona rancher Robert Krentz was apparently gunned down by an illegal immigrant. Krentz’s family has maintained a ranch in southern Arizona since 1907, and he was known as a compassionate man who gave water and medical care to illegal immigrants crossing his land from Mexico.
Krentz was found shot to death, slumped over his vehicle on his ranch. Police dogs tracked the shooter to the Mexican border 15 miles away, indicating that the shooter was almost certainly someone in this country illegally from Mexico.
The murder of this good man casts in stark relief the outrageous failure of President Barack Obama and Secretary Janet “the system worked” Napolitano to deal with the enormous problem America faces as a result of illegal immigrants. Perhaps if they weren’t so busy taking over the economy (which the Constitution forbids them from doing), they’d actually secure the border (which the Constitution requires them to do).
This outrage occurred just as the Obama administration plans on pivoting to the immigration issue, at the perfect time to try to create a wedge issue to scare Hispanics into voting Democrat in 2010 in order to mitigate the massive losses in Congress that Democrats are sure to suffer after more than a year of ramming through a far-left agenda with extreme partisanship.
Immigration is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed. There are approximately 12 million foreigners in this country illegally, creating serious problems for a whole host of issues, from education, to healthcare, to employment, to law enforcement.
And this issue must be addressed in a humane and compassionate manner. Most illegal immigrants don’t want to break the law. They’re just desperate to find work to provide for themselves and their families, and they know that America is a land of opportunity. So they break our laws to get here and stay here because they’re focused on making a better life for their families.
In tackling immigration, we need to always remember that most of these people don’t want to harm Americans; they just want to help themselves and their loved ones. And they’re desperate to do so.
But the United States is a prosperous land of opportunity only because we live by the rule of law. We’re a country that respects property rights and business contracts, and that encourages free markets and private businesses (at least until President Obama took office).
We’re also a country where lawbreaking is punished, and where violent criminals are held to account. Foreigners who murder innocent Americans in cold blood should receive the ultimate punishment, as a clear statement that such crimes shall be met with swift and sure justice in the United States.
Ronald Reagan once said, “A nation that cannot control its own borders is not a nation.” The Constitution tasks the federal government with controlling our borders, to maintain an effective immigration policy and to protect the property, rights, and lives of American citizens.
The tragic murder of Robert Krentz shows just how abysmally the federal government has failed us all in this regard. Secretary Napolitano needs to admit that the system did not work. And President Obama had better drop the hyper-partisanship to address immigration in a way that meets Republican demands to uphold the rule of law and not reward illegal behavior.
This is not the time for far-left pandering or promises of amnesty in the galling hopes of political gain. Nor is this the time for cramming through a law instead of beginning a long, slow, deliberate conversation with the opposition party and the American people. This is the time for addressing a serious problem for this country, a problem that quite clearly includes a deadly threat to our citizens.
Obama's Defining Lie
Terry Jeffrey
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
History will remember how often and adamantly President Barack Obama insisted that the socialized medicine law he signed last week would reduce the federal deficit. It will be his defining lie.
"This legislation will also lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government, reducing our deficit by over $1 trillion in the next two decades," Obama said when he signed the bill on March 23. "It is paid for; it is fiscally responsible."
Two days later, he repeated the claim at the University of Iowa. "Costs will come down for families and businesses and the federal government, reducing our deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next two decades," he said.
Americans wisely do not believe him. A Gallup poll released on Tuesday asked people whether the federal budget deficit would "get better, not change or get worse" as a result of Obamacare. Sixty-one percent said it would get worse, and 14 percent said it would not change.
An honest look at the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the total health care package backs the commonsense conclusion of the average American.
On March 19, two days before the House voted to enact the Senate health care bill and a companion reconciliation bill to make alterations in the Senate bill, the CBO sent a letter to Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, responding to his question about the combined budgetary impact of these two bills plus an associated bill to adjust the Medicare payment rates for doctors that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has vowed to enact.
The bill to adjust the Medicare payment rates for doctors is needed because, under current law, those rates are set to suddenly plunge by 21 percent in April. After that, they are set to decline by about 2 percent per year for the next decade.
These dramatic cuts are the result of a gimmick members of Congress wrote into earlier budgets: They mandated that doctors' fees suddenly drop by one-fifth as a way of making the deficit spending they were voting for seem less than it was. They always knew they would repeal the dramatic fee cuts before they actually hit. Like Obama's claim that the health care bill will reduce the deficit by $1 trillion, these phantom fee cuts were a lie.
So, what is the impact on the deficit when the Senate health care bill, the reconciliation bill to fix the Senate health care bill and the bill to fix the phantom reductions in doctors' fees are all considered together?
"You asked about the total budgetary impact of enacting the reconciliation proposal (the amendment to H.R. 4872), the Senate-passed health bill (H.R. 3590) and the Medicare Physicians Payment Reform Act of 2009 (H.R. 3961)," CBO said in its letter to Ryan. "CBO estimates that enacting all three pieces of legislation would add $59 billion to budget deficits over the 2010-2019 period."
Rather than cut the deficit by $1 trillion over two decades as Obama claims, the full health care package increases the deficit by $59 billion over one decade. The CBO only does budget estimates for 10-year periods.
There are other factors buried in the CBO's analysis that further debunk the president's claim that his plan will reduce the deficit. For example, the CBO discovered that the bill authorizes new discretionary spending that Congress will need to approve in future years to make sure the bureaucracies are in place to carry out the new plan. CBO estimates this will lead to "at least $50 billion" in new spending over 10 years that was not included in the health care bill itself.
By contrast, the CBO did include in its analysis of the health care bill $53 billion in new Social Security tax revenues it believed would come to the government when employers drop expensive health care plans that will be subject to a new federal tax and use some of the money saved on premiums to pay their employees higher salaries that will be subject to higher payroll taxes.
The problem with counting this $53 billion in Social Security tax revenue against expenditures in Obama's health care plan is that Social Security is already in deficit and faces a multitrillion dollar long-term shortfall.
Nor should Obama's socialized medicine plan be viewed in isolation from the rest of his budget. CBO says his fiscal 2011 budget proposal will increase the national debt by $9.8 trillion over the next 10 years. He is running a record $1.5 trillion deficit this year, and the smallest deficit he will ever run is $724 billion in 2014 -- the year his unconstitutional individual insurance mandate kicks in.
After that, the deficit starts an unbroken climb, surpassing $1 trillion again in 2018 and heading ever higher.
Just as Obama's claim that his socialized medicine plan will reduce the deficit by $1 trillion will be his defining lie, his legacy will be this: He bankrupted America.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
History will remember how often and adamantly President Barack Obama insisted that the socialized medicine law he signed last week would reduce the federal deficit. It will be his defining lie.
"This legislation will also lower costs for families and for businesses and for the federal government, reducing our deficit by over $1 trillion in the next two decades," Obama said when he signed the bill on March 23. "It is paid for; it is fiscally responsible."
Two days later, he repeated the claim at the University of Iowa. "Costs will come down for families and businesses and the federal government, reducing our deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next two decades," he said.
Americans wisely do not believe him. A Gallup poll released on Tuesday asked people whether the federal budget deficit would "get better, not change or get worse" as a result of Obamacare. Sixty-one percent said it would get worse, and 14 percent said it would not change.
An honest look at the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the total health care package backs the commonsense conclusion of the average American.
On March 19, two days before the House voted to enact the Senate health care bill and a companion reconciliation bill to make alterations in the Senate bill, the CBO sent a letter to Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, responding to his question about the combined budgetary impact of these two bills plus an associated bill to adjust the Medicare payment rates for doctors that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has vowed to enact.
The bill to adjust the Medicare payment rates for doctors is needed because, under current law, those rates are set to suddenly plunge by 21 percent in April. After that, they are set to decline by about 2 percent per year for the next decade.
These dramatic cuts are the result of a gimmick members of Congress wrote into earlier budgets: They mandated that doctors' fees suddenly drop by one-fifth as a way of making the deficit spending they were voting for seem less than it was. They always knew they would repeal the dramatic fee cuts before they actually hit. Like Obama's claim that the health care bill will reduce the deficit by $1 trillion, these phantom fee cuts were a lie.
So, what is the impact on the deficit when the Senate health care bill, the reconciliation bill to fix the Senate health care bill and the bill to fix the phantom reductions in doctors' fees are all considered together?
"You asked about the total budgetary impact of enacting the reconciliation proposal (the amendment to H.R. 4872), the Senate-passed health bill (H.R. 3590) and the Medicare Physicians Payment Reform Act of 2009 (H.R. 3961)," CBO said in its letter to Ryan. "CBO estimates that enacting all three pieces of legislation would add $59 billion to budget deficits over the 2010-2019 period."
Rather than cut the deficit by $1 trillion over two decades as Obama claims, the full health care package increases the deficit by $59 billion over one decade. The CBO only does budget estimates for 10-year periods.
There are other factors buried in the CBO's analysis that further debunk the president's claim that his plan will reduce the deficit. For example, the CBO discovered that the bill authorizes new discretionary spending that Congress will need to approve in future years to make sure the bureaucracies are in place to carry out the new plan. CBO estimates this will lead to "at least $50 billion" in new spending over 10 years that was not included in the health care bill itself.
By contrast, the CBO did include in its analysis of the health care bill $53 billion in new Social Security tax revenues it believed would come to the government when employers drop expensive health care plans that will be subject to a new federal tax and use some of the money saved on premiums to pay their employees higher salaries that will be subject to higher payroll taxes.
The problem with counting this $53 billion in Social Security tax revenue against expenditures in Obama's health care plan is that Social Security is already in deficit and faces a multitrillion dollar long-term shortfall.
Nor should Obama's socialized medicine plan be viewed in isolation from the rest of his budget. CBO says his fiscal 2011 budget proposal will increase the national debt by $9.8 trillion over the next 10 years. He is running a record $1.5 trillion deficit this year, and the smallest deficit he will ever run is $724 billion in 2014 -- the year his unconstitutional individual insurance mandate kicks in.
After that, the deficit starts an unbroken climb, surpassing $1 trillion again in 2018 and heading ever higher.
Just as Obama's claim that his socialized medicine plan will reduce the deficit by $1 trillion will be his defining lie, his legacy will be this: He bankrupted America.
Showdown in the States over Health Reform
Armstrong Williams
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Now that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has dispensed with colorful metaphors and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has removed her perma-smile, bureaucrats in Washington are busily preparing the necessary channels to begin communicating details of the massive bill to the States. And so a new chapter begins in this epic saga, but one President Obama and his team will not want to read.
As governors begin to sort through the murky details, they're quickly realizing this albatross is worse than originally feared. Faced with higher taxes for small businesses to support Medicare rates, ballooning Medicaid burdens, mandatory requirements for every denizen, not to mention the fear that many companies will simply jettison their own health plans in lieu of the promise of something better, the wages of this federal sin will only worsen. So much for the Democratic argument that once the bill becomes law, the American people will see the light and be healed!
Less than a week after penning his signature, the president is now threatened with lawsuits from more than a dozen states charged with implementing the new law. On Thursday, Georgia Republicans led by Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle called on the state's Attorney General Thurbert Baker, a Democrat, to do the right thing and sue the administration for imposing such a massive unfunded mandate on the Peach State.
"In addition to the questionable constitutionality of the bill, the unfunded mandates in the healthcare reform will cripple Georgia's economic recovery," said Mr. Cagle. "Unlike Washington, our state constitution requires us to balance the budget each year." The constitutionality of Health Care Reform revolves around the interpretation of the Tenth Amendment and the Commerce Clause. The Tenth Amendment reads, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
There is nothing in the constitution which gives the government the right to tell people what goods and services they should purchase. Proponents of Health Care Reform argue that the Commerce Clause conveys this right to the government. It states "[The Congress shall have power] to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States."
Without dismissing the complex legal arguments of the expansive Commerce Clause, the mandate on individuals to purchase insurance is clearly at odds with the Tenth Amendment. Never before has the U.S. government required individuals to purchase a product or service unless they were doing so to participate in a public privilege such as driving on a government road. Clearly the Tenth Amendment was enacted with intent of limiting what the government could force its citizens to do.
If the government can force its citizens to buy health insurance, can it next mandate Americans to purchase General Motors cars? Organic foods? American-made TV sets?
Without mandated insurance for every American, health care insurance reform collapses. The young, the healthy and the optimistic will choose not to pay the high premiums required by community ratings (as opposed to actuarial calculations). They will only purchase health care insurance when they become sick or transition into a higher risk classification. That will further increase premiums. Proponents of the federal measure, and several constitutional scholars, argue this small but vocal faction doesn't have a constitutional leg to stand on.
Mr. Baker indicated as much when he told the Associated Press that "This was not a very tough legal question."
Personally, I would take the constitutional issues seriously. I think the Supremacy and Commerce clauses of the Constitution and the Ninth Amendment are clearly in play. Both sides have a reasonable argument depending on whether the Supreme Court takes a strict or expansive interpretation of the Constitution.
More importantly, however, the actions of the states speak to a larger political dilemma for the Obama administration and any future initiatives it pursues. You can't keep jamming unwanted and unpopular national measures through Congress, hoping it'll get sorted out later. The White House is slated next to consider reauthorizing federal education programs; does it honestly believe states should sit this one out, let alone acquiesce, on that important 10th amendment prerogative?
There's an interesting subtext to the Georgia lieutenant governor's argument. In the Democrats' blind zeal to pass their leftist policies, they are by default writing checks they know they can't cash. That massive bout of irresponsibility doesn't just end with aimless numbers on a congressional budget page. Contrary to what the president and party Democrats believe, our nation's debt is "Not all on paper" nor are new programs easily paid for because "A billion dollars today is a mere rounding error!"
Every statewide elected official like Mr. Cagle, Republican and Democrat alike, woke up Monday morning with the stark realization that they now have to pay for the mess Congress has created. And I guarantee you every one of them began the thought process with similar words, "Unlike Washington, we have to balance our budgets -- what are we going to do?" One thing's clear the polarizing politics of nationalizing one-sixth of our country's economy won't easily dissipate. If the president isn't careful, he could alienate even Democratic allies at the state and local levels, all facing excruciatingly tight budget woes, and none too eager to swallow more problems in the name of party loyalty.
Many are beginning to wonder whether the passage of health care has signaled the opening of Pandora's box in a rapid move toward socialism and government control over their lives.
Will government eventually determine what books are read in schools? What you eat? Where you live? What car you drive? Who you marry? What you watch on TV?
Are we finally witnessing the null of American life and the end of the greatest economic and military might ever known to man? What a sad and pathetic way for our once-great nation to be remembered in the history books.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Now that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has dispensed with colorful metaphors and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has removed her perma-smile, bureaucrats in Washington are busily preparing the necessary channels to begin communicating details of the massive bill to the States. And so a new chapter begins in this epic saga, but one President Obama and his team will not want to read.
As governors begin to sort through the murky details, they're quickly realizing this albatross is worse than originally feared. Faced with higher taxes for small businesses to support Medicare rates, ballooning Medicaid burdens, mandatory requirements for every denizen, not to mention the fear that many companies will simply jettison their own health plans in lieu of the promise of something better, the wages of this federal sin will only worsen. So much for the Democratic argument that once the bill becomes law, the American people will see the light and be healed!
Less than a week after penning his signature, the president is now threatened with lawsuits from more than a dozen states charged with implementing the new law. On Thursday, Georgia Republicans led by Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle called on the state's Attorney General Thurbert Baker, a Democrat, to do the right thing and sue the administration for imposing such a massive unfunded mandate on the Peach State.
"In addition to the questionable constitutionality of the bill, the unfunded mandates in the healthcare reform will cripple Georgia's economic recovery," said Mr. Cagle. "Unlike Washington, our state constitution requires us to balance the budget each year." The constitutionality of Health Care Reform revolves around the interpretation of the Tenth Amendment and the Commerce Clause. The Tenth Amendment reads, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
There is nothing in the constitution which gives the government the right to tell people what goods and services they should purchase. Proponents of Health Care Reform argue that the Commerce Clause conveys this right to the government. It states "[The Congress shall have power] to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States."
Without dismissing the complex legal arguments of the expansive Commerce Clause, the mandate on individuals to purchase insurance is clearly at odds with the Tenth Amendment. Never before has the U.S. government required individuals to purchase a product or service unless they were doing so to participate in a public privilege such as driving on a government road. Clearly the Tenth Amendment was enacted with intent of limiting what the government could force its citizens to do.
If the government can force its citizens to buy health insurance, can it next mandate Americans to purchase General Motors cars? Organic foods? American-made TV sets?
Without mandated insurance for every American, health care insurance reform collapses. The young, the healthy and the optimistic will choose not to pay the high premiums required by community ratings (as opposed to actuarial calculations). They will only purchase health care insurance when they become sick or transition into a higher risk classification. That will further increase premiums. Proponents of the federal measure, and several constitutional scholars, argue this small but vocal faction doesn't have a constitutional leg to stand on.
Mr. Baker indicated as much when he told the Associated Press that "This was not a very tough legal question."
Personally, I would take the constitutional issues seriously. I think the Supremacy and Commerce clauses of the Constitution and the Ninth Amendment are clearly in play. Both sides have a reasonable argument depending on whether the Supreme Court takes a strict or expansive interpretation of the Constitution.
More importantly, however, the actions of the states speak to a larger political dilemma for the Obama administration and any future initiatives it pursues. You can't keep jamming unwanted and unpopular national measures through Congress, hoping it'll get sorted out later. The White House is slated next to consider reauthorizing federal education programs; does it honestly believe states should sit this one out, let alone acquiesce, on that important 10th amendment prerogative?
There's an interesting subtext to the Georgia lieutenant governor's argument. In the Democrats' blind zeal to pass their leftist policies, they are by default writing checks they know they can't cash. That massive bout of irresponsibility doesn't just end with aimless numbers on a congressional budget page. Contrary to what the president and party Democrats believe, our nation's debt is "Not all on paper" nor are new programs easily paid for because "A billion dollars today is a mere rounding error!"
Every statewide elected official like Mr. Cagle, Republican and Democrat alike, woke up Monday morning with the stark realization that they now have to pay for the mess Congress has created. And I guarantee you every one of them began the thought process with similar words, "Unlike Washington, we have to balance our budgets -- what are we going to do?" One thing's clear the polarizing politics of nationalizing one-sixth of our country's economy won't easily dissipate. If the president isn't careful, he could alienate even Democratic allies at the state and local levels, all facing excruciatingly tight budget woes, and none too eager to swallow more problems in the name of party loyalty.
Many are beginning to wonder whether the passage of health care has signaled the opening of Pandora's box in a rapid move toward socialism and government control over their lives.
Will government eventually determine what books are read in schools? What you eat? Where you live? What car you drive? Who you marry? What you watch on TV?
Are we finally witnessing the null of American life and the end of the greatest economic and military might ever known to man? What a sad and pathetic way for our once-great nation to be remembered in the history books.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Clowns to the Left, Jokers on the Right
Debra J. Saunders
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
When activists break the law protesting Republican policies, it is because lefties care so much. But when conservatives act likewise, it's because they are loudmouths and louts.
So TV tells me. During an interview last week with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., NBC's Ann Curry observed that former GOP running mate Sarah Palin, who was about to stump for McCain over the weekend, had told supporters, "Don't retreat, instead -- reload" and posted on her Facebook page "a map highlighting weak Democratic districts that conservatives should target with a crosshair symbol.
"Considering these threats, these concerns that we've been hearing about, regarding violence, do you think, do you now recommend that your party use less incendiary language and will you say that to her tomorrow?"
What could McCain do but laugh? The political lexicon long has used martial terms like "target" and "battleground." Even if that is true -- somehow she seemed unsure -- Curry continued, "These are very dangerous times. Is this the language that we should be hearing today?"
The short answer: Yes. CNN's Howard Kurtz got it right when he noted on "Reliable Sources" Sunday, "The conservative argument is that the media didn't seem quite so concerned with civility when protesters were calling George W. Bush a war criminal and a Nazi, and (using) that kind of overheated rhetoric as well."
Remember when an Iraqi threw his shoes at Bush -- and it was Bush's fault? Kurtz's three media guests disagreed. You see, they said, the right crossed the line. Poor babies; they can't even see that their line is the right.
Because Democrats see this story as a Victim Opportunity, there is more rage at vocal ObamaCare opponents than, say, students who have vandalized UC Berkeley property, including the chancellor's home, or toward violent anti-Bush protests.
Being a Victim is great for business, too. As Pelosi said Monday, the GOP "really helps me with my fundraising."
As the recipient of copious slurs and the occasional threat, I have more cause than most to resent the angry froth that bubbles forth when ideologues believe the rules of civility do not apply to them.
While most of the vacuous insults hurled my way come from the left, I get them from the right, too. Incivility is not confined to one party. Both sides know how to shout.
On Saturday, authorities arrested a Philadelphia man for threatening House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va. Apparently, Norman Leboon videotaped his threat to kill Cantor and his "cupcake evil wife" and children, and was so impressed with himself that he posted his threat on the Internet. A genius, that man. As Politico reported, Leboon also referred to the fact that Cantor is Jewish.
Does Leboon's behavior reflect on all liberals? Should the conservative media connect Leboon's threats to left-wing anti-Semitism? Will Curry ask Democrats to tone down their rhetoric lest they inflame more violence? Of course not.
Yet somehow, threats made against Democrats are supposed to reflect on the right. Folks like Curry have a story line, and they'll make the facts fit it. When the facts don't fit, there is no story.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
When activists break the law protesting Republican policies, it is because lefties care so much. But when conservatives act likewise, it's because they are loudmouths and louts.
So TV tells me. During an interview last week with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., NBC's Ann Curry observed that former GOP running mate Sarah Palin, who was about to stump for McCain over the weekend, had told supporters, "Don't retreat, instead -- reload" and posted on her Facebook page "a map highlighting weak Democratic districts that conservatives should target with a crosshair symbol.
"Considering these threats, these concerns that we've been hearing about, regarding violence, do you think, do you now recommend that your party use less incendiary language and will you say that to her tomorrow?"
What could McCain do but laugh? The political lexicon long has used martial terms like "target" and "battleground." Even if that is true -- somehow she seemed unsure -- Curry continued, "These are very dangerous times. Is this the language that we should be hearing today?"
The short answer: Yes. CNN's Howard Kurtz got it right when he noted on "Reliable Sources" Sunday, "The conservative argument is that the media didn't seem quite so concerned with civility when protesters were calling George W. Bush a war criminal and a Nazi, and (using) that kind of overheated rhetoric as well."
Remember when an Iraqi threw his shoes at Bush -- and it was Bush's fault? Kurtz's three media guests disagreed. You see, they said, the right crossed the line. Poor babies; they can't even see that their line is the right.
Because Democrats see this story as a Victim Opportunity, there is more rage at vocal ObamaCare opponents than, say, students who have vandalized UC Berkeley property, including the chancellor's home, or toward violent anti-Bush protests.
Being a Victim is great for business, too. As Pelosi said Monday, the GOP "really helps me with my fundraising."
As the recipient of copious slurs and the occasional threat, I have more cause than most to resent the angry froth that bubbles forth when ideologues believe the rules of civility do not apply to them.
While most of the vacuous insults hurled my way come from the left, I get them from the right, too. Incivility is not confined to one party. Both sides know how to shout.
On Saturday, authorities arrested a Philadelphia man for threatening House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va. Apparently, Norman Leboon videotaped his threat to kill Cantor and his "cupcake evil wife" and children, and was so impressed with himself that he posted his threat on the Internet. A genius, that man. As Politico reported, Leboon also referred to the fact that Cantor is Jewish.
Does Leboon's behavior reflect on all liberals? Should the conservative media connect Leboon's threats to left-wing anti-Semitism? Will Curry ask Democrats to tone down their rhetoric lest they inflame more violence? Of course not.
Yet somehow, threats made against Democrats are supposed to reflect on the right. Folks like Curry have a story line, and they'll make the facts fit it. When the facts don't fit, there is no story.
How Obamacare Hits Industry and Threatens Jobs
Byron York
Monday, March 29, 2010
The people at Zoll Medical Corp. saw a ray of hope in January when Scott Brown was elected senator from Massachusetts. Located in Chelmsford, 30 miles outside of Boston, Zoll is the nation's leading manufacturer of heart defibrillators, which save the lives of thousands of heart-attack victims each year. Back in January, as the Senate race was raging, both House and Senate Democrats wanted to impose a crippling new tax on the makers of medical devices, Zoll included, to help pay for Obamacare.
The total tax on the industry would be about $2 billion a year, or $20 billion over the next decade. Companies watched nervously as lawmakers pushed ahead, first the House and then the Senate. But then Brown was elected on the promise to be the crucial Republican vote to stop healthcare reform. For Zoll, things were looking up.
Not anymore. Democrats regrouped, pushed the legislation through Congress, and now the new tax is law. And that means Zoll and other medical-device makers could be headed for hard times.
"We believe that the tax will cost us somewhere between $5 million and $10 million a year," says Richard Packer, Zoll's chairman and CEO. "Our profit in 2009 was $9.5 million."
That would be a devastating blow. Zoll employs about 1,800 people. Roughly 1,600 of them are in the United States, and about 650 of those are in Massachusetts. Once the new tax kicks in, that could all change. "We can't run this company at a break-even or a negative rate," says Packer, "so we will be forced to look at alternatives."
The company's first option is to pass the increase onto customers such as hospitals and ambulance companies. That might or might not work, given that they are coming under increasing pressure to cut their own costs.
The next option is to cut research and development -- a short-term, money-saving move that will surely cost Zoll down the road. And a third option, says Packer, is to "look at trying to shift jobs to lower-cost places around the world." That would be bad news for Massachusetts and the United States.
It's still not clear precisely how the new system will work. The new healthcare bill, along with the "fixes" passed along with it, would impose a 2.3 percent excise tax on medical devices, going into effect in 2013. For Zoll, that's a little better than an earlier version of the tax, which would have gone into effect immediately. Now, at least, they have some time to prepare.
But no matter how it plays out, the makers of the devices that save our lives are going to take a major hit.
"It's a real concern for some of these companies, in that they probably are operating on pretty thin margins," says Brian Johnson, publisher of MassDevice, an independent business journal devoted to the medical-device industry. Johnson adds that even those companies that can pay the tax face perhaps even more serious problems because of recent government actions, apart from healthcare reform, making it harder and more costly to win Food and Drug Administration approval for new products. "As a whole, in terms of stricter regulation and the added tax, that's a pretty big bag they're carrying right now," Johnson says.
And then, of course, there is the continuing economic downturn. All in all, it's not a good time to levy a new and burdensome tax on a highly innovative American industry. And yet that is exactly what Obamacare does.
When I called Richard Packer at Zoll on the morning after the bill was passed, I asked how he was doing. "A total state of depression," he answered, with the kind of short, dry laugh that says it's not really funny. A lot of Americans are feeling that way now.
Monday, March 29, 2010
The people at Zoll Medical Corp. saw a ray of hope in January when Scott Brown was elected senator from Massachusetts. Located in Chelmsford, 30 miles outside of Boston, Zoll is the nation's leading manufacturer of heart defibrillators, which save the lives of thousands of heart-attack victims each year. Back in January, as the Senate race was raging, both House and Senate Democrats wanted to impose a crippling new tax on the makers of medical devices, Zoll included, to help pay for Obamacare.
The total tax on the industry would be about $2 billion a year, or $20 billion over the next decade. Companies watched nervously as lawmakers pushed ahead, first the House and then the Senate. But then Brown was elected on the promise to be the crucial Republican vote to stop healthcare reform. For Zoll, things were looking up.
Not anymore. Democrats regrouped, pushed the legislation through Congress, and now the new tax is law. And that means Zoll and other medical-device makers could be headed for hard times.
"We believe that the tax will cost us somewhere between $5 million and $10 million a year," says Richard Packer, Zoll's chairman and CEO. "Our profit in 2009 was $9.5 million."
That would be a devastating blow. Zoll employs about 1,800 people. Roughly 1,600 of them are in the United States, and about 650 of those are in Massachusetts. Once the new tax kicks in, that could all change. "We can't run this company at a break-even or a negative rate," says Packer, "so we will be forced to look at alternatives."
The company's first option is to pass the increase onto customers such as hospitals and ambulance companies. That might or might not work, given that they are coming under increasing pressure to cut their own costs.
The next option is to cut research and development -- a short-term, money-saving move that will surely cost Zoll down the road. And a third option, says Packer, is to "look at trying to shift jobs to lower-cost places around the world." That would be bad news for Massachusetts and the United States.
It's still not clear precisely how the new system will work. The new healthcare bill, along with the "fixes" passed along with it, would impose a 2.3 percent excise tax on medical devices, going into effect in 2013. For Zoll, that's a little better than an earlier version of the tax, which would have gone into effect immediately. Now, at least, they have some time to prepare.
But no matter how it plays out, the makers of the devices that save our lives are going to take a major hit.
"It's a real concern for some of these companies, in that they probably are operating on pretty thin margins," says Brian Johnson, publisher of MassDevice, an independent business journal devoted to the medical-device industry. Johnson adds that even those companies that can pay the tax face perhaps even more serious problems because of recent government actions, apart from healthcare reform, making it harder and more costly to win Food and Drug Administration approval for new products. "As a whole, in terms of stricter regulation and the added tax, that's a pretty big bag they're carrying right now," Johnson says.
And then, of course, there is the continuing economic downturn. All in all, it's not a good time to levy a new and burdensome tax on a highly innovative American industry. And yet that is exactly what Obamacare does.
When I called Richard Packer at Zoll on the morning after the bill was passed, I asked how he was doing. "A total state of depression," he answered, with the kind of short, dry laugh that says it's not really funny. A lot of Americans are feeling that way now.
Monday, March 29, 2010
More “Hateful” Propaganda from the Left
Laura Hollis
Monday, March 29, 2010
They've gotten what they wanted, and now it's time to castrate their opponents by smearing them all as terrorists. And "let us be clear," as the Obamessiah would state it; that is exactly how they intend to paint you.
How do they do it? By locating an idiot or two who gets hostile, a trumped-up account that cannot be proven, or even a story that has been disproven - no matter - and then spinning that out as the apotheosis of their political opposition. Just as was done from the Kremlin to Pravda, the word goes out that this is the meme to be disseminated, and Big Media will dutifully repeat the lies over and over again as if it is conventional wisdom or gospel truth.
Check out this nonsense:
From Mort Kondracke (who should know better):
"And [Democrat voters] may be further motivated by the ugliness demonstrated by Tea Party opponents of the measure — racist and homophobic slurs and threats of violence — and the condoning of misbehavior by some Republican leaders."
There is not a single Republican leader who has "condoned" violence. (I have no idea what Kondracke means by "misbehavior"). NOT ONE.
And Eugene Robinson. First he accuses Republicans of not quelling the angry sentiments: "One would expect responsible Republican leaders to do everything in their power to lower the temperature."
Then, after acknowledging that both Republican leaders and leaders of tea parties had in fact denounced any use of violence, he writes,
"But this strikes me, and probably will strike others, as disingenuous. The tea party movement is fueled by rhetoric that echoes the paranoid ravings of the most extreme right-wing nutcases. When tea party leaders talk about the threat of "socialism" and call for "a new revolution" and vow to "take our country back," they can say they are simply using vivid metaphors. But they cannot plausibly claim to be unaware that there are people -- perhaps on the fringe of the movement, but close enough -- who give every sign of taking these incendiary words literally. And does anyone doubt that the movement attracts the kind of people who take these words literally?"
Oh, I get it. Because some people out there don't understand metaphor, using it is inciting violence.
Newsflash, Mr. Robinson: "Socialism" isn't a "paranoid raving," it is literally what Obama is sending us hurtling towards. A lot of us don't like it. "Taking our country back" is not threatening violence. There is a way to do it, and it's called VOTING. Can voters create a "revolution" at the ballot box? Of course.
And then there's Paul Krugman, who seems to be living in an alternate universe. He has his own glee: "I admit it: I had fun watching right-wingers go wild as health reform finally became law."
But he's upset that everyone isn't as gleeful. This quote is priceless: "For if you care about America’s future, you can’t be happy as extremists take full control of one of our two great political parties."
I couldn’t agree more. Because a lot of us think the Marxist takeover of the Democrat Party is extreme. A lot of us think that skyrocketing debt and the nationalization of private industry are extreme. A lot of us think that forcing people to purchase something they don’t want on peril of imprisonment is extreme.
And then there is this choice excerpt: "To be sure, it was enjoyable watching Representative Devin Nunes, a Republican of California, warn that by passing health reform, Democrats 'will finally lay the cornerstone of their socialist utopia on the backs of the American people.' Gosh, that sounds uncomfortable."
What a pompous ass. As an economist, he should be well aware that the tax and debt burden borne by the American people will be more than uncomfortable, as it crushes innovation and economic growth, and results in the very rationing of health care that Obama has promised (and lied) would never happen.
But your discomfort doesn’t matter. Because you don’t matter. Want proof? Everything you need to know about the fundamental creed of these self-appointed visionaries is contained in this pearl of Krugmanite wisdom: "A side observation: one Republican talking point has been that Democrats had no right to pass a bill facing overwhelming public disapproval. As it happens, the Constitution says nothing about opinion polls trumping the right and duty of elected officials to make decisions based on what they perceive as the merits."
Doesn't that just warm your heart? We know better that you, you bunch of drooling neanderthals. You didn't elect us to represent you; you elected us to rule over you.
Finally, there is this staggering combination of complete denial and rhetorical sleight-of-hand: "All of this goes far beyond politics as usual. Democrats had a lot of harsh things to say about former President George W. Bush — but you’ll search in vain for anything comparably menacing, anything that even hinted at an appeal to violence, from members of Congress, let alone senior party officials."
Note what Krugman has done here. When complaining about conservatives' conduct, he points to the behavior of the odd loony and subsequently smears Republican political leadership with that dung. But then he tries to redeem Democrats by referring only to "members of Congress" or "senior party officials."
This is breathtaking deception. First, NO Republican member of Congress has used "menacing" language or "appealed to violence."
Second, Krugman had better check his history. (But then, Leftists are notorious for ignoring or rewriting history when it suits their purposes.) Democrat members of Congress used language that was more than "harsh," accusing Bush of lying, and calling for his impeachment. Does Krugman not think that Senator Byrd's comparison of Bush to Hermann Goering is not "menacing"? That characterizing Bush as Hitler, analogizing the Bush administration to the Third Reich, and comparing Americans who listen to Rush Limbaugh as "unthinking brownshirts that terrorized millions,” by groups as closely aligned with the Democrats as democrat.com and MoveOn.org is not inflammatory?
And if “silence” is the new “menacing,” where was the Democrats’ outrage at the film, “Death of a President,” which depicted the assassination of President Bush?
What about the media’s vulgar sexual slurs of Americans protesting at tea parties? And this was done not by some obscure Lefty blogger posting in his pjs, but by the so-called “mainstream” press!
Hypocrisy, thy name is “progressive.” Victor Davis Hanson at National Review got it right yesterday when he wrote, “Like it or not, between 2001 and 2008, the ‘progressive’ community redefined what is acceptable and not acceptable in political and public discourse about their elected officials. Slurs like ‘Nazi’ and ‘fascist’ and ‘I hate’ were no longer the old street-theater derangement of the 1960s, but were elevated to high-society novels, films, political journalism, and vein-bulging outbursts of our elites.”
So I don't have any sympathy for Democrats whose feelings are hurt by strong language, when they rammed through a health care bill that 54% of the population didn't want, using procedures intended to correct typos, manipulating the legislative process with threats and bribes because they couldn't even get the votes of their own party members! (Bart Stupak said his life was “a living hell”? This was before he voted for the health care bill. Who threatened an ethics investigation of Mr. Stupak? The tea partiers?)
But it must be said that at least in one respect, what Mr. Krugman said is absolutely true. Nothing in the Constitution requires the representatives elected by the people to do the will of the people. But we kind of expect them to, nevertheless. That's why we called their offices, and showed up at their townhalls by the thousands and protested in D.C. And when our elected representatives don’t do what we want, we vote them out.
Throughout history, there have been strong differences of opinion in the political arena. But this group is different. They show not merely disregard for Americans, but condescension and disdain. It is they who are a blot on the face of representative democracy, not those of us who are upset with them. Come November, they will be gone. And if Democrats choose to ignore that advance notice, or characterize it as “hate speech,” then so be it.
Conservatives and Republicans need to brush off this latest psy-ops salvo from the Left and call it out for what it is: a manipulative campaign of mass disinformation and political propaganda.
Monday, March 29, 2010
They've gotten what they wanted, and now it's time to castrate their opponents by smearing them all as terrorists. And "let us be clear," as the Obamessiah would state it; that is exactly how they intend to paint you.
How do they do it? By locating an idiot or two who gets hostile, a trumped-up account that cannot be proven, or even a story that has been disproven - no matter - and then spinning that out as the apotheosis of their political opposition. Just as was done from the Kremlin to Pravda, the word goes out that this is the meme to be disseminated, and Big Media will dutifully repeat the lies over and over again as if it is conventional wisdom or gospel truth.
Check out this nonsense:
From Mort Kondracke (who should know better):
"And [Democrat voters] may be further motivated by the ugliness demonstrated by Tea Party opponents of the measure — racist and homophobic slurs and threats of violence — and the condoning of misbehavior by some Republican leaders."
There is not a single Republican leader who has "condoned" violence. (I have no idea what Kondracke means by "misbehavior"). NOT ONE.
And Eugene Robinson. First he accuses Republicans of not quelling the angry sentiments: "One would expect responsible Republican leaders to do everything in their power to lower the temperature."
Then, after acknowledging that both Republican leaders and leaders of tea parties had in fact denounced any use of violence, he writes,
"But this strikes me, and probably will strike others, as disingenuous. The tea party movement is fueled by rhetoric that echoes the paranoid ravings of the most extreme right-wing nutcases. When tea party leaders talk about the threat of "socialism" and call for "a new revolution" and vow to "take our country back," they can say they are simply using vivid metaphors. But they cannot plausibly claim to be unaware that there are people -- perhaps on the fringe of the movement, but close enough -- who give every sign of taking these incendiary words literally. And does anyone doubt that the movement attracts the kind of people who take these words literally?"
Oh, I get it. Because some people out there don't understand metaphor, using it is inciting violence.
Newsflash, Mr. Robinson: "Socialism" isn't a "paranoid raving," it is literally what Obama is sending us hurtling towards. A lot of us don't like it. "Taking our country back" is not threatening violence. There is a way to do it, and it's called VOTING. Can voters create a "revolution" at the ballot box? Of course.
And then there's Paul Krugman, who seems to be living in an alternate universe. He has his own glee: "I admit it: I had fun watching right-wingers go wild as health reform finally became law."
But he's upset that everyone isn't as gleeful. This quote is priceless: "For if you care about America’s future, you can’t be happy as extremists take full control of one of our two great political parties."
I couldn’t agree more. Because a lot of us think the Marxist takeover of the Democrat Party is extreme. A lot of us think that skyrocketing debt and the nationalization of private industry are extreme. A lot of us think that forcing people to purchase something they don’t want on peril of imprisonment is extreme.
And then there is this choice excerpt: "To be sure, it was enjoyable watching Representative Devin Nunes, a Republican of California, warn that by passing health reform, Democrats 'will finally lay the cornerstone of their socialist utopia on the backs of the American people.' Gosh, that sounds uncomfortable."
What a pompous ass. As an economist, he should be well aware that the tax and debt burden borne by the American people will be more than uncomfortable, as it crushes innovation and economic growth, and results in the very rationing of health care that Obama has promised (and lied) would never happen.
But your discomfort doesn’t matter. Because you don’t matter. Want proof? Everything you need to know about the fundamental creed of these self-appointed visionaries is contained in this pearl of Krugmanite wisdom: "A side observation: one Republican talking point has been that Democrats had no right to pass a bill facing overwhelming public disapproval. As it happens, the Constitution says nothing about opinion polls trumping the right and duty of elected officials to make decisions based on what they perceive as the merits."
Doesn't that just warm your heart? We know better that you, you bunch of drooling neanderthals. You didn't elect us to represent you; you elected us to rule over you.
Finally, there is this staggering combination of complete denial and rhetorical sleight-of-hand: "All of this goes far beyond politics as usual. Democrats had a lot of harsh things to say about former President George W. Bush — but you’ll search in vain for anything comparably menacing, anything that even hinted at an appeal to violence, from members of Congress, let alone senior party officials."
Note what Krugman has done here. When complaining about conservatives' conduct, he points to the behavior of the odd loony and subsequently smears Republican political leadership with that dung. But then he tries to redeem Democrats by referring only to "members of Congress" or "senior party officials."
This is breathtaking deception. First, NO Republican member of Congress has used "menacing" language or "appealed to violence."
Second, Krugman had better check his history. (But then, Leftists are notorious for ignoring or rewriting history when it suits their purposes.) Democrat members of Congress used language that was more than "harsh," accusing Bush of lying, and calling for his impeachment. Does Krugman not think that Senator Byrd's comparison of Bush to Hermann Goering is not "menacing"? That characterizing Bush as Hitler, analogizing the Bush administration to the Third Reich, and comparing Americans who listen to Rush Limbaugh as "unthinking brownshirts that terrorized millions,” by groups as closely aligned with the Democrats as democrat.com and MoveOn.org is not inflammatory?
And if “silence” is the new “menacing,” where was the Democrats’ outrage at the film, “Death of a President,” which depicted the assassination of President Bush?
What about the media’s vulgar sexual slurs of Americans protesting at tea parties? And this was done not by some obscure Lefty blogger posting in his pjs, but by the so-called “mainstream” press!
Hypocrisy, thy name is “progressive.” Victor Davis Hanson at National Review got it right yesterday when he wrote, “Like it or not, between 2001 and 2008, the ‘progressive’ community redefined what is acceptable and not acceptable in political and public discourse about their elected officials. Slurs like ‘Nazi’ and ‘fascist’ and ‘I hate’ were no longer the old street-theater derangement of the 1960s, but were elevated to high-society novels, films, political journalism, and vein-bulging outbursts of our elites.”
So I don't have any sympathy for Democrats whose feelings are hurt by strong language, when they rammed through a health care bill that 54% of the population didn't want, using procedures intended to correct typos, manipulating the legislative process with threats and bribes because they couldn't even get the votes of their own party members! (Bart Stupak said his life was “a living hell”? This was before he voted for the health care bill. Who threatened an ethics investigation of Mr. Stupak? The tea partiers?)
But it must be said that at least in one respect, what Mr. Krugman said is absolutely true. Nothing in the Constitution requires the representatives elected by the people to do the will of the people. But we kind of expect them to, nevertheless. That's why we called their offices, and showed up at their townhalls by the thousands and protested in D.C. And when our elected representatives don’t do what we want, we vote them out.
Throughout history, there have been strong differences of opinion in the political arena. But this group is different. They show not merely disregard for Americans, but condescension and disdain. It is they who are a blot on the face of representative democracy, not those of us who are upset with them. Come November, they will be gone. And if Democrats choose to ignore that advance notice, or characterize it as “hate speech,” then so be it.
Conservatives and Republicans need to brush off this latest psy-ops salvo from the Left and call it out for what it is: a manipulative campaign of mass disinformation and political propaganda.
Obama Slights Our Friends, Kowtows to Our Enemies
Michael Barone
Monday, March 29, 2010
Barack Obama's decision to postpone his trip to Indonesia and Australia -- to a democracy with the world's largest Muslim population and to the only nation that has fought alongside us in all the wars of the last century -- is of a piece with his foreign policy generally: attack America's friends and kowtow to our enemies.
Examples run from Britain to Israel. Early in his administration, Obama returned a bust of Churchill that the British government had loaned the White House after 9/11. Then Obama gave Prime Minister Gordon Brown a set of DVDs that don't work on British machines and that Brown, who has impaired vision, would have trouble watching anyway.
More recently, Obama summoned Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, permitted no photographs, laid down non-negotiable demands and went off to dinner.
Some may attribute these slights to biases inherited from the men who supplied the titles of Obama's two books. Perhaps like Barack Obama Sr., he regards the British as evil colonialists. Or perhaps like his preacher for 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he regards Israel as an evil oppressor.
But the list of American friends Obama has slighted is long. It includes Poland and the Czech Republic (anti-missile program cancelled), Honduras (backing the constitutionally ousted president), Georgia (no support against Russia), and Colombia and South Korea (no action on pending free trade agreements).
In the meantime, Obama sends yearly greetings to (as he puts it) the Islamic Republic of Iran, exchanges friendly greetings with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, caves to Russian demands on arms control and sends a new ambassador to Syria.
What we're seeing, I think, is a president who shares a view, long held by some on the American left, that the real danger to America often comes from America's allies.
This attitude goes back to Gen. Joseph Stilwell's feud against China's Chiang Kai-shek in World War II. As Barbara Tuchman writes in her definitive biography, Stilwell thought Chiang was undercutting the U.S. by not fighting hard enough against the Japanese. He may have shared the view common among some "old China hands" -- diplomats and journalists like Edgar Snow -- that the Chinese communists were preferable.
After China fell to the communists, the old China hands got a fair share of the blame, and liberals who opposed military support of Chiang were vilified. This lesson was not forgotten.
In his first book on Vietnam, David Halberstam argued that the Diem brothers were not fighting hard enough against the communists. I remember him telling a group at the Harvard Crimson at the time how the U.S. needed to replace the Diems in order for liberals to avoid a political backlash like that against the old China hands.
The idea that allies can cause you trouble is not totally without merit. The Cold War caused us to embrace some unsavory folks. Democratic administrations supported military takeovers in Brazil in 1964 and Greece in 1967, just as a Republican administration supported one in Chile in 1973.
But liberals tend to forget the first two examples and remain fixated on the third. They see history as moving inevitably and beneficially to the left and bemoan American alliances with what they see as retrograde right-wing regimes.
They want us to look more favorably on those like Chavez and Fidel Castro, who claim they are helping the poor. Somehow it is seen as progressive to cuddle up to those who attack America and to scorn those who have shown their friendship and common values over many years.
And so Obama, the object of so much adulation in Western Europe, seems to have had only the coolest of relations with its leaders. The candidate who spoke in Berlin is now the president with no sympathy for the leaders of peoples freed when the wall fell. They are seen as impediments to his goal of propitiating Vladimir Putin's Russia, where Joseph Stalin is now an honored hero.
Obama's concessions to Russia have not prevented Russia from watering down sanctions against Iran. And Obama's display of scorning Netanyahu has not gotten the Palestinians to sit down face-to-face with the Israelis, as Netanyahu has promised to do.
Obama proclaims that through persistence he can make the leaders of Iran, North Korea, Russia, China and the Palestinians see things our way. The evidence so far is that they are making him do things their way -- and that our friends are wondering whether it pays to be on America's side.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Barack Obama's decision to postpone his trip to Indonesia and Australia -- to a democracy with the world's largest Muslim population and to the only nation that has fought alongside us in all the wars of the last century -- is of a piece with his foreign policy generally: attack America's friends and kowtow to our enemies.
Examples run from Britain to Israel. Early in his administration, Obama returned a bust of Churchill that the British government had loaned the White House after 9/11. Then Obama gave Prime Minister Gordon Brown a set of DVDs that don't work on British machines and that Brown, who has impaired vision, would have trouble watching anyway.
More recently, Obama summoned Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, permitted no photographs, laid down non-negotiable demands and went off to dinner.
Some may attribute these slights to biases inherited from the men who supplied the titles of Obama's two books. Perhaps like Barack Obama Sr., he regards the British as evil colonialists. Or perhaps like his preacher for 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he regards Israel as an evil oppressor.
But the list of American friends Obama has slighted is long. It includes Poland and the Czech Republic (anti-missile program cancelled), Honduras (backing the constitutionally ousted president), Georgia (no support against Russia), and Colombia and South Korea (no action on pending free trade agreements).
In the meantime, Obama sends yearly greetings to (as he puts it) the Islamic Republic of Iran, exchanges friendly greetings with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, caves to Russian demands on arms control and sends a new ambassador to Syria.
What we're seeing, I think, is a president who shares a view, long held by some on the American left, that the real danger to America often comes from America's allies.
This attitude goes back to Gen. Joseph Stilwell's feud against China's Chiang Kai-shek in World War II. As Barbara Tuchman writes in her definitive biography, Stilwell thought Chiang was undercutting the U.S. by not fighting hard enough against the Japanese. He may have shared the view common among some "old China hands" -- diplomats and journalists like Edgar Snow -- that the Chinese communists were preferable.
After China fell to the communists, the old China hands got a fair share of the blame, and liberals who opposed military support of Chiang were vilified. This lesson was not forgotten.
In his first book on Vietnam, David Halberstam argued that the Diem brothers were not fighting hard enough against the communists. I remember him telling a group at the Harvard Crimson at the time how the U.S. needed to replace the Diems in order for liberals to avoid a political backlash like that against the old China hands.
The idea that allies can cause you trouble is not totally without merit. The Cold War caused us to embrace some unsavory folks. Democratic administrations supported military takeovers in Brazil in 1964 and Greece in 1967, just as a Republican administration supported one in Chile in 1973.
But liberals tend to forget the first two examples and remain fixated on the third. They see history as moving inevitably and beneficially to the left and bemoan American alliances with what they see as retrograde right-wing regimes.
They want us to look more favorably on those like Chavez and Fidel Castro, who claim they are helping the poor. Somehow it is seen as progressive to cuddle up to those who attack America and to scorn those who have shown their friendship and common values over many years.
And so Obama, the object of so much adulation in Western Europe, seems to have had only the coolest of relations with its leaders. The candidate who spoke in Berlin is now the president with no sympathy for the leaders of peoples freed when the wall fell. They are seen as impediments to his goal of propitiating Vladimir Putin's Russia, where Joseph Stalin is now an honored hero.
Obama's concessions to Russia have not prevented Russia from watering down sanctions against Iran. And Obama's display of scorning Netanyahu has not gotten the Palestinians to sit down face-to-face with the Israelis, as Netanyahu has promised to do.
Obama proclaims that through persistence he can make the leaders of Iran, North Korea, Russia, China and the Palestinians see things our way. The evidence so far is that they are making him do things their way -- and that our friends are wondering whether it pays to be on America's side.
What You Get With Free Health Care
Janice Shaw Crouse
Monday, March 29, 2010
Most of the arguments supporting the health care reform bill just passed by the Democrats in Congress were myths. These myths were exposed as early as 2008 in a book by Sally C. Pipes, president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute. Her funny little book skewers everything we’ve heard via the ObamaCare demagoguery. Others, since then, have been equally devastating to the arguments used to ram through ObamaCare.
In fact, the so-called miracles sold by today’s health care hucksters are about as real as those sold by the shysters of old.
However, most Americans see through the political spin, and they are not buying the snake oil. Vision is much clearer outside the Beltway. Further, as John Adams once said, “Facts are stubborn things.” This week, four different polls (Quinnnipiac, Bloomberg, CNN and CBS) show the same result: less than 40 percent of Americans approve of the health care bill that the President just signed. Numerous states are concerned about the way ObamaCare infringes on individual rights. In addition, there are significant constitutional questions about requiring citizens to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty. Many state attorneys general are noting that ObamaCare is the first time Americans would be forced to buy a good or service.
All of that didn’t matter to those determined to see their utopian ideology enacted into legislation. Congressional Democrats, disregarding the will of the people and dressing their action in high-sounding rhetoric, rammed through Congress their unpopular and disastrous plan for “transforming” America into a Cuban, British, Canadian or French image.
One of the prime arguments used to sell ObamaCare was that it would reverse the financial crisis and save the country a gazillion dollars — with benefits beginning in its first year. Sadly, somebody’s arm got twisted to produce Congressional Budget Office (CBO) figures — nicely timed for the House vote — to supposedly back up the Democrats’ arguments. Nobody seemed to understand that the CBO figures were just estimates. Yet, as they say, the devil is in the details. The CBO details clearly indicate that having the government’s role expanded to provide universal coverage will significantly increase costs, as well as premiums and taxes. Worse, the CBO notes that most of the current costs of the U.S. world-class health care are from providing new, cutting-edge treatments and ever-expanding medical technologies. They add, “Given the central role of medical technology in cost growth, reducing or slowing spending over the long term would probably require decreasing the pace of adopting new treatments and procedures or limiting the breadth of their application.”
How’s that for dispelling the claims that quality will remain high, rationing won’t happen, and technology will continue to expand while costs go down? The real life record of government control is a long way from matching the soaring rhetoric that has dominated the media coverage of the health care debate. Further, in those countries where massive government intervention has replaced free market enterprise, the reality is far short of the utopian promises and the policies that have been spun out so recklessly and misleadingly. Price controls, inevitably, limit innovation. If that happens to medical research and technological advancement, the results will be disastrous.
Everybody wants affordable, accessible, and high-quality health care; there are proposals on the table for changes that would make significant improvements in those aspects of U.S. health care. Those proposals would unleash free market competition, improve quality, and lower costs for health care in the same way that it has done for other national industries and businesses. A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that American health care is very efficient, with only six percent of the premiums going to administrative costs and fully 86 percent covering the actual costs of care.
But cost control is not the purpose of ObamaCare. ObamaCare is all about redistributing wealth and putting a vast segment of the economy under bureaucratic control — some estimates of health care spending run as high as 20 percent of the U.S. economy by 2016.
Under ObamaCare, Uncle Sam becomes Santa Claus. But sooner or later, the bills come in and all those “gifts” turn out to be pretty expensive after all.
Right now, the U.S. has the “world’s best cancer survival rates” — Sally Pipes reported that Americans “have a better survival rate for 13 of the 16 most common cancers” — a fact most appreciated by those victims and their families who benefit from the expensive drugs that result from years-long research and clinical trials. Most Americans are personally satisfied with their own private health insurance coverage and appreciate the medical advances that save lives and provide miracle cures. Others, too, depend upon American health care. Tens of thousands of foreigners come to the United States for treatments not available or rationed in their home countries.
Most Americans are also aware and appreciate the fact that government-funded programs already provide for those Americans who are truly poor. Hospitals are not allowed to refuse treatment to those without insurance. Medicare, Medicaid, and other special programs for children, veterans, and specific population groups provide care for those with special needs. Nobody claims that these government-run programs provide the quality of care that those with private insurance enjoy. In fact, the false promise of something for nothing — the utopian scheme of everybody having top-quality health care coverage and it not costing anybody any more than they are currently paying — is the biggest myth of all. Sally Pipes quoted P.J. O’Rourke, “If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it’s free.”
Monday, March 29, 2010
Most of the arguments supporting the health care reform bill just passed by the Democrats in Congress were myths. These myths were exposed as early as 2008 in a book by Sally C. Pipes, president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute. Her funny little book skewers everything we’ve heard via the ObamaCare demagoguery. Others, since then, have been equally devastating to the arguments used to ram through ObamaCare.
In fact, the so-called miracles sold by today’s health care hucksters are about as real as those sold by the shysters of old.
However, most Americans see through the political spin, and they are not buying the snake oil. Vision is much clearer outside the Beltway. Further, as John Adams once said, “Facts are stubborn things.” This week, four different polls (Quinnnipiac, Bloomberg, CNN and CBS) show the same result: less than 40 percent of Americans approve of the health care bill that the President just signed. Numerous states are concerned about the way ObamaCare infringes on individual rights. In addition, there are significant constitutional questions about requiring citizens to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty. Many state attorneys general are noting that ObamaCare is the first time Americans would be forced to buy a good or service.
All of that didn’t matter to those determined to see their utopian ideology enacted into legislation. Congressional Democrats, disregarding the will of the people and dressing their action in high-sounding rhetoric, rammed through Congress their unpopular and disastrous plan for “transforming” America into a Cuban, British, Canadian or French image.
One of the prime arguments used to sell ObamaCare was that it would reverse the financial crisis and save the country a gazillion dollars — with benefits beginning in its first year. Sadly, somebody’s arm got twisted to produce Congressional Budget Office (CBO) figures — nicely timed for the House vote — to supposedly back up the Democrats’ arguments. Nobody seemed to understand that the CBO figures were just estimates. Yet, as they say, the devil is in the details. The CBO details clearly indicate that having the government’s role expanded to provide universal coverage will significantly increase costs, as well as premiums and taxes. Worse, the CBO notes that most of the current costs of the U.S. world-class health care are from providing new, cutting-edge treatments and ever-expanding medical technologies. They add, “Given the central role of medical technology in cost growth, reducing or slowing spending over the long term would probably require decreasing the pace of adopting new treatments and procedures or limiting the breadth of their application.”
How’s that for dispelling the claims that quality will remain high, rationing won’t happen, and technology will continue to expand while costs go down? The real life record of government control is a long way from matching the soaring rhetoric that has dominated the media coverage of the health care debate. Further, in those countries where massive government intervention has replaced free market enterprise, the reality is far short of the utopian promises and the policies that have been spun out so recklessly and misleadingly. Price controls, inevitably, limit innovation. If that happens to medical research and technological advancement, the results will be disastrous.
Everybody wants affordable, accessible, and high-quality health care; there are proposals on the table for changes that would make significant improvements in those aspects of U.S. health care. Those proposals would unleash free market competition, improve quality, and lower costs for health care in the same way that it has done for other national industries and businesses. A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that American health care is very efficient, with only six percent of the premiums going to administrative costs and fully 86 percent covering the actual costs of care.
But cost control is not the purpose of ObamaCare. ObamaCare is all about redistributing wealth and putting a vast segment of the economy under bureaucratic control — some estimates of health care spending run as high as 20 percent of the U.S. economy by 2016.
Under ObamaCare, Uncle Sam becomes Santa Claus. But sooner or later, the bills come in and all those “gifts” turn out to be pretty expensive after all.
Right now, the U.S. has the “world’s best cancer survival rates” — Sally Pipes reported that Americans “have a better survival rate for 13 of the 16 most common cancers” — a fact most appreciated by those victims and their families who benefit from the expensive drugs that result from years-long research and clinical trials. Most Americans are personally satisfied with their own private health insurance coverage and appreciate the medical advances that save lives and provide miracle cures. Others, too, depend upon American health care. Tens of thousands of foreigners come to the United States for treatments not available or rationed in their home countries.
Most Americans are also aware and appreciate the fact that government-funded programs already provide for those Americans who are truly poor. Hospitals are not allowed to refuse treatment to those without insurance. Medicare, Medicaid, and other special programs for children, veterans, and specific population groups provide care for those with special needs. Nobody claims that these government-run programs provide the quality of care that those with private insurance enjoy. In fact, the false promise of something for nothing — the utopian scheme of everybody having top-quality health care coverage and it not costing anybody any more than they are currently paying — is the biggest myth of all. Sally Pipes quoted P.J. O’Rourke, “If you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it’s free.”
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Don’t Give Up on Europe
It’s in decline — but worth saving.
Conrad Black
Thursday, March 18, 2010
As with so many other foreign-policy matters, there is room and reason for the United States to reassess its policy toward Europe. That policy was stable throughout the Cold War: support of anything that assisted the Western Europeans in being better Cold Warriors. The destruction of World War II and related conflicts such as the Spanish, Yugoslav, and Greek civil wars left all Europe from Castile to Leningrad and Stalingrad — except for Switzerland, parts of France, Scandinavia, and the British Isles, and pockets around Prague and Vienna — largely smashed to rubble and depopulated of young men. Tens of millions of people had been displaced. In such desolation and chaos, the advance of Western Europe’s Communist parties was a real danger. So was the proximity of Stalin’s mighty Red Army, only 100 miles from the Rhine, after he had violated every clause of the Yalta agreement, especially the guarantees of democracy and autonomy in Poland and “Liberated Europe.”
The United States developed the policy of containment: The West would not provoke or confront the USSR, but would assist threatened states against external intimidation and externally directed subversion. This became the Truman Doctrine, starting with Greece and Turkey, and was soon broadened to the Marshall Plan of economic recovery and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the most successful long-term alliance in history.
For 40 years, the United States was engaged in trying to impart courage to the Europeans. There were constant temptations to and from the leftist parties throughout Europe, particularly in Germany, France, and Italy (in the last two, the local Communist parties routinely polled over 20 percent of the vote, and waffly socialists another 10 or 15 percent, until the Eighties). These could always be easily distracted by Soviet pitches for “neutrality.” The Americans carried most of the defense commitment and steadily complained of uneven “burden-sharing.” The European reply was a specious improvisation that because Western Europe was closer to the Soviet bloc, it was at greater risk, so the Americans should compensate by providing most of the manpower and hardware. American strength, which much of Europe resented, enabled Europe to be weak and yet to remain free.
Many of the Europeans not only suspected the Americans of wishing to confine any conflict with the Soviet bloc to Europe, thus sparing America, but effectively proposed retention of the U.S. (and Canadian) guarantee of Western Europe, while edging far enough away from the Americans to make any Soviet-American dispute one that would be conducted directly between them, if need be, literally over the heads of the Europeans in the high altitudes of advanced weapons systems.
Only periodic bursts of exceptional European leadership and great dexterity in Washington kept the alliance functioning. In the 1948 Italian elections, Pope Pius XII’s announcement of the automatic excommunication of any Communist voter, coupled to President Truman’s statement that a Communist victory would cause the immediate end of all Marshall Plan assistance, probably saved the pro-Western De Gasperi government. In 1951 and 1952, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer may have scored the greatest feat of statesmanship of the entire Cold War when he declined Stalin’s offer of German reunification in exchange for Cold War neutrality, and carried German public opinion with him. The same gambit from the Kremlin 20 years later would probably have succeeded. And in the 1980s, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher uniquely supported the American retaliatory air attack on Libya, and led the deployment of intermediate nuclear missiles in Western Europe. When the Left clamored for a nuclear-free Europe, she expressed her preference for a “war-free Europe.”
Throughout this difficult period, the U.S. understandably favored anything that would make the Europeans more staunch allies, including the federal integration of Europe, and the adherence of Britain to it. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, especially, noted that many of the sponsors of a politically united Europe hoped that the traditional Great Powers of Western Europe would then stand on each others’ shoulders and resurrect some of their influence of a hundred years earlier, before World War I and the cataract of Europe’s grievous self-inflicted wounds that followed it, served up by the Nazi and Communist whelps of the Darkest Age of European political history.
The motivation of many of the Euro-federalists as the Cold War ended and the Soviet threat evaporated was essentially anti-American. West German chancellor Willy Brandt and foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, British prime minister Edward Heath, French foreign minister Michel Jobert, most of the German Social Democrats, much of the British Labour party and the anti-Thatcher Tories, Gaullists, the French and Italian Left, and poseurs such as Canada’s long-serving prime minister Pierre Trudeau were rather, and sometimes luridly, anti-American.
Most of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment, and especially the Democrats, including Jimmy Carter and the Clintons, simply didn’t notice much of it, and they and those who served them just kept repeating the virtues of a united Europe as if in a trance.
Now, Europe is hobbled by the invoice for decades of paying social-democratic Danegeld to the workers and small farmers who so often in their history have mutated into revolutionary mobs. Europe, America, and Japan are all groaning under the weight of decades of overconsumption, the unproductive delusions of the service economy, and, in most countries (but not the U.S.), the degeneration of the social safety net into an unaffordable hammock of rich entitlements gouged from those who have earned the money and paid out to those who have not, with patchy regard to merit. And as Europe’s birthrate has imploded and it has replaced its own unborn with frequently disaffected Muslims, a new argument for transatlantic solidarity arises from the sudden erosion of the West and its emulators, such as Japan.
It must rank as one of history’s great ironies that on the heels of the immense and relatively bloodless Western victory of the Cold War, and the emergence of the United States as the world’s only unrivaled superpower in history, the whole West, except for Canada and Australia, quickly mismanaged itself into an anthill of decay and confusion.
In most of Europe, fewer working-age people work shortening working years to support an ever-aging and less active population. Greece is the precursor of the problems of almost all of the West, though it is poorer and has been even more incompetently governed than most.
The debt-ridden floundering of the U.S. and the torpid dyspepsia of most of Europe should be addressed together. It may be that President Obama’s socialistic quixotry at home and apologetic diffidence abroad will make American leadership more palatable in Europe than it was during the Cold War, but no one should count on it. While the U.S. has been shaken by financial and other setbacks, its residual strength, compared to much of Europe, has, if anything, grown, precisely because of the relative absence in the U.S. of the socialist over-regimentation that Obama professed to lament in his first official visit to Europe.
Eurofederalism has come to a dead end in the tenebrous thicket of official Brussels. The glib Euro-conceit of just ten years ago has almost vanished. There is a huge opportunity to reemphasize Western solidarity, and reform NATO from its present slovenly confidence trick of the “coalition of the willing” (meaning the countries that think, from time to time, that the American security guarantee is worth the commitment of token forces to U.S.-led military interventions).
The advanced and aspirant democracies should reinvent themselves in dedication to victory in the third great era of the world’s democratization, following the glorious victories of World War II over Fascism and of the Cold War over Communism. We have not got through those implacable Manichaean ordeals to enter the Spenglerian decline of the West. To quote famous preceptors, “If not us, who? If not now, when?”
Conrad Black
Thursday, March 18, 2010
As with so many other foreign-policy matters, there is room and reason for the United States to reassess its policy toward Europe. That policy was stable throughout the Cold War: support of anything that assisted the Western Europeans in being better Cold Warriors. The destruction of World War II and related conflicts such as the Spanish, Yugoslav, and Greek civil wars left all Europe from Castile to Leningrad and Stalingrad — except for Switzerland, parts of France, Scandinavia, and the British Isles, and pockets around Prague and Vienna — largely smashed to rubble and depopulated of young men. Tens of millions of people had been displaced. In such desolation and chaos, the advance of Western Europe’s Communist parties was a real danger. So was the proximity of Stalin’s mighty Red Army, only 100 miles from the Rhine, after he had violated every clause of the Yalta agreement, especially the guarantees of democracy and autonomy in Poland and “Liberated Europe.”
The United States developed the policy of containment: The West would not provoke or confront the USSR, but would assist threatened states against external intimidation and externally directed subversion. This became the Truman Doctrine, starting with Greece and Turkey, and was soon broadened to the Marshall Plan of economic recovery and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the most successful long-term alliance in history.
For 40 years, the United States was engaged in trying to impart courage to the Europeans. There were constant temptations to and from the leftist parties throughout Europe, particularly in Germany, France, and Italy (in the last two, the local Communist parties routinely polled over 20 percent of the vote, and waffly socialists another 10 or 15 percent, until the Eighties). These could always be easily distracted by Soviet pitches for “neutrality.” The Americans carried most of the defense commitment and steadily complained of uneven “burden-sharing.” The European reply was a specious improvisation that because Western Europe was closer to the Soviet bloc, it was at greater risk, so the Americans should compensate by providing most of the manpower and hardware. American strength, which much of Europe resented, enabled Europe to be weak and yet to remain free.
Many of the Europeans not only suspected the Americans of wishing to confine any conflict with the Soviet bloc to Europe, thus sparing America, but effectively proposed retention of the U.S. (and Canadian) guarantee of Western Europe, while edging far enough away from the Americans to make any Soviet-American dispute one that would be conducted directly between them, if need be, literally over the heads of the Europeans in the high altitudes of advanced weapons systems.
Only periodic bursts of exceptional European leadership and great dexterity in Washington kept the alliance functioning. In the 1948 Italian elections, Pope Pius XII’s announcement of the automatic excommunication of any Communist voter, coupled to President Truman’s statement that a Communist victory would cause the immediate end of all Marshall Plan assistance, probably saved the pro-Western De Gasperi government. In 1951 and 1952, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer may have scored the greatest feat of statesmanship of the entire Cold War when he declined Stalin’s offer of German reunification in exchange for Cold War neutrality, and carried German public opinion with him. The same gambit from the Kremlin 20 years later would probably have succeeded. And in the 1980s, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher uniquely supported the American retaliatory air attack on Libya, and led the deployment of intermediate nuclear missiles in Western Europe. When the Left clamored for a nuclear-free Europe, she expressed her preference for a “war-free Europe.”
Throughout this difficult period, the U.S. understandably favored anything that would make the Europeans more staunch allies, including the federal integration of Europe, and the adherence of Britain to it. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, especially, noted that many of the sponsors of a politically united Europe hoped that the traditional Great Powers of Western Europe would then stand on each others’ shoulders and resurrect some of their influence of a hundred years earlier, before World War I and the cataract of Europe’s grievous self-inflicted wounds that followed it, served up by the Nazi and Communist whelps of the Darkest Age of European political history.
The motivation of many of the Euro-federalists as the Cold War ended and the Soviet threat evaporated was essentially anti-American. West German chancellor Willy Brandt and foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, British prime minister Edward Heath, French foreign minister Michel Jobert, most of the German Social Democrats, much of the British Labour party and the anti-Thatcher Tories, Gaullists, the French and Italian Left, and poseurs such as Canada’s long-serving prime minister Pierre Trudeau were rather, and sometimes luridly, anti-American.
Most of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment, and especially the Democrats, including Jimmy Carter and the Clintons, simply didn’t notice much of it, and they and those who served them just kept repeating the virtues of a united Europe as if in a trance.
Now, Europe is hobbled by the invoice for decades of paying social-democratic Danegeld to the workers and small farmers who so often in their history have mutated into revolutionary mobs. Europe, America, and Japan are all groaning under the weight of decades of overconsumption, the unproductive delusions of the service economy, and, in most countries (but not the U.S.), the degeneration of the social safety net into an unaffordable hammock of rich entitlements gouged from those who have earned the money and paid out to those who have not, with patchy regard to merit. And as Europe’s birthrate has imploded and it has replaced its own unborn with frequently disaffected Muslims, a new argument for transatlantic solidarity arises from the sudden erosion of the West and its emulators, such as Japan.
It must rank as one of history’s great ironies that on the heels of the immense and relatively bloodless Western victory of the Cold War, and the emergence of the United States as the world’s only unrivaled superpower in history, the whole West, except for Canada and Australia, quickly mismanaged itself into an anthill of decay and confusion.
In most of Europe, fewer working-age people work shortening working years to support an ever-aging and less active population. Greece is the precursor of the problems of almost all of the West, though it is poorer and has been even more incompetently governed than most.
The debt-ridden floundering of the U.S. and the torpid dyspepsia of most of Europe should be addressed together. It may be that President Obama’s socialistic quixotry at home and apologetic diffidence abroad will make American leadership more palatable in Europe than it was during the Cold War, but no one should count on it. While the U.S. has been shaken by financial and other setbacks, its residual strength, compared to much of Europe, has, if anything, grown, precisely because of the relative absence in the U.S. of the socialist over-regimentation that Obama professed to lament in his first official visit to Europe.
Eurofederalism has come to a dead end in the tenebrous thicket of official Brussels. The glib Euro-conceit of just ten years ago has almost vanished. There is a huge opportunity to reemphasize Western solidarity, and reform NATO from its present slovenly confidence trick of the “coalition of the willing” (meaning the countries that think, from time to time, that the American security guarantee is worth the commitment of token forces to U.S.-led military interventions).
The advanced and aspirant democracies should reinvent themselves in dedication to victory in the third great era of the world’s democratization, following the glorious victories of World War II over Fascism and of the Cold War over Communism. We have not got through those implacable Manichaean ordeals to enter the Spenglerian decline of the West. To quote famous preceptors, “If not us, who? If not now, when?”
Demonizing Everyday Americans
Ken Blackwell
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Ken Klukoswki contributed to this report.
There appears to be a concerted effort among the political Left and many mainstream media people to demonize and marginalize the expanding citizen-based movement known as the tea party movement. This effort flows from both a fear of what these tea parties represent and a contempt for everyday Americans. But those ordinary citizens are poised to be the ones laughing when it’s all over, when democracy takes its course.
There seems to be a consensus now among the liberal elite when it comes to the tea parties. Senior administration officials deride them, as do liberal congressional Democrats. These elitists characterize the tea partiers as extremists, some drawing analogies between these ordinary citizens and right-wing militias, fanatics, and religious zealots. Some members of Congress are even saying that these tea party people are racist, which is pretty much the worst label that can be slapped on you in modern politics.
And many leftist talking heads in the media parrot this message, with their own biting editorial, adding that some in the tea party crowd are dangerous. Some talking heads, including some Hollywood actors and others who don’t seem to have any credentials as policy analysts but are nonetheless given air time, are really playing up the racism angle, and even suggest that some tea party attendees may be domestic terrorists.
Try the decaf, people.
Agents of big government and their boosters in the mainstream media seem determined to throw cold water on this growing grassroots movement that is a reaction to the Obama administration’s power grab of the growth and expansion of this country’s central government.
There’s a great deal of diversity among tea party people. Some just want lower taxes, and some also want less regulation. Still others are pro-life voters or Christian conservatives that also want fiscal responsibility. Many others push for conservative judges, while still others hold up signs calling for a restoration of American sovereignty, or protecting America’s borders, or defeating cap and trade or card check.
But they all have two things in common: They all want smaller government, and oppose the trampling of the Constitution embodied in these efforts to radically expand the size and scope of government. And as part of that desire, they want this utterly-ludicrous spending binge to end before it bankrupts all of us.
There’s nothing extremist about that agenda, because common sense is never extreme.
Are there some people attending tea party rallies who are intemperate in their remarks? Sure. Whenever you get tens of thousands of regular folks together, you’ll always get a few who makes comments that they should reconsider. Even then, nothing we’ve seen is worse than the truly outrageous statements that we’ve heard from the Left in recent years about President Bush or Republicans.
Having been engaged in many gatherings of the tea party crowd, it’s offensive that many in the mainstream media are engaging in a systematic effort to marginalize American citizens who are simply trying to take a stand for individual liberty—a stand in opposition to big-government expansion. Also one of us speaking as an African-American (Blackwell), it’s especially insulting to suggest that these people’s opposition to President Obama is driven by racism.
America’s history of grassroots activism goes back to the founding of our republic. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people includes as a necessary element those same average, ordinary people being able to gather and speak out. This freedom to assemble was considered so essential to a free nation that our Founders put it in the First Amendment, right alongside the freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
Ironically, these rights are set side-by-side with the freedom of the press, as well. The leftists in the media would do well to remember that their liberty to be a free press comes from the same constitutional amendment as the tea party crowd’s liberty to gather together.
And our elected leaders would do well to remember that the First Amendment exists to protect average people from the government, not the other way around.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Ken Klukoswki contributed to this report.
There appears to be a concerted effort among the political Left and many mainstream media people to demonize and marginalize the expanding citizen-based movement known as the tea party movement. This effort flows from both a fear of what these tea parties represent and a contempt for everyday Americans. But those ordinary citizens are poised to be the ones laughing when it’s all over, when democracy takes its course.
There seems to be a consensus now among the liberal elite when it comes to the tea parties. Senior administration officials deride them, as do liberal congressional Democrats. These elitists characterize the tea partiers as extremists, some drawing analogies between these ordinary citizens and right-wing militias, fanatics, and religious zealots. Some members of Congress are even saying that these tea party people are racist, which is pretty much the worst label that can be slapped on you in modern politics.
And many leftist talking heads in the media parrot this message, with their own biting editorial, adding that some in the tea party crowd are dangerous. Some talking heads, including some Hollywood actors and others who don’t seem to have any credentials as policy analysts but are nonetheless given air time, are really playing up the racism angle, and even suggest that some tea party attendees may be domestic terrorists.
Try the decaf, people.
Agents of big government and their boosters in the mainstream media seem determined to throw cold water on this growing grassroots movement that is a reaction to the Obama administration’s power grab of the growth and expansion of this country’s central government.
There’s a great deal of diversity among tea party people. Some just want lower taxes, and some also want less regulation. Still others are pro-life voters or Christian conservatives that also want fiscal responsibility. Many others push for conservative judges, while still others hold up signs calling for a restoration of American sovereignty, or protecting America’s borders, or defeating cap and trade or card check.
But they all have two things in common: They all want smaller government, and oppose the trampling of the Constitution embodied in these efforts to radically expand the size and scope of government. And as part of that desire, they want this utterly-ludicrous spending binge to end before it bankrupts all of us.
There’s nothing extremist about that agenda, because common sense is never extreme.
Are there some people attending tea party rallies who are intemperate in their remarks? Sure. Whenever you get tens of thousands of regular folks together, you’ll always get a few who makes comments that they should reconsider. Even then, nothing we’ve seen is worse than the truly outrageous statements that we’ve heard from the Left in recent years about President Bush or Republicans.
Having been engaged in many gatherings of the tea party crowd, it’s offensive that many in the mainstream media are engaging in a systematic effort to marginalize American citizens who are simply trying to take a stand for individual liberty—a stand in opposition to big-government expansion. Also one of us speaking as an African-American (Blackwell), it’s especially insulting to suggest that these people’s opposition to President Obama is driven by racism.
America’s history of grassroots activism goes back to the founding of our republic. Government of the people, by the people, and for the people includes as a necessary element those same average, ordinary people being able to gather and speak out. This freedom to assemble was considered so essential to a free nation that our Founders put it in the First Amendment, right alongside the freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
Ironically, these rights are set side-by-side with the freedom of the press, as well. The leftists in the media would do well to remember that their liberty to be a free press comes from the same constitutional amendment as the tea party crowd’s liberty to gather together.
And our elected leaders would do well to remember that the First Amendment exists to protect average people from the government, not the other way around.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
‘Don’t Tread on Me’
The history of a symbol of rebellion.
Robert VerBruggen
Saturday, March 27, 2010
As the House health-care debate entered the homestretch on Sunday, GOP lawmakers interacted with the protesters who had gathered outside the Capitol. “There was a very, very large group of people, and many flags from our heritage were on display,” recalls Rep. Geoff Davis (R., Ky.).
Davis and fellow Republican representative Mary Fallin (Okla.) borrowed one of those flags — a yellow one bearing an image of a rattlesnake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me” — brought it upstairs, and hung it from the building’s balcony.
That flag has become a staple of tea-party rallies nationwide. Its appearance at the Capitol last weekend was only the latest of many times it has symbolized American resistance to government encroachments on individual liberty.
The sentiment behind the flag has roots among the borderland people called the Scotch-Irish, says historian David Hackett Fischer, a professor at Brandeis University and the author of Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas. “They lived for a thousand years under two governments that brought nothing but misery,” he says. “They were double-taxed, and abused in every kind of way. They hated government and hated taxation, and looked instead to themselves, their clans, and their families.”
In America, it was immigrants from this region and their children who introduced versions of the rattlesnake/“Don’t Tread on Me” flag in 1775, the year the Revolutionary War began. It appeared simultaneously among militia units from Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Virginia. One famous early appearance of this imagery occurred when the Second Continental Congress sent a group of Marines to help the Navy intercept and capture some British supply ships. The Marines carried drums that were painted yellow, with the words “Don’t Tread on Me” and the rattlesnake image.
The same year, Christopher Gadsden — who represented South Carolina in the Continental Congress — chose Esek Hopkins to be commander-in-chief of the Continental Navy. Gadsden presented Hopkins with a personal standard: a yellow rattlesnake flag, with the words “Don’t Tread on Me.” He also presented the flag to his home state’s legislature in Charleston. Today, the rattlesnake flag’s yellow iteration (other colors were also used) is commonly known as the Gadsden flag.
The design soon became a universal symbol of the Revolution; everyone from Minuteman militias to the New Continental Fleet used it. However, Betsy Ross’s Stars and Stripes was adopted as the official American flag in 1777.
Why choose a rattlesnake as a symbol of America? In December of 1775, writing under the pseudonym An American Guesser, Ben Franklin — whose famous “Join or Die” political cartoon had also used a snake to represent America — noted the Marines’ painted drums. He meditated on the features that set the rattlesnake off from other creatures. After noting that the rattlesnake is found only in America; that its lack of eyelids signifies eternal vigilance; that it never attacks, but it defends itself to the death; and that its fangs are concealed but lethal, he wrote:
And now, of course, the tea-party movement has taken it up. “There was never a meeting where we said, ‘This is our symbol,’” says Adam Brandon, press secretary for FreedomWorks, a libertarian group that functions as a service center for tea-party organizers. “But I remember talking to the early activists about imagery when this started rolling. You didn’t want a lot of country music and American flags necessarily, because that gave the idea that it was the Fourth of July and you were celebrating. This flag was patriotic, but it said that we’re kind of upset about something right now.” Brandon adds that the flag’s Revolutionary War roots fit with the tea-party idea.
When Republicans and tea-partiers use the flag, they are true to its meaning, Fischer says — but he is quick to point out that the sentiments behind the flag were not universal among early American revolutionaries. New Englanders saw liberty as a right to belong — a right to vote in town meetings, for instance. Quaker Pennsylvanians thought liberty entailed “the reciprocal rights of everyone,” while Virginians saw the concept in a way that was consistent with hierarchy; there was no contradiction between liberty for them and bondage for their slaves.
Nonetheless, the defiant, autonomy-focused “Don’t Tread on Me” strain of thought was an integral part of America’s Founding. And just as the revolutionaries cast off the oppressions of British rule, the tea-partiers hope to roll back the impositions of our ever-expanding federal government.
Robert VerBruggen
Saturday, March 27, 2010
As the House health-care debate entered the homestretch on Sunday, GOP lawmakers interacted with the protesters who had gathered outside the Capitol. “There was a very, very large group of people, and many flags from our heritage were on display,” recalls Rep. Geoff Davis (R., Ky.).
Davis and fellow Republican representative Mary Fallin (Okla.) borrowed one of those flags — a yellow one bearing an image of a rattlesnake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me” — brought it upstairs, and hung it from the building’s balcony.
That flag has become a staple of tea-party rallies nationwide. Its appearance at the Capitol last weekend was only the latest of many times it has symbolized American resistance to government encroachments on individual liberty.
The sentiment behind the flag has roots among the borderland people called the Scotch-Irish, says historian David Hackett Fischer, a professor at Brandeis University and the author of Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas. “They lived for a thousand years under two governments that brought nothing but misery,” he says. “They were double-taxed, and abused in every kind of way. They hated government and hated taxation, and looked instead to themselves, their clans, and their families.”
In America, it was immigrants from this region and their children who introduced versions of the rattlesnake/“Don’t Tread on Me” flag in 1775, the year the Revolutionary War began. It appeared simultaneously among militia units from Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Virginia. One famous early appearance of this imagery occurred when the Second Continental Congress sent a group of Marines to help the Navy intercept and capture some British supply ships. The Marines carried drums that were painted yellow, with the words “Don’t Tread on Me” and the rattlesnake image.
The same year, Christopher Gadsden — who represented South Carolina in the Continental Congress — chose Esek Hopkins to be commander-in-chief of the Continental Navy. Gadsden presented Hopkins with a personal standard: a yellow rattlesnake flag, with the words “Don’t Tread on Me.” He also presented the flag to his home state’s legislature in Charleston. Today, the rattlesnake flag’s yellow iteration (other colors were also used) is commonly known as the Gadsden flag.
The design soon became a universal symbol of the Revolution; everyone from Minuteman militias to the New Continental Fleet used it. However, Betsy Ross’s Stars and Stripes was adopted as the official American flag in 1777.
Why choose a rattlesnake as a symbol of America? In December of 1775, writing under the pseudonym An American Guesser, Ben Franklin — whose famous “Join or Die” political cartoon had also used a snake to represent America — noted the Marines’ painted drums. He meditated on the features that set the rattlesnake off from other creatures. After noting that the rattlesnake is found only in America; that its lack of eyelids signifies eternal vigilance; that it never attacks, but it defends itself to the death; and that its fangs are concealed but lethal, he wrote:
Was I wrong . . . in thinking this a strong picture of the temper and conduct of America? The poison of her teeth is the necessary means of digesting her food, and at the same time is certain destruction to her enemies. This may be understood to intimate that those things which are destructive to our enemies, may be to us not only harmless, but absolutely necessary to our existence. I confess I was wholly at a loss what to make of the rattles, ’till I went back and counted them and found them just thirteen, exactly the number of the Colonies united in America; and I recollected too that this was the only part of the Snake which increased in numbers.Even after the adoption of the Stars and Stripes, the Gadsden flag did not cease to play a role in American culture. The U.S. military’s various branches, especially the Navy, have used the flag, words, and rattlesnake for various purposes; the First Navy Jack, for example, is a direct descendant. The rock band Metallica featured the rattlesnake on an album cover. The Free State Project — a kooky effort to encourage libertarian-minded Americans to move to New Hampshire and turn the state into Galt’s Gulch — even created a version of the flag that substituted its mascot, a porcupine, for the rattlesnake.
And now, of course, the tea-party movement has taken it up. “There was never a meeting where we said, ‘This is our symbol,’” says Adam Brandon, press secretary for FreedomWorks, a libertarian group that functions as a service center for tea-party organizers. “But I remember talking to the early activists about imagery when this started rolling. You didn’t want a lot of country music and American flags necessarily, because that gave the idea that it was the Fourth of July and you were celebrating. This flag was patriotic, but it said that we’re kind of upset about something right now.” Brandon adds that the flag’s Revolutionary War roots fit with the tea-party idea.
When Republicans and tea-partiers use the flag, they are true to its meaning, Fischer says — but he is quick to point out that the sentiments behind the flag were not universal among early American revolutionaries. New Englanders saw liberty as a right to belong — a right to vote in town meetings, for instance. Quaker Pennsylvanians thought liberty entailed “the reciprocal rights of everyone,” while Virginians saw the concept in a way that was consistent with hierarchy; there was no contradiction between liberty for them and bondage for their slaves.
Nonetheless, the defiant, autonomy-focused “Don’t Tread on Me” strain of thought was an integral part of America’s Founding. And just as the revolutionaries cast off the oppressions of British rule, the tea-partiers hope to roll back the impositions of our ever-expanding federal government.
Obamacare Dystopia
The single component of “health” “care” “reform” neatly encompasses all the broader trends about where we’re headed.
Mark Steyn
Saturday, March 27, 2010
May I be boring? Or, if you’re a regular reader, more boring than usual? Bear with me. There’s some eye-glazing numbers and whatnot.
In 2003, Washington blessed a grateful citizenry with the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, it being generally agreed by all the experts that it was unfair to force seniors to choose between their monthly trip to Rite-Aid and Tony Danza in dinner theater. However, in order to discourage American businesses from immediately dumping all their drug plans for retirees, Congress gave them a modest tax break equivalent to 28 percent of the cost of the plan.
Fast forward to the dawn of the Obamacare utopia. In one of a bazillion little clauses in a 2,000-page bill your legislators didn’t bother reading (because, as Representative Conyers explained, he wouldn’t understand it even if he did), Congress voted to subject the 28 percent tax benefit to the regular, good, ol’, American-as-apple-pie corporate tax rate of 35 percent. For the purposes of comparison, Sweden’s corporate tax rate is 26.3 percent, and Ireland’s is 12.5 percent. But just because America already has the second-highest corporate tax in the OECD is no reason why we can’t keep going until it’s double Sweden’s and quadruple Ireland’s. I refer you to the decision last year by the donut chain Tim Hortons, a Delaware corporation, to reorganize itself as a Canadian corporation “in order to take advantage of Canadian tax rates.” Hold that thought: “In order to take advantage of Canadian tax rates” — a phrase hitherto unknown to American English outside the most fantastical futuristic science fiction.
Ask yourself this: If you impose a sudden 35 percent tax on something, are you likely to get as much of it? Go on, take a wild guess. On the day President Obama signed Obamacare into law, Verizon sent an e-mail to all its employees warning that the company’s costs “will increase in the short term.” And in the medium term? Well, U.S. corporations that are able to do so will get out of their prescription-drug plans and toss their retirees onto the Medicare pile. So far just three companies — Deere, Caterpillar, and Valero Energy — have calculated that the loss of the deduction will add a combined $265 million to their costs. There are an additional 3,500 businesses presently claiming the break. The cost to taxpayers of that 28 percent benefit is about $665 per person. The cost to taxpayers of equivalent Medicare coverage is about $1,200 per person. So we’re roughly doubling the cost of covering an estimated 5 million retirees.
Now admittedly the above scenario has not been, as they say, officially “scored” by the Congressional Budget Office, by comparison with whom Little Orphan Annie singing “The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow” sounds like Morrissey covering “Gloomy Sunday.” Incidentally, has the CBO ever run the numbers for projected savings if the entire CBO were laid off and replaced by a children’s magician with an assistant in spangled tights from whose cleavage he plucked entirely random numbers? Just a thought.
This single component of “health” “care” “reform” neatly encompasses all the broader trends about where we’re headed — not just in terms of increased costs (both to businesses and individual taxpayers) and worse care (for those retirees bounced from company plans into Medicare), but also in the remorseless governmentalization of American life and the disincentivization of the private sector. As we see, even the very modest attempts made by Congress to constrain the 2003 prescription-drug plan prove unable to prevent its expansion and metastasization. The one thing that can be said for certain is that, whatever claims are made for Obamacare, it will lead to more people depending on government for their health arrangements. Those 5 million retirees are only the advance guard. And, if you’re one of those optimistic souls whose confidence in the CBO is unbounded, let’s meet up in three years’ time and see who was correct — the bureaucrats passing out the federal happy juice, or the real businesses already making real business decisions about Obamacare.
Can we afford this? No. Even on the official numbers, we’re projected to add to the existing $8 trillion in debt another $12 trillion over the next decade. What could we do? Tax those big bad corporations a bit more? Medtronic has just announced that the new Obamacare taxes on its products could force it to lay off a thousand workers. What do those guys do? Well, they develop products such as the recently approved pacemaker that’s safe for MRI scans or the InterStim bladder-control device. So that’s a thousand fewer people who’ll be working on new stuff. Well, so what? The public won’t miss what they never knew they had. So again the effect is one of disincentivization — in this case, of innovation.
If existing tax structures can’t cover the costs, what can we do? Start a new tax! The VATman cometh. VAT is Euro-speak for “value-added tax.” Americans often carelessly assume it’s merely a sales tax, but in fact it’s far more cumbersome than that, being levied at each stage “value” is added to a product or service. The consumer can’t claim back the VAT, but intermediate businesses in the production chain can. So self-employed individuals with relatively modest incomes wind up both charging VAT to their clients (25 percent in Scandinavia) and then claiming back the VAT they spent on the stamp and stationary they used to mail out the invoice. This is yet another imposition on businesses, taking time away from wealth creation and reallocating it to government paperwork. If the Democrats hold Congress this fall, I would figure on VAT sooner rather than later.
All of the above is pretty much a safe bet. What about the imponderables? Even Obama hasn’t yet asked the CBO to cost out, say, what happens to the price of oil when the Straits of Hormuz are under a de facto Iranian nuclear umbrella — as they will be soon, because the former global hyperpower, which now gets mad over a few hundred housing units in Jerusalem, is blasé and insouciant about the wilder shores of the mullahs’ dreams. Or suppose, as seems to be happening, the Sino-Iranian alliance were to result in a reorientation of global oil relationships, or the Russo-Iranian friendship bloomed to such a degree that, between Moscow’s control of Europe’s gas supply and Teheran’s new role as Middle Eastern superpower, the economy of the entire developed world becomes dependent on an alliance profoundly hostile to it.
Which is to say that right now the future lies somewhere between the certainty of decline and the probability of catastrophe. What can stop it? Not a lot. But now that your “pro-life” Democratic congressman has sold out, you might want to quit calling Washington and try your state capital. If the Commerce Clause can legitimize the “individual mandate,” then there is no republic, not in any meaningful sense. If you don’t like the sound of that, maybe it’s time for a constitutional convention.
Mark Steyn
Saturday, March 27, 2010
May I be boring? Or, if you’re a regular reader, more boring than usual? Bear with me. There’s some eye-glazing numbers and whatnot.
In 2003, Washington blessed a grateful citizenry with the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, it being generally agreed by all the experts that it was unfair to force seniors to choose between their monthly trip to Rite-Aid and Tony Danza in dinner theater. However, in order to discourage American businesses from immediately dumping all their drug plans for retirees, Congress gave them a modest tax break equivalent to 28 percent of the cost of the plan.
Fast forward to the dawn of the Obamacare utopia. In one of a bazillion little clauses in a 2,000-page bill your legislators didn’t bother reading (because, as Representative Conyers explained, he wouldn’t understand it even if he did), Congress voted to subject the 28 percent tax benefit to the regular, good, ol’, American-as-apple-pie corporate tax rate of 35 percent. For the purposes of comparison, Sweden’s corporate tax rate is 26.3 percent, and Ireland’s is 12.5 percent. But just because America already has the second-highest corporate tax in the OECD is no reason why we can’t keep going until it’s double Sweden’s and quadruple Ireland’s. I refer you to the decision last year by the donut chain Tim Hortons, a Delaware corporation, to reorganize itself as a Canadian corporation “in order to take advantage of Canadian tax rates.” Hold that thought: “In order to take advantage of Canadian tax rates” — a phrase hitherto unknown to American English outside the most fantastical futuristic science fiction.
Ask yourself this: If you impose a sudden 35 percent tax on something, are you likely to get as much of it? Go on, take a wild guess. On the day President Obama signed Obamacare into law, Verizon sent an e-mail to all its employees warning that the company’s costs “will increase in the short term.” And in the medium term? Well, U.S. corporations that are able to do so will get out of their prescription-drug plans and toss their retirees onto the Medicare pile. So far just three companies — Deere, Caterpillar, and Valero Energy — have calculated that the loss of the deduction will add a combined $265 million to their costs. There are an additional 3,500 businesses presently claiming the break. The cost to taxpayers of that 28 percent benefit is about $665 per person. The cost to taxpayers of equivalent Medicare coverage is about $1,200 per person. So we’re roughly doubling the cost of covering an estimated 5 million retirees.
Now admittedly the above scenario has not been, as they say, officially “scored” by the Congressional Budget Office, by comparison with whom Little Orphan Annie singing “The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow” sounds like Morrissey covering “Gloomy Sunday.” Incidentally, has the CBO ever run the numbers for projected savings if the entire CBO were laid off and replaced by a children’s magician with an assistant in spangled tights from whose cleavage he plucked entirely random numbers? Just a thought.
This single component of “health” “care” “reform” neatly encompasses all the broader trends about where we’re headed — not just in terms of increased costs (both to businesses and individual taxpayers) and worse care (for those retirees bounced from company plans into Medicare), but also in the remorseless governmentalization of American life and the disincentivization of the private sector. As we see, even the very modest attempts made by Congress to constrain the 2003 prescription-drug plan prove unable to prevent its expansion and metastasization. The one thing that can be said for certain is that, whatever claims are made for Obamacare, it will lead to more people depending on government for their health arrangements. Those 5 million retirees are only the advance guard. And, if you’re one of those optimistic souls whose confidence in the CBO is unbounded, let’s meet up in three years’ time and see who was correct — the bureaucrats passing out the federal happy juice, or the real businesses already making real business decisions about Obamacare.
Can we afford this? No. Even on the official numbers, we’re projected to add to the existing $8 trillion in debt another $12 trillion over the next decade. What could we do? Tax those big bad corporations a bit more? Medtronic has just announced that the new Obamacare taxes on its products could force it to lay off a thousand workers. What do those guys do? Well, they develop products such as the recently approved pacemaker that’s safe for MRI scans or the InterStim bladder-control device. So that’s a thousand fewer people who’ll be working on new stuff. Well, so what? The public won’t miss what they never knew they had. So again the effect is one of disincentivization — in this case, of innovation.
If existing tax structures can’t cover the costs, what can we do? Start a new tax! The VATman cometh. VAT is Euro-speak for “value-added tax.” Americans often carelessly assume it’s merely a sales tax, but in fact it’s far more cumbersome than that, being levied at each stage “value” is added to a product or service. The consumer can’t claim back the VAT, but intermediate businesses in the production chain can. So self-employed individuals with relatively modest incomes wind up both charging VAT to their clients (25 percent in Scandinavia) and then claiming back the VAT they spent on the stamp and stationary they used to mail out the invoice. This is yet another imposition on businesses, taking time away from wealth creation and reallocating it to government paperwork. If the Democrats hold Congress this fall, I would figure on VAT sooner rather than later.
All of the above is pretty much a safe bet. What about the imponderables? Even Obama hasn’t yet asked the CBO to cost out, say, what happens to the price of oil when the Straits of Hormuz are under a de facto Iranian nuclear umbrella — as they will be soon, because the former global hyperpower, which now gets mad over a few hundred housing units in Jerusalem, is blasé and insouciant about the wilder shores of the mullahs’ dreams. Or suppose, as seems to be happening, the Sino-Iranian alliance were to result in a reorientation of global oil relationships, or the Russo-Iranian friendship bloomed to such a degree that, between Moscow’s control of Europe’s gas supply and Teheran’s new role as Middle Eastern superpower, the economy of the entire developed world becomes dependent on an alliance profoundly hostile to it.
Which is to say that right now the future lies somewhere between the certainty of decline and the probability of catastrophe. What can stop it? Not a lot. But now that your “pro-life” Democratic congressman has sold out, you might want to quit calling Washington and try your state capital. If the Commerce Clause can legitimize the “individual mandate,” then there is no republic, not in any meaningful sense. If you don’t like the sound of that, maybe it’s time for a constitutional convention.
Friday, March 26, 2010
The Definition of "Freakout"
Jonah Goldberg
Friday, March 26, 2010
During the 2004 Democratic convention I was on a train heading to Boston's Fleet Center. While straining to contain my excitement over the prospect of hearing presidential nominee John Kerry's soaring oratory (and seeing vice presidential candidate John Edwards' hair), I was distracted by a woman standing in front of me. She was part of a big group of very excited Democrats, convinced that their man was going to lift the dark, evil cloud that hung over George Bush's America like the shadow of Sauron over Mordor. It was, of course, not to be. It turned out that the Human Toothache and the Silky Pony were not what the American people were looking for in 2004.
Anyway, back to that woman. Her demeanor and appearance suggested that the used bookstore/macrobiotic-aromatherapy café she worked for had given her as much time off as she needed to attend the convention and save the country. And she came prepared. Adorning what appeared to be her Eastern European soldier's topcoat, she had a giant button. It read: "I do not consent to any search."
I gathered this was a reference to the Patriot Act, a piece of legislation that consumed the minds of the American left, the Democratic Party and, perhaps most of all, America's librarians to an extent no rational person could explain -- then or now.
The Patriot Act, considerably weaker than similar laws in Europe, allowed the FBI to ask a judge for a warrant to seek third-party business records and search suspected terrorists' homes without notifying them right away. (The alternative is to tip off the next Mohammed Atta prematurely.)
Leading left-wing civil libertarians went crazy. The ACLU proclaimed that "the FBI could spy on a person because they don't like the books she reads, or because they don't like the websites she visits. They could spy on her because she wrote a letter to the editor that criticized government policy." Howard Dean insisted that Attorney General John Ashcroft "is no patriot. He's a direct descendant of Joseph McCarthy." David Cole wrote of the Patriot Act in The Nation that the law "resurrects the philosophy of McCarthyism, simply substituting 'terrorist' for 'communist.'"
My favorite response came from Jan O'Rourke, a Pennsylvania librarian who destroyed the records of all library visitors so she could prevent the G-men from finding out who borrowed "Catcher in the Rye" or surfed the Web for adoptable kittens.
Why do I bring all of this up? It's not just to point out how demented, partisan and dishonest so much of this nonsense was. But I will note that President Obama and the Democratic Congress extended the major provisions of the Patriot Act for yet another year last month, and while the ACLU worked the fax machines, it'd be a stretch to say that any of the usual suspects made much of a fuss about that.
No, the real point of this trip down memory lane is to put the conservative reaction to the health-care bill in some context. Patriot Act hysteria consumed American politics for years, even though the bill was reasonable and the number of those affected by it comparatively miniscule. No libraries were searched. Terrorists were caught. Inconveniences and mistakes surely transpired, but not on some grand scale. American privacy endured.
Now consider what the left-wing magazine Salon calls the conservative "freakout" over the health-care legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by Obama. Unlike the Patriot Act, which passed with overwhelming, almost unanimous, bipartisan support, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 was passed narrowly, against the public's wishes and in the face of bipartisan opposition. It will cost trillions of dollars we do not have. It gives the government greater say in the most intimate areas of your life, far more private than your library record. It is based on dubious constitutional assumptions.
Lots of liberals opposed the Patriot Act on slippery-slope grounds, but it's worth noting that very few conservatives said the Patriot Act was just a "first step" or a "down payment" toward an even more aggressive police state, while many hoped it would be a temporary measure. Lots of liberals insist health-care reform merely begins the process of pushing for full governmentalization of health care.
And yet the woman on that train, and those like her, were treated by the mainstream press as not merely sane and serious, but as the conscience of the nation. Those of us justifiably freaking out about this far more massive and far more outrageous expansion of the government into our lives are treated like crackpots.
Better to be a called a crackpot than be one, I say.
Friday, March 26, 2010
During the 2004 Democratic convention I was on a train heading to Boston's Fleet Center. While straining to contain my excitement over the prospect of hearing presidential nominee John Kerry's soaring oratory (and seeing vice presidential candidate John Edwards' hair), I was distracted by a woman standing in front of me. She was part of a big group of very excited Democrats, convinced that their man was going to lift the dark, evil cloud that hung over George Bush's America like the shadow of Sauron over Mordor. It was, of course, not to be. It turned out that the Human Toothache and the Silky Pony were not what the American people were looking for in 2004.
Anyway, back to that woman. Her demeanor and appearance suggested that the used bookstore/macrobiotic-aromatherapy café she worked for had given her as much time off as she needed to attend the convention and save the country. And she came prepared. Adorning what appeared to be her Eastern European soldier's topcoat, she had a giant button. It read: "I do not consent to any search."
I gathered this was a reference to the Patriot Act, a piece of legislation that consumed the minds of the American left, the Democratic Party and, perhaps most of all, America's librarians to an extent no rational person could explain -- then or now.
The Patriot Act, considerably weaker than similar laws in Europe, allowed the FBI to ask a judge for a warrant to seek third-party business records and search suspected terrorists' homes without notifying them right away. (The alternative is to tip off the next Mohammed Atta prematurely.)
Leading left-wing civil libertarians went crazy. The ACLU proclaimed that "the FBI could spy on a person because they don't like the books she reads, or because they don't like the websites she visits. They could spy on her because she wrote a letter to the editor that criticized government policy." Howard Dean insisted that Attorney General John Ashcroft "is no patriot. He's a direct descendant of Joseph McCarthy." David Cole wrote of the Patriot Act in The Nation that the law "resurrects the philosophy of McCarthyism, simply substituting 'terrorist' for 'communist.'"
My favorite response came from Jan O'Rourke, a Pennsylvania librarian who destroyed the records of all library visitors so she could prevent the G-men from finding out who borrowed "Catcher in the Rye" or surfed the Web for adoptable kittens.
Why do I bring all of this up? It's not just to point out how demented, partisan and dishonest so much of this nonsense was. But I will note that President Obama and the Democratic Congress extended the major provisions of the Patriot Act for yet another year last month, and while the ACLU worked the fax machines, it'd be a stretch to say that any of the usual suspects made much of a fuss about that.
No, the real point of this trip down memory lane is to put the conservative reaction to the health-care bill in some context. Patriot Act hysteria consumed American politics for years, even though the bill was reasonable and the number of those affected by it comparatively miniscule. No libraries were searched. Terrorists were caught. Inconveniences and mistakes surely transpired, but not on some grand scale. American privacy endured.
Now consider what the left-wing magazine Salon calls the conservative "freakout" over the health-care legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by Obama. Unlike the Patriot Act, which passed with overwhelming, almost unanimous, bipartisan support, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 was passed narrowly, against the public's wishes and in the face of bipartisan opposition. It will cost trillions of dollars we do not have. It gives the government greater say in the most intimate areas of your life, far more private than your library record. It is based on dubious constitutional assumptions.
Lots of liberals opposed the Patriot Act on slippery-slope grounds, but it's worth noting that very few conservatives said the Patriot Act was just a "first step" or a "down payment" toward an even more aggressive police state, while many hoped it would be a temporary measure. Lots of liberals insist health-care reform merely begins the process of pushing for full governmentalization of health care.
And yet the woman on that train, and those like her, were treated by the mainstream press as not merely sane and serious, but as the conscience of the nation. Those of us justifiably freaking out about this far more massive and far more outrageous expansion of the government into our lives are treated like crackpots.
Better to be a called a crackpot than be one, I say.
How the Left Fakes the Hate: A Primer
Michelle Malkin
Friday, March 26, 2010
If you can't stand the heat, manufacture a hate-crime epidemic.
After years of covering racial hoaxes on college campuses and victim sob stories in the public arena, I've encountered countless opportunists who live by that demented mindset. At best, the fakers are desperately seeking 15 minutes of infamy. At worst, their aim is the criminalization of political dissent.
Upon decimating the deliberative process to hand President Obama a health care "reform" victory, unpopular Beltway Democrats and their media water-carriers now claim there's a Tea Party epidemic of racism, harassment and violence against them.
On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a tepid, obligatory statement against smearing all conservatives as national security threats. But her lieutenants had already emptied their tar buckets. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Chris Van Hollen accused Republican leaders of "stoking the flames." Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn accused the GOP of "aiding and abetting" what he called "terrorism."
Yet, the claims that Tea Party activists shouted "nigger" at black House Democrats remain uncorroborated. The coffin reportedly left outside Missouri Democratic Rep. Russ Carnahan's home was used in a prayer vigil by pro-life activists in St. Louis protesting the phony Demcare abortion-funding ban in Obama's deal-cutting executive order. Videotape of a supposed intentional spitting incident targeting Missouri Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver at the Capitol shows no such thing. Cleaver himself backed off the claim a few days later. He described his heckler to The Washington Post in more passive terms as "the man who allowed his saliva to hit my face." Slovenliness equals terrorism!
The FBI is now investigating the most serious allegation -- that Tea Party activists in Virginia are somehow responsible for a cut gas line at the home of Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello's brother. But instead of waiting for the outcome of that probe, liberal pundits have enshrined the claim as conclusive evidence of the Tea Party reign of terror.
Need more reasons to treat the latest Democratic hysteria with a grain of salt the size of their gargantuan health care bill? Remember:
-- In November 2009, Kentucky census worker Bill Sparkman was found dead in a secluded rural cemetery with the word "Fed" scrawled on his chest and a rope around his neck. The Atlantic Monthly, Huffington Post and liberal media hosts stampeded over themselves to blame Fox News, conservative blogs, Republicans and right-wing radio. Federal, state and local authorities discovered that Sparkman had killed himself and deliberately concocted a hate-crime hoax as part of an insurance scam to benefit his surviving son.
-- In mid-October 2008, news outlets from Scranton, Pa., to ABC News to the Associated Press and MSNBC reported that someone at a Sarah Palin rally shouted "kill him" when Obama's name was mentioned. In fact, the Secret Service (which was at the event in full force) couldn't find a single person to corroborate the story -- other than the local reporter for the Scranton Times-Tribune who made an international incident out of the claim. Agent Bill Slavoski "said he was in the audience, along with an undisclosed number of additional secret service agents and other law enforcement officers, and not one heard the comment," the paper reported in a red-faced follow-up. Maybe the shouter is hiding with Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman's real killer.
-- In late October 2008, a gaggle of liberal blogs spread the rumor that a Republican supporter of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's had shouted that Obama was "a nigger" during a campaign rally in Iowa. Video and firsthand accounts showed that the protester did not shout "he's a nigger," but "he's a redistributor." A lefty activist at the "progressive" Daily Kos blog confirmed the truth -- but to this day, the crisis-manufacturing smear stands uncorrected and unretracted across the Internet.
-- In September 2009, supporters of Colorado Democratic Rep. John Salazar falsely accused a town hall protester of hurling a death threat at the congressman. Liberal blogs again disseminated the angry Tea Party mob narrative. A week later, the local press quietly reported that Grand Junction police had investigated the incident -- and determined the claim was "unfounded." A police spokeswoman revealed that "(p)eople who witnessed the interaction between the man who made the complaint and the suspect confirmed they never heard any direct threats made regarding Congressman Salazar." Witnesses included a Grand Junction cop "in close proximity when the interaction took place."
-- In late August 2009, as lawmakers faced citizen revolts at health care town halls nationwide, the Colorado Democratic Party decried a vandalism attack at its Denver headquarters. A hammer-wielding thug smashed 11 windows and caused $11,000 in property damage. The perpetrator, Maurice Schwenkler, turned out to be a far-left nutball/transgender activist/single-payer anarchist who had worked for an SEIU-tied 527 group and canvassed for a Democratic candidate. Nevertheless, Colorado Democratic Party Chair Pat Waak continued to blame "people opposed to health care" for the attack.
Then, as now, being a Democratic Party official means never having to say you're sorry for smearing conservative dissent.
Friday, March 26, 2010
If you can't stand the heat, manufacture a hate-crime epidemic.
After years of covering racial hoaxes on college campuses and victim sob stories in the public arena, I've encountered countless opportunists who live by that demented mindset. At best, the fakers are desperately seeking 15 minutes of infamy. At worst, their aim is the criminalization of political dissent.
Upon decimating the deliberative process to hand President Obama a health care "reform" victory, unpopular Beltway Democrats and their media water-carriers now claim there's a Tea Party epidemic of racism, harassment and violence against them.
On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a tepid, obligatory statement against smearing all conservatives as national security threats. But her lieutenants had already emptied their tar buckets. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Chris Van Hollen accused Republican leaders of "stoking the flames." Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn accused the GOP of "aiding and abetting" what he called "terrorism."
Yet, the claims that Tea Party activists shouted "nigger" at black House Democrats remain uncorroborated. The coffin reportedly left outside Missouri Democratic Rep. Russ Carnahan's home was used in a prayer vigil by pro-life activists in St. Louis protesting the phony Demcare abortion-funding ban in Obama's deal-cutting executive order. Videotape of a supposed intentional spitting incident targeting Missouri Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver at the Capitol shows no such thing. Cleaver himself backed off the claim a few days later. He described his heckler to The Washington Post in more passive terms as "the man who allowed his saliva to hit my face." Slovenliness equals terrorism!
The FBI is now investigating the most serious allegation -- that Tea Party activists in Virginia are somehow responsible for a cut gas line at the home of Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello's brother. But instead of waiting for the outcome of that probe, liberal pundits have enshrined the claim as conclusive evidence of the Tea Party reign of terror.
Need more reasons to treat the latest Democratic hysteria with a grain of salt the size of their gargantuan health care bill? Remember:
-- In November 2009, Kentucky census worker Bill Sparkman was found dead in a secluded rural cemetery with the word "Fed" scrawled on his chest and a rope around his neck. The Atlantic Monthly, Huffington Post and liberal media hosts stampeded over themselves to blame Fox News, conservative blogs, Republicans and right-wing radio. Federal, state and local authorities discovered that Sparkman had killed himself and deliberately concocted a hate-crime hoax as part of an insurance scam to benefit his surviving son.
-- In mid-October 2008, news outlets from Scranton, Pa., to ABC News to the Associated Press and MSNBC reported that someone at a Sarah Palin rally shouted "kill him" when Obama's name was mentioned. In fact, the Secret Service (which was at the event in full force) couldn't find a single person to corroborate the story -- other than the local reporter for the Scranton Times-Tribune who made an international incident out of the claim. Agent Bill Slavoski "said he was in the audience, along with an undisclosed number of additional secret service agents and other law enforcement officers, and not one heard the comment," the paper reported in a red-faced follow-up. Maybe the shouter is hiding with Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman's real killer.
-- In late October 2008, a gaggle of liberal blogs spread the rumor that a Republican supporter of vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's had shouted that Obama was "a nigger" during a campaign rally in Iowa. Video and firsthand accounts showed that the protester did not shout "he's a nigger," but "he's a redistributor." A lefty activist at the "progressive" Daily Kos blog confirmed the truth -- but to this day, the crisis-manufacturing smear stands uncorrected and unretracted across the Internet.
-- In September 2009, supporters of Colorado Democratic Rep. John Salazar falsely accused a town hall protester of hurling a death threat at the congressman. Liberal blogs again disseminated the angry Tea Party mob narrative. A week later, the local press quietly reported that Grand Junction police had investigated the incident -- and determined the claim was "unfounded." A police spokeswoman revealed that "(p)eople who witnessed the interaction between the man who made the complaint and the suspect confirmed they never heard any direct threats made regarding Congressman Salazar." Witnesses included a Grand Junction cop "in close proximity when the interaction took place."
-- In late August 2009, as lawmakers faced citizen revolts at health care town halls nationwide, the Colorado Democratic Party decried a vandalism attack at its Denver headquarters. A hammer-wielding thug smashed 11 windows and caused $11,000 in property damage. The perpetrator, Maurice Schwenkler, turned out to be a far-left nutball/transgender activist/single-payer anarchist who had worked for an SEIU-tied 527 group and canvassed for a Democratic candidate. Nevertheless, Colorado Democratic Party Chair Pat Waak continued to blame "people opposed to health care" for the attack.
Then, as now, being a Democratic Party official means never having to say you're sorry for smearing conservative dissent.
A Sudden Turn Against Israel
Diana West
Thursday, March 25, 2010
It's mind-boggling how quickly the Jerusalem housing project realigned the stars over Israel to shine down on a new, official vision of the Jewish state as a drag on our interests in the world -- endangering the lives of our troops.
That was the message Vice President Biden delivered in Israel this month: "What you're doing here undermines the security of our troops ..." according to Israeli media. The White House denied it.
That was the feeling the president conveyed in treating visiting Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu like an international leper this week (no pictures, no press, no statements, no nothing).
And very sensationally, that was the narrative CENTCOM Commander Gen. David Petraeus put in writing to the U.S. Senate (sending hero-worshipping conservatives into denial) as noted in last week's column. Disregarding the impetus of 14 centuries of Muslims' doctrinally driven aggression on non-Muslims, Petraeus advanced a line that echoed the Arab League's: namely, that "Arab anger over the Palestinian question" drives violence throughout the CENTCOM region, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan, and enhances the powers of Iran and al-Qaida.
One prominent conservative commentator who strongly supported the Bush-Petraeus policy in Iraq expressed his shock to me in an e-mail: "I would think that Jewish leaders would be appalled by Petraeus' statement ('The Jews are protecting their property with the blood from the bodies of our dead young men!!!') It is about 95 percent the way to the 'blood libel' that, I hate to admit, Christians used in the Middle Ages against the Jewish people."
And it energized the Israel bashers, from Stephen Walt, who quoted Petraeus in a Washington Post op-ed, to Robert Malley, erstwhile Middle East adviser to candidate Obama -- let go for his contact with Hamas, who bluntly underscored the same line at a conference: "Israeli actions are threatening U.S. actions and military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza launched about a dozen terror rockets into Israel, drawing zero international comment. Next, Great Britain took the extreme measure of expelling an Israeli diplomat over British passport forgeries used in the alleged Mossad assassination of a Hamas terrorist. Is the international noose around Israel drawing tighter or is the "peace process" just intensifying? When executing terrorists and building apartment houses violates "peace," and launching rockets is part of the "process," it's impossible to tell the difference.
Obviously, there is more to this than apartment houses. In his book "The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism," Andrew Bostom explains the doctrinal basis not just of Islamic antisemitism -- an eternal driver of the jihad on Israel -- but also of the concept that there exists a kind of eternal right of return of Muslims to any former Muslim conquest. "All of historical Palestine," he writes, "whose pre-Islamic inhabitants, Jews, Samaritans and Christians were conquered by jihad in the fourth decade of the seventh century, is considered 'fay territory.'" In other words, having once been conquered by Islam, such land is considered by Muslims to be "a permanent part of the Dar al Islam, where Islamic law must forever prevail." According to this thinking, Israel, governed by "usurper" infidel Jews who are no longer a subjugated dhimmi people, "must be destroyed in a collective jihad by the entire Muslim community."
Hard to ignore such a potent source of aggrieved aggression. But we do, and to the point of denying its very existence. And then what? Oskar Freysinger of the Swiss People's Party, famous for leading the campaign to ban minaret construction in Switzerland, when explaining why his party, known for its anti-Islamization policies, had always supported Israel, once told me: "We are well aware that if Israel disappears, we lose a vanguard. They (the Israelis) are fighting our fight, in fact. As long as the Muslims are concentrated on Israel, it's not so hard for us. But as soon as Israel will have disappeared, they will come to get the other part" -- namely, Europe.
What Freysinger sees better than most (including Israelis) is the apocalyptic dimension to global jihad, regardless of the "peace process" and other camouflage. Not only are we witnessing what could be the final stages of jihad on Israel; the United States is now openly supporting the wrong side.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
It's mind-boggling how quickly the Jerusalem housing project realigned the stars over Israel to shine down on a new, official vision of the Jewish state as a drag on our interests in the world -- endangering the lives of our troops.
That was the message Vice President Biden delivered in Israel this month: "What you're doing here undermines the security of our troops ..." according to Israeli media. The White House denied it.
That was the feeling the president conveyed in treating visiting Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu like an international leper this week (no pictures, no press, no statements, no nothing).
And very sensationally, that was the narrative CENTCOM Commander Gen. David Petraeus put in writing to the U.S. Senate (sending hero-worshipping conservatives into denial) as noted in last week's column. Disregarding the impetus of 14 centuries of Muslims' doctrinally driven aggression on non-Muslims, Petraeus advanced a line that echoed the Arab League's: namely, that "Arab anger over the Palestinian question" drives violence throughout the CENTCOM region, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan, and enhances the powers of Iran and al-Qaida.
One prominent conservative commentator who strongly supported the Bush-Petraeus policy in Iraq expressed his shock to me in an e-mail: "I would think that Jewish leaders would be appalled by Petraeus' statement ('The Jews are protecting their property with the blood from the bodies of our dead young men!!!') It is about 95 percent the way to the 'blood libel' that, I hate to admit, Christians used in the Middle Ages against the Jewish people."
And it energized the Israel bashers, from Stephen Walt, who quoted Petraeus in a Washington Post op-ed, to Robert Malley, erstwhile Middle East adviser to candidate Obama -- let go for his contact with Hamas, who bluntly underscored the same line at a conference: "Israeli actions are threatening U.S. actions and military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza launched about a dozen terror rockets into Israel, drawing zero international comment. Next, Great Britain took the extreme measure of expelling an Israeli diplomat over British passport forgeries used in the alleged Mossad assassination of a Hamas terrorist. Is the international noose around Israel drawing tighter or is the "peace process" just intensifying? When executing terrorists and building apartment houses violates "peace," and launching rockets is part of the "process," it's impossible to tell the difference.
Obviously, there is more to this than apartment houses. In his book "The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism," Andrew Bostom explains the doctrinal basis not just of Islamic antisemitism -- an eternal driver of the jihad on Israel -- but also of the concept that there exists a kind of eternal right of return of Muslims to any former Muslim conquest. "All of historical Palestine," he writes, "whose pre-Islamic inhabitants, Jews, Samaritans and Christians were conquered by jihad in the fourth decade of the seventh century, is considered 'fay territory.'" In other words, having once been conquered by Islam, such land is considered by Muslims to be "a permanent part of the Dar al Islam, where Islamic law must forever prevail." According to this thinking, Israel, governed by "usurper" infidel Jews who are no longer a subjugated dhimmi people, "must be destroyed in a collective jihad by the entire Muslim community."
Hard to ignore such a potent source of aggrieved aggression. But we do, and to the point of denying its very existence. And then what? Oskar Freysinger of the Swiss People's Party, famous for leading the campaign to ban minaret construction in Switzerland, when explaining why his party, known for its anti-Islamization policies, had always supported Israel, once told me: "We are well aware that if Israel disappears, we lose a vanguard. They (the Israelis) are fighting our fight, in fact. As long as the Muslims are concentrated on Israel, it's not so hard for us. But as soon as Israel will have disappeared, they will come to get the other part" -- namely, Europe.
What Freysinger sees better than most (including Israelis) is the apocalyptic dimension to global jihad, regardless of the "peace process" and other camouflage. Not only are we witnessing what could be the final stages of jihad on Israel; the United States is now openly supporting the wrong side.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Obamacare: “The Bigger the Lie”
Howard Rich
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Lost amid the partisan sniping and procedural jousting over the passage of “Obamacare” is a fundamental, unavoidable hypocrisy - one that’s worth unmasking as Washington politicians continue to ignore the will of the American people and plunge our nation deeper into full-blown socialism.
President Barack Obama and his Congressional allies are spending money that they know we don’t have on a program that they know isn’t going to work – all in an effort to expand government’s control over the private sector and its reach into the private lives of American citizens.
Sound a bit conspiratorial?
It’s not – at least not when you turn down the partisan rhetoric (on both sides of the debate) and start examining what this monstrosity actually does.
“Obamacare is really about who commands the country's medical resources,” an editorial in The Wall Street Journal noted the day before the legislation was passed. “It vastly accelerates the march toward a totally state-driven system, in contrast to reforms that would fix today's distorted status quo by putting consumers in control.”
With government already purchasing nearly half of all health care services in America (a system that’s rampant with fraud and anti-competitive price-fixing), just who did you think was responsible for the “distorted status quo” that Obamacare ostensibly seeks to correct?
Here’s a hint – it’s not those "evil" insurance companies, which will be receiving nearly a half-trillion dollars in Obamacare subsidies.
Consistent with the core fallacy of other recent socialist misadventures (like former President George Bush’s TARP bailout or Obama’s so-called “stimulus”), Washington politicians are once again attempting to solve problems that have been exacerbated by excessive government interventionism with additional government interventionism. “Dumping buckets of water on the head of a drowning victim,” if you will.
Even though America can’t even begin to afford its current entitlement obligations, Washington’s answer is to create yet another new entitlement program – something that Republicans who voted in favor of Bush’s prescription drug benefit know all about. And even as Medicare and Medicaid have failed spectacularly (and expensively) to provide cost-effective health care, Obama and his allies are using this failure as an excuse to dramatically escalate their “government knows best” approach to include individual mandates and huge fines for families and small businesses who fail to comply.
It’s a power grab, pure and simple. And a money grab, which is why Obamacare spends $10 billion to hire 17,000 new tax collectors at the IRS to rake in billions of dollars from America’s newly-created class of “illegally uninsured” citizens.
That hardly sounds like a plan built around “expanding coverage,” does it?
Obviously Obamacare isn’t going to reduce the deficit either. In fact when the actual cost of just one of the variables ignored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is calculated into the legislation, its price tag soars by nearly $208 billion (putting it $59 billion in the red).
Even "Obamacare's" worst-case deficit projections are likely to prove overly-optimistic. In 1965, for example, government accountants predicted that the hospital insurance portion of Medicaid would cost $9 billion by 1990. It wound up costing $63 billion. Even after adjusting for inflation, that’s still twice as expensive as the government originally estimated.
Earlier this month The New York Times – ostensibly seeking to build momentum for universal coverage – published a story highlighting the un-sustainability of Medicaid. The story revealed that last year, while state governments were relying on bailout money to fund skyrocketing growth rates, the program added 3.3 million new members – raising its total enrollment to 47 million. It is going broke, clearly, although that didn’t stop Obama and his Congressional allies from raiding $202 billion from its coffers (as well as $53 billion from Social Security) to make their plan appear deficit neutral.
And that may be the ultimate irony of Obamacare – that it is funding tomorrow’s big government obligations with the failed promises of yesterday.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Lost amid the partisan sniping and procedural jousting over the passage of “Obamacare” is a fundamental, unavoidable hypocrisy - one that’s worth unmasking as Washington politicians continue to ignore the will of the American people and plunge our nation deeper into full-blown socialism.
President Barack Obama and his Congressional allies are spending money that they know we don’t have on a program that they know isn’t going to work – all in an effort to expand government’s control over the private sector and its reach into the private lives of American citizens.
Sound a bit conspiratorial?
It’s not – at least not when you turn down the partisan rhetoric (on both sides of the debate) and start examining what this monstrosity actually does.
“Obamacare is really about who commands the country's medical resources,” an editorial in The Wall Street Journal noted the day before the legislation was passed. “It vastly accelerates the march toward a totally state-driven system, in contrast to reforms that would fix today's distorted status quo by putting consumers in control.”
With government already purchasing nearly half of all health care services in America (a system that’s rampant with fraud and anti-competitive price-fixing), just who did you think was responsible for the “distorted status quo” that Obamacare ostensibly seeks to correct?
Here’s a hint – it’s not those "evil" insurance companies, which will be receiving nearly a half-trillion dollars in Obamacare subsidies.
Consistent with the core fallacy of other recent socialist misadventures (like former President George Bush’s TARP bailout or Obama’s so-called “stimulus”), Washington politicians are once again attempting to solve problems that have been exacerbated by excessive government interventionism with additional government interventionism. “Dumping buckets of water on the head of a drowning victim,” if you will.
Even though America can’t even begin to afford its current entitlement obligations, Washington’s answer is to create yet another new entitlement program – something that Republicans who voted in favor of Bush’s prescription drug benefit know all about. And even as Medicare and Medicaid have failed spectacularly (and expensively) to provide cost-effective health care, Obama and his allies are using this failure as an excuse to dramatically escalate their “government knows best” approach to include individual mandates and huge fines for families and small businesses who fail to comply.
It’s a power grab, pure and simple. And a money grab, which is why Obamacare spends $10 billion to hire 17,000 new tax collectors at the IRS to rake in billions of dollars from America’s newly-created class of “illegally uninsured” citizens.
That hardly sounds like a plan built around “expanding coverage,” does it?
Obviously Obamacare isn’t going to reduce the deficit either. In fact when the actual cost of just one of the variables ignored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is calculated into the legislation, its price tag soars by nearly $208 billion (putting it $59 billion in the red).
Even "Obamacare's" worst-case deficit projections are likely to prove overly-optimistic. In 1965, for example, government accountants predicted that the hospital insurance portion of Medicaid would cost $9 billion by 1990. It wound up costing $63 billion. Even after adjusting for inflation, that’s still twice as expensive as the government originally estimated.
Earlier this month The New York Times – ostensibly seeking to build momentum for universal coverage – published a story highlighting the un-sustainability of Medicaid. The story revealed that last year, while state governments were relying on bailout money to fund skyrocketing growth rates, the program added 3.3 million new members – raising its total enrollment to 47 million. It is going broke, clearly, although that didn’t stop Obama and his Congressional allies from raiding $202 billion from its coffers (as well as $53 billion from Social Security) to make their plan appear deficit neutral.
And that may be the ultimate irony of Obamacare – that it is funding tomorrow’s big government obligations with the failed promises of yesterday.
Is it Go Easy or Go For Broke, Mr. President?
Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, March 25, 2010
After the bloodletting over the health-care bill, President Obama is now at a crossroads.
Not one opposition member voted for his health-care reform. That, along with tawdry buyoffs for fence-sitting members of the Senate and a reconciliation process that avoids another Senate vote have made a mockery of Obama's former healing campaign rhetoric.
In reaction, will the president now pick his next fights more carefully -- avoiding the sort of shady legislative dealings and us-vs.-them rhetoric that helped ram this bill through?
Or will the methods used to pass "Obamacare," which many polls deemed unpopular leading up to this weekend's vote, become the model formula for a new damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead progressive agenda?
We will learn soon on a variety of issues.
Obama may well try again for a comprehensive cap-and-trade bill to reduce carbon inputs. The increased taxes resulting from such legislation would trickle down into added fees on power bills for households and businesses. Such European-style state regulation would delight his liberal base and cement his credentials as our first activist green president.
Yet, given the shaky economy and controversies over the very science of global warming, forcing cap-and-trade through would ensure more months-long acrimony -- identical, in other words, to the health-care fury.
Far easier world be a bipartisan effort aimed at more reliance on nuclear power, and radical expansion of drilling for vast deposits of domestic natural gas.
Pro-industry supporters would welcome the boost for employment and greater independence from costly foreign energy. Liberals could applaud fewer greenhouse gases than currently produced from existing coal-fired plants.
President Obama apparently also wants to do comprehensive immigration -- and spoke of his plans in a taped video at this past weekend's immigration march in Washington.
But Obama's version of comprehensively solving illegal immigration through earned citizenship/amnesty can likely only be pushed through by legislative gymnastics, demonizing the opposition as nativists and energizing partisan activists by paying them back for their blanket support in the 2008 campaign.
In other words, it will also require the same kind of knockdown, drag-out fight we just saw over health care.
Again, far better for the country would be a bipartisan effort to take less-dramatic steps at ending the influx of illegal aliens.
The president could do an about-face and complete the stalled border fence, and enforce all existing laws against employers of illegal aliens -- putting off the messy fight over amnesty and guest workers until the borders are secure.
Liberals and unions would welcome the rise in wages once low-income American laborers had fewer illegal competitors. Conservatives could be assured that without an annual addition of a million new illegal aliens, there would be greater chances for integration and assimilation within American society.
It could be a win/win situation for everyone -- except a minority who counts on open borders and serial amnesties for those who break federal laws, along with a Mexican government that exports its population rather than make the necessary changes to allow them to stay with their families at home.
Then there are the now-record annual deficits and spiraling national debt. Even the new revenue from a promised return to the higher Clinton-era tax rates and a radical lifting on the caps on income subject to payroll taxes won't balance the budget.
So as Obama continues to grow the government, he'll bring on even more partisan fights over ever-higher taxes.
Or he can acknowledge that new local, state, payroll health-care and income taxes will soon take over 60 percent of incomes of precisely those who pay the majority of existing taxes -- and decide instead to offer a real freeze of all federal spending to the rate of inflation.
These areas where Obama could find centrist solutions and bridge differences are almost endless -- from an end to agricultural subsidies to energy independence. But getting things done incrementally and quietly would not bring out the drama, the headlines and the partisan emotions like the fight over health care.
What lessons will the president draw for the future from last week's health-care brawl?
I doubt it will be that the president and Congress should not ram through unpopular legislation on a strictly partisan and bare majority.
More likely, Obama's conclusion will be that a win is a win, and it's time to move on for more of the same bare-knuckles brawling.
If the latter is true, Americans may see more change but surely will end up with far less hope.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
After the bloodletting over the health-care bill, President Obama is now at a crossroads.
Not one opposition member voted for his health-care reform. That, along with tawdry buyoffs for fence-sitting members of the Senate and a reconciliation process that avoids another Senate vote have made a mockery of Obama's former healing campaign rhetoric.
In reaction, will the president now pick his next fights more carefully -- avoiding the sort of shady legislative dealings and us-vs.-them rhetoric that helped ram this bill through?
Or will the methods used to pass "Obamacare," which many polls deemed unpopular leading up to this weekend's vote, become the model formula for a new damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead progressive agenda?
We will learn soon on a variety of issues.
Obama may well try again for a comprehensive cap-and-trade bill to reduce carbon inputs. The increased taxes resulting from such legislation would trickle down into added fees on power bills for households and businesses. Such European-style state regulation would delight his liberal base and cement his credentials as our first activist green president.
Yet, given the shaky economy and controversies over the very science of global warming, forcing cap-and-trade through would ensure more months-long acrimony -- identical, in other words, to the health-care fury.
Far easier world be a bipartisan effort aimed at more reliance on nuclear power, and radical expansion of drilling for vast deposits of domestic natural gas.
Pro-industry supporters would welcome the boost for employment and greater independence from costly foreign energy. Liberals could applaud fewer greenhouse gases than currently produced from existing coal-fired plants.
President Obama apparently also wants to do comprehensive immigration -- and spoke of his plans in a taped video at this past weekend's immigration march in Washington.
But Obama's version of comprehensively solving illegal immigration through earned citizenship/amnesty can likely only be pushed through by legislative gymnastics, demonizing the opposition as nativists and energizing partisan activists by paying them back for their blanket support in the 2008 campaign.
In other words, it will also require the same kind of knockdown, drag-out fight we just saw over health care.
Again, far better for the country would be a bipartisan effort to take less-dramatic steps at ending the influx of illegal aliens.
The president could do an about-face and complete the stalled border fence, and enforce all existing laws against employers of illegal aliens -- putting off the messy fight over amnesty and guest workers until the borders are secure.
Liberals and unions would welcome the rise in wages once low-income American laborers had fewer illegal competitors. Conservatives could be assured that without an annual addition of a million new illegal aliens, there would be greater chances for integration and assimilation within American society.
It could be a win/win situation for everyone -- except a minority who counts on open borders and serial amnesties for those who break federal laws, along with a Mexican government that exports its population rather than make the necessary changes to allow them to stay with their families at home.
Then there are the now-record annual deficits and spiraling national debt. Even the new revenue from a promised return to the higher Clinton-era tax rates and a radical lifting on the caps on income subject to payroll taxes won't balance the budget.
So as Obama continues to grow the government, he'll bring on even more partisan fights over ever-higher taxes.
Or he can acknowledge that new local, state, payroll health-care and income taxes will soon take over 60 percent of incomes of precisely those who pay the majority of existing taxes -- and decide instead to offer a real freeze of all federal spending to the rate of inflation.
These areas where Obama could find centrist solutions and bridge differences are almost endless -- from an end to agricultural subsidies to energy independence. But getting things done incrementally and quietly would not bring out the drama, the headlines and the partisan emotions like the fight over health care.
What lessons will the president draw for the future from last week's health-care brawl?
I doubt it will be that the president and Congress should not ram through unpopular legislation on a strictly partisan and bare majority.
More likely, Obama's conclusion will be that a win is a win, and it's time to move on for more of the same bare-knuckles brawling.
If the latter is true, Americans may see more change but surely will end up with far less hope.
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