Story of 2013 Was The One Media Took Pains To Avoid

By Douglas MacKinnon

Thursday, January 02, 2014

All the mainstream media love to trumpet the winning of the now sadly tainted and greatly devalued Pulitzer Prize, given almost exclusively to left-leaning journalists from a left-leaning committee.

While we know how they like to celebrate suspect accolades, how do these same mainstream media admonish themselves when they make an egregious error of epic proportions?

How do the mainstream media come clean to the American people and let them know that purely because of their own political and personal bias, they went out of their way to deliberately deceive their readers and viewers as they ignored, under-reported or flat-out misrepresented the "facts" surrounding the most important story in years. A story that directly affects every single American.

Thomas Jefferson once said: "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." Jefferson was correct to want a press that was free, honest, ethical and served the American people.

Tragically, what we have today are mainstream media that put the socialist and destructive policies of the far left well before objectivity, professionalism or the welfare of the American people and actively promote those "progressive" policies while simultaneously working to discredit conservative and common-sense opposition.

No better example of this mainstream-media malfeasance exists than the case of ObamaCare and the thousands of liberal "journalists" at the networks, cable networks, newspapers and radio outlets who chose — out of loyalty to the president and his naively utopian nanny-state beliefs — to shill for a program they knew to be built on a foundation of lies from day one.

Worse than knowing it was built on a foundation of deceit, most also knew it would decimate our health-care system, increase costs for tens of millions of Americans and put doctors in an untenable position.

They knew it, and they still hid the truth.

Do any of these journalists now feel shame or remorse? Are they not embarrassed by the unassailable fact that almost their entire industry went into the tank for President Obama and the Democrats to propagandize a fairy tale?

Doesn't anyone now feel a responsibility to tell the truth and finally do his or her job in an unbiased manner? Unfortunately, no.

Since the day in 2010 when then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi mind-numbingly said, "But we have to pass the bill (ObamaCare) so that you can find out what's in it," most of the mainstream media knew something was amiss.

Just because they're biased and unethical does not mean they are unintelligent or can't at least ask basic questions in private.

Over three years ago, a number of these journalists did start going to primary-care doctors and specialists and asking about the ramifications of ObamaCare.

Three years ago and longer these journalists knew there were a growing number of doctors warning about government intervention, rationing, price increases, Americans being kicked off their plans, the forced replacement of primary-care doctors and mass confusion.

All these concerns — and many more — were communicated directly to many in the mainstream media.

And yet, they still purposely chose to ignore the warnings and perpetuate a myth. Why?

Two main reasons:

First, a majority in the mainstream media desperately wanted to see Obama re-elected in 2012 and knew it would be much harder to obtain that outcome if his signature program were exposed as the fraud it was.

Second, as an editor at a top-10 newspaper once told me, many of these "journalists" put far-left ideology before all and are willing to sacrifice the truth in service to that cause.

Normally, at the end of each year, the mainstream media seek to publicize the most important story over the last 12 months.

To make that task easier for them, I would submit that the most newsworthy story of 2013 was the mainstream media burying the most newsworthy story of 2013.

Woman of the Year

By Emmett Tyrrell

Thursday, January 02, 2014

WASHINGTON -- "What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," observes Camille Paglia, the learned iconoclast and professor of humanities at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She made that observation in a lengthy interview with The Wall Street Journal, the highbrow newspaper that proves daily that intelligent journalism in America is neither dead nor near bankruptcy as long as it holds to the right values. Paglia was talking about our civilization, and I have nothing to add save one caveat. I recall the late 1970s, when America was pretty much in a heap. Suddenly, along came the oldest president in American history -- a president whom his friend William F. Buckley adjudged too old to govern -- and that president, Ronald Reagan, won the Cold War, revived the economy and still managed long naps in the afternoon.

Miss Paglia, America still has enormous restorative powers, and I think 2014 is going to see those powers revive. Yet for now, you are right.

Today the American scene is bleak, except for a few horselaughs provided by the White House. When I reflect on the nonsensical boasts made for big government and the nanny state and I watch our president slip and fall on yet another government-issued banana peel, you will forgive me, but I double up in laughter. President Barack Obama has been a hoot. Possibly not so amusing as Jimmy Carter, but he comes very close, and I think that history will prove that he brought the entire left-wing project to foozle. The Founding Fathers are redeemed!

Still, there is reason to be alarmed, and the sage from The University of the Arts has put her fingers on all the culprits. The Journal sums them up: "The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead."

Certainly, the values that go into a soldier are dismissed by our cultural institutions, though Hollywood still has a little time for its nonsensical dramaturgical monstrosities about the SEALs and the fiery and clangorous special effects that they supposedly struggle with. "These people (our elite class) don't think in military ways," she says, "so there's this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we're just nice and benevolent to everyone they'll be nice too. They literally don't have any sense of evil or criminality." Wait a minute, Miss Paglia. Think of our elites' assessment of Sen. Ted Cruz.

The bland saps who do so much to foster cultural decline begin their adventure in blandness in kindergarten and continue right through college and graduate school. There, both female and male students are educated in "female values," by which she means displaying tender emotions, socialization and cooperation. Education in America is perpetrated by a conspiracy of idiots. To speak of the proper use of aggression is horrifying to these elites, and no good can come of it. Though, of course, aggression is a concomitant of testosterone. It can be put to good effect, for instance, in hard work, creative work, high-tech work, spatial cognizance and, one of Paglia's favorites, manual work. She has spoken with admiration about men in the construction trades, building roads and dams and bridges.

Her ideal feminist role models are "iconoclastic women" from the 1930s, such as Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn. I wonder who her male role models are. Would one be the Old Cowboy, Ronald Reagan? Well into his 70s, he could still wrestle with a broken fence post and mind the ranch. Not only that bit of manual labor but he minded the White House pretty well.

In 2014, we shall find a few likely presidential candidates, and with luck, one or two will be like Reagan.

Obamacare's Biggest Whopper

By Betsy McCaughey

Thursday, January 02, 2014

2013 was the year of Obamacare whoppers. But the nastiest truth about the health law is still to be exposed – the tightening hold the federal government will have over your doctor, even if you’re paying with private insurance. Obama said “you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making.” It was a lie from day one, just like the president’s other sales pitches.

President Obama’s often repeated claim that “if you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan” was the obvious whopper of 2013. Over six million people had their plans cancelled already.

Then, on December 20th, the president brushed aside reporters’ questions about the latest changes to Obamacare by brazenly claiming “the basic structure of the law is working.” That’s a lie too.

Premiums for Obamacare plans are 41% higher, on average, than what consumers paid in the individual market last year, with deductibles as high as double, and for all that, you generally won’t be able to use academic hospitals, top tier cancer hospitals for cancer, and the doctors who practice at these institutions.

But the truth is still to come out about the biggest whopper. Section 1311(h)(1) (B) of the health law gives the Secretary of Health and Human Services, a presidential appointee, blanket authority to dictate how doctors treat patients. Not just patients in government programs like Medicare and Medicaid. But also patients with private plans they pay for themselves.

On December 2, 2013 in the Federal Register, it was disclosed that the rules are in process of being written. Starting in 2015, insurance companies will be barred from doing business with doctors who fail to comply. Supposedly the rules are in the name of “quality,” but that could mean everything in medicine. “The powers given to the Secretary are so broad he or she could literally dictate how all physicians nationwide practice medicine,” warns Congressman Phil Gingrey (R. Georgia), himself a physician. Gingrey is sponsoring a bill to repeal Section 1311(h)(1)(B). He explains that otherwise, the HHS Secretary, a Washington bureaucrat with no medical training, could bar doctors from doing routine mammogram screenings until female patients turn 50, for example. The government will be calling the shots on what patients get.

The rules have not been announced, but the president’s key health advisor when the Affordable Care Act was written, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, early on discussed what government intervention was needed.

Emanuel said doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously “as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others.” As long as doctors are in charge, cost control would not be possible. “Vague promises of savings from cutting waste enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality of care are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control,more for show and public relations than for true change.” Emanuel advocated for top down federal rules to allocate resources to patients based on what he called “social justice.”

Obama nominee to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS), Dr. Donald Berwick, was also insistent that the federal government must step in between doctors and their patients to curb and redistribute the use of medical resources. Berwick said resources should be allocated based on “important subgroups.” These groups, rather than the individual patient in the doctor’s office, should be the “unit of concern,” he said

Obama’s advisors would have these considerations override your doctor’s focus on your needs as a patient.

Right now states license and discipline doctors. And that’s plenty of oversight. In 2006, when the U.S. Attorney General tried to interfere in how Oregon doctors used controlled substances to treat patients, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal intrusion. (Gonzalez v. Oregon, 2006) The Justices warned it would amount to a “radical shift of authority from the States to the Federal government to define general standards of medical practice in every locality.”

That is what Obamacare does. It puts the federal government between you and your doctor with an eye toward limiting your care—just what the president promised would not happen.

Myths to Ditch in 2014

By Jonah Goldberg

January 01, 2014

The Beltway consensus seems to be that 2013 was a bad year for the same reason nearly every other recent year was bad: polarization and partisanship. Personally, I can think of plenty of more important things to worry about than partisanship. Democracy is about disagreements, and partisanship is often a sign of healthy disagreement.

But polarization is a bit different. It speaks not just to a lack of basic agreement about what kind of society we should live in, but a breakdown in understanding and respect among Americans. There’s a lot of them-vs.-us talk these days on the left and the right. And while I’d never want to live in a country where we all join hands and sing “Kumbaya,” maybe a bit more understanding wouldn’t be all bad.

So I have small suggestions for New Year’s resolutions for both the Right and the Left in 2014. For liberals, maybe you should try to accept the fact that you’re not the non-conformists you think you are. And for conservatives, perhaps you should consider that you’re not necessarily the irrefutable voice of “normal” Americans.

The thought occurred to me while reading “The Liberal Illusion of Uniqueness” in the journal Psychological Science. Apparently it’s a well-established finding that liberals tend to think their views are more rebellious than they are. They feel a “need for uniqueness.” And that need can stand in the way of seeking commonality with other Americans.

Conservatives don’t crave uniqueness. In fact, they are more likely to overestimate the extent to which there is a consensus around their beliefs. In other words, liberals bristle at the notion that they’re conventional thinkers, while conservatives are too quick to assume everyone thinks like them.

I’m not a huge fan of subjecting politics to psychological analysis. It often lends itself to the pernicious idea that people with “healthy” minds have certain political views and that people with unpopular notions aren’t simply wrong — or have different preferences — but are somehow sick.

Still, something about this finding rings true to me. One of the most impressive achievements of liberalism is the perpetuation of the myth of liberal rebelliousness. One of my favorite things to do when speaking on college campuses is to point out to students how conformist they are. (College students are a lot like that mob in Monty Python’s Life of Brian who chant in unison, “We’re all individuals!”) I point out to the students that their professors are liberal. Their school administrators are liberal. Hollywood and the music and publishing industries are all overwhelmingly liberal. The mainstream media are liberal. “But,” I ask them, “you think you’re sticking it to the Man by agreeing with them?”

Meanwhile, lots of my friends on the right often seem to take it for granted that there’s a vast silent majority of Americans pitted against a small cabal of elitist pinheads and would-be social engineers. As a conservative, I believe there are a lot of pinhead social engineers (see: Bloomberg, Michael). But I also understand — or at least try to — that there are millions of Americans who see these people as leaders who speak for them and address their needs.

Ironically, both the conservative false confidence in consensus and the liberal false confidence in uniqueness have a similar downside: smugness. Evidence for this is about as hard to find as hay in a haystack. Liberals often talk as if only the backward masses disagree with them, and conservatives often assume that only overeducated weirdos and radicals could object to their agenda. Hence Barack Obama’s infamous explanation for why rural Pennsylvanians didn’t support him: They were too busy “clinging” to their God and guns. Tellingly, conservatives took that line as a badge of honor.

Smugness is also the chief source of political problems for both the Left and the Right.

Conservatives have become far too insular, too often rejecting the need to persuade those who don’t already agree with them, arguing instead that ever bloodier doses of red meat will grow the coalition. Liberals have become far too content with the myth of their uniqueness and the pretense that they are brave polymath iconoclasts who know what’s best for you better than you do.

Maybe, just maybe, if both sides resolved not to take their most flattering myths for granted, America would be just a bit less polarized.

A Year of Fear

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Anno Domini 2013 was an excellent opportunity to learn the lesson that we failed to learn in 1857, 1933, 1971, and 2008: Uncertainty is the destroyer. Economic growth remains unsteady, with a consensus among experts that the economy is slowing down as the year closes — Bloomberg calculates the average of economic-growth forecasts at a tepid 1.8 percent. Key figures remained negative in 2013, from the labor-force participation rate (down 2.7 percentage points since Barack Obama took office) to the employment-to-population ratio (down 2 percentage points during the same period). The most important of those economic indicators, at least so far as future growth is concerned, is net domestic private investment, which remains far away from returning to pre-crash levels.

Weak private investment means weak growth and bleak long-term employment prospects. There is no way to finesse away that fact. The question is: Why are we still in this position, all these years after the end of the recession?

There is some debate on the right about whether President Obama is a fundamentally well-intentioned incompetent or a more Machiavellian figure so power-hungry that he is willing to kneecap key sectors of the U.S. economy in order to advance his political agenda. My own view is that the distinguishing feature of Obama’s ideology is the utter inability of the president and his partisans to distinguish between the national interest and their own political interests. (That is one problem with electing a messiah rather than a chief administrator.) If you believe that your guy is a uniquely gifted, once-in-a-lifetime transformational figure with a mandate to save the country, and that he is opposed by uniquely wicked servants of Mammon and partisans of unreason, then it follows that your political interests are identical to the national interest, and consequently you have such grey eminences as Bill Clinton, who has managed to secure for himself a career as an elder statesman without ever having been a statesman, insisting that Republicans are “begging for America to fail” — because they oppose large parts of the president’s health-care program, which the president now opposes, too, having set aside measures that are too unworkable or punitive to act on until some more politically opportune time.

Market orders are complex and organic; political orders are relatively crude and artificial. Obamacare, to take the year’s most dramatic example, is an attempt to impose a simpleton order on a much more sophisticated order, like trying to make microchips with cookie cutters. Such attempts generally end badly, succeeding only in bringing chaos out of order. Friedrich Hayek described the process in The Road to Serfdom: The plan never pans out the way it was expected to, and the planners are obliged by political necessity to take ever more arbitrary and authoritarian steps in order to give the appearance of success to an enterprise that cannot in fact achieve its goals. Even in a democratic society — perhaps especially in such a society — the effects are corrosive, undermining the rule of law, liberal institutions, and the mutual trust that enables meaningful social cooperation. Therefore the question of incompetence vs. malice is not entirely a question of A or B.

This is complicated by the fact that politics is about more than policy, to the extent that politics is about policy at all. Politics is emotional and tribal. There is, for example, nothing inherent in the socialist model that necessitates its being paired with anti-Semitism, but in practice it generally has been, in both its major German and Russian expressions. There is really nothing in Deng Xiaoping’s dream of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” that requires such butchery as Beijing has executed — against Tibetans, Uighurs, Falun Gong, Christians, democrats, mothers, etc. — but it is difficult to imagine the Chinese national-socialist project without it. There is, likewise, nothing in the substance of Obamaite policy thinking on health care that necessitates an all-out assault on Catholic institutions, but those attacks are of fundamental importance to the political project of which those health-care policies are a part. For the Left, politics is heroic — and every hero must have an antagonist. In 2013, those nominated to wear the black hats were Catholics, the wrong kind of business executives, insurance companies, one half of Congress, more than half of the nation’s governors, the Koch brothers and their allies (real and imagined), gun owners and enthusiasts, and people who cling to what was the president’s own view regarding gay marriage until 600 days ago.

We find ourselves, then, in a kind of crossfire: The battle between competence and incompetence rages on one front, while another war — one in which the participants understand themselves to be in an epoch-defining contest between good and evil — is fought perpendicularly.

Whichever side you find yourself on, know this: No sane person builds a widget factory in the middle of a battlefield.

Robert Higgs, economic historian and author of the indispensable Crisis and Leviathan, describes a condition he calls “regime uncertainty,” under which the possibility of significant changes in the status of property rights makes investment decisions difficult or impossible. This is partly related to uncertainty regarding policy issues such as taxes and regulations, but it is a wider phenomenon, one that is partly cultural. Higgs writes: “Regime uncertainty pertains to more than the government’s laws, regulations, and administrative decisions. For one thing, as the saying goes, ‘personnel is policy.’ Two administrations may administer or enforce identical statutes and regulations quite differently. A business-hostile administration such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s or Barack Obama’s will provoke more apprehension among investors than a business-friendlier administration such as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s or Ronald Reagan’s, even if the underlying ‘rules of the game’ are identical on paper. Similar differences between judiciaries create uncertainties about how the courts will rule on contested laws and government actions.”

The Obama administration has achieved a special distinction here: Investors are faced with considerable uncertainty vis-à-vis how it might interpret rules as compared with the Bush or Clinton administrations — and also about how it might interpret rules as compared with the Obama administration the day before yesterday. Now you see a mandate, now you don’t. And as bad as it is in 2013, the seething hostility of Elizabeth Warren is ascendant on the left, a fact that offers very little encouragement to entrepreneurs and investors considering illiquid, long-term positions — things like factories, stores, and buildings, as opposed to easily liquidated investments in financial instruments. Many on the left complain about the “financialization” of the U.S. economy, while unwittingly helping to encourage that very phenomenon. Given a choice between dividing up his investments between a couple of hedge funds and financial firms or locking it up for ten years in an assembly line in Indiana, a sane man will consider the question of uncertainty and predictability. And under current conditions, the assembly line is a risky bet.

Perhaps 2014 will be the year in which we learn the value of predictability. Who can say?