Curvy Politics

The Health Care Bill Is Dead

2010-01-21T16:12:00.002-05:00

And other repercussions of Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts.

BY Fred Barnes

January 20, 2010 12:30 AM

The impact of Republican Scott Brown’s capture of the Massachusetts Senate seat held for decades by Teddy Kennedy will be both immediate and powerful. It’s safe to say no single Senate election in recent memory is as important as this one.

Here are a few of the repercussions:

1) President Obama is weakened. For the third time in three months, he couldn’t deliver for a Democratic candidate. Last November, he abetted the defeat of Democrat Creigh Deeds in the Virginia governor’s race and failed to prevent Democrat Jon Corzine’s ouster as New Jersey governor. Now in Massachusetts, his appearance for Martha Coakley was a bust. A president who can’t aid his party’s candidates loses influence with Congress and inside his party.

That’s not all. Obama’s agenda, chiefly health care, took a beating in Massachusetts. In fact, it was the chief cause of Coakley’s defeat. Without the intrusion of national politics, she would have defeated Brown. But Obama and Democrats in Washington have created a hostile environment for Democratic candidates even in liberal and Democrat-dominated Massachusetts. So there’s a double whammy for Obama: he can’t help if he personally shows up to campaign on behalf of Democrats and his policies are ruining their chances of being elected.

2) Independents are lost to Democrats, at least for the time being. In 2006 and 2008, they fled Republicans in large numbers and facilitated Democratic triumphs for the House, Senate, and White House. Now they’ve staged a mass migration to the Republican camp. In Massachusetts, where they make up half the electorate, they overwhelmingly voted for Brown. This followed the 2-to-1 advantage they gave to Republicans in Virginia and New Jersey last year.

Democrats may win them back, but not if they stick with the liberal policies--especially the unbridled spending and $1 trillion deficits--of Obama and congressional Democrats. These are killer issues among independents. Perhaps it will take another unpopular Republican administration in Washington to push them toward Democrats again. And that is years away.

3) In the midterm election in November, Republicans are poised to win 25 or so House seats. But it will take a net of 40 to take control the House. For this, they need more open Democratic seats, which are easier to win than incumbent-held seats. Brown’s victory in Massachusetts is a good bet to scare many more Democrats into retirement.

If a Republican can win in Massachusetts, why not in Missouri or Pennsylvania or a solidly Democratic state like New York? Last week, Democrat Vic Snyder of Arkansas announced his retirement, citing the political climate as the reason. It’s an anti-Democratic climate.

By keeping his minority together, McConnell put enormous pressure on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who had to keep every Democrat in line to gain the 60 votes need to halt a Republican filibuster. On health care, it meant he had to make unseemly deals with a host of senators, most egregiously in the Medicaid payoff to Nebraska to appease Senator Ben Nelson. Reid got the votes, but the deals were political poison.

5) Oh, yes. The health care bill, ObamaCare, is dead with not the slightest prospect of resurrection. Brown ran to be the 41st vote for filibuster and now he is just that. Democrats have talked up clever strategies to pass the bill in the Senate despite Brown, but they won’t fly. It’s one thing for ObamaCare to be rejected by the American public in poll after poll. But it becomes a matter of considerably greater political magnitude when ObamaCare causes the loss of a Senate race in the blue state of Massachusetts.

Then there’s the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi insists some version of ObamaCare will be approved and soon. She’s not kidding. She’s simply wrong. At best, she has the minimum 218 votes for passage. After the Massachusetts fiasco, however, there’s sure to be erosion. How many Democrats in Republican-leaning districts want to vote for ObamaCare, post-Massachusetts? Not many.

Pelosi met with House Democrats yesterday to tell them how the negotiations on a compromise health care bill between the House and Senate were going. As she spoke, one Democratic member whispered to another, “It’s like talking about your date on Friday, but the date’s in the emergency room.” ObamaCare went into the emergency room in Massachusetts and didn’t make it out alive.

Dismantling America

2009-10-28T10:17:00.000-04:00

By Thomas Sowell

Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many "czars" appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent?

Did you think that another "czar" would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers — that is, to create a situation where some newspapers' survival would depend on the government liking what they publish?

Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called "experts" deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments?

Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones?

Does any of this sound like America?

How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough.

How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? President Obama has already floated the idea of a national police force, something we have done without for more than two centuries.

We already have local police forces all across the country and military forces for national defense, as well as the FBI for federal crimes and the National Guard for local emergencies. What would be the role of a national police force created by Barack Obama, with all its leaders appointed by him? It would seem more like the brown shirts of dictators than like anything American.

How far the President will go depends of course on how much resistance he meets. But the direction in which he is trying to go tells us more than all his rhetoric or media spin.

Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to "change the United States of America," the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country.

Jeremiah Wright said it with words: "G0d damn America!" Bill Ayers said it with bombs that he planted. Community activist goons have said it with their contempt for the rights of other people.

Among the people appointed as czars by President Obama have been people who have praised enemy dictators like Mao, who have seen the public schools as places to promote sexual practices contrary to the values of most Americans, to a captive audience of children.

Those who say that the Obama administration should have investigated those people more thoroughly before appointing them are missing the point completely. Why should we assume that Barack Obama didn't know what such people were like, when he has been associating with precisely these kinds of people for decades before he reached the White House?

Nothing is more consistent with his lifelong patterns than putting such people in government — people who reject American values, resent Americans in general and successful Americans in particular, as well as resenting America's influence in the world.

Any miscalculation on his part would be in not thinking that others would discover what these stealth appointees were like. Had it not been for the Fox News Channel, these stealth appointees might have remained unexposed for what they are. Fox News is now high on the administration's enemies list.

Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year — each bill more than a thousand pages long — too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question — and the biggest question for this generation.

Weary Americans

2009-08-14T14:09:00.001-04:00

By: Melissa Clouthier

You are so sick of the debates. You have a freaking life after all. You have a mortgage. You have kids you worry over. You have a job, if you're lucky. You like sports. You like your family. You like your car. You like your country. You believe there is a God and after this short time on earth, if there's any justice, bad guys will pay and good guys will ultimately win. You're an American. Imperfect, sure, but mostly decent.

It is simply unfathomable that someone would would see that life and think it is bad. It is difficult to comprehend that someone or a group of people would see this life as evil. And yet, many do.

The traditional suburban family, job, kids, house, SUV, sports, dogs, etc. are viewed with suspicion and pure hatred by some. Americans are viewed as wasteful, consumptive, selfish, stupid, parochial simpletons.

The solution to the "problem" of the average American, then, is to help the American live a better life...by force, if necessary. Doctor Zero of Hot Air's Greenroom has a must read piece titled "The Aggressor State". He says:

Because liberalism defines itself as transformative, it is very comfortable with aggression. This posture serves them well with a public that believes “progress” is inherently positive. The business of building the modern super-state has been a sustained attack, using cultural pressure, legislative power, and the blunt instrument of loyal voting blocs to beat Middle America into submission. The goal of the Left is to convince the middle class to give it the power to do things they would never be depraved or dishonest enough to do themselves. Ordinary people refer to the “redistribution of wealth” as “theft.” If a man wearing a tailored suit and power tie came to your door one day, and offered to take care of your health, in exchange for surrendering all control over your medical decisions to a board of faceless strangers – who also demand unlimited control over every part of your life that might conceivably impact your health – you’d slam the door in his face and call the cops. If you caught someone writing himself a $4000.00 check from your checkbook, and he explained he needs the money as tribute to his Church of Global Warming so they can save the world from an imaginary evil, you’d shoot first and call 911 later. The mission of the Left is to convince people that all of these outrages become virtuous when elected officials perpetrate them. After all, “they won.” [Emphasis added.]

But those who view American life with contempt know that a direct assault on the American character won't work. It must be subtle. The arguments must infer that your neighbor, the small business owner whose company earns more than $200,000 is evil, not you. The insurance company is evil--hell, you know the pain in the ass insurance companies can be. The talk show host is evil--well, crud, Mr. Big Mouth Talk Show Host sure can be annoying sometimes. Then anyone who thinks mandatory union membership seems oppressive is evil. Then people who like their incandescent lights are evil. The circle begins to expand. Like a consuming Venn diagram, suddenly, all Americans, even you, are inside the circle of evil.

How did that happen?

Leftists and the state they worship know no constraint. There is not one aspect of life that they don't believe they know how to better manage than you. Not one. Health care is the big, juicy prize because under the auspices of caring, absolute and total control is willingly ceded to the government.

No one in America would argue that the health care system doesn't need reform. It is patently obvious that the biggest generation ever is reaching old age. Health care costs, just because there are so many people, will increase. What to do? The Congressional Democrat's solution is to cut coverage for these old people and "fund" health care for the uninsured. Like a shell game, the government will shift money and serve people who better "deserve" the care. More than that, taxes will go up to pay for everyone.

People are tired of the debate. This fatigue plays into big government plans. For generations, the Left has stoked a perpetual state of discontent. Finally, when the economy is staggering under the weight of bad debt, oppressive regulation and perverse incentives, people are sobered and serious about solutions. What the Left offers is more of the same: bigger government to solve an already too big government.

If the Left can continue to make people feel like someone else is to blame and someone else will be punished, the desire for Health Care legislation, and every other form of government control will pass. But people are starting to get wary, even in their weariness. Suddenly, the health care people already enjoy doesn't seem so bad. Suddenly, the massive expansion of government seems expensive.

Hopefully, the American people will overcome their political fatigue and become more active. After a certain point, the political process seems akin to the boy who cried wolf and when the wolf finally comes....no one listens. The government wolf is here and ready to devour a sixth of the economy. The time to fight is now.
Melissa Clouthier's Bio
Dr. Melissa Clouthier blogs on her own website and RightWingNews.com . She also hosts a new online radio show on RFC Radio . Owning her own medical business means that what happens in Washington is not theoretical to her or her family.

'Death Panels' in Oregon?

2009-08-14T13:11:00.000-04:00

Maybe Sarah Palin wasn't off the mark after all:

August 11, 2009

Ethel C. Fenig
Perhaps former Governor Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) was referring to the tragic predicament of Barbara Wagner of Oregon when she wrote how she feared for the fate of her Down Syndrome son under "Obama's 'Death Panels.' "

Susan Donaldson James of ABC News reports on the letter Ms. Wagner received from the Oregon Health Plan in response to a $4000 a month drug her doctor prescribed after her lung cancer, long in remission, returned..

the insurance company refused to pay.

What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50.

Hmmmm, let's do the math. Yep, a one time prescription of $50 sure is cheaper than $4000 a month for who knows how many months to keep a 64 year old woman alive. So the Oregon "Death Panel" graciously offered suicide pills. Or doctor assisted murder.

But Ms. Wagner had an understandably different reaction.

"It was horrible," Wagner told ABCNews.com. "I got a letter in the mail that basically said if you want to take the pills, we will help you get that from the doctor and we will stand there and watch you die. But we won't give you the medication to live."

Ah, but Ms. Wagner wanted to live. And she didn't care what the Oregon "Death Panel" - uhm, Oregon Health Plan decided. And her situation is not unique.

But a 1998 study from Georgetown University's Center for Clinical Bioethics found a strong link between cost-cutting pressures on physicians and their willingness to prescribe lethal drugs to patients -- were it legal to do so.

The study warns that there must be "a sobering degree of caution in legalizing [assisted death] in a medical care environment that is characterized by increasing pressure on physicians to control the cost of care."

Cancer drugs can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $6,000 a month. The cost of lethal medication, on the other hand, is about $35 to $50.

So Sarah Palin's "death panels" aren't as quite off the mark as those afflicted by Palin Derangement Syndrome and mocking her seem to think. Apparently they're called Centers for Bioethics and people are sincerely grappling with these issues. The issues are deep, the problems are complex. And alas there are no easy answers. But let's keep the Barbara Wagners in mind. For one day, a loved one may be in the same predicament. Or you.

How Should We Then Live?

2009-07-31T16:48:00.001-04:00

Thursday, July 30, 2009

By Randy Wills
America's Right

It concerns me greatly that so much attention is focused on the individual plans and programs that the Obama administration is pushing to enact. All that you see taking place today on the floor of Congress simply obfuscates the real end game: the means to gain complete control over every facet of each of our lives. As Vladimir Lenin reportedly said, “It is true that liberty is precious – so precious that it must be rationed.” And you know who’s going to do the rationing, don’t you?

What’s going on reminds me of the tricks that a trainer might use to coax a green horse into allowing a bit to be put in its mouth. Of course, putting the bit in a horse’s mouth is by no means the goal; the goal is to be able to control the animal by the discomfort that the bit causes if the horse doesn’t obey the rider or the plowman. After we, like the dumb beast, have allowed the “bit” of complete government control to be placed in our mouth, then you’ll see the end game unfold.

Colin Powell was absolutely right when he endorsed Obama with the comment “He’s a transformative figure”. Unfortunately, transformations can be anything that the “transformative figure” wants them to be. History is replete with the tales of carnage-covered battlefields left to rot by arrogant leaders in their attempt to “transform” societies and cultures. I am convinced that the end game of this administration is a new world order in which all conflict-producing differences – race, economic, political, religious – are resolved by means of enforced sameness. The spark of human initiative and creativity – individual choice – will be dead, and with it, the spirit of man. The trumped-up emergencies attracting all of our attention are just a means of gaining sufficient control of the levers of political and economic power to begin this Orwellian end game. Don’t be fooled into thinking that defeating any one of these programs is going to change that.

We know what we have to do – take back our country - but how is not so easily discerned. And that is the problem. How do we take back a nation-gone-awry where every vote - regardless of competence, motivation, or legality - counts equally and can be purchased or enticed by corrupt politicians who have nothing in mind other than the power that comes with victory? How does one change the course of a democracy if the electorate – an electorate “educated” in an apostate school system which openly disdains and mocks traditional values - is told what to believe by a complicit MSM, has its values shaped by a hedonistic entertainment industry, and has lost interest in the principle of right and wrong? All one has to do is follow the news for one day to recognize that too many Americans now operate almost exclusively on the basis of self-interest rather than on some commonly understood standard of decency and corporate well-being.

For the rational thinker, it would be difficult to avoid the conclusion that there is some over-arching cosmic war going on between good and evil that is playing out on the world stage with the United States at its epicenter and poised for the climactic battle. I say climactic because if this battle is lost (and the outcome will be decided sooner than most think) and the U.S. is transformed into a Godless bastion of socialism, who will be left to take our place in the world as the friend and protector of all that is good and the implacable foe of all who would withhold the right of mankind to live free?

The colonists, risking all and eschewing anarchy, came to this continent to escape the tyranny of religious persecution, but there is no comparable place for us to go to escape the assault on our freedoms now being made by the White House, Congress, and the courts. We must fight the battle here, among our enemies, constrained as we are by our commitment to peaceful means. Consequently we are faced with even more difficult choices than the colonists were. And besides, aren’t we – those of us who trace our political and moral values to those same Pilgrims, Revolutionaries, and Founding Fathers - the rightful heirs of the product of their wisdom and sacrifices? Why should we be the ones to capitulate to those who claim that the Constitution is a “living document” and interpret it to suit their personal ideology? When President Obama declares that he is going to “remake” America, does he really have a right to claim such a prerogative without a Constitutional Convention giving him that right? Obviously not, but how do we put a stop to this mad plunge into the economic and moral ruin called socialism without resorting to violence? The plain truth is, perhaps we can’t, but rest assured that socialism, as it has in all of its prior manifestations, will fail, and when it does, only those who are able to survive the ensuing cataclysm will be in a position to bring about the rebirth of the Founders’ vision for a free and democratic society.

In my pervious postings on AR I have made it clear that I’m against all violence - except in an act of defense of self, family, community, or nation - as a remedy for human conflict, including political tyranny. All of the rhetoric about “Give me liberty or give me death” notwithstanding, I believe this position is consistent with that held by the Founders until goaded by the British into defending themselves. Their example continues to be my political, as well as spiritual, point of reference. Yet armed with only the two-party political system, weakened as it has become as a result of rampant corruption and moral failure, it seems as though we are faced with the “perfect storm” of destructive elements which many, including myself, fear may not yield to that dull tool in time to keep from reaching the point of no return . As far as a third-party campaign is concerned, my opinion is that it would have little real value other than to make a statement. We tried that in ‘92 with Ross Perot and got Bill Clinton for eight years, so let’s not waste time and resources by going down that road again.

I envision our nation as a house of beautifully unique architecture and great history – let’s call it “The People’s House” - that has become so infested with termites and rot that it is ready to fall with the slightest ground tremor or gust of wind. Perhaps even just one more day of destruction by the hordes of uninvited guests, the termites, will finish the job. We know that we must try to preserve it with our lives because it is the greatest structure of its kind ever built and, if destroyed, may well be the last of its kind in history. It represents who we are – or at least who we once were and would like to become again - but even its foundation (you know, the requisite “Godly virtue” upon which the Founders built “The Peoples’ House”) has crumbled from neglect and there appears to be little interest in rebuilding it. We’ve become so steeped in the fraud called “diversity” that we dare not even broach the subject of Godliness of the Judeo/Christian kind in the political arena, much to our shame.

So realistically, the question becomes an issue of whether it be saved before it collapses or must first be reduced to rubble by its own unsupportable weight before the rebuilding can begin. This has typically been the course that other totalitarian regimes, such as Nazism, Communism, and Fascism, have taken. Those political philosophies have left their host nations in ruin before they would admit to their failure. Don’t think for a minute that, if we continue down the path that the Obama administration has chosen for us, it can’t happen here. The political class has bandied about the term “economically unsustainable” so frequently and casually that we’ve become numb to the implications of that term. When economic collapse happens, as it certainly will if we continue to promise more than any nation can afford, it is a “given” that mass civil unrest will soon follow. As a case in point, it has been reported in the press that the prospect of uncontrollable civil disorder is exactly the “hammer” that Secretary of the Treasury Paulson used to strong-arm TARP through Congress.

So what should our strategy be in times such as these? Should we attempt to replace the rotted timbers by means of the elective process, one at a time, hoping to shore up the structure before it falls? And to what end will any strategy lead us without a foundation upon which to build anew? Some would resort to violence, but that would be the equivalent of burning our house as a means of fumigation to kill the invaders. Lest we bring it down on ourselves like Samson of old, we must choose other means.

Common sense would tell us to get out before it collapses on top of us all. And collapse it will, no matter what the new “Building Superintendent”, President Obama, tells us. A $780 billion “fix” here, a new $1.5 trillion “maintenance” plan there, more extortion of taxpayer wealth somewhere else; just continue to believe in “Hope” and “Change” and all things will be made right. Like the old-time evangelist, he’s very skilled at suspending us over the fiery pit, extorting more and more of our hard-earned income by telling us that if we don’t act now and pony up the cost of the obviously-needed repairs all will be forever lost. He thunders from the bully pulpit “It’s not about me. It’s about taking care of YOU, the endangered inhabitants of the about-to-collapse house.” And the best part of his spiel is that only the top floor tenants will have to bear the expense. Free-everything for all of the lower floor tenants. Right! Everyone with half a brain knows – or would know if they hadn’t had their brains fried in the public education system - that it’s a hoax. The top floor tenants can’t possibly pay for all of his new “repair” programs without bankrupting themselves, so they’ll take their wealth and their business elsewhere, leaving the lower-floor tenants with nothing but suffocating debt and no means to pay it. Obama is a smart guy; he knows this full well, so it must somehow fit his plan. You figure it out.

So, as you can see, our options are very limited. Of course we should continue to work as hard as we can through the political process to replace the current keeper of “The People’s House” and his wrecking crew in Congress. However, it would be foolhardy to bank on being able to fumigate the building and begin to repair the damage before the “Termite-in-Chief” orchestrates the total collapse of the structure. My guess is that the creatures who feed off the very structure that houses them don’t really care whether it is left standing or if it has collapsed into a pile of sawdust. To them, it all tastes the same, so, as long as they can satisfy their appetites, they’ll continue to gnaw away, mindless of what they have wantonly destroyed.

At the risk of being accused of apocalyptic hysteria, my recommendation, and the plan that I and my family are implementing, is for every one with the courage to face reality make preparing for a major upheaval, such as William R. Forstchen portrays in “One Second After”, their top priority. There are many scenarios in which civil disorder of this magnitude could become reality (just think “Katrina” in every metropolitan area), and I wouldn’t dismiss any one of them out-of-hand. We live in extremely volatile economic and political times, exacerbated by a delicate nuclear balance-of-power on the world stage. The match that ignites a global conflagration could be struck in dozens of places – you name it -and at any time.

On the domestic front, the prospects are not any better. I see racial conflict growing, and any serious threat to the Obama administration is only going to intensify that conflict. Listen to his words and you will understand why he wants a civilian armed force, GREATER than our military, made up, I’m sure, of the likes of Acorn, the SEIU, and Americorps. I fear that, in the minds of too many minorities, it's about payback rather than parity. I don’t think that anyone who sat through twenty years of Dr. Wright’s “Black Liberation Theology” rantings is going to do much to ameliorate those feelings. President Obama’s unfortunate press conference comments regarding the incident between Professor Gates and Sgt. Crowley only serves to confirm his tendency to inflame racial tension as a political tool.

Disasters, either man-made or natural, happen, so be prepared. Be prepared for a major collapse of the infrastructure we depend on and civil disorder that will inevitably follow. If you have the freedom to do so, I would even consider moving away from major metropolitan areas - areas typically controlled by the forces that are driving this country into the ground - to areas of like-minded citizenry who will coalesce to provide mutual support in time of chaos. Most importantly, lay up supplies sufficient to sustain those you love in safety and health for an extended period of time. My starting goal was one month and then going on from there, but most people, other than our Mormon friends, aren’t prepared for even a few days absent an intact infrastructure.

My belief is that the next eighteen months will be the most dangerous for the survival of our Constitutional freedom since we became a self-governing people, so my advice is to not be lulled into thinking that this is just another soon-to-be-corrected, pendulum-like, deviation from the norm. It isn’t.

Facing the Abyss – H.R. 3200 and healthcare reform

2009-07-24T11:29:00.000-04:00

Thursday, July 23, 2009

By Dr. William Harvey, M.D.
America's Right

It took the Continental Congress 5 years (1776-1781) to develop the Articles of Confederation governing the relationship between the states; after 6 years the Congress convened the Federal Convention (today known as the Constitutional Convention) ostensibly to propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation. The Constitutional Convention took 6 months to do its work, but the entire process of developing the Constitution, from the Annapolis Convention to the seating of the first Congress under the Constitution, took almost 3 years (1787-1791). The Founding Fathers knew that critical decisions, nation-altering decisions, deserve full public deliberation and care before being enacted.

Three similar approaches to healthcare legislation, two from the Senate Democrats and one from the House Democrats, were made public last week. President Obama announced publicly he’d like to have final healthcare reform legislation on his desk for signature before the August Congressional recess. As a nation, we’ve had the financial stimulus and the bailout bills rammed through Congress before anyone had a chance to read or evaluate them. Will we do the same with the most critical piece of legislation that has come before the Congress in at least 60 years, if not longer?

In the Senate, the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (appropriately abbreviated “HELP”)developed their bill under Senator Baucus. This bill is as yet unnumbered but is titled “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009”. I can’t find the Senate version of the bill in either THOMAS, the official Congressional website for pending legislation, or in Govtrack.us, but it is posted on the Senate HELP Committee’s website in its submitted form, the committee mark-up (Ref. 5), and the Chairman’s mark-up form (Ref. 6).

Once the Senate HELP reported its bill out to the Senate, the basic bill (now identified as H.R. 3200) was introduced by Rep. John Dingell on July14 and ultimately referred to four other House Committees. It was reviewed and reported out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee to the full House on July 17. The vote was 26-22 along mostly party lines. (The full committee has 37 Democrat and 22 Republican members).

In short, both the House and the Senate have similar bills before each chamber, ready for debate and voting. Let’s look at the contents of H.R. 3200 to see the operational details of the Democrats’ healthcare plan.

H.R. 3200 is a svelte 1017 pages. The basic strategy is to leave the current multiple-provider / multiple-payor, employer-driven, insurance-based system intact but improve the system “by building on what works in today’s health care system, while repairing the aspects that are broken.” In fact, the bill, if passed in its current form, will, in a few short years, irretrievably destroy the current private healthcare system by removing the competitiveness of the private payer system and by creating a new generation of healthcare workers trained to believe that a government-run, government-financed system is the only choice.

The bill is organized as follows:

Division A (“Affordable Healthcare Choices”) establishes standards for health benefit plans (Title 1), defining the services that must be offered and ensuring access. Title 2 creates the Health Insurance Exchanges (also called gateways), defines the public health insurance option, and establishes subsidies for lower-income households. Title 3 requires employers to provide and individuals to obtain health insurance. Title 4 modifies the IRS code to establish penalties for companies and individuals who fail to comply. This Division essentially redefines the American healthcare system from both the individual and employer perspectives.

The Congressional Budget Office, in its formal review of the introduced version of this bill, indicated that (Refs. 1, 2):

Collectively, those provisions [of the bill] would yield a significant increase in the number of Americans with health insurance. By 2019, CBO and the staff of JCT estimate, the number of nonelderly people without health insurance would be reduced by about 37 million, leaving about 17 million nonelderly residents uninsured (nearly half of whom would be unauthorized immigrants). In total, CBO estimates that enacting those provisions would raise deficits by $1,042 billion over the 2010-2019 period.

Because of certain projected “revenue provisions” (like $583 bn in increased taxes on individuals and employers) and other “savings”, the net budget deficit in the CBO projections is smaller, on the order of $239 bn. This plan certainly does not meet the President’s goal of being revenue neutral.

The public health insurance “option” in Title 2 is perhaps the most worrisome aspect of the first division of this bill. In a New York Times editorial, Mankiw (Reference 4) examines how such an option would quickly drive pricing to the point where only the public option would remain. Many articles have mistakenly referred to this option as creating a government monopoly, but in fact, it would create a monopsony. A monopoly is a market situation where one seller has multiple buyers and can drive prices up; a monopsony is a market situation where one buyer has multiple sellers and can drive prices down.

Imagine a taxpayer-subsidized public option, which starts with the single largest patient pool (all Medicare, Medicaid, S-Chip, Defense Department and Department of Veterans’ Affairs beneficiaries and dependents; approaching 50% of the U.S. population). How hard would it be for such a behemoth to “negotiate” major discounts from all stakeholders in healthcare and then price undercut all private payors and other suppliers? Employers would clearly turn to such an option to reduce their (now government-mandated) healthcare expenses, and in a short period of time there would be only one plan: the public option. Government should not be in the business of competing with the private marketplace under any circumstances, but certainly not while subsidized with taxpayer funds.

Division B modifies Medicare, Medicaid and S-CHIP to align and operate more smoothly in the new healthcare landscape. It provides consistency of services in rural areas, establishes quality standards, and impacts the education of medical trainees within Medicare, although, as we’ll see in a moment, the entire medical educational system will be revamped eventually, under the direction of the Federal government.

Division C continues the Public Health aspects started in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (“The Stimulus Bill”). Here, a complete revamping of the Primary Care, Nursing and Public Health workforces is implemented. As in the UK and other countries with a government-run healthcare system the government will take over the training of most healthcare workers in the US through a series of scholarship, loan or other support programs which will require either a period of National Service (Public Health Workforce Corps, section 3401) or some method for loan repayment (section 340N). These programs will include training for diversity (section 2241) as well as “cultural and linguistic competency training for health care professionals (section 2251). Section 2301 expands the prevention and wellness research initially authorized in (you guessed it!) the Stimulus Bill. Section 2002 creates a protected “slush fund”, under the title Public Health Investment Fund, starting with $5 bn in annual funding in fiscal 2010 and growing to $12.7 bn annually in fiscal 2017. This fund is to be used to carry out “activities under designated public health provisions”. These funds “shall not be taken into account for purposes of any budget enforcement procedures… of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act and budget resolutions for fiscal years during which appropriations are made from the Fund”, meaning they are “off the books” for deficit reporting and reduction.

Here again, the Federal Government is stepping well beyond any passive role as a provider of financial support for medical education to provide staffing for the nation’s need. Instead, during a long period of public service to repay loans, the nation’s healthcare workers are being given non-medical, political indoctrination on what the proper social and societal views should be towards the provision of healthcare in a free-market based constitutional republic. If this bill is left in its current form, within one generation, there will be no way to modify any aspect of this approach to healthcare; both the private payer infrastructure and the required workforce will be utterly destroyed.

Perhaps most insidious is the last provision of Division C of this bill. I’ll simply quote it in full:

Subtitle E—States Failing To Adhere to Certain Employment Obligations
SEC. 2541. LIMITATION ON FEDERAL FUNDS.
A State is eligible for Federal funds under the provisions of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 201 et seq.) only if the State—
(1) agrees to be subject in its capacity as an employer to each obligation under division A of this Act and the amendments made by such division applicable to persons in their capacity as an employer;
and
(2) assures that all political subdivisions in the State will do the same.

In short, the Federal government here demands that in order to have medical staff and receive funding for health care facilities and other resources each state must impose on itself and on its local governments all the obligations the Federal government is placing on employers. Any semblance of the original relationship intended by the Founding Fathers between the powers of the Federal government and the states is utterly lacking. This is the clear imposition of the will of the Federal government on the states.

Every American is impacted by healthcare reform. Not sometime in the future but immediately. This bill will change your care, your taxes and the nature of your relationship to your doctor (or your next doctor, if many physicians elect to retire early once they sense the direction of this change). More importantly, it will be an irreversible step in the relationship of the Federal government, the states, and the people. Read the parts of this bill that worry you … and contact your Congressional representatives. Senator Enzi has certainly provided his thoughts (Ref. 3) and polls are beginning to show the American people are not as dazzled by President Obama’s rhetoric as they were in January. Let your Congressmen (and women) know how you feel. Politically there is nothing more important than this bill right now. Let’s not let the “dog days of summer” allow something this critical to just sneak by. Nothing less than the future of America is at stake.

REFERENCES
1. CBO to Rep. J Dingell, letter dated July 17. Preliminary analysis of HR 3200.
2. CBO, Director’s Blog: Preliminary Analysis of the House Democrats’ Health Reform Proposal.
3. Enzi: HELP Democrats’ Bill a Prescription for Failure. Press Release; July 15, 2009 (pdf)
4. Mankiw, N. Gregory: The Pitfalls of the Public Option. NY Times; June 28, 2009
5. Senate HELP Committee: Markup of H.R. 3200 (“America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009’’).
6. Senate HELP Committee: Chairman’s Markup of H.R. 3200 (“America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009’)’. (pdf)
7. Singer, Peter: Why We Must Ration Health Care. NY Times Magazine, July 19, 2009

---------------
William Harvey is a physician with extensive experience in drug research and development. He began as an academic researcher but has been a pharmaceutical executive in the global development arena for almost two decades. His current position involves the strategic use of comparative effectiveness research to speed drug development and to educate healthcare stakeholders: government, payors, prescribers, and patients. He lives in the greater Philadelphia area.
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Things Hippies want to blame on global warming

2009-07-21T19:00:00.002-04:00

[I found this list on "America's Right" blog. I was both stunned and bemused that there was actually an article associated to each item. To read the articles, go to www.americasright.com]

Things Hippies want to blame on global warming

ACNE
AGRICULTURAL LAND INCREASE
AFGHAN POPPIES DESTROYED
AFRICA DEVASTATED
AFRICAN AID THREATENED
AFRICA, CONTINENT OF CONFLICT
AGGRESSIVE WEEDS
AIR PRESSURE CHANGES
ALASKA RESHAPED
ALLERGIES INCREASE
ALPS ARE MELTING
AMAZON WILL TURN TO DESERT
AMERICAN DREAM AT END
AMPHIBIAN BREEDING PATTERNS
ANAPHYLACTIC REACTIONS (BEES)
ANCIENT FORESTS CHANGED
ANIMALS HEAD FOR HILLS
ANTARCTIC GRASS FLOURISHING
ANTARCTIC ICE GROWTH
ANTARCTIC ICE SHRINKS
ANTARCTIC SEA LIFE AT RISK
ANXIETY TREATMENT
ALGAE BLOOM FORMATIONS
ARCHAEOLOGICAL SITES AT RISK
ARCTIC BOGS ARE MELTING
ARCTIC IN BLOOM
ARCTIC ICE FREE
ARCTIC LAKES ARE DISAPPEARING
ARCTIC TUNDRA WILL BURN
ATLANTIC OCEAN LESS SALTY
ATLANTIC OCEAN MORE SALTY
ATMOSPHERIC CHANGES
ATTACK OF THE KILLER JELLYFISH
AVALANCHES NOT AS COMMON
AVALANCHES MORE COMMON
BAGHDAD SNOW
BAHRAIN UNDER WATER
BANANAS GROW WILD
BEER SHORTAGE (yikes!)
BEETLE INFESTATION
BET FOR $10,000
BETTER BEER (yay!)
BIG MELT COMING FASTER
BILLION-DOLLAR RESEARCH PROJECTS
BILLIONS FACE RISK
BILLIONS OF DEATHS
BIRD DISTRIBUTION CHANGES
BIRD VISITORS DECREASED
BIRDS ARE CONFUSED
BIRDS RETURN EARLY
BIRDS DRIVEN NORTH
BITTERN BOOM ENDS
BLACKBIRDS STOP SINGING
BLIZZARDS
BLUE MUSSELS RETURN
BLUE TONGUE
BRAINS SHRINK
BRIDGE COLLAPSE (MINN.)
BRITAIN SIBERIAN
BRITISH GARDENS ARE CHANGING
BROTHELS STRUGGLE
BROWN IRELAND
BUBONIC PLAGUE
BUDGET INCREASES
BUDDHIST TEMPLE THREATENED
BUILDING COLLAPSE
BUILDING SEASON EXTENSION
BRUSH FIRES
BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES
BUSINESS RISKS
BUTTERFLIES MOVE NORTH
CAMELS ARE DYING
CANCER DEATHS IN ENGLAND
CANNIBALISM IN THIRTY YEARS
CATARACTS
CATERPILLAR BIOMASS SHIFT
CAVE PAINTINGS THREATENED
CHILDHOOD INSOMNIA
CHOLERA
CIRCUMCISION IN DECLINE
CIRRUS DISAPPEARANCE
CIVIL UNREST
CLOUD INCREASE
CLOUD STRIPPING
COCKROACH MIGRATION
COFFEE CROP THREATENED
COLD CLIMATE CREATURES SURVIVE
COLD SPELLS IN AUSTRALIA
COLD WEATHER TREND IN INDIA
COMPUTER MODELS
CONFERENCES INCREASE
CONFLICT
CONFLICT WITH RUSSIA
CONSUMERS FOOT THE BILL
CORAL BLEACHING
CORAL REEFS ARE DYING
CORAL REEFS ARE GROWING
CORAL REEFS SHRINK
COST OF TRILLIONS
COUGAR ATTACKS ON THE RISE
CRADLE OF CIVILZATION THREATENED
CRIME ON THE RISE
CROCODILE GENDER SHIFTS
CROPS DEVASTATED
CRUMBING ROADS & SEWER SYSTEMS
CURRICULUM CHANGES
CYCLONES IN AUSTRALIA
DANGER TO CHILDREN'S HEALTH
DARFUR
DARTFORD WARBLER PLAGUE
DEATH RATE INCREASE IN U.S.
DENGUE HEMORRHAGIC FEVER
DEPRESSION
DESERT ADVANCES
DESERT RETREATS
DESTRUCTION OF THE EARTH
DISAPPEARANCE OF COASTAL CITIES
DISEASES MOVE NORTH
DOLOMITES COLLAPSE
DROUGHT
DUCKS AND GEESE DECLINE
DUST BOWL IN THE CORN BELT
EARLY MARRIAGES
EARLY SPRING
EARLIER POLLEN SEASON
EARTH BIODIVERSITY CRISIS
EARTH DYING
EARTH EVEN HOTTER
EARTH LIGHT DIMMING
EARTH LOPSIDED
EARTH MELTING
EARTH'S MORBID FEVER
EARTH ON FAST TRACK
EARTH PAST POINT OF NO RETURN
EARTH SLOWING DOWN
EARTH SPINNING FASTER
EARTH TO EXPLODE
EARTH UPSIDE DOWN
EARTH IS WOBBLING
EARTHQUAKES
EL NINO INTENSIFICATION
END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
EROSION
EMERGING INFECTIONS
ENCEPHALITIS
ENGLISH VILLAGES LOST
EQUALITY THREATENED
EUROPE BOTH BAKING AND FREEZING
EUTROPHICATION
EVOLUTION IS ACCELERATING
EXPANDING UNIV. CLIMATE GROUPS
EXTINCTION -- THE HUMAN RACE
EXTINCTION -- CIVILIZATIONS
EXTINCTION -- LOGIC
EXTINCTION -- INUIT AFFECTED
EXTINCTION -- SMALLEST BUTTERFLY
EXTINCTION -- COD
EXTINCTION -- LADYBIRDS
EXTINCTION -- PIKAS
EXTINCTION -- POLAR BEARS
EXTINCTION -- GORILLAS
EXTINCTION -- WALRUS
EXTINCTION -- WHALES
EXTINCTION -- FROGS
EXTINCTION -- TOADS
EXTINCTION -- PLANTS
EXTINCTION -- SALMON
EXTINCTION -- TROUT
EXTINCTION -- WILDFLOWERS
EXTINCTION -- WOODLICE
EXTINCTION -- PENGUINS
EXTINCTION -- A MILLION SPECIES
EXTINCTION -- 1/2 ANIMALS, PLANTS
EXTINCTION -- MOUNTAIN SPECIES
EXTINCTION -- NOT POLAR BEARS
EXTINCTION -- BARRIER REEF
EXTINCTION -- LEECHES
EXPERTS MUZZLED
EXTREME CHANGES TO CALIFORNIA
FADING FALL FOLIAGE
FAINTING
FAMINE
FARMERS GO BANKRUPT
FASHION DISASTERS
FEVER
FIGUREHEAD SACKED
FIR CONE BONANZA
FISH CATCHES DECLINE
FISH DOWNSIZE
FISH CATCHES INCREASE
FISH DEAFNESS
FISH GET LOST
FISH STOCKS AT RISK
FISH STOCKS DECLINE
FIVE MILLION ILLNESSES
FLESH-EATING DISEASE
FLOOD PATTERNS CHANGE
FLOODS
FLOODS OF BEACHES AND CITIES
FLOOD OF MIGRANTS
FLOOD PREPARATION FOR CRISIS
FLORIDA ECONOMIC DECLINE
FLOWERS IN PERIL
FOOD POISONING
FOOD PRICES RISE
FOOD PRICES SOAR
FOOD SECURITY THREAT
FOOTPATH EROSION
FORESTS IN DECLINE
FORESTS ARE EXPANDING
FROG WITH MULTIPLE HEADS
FROSTBITE
FROST DAMAGE INCREASED
FROSTS
FUNGI FRUITFUL
FUNGI INVASION
GAMES CHANGE
GARDEN OF EDEN WILTS
GENETIC DIVERSITY DECLINE
GENE POOLS SLASHED
GIANT OYSTERS INVADE
GIANT PYTHONS INVADE
GIANT SQUID MIGRATE
GINGERBREAD HOUSES COLLAPSE
GLACIAL EARTHQUAKES
GLACIAL RETREAT
GLACIAL GROWTH
GLACIER WRAPPED
GLOBAL COOLING
GLOBAL DIMMING
GLOWING CLOUDS
GOD MELTS
GOLF -- MASTERS WRECKED
GORE OMNIPRESENCE
GRANDSTANDING
GRASSLANDS WETTER
GREAT BARRIER REEF 95% DEAD
GREAT LAKES DROP
GREENING OF THE NORTH
GREY WHALES LOSE WEIGHT
GULF STREAM FAILURE
HABITAT LOSS
HANTAVIRUS PULMONARY SYNDROME
HARMFUL ALGAE
HARVEST INCREASE
HARVEST DECREASE
HAY FEVER EPIDEMIC
HEALTH AFFECTED
HEALTH OF CHILDREN HARMED
HEART DISEASE
HEART ATTACKS AND STROKES
HEAT WAVES
HIBERNATION PATTERNS AFFECTED
HIBERNATION ENDS TOO SOON
HIBERNATION ENDS TOO LATE
HOMELESS BOOM TO FIFTY MILLION
HORNETS
HIGH COURT DEBATES
HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REVERSAL
HUMAN FERTILITY REDUCED
HUMAN HEALTH IMPROVEMENT
HUMAN HEALTH RISK
HUMAN RACE OBLIVION
HURRICANES IN GENERAL
HURRICANE REDUCTION
HYDROPOWER PROBLEMS
HYPERTHERMIA DEATHS
ICE SHEET GROWTH
ICE SHEET SHRINKAGE
ICE SHELF COLLAPSE
ILLNESS AND DEATH
INCLEMENT WEATHER
INDIA DROWNING
INFRASTRUCTURE FAILURE (CANADA)
INDUSTRY THREATENED
INFECTIOUS DISEASES
INFLATION IN CHINA
INSECT EXPLOSION
INSURANCE PREMIUMS ON THE RISE
INUIT DISPLACEMENT
INUIT POISONED
INUIT TAKE LEGAL ACTION
INVASION OF CATS
INVASION OF HERONS
INVASION OF JELLYFISH
INVASION OF MIDGES
ISLAND DISAPPEARS
ISLANDS SINKING
ITCHIER POISON IVY
JELLYFISH EXPLOSION
JETS FALL FROM SKY
KEW GARDENS TAXED
KIDNEY STONES
KILLING US
KITTEN BOOM
KRILL DECLINE
LAKE, STREAM PRODUCTIVITY DOWN
LAKE EMPTIES
LAKE SHRINKING AND GROWING
LANDSLIDES
LANDSLIDES OF ICE AT 140 MPH
LAWSUITS ON THE RISE
LAWSUITS SUCCESSFUL
LAWYERS' INCOME INCREASED
LIVES SAVED
LOCH NESS MONSTER DEAD
LUSH GROWTH IN RAIN FORESTS
MALARIA
MAMMOTH DUNG MELT
MAPLE PRODUCTION UP
MAPLE SYRUP SHORTAGE
MARINE DISEASES
MARINE FOOD CHAIN DECIMATED
MEACHING
MEDITERRANEAN RISES
MEGACRYOMETEORS
MELANOMA
METHANE EMISSIONS FROM PLANTS
METHANE BURPS
METHANE RUNAWAY
MELTING PERMAFROST
MIDDLE KINGDOM CONVULSES
MIGRATION
MIGRATION DIFFICULT FOR BIRDS
MIGRATORY BIRDS HUGE LOSSES
MICROBES DECOMPOSE SOIL QUICKER
MINORITIES HIT
MONKEYS ON THE MOVE
MONT BLANC GROWS
MONUMENTS IN PERIL
MOOSE ARE DYING
MORE BAD AIR DAYS
MORE RESEARCH NEEDED
MORTALITY INCREASED
MOUNT EVEREST SHRINKING
MOUNTAINS BREAK UP
MOUNTAINS MELTING
MOUNTAINS TALLER
MORTALITY DECREASED
NATIONAL SECURITY IMPLICATIONS
NATURAL DISASTERS QUADRUPLE
NEW ISLANDS
NEXT ICE AGE
NFL THREATENED
NILE DELTA DAMAGED
NOCTILUCENT CLOUDS
NO EFFECT IN INDIA
NORTHWEST PASSAGE OPENED
NUCLEAR PLANTS BLOOM
OAKS DYING
OAKS MOVE NORTH
OCEAN ACIDIFICATION
OCEAN DESERTS EXPAND
OCEAN WAVES SPEED UP
OPERA HOUSE TO BE DESTROYED
OUTDOOR HOCKEY THREATENED
OZONE REPAIR SLOWED
OZONE ON THE RISE
PACIFIC DEAD ZONE
PERSONAL CARBON RATIONING
PEST OUTBREAKS
PESTS INCREASE
PHENOLOGY SHIFTS
PLANKTON BLOOMS
PLANKTON DESTABILIZED
PLANKTON LOSS
PLANT VIRUSES
PLANTS MARCH NORTH
POLAR BEARS AGGRESSIVE
POLAR BEARS CANNIBALISTIC
POLAR BEARS DROWNING
POLAR BEAR STARVATION
POLAR TOURS SCRAPPED
POPCORN RISE
PORPOISE ASTRAY
PROFITS COLLAPSE
PSYCHIATRIC ILLNESS
PUFFIN NUMBERS DECLINE
RAILROAD TRACKS DEFORMED
RAINFALL INCREASE
RAPE WAVE
REFUGEES
RELEASE OF ANCIENT FROZEN VIRUSES
RESORTS DISAPPEAR
RICE THREATENED
RICE YIELDS CRASH
RIFT ON CAPITOL HILL
RIOTING AND NUCLEAR WAR
RIVER FLOW IMPACTED
RIVERS RAISED
ROADS WEAR OUT
ROBINS RAMPANT
ROCKY PEAKS CRACK APART
ROOF OF THE WORLD A DESERT
ROOFTOP BARS
ROSS RIVER DISEASE
RUINS RUINED
SALINITY REDUCTION,
SALINITY INCREASE
SALMONELLA
SATELLITES ACCELERATE
SCHOOL CLOSURES
SEA LEVELS RISE
SEA LEVEL RISE FASTER
SEALS MATING MORE
SEWER BILLS RISE
SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS
SEX CHANGE
SHARKS BOOMING
SHARKS MOVING NORTH
SHEEP SHRINK
SHOP CLOSURES
SHORT-NOSED DOGS ENDANGERED
SHRINKING PONDS
SHRINKING SHRINE
SKI RESORTS THREATENED
SKIN CANCER
SLOW DEATH
SMALLER BRAINS
SMOG
SNOWFALL INCREASE
SNOWFALL HEAVY
SNOWFALL REDUCTION
SOARING FOOD PRICES
SOCIETAL COLLAPSE
SONGBIRDS CHANGE EATING HABITS
SOUR GRAPES
SPACE PROBLEM
SPECTACULAR ORCHIDS
SPIDERS INVADE SCOTLAND
SQUID POPULATION EXPLOSION
SQUIRRELS REPRODUCE EARLIER
STORMS ARE WETTER
STORMWATER DRAINS STRESSED
STREET CRIME TO INCREASE
SUBSIDENCE
SUICIDE
SWORDFISH IN THE BALTIC
TABASCO TRAGEDY
TAXES
TECTONIC PLATE MOVEMENT
TEENAGE DRINKING
TERRORISM
THREAT TO PEACE
TICKS MOVE NORTH TO SWEDEN
TIDES RISE
TORNADO OUTBREAK
TOURISM INCREASE
TRADE BARRIERS
TRADE WINDS WEAKENED
TRANSPORTATION THREATENED
TREE FOLIAGE INCREASE
TREE GROWTH SLOWED
TREES COULD RETURN TO ANTARCTIC
TREES IN TROUBLE
TREES LESS COLORFUL
TREES MORE COLORFUL
TREES LUSH,
TROPICS EXPANSION
TROPOPAUSE RAISED
TRUFFLE SHORTAGE
TURTLES CRASH
TURTLES LAY EGGS EARLIER
U.K. COASTAL IMPACT
U.K. KATRINA
VAMPIRE MOTHS
VENICE FLOODED
VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS
WALRUS PUPS ORPHANED
WAR
WARS OVER WATER
WARS SPARKED
WARS THREATEN BILLIONS
WATER BILLS DOUBLE
WATER SUPPLY UNRELIABILITY
WATER SCARCITY
WATER STRESS
WEATHER GONE WILD
WEATHER PATTERNS INCONSISTENT
WEEDS
WESTERN AID CANCELED OUT
WEST NILE FEVER
WHALES MOVE NORTH
WHEAT YIELDS CRUSHED IN AUSTRALIA
WILDFIRES
WIND SHIFT
WIND REDUCED
WINE -- AUSTRALIAN PROBLEMS
WINE -- CALIF. INDUSTRY DAMAGE
WINE -- U.S. INDUSTRY DISASTER
WINE -- MORE ENGLISH
WINE -- GERMAN BUSINESS BOOMING
WINE -- NO MORE FROM FRANCE
WINE -- NAPA PASSE
WINTERS COLDER IN U.K.
WINTER DEAD IN U.K.
WITCHCRAFT EXECUTIONS
WOLVES ARE EATING MORE MOOSE
WOLVES ARE EATING LESS
WORKERS LAID OFF
WORLD AT WAR
WORLD BANKRUPTCY
WORLD IN CRISIS
WORLD IN FLAMES
YELLOW FEVER

Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Sotomayor and Abortion for Undesired 'Populations'

2009-07-16T13:47:00.000-04:00

From National Review [Ed Whelan]

In this interview from this coming Sunday’s issue of the New York Times Magazine, Justice Ginsburg sees fit to offer her views on a range of matters, including:

1. Interviewer Emily Bazelon states that Ginsburg “was forceful about why she thinks Sotomayor should be confirmed.” Just the topic, of course, that any Supreme Court justice should see fit to opine on the day before a confirmation hearing starts.

Ginsburg offers this feeble defense of Sotomayor’s “wise Latina woman” comment: “Think of how many times you’ve said something that you didn’t get out quite right, and you would edit your statement if you could.” Ginsburg is evidently unaware that Sotomayor’s comment was part of a text that Sotomayor herself prepared and later published as a law-review article (and that she repeated on several occasions).

2. Speaking of something that maybe “didn’t get out quite right” (but maybe did): As part of her broad-ranging discussion of abortion, Ginsburg offers this, er, interesting comment why the Court’s 1980 decision in Harris v. McRae, which ruled that the Hyde Amendment’s exclusion of nontherapeutic abortions from Medicaid reimbursement was constitutionally permissible, “surprised” her:

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.

Gee, Justice Ginsburg, would you like to tell us more about your views on those populations that “we don’t want to have too many of”?

Tell the Senate to Say NO to Robert Groves and ACORN Corruption!

2009-07-09T18:12:00.001-04:00

NetRight Nation Blog
Written by ALG News
Thursday, 09 July 2009 20:14
Barack Obama -- the former attorney for the corrupt Association of Community Organization and Reform Now (ACORN) -- has now nominated for Census Bureau czar a man who (perhaps not surprisingly) refuses to rule out paying ACORN lieutenants tens of millions of tax dollars to, of all things, count the number of Americans who should receive federally funded hand-outs and be allowed to vote.
Now, remember, this is the very same ACORN group that is currently under investigation for committing electoral fraud in 12 states during the most recent election cycle alone, including Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. And it’s the same group whose malfeasance dates back at least to 1998, when its Project Vote contractor was arrested in Arkansas for falsifying 400 voter registration cards.

In King County, Washington, in 2008, elections officials were forced to remove 1,762 voter registrations submitted by ACORN. In Delaware County, Pennsylvania, nearly 1,200 fraudulent voter registrations were submitted by ACORN. In Cleveland, Ohio, ACORN registered one voter 77 times. And in Chicago, 10,000 false registrations were submitted.

No wonder Chicago is Barack Obama’s kind of town. Clearly, his kind of people tally the votes there. Which may explain why in 2008, his presidential campaign paid ACORN operatives a whopping $800,000 to register voters. And why Investor’s Business Journal called Mr. Obama “ACORN’s Senator.”

In view of all this, it is little wonder that on May 19 of this year, Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) asked Obama Census Czar nominee Robert Groves for a firm commitment that he would not hire ACORN operatives to count the U.S. populace. And it is even less wonder that Mr. Vitter has now put a hold on the Groves’ nomination, since Mr. Groves refuses to extend the Senator even the courtesy of a response, let alone a commitment to protect the sanctity of the census from the voraciously corrupt ACORN lieutenants.

What is at stake in this situation is much more than a mere uneven headcount; it is the corruption of the voting process itself. If ACORN is allowed to skew its census count the way it has repeatedly skewed its voter registrations, key decisions as to where and how federal funds are distributed will be at stake. And the redrawing of congressional boundaries will be at the mercy of ACORN operatives’ decisions as to whom they wish to count and whom they don’t.

If ACORN lieutenants decide to lose a few hundred thousand citizens in districts where Republicans are strong – such as the South and West -- those voters could be deprived of congressional representation. And if they decide to add on a few hundred thousand in areas where Democrats dominate – such as major urban areas – those cities could find themselves with additional votes in the halls of Congress.

In short, to put it bluntly: if ACORN is allowed to corrupt the census as it has, time and again, corrupted voter registration, the fragile fabric of democracy could be forever destroyed.

That’s what is at stake. And that’s why Americans from all walks of life, from either party, and from every area of the country must support the Vitter hold on Robert Groves.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has threatened to invoke a cloture vote Monday morning to break Mr. Vitter’s hold on Mr. Groves. It’s time to tell the members of the Senate in no uncertain terms: “If Robert Groves won’t commit to keeping ACORN away from the census count, we want him kept away from the Census Bureau.” The Senate switchboard number is 202-225-3121.

The Fed Must Be Stopped

2009-07-09T13:10:00.001-04:00

July 9, 2009
Written by: Ron Paul
Our country currently finds itself in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s and, as during all economic crises, people search for the answer as to why this has happened. Not only have large financial firms been affected, but also mainstays of American industry such as GM and Chrysler, all the way down to the Mom & Pop stores on Main Street. The easy way out is to blame the traditional scapegoats: foreign governments, fraudulent businessmen, and greedy speculators. But the real villain is far more sinister; the organization entrusted with maintaining a stable dollar and touted as the guarantor of economic stability – the Federal Reserve.

In the United States, monetary policy has been the domain of the Federal Reserve since its inception in 1913. Since that time we have had a number of cyclical recessions, each one following a boom caused by the Federal Reserve's loose monetary policy. The problem with the Federal Reserve is that it interferes with market pricing functions. Interest rates are a price just like any other and arise because of the fact that people prefer to consume in the present rather than in the future. The extent to which people defer present consumption is reflected in interest rates, which in a free market are determined by the spontaneous interactions and decisions of millions of people.

Fed intervention to set prices throws markets and interest rates out of equilibrium. When the Federal Reserve pushes interest rates below what the market rate would be, everyone wants to borrow money for long-term projects. Shortages of loanable funds would occur, except that the Federal Reserve has the ability to create bank balances out of thin air. The Fed can create a bank ledger on paper, or on a computer, establish a balance of millions or billions of dollars, and then spend these dollars out into the economy.

Loans become cheap, and the result of these lower interest rates is an economic boom which eventually manifests itself as a bubble. Beginning in 2001, the Federal Reserve pushed interest rates to as low as one percent, which after adjusting for inflation meant that the real interest rate was negative, so businesses were actually making money by taking out loans. This was the fuel for the housing bubble and the reason there are 19 million empty houses today.

Because of this awesome power to create money out of thin air, the Fed has jumped in to stabilize ailing financial firms by pledging over $7 trillion through various guarantee programs and credit facilities. This is equivalent to over half of the entire nation's GDP. Over $1 trillion of this is already in play, propping up banks and other institutions that should be allowed to fail. All of this has taken place with no oversight by Congress. The Fed was created by Congress, and it is unconscionable that we have allowed it to act in such a way without our oversight. Currently the Federal Reserve's credit facilities, open market operations, and agreements with foreign governments and central banks are all exempt from any sort of audit or oversight. Earlier this year I introduced the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, HR 1207, that would remove all restrictions on Federal Reserve audits and call for a f ull audit of the Federal Reserve System to be completed by the end of 2010. At this writing, 245 of my fellow Congressmen have cosponsored this bill and we hope to have hearings in the near future. In the Senate, Republicans Jim DeMint, Mike Crapo and David Vitter have cosponsored S. 604, companion legislation introduced by Bernie Sanders. I am very encouraged by the tremendous growing momentum on Capitol Hill.

Our Founding Fathers never intended for a single entity such as the Federal Reserve to have this much power. In fact, there is no authority in the Constitution for the federal government to create a central bank, to enact legal tender laws, or to print paper money. The Tenth Amendment is quite clear that “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.” The states themselves are prohibited from emitting bills of credit, i.e. paper money, arising from the Founders' negative experiences with paper money during the Revolutionary War. Cheap, un-backed, easily counterfeited paper money nearly lost the Revolution, until the government returned to minting gold and silver coins. Unfortunately, like too many other lessons learned by the Founders, the painful experiences of paper money have been forgotten by those living in the pres ent. We even ignore the experiences of Germans in the 1920s, Argentines in the 1980s, and Zimbabweans over the past decade. The Fed doubled the monetary base last fall in a matter of months, and God help us if any of this high-powered money begins to make its way through the economy.

An audit of the Fed is only the first step towards returning to where our Founders intended this country to be. The Founders knew that paper money could ruin a country, and drafted the Constitution in such a way that they thought would ensure sound, commodity-backed currency. Unfortunately, the Constitution was dispensed with long ago, and we find ourselves now suffering under an unconstitutional regime of un-backed paper money. Until we abolish the Federal Reserve and return to a stable currency that is not able to be manipulated to create boom and bust cycles, we will continue down the path of economic ruin.

Congress Ron Paul serves the fourteenth district of Texas and is honorary chairman of Campaign for Liberty. His new book, End the Fed (Grand Central Publishing) will release on September 16th and is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Why Women Are Unhappy

2009-07-08T15:25:00.000-04:00

June 19, 2009
by Phyllis Schlafly
The National Bureau of Economic Research released a study to be published soon in the American Economic Journal that shows women's happiness has measurably declined since 1970. It's no surprise that this has stimulated much comment.

This study covers the same time period as the rise of the so-called women's liberation or feminist movement. The correlation demands an explanation.

One theory advanced by the authors, University of Pennsylvania economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, is that the women's liberation movement "raised women's expectations" (sold them a bill of goods), making them feel inadequate when they fail to have it all. A second theory is that the demands on women who are both mothers and jobholders in the labor force are overwhelming.

I'm neither an economist nor a psychologist, but I'll join the conversation with my own armchair analysis. Another theory could be that the feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach.

Feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women held consciousness-raising sessions where they exchanged tales of how badly some man had treated them. Grievances are like flowers; if you water them, they will grow, and self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.

Another theory could be the increase in easy divorce and illegitimacy (now 40 percent of American births are to single moms), which means that millions of women are raising kids without a husband and therefore expect Big Brother government to substitute as provider. The 2008 election returns showed that 70 percent of unmarried women voted for Barack Obama, perhaps hoping to be beneficiaries of his "spread the wealth" policies.

In the pre-1970 era, when surveys showed women with higher levels of happiness, most men held jobs that enabled their wives to be fulltime homemakers. The private enterprise system constantly produces goods that make household work and kiddie care easier (such as dryers, dishwashers and paper diapers).

Betty Friedan started the feminist movement in the late 1960s with her book The Feminine Mystique, which created the myth that suburban housewives were suffering from "a sense of dissatisfaction" with their alleged-to-be-boring lives. To liberate women from the home that Friedan labeled "a comfortable concentration camp," the feminist movement worked tirelessly to make the role of fulltime homemaker socially disdained.

Economic need played no role in the feminist argument that marriage is archaic and oppressive to women. A job in the labor force was upheld as so much more fulfilling than tending babies and preparing dinner for a hard-working husband.

Women's studies courses require students to accept as an article of faith the silly notion that gender differences are not natural or biological but are social constructs created by the patriarchy and ancient stereotypes. This leads feminists to seek legislative corrections for problems that don't exist.

A former editor of the Ladies' Home Journal wrote in her book Spin Sisters that the anorexic blondes on television are every day selling the falsehood that women's lives are full of misery and threats from men. Bernard Goldberg calls the mainstream media "one of America's most pro-feminist institutions."

According to feminist ideology, the only gender-specific characteristic is that men are naturally batterers who make all women victims. On that theory, the feminists conned Congress into passing the Violence Against Women Act (note the sex discriminatory title), which includes a handout of a billion dollars a year to finance their political, legislative and judicial goals.

The feminists whine endlessly using their favorite word "choice" in matters of abortion, but they reject choice in gender roles. The Big Mama of feminist studies, Simone de Beauvoir, said, "We don't believe that any woman should have this choice. No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children . . . precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one."

The feminists have carried on a long-running campaign to make husbands and fathers unnecessary and irrelevant. Most divorces are initiated by women, and more women than men request same-sex marriage licenses in Massachusetts so that, with two affirmative-action jobs plus in vitro fertilization, they can create a "family" without husbands or fathers.

Despite the false messages of the colleges and the media, most American women are smart enough to reject the label feminist, and only 20 percent of mothers say they want full-time work in the labor force. I suggest that women suffering from unhappiness should look into how women are treated in the rest of the world, and then maybe American women would realize they are the most fortunate people on earth.

I Still Hate You, Sarah Palin

2009-07-08T14:17:00.000-04:00

July 07, 2009, 4:00 a.m.

The Republicans bring a knife to a gunfight, and lose again.

By David Kahane

One of the most terrifying moments of my political life came last summer at the Republican convention in St. Paul. No, I don’t mean seeing John McCain careering around the Xcel Energy Center like Eyegore in Young Frankenstein, his face frozen in a Lon Chaney Sr. rictus grin as he reached across the aisle to his erstwhile friends in the media and got his hand bitten off. Rather, I’m referring to the aftermath of Sarah Palin’s outrageous acceptance speech, which whipped up the Rotary Club delegates into a frenzy of white-boy fury that not even heckling by a brave Code Pink embed could deter. Truly a fascist classic and one that sent shivers down our collectivist spines.

Even worse was the glaze of horror on the phizzes of the assembled heroes of the Mainstream Media. Andrea Mitchell — yes, the very same Andrea Mitchell, NBC News, Washington, whose employer saw no conflict of interest at all when she married then Fed pooh-bah Alan Greenspan — stood there gaping like a frog while the rest of the assembled Finemans and Matthewses and Olbermanns scurried around like roaches when the light gets turned on: What the hell just hit us? For one horrible moment, it looked as if the carefully crafted plans of David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, George Soros, and the Second Chief Directorate, first department, of the old KGB were about to gang agley.

Not only were we offended at the sheer effrontery of McCain’s pick: How dare the Republicans proffer this déclassée piece of Wasilla trailer trash whose only claim to fame was that she didn’t exercise her right to choose? Where were her degrees from Smith or Barnard, her internships at PETA, the Brookings Institution, or the Young Pioneers? We were also outraged that the Stupid Party had just nominated a completely unqualified candidate nobody had ever heard of, a first-term governor of Alaska whose previous experience consisted of a small-town mayoralty. As opposed to our guy, Barry Soetoro of Mombasa, Djakarta, and Honolulu, a first-term senator nobody had ever heard of, whose previous experience had been as a state senator (D., Daley Machine) in Illinois. After eight long, illegitimate, lawless years of &*^%BUSH$#@! tyranny, how dare you contest this election?

And so the word went out, from that time and place: Eviscerate Sarah Palin like one of her field-dressed moose. Turn her life upside down. Attack her politics, her background, her educational history. Attack her family. Make fun of her husband, her children. Unleash the noted gynecologist Andrew Sullivan to prove that Palin’s fifth child was really her grandchild. Hit her with everything we have: Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, taking a beer-run break from her quixotic search for Mr. Right to drip venom on Sister Sarah; post-funny comic David Letterman, to joke about her and her daughters on national television; Katie Couric, the anchor nobody watches, to give this Alaskan interloper a taste of life in the big leagues; former New York Times hack Todd “Mr. Dee Dee Myers” Purdum, to act as an instrument of Graydon Carter’s wrath at Vanity Fair. Heck, we even burned her church down. Even after the teleological triumph of The One, the assault had to continue, each blow delivered with our Lefty SneerTM (viz.: Donny Deutsch yesterday on Morning Joe), until Sarah was finished.

You know what? It worked! McCain finally succumbed to his long-standing case of Stockholm Syndrome (“My friends, you have nothing to fear from an Obama presidency”), Tina Fey turned Palin into a see-Russia-from-my-house joke, “conservative” useful idiots like Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker hatched her, and finally Sarah cried No más and walked away. If we could, we’d cut off her head and mount it on a wall at Tammany Hall, except there is no more Tammany Hall unless you count Obama’s Tony Rezko–financed home in Chicago. And it took only eight months — heck, Sarah couldn't even have another kid in the time it took us to destroy her. That’s the Chicago way!

Yes, my friends, it’s once again time to quote Sean Connery’s famous speech from The Untouchables, written by David Mamet — the lecture the veteran Chicago cop gives a wet-behind-the-ears Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner, back when he was a movie star) while they sit in a church pew. “You want to get Capone? Here’s how you get him: he pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!” If you just think of us — liberal Democrats — as Capone you’ll begin to understand what we’re up to. And we just put one of yours in the morgue.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but maybe now you’re beginning to understand the high-stakes game we’re playing here. This ain’t John McCain’s logrolling senatorial club any more. This is a deadly serious attempt to realize the vision of the 1960s and to fundamentally transform the United States of America. This is the fusion of Communist dogma, high ideals, gangster tactics, and a stunning amount of self-loathing. For the first time in history, the patrician class is deliberately selling its own country down the river just to prove a point: that, yes, we can! This country stinks and we won’t be happy until we’ve forced you to admit it.

In other words, stop thinking of the Democratic Party as merely a political party, because it’s much more than that. We’re not just the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition. Not just the party of Aaron Burr, Boss Tweed, Richard J. Croker, Bull Connor, Chris Dodd, Richard Daley, Bill Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Emperor Barack Hussein Obama II. Not just the party of Kendall “Agent 202” Myers, the State Department official recruited as a Cuban spy along with his wife during the Carter administration. Rather, think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.

If you had any sense, you would start using our tactics against us. After all, you have a few lawyers on your side. Sue us. File frivolous ethics complaints against all our elected officials until, like Sarah, they go broke from defending themselves. (David Paterson would be a good place to start.) Challenge the constitutionality of BO2’s legion of fill-in-the-blank czars — none of whom have to be confirmed, or even pass a security check. (Come to think of it, neither did Barry.) Let slip your own journalistic dogs of war, assuming you have any, to find Barry’s birth certificate, his college transcripts, whether he applied to Occidental as a foreign student, and on which passport he traveled in 1981 to Pakistan with his friend Wahid Hamid, for starters.

You might also want to think about interviewing New York literary agent Jane Dystel, who a) contacted the totally unknown Obama in the wake of an adulatory New York Times piece in 1990 and b) got him a $125,000 advance for a memoir that c) he couldn’t write, even after a long sojourn in Bali, which d) got the contract canceled, whereupon e) Dystel got him $40,000 from another publisher, following which f) the book finally came out to glowing reviews and g) Obama fired her. Wouldn’t she have an interesting story to tell?

Of course, you won’t. You’re too nice, too enamored of history and tradition to realize that the rules have changed. Remember, I live and work in a town where, “Hello, he lied,” isn’t a joke; we men of the Left are perfectly comfortable lying, cheating, and stealing — hello, Senator Franken! — in order to attain and keep political power. Not for nothing is one of our mottos, “By Any Means Necessary.” You see, we’re the good guys, and for us the ends always justify the means. We are, literally, shameless, which is why Bill Clinton is now a multi-millionaire and Eliot Spitzer is already on the comeback trail.

In Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, “the fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.” This is the book that “Reset” Rodham (what ever happened to her?) and BHO II grew up reading and continue to live by. If you don’t understand that that’s the way we see you — as the enemy — then you’re too dumb to survive. Remember that for us politics is not just an avocation, or even just a job, but our life. We literally stay awake nights thinking up ways to screw you. And one of the ways we do that is by religiously observing Alinsky’s Rule No. 4.

Did Sarah stand for “family values”? Flay her unwed-mother daughter. Did she represent probity in a notoriously corrupt, one-family state? Spread rumors about FBI investigations. Did she speak with an upper-Midwest twang? Mock it relentlessly on Saturday Night Live. Above all, don’t let her motivate the half of the country that doesn’t want His Serene Highness to bankrupt the nation, align with banana-republic Communist dictators, unilaterally dismantle our missile defenses, and set foot in more mosques than churches since he has become president. We’ve got a suicide cult to run here.

And that’s why Sarah had to go. Whether she understood it or not, she threatened us right down to our most fundamental, meretricious, elitist, sneering, snobbish, insecure, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders bones. She was, after all, a “normal” American, the kind of person (or so I’m told) you meet in flyover country. The kind that worries first about home and hearth and believes in things like motherhood and love of country the way it is, not the way she wants to remake it.

What you clowns need, in other words, is a Rules for Radical Conservatives to explain what you’re up against and teach you how to compete before it’s too late. Luckily, since I care about money even more than I care about politics, I have just such a book in the proposal stage, currently making the rounds of various publishers, assuming any of them are wise enough to take me up on it.

And, yes, this time it really is personal.

— David Kahane is pushing for a new national holiday to commemorate the destruction of Sarah Palin, and is hopeful that his senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, will co-sponsor it, along with Henry Waxman in the House. You can second the motion at kahanenro@gmail.com or on Facebook.

—

More Constructive Obstructionism in Action

2009-07-08T14:08:00.001-04:00

Wednesday, July 8, 2009
From America's Right blog

Louisiana congressman introduces bill that would force any member of Congress who votes in favor of government-run health care to enroll themselves in the program.

Yesterday, I wrote a little about the Doctrine of Constructive Obstructionism, about how congressional Republicans must propose alternatives to the plans and proposals put forth by their counterparts across the aisle, unify behind those alternatives, and refuse to budge with regard to each and every piece of legislation proposed by the Democrats that weakens our economy and undermines our national defense.

It seems as though, when it comes to the health care debate, one House Republican is getting the ball rolling. In a recent press release, Louisiana Congressman John Fleming, M.D.--that's right, a medical doctor--described a new piece of legislation he has introduced which would hold his colleagues accountable as they seek to enact groundbreaking reforms to the American health care system. Fleming's statement:

As a physician, I am amazed at the number of bureaucrats in this House who are quick to claim a government-run health care plan is the reform this country needs. This resolution will offer members of Congress an opportunity to put their money where their mouth is, and urge their colleagues who vote for legislation creating a government-run health care plan to lead by example and enroll themselves in the same public plan.

Fantastic. What better way for congressmen and congresswomen to truly represent their constituents than to subject themselves to the very same rules they enact? I love it.

Fleming's legislation, of course, will likely not go anywhere -- but it's the idea that Republicans are offering alternatives and new ideas while at the very same time strongly saying "no" to the Democrats' plans. Regardless of whether the health care reform legislation passes, the GOP can and will be in the position of looking back upon the debate and informing the electorate that, no, the Democrats refused to play by the very same rules which they were foisting upon the American people.

Nothing So Shocking About This Coup

2009-07-01T12:42:00.003-04:00

Written by Glenn Garvin
Wednesday, 01 July 2009 02:35
From the Miami Herald:
The greatest tourist attraction in Central America has always been politics. Diplomats stop by every few years, take a couple of snapshots of what's going on at the presidential palace, and then profoundly declare their opinions, devoid of context or history. This week's favorite diplotourism destination is Honduras, where the army Sunday arrested President Manuel Zelaya and booted him across the border to Costa Rica. In the Polaroid analysis, it's pretty clear what happened: ''A return to barbarism in our hemisphere,'' as Argentina's president Cristina Fernández put it.
She had plenty of company. ''The action taken against Honduran President Mel Zelaya violates the precepts of the Inter-American Democratic Charter, and thus should be condemned by all,'' said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. ``We call on all parties in Honduras to respect the constitutional order and the rule of law.''
The OAS Permanent Council voted ''to condemn vehemently the coup d'etat staged this morning against the constitutionally established government of Honduras.'' U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon demanded ``the reinstatement of the democratically elected representatives of the country and full respect for human rights.''
Here's a question for all these new-found defenders of Honduran democracy: Where were you last week? Perhaps if some of these warnings about sticking to the constitution had been addressed to President Zelaya, the Honduran army would still be in the barracks where it belongs.
A naked power grab
For weeks, Zelaya -- an erratic leftist who styles himself after his good pal Hugo Chávez of Venezuela -- has been engaged in a naked and illegal power grab, trying to rewrite the Honduran constitution to allow him to run for reelection in November.
First Zelaya scheduled a national vote on a constitutional convention. After the Honduran supreme court ruled that only the country's congress could call such an election, Zelaya ordered the army to help him stage it anyway. (It would be ''non-binding,'' he said.) When the head of the armed forces, acting on orders from the supreme court, refused, Zelaya fired him, then led a mob to break into a military base where the ballots were stored.
His actions have been repudiated by the country's supreme court, its congress, its attorney-general, its chief human-rights advocate, all its major churches, its main business association, his own political party (which recently began debating an inquiry into Zelaya's sanity) and most Hondurans: Recent polls have shown his approval rating down below 30 percent.
In fact, about the only people who didn't condemn Zelaya's political gangsterism were the foreign leaders and diplomats who now primly lecture Hondurans about the importance of constitutional law. They're also strangely silent about the vicious stream of threats against Honduras spewing from Chávez since Zelaya was deposed.
Warning that he's already put his military on alert, Chávez on Monday flat-out threatened war against Honduras if Roberto Micheletti, named by the country's congress as interim president until elections in November, takes office.
''If they swear him in we'll overthrow him,'' Chávez blustered. ``Mark my words. Thugetti -- as I'm going to refer to him from now on -- you better pack your bags, because you're either going to jail or you're going into exile.''
Hey, Hillary: What does the Inter-American charter say about that?
The Honduran army clearly did not act on its own when it arrested Zelaya and sent him packing. The supreme court says the generals acted on its orders, and almost every Honduran politician of any note -- regardless of party -- has voiced approval.
Long, unpleasant history
They may come to regret their decision. Honduras had a long and unpleasant history of military government in the 20th century, and perhaps the army will not march back into Pandora's box and close the lid behind it so willingly.
But the initial signs are promising; the army, after getting rid of Zelaya, put congress in charge of choosing his replacement. Elections are still scheduled for November. Let's see if the OAS and the United Nations and the Obama administration come back to take another snapshot then.

A Tribute to the Heroes of Honduras

2009-07-01T11:16:00.006-04:00

I found the previous article and this video on the Net Right Nation blog. The situation in Honduras has received poor media coverage from networks such as CNN. The following video was created by someone in Honduras and shows that the protests are peaceful. I encourage everyone to spread this around and help get the message out for those fighting for freedom in Honduras:

Cynthia McKinney Earns Certificate of INSANITY

2009-07-01T10:59:00.003-04:00

Note: I included this article for the amusement of our group, since we are by enlarge, Atlanta natives. Who voted for this woman anyway???

From The Lid blog:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
--Albert Einstein

Former Congresswoman, and professional nut job Cynthia McKinney fits Einstein's definition perfectly.

This past December McKinney, who was once arrested for slapping a US Capitol Policeman who asked her for ID, decided to get on a boat in an attempt to get around Israel's blockade and dock the vessel in a war zone so she could help and resupply the terrorist group Hamas. McKinney was on the boat as it was damaged by an Israeli navy vessel which rammed it three times before it was sent on its merry moonbat way home.

The brain cell deprived McKinney decided that once was not enough, as she left Cyprus on a boat toward terrorist controlled Gaza and expected a different result.

"This is an outrageous violation of international law against us," said McKinney. "Our boat was not in Israeli waters and we were on a human rights mission to the Gaza Strip. President Obama just told Israel to let in humanitarian and reconstruction supplies, and that's exactly what we tried to do. We're asking the international community to demand our release so we can resume our journey."

The Israeli military issued a statement Tuesday saying that the boat had attempted to break a blockade of Gaza and was forced to sail to an Israeli port after ignoring a radio message to stay out of Gaza waters.

The statement said navy personnel boarded the freighter Arion without any shots being fired, and those on board were to be handed over to immigration authorities. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said Israel was planning to free the crew and passengers.

"Nobody wants to keep them here," he said. "They will be released as soon as they are checked."

Hey we don't want her here either. Maybe we can negotiate with Israel to keep her. I got it, how about, Israel keeps McKinney and Obama eases up on his anti-Israel settlement rhetoric:

The humanitarian cargo was also to be trucked into the Gaza Strip after a security check.

In a statement released by the Green Party, McKinney said she had sent appeals to Obama and the State Department for assurances of protection for the relief mission. She said the boat was sailing in international waters when it was seized.

But McKinney got her desired result, when she returns to the US she will get an official certificate of insanity.

Israel’s consulate general accused McKinney of a “reckless political stunt.”

“Once again former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and her fellow travelers have taken it upon themselves to disregard their own safety, as well as the safety of the vessel’s crew, by leading a boat into restricted waters,” the consulate general’s office in Atlanta said in a statement.
Source Fox News

Kill Cap-and-Trade Before it Kills US/Call Congress NOW !!!

2009-07-01T10:48:00.003-04:00

From The Lid blog:

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

This past February, in a stunning disregard of their fiduciary responsibilities to the American People, the Congress voted on a stimulus bill that they hadn't read. This one bill that singlehandedly increased the national debt by 160%. The bill was over 800 pages, and the members of the House received the bill at 11 pm the night before they were to vote on it. The vote couldn't be delayed because Nancy Pelosi was going on vacation to Italy.
Nancy Pelosi is about to do it again, she has scheduled a vote on the 800+ page bill and while there is a little more time than the February incident it is clear by the bill's support that many in Congress have not read the bill. Because if they had, they could not support it.

If they read the Waxman bill these Democrats would realize that not only will the legislation do nothing to help the environment, it will hurt the US Economy. Just take a look at the map above (click on it to see it larger). The states in green will do better under the plan, the ones in red, including Waxman's sometimes home state of Florida, will have to pay much more in energy costs. What the map doesn't reflect is the fact that manufacturing and production costs for all goods made in those states will become more expensive because of the increased energy costs, that greater expense will be passed to the consumer, causing inflationary pressure above and beyond all of that extra money the fed has been printing.

There is good news though, the vote will be close, if you call Congress today, there is still time to kill Cap-and-Trade, before it kills us:

Not Too Late To Kill 'Cap-And-Tax' Bill By ROBERT E. MURRAY
Perhaps the most destructive legislation in our country's history will, as soon as this week, be voted on in the House of Representatives: the Waxman-Markey tax bill in the guise of addressing climate change.

It will have adverse and lingering consequences for every American. It will raise the cost of electricity in our homes, the fuel for our cars and the energy that produces our manufacturing jobs, with little or no environmental benefit.

Further, independent experts estimate that it will cost Americans more than $2 trillion in just over eight years.

All Americans in the Midwest, South and Rocky Mountain regions will be most drastically affected because the climate change legislation will destroy the nation's coal industry and the low-cost electricity it has provided to these regions for generations.

Wealth will be transferred away from almost every state to the West Coast and New England.

The most abundant and by far least expensive energy source in our country for generating electricity is coal. America's coal reserves rival the energy potential of Saudi Arabian oil.

Unfortunately, the proposed climate-change legislation in the House of Representatives, the Waxman-Markey bill, forces America to throw away this tremendous resource, and our low-cost electricity with it.

The legislation discards coal and low-cost energy with it by setting an unattainable cap on carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, with the first reductions due by 2012.

Under the program, businesses that emit carbon dioxide would be required to purchase or obtain from the government special carbon dioxide credits. This carbon dioxide cap will force utilities to switch from lower-cost coal to natural gas or other more expensive energy sources.

Reliable estimates show that this bill will cost each American family at least $3,000 more in energy costs each year, notwithstanding the $2 trillion cost to the economy in just eight years. The chief executive of one of the nation's major utilities recently said it best in the Wall Street Journal:

"The 25 states that depend on coal for more than 50% of their electricity . . . will have to shut down and replace the majority of their fossil fuel plants as a result of the climate change legislation."

The supporters of this ill-conceived legislation point to two provisions that they claim will help coal. The first is that they give electric utilities free credits. However, those credits are worth millions of dollars, and the utilities will be free to sell the credits and use the proceeds to build more expensive natural gas or nuclear power plants, and not use our lowest-cost fuel — coal.

Second, the authors of the legislation invest money in carbon capture and storage technology, claiming that this will save jobs. But this technology will not be commercially available for at least 15 to 20 years, long after the reductions are required in 2012 and long after our coal plants are shut down and our manufacturing jobs are exported to China, India and other countries.

All these countries have stated that they will not place any restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions. China alone, which has surpassed the United States in carbon dioxide emissions, brings a new 500-megawatt coal-fired power plant on line every week. They will have low-cost electricity, and America will massively export more jobs to them.

It is not too late to tell Congress to kill this flawed bill. Call your representative in Congress and ask him or her to vote no on the Waxman-Markey climate bill (otherwise known as cap-and-tax) and support affordable energy, American jobs and our quality of life.

Our dumb and dumber Congress

2009-07-01T10:14:00.008-04:00

The Washington Examiner

James Carafano - June 26, 2009

Something extraordinary will happen at Washington, DC's Newseum on July 3. There, on the day before Independence Day, those who suffered through the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon will tell their stories. For the ages. It's part of an oral history project sponsored by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, in partnership with StoryCorps.

Attack survivors, members of victims' families, first responders, volunteer rescuers and other witnesses will record the horrors and heroics they witnessed that day. Their interviews will be maintained at the Library of Congress and become part of the permanent collection at the 9/11 memorial in New York. (While the interviews are being recorded, Newseum visitors will be able to sign one of the "I" beams that will be used in building the memorial.)

It's important to preserve, forever, the memory of that murderous attack on the American homeland. If we forget the past, it may well revisit us again.

That said, let's hope members of Congress will read some of these transcripts. It may remind them of their obligation to be ever-vigilant, and to give us laws that will keep us safe, free, and prosperous against a lurking transnational terrorist threat.

Sadly, this year the House on the Hill seems inclined to do anything but that. Here is a short list of really stupid pending legislation. Some entries exemplify "checkbook security"--measures that succeed in spending money, without improving our security.

Others exemplify "feel-good security"--bills that pretend to do something worthwhile, when it's not. And some demonstrate "checklist security"--meaningless gestures that won't accomplish much of anything. None of it is real security.

Topping the "dumb" list is a bill called "Providing for Additional Security in States Identification (PASS ID)." Despite its misleading title, PASS ID actually "takes a pass" at implementing a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission: Improving the security of identity credentials like driver's licenses.

The bill would rescind key provisions of the REAL ID Act, which established national standards. One requirement eliminated is a system that allows states to readily cross-check their data bases to combat fraud and identity theft. While PASS ID wouldn't roll back REAL ID in its entirety, it would leave us with something akin to a square fort with three walls.

Then there's the proposed "Chemical Facility Antiterrorism Act." The Department of Homeland Security has already established reasonable standards for chemical security, but they expire in October. Rather than just reauthorize the standards, this House bill would hijack the issue and force new regulations to advance an activist environmental agenda.

Under this bill, the government gets to decide what chemicals companies should be producing. And the criteria for this decision-making will be "green," not security. While this will do little to make us safer, it is sure to drive some chemical companies out of business and encourage others to move operations--and jobs--overseas.

Also pending in the House is the "Homeowners Defense Act," a bill to create a massive government insurance program--allegedly to help Americans recover after a catastrophic disaster. In reality, the main function of the bill is to force all taxpayers to subsidize insurance for folks who opt to live in beach houses in hurricane zones.

Beachfront property offers a pleasant but risky lifestyle, to be sure. But why should these property owners expect others to underwrite their risky behavior? And what in the world does it have to do with security?

And, of course, there's the "Travel Promotion Act." This bill proposes an unusual "solution" to the post-9/11 decline in foreign travel to the United States: Slap a tax on foreigners who do visit. The tax money, you see, would then pay for a government-sponsored ad campaign to encourage people to visit.

The geniuses in Congress are really onto something with this one, aren't they? It could be the start of something really big. How about taxing foreigners who buy U.S. produced beef so the government could launch a "Buy Beef" campaign? Or maybe a special levy on foreigners who buy GM cars. You can almost see the U.S. steel flying off foreign showroom floors, can't you?

Unfortunately, this through-the-looking-glass logic is all the rage on Capitol Hill. But piling up debt, raising taxes, growing government, strangling private industry, and repealing sound security measures will not make us safer. As unveiled so far this year, the Congressional agenda for homeland security so far just makes our legislative leaders look dumb and dumber.

Examiner Columnist James Jay Carafano is a senior research fellow for national security at The Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org heritage.org)

Honduran 'Coup' Provides Glimpse of Consistency in Obama's Foreign Policy

2009-06-30T15:51:00.000-04:00

From America's Right blog:
Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Many say that the administration's approach to foreign policy is non-existent or, at best, inconsistent -- in reality, it's quite the opposite

Since the weekend, I've been following the ongoing political situation in Honduras with interest and curiosity. Reading that the United Nations adopted a resolution today mandating that all U.N. member states refuse to recognize any Honduran government other than that of the nation's ousted leader finally was enough for me.

As it turns out, the transition of political power in a small Central American nation has perhaps taught me more about our own president and his foreign policy--not to mention how that foreign policy is embraced by the rest of the world--than any other occurrence or set of events so far, and the way it has been handled by the rest of the world has sent chills up my spine -- quite different, I assure you, than a thrill up the leg.

So far, the goings-on in Honduras has been widely reported by pretty much everybody as a "coup" but, in reality, such a characterization could not be further from the truth. In fact, what we've seen in Tegucigalpa has been a nation upholding its constitution, peaceably taking action to maintain the rule of law. And it is that distinction which lends so much insight into our own president's designs, goals, aspirations and mere tendencies.

Like in the United States of America as it stands now, Honduras is a nation bound by a constitution. And, much like in America, a head of state in Honduras is bound by term limits, though in that country it constitutes a single, four-year term. For a better understanding of exactly what is going on in Honduras, I want to play a little "make-believe," venture a few steps into the realm of God-I-hope-not:

The year is 2016, four years after American President Barack Hussein Obama won a decisive re-election victory over the Republican Party's Colin Powell, a moderate candidate foisted upon the American political right by means of a constant bombardment of misinformation, specifically that the GOP could only see success by abandoning its conservative roots. The American economy is in shambles, but the state of crisis only leads the poor and politically ignorant to believe that government cures all, and that contrary to what Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned of back in January 2008, blind faith in the state's omnipotence is the only key to renewed prosperity.

As a result, Obama has pushed for a special vote intended to serve as a litmus test determining public support among the politically ignorant for the possible repeal of the 22nd Amendment, thus lifting the provision for term limits added to the U.S. Constitution in the wake of the exponential expansion of government during the four terms of former President Franklin D. Roosevelt and allowing Obama to serve as president in perpetuity. The proposed vote is met with opposition from concerned Americans on both sides of the political spectrum, and the twice democratically-elected president of the United States is forced out by judicial and legislative branch officials simply honoring their sworn obligation to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.

Almost instantaneously, people from across Europe--where Obama is loved second only to David Hasselhoff--and leftist leaders from across the globe denounce what they deem a "coup." Obama himself travels to New York City and addressed the United Nations; shortly thereafter, the world body adopts a resolution demanding that all 192 member nations refuse to recognize any government in the United States other than that led by Barack Hussein Obama.

Given the hypothetical, what business would the United Nations have in determining whether or not a sovereign nation upholds its Constitution? Yet, in the case of today's resolution, that's exactly what the United Nations is doing with regard to the situation in Honduras. That nation has a constitution, its people are looking to uphold it, and yet the rest of the world is siding with an ousted leader fraught with dictatorial aspirations.

And our president has joined dictators like Cuba's Fidel Castro, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega in embraced him. Not only that, but the very same Barack Obama who, purportedly afraid to "meddle," waited for ten days before voicing support for those in Iran seeking freedom from a tyrannical regime--and waited days after that to rescind an invitation to celebrate July 4th with Iranian diplomats--almost immediately came to the aid of ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, trying to stop the so-called "coup" and later denouncing the action as "illegal."

Here's the very same American president who, just six months before in his historic inaugural address, called upon the American people to "let it be said by our children's children that . . . we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations" and yet, instead of championing freedom, Barack Obama has done nothing but support dictatorships and tyranny, whether it be through his fervent protests in terms of those seeking to uphold their constitution in Honduras, or those laying their lives on the line for freedom in Iran.

It is the root of Obama's selective action and inaction which is so telling, and which worries me. While conservative pundits everywhere are beginning to argue that the American foreign policy under Barack Obama is aimless, that it is non-existent, I find myself worried because I see its stark consistency.

For Obama, see, it's all about justice, and the resulting worldview has been bred into him from his beginnings, and reinforced by those in his inner circle. (After all, it's the concept of "justice" which made Michelle Obama so "proud of her country" for the first time after her husband began to gain popularity during last year's campaign.) Previously, I led myself to believe that our president's yearning for that nebulous goal of "justice" only affected his domestic policy -- I saw it as the reason for his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the seat on the U.S. Supreme Court vacated by Justice David Souter; I saw it as the inspiration for increased goverment control over the banks and automakers; I've seen it as the driving force behind the socialist aspects of the cap-and-trade legislation currently working its way through Congress. Yet striving for "justice," whatever that may be, greatly affects his approach to foreign policy as well.

Previously, I had dismissed Obama's approach to foreign policy as "detente-at-all-costs," an unintended homage to former President Jimmy "Dhimmi" Carter. But I don't think that's it. Detente, it seems, is just a desired side effect of Obama's justice-driven foreign policy. After all, it's that hope for his brand of "justice" which allows him to weigh in on where Jews can build homes in Jerusalem and embrace a wanna-be dictator in Honduras but not want to "meddle" with affairs in Iran.

The question, however, remains: what, exactly, is Barack Obama's definition of "justice?"

I don't know. But I'm starting to understand it. When he finally broke silence on the uprisings in Iran, President Obama never once spoke of the protests in terms of freedom, choosing instead to define them in terms of a frustrated people seeking "justice." And his statements on Iran, of course, come weeks after he spoke to the Muslim world in Cairo, delivering a speech during which he weighed the moral equivalency between Palestinians wandering the desert for six decades looking for a home and the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust.

Justice, to Barack Obama, seems to hinge upon government being the ultimate arbiter with regards to fundamental rights bequeathed upon an obedient people. The Palestinians had no such government to trade in fundamental rights, so such an absence of governance was a travesty on par with the death of six million Jews. With regard to Iran, Obama echoed the mainstream media's argument that the protests were about elections, not freedom. And with regard to the ongoing situation in Honduras, in the interest of "justice" of course Obama will side with Manuel Zelaya, as government knows what is best for the people, even if that means scrapping the constitution in order to provide that government in perpetuity.

That's why the so-called "coup" in Tegucigalpa shed so much light, at least for me, on Barack Obama's own tendencies. Conservatives often argue that liberals are unable, in terms of foreign policy, to discern between good and evil. When Barack Obama is concerned, however, it is becoming increasing obvious that the struggle is not so much between forces of good and evil as it is between liberty and tyranny. Sadly, that consistency I've found in Obama's foreign policy, the consistency so many conservative commentators seem to believe to be missing, is that he will always side with the latter.

Sen. Inhofe Calls for Inquiry Into'Suppressed' Climate Change Report

2009-06-30T12:37:00.003-04:00

Republicans are raising questions about why the EPA apparently dismissed an analyst's report questioning the science behind global warming.

By Judson Berger

FOXNews.com

Monday, June 29, 2009

EPA analyst Alan Carlin raised questions about the impact of global warming on areas like Greenland. Shown here is an iceberg off Ammassalik Island, Greenland. (AP Photo)

A top Republican senator has ordered an investigation into the Environmental Protection Agency's alleged suppression of a report that questioned the science behind global warming.

The 98-page report, co-authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin, pushed back on the prospect of regulating gases like carbon dioxide as a way to reduce global warming. Carlin's report argued that the information the EPA was using was out of date, and that even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, global temperatures have declined.

"He came out with the truth. They don't want the truth at the EPA," Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., a global warming skeptic, told FOX News, saying he's ordered an investigation. "We're going to expose it."

The controversy comes after the House of Representatives passed a landmark bill to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, one that Inhofe said will be "dead on arrival" in the Senate despite President Obama's energy adviser voicing confidence in the measure.

According to internal e-mails that have been made public by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Carlin's boss told him in March that his material would not be incorporated into a broader EPA finding and ordered Carlin to stop working on the climate change issue. The draft EPA finding released in April lists six greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, that the EPA says threaten public health and welfare.

An EPA official told FOXNews.com on Monday that Carlin, who is an economist -- not a scientist -- included "no original research" in his report. The official said that Carlin "has not been muzzled in the agency at all," but stressed that his report was entirely "unsolicited."

"It was something that he did on his own," the official said. "Though he was not qualified, his manager indulged him and allowed him on agency time to draft up ... a set of comments."

Despite the EPA official's remarks, Carlin told FOXNews.com on Monday that his boss, National Center for Environmental Economics Director Al McGartland, appeared to be pressured into reassigning him.

Carlin said he doesn't know whether the White House intervened to suppress his report but claimed it's clear "they would not be happy about it if they knew about it," and that McGartland seemed to be feeling pressure from somewhere up the chain of command.

Carlin said McGartland told him he had to pull him off the climate change issue.

"It was reassigning you or losing my job, and I didn't want to lose my job," Carlin said, paraphrasing what he claimed were McGartland's comments to him. "My inference (was) that he was receiving some sort of higher-level pressure."

Carlin said he personally does not think there is a need to regulate carbon dioxide, since "global temperatures are going down." He said his report expressed a "good bit of doubt" on the connection between the two.

Specifically, the report noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend over the past 11 years, that scientists do not necessarily believe that storms will become more frequent or more intense due to global warming, and that the theory that temperatures will cause Greenland ice to rapidly melt has been "greatly diminished."

Carlin, in a March 16 e-mail, argued that his comments are "valid, significant" and would be critical to the EPA finding.

McGartland, though, wrote back the next day saying he had decided not to forward his comments.

"The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision," he wrote, according to the e-mails released by CEI. "I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office."

He later wrote an e-mail urging Carlin to "move on to other issues and subjects."

"I don't want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research, etc., at least until we see what EPA is going to do with climate," McGartland wrote.

The EPA said in a written statement that Carlin's opinions were in fact considered, and that he was not even part of the working group dealing with climate change in the first place.

"Claims that this individual's opinions were not considered or studied are entirely false. This administration and this EPA administrator are fully committed to openness, transparency and science-based decision making," the statement said. "The individual in question is not a scientist and was not part of the working group dealing with this issue. Nevertheless the document he submitted was reviewed by his peers and agency scientists, and information from that report was submitted by his manager to those responsible for developing the proposed endangerment finding. In fact, some ideas from that document are included and addressed in the endangerment finding."

The e-mail exchanges and suggestions of political interference sparked a backlash from Republicans in Congress.

Reps. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Darrell Issa, R-Calif., also wrote a letter last week to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson urging the agency to reopen its comment period on the finding. The EPA has since denied the request.

Citing the internal e-mails, the Republican congressmen wrote that the EPA was exhibiting an "agency culture set in a predetermined course."

"It documents at least one instance in which the public was denied access to significant scientific literature and raises substantial questions about what additional evidence may have been suppressed," they wrote.

In a written statement, Issa said the administration is "actively seeking to withhold new data in order to justify a political conclusion."

"I'm sure it was very inconvenient for the EPA to consider a study that contradicted the findings it wanted to reach," Sensenbrenner said in a statement, adding that the "repression" of Carlin's report casts doubt on the entire finding.

Carlin said he's concerned that he's seeing "science being decided at the presidential level."

"Now Mr. Obama is in effect directly or indirectly saying that CO2 causes global temperatures to rise and that we have to do something about it. ... That's normally a scientific judgment and he's in effect judging what the science says," he said. "We need to look at it harder."

The controversy is similar to one under the Bush administration -- only the administration was taking the opposite stance. In that case, scientist James Hansen claimed the administration was trying to keep him from speaking out and calling for reductions in greenhouse gases.

Darned Flat-Earther

2009-06-30T12:35:00.002-04:00

From America's Right blog:

Consider me unsurprised. A political agency such as the EPA would suppress information that counters its own views and political perspective? Ohmigosh. What I did find incredible was the derision with which the EPA dismissed the report.

"It was something he did on his own," the EPA official told Fox News. "Though he was not qualified, the manager indulged him and allowed him on agency time to draft up . . . a set of comments."

Indulged him? How positively condescending.

Personally, I don't care whether or not the EPA official who penned the suppressed report was a scientist, an economist or the guy who changes the urinal cakes in the agency's building. If the report contains facts, ran afoul of the "consensus" touted by the president and greenies everywhere, and was suppressed -- I'm crying foul.

We're about to pass legislation that will unreasonably ruin the American economy, perhaps the most harmful bill ever proposed in the 233-year history of our nation, based completely on a farcical theory founded on junk science. We need all of the information, not simply the information permitted us by those who buy into the global socialism underpinnings of the climate change issue.

An Open Letter to the President

2009-06-29T14:03:00.002-04:00

Sunday, June 28, 2009
From America's Right blog

Dear President Obama:

I watched your address to the nation today. The one you made yesterday morning, one day after the House of Representatives passed the 1,500-page Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade bill without reading it, and after adding 300 pages just hours before. You looked great, and your charm showed through. You always do, and it always does. In fact, I dare say I'd like you -- if it weren't for your policies.

I'm sorry, Mr. President. There is "no longer a debate about whether carbon pollution is placing our planet in jeopardy?" It's happening? Really? Why then, Mr. President, is Mars warming while we're stuck in a 10-plus year-long cooling trend? I haven't seen any little green men driving Hummers. The cool photos sent back to Earth from the Red Planet sure haven't shown any coal plants, or industry, or anything else your people claim to be driving global warming here at home. Could it be, Mr. President, that mankind and whatever pollution we're emitting has much less to do with climate change than other natural forces? Perhaps we should look at the sun when talking about global temperatures, no?

Here are some other questions I'd really like you and your kind--your "kind" being socialist, globalist progressives hell bent on destroying American exceptionalism any way you can (with climate change being a convenient vehicle for that goal)--to answer before you go and ruin the American economy:

Considering that a single volcanic eruption releases several times the amount of carbon dioxide than the entire human race releases in an entire year, how has the world survived countless such eruptions throughout the planet's 4.5 billion year history?
Termites release ten times more carbon dioxide than every single man, woman, child, factory and automobile in the entire world. How is it that mankind's carbon emission is the determining factor on how quickly the planet is destroyed? Shouldn't your farcical energy bill focus on termites? After all, they also eat wood, and environmentalists absolutely love wood . . .
Scientists are absolutely incapable of predicting the weather a week out with any significant accuracy. Why should we believe them capable of putting together accurate models looking forward by a century, or even a decade? If Glenn "Hurricane" Schwartz here in Philadelphia says it's going to be 86 degrees here tomorrow and it turns out to be 91 degrees, why trust a liberal idealogue masquerading as a scientist to predict global temperatures in 2050 to within six-tenths of a degree?
In that same line of thinking -- why do existing climate models completely fail to predict the known past? In other words, if the same models used by your so-called experts don't work to predict known conditions, why should we bank our economy on those models and experts now?
Staying in the past, why did the planet cool between 1940 and 1975, even though human carbon dioxide emissions were sky high? Could it be that human carbon emissions and global temperature have absolutely nothing to do with each other?
Why don't we see, in core samples, actual empirical evidence over a broad span of time--not 100 year segments here or there--that carbon dioxide levels drive temperature? Why don't we see corresponding increases in such samples at the time of major volcanic activity?
The planet's climate has always changed -- why are we so willing to destroy the economy (or even take the risk in doing so) in order to fight a natural cyclical process?

With all due respect, Mr. President, the debate is far from over. Yes, I absolutely, positively believe that we should be responsible stewards of our planet; but believing that, after 4.5 billion years of plate-shifting and ice ages and asteroid strikes and a climate that has ranged from incredibly hot to unbelievably cold, we suddenly are endangering Mother Earth because of our industrial activities and internal combustion engines is more than ridiculous -- it's unfathomably arrogant.

And yet arrogance seems to be a hallmark of your presidency and your administration, Mr. President. You travel around apologizing to the world for America, when it is our economy that drives the globe, when it has been our brave men and women who have liberated it. You believe that your meaningless and empty words, authored by someone else and read from a TelePrompTer, can somehow change the ideological struggle between Islam and the West overnight, taking credit even for the uprising in Iran. As much as I like you on a personal level--and I do--as president of the United States your arrogance is matched only by your popularity among the politically ignorant. Combine yours with the arrogance inherent among the cult-like believers in detrimental climate change, and I fear for our world.

Wouldn't it be ironic, sir, if the very same efforts which on their face claim to be done in the best interests of the planet actually end up destroying it? What of the hundreds of millions of people teetering on the edge of death from famine and disease, propped up only by a robust American economy and the generosity of a capable American people? What of the hundreds of millions of people whose only line of defense against ruthless oppression is our strong military, funding by a strong American economy, manned by a capable American people?

Yet your actions, and the actions of those in your party, are directly threatening the very heart of American exceptionalism. You claim that there is no contradiction between investing in clean energy and economic growth, yet study after study shows otherwise, that this legislation rooted so shamelessly in the expansion of political power will result in disaster for American business and industry and unsustainable, increased costs on American people from coast to coast. This legislation, and indeed your presidency as a whole, has been built on a web of lies on everything from transparency to policy and everywhere in between, and the price for those lies will be paid by an increasingly burdened American people. My three-year-old child, and her children after her, will be paying for your inexperience, ignorance, arrogance and malfeasance.

You acknowledge that "dependence on foreign oil is endangering our security" as if you've done anything at all to guide our nation to true energy independence. In reality, looking at energy independence in terms of the national security it provides, this horrific legislation is little more than the latest salvo in your ongoing war against the safety and security of America and the American people you are charged with protecting, be it the way you've handled our detainees, the way your party has disheartened our intelligence community, or the way your detente-at-all-costs approach to foreign policy has emboldened enemies of the United States of America and everything for which She stands.

If you truly wanted to become energy independent, if you truly wanted to facilitate economic growth, you would invest in the American people and the resources America is blessed to sit upon. You would create hundreds of thousands of jobs by drilling for oil off our coasts and on the northern plain of Alaska, and by increasing efforts to explore our vast oil shale deposits located under your hated flyover states. Knowing that the United States of America is essentially the Saudi Arabia of coal, you would pave the way for clean coal and expansion of the coal industry rather than overtly working to destroy it. You would build nuclear plants. But this disastrous piece of legislation is no more about clean energy or the environment as your stimulus package was about stimulating the economy -- it's about advancing your collectivist agenda, it's about expanding the size and scope and influence of the federal government, it's about trampling the values and principles upon which this nation was founded, and it's about taking what you view as an unfairly powerful and successful America down a peg or two relative to Europe and the rest of the slowly developing world.

The problem, Mr. President, is that--for now, at least--you're getting away with it. An obedient media and ignorant people are lost in your smile and ample charm. An embittered Democrat Party is making the most of what I promise will be an extremely short time in power. And a global community jealous of our freedom and our prosperity is clamoring for one of their own, a true Citizen of the World, to reduce America from the world's only superpower to a beholden nation which relies upon everyone else for energy, for goods and, soon, for food. And you're taking them up on it, quicker than any of us could have imagined.

Right now, when perhaps the greatest possible question is asked of those who believe wholeheartedly in the danger of climate change--what, pray tell, is the appropriate temperature for planet Earth?--the answer may very well be: "Whatever our Dear Leader says it should be." But it won't be for long. 2010 is right around the corner, 2012 is not far behind, and we're waking up. America is waking up, Mr. President, and I take comfort in knowing you'll be on the speaking circuit and measuring the drapes for your presidential library in no time.

Warmest Regards,

Jeff Schreiber
America's Right

Cap and trade vote today, complete with AP spin

2009-06-26T15:12:00.001-04:00

Update: 300-page, last-minute amendment; Update: Greenpeace opposes

posted at 8:46 am on June 26, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
From Hot Air Blog

In pre-Norman England, King Canute once had his bearers carry him to the sea, where he ordered the ocean to recede. Often this story is told to indict Canute for having delusions of grandeur, but historians usually agree that Canute intended to teach a lesson to his court, whose profuse flattery had annoyed the king to distraction. Why does Canute come to mind today? For some reason, I thought of it when I read the AP’s lead to their coverage of the cap-and-trade bill coming to the House floor for a vote:

A handful of undecided Democrats hold the key to whether the House will confront global warming and begin a shift away from fossil fuels to cleaner sources of energy.

Well, that’s not biased coverage at all, is it? “Whether the House will confront global warming” implies that all debate has ceased on the subject, while in truth it has intensified. Kim Strassel notes the increasing skepticism in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as “deniers.” The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country’s weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.)

The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

Of course, the AP reports on this as part of its coverage, too. This comes in paragarph … er … oh, wait, it doesn’t appear at all. The AP does report on opposition to the bill on its fiscal insanity, but waters that down considerably:

Everyone agrees that under this “cap-and-trade” system the cost of energy is expected to increase as electricity producers and industrial plants pay for increased efficiency, move toward greater use of renewable energy, pay for ways to capture carbon emissions or purchase pollution allowances.

They disagree, however, on how much of the added cost would be passed onto consumers. Democrats argue that much of the cost increase could be offset by other provisions in the bill.

All of the increase will get passed to consumers. Democrats hope to buffer that through targeted subsidies, but the AP neglects to mention that mechanism — because that money also comes from consumers. Business costs always get passed to the purchaser in the form of higher prices, and anyone who argues that they don’t either have no understanding of business and pricing or has a desire to sell snake oil to the gullible.

Cap-and-trade is a tax, one imposed through an artificial scarcity model onto an industry that drives the economy. The AP reports the CBO and EPA cost estimates without mentioning that those predictions only cover the actual mechanical costs of cap-and-trade. They do not predict the economic impact on American families from the loss of economic power as energy becomes more scarce and expensive. This bill will lose the US 2.5% of its GDP each and every year in the years after the first decade of implementation.

King Canute knew better than to believe his advisers when they told him that he was powerful enough to affect ocean levels. Unfortunately, this administration and the Democratic Party don’t have the sense Canute did.

Call your Representative today to tell them not to strangle the American economy. Michelle has the numbers and names to call.

Update: Before today, the bill ran a little over 1,000 pages. Early this morning, Waxman dropped a 300-page amendment into it. Be sure to ask your Representatives if they plan to read either of these before voting on the bill. (via Mary Katharine Ham)

Update II: Greenpeace has come out in opposition to Waxman-Markey, too. However, conservatives should temper their enthusiasm:

“Since the Waxman-Markey bill left the Energy and Commerce committee, yet another fleet of industry lobbysists has weakened the bill even more, and further widened the gap between what Waxman-Markey does and what science demands. As a result, Greenpeace opposes this bill in its current form. We are calling upon Congress to vote against this bill unless substantial measures are taken to strengthen it. Despite President Obama’s assurance that he would enact strong, science-based legislation, we are now watching him put his full support behind a bill that chooses politics over science, elevates industry interests over national interest, and shows the significant limitations of what this Congress believes is possible.

“As it comes to the floor, the Waxman-Markey bill sets emission reduction targets far lower than science demands, then undermines even those targets with massive offsets. The giveaways and preferences in the bill will actually spur a new generation of nuclear and coal-fired power plants to the detriment of real energy solutions. To support such a bill is to abandon the real leadership that is called for at this pivotal moment in history. We simply no longer have the time for legislation this weak. “

In other words, Greenpeace is angry that it doesn’t get more confiscatory and economically suicidal. It makes Waxman-Markey look moderate, which is a bigger problem than a boon for conservatives.

The Climate Change Climate Change

2009-06-26T13:38:00.004-04:00

The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.

By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL - The Wall Street Journal

Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.

If you haven't heard of this politician, it's because he's a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country's carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.

Associated Press

Steve Fielding

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

Credit for Australia's own era of renewed enlightenment goes to Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist. Earlier this year he published "Heaven and Earth," a damning critique of the "evidence" underpinning man-made global warming. The book is already in its fifth printing. So compelling is it that Paul Sheehan, a noted Australian columnist -- and ardent global warming believer -- in April humbly pronounced it "an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence." Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public skepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.

The rise in skepticism also came as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, elected like Mr. Obama on promises to combat global warming, was attempting his own emissions-reduction scheme. His administration was forced to delay the implementation of the program until at least 2011, just to get the legislation through Australia's House. The Senate was not so easily swayed.

Mr. Fielding, a crucial vote on the bill, was so alarmed by the renewed science debate that he made a fact-finding trip to the U.S., attending the Heartland Institute's annual conference for climate skeptics. He also visited with Joseph Aldy, Mr. Obama's special assistant on energy and the environment, where he challenged the Obama team to address his doubts. They apparently didn't.

This week Mr. Fielding issued a statement: He would not be voting for the bill. He would not risk job losses on "unconvincing green science." The bill is set to founder as the Australian parliament breaks for the winter.

Republicans in the U.S. have, in recent years, turned ever more to the cost arguments against climate legislation. That's made sense in light of the economic crisis. If Speaker Nancy Pelosi fails to push through her bill, it will be because rural and Blue Dog Democrats fret about the economic ramifications. Yet if the rest of the world is any indication, now might be the time for U.S. politicians to re-engage on the science. One thing for sure: They won't be alone.

Waxman-Markey Bill Is An Energy Tax That Doesn’t Work

2009-06-26T10:06:00.002-04:00

From The Heritage Foundation:

Later today, the House of Representatives is slated to vote on the most convoluted attempt at economic central-planning this nation has ever attempted: cap and trade. The 1,200-plus page Waxman-Markey climate change legislation is nothing more than an energy tax in disguise that by 2035 will raise:

Gasoline prices by 58 percent
Natural gas prices by 55 percent
Home heating oil by 56 percent
Worst of all, electricity prices by 90 percent

Although proponents of the bill are pointing to grossly underestimated and incorrect costs, the reality is when all the tax impacts have been added up, the average per-family-of-four costs rise by $2,979 per year. In the year 2035 alone, the cost is $4,609. And the costs per family for the whole energy tax aggregated from 2012 to 2035 are $71,493.

But on second thought, cap and trade is much more than that.

It Kills Jobs: Over the 2012-2035 timeline, job losses average over 1.1 million. By 2035, a projected 2.5 million jobs are lost below the baseline (without a cap and trade bill). Particularly hit hard are sectors of the economy that are very energy-intensive: Manufacturers, farmers, construction, machinery, electrical equipment and appliances, transportation, textiles, paper products, chemicals, plastics and rubbers, and retail trade would face staggering employment losses as a result of Waxman-Markey. It’s worth noting the job losses come after accounting for the green jobs policymakers are so adamant about creating. But don’t worry because the architects of the bill built in unemployment insurance; too bad it will only help 1.5% of those losing their jobs from the bill.

It Destroys Our Economy: Just about everything we do and produce uses energy. As energy prices increase, those costs will be passed onto the consumer and reflected in the higher prices we pay for products. Higher energy prices will cause reduced income, less production and an economy that falls way short of its potential. The average Gross Domestic Product (GDP) lost is $393 billion, hitting a high of $662 billion in 2035. From 2012-2035, the accumulated GDP lost is $9.4 trillion. The negative economic impacts accumulate, and the national debt is no exception. The increase in family-of-four debt, solely because of Waxman-Markey, hits an almost unbelievable $114,915 by 2035.

It Provides Red Meat for Lobbyists: Businesses, knowing very well this would impose a severe cost on their bottom line, sent their lobbyists to Washington to protect them. And it worked. Most of the allowances (the right to emit carbon dioxide) have been promised to industry, meaning less money will be rebated back to the consumer. Free allowances do not lower the costs of Waxman-Markey; they just shift them around. In other words, every day Americans are going to be footing the bill. Although the government awarded handouts to businesses, the carbon dioxide reduction targets are still there, and the way they will be met is by raising the price of energy and thereby inflicting more economic pain. Prices have to go up enough to force people to use less energy, and so if anyone is bought off with free allowances, the costs for everyone else are that much higher.

There’s one thing the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill doesn’t do: Work. All of the above-mentioned costs accrue in the first 25 years of a 90-year program that, as calculated by climatologists, will lower temperatures by only hundredths of a degree Celsius in 2050 and no more than two-tenths of a degree Celsius at the end of the century. In the name of saving the planet for future generations, Waxman-Markey does not sound like a great deal: Millions of lost jobs, trillions of lost income, 50-90 percent higher energy prices, and stunning increases in the national debt, all for undetectable changes in world temperature. Who’s buying that?

The White House Infomercial

2009-06-25T10:08:00.002-04:00

From the Heritage Foundation:

Last night, ABC News aired ‘Questions for the President: Prescription for America‘ designed to be a town hall for doctors, patients and health care experts to ask President Obama challenging questions on his health care proposals. Many Americans protested before the program aired, in self-described “waiting rooms,” to challenge a perceived notion that ABC was simply giving the President one hour of prime time television to sell his program without an opposing view.

Conservative Members of Congress gathered on Capitol Hill during the hour to showcase their health reform plans at an event organized by Americans for Tax Reform, including Congressman Tom Price (R-GA), a former physician who said “If the fourth estate continues to be in the tank [for the Obama administration], it would endanger the future of the nation.”

The Heritage Foundation decided to be a part of the discussion and was granted two invites to the event by ABC News. Vice President for Domestic and Economic Studies, Stuart Butler and Nina Owcharenko, the Deputy Director of our Center for Health Policy Studies were at the White House hoping to engage the President on his plan for a massive government health care system, or exactly how he was planning on paying for his proposals. According to Stuart Butler, “ABC News promised a tough town hall meeting but delivered a White House infomercial.”

Nina Owcharenko said: “The stage-managed nature of the meeting, and preventing tough follow-up questions, meant President Obama could talk around the issues raised about his proposal rather than really answering them.” In fact, some of the audience members did have tough questions, including Dr. Orrin Devinsky who led off by asking the President if he would sacrifice the health of his own family by putting them in a government plan.

The President said “If it’s my family member, it’s my wife, if it’s my children, if it’s my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care. But here’s the problem that we have in our current health care system, is that there is a whole bunch of care that’s being provided that every study, every bit of evidence that we have indicates may not be making us healthier.” In other words, the Doctor-in-Chief believes that the government could in fact make better decisions about health care than you and your doctor. Of course, he evaded answering whether he and his family would ever live under such a public plan.

Later, in the Nightline hour, after most viewers had gone to sleep, ABC finally got around to asking the President about his public plan. Up until a week ago, the President was adamant that anyone who wanted to stay in their current plan could and would. Shortly after Heritage President Ed Feulner delivered an Open Letter debunking this myth, the White House began to walk back this claim, continuing to do so last night.

First the President told Christopher Bean in the audience “If you’re happy with your plan, as I said, you keep it.” Then he said that a public plan wouldn’t create an unlevel playing field because the plan itself would have to play by the rules it sets. Got that?

Stuart Butler said “President Obama continued to argue that if a public plan does well against private insurers that’s just what competition is about, but if the government sets up a plan where it can drive down payment to doctors and hospitals, force doctors to join its plan on its terms, have Congress rig the rules of competition to favor its plan, and not have to balance its books – Medicare has $32 trillion in unfunded commitments – then I suppose it can do “well” in a competition with private plans.”

When specifically asked whether millions of people would be dumped into a public plan because their employers were incentivized to drop private coverage, he introduced a new concept: “firewalls.” This is where the government would decide which “large employers” had to pay more into the system, and who could and couldn’t join this great new plan. So, of course, millions would be dumped into government-run health care but he would design a system to pick winners and losers to slow the drain.

The President argued last night that the “status quo” wasn’t good enough. This is the new talking point of the left. Before, they argued there weren’t any alternatives, but then realized Congressional Republicans were the only ones with a complete proposal in the public domain. Now they argue that if you don’t want massive government intervention, you must be in favor of no change at all. In fact, the Heritage Foundation has been leading the charge for substantive health care reform for decades, and we wish we had the opportunity last night to share with him some of our ideas. For now, he’ll just have to visit www.FixHealthCarePolicy.com to learn better ways to provide quality care to all Americans.

Conservatives Counter ABC Obamacare Infomercial

2009-06-25T10:04:00.000-04:00

By Philip Klein

6.24.09

The American Spectator

On a day when ABC News has turned over its programing to the White House so that President Obama can promote his health care agenda, Americans for Tax Reform gathered together a group on Capitol Hill to offer a competing, market-based vision for health care reform.

Sen. Jim DeMint was there to tout his health care proposal along with Rep. Tom Price.

Price, a former physician in Atlanta, said that, "If the fourth estate continues to be in the tank (for the Obama administration, it would endanger the future of the nation." Price outlined three "death knells" for the health care system: a government plan that would crowd out private insurance, coverage mandates, and "ceding quality to the federal government. He said patients need to make their own health care decisions and be able to choose plans that they own and control.

"We don't need an expansion of government," DeMint said, and he outlined his plan for health care that would maintain the employer-based insurance system, give vouchers to individuals that would replicate the tax advantages enjoyed by those who obtain coverage through their employers, and allow people to purchase insurance across state lines.

DeMint said his plan would be deficit-neutral because it would be financed by terminating the $700 billion TARP program. If the program isn't terminated, he said, it would just be used as a "slush fund" for the Treasury Department. However, when I asked DeMint how the plan would be paid for once the TARP money runs out, he replied, "We just have to see where we're going." He insisted that his reforms would bring down health care costs, and in any event would be less than the trillions that Obama's proposals would cost.

"We can win this if we engage the American people," DeMint said of the health care battle. "They are not stupid."

The event also featured a panel of activists, policy experts, and a Canadian woman who shared her horror story with their government-run health care system.

Merrill Matthews, the director of the Council for Affordable Health Insurance, took aim at the government option. He argued that Medicare and Medicaid are rampant with fraud and abuse and use their market share to impose price controls on doctors and hospitals, which providers then recoup by jacking up prices on individuals and private insurers. He noted that though proponents of government health care like to point to the low administrative costs of Medicare, their estimates leave out costs such as staff salaries, building rent ,and insurance -- alll of which show up elsewhere in the federal budget. Nor do the estimates of administrative costs include fraud and abuse. The creation of any new government plan, Matthews said, would ding taxpayers for the start up costs, and would continue to change the rules on the private sector so that it could not compete.

Today, Preident Obama officially said he changed his mind and now supports the inclusion of an individual mandate requiring people to purchase health insurance. But Greg Scandlen, director of Consumers for Health Care Choices, explained that mandates have proven ineffective. For instance, even though we have mandates for car insurance, roughly 15 percent of car owners remain non-compliant.

The room also heard from Shona Holmes, a Canadian who was suffering from vision loss and had to come to America to get treated because she was put on a several month waiting list to see a specialist in her home country, even though she risked losing her vision if she was not treated in four to six weeks.

Health-Care Myths

2009-06-24T15:59:00.000-04:00

by Elizabeth MacDonald

The Obama administration is now attempting the biggest overhaul of healthcare since Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

But the health care reform debate is riddled with misleading myths taken as fact, myths that are torquing the debate beyond recognition, from the U.S.’s supposedly poor infant mortality rates, who really gets medical care, the level of uninsureds, who really pays for insurance, who actually can afford insurance and wait times for surgeries.

Most everyone agrees that the U.S. health system is broken and that the uninsured must get coverage.

But fixing the health system should be based on the facts, not on a statistical faith-based initiative mounted to ram through reform, where the data is either more nuanced on closer look or the statements made are simply not true.

Worth keeping in mind, as the U.S. is already on track to compile total 10-year deficits that would surpass the annual GDP of Great Britain, Russia and Germany for one year-combined, and as the government is getting increasingly entangled in key industries, with higher taxes coming on incomes, on capital and on energy.

Meanwhile, the deficit spending figures do not include Medicare and Social Security costs, reforms which are so far on the backburner, they are off the stove. The following includes research from Fox News analyst James Farrell.

Myth: “The U.S. has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the developed world.”

Talk about stretching a point until it snaps. This ranking is based on data mining.

The U.S. ranks high on this list largely because this country numbers among those that actually measure neonatal deaths, notably in premature infant fatalities, unlike other countries that basically leave premature babies to die, notes health analyst Betsey McCaughey.

Other statistical quirks push the U.S. unjustifiably higher in this ranking compared to other countries.

The Center for Disease Control says the U.S. ranks 29th in the world for infant mortality rates, (according to the CDC), behind most other developed nations.

The U.S. is supposedly worse than Singapore, Hong Kong, Greece, Northern Ireland, Cuba and Hungary. And the U.S. is supposedly on a par with Slovakia and Poland. CNN, the New York Times, numerous outlets across the country report the U.S. as abysmal in terms of infant mortality, without delving into what is behind this ranking.

The Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit research group, routinely flunks the U.S. health system using the infant mortality rate.

“Infant mortality and our comparison with the rest of the world continue to be an embarrassment to the United States,” Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a research organization, has said.

Start with the definition. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines a country’s infant mortality rate as the number of infants who die between birth and age one, per 1,000 live births.

WHO says a live birth is when a baby shows any signs of life, even if, say, a low birth weight baby takes one, single breath, or has one heartbeat. While the U.S. uses this definition, other countries don’t and so don’t count premature or severely ill babies as live births-or deaths.

The United States counts all births if they show any sign of life, regardless of prematurity or size or duration of life, notes Bernardine Healy, a former director of the National Institutes of Health and former president and chief executive of the American Red Cross (Healy noted this information in a column for U.S. News & World Report).

And that includes stillbirths, which many other countries don’t report.

And what counts as a birth varies from country to country. In Austria and Germany, fetal weight must be at least 500 grams (1 pound) before these countries count these infants as live births, Healy notes.

In other parts of Europe, such as Switzerland, the fetus must be at least 30 centimeters (12 inches) long, Healy notes. In Belgium and France, births at less than 26 weeks of pregnancy are registered as lifeless, and are not counted, Healy says. And some countries don’t reliably register babies who die within the first 24 hours of birth, Healy notes.

Norway, which has one of the lowest infant mortality rates, shows no better infant survival than the United States when you factor in Norway’s underweight infants that are not now counted, Healy says, quoting Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Moreover, the ranking doesn’t take into account that the US has a diverse, heterogeneous population, Healy adds, unlike, say, in Iceland, which tracks all infant deaths regardless of factor, but has a population under 300,000 that is 94% homogenous.

Likewise, Finland and Japan do not have the ethnic and cultural diversity of the U.S.’s 300 mn-plus citizens.

Plus, the U.S. has a high rate of teen pregnancies, teens who smoke, who take drugs, who are obese and uneducated, all factors which cause higher infant mortality rates.

And the US has more mothers taking fertility treatments, which keeps the rate of pregnancy high due to multiple-birth pregnancies.

Again, the U.S. counts all of these infants as births. Moreover, we’re not losing healthy babies, as the scary stats imply. Most of the babies that die are either premature or born seriously ill, including those with congenital malformations.

Even the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which collects the European numbers, cautions against using comparisons country-by-country.

“Some of the international variation in infant and neonatal mortality rates may be due to variations among countries in registering practices of premature infants (whether they are reported as live births or not),” the OECD says.

“In several countries, such as in the United States, Canada and the Nordic countries, very premature babies (with relatively low odds of survival) are registered as live births, which increases mortality rates compared with other countries that do not register them as live births.” (Note: Emphasis EMac’s).

The U.S. ranks much better on a measure that the World Health Organization says is more accurate, the perinatal mortality rate, defined as death between 22 weeks’ gestation and 7 days after birth. According to the WHO 2006 report on Neonatal and Perinatal Mortality, the U.S. comes in at 16^th-and even higher if you knock out several tiny countries with tiny birthrates and populations, such as Martinique, Hong Kong, and San Marino.

Myth: “About 46 mn Americans lack access to health insurance.”

There is a difference between health care and health insurance, as Fox Business anchor Brian Sullivan points out after researching reports on health care from the Congressional Budget Office, Blue Cross-Blue Shield and Georgetown University.

Everyone has access to health care. They may not have health insurance, but the law mandates everyone who shows up at emergency rooms must be treated, insurance or not, he reports.

About 14 mn of the uninsured were eligible for Medicaid and SCHIP 2003, a BlueCross-BlueShield Association study based on 2003 data estimated. These people would be signed up for government insurance if they ever made it to the emergency room, Sullivan says.

A whopping 70% of uninsured children are eligible for Medicaid, SCHIP, or both programs, a 2008 study by the Georgetown University Health Policy Institute shows.

Census figures also show that 18.3 mn of the uninsured were under 34 who may simply not think about the need for insurance, Sullivan reports.

And of those 46 mn without insurance, an estimated 10 mn or so are non-U.S. citizens who may not be eligible, according to statistics from the Census Bureau), Sullivan reports.

Myth: “The uninsured can’t afford to buy coverage.”

Many may be able to afford health insurance, but for whatever reason choose to not buy it. In 2007, an estimated 17.6 mn of the uninsured made more than $50,000 per year, and 10 mn of those made more than $75,000 a year, says Sally Pipes, author of the book, The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care: A Citizen’s Guide, a book that attempts to dig behind the numbers. According to author Pipes, 38% of the U.S. uninsured population earns more than $50,000 per year.

That means 38% of the uninsured likely make enough to afford health insurance, but for undetermined reasons choose not to buy it.

Myth: “Most of the uninsured do not have health insurance because they are not working and so don’t have access to health benefits through an employer.”

Not so fast–the data is more nuanced and revealing upon closer look.

According to the CBO, about half of the uninsured in 2009 fall into one of the following three categories. Some people will be in more than one of those categories at the same time:

*Nearly one out of three, 30%, will be offered, but will decline, coverage from an employer.

*Nearly one out of five, 18%, will be eligible for, but not enrolled in Medicaid; and

*More than one out of seven, 17%, will have family income above 300% of the poverty level (about $65,000 for a family of four);

What is potentially the real number for the poor uninsured? According to a 2003 Blue Cross study, 8.2 mn Americans are actually without coverage for the long haul, because they are too poor to purchase health care, but earn too much to qualify for government assistance.

[Source: CBO, "Key Issues in Analyzing Major Health Insurance Proposals," December 18, 2008, http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/99xx/doc9924/12-18-KeyIssues.pdf]

Myth: “The estimated 45 mn people without health insurance lacked health insurance for every day of the year.”

The CBO’s 45 mn estimate reflects individuals “without health insurance at any given time during 2009.”

But that does not mean that all 45 mn people spend every day of 2009 without insurance. It is a point estimate - on any particular day, there will be 45 mn individuals without health insurance.

[Source: CBO, "Key Issues in Analyzing Major Health Insurance Proposals," December 18, 2008, http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/99xx/doc9924/12-18-KeyIssues.pdf]

Myth: “Government-run universal health care would increase the international competitiveness of U.S. companies.”

The Congressional Budget Office disagrees.

“Replacing employment-based health care with a government-run system could reduce employers’ payments for their workers’ insurance, but the amount that they would have to pay in overall compensation would remain essentially unchanged,” the CBO says. “Cash wages and other forms of compensation would have to rise by roughly the amount of the reduction in health benefits for firms to be able to attract the same number and types of workers.”

[Source: CBO, "Key Issues in Analyzing Major Health Insurance Proposals," December 18, 2008, http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/99xx/doc9924/12-18-KeyIssues.pdf]

Myth: “The cost of uncompensated care for the uninsured significantly increases hospital costs.”

Hospitals provided about $35 bn in uncompensated care in 2008, the CBO says. Uncompensated care represented only 5% of total hospital revenues. In addition, half of the $35 bn in uncompensated hospital costs were offset by Medicare and Medicaid.

And the cost of uncompensated care for the uninsured is “unlikely to have a substantial effect on private payment rates,” the CBO says, adding that shifting costs from uninsured to private insurance premiums is “likely to be relatively small.”

[source: CBO, "Key Issues in Analyzing Major Health Insurance Proposals," December 2008, http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/99xx/doc9924/12-18-KeyIssues.pdf]

Myth: “Nationalized health care would not impact patient waiting times.”

Waiting time for elective surgery is lower in the US than in countries with nationalized health care.

In 2005, only 8% of U.S. patients reported waiting four months or more for elective surgery.

Countries with nationalized health care had higher percentages with waiting times of four months or more, including Australia (19%); New Zealand (20%); Canada (33%); and the United Kingdom (41%).

[Source: Commonwealth Fund, "MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL: AN INTERNATIONAL UPDATE ON THE COMPARATIVE PERFORMANCE OF AMERICAN HEALTH CARE," by Karen Davis, Cathy Schoen, Stephen C. Schoenbaum, Michelle M. Doty, Alyssa L. Holmgren, Jennifer L. Kriss, and Katherine K. Shea, May 2007, http://www.commonwealthfund.org/~/media/Files/Publications/Fund%20Report/2007/May/Mirror%20%20Mirror%20on%20the%20Wall%20%20An%20International%20Update%20on%20the%20Comparative%20Performance%20of%20American%20Healt/1027_Davis_mirror_mirror_international_update_final%20pdf.pdf]

Myth: “Insurers cover less today than they did in the past.”

No they’re covering more costs. According to the CBO, consumers paid for 33 % of their total, personal health care expenditures in 1975. But by 2000, consumers’ personal share had fallen to 17%, and it declined to 15% in 2006.

[Source: CBO, "Key Issues in Analyzing Major Health Insurance Proposals," December 18, 2008, http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/99xx/doc9924/12-18-KeyIssues.pdf]

VOTER ALERT: Cap-and-Trade Bill Set for FRIDAY Vote

2009-06-24T09:42:00.000-04:00

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

CALL YOUR CONGRESSMAN!!

According to The Wall Street Journal, the cap-and-trade legislation co-sponsored by California and Massachusetts Democrats Henry Waxman and Ed Markey will likely reach a vote on the House floor on Friday.

This bill is an absolute nightmare, and will result in nothing short of sheer destruction of American business and industry, and will exponentially increase energy costs for individuals and families of all income levels from coast to coast.

For background information, including an assessment of the likely costs of the legislation, check out a previous piece here at America's Right, The Exponentially Increasing Costs of a Manufactured Environmental Crisis, as well as a companion piece, 'Green' Spokesmouths Need to Curb Emissions.

Find your representative's office number HERE. Call it. Call it NOW. It doesn't matter if they are a Democrat, a Republican, or somewhere in between. Let them know that their vote on this disastrous bill is a bona fide determinative factor when it comes to their re-election in 2010. Support means they're going home, plain and simple.

I cannot stress enough exactly how devastating this piece of legislation is. Frankly, I am absolutely astounded that something so detrimental to our national economy is even being considered nonetheless voted upon, even by Democrats.

This is winnable for concerned Americans like you and like me. Let's make sure this doesn't make it out of the House.

CALL YOUR CONGRESSMAN!!

Focus on the Democrats' Health Care Reform

2009-06-23T15:33:00.001-04:00

From America's Right blog:

I've mentioned before that our daughter was born six weeks early, that she spent a week in the Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit before being sent home at four pounds, fifteen ounces. Back at that time, my wife was still working as a surgical nurse at one of the top hospitals in Philadelphia, and we had the greatest possible health insurance plan available. Yet we paid almost $8000 out of pocket for the birth of our child.

What was perhaps the most maddening was not even the money. It was the billing. Every doctor who cared for our daughter during the various stages of her time in the NICU billed at different rates, through different companies, and even the amounts due for the same doctors varied from month-to-month. Making phone calls was pointless as well -- nobody knows anything, nobody has the answers. Our final bill from the birth of our daughter--the first notice for a specific doctor or procedure, no less--arrived almost one year to the day after she was born.

Our health care system does indeed need reform. If my wife, a nurse who spent her college years handling insurance and billing issues at a busy doctor's office, could not make heads or tails of what was going on, what kind of chance does her octogenarian aunt have?

The problem is that the Democrats look at the successes of our health care system as failures, and because of that want to solve the wrong problems with the wrong solutions. People gain wealth here in our health care system, for example, a problem for many on the left but, in reality, the potential for wealth and success is why we have the best doctors in the United States, the best machinery, the best drugs, the best procedures.

Everything good in our system comes from a free market approach. Yet the Democrats look to more and more government as a solution for manufactured crisis. They cite numbers essentially pulled from thin air, such as the millions of uninsured, a group largely made up of illegal immigrants or people who could afford insurance but choose not to.

Personally, I think this is a fight that concerned Americans on both sides of the aisle can win. And it is one we must win. The health care program being advanced by the White House is, by far, the largest ever entitlement program here in America, and one we never could dial back. At 852 pages, the Democrats have proposed what House Minority Leader John Boehner describes as a bureaucratic nightmare that rations care, raises taxes, and empowers government bureaucrats--not patients and doctors--to make critical medical decisions.

"This plan will make health care more expensive, reduce the quality of care for millions of families and small businesses, cost American jobs, and force untold millions of Americans off their current plans and into a government-run nightmare operated by federal bureaucrats," Boehner said on Friday.

His Web site, as well as the Web site for the House GOP Conference, currently offers a wealth of information on the issue. From Boehner's site, here are the latest top ten things everyone should know about the Democrats' program:

Democrats’ Government Takeover Will Cost Middle-Class Families and Small Businesses Billions. Though House Democrats don’t know (or won’t say) how much their government takeover will cost, here’s what we do know: the plan will make health care more expensive and hit the middle class particularly hard with higher taxes, rationed care, and new health care costs. As millions of families and small businesses are struggling to make ends meet while making responsible choices, this plan forces those that make responsible decisions to foot the bill for those who don’t.
Democrats’ Government Takeover Will Cost Tens of Millions Their Current Health Care Coverage. The House Democrats’ plan could force more than 100 million Americans out of their current health care plan and onto the government rolls, according to a Lewin Group study published earlier this year. A Congressional Budget Office report on a similar plan authored by Senate Democrats that would force at least 23 million Americans off of their current plans. According to the Associated Press, even the White House admits that the President’s promises about allowing the American people to keep their health care shouldn’t be taken literally.
Democrats’ Government Takeover Will Cost Millions of Americans Their Jobs. The House Democrats’ plan would impose employer mandates and cost jobs by requiring some employers – especially some small businesses – to pay a new eight percent tax to Washington. The plan would also slap employers that are unable to offer coverage the government deems adequate with another new financial burden. These two new taxes will make it more difficult than ever for small business owners to reinvest in their businesses and create and retain good paying jobs. Using the economic model of the President’s own economic advisors, an employer mandate would result in 4.7 million Americans losing their jobs.
Democrats’ Government Takeover Will Put Bureaucrats in Charge of Key Medical Decisions. Instead of keeping patients and doctors in charge of key medical decisions, the House Democrats’ plan will give Washington the power instead. And if you’re outraged with what Washington’s done with the bailouts, just wait until you see what Uncle Sam does with your health care.
Democrats’ Government Takeover Will Cost Future Generations Money They Don’t Have. The House Democrats’ bill simply shifts the burden of debt from one generation to the next. Our nation can’t sustain the Medicaid and Medicare programs now. At a time when families and small businesses already are being crushed under the weight of historic debt, a new government-run program will only further add to the bill passed along to our children and grandchildren.
Democrats’ Government Takeover Will Cost Seniors Key Medicare Benefits and Options. In order to expand health care benefits to some seniors, House Democrats will slash coverage millions of other seniors depend on. These benefit cuts will ultimately eliminate choices for seniors.
Democrats’ Government Takeover Will Place a New Mandate on Individuals. The House Democrats’ plan mandates that every American buy health insurance or pay a hefty penalty to Washington equal to almost two percent of their income. This would force more Americans into government-run system that will make health care more expensive, ration care, and put bureaucrats in charge of medical decisions.
Democrats’ Government Takeover Will Raise Taxes on Families, Small Businesses. Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) readily admitted that the Democrats’ health care “reform” plan would be financed with tax hikes. The Associated Press reported that, “Democrats are considering everything from taxing soda, to raising income taxes on upper income people earning more than $200,000, to a federal sales tax.” Exactly how many new taxes will there be to bankroll this government takeover? When do Democrats plan to reveal them?
Democrats’ Government Takeover Is a Missed Opportunity To Reduce Health Care Costs. The House Democrats’ plan does not include even a shred of medical liability reform, missing an opportunity to drive down health care costs by reducing costly, unnecessary defensive medicine practiced by doctors trying to protect themselves from trial lawyers.
Democrats’ Government Takeover Harms Small Businesses, Costs Jobs. The House Democrats’ plan uses the amount of an employer’s annual payroll to define “small business,” which is troubling news for millions of Americans who depend on these engines of economic growth. Based on the Democrats’ definition of small businesses only those with, on average, less than 10 employees will be spared from new taxes through employer mandates. This leaves a huge number of small businesses to deal with the onerous and expensive mandates of the House Democrats’ government defined health benefit plan (“small businesses” are traditionally defined as employing less than 500 people). These small businesses employ 47.3 million employees and provide those employees $1.7 trillion in wages annually. The House Democrats’ new employer mandate and taxes on these businesses will make it more difficult to retain these jobs and wages.

An article published on Friday from the folks at Canada.com detailed the lengths Canucks are going to measure and complain about wait times for health care services up there in the frozen north. In a report released this year by the Wait Time Alliance, the realities of a government-run health care system sets in.

Emergency room patients, for example, are waiting an average of nine hours to be seen and treated by a doctor. Those who need to be admitted are averaging a nearly 24 hour delay. Cancer patients, the group maintains, are on average waiting seven weeks for radiation therapy, three weeks past the benchmark of four weeks. Four weeks is the benchmark? Here in the States, a cancer diagnosis can bring radiation treatment by the end of a given workweek. Furthermore, if seven weeks is the average, that means that much of the cancer-stricken Canadian population is waiting longer than seven weeks for life-saving treatment.

Oh, but Obama says that ours would not be a government-run system. He says we can all keep our program if we want. The problem with his logic is that millions of employers from coast to coast will simply stop bearing health care costs and force employees to simply take the public option; eventually, private health care will be pushed out.

When looking at the Democrats' approach to health care reform, we must remember two things: First, the Democrats are the master of the unseen adverse consequences. Second, and most importantly, it's not about health care.

That's right. None of this is about health care. Like everything else, it is about control. A government-run health care system is the master key to the locked doors protecting us from government intervention in each and every aspect of our daily live. Want a cup of coffee? Better use Splenda. Want a hamburger? Better make it a garden burger. The government foots the bill (through taxpayers) for your health care, so you'd better be proactive.

At the very least, this giant entitlement program is not something that should be passed hastily. This is something that requires the kind of discussion that only adequate time can facilitate. Yet look for the Democrat-controlled Congress to ram this one through as quickly as possible.

So bend over, America. You're going to feel a little pressure. And if you don't push back, it's really going to hurt.

NRA Sheds Light on Manipulated Gun Experiment Conducted by ABC News

2009-06-18T11:41:00.001-04:00

From Americas Right blog:

Thursday, June 18, 2009

If ABC is willing to manipulate so-called 'experiments' to make their point on guns and immigration, what should we expect with healthcare?

When I was young, it was Sports Illustrated. I couldn't wait for Rick Reilly's expertly-written column, for the photography that made me marvel at the capabilities of light, film and talent. For a while a few years ago, it was The Weekly Standard, but I quickly found that the commentaries I was reading in paper form could essentially be found online days earlier. Now, I only receive two magazines -- one being a publication distributed by the Auburn Alumni Association, the other being the National Rifle Association's American Rifleman.

When I came home to work to find that the latter had arrived in my mailbox yesterday, I tore it open. My first stop is always the Armed Citizen section, a collection of abstracts from recent news accounts of ordinary Americans like you and me stopping home invasions and other crimes in the process with the help of boundless courage and their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. To me, the Armed Citizen shows America in a nutshell -- thanks to a little self-reliance, the independent-thinking righteous person is capable of anything.

A few pages past that, I stumbled across a fantastic article by NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris Cox on a shamelessly manipulated "experiment" conducted and publicized by ABC News' 20/20, the same ABC News scheduled to broadcast health care propaganda from the Blue Room and East Room of the White House next week. The so-called "experiment" was meant to prove that handguns are simply ineffective with regard to self-defense against mass shooters, using a university setting as a backdrop.

Sounds like an interesting idea, save for ABC News' penchant for faking such "experiments." After all, it was ABC's John Quinones who staged a situation intended to expose everyday Americans' racism toward illegal immigrants, going so far as to hire a paid actor to elicit controversial remarks. From a January 6, 2009 article at Newsbusters:

Correspondent John Quinones, the host of a series of ABC hidden camera specials designed to test how people react to ethical situations, appeared to preview a new edition that featured a cashier in a New Jersey deli yelling at a Hispanic customer.

The ABC crew had the pretend employee scream at a confused day laborer, saying things such as "We're building walls to keep you guys out of the country! You don't speak English, you don't get service! We don't serve your kind here!" Quinones then theatrically lectured, "...On this day, the only thing they [the customers] are being served is prejudice." He later observed that the experiment "uncovered some of the dark impulses many of us share."

In the gun-related "experiment" cited by the NRA's Cox, ABC News armed college students interested in employing firearms for self-defense purposes, staged a classroom situation, and simulated the entry of gun-wielding mass shooters such as those seen at so many of our nation's schools and shopping malls. The problems were numerous. First, the armed student in the equation was provided with ill-fitting gear, making a clean draw nearly impossible. Second, the student was always seated in the same place: in the front row of the simulated classroom, right in the middle. Worse yet, the perpetrator was portrayed by a police shooting instructor -- and knew in advance where the armed student was seated from the beginning.

Through the use of paint ammunition, ABC used its "experiment" to demonstrate that armed students who dare stand up to a mass shooter was usually killed before he or she could stop the shooter. When the student actually did well despite the odds stacked against him or her, advantages to a shooter that may not be there in real life, ABC's Diane Sawyer--a propagandist masquarading as a journalist--brushed it off.

So much for embracing opposition. ABC's penchant for shaping opinions through a carefully set agenda is worrisome, considering that ABC News has been invited by the Barack Obama administration to set up shop next Wednesday in the East Room and Blue Room of the White House to sell the Democrats' disastrous health care plan to an increasingly skeptical public. It is a purely defensive move by Obama and his flunkies -- Republicans and even some Blue Dog Democrats on Capitol Hill are having success in explaining to the American people how the president's plan will cost upwards of $1.6 trillion--money we would need to borrow or print--and really not expand coverage to that many people now uninsured, not to mention the adverse effects that such a plan will have on the quality and availability of care.

For that reason, the mainstream press is a natural partner for the Obama White House. Like the adminstration, the Obama-loving media has no problem manipulating facts, lying to those paying attention, and creating a crisis in order to advance its agenda. In "20/20 Turns a Blind Eye on Self-Defense," for example, Cox compares the faked ABC gun experiment to the famous case of Dateline NBC and the exploding pick-up trucks, a fabricated story for which the news magazine program was so intent upon conveying the results it wanted to convey that it actually strapped explosives to vehicles to demonstrate how the trucks supposedly blew up during collisions.

With that kind of integrity, what can we expect from the mainstream press in shilling for their Messiah's health care agenda? Already we see that ABC has refused to air advertisements during the special programming from groups opposing the administration's plan.

The truth has never much mattered to news organizations like ABC News. In the case of the gun "experiment," time and time again stories like those featured in the Armed Citizen section of American Rifleman highlight how ordinary people can save lives including and beyond their own, but ABC mentions them not. No word of the undercover police officer--carrying a weapon against mall policy--who stopped a mass shooting in progress at the Trolley Square Mall. No word of the students that averted a tragedy at Appalachian Law School. Even last week's horrible shooting at the National Holocaust Museum underscores the importance of an armed populace -- uniformed security guards stopped shooter James von Brunn by using him. Yes, they may have been in uniform, but the issue isn't as much about the guard badge and uniform as it is about the guns and the brave souls trained to use them.

There are very, very few armed guards at my law school. There are very, very few armed guards at shopping malls across the country. Our safety and security is up to us, my friends. Unfortunately, my school's policy renders my concealed carry permit useless and the nearest mall has "gun-free zone" signs posted all around -- the same sort of signs and policies were in effect at Virginia Tech, Columbine High School, the Trolley Square Mall and more.

This country needs to have a frank, detailed discussion on the issue of guns, just as it must talk about health care and energy as well. But this administration and Congress doesn't want that. They know common sense and an independent American public are stacked up against them, and that the only way to prevail on their proposals is by cramming it down the American people's throat with little if any time given to true opposition. On guns, the best way to do that is through reports like the one shown on 20/20; on health care, it's through shutting down all opposition response.

Reports like the ones broadcasted by ABC News and 20/20 do nothing good for anybody. When it comes to firearms, such reports embolden criminals, ensure that law-abiding citizens are subject to more scrutiny than those who choose to break the law, and therefore make people more unsafe. On immigration, they work hard to elicit a response that may not truly be there. On health care, they cheapen a solid debate rooted in common sense.

But they fit the liberal agenda, and that is all that matters.

Open Letter to our Nation's Leadership

2009-06-17T15:20:00.001-04:00

Glenn Beck received this letter from a woman in Arizona. She writes an open letter to our nation's leadership:

I'm a home grown American citizen, 53, registered Democrat all my life. Before the last presidential election I registered as a Republican because I no longer felt the Democratic Party represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. Now I no longer feel the Republican Party represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. The fact is I no longer feel any political party or representative in Washington represents my views or works to pursue the issues important to me. There must be someone. Please tell me who you are. Please stand up and tell me that you are there and that you're willing to fight for our Constitution as it was written. Please stand up now. You might ask yourself what my views and issues are that I would horribly feel so disenfranchised by both major political parties. What kind of nut job am I? Will you please tell me?

Well, these are briefly my views and issues for which I seek representation:

One, illegal immigration. I want you to stop coddling illegal immigrants and secure our borders. Close the underground tunnels. Stop the violence and the trafficking in drugs and people. No amnesty, not again. Been there, done that, no resolution. P.S., I'm not a racist. This isn't to be confused with legal immigration.

Two, the TARP bill, I want it repealed and I want no further funding supplied to it. We told you no, but you did it anyway. I want the remaining unfunded 95% repealed. Freeze, repeal.

Three: Czars, I want the circumvention of our checks and balances stopped immediately. Fire the czars. No more czars. Government officials answer to the process, not to the president. Stop trampling on our Constitution and honor it.

Four, cap and trade. The debate on global warming is not over. There is more to say.

Five, universal healthcare. I will not be rushed into another expensive decision. Don't you dare try to pass this in the middle of the night and then go on break. Slow down!

Six, growing government control. I want states rights and sovereignty fully restored. I want less government in my life, not more. Shrink it down. Mind your own business. You have enough to take care of with your real obligations. Why don't you start there.

Seven, ACORN. I do not want ACORN and its affiliates in charge of our 2010 census. I want them investigated. I also do not want mandatory escrow fees contributed to them every time on every real estate deal that closes. Stop the funding to ACORN and its affiliates pending impartial audits and investigations. I do not trust them with taking the census over with our taxpayer money. I don't trust them with our taxpayer money. Face up to the allegations against them and get it resolved before taxpayers get any more involved with them. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, hello. Stop protecting your political buddies. You work for us, the people. Investigate.

Eight, redistribution of wealth. No, no, no. I work for my money. It is mine. I have always worked for people with more money than I have because they gave me jobs. That is the only redistribution of wealth that I will support. I never got a job from a poor person. Why do you want me to hate my employers? Why ‑‑ what do you have against shareholders making a profit?

Nine, charitable contributions. Although I never got a job from a poor person, I have helped many in need. Charity belongs in our local communities, where we know our needs best and can use our local talent and our local resources. Butt out, please. We want to do it ourselves.

Ten, corporate bailouts. Knock it off. Sink or swim like the rest of us. If there are hard times ahead, we'll be better off just getting into it and letting the strong survive. Quick and painful. Have you ever ripped off a Band‑Aid? We will pull together. Great things happen in America under great hardship. Give us the chance to innovate. We cannot disappoint you more than you have disappointed us.

Eleven, transparency and accountability. How about it? No, really, how about it? Let's have it. Let's say we give the buzzwords a rest and have some straight honest talk. Please try ‑‑ please stop manipulating and trying to appease me with clever wording. I am not the idiot you obviously take me for. Stop sneaking around and meeting in back rooms making deals with your friends. It will only be a prelude to your criminal investigation. Stop hiding things from me.

Twelve, unprecedented quick spending. Stop it now.

Take a breath. Listen to the people. Let's just slow down and get some input from some nonpoliticians on the subject. Stop making everything an emergency. Stop speed reading our bills into law. I am not an activist. I am not a community organizer. Nor am I a terrorist, a militant or a violent person. I am a parent and a grandparent. I work. I'm busy. I'm busy. I am busy, and I am tired. I thought we elected competent people to take care of the business of government so that we could work, raise our families, pay our bills, have a little recreation, complain about taxes, endure our hardships, pursue our personal goals, cut our lawn, wash our cars on the weekends and be responsible contributing members of society and teach our children to be the same all while living in the home of the free and land of the brave.

I entrusted you with upholding the Constitution. I believed in the checks and balances to keep from getting far off course. What happened? You are very far off course. Do you really think I find humor in the hiring of a speed reader to unintelligently ramble all through a bill that you signed into law without knowing what it contained? I do not. It is a mockery of the responsibility I have entrusted to you. It is a slap in the face. I am not laughing at your arrogance. Why is it that I feel as if you would not trust me to make a single decision about my own life and how I would live it but you should expect that I should trust you with the debt that you have laid on all of us and our children. We did not want the TARP bill. We said no. We would repeal it if we could. I am sure that we still cannot. There is such urgency and recklessness in all of the recent spending.

From my perspective, it seems that all of you have gone insane. I also know that I am far from alone in these feelings. Do you honestly feel that your current pursuits have merit to patriotic Americans? We want it to stop. We want to put the brakes on everything that is being rushed by us and forced upon us. We want our voice back. You have forced us to put our lives on hold to straighten out the mess that you are making. We will have to give up our vacations, our time spent with our children, any relaxation time we may have had and money we cannot afford to spend on you to bring our concerns to Washington. Our president often knows all the right buzzword is unsustainable. Well, no kidding. How many tens of thousands of dollars did the focus group cost to come up with that word? We don't want your overpriced words. Stop treating us like we're morons.

We want all of you to stop focusing on your reelection and do the job we want done, not the job you want done or the job your party wants done. You work for us and at this rate I guarantee you not for long because we are coming. We will be heard and we will be represented. You think we're so busy with our lives that we will never come for you? We are the formerly silent majority, all of us who quietly work , pay taxes, obey the law, vote, save money, keep our noses to the grindstone and we are now looking up at you. You have awakened us, the patriotic spirit so strong and so powerful that it had been sleeping too long. You have pushed us too far. Our numbers are great. They may surprise you. For every one of us who will be there, there will be hundreds more that could not come. Unlike you, we have their trust. We will represent them honestly, rest assured. They will be at the polls on voting day to usher you out of office. We have cancelled vacations. We will use our last few dollars saved. We will find the representation among us and a grassroots campaign will flourish. We didn't ask for this fight. But the gloves are coming off. We do not come in violence, but we are angry. You will represent us or you will be replaced with someone who will. There are candidates among us when hewill rise like a Phoenix from the ashes that you have made of our constitution.

Democrat, Republican, independent, libertarian. Understand this. We don't care. Political parties are meaningless to us. Patriotic Americans are willing to do right by us and our Constitution and that is all that matters to us now. We are going to fire all of you who abuse power and seek more. It is not your power. It is ours and we want it back. We entrusted you with it and you abused it. You are dishonorable. You are dishonest. As Americans we are ashamed of you. You have brought shame to us. If you are not representing the wants and needs of your constituency loudly and consistently, in spite of the objections of your party, you will be fired. Did you hear? We no longer care about your political parties. You need to be loyal to us, not to them. Because we will get you fired and they will not save you. If you do or can represent me, my issues, my views, please stand up. Make your identity known. You need to make some noise about it. Speak up. I need to know who you are. If you do not speak up, you will be herded out with the rest of the sheep and we will replace the whole damn congress if need be one by one. We are coming. Are we coming for you? Who do you represent? What do you represent? Listen. Because we are coming. We the people are coming.

2009-06-16T16:01:00.001-04:00

An important message from Free Speech Coalition Chairman Roger Hedgecock:

ABC News has reportedly agreed to broadcast its news June 24 from the Blue Room of the White House, virtually turning over news programming that night to the Obama Government.

ABC also plans a prime time special, "Prescription for America", again broadcast from the White House. This "Special" will feature Obama Government officials promoting the President's proposal for Government health care. No opposing views are allowed on the program.

As Chair of the Free Speech Coalition (donttouchmydial.com), I call on ABC to include all points of view on this most important issue. As more Americans become familiar with the complexities of the health care system and the various proposals to "reform" it, it is the responsibility of the "News" to let all voices be heard.

ABC News is in danger of becoming a propaganda organ for the Obama Government.

Our Coalition was formed to fight restrictions on Free Speech in the Media, particularly the "Fairness Doctrine" and its evil offshoots "localism" and "media ownership diversity" --policies now being considered for the purpose of censoring conservative talk radio by the Obama FCC.

For ABC News to present only the Obama Government side of this important issue would betray the public interest in a free press.

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Congressional Budget Office Director’s Blog

2009-06-16T11:44:00.001-04:00

Preliminary Analysis of Major Provisions Related to Health Insurance Coverage Under the Affordable Health Choices Act

CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation staff worked together to produce a preliminary analysis of the major provisions related to health insurance coverage contained in the “Affordable Health Choices Act,” drafted by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP). The estimates are based on provisions from title 1 of the draft legislation released by HELP on June 9th. Among other things, the draft legislation would establish insurance exchanges (called “gateways”) through which individuals and families could purchase health insurance coverage. The proposed bill also would provide federal subsidies to substantially lower the cost of that coverage for some enrollees.

According to our preliminary assessment, enacting the proposal would result in a net increase in federal budget deficits of about $1.0 trillion over the 2010-2019 period. When fully implemented, about 39 million individuals would obtain coverage through the new insurance exchanges. At the same time, the number of people who had coverage through an employer would decline by about 15 million (or roughly 10 percent), and coverage from other sources would fall by about 8 million, so the net decrease in the number of people uninsured would be about 16 million or 17 million.

These new figures do not represent a formal or complete cost estimate for the draft legislation, for several reasons. The estimates provided do not address the entire bill—only the major provisions related to health insurance coverage. Some details have not been estimated yet, and the draft legislation has not been fully reviewed. Also, because expanded eligibility for the Medicaid program may be added at a later date, those figures are not likely to represent the impact that more comprehensive proposals—which might include a significant expansion of Medicaid or other options for subsidizing coverage for those with income below 150 percent of the federal poverty level—would have both on the federal budget and on the extent of insurance coverage.

CBO will continue to work on an ongoing basis with the HELP Committee and the other Senate and House committees involved in health care reform to provide estimates and analyses as legislation is developed.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Budget Projections, Health.

US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive

2009-06-15T13:57:00.002-04:00

From the UK Telegraph:

Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic "shrink to survive" proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.

By Tom Leonard in Flint, Michigan
Published: 6:30PM BST 12 Jun 2009

The US government is looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature Photo: GETTY

The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.

Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the "rust belt" of America's Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

"The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we're all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way," said Mr Kildee. "Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity."

Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was "both a cultural and political taboo" about admitting decline in America.

"Places like Flint have hit rock bottom. They're at the point where it's better to start knocking a lot of buildings down," she said.

Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000.

Unemployment is now approaching 20 per cent and the total population has almost halved to 110,000.

The exodus – particularly of young people – coupled with the consequent collapse in property prices, has left street after street in sections of the city almost entirely abandoned.

In the city centre, the once grand Durant Hotel – named after William Durant, GM's founder – is a symbol of the city's decline, said Mr Kildee. The large building has been empty since 1973, roughly when Flint's decline began.

Regarded as a model city in the motor industry's boom years, Flint may once again be emulated, though for very different reasons.

But Mr Kildee, who has lived there nearly all his life, said he had first to overcome a deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that "big is good" and that cities should sprawl – Flint covers 34 square miles.

He said: "The obsession with growth is sadly a very American thing. Across the US, there's an assumption that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful. If they're shrinking, they're failing."

But some Flint dustcarts are collecting just one rubbish bag a week, roads are decaying, police are very understaffed and there were simply too few people to pay for services, he said.

If the city didn't downsize it will eventually go bankrupt, he added.

Flint's recovery efforts have been helped by a new state law passed a few years ago which allowed local governments to buy up empty properties very cheaply.

They could then knock them down or sell them on to owners who will occupy them. The city wants to specialise in health and education services, both areas which cannot easily be relocated abroad.

The local authority has restored the city's attractive but formerly deserted centre but has pulled down 1,100 abandoned homes in outlying areas.

Mr Kildee estimated another 3,000 needed to be demolished, although the city boundaries will remain the same.

Already, some streets peter out into woods or meadows, no trace remaining of the homes that once stood there.

Choosing which areas to knock down will be delicate but many of them were already obvious, he said.

The city is buying up houses in more affluent areas to offer people in neighbourhoods it wants to demolish. Nobody will be forced to move, said Mr Kildee.

"Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow," he said.

Mr Kildee acknowledged that some fellow Americans considered his solution "defeatist" but he insisted it was "no more defeatist than pruning an overgrown tree so it can bear fruit again".

BBC: US deliberately kept Britain in the dark over Uighurs, Bermuda

2009-06-15T11:22:00.005-04:00

by Ed Morrissey - Hot Air

June 13, 2009

Yesterday, when the news broke that the British were “pissed” about Barack Obama’s dump of four of the Gitmo Uighurs onto Bermuda, the White House tried to spin it by claiming they thought Bermuda’s premier had included the UK in their end of the discussions. The BBC reports today that their sources inside the White House dispute that. Obama deliberately kept London in the dark until he thought he had a fait accompli -but the White House now claims it was for the UK’s own good:

A senior US official has told the BBC Washington decided not to tell London ahead of time about a deal to resettle four Guantanamo detainees in Bermuda. …

The unnamed senior official also told the BBC that Washington was attempting to shield the UK from Chinese anger. …

Pressed on whether the US had told the British government, an unnamed state department official was quoted as saying: “We did talk to them before the Uighurs got on the plane.”

Now a senior US official has told the BBC it was a deliberate decision not to consult London on the resettlement, after other countries came under pressure from China not to accept the Uighurs.

In a highly unusual move, a senior US official said Washington opted to keep details of the deal from London until the last minute to enable Britain to deny all knowledge of the deal and thus avoid China’s anger, says the BBC’s Washington correspondent Kim Ghattas.

They talked to them “before the Uighurs got on the plane”? Well, that was certainly sweet of them. Did they mention on which flight they’d be coming to Bermuda, or did they make the Brits guess that, too?

It’s a highly unusual move, all right. I don’t recall the last time an ally sent trained terrorists into a territory for which the other ally had responsibility for security without their permission. Why? Because it hasn’t ever happened before now.

So, to our British friends: how does it feel to have Obama make security decisions about your territory without bothering to consult you at all? The liberal press in the UK used to deride Tony Blair as George Bush’s poodle; what does that make Gordon Brown in relation to Barack Obama? It’s a good thing that arrogant Bush isn’t running things in Washington any more, huh?

The Toaster May Be $5.00, but the Insight is Free

2009-06-15T11:15:00.002-04:00

Lessons from a successful yard sale

by JEFF SCHREIBER - America's Right

June 14, 2009

My absence yesterday can be directly attributed to a street-wide yard sale organized by some of our neighbors down the block. I've never been a big yard sale guy -- I haven't really shopped at any, nor had we ever put anything out for sale ourselves.

Now, however, I'm hooked.

The money on Saturday--just over $150--certainly wasn't anything to write home about, but there is definitely something about seeing someone who apparently is in dire need of a battery-powered salad spinner, or even better watching a kid who might not have as much as some of the other kids on this block light up when his father says "I'll take it" to the prospect of a wickedly underpriced mountain bike which, given my increasing girth, I've obviously not been using anymore.

There's also something about us, staring down a pending 700-mile move, being able to clear out unused kitchen appliances, books, exercise equipment, housewares and such and actually be compensated for doing so. But by a long shot, however, the greatest part about today was the cross-section of Americana which found their way onto our driveway and front yard.

Rich and poor. Black, white, Asian, Arab and Pacific Islander. People who would be welcome at our house for dinner, and people who scared the bejeezus out of me and made me thankful for my Second Amendment rights and carry permit. People who were looking for something very specific--Do you have any seashells? Please? Any seashells?--and people who, from the looks of what was in the trunk of their cars, had been to every single yard sale in the Philadelphia metro area.

By far the funniest and saddest part of the day was a conversation I had with a very nice middle-aged woman as she looked curiously at a 19-inch Zenith television set I had purchased at least a dozen years ago in college.

"Do you have any digital LSD TVs?" She asked, her head cocked to the side like a labrador retriever processing a funny sound.

I gave her the bad news, and without me even needing to ask, she offered that her television quit working the day before, and that she had made a few phone calls and was told that she needed "some sort of box thing" or "one of them digital LSD TVs." Obviously, she wasn't quite prepared for the transition to digital television signals which took place on Friday.

And it turns out she wasn't nearly alone. According to the Associated Press, almost 700,000 people called a federal hot line over the past week regarding the transition, including 317,450 yesterday alone.

The conversion, of course, was at first supposed to happen in February. Then, it was pushed back to June 12. In advance of both dates, hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were spent by Congress to facilitate a smooth transition, mostly through the distribution of $40 coupons with which people still dependent upon rabbit-ear-style antennae could purchase a digital converter box. In fact, when Barack Obama's so-called "stimulus" package was passed on January 28, it contained a second dose of $650 million for transition-related outreach.

In other words, taxpayers like you and me, people who were not affected by the transition because we choose to maintain cable or satellite or the right kind of box, were forced to pay money so that people across the country could watch television. Television, it seems, has joined speech and due process as an absolute American right. And yet, regardless of all the public service advertisements, regardless of every segment on the local news broadcasts, I still had a woman standing in my driveway, asking about "digital LSD TVs."

What struck me is that these 700,000 people are people who largely rely upon the network news broadcasts for their news, and many of them probably vote. Also, I think it's important to understand that regardless of how much money was spent and how much effort was taken and how many different means and measures were used by our federal government, it wasn't enough, and people were still calling the federal government and asking for a solution.

We are a nation addicted to the government teat. And it's up to those of us who are awake to slowly but surely awaken the rest and start the weaning process. I know it can happen. I know we can do it. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I'm re-reading Atlas Shrugged; well, at least six or seven different people spotted it on my chair yesterday and wanted to talk about it. Two were liberals, one of them even drove up in a Prius and--I kid you not--was wearing a baseball cap with an integrated solar-powered fan. All of them agreed on something -- that they were feeling the "government pinch," that they were seeing an America that was increasingly looking down its nose at success and prosperity.

So, yes, it was our first yard sale yesterday. But it certainly will not be our last. As I packed up the stuff that didn't sell, I did so with a smile on my face. We rid ourselves of rarely-used junk, gained an optimistic perspective on the future of America, educated a woman about "digital LSD TVs," and made some money in the process. How capitalist of us.

Just Make Stuff Up

2009-06-15T10:35:00.005-04:00

President Obama’s war on the truth.

By Victor Davis Hanson

In the first six months of the Obama administration, we have witnessed an assault on the truth of a magnitude not seen since the Nixon Watergate years. The prevarication is ironic given the Obama campaign’s accusations that the Bush years were not transparent and that Hillary Clinton, like her husband, was a chronic fabricator. Remember Obama’s own assertions that he was a “student of history” and that “words mean something. You can’t just make stuff up.”

Yet Obama’s war against veracity is multifaceted.

Trotskyization. Sometimes the past is simply airbrushed away. Barack Obama has a disturbing habit of contradicting his past declarations as if spoken words did not mean much at all. The problem is not just that once-memorable statements about everything from NAFTA to public campaign financing were contradicted by his subsequent actions. Rather, these pronouncements simply were ignored to the point of making it seem they were never really uttered at all.

What is stunning about Obama’s hostile demagoguery about Bush’s War on Terror is not that he has now contradicted himself on one or two particulars. Instead, he has reversed himself on every major issue — renditions, military tribunals, intercepts, wiretaps, Predator drone attacks, the release of interrogation photos, Iraq (and, I think, soon Guantanamo Bay) — and yet never acknowledged these reversals.

Are we supposed to think that Obama was never against these protocols at all? Or that he still remains opposed to them even as he keeps them in place? Meanwhile, his attorney general, Eric Holder, is as voluble on the excesses of the Bush War on Terror as he is silent about his own earlier declarations that detainees in this war were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention.

Politicians often go back on earlier promises, and they often exaggerate (remember Obama’s “10,000” who died in a Kansas tornado [12 perished], or his belief that properly inflating tires saves as much energy as offshore drilling can produce?). But the extent of Obama’s distortions suggests that he has complete confidence that observers in the media do not care — or at least do not care enough to inform the public.

The “Big Lie.” Team Obama says that Judge Sotomayor misspoke when she asserted that Latinas were inherently better judges than white males. Yet the people around Obama knew before Sotomayor was nominated that she has reiterated such racialist sentiments repeatedly over many years.

Obama complained that his deficits were largely inherited — even though his newly projected annual deficit and aggregate increase in the national debt may well, if they are not circumvented, equal all the deficit spending compiled by all previous administrations combined.

The president lectures Congress on its financial excesses. He advocates “pay as you go” budgeting. But he remains silent about the unfunded liabilities involved in his own proposals for cap-and-trade, universal health care, and education reform, which will in aggregate require well over a trillion dollars in new spending on top of existing deficits — but without any “pay as you go” proposals to fund them.

By the same token, his promise that 95 percent of Americans will receive an Obama “tax cut” is impossible. Remember, almost 40 percent of households currently pay no income taxes at all — and the $1.7-trillion annual deficit will necessitate a broad array of taxes well beyond those assessed on incomes above $250,000.

Obama talks about cutting federal outlays by eliminating $17 billion in expenditures — one-half of one percent of a $3.4-trillion budget. Here the gap between rhetoric and reality is already so wide that it simply makes no difference whether one goes completely beyond the limits of belief. Why would a liberal “budget hawk” go through the trouble of trying to cut 10 or 20 percent of the budget when he might as well celebrate a 0.5 percent cut and receive the same amount of credit or disdain? If one is going to distort, one might as well distort whole-hog.

Outright historical dissimulation. On matters of history, we now know that much of what President Obama says is either not factual or at least misleading. He predictably errs on the side of political correctness. During the campaign, there was his inaccurate account of his great-uncle’s role in liberating Auschwitz. In Berlin, he asserted that the world — rather than the American and British air forces — came together to pull off the Berlin Airlift.

In the Cairo speech, nearly every historical allusion was nonfactual or inexact: the fraudulent claims that Muslims were responsible for European, Chinese, and Hindu discoveries; the notion that a Christian Córdoba was an example of Islamic tolerance during the Inquisition; the politically correct canard that the Renaissance and Enlightenment were fueled by Arab learning; the idea that abolition and civil rights in the United States were accomplished without violence — as if 600,000 did not die in the Civil War, or entire swaths of Detroit, Gary, Newark, and Los Angeles did not go up in flames in the 1960s.

Here we see the omnipotent influence of Obama’s multicultural creed: Western civilization is unexceptional in comparison with other cultures, and history must be the story of an ecumenical, global shared brotherhood.

The half-, and less-than-half, truth. At other times, Obama throws out historical references that are deliberately incomplete. To placate critical hosts, he evokes the American dropping of the bomb. But he is silent about the impossible choices for the Allies — after Japanese atrocities in Manchuria, Korea, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa — facing the necessity of stopping a Japanese imperial killing machine, determined to fight to the death.

He lectures about equivalent culpability between Muslims and Americans without mentioning American largess to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians. He mostly ignores American military efforts to save Muslims in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Somalia — and American criticism of Russia’s and China’s treatment of their own persecuted Muslim minorities.

When Obama contextualizes the United States’ treatment of Muslims, does he do so in comparison to the Chinese treatment of the Uighurs, the Russians in Chechnya and Afghanistan, or the European colonial experience in North Africa?

When he cites European colonialism’s pernicious role in the Middle East, does he mention nearly 400 years of Ottoman Muslim colonial rule in the Arab-speaking world? Or the Muslim world’s own role in sending several million sub-Saharan Africans to the Middle East as slaves? By no stretch of the imagination is purported Western bias against Islam commensurate with the Islamic threats that have been issued to Danish cartoonists, British novelists, the pope, or German opera producers.

Obama surely knows that a mosque is acceptable in America and Europe in a way that a church is not in most of the Gulf States, or that Muslims freely voice their beliefs in Rotterdam and Dearborn in a way Westerners dare not in Tehran, Damascus, or Riyadh.

Here we see the classic notion of the “noble lie,” or the assumption that facts are to be cited or ignored in accordance with the intended aim: Interfaith reconciliation means downplaying Muslim excesses, or treating Islamic felonies as equivalent with Western misdemeanors.

Why has President Obama developed a general disregard for the truth, in a manner far beyond typical politicians who run one way and govern another, or hide failures and broadcast successes?

First, he has confidence that the media will not be censorious and will simply accept his fiction as fact. A satirist, after all, could not make up anything to match the obsequious journalists who bow to their president, proclaim him a god, and receive sexual-like tingles up their appendages.

Second, Obama is a postmodernist. He believes that all truth is relative, and that assertions gain or lose credibility depending on the race, class, and gender of the speaker. In Obama’s case, his misleading narrative is intended for higher purposes. Thus it is truthful in a way that accurate facts offered by someone of a different, more privileged class and race might not be.

Third, Obama talks more than almost any prior president, weighing in on issues from Stephen Colbert’s haircut, to Sean Hannity’s hostility, to the need to wash our hands. In Obama’s way of thinking, his receptive youthful audiences are proof of his righteousness and wisdom — and empower him to pontificate on matters he knows nothing about.

Finally, our president is a product of a multicultural education: Facts either cannot be ascertained or do not matter, given that the overriding concern is to promote an equality of result among various contending groups. That is best done by inflating the aspirations of those without power, and deflating the “dominant narratives” of those with it.

The problem in the next four years will be not just that the president of the United States serially does not tell the truth. Instead, the real crisis in our brave new relativist world will be that those who demonstrate that he is untruthful will themselves be accused of lying.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

The sixth wind?

2009-06-15T09:44:00.003-04:00

Headlines trumpet Christian decline, but a closer look suggests another rise in serious faith | Marvin Olasky

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

Sometimes it seems that an atheistic tsunami has hit. Anti-Christian books land high on bestseller lists. Polls purportedly show a decline in belief. Newsweek this spring had one of its traditional Easter cover stories on "The Decline and Fall of Christian America."

Whenever the conventional wisdom points in a particular direction it's good practice to ask: What if the opposite is true? What if nominal Christian affiliation is declining but serious biblical belief is actually on the rise? What if Christianity in America is not dying, but instead getting its second wind—or maybe its sixth wind?

After all, the American colonists were a mixed multitude, with high-minded preachers and a greater number of lowlifes. By the 1730s rampant concern with spiritual decline set the stage for a Great Awakening, with a decline later in the century leading to a Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s.

Those second and third winds of American Christianity had died down so much by 1850 that spiritualism was surging—but then came a northern urban revival in 1858, a revival in the Confederate armies during the terrible war, and the post-war growth of urban missions that together could constitute a fourth wind. A fifth wind blew in the 1950s as Billy Graham and others came to the fore amid threats of nuclear war, and that brings us to the present, where we face radical Islam but not Hitler or Soviet missiles.

What is the evidence that a sixth wind may now be blowing? The numbers are ambiguous. Recent publication of the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey of 50,000 adults led some to say the heavens are falling, since from 1990 to 2008 the portion of American adults who self-identify as Christians dropped 10 percentage points, from 86 percent to 76 percent. Those who report no religious affiliation almost doubled, from 8 percent to 15 percent.

But almost all of that change occurred from 1990 to 2001: since then, essentially no change. Furthermore, a Baylor survey in 2006 showed that two-thirds of Americans who claim no religious affiliation say they believe in God. A 2008 Pew Forum study found two of every five religiously unaffiliated persons still describing religion as important in their lives. Levels of religious affiliation probably measure not belief but how settled Americans are in communities—and the increased number of single, childless adults translates into less settling.

Furthermore, Pew reported that "the unaffiliated have one of the lowest retention rates of any of the major religious groups, with most people who were raised unaffiliated now belonging to one religion or another." The survey showed 39 percent of those "raised unaffiliated" are now Protestant, and most of those are in evangelical churches. Another 15 percent of those unaffiliated as children or teens are now in Catholicism or some other faith.

In comparison, 80 percent of those raised as Protestants are still Protestants (some 3 percent are Catholic, 4 percent are involved with some other faith, and 13 percent are unaffiliated). We hear often about evangelical kids drifting away—and the danger is certainly real—but we don't hear often enough the good news of God's grace falling on those raised among scoffers. The movement is both ways, but God's pull is stronger than atheism's push. Naomi Schaefer Riley in God on the Quad (2006) reported on the many students who ignore professorial propaganda, forsake secular liberalism, and seek deeper religious faith.

Stephen Prothero, who chairs the religion department at Boston University, summarizes the recent polling results this way: "What the data do not tell us is that the United States is becoming 'post-Christian.' If you meet a random American walking down the street, the odds are only one in 62 that he or she will self-identify as atheist or agnostic."

In any event, quantitative results tell us little about quality. What if the drop during the 1990s was largely among nominal "Christians" who now respond more honestly to pollsters than they once did? Atheists with axes to grind may exaggerate changes, and some Christians follow the American tradition (begun by the Puritans) of emphasizing decline from the good old days. But here's a question: What are observers without a foot in either camp noticing?

I had lunch recently with two Oxford-educated Brits who have just co-authored God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World (Penguin Press, 2009). John Micklethwait is editor-in-chief of The Economist, a weekly newsmagazine that shows skepticism about everything, and Adrian Wooldridge is the magazine's Washington bureau chief. Micklethwait described the duo theologically as "non-involved outsiders," and Wooldridge, an Anglican, added, "I support the church like a flying buttress, from the outside."

These outsiders see evident problems: Some churches combine big numbers with shallow commitment. But the two also see that Christianity "helps suburbanites to form communities in the atomized world of the Sunbelt . . . ordinary people all over America to deal with the problems of alcoholism and divorce, wayward children and hopelessness . . . the hard-pressed inhabitants of the inner cities to deal with the chaos that surrounds them."

Wooldridge said that researching and writing God Is Back had "made me a better person." When others around the table laughed, not expecting such a comment from a journalist who looks world-weary, he asked, "Why do you laugh?" and emphasized his seriousness. He spoke about how impressed he was with urban pastors like Richard Smith of inner-city Philadelphia. "Christians are the people looking after the homeless, the drug-addicted," Wooldridge stated fiercely. "Where is the atheist homeless shelter? Atheists are only interested in themselves."

Wooldridge sees modernization leading not to secularization but to more emphasis on God, as a search for meaning grows more intense, and he argues that "America has reached the future first." He and Micklethwait lay out specifics: "America leads the world in producing religious entrepreneurs . . . religious publishing is undoubtedly growing at a time when the publishing industry in general is struggling. . . . Evangelicals are rediscovering the life of the mind [and] are starting to produce intellectuals again."

All of these forays are dangerous—"pastorpreneurs," publishers, and professors all face temptations to glorify themselves rather than God—but, as Wooldridge said, "Evangelicals can choose between arguing for God or retreating." He argues that growing churches provide "social capital" that prevents social anarchy: These churches "keep their buildings open from dawn to dusk and provide a mind-boggling array of services," including schools, counseling and guidance groups, and children's activities.

And what of those polls? Wooldridge said, "What we see in the numbers is not a waning of Christianity, but a polarization. The number of people saying that God is central to their lives is going up. We're seeing the death of the Eisenhower era where everyone claimed to be a Christian or a Jew because that was just part of being respected, part of being a good American. Now, people who were lukewarm about religion are now more happy saying that they're atheists or agnostics, and people who claim they're serious about faith are serious about faith."

For further thoughts of Micklethwait and Wooldridge, see the interview with them in this issue—but they are not the only observers who have spent time with conservative Christians and come away impressed. The Princeton University Press, an outfit not known for positive portrayal of Christian conservatives, recently published a book with a surprising title, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right. In it author Jon A. Shields writes, "although my liberal Protestant upbringing initially made me feel out of place hanging out with conservative Christians, I found them disarming, gracious, and more misunderstood than I ever imagined."

Shields criticizes liberal journalists for spotlighting extremists and "mistaking such marginal fundamentalists as representative of the Christian Right as a whole." He notes that "the vast majority of Christian Right leaders have long labored to inculcate deliberative norms in their rank-and-file activists—especially the practice of civility and respect; the cultivation of real dialogue by listening and asking questions."

Shields particularly scrutinized the pro-life movement and its critics. On one side, "Rank-and-file citizens are encouraged by their leaders to develop into truly Christian activists. The 'mantra' that the president of New York State Right to Life, Lori Kehoe, repeats to her activists is 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" On the other side he describes the reception of pro-life members of Justice for All: "An instructor at the University of New Mexico yelled at JFA volunteers, 'You are the American Taliban.' Professors at the University of Texas at Austin also routinely screamed obscenities at JFA staff as well. As one of the offending professors at Austin confessed, 'I am incandescent with rage.'"

Shields stops at that point, but some pro-life leaders are bucking the tide and becoming almost incandescent with optimism. For example, Frank Pavone of Priests for Life notes that we're seeing a "strong and ever-growing involvement of young people in all aspects of the fight to end abortion." He also points out that among older people working either in abortion businesses or pro-life centers, the flow of conversions is in one direction—from pro-abortion to pro-life.

Liberal secularists downplay such stories: It would be front page news if a pro-lifer were to repent of saving babies, but the many instances of abortion industry veterans repenting are like trees falling in the forest. (A broader measure of attitudes last month also received little attention: A Gallup Poll reported that 51 percent of Americans surveyed called themselves "pro-life" and only 42 percent "pro-choice." Gallup began asking that either-or question in 1995, and this is the first time a majority has embraced "pro-life." Ultrasound machines, pro-life pregnancy resource centers, and a generation of regret-filled women are all having an impact.)

Some preachers also downplay positive changes, sometimes because of the Puritan heritage of preaching about decline, sometimes because Christians have bought into secular media reports that emphasize church problems, sometimes because of political pessimism or beliefs that things will get worse and the Rapture will then occur. And yet, a new book by critic Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, published by the decidedly non-theistic Yale University Press, asks, "Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?"

Eagleton's answer: Nothing else—not science, not reason, not liberalism, not economics—works. He concludes, "If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world."

Another cause for optimism: the growing number of Hispanic and Asian churchgoers. For example, Soong-Chan Rah notes in The Next Evangelicalism (IVP, 2009) that when he was preparing to move to the Boston area, "Every story that I heard or concern that was raised seemed to assume that the city of Boston represented the worst of a post-Christian region, and that secular humanism had completely overtaken that city."

Rah continues, "When I arrived in Boston I found a very different scenario. I found that Christianity was not only alive in Boston, it was flourishing. . . . In 1970 the city of Boston was home to about 200 churches. Thirty years later, there were 412 churches. The net gain in the number of churches was in the growth of the number of churches in the ethnic and immigrant communities."

Immigration is helping Christianity in America. While many mainline WASP churches move toward theologically liberal irrelevance and therefore lose members who want more than a social club, Asians bulwark urban but theologically conservative churches like Redeemer Presbyterian in Manhattan, and Hispanics do the same throughout the United States but particularly in the Southwest. Some churches, including some mega-churches, have shallow teaching, but the more thoughtful pastors push to go deeper.

The reasons for media insinuations of Christianity's decline are easy to grasp. One is tradition, as the wistfulness of nonbelievers repeats itself in every generation: Thomas Jefferson, Clarence Darrow, and many others have predicted Christianity's imminent end. But another reason is the tendency of some reporters to make erroneous assumptions based on convenience samples. They look at mainline churches and miss ethnic and immigrant churches. They associate Christianity with a particular type of gospel proclamation and political involvement, then note the passing of Jerry Falwell and D. James Kennedy.

Evidence for Christian short-run pessimism does abound. Samuel John Stone's line in "The Church's One Foundation" (1868)—that "with a scornful wonder men see her sore oppressed, by schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed"—could have been written yesterday about Episcopalians and others. Warren Cole Smith's A Lover's Quarrel with the Evangelical Church (Authentic, 2009) rightly criticizes "Body-Count Evangelism" and calls for churches to emphasize spiritual depth.

But let's look at what is happening to Christianity's opposite, atheism. Alister McGrath documented in The Twilight of Atheism (2004) the 20th-century verdict: atheism weighed and found wanting in Communist countries and many Western ones as well. The popping up of several New York Times bestsellers over the past five years shows that those hostile to Christianity have some discretionary income, but publishing successes do not root out atheism's underlying problem both rationally and emotionally: Atheism denies the glory of God that the heavens declare, and atheism cannot by its very nature offer any hope.

Meanwhile, Christianity's main religious opponents, Islam and Hinduism, can only hold onto their flocks by banning or persecuting missionaries and attempting to restrict discussion. They fear open debate, but Christians can say what John Milton wrote in 1644: "Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play on the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?"

In Europe and America, Christianity's opponents try to avoid free and open encounters by using ridicule. Janie Cheaney reported in WORLD's June 6 issue that British literary lion A.N. Wilson has dropped his atheism, but I want to quote his account of why he became one: "Like most educated people in Britain and Northern Europe (I was born in 1950), I have grown up in a culture that is overwhelmingly secular and anti-religious. The universities, broadcasters and media generally are not merely non-religious, they are positively anti. To my shame, I believe it was this that made me lose faith and heart in my youth. It felt so uncool to be religious. With the mentality of a child in the playground, I felt at some visceral level that being religious was unsexy."

Christianity's ride through 2,000 years, and in America for 400, has always been a roller coaster: up and down, slow and fast, sometimes sideways, always planned by God but unpredictable for man. The first time around a roller coaster is terrifying for children. They do not know that a power beyond them is in control. Like A.N. Wilson but even more so, most of last month's and this month's college graduates have been exposed to years of anti-Christian propaganda from academia and media. Uncool. Unsexy.

But look at how experience has helped Wilson: He now states publicly his belief in Christianity because of "the confidence I have gained with age. Rather than being cowed by them, I relish the notion that, by asserting a belief in the risen Christ, I am defying all the liberal clever-clogs on the block."

Is a sixth wind blowing? I don't know, but I was also born (like Wilson) in 1950, and confidence gained with age leads me to assert that there's no reason to be depressed. Truth trumps everything, including liberal clever-clogs. The apostle Paul was not unduly impressed by temporary ascents and descents. His confidence did not depend on which emperor was in power or who the next emperor might be. He knew that a benevolent reign would allow more to hear the gospel, but a hard reign would create inspiring testimonies that would show how the gospel sustained believers amid pressure—so Christ's cause would win either way.

Paul from prison told the Philippians that "what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel." Paul told the Corinthians that "in all our affliction, I am overflowing with joy." What afflictions has the church in America faced that we should be grumpy pessimists?

RYAN/NUNES: Let the debate begin

2009-06-12T12:11:00.000-04:00

By Rep. Paul D. Ryan and Rep. Devin Nunes | Monday, June 8, 2009

COMMENTARY:

Halfway through 2009, the Obama administration and the Democratic majority in Congress seem to have forgotten that the 2008 election is over.

Hoping that rhetoric and promises can continue to substitute for substance, Democrats remain stuck in campaign mode on an issue that requires an open and thorough debate: health care reform. Their promise of date-certain results on universal health care lacks one critical component: a legislative proposal.

While it is within the majority's power to ignore the Republican minority, a group of people that shouldn't be ignored are the American people. The closed-door internal debate -- focused mainly on the insistence of a government-run "option" and what current (or future) Americans will be taxed to pay for it -- is a debate they've calculated is too risky to hold in public view.

It is not an unwise strategy, as it would be difficult to reconcile the administration's and the majority's rhetoric with their oft-discussed (but not yet introduced) new gov- ernment health entitlement or their oft-discussed (but not yet introduced) federalization of health insurance with stifling mandates. You can't create a public program -- where the government serves as both the referee and the player in the game - setting up a stacked deck where private insurers would quickly dump 120 million Americans onto government insurance -- and call that greater choice and fair competition.

You can't expand choice by restricting it with endless mandates and dictates from Washington. You can't create new government entitlements, impose trillions of dollars of new taxes, and call this cost containment.

The expectation was that Democrats in Washington would emerge from their secret meeting rooms and tell the American people: Allow the government to take over the management of health care or continue with the failed status-quo of today. This is a false choice. Along with our fellow Republican Sens. Tom Coburn (a doctor of medicine) of Oklahoma and Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, we have proposed a comprehensive, innovative plan that reorients health care around the individual, not the government.

The Patients' Choice Act of 2009 (S. 1099/H.R. 2520) demonstrates we can have universal health insurance in this country without the government taking it over.

We agree with the stated goals of both political parties when it comes to health care reform: tackling the fundamental drivers of exploding costs; empowering patients and providers with greater choice and competition; and ensuring access to quality, affordable health coverage for all Americans. The difference is that we actually accomplish these goals. It is irresponsible to promise such things without clearly articulating how to achieve them.

The problem is not that we don't spend enough money, but that we don't spend it efficiently or effectively. The federal government spends about $200 billion each year funding a discriminatory tax policy for those who receive health insurance through their employer. Those who don't have employer-provided health insurance, or who are unemployed, receive no tax benefit. Our proposal replaces this income tax exclusion with an advanceable, refundable tax credit for all Americans to buy portable health insurance.

We continue to encourage businesses to offer health insurance by allowing the current tax incentives for businesses to remain intact. So if you like what you have, you can keep it - but it will be your decision.

The proposed Patients' Choice Act also would reform the second-class care for society's most vulnerable by converting the broken Medicaid program from a defined benefit to a defined contribution program. In addition to the universal tax credit, Medicaid beneficiaries would receive additional resources to pay for health care.

To ensure affordable, quality coverage for all, we propose real insurance reforms that reorient the incentives of these companies so that they jibe with patients. Our bill encourages state-based solutions - in the form of voluntary health exchanges. These exchanges will prevent cherry-picking against those deemed uninsurable and will be made possible with risk adjustment mechanisms and other state-level options such as reinsurance and risk pools. We also include common-sense reforms to expand coverage through auto-enrollment for individuals who do not select a plan at the start of the year.

To ensure that market forces can actually work in health care, patients must know what services cost and who provides the best service. We propose an industry-based Healthcare Services Commission that will bring much-needed transparency to the currently opaque health care market.

This comprehensive reform legislation includes concrete prevention and wellness initiatives, health information technology, long overdue entitlement reforms, and more.

All the reforms in this legislation demonstrate a clear, coherent path to achieving universal access to quality, affordable health care with the patient and the doctor - not the government or insurance companies - as the nucleus of health care in America.

We could not agree more with President Obama: Reforming our health care system is no longer an option; it is a necessity. The Patients' Choice Act is a real proposal with real legislative text and real solutions.

We believe it is irresponsible to simply criticize without offering a better path forward - for both the American people and our colleagues in Congress to read, scrutinize and debate. This cannot be a one-sided discussion. We hope the majority soon gets over the fear of its own ideas and engages in a health care debate the American people deserve.

Rep. Paul D. Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, and Rep. Devin Nunes, California Republican, are both members of the House Budget Committee and the Ways and Means Committee.

Obama Rhetoric vs Health Care Reality

2009-06-12T10:05:00.001-04:00

From the Heritage Foundation:

Campaigning for his health care plan yesterday, President Barack Obama told a Green Bay, Wisconsin audience: “Right now a number of my Republican friends have said, ‘We can’t support anything with a public option.’ It’s not clear that it’s based on any evidence as much as it is their thinking, their fear, that somehow once you have a public plan that government will take over the entire health care system.” In fact, the opposite is true. It is President Obama who is operating on rhetoric without any evidence to back up his claims. Consider the following four themes crucial to Obama’s argument:

1. You will be able to keep your doctor and health insurance if you want.
On the contrary an independent analysis has shown that up to 119 million Americans could lose the coverage they have today under a Medicare like public plan. The whole notion that a public plan would help increase competition defies common sense. For one thing, the government cannot create a level playing field between its own plan and private plans. It would be like an umpire at a baseball game also fielding a team. The playing field will always tilt towards the government plan that would eventually run out. And that is the whole point of the public plan. Just ask public plan architect Jacob Hacker: “Someone once said to me this is a Trojan Horse for single-payer, and I said, well it’s not a Trojan Horse, right? It’s just right there.”

2. You will have the choice of buying health coverage that is similar to the plan available to members of Congress.
During the campaign, President Obama continued to tell people that his plan would give the same coverage offered to Members of Congress through the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program (FEHBP). First, there is no public plan in FEBHP. Second, there is no “one-size-fits-all plan” in FEBHP. The plans offered vary by price, benefit and region. As a matter of fact there are over 250 plans offered through FEBHP including at least a dozen national plans that are available wherever you live. Under the President’s planned version of an “exchange” and detailed in congressional plans, the federal government would have unprecedented control over the type of coverage Americans can buy resulting in a “one-size-fits-all” federal standard which would limit choices for families and weaken incentives for insurers to compete for enrollees based on value.

3. No government bureaucrat will second guess decisions about your care.
Nobody wants to get between a person and their doctor, yet President Obama wants to establish a Federal Health Board — a Supreme Court of health care that would micromanage the practice of medicine through “best practices” and “comparative effectiveness.” Ironically, the examples the President pointed out yesterday of high quality, low cost care systems would probably not exist today if the government were involved in it. The federal bureaucracy would destroy innovation and change would be slow to come by. So, in twenty years the American health care system would be stuck (again) in an outdated 2000 health care model.

4. American families will save money
The President’s health plan is estimated to cost $1.6 Trillion over 10 years. He plans to pay for some of it with “savings.” Unfortunately, these “savings” are unproven and untested. Even the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) – the score keeper for cost and savings – doesn’t appear to have much faith in these savings. And what has been the reaction from the left in Congress? Instead of embracing objective evidence on health care reform, they are trying to find ways around it, with some in Congress threatening to scrap the CBO’s cost estimate of the Obama plan and instead go with the White House’s own cost estimates.

Closing his remarks yesterday, President Obama said: “To those who criticize our efforts, I ask, “What is the alternative? What else do we say to all those families who now spend more on health care than housing or food?” There is an alternative. A patient centered alternative that keeps health care decisions between doctors and patients instead of centralizing power in Washington. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has a bill, the Patient’s Choice Act, and he recently took questions from Americans across the country on a 45 minute conference call. Listen to what real health care reform sounds like, here.

Why Join the Fight Against Medicare For All?

2009-06-12T09:09:00.009-04:00

1. Medicare for All will create shortages in healthcare services forcing providers to ration care and increase wait times for patients (12-18 month wait in other countries).

2. Currently, Americans do not pay taxes on employer provided health insurance benefits. If you have health insurance through your company, you are about to be taxed on those plans. The Government will require all Americans have health insurance and impose FINES on those who do not.

3. The REAL GOAL: Government insurance seeks to eventually squeeze out and eliminate private health insurance companies altogether, forcing Americans to become dependent on a "one plan fits no one" Medicare system.

4. The Government will have access to and control over your health records intruding into the privacy and confidentiality of the doctor patient relationship. We all know how the Government handles confidential information.

5. The current Medicare and Medicaid programs are flawed and full of corruption. What will happen when we add another 100 million Americans to the program?

6. The President's current plan will add another TRILLION dollars to the deficit. Another government program on an already strained economy will bankrupt the United States.

7. How will Congress pay for their new plans? TAXES. The President campaigned that 95% of Americans would receive a tax cut. However Democrats are now planning to increase taxes on everything from sugar to cigarettes as well as creating new taxes, such as Value Added Tax.

8. No one in the country is currently denied access to healthcare so why is the President rushing a plan for socialized medicine without thoughtful debate and consideration? The Government should not be allowed to tell you what healthcare you are entitled to and how to live your life.

9. Government controlled heath care takes the decision making out of the hands of individuals and families and puts it in the hands of politicians in Washington.

10. What legal recourse will you have if the government denies you or a loved one medical care? None.

Help us win the fight against Medicare for All. Visit smartgirlpolitics.ning.com for more information.

Curvy Politics

The Health Care Bill Is Dead

And other repercussions of Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts.

BY Fred Barnes

Dismantling America

Weary Americans

'Death Panels' in Oregon?

How Should We Then Live?

Facing the Abyss – H.R. 3200 and healthcare reform

Things Hippies want to blame on global warming

Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Sotomayor and Abortion for Undesired 'Populations'

Tell the Senate to Say NO to Robert Groves and ACORN Corruption!

The Fed Must Be Stopped

Why Women Are Unhappy

I Still Hate You, Sarah Palin

More Constructive Obstructionism in Action

Nothing So Shocking About This Coup

A Tribute to the Heroes of Honduras

Cynthia McKinney Earns Certificate of INSANITY

Note: I included this article for the amusement of our group, since we are by enlarge, Atlanta natives. Who voted for this woman anyway???

Kill Cap-and-Trade Before it Kills US/Call Congress NOW !!!

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Our dumb and dumber Congress

The Washington Examiner

James Carafano - June 26, 2009

Honduran 'Coup' Provides Glimpse of Consistency in Obama's Foreign Policy

Sen. Inhofe Calls for Inquiry Into'Suppressed' Climate Change Report

Republicans are raising questions about why the EPA apparently dismissed an analyst's report questioning the science behind global warming.

Darned Flat-Earther

An Open Letter to the President

Cap and trade vote today, complete with AP spin

Update: 300-page, last-minute amendment; Update: Greenpeace opposes

posted at 8:46 am on June 26, 2009 by Ed Morrissey From Hot Air Blog

The Climate Change Climate Change

The number of skeptics is swelling everywhere.

By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL - The Wall Street Journal

Waxman-Markey Bill Is An Energy Tax That Doesn’t Work

The White House Infomercial

Conservatives Counter ABC Obamacare Infomercial

Health-Care Myths

VOTER ALERT: Cap-and-Trade Bill Set for FRIDAY Vote

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Focus on the Democrats' Health Care Reform

NRA Sheds Light on Manipulated Gun Experiment Conducted by ABC News

From Americas Right blog:

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Open Letter to our Nation's Leadership

More Problems Than Solutions in Medicare Report

Congressional Budget Office Director’s Blog

US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to survive

From the UK Telegraph:

Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic "shrink to survive" proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.

BBC: US deliberately kept Britain in the dark over Uighurs, Bermuda

The Toaster May Be $5.00, but the Insight is Free

Just Make Stuff Up

The sixth wind?

Copyright © 2009 WORLD Magazine Articles cannot be reproduced without permission June 20, 2009, Vol. 24, No. 12

RYAN/NUNES: Let the debate begin

Obama Rhetoric vs Health Care Reality

Why Join the Fight Against Medicare For All?

posted at 8:46 am on June 26, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
From Hot Air Blog

Copyright © 2009 WORLD Magazine
Articles cannot be reproduced without permission
June 20, 2009, Vol. 24, No. 12