The Real Navy Yard Scandal
It is inhumane not to treat those suffering from mental illness.
By Charles KrauthammerIn the liberal remake of Casablanca, the police captain comes upon the scene of the shooting and orders his men to “round up the usual weapons.”
It’s always the weapon and never the shooter. Twelve people are murdered in a rampage at the Washington Navy Yard, and before sundown Senator Dianne Feinstein has called for yet another debate on gun violence. Major opprobrium is heaped on the AR-15, the semiautomatic used in the Newtown massacre.
Turns out no AR-15 was used at the Navy Yard. And the shotgun that was used was obtained legally in Virginia after the buyer, Aaron Alexis, had passed both a state and federal background check.
As was the case in the Tucson shooting — instantly politicized into a gun-control and (fabricated) tea-party-climate-of-violence issue — the origin of this crime lies not in any politically expedient externality but in the nature of the shooter.
On August 7, that same Alexis had called police from a Newport, R.I., Marriott. He was hearing voices. Three people were following him, he told the cops. They were sending microwaves through walls, making his skin vibrate and preventing him from sleeping. He had already twice changed hotels to escape the men, the radiation, the voices.
Delusions, paranoid ideation, auditory (and somatic) hallucinations: the classic symptoms of schizophrenia.
So here is this panic-stricken soul, psychotic and in terrible distress. And what does modern policing do for him? The cops tell him to “stay away from the individuals that are following him.” Then they leave.
But the three “individuals” were imaginary, for God’s sake. This is how a civilized society deals with a man in such a state of terror?
Had this happened 35 years ago in Boston, Alexis would have been brought to me as the psychiatrist on duty at the ER of the Massachusetts General Hospital. Were he as agitated and distressed as in the police report, I probably would have administered an immediate dose of Haldol, the most powerful fast-acting antipsychotic of the time.
This would generally relieve the hallucinations and delusions, a blessing not only in itself, but also for the lucidity it brings on that would allow him to give us important diagnostic details — psychiatric history, family history, social history, medical history, etc. If I thought he could be sufficiently cared for by family or friends to help him receive regular oral medication, therapy, and follow-up, I would have discharged him. Otherwise, I’d have admitted him. And if he refused, I’d have ordered a 14-day involuntary commitment.
Sounds cruel? On the contrary. For many people living on park benches, commitment means a warm bed, shelter, and three hot meals a day. For Alexis, it would have meant the beginning of a treatment regimen designed to bring him back to himself before discharging him to a world heretofore madly radioactive.
That’s what a compassionate society does. It would no more abandon this man to fend for himself than it would a man suffering a stroke. And as a side effect, that compassion might even extend to potential victims of his psychosis — in the event, remote but real, that he might someday burst into some place of work and kill twelve innocent people.
Instead, what happened? The Newport police sent their report to the local naval station, where it promptly disappeared into the ether. Alexis subsequently twice visited VA hospital ERs, but without any florid symptoms of psychosis and complaining only of sleeplessness, the diagnosis was missed. (He was given a sleep medication.) He fell back through the cracks.
True, psychiatric care is underfunded and often scarce. But Alexis had full access to the VA system. The problem here was not fiscal but political and, yes, even moral.
I know the civil-libertarian arguments. I know that involuntary commitment is outright paternalism. But paternalism is essential for children because they don’t have a fully developed rational will. Do you think Alexis was in command of his will that night in Newport?
We cannot, of course, be cavalier about commitment. We should have layers of review, albeit rapid. But it’s both cruel and reckless to turn loose people as lost and profoundly suffering as Alexis, even apart from any potential dangerousness.
More than half of those you see sleeping on grates have suffered mental illness. It’s a national scandal. It’s time we recalibrated the pendulum that today allows the mentally ill to die with their rights on — and, rarely but unforgivably, take a dozen innocents with them.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359006/real-navy-yard-scandal-charles-krauthammer
Same Lies, Different Day
When the powerful cannot fully control the actions of those fellow citizens they dislike, at least they can control the lies publicly told about them. Thus, we once again find ourselves, days after a tragedy, dissecting the falsehoods spewed forth to gain political ground in the midst of a terrible loss. As we have seen with disturbing regularity, the Navy Yard shooting was an event not seen so much as a tragedy by the left as it was a welcome opportunity, a gift from on high by whatever amoral deity bestows such awful things upon its faithful.
In recent months, the hyperbole and emotionalism of liberal efforts to reinstitute the Assault Weapons Ban, and other de facto infringements of the Second Amendment,
have calmed in some places, and been reversed in others, giving those
who seek real solutions to difficult problems a chance to be heard.
Discussions regarding practical means of preventing the mentally ill
from gaining access to guns have taken place among the rational, who
recognize that the problem lies with the actor, and not the instrument.
In some locales, commonsense measures to protect vulnerable children,
including armed guards, faculty and staff in schools, have replaced the
tacit invitation to violence in schools which once proudly proclaimed
themselves "gun free zones." Somehow, violent and mentally-ill attackers
did not recognize that status as a deterrent. Liberals are still trying
to figure out the math on that one. In solving that problem, however,
there are some very ugly truths that make clear why the left is so
intent on blaming the gun, and not the shooter.
Contrary to liberal theology, it isn't the gun. Ever. This is something the left cannot afford to admit. As long as they can keep the conversation about the gun, they don't have to answer for the society they have promoted that makes the gun seem an acceptable tool for change. In the neighborhoods they have transformed with destructive liberal policies, use of illegally possessed guns is an everyday occurrence. They are tools of power, not a means of defense. In certain hands, a gun allows the animalistic dominance of one person over another. But only in certain hands. In the hands of people not bent on dominance, they are defensive tools, meant to protect and save lives from those who violently seek to destroy. In order to avoid discussing why almost all gun violence is practiced by those relatively few violent ones, or why it so often involves doing harm to the defenseless, or the illegality of the possession of the guns, and from what cultural deficits the inclination toward such violence flows, the left simply decries all gun ownership, as if all groups behave the same, and have guns for the same reasons. By purposeful misdirection, the left never strays from the gun.
In the real world, of course, focusing on the wrong things does not solve problems, but it does distract. When the left focuses on the gun as the common element, they don't have to focus on the depravity they have engendered as that common thread. They don't have to answer for the lies they have told to keep the poor compliant, and tethered financially, to the politicians who endlessly promise to someday save them. They don't have to answer for their utter failure and refusal to address the root causes of the violence: the fatherless homes, the drug-addicted parents, the high crime rate, the welfare addiction, the rampant poverty, the joblessness, or the propaganda that others are to blame for their situation, all of which are products of the mess the left has made of those lives. They evade accountability for the pervasive hopelessness of victimhood that is so necessary to the left's political power.
Similarly, they don't have to explain why their utopian "gun-free zones" are actually slaughter pens, in which those who are trained and prepared to use guns in self defense are purposefully prevented from doing so. As long as honest discussion is off the table, we won't talk about the utter foolishness of placing agenda over reality, or the body count that has resulted. It is alarming to recognize that on the left, a higher social value is put on being delusional than being safe. How proud are the school administrators, or theater owners, or store owners, of their gun-free zones while the funerals are under way for those whom they left defenseless? In the case of former President Clinton, who made military bases gun-free zones, how proud is he in the wake of Fort Hood, and now the Washington Navy Yard massacres? Literally in the presence of hundreds of men and women trained and trusted to use guns defensively, almost none of them were allowed to possess them.
If the problem is the gun, and not the shooter, the left does not have to account for the redirection of resources away from identifying and treating the mentally ill, whose disregard as an at-risk subset of society indirectly facilitates their involvement in such crimes. They do not have to address the need to implement a system of checks or alarms directed more to actual risk than creating a data base of all gun owners, as if all pose equal risks. They do not have to ponder the effect of political correctness on openly addressing the risks of mental illness and violent crime. Indeed, the left prefers not to talk about mental illness at all, since to do so would be to tacitly admit that the shooters are actually someone other than law-abiding gun owners acting on irrational, deep rooted prejudices and hatreds; i.e. how the left characterizes conservatives for its true believers.
By focusing on the gun, and not the user, the left does not have to address the failure of the criminal justice system to consistently punish illegal gun use. They can ignore, for example, that prior gun charges against the Navy Yard shooter were not pursued in a liberal criminal justice system that coddles criminals and ignores gun crimes. Prosecutors in liberal jurisdictions, and perhaps in many jurisdictions, are much more interested in obtaining convictions than actually punishing gun crimes. For the sake of their stats, they will accept guilty pleas to one of many lesser included charges, perhaps a second degree assault or a disorderly conduct, and dismiss the gun charges. They get credit for a conviction, and we end up with career criminals who successfully wiggle their way out of the more serious gun crimes, and are thus free to commit them again until they eventually cross the line and kill someone. Nothing is done to cure this. The liberal politicians protect their own.
Finally, if we focus on the gun, and not its user, we can justify complete bans and eventual confiscation. If each and every gun is evil, no matter its user, the solution is to take them all. Even this, however, is an exercise in misdirection. In every society in which there has been an all-powerful, authoritarian government, gun ownership has been outlawed and guns taken. If liberals succeed in making the issue about guns, rather than their misuse, they will have succeeded in disarming their political enemies, which will make complete domination vastly easier. The British knew that and tried. The descendants of patriots understand the long game being played.
So too, however, do the liberals. They recognize that time is a weapon. They have mostly failed in their concerted efforts to enact outright bans, in part because there are still enough people who reject the hysterics and illogic in which liberals couched their arguments. Every prediction made about concealed-carry laws leading to intersections and stores becoming shooting galleries has proved irrational. Every claim that allowing people to own guns for their own protection would lead to skyrocketing crime was false.
Sadly, this is why mass shootings by the mentally ill are viewed by the left as priceless opportunities. The left, through immediate and overwhelmingly false reports in the aftermath of tragedy, do not even wait until the dead have been identified before blitzing the country with their carefully honed, emotionally-charged messaging. Emotion and propaganda go hand in hand on the left. When someone is hurt or killed, it is always the gun, and never the person whose possession was prevented by sensible rules and policies. We are not allowed to discuss those solutions. It's the gun. It's always the gun. In fact, they have so fixated on this message that they even have a go-to gun, which they will claim was used even when it wasn't: the AR15. It is always about the gun.
Except, it never is. It is about power and politics. It is about enabling some, and demonizing others, to achieve a much larger objective. When there are no more guns, there is no more freedom from an out-of-control government that feels no duty or allegiance to the Constitution, or its carefully drawn limits upon vast power. The Founders anticipated this. That is the singular purpose of the Second Amendment. And the left knows it to its core.
Contrary to liberal theology, it isn't the gun. Ever. This is something the left cannot afford to admit. As long as they can keep the conversation about the gun, they don't have to answer for the society they have promoted that makes the gun seem an acceptable tool for change. In the neighborhoods they have transformed with destructive liberal policies, use of illegally possessed guns is an everyday occurrence. They are tools of power, not a means of defense. In certain hands, a gun allows the animalistic dominance of one person over another. But only in certain hands. In the hands of people not bent on dominance, they are defensive tools, meant to protect and save lives from those who violently seek to destroy. In order to avoid discussing why almost all gun violence is practiced by those relatively few violent ones, or why it so often involves doing harm to the defenseless, or the illegality of the possession of the guns, and from what cultural deficits the inclination toward such violence flows, the left simply decries all gun ownership, as if all groups behave the same, and have guns for the same reasons. By purposeful misdirection, the left never strays from the gun.
In the real world, of course, focusing on the wrong things does not solve problems, but it does distract. When the left focuses on the gun as the common element, they don't have to focus on the depravity they have engendered as that common thread. They don't have to answer for the lies they have told to keep the poor compliant, and tethered financially, to the politicians who endlessly promise to someday save them. They don't have to answer for their utter failure and refusal to address the root causes of the violence: the fatherless homes, the drug-addicted parents, the high crime rate, the welfare addiction, the rampant poverty, the joblessness, or the propaganda that others are to blame for their situation, all of which are products of the mess the left has made of those lives. They evade accountability for the pervasive hopelessness of victimhood that is so necessary to the left's political power.
Similarly, they don't have to explain why their utopian "gun-free zones" are actually slaughter pens, in which those who are trained and prepared to use guns in self defense are purposefully prevented from doing so. As long as honest discussion is off the table, we won't talk about the utter foolishness of placing agenda over reality, or the body count that has resulted. It is alarming to recognize that on the left, a higher social value is put on being delusional than being safe. How proud are the school administrators, or theater owners, or store owners, of their gun-free zones while the funerals are under way for those whom they left defenseless? In the case of former President Clinton, who made military bases gun-free zones, how proud is he in the wake of Fort Hood, and now the Washington Navy Yard massacres? Literally in the presence of hundreds of men and women trained and trusted to use guns defensively, almost none of them were allowed to possess them.
If the problem is the gun, and not the shooter, the left does not have to account for the redirection of resources away from identifying and treating the mentally ill, whose disregard as an at-risk subset of society indirectly facilitates their involvement in such crimes. They do not have to address the need to implement a system of checks or alarms directed more to actual risk than creating a data base of all gun owners, as if all pose equal risks. They do not have to ponder the effect of political correctness on openly addressing the risks of mental illness and violent crime. Indeed, the left prefers not to talk about mental illness at all, since to do so would be to tacitly admit that the shooters are actually someone other than law-abiding gun owners acting on irrational, deep rooted prejudices and hatreds; i.e. how the left characterizes conservatives for its true believers.
By focusing on the gun, and not the user, the left does not have to address the failure of the criminal justice system to consistently punish illegal gun use. They can ignore, for example, that prior gun charges against the Navy Yard shooter were not pursued in a liberal criminal justice system that coddles criminals and ignores gun crimes. Prosecutors in liberal jurisdictions, and perhaps in many jurisdictions, are much more interested in obtaining convictions than actually punishing gun crimes. For the sake of their stats, they will accept guilty pleas to one of many lesser included charges, perhaps a second degree assault or a disorderly conduct, and dismiss the gun charges. They get credit for a conviction, and we end up with career criminals who successfully wiggle their way out of the more serious gun crimes, and are thus free to commit them again until they eventually cross the line and kill someone. Nothing is done to cure this. The liberal politicians protect their own.
Finally, if we focus on the gun, and not its user, we can justify complete bans and eventual confiscation. If each and every gun is evil, no matter its user, the solution is to take them all. Even this, however, is an exercise in misdirection. In every society in which there has been an all-powerful, authoritarian government, gun ownership has been outlawed and guns taken. If liberals succeed in making the issue about guns, rather than their misuse, they will have succeeded in disarming their political enemies, which will make complete domination vastly easier. The British knew that and tried. The descendants of patriots understand the long game being played.
So too, however, do the liberals. They recognize that time is a weapon. They have mostly failed in their concerted efforts to enact outright bans, in part because there are still enough people who reject the hysterics and illogic in which liberals couched their arguments. Every prediction made about concealed-carry laws leading to intersections and stores becoming shooting galleries has proved irrational. Every claim that allowing people to own guns for their own protection would lead to skyrocketing crime was false.
Sadly, this is why mass shootings by the mentally ill are viewed by the left as priceless opportunities. The left, through immediate and overwhelmingly false reports in the aftermath of tragedy, do not even wait until the dead have been identified before blitzing the country with their carefully honed, emotionally-charged messaging. Emotion and propaganda go hand in hand on the left. When someone is hurt or killed, it is always the gun, and never the person whose possession was prevented by sensible rules and policies. We are not allowed to discuss those solutions. It's the gun. It's always the gun. In fact, they have so fixated on this message that they even have a go-to gun, which they will claim was used even when it wasn't: the AR15. It is always about the gun.
Except, it never is. It is about power and politics. It is about enabling some, and demonizing others, to achieve a much larger objective. When there are no more guns, there is no more freedom from an out-of-control government that feels no duty or allegiance to the Constitution, or its carefully drawn limits upon vast power. The Founders anticipated this. That is the singular purpose of the Second Amendment. And the left knows it to its core.
Damned by Faint Praise
Headed by a big picture of Obama flashing a big smile, two members of Politico's staff, put together an opinion piece entitled, "And What's Right with Obama." They end up citing only style factors to the absence of accomplishments. By doing so they have inadvertently ended up with a sly hit piece on Obama's presidency that is right on the money. Here are the factors cited.
His personality
"No one will ever mistake Obama
for warm and fuzzy. But when he tries even a bit, he can't help being
winning. His smile remains dazzling, even if he flashes it less often."
"... the fact that people basically like the guy."
His normality
" ... but it's hard to imagine that he would ever slide into LBJ-style meltdown or Nixonian paranoia."
His party
"Obama has the good fortune to govern at a time when long-term demographic and ideological trends are breaking in the direction of his party."
His luck
" ... he was "lucky" to have run for president against John McCain."
There
you have it. His personality, his normalcy, his luck and his party.
Nothing about his policies. Nothing about his legislative
accomplishments; his foreign policy accomplishments; his domestic
accomplishments; his economic accomplishments. Accomplishments? Forget
it. He is one swell guy and lucky too. Missing are the touted would be
accomplishments of his presidency: unify the country, gain respect abroad and create an economy "built to last." "What's Right with Obama" says it all - unfortunately.
House votes to cut $4B a year from food stamps
The House has voted to cut nearly $4 billion a year from food stamps, a 5 percent reduction to the nation's main feeding program used by more than 1 in 7 Americans.The 217-210 vote was a win for conservatives after Democrats united in opposition and some GOP moderates said the cut was too high. Fifteen Republicans voted against the measure.
The bill's savings would be achieved by allowing states to put broad new work requirements in place for many food stamp recipients and to test applicants for drugs. The bill also would end government waivers that have allowed able-bodied adults without dependents to receive food stamps indefinitely.
House conservatives, led by Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., have said the almost $80 billion-a-year program has become bloated. More than 47 million Americans are now on food stamps, and the program's cost more than doubled in the last five years as the economy struggled through the Great Recession.
Democrats said the rise in the rolls during tough economic times showed the program was doing its job.
Finding a compromise — and the votes — to scale back the feeding program has been difficult. The conservatives have insisted on larger cuts, Democrats opposed any cuts and some moderate Republicans from areas with high food stamp usage have been wary of efforts to slim the program. The White House has threatened to veto the bill.
House leaders were still shoring up votes on the bill just hours before the vote. To make their case, the Republican leaders emphasized that the bill targets able-bodied adults who don't have dependents. And they say the broader work requirements in the bill are similar to the 1996 welfare law that led to a decline in people receiving that government assistance.
"This bill is designed to give people a hand when they need it most," Cantor said on the floor just before the bill passed. "And most people don't choose to be on food stamps. Most people want a job ... They want what we want."
The new work requirements proposed in the bill would allow states to require 20 hours of work activities per week from any able-bodied adult with a child over age 1 if that person has child care available. The requirements would be applicable to all parents whose children are over age 6 and attending school.
The legislation is the House's effort to finish work on a wide-ranging farm bill, which has historically included both farm programs and food stamps. The House Agriculture Committee approved a combined bill earlier this year, but it was defeated on the floor in June after conservatives revolted, saying the cuts to food stamps weren't high enough. That bill included around $2 billion in cuts annually.
After the farm bill defeat, Republican leaders split the legislation in two and passed a bill in July that included only farm programs. They promised the food stamp bill would come later, with deeper cuts.
In order to negotiate the bill with the Senate, Republicans said Thursday that one more step is needed — the House will have to hold a procedural vote to allow both the farm and food stamp bills to go to a House-Senate conference together. It is unclear whether Republicans who pushed to split the two bills will oppose that effort.
Once the bills get to that conference, negotiations with the Senate will not be an easy task. A Senate farm bill passed in June would only make a tenth of the cuts to food stamps, or $400 million, and the White House has issued a veto threat against the House bill. The two chambers will also have to agree on policy for farm subsidies amid disputes between different crops.
Every Democrat voting on Thursday opposed the bill. Many took to the floor with emotional appeals.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the bill is a "full assault on the health and economic security of millions of families." Texas Rep. Lloyd Doggett called it the "let them starve" bill.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said Thursday that House Republicans are attempting to "literally take food out of the mouths of hungry Americans in order to, again, achieve some ideological goal."
The Congressional Budget Office says that if the bill were enacted, as many as 3.8 million people could lose their benefits in 2014.
Around 1.7 million of those would be the able-bodied adults who would be subject to work requirements after three months of receiving food stamps. The 1996 welfare law put that limit into law, but most every state has been allowed to waive that requirement since the Great Recession began in 2008.
The other 2.1 million would lose benefits because the bill would largely eliminate so-called categorical eligibility, a method used by many states that allows people to automatically qualify for food stamps if they already receive other benefits. Some of those people who qualify that way do not meet current SNAP income and asset tests.
The Census Bureau reported this week that just over half of those who received food stamps were below poverty and 44 percent had one or more people with a disability.
By state, Oregon led the nation in food stamp use at 20.1 percent, or 1 in 5, due in part to generous state provisions that expand food stamp eligibility to families. Oregon was followed by more rural or more economically hard-hit states, including Mississippi, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan and Tennessee. Wyoming had the fewest households on food stamps, at 7 percent.
http://townhall.com/news/politics-elections/2013/09/19/house-to-vote-on-cutting-back-on-food-stamps-n1704141
PK'S NOTE: But keep in mind all the fraud going on with this program. How about some oversight/reforms to make sure the program is getting help to the right people? And the cuts are only 5%, fergoodnesssakes.
Dems Lash Out at GOP After Narrow Food-Stamp Reform Victory
Democrats accused Republicans of starving children, veterans, and
seniors with the passage of a bill to reform the food stamp program to
the tune of $39 billion in savings.Senator says bill "abandons the moral principles our country is built on," but proponents say it returns program to its true intention.
The Nutrition Reform and Work Opportunity Act hit the House floor for a vote today under a sharply worded veto threat from the White House.
“The bill would result in millions of Americans losing access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which is one of our nation’s strongest defenses against hunger and poverty,” the Office of Management and Budget said on Wednesday. “These cuts would affect a broad array of Americans who are struggling to make ends meet, including working families with children, senior citizens, veterans, and adults who are still looking for work. Slashing SNAP also weakens our nation’s farm and rural economies.”
The bill tries to rein in food stamp spending that has doubled over the course of the Obama presidency to nearly $80 billion each year.
In the first SNAP reforms since 1996′s Welfare Reform Act, it caps work-requirement waivers, closes loopholes where recipients could get benefits from multiple states, ensures illegal immigrants and lottery winners are ineligible, allows states to conduct drug testing on SNAP applicants, cracks down on food-stamp fraud at retailers, and more. While cutting in some areas, the legislation reauthorizes food distribution programs to help Indian tribes.
The vote was 217-210 today, with all Democrats who voted opposing the legislation and 15 Republicans also voting against the bill.
The GOP “no” votes came from Reps. Shelly Moore Capito (W.Va.), Mike Fitzpatrick (Pa.), Jeff Fortenberry (Neb.), Chris Gibson (N.Y.), Michael Grimm (N.Y.), Richard Hanna (N.Y.), Walter Jones (N.C.), Peter King (N.Y.), Frank LoBiondo (N.J.), Pat Meehan (Pa.), Gary Miller (Calif.), Chris Smith (N.J.), David Valadao (Calif.), Frank Wolf (Va.) and Don Young (Alaska).
Valadao, who represents a chunk of central California’s San Joaquin Valley, said “without this assistance many in my District would be unable to feed their families.”
“I recognize that there are problems with the SNAP program and while I believe reforms to the SNAP Program are necessary to ensure that those who truly need assistance receive it, I do not believe in making drastic changes to this program during a time of such great economic uncertainty without giving states flexibility enforcing proposed requirements,” he continued. “Portions of my district are suffering from more than 30 percent unemployment, making it nearly impossible for many to find work despite their best efforts. It is unfair to the American people for Congress to implement policies containing work requirements when our national economy is severely suffering.”
Republican proponents, though, said the cost-saving reforms are needed now precisely because of the economic crisis.
“An overextended, unchecked SNAP program won’t be capable of serving the citizens it’s purposed to help,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.).
“Consistent with the bipartisan belief that the solution to poverty is found through work, and not just aid, the Nutrition Reform & Work Opportunity Act reinstates Clinton-era SNAP work requirements. These rules stipulate that able-bodied adults with no dependents, must be looking for work, developing job skills, completing community service or obtain employment to draw food stamp benefits,” Foxx added. “Not only will this provision ensure that the truly needy continue to receive aid, it will also help these individuals compete and prepare for jobs.”
Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), a driving force behind the bill, said on the House floor that the measure “is designed to give people a hand when they need it most.”
“Most people don’t choose to be on food stamps. Most people want a job. Most people want to go out and be productive so that they can earn a living, so that they can support a family, so that they can have hope for a more prosperous future. They want what we want. There may be some who choose to abuse this system – that’s not out of the realm of possibility – frankly it’s wrong. It’s wrong for hardworking, middle class Americans to pay for that,” Cantor said.
“…The truth is anyone subjected to the work requirements under this bill, who are able-bodied under 50, will not be denied benefits if only they are willing to sign up for the opportunity for work. There is no requirement that jobs exist.”
Democrats in both chambers lashed out at the “devastating” bill, though, claiming that the GOP was in the business of starving people.
“Families who are living in poverty – hungry children, seniors, troops and veterans who are just trying to figure out how to keep the lights on and put food on the table – they did not spend this nation into debt, and we should not be trying to balance the budget on their backs. They deserve better than what happened in Congress today,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).
“We know that one in four American children are hungry. The Institute of Medicine did a report this year on SNAP/food stamps and concluded that our current safety net is inadequate in the face of hunger in the United States. In light of these facts, the House GOP has decided to pass a bill that cuts $40 billion from food stamps, directly punishing the hungry,” she added. “Millions more won’t be able to put food on the table if this draconian legislation were to become law. I will urge my Senate colleagues to stand together and fight these cuts in conference.”
Today’s legislation pulled out one of the most contentious issues of the larger farm bill, which Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) wants to push into a conference committee.
“Though I’m not surprised, I’m extremely disappointed that the Tea Party-controlled House of Representatives continued its systematic assault on programs to support poor and working-class Americans today by passing legislation that cuts almost $40 billion from vital food assistance programs,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). “On its own, the policy is bad enough – it denies hungry children, seniors, veterans, and struggling families modest assistance to put food on the table, and it abandons the moral principles our country is built on. But the twisted justifications from House Republicans are even worse.”
“They claim that food assistance programs foster a dependency culture in our country, add to our national debt, and hold back our economy, but in reality, nothing could be further from the truth,” the senator continued. “Study after study shows that food assistance programs lift millions of families out of poverty each year, provide a literal lifeline for children, seniors, and disabled Americans, and dramatically reduce homelessness and serious public health issues.”
Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.) derisively called the bill the “Increasing Hunger in America Act.”
“Ninety-two percent of people on SNAP are children, elderly, disabled, or already working,” Hastings said. “Cutting SNAP benefits for vulnerable and struggling Americans in the name of fiscal responsibility is just plain wrong. There are most certainly other ways to cut our national deficit that do not result in 50 million empty stomachs.”
But Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said the measure simply goes back and adds SNAP reforms that couldn’t be included in July’s farm bill.
“SNAP was originally designed to offer aid to those who truly needed assistance,” King said. “Unfortunately, it has turned into a bloated program with far too few checks and balances monitoring to whom the assistance is going. Participation in SNAP rose 65 percent from 2008 to 2012. During that same time, the total cost of the program rose from $37.6 billion to $78.4 billion a year. It is critical we get the growth of this program under control by ensuring that benefits go to only those who are in need.”
“My Democratic colleagues have long been for expanding the dependency class here in America. This bill provides temporary assistance to struggling families, but it also cuts out unnecessary spending and refocuses our limited resources on those truly in need.”
http://pjmedia.com/blog/dems-lash-out-at-gop-after-narrow-food-stamp-reform-victory/?singlepage=true
The Press and the IRS
Journalistic partisanship fed the scandal.
The Washington Post is credited with exposing the Watergate conspiracy and helping to bring down a corrupt presidency. Forty years later, the Post played a role in the corruption of the Internal Revenue Service, to the benefit of an incumbent president in a bitter and close re-election.A staff memo released earlier this week by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee provides an "interim update" on the investigation of the IRS scandal. A central finding: "Media attention caused the IRS to treat conservative-oriented tax-exempt applications differently" from liberal or progressive ones.
The memo presents no evidence that the White House directly ordered the IRS to crack down on political opponents. Instead, it is consistent with the theory, described here in May, that IRS personnel responded to "dog whistles" (in Peggy Noonan's metaphor) in public statements from the president and his supporters.
In a passage we've annotated with links, the memo describes the media "drumbeat" in early 2010, when the IRS first began turning its attention to the Tea Party:
Washington Post columnists accused Tea Party groups of "smolder[ing] with anger" [Colbert King] and practicing a brand of patriotism reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan [Courtland Milloy]. Another Post columnist opined in late March 2010 that Tea Party rhetoric "is calibrated not to inform but to incite" [Eugene Robinson]. In April 2010, Reuters tied the Tea Party movement to "America's season of rage and fear."Contrary to initial claims that the Tea Party targeting was a product of rogue employees in the IRS's Cincinnati office, the Oversight Committee memo shows that as early as February 2010, Cincinnati employees were flagging Tea Party applications for Washington's attention, and their stated motive was media interest:
The potential for media attention continued to be a concern for IRS officials once Washington received additional sample cases in late March 2010. Upon receiving the cases in Washington, an IRS employee reviewing the application reiterated that "[t]he concern is potential for media attention." Around the same time that the Washington Post was running columns critical of the Tea Party, she added that "[t]he Tea Party movement is covered in the Post almost daily. I expect to see more applications.""Other IRS employees also monitored news about conservative-leaning groups applying for tax exemption," according to the memo:
In March 2012, a line attorney in the IRS Chief Counsel's office circulated a New York Times editorial entitled "The I.R.S. Does Its Job" to three colleagues. The first sentence of the editorial read: "Taxpayers should be encouraged by complaints from Tea Party chapters applying for nonprofit tax status at being asked by the Internal Revenue Service to prove they are 'social welfare' organizations and not the political activities they so obviously are."In May we faulted the Times for "cheering on the IRS" as it abused its power. Now we have confirmation that the IRS got the message.
The memo presents evidence that the IRS used an ideologically biased definition of what constitutes a "social welfare" organization, citing this testimony from a Cincinnati IRS employee (which we quote verbatim from the memo):
Normal (c)(4) cases we must develop the concept of social welfare, such as the community newspapers, or the poor, that types. These [Tea Party] organizations mostly concentrate their activities on the limiting government, limiting government role, or reducing government size, or paying less tax. I think it[']s different from the other social welfare organizations which are (c)(4).The reference is to Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code, which defines a type of nonprofit organization whose operations are tax-exempt but whose contributions are not.
The memo also notes striking similarities between President Obama's and Lois Lerner's rhetoric in the wake of Justice Anthony Kennedy's landmark January 2010 First Amendment ruling, Citizens United v. FEC. Here's Obama in an August 2010 speech:
Right now all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates all across the country. And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation. You don't know if it's a big oil company, or a big bank. You don't know if it's a insurance [sic] company that wants to see some of the provisions in health reform repealed because it's good for their bottom line, even if it's not good for the American people.Note that Obama did not even attempt to conceal the partisan and ideological nature of his concern. His worry was about substance, not process--about "ads against Democratic candidates" and in support of industries he chose to demonize.
Now, here's Lerner in an October 2010 speech at Duke University:
What happened last year [sic; actually earlier the same year] was the Supreme Court--the law keeps getting chipped away in the federal election arena. The Supreme Court dealt a huge blow, overturning a 100-year-old precedent that said basically corporations couldn't give directly to political campaigns. And everyone is up in arms because they don't like it. The Federal Election Commission can't do anything about it. They want the IRS to fix the problem. The IRS laws are not set up to fix the problem. (c)(4)s can do straight political activity. They can go out and pay for an ad that says, "Vote for Joe Blow." That's something they can do as long as their primary activity is their (c)(4) activity, which is social welfare.
So everybody is screaming at us right now: "Fix it now before the election. Can't you see how much these people are spending?" I won't know until I look at their 990s next year whether they have done more than their primary activity as political or not. So I can't do anything right now.Lerner's description of the Citizens United decision is grossly inaccurate. It did not overturn any century-old precedent, but a pair of more recent ones, the older of which, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, was decided in 1990. And it left standing the ban on corporate donations to federal campaigns. What it protects is independent speech about campaigns. These errors are telling, because they track closely with Obama's false description of Citizens United in his 2010 State of the Union address:
With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests--including foreign corporations--to spend without limit in our elections. I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.Perhaps even more telling is Lerner's lament that "everybody is screaming at us right now." Not only did she hear the dog whistle, but she apparently was unable to identify it as emanating from a partisan source. Obama, congressional Democrats and the liberal media were the only voices Lerner was capable of hearing.
Obama backers seeking to minimize the IRS scandal frequently claim that the agency scrutinized progressive groups, too. The Oversight Committee memo powerfully rebuts this claim with a specific example:
From 2004 to 2008, the IRS evaluated and approved five applications from affiliates of the progressive-oriented group, Emerge America, which describes itself as "the premier training program for Democratic women." According to one IRS employee, some of these five applications were approved by Cincinnati employees in a "matter of hours."
Later, in 2010, the IRS Chief Counsel's office evaluated another progressive application, described by an IRS employee as "a (c)(4) that was going to be training women to become candidates" for the Democratic Party. The same employee testified that at the time, the IRS had "two or three other applications" from affiliated groups. However, there are several distinctions between the manner in which the IRS evaluated Emerge America applications and the manner in which the IRS evaluated conservative-oriented applications.
According to testimony from an IRS attorney in the Chief Counsel's office, tax law specialists in EO [Exempt Organizations] Technical had recommended denying the Emerge application before the case was sent to the IRS Chief Counsel's office in 2010. The Chief Counsel's office agreed with the recommended denial, and the application was subsequently denied in early 2011. Conversely, three tax law specialists who worked a conservative (c)(4) application in 2011 all separately recommended approving the group for exempt status. Despite the proposed approval from three different IRS employees, the case was nonetheless sent to the IRS Chief Counsel's office, which asked the tax law specialists to gather additional information about the group's activities during the 2010 election cycle. To the best of the Committee's information, this application is still pending.From this account, it appears that the IRS was more skeptical of Emerge, the left-wing group, in 2010-11 than it had been during the Bush administration. To that extent it runs counter to the IRS scandal narrative.
But only to that extent. The Emerge application was disapproved on the professional recommendation of IRS legal experts. The conservative groups' applications were delayed despite the professional
recommendation of those same experts. If this example is typical, the only progressive groups whose applications were denied were those that should have been, while conservative groups that should have been approved instead were delayed until the 2012 election and beyond.
So it seems that the IRS came up with a way to "fix the problem," as Lerner put it, in time for 2012, even if not 2010. In this context, consider the following Sept. 9 report from Investor's Business Daily:
Top officials with both the IRS and Justice Department--including the IRS commissioner and attorney general--met in Washington with several dozen prominent black church ministers representing millions of voters to brief them on how to get their flocks out to vote without breaking federal tax laws.
The "summit" on energizing the black vote in houses of worship was hosted by the Democrat-controlled Congressional Black Caucus inside the U.S. Capitol on May 30, 2012.
The day before the special IRS training session, then-Black Caucus Chairman Rep. Emanuel Cleaver predicted Obama would get 95% of the African-American vote--but only if black pastors "encourage" them to get to the polls. (He ended up getting over 93% of the black vote.)The CBC summit is not mentioned in the Oversight Committee memo, and it isn't clear if it is part of the investigation. Considered in isolation, it isn't even objectionable. There's nothing wrong with a law-enforcement agency advising citizens on how to comply with the law. But the pattern of favoritism--with the IRS taking a helpful attitude toward supporters of the president and an adversarial one toward opponents--is cause for alarm and outrage.
As we have argued before, Barack Obama's re-election deserves to be listed with an asterisk in the record books. He is the political equivalent of an athlete found to have used illicit performance-enhancing drugs. Whether he would have won in 2012 absent the IRS's political corruption is unknowable. We know only that he did win with the help of a corrupt IRS. And if indeed the election was stolen, many in the media were complicit in its theft.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323808204579085100811015502.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion
Nudge or Shove? Obama Admin Takes Another Shot in ‘War on Coal’ With Announcement of Something Never Done Before
In June a White House adviser said “a war on coal is exactly what’s needed” to combat climate change. Now, the Obama administration is taking another step in waging that war, pressing ahead with tough requirements for new coal-fired power plants, moving to impose for the first time strict limits on the pollution blamed for global warming.
This proposal would reshape where
Americans get electricity, away from a coal-dependent past into a future
fired by cleaner sources of energy. It’s also a key step in President
Barack Obama’s global warming plans, because it would help end what he
called “the limitless dumping of carbon pollution” from power plants.
Restrictions on coal-fired power plants might sound familiar. The Environmental Protection Agency already proposed several renditions of a rule that would limit emissions from existing plants, thus requiring them power plants to make costly upgrades to equipment.
You might remember also Obama’s
interview with the San Francisco Chronicle where he gave his intentions
to “bankrupt” coal-fired power plants.
“So if somebody wants to build a coal
power plant they can, it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they
are going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s
being emitted,” Obama said during the interview.
Although the proposed rule won’t
immediately affect plants already operating, it eventually would force
the government to limit emissions from the existing power plant fleet,
which accounts for a third of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Obama
has given the Environmental Protection Agency until next summer to
propose those regulations.
The EPA provided The Associated Press
with details of the proposal prior to the official announcement, which
was expected Friday morning. The public will have a chance to comment on
the rule before it becomes final.
Despite some tweaks, the rule packs
the same punch as one announced last year, which was widely criticized
by industry and Republicans as effectively banning any new coal projects
in the U.S.
Again, that’s because to meet the
standard, new coal-fired power plants would need to install expensive
technology to capture carbon dioxide and bury it underground. No
coal-fired power plant has done that yet, in large part because of the
cost. And those plants that the EPA points to as potential models, such
as a coal plant being built in Kemper County, Miss., by Southern Co.,
have received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants and tax
credits.
Coal, which is already struggling to
compete with cheap natural gas, accounts for 40 percent of U.S.
electricity, a share that was already shrinking. And natural gas would
need no additional pollution controls to comply.
“For power producers and coal mining
companies that reject these standards, they have no reason to complain,
and every excuse to innovate,” said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., the author
of a 2009 bill to limit global warming. The legislation, backed by the
White House, passed the House, but died in the Senate.
The regulations have been in the works
since 2011 and stem from a 1970 law passed by Congress to control air
pollution. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that that law, the Clean Air
Act, could be applied to heat-trapping pollution. The EPA already has
issued rules aimed at curbing global warming pollution from automobiles
and the largest industrial sources.
An EPA official told the AP that the
rule doesn’t specify any particular technology. But the official
acknowledged that carbon capture was the only current technology
available for a company to meet the threshold of 1,100 pounds of carbon
dioxide emissions per megawatt hour of electricity. To put that in
perspective, a modern coal plant without carbon controls would release
about 1,800 pounds per megawatt hour.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement of the rule had not been made.
The administration went back to the
drawing board after receiving more than 2 million comments on its first
proposal, which was legally vulnerable because it required coal and
natural gas to meet the same limit. Coal and natural gas now have
separate standards, but the latest proposal will almost certainly to be
litigated once it becomes final, which the law requires the EPA to do in
a year.
The legal argument likely will be based around whether carbon capture and storage is a demonstrated technology.
“EPA has set a dangerous and
far-reaching precedent for the broader economy by failing to base
environmental standards on reliable technology,” said Hall Quinn,
president and CEO of the National Mining Association. The EPA regulation
“effectively bans coal from America’s power portfolio,” he said.
The EPA will seek comments on whether to subject three coal plants in
various stages of the development to the new standard, or treat them as
existing sources. They are the Sunflower Electric Power Corp.’s facility
near Holcomb, Kan., Power4Georgian’s planned Washington County, Ga.,
facility, and Wolverine Power Cooperative’s plans for a new power plant
near Rogers City, Mich.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/09/20/nudge-or-shove-obama-admin-takes-another-shot-in-war-on-coal-with-announcement-of-something-never-done-before/
PK'S NOTE: And know that this Bush is a Progressive just like the other Bushes.
Jeb Bush's Latest Common Core Snit Fit
By Michelle Malkin
This is priceless. Former Fla. GOP Gov. Jeb Bush, consummate politician
and 2016 presidential aspirant, has now bitterly accused opponents of
his federal education schemes of possessing "purely political" motives.
Projection, anyone?
Yep. If you question Jeb Bush and his Big Business/Big Government cronies, you stand foursquare against student achievement and intellectual rigor. Pay attention, all you informed moms and dads who have raised pointed, carefully researched questions about the costs, quality, validity, constitutionality and intrusiveness of Common Core. Bush thinks you are "purely political" beasts who are recklessly harming your own kids' scholastic advancement.
"If you're comfortable with mediocrity, fine. I'm not," Bush hissed at Common Core critics. "(W)e're not going to be able to sustain this extraordinarily exceptional country unless we challenge every basic assumption on how we do things."
Translation: Don't you know Jeb Bush cares more about your children than you do?
Bush is all for challenging how we do things, unless you're challenging how the Common Core machine does things. He reiterated Common Core peddlers' claims that their standards are internationally "benchmarked" and "world-class." But that's pure horse-hockey. And it's not "political" people who are calling out the Common Core racket.
Stanford University professor James Milgram, a prominent dissenting member of the Common Core math standards committee, has exposed how the muddled standards would leave American students at least two years behind the rest of the planet.
University of Arkansas education professor emeritus and Massachusetts school standards architect Sandra Stotsky, who sat on the language arts validation panel, has documented how the English standards will result in:
1) teachers spending at least 50 percent of their reading instruction time on "informational texts" at every grade level.
2) reduced emphasis on analytical skills involving complex literary works.
3) a depleted fund of content knowledge that will leave students unprepared for basic college coursework.
Both Stotsky and Milgram repeatedly asked their panel colleagues for the names of the countries the Common Core standards were allegedly "benchmarked" to, but they never received an answer.
Furthermore, Christopher Tienken of Seton Hall University notes that much of the "evidence" and "empirical research" that the Common Core crowd cites comes from ... the Common Core crowd. "When I reviewed that 'large and growing body of knowledge,'" Tienken reported, "I found that it was not large, and in fact built mostly on one report, Benchmarking for Success, created by the NGA (National Governors Association) and the CCSSO (Council of Chief State School Officers), the same groups that created these standards. Hardly independent research."
Jeb Bush routinely has dismissed those who protest Common Core's increasing federalization of local control over schools as conspiracy-mongers. But it's President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan who've made common cause with Bush and corporate elites in foisting Common Core standards, tests, technology and data-mining boondoggles on local school districts. Obama, Duncan and Bush have been meeting with deep-pocketed CEOs in Washington, not with ordinary parents outside the Beltway.
Dr. Bill Evers of the Hoover Institution succinctly debunked Bush's repeated insistence that 45 states voluntarily adopted the irresistibly rigorous standards:
"(S)tates weren't leaping because they couldn't resist the Core's academic magnetism. They were leaping because it was the Great Recession -- and the Obama administration was dangling a $4.35 billion Race to the Top carrot in front of them. Big points in that federal program were awarded for adopting the Core, so, with little public debate, most did."
Can you spell b-o-o-n-d-o-g-g-l-e? Remember: Bush's educational foundation, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, is tied at the hip to the federally funded testing consortium called PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), which raked in $186 million through Race to the Top to develop nationalized tests "aligned" to the top-down Common Core program.
One of the Bush foundation's behemoth corporate sponsors is Pearson, the multi-billion-dollar educational publishing and testing conglomerate. Pearson snagged $23 million in contracts to design the first wave of PARCC test items. The company holds a $250 million contract with Florida to design and publish its state tests. Pearson designed New York's Common Core-aligned assessments and is also the exclusive contractor for Texas state tests.
And in Los Angeles this summer, Pearson sealed a whopping $30 million taxpayer-subsidized deal to supply the city's schools with 45,000 iPads pre-loaded with Pearson Common Core curriculum apps. That's $678 per iPad, $200 more than the standard cost, with scant evidence that any of this shiny edu-tech will do anything to improve the achievement bottom line.
As with all political posers who grab power under the guise of doing it "for the children," don't read their lips. Follow the money.
http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2013/09/20/jeb-bushs-latest-common-core-snit-fit-n1704825/page/full
Welfare Pays More than Minimum Wage in 35 States
"If you came to me and offered to pay me what I'm making now and tell me that I could stay home I'm certainly going to think about it," says Michael Tanner, senior fellow at the Cato Institute.In his most recent study, The Work Versus Welfare Trade-Off: 2013, Tanner reveals how welfare participants can earn more than working a minimum wage job in 35 states.
"There's no evidence to show [welfare recipients] are any lazier than the rest of us, but they also aren't dumber than the rest of us," Tanner explains. "If you offer them the same incentives that's what they will do."
http://reason.com/reasontv/2013/09/19/michael-tanner
Federal Government Sinks Another $527K Into Recovery.gov Website Redesign
In 2009, the Obama administration made news with an $18 million, five year contract to redesign Recovery.gov, the website the government set up to allow taxpayers to track the stimulus spending enacted by the president and Congress soon after President Obama took office. On Wednesday, notice of a contract awarded to Smartronix, a Hollywood, Maryland company was posted for "Modification to exercise the Option to Extend Clause" for a total of $527,216.00:
The stimulus is now into its fifth year. The contract notice does not indicate what modifications are needed to the website to keep the public informed of the ongoing operation of the legislation.
According to the Recovery.gov website, $803.1 billion of the $840 billion authorized by the stimulus has been disbursed.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/federal-government-sinks-another-527k-recoverygov-website-redesign_756492.html
Obamacare Software Can't 'Reliably Determine' Enrollees' Eligibility For Subsidies
The centerpiece of President Obama’s new health law is a collection of government-sponsored insurance exchanges, in which people who shop for coverage on their own can purchase health insurance, and gain a taxpayer-funded subsidy if their income is low enough. The exchanges are set to roll out on October 1, in less than two weeks. In other words, it’s crunch time. And in this morning’s Wall Street Journal comes word that the exchange software, for which the government has spent upwards of $88 million, still can’t correctly calculate the amount of subsidies that an individual applicant is eligible for. “There’s a blanket acknowledgment that rates are being calculated incorrectly,” one senior insurance executive told the WSJ. “Our tech and operations people are very concerned about the problems they’re seeing and the potential of them to stick around.”The WSJ article was authored by Christopher Weaver, Timothy Martin, and Jeniffer Corbett Dooren. “If not resolved by the Oct. 1 launch date,” they report, “the problems could affect consumers in 36 states where the federal government is running all or part of the exchanges. About 32 million uninsured people live in those states.”
Glitches could lead to waste, fraud, and abuse
Here’s how it works. The exchanges offer individuals a subsidy on a sliding scale, depending on your income, to purchase insurance. If your income is near the poverty line, you get almost a full subsidy. If you make two to three times the federal poverty level—say $25,000 to $35,000 a year for a childless unmarried adult—you get a partial subsidy. And if you make more than four times the federal poverty level—about $46,000 a year—you don’t get any subsidy at all.
But tests on the software that calculates how much your subsidy is worth, if any, only began this week, according to the Journal reporters, even though they were “initially scheduled to begin months ago.” If enrollees’ subsidies are calculated incorrectly, it could mean that some people gain much larger subsidies than they’re eligible for under the law, and others miss out on subsidies they would otherwise obtain. “On the surface, you’d think this is pretty easy for a website to give you a price, but behind the scenes, the number of variables is very high,” says Michael Krigsman, an IT consultant.
In general, when there are problems like this, and the program rolls out anyway, the result is substantial amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse. We already know that the government will be relying on the “honor system” for people to report their incomes, and thereby their eligibility, for exchange subsidies. Combine that with the fact that the exchange software can’t calculate what your subsidy actually is, and the result is that many people will be able to game the system to gain larger subsidies than the law intends.
HHS delays release of exchange insurance prices
Earlier this month, I and several of my Manhattan Institute colleagues published an interactive map that allows you to figure out how much Obamacare will increase individual-market insurance premiums in your state, relative to what you can purchase today. However, we are still waiting on more than 30 states to release their pricing information, because that information is being closely held by—you guessed it—the federal government; specifically, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
I’d been told by Congressional sources that HHS had been saying that this data would be out on September 19. But now, sources tell me this data won’t be ready until October 1, if even then.
Why not delay the whole law by one year?
These problems are yet one more illustration of the fact that Obamacare isn’t ready for prime time. The law would work better—and minimize the potential for waste and fraud—if federal and state officials had more time to work out the kinks of the exchanges.
Kevin Counihan, chief of the Connecticut exchange, has publicly expressed his frustration with the Obama administration’s flakiness. “Sometimes it feels like we’re driving a car and then changing the tire at the same time,” he told the Associated Press in March. “We’re going to have a challenging enough time providing the quality of service that our residents deserve in Connecticut with the deadline that we have. If they keep adding new regulations, I’m sorry. We have to suddenly say, ‘enough is enough.’” Counihan is one of the many people trying in good faith to implement the law who says, “I wish we had one more year.”
That is what Republicans should have advocated, instead of threatening to shut down the government over Obamacare. There’s still time for them to work with centrist Democrats to get it right.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/20/wsj-obamacare-software-cant-reliably-determine-enrollees-eligibility-for-subsidies
Defund Obamacare!
By Andrew C McCarthyGrassroots pressure from conservatives has induced the House Republican leadership to permit a vote on a continuing resolution that defunds Obamacare. That is excellent news.
For spearheading the move to defund the (Not Remotely) Affordable Care Act, intrepid Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) have been scalded by the usual ruling class crowd of GOP establishment leaders and Obama administration officials. Yet public resistance to a law the public has never liked – and about which the public grows increasingly anxious as its deleterious consequences and exploding costs begin to materialize – has forced leadership’s hand even as it demonstrates, yet again, the divide between the Beltway and the country.
The objections to the defunding strategy are as unconvincing as they are feckless. Naysayers argue that President Obama will never sign a bill to fund government operations that slashes his signature achievement. Thus, the argument goes, defunding can only result in a government shutdown for which, thanks to Obama’s slavish media, Republicans will be blamed. Also trotted out, of course, is the bromide the GOP establishment chants to rationalize its supine posture whenever opportunities arise to oppose Obama’s hard Left agenda: “We only control one-half of one-third of the government, so we cannot dictate policy.”
Resistance is futile, in other words, so why resist at all? It’s an ironic argument since it seems Republican leadership only resists when doing so is futile, when the resistance is token. Thus the prior votes to repeal Obamacare, all forty of them, taken in the comfortable knowledge that they had no chance of succeeding – just going through the motions in faux fulfillment of a commitment to the base to work tirelessly to undo the law. But when something might not be futile – when it could actually work, and therefore entails hard work and risk – we generally find leadership in folderoo mode, babbling its one-half-of-one-third mantra.
Defunding could work for several reasons. First it puts the lie to the one-half-of-one-third blather. The United States Constitution does not set up government by percentage; it sets up government by enumerated power. The capacity of the respective branches to shape policy is not a function of how many of the branches a political party controls and by how much. It is a function of the subject matter of the policy in question. The president is only one-third of the government, but he is commander-in-chief, and if the issue is war strategy, he has policy primacy – it is immaterial whether the opposition party has a lock on Congress and the courts. Similarly, if the issue is adjudication of a constitutional case, it matters not whether we have a Republican president and 535 Republicans in Congress – the tune can be called by five left-wing Democrats in robes (or roughly one-half of one-third of the government).
When it comes to spending, Congress has primacy, and pride of place rests with the House (the one-half of one-third Republicans control) because the Constitution mandates that spending bills originate in the lower chamber – the one closest to the people. Equally important, the hard jobs in government are the ones where an officeholder has to do something. It is a lot easier when all that’s necessary is to refuse to act. Spending requires a positive act by Congress – not a thin dime may be spent unless Congress approves. That is, there can be no spending on Obamacare unless Congress votes to approve it. Thus, the one-half-of-one-third crowd is in the driver’s seat. All they need to do is say, “No.” It is President Obama who needs action here – congressional Republicans need only decline to act.
And by the way, if Republicans do act, if they vote to fund Obamacare, then they are for Obamacare. Don’t let them fool you with meaningless “repeal” votes. Repeal – i.e., changing the law – is a positive act; unlike refusing to spend money, it cannot be accomplished simply by saying no. Just as President Obama needs Republicans to get his spending, Republicans would need the president (or substantial cooperation from congressional Democrats) to get their repeal. This, we all know, they will never get – there will be no repeal until an election or two drastically changes the landscape. But spending is another story – and President Obama should be made to understand that it is just as hopeless to get Republican assent to spending on Obamacare as Republicans understand it is hopeless to get Obama’s assent on repeal.
In fact, defunding has a chance to work precisely because it is not an effort to repeal Obamacare. President Obama is a proud man. It is unreasonable to expect that he would ever sign a repeal, a complete surrender that would be tantamount to an admission of total failure. Defunding is not a complete victory for Republicans – Obamacare would still remain on the books as the law of the land.
Moreover, defunding is not all bad for Obama. Putting Obamacare to the side for a moment, there is no conservative who believes the federal government should be funded at current astronomical levels. To compare, in 2000, at the end of the Clinton presidency that Democrats speak of as an economic Golden Age, annual federal spending was around $1.76 trillion, roughly 18 percent of GDP. Today, spending has doubled ($3.5 trillion), hovering around a staggering 25 percent of GDP – and debt has tripled to $17 trillion (without accounting for tens of trillions more in unfunded liabilities). Conservatives want spending slashed at least back to Clinton levels. Yet, for purposes of the Obamacare defunding battle, conservatives are agreeing to fund the rest of the government at the current absurd heights just to make the political point that if the government shuts down, it is Obama’s doing.
Obama is talking a brave game right now about how he won’t even entertain a budget that erases Obamacare – he vows a veto and a shutdown. But his political position is untenable, even with the media carrying his water. He will be grinding things to a halt to force Obamacare on the public even though he himself has slashed Obamacare for the benefit of big business and members of Congress. By agreeing to fund the rest of government, Republicans allow Obama a face-saving out: He can tell his base he preserved record-spending on social welfare programs, and that while Obamacare has been delayed, it is still the law and he will be back pushing for funding it in next year’s budget when the executive branch is more prepared to implement it.
That’s why I’m betting he’ll cave.
Conservatives, of course, will not pretend that we don’t want Obamacare repealed or that we would not regard defunding as a sweet, albeit transitory, victory. Nevertheless, defunding is simply not repeal. Whether one hoped defunding would merely be a delay in implementation (as the Left would) or the first step toward eradication (as conservatives would), it would actually be a concession to reality, propriety, and equal protection under the law.
Reality because the law is not close to being ready for prime time. Obama has already conceded this point by selectively waiving – better to say: dubiously claiming the power to waive – the law’s implementation. He has massively defunded Obamacare by suspending the employer mandate. He has also gutted the verification requirements imposed on state health insurance “exchanges” (which are designed to verify the income of enrollees and whether they are already covered by employers) – a fiat that invites fraud certain to subject the program to billions of dollars in costs. And he has removed sundry Obamacare burdens that would otherwise be imposed on hundreds of his favored interest groups. Most disgracefully, this includes the ruling class itself: Congress critters and their staffers have been relieved of what would otherwise be a rescission of their $5,000 to $11,000 taxpayer health-insurance subsidy – once again, unlike the government, we mere peons will have to figure out a way to live within our means.
As all this elucidates, Obama himself is already defunding Obamacare. He has already demonstrated beyond cavil that the program is not ready to be applied as the enabling legislation commands. Conservatives need to be better at hammering this theme. Despite the White House campaign to paint them as extremists, Republicans are merely trying to do what Obama is already doing – except do it more fairly and more faithfully to both the terms of the statute and the debate over its passage.
That brings us to propriety. No president has authority to enact law, either by proclamation or by unilaterally repealing selective parts of a statute. Obama’s presumptuous waivers are an unconstitutional perversion of the legislative process. Legislation is about compromise: There would not be law unless lawmakers agreed to swallow provisions they do not like in order to enact the terms they favor.
Courts upset this balance when they invalidate a part of a statute – often a part whose acceptance was necessary to attract support for passage of the whole. But we tolerate this because courts have a justification: A statutory provision may be stricken only if it violates the Constitution, and only because the court has no alternative but to rule on the provision in order to decide a pending case. And courts often take pains not to usurp the legislative function: If an infirm provision is key to a statute, they will simply strike the whole statute rather than rewrite it selectively.
In stark contrast, Obama is not vindicating the Constitution. He is selectively mining the law’s provisions, as well as picking winners and losers in its enforcement, based on political considerations. In our constitutional system, it is the assigned duty of Congress to make those choices; the president’s job is to enforce the law as written. If the law cannot be enforced as written, it should not be enforced at all.
In the case of Obamacare, there is a powerful additional reason to honor this principle: The claim by Obamacare proponents that the healthcare system needed comprehensive reform.
By and large, opponents of Obamacare did not (and do not) deny that our health care system needs reform. But opponents argued that, because a system involving a sixth of our massive economy is so complex, reforms should be undertaken gradually, in the prudent realization that there would be unintended consequences to address. Radical shocks to the system, we argued, ought to be avoided. But no: Obamacare advocates insisted, as they ramrodded through their unpopular 2700-page bill, that we needed comprehensive reform. The system, they told us, is intricately interdependent. It could not be addressed in pieces heedless of the other pieces. Now, however, they risibly contend that the president – not the lawmaking department of government but the executive – can haphazardly tweak parts without affecting other parts.
Worse, they claim he can do so in gross violation of our constitutional commitment to equal protection under the law for every American. A waiver here, but not there. Big corporations relieved of their mandate (because the administration and the Democrats cannot afford the political fallout of higher unemployment heading into the 2014 midterms), but individual Americans told to pay up, pronto. Members of Congress who foisted Obamacare on us protected from its onerous terms, but ordinary citizens who never wanted Obamacare ordered to comply. That is a travesty, and millions of Americans are boiling over it.
Even in a Congress solidly controlled by leftwing Democrats, Obamacare only passed by the skin of its teeth – and only thanks to the rankest kind of back-room deals and fraudulent budgeting. It would never have passed, not in a million years, if the public had been told that corporations would be favored over citizens, and Obama cronies over those without political connections.
What conservative proponents of defunding are seeking is not a repeal. Conservatives seek merely to do what Obama is already doing: defund the law … except conservatives would defund within constitutional norms. This would be a refusal to fund a law accomplished by the branch of government responsible for spending and lawmaking, not by an imperial president who has usurped lawmaking power and would coerce spending in accordance with his political whims, not equal protection of law for all Americans.
That is an argument conservatives can win, shutdown or no shutdown.
http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2013/09/19/defund-obamacare/?singlepage=true
Obamacare and That Q-Easy Feeling
On Thursday, the Federal Reserve made a mockery of President Obama’s recent campaign to convince the American people of “how far we’ve come from where we were five years ago.”Quantitative easing may never end, especially if worker-demoralizing Obamacare stays.
In “unexpectedly” announcing that it would continue propping up the economy with $85 billion of monthly “quantitative easing,” i.e., electronically “printing” money out of thin air to buy Treasury and mortgage-backed securities, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke essentially said, “This economy still stinks.”
The mystery is why the Fed’s decision to leave “QE” where it is was at all unexpected, for a number of obvious reasons, plus another which should be.
In July, in a rare moment of unfettered candor deliberately ignored by all but a very few in the establishment press, when asked at his congressional testimony what would happen if the Fed tightened its monetary policy — which in the current context really means, “What would happen if you reduced QE by as little as $10 billion per month?” — Bernanke responded bluntly: “The economy would tank.”
That’s obviously still the case.
Nothing we’ve seen in the past two months would lead any reasonable observer to believe that the economy is meaningfully improving, or that it wouldn’t slip into another recession without its full monthly shot of monetary crack cocaine.
Employment growth this year has been and continues to be dominated by part-timers and temps. Labor force participation is at a 35-year low. In June, wildly disproportionate food stamp enrollment was over 47 million for the eleventh month in a row, seemingly and intractably stuck at a level 36 percent above where it was at the recession’s official end in June 2009.
Seasonally adjusted new home sales in July were over 20 percent below the figure originally reported in June, which itself was revised down by 8 percent. This is the sector whose alleged strong but in reality barely existing turnaround was going to bring back the economy. Despite all the hype, the fact remains that the seasonally adjusted number of single-family homes under construction in August was barely higher than it was at the recession’s end.
Beyond that, 2012 Census Bureau data released on September 17 revealed that real median household income fell for the fifth straight year to a mind-boggling 8.3 percent below where it was in 2007. African-Americans (down 11.3 percent since 2007) and Hispanics (down 8.9 percent) have taken even harder hits. The overall poverty rate, as imperfect a measurement as it is, remained at 15.0 percent, up 2-1/2 points, or 20 percent, from 2007.
Barack Obama, allegedly a fan of redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor and a champion of the middle class, has presided over an economy where during the past two years only the top 5 percent of households have seen median income gains.
In a huge irony, given Obama’s alleged “progressive” nature, stock market investors are about the only ones who are pleased with Bernanke’s move. Interest rates will remain artificially low for a while, but I wouldn’t get too comfortable. One astute contrarian claimed on Wednesday that “the Feds have already lost control of the bond market,” and in essence that it’s only a matter of time before “it lose(s) control of the stock market.”
For now, stocks remain one of the few places an investor can go, outside of volatile commodities, in pursuit of returns greater than inflation. Apparently, the market’s major players all seem to believe that they’ll know when to get out before calamity strikes. Logic dictates that all of them can’t be right.
This government-induced economic tragedy and its reverse Robin Hood nature is beginning to wear on the can-do American psyche. Amazingly, 8.4% of Americans now describe themselves as “lower class,” which is “more than at any other time in the four decades that the question has been asked.”
Now here comes Obamacare. If it isn’t stopped, we many never see the end of the Fed’s QE. That’s because, when it comes to demoralizing the population, to quote an old Bachman-Turner Overdrive song, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Beyond the confusion, the cost increases, the layoffs, the lower quality of care, and the deliberately skewed part-time workforce it will create, Obamacare will, as I noted in March 2010, virtually destroy almost all motivation for financial self-improvement while deeply discouraging marriage.
A table I used 3-1/2 years ago, based on information originally prepared by Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation in January of that year, drives home this point. It shows how Obamacare’s exchange subsidies change at different income levels. The table remains essentially correct except for relatively small changes due to inflation and revised poverty lines.
Brace yourself:
My original explanation (bolds are mine):
The orange boxes represent examples where the subsidy decrease amounts to almost 80% or more than 80% of a couple’s $5,000 increase in combined or joint income. After adding another 7.65% for Social Security and Medicare taxes on top of the typical 15% (or higher) marginal federal income tax rate, the extra $5,000 earned will cost the couple more than $5,000 — even before considering state and local income taxes.
Then there are the purple boxes, where subsidy loss alone amounts to more than $5,000, including one case where it’s more than double that, before considering any other taxes.Even the supposedly “not so bad” incremental changes not boxed in above, which show roughly $500-$1,000 subsidy reductions for each additional $5,000 in income, are hugely discouraging. As I wrote 3-1/2 years ago:
.. many and probably most lower- and middle-income Americans will conclude that there’s no point in accepting promotions, working overtime, getting a second job, or attempting any other form of financial self-improvement (except perhaps under the table). They will thus end up stuck where they are.As to the incentive to get or stay married, to cite just one example in the table: A married couple where both spouses are 60 years old and each earns $30,000 per year ($60,000 combined) would move from receiving no subsidy if they stay married to $10,425 in annual subsidies if they choose to cohabit.
There’s a word for when the government, as shown above, takes all of the fruits of your incremental labor and in certain instances even more than that. It’s not socialism. It’s far more than that. Financially at the margins involved, it’s de facto slavery, in that the fruits of all of one’s work are taken by the master, in this case the government, in return for nothing.
Republicans appear to have acquired a bit of a spine Wednesday, as the John Boehner-led House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution which does not fund Obamacare.
If the real-world impacts seen in the above table aren’t enough to stiffen Republicans’ and conservatives’ resolve to stay their current course, what will be?
http://pjmedia.com/blog/obamacare-and-that-q-easy-feeling/?singlepage=true
Yikes: Medical Clinic Obama Touted as a Model for Obamacare Slashes Budget…Because of Obamacare
Here’s the president singing the Cleveland Clinic’s praises back in 2009:
"The reason I visited the Cleveland Clinic is because, along with the Mayo Clinic, they have been able to drive down costs more than any other health care system out there while maintaining some of the highest quality."In other words, as this reporter noted at the time, President Obama saw the Cleveland Clinic “as a model for the future of health care in America.” The problem? The president’s own health care law is now forcing them to slash its budget.
An Ohio clinic that was touted by Obama while he was speaking on health care reform is now blaming ObamaCare after it was forced to cut $330 million from its budget.
Fox 8 reports the Cleveland Clinic, which is the largest employer in Northeast Ohio with about 39,000 workers in the region, announced the cuts to its 2014 budget at a meeting Wednesday.
A spokeswoman for the clinic tells Fox News the clinic is being forced to cut back to prepare for increased costs and decreased revenue under the health care reform law.
These changes will include offering early retirement to approximately 3,000 employees, reducing operational costs, and then layoffsas needed.
The clinic says its main priority is to continue to provide a high quality of care during the transition, an attribute that led Obama to tout it in 2009 as an example of what hospitals could be under ObamaCare.
It seems as though the Cleveland Clinic was operating just fine before Obamacare came along. Now, of course, layoffs are expected, operation costs are increasing, and Northeastern Ohio's largest employer is uncertain what the future will hold for its employees. What a nightmare. I’ll leave you with this:
In a press conference in July of that year, Obama said the Cleveland Clinic is an example of health care that works “well.”
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney did not comment when asked about the budget cuts to the Cleveland Clinic at a press briefing.Surprise.
Taking the Fight to the Democrats
In Virginia's gubernatorial race, opponents of Terry McAuliffe may have cracked the playbook Democrats have used to win in states that ought to go Republican.
By Kimberley Strassel
Democrats used the 2012 election to fine-tune a strategy for beating
conservatives in conservative-friendly states. A handful of GOP players
are now using Virginia's off-year gubernatorial race to trial-run a
strategy for defeating that Democratic tactic.Virginia so far has been a carbon copy of what Democrats did so successfully in last year's Senate and House races. The approach runs thus: A Democratic candidate, assisted by unions and outside partisan groups, floods the zone with attack ads, painting the GOP opponent as a tea-party nut who is too "extreme" for the state. The left focuses on divisive wedge issues—like abortion—that resonate with women or other important voting constituencies.
As the Republican's unfavorable ratings rise, the Democrat presents himself as a reasonable moderate, in tune with the state's values. A friendly media overlook the Democrat's reliably liberal record, and the lies within the smears against his opponent, and ultimately declares the Democrat unbeatable.
This is how Sen. Heidi Heitkamp won in North Dakota (while Mitt Romney won there by 20 points); how Sen. Joe Donnelly won in Indiana (Romney by 10 points); how Sen. Jon Tester won in Montana (Romney by 14 points). And this is how Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe hopes to beat his GOP rival, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.
The McAuliffe crew has for months slammed Mr. Cuccinelli as a whackadoodle social conservative—suggesting that the respected lawyer is against punishing rapists, against allowing divorce, against contraception. The latest McAuliffe ad presents an obstetrician who declares that Mr. Cuccinelli would "make all abortion illegal." Mr. McAuliffe's advertising rarely ventures into discussing his policy ideas.
The media have failed to challenge most of these accusations, showing considerably more interest in polls showing Mr. McAuliffe pulling ahead, while unfavorability ratings for Mr. Cuccinelli have increased—no doubt driven by the negative ads. The tenor of the campaign coverage: Mr. Cuccinelli is finished.
Enter a new conservative Super PAC, Fight For Tomorrow, which last week began running a creative TV ad against Mr. McAuliffe in the Washington and Richmond areas. Little is known about FFT (as a national Super PAC, it will be required to disclose its backers in January), but one thing is clear from conversations with those involved: The organization's primary focus is to directly take on the Democratic bare-knuckle strategy—and not just neutralize it, but throw it back at the attackers.
The concept behind FFT's ad is to give Virginia voters a context in which to view the McAuliffe attacks. The group's TV spot notes that there is a "gang" supporting Mr. McAuliffe: the leaders of the Democratic Party; an elitist media; Wall Street liberals; outside partisan groups; Hollywood.
Having specified who is doing the smearing on Mr. McAuliffe's behalf, the spot goes on to explain why the groups want Mr. McAuliffe to win: To impose an agenda that Virginians truly would view as nuts. Employing a potent list of "geography verbs," the ad finishes: "Tell these McAuliffe puppeteers, this is Virginia. We won't let you Detroit us with taxes and debt. You will not California Virginia with regulations that kill jobs, or Hollywood our families and schools. You will not bring District of Columbia tax and spend to our state. Tell them: You can't have Virginia."
One merit of the ad is that, while it directly addresses the left's scorched-earth campaign, it doesn't stoop to responding to the accusations against Mr. Cuccinelli. (The ad doesn't even mention the candidate.) Another attribute is that it switches voter attention away from the wild Cuccinelli caricature and onto all the failed Democratic policies—like the ones that produced soaring energy prices, health-care rationing and huge deficits—that Mr. McAuliffe seems desperate to avoid discussing.
Indeed, the whole idea here is to turn the tables, to get the GOP back on offense, rather than offering cringing defenses of positions that are in fact widely shared by a center-right country.
"The honest views of Terry McAuliffe and his liberal supporters are what are extreme, but they are hiding them, and doing so by running a smear campaign against Ken Cuccinelli," says Matt Mackowiak, the executive director of FFT.
While the FFT ad buy has been modest, Mr. Mackowiak says that a focus group testing the ad among Virginians showed that 27 of 28 people who watched the spot moved away from supporting Mr. McAuliffe. The ad had been slated to run only two days, but the response was so positive, he says, that the group extended the campaign to a full week. This comes even as a recent poll showed the race close within the margin of error, blowing up the media's early burial of Mr. Cuccinelli and giving his supporters new drive to take on the McAuliffe machine.
Whether or not the FFT campaign ultimately moves the dial, no one can fault that group's desire to confront what is now the standard Democratic playbook. If the GOP wants to start winning states it should be winning, that playbook is the nut it has to crack.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324492604579085573401677650.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
Walk of Shame - List of Names
As Katie reported yesterday, every Democrat attending the House Oversight and Government Reform hearing today on Benghazi -- except for Elijah Cummings and Jackie Spier -- left the hearing room without offering the victims' families the courtesy even of hearing their testimony.What shoddy disgraces.
So who were these people? Chairman Issa's spokesman reported that fourteen Democrats attended the first part of the hearing. There are 18 Democrats on the committee. That means that 4 didn't attend any of the hearing, and 12 others walked out.
Below is a list of the congressmen whose staffs confirmed they attended yesterday's hearing. These are people who evidently walked out without waiting to hear from the families of those murdered in Benghazi:
- Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, New York (Contact)
- Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, District of Columbia (Contact)
- Rep. Stephen F. Lynch, Massachusetts (Contact)
- Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, Virginia (Contact)
- Rep. Mark Pocan, Wisconsin (Contact)
- Rep. Tammy Duckworth, Illinois*** (Contact)
- Rep. Danny K. Davis, Illinois (Contact)
- Rep. Tony Cardenas, California (Contact)
- Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham, New Mexico (Contact)
The following offices either couldn't or wouldn't provide an answer about the simple whereabouts of congressmen yesterday -- so they may or may not have been at the hearing:
- Rep. John F. Tierney, Massachusetts. (This office wins the dubious distinction of having the rudest staff) (Contact)
- Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay, Missouri (This office had yet to open at 9:30 this morning) (Contact)
- Rep. Matt Cartwright, Pennsylvannia (Contact)
- Rep. Peter Welch, Vermont (Contact)
- Rep. Steven Horsford, Nevada (Contact)
- Rep. Jim Cooper, Tennessee
- Rep. Robin Kelly, Illinois
What Your Neighborhood List-Serv Tells You About The Demise of America
When did mowing the lawn become a bridge too far?
I read the subject line for the latest message on my neighborhood listserv with interest: “Kids Cutting Grass?”
A few years ago I’d used a post with a similar headline to find someone to do some yard work. My husband and I hired a neighborhood kid whose Dad had died the year prior after a long illness. Maybe 13 years old, he’d taken to doing yard work to raise much-needed money and have something to do.
But this email was very different. It read:
“We just had a group of adorable and entrepreneurial kids (young,
maybe 9-11 years old) offer to mow our grass. Not to be Scrooges in the
neighborhood, but what is the general consensus on this around [the
neighborhood] re: safety? They looked pretty young, and we didn’t see a
parent with them supervising. I realize kids want to earn spending
money, but I was interested in getting the pulse on this sort of thing.
Teenagers, maybe. But these kids looked like they may be older elementary school aged (guess). We had a family member lose a couple of toes mowing while a young kid, so maybe I’m just overly sensitive.”
Teenagers, maybe. But these kids looked like they may be older elementary school aged (guess). We had a family member lose a couple of toes mowing while a young kid, so maybe I’m just overly sensitive.”
The next email read, “For anyone whose interested, the [American
Academy of Pediatrics] recommends that children be at least 12 years old
before operating a push mower and 16 for a ride-on mower, along with a
list of safety precautions. Just FYI.”
A link was provided to a page on the AAP web site headlined “Mowing the Lawn Can Be a Dangerous Chore.”
Injury prevention tips there include: “Have anyone who uses a mower or
is in the vicinity wear polycarbonate protective eyewear at all times.”
I repeat. One tip was that everyone in the vicinity of a lawn mower
should be wearing polycarbonate protective eyewear at all times.
A neighbor weighed in: “That’s a good age recommendation, probably. I
would also suggest not having any age kid mow if there are any
pesticides, herbicides, or insecticides involved. The American Cancer
Society considers those to be a risk factor for non-Hodgkin lymphoma,
possibly more.”
One tip was that everyone in the vicinity of a lawn mower should be wearing polycarbonate protective eyewear at all times.
Never had the 1980s seemed so idyllic. Imagine being a kid in these
times in my neighborhood, a cheery, liberal suburb of Washington, D.C.
(How cheery? We have the delightful Dairy Godmother custard shop. How liberal? More than three-quarters of my neighbors voted for Obama in 2012.)
I weighed in on the neighborhood list-serv as well.
“My brother and I did lawn mowing jobs—completely unsupervised by our
parents, though with their encouragement—from a young age. There are,
as with all things, health and safety risks. But we learned how money
and business worked. We developed a work ethic. We interacted with our
neighbors and honed our yard work skills. We gained independence and
confidence. And we made money! It’s all about trade-offs. In our case,
the positive far outweighed the negative. Also, as it happens, I could
use some lawn mowing as our lawn mower broke down. So if anyone sees
these young entrepreneurs, perhaps they could be pointed our way.”
Tricycle helmets for all
David Frum eloquently pointed out one problem with over-protecting children in his book What’s Right. Reflecting on the hordes of preschoolers wearing helmets as they rode 1-2 miles per hour down the sidewalk, he wondered if his fellow parents hadn’t gone mad.Our children are soaked with the cult of safety the way they would once have imbibed religion or patriotism. At school, teachers ‘street-proof’ children—that is, they teach them that kidnappers and child molesters lurk in every playground. Television excites children with environmentalist fears that the air and water they breathe and drink teem with toxins, that the food they eat is saturated with deadly pesticides, and that the juice bottles they discard will soon cover the entire surface of the earth.
When everything is a safety crisis, nothing is. So it should be
little surprise that older children are less likely to heed warnings
against smoking, drinking and having, in the parlance of modern
educators, “unsafe” sex.
When everything is a safety crisis, nothing is.
Of course, it’s one thing to note that modernity is ablating the
proud, agrarian independence of rural America. That’s been happening for
a century. But the signs of this crushing of America’s spirit of
risk-taking are everywhere. I see it every time I take my children to a
suburban playground. The dangerous metal slides, rickety merry-go-rounds
and tall monkey bars are a thing of the past, a casualty of federal
regulations and rapacious lawyers. The benefit is supposed to be fewer
injuries, although the evidence of that is surprisingly thin. Those old
playgrounds had a progressive danger to them that taught kids how to
assess risk. When you grow up thinking that every fall will be cushioned
by safety mulch or fall height-rated rubber flooring, turns out you
have trouble when it comes to real world rock-climbing.
Even The New York Times has asked the question “Can a Playground Be Too Safe?” The answer is a resounding yes:
While some psychologists – and many parents – have worried that a child who suffered a bad fall would develop a fear of heights, studies have shown the opposite pattern: A child who’s hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights.
By gradually exposing themselves to more and more dangers on the playground, children are using the same habituation techniques developed by therapists to help adults conquer phobias, according to Dr. Sandseter and a fellow psychologist, Leif Kennair, of the Norwegian University for Science and Technology.
“Risky play mirrors effective cognitive behavioral therapy of anxiety,” they write in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, concluding that this “anti-phobic effect” helps explain the evolution of children’s fondness for thrill-seeking. While a youthful zest for exploring heights might not seem adaptive – why would natural selection favor children who risk death before they have a chance to reproduce? – the dangers seemed to be outweighed by the benefits of conquering fear and developing a sense of mastery.
“Paradoxically,” the psychologists write, “we posit that our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”
So to sum up, letting your child take risks allows them to conquer
fear and develop “a sense of mastery.” Irrationally shielding them from
risk creates phobias and psychopaths.
Safety is not a virtue
Who knew that helicopter parents would be threatened by actual helicopters?
Never mind that riding on a Chinook would be the adventure of a
lifetime for a 10-year-old. Perhaps because there were no other
reasonable options, the airlift commenced the next day. Every child
survived and my nephew reported that “No one ever had so much fun in a
natural disaster.”
Look, I’m a mother. I care deeply about my children’s safety. But
safety is just one important thing to teach our children. And it’s not
even anywhere near the most important thing. Keeping your kids from
dying or getting hurt is of secondary importance to teaching them how to
live. Safety isn’t even a virtue. If you’re teaching your kids more
about safety than you are about honesty, kindness, respect for others,
responsibility, gratitude, integrity, cooperation, determination, social
skills, enthusiasm, compassion and manners, you’re doing it wrong.
Incidentally, a great way to learn some of those virtues is by encouraging them to mow a neighbor’s lawn.
It’s all about trade-offs
As I told my neighborhood listserv, when my brother and I got out of the house to do yard work, we were in what you’d call a trade-off situation. We risked our safety, however modestly. But we gained money, work ethic, communication skills, and knowledge. We also got to actually know and interact with our neighbors.
When the folks in my neighborhood try to shut down a burgeoning lawn
care enterprise, they’re also in a trade-off situation. They gain some
satisfaction in feeling they’ve made children safer. But at what cost?
A parenting style that abjures risk at all costs may be at least partially responsible for the country’s economic doldrums
My neighborhood is in Northern Virginia, an area that has been
rewarded for playing it safe and going after government cash. Many of my
neighbors are government employees, lawyers and lobbyists. Many of them
have found success regulating other people’s businesses out of
existence, destructive acts all too frequently predicated on fears that
somebody somewhere might get hurt. It’s not surprising, in that context,
that my neighbors would call for regulation of the lemonade stand or
lawn mowing business run by the kids next door.
The fact is that America is now run by people who profit from keeping
everyone else from taking risks. It’s lucrative work if you can get it.
Six of the ten richest counties in the country are next to Washington, D.C., for good reason. [“It’s where the money is.” -- Willie Sutton] But this isn’t a recipe for prospering culturally or politically.
In order to pull out of this tailspin, it will take a generation or
more of parents raising kids to take risks. We need mothers and fathers
who encourage their kids to play outside, to mow lawns, to start
business ventures and to live freely. Yes, they may face danger and get
hurt. That’s a feature, not a bug.
For what it’s worth, when I wrote my note to the listserv, I received
excellent feedback from other neighbors who were thankful for my
response. But nobody else weighed in publicly. Whether that was just a
prudent decision in an overwhelmingly Blue neighborhood or an indication
of a lack of courage is unknown. Either way, it’s alarming that I was
the only one who spoke up. If we’re ever going to fix America, we have
to understand that freedom’s just another word for letting the
neighborhood kids mow your lawn.
http://thefederalist.com/2013/09/20/what-your-neighborhood-list-serv-tells-you-about-the-demise-of-america/
http://thefederalist.com/2013/09/20/what-your-neighborhood-list-serv-tells-you-about-the-demise-of-america/
High School Forces Student To Remove ‘Duck Dynasty’ Shirt Because It Was Deemed ‘Threatening’
A Virginia high school wasn’t “happy, happy, happy” with a “Duck Dynasty” t-shirt one student wore to class recently.According to WWBT-TV, Dinwiddie High School forced Hunter Spain to remove his shirt that pictured Si Robertson with the words “I Will Hurt You Physically and Metaphysically” because it was deemed too “threatening.”
“For this to be considered a threat to the school, I couldn’t understand it,” Edna-Jo Spain, the student’s mother, told WWBT.
The school reportedly told Spain to either turn the shirt inside-out or go home to get a new one.
“I’m not going to look stupid in front of all these young ladies in the school,” the student told WWBT. “So I decided to get a different t-shirt.”
The school stands by its decision, saying the shirt could be misconstrued to those that don’t watch the popular reality show.
“If you are a ‘Duck Dynasty’ fan you understand the meaning of the shirt,” David Clark, the school’s superintendent, told WWBT. “But if you haven’t watched ‘Duck Dynasty’ you may question if the shirt implies violence. As a school division, we would like to keep our slogans on student shirts as non-violent as possible.
The Spains, who are huge fans of the show, will be taking part next year in a “Ducky Dynasty” cruise.
The reality show has been a smash hit for A&E, as the Season 4 premiere became the number one nonfiction series telecast in cable history with 11.8 million viewers.
http://washington.cbslocal.com/2013/09/20/high-school-forces-student-to-remove-duck-dynasty-shirt-because-it-was-deemed-threatening/
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