The Debt Ceiling Is a Red Herring
Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke announced last week the US central bank will continue its "quantitative easing" program, basically printing money like an African dictatorship to buy US debt. The harsh truth behind Bernanke's action makes the upcoming debate on raising the debt ceiling a red herring that diverts attention away from reality: the US ship of state has hit a giant financial iceberg. Captain Bernanke's response is to continue to bail water.The Federal Reserve buys billions of dollars of US debt at near-zero interest to fund the ever-increasing deficit to keep up the charade that the good faith and credit of the nation is intact. In effect, Fed policy is a lie surrounding a bigger lie -- that Obama's economic recovery plan is on course. If the Fed does not step up and purchase US debt at ridiculously low interest, rates would have to float upwards dramatically to attract the usual buyers. Interest on the debt is already running at $26 billion per month; an increase caused by allowing rates to equate to investor requirements could easily double the staggering current monthly outlay. And what is the effect of squandering the US money supply on US debt that provides scant return?
The rate the US should have to pay in the real world to sell our debt would translate to rates charged to Fed member banks, who add vigorish for themselves and lend it out. But despite Fed rates artificially kept below one percent by Bernanke's sleight-of-hand, lending in the US to small businesses is at a 12-year low. If the Fed rate followed the appropriate level needed to attract buyers of our national debt, interest rates on bank lending will rise dramatically. The already suffering small business sector, which represents 90 percent of the economy and provides all new jobs, will be facing ruin.
This sorry state of affairs is due to Obama ignoring the small business sector and diverting stimulus money to save the banksters, fund pipe dreams to develop alternative sources of energy, launch unattainable transportation initiatives and hand gifts to friends and supporters. He saved Wall Street and left Main Street -- where small businesses reside -- holding the bag. That is the main reason his policies have failed -- and worse, permanently undermined the American economy. Yet, the Fed claims it is continuing its US debt purchases at near-zero interest to prevent the inflation to come in the alleged recovery. The unpleasant truth is inflation is everywhere already, but there is no recovery -- despite wishful thinking by the administration, who spin the abysmal economic numbers to fit their hopeful belief that happy days are just around the corner -- and that Obama and his cohorts know what they are doing.
Even Obama devotees are seeing through this charade. The only piece of the Bernanke strategy that works is forcing capital into the equities and commodities markets (and their derivatives) which in turn makes the Dow go higher. This pleases investors and owners of 401-K plans, and fools voters that the Obama recovery is real. Underneath the increasing value of stocks is an economy that does not support their value. With the realization the economy is stagnating and real growth not happening, investors will cut back on equities. Since there is no return on cash in the Bernanke scenario, mattresses and coffee can sales will skyrocket. With scant lending available for the small businessman as things stand today, there will soon be none.
Will Bernanke print more money and buy more US debt to support Obama's new tomorrow? What happens then? We become a new Greece. The global economy sputters and nations with proper financial controls and procedures retreat inwardly as occurred during the Great Depression). The EU, already reeling from US crooks who sold member states mortgage backed securities, disintegrates ( an outcome several members desire) and the American-led post post-World War 2 global construct terminates.
The proof is here in America. Unemployment has not noticeably abated, except technically as more and more workers give up looking for jobs and don't show up in the figures. According to an economic statistician at MIT, two million new jobs would have to be created immediately to return the work force to pre-2008 levels. Long-term unemployment is approaching 37 weeks and bankruptcy figures are becoming like unemployment statistics: businesses, like the long-term jobless, are foregoing the process and simply fading away.
Stimulus financing under Obama is obviously not working, but has driven the federal debt to record highs. There is more bad news: According to the Pew Research Center, by 2030, 18% of the nation will be collecting Social Security and receiving Medicare, which means younger Americans will be called upon to pay the taxes to support their elders. But the millennial generation -- between 18 and 29 -- are severely negatively affected by the present economic climate with 13.1% unemployed (a two percent increase in the last year, a grim testimony to the alleged Obama recovery) and another three percent underemployed. This ought not be Greek to Obama and Bernanke.
Obama's Affordable Care Act is the coup de grace that will kill off the American Century. While most of us will suffer through the apocalypse, the politicians who created the backdrop for the mortgage crisis will enjoy a large pension. And the bankers and investment firm executives - who took advantage of government policy by creating fraudulent and impenetrable mortgage instruments - will slip off to Old Europe or their own private island with the money they stole from the American people. How fitting: federal socialistic policy mandating a house for everyone joins with corrupt capitalist bankers to turn the American Dream into a nightmare.
Reuters poll shows Obama at a 39% overall approval rating
Recent polls have shown a rapid decline in Barack Obama’s standing with the American public, but the new Reuters/Ipsos poll is the most dramatic — although technically, it’s not a decline. His job approval has dropped to 39/55, and the Democratic Party doesn’t get above 40% in trust for any of the major issues on the table. Neither does the GOP, though, which shows a deep credibility problem for both major parties (via Jim Geraghty).First, let’s take a look at the breakdowns on Obama’s performance. Democrats approve overall 74/22, but only 35% strongly approve, which is an interesting figure among his own party As one might expect, Republicans highly disapprove at 12/88. The score among independents is what’s killing Obama at the moment — a 23/69, which is going to be a huge problem for vulnerable Democrats in next year’s midterms if Obama can’t right the ship before then. Only 10% of independents strongly approve, as opposed to 39% who strongly disapprove. Those kind of numbers may threaten Democrats in some districts and states previously seen as safer, too.
However, this is not a drop in approval for Obama, at least not within this series. Disapproval spiked in September at 56% in the last poll two weeks ago, where Obama also had a 39% approval rating. It’s still a decline from August, where several Reuters polls put Obama approval between 41-43%, within the margin of error from September. In July, Obama bottomed out at 40/51. This chart shows the pattern for 2013:
The widening of the split in this series began in July, but has accelerated through August and September. That’s more than just Syria at work, although that certainly isn’t helping.
The right/wrong track numbers show a bigger problem for Democrats, though, who control the White House and Senate and have for more than four years. That number is now 22/64, which is hardly an endorsement of current leadership. Among Democrats it’s just 43/41, but among independents it falls to 14/71. The right/wrong track is open to interpretation, but it’s generally seen as an indicator of satisfaction with the party in power. That’s not a good sign for the White House. This is roughly within the same territory as RCP’s overall polling trend on the direction question, which shows a widening negative split this year as well.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/27/reuters-poll-shows-obama-at-a-39-overall-approval-rating/
White House to announce $300M in aid Friday to make Detroit safer, erase blight
Nearly $300 million in aid for Detroit — from federal and state coffers, private businesses and charitable foundations — will be announced Friday as Obama administration officials visit the city to discuss what can be done to help eradicate blight, improve transportation, encourage new business
and make residents safer.The funding will include $150 million in blight eradication and community redevelopment, including $65 million in Community Development Block Grant funding — which had already been awarded over two years but could not be accessed by the city. An additional $25 million could help hire as many as 150 firefighters in the city.
Some $24 million in federal resources that had been tied up will go to repairing buses and installing security cameras, part of an overall $140-million investment in transit systems. And several charitable groups — the Ford Foundation, Kresge Foundation and Knight Foundation — will put millions into spurring entrepreneurship and creating jobs.
Gene Sperling, the head of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council and an Ann Arbor native, briefed reporters on some the plans Thursday evening, saying Friday’s meeting at Wayne State University is “the first of many efforts that the administration will engage in with the city of Detroit.”
Many details were still to come out Friday.
“We’ve found significant resources that we believe can be unlocked and expedited and leveraged to have significant impact on the economy of Detroit,” Sperling said.
Gov. Rick Snyder, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing and emergency manager
Kevyn Orr — who on Detroit’s behalf filed the largest municipal
bankruptcy in history in July — will be part of the talks with Sperling,
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, Transportation
Secretary Anthony Foxx and Attorney General Eric Holder.Representatives of local foundations and business leaders were expected to be present as well. Members of Michigan’s congressional delegation were expected to attend if they could break away from votes with a federal shutdown looming at midnight Monday without a funding resolution.
“If we’re not there we’ll teleconference,” said U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich. “I think what is really important is there is an ongoing commitment from the administration.”
Sperling wasn’t immediately able to break down just how much of the $300 million represents new funding and how much had already been awarded to Detroit but, for whatever reason, hadn’t reached the city before. But he said much of it represented an effort by adminisitration officials to scour their departments for funding that Detroit could access.
For instance, in the case of $25 million to be used for firefighters, the funding, Sperling said, had “been accumulating for years” but could not be accessed. The $65 million in CDBG funding includes $33 million that had been withheld from the last fiscal year because the city did not meet required obligations to access it.
In recent weeks and months, local leaders — from former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer to UAW President Bob King — had visited the White House
to talk about what could be done for Detroit, with a federal bailout out of the question.Sperling said all of the parties have been working to find ways not only to make funds more flexible so they can be used where most needed, such as for demolition, but to figure out ways to ensure that the city has the proper planning and accounting systems to get the funding out to needed projects.
In the months to come, for instance, the White House’s chief technology officer is expected to lead a team of experts to Detroit to make recommendations on how to improve city systems, Sperling said.
“Detroit historically had some major problems deploying grants and other resources, and so there could be a fair amount sort of stuck in the pipeline,” said Snyder, who was in Washington on Thursday. “Financial systems, accounting systems for the city of Detroit? They are a disaster.”
http://www.freep.com/article/20130926/NEWS01/309260199/white-house-bankruptcy-aid-for-detroit-blight-removal
White House says it isn't behind 'Adorable Care Act'
It would have been a clever move for the White House or Organizing for Action to turn to cute animals and social media to try to draw attention to the start of the Affordable Care Act's registration period.But both deny having any connection to the Adorable Care Act accounts on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook that caught the attention of the political press -- and the White House -- on Thursday.
"The 'Adorable Care Act' Twitter and Tumblr accounts are not run by the White House," a White House official told POLITICO. "On social media channels, the White House highlights content from outside individuals, groups and organizations. The Adorable Care Act was highlighted by official White House channels as a creative way to raise awareness around the Affordable Care Act and HealthCare.gov."
The White House's official Twitter account shared some of @adorablecareact's images on Thursday -- beginning with one featuring a mouse saying: "I can rest easy knowing that lifetime caps on health coverage have been eliminated! Thanks, Adorable Care Act." The White House's shares helped the account attract hundreds of new followers, hitting a total of 900 just as this post was filed.
OFA also offered a denial of any involvement. "Not us," an official there said."Kitten coverage till age 26: prayers answered," reads the most recent image posted on @adorablecareact. It features a photo of a kitten and blue-and-white graphics reminiscent of the 2012 Obama campaign's iconography.The earliest tweet is from Sept. 20, but the earliest post on Tumblr dates back to July 18, and features a pony and this message: "Introducting the Adorable Care Act protecting America's greatest resource one pony at a time."
Earlier in the day during his daily briefing, White House press secretary Jay Carney said he wasn't aware of the emerging meme. He did, though, have a take on why it's gained traction. "Everybody loves cute animals," he said.
http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/09/white-house-says-it-isnt-behind-adorable-care-act-173649.html
A Small President on the World Stage
At the U.N., leaders hope for a return of American greatness.
By Peggy NoonanThe world misses the old America, the one before the crash—the crashes—of the past dozen years.
That is the takeaway from conversations the past week in New York, where world leaders gathered for the annual U.N. General Assembly session. Our friends, and we have many, speak almost poignantly of the dynamism, excellence, exuberance and leadership of the nation they had, for so many years, judged themselves against, been inspired by, attempted to emulate, resented. As for those who are not America's friends, some seem still confused, even concussed, by the new power shift. What is their exact place in it? Will it last? Will America come roaring back? Can she? Does she have the political will, the human capital, the old capability?
It is a world in a new kind of flux, one that doesn't know what to make of America anymore. In part because of our president.
"We want American leadership," said a member of a diplomatic delegation of a major U.S. ally. He said it softly, as if confiding he missed an old friend.
"In the past we have seen some America overreach," said the prime minister of a Western democracy, in a conversation. "Now I think we are seeing America underreach." He was referring not only to foreign policy but to economic policies, to the limits America has imposed on itself. He missed its old economic dynamism, its crazy, pioneering spirit toward wealth creation—the old belief that every American could invent something, get it to market, make a bundle, rise. The prime minister spoke of a great anxiety and his particular hope. The anxiety: "The biggest risk is not political but social. Wealthy societies with people who think wealth is a given, a birthright—they do not understand that we are in the fight of our lives with countries and nations set on displacing us. Wealth is earned. It is far from being a given. It cannot be taken for granted. The recession reminded us how quickly circumstances can change." His hope? That the things that made America a giant—"so much entrepreneurialism and vision"—will, in time, fully re-emerge and jolt the country from the doldrums.
The second takeaway of the week has to do with a continued decline in admiration for the American president. Barack Obama's reputation among his fellow international players has deflated, his stature almost collapsed. In diplomatic circles, attitudes toward his leadership have been declining for some time, but this week you could hear the disappointment, and something more dangerous: the sense that he is no longer, perhaps, all that relevant. Part of this is due, obviously, to his handling of the Syria crisis. If you draw a line and it is crossed and then you dodge, deflect, disappear and call it diplomacy, the world will notice, and not think better of you. Some of it is connected to the historical moment America is in.
But some of it, surely, is just five years of Mr. Obama. World leaders do not understand what his higher strategic aims are, have doubts about his seriousness and judgment, and read him as unsure and covering up his unsureness with ringing words.
A scorching assessment of the president as foreign-policy actor came from a former senior U.S. diplomat, a low-key and sophisticated man who spent the week at many U.N.-related functions. "World leaders are very negative about Obama," he said. They are "disappointed, feeling he's not really in charge. . . . The Western Europeans don't pay that much attention to him anymore."
The diplomat was one of more than a dozen U.S. foreign-policy hands who met this week with the new president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani. What did he think of the American president? "He didn't mention Obama, not once," said the former envoy, who added: "We have to accept the fact that the president is rather insignificant at the moment, and rely on our diplomats." John Kerry, he said, is doing a good job.
Had he ever seen an American president treated as if he were so insignificant? "I really never have. It's unusual." What does he make of the president's strategy: "He doesn't know what to do so he stays out of it [and] hopes for the best." The diplomat added: "Slim hope."
This reminded me of a talk a few weeks ago, with another veteran diplomat who often confers with leaders with whom Mr. Obama meets. I had asked: When Obama enters a room with other leaders, is there a sense that America has entered the room? I mentioned De Gaulle—when he was there, France was there. When Reagan came into a room, people stood: America just walked in. Does Mr. Obama bring that kind of mystique?
"No," he said. "It's not like that."
When the president spoke to the General Assembly, his speech was dignified and had, at certain points, a certain sternness of tone. But after a while, as he spoke, it took on the flavor of re-enactment. He had impressed these men and women once. In the cutaways on C-Span, some the delegates in attendance seemed distracted, not alert, not sitting as if they were witnessing something important. One delegate seemed to be scrolling down on a BlackBerry, one rifled through notes. Two officials seated behind the president as he spoke seemed engaged in humorous banter. At the end, the applause was polite, appropriate and brief.
The president spoke of Iran and nuclear weapons—"we should be able to achieve a resolution" of the question. "We are encouraged" by signs of a more moderate course. "I am directing John Kerry to pursue this effort."
But his spokesmen had suggested the possibility of a brief meeting or handshake between Messrs. Obama and Rouhani. When that didn't happen there was a sense the American president had been snubbed. For all the world to see.
Which, if you are an American, is embarrassing.
While Mr. Rouhani could not meet with the American president, he did make time for journalists, diplomats and businessmen brought together by the Asia Society and the Council on Foreign Relations. Early Thursday evening in a hotel ballroom, Mr. Rouhani spoke about U.S.-Iranian relations.
He appears to be intelligent, smooth, and he said all the right things—"moderation and wisdom" will guide his government, "global challenges require collective responses." He will likely prove a tough negotiator, perhaps a particularly wily one. He is eloquent when speaking of the "haunted" nature of some of his countrymen's memories when they consider the past 60 years of U.S.-Iranian relations.
Well, we have that in common.
He seemed to use his eloquence to bring a certain freshness, and therefore force, to perceived grievances. That's one negotiating tactic. He added that we must "rise above petty politics," and focus on our nations' common interests and concerns. He called it "counterproductive" to view Iran as a threat; this charge is whipped up by "alarmists." He vowed again that Iran will not develop a nuclear bomb, saying this would be "contrary to Islamic norms."
I wondered, as he spoke, how he sized up our president. In roughly 90 minutes of a speech followed by questions, he didn't say, and nobody thought to ask him.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303342104579099623833385780.html?mod=rss_mobile_uber_feed
Obama’s myopic worldview
“The world is more stable than it was five years ago,” Barack Obama assured the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday. This transparently self-serving but otherwise baffling claim came at the beginning of a long and dense address aimed at answering the critique that he lacks a coherent foreign policy, particularly regarding the Middle East.Judging from the widely varying reactions he inspired, Obama didn’t end the confusion about what he stands for. But his boast that his presidency has calmed the globe opened a window on his peculiar outlook on foreign affairs — and why it has led him to mismanage the most important crises on his watch.
So: Why, according to Obama, is the world better off than in 2008? Well, the global economic crisis has abated. But that’s not all: “We’ve also worked to end a decade of war,” the president said, by withdrawing U.S. and NATO troops from Iraq and Afghanistan and “shifting away from a perpetual war footing.” Here’s where you could almost hear the head-scratching in the Iraqi and Afghan delegations: Violence in both of those countries is considerably worse than it was five years ago, in part because of the U.S. withdrawals.
Also, as Obama half-acknowledged, al-Qaeda is more of a threat in more places — Kenya, Nigeria, Mali, Libya, Syria — than it was in 2008. And then there is the region stretching from Morocco to Iran, which is experiencing not stability but an epochal upheaval, one that has brought civil war or anarchy to a half-dozen countries and spawned the greatest crimes against humanity since the turn of the 21st century.
It’s easy to dismiss Obama’s claim on factual grounds. More interesting is to see what prompted it: a soda-straw view of the world in which only the president’s inauguration-day priorities are visible. His aim then was to bring home U.S. troops, end the “endless war” of George W. Bush, defend the homeland from al-Qaeda and step back from the quagmire of the Arab Middle East. He did all that; ergo, the world is more stable — and from the attenuated perspective of an American who mainly wishes the world would go away, perhaps it is.
This definition of stability, however, requires ignoring all that would disturb it — anything that might demand new military commitments or deeper U.S. engagement with Arabs and their seemingly endless conflicts. And so Obama spelled out four “core interests” for which he would use “all elements of our power, including military force”: preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, stopping attacks on the U.S. homeland, defending allies and ensuring the “free flow of energy.” All else, including promoting democracy and preventing genocide, was relegated to a lesser category, in which his administration will act only in concert with “the international community.” And maybe not even then.
It’s worth noting that Obama has not always been so small-minded, at least rhetorically. In May 2011, after the NATO intervention in Libya that he reluctantly joined, he delivered another major address on the Middle East. He started by listing the same core priorities. Then he said: “We must acknowledge that a strategy based solely upon the narrow pursuit of these interests will not fill an empty stomach or allow someone to speak their mind.”
He defined a new set of “core principles” that the United States would defend in the Middle East, including “free speech, the freedom of peaceful assembly, the freedom of religion, equality for men and women under the rule of law, and the right to choose your own leaders — whether you live in Baghdad or Damascus, Sanaa or Tehran.” He said: “Our support for these principles is not a secondary interest. Today I want to make it clear that it is a top priority that must be translated into concrete actions, and supported by all of the diplomatic, economic and strategic tools at our disposal.”
In fact, as Egyptians and Syrians can testify, he never followed up. On Tuesday, Obama relinked his rhetoric to his actions and his underlying worldview. He listed just two goals: striking an agreement with Iran that would curtail its pursuit of nuclear weapons and brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord. Both are worthy but long-shot initiatives; both were on Obama’s agenda in January 2009. And neither, even if achieved, would address the larger Middle East crisis.
Obama warned the General Assembly on Tuesday that “the danger for the world is that the United States, after a decade of war . . . may disengage, creating a vacuum of leadership that no other nation can fill.” Sadly, it is not just a danger. It was the message of his speech — and the tangible result of his presidency.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jackson-diehl-obamas-myopic-worldview/2013/09/26/24670492-26c8-11e3-b75d-5b7f66349852_story.html
Once Upon a Time in America Partisanship Was For the Good of The People, What Happened?
After watching Wednesday’s Obamacare debate, we aren’t surprised to learn that 60 percent of Americans, according to the latest Gallup survey,
believe the federal government is too powerful. In fact, it has now
been more than eight years since fewer than half of Americans wanted to
reduce the power of government.
And
yet, since 2005, federal spending has grown 58 percent, the federal
bureaucracy has added more than 100,000 to its ranks, and the cost of complying with its regulations has increased 59 percent – and all this before the full implementation of Obamacare.
That
means in a period when more than half of Americans thought the
government was too powerful, it has grown much more powerful still.
How does this happen in a republic? A
momentary poll result can perhaps be safely ignored, but a sentiment
sustained over eight years, through four congressional elections and two
presidential contests? Plainly, something is wrong when the direction
of the government and the sentiments of the people diverge to such an
extreme degree.
In fact, several things are wrong. As we argued in an earlier essay
in this series, the American governing class has become a
“super-faction,” pursuing its good at the expense of the American
people, as Congress’s special Obamacare deal illustrates. At the head of
that group is President Obama, implementing a Progressive program that
is purposefully and inherently divisive, the work of a faction-builder-in-chief.
But there is a less comfortable
reality we can’t afford to ignore: the role that we, the people, have
played in normalizing the politics of faction.
The authors of the The Federalist Papers
hoped and believed that a republican people would welcome an honest
assessment of its vices insofar as the exercise produced a healthy
re-examination of its political choices and, ultimately, promised
greater security for its rights and liberties. Since, in James Madison’s
words, faction is “sown in the nature of man,” we cannot wisely
consider ourselves free from its temptations.
hoped and believed that a republican people would welcome an honest
assessment of its vices insofar as the exercise produced a healthy
re-examination of its political choices and, ultimately, promised
greater security for its rights and liberties. Since, in James Madison’s
words, faction is “sown in the nature of man,” we cannot wisely
consider ourselves free from its temptations.
Near the end of Democracy in America 
,
Alexis de Tocqueville argued that “a democratic government . . .
increases its prerogatives by the sole fact that it endures.” Time
brings about increased centralization of power – even in a society where
most people want a small and limited government.
,
Alexis de Tocqueville argued that “a democratic government . . .
increases its prerogatives by the sole fact that it endures.” Time
brings about increased centralization of power – even in a society where
most people want a small and limited government.
Again: how could this be? With his
usual keen insight into democratic peoples, de Tocqueville identifies
the problem [emphasis from the author]:
“Democratic centuries are times of
attempts, innovations, and adventures. There is always a multitude of
men engaged in a difficult or new undertaking that they pursue
separately, without bothering themselves about those like them. They
do indeed accept for a general principle that the public power ought
not to intervene in private affairs, but each of them desires that it
aid him as an exception in the special affair that preoccupies
him, and he seeks to attract the action of the government to his side,
all the while wanting to shrink it for everyone else.”
What de Tocqueville suggests is that
there is something missing from the Gallup poll’s results. Most people
think that government is too powerful – but not in the areas where they
benefit from special programs, favorable regulations, or tax law
carve-outs. Most people want a smaller government – except where a
little more power might shift resources in their direction.
Meanwhile, the government always wants
more power. So it gladly obliges as many individuals and groups as it
can – and is always ready to oblige more when resources allow. Over
time, therefore, the government always wins – and we pay a big price for
our small hypocrisy.
The American people might be forgiven
for some of this failure. For too long, the establishment leaders of
both major parties have ignored, excused, and sometimes encouraged
factious behavior for their short-term political benefit. Instead of
making an appeal to the American people as a whole, they carve us up
into various groups (economic, ethnic, religious, etc.), peddling
focus-group-tested proposals and slogans that scratch where each group
itches. When the smooth operators behind the candidates calculate that
the next president will be determined by three counties in Ohio, there
is no end to the particular appeals calculated to please the winners of
this political lottery.
Once upon a time in America, our
political leaders took a different approach. Their campaigns were still
rough, their differences still sharp, but in the spirit of Federalist 10
they sought, at least on their best days, to “refine and enlarge the
public view” by pointing the American people to a common good above all
particular interests.
Consider that after co-authoring the Federalist,
a work that condemns factious behavior, Alexander Hamilton and Madison
founded the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties, respectively.
These parties were at odds with one another.
Had they forgotten their earlier admonitions against faction?
No. Both Hamilton and Madison pursued
policies (tending to the young nation’s fiscal health and political
stability on the one hand, and working to preserve the republican
character of its politics on the other hand) that they thought would
best secure the American people’s God-given liberty. And neither man
swerved from his belief that this required an “impartial and exact
execution of the laws.”
In other words, Hamilton and Madison
were partisan in the best sense of the word: advancing a particular
program aiming – not in pretense, but in fact – to achieve the good of
all.
American politicians in our day pursue
policies with a very different aim. Too often we are tempted by the
prospect of personal gain to go along with it. We may go along with
today’s pseudo-Hamiltonian state builders because we think the
government’s strength is our security. We may go along with today’s
pseudo-Jeffersonian equalizers because we think that others’ good luck
or hidden corruption too often limit our success.
But instead of the best of these two
American traditions, we get the worst: the unholy marriage of
Hamiltonian means with Jeffersonian ends called for by Progressive giant
Herbert Croly, an “alliance between two principles” that Croly rightly
understood and hoped would “not leave either of them intact.”
Through a coordinated effort by elites
from both political parties, the media and the academy, the
Progressives succeeded in their effort to reinterpret, and thereby
remake, the first principles of American politics. But there have been
exceptions to their rule that give us hope.
Calvin Coolidge, at the height of the
Progressive ascendancy, reminded Americans that self-evident truths
don’t expire. He led a dramatic reduction in government spending from
its Woodrow Wilson-era high. He called upon the American people to work
and save – and they responded, producing an extended period of growth
and prosperity. A powerful people, rather than a powerful government.
Coolidge’s example reminds us that a
trans-factious politics is possible to the degree both sets of political
actors – statesmen and citizens – are willing to consider every policy,
law, regulation, or governmental activity on the basis of whether it
furthers the common good or benefits individuals seeking their own
advantage.
We will not thrive as a healthy and
prosperous political community unless modern-day Coolidges take on the
entrenched interests of Washington culture and the enormous state that
feeds them. But just as surely, these statesmen will not be successful
in this effort unless they can draw upon the reserves of an American
people no longer willing to buy in to a faction-driven politics that has
left us divided and broke with a government more powerful than ever.
http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/once-upon-a-time-in-america-partisanship-was-for-the-good-of-america-what-happened/
The Bogus Case for “Compromise”
Conviction is not a political liability
When Texas Senator Ted Cruz rolled out an epic 21-hour small-“f”
anti-Obamacare filibuster, his efforts were ridiculed by journalists
across the Twitterverse as a useless exercise in would-be
obstructionism. No surprise there.
The New York Times editorial board joined in, spitting out an
angry editorial accusing Cruz of employing an “aimless and
self-destructive Tea Party strategy”; an egomaniacal attempt to cash in
on the impulses of misguided conservatives. However hopeless a liberal
cause may be (gun control, cap-and-trade, Wendy Davis, take your pick)
it’s always a worthy idealistic pursuit. Conservatives in uphill fights,
on the other hand, are more likely to be fanatics or money-grubbing
frauds – the Times can’t seem to decide.
Senate Majority leader Harry Reid took to the Senate floor as well,
and declared Cruz’s efforts a waste time, unpacking his standard lament
about the lack of compromise in Washington. Reid reminisced about the
early 1980s, offering a personal story about a Republican who had helped
him feel more comfortable when he first arrived in Washington. If only
today’s “anarchists” (his description) were half as cooperative, we’d
really get stuff done.
Well, believe it or not, compromise isn’t a holy sacrament. It’s not a
mitzvah. It’s not particularly inspiring to voters. Politics is the art
of compromising as little as possible, actually.
So while conservatives may be fumbling for a plausible plan to deal
with Obamacare, the contention that they’re more ideologically
inflexible than their opponents is preposterous. The only thing more
preposterous is the idea that Cruz’s crusade will hurt them.
Yes, this is a hostage crisis
But that’s not the only myth. In a recent exchange on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” panelists went a few rounds on the GOP’s strategy for the upcoming budget showdowns (wily anarchists or slack-jawed yokels?) and talked about the pros and cons of “hostage taking” before MSNBC’s Chris Hayes chimed in with a pretty revealing comment:To your point about whether it is a fair tactic, I think it’s useful to separate the kind of tactical question from the substantive one, which is to say, you know, like, if there was a liberal caucus in the United States government that could, you know, hold the continuing resolution hostage to try to stop a war that I thought was horrible, I would say, yeah, do it. The thing they’re trying to stop here is 30 million people getting health insurance! Like, that’s the substance here!
It’s the substantive question liberals have a problem with these days, not the tactical one.
A potential shutdown over the continuing resolution or the debt
ceiling would be fine if the issue happened to move the liberal soul.
But Republicans can’t possibly have a legitimate reason to want to
defund/delay/defeat/de-anything Obamacare. The GOP opposes the law
because of an insatiable impulse to deny millions of poor Americans
health insurance. If Hayes were to concede that genuine objections
existed – however misguided he might find them – he’d also be conceding
that conservatives have a purpose beyond his own cartoon depiction of
free-market beliefs.
In this cartoon the GOP are obstructionists, and that’s that. When Reid says any Republican House budget he dislikes is “dead on arrival”
how many non-partisan publications will call him out on his
uncompromising position? When the president states that negotiating with
Republicans over debt ceiling “is not going to happen” how many reporters are going to point out that his stubbornness could potentially lead to a government shutdown?
But one of the remarkable and most often overlooked aspect of this
debate is that it revolves around perhaps the least cooperative pieces
of major legislation in American history, Obamacare. Shouldn’t those who
idealize the D.C. bargain be concerned that a single party took control
of a significant chunk of the American economy and compelled the
participation of every family and business in the nation without a shred
of support from the minority party? Even the wing-we-can-get-behind of
the Senate – the McCains of the world – weren’t on board. Talk about a
hostage crisis.
Does compromise need rescuing?
So there is the cynical push for Republican compromise and then there is a more idealistic championing of the idea, most often by realists on morning cable shows. This version of compromise for compromising’s sake is most intricately laid out in a remarkably misguided 4,500-word piece written by the typically sharp Jonathan Rauch in National Affairs. Basically it boils down to this:Tinkering with filibusters and gerrymanders and the like may be worthwhile, but wholesale change requires an injection of ideas. Small-bore change will not work without an intellectual effort to advance a principled, positive, patriotic case for compromise, especially on the right.
Rauch argues that the Founders – Madison in particular – envisioned
an American government with an embedded compromise-forcing system, with
mechanisms that endow “the constitutional order with stability and
dynamism. It not only tempers the worst in us; it often brings out the
best.”
Obviously, compromise is often the inevitable outcome of our
political process and we have a republican system that gives us a better
chance than a democracy. But a person could very easily argue that
Madison would probably be more apprehensive about the lack of checks and
balances, that he would support evolutionary rather than revolutionary
change, and that protecting the voice of the minority would be a top
concern. Certainly, nothing in The Federalist Papers leads us
to believe that perfunctory compromise would have topped his list.
Madison and the Founders – and this is just a hunch – would be
uncomfortable with the idea of legislation that coerces American
citizens to buy a product (many against their will) and undermines
federalism by blackmailing every state to compliance.
Fact is, the only way for the minority GOP can collect any crumbs of concession is to
trigger showdowns. The big trick is winning them. Whether Republicans
have the right strategic ideas to achieve is another discussion. But
with both parties drifting towards ideological purity over the past
decade, there is no other way to forge compromise without some level of
anguish. There has to be a showdown on every major issue because there
is less common ground to work with. That’s not necessarily unhealthy.
Even with all the scaremongering about the end of political
cooperation, somehow budgets pass every year, clean energy gets its
subsidies, massive new regulatory schemes grind on and unprecedented
reforms efforts move forward. Considering the gaping ideological divide
Washington functions under it’s actually pretty amazing how little
things change– and, for a lot of us, that’s pretty disappointing.
http://thefederalist.com/2013/09/26/the-bogus-case-for-compromise/
With ObamaCare in place, death panels will be the least of America's worries. If ever there was a time that mainstream America needed bold and principled representation, this is the time.
So why is the GOP -- the current vehicle for the center-right mainstream in American politics -- divided over whether to stand and fight or to simply step out of the way of the left's final steps toward socialism? Or, to put it bluntly, why is it always the Republicans who cave and never the far left?
Notice that there was never any question that the four leftist justices on the Supreme Court would vote to uphold ObamaCare. The left knew that their four votes on the Court were solid even before the bill was drafted. The only political question prior to the notorious decision was whether the GOP appointees would stand with the Constitution or fold under pressure from the left. John Roberts had to know the depth and the consequences of his betrayal for future generations of Americans, and yet he caved.
And though mainstream America overwhelmingly wants ObamaCare stopped, notice that there has never been the slightest concern on the left that Obama, Reid, or Pelosi might cave under public pressure. Poll results, economic carnage, and the threat of chaos in the health care system do not scare the radical left or cause them to waver from their support of ObamaCare. The only question on the table has been whether Mitch McConnell and John Boehner would stand with the American people or with the Beltway leftists.
Why does the wheel of government always ratchet to the left regardless of which party's hands are on the wheel?
It is too easy to answer that Republican voters put the wrong people in office. Even if that is true, we still have to ask why that would be the case. The Democrats never put squishy leftists in office. Bizarre, maybe, but never squishy. So why would GOP voters continue to put weak-kneed Republicans in office, especially during times such as these when the nation is in crisis?
We would be getting closer to the truth to say that the GOP folds and the Democrats don't because the left dominates our cultural institutions of education and news. Ill-educated and ill-informed voters are easy prey for one-sided news coverage, and the GOP leadership knows what kind of coverage awaits any Republican who stands in the way of the left's agenda. Cautious Republicans can reasonably ask what good it does in the long run to stand and fight if those who stand get driven from office by an outraged media.
But again we should ask why mainstream America has allowed the far left to dominate our educational and news institutions. The center-right majority has the financial clout to force these institutions to stop pushing the left's agenda and to more fairly reflect the values and beliefs of mainstream America, but instead we do nothing besides complaining.
For that matter, Republicans complain about liberal moderators in presidential debates, but we should ask why the GOP candidate always agrees to have liberal moderators who always try to throw the debate for the Democrats. Could the GOP's campaign managers possibly be so dense as to think that maybe next time the moderators will be fair? Does anyone really think that Hillary Clinton would agree to a debate with Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity as the moderator?
Imagine for a moment that the GOP had won the White House, Senate, and House in 2012. Is it likely that the Democrats would have passively allowed the repeal of ObamaCare just because they didn't have formal control of the government? They would have fought the GOP in the trenches and, based on history, they would probably have wrung out enough concessions to keep the bulk of ObamaCare in place until they were back in power. Yet, many in the GOP are ready to cave even with most of the country backing them.
Just as many a toddler has learned to manipulate tired parents who have worked all day, the left-wing minority understands the prime rule of politics: a determined minority willing to push an agenda will always dominate a majority that just wants peace and quiet. Mainstream America for the most part just wants peace and quiet so that we can work, take care of our responsibilities, and mind our own business. The left is willing to make life miserable for everyone until they get their way. So far, the mainstream just has not had the stomach for a political fight.
Until politicians have to worry more about pleasing the mainstream than appeasing the far left, nothing will change.
And that's why the GOP always folds.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/why_the_republicans_always_cave.html#ixzz2g75TSSGr
http://thefederalist.com/2013/09/26/the-bogus-case-for-compromise/
Why the Republicans Always Cave
Leftist politicians have known for decades that America would never accept anything labeled as socialism, and so they followed a strategy of gradualism that brought socialism to America on the installment plan. ObamaCare is the next-to-the-last payment in that installment plan. A citizenry that will allow the government to seize control of its health care will eventually accept seizure of firearms, redistribution of income, limits on speech that the government finds unacceptable, and a host of other evils that always follow the left's rise to power.With ObamaCare in place, death panels will be the least of America's worries. If ever there was a time that mainstream America needed bold and principled representation, this is the time.
So why is the GOP -- the current vehicle for the center-right mainstream in American politics -- divided over whether to stand and fight or to simply step out of the way of the left's final steps toward socialism? Or, to put it bluntly, why is it always the Republicans who cave and never the far left?
Notice that there was never any question that the four leftist justices on the Supreme Court would vote to uphold ObamaCare. The left knew that their four votes on the Court were solid even before the bill was drafted. The only political question prior to the notorious decision was whether the GOP appointees would stand with the Constitution or fold under pressure from the left. John Roberts had to know the depth and the consequences of his betrayal for future generations of Americans, and yet he caved.
And though mainstream America overwhelmingly wants ObamaCare stopped, notice that there has never been the slightest concern on the left that Obama, Reid, or Pelosi might cave under public pressure. Poll results, economic carnage, and the threat of chaos in the health care system do not scare the radical left or cause them to waver from their support of ObamaCare. The only question on the table has been whether Mitch McConnell and John Boehner would stand with the American people or with the Beltway leftists.
Why does the wheel of government always ratchet to the left regardless of which party's hands are on the wheel?
It is too easy to answer that Republican voters put the wrong people in office. Even if that is true, we still have to ask why that would be the case. The Democrats never put squishy leftists in office. Bizarre, maybe, but never squishy. So why would GOP voters continue to put weak-kneed Republicans in office, especially during times such as these when the nation is in crisis?
We would be getting closer to the truth to say that the GOP folds and the Democrats don't because the left dominates our cultural institutions of education and news. Ill-educated and ill-informed voters are easy prey for one-sided news coverage, and the GOP leadership knows what kind of coverage awaits any Republican who stands in the way of the left's agenda. Cautious Republicans can reasonably ask what good it does in the long run to stand and fight if those who stand get driven from office by an outraged media.
But again we should ask why mainstream America has allowed the far left to dominate our educational and news institutions. The center-right majority has the financial clout to force these institutions to stop pushing the left's agenda and to more fairly reflect the values and beliefs of mainstream America, but instead we do nothing besides complaining.
For that matter, Republicans complain about liberal moderators in presidential debates, but we should ask why the GOP candidate always agrees to have liberal moderators who always try to throw the debate for the Democrats. Could the GOP's campaign managers possibly be so dense as to think that maybe next time the moderators will be fair? Does anyone really think that Hillary Clinton would agree to a debate with Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity as the moderator?
Imagine for a moment that the GOP had won the White House, Senate, and House in 2012. Is it likely that the Democrats would have passively allowed the repeal of ObamaCare just because they didn't have formal control of the government? They would have fought the GOP in the trenches and, based on history, they would probably have wrung out enough concessions to keep the bulk of ObamaCare in place until they were back in power. Yet, many in the GOP are ready to cave even with most of the country backing them.
Just as many a toddler has learned to manipulate tired parents who have worked all day, the left-wing minority understands the prime rule of politics: a determined minority willing to push an agenda will always dominate a majority that just wants peace and quiet. Mainstream America for the most part just wants peace and quiet so that we can work, take care of our responsibilities, and mind our own business. The left is willing to make life miserable for everyone until they get their way. So far, the mainstream just has not had the stomach for a political fight.
Until politicians have to worry more about pleasing the mainstream than appeasing the far left, nothing will change.
And that's why the GOP always folds.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/why_the_republicans_always_cave.html#ixzz2g75TSSGr
It Doesn't Matter If the Obamacare Defunding Gambit Fails
The
current campaign to deprive President Obama's health care leviathan of
the life-sustaining tax dollars it needs for full bureaucratic
metastasis is what left-wingers call a consciousness-raising exercise.
It matters next to nothing if current Republican efforts succeed in immediately defunding Obamacare. That's because this is just the opening round of what promises to be a protracted struggle to restore sanity to the American health care system. A temporary defeat at one juncture on the road to repeal isn't really a defeat at all, provided that it serves a larger purpose. Obamacare, after all, wasn't enacted in a day and it won't be repealed in a day.
Both the Ted Cruz talkathon and the brinksmanship over the stop-gap government funding measure (called a "continuing resolution") epitomize purposeful political theater.
Ignore the blatherskite spewing from GOP establishment talking heads like Karl Rove: there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing political things strictly for public consumption even when there is a less-than-direct or less-than-obvious relationship between the things done and the desired results. It's not somehow dishonest or dishonorable to do this, contrary to the protestations of the pompous pundits who suck up air in the Washington echo chamber.
In this age of instant everything, we tend to forget that politics isn't always about concrete, instantaneous results. It's about symbolism. It's about focusing the attention of people in order to educate them. It's about framing the issues properly, telling stories, and planting memes in public spaces, allowing them to spread like dandelion seeds on a passing breeze. That's how Americans were brainwashed into believing that Republicans are the "party of the rich" and gazillionaire George Soros's Democrats are the caring party of compassion.
But intellect by itself doesn't always serve champions of limited government well. Sometimes showmanship and connecting with people on an emotional level is required to make good things happen. All good salespeople understand this. Andrew Breitbart understood this. James O'Keefe III and Hannah Giles understand this. Republicans used to understand this.
Although the master of political theater, Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky, was an irredeemably anti-American Marxist with a taste for political violence, he wasn't wrong about everything. He believed in using public spectacles to generate the friction that is a precondition of change. "Action comes from keeping the heat on," Alinsky wrote in his opus. "No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough."
Which brings us to the dramaturgist of the hour, Ted Cruz. As enemies from the media and both political parties circled over him, the Leonidas-like Cruz showed his gun-shy Republican colleagues how it's done. In a lonely de facto filibuster, the junior senator from Texas spoke in the United States Senate for more than 21 hours in a long-shot bid to derail Obamacare.
It was a wonderful civic moment. The iron-bladdered lawmaker provided the nation with what amounted to a highly informative infomercial on C-SPAN that detailed how the incipient entitlement program is needlessly boosting health care insurance premiums, expanding the ranks of the uninsured, and generating unemployment, headaches for small businesses, and misery in general across America. The Cruz talkathon was public service at its finest.
In congressional Republicans' long post-War World Two exile from majority status, they rarely rose up to challenge the powers that be, but when they did it was a thing of beauty.
There was the bitterly contested 1984 election in Indiana's eighth congressional district in which House Democrats stole the election in broad daylight. After Indiana certified his Republican challenger, Rick McIntyre, as the winner, months and many recounts later the Democrat-controlled House seated Frank McCloskey.
Famed psephologist Charlie Cook bemoans the seating of McCloskey as the starting point of a downward spiral in civility in national politics. "At that point Republicans had been in the minority for 30 years and they were pretty docile ... living off the crumbs that the Democratic majority threw them."
The seating of McCloskey in 1985 "so enraged House Republicans and even some of the most mild-mannered, most moderate members," that they began "supporting Newt Gingrich and his rise to take over the Republican apparatus."
At the time the House Minority Leader was Bob Michel, a milquetoast cat-herder appreciated by Democrats and the media because he was so ineffectual. But the shabby treatment afforded McIntyre galvanized Republicans. They walked out in unison to protest the seating of McCloskey. This solidarity of brothers-in-arms was political theater. It was also the beginning of a renewed, ultimately successful GOP effort to recapture the House.
Naturally, Cook sees the walkout as a bad thing. The Indiana-8 fight "became so partisan and so bitter between the two sides ... you started seeing a bunch of House members coming over to the Senate and it was almost like a contagion coming over from one body into another body," said Cook.
"It took a long time before the bitterness that was in the House moved over to the Senate," he said, but "now it's in the Senate."
Given Cook's mushy liberal leanings --he's a former Democratic Senate aide-- he can be forgiven for calling Republicans' pre-Indiana-8 spinelessness "civility."
This so-called civility, which in this case is the same as docility, turns out to be the enemy of limited government. Yet many Republicans today share Cook's foolish civility fetish.
Nothing in recent memory has brought out this losing mindset among Republicans more than conversations about how the GOP should fight Obamacare, assuming, of course, that GOPers actually do want to fight Obamacare.
The inordinate fear of shutting down the federal government or of being blamed for the shutdown of the federal government haunts Republican strategists. Discussions of strategy and tactics between these tormented souls nowadays are like episodes of Seinfeld, filled with invented, silly rules and extended debate about niceties and etiquette.
Some Obamacare opponents on the GOP side say defunding would be impossible even if Obamacare opponents had the votes because Obamacare is supported by so-called mandatory spending.
Contrary to commonly received Washington wisdom, anything funded by the government can be defunded -- as long as the Constitution continues to contain an Appropriations Clause that gives Congress the power of the purse. Some have pointed out that funds have already been appropriated to implement Obamacare. Those funds can be rescinded. The offices already created can be plowed under and the ground sown with salt.
They also ignore the fact that Republicans won the shutdown battle with President Clinton in 1995. Contrary to media propaganda, the Republicans in that glorious conflict got largely what they wanted and did fine in the following congressional election, even gaining Senate seats. (Republicans didn't win the presidency in 1996, of course, but that's because they nominated the king of the RINOs, Bob Dole, as their candidate.)
But facts count for little because there is so much irrational fear out there right now in GOP circles. Republicans are a party scared of its own shadow. They make up rationalizations to justify passivity. That's no way to win.
Republicans who counsel going along to get along say the GOP needs to win congressional majorities in 2014 and 2016 in order to kill Obamacare properly.
But they have no answer to this question: how exactly are Republicans going to get these majorities in 2014 and 2016 to repeal Obamacare if they don't honor the solemn vow they made to take on Obamacare? Failing to at least try to sabotage the program guarantees a segment of conservative voters will stay home on Election Day.
Right now the public is receptive to anti-Obamacare overtures. A new Rasmussen poll says a bare majority of Americans is now okay with at least a "partial" government shutdown.
An ABC/Washington Post poll shows 9 of 10 Americans don't believe the federal government, their state governments, and the health insurance industry are fully prepared to implement Obamacare. Headline after headline brings news of government bureaucracy's inability to get health insurance exchanges up and running.
In 16 ABC/Post polls since August 2009, Obamacare has never received majority support and 6 in 10 Americans now believe the federal government has too much power, according to Gallup polls. A mere 7 percent of Americans believe the government doesn't have enough power.
So the question arises, if not now, when?
Something, anything, has to be done to throw a wrench into the remorseless machinery of Obamacare, this hideous usurpation of civil society that is being implemented in stages, death of a thousand cuts-style.
It's not like Obamacare was enacted legitimately. Parliamentary rules were twisted beyond recognition to get this monstrosity through the Senate without meeting the normal numerical threshold for passage. It was passed by one party alone without any affirmative votes from the other party. This traditionally is not the way entitlements have been enacted. And, to boot, in the subsequent midterm election there was a wave of anti-Obamacare lawmakers elected. Democrats used fraud to get Obamacare enacted,
Benefits are being implemented early in the process. If people get used to the benefits they will support Obamacare. With each passing day and every new benefit, the people who get the benefits aren't going to want to give them up and they'll get awfully angry at anyone who tries to take them away. This is the animating principle of the welfare state. If you think it's hard to curb government spending now, just wait till the future when the program kicks into high gear.
We know with absolute certainty that the program, which is even more centralizing than Britain's disastrous national health care system, will fail, harming health outcomes, causing huge lineups and backlogs, stifling medical and pharmaceutical innovations, and bankrupting the up-till-now greatest nation on earth.
We are in uncharted territory and the normal rules Republicans like to honor simply don't apply here.
This is not just another law. This is an America-killer.
It's time to stop worrying about the Republican Party and go to war for America's sake.
Some may recall that during the 2012 presidential election, the progressive media accused GOP nominee Mitt Romney of wanting to "kill Big Bird" when he came out in opposition to funding public broadcasting services like PBS and NPR. Now, only months after the election, Obamacare is about to "kill Big Bird" in Pennsylvania.
One of The Keystone State's biggest tourist attractions is Sesame Place, a Sesame Street-themed amusement park just northeast of Philadelphia. First opened in 1980, Sesame Place employs about 1,650 people both full and part-time and brings in upwards to $75 million in economic activity to Pennsylvania's Bucks County.
However, Sesame Place parent company SeaWorld has announced that it will cut hours for part-time employees, likely to keep them under the 30-hour threshold set down in Obama’s healthcare law. SeaWorld will also cease offering company-based healthcare plans for part-time workers.
"This law is hurting real people in my district and around the country," Representative Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA) wrote in a letter to the Obama administration.
Philly Inquirer writer Julie Zauzmer reports that SeaWorld has confirmed that it has cut part-time worker's hours from 32 hours a week to 28. This will keep employees under the new Obamacare limit of what makes a "full-time worker."
In his letter, Fitzpatrick enclosed a memo from SeaWorld to
Therefore, SeaWorld has advised employees to seek their own healthcare solutions through the Obamacare exchanges or other private insurance.
Rep. Fitzpatrick, a signer of the House budget plan that would defund Obamacare, said, "I continue to believe it must be repealed and replaced with a sustainable solution that promotes affordable access to world-class health care for which our nation is recognized."
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2013/09/26/Obamacare-Discontinues-Big-Bird-s-Healthcare
Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry pressed White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on reports of employers dropping low cost health insurance plans Thursday in the White House press conference.
Henry cited a Wall Street Journal report which stated more than 1,200 firms will have to drop their low cost health insurance plans starting January 1st under Obamacare.
The nation’s largest provider of security guards, Securitas, is among those firms dropping coverage for 55,000 of their employees, according to the report.
Carney dismissed Henry’s question and the Wall Street Journal’s statistics as “anecdotes” which do not conform to what the White House press secretary termed the “overwhelming facts” that employers are by and large not eliminating health insurance:
Obamacare seeks to substantially reduce the ranks of uninsured.
Smaller businesses and healthy young people are seeing premiums jump—sometimes by 300 percent. The former are finding it cheaper to drop plans for full-time employees and pay a penalty starting in 2015.
Many healthy young people will calculate it is better to forego coverage and pay a modest penalty—after all, a 30-year old earning $50,000 really can’t easily afford $4000 for insurance, making a $500 penalty appear modest. Even some middle income families will find similar math compelling.
This will leave health insurance exchanges with too many sick people and too few healthy ones. This will drive up premiums further, compel more businesses and individuals to forgo insurance, and create enormous political pressure to increase federal insurance subsidies for low and middle income individuals and families.
Medicare’s actuaries expect health costs per person across the entire population to rise from about $9,200 in 2013 to about $14,700 in 2022. That’s about 20 percent of GDP, whereas Germany spends about 12 percent and Britain even less.
Large U.S. multinationals will find providing most employees with insurance too expensive if they are to compete in global markets and dump their employees into subsidized public exchanges.
It will still be impossible for the GOP to win 60 Senate seats on a platform to repeal Obamacare. Although many folks will be without coverage, too many voters will depend on federal subsidies or Medicaid and simply won’t vote to give up those entitlements.
The burden to find solutions will take congress to places that Republicans are very reluctant to go.
The German and other European systems accomplish lower costs and universal coverage by imposing tight controls on prices for services, drugs, and devices. Britain’s National Health Service doesn’t bother with insurance companies and claims forms—by eliminating insurance company overhead it accomplishes much lower costs than even the German system.
Even before Obamacare, federal and state governments, through Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs, paid more than 50 percent of U.S. health care bills. That was more than the 9 percent of GDP, and the amount Britain spends to accomplish universal coverage—without the additional $4,600 per person American businesses and individuals pony up.
Reducing U.S. doctors fees and drug and device prices down to German levels won’t be easy or likely possible, but politicians, providers, and businesses still providing health insurance will need a solution—likely a scapegoat.
Enter the insurance companies that have been screwing down doctor’s fees, hassling everyone with mindless paperwork, and paying executives like royalty.
The federal government could probably pay doctors, drug companies, and device manufactures pretty reasonably directly, and without the insurance company middle-men, through an American National Health Service.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/27/First-ObamaCare-Then-a-Single-Payer-System
This is rapidly becoming the preferred shorthand argument for why criticism of Obamacare is just so, so wrong. It also serves as the lead sentence of a larger claim that all attempts to overturn the Affordable Care Act are really symptoms of a kind of extremist right-wing lunacy.
For instance, here's Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who walked out of the painting "American Gothic" to deliver this homespun wisdom: "We're not going to bow to Tea Party anarchists who deny the mere fact that Obamacare is the law. We will not bow to Tea Party anarchists who refuse to accept that the Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare is constitutional."
Where to begin? For starters, I know a great many self-described members of the Tea Party, and I've yet to meet one who would not acknowledge -- admittedly with dismay -- that Obamacare is the law. Nor have I met one unwilling to concede that the Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare is constitutional. Though from my informal polling, I can report that most think the court's reasoning left much to be desired (logic, persuasiveness, consistency, etc.).
Lurking beneath such lazy rhetoric is a nasty psychological insinuation that there's something deranged not just about opposing Obamacare, but about being a conservative. This is an ancient smear, used to discredit conservatives in order to avoid debating them.
Reid is a dim and sallow man whose tin ear long ago started to rust. But it's worth pointing out that "anarchy" is not defined in any textbook or dictionary I can find as "the absence of Obamacare." While, yes, it's true, most "Mad Max," zombie and other post-apocalyptic films are set in worlds without Obamacare, that's really not the most salient factor.
More to the point, petitioning Congress to repeal a bad law through formal procedures is not the kind of behavior educated people normally associate with anarchism.
Indeed, the hypocrisy of liberals who find it somehow "extreme" for citizens to organize peacefully to overturn a law they consider bad and unjust is a marvel to behold. The Fugitive Slave Act was once the law of the land. So was the Defense of Marriage Act. Were those determined to overturn them anarchists?
On an almost daily basis, I get a fundraising e-mail from a Democrat or from liberal outfits begging for help to overturn Citizens United, which in case you hadn't heard is the law of the land. Why won't these anarchists and extremists accept that the Supreme Court has ruled? I cannot wait for the Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade, just to hear liberals announce, "Well, the fight is over. The Court has spoken."
Nearly the whole story of American liberalism is a story of dedicated ideologues seeking to overturn what they consider to be bad laws and replace them with good ones. Sometimes those efforts were laudable, as when they fought to overturn the doctrine of "separate but equal" (despite fierce opposition from Democrats). And sometimes they were lamentable, as when they routinely labor to overturn or deny school choice laws, consigning underprivileged children to horrible schools just to placate teachers unions. But when conservatives try to do the exact same thing, they can't simply be wrong, according to liberals. They must be demented extremists, anarchists and -- another favorite epithet these days -- nihilists.
The hypocrisy goes deeper though. Yes, Obamacare is the law of the land. But it is President Obama -- who is legally and constitutionally required to faithfully execute the law -- and not Republicans who has openly defied it. He has unilaterally and often with no statutory authority opted to waive and delay the parts of the Affordable Care Act that are politically inconvenient to him (or that his administration has been too incompetent to implement).
Obama has declared that in states setting up their own exchanges, no one will have to prove their income in order to sign up for subsidies. He is so desperate to get the subsidies rolling -- and hence, he hopes, buy support for the unpopular law -- he's willing to let people skip the part in the law where it says they have to prove they qualify for the goodies. He delayed the requirement for large businesses to comply with the law, because the initial turmoil of having millions kicked off their insurance plans was more than he could bear politically.
While this is closer to anarchy than anything the tea partiers have pushed for, anarchy still isn't the right word for it. Because President Obama still believes people should obey the law of the land -- when it pleases him, that is.
http://townhall.com/columnists/jonahgoldberg/2013/09/27/a-funny-definition-of-anarchy-n1710813/page/full
It's the Democrats who are guilty of wanting to shut down the government, mainly because historically government shutdowns have been blamed on Republicans. In reality, if government shuts down, it will be because the Democrat-led Senate refuses to pass - or Obama refuses to sign, - a resolution that doesn’t fund ObamaCare.
The full-fledged smear campaign launched by the President, his Pundits, and the fake grassroots organization Organizing For Action is a testament to Democrat extremism and the Chicago way. Progressive commentator Tamara Holder actually said on Hannity that John Boehner should be arrested for extortion. She got that line from the President himself. (It’s not actually a talking point, but rather a presidential meme, offered in hopes of getting invited to the White House Christmas party. Fingers crossed, Tamara!)
Here are just a few examples of Democrat extremism:
It's extreme to lie about the effects of ObamaCare as positive and saving people money when the American people know the opposite is true.
ObamaCare doesn't work. It's a scam. All reasonable and rational people know this. But President Obama and his team of liars don’t care.
ObamaCare raises insurance premiums. A recent report said it will cost the average family $7,450 more each year. That's a far cry from “bending the cost curve,” the ObamaCare tagline. When Nancy Pelosi says ObamaCare will have a positive effect on the economy, she’s lying.
(Funny enough, there's a new website called Things Nancy Pelosi Actually Said where you get to decide whether or not Nancy Pelosi said some most ridiculous quotes you've ever heard of. Here's a hint: Yes, she said it!)
It's extreme to blame lack of gun control laws - and the NRA - for the Navy Yard murders.
Gun control is a perennial progressive talking point. Blame a mass murder on the Second Amendment, and the President, his organized (read “paid”) communities, and mainstream media will trip over one another to support you.
Mental health is a more complex issue, with nuances and ambiguities. Progressives have no incentive to stray into that particular minefield. Moral and intellectual honesty don’t seem to factor into the liberal mindset.
We're witnessing a new level of Pavlovian response in America. Any time the word “gun" is uttered on MSNBC or CNN, the NRA-haters salivate. Even when the facts are false. Even when the gun (like an AR-15) has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
The greatest mudslingers, like Piers Morgan, and celebrity hacks, like Cher and now Henry Winkler (go, reverse mortgages, go!); all want to attack the NRA. President Obama of course, gets into the game by talking about gun control at an event to "honor" those who were killed at the Naval Yard. Just as he “honored” the Tucson victims with a campaign stop and free t-shirts.
They are cowards. Except Piers Morgan; he's a coward and a whore for ratings. They're cowards because they want to talk about guns when guns aren't the problem, and they don't want to talk about mental illness when mental illness is a problem that needs open and continued discussion.
And it's extreme to direct the IRS to be your own SS.
It's clear that Obama was using the IRS to attack organizations that opposed his agenda. People who disagreed with his domestic policy. People who actively worked to ensure that his policies, plans and procedures were never implemented. Tea Party, Patriot, Constitution, Soccer Mom - all targeted by Obama's IRS.
And how wonderfully convenient it is for Obama that Lois Lerner, at the center of the criminal action, is retiring. How wonderfully convenient for the president that she'll be able to just drift off into the sunset, the problem wrapped up in a pretty little bow. She'll take the heat, along with her taxpayer paid pension. With her retirement, allegedly, she will fall on the sword (undoubtedly, in their minds, wielded by Darrell Issa, who chairs the House Oversight Committee and had the chutzpah to question Lerner’s involvement). Now, the Left will proclaim, the IRS has been cleansed if not cleared. Now all will be back to normal.
In Mafia parlance, it's called having a heart attack. It's when some older guy decides he needs out of the family business, has a "heart attack" during a vacation to Florida and then never returns. That's Lois Lerner.
It turns out that Barack Obama thinks he's Don Corleone. The difference is Don Corleone had a code. Don Corleone had honor.
Three different examples of extremism from one political party. It's about time Democrats realized that if they want to know the extremists in their midst all they have to do is look in the mirror. Or watch Piers Morgan.
http://townhall.com/columnists/tonykatz/2013/09/27/obama-and-the-extremists-n1710305/page/full
Residents of Denver’s wealthiest neighborhoods claim that a
government worker went door-to-door in their neighborhoods giving away
trees, according to KCNC.
The 4,000 trees were part of a stimulus effort aimed at jump-starting
the economy. “This fella said, ‘How would you like to have a tree in
your yard?’ And I said, ‘Really?,’ “ said John Backlund, who lives in
Denver’s Cherry Creek North neighborhood in a home appraised at more
than $700,000.
The tree program had no income guidelines, meaning that trees were planted everywhere.City forester Rob David admitted, “It’s open to anybody. It’s basically if you live in Denver, you want to reduce your energy costs, you want to have a tree that can raise your property value, go to the web page to sign up.”
The program spent about $600,000 in funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment act. They used this money to buy and plant the trees. The program reasoned that the government funds jump-start the economy by creating jobs for those who planted the trees. Each tree cost about $150. Davis cited energy savings (fully grown trees will provide shade and cut energy costs) as a long-term benefit. The program has since closed and no more trees will be planted using stimulus funds.
http://freebeacon.com/federal-stimulus-funds-paid-for-trees-in-wealthy-neighborhoods/
Judiciary Rep. Bob Goodlatte has come out of the closet as an amnesty supporter. Of course, Goodlatte wants legalization, not citizenship–or rather, not a “special path” to citizenship. But he would apparently still legalize more or less the entire illegal immigrant population. Traditional amnesty advocates would clearly jump to accept the plan. …
Goodlatte seems to be hoping he can bring along conservatives by claiming his proposal isn’t as bad as the Senate’s massive bill (and, implicitly, by suggesting it would be better for Republicans by delaying the day when all those newly legalized immigrants could register and vote Democratic). Never mind that it’s the worst-of-both-worlds for the GOPs–actually, the worst of three worlds: It (1) creates a huge incentive for further illegal immigration–’Look, they got to stay legally’–while (2) expanding the Democratic electorate in the long run while (3) giving Dems an issue (the denial of citizenship) to use to keep winning the Latino vote in the short run. …
It’s pretty clear that Speaker Boehner approves the Goodlatte initiative, as my colleague Neil Munro suggests.*** Whether Boehner is pushing this lowest-common-denominator amnesty because he really wants to pass a bill or because he merely wants to make a show for Latinos and lobbyists to demonstrate that he’s trying isn’t clear. Here’s hoping it’s Kabuki. Even if it isn’t, of course, a majority of Boehner’s caucus might not be fooled. …
P.S.: The final hurdle to a total leadership sellout on amnesty would require Goodlatte to fudge on his earlier argument that “the border has to be secure” before any legalization. His recent rephrasing of the demand–that.enforcement must only “be up and operating”– is
a good first step. (You could interpret that phrase to only require
that, say, a new E-Verify system be operating in a few companies.) Suggested further fudge: Require only a “pathway to a secure border”! Hey, nobody will notice. …
__
** –Newly legalized illegals could still take advantage of non-special paths, like getting married to a U.S.
citizen, having an employer sponsor them or being sponsored bytheir anchor babies a U.S. citizen child.
***–It was Boehner, remember, who made Goodlatte chairman.
Students at a Southaven, Miss. middle school were educated in the “Big Pimpin’” thug life of Jay-Z, and the school district can’t imagine why anyone would object to lessons on reading, writing and rapping.
Sixth graders at Desoto Central Middle School spent three days learning about one of the most successful hip-hop artists and entrepreneurs in the nation. They were also tested on their knowledge about Jay-Z’s “resilience.”
A parent, who had a son in the English class, reached out to me – and she’s fired up. The mad mom asked to remain anonymous over fears of repercussions. I was able to verify her claims and have agreed to provide anonymity.
“One of the songs listed on the paper that was brought home was ‘Big Pimpin’,” she told me. “Another song talked about thug life. My child was getting an education about thug life.”
She could not believe that her child was learning about a man who sings songs that degrade women and glorify the thug life.
“When he pulled out the paper in his backpack in the car, I called my husband right then,” she told me. “I was furious. We talked about it until late that night. My husband was about to blow his top.”
I called the principal to get his side of the story, but he said he
didn’t want to talk to me. Instead, he referred me to the
superintendent’s office.
No answer.
Eventually, I was told to contact their official spokesperson.
The spokesperson told me she could not understand why Fox News was interested in a simple classroom assignment. She said she would send an official statement but declined to go on the record. I’m still waiting for the “official statement.”
The child’s parents had a similar experience. They contacted the school – hoping to get some answers. Instead, they got the brush-off.
“They made it sound like it was no big deal,” the mom told me. “They said the point of the assignment was because Jay-Z is successful.”
She said one school official even chimed in that the rapper owns a professional sports team.
“I asked him what that had to do with anything,” the parent told me. “Let’s talk about somebody that is a success that has done good things – not thug life things.”
Using the school’s logic, the mom wondered why the school doesn’t assign lessons on Hugh Hefner or Larry Flynt.
“Either way, it’s all the same,” she said.
She said the same school official told her that no matter who they assigned the kids to learn about – that person would have something negative in their past.
“We are conservative,” she said. “We are Christian. And this was brought into my house. That’s why I was so furious. It was a moral issue.”
The little boy’s father was so livid that the school brushed off his wife he decided to write a letter to the school district:
“The page sent home was an eye-opener and I refuse to have my son subjected to today’s version on what should be accepted as okay and normal without knowing the facts,” the dad wrote.
“The facts are this page represented this thug in a positive way and calls him successful. Success to me doesn’t mean demeaning women, glorifying drugs and violence and flaunting money. Success should be about living decent and having respect for themselves and others.”
And to put an exclamation point on his reasoning, the dad included the lyrics to a Jay-Z song. I’d love to share some of those lyrics with you – but I’ve got standards. Let’s just say, Jay-Z has an affinity for the F-word and the B-word.
Heather Fox is not surprised to learn about the three-day Jay-Z lecture at the middle school. She runs a Facebook page called “Desoto County Reform
” – an online gathering place for parents concerned about the school district.
“Hopefully we can address the issues that most people are afraid to address out loud,” she told me. “The school district is not happy about our website.”
“We know there are students at the high school who’ve had to read explicit books,” she said. “And now we know about the Jay-Z class.”
Fox said the sixth grade assignment was not age appropriate.
“A lot of the kids don’t know anything about the things that surround Jay-Z – it’s something that a lot of parents are concerned about,” Fox said. “Why make them exposed to it at such an early age?”
It’s really unfortunate that the school superintendent won’t talk to me about the assignment. I’d love to hear his side of the story. But the school district’s silence makes me a bit suspicious.
If there’s nothing wrong with the assignment, what’s there to hide? Why brush off a concerned parent who has a valid concern about what her child is learning?
The mom told me the school made a “bad, bad choice” – and now she and her husband are about to make a choice.
“It really makes me want to either send him to a private school or homes school,” she said.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/09/25/sixth-graders-learn-about-jay-z-big-pimpin/?intcmp=latestnews
It's elementary. Public education bureaucrats do the darnedest, stupidest things. Clever kids are ready, willing and able to capitalize on that costly stupidity in a heartbeat. Within days of rolling out a $30 million Common Core iPad program in Los Angeles, for example, students had already hacked the supposedly secure devices.
The Los Angeles Times reports that the disastrous initiative has been suspended after students from at least three different high schools breached the devices' security protections. It was a piece of iCake. The young saboteurs gleefully advertised their method to their friends, fellow Twitter and Facebook users, and the media.
"Roosevelt students matter-of-factly explained their ingenuity Tuesday outside school," the L.A. Times told readers. "The trick, they said, was to delete their personal profile information. With the profile deleted, a student was free to surf. Soon they were sending tweets, socializing on Facebook and streaming music through Pandora, they said."
Goodbye, Common Core apps. Hello, Minecraft! The district spent untold millions of taxpayer dollars on iPad "training," but many teachers still couldn't figure out how to sync up the souped-up tablets for academic use in the classroom at the start of the school year. In less than a week, though, teens were able to circumvent the locks for fun and playtime at home faster than you can type "LOL."
The Los Angeles Unified School District school board shoveled $30 million to Pearson for the leaky iPads, but nobody foresaw this glaring security weakness. Where's the fiscal accountability? Where's the adult responsibility?
Remember: These "reform" programs are not about stimulating brain cells. It's all about stimulating the Benjamins. Pearson is the multibillion-dollar educational publishing and testing conglomerate at the center of the federally driven, taxpayer-funded "standards" racket. For Pearson, ed publishing and ed computing are a $6 billion global business. For nearly a decade, the company has plotted a digital learning takeover.
According to industry estimates, Pearson's digital learning products are used by more than 25 million people in North America. Common Core has been a convenient new catalyst for getting the next generation of consumers hooked.
As I reported last week, Pearson sealed its whopping $30 million taxpayer-subsidized deal to supply the city's schools with 45,000 iPads pre-loaded with Pearson Common Core curriculum apps earlier this summer. I repeat: That works out to $678 per glorified e-textbook, $200 more than the standard cost, with scant evidence that any of this software and hardware will do anything to improve the achievement bottom line.
The abysmal history of federal investments in ed technology is as crystal-clear as an HD touch screen. Take President Obama's $49 million technology initiative for the Detroit public schools, funded by federal stimulus money. The city is bankrupt. The urban school system is overrun by corruption, violence and incompetence. The federal ed tech program showered some 40,000 new (foreign-made) ASUS netbook computers on Detroit, plus thousands of printers, scanners and desktop computers to teachers and kids from early childhood through 12th grade.
The district budget is $300 million in the hole. Meanwhile, the board slashed special education buses and shut down 70 schools. Have the devices helped students "compete in a global marketplace," as champions of the program promised? SAT scores in Detroit remain "stagnant." High school graduation rates are rock-bottom. According to the most recent data, just 3 percent of Detroit fourth-graders are proficient in math; 6 percent are proficient in reading. In 2010, 11 people were charged in connection with a lucrative fencing scheme involving hundreds of DPS computers, which they stole and sold on eBay or peddled to friends and family.
Nothing has changed. As I've reported previously, in both urban and rural school districts, large and small, these technology infusions have turned out to be gesture-driven boondoggles and political payoffs that squander precious educational resources -- with few, if any, measurable academic benefits. The Obama administration plans to dig even deeper into the FedEdTech hole through a furtive $5 billion "fee" on cellphone users for "ConnectEd" -- another progressive, FedEd boondoggle to subsidize high-speed Internet installation throughout the U.S.
Like districts across the country, Detroit and Los Angeles are infatuated with fancy electronic devices, glossy new textbooks and DVDs "aligned" to top-down Common Core "standards, and other whiz-bang gadgetry to stimulate "21st century learning." Education's Shiny Toy Syndrome is the result of a toxic alliance between big government and big business. In the words of Robert Small, the Maryland dad who was arrested last week for daring to raise questions about Common Core: "Parents, you need to question these people. ... Don't stand for this!"
http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2013/09/27/educations-shiny-toy-syndrome-n1710872/page/full
“In Cuba many people spent long hours with me, helped open doors I could not have pushed through myself, and offered friendship and warmth to myself during research trips to the island…Elsa Montero and Jose Gomez Abad championed this project,” Julia Sweig wrote in the acknowledgements of her 2002 book, “Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground.”
Sweig serves as the Latin American Studies director for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a high-powered think tank that includes the cream of U.S. foreign policy makers.
Montero and Abad, posing as U.N. diplomats, were terrorists who plotted to blow up Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Grand Central Terminal with 500 kilos of TNT on Black Friday in 1962.
Humberto Fontavo, author of “The Longest Romance: The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro” (Encounter Books), identifies Sweig as a foreign agent of influence and cites testimony from retired Lt. Col. Chris Simmons, a former intelligence officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency, who foiled Castro-backed plots.
Fontavo also points to Sweig’s longstanding pro-Castro ties.
Sweig has worked on ending the embargo against the Cuban regime since 1988, when she worked for the Institute for Policy Studies and arranged a tour of Cuba jails. While many opponents of the Castro dictatorship support ending the embargo as a way of undermining Castro’s monopoly on the Cuban economy, Sweig takes it further. She advocates removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and having the United States work “together” with the regime to solve problems such as “environmental and security challenges, as well as the fate of high-profile nationals serving time in U.S. and Cuban prisons.”
Sweig also worked for the left-wing Arca Foundation.
The Arca Foundation was founded by a tobacco heiress Nancy Susan Reynolds Bagley in 1952 with a stated intention “to better the lot of humankind.” The grant-making institution was later run by Reynolds’ son, the late socialite, Democratic fundraiser and ambassador’s spouse Smith Bagley, who gave to pro-Castro groups such as Pastors for Peace ($10,000 in 1999), Global Exchange ($50,000 in 1999), and the TransAfrica Forum ($100,000). In 1999 alone, Arca gave to over 19 pro-Castro groups.
In 2000, shortly after Elián González was seized in a SWAT raid in Miami, Smith Bagley treated the six-year-old boy and his Castro-loyalist father Juan Miguel González Quintana to a smoked salmon dinner at his home in Georgetown.
“The Arca Foundation is the pro-Castro lobby’s sugar daddy,” Jose Cardenas, Washington spokesman for the Cuban American National Foundation, told the Washington Times at the time. “Arca is a walkup window for free checks passed out to any and all comers with an ideological ax to grind against U.S. policy on Cuba.”
The Arca Foundation has also given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Council on Foreign Relations, where Sweig now works.
The 91-year-old Council on Foreign Relations boasts $439 million in total assets, according to its 2012 annual report, and 4,681 members, most of them in the New York/District of Columbia corridor. Current members include Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker. Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski is a member, as are two of his children, Ambassador to Sweden Mark Brzezinski and MSNBC hostess Mika Brzezinski. The CFR is generally considered the most influential foreign policy think tank in the United States.
Fontova contends that Sweig’s CFR clout and longstanding relationship with the Cuban dictator allowed her to help Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Magazine in 2010 get the first Fidel Castro interview after his brush with death in 2006.
“We shook hands,” Goldberg wrote about the meeting with Fidel Castro. “Then he greeted Julia warmly. They (Castro and Sweig) have known each other for more than 20 years.”
Sweig built her friendship with Castro’s regime over decades.
“Between 1995 and 1997 the Cuba Council of State, the highest governmental body in Cuba, permitted Julia Sweig unprecedented access to the archival holdings of the Office of Historic Affairs,” wrote the abstract of Sweig’s pro-Che Guevara, pro-Castro dissertation, “The Cuban Insurrection Declassified: Strategy and Politics in Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, 1957-1959.”
Fontavo points out that Sweig shares another view consistent with Castro’s communist Cuba: strong opposition to the right of self-defense enshrined in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
On August 2, the Council on Foreign Relations released a “Policy Innovation Memorandum” authored by Sweig with the title “A Strategy to Reduce Gun Trafficking and Violence in the Americas.” Sweig blames Americans’ access to guns for violence in Latin America.
“The flow of high-powered weaponry from the United States to Latin America and the Caribbean exacerbates soaring rates of gun-related violence in the region,” Sweig asserts in her memo.
“Although recent federal gun control measures have run aground on congressional opposition,” Sweig writes, “though the Senate rejected measures to expand background checks on firearms sales, reinstate a federal assault-weapons ban, and make straw purchasing a federal crime, the Obama administration can still take executive action to reduce the availability and trafficking of assault weapons and ammunition in the Americas.”
Sweig did not return a phone call or email requests for comment.
http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/26/nations-most-influential-foreign-policy-think-tank-employs-pro-terrorist-castro-follower/#ixzz2g6ocb400
It matters next to nothing if current Republican efforts succeed in immediately defunding Obamacare. That's because this is just the opening round of what promises to be a protracted struggle to restore sanity to the American health care system. A temporary defeat at one juncture on the road to repeal isn't really a defeat at all, provided that it serves a larger purpose. Obamacare, after all, wasn't enacted in a day and it won't be repealed in a day.
Both the Ted Cruz talkathon and the brinksmanship over the stop-gap government funding measure (called a "continuing resolution") epitomize purposeful political theater.
Ignore the blatherskite spewing from GOP establishment talking heads like Karl Rove: there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing political things strictly for public consumption even when there is a less-than-direct or less-than-obvious relationship between the things done and the desired results. It's not somehow dishonest or dishonorable to do this, contrary to the protestations of the pompous pundits who suck up air in the Washington echo chamber.
In this age of instant everything, we tend to forget that politics isn't always about concrete, instantaneous results. It's about symbolism. It's about focusing the attention of people in order to educate them. It's about framing the issues properly, telling stories, and planting memes in public spaces, allowing them to spread like dandelion seeds on a passing breeze. That's how Americans were brainwashed into believing that Republicans are the "party of the rich" and gazillionaire George Soros's Democrats are the caring party of compassion.
But intellect by itself doesn't always serve champions of limited government well. Sometimes showmanship and connecting with people on an emotional level is required to make good things happen. All good salespeople understand this. Andrew Breitbart understood this. James O'Keefe III and Hannah Giles understand this. Republicans used to understand this.
Although the master of political theater, Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky, was an irredeemably anti-American Marxist with a taste for political violence, he wasn't wrong about everything. He believed in using public spectacles to generate the friction that is a precondition of change. "Action comes from keeping the heat on," Alinsky wrote in his opus. "No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough."
Which brings us to the dramaturgist of the hour, Ted Cruz. As enemies from the media and both political parties circled over him, the Leonidas-like Cruz showed his gun-shy Republican colleagues how it's done. In a lonely de facto filibuster, the junior senator from Texas spoke in the United States Senate for more than 21 hours in a long-shot bid to derail Obamacare.
It was a wonderful civic moment. The iron-bladdered lawmaker provided the nation with what amounted to a highly informative infomercial on C-SPAN that detailed how the incipient entitlement program is needlessly boosting health care insurance premiums, expanding the ranks of the uninsured, and generating unemployment, headaches for small businesses, and misery in general across America. The Cruz talkathon was public service at its finest.
In congressional Republicans' long post-War World Two exile from majority status, they rarely rose up to challenge the powers that be, but when they did it was a thing of beauty.
There was the bitterly contested 1984 election in Indiana's eighth congressional district in which House Democrats stole the election in broad daylight. After Indiana certified his Republican challenger, Rick McIntyre, as the winner, months and many recounts later the Democrat-controlled House seated Frank McCloskey.
Famed psephologist Charlie Cook bemoans the seating of McCloskey as the starting point of a downward spiral in civility in national politics. "At that point Republicans had been in the minority for 30 years and they were pretty docile ... living off the crumbs that the Democratic majority threw them."
The seating of McCloskey in 1985 "so enraged House Republicans and even some of the most mild-mannered, most moderate members," that they began "supporting Newt Gingrich and his rise to take over the Republican apparatus."
At the time the House Minority Leader was Bob Michel, a milquetoast cat-herder appreciated by Democrats and the media because he was so ineffectual. But the shabby treatment afforded McIntyre galvanized Republicans. They walked out in unison to protest the seating of McCloskey. This solidarity of brothers-in-arms was political theater. It was also the beginning of a renewed, ultimately successful GOP effort to recapture the House.
Naturally, Cook sees the walkout as a bad thing. The Indiana-8 fight "became so partisan and so bitter between the two sides ... you started seeing a bunch of House members coming over to the Senate and it was almost like a contagion coming over from one body into another body," said Cook.
"It took a long time before the bitterness that was in the House moved over to the Senate," he said, but "now it's in the Senate."
Given Cook's mushy liberal leanings --he's a former Democratic Senate aide-- he can be forgiven for calling Republicans' pre-Indiana-8 spinelessness "civility."
This so-called civility, which in this case is the same as docility, turns out to be the enemy of limited government. Yet many Republicans today share Cook's foolish civility fetish.
Nothing in recent memory has brought out this losing mindset among Republicans more than conversations about how the GOP should fight Obamacare, assuming, of course, that GOPers actually do want to fight Obamacare.
The inordinate fear of shutting down the federal government or of being blamed for the shutdown of the federal government haunts Republican strategists. Discussions of strategy and tactics between these tormented souls nowadays are like episodes of Seinfeld, filled with invented, silly rules and extended debate about niceties and etiquette.
Some Obamacare opponents on the GOP side say defunding would be impossible even if Obamacare opponents had the votes because Obamacare is supported by so-called mandatory spending.
Contrary to commonly received Washington wisdom, anything funded by the government can be defunded -- as long as the Constitution continues to contain an Appropriations Clause that gives Congress the power of the purse. Some have pointed out that funds have already been appropriated to implement Obamacare. Those funds can be rescinded. The offices already created can be plowed under and the ground sown with salt.
They also ignore the fact that Republicans won the shutdown battle with President Clinton in 1995. Contrary to media propaganda, the Republicans in that glorious conflict got largely what they wanted and did fine in the following congressional election, even gaining Senate seats. (Republicans didn't win the presidency in 1996, of course, but that's because they nominated the king of the RINOs, Bob Dole, as their candidate.)
But facts count for little because there is so much irrational fear out there right now in GOP circles. Republicans are a party scared of its own shadow. They make up rationalizations to justify passivity. That's no way to win.
Republicans who counsel going along to get along say the GOP needs to win congressional majorities in 2014 and 2016 in order to kill Obamacare properly.
But they have no answer to this question: how exactly are Republicans going to get these majorities in 2014 and 2016 to repeal Obamacare if they don't honor the solemn vow they made to take on Obamacare? Failing to at least try to sabotage the program guarantees a segment of conservative voters will stay home on Election Day.
Right now the public is receptive to anti-Obamacare overtures. A new Rasmussen poll says a bare majority of Americans is now okay with at least a "partial" government shutdown.
An ABC/Washington Post poll shows 9 of 10 Americans don't believe the federal government, their state governments, and the health insurance industry are fully prepared to implement Obamacare. Headline after headline brings news of government bureaucracy's inability to get health insurance exchanges up and running.
In 16 ABC/Post polls since August 2009, Obamacare has never received majority support and 6 in 10 Americans now believe the federal government has too much power, according to Gallup polls. A mere 7 percent of Americans believe the government doesn't have enough power.
So the question arises, if not now, when?
Something, anything, has to be done to throw a wrench into the remorseless machinery of Obamacare, this hideous usurpation of civil society that is being implemented in stages, death of a thousand cuts-style.
It's not like Obamacare was enacted legitimately. Parliamentary rules were twisted beyond recognition to get this monstrosity through the Senate without meeting the normal numerical threshold for passage. It was passed by one party alone without any affirmative votes from the other party. This traditionally is not the way entitlements have been enacted. And, to boot, in the subsequent midterm election there was a wave of anti-Obamacare lawmakers elected. Democrats used fraud to get Obamacare enacted,
Benefits are being implemented early in the process. If people get used to the benefits they will support Obamacare. With each passing day and every new benefit, the people who get the benefits aren't going to want to give them up and they'll get awfully angry at anyone who tries to take them away. This is the animating principle of the welfare state. If you think it's hard to curb government spending now, just wait till the future when the program kicks into high gear.
We know with absolute certainty that the program, which is even more centralizing than Britain's disastrous national health care system, will fail, harming health outcomes, causing huge lineups and backlogs, stifling medical and pharmaceutical innovations, and bankrupting the up-till-now greatest nation on earth.
We are in uncharted territory and the normal rules Republicans like to honor simply don't apply here.
This is not just another law. This is an America-killer.
It's time to stop worrying about the Republican Party and go to war for America's sake.
Big Bird Loses Healthcare Under Obamacare Rules
Millions of Americans are losing their work-provided healthcare insurance plans all across the country as the costs, fees, and fines of Obamacare become clear. Now, even Big Bird of Sesame Street fame has lost his healthcare insurance thanks to the President's take over of the healthcare system.Some may recall that during the 2012 presidential election, the progressive media accused GOP nominee Mitt Romney of wanting to "kill Big Bird" when he came out in opposition to funding public broadcasting services like PBS and NPR. Now, only months after the election, Obamacare is about to "kill Big Bird" in Pennsylvania.
One of The Keystone State's biggest tourist attractions is Sesame Place, a Sesame Street-themed amusement park just northeast of Philadelphia. First opened in 1980, Sesame Place employs about 1,650 people both full and part-time and brings in upwards to $75 million in economic activity to Pennsylvania's Bucks County.
However, Sesame Place parent company SeaWorld has announced that it will cut hours for part-time employees, likely to keep them under the 30-hour threshold set down in Obama’s healthcare law. SeaWorld will also cease offering company-based healthcare plans for part-time workers.
"This law is hurting real people in my district and around the country," Representative Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA) wrote in a letter to the Obama administration.
Philly Inquirer writer Julie Zauzmer reports that SeaWorld has confirmed that it has cut part-time worker's hours from 32 hours a week to 28. This will keep employees under the new Obamacare limit of what makes a "full-time worker."
In his letter, Fitzpatrick enclosed a memo from SeaWorld to
Therefore, SeaWorld has advised employees to seek their own healthcare solutions through the Obamacare exchanges or other private insurance.
Rep. Fitzpatrick, a signer of the House budget plan that would defund Obamacare, said, "I continue to believe it must be repealed and replaced with a sustainable solution that promotes affordable access to world-class health care for which our nation is recognized."
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2013/09/26/Obamacare-Discontinues-Big-Bird-s-Healthcare
Carney: Reports of Employers Dropping Health Care Coverage Just ‘Anecdotes’
'There's a difference between anecdotes and data'
Henry cited a Wall Street Journal report which stated more than 1,200 firms will have to drop their low cost health insurance plans starting January 1st under Obamacare.
The nation’s largest provider of security guards, Securitas, is among those firms dropping coverage for 55,000 of their employees, according to the report.
Carney dismissed Henry’s question and the Wall Street Journal’s statistics as “anecdotes” which do not conform to what the White House press secretary termed the “overwhelming facts” that employers are by and large not eliminating health insurance:
ED HENRY: So maybe Ted Cruz should
acknowledge the good things there, but why won’t you acknowledge, for
example, the one I asked before, 55,000 employees who had health care
through their employer –
JAY CARNEY: Ed –
HENRY: Did you not say a couple of times that — (inaudible) –
CARNEY: Come on, Ed. Really, I feel like we’re doing this sideshow thing.
HENRY: I’m sorry — no, no, no — (inaudible) — you get to keep your health care?
CARNEY: Absolutely, if you have –
HENRY: OK, what about those 55,000 people?
CARNEY: If you have — again, you can come up with anecdotes and — but the –
HENRY: That’s what — (inaudible) –
CARNEY: — but the overwhelming facts
dispute this — that this — that employers are shedding employees from
insurance plans because of the Affordable Care Act or that they’re
moving into — moving them into part-time status because of this. Again,
you can — you can ignore the data and come — and present competing
anecdotes. And again, I’m not diminishing –
HENRY: (Off mic) — The Wall Street Journal yesterday, 55,000 people are moving — that’s the data.
CARNEY: Ed, please. We can — no, that’s an anecdote.
HENRY: (Off mic) — data and — (inaudible) –
CARNEY: There’s a difference between anecdotes and data.
http://freebeacon.com/carney-reports-of-employers-dropping-health-care-coverage-just-anecdotes/
First Obamacare, Then a Single Payer System
Republicans must live with Obamacare. They have few prospects for electing 60 senators needed to repeal the law, and unless they work to make it more palatable—something they have few ideas to accomplish—the nation is headed for socialized medicine.Obamacare seeks to substantially reduce the ranks of uninsured.
- It requires businesses with more than 50 employees to provide health insurance.
- Requires persons without employer insurance to purchase coverage, with federal subsidies for low and moderate income households.
- Expands Medicaid eligibility to many families with incomes up to 133 percent of the poverty line.
- Establishes government-run exchanges to facilitate purchase of health insurance.
- Imposes minimum coverage standards for private policies.
- Requires that insurance companies not turn away individuals with pre-existing conditions or charge them more than healthy policyholders.
Smaller businesses and healthy young people are seeing premiums jump—sometimes by 300 percent. The former are finding it cheaper to drop plans for full-time employees and pay a penalty starting in 2015.
Many healthy young people will calculate it is better to forego coverage and pay a modest penalty—after all, a 30-year old earning $50,000 really can’t easily afford $4000 for insurance, making a $500 penalty appear modest. Even some middle income families will find similar math compelling.
This will leave health insurance exchanges with too many sick people and too few healthy ones. This will drive up premiums further, compel more businesses and individuals to forgo insurance, and create enormous political pressure to increase federal insurance subsidies for low and middle income individuals and families.
Medicare’s actuaries expect health costs per person across the entire population to rise from about $9,200 in 2013 to about $14,700 in 2022. That’s about 20 percent of GDP, whereas Germany spends about 12 percent and Britain even less.
Large U.S. multinationals will find providing most employees with insurance too expensive if they are to compete in global markets and dump their employees into subsidized public exchanges.
It will still be impossible for the GOP to win 60 Senate seats on a platform to repeal Obamacare. Although many folks will be without coverage, too many voters will depend on federal subsidies or Medicaid and simply won’t vote to give up those entitlements.
The burden to find solutions will take congress to places that Republicans are very reluctant to go.
The German and other European systems accomplish lower costs and universal coverage by imposing tight controls on prices for services, drugs, and devices. Britain’s National Health Service doesn’t bother with insurance companies and claims forms—by eliminating insurance company overhead it accomplishes much lower costs than even the German system.
Even before Obamacare, federal and state governments, through Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs, paid more than 50 percent of U.S. health care bills. That was more than the 9 percent of GDP, and the amount Britain spends to accomplish universal coverage—without the additional $4,600 per person American businesses and individuals pony up.
Reducing U.S. doctors fees and drug and device prices down to German levels won’t be easy or likely possible, but politicians, providers, and businesses still providing health insurance will need a solution—likely a scapegoat.
Enter the insurance companies that have been screwing down doctor’s fees, hassling everyone with mindless paperwork, and paying executives like royalty.
The federal government could probably pay doctors, drug companies, and device manufactures pretty reasonably directly, and without the insurance company middle-men, through an American National Health Service.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/27/First-ObamaCare-Then-a-Single-Payer-System
A Funny Definition of Anarchy
"It's the law of the land."This is rapidly becoming the preferred shorthand argument for why criticism of Obamacare is just so, so wrong. It also serves as the lead sentence of a larger claim that all attempts to overturn the Affordable Care Act are really symptoms of a kind of extremist right-wing lunacy.
For instance, here's Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who walked out of the painting "American Gothic" to deliver this homespun wisdom: "We're not going to bow to Tea Party anarchists who deny the mere fact that Obamacare is the law. We will not bow to Tea Party anarchists who refuse to accept that the Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare is constitutional."
Where to begin? For starters, I know a great many self-described members of the Tea Party, and I've yet to meet one who would not acknowledge -- admittedly with dismay -- that Obamacare is the law. Nor have I met one unwilling to concede that the Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare is constitutional. Though from my informal polling, I can report that most think the court's reasoning left much to be desired (logic, persuasiveness, consistency, etc.).
Lurking beneath such lazy rhetoric is a nasty psychological insinuation that there's something deranged not just about opposing Obamacare, but about being a conservative. This is an ancient smear, used to discredit conservatives in order to avoid debating them.
Reid is a dim and sallow man whose tin ear long ago started to rust. But it's worth pointing out that "anarchy" is not defined in any textbook or dictionary I can find as "the absence of Obamacare." While, yes, it's true, most "Mad Max," zombie and other post-apocalyptic films are set in worlds without Obamacare, that's really not the most salient factor.
More to the point, petitioning Congress to repeal a bad law through formal procedures is not the kind of behavior educated people normally associate with anarchism.
Indeed, the hypocrisy of liberals who find it somehow "extreme" for citizens to organize peacefully to overturn a law they consider bad and unjust is a marvel to behold. The Fugitive Slave Act was once the law of the land. So was the Defense of Marriage Act. Were those determined to overturn them anarchists?
On an almost daily basis, I get a fundraising e-mail from a Democrat or from liberal outfits begging for help to overturn Citizens United, which in case you hadn't heard is the law of the land. Why won't these anarchists and extremists accept that the Supreme Court has ruled? I cannot wait for the Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade, just to hear liberals announce, "Well, the fight is over. The Court has spoken."
Nearly the whole story of American liberalism is a story of dedicated ideologues seeking to overturn what they consider to be bad laws and replace them with good ones. Sometimes those efforts were laudable, as when they fought to overturn the doctrine of "separate but equal" (despite fierce opposition from Democrats). And sometimes they were lamentable, as when they routinely labor to overturn or deny school choice laws, consigning underprivileged children to horrible schools just to placate teachers unions. But when conservatives try to do the exact same thing, they can't simply be wrong, according to liberals. They must be demented extremists, anarchists and -- another favorite epithet these days -- nihilists.
The hypocrisy goes deeper though. Yes, Obamacare is the law of the land. But it is President Obama -- who is legally and constitutionally required to faithfully execute the law -- and not Republicans who has openly defied it. He has unilaterally and often with no statutory authority opted to waive and delay the parts of the Affordable Care Act that are politically inconvenient to him (or that his administration has been too incompetent to implement).
Obama has declared that in states setting up their own exchanges, no one will have to prove their income in order to sign up for subsidies. He is so desperate to get the subsidies rolling -- and hence, he hopes, buy support for the unpopular law -- he's willing to let people skip the part in the law where it says they have to prove they qualify for the goodies. He delayed the requirement for large businesses to comply with the law, because the initial turmoil of having millions kicked off their insurance plans was more than he could bear politically.
While this is closer to anarchy than anything the tea partiers have pushed for, anarchy still isn't the right word for it. Because President Obama still believes people should obey the law of the land -- when it pleases him, that is.
http://townhall.com/columnists/jonahgoldberg/2013/09/27/a-funny-definition-of-anarchy-n1710813/page/full
Obama and the Extremists
Democrats and their PR firm MSNBC are calling the Republicans extremists. Why? Because the majority-GOP House passed a continuing resolution that would keep government funded through the end of the year while defunding ObamaCare. Democrats are equating the CR with “trying to shut down the federal government.” If Democrats want to see extremists, they need only look in the mirror.It's the Democrats who are guilty of wanting to shut down the government, mainly because historically government shutdowns have been blamed on Republicans. In reality, if government shuts down, it will be because the Democrat-led Senate refuses to pass - or Obama refuses to sign, - a resolution that doesn’t fund ObamaCare.
The full-fledged smear campaign launched by the President, his Pundits, and the fake grassroots organization Organizing For Action is a testament to Democrat extremism and the Chicago way. Progressive commentator Tamara Holder actually said on Hannity that John Boehner should be arrested for extortion. She got that line from the President himself. (It’s not actually a talking point, but rather a presidential meme, offered in hopes of getting invited to the White House Christmas party. Fingers crossed, Tamara!)
Here are just a few examples of Democrat extremism:
It's extreme to lie about the effects of ObamaCare as positive and saving people money when the American people know the opposite is true.
ObamaCare doesn't work. It's a scam. All reasonable and rational people know this. But President Obama and his team of liars don’t care.
ObamaCare raises insurance premiums. A recent report said it will cost the average family $7,450 more each year. That's a far cry from “bending the cost curve,” the ObamaCare tagline. When Nancy Pelosi says ObamaCare will have a positive effect on the economy, she’s lying.
(Funny enough, there's a new website called Things Nancy Pelosi Actually Said where you get to decide whether or not Nancy Pelosi said some most ridiculous quotes you've ever heard of. Here's a hint: Yes, she said it!)
It's extreme to blame lack of gun control laws - and the NRA - for the Navy Yard murders.
Gun control is a perennial progressive talking point. Blame a mass murder on the Second Amendment, and the President, his organized (read “paid”) communities, and mainstream media will trip over one another to support you.
Mental health is a more complex issue, with nuances and ambiguities. Progressives have no incentive to stray into that particular minefield. Moral and intellectual honesty don’t seem to factor into the liberal mindset.
We're witnessing a new level of Pavlovian response in America. Any time the word “gun" is uttered on MSNBC or CNN, the NRA-haters salivate. Even when the facts are false. Even when the gun (like an AR-15) has nothing to do with the subject at hand.
The greatest mudslingers, like Piers Morgan, and celebrity hacks, like Cher and now Henry Winkler (go, reverse mortgages, go!); all want to attack the NRA. President Obama of course, gets into the game by talking about gun control at an event to "honor" those who were killed at the Naval Yard. Just as he “honored” the Tucson victims with a campaign stop and free t-shirts.
They are cowards. Except Piers Morgan; he's a coward and a whore for ratings. They're cowards because they want to talk about guns when guns aren't the problem, and they don't want to talk about mental illness when mental illness is a problem that needs open and continued discussion.
And it's extreme to direct the IRS to be your own SS.
It's clear that Obama was using the IRS to attack organizations that opposed his agenda. People who disagreed with his domestic policy. People who actively worked to ensure that his policies, plans and procedures were never implemented. Tea Party, Patriot, Constitution, Soccer Mom - all targeted by Obama's IRS.
And how wonderfully convenient it is for Obama that Lois Lerner, at the center of the criminal action, is retiring. How wonderfully convenient for the president that she'll be able to just drift off into the sunset, the problem wrapped up in a pretty little bow. She'll take the heat, along with her taxpayer paid pension. With her retirement, allegedly, she will fall on the sword (undoubtedly, in their minds, wielded by Darrell Issa, who chairs the House Oversight Committee and had the chutzpah to question Lerner’s involvement). Now, the Left will proclaim, the IRS has been cleansed if not cleared. Now all will be back to normal.
In Mafia parlance, it's called having a heart attack. It's when some older guy decides he needs out of the family business, has a "heart attack" during a vacation to Florida and then never returns. That's Lois Lerner.
It turns out that Barack Obama thinks he's Don Corleone. The difference is Don Corleone had a code. Don Corleone had honor.
Three different examples of extremism from one political party. It's about time Democrats realized that if they want to know the extremists in their midst all they have to do is look in the mirror. Or watch Piers Morgan.
http://townhall.com/columnists/tonykatz/2013/09/27/obama-and-the-extremists-n1710305/page/full
Federal Stimulus Funds Paid For Trees In Wealthy Neighborhoods
$600,000 in federal stimulus used to plant trees
The tree program had no income guidelines, meaning that trees were planted everywhere.City forester Rob David admitted, “It’s open to anybody. It’s basically if you live in Denver, you want to reduce your energy costs, you want to have a tree that can raise your property value, go to the web page to sign up.”
The program spent about $600,000 in funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment act. They used this money to buy and plant the trees. The program reasoned that the government funds jump-start the economy by creating jobs for those who planted the trees. Each tree cost about $150. Davis cited energy savings (fully grown trees will provide shade and cut energy costs) as a long-term benefit. The program has since closed and no more trees will be planted using stimulus funds.
http://freebeacon.com/federal-stimulus-funds-paid-for-trees-in-wealthy-neighborhoods/
It’s Official: Boehner Pushing Amnesty
Worst of Three Worlds! House Judiciary Rep. Bob Goodlatte has come out of the closet as an amnesty supporter. Of course, Goodlatte wants legalization, not citizenship–or rather, not a “special path” to citizenship. But he would apparently still legalize more or less the entire illegal immigrant population. Traditional amnesty advocates would clearly jump to accept the plan. …Goodlatte seems to be hoping he can bring along conservatives by claiming his proposal isn’t as bad as the Senate’s massive bill (and, implicitly, by suggesting it would be better for Republicans by delaying the day when all those newly legalized immigrants could register and vote Democratic). Never mind that it’s the worst-of-both-worlds for the GOPs–actually, the worst of three worlds: It (1) creates a huge incentive for further illegal immigration–’Look, they got to stay legally’–while (2) expanding the Democratic electorate in the long run while (3) giving Dems an issue (the denial of citizenship
) to use to keep winning the Latino vote in the short run. …It’s pretty clear that Speaker Boehner approves the Goodlatte initiative, as my colleague Neil Munro suggests.*** Whether Boehner is pushing this lowest-common-denominator amnesty because he really wants to pass a bill or because he merely wants to make a show for Latinos and lobbyists to demonstrate that he’s trying isn’t clear. Here’s hoping it’s Kabuki. Even if it isn’t, of course
, a majority of Boehner’s caucus might not be fooled. …P.S.: The final hurdle to a total leadership
sellout on amnesty would require Goodlatte to fudge on his earlier argument that “the border has to be secure” before any legalization. His recent rephrasing of the demand–that.enforcement must only “be up and operating”– is
a good first step. (You could interpret that phrase to only require
that, say, a new E-Verify system be operating in a few companies.) Suggested further fudge: Require only a “pathway to a secure border”! Hey, nobody will notice. …__
** –Newly legalized illegals could still take advantage of non-special paths, like getting married to a U.S.
citizen, having an employer sponsor them or being sponsored by
***–It was Boehner, remember, who made Goodlatte chairman.
Sixth-graders learn all about Jay-Z, Big Pimpin’
By Todd StarnesStudents at a Southaven, Miss. middle school were educated in the “Big Pimpin’” thug life of Jay-Z, and the school district can’t imagine why anyone would object to lessons on reading, writing and rapping.
Sixth graders at Desoto Central Middle School spent three days learning about one of the most successful hip-hop artists and entrepreneurs in the nation. They were also tested on their knowledge about Jay-Z’s “resilience.”
A parent, who had a son in the English class, reached out to me – and she’s fired up. The mad mom asked to remain anonymous over fears of repercussions. I was able to verify her claims and have agreed to provide anonymity.
“One of the songs listed on the paper that was brought home was ‘Big Pimpin’,” she told me. “Another song talked about thug life. My child was getting an education about thug life.”
She could not believe that her child was learning about a man who sings songs that degrade women and glorify the thug life.
“When he pulled out the paper in his backpack in the car, I called my husband right then,” she told me. “I was furious. We talked about it until late that night. My husband was about to blow his top.”
It’s really unfortunate that the school superintendent won’t talk to me about the assignment. I’d love to hear his side of the story.
No answer.
Eventually, I was told to contact their official spokesperson.
The spokesperson told me she could not understand why Fox News was interested in a simple classroom assignment. She said she would send an official statement but declined to go on the record. I’m still waiting for the “official statement.”
The child’s parents had a similar experience. They contacted the school – hoping to get some answers. Instead, they got the brush-off.
“They made it sound like it was no big deal,” the mom told me. “They said the point of the assignment was because Jay-Z is successful.”
She said one school official even chimed in that the rapper owns a professional sports team.
“I asked him what that had to do with anything,” the parent told me. “Let’s talk about somebody that is a success that has done good things – not thug life things.”
Using the school’s logic, the mom wondered why the school doesn’t assign lessons on Hugh Hefner or Larry Flynt.
“Either way, it’s all the same,” she said.
She said the same school official told her that no matter who they assigned the kids to learn about – that person would have something negative in their past.
“We are conservative,” she said. “We are Christian. And this was brought into my house. That’s why I was so furious. It was a moral issue.”
The little boy’s father was so livid that the school brushed off his wife he decided to write a letter to the school district:
“The page sent home was an eye-opener and I refuse to have my son subjected to today’s version on what should be accepted as okay and normal without knowing the facts,” the dad wrote.
“The facts are this page represented this thug in a positive way and calls him successful. Success to me doesn’t mean demeaning women, glorifying drugs and violence and flaunting money. Success should be about living decent and having respect for themselves and others.”
And to put an exclamation point on his reasoning, the dad included the lyrics to a Jay-Z song. I’d love to share some of those lyrics with you – but I’ve got standards. Let’s just say, Jay-Z has an affinity for the F-word and the B-word.
Heather Fox is not surprised to learn about the three-day Jay-Z lecture at the middle school. She runs a Facebook page called “Desoto County Reform
” – an online gathering place for parents concerned about the school district.“Hopefully we can address the issues that most people are afraid to address out loud,” she told me. “The school district is not happy about our website.”
“We know there are students at the high school who’ve had to read explicit books,” she said. “And now we know about the Jay-Z class.”
Fox said the sixth grade assignment was not age appropriate.
“A lot of the kids don’t know anything about the things that surround Jay-Z – it’s something that a lot of parents are concerned about,” Fox said. “Why make them exposed to it at such an early age?”
It’s really unfortunate that the school superintendent won’t talk to me about the assignment. I’d love to hear his side of the story. But the school district’s silence makes me a bit suspicious.
If there’s nothing wrong with the assignment, what’s there to hide? Why brush off a concerned parent who has a valid concern about what her child is learning?
The mom told me the school made a “bad, bad choice” – and now she and her husband are about to make a choice.
“It really makes me want to either send him to a private school or homes school,” she said.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/09/25/sixth-graders-learn-about-jay-z-big-pimpin/?intcmp=latestnews
Education's Shiny Toy Syndrome
By Michelle MalkinIt's elementary. Public education bureaucrats do the darnedest, stupidest things. Clever kids are ready, willing and able to capitalize on that costly stupidity in a heartbeat. Within days of rolling out a $30 million Common Core iPad program in Los Angeles, for example, students had already hacked the supposedly secure devices.
The Los Angeles Times reports that the disastrous initiative has been suspended after students from at least three different high schools breached the devices' security protections. It was a piece of iCake. The young saboteurs gleefully advertised their method to their friends, fellow Twitter and Facebook users, and the media.
"Roosevelt students matter-of-factly explained their ingenuity Tuesday outside school," the L.A. Times told readers. "The trick, they said, was to delete their personal profile information. With the profile deleted, a student was free to surf. Soon they were sending tweets, socializing on Facebook and streaming music through Pandora, they said."
Goodbye, Common Core apps. Hello, Minecraft! The district spent untold millions of taxpayer dollars on iPad "training," but many teachers still couldn't figure out how to sync up the souped-up tablets for academic use in the classroom at the start of the school year. In less than a week, though, teens were able to circumvent the locks for fun and playtime at home faster than you can type "LOL."
The Los Angeles Unified School District school board shoveled $30 million to Pearson for the leaky iPads, but nobody foresaw this glaring security weakness. Where's the fiscal accountability? Where's the adult responsibility?
Remember: These "reform" programs are not about stimulating brain cells. It's all about stimulating the Benjamins. Pearson is the multibillion-dollar educational publishing and testing conglomerate at the center of the federally driven, taxpayer-funded "standards" racket. For Pearson, ed publishing and ed computing are a $6 billion global business. For nearly a decade, the company has plotted a digital learning takeover.
According to industry estimates, Pearson's digital learning products are used by more than 25 million people in North America. Common Core has been a convenient new catalyst for getting the next generation of consumers hooked.
As I reported last week, Pearson sealed its whopping $30 million taxpayer-subsidized deal to supply the city's schools with 45,000 iPads pre-loaded with Pearson Common Core curriculum apps earlier this summer. I repeat: That works out to $678 per glorified e-textbook, $200 more than the standard cost, with scant evidence that any of this software and hardware will do anything to improve the achievement bottom line.
The abysmal history of federal investments in ed technology is as crystal-clear as an HD touch screen. Take President Obama's $49 million technology initiative for the Detroit public schools, funded by federal stimulus money. The city is bankrupt. The urban school system is overrun by corruption, violence and incompetence. The federal ed tech program showered some 40,000 new (foreign-made) ASUS netbook computers on Detroit, plus thousands of printers, scanners and desktop computers to teachers and kids from early childhood through 12th grade.
The district budget is $300 million in the hole. Meanwhile, the board slashed special education buses and shut down 70 schools. Have the devices helped students "compete in a global marketplace," as champions of the program promised? SAT scores in Detroit remain "stagnant." High school graduation rates are rock-bottom. According to the most recent data, just 3 percent of Detroit fourth-graders are proficient in math; 6 percent are proficient in reading. In 2010, 11 people were charged in connection with a lucrative fencing scheme involving hundreds of DPS computers, which they stole and sold on eBay or peddled to friends and family.
Nothing has changed. As I've reported previously, in both urban and rural school districts, large and small, these technology infusions have turned out to be gesture-driven boondoggles and political payoffs that squander precious educational resources -- with few, if any, measurable academic benefits. The Obama administration plans to dig even deeper into the FedEdTech hole through a furtive $5 billion "fee" on cellphone users for "ConnectEd" -- another progressive, FedEd boondoggle to subsidize high-speed Internet installation throughout the U.S.
Like districts across the country, Detroit and Los Angeles are infatuated with fancy electronic devices, glossy new textbooks and DVDs "aligned" to top-down Common Core "standards, and other whiz-bang gadgetry to stimulate "21st century learning." Education's Shiny Toy Syndrome is the result of a toxic alliance between big government and big business. In the words of Robert Small, the Maryland dad who was arrested last week for daring to raise questions about Common Core: "Parents, you need to question these people. ... Don't stand for this!"
http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2013/09/27/educations-shiny-toy-syndrome-n1710872/page/full
‘Nation’s most influential foreign-policy think tank’ employs pro-terrorist Castro follower
The influential Council on Foreign Relations employs a director who thanks convicted terrorist bombers in a book, calls for restrictive gun laws, and has a long history of warm relations with the most extreme elements of the Castro regime.“In Cuba many people spent long hours with me, helped open doors I could not have pushed through myself, and offered friendship and warmth to myself during research trips to the island…Elsa Montero and Jose Gomez Abad championed this project,” Julia Sweig wrote in the acknowledgements of her 2002 book, “Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground.”
Sweig serves as the Latin American Studies director for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a high-powered think tank that includes the cream of U.S. foreign policy makers.
Montero and Abad, posing as U.N. diplomats, were terrorists who plotted to blow up Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Grand Central Terminal with 500 kilos of TNT on Black Friday in 1962.
Humberto Fontavo, author of “The Longest Romance: The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro” (Encounter Books), identifies Sweig as a foreign agent of influence and cites testimony from retired Lt. Col. Chris Simmons, a former intelligence officer with the Defense Intelligence Agency, who foiled Castro-backed plots.
Fontavo also points to Sweig’s longstanding pro-Castro ties.
Sweig has worked on ending the embargo against the Cuban regime since 1988, when she worked for the Institute for Policy Studies and arranged a tour of Cuba jails. While many opponents of the Castro dictatorship support ending the embargo as a way of undermining Castro’s monopoly on the Cuban economy, Sweig takes it further. She advocates removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism and having the United States work “together” with the regime to solve problems such as “environmental and security challenges, as well as the fate of high-profile nationals serving time in U.S. and Cuban prisons.”
Sweig also worked for the left-wing Arca Foundation.
The Arca Foundation was founded by a tobacco heiress Nancy Susan Reynolds Bagley in 1952 with a stated intention “to better the lot of humankind.” The grant-making institution was later run by Reynolds’ son, the late socialite, Democratic fundraiser and ambassador’s spouse Smith Bagley, who gave to pro-Castro groups such as Pastors for Peace ($10,000 in 1999), Global Exchange ($50,000 in 1999), and the TransAfrica Forum ($100,000). In 1999 alone, Arca gave to over 19 pro-Castro groups.
In 2000, shortly after Elián González was seized in a SWAT raid in Miami, Smith Bagley treated the six-year-old boy and his Castro-loyalist father Juan Miguel González Quintana to a smoked salmon dinner at his home in Georgetown.
“The Arca Foundation is the pro-Castro lobby’s sugar daddy,” Jose Cardenas, Washington spokesman for the Cuban American National Foundation, told the Washington Times at the time. “Arca is a walkup window for free checks passed out to any and all comers with an ideological ax to grind against U.S. policy on Cuba.”
The Arca Foundation has also given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Council on Foreign Relations, where Sweig now works.
The 91-year-old Council on Foreign Relations boasts $439 million in total assets, according to its 2012 annual report, and 4,681 members, most of them in the New York/District of Columbia corridor. Current members include Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, former Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker. Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski is a member, as are two of his children, Ambassador to Sweden Mark Brzezinski and MSNBC hostess Mika Brzezinski. The CFR is generally considered the most influential foreign policy think tank in the United States.
Fontova contends that Sweig’s CFR clout and longstanding relationship with the Cuban dictator allowed her to help Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Magazine in 2010 get the first Fidel Castro interview after his brush with death in 2006.
“We shook hands,” Goldberg wrote about the meeting with Fidel Castro. “Then he greeted Julia warmly. They (Castro and Sweig) have known each other for more than 20 years.”
Sweig built her friendship with Castro’s regime over decades.
“Between 1995 and 1997 the Cuba Council of State, the highest governmental body in Cuba, permitted Julia Sweig unprecedented access to the archival holdings of the Office of Historic Affairs,” wrote the abstract of Sweig’s pro-Che Guevara, pro-Castro dissertation, “The Cuban Insurrection Declassified: Strategy and Politics in Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement, 1957-1959.”
Fontavo points out that Sweig shares another view consistent with Castro’s communist Cuba: strong opposition to the right of self-defense enshrined in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
On August 2, the Council on Foreign Relations released a “Policy Innovation Memorandum” authored by Sweig with the title “A Strategy to Reduce Gun Trafficking and Violence in the Americas.” Sweig blames Americans’ access to guns for violence in Latin America.
“The flow of high-powered weaponry from the United States to Latin America and the Caribbean exacerbates soaring rates of gun-related violence in the region,” Sweig asserts in her memo.
“Although recent federal gun control measures have run aground on congressional opposition,” Sweig writes, “though the Senate rejected measures to expand background checks on firearms sales, reinstate a federal assault-weapons ban, and make straw purchasing a federal crime, the Obama administration can still take executive action to reduce the availability and trafficking of assault weapons and ammunition in the Americas.”
Sweig did not return a phone call or email requests for comment.
http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/26/nations-most-influential-foreign-policy-think-tank-employs-pro-terrorist-castro-follower/#ixzz2g6ocb400
The Iranian ‘Moderate’
Hassan Rouhani is no trustworthy, useful negotiating partner.
By Charles KrauthammerThe search, now 30 years old, for Iranian “moderates” goes on. Amid the enthusiasm of the latest sighting, it’s worth remembering that the highlight of the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages debacle was the secret trip to Tehran taken by Robert McFarlane, President Reagan’s former national-security adviser. He brought a key-shaped cake symbolizing the new relations he was opening with the “moderates.”
We know how that ended.
Three decades later, the mirage reappears in the form of Hassan Rouhani. Strange résumé for a moderate: 35 years of unswervingly loyal service to the Islamic Republic as a close aide to Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei. Moreover, Rouhani was one of only six presidential candidates, another 678 having been disqualified by the regime as ideologically unsound. That puts him in the 99th percentile for fealty.
Rouhani is Khamenei’s agent but, with a smile and style, he’s now hailed as the face of Iranian moderation. Why? Because Rouhani wants better relations with the West.
Well, what leader would not want relief from Western sanctions that have sunk Iran’s economy, devalued its currency, and caused widespread hardship? The test of moderation is not what you want but what you’re willing to give. After all, sanctions were not slapped on Iran for amusement. It was to enforce multiple Security Council resolutions demanding a halt to uranium enrichment.
Yet in his lovey-dovey Washington Post op-ed, his U.N. speech, and various interviews, Rouhani gives not an inch on uranium enrichment. Indeed, he has repeatedly denied that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons at all. Or ever has been. Such a transparent falsehood — what country swimming in oil would sacrifice its economy just to produce nuclear electricity that advanced countries like Germany are already abandoning? — is hardly the basis for a successful negotiation.
But successful negotiation is not what the mullahs are seeking. They want sanctions relief. And more than anything, they want to buy time.
It takes about 250 kilograms of 20 percent–enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported in August that Iran already has 186 kilograms. That leaves the Iranians on the threshold of going nuclear. They are adding 3,000 new high-speed centrifuges. They need just a bit more talking, stalling, smiling, and stringing along a gullible West.
Rouhani is the man to do exactly that. As Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator between 2003 and 2005, he boasted in a 2004 speech to the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council, “While we were talking with the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment in parts of the [uranium conversion] facility in Isfahan. . . . In fact, by creating a calm environment, we were able to complete the work in Isfahan.”
Such is their contempt for us that they don’t even hide their strategy: Spin the centrifuges while spinning the West.
And when the president of the world’s sole superpower asks for a photo-op handshake with the president of a regime that, in President Obama’s own words, kills and kidnaps and terrorizes Americans, the killer-kidnapper does not even deign to accept the homage. Rouhani rebuffed him
Who can blame Rouhani? Offer a few pleasant words in an op-ed hailing a new era of non-zero-sum foreign relations, and watch the media and the administration immediately swoon with visions of détente.
But at least we have to talk, say the enthusiasts. As if we haven’t been talking. For a decade. Strung along in negotiations of every manner — the EU3, the P5+1, then the final, very final, last-chance 2012 negotiations held in Istanbul, Baghdad, and Moscow at which the Iranians refused to even consider the nuclear issue, declaring the dossier closed. Plus two more useless rounds this year.
I’m for negotiations. But only if it’s to do something real, not to run out the clock as Iran goes nuclear. The administration says it wants actions, not words. Fine. Demand one simple proof of good faith: Honor the U.N. resolutions. Suspend uranium enrichment and we will talk.
At least that stops the clock. Anything else amounts to being played.
And about the Khamenei agent who charms but declares enrichment an inalienable right, who smiles but refuses to shake the president’s hand. When asked by NBC News whether the Holocaust was a myth, Rouhani replied: “I’m not a historian. I’m a politician.”
Iranian moderation in action.
And, by the way, do you know who was one of the three Iranian “moderates” the cake-bearing McFarlane dealt with at that fateful arms-for-hostages meeting in Tehran 27 years ago? Hassan Rouhani.
We never learn.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359682/iranian-moderate-charles-krauthammer
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