Ten Biggest Lies of the Showdown
By Mark Davis....But as we move forward amid a web of strategic arguments over how to proceed, it is important to close this month’s chapter with some clarity over what happened and what did not, what is true and what is false.
So toward that end, here are the Top 10 lies of the October Struggle:
1. We just dodged a nearly fatal economic bullet.
Please. The talk of default and unpaid bills was a complete load of hooey, a scare tactic part of a larger scheme-- the left’s narrative that any interruption in government largesse is to be viewed with the urgency of an approaching asteroid.
Minutes After Debt Ceiling Is Raised, Obama Shows up with List of Things to Spend Money On
By Stephen Kruiser
“In fact, there are things that we know will help strengthen our economy that we could get done before this year is out,” said Obama from the White House briefing room. “We still need to pass a law to fix our broken immigration system. We still need to pass a farm bill. And with the shutdown behind us and budget committees forming, we now have an opportunity to focus on a sensible budget that is responsible, that is fair, and that helps hard working people all across this country. And we could get all these things done even this year, if everybody comes together in a spirit of how-are-we-going-to-move-this-country forward and put the last three weeks behind us.”Yes, I laughed until my ribs hurt at the “sensible budget that is responisble” line too.
Anyone familiar with Obamaspeak knows that the above paragraph is the political version of a kid in a candy store.
...Aided by centrist Republicans who are more interested in DC social status than the future of the republic, Obama and the Democrats are now encouraged to continue profligate spending habits. And thanks to the John McCain/Pete King wing of the GOP, they can do it virtually unchecked.
Warning: Hearing the Way Ed Schultz Spoke to a 23-Year Military Veteran May Make Your Blood Boil
By Jason HowertonA retired military veteran called in during Ed Schultz’s radio program on Thursday to respectfully disagree with the host’s claim that Republicans are an enemy to the nation’s vets. Rather than having a reasonable debate, Schultz screamed at the caller, “Russell,” and called his point of view an “idiot argument.”
Glenn Beck ‘Horrified’ by ‘America’s Latest Propaganda Machine’
By Erica Ritz
....Beck proceeded to tell his viewers
about two groups, the first called “Imagining America” and the second
called “The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture.”
The latter isn’t actually a body of the United States government, but in the group’s own words,
“the nation’s newest people-powered department, founded on the truth
that art and culture are our most powerful and under-tapped resources
for social change.”
...“Several of the board members work closely with the government, what a
surprise!” Beck remarked. “…So we have the government, radicals, and
the universities, and some of their affiliates are actually public
officials. They actually hold conferences and presentations about how to
re-author American history, and it’s [funded] by you.”
...Beck said the entire scenario “looks
uncomfortably … [like] the Ministry of Propaganda and Public
Enlightenment,” the government agency used to enforce and regulate the
culture of Nazi Germany in the 1940′s.
“This is exactly what Germany was
doing. They re-imagined history with a look to the social frontier,” he
said. “This is exactly what this group is doing. You need to tell your
friends and if they don’t believe you, doesn’t matter. You need to keep
your eye on these people.”
Bombshell: Obamacare Website Uses Decade-Old Technology, May Require 'Constant Fixes' For Six Months
By Guy Benson
...Meanwhile, the "death spiral" concept is really important to this entire discussion. Megan McArdle explains it well in her indispensable Bloomberg piece,
but the idea is straightforward: Because the exchanges are so
dysfunctional, only the most motivated consumers are likely to tough it
out and work really hard to enroll. These people, for obvious reasons,
tend to be sicker, older folks with pre-existing conditions. So if they
flood into the market --while young and healthy people do not (thus
off-setting the others) -- insurance companies will have no choice but
to jack up rates on everyone to compensate for their new, unusually
costly, enrollees. This, in turn, will drive younger, healthier
consumers to exit the market, making the problem worse. Unless Obamacare
gets its act together very soon, and manages to get millions
of "young invincibles" to voluntarily overpay for coverage (rather than
pay the cheap penalty tax), the entire insurance market breaks down. As
Laszewski's analysis demonstrates, the sign-up rate is pathetically low
-- so much so that HHS is now denying that they ever had monthly enrollment goals in the first place.
Forget the Obamacare website, the real crisis is with the insurers
By Rick Moran
...After
January 1, other Americans are also going to be in for a nasty shock.
The IRS is sending a separate form to all taxpayers requiring them to
declare what health insurance they carry, what the benefits are, and how long they've been enrolled.It is the IRS who will decide whether or not you're carrying the proper insurance. If not, taxpayers will be forced to pay the fine. It won't matter what your insurance company tells you. If the IRS determines you're not in compliance -- tough luck for you.
We're only finishing the first chapter in the Book of Obamacare. So far, it's living up to its billing as a horror story.
What the Defunders Learned from the Shutdown
By Conn Carroll
...You know one of the things I think that became clear over the past
several weeks is that Democrats have tremendous political unity. And
somehow, contrary to what the politics of their state would dictate,
these guys held together.
They need to feel pressure so they can begin to crack. I don't think
you can apply real pressure to them without some sort of legislative
strategy, because the grassroots outside of Washington are not going to
be engaged without real action. So there has to be a legislative
component to that.
I think it is too early to say what that strategy should look like. There is a lot of stuff in flux right now.
Obama Romneyizes the Republicans
The president is doing the same thing to Ted Cruz and the tea party that he did to the 1%.
By Daniel Henninger....For all the changes in information delivery, not much ever changes for the GOP's messaging skills.
Wind back to the 2012 presidential election. Recall how after it was over, the GOP promised that it would duplicate the incredible modern messaging machine the Obama team created across every available new-information platform. That delivery system was why across four years Barack Obama kept hammering "the 1%" and "the wealthiest." He was feeding the machine that was emailing, texting and tweeting this propaganda to targeted audiences.
Now suddenly comes a marketing ploy from the GOP's backbenches: "Defund ObamaCare." This idea was supposed to rally the nation against the Affordable Care Act. So if you were to ask students in marketing at the local community college what they thought of "Defund ObamaCare," what do you guess they might say? They'd say, absent the product, it sounds like a niche strategy with a low sales ceiling. Defund ObamaCare is now the Republicans' New Coke.
Want a look at how a pro is spinning the Washington mess? Punch into Twitter.com and type "Barack Obama" into the search window. Click on "Barack Obama," next to the "End This Now" logo. The Obama tweets the past week have been fairly amazing. As in the presidential campaign against Mitt Romney, the Twitter feeds going out in the name of the president of the United States are virtually wall-to-wall propaganda.
... Everyone recalls the 2012 campaign's carpet bombing of "the wealthiest," even after they'd been shelled with a tax increase. Barack Obama has found—actually, it was handed to him—a scapegoat analogous to "the wealthiest" and "the banks" for his campaign to suppress votes for GOP candidates in the 2014 elections. It's "tea party Republicans."
Barack Obama: "Tea Party Republicans are threatening an economic shutdown. Tell them to #EndThisNow."
Barack Obama: "The #TeaPartyShutdown is harming small businesses. Say you've had #EnoughAlready."
Wednesday's first Obama tweet: "Day 16 of the #TeaPartyShutdown. This can't continue—Congress needs to #EndThisNow."
This isn't routine partisan noise. The Obama Twitter account lists 38,258,000 followers. Unless some of these are fake, that's nearly 30% of the total popular vote in 2012. All through the week, this number rose as the site poured forth boiling oil.
Virtually every Obama tweet demonizes the tea party. Last week, within minutes of the collapse of the Obama-Boehner talks, the tweeting robot called "Barack Obama" had hung the collapse on the "tea party."
Wednesday morning (with even the New York Post cover depicting Uncle Sam going over Niagara Falls on the "Brink of Disaster"), the machinery that runs @BarackObama rolled into view. It's the former Obama re-election apparatus, which has shape-shifted into a 501(c)(4) group called Organizing for Action.
From the Barack Obama Twitter feed at 10 a.m.: "Be a part of @OFA'S Twitter takeover and tell Congress to #EndThisNow."
Republicans complain constantly that the media "lets him get away with it." The media is floating down the electric river. No, they—the message-impoverished Republicans—let him get away with it. The Washington GOP is now a political Gulliver, tied down by tweets and twerps.
A month ago, before the congressional Republicans' General Custer Caucus used "Defund ObamaCare" to vote themselves into their current, bullet-riddled fort, the Obama characterization of the entire GOP as "tea party Republicans" would have been a pathetic stretch. He was the one being laughed at by the whole world for his vanishing red lines in Syria and a foreign policy that even his own defense secretary described as "swinging from vine to vine."
Not anymore. Barack Obama is Romneyizing the Republicans. He's doing to Ted Cruz and the House Republicans what he did to Mitt Romney and the 1%. It may be voter brainwashing, but in the expanded media age in which we all marinate, it works.
Someone in the tea party outside the Beltway had better wake up and smell the smoke. The great nemesis has done it again: He's turning them into political toast.
Grilling the Park Service Bullies
The House Oversight Committee wants to find out why the Park Service behaved so bizarrely.
By John Fund....Ebell also noted the number of barricades and printed signs needed to close 401 parks and monuments on the shutdown’s first day required foresight and planning. The speed of the closures and the procurement of barricades has also convinced former secretary Norton that a lot of thought had gone into how to conduct the Park Service’s blitzkrieg. “I imagine that the decision was made at the highest levels of Park Service leadership, in co-operation with the White House,” she told NRO.
...But now that the shutdown is over, it’s important for Chairman Issa and others to figure out how it was manipulated politically. Because if the Park Service can become a pawn in the Obama administration’s political wars, does anyone doubt that the integrity of other even more vital agencies wouldn’t be at risk in any future budget showdown?
Mark Steyn: ‘The governing institutions of the United States are utterly repulsive and disgusting’
...“Right now, the governing institutions of the United States are utterly repulsive and disgusting,” he continued. “This bipartisan bill agreed yesterday includes $175,000 dollars to the widow of the late senator, Frank Lautenberg, because apparently, it’s the tradition of the Senate to give significant six-figure payments to the widows of distinguished senators. Why is that in this bill? It’s nothing to do with this bill. And that’s why government, more spending, more debt, another trillion dollars as we float free of the debt ceiling, we’re telling the world that this is just the way it is now. No serious course correction can be mounted by America’s governing institutions. That’s a hell of a message.”Steyn also commented on President Barack Obama’s remarks from the White House following the reopening of the federal government. Steyn slammed him for calling on members of congress to change the way Washington works and not give in to influence from lobbyists or bloggers.
“I resent this coming from a guy like President Obama,” he said. “The only day job he’s ever had was as a professional activist, as a so-called community organizer. You know, the thing he said just after that, where he said you know, you have to stop using shutdowns and all the rest of us, and have to learn from now on that the way to do it is to win the election. I found that very interesting, because the Republican Party in the election for the House of Representatives won the election. They won that election. They’re the majority party in that house. And either that means something under the United States Constitution, or it doesn’t.”
“He was talking, it was fascinating to me, in that moment, he revealed that he saw this country as a presidential republic somewhat closer, to be polite, to France’s, or at worst, to Latin America,” Steyn continued. “In other words, there’s the president, and nobody else matters. He won the only election that matters, and the rest of you are just lobby fodder, and should demonstrate no independent initiatives of your own. And again, he’s saying, he’s saying that essentially what has happened is that the United States Constitution now has become so deformed, that it is no longer operating as it’s meant to.
The Case for Optimism
Conservatives can have a good year — if they want to.
By Charles C W Cooke....Rather amusingly, Drum went on to ask, “Why has this turned out to be so much worse than I thought it would be?” This prompted a blunt answer from my colleague Jim Geraghty: Well, “because you have way too much faith in the good intentions and competence of Obama administration officials.” Jim is correct, and herein lies a real threat not only to Obamacare but to the entire progressive sales pitch of “Let us take charge!” This is to say that the failure of the administration to deliver a simple website in three years is an indictment of technocracy itself and, more specifically, of the ugly Wilsonian contention that governments are realistically able to “open for the public a bureau of skilled, economical administration” run by the “hundreds who are wise” for the good of the “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.” Back in June, HHS technologists were telling The Atlantic that “it’s incredible what can happen when you give a team of talented developers and managers [room to work] and let them go.” They were right. As we have learned in these past three weeks, it is indeed incredible what happens when the federal government does this.
Conservatives have been presented with a golden opportunity to remind Americans why bloated, arrogant, centralized government is not to be trusted in this age or the next. They must take it. Obamacare, as Ross Douthat has observed, is “the whole ballgame for liberalism right now.” If it fails, the “hoped-for of liberalism will have been foreclosed, not by Tea Party extremism, but by a liberal administration’s own unforced errors.”
Republican Recovery
A way forward for the GOP after the shutdown debacle.
By Mona Charen...Going forward, Republicans should be assembling clips of Barack Obama promising that his health reform would not add “one dime” to the deficit, would bring down premiums by an average of $2,500, and would solve the problem of the uninsured.
The disillusioned will have new reasons to listen. They may even be willing to give “progressivism” a failing grade.
Is Dennis Miller Right?
By Bruce Johnson...Where I question Mr. Miller's position is that, in my view, we must never lose any good opportunity to lay out facts and logic and politely argue emboldened liberals as they espouse their agenda. This is the least one can do. Respond calmly and with emotion in check, politely, and always with a "quiver" of hard facts and sources. A sporting venture, if you will. Then put on the pod face, because it is likely the vitriol and slurs are sure to follow.
Did we lose the last Presidential election? Yes. But is rolling over just what they want conservatives to do? Yes again, and that is what is bothersome with the Miller position. Rolling over is what they want you to do, and their delight in this is distasteful.
Dennis, I am not saying you are entirely wrong in your surrender. Personal happiness is extremely important. However, I encourage you to keep a little bit of Patrick Henry at your ready and keep that "quiver" at hand. I suspect you will.
Why Can't I Compromise? A Blogger Responds to President Obama
By Joel B PollakPresident Barack Obama attacked "bloggers" like me today, blaming us for the recent crisis and imploring the rest of the nation to find a way to responsible compromise. Instead of rejecting outright what he was saying, I paused to consider whether he might be right.
Were people like me really at fault? Are we so busy stoking opposition that we are missing opportunities to find common ground? Do we dislike Obama that much?
I remembered how I was once a Democrat who filled my office fridge with sparkling wine to celebrate George W. Bush's anticipated defeat in 2004, but that I vigorously, and publicly, defended Bush policies with which I agreed. No, I am not against compromise.
I thought about how eagerly conservatives had embraced Obama after his speech at the memorial service in Tucson--only to have his pledge of "civility" thrown in our faces.
Obama is open to compromise--as long as you accept his view of big government as a starting point. Similarly, he is in favor of reducing the deficit and the debt--as long as you accept spending at or near current levels. He is a champion of tolerance--as long as you are willing to give up the tenets of your religion in favor of his new policies. He welcomes debate--but only when there is nothing left to debate and he has nothing left at stake.
His attack on bloggers is revealing:
...now that the government has reopened and this threat to our economy is removed, all of us need to stop focusing on the lobbyists, and the bloggers, and the talking heads on radio and the professional activists who profit from conflict, and focus on what the majority of Americans sent us here to do...He pretends to be above politics, and casts everyone else as motivated by profit, not idealism.
And yet Obama's own group, Organizing for Action, held rallies (see photo) and raised money off the shutdown. "We're fighting for change--chip in $5 or more to support OFA today," said one email I received Oct. 8, ripping House Speaker John Boehner.
Aside from his breathtaking hypocrisy, Obama's attack reveals a very limited understanding of democracy, one in which debate only exists to serve the administrative dictates of the state.
Obama wants to shift the boundaries of political debate to exclude much of what American liberty once was and to embrace a redistributionist, social democratic model. There are two problems I have with that.
One is that Obama's model does not work. Big government is almost never "smart, effective government," as Obamacare is proving. And fixing big government has almost always meant making it smaller while expanding freedom.
The other problem is that I do not wish to live in a society where individuals feel they exist at government's pleasure--that we ought to be grateful for "the air we breathe," as Obama put it.
Unlike other immigrants, my family and I did not come from a place were we were doomed to poverty, but where we might have enjoyed great wealth. We gave that up because we preferred to live in a country where people are equally free.
I want to like Obama. But I cannot compromise with Obama because he is asking me to accept things about government that I know to be untrue, and because he wants to put beyond discussion the very things that must be debated.
I cannot find common ground with a leader who blames my freedom of speech for his failure to govern. That idea is the basis of tyranny, not democracy, and there is no room for compromise with that.
Union bosses retaliate against teachers who left union
Kathi Moreau, a Michigan school
counselor who decided to leave her union, was surprised to see her name
published in her former union’s newsletter — along with 15 other
deserters...Michigan became a right-to-work state after the 2012 election, giving teachers
and other public employees the right to opt-out of joining unions. But a
delay in right-to-work’s implementation allowed school districts to
lock their employees into their current contracts and force them to pay
union dues for years, however.
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