Obamacare meltdown

Can it get any weirder?
Obamacare was sacrosanct, liberals argued. It could not be changed by Congress, which is the only body with authority to pass a law, change a law or repeal a law.
Yet Obama, who has no such authority, has now changed the sacrosanct law for the 14th time!
This time he is waiving the individual mandate for millions of Americans.
This, his mob had argued before the Supreme Court, was the heart and soul of the law. It was essential. It could not be tampered with under any circumstances.
So, you can go without insurance, under a plan that was going to insure everyone, or you can buy catastrophic insurance, which is less expensive.
Having health savings accounts and catastrophic insurance would have solved much of the problem with health insurance in the first place, but libs have made health savings accounts less useful, not more.
Instead they steadfastly have pursued a single-payer system and Obamacare, as they have admitted, was but the first step.
Now it is unravelling quickly and among the victims will be the insurance companies, who jumped in bed with the libs. It was in hope of self-preservation, I understand, and perhaps resistance would have been futile, but it also could have made a difference. Even with the trickery and deception it was a close vote.
Even members of Congress got hornswoggled. One congressman told me his mandatory Obamacare policy cost three times as much as the previous one he had, and is not as good.
However, libs are not going to admit that it is an unmitigated disaster. They will double down and ram it down the throats of Americans, no matter what the cost.
However, there is a good chance that it will cost them the U.S. Senate next year.
Maybe then, the Reconstruction can begin.

What is he really up to?

At some point you have to wonder.
President Obama, as everyone knows from the book The Roots of Obama's Rage by Dinest D-Souza, Obama is an anti-colonialist with a deep hatred for western civilization in general and the United States in particular.
He absorbed this from his communist father and mother and his many socialist/communist friends and mentors.
His twin agenda is to bring down the United States economically and reduce its standing in the word from a superpower to an also-ran.
So far, he is making progress.
The economy is crippled, perhaps permanently if liberals remain in power.
Obamacare, enacted by fraud and trickery against the wishes of the American people, remains in place and new revelations as to its potential harm appear almost every day.
But the world stage is where he may be doing the most damage.
We now pretend that weapons of mass distraction don't matter. This, after the mass hysteria on the left about previous efforts to stop their use.
It also follows more than a half-century of angst by the left over the fact that America had nuclear weapons.
Now, Obama is seeking to reduce our nuclear stockpile, while winking at efforts by our enemies to build their nuclear arsenal.
Syria began building up chemical weapons, and Obama declared a victory by pretending to halt their effort.
Iran is building a nuclear weapon and over the weekend Obama declared he would allow them to proceed, and even to lift sanctions against them that were intended to hamper the effort.
Does he actually hope for war to break out in the Mideast, perhaps to spread worldwide?
That certainly could be one outcome. If Israel acts against Iran in order to protect its own interests, another Arab/Persian-Jewish conflict probably would soon follow.
Whatever he is doing, it is not in the best interest of the United States. In the event of catastrophe, it would not matter whether the result was from incompetence or intent.

Liberal idol worship

No one ranks higher in the liberal pantheon than St. Franklin of Roosevelt.
They think of FDR as the savior of America. The main evidence of his wonderfulness appears to be the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Why an ordinary two-lane road that wanders through the mountain is worthy of such reverence is beyond me. It is scenic, granted, and I have driven most of it for the view.
But as proof of the New Deal's effectiveness, it falls woefully short.
Let's consider some facts.
Roosevelt's main advisers, laughably called "the brain trust," made a trip to Russia and were awed by what they saw as great achievements by the communists. (This was at a time when Stalin was murdering millions, and the New York Times was lying about it.)
Roosevelt and Mussolini had a mutual admiration society, exchanging congratulatory letters.
At a time when millions of Americans were unemployed and hungry, the New Deal was destroying food and putting people in prison for lowering food prices.
One unconstitutional action was to prohibit employers from offering lower wages so they could afford to hire people who would have been glad to get the work and get out of the breadlines.
The cynical FDR used the jobs programs he created as political weapons. Little help went to areas that needed it the most, but already voted Democrat. Instead, most went to areas in the West and other places where FDR needed votes.
In the Northeast, Republicans who applied for make-work New Deal jobs were stiffed. It was a Democrat program.
The Depression began as an ordinary recession. The Smoot-Hawley tariff helped turn it into a depression, worldwide. FDR, who had promised not to raise taxes, raised them, and that further worsened the problem.
After a similar recession in the early '20s, taxes were lowered and the economy quickly recovered.
It took America's entry in World War II, which FDR also had promised he would not allow, to bring the economy back.
Even then, New Deal policies continued to cause misery. It was wage and price controls during the war that brought on employer-provided health insurance, which helped exacerbate the current problem in that realm.
FDR's other accomplishment, according to liberals was Social Security. Again, Roosevelt's vision was that it would be a supplement to retirement that only a few would receive. It was constructed so that half of the population would die before receiving benefits.
Politicians after FDR continued to pile on costs and benefits to the Ponzi scheme and today it faces bankruptcy. But that's another story.
The bottom line is that FDR was no hero. He was a politician.

Liberals waste their worry

When they aren't worrying about some doomsday scenario such as meteors smashing into the Earth, liberals fret about inequality.
Why?
Inequality is not growing, as saps like Jimmy Carter contend. It was much higher in the 1920s than it is today.
But it doesn't really matter whether inequality is growing or not as long as those in every income group are experiencing greater prosperity.
That was the situation in the 1980s, when the rising tide was lifting all boats.
But those who feed off class warfare seek to promote envy among those with less income, based on the false claim that there is a finite "pie" of income that everyone shares.
It is liberal policies that stifle growth, and thus prosperity, and thus rising incomes at the bottom.
They also conveniently overlook the fact that there is great mobility among income groups. The rich don't always get richer. They get poor even as the poor are becoming rich.
Lottery winners and sports heroes fritter away their great incomes and become poor. Young people inherit wealth and lose it because they don't have the same drive and talent as their parents.
Equality does not exist anywhere and there is not the slightest evidence that the world would be better off if it did.

There is a way out

President Obama has said he is open to any suggestions to improve Obamacare.
By saying that, he demolished the liberal talking point that the law is inviolate, not susceptible to any change from what was enacted.
But Obama also demolished his own statement that he would not negotiate.
Publisher Steve Forbes has made several suggestions that would, beyond question, improve health care and health insurance in America. Contrary to the media, the two are not the same.
Forbes suggests that Congress:

• Allow interstate shopping for insurance;
• Give tax deductions for insurance premiums currently limited to businesses and the self-employed to everyone;
• Prevent Medicare money from being used to fund Obamacare;
• Stop the exemption of Congress and staff from Obamacare;
• Encourage high-risk pools to lower costs for everyone else;
• Push medical malpractice reform; and
• Eliminate Obamacare's mandated benefits and let people decide what coverage they want.

Instead of bluster and bullying, the people in Washington should be discussing and debating those proposals.
The debate over government funding and the debt ceiling is focused on forcing down ruinous spending. But Obamacare adds greatly to that problem and common sense improvements to it are necessary.

So much for compromise

The current "government shutdown" debacle is a classic example of liberalism in action.
We constantly are bombarded with liberal demands, echoed by the compliant media, that conservatives should "compromise."
Here's what that means. If liberals want to increase spending by $1 trillion, conservatives are supposed to agree to at least $500 billion.
But if conservatives want to cut the wild spending spree the government has been on for seven years by $1 trillion, they are pilloried for their heartlessness. The word compromise is never spoken in that debate.
So it is now.
The House sent the liberal Senate a bill that would keep the government operating. It was refused.
The reason it was refused is that the rich and powerful liberals in the Senate would rather shut down the government than be subjected to Obamacare, which they insist is wonderful -- for ordinary Americans.
The bill would require members of Congress to use Obamacare, without fat subsidies.
It also would delay the individual mandate for Obamacare, which is hated by the public.
Liberals say the law can't be changed. But they have changed it. Obama unilaterally delayed the employer mandate.
Passing the bill in the Senate would be a compromise -- the very thing liberals have been extolling for years, whenever they want to have their way.
But they won't do it.

Warmaking 101

Attention class: Please take notes.
President Obama says we have a moral duty to go to war with Syria and possibly set the Mideast aflame, because the Syrian government killed several hundred people with nerve gas -- after killing about 100,000 people with bullets, which do not create a moral duty. It is urgent, he said -- so urgent that he waited two years after demanding the head of Syria leave office before taking action on a red line he painted but denied painting, and then he went to Congress after saying he did not need to go to Congress to get permission, but it was so urgent that he waited two months before going. But then John Kerry, who has had cozy dinners with Mr. and Mrs. Assad, made an offhand crack about Syria giving up their WMD to avoid a military strike, which he said they would never do, and the White House said he was just kidding but then Putin said Russia liked the idea and Obama said, "That's my plan!" and Syria, which had said it did not have any WMD said it would give its WMD to the Russians, who can be trusted, Obama says, to verify that they have it and it is being kept safe because, after all, they stole the atom bomb secrets from the United States. Apparently, Assad was terrified at the prospect of what Obama assured everyone would be a harmless strike that would "degrade" Syria's ability to use WMD, which Syria said they did not have and did not get from Saddam Hussein, who never had any, according to liberals, even though one of Saddam's generals said Saddam sent his WMD to Syria. Now it looks like everything is going to be hunky-dory and the only thing remaining is for Dennis Rodman to get North Korea to surrender. Or, we can surrender to them. Whatever.
There will be a pop quiz next week.

Warmonger in the White House

He was going to unite America. Indeed, he was going to bring the entire world under his spell. There would be renewed respect for America and confidence in its ability as the No. 1 superpower.

But then came Syria.

It is a debacle. Charles Krauthammer aptly calls it “amateur hour” in the White House.

President Obama now stands as a monument to ambivalence, indecisiveness and political cynicism.

Americans overwhelmingly oppose getting involved in the civil war in Syria, as do most other nations. Americans recognize that America has no friends in that struggle, and that the only reason for intervening would be to spite Iran.

But, doing so might also provoke Iran into striking Israel, or America. Up to now, Iran has only supported and supplied those whose primary motivation is to harm America.

Obama draws red lines, then says he didn't. He says Assad must go – two years ago – but does nothing to make it happen.

His proposal is to strike, but not harm anything or anyone. He has given enough notice so that any targets now are no longer important.

Contrast this with the Israelis. When their national security is threatened, they act, and act decisively. They don't give advance notice and don't discuss it afterward.

When Iraq built a nuclear reactor at Osirak, Israeli planes flew into that country in 1981 and wiped the plant off the earth. It is reasonable to assume they will do the same in Iran if the Persians persist in their threats.

But Obama dithers. He didn't need Congress, he said, but he went to them anyway. Then his administration says he might act without Congress, and that he will not. He clarifies it and leaves it more confused. Americans have learned that when Obama says “Let me be clear,” they are about to get bamboozled.

The liberal position is that it is urgent to attack Syria and is the “moral” thing to do because someone has used weapons of mass destruction, which are prohibited by a treaty.

But why wasn't it moral to intervene in Iraq when another Arab dictator had killed many times more people with chemical weapons? Democrats – after saying in public that Saddam had WMD and was a serious threat – criticized George Bush for taking action. (Earlier, they had criticized the first Bush for NOT removing Saddam.)

Left unanswered is where the WMD came from. A former general in Iraq said in a book that Saddam shipped his supply to Syria when U.S. troops were bearing down on him.

It isn't even certain whether Assad or the other side in the civil war used the WMD. Granted, the “other side” is a ragtag bunch that includes terrorists of various camps and also a few people who might want a democracy or might just be a front.

We were assured in the glorious Arab spring that democracy was on the way to Egypt, and wound up with the Muslim Brotherhood gang of terrorists in charge.

Liberals always seem to be on the side of Muslims. When Muslims were slaughtering Christians in Bosnia, they didn't care. When the tide turned and Christians began winning, Bill Clinton started bombing, ostensibly to prevent a “genocide.”

Obama has supported the Arab terrorists who call themselves Palestinians, the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and now the rebels who include al-Qaida in Syria. Meanwhile, he doesn't even have time to have dinner with the head of state of Israel, which is one of America's staunchest allies.

Another ally that usually supports America is Britain. It has said no thanks to participating in this confused, unnecessary, pointless excursion.

So, Bush brought down a ruthless dictator with the support of the people, Congress, the United Nations and a coalition of other nations. Liberals castigated him. Now liberals want to order our military into battle, alone and against the will of the American people, to do … what?

Here they go again

I don't buy it or read it, but I saw a headline on the local liberal newspaper that signaled it was again trying to convince people they should pay higher taxes.

This is a fixation with the media.

As always, they try to tell you that paying higher taxes will give you a higher “quality of life.”

You know what gives you a higher quality of life?

Keeping a little bit of the money you have earned so that you can provide what your own family needs and wants, instead of turning it all over to politicians to spend as they see fit.

Does anyone in Jacksonville think that their quality of life has increased measurably because wealthy judges and wealthy lawyers can now work in a building that rivals the Taj Mahal?

How about the huge, expensive horse barn that was built out on Normandy Boulevard?

Or the ridiculous intersection at Bay and Laura streets, where the pavement was ripped up and replaced with broken pieces of brick so that your car tires are shredded as you bounce across it? That's the “quality of life” Jacksonville residents had in 1910.

This is the same nonsense we get from Washington. You would be so much happier, liberals insist, if you had less money for your health care, retirement and other needs. Let them spend it instead on their lavish retirement and health care plans, junkets around the world and fat contracts for their contributors.

At one time the local paper, at least on the opinion pages, had some regard for the hard-working Jacksonville families and demanded that politicians justify any new spending. Not any more.

Now it is: cough it up, citizens. We will connive with the politicians to decide how best to spend your money.

Don't buy the birpartisanship baloney

Libs can talk until they are blue in the face about how we need to "come together" and "work to get things done for the American people."
America is in an all-out culture war and surrender -- which is what they mean by coming together (on their side) -- is not an option.
Liberals are out to do just what Barack Hussein Obama promised: fundamentally transform America.
But not into something better.
None of the transparency, openness, honesty and bridge-building Obama promised has happened. It was never going to.
He explained it succinctly: "We won."
Legislation was crammed through Congress by subverting rules and dishonoring traditions. Even today, Harry Reid is plotting to do away with the hallowed Senate filibuster, made famous by Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Mr. Smith would walk out of this mess in Washington today.
Liberals are using threats, intimidation and every method brewed in the cauldron of Chicago politics.
There is one last chance. Putting Congress back in the hands of Americans next year will at least enable the legislative branch to suppress Obama's attempts during his last two years in office to take the nation as far left as it can go.
He has threatened, and will, to simply bypass Congress and rule by fiat. That is why the Supreme Court, already dangerously tilted left, may be the last hope.
When one half of the country wants to go in one direction and the other half in the opposite direction, there is no feasible compromise. 

Who is this guy?

Most of the media is missing the most important question in the matter of Edward Snowden.

Snowden now is on a worldwide tour of countries that hate the United States, carrying four laptop computers filled with secret information about the nation's intelligence gathering operations.

This guy has little education and not much sense, as far as we can tell from news stories.

So how did he get a top secret security clearance and access to important information related to national security?

Isn't that just a little bit important?

Instead it is all about “metadata” and the like. Various people on both sides of the political fence seem to think he is a national hero.

I'm not willing to shower him with accolades just yet.

For one thing, it isn't clear whether his information shows that the law is too permissive, or whether it shows that the Obama regime isn't following laws that are fair and reasonable.

Even if it is the latter case, what is the benefit to Americans from turning over that information to our enemies?

He could have gone to congressional oversight committees with it, for example. That way, the information could have been kept confidential yet the administration's use of the information could have been investigated.

Was the information used for political activities, or to protect the nation?

This nation must gather intelligence. Virtually all nations do.

Liberals don't like intelligence gathering and in the 1970s they succeeded in reducing our ability to conduct it, which probably was a contributing factor in the attacks on America on Sept. 11, 2001.

Now, Russia, China and who-knows-who-else have our secrets and, with the traitor organization Wikileaks involved, it is likely that everyone in the world will have access to them.

Snowden clearly wasn't working in the best interests of the United States. What we need to know is who he was working for and how he got his hands on our secrets.

More media malpractice

Here we go again, with a typical liberal media "news story" about public schools.
This story is a tear-jerker about two of Brevard County's 82 schools closing.
It contains almost no useful information.
It claims the closings are because of $30 million in "budget cuts" but offers no facts to support that contention.
According to the state Department of Education, Brevard County schools had $531 million in revenue in 2009-2010 and the amount has gone up every year to $548 million this year.
Even if the mysterious budget cuts exist, some politicians had to decide to close schools as one way of staying within their budget. Who made the decision and why? There was nothing else that could be cut in the district budget of a half-billion dollars?
Then, why those two particular schools?
Are they old? The story doesn't say. There is one mysterious reference to one of the schools "reopening" in 1997.
Are the schools failing? The story quotes one parent as saying one of the schools is a "No. 1" school, but doesn't tell readers whether that is true or not.
Did politicians close a new school that is doing a good job?
If they did, telling readers why that decision was made would make interesting reading.
Instead, it is a bunch of mawkish baloney about kids being inconvenienced by having to attend a different school. Except that one of the kids is quoted as saying he is looking forward to making new friends.
Apparently, Florida Today has no editors, or this waste of precious news space never would have seen the light of day.
Or, more likely, this was another editor-generated story, where hapless reporters were told to "go out there and write a sob story about schools closing because of budget cuts."

The Infernal Revenge Service

When I was an editorial page editor in the 1990s, the head of the IRS came to visit one day.
She swept into our conference room grandly with the usual retinue of about a dozen yes men.
During the conversation, I asked her how many people she employed. I don't remember her answer but my next comment was:
"I'm looking forward to the day when we can put the entire IRS in a room this size."
The jaws of her yes men dropped as if on cue.
But she answered smugly, "I don't think that's going to happen."
I explained my hope that passage of the Fair Tax would make it happen and we moved on to other things.
Since then, the IRS has only grown and with Obamacare it will grow even more. So, maybe she was right.
But it remains an arm of the government that is available,  to any president unscrupulous enough to employ it, as a vehicle to punish political opponents.
Saint Franklin of Roosevelt was one of the first to use it for such purposes, as he and his New Deal gang waged a war on capitalism.
It was also FDR who began withholding income tax from paychecks, another disaster for good government. Imagine writing a check to the government each month for your taxes and how that would affect public policy for the better.
In light of recent events, an independent counsel, the likes of Ken Starr, clearly is needed to determine who unleashed the IRS on conservatives this time. It is highly unlikely that the scapegoat who was fired is the instigator.
Only the low-information voter would put any stock in Obama's assurances that "We're going to fix it."

Making believers

This story explains a lot about the global warming scam.
The alarmists in the federal government hand out free money to "study" something -- global warming in this case -- and local politicians and bureaucrats fall all over themselves grabbing for the cash.
Of course there is global warming! If there wasn't, they wouldn't get any free money. And, the alarmists say, the studies the taxpayers' money pay for "prove" there is global warming caused by humans.
Except it doesn't.
There hasn't been any warming for about 15 years, a fact alarmists are squirming over. The computer models they rely on are bogus.
In this case, the money is supposed to be used to plan for the flooding that global warming is going to cause in a century or so.
These guys are bureaucrats who already are paid to plan. Why do they need more money to do what they are supposed to be doing every day?
It doesn't cost any more to plan for flooding than it does to plan for increased traffic. None of their plans are likely to have any effect any way, even if they are needed.
Local politicians aren't going to pony up the money for the dikes, or whatever. They will turn to the alarmists in the federal government, who will be only too happy to shovel more money their way.
In a century, when the "threat" has been exposed as a hoax, they won't be around to be held accountable. Meanwhile, your children and grandchildren still will be paying the tab.

The unthinkable happens

It was 40 years ago that the American Psychological Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.
I won't even go there on the question of whether they were right pre-1973 or post-1973.
The point is that this science was a consensus for many years.
Global warming alarmists call people who don't buy their guff "deniers" and sniff that the belief in this theory is a "scientific consensus."
Let's leave aside the fact that there are thousands of scientists who don't buy it.
But just what is a consensus? It is a common belief among a group based on what they know.
Let's face it: Scientists just don't know everything about the weather, or climate.
Currently, there is widespread embarrassment among alarmists over the fact that there hasn't been any warming for the past 20 years.
Their computer models insist that it should be warming, and that anticipated future warming predicted by these models will wipe out mankind. These models are the basis for the demand that humans worldwide completely change their way of life and spend trillions of dollars in the process.
Maybe before that, we should have models that work?
Previously, they said no warming over a period of 10-20 years would be evidence that the theory is at fault. Now that period has passed, they are insisting it will take 30-40 years to show catastrophe is not imminent.
Let's also step back and take note that all this furor is over an increase in global warming of less than one degree since it began being measured.
At about the time psychological scientists changed their consensus, national news magazines were writing about a scientific consensus that the Earth was facing a new Ice Age.
That's right. There had been a cooling period of several years, following a warming period, and the science was settled, according to news accounts. Glaciers were coming.
Not long after that, a new consensus was formed and global warming was born.
They assured us it was not just a normal cycle of warming and cooling. Humans were causing it with their electric plants and automobiles. Don't worry about the fact that most of the increase occurred before electric plants and automobiles.
Common carbon dioxide -- without which life cannot exist on Earth -- came to be a "pollutant." Politicians want to tax it.
But the public is catching on. Global warming now ranks very low on the list of what people worry about, according to opinion polls.
Maybe those in the alarmist community might want to re-examine their consensus as the psychologists did 40 years ago.

What institutions of "higher education" produce

You have to despair upon reading something like this.
Probably, this kid had sense at one time. But after four years in a university, his brain has turned into mush, if this column is any evidence of what goes on inside his head.
Just to use two examples:
He talks about the "rivers" of oil terrorizing Arkansas residents.
The amount of oil released could easily be contained in two swimming pools. Is that enough to flood an entire state and drive people from its cities?
Then, to avoid the moral crime of using oil he suggests everyone should switch to an electric car.
Where does he suppose the electricity is going to come from in an oil-free world? Windmills?
He probably thinks this is bold, new thinking, and quite daring. This is nothing more than standard, knee-jerk liberalism, instilled in him by professors who are steeped in rivers of it.
You can get your fill of it any day on MSNBC or in the columns of the New York Times. Fewer people make those choices every day.
We all hear the nonsense from "educators" that we cannot teach facts; we must teach people "how to think."
If this is an example, I'll go for facts any day.

Conned again

Rush Limbaugh says: "Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in my life, I am ashamed of my country."
Why? Polls show high approval for President Obama and people blaming the GOP for the panic Obama manufactured over the sequester.
The sequester would mean precisely this: The federal government would spend more next year than this year. It would merely spend 5 percent less than politicians want to spend.
In other words, the government could do everything it is doing now.
Yet, the president paints a picture of children in the streets with begging bowls, crying for food, if Congress allows his sequester plan to take place.
The GOP-controlled House has passed a plan to avoid sequester. But the Democrat Senate won't pass it and the president would not sign it.
Government by continuing crisis is working, as is the plan to tear down America.
By the time people wake up, if ever, it will be too late.
It is a lot like being a citizen of Rome in 410 A.D., when the city was sacked by barbarians. Within a generation, the empire was dissolved.

Lunacy at the top

President Obama's new line -- we can't cut our way to prosperity -- is meant to be a twist on the conservative staple that you can't tax your way to prosperity.
However, there is a slight difference. One is true and one is not.
Taxing -- taking money from the productive part of the economy and allowing politicians to "spread it around a bit" has not ever produced prosperity and never will.
On the other hand, the $5 trillion in spending added during the past six years Democrats have been in control has done nothing beneficial.
Think about it. None of that money was being spent six years ago and yet we were a healthy, happy, hale and hearty nation. The debt was worrisome but manageable -- if we had just frozen spending, without making cuts.
Obama has abandoned the pose of being a moderate and now is openly pushing to create a welfare state that will dwarf those in socialist countries.
Regardless what we can't do, what we can do is tax and spend our way to bankruptcy.