A Little Reminder To All You Leftists On The Anniversary Of Osama’s Death
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If the C.I.A. had been forced to refrain from utilizing the enhanced interrogation techniques that Barack Obama and the entire Democrat party leadership fought tooth-and-nail to get rid of, Osama Bin Laden would still be alive today. The information acquired from the terrorists upon whom those techniques were employed was integral in finding Bin Laden, as well as other Al-Qaeda leaders. This is no big secret, it’s a well-known fact, yet Obama is more than happy to let you continue to delude yourselves into thinking that his war policies had something to do with Osama’s death. They didn’t, and every Democrat politician from D.C. to Dallas knows it.
Beyond that, your leftist leaders and their minions in the Jurassic media would have you believe that Obama’s decision to allow our special forces personnel to kill Bin Laden, once they discovered his whereabouts, was somehow a “gutsy call”, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Obama had NO ALTERNATIVE but to make the call he did. If you don’t think so, just imagine what would have happened to his re-election chances if the American people found out that he’d had an opportunity to authorize the death of the most wanted terrorist in history and refused to do it! The Republicans could run a stale potato chip against him in November and win in a landslide. You all know that’s true, just as you know that Mitt Romney would have made the exact same call for the exact same reason. Only a suicidally stupid politician wouldn’t have done so.
So let’s recap…
1.) Bin Laden was hunted down and killed in spite of Obama’s policies, not because of them.
2.) Obama made the only call possible under the circumstances, just like any other president would have.
3.) You’re all a bunch of idiots.
Like this:
Daily Benefactor Columnists – The Solyndra Fraud (Andrew C. McCarthy) – More Op-Eds
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The Solyndra Fraud – Andrew C. McCarthy
The Solyndra debacle is not just Obama-style crony socialism as usual. It is a criminal fraud. That is the theory that would be guiding any competent prosecutor’s office in the investigation of a scheme that cost victims – in this case, American taxpayers – a fortune.
Fraud against the United States is one of the most serious felony offenses in the federal penal law. It is even more serious than another apparent Solyndra violation that has captured congressional attention: the Obama administration’s flouting of a statute designed to protect taxpayers.
Homing in on one of the several shocking aspects of the Solyndra scandal, lawmakers noted that, a few months before the “clean energy” enterprise went belly-up last week, the Obama Energy Department signed off on a sweetheart deal. In the event of bankruptcy – the destination to which it was screamingly obvious Solyndra was headed despite the president’s injection of $535 million in federal loans – the cozily connected private investors would be given priority over American taxpayers. In other words, when the busted company’s assets were sold off, Obama pals would recoup some of their losses, while you would be left holding the half-billion-dollar bag.
As Andrew Stiles reported here at NRO, Republicans on the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee say this arrangement ran afoul of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This law – compassionate conservatism in green bunting – is a monstrosity, under which Leviathan, which can’t run a post office, uses your money to pick winners and losers in the economy’s energy sector. The idea is cockamamie, but Congress did at least write in a mandate that taxpayers who fund these “investments” must be prioritized over other stakeholders. The idea is to prevent cronies from pushing ahead of the public if things go awry – as they are wont to do when pols fancy themselves venture capitalists.
On the Energy Policy Act, the administration’s malfeasance is significant, but secondary. That’s because the act is not a penal statute. It tells the cabinet officials how to structure these “innovative technology” loans, but it provides no remedy if Congress’s directives are ignored.
The criminal law, by contrast, is not content to assume the good faith of government officials. It targets anyone – from low-level swindlers to top elective officeholders – who attempts to influence the issuance of government loans by making false statements; who engages in schemes to defraud the United States; or who conspires “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof, in any manner or for any purpose.” The penalties are steep: Fraud in connection with government loans, for example, can be punished by up to 30 years in the slammer.
Although Solyndra was a private company, moreover, it was using its government loans as a springboard to go public. When the sale of securities is involved, federal law criminalizes fraudulent schemes, false statements of material fact, and statements that omit any “material fact necessary in order to make the statements made… not misleading.” And we’re not just talking about statements made in required SEC filings. Any statement made to deceive the market can be actionable. In 2003, for example, the Justice Department famously charged Martha Stewart with securities fraud. Among other allegations, prosecutors cited public statements she had made in press releases and at a conference for securities analysts – statements in which she withheld damaging information in an effort to inflate the value of her corporation and its stock.
That’s exactly what President Obama did on May 26, 2010, with his Solyndra friends about to launch their initial public offering of stock. The solar-panel company’s California factory was selected as the fitting site for a presidential speech on the virtues of confiscating taxpayer billions to prop up pie-in-the-sky clean-energy businesses.
By then, the con game was already well under way. Solyndra had first tried to get Energy Act funding during the Bush administration, but had been rebuffed shortly before President Bush left office. Small wonder: Solyndra, as former hedge-fund manager Bruce Krasting concluded, was “an absolute complete disaster.” Its operating expenses, including supply costs, nearly doubled its revenue in 2009 – and that’s without factoring in capital expenditures and other costs in what, Krasting observes, is a “low margin” industry. The chance that Solyndra would ever become profitable was essentially nonexistent, particularly given that solar-panel competitors backed by China produce energy at drastically lower prices.
Yet, as Stiles reports, within six days of Obama’s taking office, an Energy Department official acknowledged that the Solyndra “approval process” was suddenly being considered anew. Eventually, the administration made Solyndra the very first recipient of a public loan guarantee when the Energy Act program was beefed up in 2009 – just part of nearly a trillion dollars burned through under the Obama stimulus.
For a while after Solyndra tanked, the administration stonewalled the House subcommittee’s investigation, but we now know that minions in the Energy Department and the Office of Management and Budget had enormous qualms about the Solyndra loan. They realized that the company was hemorrhaging money and, even with the loan, would lack the necessary working capital to turn that equation around. Yet they caved under White House pressure to sign off in time for Vice President Joe Biden to make a ballyhooed announcement of the loan in September 2009. An OMB e-mail laments that the timing of the loan approval was driven by the politics of the announcement “rather than the other way around.”
Why so much pressure to give half a billion dollars to a doomed venture? The administration insists it had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that Solyndra’s big backers include the George Kaiser Family Foundation. No, of course not. George Kaiser, an Oklahoma oil magnate, just happens to be a major Obama fundraiser who bundled oodles in contributions for the president’s 2008 campaign. Solyndra officers and investors are said to have visited the White House no fewer than 20 times while the loan guarantee was being considered and, later, revised. Kaiser, too, made several visits – but not to worry: Both he and administration officials deny any impropriety. You’re to believe that the White House was just turning up the heat on OMB and DOE because Solyndra seemed like such a swell investment.
Except it didn’t seem so swell to people who knew how to add and subtract, and those people weren’t all at OMB and DOE. Flush with confidence that their mega-loan from Uncle Sam would make the company attractive to private investors, Solyndra’s backers prepared to take the company public. Unfortunately, SEC rules for an initial public offering of stock require the disclosure of more than Obama speeches glowing with solar power. Companies that want access to the market have to reveal their financial condition.
In Solyndra’s case, outside auditors from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) found that condition to be dire. “The company has suffered recurring losses from operations, negative cash flows since inception, and has a net stockholders’ deficit,” the PWC accountants concluded. Even with the gigantic Obama loan, Solyndra was such a basket case that PWC found “substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”
The “going concern” language is not boilerplate. As Townhall finance maven John Ransom explains, it is a term of art to which auditors resort when there is an extraordinary need to protect themselves and the company from legal liability. Angry investors who’ve lost their shirts tend to scapegoat the loser company’s accountants. In truth, even if the accountants affixed a neon “going concern” sign to the company’s financial statements, investors would have no one but themselves to blame. But it is unusual: The language is absent from the statements of many companies that actually end up going bankrupt. Auditors reserve it for the hopeless causes – like Solyndra.
With no alternative if they wanted to make a play for market financing, Solyndra’s backers disclosed the auditors’ bleak diagnosis in March 2010. The government had thus been aware of it for two months when President Obama made his May 26 Solyndra speech – the speech Solyndra backers were clearly hoping would mitigate the damage.
As president, Obama had a fiduciary responsibility to be forthright about Solyndra’s grim prospects – in speaking to the American taxpayers whose money he had redistributed, and to the American investors who were about to be solicited for even more funding. Instead, he pulled a Martha Stewart.
The president looked us in the eye and averred that, when it came to channeling public funds into private hands, “We can see the positive impacts right here at Solyndra.” He bragged that the $535 billion loan had enabled the company to build the state-of-the-art factory in which he was then speaking. He said nothing about how Solyndra was continuing to lose money – public money – at a catastrophic pace. Instead, he painted the brightest of pictures: 3,000 construction workers to build the thriving plant; manufacturers in 22 states building an endless stream of supplies; technicians in a dozen states constructing the advanced equipment that would make the factory hum; and Solyndra fully “expect[ing] to hire a thousand workers to manufacture solar panels and sell them across America and around the world.”
Not content with that rosy portrait, the president further predicted a “ripple effect”: Solyndra would “generate business for companies throughout our country who will create jobs supplying this factory with parts and materials.” Sure it would. The auditors had scrutinized Solyndra and found it to have, from its inception, a fatally flawed business model that was hurtling toward collapse. Obama touted it as a redistribution success story that would be rippling jobs, growth, and spectacular success for the foreseeable future.
It was a breathtaking misrepresentation. Happily, it proved insufficient to dupe investors who, unlike taxpayers, get to choose where their money goes. They stacked what the administration was saying against what the PWC auditors were saying and wisely went with PWC. Solyndra had to pull its initial public offering due to lack of interest.
But fraud doesn’t have to be fully successful to be a fraud, and this one still had another chapter to go. As the IPO failed and the company inevitably sank in a sea of red ink, Solyndra’s panicked backers pleaded with the administration to restructure the loan terms – to insulate them from their poor business judgment, allowing them to recoup some of their investment while the public took the fall.
It should go without saying that the duty of soi-disant public servants is to serve the public. In this instance, the proper course was clear. As structured, the loan gave the public first dibs on Solyndra’s assets if it collapsed, and, as we’ve seen, the law requires it. There was no good reason to contemplate a change.
In addition, as Andrew Stiles relates, OMB had figured out that there was no economic sense in restructuring: Solyndra was heading for bankruptcy anyway, and an immediate liquidation would net the government a better deal – about $170 million better. The case for leaving things where they stood was so palpable that OMB openly feared “questions will be asked” if DOE proceeded with an unjustifiable restructuring. So, with numbing predictability, the Obama administration proceeded with an unjustifiable restructuring. In exchange for lending some of their own money and thus buying more time, Solyndra officials were given priority over taxpayers with respect to the first $75 million in the event of a bankruptcy – the event all the insiders and government officials could see coming from the start, and that hit the rest of us like a $535 billion thunderbolt last week.
The administration’s rationalization is priceless. According to DOE officials, the restructuring was necessary “to create a situation whereby investors felt there was a value in their investment.” Of course, the value in an investment is the value created by the business in which the investment is made. Here, Solyndra had no value. Investors could be enticed only by an invalid arrangement to recoup some of their losses – by a scheme to make the public an even bigger sap.
The word for such schemes is fraud.
Click HERE For Rest Of Article
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‘Pass This Jobs Bill!’ – Mark Steyn
The president has taken to the campaign trail to promote his “American Jobs Act.” That’s a good name for it: an act. “Pass this bill now!” he declared 24 times at a stop in Raleigh, N.C., and another 18 in Columbus, Ohio, and the act is sufficiently effective that, three years into the Vapidity of Hope, the president can still find crowds of true believers willing to chant along with him: “Pass this bill now!”
Not all supporters are content merely to singalong with the prompter-in-chief. In North Carolina, a still-devoted hopeychanger cried out, “I love you!”
“I love you, too,” said the president. “But…”
Click HERE For Rest Of Article
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So A Comatose Guy Walks Into A Bar… – Ann Coulter
Liberals are on their high horses about a single audience member at CNN’s Republican debate whom they believe wanted a hypothetical man without health insurance in a hypothetical coma to die – hypothetically.
(Democrats want people in comas to die only when they are not hypothetical but real, like Terri Schiavo.)
I concur with the audience member who shouted “Yes!” This has nothing to do with any actual people in comas – the people Democrats want to kill – it’s just a big “screw you” to the moderator.
Click HERE For Rest Of Article
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Obama Plagued By Democrats’ Ingratitude – Byron York
For generations, Democrats longed for a president who could enact national health care. Barack Obama did it.
For years, Democrats longed for a president who could massively increase federal spending, impose broad new regulations and fight for higher taxes. Barack Obama did it.
For much of the past decade, Democrats longed for a president who could pull American forces out of Iraq and redirect U.S. security policy toward al Qaeda. Barack Obama did it – and killed Osama bin Laden, to boot.
Obama did all that, and more. And now many Democrats are afraid to be seen with him. Some gratitude.
Click HERE For Rest Of Article
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You Can’t Tax The Rich – Thomas Sowell
Ninety years ago – in 1921 – federal income-tax policies reached an absurdity that many people today seem to want to repeat. Those who believe in high taxes on “the rich” got their way. The tax rate on people in the top income bracket was 73 percent in 1921. On the other hand, the rich also got their way: They didn’t actually pay those taxes.
The number of people with taxable incomes of $300,000 a year or more – equivalent to far more than $1 million in today’s money – declined from over 1,000 people in 1916 to fewer than 300 in 1921. Were the rich all going broke?
It might look that way. More than four-fifths of the total taxable income earned by people making $300,000 a year up and vanished into thin air.
Click HERE For Rest Of Article
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Obama’s Quiver Is Empty – Victor Davis Hanson
Ex-president George W. Bush with accustomed candor once shrugged after the end of his eight-year presidency, “People were kind of tired of me.” That ennui happens eventually with most presidents. But in the case of Barack Obama, our modern Phaethon, his fiery crash is coming after 32, not 96, months.
We can sense the national weariness with Obama in a variety of strange and unexpected ways. There is the self-pitying anguish of liberal columnists who scapegoat him for turning the public against their own leftwing agenda. The current silence of “moderate” Republicans and conservative op-ed writers who once in near ecstasy jumped ship to join Obama is deafening. A growing number of Democratic representatives and senators up for reelection do not want their partisan president to visit their districts in the runup to November 2012. Approval ratings hover around 40 percent.
Click HERE For Rest Of Article
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The Cash-For-Visas Program – Michelle Malkin
As part of his warmed-over jobs plan, President Obama is repackaging “Buy American” stimulus subsidies to help hard-hit homegrown businesses. At the same time, however, Congress is pushing to expand a fraud-riddled investor program that puts U.S. citizenship for sale to the highest foreign business bidders.
Call it the Buy America Cash-for-Visas plan.
As I first reported 10 years ago, the EB-5 immigrant investor program was created under an obscure section of the 1990 Immigration Act. The law allows 10,000 wealthy foreigners a year to purchase green cards by investing between $500,000 and $1 million in new commercial enterprises or troubled businesses.
Click HERE For Rest Of Article
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If you think Gay marriage is reasonable then, be reasonable about it
Image via Wikipedia
Aleister thinks that Gay activists overreached when they tried to bring their agenda to Sesame Street
I support gay marriage but I think gay marriage activists overreached and damaged their cause with the campaign to have Sesame Street’s Ernie and Bert get married.
As a member of Generation X, I grew up with Ernie and Bert and always viewed them more as a comedy team than anything else. Gay marriage activists went too far by insisting they’re a gay couple who should be married.
Even the liberal Sesame Workshop, formerly known as the Children’s Television Workshop wasn’t into the idea…
Sesame Workshop, which produces the long-running children’s series, seemed to be throwing water on any marital plans.
“Bert and Ernie are good friends,” the company declared in a statement. “They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves.”
Isn’t that last part the point? If you’re to the left of a show on PBS, shouldn’t you rethink your position?
If it is true that the point of Ernie and Bert is to teach children that “people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves.” Then the need to portray them as a gay couple is as useful as remembering Oscar Wilde as a boob man.
The main concern should be the target audience. When I was 6 years old, I loved Ernie and Bert, not because of their politics or their sex. I just thought they were funny and frankly, isn’t that all a 6 year old should care about?
Absolutely! This is the only problem I see with Gay marriage. I believe that most Gay people who want to marry are sincere, and are NOT looking to force anything on anybody. They are, indeed like most people. Let them live their lives and leave them alone and they are just fine.
Then, there are the “activists”. Sometimes, I think activist is becoming as ugly a title as politician is. I wonder if the activists, in this case Gay activists, even really care about progress, or making things better, or righting wrongs. I am starting to think that to the activist, their activism is all about them, and their over-inflated egos. They want things a certain way, because they know best, and by God, unless they are an Atheist activist of course, they are going to shove their agenda down our throats. Which is why I tend to have a distaste for the control freaks posing as caring activists. Whether they are trying to re-define marriage, or force their prohibitionist nonsense on everyone else, or trying to ban smoking in restaurants, or trying to police what I watch on TV, I have no use for them.
Such over the top behavior, and isn’t trying to screw up Sesame Street for kids screwed up, is despicable frankly, and such antics are why I am becoming more and more wary of and turned off by, any “activist”, even if they support something I support.
Yeah, about that whole compromise thingy…………
Frank Slavato sums it up nicely
The Obama Administration, Congressional Progressives and Democrats, and the mainstream media have done a fantastic job of controlling the narrative in the debt ceiling/budget debate. They have hammered home, in an almost Goebbels-esque manner, the false notion that Republicans have not “compromised on their partisan ideals”; that the GOP is, to use their talking point, “intransigent.” This is nothing short of exactly the opposite from the truth.
The fact of the matter is that House Speaker John Boehner, and a majority of the House and Senate Republican contingents, have compromised, and have done so on a major issue: raising the debt ceiling.
Go read it all
Greenpeace And The IPCC: Time, Surely, For A Climate Masada?
Greenpeace And The IPCC: Time, Surely, For A Climate Masada? – James Delingpole
For once my sympathy is all with the whalers…
And how are you feeling today, all you Greenies, after your most embarrassing week (well, one of the most embarrassing: the competition, it must be said, has been pretty stiff these last 18 months) since Climategate?
Just in case your only information sources are RealClimate or Guardian Environment let me explain, briefly, what has been happening out here on Planet Reality. In a nutshell, you’ve been caught with your trousers down yet again, viz:
An official IPCC report bigging up renewable energy as the power source of the future turns out to have been lead-authored by an activist from Greenpeace and based not on solid science but a wish-fulfilment fantasy scenario devised by, you guessed it, Greenpeace.
Here’s how the press release of the IPCC’s Summary For Policymakers reported its findings:
Close to 80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies a new report shows.
This was uncritically reported by its amen corner in the MSM, led of course by the BBC’s Richard Black and the Guardian. But others more diligent smelt a rat – among them the mighty Steve McIntyre whose magisterially contemptuous blogpost on the subject has been keeping climate sceptics such as Bishop Hill, WUWT, Rex Murphy, Ronald Bailey and Mark Lynas busy all week.
Mark Lynas? Not the same eco activist Mark Lynas who once threw a custard pie in Bjorn Lomborg’s face and was responsible for advising the Maldives cabinet to pose for that nauseatingly disingenuous publicity shot where they’re all under water (because, like, the Maldives are being drowned due to global warming: except, of course they’re not)? Yep, that one. But on this occasion, at least, even as committed an eco zealot as he has been forced to concede that IPCC has done its reputation as the “gold standard” (copyright: B Obama) of international climate science few favours:
The IPCC must urgently review its policies for hiring lead authors – and I would have thought that not only should biased ‘grey literature’ be rejected, but campaigners from NGOs should not be allowed to join the lead author group and thereby review their own work. There is even a commercial conflict of interest here given that the renewables industry stands to be the main beneficiary of any change in government policies based on the IPCC report’s conclusions. Had it been an oil industry intervention which led the IPCC to a particular conclusion, Greenpeace et al would have course have been screaming blue murder.
Additionally, the Greenpeace/renewables industry report is so flawed that it should not have been considered by the IPCC at all. Whilst the journal-published version looks like proper science, the propaganda version on the Greenpeace website has all the hallmarks of a piece of work which started with some conclusions and then set about justifying them. There is a whole section dedicated to ‘dirty, dangerous nuclear power’, and the scenario includes a complete phase-out of new nuclear globally, with no stations built after 2008.
It is a good point well made. Putting a guy from Greenpeace in charge of writing the supposedly neutral, scientifically-based report on which governments are going to base their energy policy is like putting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in charge of a report entitled Whither Israel? It is, in fact, yet another scandal of Climategate proportions. But you’d be amazed how many people there are out there who still don’t quite see the broader significance of this.
Here, for example, is the characteristically wet response from the Economist’s Babbage:
The release of the full text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on Renewable Energy this week has led to a new set of questions about the panel’s attitudes, probity and reliability: is it simply a sounding board for green activists? The answer is no—but that doesn’t mean it’s without serious problems.
Er, no, actually, Babbage. The answer is “yes.” Since its very foundation, the IPCC has been a sounding board for green activists. That is indeed its purpose. It has no remit to investigate whether or not climate change is significantly man-made and whether this constitutes a threat serious enough to handicap the global economy with massive tax and regulation because it takes all those as givens: as far as the IPCC’s concerned, the debate is over and the time to act is now. (Which, funnily enough, is exactly what green activists think). This was the point of McKitrick and McIntyre’s brilliant demolition of the Hockey Stick; the point of Climategate; the point of Amazongate, Glaciergate, Africagate et al; the point of Donna Laframboise’s superb research showing how much “grey literature” (ie activist propaganda with no solid scientific basis) from activist groups like WWF and Greenpeace has informed the IPCC’s supposedly state-of-the-art assessment reports.
The Man Made Global Warming industry is a crock, a scam on an epic scale, fed by the world’s biggest outbreak of mass hysteria, stoked by politicians dying for an excuse to impose more tax and regulation on us while being seen to “care” about an issue of pressing urgency, fuelled by the shrill lies and tear-jerking propaganda of activists possessed of no understanding of the real world other than a chippy instinctive hatred of capitalism, given a veneer of scientific respectability by post-normal scientists who believe their job is to behave like politicians rather than dispassionate seekers-after-truth, cheered on by rent-seeking businesses, financed by the EU, the UN and the charitable foundations of the guilt-ridden rich, and promoted at every turn by schoolteachers, college lecturers, organic muesli packets, Walkers crisps, the BBC, CNBC, Al Gore, the Prince Of Wales, David Suzuki, the British Antarctic Survey, Barack Obama, David Cameron and Knut – the late, dyslexic-challenging, baby polar bear, formerly of Berlin Zoo.
And you really don’t need to be a contrarian or an out-there conspiracy theorist or a hard-core libertarian or a rampant free-market capitalist or a dyed in the wool conservative to think this way any more. This is reality. This is how it is. This is where all the overwhelming evidence points. So what kind of a bizarro, warped, intellectually challenged, cognitively dissonant, eco-fascistic nutcase would you have to be to think otherwise?
Look, I’m sorry to be blunt all you Greenies (you know how normally polite and respectful I am to you and your cause) but don’t you think the charade has gone on long enough? Do you not think, maybe, that given that the IPCC is the basis of all your so-called “science” on climate change, and given that the IPCC has been proven dozens of times now to have been hijacked by activists with about as much of a handle on objective reality as Syd Barrett locked in a cupboard during a particularly bad acid trip, it mightn’t be time finally to do the decent thing?
Either come over to the side of reality, truth and climate scepticism (as your Lynas has sort of done) and admit you’re wrong. Or gather together in your last redoubt with your Hansens and your Gores and your Porritts and all the other die hards and do the only other honorable thing: show the courage of your convictions by staging a Climate Masada.
Medicare ‘Part D’ Pays $3.1M For Viagra
Medicare ‘Part D’ Pays $3.1M For Viagra – Sweetness & Light
From the Politico:
Medicare mistakenly pays for Viagra
By Brett Coughlin
March 14, 2011It is against the law for Medicare to pay for prescriptions to Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs, but the government health program paid claims worth $3.1 million for those drugs, the HHS Office of Inspector General has found.
The claims were paid in 2007 and 2008. The problem stems from a mistake in editing software that was supposed to block Part D coverage for the drugs, the HHS OIG reported.
And these people getting Viagra weren’t even in a Milwaukee teachers union. Oh, well, if it was just a computer glitch – then that is okay.
The OIG has recommended that CMS recoup payment for the drugs and “strengthen internal controls to help ensure that drugs covered by Medicare Part D comply with federal requirements.” This can be accomplished by maintaining an up-to-date list of all ED drugs, making sure that Part D plans have that list and periodically updating the software employed to deny payment for those drugs.
You see, the bureaucrats (at whatever the CMS is) did not know that Viagra was an ‘Erectile Dysfunction’ drug because they didn’t have an up-to-date list. Viagra being such an obscure brand.
Notice, too, that it is just a recommendation that the CMS “recoup payment.” They aren’t going to get tough about it. After all, it’s just taxpayer money. It’s not real.
Congress nixed Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement for Viagra, manufactured by Pfizer, in a Hurricane Katrina relief bill approved in 2005. The law was a response to news that the New York Medicaid program was paying for prison inmates to take the drug.
This is government oversight? They only find out about such things because of news reports – probably from a tabloid?
The same law, however, allowed Pfizer to sell a nearly identical drug – Revatio – to Medicare patients who suffer from vascular degeneration, but at a much higher price…
So those in the know will still get their ‘Viagra,’ but just at a much higher cost to the taxpayer. How perfectly typical.
And what a nice preview of life under Obama-care, when these stories will be multiplied by ten thousand.
Total payments for Part D claims were $133 billion in 2007 and 2008.
Which, of course, is the real scandal here.
By the way, when the ‘Medicare Part D’ bill was up for passage back in 2003 we were told it would (only) cost $395 for ten years. Or less than $40 billion a year.
My how time flies.
Godzilla Redux
Godzilla Redux – American Spectator
Friday’s tremendous earthquake off Japan’s coast has triggered the normal responses. The American media is busily hyperventilating over what it claims to be the greatest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, the Japanese have mounted a highly-organized disaster relief program, and the U.S. military is on the scene providing the rapid, massive relief that is literally beyond the capability of any other entity on earth.
Ronald Reagan is providing a massive amount of help. No, it’s not the Gipper himself, but the nuclear carrier USS Ronald Reagan and a host of other Navy ships, about which more in a moment.
The enormity of the quake is measured on the Richter scale. The January 1994 Los Angeles quake – which collapsed highways, toppled buildings, and took about 33 lives – was measured at 6.7 on that 1-10 scale. The latest information from the Japanese meteorological agency’s re-measurement of the quake rated it at 9.0, the largest ever measured in Japan.
Remember that the Richter scale is logarithmic: each number represents ten times the next lowest number. So the Japanese quake was more than 100 times stronger than the L.A. quake.
Yesterday, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said it was the nation’s worst crisis since World War II. The media is making it sound as if it’s enough of a nuclear crisis to rouse Godzilla.
Our media has never understood why Japan – the only nation to suffer the use of nuclear weapons – would allow nuclear power plants to be built. The 1954 movie monster Godzilla was created by the effects of nuclear testing and was a metaphor for the dangers of all things nuclear, reflecting post-war Japan’s recent memories and fears. So the media’s Godzilla narrative, developed over decades of opposition to U.S. nuclear power, requires the belief that nuclear power is more dangerous than any other.
That narrative again took flight almost immediately after the Japanese quake. CNN’s Piers Morgan (who?) headlined his commentary as a “countdown to meltdown.” By Sunday, two New York Times reporters wrote, under the headline “Partial Meltdowns Presumed at Crippled Reactors,” that “Japanese officials struggled on Sunday to contain a quickly escalating nuclear crisis in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake and tsunami, saying they presumed that partial meltdowns had occurred at two crippled reactors, and that they were bracing for a second explosion, even as they appeared to face cooling problems at two more plants and international nuclear experts said radiation had leaked from a fourth.”
Buried deep in that and other reports is the disturbing fact – disturbing to the nuclear Chicken Littles – that there is little if any radiation leakage reported.
Nearly every report presumes that the Godzilla narrative will result in the continuation of America’s three-decades-long moratorium on new nuclear power plants.
The fact that the narrative is nonsensical is demonstrated by events from the 1979 Three Mile Island mishap in Pennsylvania to last week’s in Japan and the six decades of U.S. Navy experience.
A “meltdown” occurs when an out-of-control reactor’s core reaches such a high temperature that the core materials melt. If the “lava” burns through the reactor’s multiple layers of containment and flows into nearby land and water, the release of radiation could be lethal to those immediately exposed, could result in long-term increases of cancer, and could contaminate massive areas of land and water for decades.
The partial meltdown at Three Mile Island was contained. The core did not melt through to contaminate the region and very little radiation was released. TMI, unlike Chernobyl, wasn’t a cheesy reactor run by morons. (Japanese reports indicate that though two partial meltdowns have happened, they have been well-contained. The reality may prove to be worse – or better – than news reports now say.)
What is fascinating about the Japanese mini-meltdowns is not that they were contained. The fascination comes from the fact that even in this massive quake – the largest ever recorded in earthquake-prone Japan – so little actually happened. Every expectation should drive the conclusion that this once in a century event would have totally destroyed nuclear power plants in the path of the quake and resulting tsunami. But they didn’t.
If you believe the hot air-powered anti-nuke media, there should have been complete meltdowns at all the affected power plants and millions should be dying of radiation poisoning, even more facing a future of death by cancer and mutant babies that resemble Dennis Kucinich. But – from what we know now – nothing like that is happening.
The Japanese government has shown decisiveness in dealing with the crisis in ways the Soviet government did not. They have flooded the endangered reactors with boric acid mixed with seawater, destroying the cores. By doing so, the Japanese have sacrificed billions in equipment to save lives. Those reactors have been shut down and will never operate again.
The lesson should be that if you don’t build a badly-designed reactor and hire idiots to run it – à la Chernobyl – a nuclear power plant can be as safe as any power plant can be.
If we learn anything from the Japanese disaster it is that we should push forward with nuclear power – applying the lessons the Japanese learn with our own best engineering and science – at the fastest pace possible. Which is a lot faster than the liberals will want to allow despite the facts. Our record on nuclear power – including TMI, in which (according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) no one in the facility or surrounding community was injured – is excellent.
We should remember that the U.S. Navy has had nuclear-powered ships since 1953. In the 58 years since, there have been no accidents or man-made mishaps. None. Which is a good thing for the Japanese because one of those ships is providing massive relief that nothing else can.
A huge area of Japan is in desperate need of help. This earthquake has disrupted the supply of fresh water, electricity, communications and destroyed airfields and roads on which relief efforts need to flow. Then the Big Dogs started mobilizing.
There are thousands of U.S. Marines and hundreds of US Air Force aircraft stationed in Japan and they are already operating search and rescue missions in conjunction with Japanese forces and distributing relief supplies. Many of the Seventh Fleet’s combatant and supply ships are already there and more are on the way. They bring massive quantities of food, medical supplies, and construction equipment, as well as communications hubs that can fill any gaps. (Pre-positioned relief packages, such as the ones now sailing quickly toward Japan, contain everything you’d think of, from MRE’s [Meals, Ready to Eat] to baby food, to save lives and provide some level of comfort.)
When the USS Ronald Reagan arrived off the coast of Japan it changed the game.
The Reagan — like all Nimitz-class carriers — has the capability to produce over 400,000 gallons of potable water every day, and other ships can produce nearly that amount. The carrier’s four-acre deck will be the “lily pad” for Japanese and U.S. helicopters flying rescue and supply missions 24/7. As my friend retired RAdm. Mike Groothousen (former commander of the Reagan’s sister ship, USS Harry S. Truman) reminded me, if you’re not using the catapults and arresting gear – which helos don’t need – your deck crews can operate around the clock for a long time.
And, as Groot told me, the carriers have a lot of radiation-monitoring equipment aboard. They can help the Japanese determine how serious any radiation leaks may be.
Japan will recover, the damage of the earthquake itself overshadowing any effect of the damage to – or caused by – its nuclear power plants. A lot has changed since 1954. These days, Godzilla is a good guy.
Our Manifestly Unserious Republican House Leader – By Edward L. Daley
House Speaker John Boehner is not a serious adult when it comes to addressing the out-of-control federal spending of the Democrat party. That is evident in his proposal to cut a largely inconsequential $61 Billion from the final seven months of this year’s budget.
To give you a good idea of just how astoundingly weak Boehner’s proposal is, consider that the budget deficit for February of this year ALONE was $223 Billion, or almost four times the amount that the Speaker proposes to cut by year’s end.
Even if the Senate agrees to sign on to these cuts, Obama’s obscene spending policies will still add another $1.6 Trillion to our already crippling and unsustainable $14.2 Trillion national debt.
Add to that, the fact that the President has crafted a monstrously irresponsible $3.7 Trillion budget for fiscal year 2012, and Boehner ‘s $61 Billion scheme is exposed for the pathetic monetary joke that it is.
To put it bluntly, if the Republican leader of the House is not willing to propose at least $700 Billion in cuts this year in the hopes that he may be able to strike a $350 Billion deal down the road, then he has no business being Speaker, or even being a member of the GOP leadership.
Sure, I understand that the Speaker of the House has no power to force the democrat-controlled Senate or the President to accept such a proposal, but he does have the authority to set the budget-cutting negotiations bar as high as he likes.
I ask you, why allow the Democrat leadership to malign and demonize you over a mere $61 Billion in proposed budget reductions when they could easily be maligning and demonizing you over a number many times higher than that?
At the end of the day, you’d have to be the most inept haggler in the world not to get at least a quarter of a Trillion dollars in cuts out of the bastards, and what’s more, they’d come away from the experience understanding that you actually are what you said you were in November.
Unfortunately for us all, John Boehner is not what he claimed to be during the conservative electoral tsunami of 2010.
In fact, he is a demonstrably unmotivated, unremarkable and unserious individual who’s just made it painfully clear that he has no intention of confronting the tax-and-spend left in any appreciable way.
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Daily Benefactor Columnists – Hope, Change, And ‘Invest’ (Ann Coulter) – More Op-Eds
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Hope, Change, And ‘Invest’ – Ann Coulter
I missed the middle section of Obama’s State of the Union address when I took a break to read “War and Peace,” but I gather he never got around to what I was hoping he’d say, which is: “What was I thinking?”
The national debt is $14 trillion, the Democrats won’t stop spending, and President Nero gave us a long gaseous speech about his Stradivarius.
I feel so Southern whenever I watch a Democrat give a State of the Union address – and not just because it makes me want to secede. Consternating the rest of the family, my Kentucky mother always talked back to the TV. I do it only when a Democrat is giving a speech.
And if liberals didn’t like Samuel Alito mouthing the words “not true,” they should be really happy I wasn’t in the House chamber Tuesday night.
All I kept hearing was, “Ann pays more.” That’s all I ever I hear when Democrats start in with all that “investing.”
Apparently the government will be “investing” in education, “investing” in technology, “investing” in roads and “investing” in lots and lots of government workers. Ann pays more, Ann pays more, Ann pays more.
Obama compared “investing” in education to our sending a man to the moon after the Russians launched Sputnik. Say, who was the president who recently gutted spending on NASA? Oh yes, that was Obama.
So he reminded us of the glory days of the space program, but now he’s taking that money and funneling it to public school teachers. As the Democrats say: “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we hire another 10,000 public school teachers?”
Also, solar panels. Obama said the government was already “investing” in solar panels! That’s a total relief. This must be how the president who brought us “Recovery Summer” is going to dig us out of the second Great Depression.
But I do wonder why no private lender considered solar panels a wise investment, forcing solar panel manufacturers to turn to the government for loans, followed by endless tax credits just to break even.
I guess people who work for the government are just smarter. We’re so lucky to have them “investing” our money for us! Boy, egg must be on Warren Buffett’s face!
Remember how massive government “investments” gave rise to the telephone, the light bulb, the automobile, the airplane, the personal computer… OK, none of those.
But massive government expenditures did give us Amtrak and the TSA!
The only thing Obama vowed to cut were “earmarks.” Yippee! The guy with the ears is against earmarks. Yes, the same president who quadrupled our deficit by giving money away to his UAW pals, Wall Street cronies and government workers is now lecturing us about earmarks. This is a bit like being scolded by Charlie Sheen for ordering a second wine cooler.
You knew it was bad when John McCain leapt up and enthusiastically applauded. The last time I saw McCain applaud Obama like that was when he debated him.
Obama said, “We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook.”
And then the government outlawed Edison’s great invention, made the Wright brothers’ air travel insufferable, filed anti-trust charges against Microsoft and made cars too expensive to drive by prohibiting oil exploration, and right now – at this very minute – is desperately trying to regulate the Internet.
On the bright side, President Al Gore would have actually outlawed the cars in those driveways.
I especially enjoyed his pitch for high-speed trains where you “don’t have to receive pat-downs.” At least until one of those Muslims who is “part of our American family” blows one up – at which point they’ll be staffed with armies of genital-fondling, unionized TSA agents on the public dime.
Still, I can’t wait for Obama’s America. An America where I can use lightning-fast, high-speed Internet to file electronically for my unemployment benefits. Or better yet, I can ditch my old “oil-powered” car and take a “sunlight and water”-powered high-speed train to the unemployment office for a change.
And I hear CalTech is working on biofuels to power “Recovery Summer 2011.”
The big laugh line was when Nero said mockingly, “I heard rumors that a few of you still have concerns about the health care law.” That’s called “60 percent of the American public.” It’s not a joke, and it’s not funny.
Here’s one: Hey, Obama! Guy walks into a bar in the Gaza Strip. The bartender says, “What’ll you have?” But the guy is killed instantly when an Iranian-made CT-28 missile strikes the bar, also killing a woman and small child next door. Get it, Obama? HA HA!
Synthesizing Karl Marx and Ronald Reagan, Obama said the government will soon be taking over every aspect of our lives, and Republicans can’t stop him – but gosh, isn’t America a great country! Teachers are great, we need to innovate, children are our future, we need paved roads, kids should do their homework, Labrador puppies are cute, I like apple pie, I (heart) Justin Bieber, and how about them Yankees! Now, here’s your 2011 tax bill – how would you like to pay for that?
Actually, I was glad to hear him say that “there isn’t a person here” – which presumably included Democrats – who would live anyplace else.
Then why are they always trying to turn us into Western Europe?
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Oh No, Not Another Unbiased BBC Documentary About ‘Climate Change’… – James Delingpole
The new president of the Royal Society, Sir Paul Nurse has been crowing to the Guardian’s environment pages about how he bested me in a documentary for the BBC on Climate Change. This isn’t how I remember it.
Nurse came to interview me at my home last summer, ostensibly – so his producer assured me – as a disinterested seeker-after-truth on a mission to discover why the public is losing its faith in scientists. “Not scientists,” I replied. “Just ‘climate scientists.’” But as is clear from the Horizon documentary Nurse had already made up his mind.
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My State Of The Union Address – John Stossel
President Obama fulfilled his constitutional duty and gave his report on the state of the union last night. Here’s mine: We’re in deep trouble. You know why. Our debt has passed $14 trillion, and yet our current spending plans will make that worse. The U.S. debt will reach Greek levels in just 10 years.
But do not despair. If we make reasonable cuts to what government spends, our economy can grow us out of our debt. Cutting doesn’t just make economic sense, it is also the moral thing to do.
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The ‘HealthStat’ Seduction – Jonah Goldberg
If professional writing were the guild it often appears to be, Atul Gawande would be a scab. A surgeon and professor, Gawande also writes beautifully for The New Yorker about health care. His latest article, “The Hot Spotters,” focuses on what Gawande claims is a revolutionary approach to health care.
In Camden, N.J. – hardly a garden spot in the Garden State – just 1 percent of the people who used the city’s medical facilities accounted for 30 percent of the costs. One patient had 324 hospital admissions in five years. Another single-handedly cost insurers $3.5 million.
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Can Our Nation Be Saved? – Walter Williams
National debt is over $14 trillion, the federal budget deficit is $1.4 trillion and, depending on whose estimates are used, the unfunded liability or indebtedness of the federal government (mostly in the form of obligations for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and prescription drugs) is estimated to be between $60 and $100 trillion.
Those entitlements along with others account for nearly 60 percent of federal spending. They are what Congress calls mandatory or non-discretionary spending. Then there’s discretionary spending, half of which is for national defense.
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Cash For Education Clunkers – Michelle Malkin
“We’re going to have to out-educate other countries,” President Obama urged this week. How? By out-spending them, of course! It’s the same old quack cure for America’s fat and failing government-run schools monopoly. The one-trick ponies at the White House call their academic improvement agenda “targeted investing” for “winning the future.”
Truth in advertising: Get ready to fork over more Cash for Education Clunkers. Our government already spends more per capita on education than any other of the 34 wealthiest countries in the world except for Switzerland, according to recent analysis of data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
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New Heroes Vs. Old – Thomas Sowell
When I mention that my family used kerosene lamps when I was a small child in the South during the 1930s, that is usually taken as a sign of our poverty, though I never thought of us as poor at the time.
What is ironic is that kerosene lamps were a luxury of the rich in the 19th century, before John D. Rockefeller came along. With the high price of kerosene at that time, an ordinary working man could not afford to stay up at night, burning this expensive fuel for hours at a time.
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Daily Benefactor Columnists – The Philadelphia Horror: How Mass Murder Gets A Pass (Michelle Malkin) – More Op-Eds
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The Philadelphia Horror: How Mass Murder Gets A Pass – Michelle Malkin
Let’s give the “climate of hate” rhetoric a rest for a moment. It’s time to talk about the climate of death, in which the abortion industry thrives unchecked. Dehumanizing rhetoric, rationalizing language and a callous disregard for life have numbed America to its monstrous consequences. Consider the Philadelphia Horror.
In the City of Brotherly Love, hundreds of babies were murdered by a scissors-wielding monster over four decades. Whistleblowers informed public officials at all levels of the wanton killings of innocent life. But a parade of government health bureaucrats and advocates protecting the abortion racket looked the other way – until, that is, a Philadelphia grand jury finally exposed the infanticide factory run by abortionist Kermit B. Gosnell, M.D., and a crew of unlicensed, untrained butchers masquerading as noble providers of women’s “choice.” Prosecutors charged Gosnell and his death squad with multiple counts of murder, infanticide, conspiracy, abuse of corpse, theft and other offenses.
The 281-page grand jury report released Wednesday provides a bone-chilling account of how Gosnell’s “Women’s Medical Society” systematically preyed on poor, minority pregnant women and their live, viable babies. The report’s introduction lays out the criminal enterprise that claimed the lives of untold numbers of babies – and mothers:
“This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels – and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.”
Echoing the same kind of dark euphemisms plied by Planned Parenthood propagandists who refer to unborn life as “fetal and uterine material,” Gosnell referred to his deadly trade as “ensuring fetal demise.” Reminiscent of the word wizards who refer to the skull-crushing partial-birth abortion procedure as “intact dilation and evacuation” and “intrauterine cranial decompression,” Gosnell described his destruction of babies’ spinal cords as “snipping.” He rationalized his macabre habit of cutting off dead babies’ feet and saving them in rows and rows of specimen jars as “research.” His guilt-ridden employees then took photos of some of the victims before dumping them in shoeboxes, paper bags, one-gallon spring-water bottles and glass jars.
They weren’t the only ones who adopted a see-no-evil stance:
- The Pennsylvania Department of Health knew of clinic violations dating back decades, but did nothing.
- The Pennsylvania Department of State was “repeatedly confronted with evidence about Gosnell” – including the clinic’s unclean, unsterile conditions, unlicensed workers, unsupervised sedation, underage abortion patients and over-prescribing of pain pills with high resale value on the street – “and repeatedly chose to do nothing.”
- Philadelphia Department of Public Health officials who regularly visited Gosnell’s human waste-clogged offices did nothing.
- Nearby hospital officials who treated some of the pregnant mothers who suffered grave complications from Gosnell’s butchery did nothing.
- An unnamed evaluator with the National Abortion Federation, the leading association of abortion providers that is supposed to uphold strict health and legal standards, determined that Gosnell’s chamber of horrors was “the worst abortion clinic she had ever inspected” – but did nothing.
Meanwhile, the death racketeers have launched a legislative and regulatory assault across the country on pro-life crisis pregnancy centers from New York City to Baltimore, Austin and Seattle that offer abortion alternatives, counseling and family services to mostly poor, vulnerable minority women.
Already, left-wing journalists and activists have rushed to explain that these abortion atrocities ignored for four decades by abortion radicals and rationalizers are not really about abortion. A Time magazine writer argued that the Philadelphia Horror was “about poverty, not Roe v. Wade.” A University of Minnesota professor declared: “This is not about abortion.”
But the grand jury itself pointed out that loosened oversight of abortion clinics enacted under pro-choice former GOP Gov. Tom Ridge enabled Gosnell’s criminal enterprise – and led to the heartless execution of hundreds of babies. Mass murder got a pass in the name of expanding “access” and appeasing abortion lobbyists.
As the report made clear: “With the change of administration from (pro-life Democratic) Gov. Casey to Gov. Ridge,” government health officials “concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions. Better to leave clinics to do as they pleased, even though, as Gosnell proved, that meant both women and babies would pay.”
Deadly indifference to protecting life isn’t tangential to the abortion industry’s existence – it’s at the core of it. The Philadelphia Horror is no anomaly. It’s the logical, bloodcurdling consequence of an evil, eugenics-rooted enterprise wrapped in feminist clothing.
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Printing The Party Line – Thomas Sowell
We all know not to take politicians’ rhetoric at face value. But not enough of us have yet learned not to take media rhetoric at face value, even when it appears in what looks like a “news” story, but is actually a disguised editorial on the front page.
For example, a front-page story in the January 14 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle began, “From Eureka’s waterfront to San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter, California’s redevelopment program has transformed polluted and blighted areas across the state into thriving destination spots and commercial districts for nearly 60 years.”
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Everything Starts With Repeal – Charles Krauthammer
Suppose someone – say, the president of United States – proposed the following: We are drowning in debt. More than $14 trillion right now. I’ve got a great idea for deficit reduction. It will yield a savings of $230 billion over the next 10 years: We increase spending by $540 billion while we increase taxes by $770 billion.
He’d be laughed out of town. And yet, this is precisely what the Democrats are claiming as a virtue of Obamacare. During the debate over Republican attempts to repeal it, one of the Democrats’ major talking points has been that Obamacare reduces the deficit – and therefore repeal raises it – by $230 billion.
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What Green MP Caroline Lucas Should Know About Liberal Fascism – James Delingpole
In today’s Guardian Britain’s first and (thank Gaia!) only Green MP Caroline Lucas tells us that climate change is “one of the greatest threats” to Britain since the Second World War. Her solution is for Britain to “mobilise as a nation in a way we haven’t seen since 1945?.”
What this means (as is clear from the new report – entitled The New Home Front – which she launched today at the Imperial War Museum) is government rationing of food and energy, bans on unnecessary journeys, the abolition of property rights, extensive Ministry of Information-style propaganda campaigns and massive wealth re-distribution.
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A Solution At Obama’s Fingertips – Jonah Goldberg
On Tuesday, the president will deliver his State of the Union message. The conventional wisdom is that Barack Obama will continue his “move to the center.” The quotation marks are necessary because some people think he really is moving to the center, while others think he just wants to appear like he is.
Either way, this undoubtedly means Obama will try to seem as if he’s meeting Republicans halfway on their “reasonable” demands (quotation marks for the same reason as before) while drawing a stark line against their “unreasonable” ones. As much as I may enjoy it, this sort of strategizing leaves most Americans cold.
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Will The Republicans Really Cut This Time? – John Stossel
The Republicans promise less intrusive, less expensive government. But will they deliver? In the past, they have said they would shrink the state, but then they came into power and spent more. Consider George W. Bush’s eight horrendous years: The budget grew 89 percent – from $1.86 trillion to $3.52 trillion.
Two Republican House members, Scott Garrett of New Jersey, No. 2 on the budget committee, and Bill Huizenga, a freshman from Michigan, say that they really mean to cut. “I sure plan to,” Garrett said. I asked him to name three things he’d cut. He paused for a beat, then said, “We spend about a million dollars for mohair subsidies.”
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Right Must Fight Round 2 – Dick Morris
Now for the counteroffensive. The House Republicans are pushing to repeal ObamaCare. While they will doubtless succeed in the House and either fail in the Senate or face an Obama veto, their decision to raise and debate the issue is a crucial one. As happened when it passed last year, ObamaCare will ignite a national controversy.
But are conservatives prepared to win the debate? When ObamaCare was being pushed through Congress by the likes of Pelosi, Reid, Obama and Emanuel, the right was galvanized. Rallies, demonstrations, town-hall forums, television ads, letters to the editor, television commentary – all bombarded the nation, emphasizing the faults of the bill.
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Daily Benefactor Columnists – Napolitano: The Ball’s In My Court Now (Ann Coulter) – More Op-Eds
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Napolitano: The Ball’s In My Court Now – Ann Coulter
After the 9/11 attacks, when 19 Muslim terrorists – 15 from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates and one each from Egypt and Lebanon, 14 with “al” in their names – took over commercial aircraft with box-cutters, the government banned sharp objects from planes.
Airport security began confiscating little old ladies’ knitting needles and breaking the mouse-sized nail files off of passengers’ nail clippers. Surprisingly, no decrease in the number of hijacking attempts by little old ladies and manicurists was noted.
After another Muslim terrorist, Richard Reid, AKA Tariq Raja, AKA Abdel Rahim, AKA Abdul Raheem, AKA Abu Ibrahim, AKA Sammy Cohen (which was only his eHarmony alias), tried to blow up a commercial aircraft with explosive-laden sneakers, the government prohibited more than 3 ounces of liquid from being carried on airplanes.
All passengers were required to take off their shoes for special security screening, which did not thwart a single terrorist attack, but made airport security checkpoints a lot smellier.
After Muslim terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Nigeria tried to detonate explosive material in his underwear over Detroit last Christmas, the government began requiring nude body scans at airports.
The machines, which cannot detect chemicals or plastic, would not have caught the diaper bomber. So, again, no hijackers were stopped, but being able to see passengers in the nude boosted the morale of airport security personnel by 22 percent.
After explosives were inserted in two ink cartridges and placed on a plane headed to the United States from the Muslim nation of Yemen, the government banned printer cartridges from all domestic flights, resulting in no improvement in airport security, while requiring ink cartridges who traveled to take Amtrak.
So when the next Muslim terrorist, probably named Abdul Ahmed al Shehri, places explosives in his anal cavity, what is the government going to require then? (If you’re looking for a good investment opportunity, might I suggest rubber gloves?)
Last year, a Muslim attempting to murder Prince Mohammed bin Nayef of Saudi Arabia blew himself up with a bomb stuck up his anus. Fortunately, this didn’t happen near an airport, or Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano would now be requiring full body cavity searches to fly.
You can’t stop a terrorist attack by searching for the explosives any more than you can stop crime by taking away everyone’s guns.
In the 1970s, liberal ideas on crime swept the country. Gun owners were treated like criminals while actual criminals were coddled and released. If only we treated criminals with dignity and respect and showed them the system was fair, liberals told us, criminals would reward us with good behavior.
As is now well known, crime exploded in the ’70s. It took decades of conservative law-and-order policies to get crime back to near-1950s levels.
It’s similarly pointless to treat all Americans as if they’re potential terrorists while trying to find and confiscate anything that could be used as a weapon. We can’t search all passengers for explosives because Muslims stick explosives up their anuses. (Talk about jobs Americans just won’t do.)
You have to search for the terrorists.
Fortunately, that’s the one advantage we have in this war. In a lucky stroke, all the terrorists are swarthy, foreign-born, Muslim males. (Think: “Guys Madonna would date.”)
This would give us a major leg up – if only the country weren’t insane.
Is there any question that we’d be looking for Swedes if the 9/11 terrorists, the shoe bomber, the diaper bomber and the printer cartridge bomber had all been Swedish? If the Irish Republican Army were bombing our planes, wouldn’t we be looking for people with Irish surnames and an Irish appearance?
Only because the terrorists are Muslims do we pretend not to notice who keeps trying to blow up our planes.
It would be harder to find Swedes or Irish boarding commercial airliners in the U.S. than Muslims. Swarthy foreigners stand out like a sore thumb in an airport. The American domestic flying population is remarkably homogenous. An airport is not a Sears department store.
Only about a third of all Americans flew even once in the last year, and only 7 percent took more than four round trips. The majority of airline passengers are middle-aged, middle-class, white businessmen with about a million frequent flier miles. I’d wager that more than 90 percent of domestic air travelers were born in the U.S.
If the government did nothing more than have a five-minute conversation with the one passenger per flight born outside the U.S., you’d need 90 percent fewer Transportation Security Administration agents and airlines would be far safer than they are now.
Instead, Napolitano just keeps ordering more invasive searches of all passengers, without exception – except members of Congress and government officials, who get VIP treatment, so they never know what she’s doing to the rest of us.
Two weeks ago, Napolitano ordered TSA agents to start groping women’s breasts and all passengers’ genitalia – children, nuns and rape victims, everyone except government officials and members of Congress. (Which is weird because Dennis Kucinich would like it.)
“Please have your genitalia out and ready to be fondled when you approach the security checkpoint.”
This is the punishment for refusing the nude body scan for passengers who don’t want to appear nude on live video or are worried about the skin cancer risk of the machines – risks acknowledged by the very Johns Hopkins study touted by the government.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that we need to keep the government as far away from airport security as possible, and not only because Janet Napolitano did her graduate work in North Korea.
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Obama Caves On Civilian Trial For KSM – Andrew C. McCarthy
Let’s review the state of play, shall we? Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama blasted the Bush administration’s decision to treat al-Qaeda terrorists as enemy combatants and detain them without trial at Guantanamo Bay.
Now, two years into his presidency, Obama has decided to treat al-Qaeda terrorists as enemy combatants and detain them without trial at Guantanamo Bay. The media is reporting that the administration will hold Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 plotter indefinitely, granting them neither a civilian nor a military trial.
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How To Control Congress – Walter Williams
Let’s assume that each of our 535 congressmen cares about the destructive impact of deficits and debt on the future of our country. Regardless of party, congressmen face enormous lobbying pressures and awards to spend more and little or no pressure and awards to spend less.
The nation’s founders would be horrified by today’s congressional spending that consumes 25 percent of our GDP. Contrast that to the years 1787 to the 1920s when federal government spending never exceeded 4 percent of our GDP except in wartime. Today, federal, state and local government consumes 43 percent of what Americans produce each year.
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Natural Is Not Always Better – John Stossel
It’s not what we don’t know that causes us trouble. It’s what we know that isn’t so. Whichever famous writer said that (it’s been attributed to many), what he said carries truth. What are some of the things we know that aren’t so? Here’s one: Grass-fed “free-range” beef cattle are better for the environment – and for you – than factory-farmed corn-fed cattle.
It does seem to make sense that the steer raised in the more “natural” environment would be better for the world. Michael Pollan, the prolific food author and activist, wrote in The New York Times that “what was once a solar-powered ruminant (grass-fed steer) (has been turned) into the very last thing we need: another fossil-fuel machine.” How so?
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End Deficit Reduction Commissions – Thomas Sowell
Another deficit-reduction commission has now made its recommendations. My own recommendation for dealing with deficits would include stopping the appointment of deficit-reduction commissions. It is not the amount of money that these commissions cost that is the issue. It is the escape hatch that they provide for big-spending politicians.
Do you go ahead and spend the rent money and the food money – and then ask somebody else to tell you how to escape the consequences? If President Obama or the Congress were serious about keeping the deficit down, they could have had this commission’s recommendations before they spent hundreds of billions of dollars, handing out goodies hither and yon to their pet constituencies.
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Where’s My ObamaCare Waiver? – Michelle Malkin
More than one million Americans have escaped the clutches of the Democrats’ destructive federal health care law. Lucky them. Their employers and labor representatives wisely applied for Obamacare waivers earlier this fall and got out while the getting was good.
Now, it’s time for Congress to create a permanent escape hatch for the rest of us. Repeal is the ultimate waiver. As you’ll recall, President Obama promised repeatedly that if Americans liked their health insurance plan, they could keep it. “Nobody is talking about taking that away from you,” the cajoler-in-chief assured.
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Dead Souls – Victor Davis Hanson
Millions of us shuffle around, sighing that most of what we hear pounded into our brains is either banal or as untrue as it is dangerous to identify it as such. So we ignore it, we the dead souls who live in the world of unmentionable thoughts.
Here is a daily inanity: “The great majority of Muslims are moderates,” and its ancillary “Only a tiny percentage of Muslims are terrorists.” Both are true, but they have value as admonishments only if there were a widespread Western effort to demonize Islam and persecute Muslims, or we knew that mass destruction required millions of conventional troops. But neither is true.
Daily Benefactor Columnists – The ‘Gridlock’ Bogeyman (Thomas Sowell) – More Op-Eds
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The ‘Gridlock’ Bogeyman – Thomas Sowell
Whenever the party that controls the White House does not also control Capitol Hill, political pundits worry that there will be “gridlock” in Washington, so that the government cannot solve the nation’s problems.
Almost never is that fear based on what actually happens when there is divided government, compared to what happens when one party has a monopoly of both legislative and executive branches.
The last time the federal government had a budget surplus, instead of its usual deficits, there was divided government. That was when the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, where all spending bills originate, and Bill Clinton was in the White House. The media called it “the Clinton surplus.”
By the same token, some of the worst laws ever passed were passed when one party had overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress, as well as being led by their own president of the United States. Obamacare is a product of the kind of arrogance that so much power breeds.
It was the same story back in the famous “first hundred days” of the New Deal in 1933. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 clamped down on the American economy the kind of pervasive government control seldom seen outside totalitarian countries.
It was the Obamacare of its time, but covering industries right down to local dry cleaners. One man was sent to jail for charging less than the government-specified price for pressing a suit of clothes. This typified the mindset of the New Deal.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court eventually declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional. But, before that happened, the N.I.R.A. probably did more to prevent the economy from recovering from the Great Depression than any other law or policy. Even liberal icon John Maynard Keynes said at the time that the N.I.R.A. “probably impedes recovery.”
You cannot tell what effect a law or policy will have by what politicians call it, whether they label it a “recovery” program or a “stimulus” program.
Those who fear gridlock in Washington today implicitly assume that government actions are needed to “solve” the economy’s “problems.” That assumption has been so pervasive over the past 80 years that many people fail to realize that the republic existed for nearly twice that long before the federal government intervened to get the economy out of a recession or depression.
During all that time, no depression ever lasted even half as long as the Great Depression of the 1930s, when first President Herbert Hoover and then President Franklin Roosevelt intervened.
For most of the history of this country, there was no Federal Reserve System, which was established in 1914 to prevent bank failures and the bad effects of large expansions or contractions of the supply of money and credit. But bank failures in the 1930s exceeded anything ever seen before the Fed was established. So did the contraction of money and credit during the Great Depression.
The seductive notion that some Big Daddy in Washington can solve our problems for us – whether healing the sick, preventing poverty, or “growing the economy” – is encouraged by politicians for obvious reasons, and the media echoes the idea.
Both in Washington and in the media, there is virtually zero interest in comparing what actually happens when the federal government intervenes in the economy and when it does not.
More than a century and a half of ignoring downturns in the economy never produced a depression as deep or as long as the 1930s depression, with its many federal interventions, first under Hoover and then under Roosevelt.
The unemployment rate was 6.3 percent when the first big intervention took place, during the Hoover administration. It later peaked at 25 percent, but its fluctuations were always in double digits throughout the 1930s, as FDR tried one thing after another. As late as the spring of 1939, nearly a decade after the stock market crash of 1929, unemployment hit 20 percent again.
It is not a matter of faith that a market economy can recover on its own. It is a matter of faith that politicians speed recovery. But there is no way that Barack Obama is going to stop intervening in the economy unless he gets stopped. Only gridlock can do that.
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On CNN the other day, Larry King asked Tony Blair what it was he had in his buttonhole. It was a poppy – not a real poppy, but a stylized, mass-produced thing of red paper and green plastic that, as the Prime Minister explained, is worn in Britain and other Commonwealth countries in the days before November 11th.
They’re sold in the street by aged members of the Royal British Legion to commemorate that moment 83 years ago today, when on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month the guns fell silent on the battlefields of Europe.
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Repeal The 26th Amendment! – Ann Coulter
Jimmy Carter was such an abominable president we got Ronald Reagan, tax cuts, a booming economy and the destruction of the Soviet Union. Two years of Bill Clinton and a Democratic Congress got us the first Republican Congress in half a century, followed by tax cuts, welfare reform and a booming economy – all of which Clinton now claims credit for.
Obama’s disastrous presidency has already produced Republican senators from Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Illinois; New Jersey’s wonder-governor Chris Christie; and the largest House majority for Republicans since 1946. We deserve more.
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I’m Politically Incorrect – John Stossel
This week, I held a bake sale – a racist bake sale. I stood in midtown Manhattan shouting, “Cupcakes for sale.” My price list read: Asians – $1.50. Whites – $1.00. Blacks/Latinos – 50 cents. People stared. One yelled, “What is funny to you about people who are less privileged?”
A black woman said, angrily, “It’s very offensive, very demeaning!” One black man accused me of poisoning the cupcakes. I understand why people got angry. What I did was hurtful to some. My bake sale mimicked what some conservative college students did at Bucknell University.
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The Obama Fabulists – Victor Davis Hanson
During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama was billed as a cool rationalist – a sober and judicious intellectual so unlike the inattentive and twangy “smoke ‘em out” George W. Bush, so rational in contrast to the herky-jerky and frenetic John McCain. Like Senator Kerry, our professor president now laments Americans’ descent into emotion.
“Facts and science and argument does [sic] not,” our president moans, “seem to be winning the day.” The largely academic intellectuals whom Obama brought into his administration promised to bring their erudition and logic both to reading public opinion and to providing commensurate winning solutions.
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Throw Carol Browner Under The Bus – Michelle Malkin
Energy czar Carol Browner needs to go the way of disgraced green jobs czar Van Jones: under the bus and stripped of her unbridled power to destroy jobs and lives in the name of saving the planet. ASAP.
One of the Beltway’s most influential, entrenched and unaccountable left-wing radicals, Browner has now been called out twice by President Obama’s own federal BP oil spill commission and Interior Department inspector general. How many strikes should a woman who circumvented the Senate confirmation process and boasts a sordid history of abusing public office get?
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Earmarks Aren’t Even The Beginning – Andrew C. McCarthy
In offering himself as the next speaker of the House after last Tuesday’s sea-change election, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed of about 800 words. The word “debt” is not one of them, nor does the concept appear. That’s a bit odd, no?
The debt is what the election was about: the growth-killing tab that runs up another $4 billion every day – even days when President Obama is not touring the Far East with 3,000 courtiers in his retinue. The debt, driven by unconstitutional and unsustainable federal intrusions into everything from how much carbon dioxide we emit to which light bulbs we use, is what in turn drives unemployment.
Why I Quit… Desert Storm Vet Explains Decision To Leave Air Force After 22 Years
Why I Quit… Desert Storm Vet Explains Decision To Leave Air Force After 22 Years – Mike Banzet
I never expected to write this letter, but my Mom e-mailed me to get information about my career for a writeup on Veterans Day, and as this is the first such holiday in 22 years when I will not be on active duty, I felt compelled to let you know why I decided to quit.
Quit is a strong word, I know. Everyone I’ve talked to has repeated that I’ve had a marvelous career and that I’ve retired with honor. Maybe that’s true on paper; I guess that it’s reflected by the record. But that’s not how I feel. I feel like I’ve quit. And because I’m not a quitter, I feel I have to explain why — not that anyone is asking, but because perhaps they don’t know to ask.
Briefly, my career had been a representation of the promise of this country. Starting out on the lowest rung of the rank ladder as an F-4G Wild Weasel crew chief, continuing on F-16s and the F-117A Stealth fighter in Desert Storm, then a small part of Desert Fox as a nuclear Maintenance Officer and finally a pilot that took part in numerous deployments in Southern Watch, Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. I finished up an awesome year on the ground in Iraq, and was selected to receive a coveted “Definitely Promote,” assuring me of promotion to lieutenant colonel. They don’t pass out many of those. My dreams were right in front of me. All I had to do was grab them. And then I retired. Why?
Atlas Shrugged.
I had chosen, freely, to place my life between those that would do harm to the U.S. and those whom I would protect: her citizens. I had always believed in the best of America and the people of her lands; that despite occasional missteps there was a general “rightness” to our way. I lived that belief for 22 years, leading and following warriors into combat. I’m certainly no war hero; my brothers in arms have seen far more combat, more intense and personal than I. But I have become acquainted with death in a way that I hope you never do. My last tour, on the ground in Iraq was where my heart started to be hardened towards you, the electorate, and culminated in this letter, written two days before our elections. And here’s why.
You’ve elected officials who, for partisan points, spoke openly that the “…war is lost.” I happened to be in a dining facility in Baghdad that day, filled with the (mostly) young faces of (mostly) Army men and women. CNN was on the TVs, and things got very quiet when this elected official continued on, railing that the mission that some of these very people were here to do, had “…failed.” Yet, they would be donning their body armor, strapping on med kits and weapons, mounting HMMVs or MRAPs and heading outside the wire, ensuring that the newborn democracy in Iraq, purchased with so many lives, would be safe another night. The newly re-invigorated insurgents would be waiting, teeth bared back in a hateful smile, gripping the IED detonator, the RPG launcher, or the AK-47s to ply their trade with new energy, because the Senate Majority Leader had said they were winning.
You elected officials who continually defame and berate military members, whether it is the observation that if you’re not too bright, you’ll get “…stuck in Iraq” (this from a guy who has two Purple Hearts for self-inflicted wounds, and known for throwing someone else’s medals away in protest), or the calling of combat Marines cold-blooded killers (in a war; before trial). You’ve elected officials in the role of commander-in-chief who “loathe” the military, while using ROTC deferments and special treatment to avoid military service that the less “connected” take as a responsibility. On the basis of “change,” you elected someone who had close, ongoing associations with people who were part of an organization that tried to kill us [U.S. military] on our own soil.
You elected officials that promised to take property from some Americans, and give it to you, merely because they had more than you did. Those Americans that these officials have labeled as the “rich” are your neighbors, who provide jobs and pay far more in taxes than you ever will. That means they are already subsidizing your lifestyle choices; you just want more of their property without the responsibility of risking your wealth and labor to get it. You would rather hire someone to take it from them. And you have.
Yet these same officials from this same party are the wealthiest group of people in both the House and Senate. They have offshore accounts, forbid unions in their businesses and use every tax loophole they can find with their armies of accountants. But you keep sending them back to those jobs, because they promise to steal from some Americans and give to you.
You elect officials who openly embrace illegal activity; but they don’t have to live with the consequences. Other Americans pay the price. You support “sanctuary cities” and open defiance of federal law, including supporting administrations who sue our sister states as they desperately try to control a crime epidemic by supporting federal law. You support an administration that leads a party that gives a standing ovation to the leader of a country that exploits our kindness and actively encourages law-breaking in our country while insulting our fellow citizens who dare to try to enforce the law. Check out your elected officials; did they stand and applaud the racist diatribe of the president of Mexico? Did they join the attorney general and the head of Homeland Security in applauding this gaping hole in (homeland) security and law? Do you have locks on your doors? Why?
You elect officials who are openly racist, decrying that “White folks’ greed drives a world in need…” and that their own grandmother was a “…typical white person.” Someone who sits in admiration as their pastor (small p; no capital letters for racists), in a church he attended for 20 years, slanders the United States as the “…U.S. of KKK America” and delights that the 9/11 “…chickens have come home to roost.” Someone who refused to denounce a paramilitary, racist organization that placed its members in front of polling places armed with billy clubs, and yelling racist, threatening epithets. On video. And the Attorney General did nothing.
Oh, wait. The Justice Department is now apparently, under sworn testimony, the Department of Racial Payback. And you continue to support the party that supports this blatantly racist behavior because they say that they will stick it to “the man” on your behalf. A Nation of Cowards? I don’t think so; the courage of this breathtaking racism is without equal in modern times. One would think that you would use your votes to eradicate these racist policies from the U.S. But that assumes eradicating racism is your aim. It’s not, or you would be as incensed at this blatant racism as you would if sheet-covered whites were there. But longtime Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd’s old gang has been rightfully disgraced and shamed into a virtual non-existence. Thank goodness that 52 percent of you discourage that kind of behavior.
But you don’t. You support the tactic of using the epithet of “racist” as the cudgel of choice for racists who don’t like policies that conservatives advocate. Don’t like illegal activity? Racist. Your party insists that to provide a photo ID — proving you are who you say you are — is not only too much of a burden to ask a voter to bear, but it’s racist as well. This not only terribly insulting to all races, but when the burden of proof to rent the DVD “Second Hand Lions” (amazing movie!) is higher than that required to vote for someone who has control of nuclear weapons or deploying men and women into harm’s way, there is something wrong.
It doesn’t end there. Don’t like a particular female’s policies? Sexist. Yet, you support politicians who prey on 20-year old interns, seduce underage male interns, and, as a double bonus, support a person for the Supreme Court who says she is “wiser” than white people because of her race and sex. And any opponent of hers must be sexist and racist. Yet the prevailing double standard makes “bitch” an acceptable term for a conservative grandmother with the temerity to want to stop illegal activity. And “whore” is acceptable terminology for any conservative woman.
Sarah Palin seems to be a nice person, the kind you would love to have as a neighbor, regardless of her policies; but you insist that she is stupid and vile. She is ignorant and inexperienced, clearly not ready for anything, as holding a variety of elected and appointed positions culminating in the governorship of Alaska clearly doesn’t hold up against… an organizer of race-based communities. Sexist, if a conservative said those words about a liberal, but because she is not pro-killing-little-kids, 52 percent of you decided she was worth vicious ad hominem attacks that continue to this day. Not just saying that you disagree, but saying she is evil. You support it all. All because the folks that practice this abhorrent behavior promise to give you free health care stolen from other Americans who haven’t paid their ill-defined “fair share.”
My oath was this: “I, Mike, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”
I took that oath seriously. But you have responsibilities, too. You should take them seriously.
Mike Banzet, a retired major in the U.S. Air Force, is a 1986 graduate of Flathead High School in Kalispell, Montana.
Op-Ed: They Hate Our Guts (And They’re Drunk On Power) – P. J. O’Rourke
They Hate Our Guts (And They’re Drunk On Power) – P. J. O’Rourke
Perhaps you’re having a tiny last minute qualm about voting Republican. Take heart. And take the House and the Senate. Yes, there are a few flakes of dander in the fair tresses of the GOP’s crowning glory—an isolated isolationist or two, a hint of gold buggery, and Christine O’Donnell announcing that she’s not a witch. (I ask you, has Hillary Clinton ever cleared this up?) Fret not over Republican peccadilloes such as the Tea Party finding the single, solitary person in Nevada who couldn’t poll ten to one against Harry Reid. Better to have a few cockeyed mutts running the dog pound than Michael Vick.
I take it back. Using the metaphor of Michael Vick for the Democratic party leadership implies they are people with a capacity for moral redemption who want to call good plays on the legislative gridiron. They aren’t. They don’t. The reason is simple. They hate our guts.
They don’t just hate our Republican, conservative, libertarian, strict constructionist, family values guts. They hate everybody’s guts. And they hate everybody who has any. Democrats hate men, women, blacks, whites, Hispanics, gays, straights, the rich, the poor, and the middle class.
Democrats hate Democrats most of all. Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough to vote for Democrats.
Whence all this hate? Is it the usual story of love gone wrong? Do Democrats have a mad infatuation with the political system, an unhealthy obsession with an idealized body politic? Do they dream of capturing and ravishing representational democracy? Are they crazed stalkers of our constitutional republic?
No. It’s worse than that. Democrats aren’t just dateless dweebs clambering upon the Statue of Liberty carrying a wilted bouquet and trying to cop a feel. Theirs is a different kind of love story. Power, not politics, is what the Democrats love. Politics is merely a way to power’s heart. When politics is the technique of seduction, good looks are unnecessary, good morals are unneeded, and good sense is a positive liability. Thus Democrats are the perfect Lotharios. And politics comes with that reliable boost for pathetic egos, a weapon: legal monopoly on force. If persuasion fails to win the day, coercion is always an option.
Armed with the panoply of lawmaking, these moonstruck fools for power go about in a jealous rage. They fear power’s charms may be lavished elsewhere, even for a moment.
Democrats hate success. Success could supply the funds for a power elopement. Fire up the Learjet. Flight plan: Grand Cayman. Democrats hate failure too. The true American loser laughs at legal monopoly on force. He’s got his own gun.
Democrats hate productivity, lest production be outsourced to someplace their beloved power can’t go. And Democrats also hate us none-too-productive drones in our cubicles or behind the counters of our service economy jobs. Tax us as hard as they will, we modest earners don’t generate enough government revenue to dress and adorn the power that Democrats worship.
Democrats hate stay-at-home spouses, no matter what gender or gender preference. Democratic advocacy for feminism, gay marriage, children’s rights, and “reproductive choice” is simply a way to invade -power’s little realm of domestic private life and bring it under the domination of Democrats.
Democrats hate immigrants. Immigrants can’t stay illegal because illegality puts immigrants outside the legal monopoly on force. But immigrants can’t become legal either. They’d prosper and vote Republican.
Democrats hate America being a world power because world power gives power to the nation instead of to Democrats.
And Democrats hate the military, of course. Soldiers set a bad example. Here are men and women who possess what, if they chose, could be complete control over power. Yet they treat power with honor and respect. Members of the armed forces fight not to seize power for themselves but to ensure that power can bestow its favors upon all Americans.
This is not an election on November 2. This is a restraining order. Power has been trapped, abused and exploited by Democrats. Go to the ballot box and put an end to this abusive relationship. And let’s not hear any nonsense about letting the Democrats off if they promise to get counseling.
Daily Benefactor Columnists – Who Says Islam Is Totalitarian? – More Op-Eds
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Who Says Islam Is Totalitarian? – Andrew C. McCarthy
Who says Islam is a totalitarian doctrine? Well, Geert Wilders does, of course. As the editors point out in Monday’s superb National Review Online editorial, the Dutch parliamentarian has even had the temerity to compare Islam with Nazism. Strong stuff indeed, and for speaking it, Wilders has earned the disdain not just of the usual Muslim Brotherhood satellite organizations but even of many on the political right.
Though they support free-speech rights, and thus grudgingly concede that Wilders should be permitted to say such things, they want you to understand they find his sentiments deplorable. Taking the politically correct view, they assure you that Islam is not a problem at all – it’s just those bad extremists and Islamists who have, as the Bush-era refrain went, “hijacked one of the world’s great religions.”
Emblematic is the estimable Charles Krauthammer, who has described Wilders’s views as “extreme, radical, and wrong.” Dr. K.’s complaint, expressed on Fox News back in March (and published on the Corner), was that Wilders conflates “Islam and Islamism.” The latter, Krauthammer insists, is “an ideology of a small minority which holds that the essence of Islam is jihad, conquest, forcing people into accepting a certain very narrow interpretation [of Islam].”
As I take a backseat to no one in my admiration of Dr. K., I wonder what he’d make of Bernard Lewis’s take on this subject. Professor Lewis is the distinguished scholar widely and aptly admired, including by Wilders’s detractors, as the West’s preeminent authority on Islam. At Pajamas Media, Andrew Bostom has unearthed a 1954 International Affairs essay in which Professor Lewis quite matter-of-factly compared Islam with Communism. The essay, in fact, was called, “Communism and Islam.”
In it, Lewis considered “the very nature of Islamic society, tradition, and thought,” and concluded that its principal defining characteristic is the “authoritarianism, perhaps we may even say the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition.” Expanding on this, he wrote:
There are no parliaments or representative assemblies of any kind, no councils or communes, no chambers of nobility or estates, no municipalities in the history of Islam; nothing but the sovereign power, to which the subject owed complete and unwavering obedience as a religious duty imposed by the Holy Law… For the last thousand years, the political thinking of Islam has been dominated by such maxims as “tyranny is better than anarchy,” and “whose power is established, obedience to him is incumbent.”
But what about the conceit that undergirds current American foreign policy, the notion that Islam and Western democracy are perfectly compatible? Lewis dismissed the idea as so much elite wishful thinking:
Many attempts have been made to show that Islam and democracy are identical – attempts usually based on a misunderstanding of Islam or democracy or both. This sort of argument expresses a need of the uprooted Muslim intellectual who is no longer satisfied with or capable of understanding traditional Islamic values, and who tries to justify, or rather, restate, his inherited faith in terms of the fashionable ideology of the day. It is an example of the romantic and apologetic presentation of Islam that is a recognized phase in the reaction of Muslim thought to the impact of the West.
Clearly, the ensuing half-century has found Western intellectuals – regardless of political bent – joining romantic forces with their uprooted Muslim counterparts. Thus the accusation by Dr. Krauthammer, to take a prominent but by no means singular example, that Wilders fails to perceive the distinction – I’d call it a hoped-for distinction – between Islam and Islamism. Yet this accusation itself conflates Islam with Muslims, as well as Islamists with violent jihadists. This confusion leads Krauthammer to surmise both (a) that only a small minority of Muslims believe jihad is “the essence of Islam,” and (b) that because most Muslims in the West are not terrorists, it should be “obvious” that they are not Islamists.
This is wrong on several levels. First, as Robert Spencer explains, “Jihad… is a key element of the Islamic faith according to every single Islamic authority on the planet.” To deny that it is the “essence of Islam” – which is how the prophet Mohammed regarded it – is to deny a basic fact. And though, as Spencer acknowledges, jihad is subject to varying interpretations, Lewis is clear on the preponderant construction. As he has recounted several times, most recently in The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, “The overwhelming majority of early authorities… citing relevant passages in the Qur’an and in the tradition, discuss jihad in military terms.” This jibes, to quote Ibn Warraq, with “the celebrated Dictionary of Islam,” which describes jihad as an “incumbent religious duty,” and defines it as “a religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad.”
Spencer echoes Lewis when he elaborates that “all the mainstream sects and schools of Islamic jurisprudence teach as a matter of faith that Islam is intrinsically political and that Muslims must wage war against unbelievers and subjugate them under the rule of Islamic law.” The fact that most Muslims do not engage in violent jihad, whether out of practicality, indifference, or what have you, does not change what Islamic doctrine says. Nor does it mean these Muslims are “rejecting” that mandate. They are ignoring it.
Moreover, as I’ve noted on several occasions, the point of jihad is to spread sharia, the Islamic legal system whose installation is the necessary precondition to creating an Islamic society. That need not be done by violent means. In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential Islamist organization, maintains that America and Europe will be “conquered” not by violence but by dawa – the proselytism of Islam by non-violent (or, more accurate, pre-violent) means, such as infiltration of our institutions. Spencer calls this phenomenon “stealth jihad.”
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Leftists, Progressives And Socialists – Walter Williams
One of the greatest sources of confusion and deception is the difference between leftists, progressives, socialists, communists and fascists. I thought about this as I caught a glimpse of the Oct. 2 “One Nation” march on Washington.
The participants proudly marched with banners, signs and placards reading “Socialists,” “Ohio U Democratic Socialists,” “International Socialists Organization,” “Socialist Party USA,” “Build A Socialist Alternative” and other signs expressing support for socialism and communism.
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Chris Coons Lied, Granny Died – Ann Coulter
In all of life’s tribulations, there is nothing so aggravating as being condescended to by an idiot. In last week’s CNN debate in the Delaware Senate race between the astonishingly well-spoken Christine O’Donnell and the unfortunate-looking Chris Coons, O’Donnell had to put up with it from Coons for 90 minutes.
O’Donnell wiped the floor with Coons, moderators Wolf Blitzer and Nancy Karibjanian, and the idiotic University of Delaware students asking questions – all of whom were against her.
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Public Sector Unions Choke Taxpayers – John Stossel
“I thought unions were great – until at Chrysler, the union steward started screaming at me. Working at an unhurried pace, I’d exceeded ‘production’ for that job.”
That comment, left on my blog by a viewer who watched my Fox Business Network show about unions, matches my experience. No one ordered me to slow down, but union rules and union culture at ABC and CBS slowed the work. Sometimes a camera crew took five minutes just to get out of the car.
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Change, Don’t ‘Celebrate.’ Cultures – Thomas Sowell
There was a reason that employers in the middle of the 19th century had signs that said, No Irish need apply – and why employers in the middle of the 20th century no longer had such signs. It was not that employers had changed. The Irish had changed.
The Catholic Church for years worked to bring about such changes among the Irish immigrants and their offspring, just as various religious and secular organizations among the Jews, among blacks, and among other groups worked to bring about changes within their respective groups.
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Extreme Girls: All The President’s Radical Women – Michelle Malkin
We are in the era of Democratic Extreme Girls – Big Nanny handmaidens who demand control of your children, your health care, your energy use, your pocketbook and your news. And that’s just for starters. If you think President Obama will move to the center after the midterms, think again.
Liberal bloggers are buzzing about the possibility that environmental czar Carol Browner could be appointed White House chief of staff next year.
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If Dems Lose, Obama Will Blame Everyone But Himself – Byron York
Assume the polls are correct and Republicans win control of the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in next month’s elections. What lessons will the White House learn? Will Barack Obama interpret the vote as a repudiation of much of his agenda, or will he conclude that he made a few tactical errors but was still right on the big issues?
Bet on the latter. All indications coming out of the White House suggest that if Democrats suffer major losses, the president and his top aides will resolutely refuse to reconsider the policies – national health care, stimulus, runaway spending – that led to their defeat.
The Bill Gates Income Tax
The Bill Gates Income Tax – Wall Street Journal
Framed on a wall in my office is a personal letter to me from Bill Gates the elder. “I am a fan of progressive taxation,” he wrote. “I would say our country has prospered from using such a system—even at 70% rates to say nothing of 90%.”
It’s one thing to believe in bad policy. It’s quite another to push it on others. But Mr. Gates Sr.—an accomplished lawyer, now retired—and his illustrious son are now trying to have their way with the people of the state of Washington.
Mr. Gates Sr. has personally contributed $500,000 to promote a statewide proposition on Washington’s November ballot that would impose a brand new 5% tax on individuals earning over $200,000 per year and couples earning over $400,000 per year. An additional 4% surcharge would be levied on individuals and couples earning more than $500,000 and $1 million, respectively.
Along with creating a new income tax on high-income earners, Initiative 1098 would also reduce property, business and occupation taxes. But raising the income tax is the real issue. Doing so would put the state’s economy at risk.
To imagine what such a large soak-the-rich income tax would do to Washington, we need only examine how states with the highest income-tax rates perform relative to their zero-income tax counterparts. Comparing the nine states with the highest tax rates on earned income to the nine states with no income tax shows how high tax rates weaken economic performance.
In the past decade, the nine states with the highest personal income tax rates have seen gross state product increase by 59.8%, personal income grow by 51%, and population increase by 6.1%. The nine states with no personal income tax have seen gross state product increase by 86.3%, personal income grow by 64.1%, and population increase by 15.5%.
It’s striking how the high-tax states have underperformed relative to those with no income tax. Especially noteworthy is how well Washington has performed compared to states with no income tax.
If Washington passes Initiative 1098, it will go from being one of the fastest-growing states in the country to one of the slowest-growing. And passage of I-1098 will only be the beginning. Just look at Ohio, Michigan and California to see that once a state adopts an income tax, there is no end to the number of reasons that such a tax could be extended, expanded and increased.
Over the past 50 years, 11 states have introduced state income taxes exactly as Messrs. Gates and their allies are proposing—and the consequences have been devastating.
The 11 states where income taxes were adopted over the past 50 years are: Connecticut (1991), New Jersey (1976), Ohio (1971), Rhode Island (1971), Pennsylvania (1971), Maine (1969), Illinois (1969), Nebraska (1967), Michigan (1967), Indiana (1963) and West Virginia (1961).
Each and every state that introduced an income tax saw its share of total U.S. output decline. Some of the states, like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio, have become fiscal basket cases. As the nearby chart shows, even West Virginia, which was poor to begin with, got relatively poorer after adopting a state income tax.
Washington’s I-1098 proposes a state income tax with a maximum rate higher than any of those initially adopted by the other 11 states. In one fell swoop, Washington would move from being one of the lowest-tax states in the nation to being one of the top nine highest. It’s economic suicide.
The states that have high income tax rates or have adopted a state income tax over the past 50 years haven’t even gotten the money they hoped for. They haven’t avoided budget crises, nor have they provided better lives for the poor. The ongoing financial travails of California, New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan and New York are cases in point.
Over the past decade, the nine states with the highest tax rates have experienced tax revenue growth of 74%—a full 22% less than the states with no income tax. Washington state has done better than the average of the nine no-tax states. Why on earth would it want to introduce a state income tax when it means less money for state coffers?
What’s true for those states with the highest tax rates is doubly true for the 11 states that have instituted state income taxes over the past half-century. They too have lost huge sums of tax revenue.
A final thought for those who want to punish the rich for their success: As the nearby chart shows, those states with the highest tax rates, and those states that have introduced state income taxes, have seen standards of living (personal income per capita) substantially underperform compared to their no-tax counterparts.
If Mr. Gates Sr. and his son feel so strongly about taxing the rich, they should simply give the state a chunk of their own money and be done with it. Leave the rest of Washington’s taxpayers alone.
Gatordoug
darcprynce
Dave C
