Views on the News
August 15, 2009
Views
on the News*
Hypocrisy is very
obvious when Democrats accuse town hall meetings as being “AstroTurf” while
they themselves import union thugs to manhandle and crowd out constituent
questioners. An enormous groundswell of opposition
to the Obama Administration is erupting throughout the land. Real Americans are shaking off their former
apathy and reasserting their role in the workings of the national government. Many of those raising their voices and fists
at the town halls have never been politically active. Their frustration was born earlier this year
with government bailouts and big spending bills, then found an outlet in the
anti-tax Tea Parties in April and has simmered in the punishing recession. The protesters have several concerns, but a
unifying emotion is distrust of the government and federal intrusion into
individual liberties or personal choices.
White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina last week gave the order
to "push back twice as hard." Let us not forget
that the call to mobilize the DNC community activists, Organizing for America
(OFA), came directly from the Barack Obama web site! Congressional Democratic leaders and
the White House are "working in close coordination with" Soros-funded
lobbying group Health Care for America Now (HCAN) and other union-backed groups
in organizing a pro-ObamaCare public relations blitz this month. the national field director of the
union-backed Health Care for America Now (HCAN) on August 4th apparently sent
out a four-page, single-spaced, 2,500-word-plus "how to counter" ObamaCare opponents. Its underlying
principle – turn out left-wing activists to drown out conservative citizens –
has been accepted by members of Congress. “If they
wanna organize, we’ll out-organize them,” said Congressman Jan Schakowsky,
a former Chicago community organizer. The
Big Labor hoodlums clad in identical purple shirts, the uniform of Service
Employees International Union (SEIU) members, own the “AstroTurf”
mob label. SEIU members have committed
to more than 1,000 members and staff working full-time in the field and
dedicated 30% of the union's resources to the health care campaign. Already approximately $10 million has been set
aside to build and mobilize public support in key states. At town hall meetings in St. Louis and Tampa
last week, purple-shirted SEIU members engaged in physical confrontations with
critics of the Democrats' health care takeover plans. Eric Holder’s Department of Justice signaled
that properly directed violence would be overlooked when it dropped all charges
against the three members of the New Black Panther Party who brandished weapons
and intimidated white voters at a Philadelphia polling place last November. The notion that Americans may not want the
federal government making health care decisions on their behalf appears to be
truly beyond the comprehension of Democrats in Congress and the White
House. So they have responded by slandering
honest folks looking to have their voices heard. The arrogance
which the Democrats have displayed by name-calling and discrediting these
people reveals their insolence and hypocrisy.
Obama turned his town hall meetings into a vehicle for him to vent since
no dissenters were allowed inside the meeting to ask any embarrassing
questions, while the large number of opponents protested outside the meeting
away from the cameras. The recent “town
hall” teleconference I attended could best be characterized as a folksie informercial
with 8,500 listeners and hand-picked questioners and preselected questions. These devious partisan
schemes have only served to energize the grassroots, who realize that as
efforts on both sides of the issue intensify, the stakes for their freedom and
the very future of their country are raised.
What the Democrats and
their bullhorns in the Mainstream Media are telling us is that they are scared
because they now know they've lost their monopoly on information. Kyle-Anne
Shiver recounts how for
40 years, this Country has been blackmailed by angry Alinskyite protest into
redistributing great chunks of wealth to aggrieved-status mobs under the
pretense of charity or entitlement. The scales of grievance have now
tilted so far to the left that it is the middle-class, which feels itself most endangered,
most unable to make its voice heard in the Halls of Congress. Saul Alinsky, for his part, told the young
radicals of the 1960s that they had to bring the middle-class into the
revolution by the mid-1970s or give up altogether. Alinsky understood
that power wasn't in the board rooms, but in the middle-class consumer's
purse. It wasn't in the school board, but in the middle-class parent's
expectations. Power wasn't even in Washington, but in the demands of the
most populous group of Americans: the vast middle-class, whom he called
the "have-a-little-want-mores,"
in keeping with his solely material worldview.
Saul Alinsky's vision amounted to making the middle-class so "rubbed raw" with "discontent", making them feel so
downtrodden that they would demand more
government handouts for themselves and more
government control in the hands of their political masters. Government
controlling everything in the whole society was Alinsky's idea of "freedom" and "liberty." He disavowed the
power of a single individual to affect change in his own life, and always,
every single time, looked to collectivist power for strength. Alinsky's
vision was, of course, Marxist, but with fascist elements thrown into the mix. What we are seeing now in town halls across
this country are middle-class people demanding that their government drop any
and every plan to convert America's healthcare system to one like those failing
throughout socialized Europe and Canada. Anyone who honestly believed
that a man, who had done nothing whatsoever in his entire life but go to
school, shout slogans at rallies, and run for office could be an able
president, have now been disabused of that fantasy. The American people
are anything but mindless dolts, most especially our vibrant and diverse
middle-class. We are seeing some of the same Alinsky tactics employed at
town hall meetings, but by a group opposed to more government control, not
demanding more of it. They are the anti-fascist, anti-socialist,
anti-Alinsky folks, who would prefer to keep the liberties they have, even if
it means sacrifice and suffering. This isn't
what the leftists in charge expected to see. The Democrats envisioned the
middle-class welcoming, with spread-wide-open arms of gratitude, these new power
plays that would put more control into the hands of their beneficent
bureaucracy. What the Democrats fear
most is that ObamaCare will be cast as the first step toward the 1978 sci-fi
movie “Logan’s Run” where
government health care depended on end-of-life at 30. Instead, the
Alinskyites are being met with 1776 Redux in these town halls, and all they can
do is yell "Fascist" at the
top of their lungs.
Obama's Medi-Scare Campaign is using precisely
the same fear tactics perfected by climate fraud peddlers to take over American
medical care. James
Lewis found the similarities
as astonishing and for a very good reason: Both global frauding and Medi-Scare are pure stage-craft, made up
by Hollywood mediots who are desperate to empower the Left, because that is the
only thing that gives meaning to their empty lives. Amazingly neither climate fraud nor Medi-Scare do anything to fix the dire
"emergency" they are trying to scare us about. There is no emergency: There
is no global warming doom coming up, and there no crisis in American
medicine. Charles Krauthamer nails the ObamaScare
simply on the facts: "... today's
ruling Democrats propose to fix our extremely high-quality (but inefficient and
therefore expensive) health-care system with 1,000 pages of additional
curlicued complexity -- employer mandates, individual mandates, insurance
company mandates, allocation formulas, political payoffs and myriad other
conjured regulations and interventions -- with the promise that this massive
concoction will lower costs. This is all
quite mad. It creates a Rube Goldberg system that simply multiplies the current
inefficiencies and arbitrariness, thus producing staggering deficits with less
choice and lower-quality care. That's why the administration can't sell
ObamaCare." According to The Journal of Geophysical Research, Atmospheres,
“the warming of the Southern Oscillation
(El Nino and related temperature changes) has always come 5-7 months before
global temperature changes in the last 50 years. The authors calculate that El
Nino and similar ocean temp changes account for about 70 percent of the global
temperature changes.” Everything else is pure illusion, tomfoolery by
politicians and mediots who stand to profit from suckering us. The American people may finally be catching
on to the fact that Obama is nothing but the Wizard of Oz. Remember how Dorothy's Wizard turned out to
be just a little old stage magician, named Oscar
Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs? Our Wizard calls himself Barry Soetoro Barack Hussein Obama, who like the
Wizard of Oz couldn't make up his mind about his real identity either. Behind Obama the actor, the ham who loves to
strut in the limelight, there is nobody -- just a starving ego and a bottomless
hunger for self-glorification. Once Dorothy figured out there was a little
old stage magician behind the screen, the power of the illusion
collapsed. Medi-Scare and Global Frauding therefore show nothing but Obama
Wizz-Bang conjuring up completely imaginary dangers and imaginary solutions -- on the way to
becoming The Glorious Messiah of the New World Order. Like Dorothy in the
Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the solution for us ordinary folks is to understand
that the Wizard is nothing but a stage act,
completely cobbled up to fool the audience. Remember Saul Alinsky Rule #1: It doesn't matter how much power you
have, but how much the enemy thinks you have. The purpose of media
propaganda is to convince us that Barack Obama is all-powerful, all-wise,
all-benevolent and All We Need To Do
to stop it is do not fall for the scam.
Having now seen the
specifics of an Obama agenda rolled out over the last six months, Americans are
perhaps beginning to understand some of the changes that weren’t so obvious as
they joyously cast their votes for a candidate largely celebrated by the media
as the man who would rescue us from the state of ruin we had arrived at under
the evil Bush. These changes include spending plans
and projected deficits in numbers that are impossible to even imagine; the
creation of a European-style nanny-state with myriad new entitlements paid for
by the “rich,” thereby fulfilling
Obama’s famous “spread the wealth”
campaign promise; a Democratic juggernaut to bulldoze through plans to
radically alter the relationship between patient and doctor; an industrial
nationalization policy that turns taxpayers into involuntary owners of broken
car companies and insolvent banks; rewarding the very same unions responsible
in part for wrecking some of these nationalized basket cases with big ownership
stakes while trampling on creditor property rights; the conversion of our
economic system into a statist economy having far more in common with socialism
than with capitalism; and perhaps the biggest change of all, a president who
travels the globe offering apologies for his country’s disrespectful and
insensitive behavior, while embracing tyrants and bowing to white-robed
kings. The recent polls are suggesting clearly that Americans are rapidly
souring on some of these changes, just as the stock market delivers a
no-confidence vote on the administration’s plans for a Brave New World. A recent CNN poll
gave Obama a C-minus after 200 days in office, whereas at the end of his first
one hundred days, he got almost universally a B-plus. Rasmussen reports found 57% of voters
oppose a single-payer health care system while only 32% favor this public
option. 52% believe such a system would
lead to lower quality of care and 45% say it would lead to higher health care
costs. There is another important poll
looming ahead: the 2010 elections. Obama
has finally revealed his vision for health insurance in his analogy with the under-performing
Post Office, who in turn announced their federal subsidy was not enough and
they lost another $7 Billion this year.
In the health care
debate, Barack Obama is getting away with the rhetorical equivalent of murder. Health
reformers have never had a clear mandate for major reform, because dissatisfaction
with the current system is met by personal satisfaction. An ABC News/Washington health care poll found
that about eight-in-ten Americans are satisfied with the quality of their care
and their insurance. 55% of Americans
even express satisfaction with the personal costs related to health care
(including 61% of the insured). The
overall truth of ObamaCare is that it constitutes a government takeover of
healthcare that runs contrary to the laws of economics and creates so many
perverse incentives and dangers of political over-reach and abuse that it is
unacceptable, unfit for a free people. All
the bills put in place a bureaucratic infrastructure and a set of legislative
mandates accompanied by a set of perverse incentives and fiscal pressures that
over time (a very short time) will transmute and morph through bureaucratic
interpretations, rules and regulations into the nightmare people foresee it to
be. To pay for the bulk of his proposed
remake of the health care system, the president has a two-part plan. Half the money would come from tax increases,
and the other half from reduced spending on Medicare. Obama proposes to come up with improvements
in the vast Medicare system that will allow him to extend health care coverage
to millions of currently uncovered people, make no cuts in existing Medicare
benefits, and save money in the process. Obama is proposing squeezing hundreds of
billions of dollars out of Medicare, which when Republicans proposed it in
1995, it was called a 'draconian cut, but now, it's called 'savings.' Obama's proposal -- no
details yet on precisely how he'll find all those "savings" and
"efficiencies" -- is even more striking when you consider that
during the campaign he attacked Sen. John McCain for allegedly planning
reductions in Medicare spending. What's
more, the president insists his plan won't hurt a bit. Only about one third of adults believe health
care legislation will personally “benefit”
them, while 65% believe the final legislation will make “everything more complicated” rather than “simpler.” Obama promised he
would change how those benefits are delivered so that they're more efficient. Sooner or later,
Obama will pay a political price for his plan to cut Medicare.
The politicians writing
the health care bill still refuse to answer basic questions about how it will
be paid for and how it will affect patients. Dr. Tom Coburn laments that the fact is that
President Obama and the vast majority of members who support the reform bills
would set up a single-payer health-care system if they could start from
scratch. In the meantime they will
settle for creating a public, government-run option in the context of our
current employer-based health-insurance system. The truth is that the health-care bills under
consideration will dramatically increase the deficit, take away patient choice,
and set the stage for a total government takeover of health care - the single-payer
model many Democrats have long dreamed of. The independent Lewin Group estimates that 114
million Americans will be forced to give up their current health-care plans as
the government-run plan puts everyone else out of business. Here are a few questions that Congressional
proponents have been loath to answer:
·
Why do we need to increase spending on health care by at least
$1.6 trillion and steal prosperity from our children and grandchildren when we
spend nearly twice per person what other industrialized nations spend on health
care?
·
What programs will you cut and whose taxes will you raise to pay
for health-care reform?
·
What earmarks or pet projects that you have sponsored will you
sacrifice to help finance the cost of health-care reform?
·
Will you vote for a public option that requires taxpayer-funded
abortion?
·
If the public option is so wonderful, will you lead by example
and vote for a plan to enroll you and your family in the public option?
·
Will you vote for a plan that will allow a board of politicians
and bureaucrats to override decisions made by you and your doctor?
·
If you support a “comparative effectiveness” board, what
qualifies you, as a politician, to practice medicine?
·
How will a government-run public option perform better than other
failing government programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Indian Health
Care?
·
If increasing spending on health care was the solution, why
hasn’t it worked yet?
·
Are you more committed to doing reform right or quickly? Would
you consider backing a thoughtful alternative to the public option? If so,
which one?
The choice is between the public option and an option that can win
the support of the public, no matter how long it takes to write.
"The problem with
socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." Margaret
Thatcher. John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, remarked that with
a projected $1.8 trillion deficit for 2009, several trillions more in deficits
projected over the next decade, and with both Medicare and Social Security
entitlement spending about to ratchet up several notches over the next 15 years
as Baby Boomers become eligible for both, we are rapidly running out of other
people's money. These deficits are
simply not sustainable. They are either
going to result in unprecedented new taxes and inflation, or they will bankrupt
us. The last thing our country needs is
a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of
dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government
takeover of our health-care system. Instead,
we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite
direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment. Here are eight reforms that would greatly
lower the cost of health care for everyone:
·
Remove the legal obstacles that slow
the creation of high-deductible health insurance plans and health savings
accounts (HSAs).
·
Equalize the tax laws so that
employer-provided health insurance and individually owned health insurance have
the same tax benefits.
·
Repeal all state laws which prevent
insurance companies from competing across state lines.
·
Repeal government mandates regarding
what insurance companies must cover.
·
Enact tort
reform to end the ruinous lawsuits that force doctors to pay insurance costs of
hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
·
Make costs transparent so that
consumers understand what health-care treatments cost.
·
Enact Medicare reform.
·
Finally, revise tax forms to make it
easier for individuals to make a voluntary, tax-deductible donation to help the
millions of people who have no insurance and aren't covered by Medicare,
Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program.
A careful
reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not
reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. This "right" has never existed in
America. Health-care
reform is very important. Whatever
reforms are enacted it is essential that they be financially responsible, and
that we have the freedom to choose doctors and the health-care services that
best suit our own unique set of lifestyle choices. We are all responsible
for our own lives and our own health and should take that responsibility very
seriously and use our freedom to make wise lifestyle choices that will protect
our health.
The more the President
flails around with barrages of new programs, taxes, mandates, and business
takeovers, the warier businessmen become about hiring new workers. Thomas E. Brewton identified Obama’s first official
economic act as the $787 billion stimulus package, which was by many multiples
the largest such program in history. When it was enacted, the
unemployment level was approximately half the present 9.4%. Payrolls have
declined every single month since then, including the most recent month, July
2009. The same can be said for real GDP,
which has declined for the last four quarters straight. Months' or years' time is needed to clear
challenges by environmentalists and other special-interest groups, not to
mention planning and letting of contracts. The Obama administration is
recreating the atmosphere of FDR's Hundred Days blitz of new Federal agencies,
huge tax increases and continual business bashing. Businessmen are
so frightened and unsure of what might come next that they stopped hiring
workers. Jerry Bowyer explains: “America
isn't hiring precisely because of government policy. Small business owners, who
are usually the first into and the first out of the job pool, are standing by
the fence and watching. They are paralyzed by regulatory uncertainty.” There is a very good case that
we'd be out of this recession by now if we had done nothing special. In
the 10 recessions after World War II, federal spending was correlated to worse employment
figures. In the Great Depression, huge and unprecedented spending increases
were followed by huge and unprecedented unemployment levels and duration.
Jobs aren't languishing despite the government's
best efforts; they're languishing because of them.
* There is so much published each week
that unless you go out of your way to find it, you will miss important breaking
events. I package the best of this
information into my “Views on the
News” each Saturday morning for your reading pleasure and to fill in
factual vacuums.
If you are
sick and tired of government and politics as usual, read my web site with its
individual issue analysis and recommendations sections at: http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com . Individual issue updates this week include:
· Civil Rights
at http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com/dp/civilrights.html
· Elections at
http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com/dp/elections.html
Week’s
Best Articles:
· “Protest for
Me, But Not for Thee” by Kyle-Anne Shiver dated August 9, 2009 published by American
Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/protest_for_me_but_not_for_the.html .
· “Obama as
the Wizard of Oz” by James Lewsi dated August 10, 2009 published by American
Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/obama_as_the_wizard_of_oz.html .
· “Obama Down,
Economy Up” by Steven M. Cohen dated August 10, 2009 published by Front
Page Magazine at http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35868 .
· “Ten
Questions Politicians Won’t Answer” by Tom Coburn dated August 10, 2009
published by National Review Online at http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDM5NDJkMDA2ODJlNmMxY2VhYmI2NGJhZGEwZGFlNjU= .
· “The Real
AstroTurf” dated August 10, 2009 published by Investor’s Business
Daily at http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=334799734876274 .
· “Will Obama
pay the price for cutting Medicare?” by Byron York dated August 11, 2009
published by The Washington Examiner at http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Will-Obama-pay-the-price-for-cutting-Medicare-8088240-52913592.html .
· “Government
Actions Cause Unemployment” by Thomas E. Brewton dated August 11, 2009 published by Intellectual
Conservative at http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2009/08/11/government-action-causes-unemployment/ .
· “The Whole
Foods Alternative to ObamaCare” by John Mackey dated August 11, 2009
published by The Wall Street Journal at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070.html .
· “ObamaCare
is a Logical Impossibility” by Larry Hunter dated August 11, 2009 published by Social
Security Institute at http://socialsecurityinstitute.com/blog_post/show/218 .
· “Leftist
Hate Crimes” by Ben Johnson dated August 11, 2009 published by Front
Page Magazine at http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35897 .
· “How to Fix
a Recession” by Randall Hoven dated August 12, 2009 published by American
Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/how_to_fix_a_recession.html .
· “’Brown Shirts’ vs. Purple
Shirts” by Michelle Malkin dated August 12, 2009 published by Town
Hall at http://townhall.com/columnists/MichelleMalkin/2009/08/12/brown_shirts_vs_purple_shirts .
· “The whining
class” by George Nethercutt dated August 12, 2009 published by Politico
at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0809/26024.html .
· “ObamaCare Likely
to Emulate Post Office” by Lowell Ponte dated August 12, 2009 published by News
Max at http://www.newsmax.com/lowell_ponte/
.
· “The Health
Care Reform Paradox” by David Paul Kuhn dated August 13, 2009 published by Real
Clear Politics at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/08/13/the_health_care_reform_paradox__97866.html .
· “Connect the
Dots on ObamaCare” by Geoffey P. Hunt dated August 13, 2009 published by
American Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/connect_the_dots_on_obamacare.html .
· “Obama
considers real America ‘the enemy’” by Chris Adamo dated August 13, 2009
published by Renew America at http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/adamo/090813 .
· “Protestor
warns: ‘You have awakened a sleeping giant.’” Dated August 13,
2009 published by The Houston Chronicle at http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/health/6570918.html .
· “
David Coughlin
Hawthorne, NY