Views on the News
August 29, 2009
Views
on the News*
Obama is a product of a marketing
promotion and as the tea parties and town hall meetings are illustrating, Americans,
including those who voted for Obama, are discovering that the change in Washington is not all that
they had hoped for. Lauri
B. Regan sees the Obama administration interjecting itself where no
administration has dared to go and in areas in which our founding fathers had
no intention of regulating. Americans
are subjected to speech after speech, press conference, after press conference,
and infomercial after infomercial in which Obama lectures us that his policies
must be implemented immediately lest terrible devastation befall the country. Obama's scripted addresses contain lies,
distortions, and threats with the goal of confusing and hindering independent
thought. The insincerity of Obama's
campaign promises becomes more evident with each passing day as he takes
measure after measure to create a country in his own image while ignoring the
wishes of Americans. He promised
bipartisanship yet we are witnessing partisanship never before seen from an
administration. He promised transparency
and yet he has filled the White House offices with a cabal of czars who are
answerable to no one and he attempts to pass legislation before anyone has the
time to read it. He promised no new taxes on people making less than $250,000
and yet he passed a new tax on cigarettes and had his economic team float the
prospect of a middle class tax as an inevitability. The citizenry is beginning to wake up;
however, the dissension in this country between liberals and conservatives is
growing at a breathtaking rate. The
question is whether their complaints are falling upon deaf ears as they are
accused of carrying swastikas and characterized as mobs by their elected
officials who simply want to shut them up and make them go away through
intimidation tactics. We are supposed to
trust the government that ran Fannie Mae, Cash for Clunkers, the USPS, and
Amtrak to make our medical decisions, our corporate decisions, and regulate
away our freedoms. The Democrats who are
the party of the right to choose are legislating away our right to choose, and
they are succeeding right before the eyes of the people of this nation. Despite all the pushback received at all the
town hall meeting, Obama is unleashing his DNC “community organizers,” Organizing for America (OFA), to conduct political
infomercials selling his health care proposals, since apparently he neither
listens to you nor cares what you think.
Framed differently, these OFA activities aren't
meant to convince attendees that healthcare is good; these activities are meant
to manufacture the news, spread propaganda tropes, and over-inflate the image
of the pro-socialized healthcare forces... in other words just more PR stunts.
President Obama's
preferred method of implementing his leftist agenda is to rush emergency, must-sign-yesterday bills
through Congress. Monte
Kuligowski suggests
forget reading the legislation; just trust Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid,
Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank with the details. The problem with this method is that when the
details finally come out, it's too late for the people to do anything about it.
President Obama's preferred method
naturally fosters frustration and anger. Due to the economic "crisis," Obama and the far left element of the Democrat Party
had to pass an emergency stimulus spending plan before anyone had time to read
it. Afterwards, the public learned that
the bulk of the emergency bill to save the economy in 2009 would not be
implemented until 2010 and beyond. As
the public learns of the legislation's massive waste and cronyism it is
becoming apparent that the so-called “stimulus”
was more about stimulating the power of the left than the economy. In just six months the administration has
more than quadrupled
the national debt, passed a $787 billion spending spree, pushed cap and trade (tax)
through the House in the dark of night and is feverishly pushing for a radical
overhaul of the entire health care system. The Obama team just
announced that the federal budget deficit next year will be nearly 20% more
than in their first forecast made only three months ago, and over the next ten
years will be two trillion dollars more than they had predicted, and this does
not include the impact of ObamaCare or “Cap
& Trade” or anything else new! Obama
is no doubt the most ideologically ambitious president in U.S. history. The key to understanding the public outrage at
the town hall meetings is to understand that the outrage is multidimensional. It's not just about health care; it's about
the audacity of Obama. How dare he speak of a new era of transparency as he tries to stuff
more major, life-changing, yet unread legislation down our collective throats. “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of
openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public
trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and
collaboration. . . . Transparency promotes accountability and provides
information for citizens about what their Government is doing.“ Everything about the Obama presidency was
built upon one fraud and hypocrisy after another, yet, his promise of
"transparency" is particularly obscene. On the question of transparency Obama voters
had to suspend their disbelief on a grand scale. After all, this is the man who still
stubbornly refuses to release his records, including his long form birth
certificate, showing the hospital and physician of record. Where he was born is not the point. The point is the man's lack of transparency
and utter contempt for the people in arrogantly refusing to release his
hospital, medical, school, college, and law school records and passports. Now “Mr.
Transparency” pounds the table and foolishly demands that Congress have a
"health care" bill on his
desk before the August break. After
having been all but worshipped as the liberal messiah, Obama's response to
legitimate opposition was to dismiss it as annoying "chatter." After the
chatter of the people rose to full-on protest, however, Obama was forced to
give up the August deadline. Surely, Mr.
Openness never intended to impose more costly and life-changing legislation on
the people behind closed doors -- legislation that no one, including Obama
himself, had fully read. Now the
President wants the "mob"
to calm down so we can have a civil but "vigorous" debate. One
in which he and his friends in the "mainstream
media” can dispel the "misrepresentations"
of the misinformed. The latest headline
from the starry-eyed press is that Obama is calling for an "honest debate," on health care. That's like the fox calling for an honest
debate with the henhouse on egg preservation. But now there is a slight problem for the
White House. After reading the proposed House
bill the people, this time, have the facts. Those facts together with the analyses of the
Congressional Budget Office, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Hoover
Institution and other organizations unsurprisingly clash with the poll-tested
rhetoric of the White House and the dittos of the "mainstream" media.
What we are witnessing and what the
White House fails to see is that the dog and pony show is over. Mr. Obama is repeating his poll-tested words
about health care, but this time the people have the actual House bill and can
separate talking points from reality. Regardless
of whether Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress "go it alone" and push through their
leftist longing for government controlled health care, the exposing of Obama's
hypocrisy has begun. Think of the Great and Powerful Oz continuing to fake it even after
the curtain is removed. So long as the
Democrats remain in total control of the federal government Obama will be able
to move around the levers and authoritatively speak into the microphone; but
new elections are fast approaching. Many
are awakening from their teleprompter-induced messianic trance, while the Obama
media tries to replace the curtain, but regardless of how hard they try, they
cannot keep the covering up indefinitely. No one can change the
fact that behind the curtain stands an inexperienced ideologue who is hell-bent
on remaking America.
One would have to go
back to the 1930s or perhaps the 1970s to find an Administration as hostile to
economic innovation and growth as this one is. Steve Forbes starts by looking at Franklin
Roosevelt who clearly thought that the age of great industrial advancement was
over and that it was Washington's task to increasingly regulate business while
bashing the "selfishness"
of "economic royalists" who
were running American enterprises. The
1970s, especially during Jimmy Carter's presidency, were also antagonistic to
commercial risk-taking. Washington is in
a similar mood today. This
Administration truly believes that the private sector is a destructive,
unguided missile that needs the constant and close supervision of Washington
politicians. They believe that without
it we'd be subject to more disasters like the current financial crisis. Before anybody can invest in anything,
Washington, in effect, would like investors to have to go through the
equivalent of an environmental impact statement: entrepreneurs, executives and
investors cannot be left to their own devices.
Thus, the capital gains tax will be
increased next year by at least one-third, and the personal tax on dividends
will probably be doubled. The
Administration will do nothing to mitigate the toxicity of the Sarbanes-Oxley
Act (Sarbox), which was created in haste in 2002 to prevent corporate fraud and
excesses. One harmful side effect of Sarbox
is that it disproportionately hurts small businesses by burdening them with
relatively huge accounting compliance costs and is therefore a barrier to
smallish companies going public. The
Obama Administration's weak-dollar policy, inherited from the Bush
Administration, also inhibits productive, robust risk-taking. It's no coincidence that when Ronald Reagan
and Paul Volcker ended the Great Inflation of 1968--82 venture capital
exploded, and Silicon Valley took off like a rocket. The U.S., and then the global economy, began
an extraordinary quarter-century of expansion and breathtaking innovation. But the Obama-ites think the prosperity of
1982--2007 is suspect and that they must keep business entrepreneurial impulses
firmly in check. Thus the howls from VCs
and entrepreneurs are music to Washington's ears. Filling out forms will sidetrack venture
capitalists. Even if they pick a winner,
they'll have difficulty launching an IPO to cash out and redeploy their
capital. Successful risk-taking will be
punished with higher investment taxes. Not
a pretty picture, is it? President Obama
should take note: Roosevelt-like stimulus packages and government intervention
in the economy are counterproductive. The
overall economy is under attack as well.
The AVERAGE annual deficit of $905
billion that the White House says the Obama administration now envisions the
government running over the next ten years will be almost TWICE AS LARGE as the LARGEST deficit the United
States ever ran before Obama entered office.
The total national debt is now $11.73 trillion, but under the new deficit spending
President Obama has planned, the national debt will reach $20.78 trillion in
2019. If the economy does not grow as
rapidly as the White House now predicts, the average annual deficits will be
larger than the $905 billion the White House anticipates, and the national
debt will grow by more over the next decade than the $9.05 trillion the White
House now estimates. If the current economic recovery remains sluggish, President
Obama and the Democrats will be hit hard at the ballot box.
The slow, ugly death of
health care reform reflects the left's deep crush with “crises” as both a cause for action, any action, as long as it expands
the size and reach of government. Bruce Walker identified government as a necessary
evil and even Marxists dream of a distant future in which the state will "whither away." Global Warming
is a “crisis,” even though there is a
profound disagreement among scientists about which direction the climate is
changing and whether people can have any significant impact upon any change
that is taking place. Periodically we
are informed that there is an infrastructure “crisis” -- roads, bridges, water lines, school buildings, etc. are
wearing out because they are getting older. The largely mythical "Hunger in America" in the 1960s was
a “crisis” which produced the Food
Stamp Program, and now leftists' planners warn us that obesity is the most
serious health problem of the poor. Monumental levels of government
"stimulus" spending were
supposed to end the economic crisis. And now we face a health care
crisis. Economies are intended to
fluctuate -- there would be little reason for a stock market if economies were
static -- and almost everything that the left deems a "crisis" is simply the natural
process of change in any normal society. Obama
and his disciples have a single, old, failed model for society: central
planning by bureaucrats. Replicating
the Fabian Socialists of Britain, the New Deal, and the other myriad examples
over the last century, from National Socialism's highly planned system of
economic development and health services, to old style, hopelessly obsolete
labor unions, is the dream of Obama. There is no health care “crisis,”
and the problems which exist in any system are being quietly, privately,
addressed. Perhaps the most profound repudiation of the Marxist notion of
capitalists acting as soulless competitors grinding down the poor is vast
outpouring of private contributions and donated services not just for family
and neighbors, but for total strangers. What is our health care "crisis?" It is a crisis of
government bureaucrats who take years to allow effective, often inexpensive,
drugs which have been used in Europe to be used in America. It is a
crisis of rapacious trial lawyers who never heal anyone, but who transfer
massive amounts of money used for medical purposes into mansions and expensive
law offices. It is a morass of federal regulation of state medical
assistance programs, so that federal regulations rather than common sense
dictate how state governments care for their citizens? Despite the
depictions from the left, our “crisis”
is essentially imaginary. Information about medical care and procedures
among patients is increasing exponentially because of the internet, as well as
support groups which provide real experiences and also moral support.
Miracle drugs, which cost a lot, are still miracle drugs, and the pool of
cheap, good, generic drugs grows virtually every day. Without incentives
or threats, those Americans who wish to live healthy lives through exercise,
diet, abstinence from dangerous habits, and so forth, make that choice.
Meanwhile a profoundly compassionate American society
is providing much of what is still lacking.
ObamaCare is a bait and
switch approach to nationalize the health industry and is being sold based on
half-truths and outright fabrications. The heart of the Obama reform is to
treat health insurance companies as national public utilities that eventually
dictate the medical care for all American citizens. The federal government would determine the
benefit packages that health insurers could offer, and pricing decisions would
be strictly limited and profits capped. An
essential element of the reform is a mandate that everyone must purchase health
insurance, with the public option being the default health care option. The notion that such an entity can exist without
the government showing such favoritism that private competitors eventually die
out defies logic and history. We all
know that when the government is setting the rules and is backed by tax
dollars, it will destroy, not compete, with the private sector. Obama is selling government health care by
repeating liberal talking points and refuting what he terms as “misinformation”
with boilerplate justification that may be inially true but quickly dissolves
over time or misleading intentional obfuscation:
·
If you like your current
health plan you can keep it. This promise is only true on day one
because existing plans are being grandfathered in, but only for five years. After
that, they have to meet the new federal mandates, whatever they turn out to be.
In the interim, they can accept no new enrollees. All new enrollees or those who desire to
change plans would be required to use the public plan. More fundamentally, the
Obama reforms completely scramble the health care market. There will be new
governmental mandates, huge new individual subsidies and different tax
treatments. When liberals talk to each other, they
explicitly admit that the public option is designed to kill private insurance
so the government can eventually take complete control.
·
Illegal aliens won't be covered There is indeed a
clause in the House bill that says illegal aliens aren't covered, but there's
no enforcement provision. The legislation contains no verification mechanism to
ensure that illegal immigrants do not apply for benefits. In other words, the
Democrats can claim that illegal aliens won't be covered by the bill and even
point to a provision in it that says it won't happen. Meanwhile, if the health
care bill passes, millions of illegal aliens can apply for and receive their health
care, just as the Democrats planned all along.
· Abortion won't be
covered by the bill. This is another clever sleight of hand designed to fool the
American public. Historically the federal government has funded abortions except
when there was an explicit prohibition written into the law. This bill would
fund abortion because there is no explicit prohibition, so abortion will be
funded by default. Obama defines reproductive health care as an essential
service and it would be defined as a mandate that any private insurance
companies wanting to participate would also be required to provide abortion
coverage. This technique
also opens the door for government money to pay for such things as cosmetic
surgery and transgender surgery. These
mandates are not explicitly identified in the current plans and are “delegated” to the Department of Health
and Human Services, and would be added after the bill passes..
·
The health care bill will lower costs: This is perhaps the
single most dishonest claim about the whole bill, especially given that
Medicare's current unfunded liability is 34 trillion dollars. How in the world are the same people running
a program that's on track to bankrupt the entire country supposed to create a
newer, larger program that's going to actually lower the cost of health
care? Estimates of how much the bill
will add to the deficit range from a few hundred billion to $3.5 trillion
dollars plus, but these are likely to dramatically underestimate the costs for
two reasons. One technique to hide the
real costs by phasing-in coverage of Americans under the plan starting in six to
10 years. That's because the Democratic plan in the House will start collecting
revenues in 2011 but won't start providing coverage until 2013 and won't be
fully implemented until 2015. At a time
when we're running the largest deficit in history and spending at an
unsustainable level, can we afford to create yet another massive entitlement
program?
· There will be no
rationing of health care. There is no "death
panel" in the bills but Federal
Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research Boards will decide how well treatments and drugs work and
who should receive them. “End-of-Life
Counseling” will be available and doctors will be incented to counsel
patients on how to plan for health contingencies. When drugs are deemed prohibitively
expensive, coverage can be denied and other alternatives like ”doctor-assisted
suicide” may be offered. Democrats also say their plan will
cover a lot more Americans, but there are no provisions in it to add any new
doctors or nurses. One of the ways they're going to save money is by simply
refusing to pay hospitals the full value of what their services are worth. Take
any business and dramatically increase the number of customers they're serving
with the same staff while significantly decreasing the amount of money per
customer they receive, and you're going to get a drop-off in quality.
When specific enforcement language to
HR3200 was proposed to close many of these loopholes, they were defeated by
party-line votes. Obama claimed that
cutting costs is dear to his heart, but he's rejected, for purely political
reasons, one of the most effective tools for containing medical costs. More than 70% of American people no
longer believe the inflated claims that Obama routinely makes about this health
care overhaul. The latest Rasmussen
Reports survey show that 53% of voters nationwide oppose the plan working its
way through Congress. Americans don't
want socialism and any compromise is actually statist incrementalism and a step
in the wrong direction. One of the reasons the health bills are so long is to “boil the frog” by masking the
incremental nature of the changes that transform our private health care
industry into a single-payer government nationalized health system.
Obama is getting a
double benefit by investigating CIA interrogators: red meat prosecutions for
his anti-war leftist base while distracting the American public from his
deteriorating health care reform. By authorizing Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special
prosecutor to determine whether a full criminal investigation of CIA employees
and contractors is warranted for the manner in which they interrogated captured
terrorists, the President has thrown his power and support behind those
far-left ideologues, in Congress and elsewhere, who believe that the CIA is a
bigger threat to our country than al Qaeda.
The probe is a
nakedly political, banana republic-style criminalizing of policy differences
and political rivalry. The release of the 2004 CIA inspector general's report on
the agency’s detention and interrogation of terror suspects describes a
well-run, highly disciplined CIA interrogation program, where clear guidelines
were established and abuses or deviations from approved techniques were
stopped, reported and addressed. Now
that classified after action reports have been released, the CIA's
interrogation practices were proven effective at uncovering and saved American
lives. In summary the program was
thoughtfully developed, carefully circumscribed, briefed to Congress, and
yielded information crucial to disrupting al Qaeda. In other words,
it worked—at least until politics got in the way. Both Obama and Holder promised their
antiwar base just this sort of “inquisition” during the 2008 campaign. Holder is also
anxiously awaiting the release of the Justice Department's Office of Legal
Responsibility report on whether former Bush Justice lawyers should be cited
for misconduct for providing the CIA with “legal
opinions” about these interrogations, further politicizing the Global War
on Terror. It will be a watershed
in American history if lawyers from the current administration prosecute
lawyers from the previous administration because they disagree with their legal
opinions. On the foreign front, liberals
might be wondering why they elected Obama. On the domestic front, Obama likely realizes
that he may have to pull in his horns on healthcare and accept some sort of
compromise which may not endear him to his constituency. So he has decided to throw a few CIA
interrogators to the wolves. The outrage is that, years later, when the political winds
have shifted and there hasn't been another attack, our politicians would punish
the men and women who did their best to protect Americans in a time of peril. Forty-nine percent (49%) of U.S.
voters disagree with the Justice Department’s decision to investigate the
treatment and ossible torture of
terrorists during the Bush administration, according to a new Rasmussen Reports. When all is said and
done, this will turn out to be just another partisan witch hunt to go back and “bayonet the wounded,” but ultimately
prove everything was approved and legal!
* 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:
·
Immigration
at http://www.returntocommonsensesite.com/dp/immigration.html
This
Week’s Best Articles:
· “Obama’s
Health Care Whopper is Bigger” by Robert Robb dated August 22, 2009 published by Real
Clear Politics at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/08/22/obamas_health_care_whopper_is_bigger_97989.html .
· “Government
Knows Best” by Lauri B. Regan dated August 23, 2009 published by American
Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/government_knows_best.html .
· “Infatuation
with Crisis” by Bruce Walker dated August 24, 2009 published by
American Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/infatuation_with_crisis.html .
· “5 Liberal
Lies About ObamaCare” by John Hawkins dated August 25, 2009 published by Town
Hall at http://townhall.com/columnists/JohnHawkins/2009/08/25/5_liberal_lies_about_obamacare .
· “Dirty
Secret No. 3 in ObamaCare” by Chuck Norris dated August 25, 2009 published by Town
Hall at http://townhall.com/columnists/ChuckNorris/2009/08/25/dirty_secret_no_3_in_obamacare .
· “Doctor
Obama and the Hypocrites Oath” by Monte Kuligowski dated August 25, 2009 published by American
Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/dr_obama_and_the_hypocrites_oa.html .
· “Retarding Recovery” by Steve Forbes
dated August 25, 2009 published by Forbes Magazine at http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/19/fact-and-comment-opinions-steve-forbes.html .
· “An Anemic
Recovery for the U.S. Economy” by Donald Lambro dated August 25, 2009 published by Town
Hall at http://townhall.com/columnists/DonaldLambro/2009/08/25/an_anemic_recovery_for_the_us_economy .
· “Obama
Versus the CIA” by Marc A. Thiessen dated August 25, 2009 published by The
Wall Street Journal at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574372741490792758.html .
· “It’s
official: Obamanomics has failed” by William Tate dated August 26, 2009
published by American Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/its_official_obamanomics_has_f.html .
· “White House
power grabs” by Monica Crowley dated August 26, 2009 published by The
Washington Times at http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/26/white-house-power-grabs/ .
· “The
Stimulus Is Definitely Working?!” by Thomas F. Cooley and Peter Rupert
dated August 26, 2009 published by Forbes Magazine at http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/25/christina-romer-stimulus-consumption-peter-rupert-opinions-columnists-thomas-f-cooley.html .
· “What the
President’s Attack on the CIA Really Means” by Herbert Meyer
dated August 26, 2009 published by Real Clear Politics at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/08/26/what_the_presidents_attack_on_the_cia_really_means_98045.html .
· “Worse and
Worser” by Randall Hoven dated August 27, 2009 published by
American Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/worse_and_worser.html .
· “Barack
Obama doesn’t care what you think” by Drew Brown dated August 27, 2009
published by American Thinker at http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/barack_obama_doesnt_care_what_1.html .
· “Obama Goes
After CIA to Appease Left” by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann dated August 27, 2009 published
by News Max at http://www.newsmax.com/morris/obama_cia_holder/2009/08/27/252988.html .
· “What Made
KSM Talk?” by Thomas Joscelyn dated August 27, 2009 published by The
Weekly Standard at http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/08/what_made_ksm_talk.asp .
· “The War on
Terror is Dead” by Daniel Henniger dated August 27, 2009 published by Real
Clear Politics at http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/08/27/lawyers_are_about_to_smother_the_war_on_terror_98060.html .
· “The Real
CIA News” by dated August 27, 2009 published by The Wall Street
Journal at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203706604574375012840827276.html .
· “Obama’s
‘Path Toward Fiscal Discipline’ is Paved with Average Annual Deficits of $900
Billion, Says White House Report” by Terence P. Jeffrey dated August
27, 2009 published by Cybercast News Service at http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/53171 .
· “Eric
Holder’s Hidden Agenda” by Andrew C. McCarthy dated August 28, 2009 published by
National Review Online at http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGMyYTQ1ZTM5YTQ5NjJjNzJmNGUxZDIyOTFjYzIyM2Y= .
· “Demonizing the
defenders” by Clifford D. May dated August 29, 2009 published by The Washington
Times at http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/29/demonizing-the-defenders/
.
David Coughlin
Hawthorne, NY