Category Archives: American

How the Mighty Have Fallen

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H/T Anchoress for the video link:

Charles Krauthammer isn’t as generous in discerning Obama’s motives, agenda and Waterloo saying in part:

In a center-right country, that was problem enough. Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one’s own image.

Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party town-hall resistance.

Obama’s reaction to that resistance made things worse. Obama fancies himself tribune of the people, spokesman for the grass roots, harbinger of a new kind of politics from below that would upset the established lobbyist special-interest order of Washington. Yet faced with protests from a real grass-roots movement, his party and his supporters called it a mob — misinformed, misled, irrational, angry, unhinged, bordering on racist. All this while the administration was cutting backroom deals with every manner of special interest — from drug companies to auto unions to doctors — in which favors worth billions were quietly and opaquely exchanged.

On Not Judging the Man-Just the Record

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For the record:  judging, discerning, and choosing are part and parcel of life.  From day one, our senses present the world to us and we’re off on the grand adventure.  All is recorded in the Book of Life from cradle to grave.  “Known but to God” can be recorded on every tombstone.  And so, now we come to the death of the “great man”, Edward Moore “Ted” Kennedy.  What constitutes this greatness matters.  Of late, we have seen idols and iconic figures come to their respective ends.  To judge, to discern, to choose is human, wisdom depends on it. Society learns and survives by it.

Let a merciful and just God judge the disposition of a soul.  I’m okay with that for myself and others.  What to make though, of hours and days and in some cases eons of public pronouncements and near cult worship.  Senator Ted Kennedy died and now the myth begins, or has it been spun like a cocoon about him throughout life?  For the butterfly to emerge, the cocoon must be broken.

I’m of the opinion that God isn’t wowed by the Kennedy legacy and I’m certain all spin stops before His throne.  A face to face with God isn’t like Facebook, Twitter or even “Meet the Press”.  Men may flatter us, but the truth is that pride goes before a fall.  Before the Almighty, humility is the better garb.

For my part, I see that Edward Moore “Ted” Kenned, had it all; life lived to the full. He got the chance as the youngest of nine children born to a Catholic mother who practiced her faith, not birth control, to experience family, faith, power, love, fun, sin and foolishness.  He got to make mistakes, ask forgiveness, build bonds of kinship and friendship.  He got to roar like a lion and cry like a baby. I see, too, that this gifted and blessed man, failed to find it in his heart or philosophy to support the unborn, the un-named also conceived by the will of  God, failed to grant them protection or welcome into the same life he so abundantly lived.  May these, the Holy Innocents,  now pray for him, their brother, offering the purest Innocent, the Lamb of God, to a loving Father who even Now, stoops to the lowly when they cry out for mercy.  Lord have mercy!

Ignatius Press sticks to the facts and leaves the funeral fuss, fantasy, and lionization to press, popular myth romantics, and political agendas.

More Nonsense Called Health Care Reform

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Charles Krauthammer opines:

In the 48 hours of June 15-16, President Obama lost the health care debate. First, a letter from the Congressional Budget Office to Sen. Edward Kennedy reported that his health committee’s reform bill would add $1 trillion in debt over the next decade. Then the CBO reported that the other Senate bill, being written by the Finance Committee, would add $1.6 trillion. The central contradiction of Obamacare was fatally exposed: From his first address to Congress, Obama insisted on the dire need for restructuring the health care system because out-of-control costs were bankrupting the Treasury and wrecking the U.S. economy — yet the Democrats’ plans would make the problem worse.

Accordingly, Democrats have trotted out various tax proposals to close the gap. Obama’s idea of limits on charitable and mortgage-interest deductions went nowhere. As did the House’s income tax surcharge on millionaires. And Obama dare not tax employer-provided health insurance because of his campaign pledge of no middle-class tax hikes.

Desperation time. What do you do? Sprinkle fairy dust on every health care plan, and present your deus ex machina: prevention.

…..

Prevention is a wondrous good, but in the aggregate it costs society money. Nothing wrong with that. That’s the whole premise of medicine: Treating a heart attack or setting a broken leg also costs society. But we do it because it alleviates human suffering. Preventing a heart attack with statins or breast cancer with mammograms is costly. But we do it because it reduces human suffering.

However, prevention is not, as so widely advertised, healing on the cheap. It is not the magic bullet for health care costs.

You will hear some variation of that claim a hundred times in the coming health care debate. Whenever you do, remember: It’s nonsense — empirically demonstrable and CBO-certified.

Demand Answers! “Facts are Stubborn”

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Read all about the healthcare that includes killing the unborn infant in the womb!…here.

From Emily Buchanan, executive director, Susan B. Anthony List:

Demand Answers at Town Hall Meetings!

With Congress in recess, many Representatives are holding Town Hall meetings so that constituents can voice their opinions.

As you’ve probably heard in the news, thousands of American voters are coming together at these Town Hall meetings to demand answers from their Representatives concerning the health care bill.

It is time for Susan B. Anthony List Pro-Life Activists to get involved and demand answers on why Congress wants to use our tax dollars to provide abortion coverage in every health care plan, public or private.

Already, Representatives are feeling the heat on abortion.

Just yesterday, when asked about abortion coverage in the health care bill,

Rep. John Dingell, the chief sponsor of the bill, responded: “There will be no payment of taxpayer funds for abortion.”

Simply put, this is a bold-faced lie.

Just this week, the Associated Press (AP) wrote a story

headlined, “Gov’t insurance would allow coverage for abortion.”

The truth is on our side, and we must make sure we share the truth with every member of Congress face-to-face to Stop the Abortion Mandate!

Here are 5 easy ways that you can make a difference in your community:

1. Find local Town Hall meetings sponsored by your Representatives. Click Here for a list of Town Hall meetings across the country.

2. Bring a homemade sign that says, “Abortion is NOT Health Care” with www.StopTheAbortionMandate.com

below it.

3. Simply ask your Representative: “Why is the current health care bill forcing me to pay for abortion coverage?” Click here for more sample questions and tips!

4. If your Representative denies the charge, hold up the Associated Press story and read the headline. Ask them why they are lying about abortion coverage in the bill. Click Here to print out the Associated Press story.

5. Please bring a video camera and have someone record your question and record the response. Contact us at information@sba-list.org so we can help you send us the video.  At the Town Hall, seek out members of the press and do interviews with them.

Emily Buchanan
Executive Director, Susan B. Anthony List
703-875-3370
www.sba-list.org


From Americans United for Life Action’s Charmaine Yoest:

Just yesterday, in a USA Today op-ed, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) argued that the people attending town hall meetings and questioning the wisdom of the House health care reform bill have been “un-American.”  “Opponents are afraid not just of differing views,” they write, “but of the facts themselves.”

But as John Adams famously argued in 1770, “Facts are stubborn things.”

The truth is that there is nothing more American than the First Amendment right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.”  The facts of the plan under consideration demand that pro-life Americans speak up now or risk being forced to pay for a plan that mandates taxpayer funds for abortion, strips health care providers of conscience rights, and threatens the ill and elderly with denial of care.

Here’s a better idea than questioning one another’s patriotism:  show them you’re not afraid of the facts.  Go to your U.S. senator or representative’s town hall meeting and ask informed questions.  AUL’s legal team has written a talking-points flyer for pro-lifers to distribute at these meetings.  It gives detailed information on the parts of the bills under consideration that relate to abortion, end-of-life care, and conscience rights.  The flyer also includes our three essential principles that must be in any health care reform plan that protects life.  Click here to download the flyer.

All the information on the flyer is also available on AUL’s RealHealthCareRespectsLife.com, along with additional in-depth analysis from our legal experts on the health care reform plans currently in the House and Senate.  If you haven’t done so already, make sure to sign the site’s petition to add your voice to the thousands urging the President to keep abortion out of health care. Thank you for joining me in protecting and defending life!

Caught on Tape: Obama Calls Abortion the Center of His Health Care Agenda

If you’ve seen our FightFOCA.com, you know that, as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama promised abortion advocates at a Planned Parenthood conference that the “first thing” he’d do as President was to sign the Freedom of Choice Act. Thankfully, you and the 700,000 others who signed our “Fight FOCA” petition helped convince him that was a bad idea. But did you know that, at that same conference, Obama said that mandated abortion coverage would be at the “center and heart” of his health care agenda? He did, and we’ve got the tape.

Obamacare Striking Out

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Charles Krauthammer says it clearly here:

“Reforming the health care system is dead. Cause of death? Blunt trauma administered not by Republicans, not even by Blue Dog Democrats, but by the green eyeshades at the Congressional Budget Office.

Three blows:

(1) On June 16, the CBO determined that the Senate Finance Committee bill would cost $1.6 trillion over 10 years, delivering a sticker shock that was near fatal.

(2) Five weeks later, the CBO gave its verdict on the Independent Medicare Advisory Council, Dr. Obama’s latest miracle cure, conjured up at the last minute to save Obamacare from fiscal ruin, and consisting of a committee of medical experts highly empowered to make Medicare cuts.

The CBO said that IMAC would do nothing, trimming costs by perhaps 0.2 percent. A 0.2 percent cut is not a solution; it’s a punch line.

(3) The final blow came last Sunday when the CBO euthanized the Obama “out years” myth. The administration’s argument had been: Sure, Obamacare will initially increase costs and deficits. But it pays for itself in the long run because it bends the curve downward in coming decades.

The CBO put in writing the obvious: In its second decade, Obamacare significantly bends the curve upward — increasing deficits even more than in the first decade.

This is obvious because Obama’s own first-decade numbers were built on arithmetic trickery. New taxes to support the health care plan begin in 2011, but the benefits part of the program doesn’t fully kick in until 2015. That excess revenue is, of course, one time only. It makes the first decade numbers look artificially low, but once you pass 2015, the yearly deficits become larger and eternal.

Three CBO strikes and you’re out cold. Though it must be admitted that the White House itself added to the farcical nature of its frantic and futile cost-cutting when budget director Peter Orszag held a three-hour brainstorming session with Senate Finance Committee aides trying to find ways to save. “At one point,” reports The Wall Street Journal, “they flipped through the tax code, looking for ideas.” Looking for ideas? Months into the president’s health care drive and just days before his deadline for Congress to pass real legislation? You gonna give this gang the power to remake one-sixth of the U.S. economy?”

Vintage Pelosi Spinning Like a Top

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ALLAHPUNDIT shares Pelosi’s nutty spin here.

“For sheer comic alarmism, this is topped only by The One’s warning at last week’s presser that greedy doctors are after your tonsils. But remember, you’re the ones who are fearmongering.

“They are the villains in this,” Pelosi said of private insurers. “They have been part of the problem in a major way. They are doing everything in their power to stop a public option from happening. And the public has to know that. They can disguise their arguments any way they want, but the fact is that they don’t want the competition.”…

“It’s almost immoral what they are doing,” added Pelosi, who stood outside her office long after her press conference ended to continue speaking to reporters, even as aides tried in vain to usher her inside. “Of course they’ve been immoral all along in how they have treated the people that they insure with pre-existing conditions, you know, the litany of it all.”

Translation: Private insurers are selfishly defending themselves from a statist boondoggle that’ll likely drive them out of business and create a government monopoly. I can’t believe it’s come to this, but Yale Law prof Stephen Carter was so distressed by Democratic attacks on nefarious profit-seekers that he felt obliged to write an op-ed this morning reminding America that profits are actually a good thing:

High profits are excellent news. When corporate earnings reach record levels, we should be celebrating. The only way a firm can make money is to sell people what they want at a price they are willing to pay. If a firm makes lots of money, lots of people are getting what they want.

To the country, profit is a benefit. Record profit means record taxes paid. But put that aside. When profits are high, firms are able to reinvest, expand and hire. And profits accrue to the benefit of those who own stocks: overwhelmingly, pension funds and mutual funds. In other words, high corporate profits today signal better retirements tomorrow.

Another reason to celebrate profit is the incentive it creates. When profits can be made, entrepreneurs provide more of needed goods and services…

We want health care to be cheaper, and the for-profit health-care industry has every incentive to make it so. Supporters of the public option tout Medicare’s cost advantages over private insurance, but those are largely obtained by setting below-market reimbursement rates for medical services (meaning that private patients subsidize Medicare patients). Moreover, the costs of compliance with the hundreds of pages of Medicare regulations are also transferred to the providers, and thus, again, to private patients.

Anchoress take on it:


“MMMhhmmmm, that’s just the sort of incompetent, inefficient nightmare bureaucracy I want managing my health care! The billion-dollar program is already broke, even though the dealers haven’t been paid. And the White House is considering asking for “more money”?

Let’s take another look at that handy budget chart, and pity these poor dealers who are just trying to stay in business and keep people employed and have no idea when they’ll ever see a dime of their $4,500 advances paid back.

Please note: Pelosi is not the only one running around pointing the finger and shrieking “villain!” The Democrats are scolding their obedient-monkey-press. Bad, bad mediamonkies!

Senate Democratic leaders on Thursday blamed Capitol Hill media for setting an August deadline for health reform and Republicans for blocking the bill’s progress. . . . [Sen Harry] Reid said reporters created a fictitious deadline of a successful vote by the August recess, and downplayed the fact that the chamber won’t meet that mark.

“That is a deadline that you created,” Reid told a group of about 75 reporters. “It’s not like we don’t have a product. Significant progress has been made …