Category Archives: Opinions

On Not Judging the Man-Just the Record

by

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

by

1

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.

Obamacare Striking Out

by

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?”

Krauthammer – Obama the Neophyte

by

Obama is pleased with the arms reduction agreement.  Should he be?  Should we be? Charles Krauthammer opines:

Obama says that his START will be a great boon, setting an example to enable us to better pressure North Korea and Iran to give up their nuclear programs. That a man of Obama’s intelligence can believe such nonsense is beyond comprehension. There is not a shred of evidence that cuts by the great powers — the INF treaty, START I, the Treaty of Moscow (2002) — induced the curtailment of anyone’s programs. Moammar Gaddafi gave up his nukes the week we pulled Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole. No treaty involved. The very notion that Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will suddenly abjure nukes because of yet another U.S.-Russian treaty is comical.

Further, says Krauthammer:

Unfortunately for the United States, the country Obama represents, the prospective treaty is useless at best, detrimental at worst.

Useless because the level of offensive nuclear weaponry, the subject of the U.S.-Russia “Joint Understanding,” is an irrelevance. We could today terminate all such negotiations, invite the Russians to build as many warheads as they want, and profitably watch them spend themselves into penury, as did their Soviet predecessors, stockpiling weapons that do nothing more than, as Churchill put it, make the rubble bounce.

Read it all here.

Death Knell for Affirmative Action?

by

3

eCharles Krauthammer sounds the death knell for reverse racism with the Supreme Courts Ricci decision:

Ricci left Sotomayor relatively unscathed. But not affirmative action. Ricci raised the bar considerably on overt discrimination against one racial group simply to undo the unintentionally racially skewed results of otherwise fair and objective employment procedures (in this case, examinations).

Krauthammer notes (bemoans?) Sotomayor’s survival:

While overturned on Ricci, she is protected by the four dissenting justices who upheld the side of the case she had taken as an appeals court judge. Sotomayor was additionally helped by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s insistence on reading her dissent from the bench, as if to emphasize the legitimacy of her position — and, by implication, Sotomayor’s.

“Desperately Seeking Yeltsin”- Krauthammer

by

Is there a leader to lead this revolution”

Charles Krauthammer writes:

Desperately seeking Yeltsin. Does this revolution have one? Or to put it another way, can Mousavi become Yeltsin?

President Obama’s worst misstep during the Iranian upheaval occurred early on when he publicly discounted the policy differences between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mousavi.

True, but that overlooked two extremely important points. First, while Mousavi himself was originally only a few inches to Ahmadinejad’s left on the political spectrum — being hand-picked by the ruling establishment precisely for his ideological reliability — Mousavi’s support was not restricted to those whose views matched his. He would have been the electoral choice of everyone to his left, a massive national constituency — liberals, liberalizers, secularists, monarchists, radicals and visceral opponents of the entire regime — that dwarfs those who shared his positions, as originally held.

Moreover, Mousavi’s positions have changed, just as he has. He is far different today from the Mousavi who began this electoral campaign.

Revolutions are dynamic, fluid. It is true that two months ago there was little difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. But that day is long gone. Revolutions outrun their origins. And they transform their leaders………..

As Mousavi hovers between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, between reformer and revolutionary, between figurehead and leader, the revolution hangs in the balance. The regime may neutralize him by arrest or even murder. It may buy him off with offers of safety and a sinecure. He may well prefer to let this cup pass from his lips.

But choose he must, and choose quickly. This is his moment and it is fading rapidly. Unless Mousavi rises to it, or another rises in his place, Iran’s democratic uprising will end not as Russia 1991, but as China 1989.