Category Archives: United States

Does Obama Trample Truth?

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I think Obama plays Truth like a shell game. Charles Krauthammer asks , “Does He lie?”

Krauthammer thinks Obama’s too slick for a simple, out and out, lie:

Obama doesn’t lie. He merely elides, gliding from one dubious assertion to another. This has been the story throughout his whole health care crusade. Its original premise was that our current financial crisis was rooted in neglect of three things — energy, education and health care. That transparent attempt to exploit Emanuel’s Law — a crisis is a terrible thing to waste — failed for health care because no one is stupid enough to believe that the 2008 financial collapse was caused by a lack of universal health care.

So on to the next gambit: selling health care reform as a cure for the deficit. When that was exploded by the Congressional Budget Office’s demonstration of staggering Obamacare deficits, Obama tried a new tack: selling his plan as revenue-neutral insurance reform — until the revenue neutrality is exposed as phony future cuts and chimerical waste and fraud.

Obama doesn’t lie. He implies, he misdirects, he misleads — so fluidly and incessantly that he risks transmuting eloquence into mere slickness.

Slickness wasn’t fatal to “Slick Willie” Clinton because he possessed a winning, near irresistible charm. Obama’s persona is more cool, distant, imperial. The charming scoundrel can get away with endless deception; the righteous redeemer cannot.

Read it all here.

Congressman Mike Rogers’ on Health Care Reform in Washington D.C.

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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.

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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.

Fighting the Taliban with God

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In a country soaked with religion, it has fallen to an Oklahoma Baptist to turn Islam into a weapon against the Taliban.

The U.S. military, eager to hand the war over to the Afghan government, has placed mentors throughout the Afghan National Army. The Americans help commanders command, fliers fly and spies spy. U.S. Army Capt. James Hill, a baby-faced 27-year-old from Lawton, Okla., drew the job of mentoring Lt. Col. Abdul Haq, a 51-year-old army mullah who has never shaved.

Capt. Hill’s faith-based mission is to counter the propaganda of Taliban fighters, who ride motorcycles through isolated villages spreading the word that the Afghan army is led by godless communists working to purge the country of Islam. Show the people that the army is a Muslim one, and they’ll be more likely to support it against the insurgents, his theory goes.

Krauthammer – Obama the Neophyte

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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.

86% of Americans Want Abortion Restrictions

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NewsMax.com reports the numbers:

Among the key findings:

  • 86% of Americans would significantly restrict abortion.
  • 60% of Americans would limit abortion to cases of rape, incest or to save the life of a mother – or would not allow it at all.
  • 53% of Americans believe abortion does more harm than good to a woman in the long term.
  • 79% of Americans support conscience exemptions on abortion for health care workers. This includes 64% of those who identify as strongly pro-choice.
  • 69% of Americans think that it is appropriate for religious leaders to speak out on abortion.
  • 59% say religious leaders have a key role to play in the abortion debate.
  • 80% of Americans believe that laws can protect both the health of the woman and the life of the unborn. This includes 68% of those who identified as strongly pro-choice.

    Additionally, the data showed that since October nearly every demographic sub-group had moved toward the pro-life position except for non-practicing Catholics and men under 45 years of age.

    Independents and liberals showed the greatest shift to the pro-life position since October, while Democrats were slightly less likely to be pro-life now than they were in October.

    “The data shows that the American people are placing an ever increasing value on human life,” said Supreme Knight Carl Anderson. “Far from the great divide that most people think exists when it comes to the abortion debate, there is actually a great deal of common ground. Most Americans are unhappy with the unrestricted access to abortion that is the legacy of Roe

    vs. Wade, and pundits and elected leaders should take note of the fact that agreement on abortion need not be limited to the fringes of the debate and issues like adoption or pre-natal care. The American people have reached a basic consensus, and that consensus is at odds with the unrestricted access to abortion that is the legacy of Roe.”

    The survey of 1,223 Americans was conducted May 28 – 31 and has a margin of error of +/-3%.

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