It’s Friday, November 1st, 2013…but before we kick off the first edition of November, here’s another bit of deliberate misrepresentation so rank it could only come from the bowels of MSDNC:
Honesty…and the Clintons…in one sentence! Yeah…
That would depend upon what your definition…
…of “honesty” is. A lot of words come to mind when you mention the name “Clinton”; “honesty” doesn’t even make the Top 100!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
Since we’re on the subject of serial prevaricators, aka, deliberate and repetitive liars (a term the nauseatingly non-judgmental Bill O’Reilly still can’t bring himself to use), here’s the latest ad from The Gang That Still Can’t Shoot Straight:
Though the majority of the MSM continues to sleep, as the WSJ records, a significant portion of the rest America is experiencing…
For all of the Affordable Care Act’s technical problems, at least one part is working on schedule. The law is systematically dismantling the individual insurance market, as its architects intended from the start.
The millions of Americans who are receiving termination notices because their current coverage does not conform to Health and Human Services Department rules may not realize this is by design. Maybe they trusted President Obama’s repeated falsehood that people who liked their health plans could keep them. But Americans should understand that this month’s mass cancellation wave has been the President’s political goal since 2008. Liberals believe they must destroy the market in order to save it.
*Editor’s note: In otherwords, why he LIED out his unaccomplished arse!!!
…For decades before Obama burst onto the political scene, liberals had been pushing for the federal government to establish some sort of national health care program. But this effort always ran up against the same obstacle — an overwhelming majority of Americans were happy with their coverage and were leery of any changes.
So the health care status quo prevailed again and again, but most prominently when President Clinton’s health care reform effort went down in flames in 1994. Eventually, Democrats learned that whenever proposing changes to the health care system, they had to emphasize that the changes wouldn’t affect those who already had coverage they liked…
Soooo, inquiring minds want to know, how many times has The Great Prevaricator told the same lie? According to New York Magazine‘s Dan Amira, certainly no fan of Conservatism in any way, shape or form, at least two dozen:
But who’s counting?!? Certainly not the MSM.
And if you loved The Dear Misleader’s lies, you’ll certainly swoon for the utter idiocy contained in the actual bill. Take the mandatory maternity coverage for 32-year-old single men and post-menopausal women; as James Taranto reports…
First, it’s not only men who are forced to buy maternity coverage they are physically incapable of using. So are women in the stage of life between childbearing age and Medicare eligibility.
Second, under-30s are exempt. That’s right, the geniuses who wrote ObamaCare are forcing everyone to buy maternity care except the age cohort that includes women at peak fertility.
We can only assume they’ll be offered maternity coverage for “free“…along with their birth control and breast pumps!
Next up, two of our favorite writers explore the gross character flaws which made Der Obafuhrer’s healthcare debacle all but inevitable; first, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger explains why, in the end…
Progressive Government Fails
Obama’s ideology is the politics of the personal cram down.
A reader remarked last week that Barack Obama is running out of human shields. With the father of ObamaCare unavailable to explain the greatest fiasco of his presidency to Congress, the American people had to settle Wednesday for his surrogate, Kathleen Sebelius.
Let us try to understand clearly what is happening now with the Obama presidency. On display to everyone watching this week is not merely the failure of a federal website or a software program or Ms. Sebelius’s management skills. This is the failure of the very idea of progressive government. Not liberal government.Progressive government.
That battle a few weeks ago over the government shutdown was a familiar Beltway spectacle. But what is happening this week to ObamaCare and the political class that created it is historic. Forty years from now, the millennials who in 2008 and 2012 believed in and voted for the progressive ideal—limitless, mandated, state-led goodness—can tell their grandchildren they watched it fall apart in 2013. This is the glitch that failed.
In the 1990s, the American left, burdened with 90 years of unfortunate left-wing metaphors, rebranded itself in the U.S. as the “progressive movement.” Teddy Roosevelt invokes cheerier memories than Leon Trotsky. In the 2008 U.S. presidential election, the left rode to power with Barack Obama.
Mr. Obama is, without embarrassment, a man of the left. American progressives saw their win with Mr. Obama as the overthrowing of the postwar Democratic liberalism that culminated with the Clintons, a liberalism willing most of the time to coexist with markets, property and private enterprise. Progressives hated these accommodations.They were purer than that. He was purer than that.Together, they created ObamaCare.
What made ObamaCare an exemplar of progressive politics and policy is precisely what has been on view this week in news stories and the Sebelius hearing. It’s not that the health program was to be administered by the state or that it promised benefits to all. Liberalism did that for decades. What made it peculiarly progressive were the mandates. And not just the law’s individual and business mandates to purchase their insurance. The essence of modern Democratic progressivism is: “You will participate in what we have created for you, and you will comply with the law’s demands.” (Irrespective of whether you need drug treatment and maternity coverage or not!)
Nothing could have been more crystal clear than the explanation for all the canceled insurance policies from the White House’s Jay Carney, the bland face of progressive coercion: “What the president said and what everybody said all along is that there are going to be changes brought about by the Affordable Care Act to create minimum standards of coverage, minimum services that every insurance plan has to provide. So it’s true that there are existing health-care plans on the individual market that don’t meet those minimum standards and therefore do not qualify for the Affordable Care Act.”
If this White House and its progressive ecosystem have a political motto, it’s this: Get over it.
American progressivism is politics by cramdown.Ask Jamie Dimon. Ask the coal miners the EPA is putting out of business. Ask the union workers waiting for jobs on the Keystone XL pipeline. Ask Boeing BA +0.02% in South Carolina or the harmless tea party groups from towns no one has ever heard of that were shut down by the IRS, or the 20,000 inner-city parents and students who marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest obliteration of their charter schools by New York’s progressive mayoral candidate, Bill de Blasio.
Up to now, most of the events of the Obama presidency have passed in and out of the news as just politics. But with ObamaCare and its details touching so many people all at once, it has become impossible not to recognize that the Affordable Care Act is an offensive ideological exercise, not merely an entitlement program. By Mr. Obama’s own admission, this law is the way he wants the world to work in the U.S.—whether in health, education, energy, infrastructure or finance. And what Americans now riding through the ObamaCare hurricane of canceled policies, disappearing doctors and rebooted promises have to be asking themselves is: Do I want to live with this level of personal enforcement in the U.S.?
Perhaps the better question is, will the political class help them understand what ObamaCare is, or wanted to be? Most Republican politicians aren’t particularly comfortable doing ideology. But the left revels in it. Mr. Obama bellows it in every speech. And absent someone shouting that the progressive emperor suddenly isn’t wearing any clothes, they will win with it again.
Barack Obama may have spent a lifetime failing up, but eventually it’s just failure. He has presided over five years of sickly economic growth, inadequate job creation, a doubling of the food stamp population and now this—ObamaCare.
Progressive government has failed in the U.S. Most fascinating to behold will be whether the Democratic presidential candidate who follows this meltdown will embrace it, fake it or move on.
That…and the fact you eventually run out of other people’s money!
Second, Commentary Magazine‘s Peter Wehner recounts the countless calumniations uttered over the last five years by…
…it’s nearly impossible to believe that the president–who is hardly a stupid or ignorant man–was clueless about this despite the fact that many people in the administration knew years in advance that a large percentage of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans. Red flags had to have gone up, time and again, at least until the message was sent from on high: Don’t rock the boat and don’t raise objections.
Remember, what we’re talking about isn’t a minor feature of an obscure policy. It’s a central component of Mr. Obama’s signature domestic achievement.And as the Wall Street Journal points out in this editorial, the Affordable Care Act is “dismantling the individual insurance market, as its architects intended from the start … this month’s mass cancellation wave has been the President’s political goal since 2008. Liberals believe they must destroy the market in order to save it.”
Different faces; same lies!
Beyond that, it’s helpful to bear in mind the characteristics of the Obama White House. This is the group that for weeks knowingly misled the public on the events surrounding the lethal attacks on the American diplomatic outpost in Benghazi. That claimed that the Affordable Care Act was both a tax and not a tax, depending on what the circumstances required. That hatched the sequestration idea, then denied it, and then blamed Republicans for it. That has perfected the art of stonewalling. That is lawless. And that ran a campaign in 2012 that was unusually vicious and dishonest, up to and including blaming Mitt Romney for the cancer death of a steelworker’s wife.
We have as president a man who routinely slanders his political opponents, distorting what they believe, even as he bemoans the lack of civility in public discourse. He constantly makes assertions that are obviously untrue. And it doesn’t matter to him. He keeps doing it because, at least until now, the media has given him something approaching a free pass…
Here’s the juice; as Joe Wilson so eloquently put it…
Which brings us to today’s Money Quote, courtesy of Best of the Web and Time‘s Joe Klein:
“The President should set the tone for the way the federal government operates. This President hasn’t done that.”
In the words of James Taranto, “It seems to us the problem is precisely that he has done that.”
Moving on, as FOX News reports, submitted for your perusal, The Most Transparent Administration in History’s latest demonstration of openness in response to the investigation into the unexplained deaths of four Americans in Benghazi:
The Justice and State departments are now citing a year-old FBI investigation and a future criminal prosecution to block access to survivors of last year’s Benghazi terror attack. In an Oct. 28 letter to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.,the State Department’s Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs, Julia Frifield, refers to “significant risks” and “serious concerns about having the survivors of the attack submit to additional interviews.”
Since we’re on the subject of guilty until proven innocent, as this forward from Jeff Foutch courtesy of Paul Bedard at the Washington Examiner informs us…
The Internal Revenue Service shared highly confidential tax information of several Tea Party groups in the IRS scandal with the Federal Election Commission, a clear violation of federal law, according to newly obtained emails. The public watchdog group Judicial Watch told Secrets Thursday that it was former scandal boss Lois Lerner who shared the information on groups including the American Future Fund and the American Issues Project.
The emails obtained by Judicial Watch show that the IRS, which was considering the tax status of the groups, gave the FEC the tax returns of the groups, including income, expenditures and staff pay. The emails also revealed the exact working of the prying political questions the IRS wanted the groups to reveal, such as their goals and the requests for brochures and ads.
The information, sent via email, to the FEC came in response to the organization’s questions about whether the IRS had granted tax-exempt status to the Tea Party groups. It is unclear how the information the IRS sent was going to help the FEC, since the IRS hadn’t determined the tax status of the groups yet.
As contributor Jeff Foutch informed us, Eric Holder’s Department of Injustice will prosecute Lerner when…
And in today’s installment of the Environmental Moment, courtesy of The Daily Caller, a bit of common sense from the Lan’ Dahwn Unda:
Aussie PM: Carbon Tax is ‘Socialism’
Australia’s newly elected prime minister pulled no punches when giving his thoughts on the country’s carbon tax, which he says must be abolished as quickly as possible.
“The carbon tax is bad for the economy and it doesn’t do any good for the environment,” newly elected Prime Minister John “Tony” Abbott told The Washington Post. “Despite a carbon tax of $37 a ton by 2020, Australia’s domestic emissions were going up, not down. The carbon tax was basically socialism masquerading as environmentalism, and that’s why it’s going to get abolished.”
“If the Labor Party wants to give the people of Australia a Christmas present, they will vote to abolish the carbon tax. It was damaging the economy without helping the environment. It was a stupid tax. A misconceived tax,” Abbott added.
So c’mon, America…
On the Lighter Side…
Then there’s one of more perfect depictions of abortion we’ve ever seen:
Finally, we’ll call it a week with yet another sordid story ripped from the pages of the Crime Blotter:
Woman arrested with drug-filled Halloween pumpkins
A woman arriving at Montreal’s airport was handed over to Canadian federal police on Thursday after a search of her luggage found cocaine stashed inside Halloween pumpkins. “The pumpkins seemed heavy, so we decided to run them through an X-ray machine and the drugs were found in bags inside the pumpkins,” Canada Border Services Agency spokeswoman Jacqueline Roby told AFP.
In a statement, the agency described the case as an “unusual seizure in this day of Halloween.”
Makes sense to us; after all, it’s not like they grow pumpkins in Canada!
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