Cato Institute – President Obama’s War on the Poor
Cafe Hayek – Chart of the Year
Political Wire – McDonnell Holds Lead in VA
WSJ – Three-Way Race in NY Could Split GOP Vote
Washington Post – Politics and the Public Option
Washington Times – Trial Lawyers Going Broke
Chris Cillizza – Is Santorum Serious?
The Hill – Sen. Harkin Says Votes Are There for Public Option
Federal Debt: $11.80 trillion
This time, the committee voted against the “moderate” Schumer version of the public option. The vote was 10-13, with Senators Baucus (MT), Lincoln (AR), and Conrad (ND) voting against government-run health care.
This looks like the death knell of the public option in the Senate, as Senator Schumer and Chairman Baucus both admit that a bill with a public option has no chance of passing the Senate with 60 votes. However, there are some reports that Senate Democrats might use the budget reconciliation process to push through a public option, requiring only 50 votes.
Call your Senators and tell them to vote “No” on a government-run public option that would result in anywhere from 80-120 million Americans losing their insurance. Here is the number: 202-224-3121.
Minutes ago the Senate Finance Committee voted against Senator Jay Rockefeller’s (WV) version of a government-run public option. The vote was a surprising victory for free-market advocates. The Rockefeller amendment failed 8-15, with Senators Baucus (MT), Conrad (ND), Lincoln (AR), Nelson (FL), and Carper (DE) voting against the public option.
Call your Senators and tell them to vote “No” on a government-run public option that would result in anywhere from 80-120 million Americans losing their insurance. Here is the number: 202-224-3121.
Strangely, this piece comes from the Huffington Post but it’s authored by Dylan Ratigan of MSNBC, who seems to be more open-minded.
His point? Democrats so often claim that the “market” is broken because health care is expensive and too many people lack health coverage. Well, one reason that health care is too expensive is because the government helps to create health care monopolies in the states and even prevents consumers from shopping across state lines for cheaper/better insurance.
There is no true “market” for health care if you live in North Dakota where Blue Cross controls 90% of the market. There is little choice in Maine where Wellpoint controls 71% of the market. Capitalism works best when consumers have choices between companies. Health care companies should beg and compete for our business, not the other way around.
Remember 2005, when global warming alarmists claimed that Hurricane Katrina proved the effects of climate change, and that Katrina-level hurricanes would occur with increasing frequency until draconian government climate legislation was imposed? The years 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 apparently didn’t get the memo, judging by the dearth of major hurricanes. Heck, remember the 1970s, when the fashionable climate-change hysteria was global cooling, not global warming?
Well, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman apparently has a short memory.
In his latest column, Krugman confidently instructs us that the sky is falling… yet again. For real this time. He assures us that “I’m not engaging in hyperbole,” but lacking any sense of irony or familiarity with recent history, he then asserts that “climate scientists have, en masse, become Cassandras — gifted with the ability to prophesy future disasters, but cursed with the inability to get anyone to believe them.” You mean, sort of like the “gifted” alarmists who predicted global cooling in the 1970s and an coming onslaught of Katrinas in 2005?
Instead of writing a New York Times column, perhaps Krugman should instead join the city’s street vagrants and carry his own “The End Is Near!” sandwich board sign.
Cato Institute – “How American Health Care Killed My Father”
Club for Growth – Fmr. Sen. Bill Frist Supports Individual Mandate
WSJ – White House Seeks to Reform Tax Code
Rep. Steny Hoyer – House Schedule
The Hill – Public Option Plagues Democrats
Politico – Michael Moore Targets Blue Dogs
Washington Post – Rationing Health Care
The Hill – House Begins Work on Net Neutrality
Federal Debt: $11.796 trillion
That’s the headline President Obama will have to live with if he doesn’t wise up to the unintended consequences of health care reform.
A Pennsylvania physician called into Mark Levin’s radio show this afternoon to share with the nation that the Amish — who oppose any form of insurance as a matter of theology — will not comply with any individual mandate that is part of healthcare reform.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we stop caring about individual rights.
The Wall Street Journal carried a superb op-ed this morning by Johns Hopkins professor Eliot Cohen on the growing dangers of Iran.
Cohen, who runs the university’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, is the author of “Supreme Command,” one of the seminal books on political leadership during wartime. He also served as a special advisor to Condoleeza Rice at the State Department during President Bush’s second term (though, from an outsider’s perspective, it seems as if Secretary Rice didn’t take nearly enough of his advice).
The whole piece is wonderful for its clarity, but the money quote is:
Pressure, be it gentle or severe, will not erase [the Iranian] nuclear program. The choices are now what they ever were: an American or an Israeli strike, which would probably cause a substantial war, or living in a world with Iranian nuclear weapons, which may also result in war, perhaps nuclear, over a longer period of time.”
Read it in its entirety here.
Following last week’s General Assembly meetings at the United Nations, former Arkansas Governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee gave his impressions of the world body during a speech at the How To Take Back America Conference in St. Louis.
“It’s time to say enough of the American taxpayer’s dollar being spent on something that may have been a noble idea, but has become a disgrace,” said Huckabee to the cheering audience. “[The U.N.] has become the international equivalent of ACORN.”
The more Americans learn about what Congress is doing to reform the nation’s health care system, the less the American people support it.
According to the latest Rasmussen Reports survey, support among nationwide voters for the reform plan(s) being pushed by President Obama and Congressional Democrats has shrunk to 41%, with 56% of voters opposing it. “That’s down two points from a week ago and the lowest level of support yet measured,” writes Rasmussen.
Other notable numbers revealed by the survey:
FoxNews.com reports:
Already facing the loss of federal government funding, the community-organizing group ACORN also has run afoul of one of its big corporate partners, Bank of America Corp.
“In response to questions from The Wall Street Journal, a spokesman for the banking company said it has ’suspended current commitments’ to ACORN Housing, an affiliated group, and ‘will not enter into any further agreements with ACORN or any of its affiliates,’ pending assessments by the bank of the organization’s operations. …”
Read the full story here.
Mere days ago, Barack Obama stabbed our Polish and Czech allies in the back by scrapping plans to locate missile defenses on their soil (on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland, no less). Jan Vidim, a Czech legislator, reacted by saying that “if the (Obama) Administration approaches us in the future with any request, I would be strongly against it.” Obama’s transparent rationalization was that his intelligence showed Iran’s long-range missile capabilities were not as advanced as previously thought.
Now, however, we receive word that Iran has test-fired its most advanced missiles yet, which are capable of reaching Europe. Among other concerns, the missiles stand as a technological breakthrough because they are propelled by solid fuel, which allows for greater accuracy and potency than Iran’s liquid-fuel older models. This comes on the heels of disclosure last week that Iran has been operating a covert nuclear enrichment site, despite a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate report stating that Iran halted its pursuit of nuclear development in the fall of 2003.
In other words, Obama the geostrategic genius has again threatened American security in his pursuit of personal popularity amongst global thugocracies.
The Washington Post, in an editorial published this morning titled “The FCC’s Heavy Hand,” takes a surprising but welcome position on the issue of Net Neutrality. Surprising because of the predictable and consistent pro-regulation stance to which readers of WaPo’s editorial page are accustomed. Welcome because it rightly points out that “federal regulators should not be telling Internet service providers how to run their businesses.”
The editorial begins:
In a speech at the Brookings Institution last week, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski promised that his agency’s plan for regulating Internet service providers (ISPs) will be ‘fair, transparent, fact-based and data-driven.’
“That’s nice. But Mr. Genachowski failed to convincingly answer the most important question of all: Is this intervention necessary?”
The answer is “No!” As the Post noted, Net Neutrality regulations “will jeopardize [‘an unfettered platform for competition, creativity and entrepreneurial activity’] — and stifle further investments by ISPs — with attempts to micromanage what has been a vibrant and well-functioning marketplace.”
“Stick a fork in it. The public health insurance option is dead!”
That’s what the so-called “experts,” commentators and junkies have been saying for weeks. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. Jeffrey Young, in The Hill today, writes:
The spotlight this week will continue on the Senate Finance Committee, where amendments to add the public insurance option will be offered by Democratic Sens. Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.) and Chuck Schumer (N.Y.).
“The issue will also continue to be a battle in the House, where liberal and centrists Democrats are fighting over whether it should be included in a House healthcare bill.”
Despite the public furor, town hall meetings and taxpayer marches — all focused, at least in part, in opposition to a government-run insurance plan — the politicians in Washington are not debating whether there should be a government takeover of health care. Rather, they are fighting over how how much of a government takeover of your health care they can get away with.
Quick question: If the election were held today, would you vote for your current representative and Senators?
In a historic election result, German voters this weekend turned toward tax cuts, free markets and labor reform, and sent the leftist Social Democratic Party (SDP) to its worst-ever performance. What made this election historic wasn’t the reelection of Chancellor Angela Merkel and her center-right Christian Democratic Party (CDP), but rather the unprecedented success of the free-market Free Democratic Party (FDP) and Germans’ rejection of socialism.
The FDP platform calls for reduced taxes, deregulation, moderation of Germany’s suffocating labor laws and strong ties with the United States, and its leader Guido Westerwelle confidently called for tax simplification and lower rates during his victory speech. German business also welcomed the results, with German Chambers of Industry and Commerce spokesman Heinrich Driftmann confirming that “the election result is a clear vote for courageous reforms.” Although Chancellor Merkel was elected in 2005, her slimmer victory margin forced her to enter a governing coalition with the socialist SDP, which threw a wet blanket on her market-oriented agenda. With the FDP’s remarkable showing, Germans expressed their desire to finally implement that freedom agenda.
This result sends a clear signal to Americans as Obama attempts to impose his own socialist model upon the United States. Germans have seen that model first-hand during this global economic downturn, and soundly rejected it to provide a welcome example for American voters.
Cato Institute – Nanny State Doesn’t Like Competition
Rep. Eric Cantor – To Fix Health Care, Start Over
Politico – Schumer Brings in the Money
WSJ – Max’s Mad Mandate
NY Times – William Safire, Political Columnist, Dies at 79
Washington Times – A Health Care Bill to Please Both Parties?
Washington Post – Costly Carbon Cuts
National Review – You Mislead!
Federal Debt: $11.792 trillion
Andy Barr, at Politico.com, outlines a major political problem for former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. A former and presumably future Republican candidate for President in 2012, Romney was front-and-center in pushing through and heralding unprecedented health care insurance expansion in the state.
Barr:
Romney can rightfully boast that he got much what he aimed for, since less than three percent of Massachusetts citizens are currently uninsured. But critics insist that the cost of Romney’s program has far exceeded the governor’s estimates and have targeted the plan as a prime example of what not to do on the national level.
“Even in Massachusetts there are signs of discomfort with the plan: A June Rasmussen Reports poll found that only 26 percent of Massachusetts voters thought the state’s health care reform was a success.”
From our periodic scans of Massachusetts media regarding the growing problems with RomneyCare (and its similarities to national proposals), we think he’s got an awful tough row to hoe (as in garden tool, not hip hop slang, can’t be too careful these days) to win the Republican nomination if he just keeps defending the problematic plan, as he seems wont to do.
Still, we think Romney is a smart and honorable man. And wouldn’t it be refreshing (not to mention unique) if he just stood up and said, “look, this was the problem and this is what we tried and it hasn’t worked, and it’s certainly not going to work on a national scale”?
Clark Hoyt, Public Editor (ombudsman, sort of) of The New York Times, today analyzes the Times’ “slow reflexes” on the ACORN story.
No bias or ideology there, a bunch of editors told him, they’re just too busy covering “health care, two wars and the deep recession,” in the words of Dean Baquet, Washington bureau chief.
Managing Editor Jill Abramson, managing editor for news, blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio,” undoubtedly forgetting that when “the New York City Council froze all its funding for Acorn and the Brooklyn district attorney opened a criminal investigation, there was still [no story].”
But just wait, conservatives. Abramson and Executive Editor Bill Keller have now appointed an editor to “monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.” The editor will be anonymous, so he doesn’t get, in Keller’s words, “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”
We have one point: Most conservatives just want newspapers that cover news (like when the local district attorney opens a criminal investigation of a major national organization) with factual, unbiased reportage, not more he said/she said babble on “bubbling controversies.” The bubbling controversies already have outlets (such as Fox News and talk radio), which seem to be doing a lot better than the Times.
We have one question: Is an anonymous editor anything like an anonymous source? It’s just a journalistic concept with which we are unfamiliar.
In an interview this morning on Fox News Sunday, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D – California) gave Americans cause for concern by demonstrating a less-than-razor-sharp familiarity with a rudimentary element of national and global security. Senator Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, stumbled immediately out of the blocks when she appeared unfamiliar with the term “centrifuge,” a mechanism that plays an essential role in uranium enrichment and Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weaponry.
Chris Wallace: Let’s start with Iran, and the disclosure that it has been building a secret nuclear enrichment facility. Let me start with you, Senator Feinstein. How strong is the evidence that this is to provide fuel for a bomb, and how sure are we that there aren’t other secret facilities in Iran?
Senator Feinstein: Well, the evidence is strong that there was, that there is, such a facility, that it’s capable of about 3,000 various… umm… oh, what’s the word…
Chris Wallace: Centrifuges.
Uh-oh…
There is something distinctly undignified when a Nobel Prize-winning economist goes postal, but then no one has accused Paul Krugman of dignity in some time.
In one of his harangues on behalf of the Waxman-Markey bill (you know, otherwise known as cap-and-tax) to supposedly prevent some future tropical creature’s diet from including boiled people, Krugman makes the argument that in 2020 the bill would cost the average family “roughly the cost of a postage stamp a day.”
Krugman did not originate the line, around a while now, one of those analogies invariably conjured up by elitists to explain to us plain folks in plain language why we can afford to fund this or that government program.
With regard to this one, we would never stoop so low as to ask what the Postal Service, yet another already bankrupt government service, will do when all those average families, who really must live within their budgets, have to sacrifice just that one postage stamp a day (and that’s if you accept Krugman’s and the government’s math). Do Nobel Prize-winning economists ever address the idea that resources which are not infinite cannot be infinitely taken?
No, we want to be positive by urging President Obama to begin selling ObamaCare by saying it’s only going to cost every senior citizen just two-and-a-half Depends diapers a day.
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