You can lead a horse to water...
Mladen Andrijasevic (American Thinker)
It puzzles and infuriates me that our western civilization is at risk because the elite political classes are not willing to devote a few hours to read about Islam, Shariah and jihad. Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20 Soviet Communist Party Congress in 1956 which was smuggled to the West by a Mossad agent in Poland was considered a sensational coup, but today we have all the information we need seconds away on the internet and no one cares to look. From the Israeli Labor party to western diplomats negotiating with Iran and Baroness Warsi in England there is a complete disconnect between reality and their perception of it. It takes half a day to read Shariah: The Threat to America . How many will actually do it?
This morning I wanted to check some facts about George VI ( the movie The King's Speech will arrive here next week) and it took me a minute to google his speech from Buckingham Palace on September 3, 1939 which shows that today we can get to a lot of information within minutes. Then I came across an article on the resumed negotiations between western powers and Iran and I thought to myself, how can this be? With all the information available to us we do not seem to be able to make any use of it.
Nothing but ignorance can explain the present situation. If the political elites whose policies brought Europe to what it is today believed that they could retain their privileges in Eurabia then they were wrong because they were ignorant and the information then was not so easily available. It is today. What will make them drink?
Only a few hours ago an incident in Gaza demonstrated the lack of understanding by the West of what is going on and demonstrates my point. The French Foreign Mister's delegation was attacked in Gaza and a member of the delegation was injured. However, this part is the most interesting
In keeping with the policy of the European Union, which considers Hamas a terror organization, Alliot-Marie did not meet with Hamas officials during her half-day visit.
But the French delegation visited a hospital which is under total control of this terror organization, and a member of the French delegation said that she was "shocked" and "surprised by the hate" they encountered during the visit. "When one is received in such a manner one wonders should they have come."
Could we imagine Anthony Eden visiting a hospital in Nazi Germany in 1938 but, of course, refusing to meet with Nazi officials?
Friday, January 21, 2011
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Reduced Spending 101
Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe: 14 paragraphs, $3 Trillion in cuts
(Laura Ingraham staff)
The Wall Street Journal reports:
The primary economic challenge today is that our government spends too much money it doesn't have, and it is involved in too many things it cannot do well and shouldn't do at all. This burden is manifested by a $1.3 trillion annual deficit and a $14 trillion national debt. The more pernicious effects of this fiscal drag are unseen: a debased dollar, massive (and hidden) unfunded liabilities, and a crushing burden on would-be job creators.
Milton Friedman correctly argued in 1999 that the "real cost of government—the total tax burden—equals what government spends plus the cost to the public of complying with government mandates and regulations and of calculating, paying, and taking measures to avoid taxes." He added, "Anything that reduces that real cost—lower government spending, elimination of costly regulations on individuals or businesses, simplification of explicit taxes—is a tax reform."
Since 2007, Congress has been on an unprecedented spending binge. That means a first and obvious budget-cutting step would be to return discretionary spending to the baseline before things got so out of control. If Congress returned to the baseline before the supposedly "temporary" stimulus bill of 2009, $177 billion per year would be saved, according to calculations by FreedomWorks based on figures from the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). If spending went back to the 2007 baseline, the beginning of the first Pelosi Congress, $374 billion would be saved. Over 10 years, that is $748 billion and $1.56 trillion in savings, respectively.
Repealing ObamaCare is another obvious source of reduced spending. The absurd claim that this government takeover of health care produces budget savings is based on budget gimmickry—such as assumed Medicare cuts that, according to estimates by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, would put 15% of our hospitals out of business, and thus will never happen. The claim also ignores the historically explosive growth in other similar programs. Medicare grew nine-fold larger than was projected during its first 25 years. In its first 10 years alone, the program experienced a 700% cost overrun.
(Laura Ingraham staff)
The Wall Street Journal reports:
The primary economic challenge today is that our government spends too much money it doesn't have, and it is involved in too many things it cannot do well and shouldn't do at all. This burden is manifested by a $1.3 trillion annual deficit and a $14 trillion national debt. The more pernicious effects of this fiscal drag are unseen: a debased dollar, massive (and hidden) unfunded liabilities, and a crushing burden on would-be job creators.
Milton Friedman correctly argued in 1999 that the "real cost of government—the total tax burden—equals what government spends plus the cost to the public of complying with government mandates and regulations and of calculating, paying, and taking measures to avoid taxes." He added, "Anything that reduces that real cost—lower government spending, elimination of costly regulations on individuals or businesses, simplification of explicit taxes—is a tax reform."
Since 2007, Congress has been on an unprecedented spending binge. That means a first and obvious budget-cutting step would be to return discretionary spending to the baseline before things got so out of control. If Congress returned to the baseline before the supposedly "temporary" stimulus bill of 2009, $177 billion per year would be saved, according to calculations by FreedomWorks based on figures from the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). If spending went back to the 2007 baseline, the beginning of the first Pelosi Congress, $374 billion would be saved. Over 10 years, that is $748 billion and $1.56 trillion in savings, respectively.
Repealing ObamaCare is another obvious source of reduced spending. The absurd claim that this government takeover of health care produces budget savings is based on budget gimmickry—such as assumed Medicare cuts that, according to estimates by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, would put 15% of our hospitals out of business, and thus will never happen. The claim also ignores the historically explosive growth in other similar programs. Medicare grew nine-fold larger than was projected during its first 25 years. In its first 10 years alone, the program experienced a 700% cost overrun.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Critical Condition
The Rights You Will [not] Have with Obamacare
By Grace-Marie Turner (National Review)
Posted on January 17, 2011
With the debate over the repeal of Obamacare coming up, President Obama and his supporters in Congress are trying to calm the millions of Americans who strongly oppose the law by focusing only on its early sweeteners — including the right of 26-year-old “children” to stay on their parents’ insurance, the right to “free” preventive care, and the right of uninsured people with preexisting conditions to buy coverage.
While these provisions are all desirable, they are not without costs and consequences. It is therefore helpful to look at what other “rights” you will have under Obamacare when the full impact hits.
1. You will have the right to lose your job as employers struggle to comply with expensive mandates. According to labor economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth, those hit hardest will be younger, less-skilled workers. The cost of employing them will soar as employers are required to buy health insurance that may cost as much as a lower-wage person’s annual earnings.
High-tech workers will be hit as well. The $20 billion tax on medical-device companies, to take one example, will force companies to lay off researchers and curtail development of new products. And tens of thousands of insurance brokers will lose their livelihoods because of arbitrary regulations from Washington.
2. As a taxpayer, you will have the right to see the federal debt soar as Congress’s budget gimmicks face economic reality. According to former CBO director Doug Holtz-Eakin, Obamacare will cost nearly $1 trillion more than estimated as employers begin dropping health insurance and sending people to the new taxpayer-subsidized exchanges instead.
3. As a business owner, you will have the right to comply with the expensive new mandates in Obamacare or drop coverage and pay fines instead. You will have the right to keep the IRS informed about the coverage you are offering and its cost. And you will have the right to stop hiring and keep your business smaller than 50 people to escape Obamacare’s fines and mandates.
4. As an employee, you will have the right to lose the coverage you have now as you and 80 to 100 million people (according to McKinsey & Company analyst Alissa Meade) are switched to other coverage when Obamacare takes effect in 2014.
5. As a citizen, you will have the right to have the government decide what health insurance you must have and to either buy the expensive policy or pay a fine.
6. If you are a young person, you will have the right to pay higher premiums for mandatory health insurance to subsidize people who are older and sicker.
7. If you are a senior, you will have the right to see half a trillion dollars taken out of Medicare to pay for new health-insurance entitlements — a move allegedly designed to make Medicare stronger.
8. If you are in a Medicare Advantage plan, you and 7 million other seniors will have the right to go back into traditional Medicare and take your chances at finding a doctor who will see you.
9. If you are already on Medicaid, you will have the right to compete with millions more people trying to get appointments with doctors, especially specialists.
10. If you are one of the estimated 16 million people who will be added to the Medicaid rolls in 2014, you will have the right to wait in hospital emergency rooms for even routine care as the program swells to 87 million recipients by the end of the decade. (As many as 900,000 additional emergency room visits every year are expected — primarily by new enrollees in Medicaid — and from many of the 23 million people who will remain uninsured.)
11. If you are a doctor or nurse, you will have the right to receive lower Medicare payments while filling out mountains of new paperwork to satisfy government “quality reporting” requirements.
12. If you have child-only health insurance, you have the right to lose that coverage as more insurers exit the market. And you have the right to lose dependent coverage entirely as many employers decide it’s just too expensive to offer.
13. If you are an insurance company, you will have the right to figure out how you are going to continue to pay claims as government adds more expensive, mandatory benefits but caps premium increases at less than the cost of providing the coverage.
14. If you have a preexisting condition and are in a temporary high-risk pool, you and 8,000 others enrolled in the $5 billion program will have the right to pay high costs for your health insurance in the poorly designed program.
15. If you are a governor or state legislator, you will have the right to figure out what state services you will cut further — education? transportation? public safety? — to comply with the federal mandate that you expand Medicaid and set up the huge health-exchange bureaucracies. You also have the right to sue the federal government to protect your state’s rights.
And everyone will have the right to pay more for health insurance as the costs soar from what will surely be a heavily loaded list of benefits that your policy must cover.
Or you have the right to ask Congress to start over again and get health reform right.
The Rights You Will [not] Have with Obamacare
By Grace-Marie Turner (National Review)
Posted on January 17, 2011
With the debate over the repeal of Obamacare coming up, President Obama and his supporters in Congress are trying to calm the millions of Americans who strongly oppose the law by focusing only on its early sweeteners — including the right of 26-year-old “children” to stay on their parents’ insurance, the right to “free” preventive care, and the right of uninsured people with preexisting conditions to buy coverage.
While these provisions are all desirable, they are not without costs and consequences. It is therefore helpful to look at what other “rights” you will have under Obamacare when the full impact hits.
1. You will have the right to lose your job as employers struggle to comply with expensive mandates. According to labor economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth, those hit hardest will be younger, less-skilled workers. The cost of employing them will soar as employers are required to buy health insurance that may cost as much as a lower-wage person’s annual earnings.
High-tech workers will be hit as well. The $20 billion tax on medical-device companies, to take one example, will force companies to lay off researchers and curtail development of new products. And tens of thousands of insurance brokers will lose their livelihoods because of arbitrary regulations from Washington.
2. As a taxpayer, you will have the right to see the federal debt soar as Congress’s budget gimmicks face economic reality. According to former CBO director Doug Holtz-Eakin, Obamacare will cost nearly $1 trillion more than estimated as employers begin dropping health insurance and sending people to the new taxpayer-subsidized exchanges instead.
3. As a business owner, you will have the right to comply with the expensive new mandates in Obamacare or drop coverage and pay fines instead. You will have the right to keep the IRS informed about the coverage you are offering and its cost. And you will have the right to stop hiring and keep your business smaller than 50 people to escape Obamacare’s fines and mandates.
4. As an employee, you will have the right to lose the coverage you have now as you and 80 to 100 million people (according to McKinsey & Company analyst Alissa Meade) are switched to other coverage when Obamacare takes effect in 2014.
5. As a citizen, you will have the right to have the government decide what health insurance you must have and to either buy the expensive policy or pay a fine.
6. If you are a young person, you will have the right to pay higher premiums for mandatory health insurance to subsidize people who are older and sicker.
7. If you are a senior, you will have the right to see half a trillion dollars taken out of Medicare to pay for new health-insurance entitlements — a move allegedly designed to make Medicare stronger.
8. If you are in a Medicare Advantage plan, you and 7 million other seniors will have the right to go back into traditional Medicare and take your chances at finding a doctor who will see you.
9. If you are already on Medicaid, you will have the right to compete with millions more people trying to get appointments with doctors, especially specialists.
10. If you are one of the estimated 16 million people who will be added to the Medicaid rolls in 2014, you will have the right to wait in hospital emergency rooms for even routine care as the program swells to 87 million recipients by the end of the decade. (As many as 900,000 additional emergency room visits every year are expected — primarily by new enrollees in Medicaid — and from many of the 23 million people who will remain uninsured.)
11. If you are a doctor or nurse, you will have the right to receive lower Medicare payments while filling out mountains of new paperwork to satisfy government “quality reporting” requirements.
12. If you have child-only health insurance, you have the right to lose that coverage as more insurers exit the market. And you have the right to lose dependent coverage entirely as many employers decide it’s just too expensive to offer.
13. If you are an insurance company, you will have the right to figure out how you are going to continue to pay claims as government adds more expensive, mandatory benefits but caps premium increases at less than the cost of providing the coverage.
14. If you have a preexisting condition and are in a temporary high-risk pool, you and 8,000 others enrolled in the $5 billion program will have the right to pay high costs for your health insurance in the poorly designed program.
15. If you are a governor or state legislator, you will have the right to figure out what state services you will cut further — education? transportation? public safety? — to comply with the federal mandate that you expand Medicaid and set up the huge health-exchange bureaucracies. You also have the right to sue the federal government to protect your state’s rights.
And everyone will have the right to pay more for health insurance as the costs soar from what will surely be a heavily loaded list of benefits that your policy must cover.
Or you have the right to ask Congress to start over again and get health reform right.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
The Left Loves to Blame the Right
Blame Righty: A Condensed History
By Michelle Malkin (Townhall)
I agree with President Obama. When it comes to politicizing random violence, he and his supporters have been "far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than" they do. Recognition is the first step toward reconciliation. It's time to recognize the poisonous pervasiveness of the Blame Righty meme.
For the past two years, Democratic officials, liberal activists and journalists have jumped to libelous conclusions about individual shooting sprees committed by mentally unstable loners with incoherent delusions all over the ideological map. The White House now pledges to swear off "pointing fingers or assigning blame." Alas, the Obama administration's political and media foot soldiers have proved themselves incapable of such restraint.
In April 2009, a disgruntled, unemployed loser shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers in a horrifying bloodbath. The gunman, Richard Poplawski, was a dropout from the Marines who threw a food tray at a drill sergeant and had beaten his girlfriend. Was this deranged shooter who pulled the trigger to blame? Nope. Despite evidence that Poplawski's homicidal, racist tendencies manifested themselves years before Obama took office, lefty publications asserted that the real culprit of the spree was the "heated, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces" (according to mainstream liberal Atlantic Monthly pundit Andrew Sullivan), along with Fox News and Glenn Beck (according to mainstream liberal journalist Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly online).
That same month, a sick, evil man named Jiverly Voong ambushed an immigration center in Binghamton, N.Y. Recently fired from his job, Voong murdered 13 people, critically wounded four others and then committed suicide. The instant psychologists of the left knew nothing about the disgruntled man of Vietnamese descent and undetermined political affiliation. But within hours of the shooting, liberal mega-website Huffington Post commenters had overwhelmingly convicted GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, the National Rifle Association, Fox News, Lou Dobbs and yours truly. Liberal radio host Alan Colmes pointed his finger at the "huge anti-immigrant backlash in this country" -- never mind that tens of millions of legal immigrants and naturalized citizens have coped with hardship, overcome racism and embraced assimilation without going bloody bonkers.
In June 2009, a depraved, elderly anti-Semite named James von Brunn gunned down a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent and lefty Center for American Progress think-tank fellow Matthew Yglesias immediately invoked the Obama administration's report on right-wing extremism, leading to a wider chorus of condemnations against the tea party, talk radio and the entire GOP. The truth? Von Brunn was an unstable, equal-opportunity hater and 9/11 Truther conspiracy loon who bashed Jews and Christians, George W. Bush and Fox News, and had also threatened the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.
In late August 2009, as lawmakers faced citizen revolts at health care town halls nationwide, the Colorado Democratic Party decried a window-smashing vandalism attack at its Denver headquarters. State Democratic Party Chair Pat Waak singled out tea party activists and blamed "people opposed to health care" for the attack. The perpetrator, Maurice Schwenkler, turned out to be a far-left transgender activist/single-payer anarchist who had worked for a labor union-tied political committee and canvassed for a Democratic candidate.
In September 2009, Bill Sparkman, a federal U.S. Census worker, was found dead in a secluded rural Kentucky cemetery with the word "Fed" scrawled on his chest with a rope around his neck. The Atlantic Monthly's Andrew Sullivan rushed to indict "Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts" in an online magazine post titled "No Suicide," which decried the "Kentucky lynching." Liberal author Richard Benjamin blamed "anti-government" bile. New York magazine fingered conservative talk radio giant Rush Limbaugh, "conservative media personalities, websites and even members of Congress." So, who killed Bill Sparkman? Bill Sparkman. He killed himself and deliberately manufactured a hate crime hoax as part of an insurance scam to benefit his surviving son.
In February 2010, ticking time-bomb professor Amy Bishop gunned down three of her colleagues at University of Alabama-Huntsville, and suicide pilot Joseph Andrew Stack flew a stolen small plane into an Austin, Texas, office complex that contained an Internal Revenue Service office. Mainstream journalists from Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart to Time magazine reporter Hilary Hylton leaped forward to tie the crimes to tea party rhetoric. Never mind that Bishop was an Obama-worshiping academic with a lifelong history of violence or that Stack was another Bush-hater outraged about everything from George W. Bush to the American medical system to the evils of capitalism to the city of Austin, the Catholic Church and airlines.
In May 2010, liberal New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to preemptively pin the Times Square bombing attempt on "someone with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something." The culprit was unrepentant Muslim jihadist Faisal Shahzad.
In August 2010, Democratic supporters of Missouri Rep. Russ Carnahan blamed a "firebombing" at the congressman's St. Louis office on tea party suspects. The real perpetrator? Disgruntled progressive activist Chris Powers, who was enraged over a paycheck dispute.
President Obama wisely counseled the nation this week at the Tucson massacre memorial that "bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath." But as the progressive left's smear-stained recent history shows, criminalizing conservatism is a hard habit to break.
Michelle Malkin
Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies" (Regnery 2010).
©Creators Syndicate
By Michelle Malkin (Townhall)
I agree with President Obama. When it comes to politicizing random violence, he and his supporters have been "far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than" they do. Recognition is the first step toward reconciliation. It's time to recognize the poisonous pervasiveness of the Blame Righty meme.
For the past two years, Democratic officials, liberal activists and journalists have jumped to libelous conclusions about individual shooting sprees committed by mentally unstable loners with incoherent delusions all over the ideological map. The White House now pledges to swear off "pointing fingers or assigning blame." Alas, the Obama administration's political and media foot soldiers have proved themselves incapable of such restraint.
In April 2009, a disgruntled, unemployed loser shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers in a horrifying bloodbath. The gunman, Richard Poplawski, was a dropout from the Marines who threw a food tray at a drill sergeant and had beaten his girlfriend. Was this deranged shooter who pulled the trigger to blame? Nope. Despite evidence that Poplawski's homicidal, racist tendencies manifested themselves years before Obama took office, lefty publications asserted that the real culprit of the spree was the "heated, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces" (according to mainstream liberal Atlantic Monthly pundit Andrew Sullivan), along with Fox News and Glenn Beck (according to mainstream liberal journalist Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly online).
That same month, a sick, evil man named Jiverly Voong ambushed an immigration center in Binghamton, N.Y. Recently fired from his job, Voong murdered 13 people, critically wounded four others and then committed suicide. The instant psychologists of the left knew nothing about the disgruntled man of Vietnamese descent and undetermined political affiliation. But within hours of the shooting, liberal mega-website Huffington Post commenters had overwhelmingly convicted GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, the National Rifle Association, Fox News, Lou Dobbs and yours truly. Liberal radio host Alan Colmes pointed his finger at the "huge anti-immigrant backlash in this country" -- never mind that tens of millions of legal immigrants and naturalized citizens have coped with hardship, overcome racism and embraced assimilation without going bloody bonkers.
In June 2009, a depraved, elderly anti-Semite named James von Brunn gunned down a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent and lefty Center for American Progress think-tank fellow Matthew Yglesias immediately invoked the Obama administration's report on right-wing extremism, leading to a wider chorus of condemnations against the tea party, talk radio and the entire GOP. The truth? Von Brunn was an unstable, equal-opportunity hater and 9/11 Truther conspiracy loon who bashed Jews and Christians, George W. Bush and Fox News, and had also threatened the conservative Weekly Standard magazine.
In late August 2009, as lawmakers faced citizen revolts at health care town halls nationwide, the Colorado Democratic Party decried a window-smashing vandalism attack at its Denver headquarters. State Democratic Party Chair Pat Waak singled out tea party activists and blamed "people opposed to health care" for the attack. The perpetrator, Maurice Schwenkler, turned out to be a far-left transgender activist/single-payer anarchist who had worked for a labor union-tied political committee and canvassed for a Democratic candidate.
In September 2009, Bill Sparkman, a federal U.S. Census worker, was found dead in a secluded rural Kentucky cemetery with the word "Fed" scrawled on his chest with a rope around his neck. The Atlantic Monthly's Andrew Sullivan rushed to indict "Southern populist terrorism, whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts" in an online magazine post titled "No Suicide," which decried the "Kentucky lynching." Liberal author Richard Benjamin blamed "anti-government" bile. New York magazine fingered conservative talk radio giant Rush Limbaugh, "conservative media personalities, websites and even members of Congress." So, who killed Bill Sparkman? Bill Sparkman. He killed himself and deliberately manufactured a hate crime hoax as part of an insurance scam to benefit his surviving son.
In February 2010, ticking time-bomb professor Amy Bishop gunned down three of her colleagues at University of Alabama-Huntsville, and suicide pilot Joseph Andrew Stack flew a stolen small plane into an Austin, Texas, office complex that contained an Internal Revenue Service office. Mainstream journalists from Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart to Time magazine reporter Hilary Hylton leaped forward to tie the crimes to tea party rhetoric. Never mind that Bishop was an Obama-worshiping academic with a lifelong history of violence or that Stack was another Bush-hater outraged about everything from George W. Bush to the American medical system to the evils of capitalism to the city of Austin, the Catholic Church and airlines.
In May 2010, liberal New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to preemptively pin the Times Square bombing attempt on "someone with a political agenda that doesn't like the health care bill or something." The culprit was unrepentant Muslim jihadist Faisal Shahzad.
In August 2010, Democratic supporters of Missouri Rep. Russ Carnahan blamed a "firebombing" at the congressman's St. Louis office on tea party suspects. The real perpetrator? Disgruntled progressive activist Chris Powers, who was enraged over a paycheck dispute.
President Obama wisely counseled the nation this week at the Tucson massacre memorial that "bad things happen, and we must guard against simple explanations in the aftermath." But as the progressive left's smear-stained recent history shows, criminalizing conservatism is a hard habit to break.
Michelle Malkin
Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies" (Regnery 2010).
©Creators Syndicate
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)