Thursday, November 5, 2015
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Progressive Lunacy-The stupid party unmasked
Frontpagemagazine ^ | 11-4-15 | Bruce Thornton
In the past week we were treated to some spectacular examples of progressive lunacy. Perhaps the manifest badness of the Democrats’ presidential hopeful, coming on top of the disastrous Obama reign, is inducing panic as the progressive claim to superior intelligence and righteousness is rapidly evaporating.
The despicable bias and journalistic incompetence of the Republican debate moderators embarrassed even other progressives, who usually make at least a half-hearted effort to tart up their prejudices in the alluring rhetoric of neutral objectivity. Nor could the moderators practice even basic journalism. Becky Quick brought up the hoary “women earn 77% of what men do,†a phony statistic debunked numerous times. And the New York Times’ John Harwood flat-out lied about the Tax Foundation’s analysis of Marco Rubio’s tax reform plan. Worse, Harwood already had to retract an earlier version of the same lie, but then lied about the retraction. Meanwhile, an hour before the debate,
Harwood’s boss the New York Times was asking people online “who made the most ridiculous comment in the Republican debate.†The Times apparently didn’t anticipate that the answer would be the moderators.
Particularly obvious of media bias and incompetence were the rank meanness of many of the questions, and the sneering air of unearned intellectual superiority one typically expects from a bus-stop autodidact. The great irony, of course, is that that all the moderators put together don’t have the intellectual heft or real-world savvy of most of the Republican candidates. In a one-on-one debate between one of them and any random mainstream media reporter or anchor, I’d put my money on the Republican. The debate showed yet again that the left is now the stupid party, its adherents’ minds stuffed with faded and worn bumper-sticker ideas that were already passé when Nehru jackets were popular.
And let’s not forget that the same week the progressives of CNBC were not even pretending to moderate fairly the Republican debate, the progressive media totally ignored one of the biggest gaffes of the campaign, Hillary Clinton’s assertion that the wait-times at VA hospitals, which have led to 50 veterans dying in Phoenix alone, have “not been as widespread as it has been made out to be.†Crickets and tumbleweeds were the media’s response to this outrageous blunder and Hillary’s subsequent refusal to apologize.
But what do we expect of “journalists†who yawned when the Secretary of State responded to questions about why four Americans in Benghazi were murdered on her watch by screeching, “What difference does it make?†Or when she continued to claim she didn’t lie when she repeatedly said three years ago that the attack resulted from a protest against an obscure video, even though she told her daughter and the Egyptians on the night of the killings that it was a terrorist attack? And how come after Hurricane Katrina George W. Bush was held responsible and viciously pilloried for the ineptness of FEMA, the Democratic mayor of New Orleans, and the Democratic governor of Louisiana, but Hillary Clinton is not responsible for the “security contractors†who, while working for the State Department she was supposedly the head of, ignored 600 emails from Ambassador Chris Stevens begging for increased protection?
Petty meanness, rank stupidity, and glaring hypocrisy were on display elsewhere among the leftist media last week. On The View, a show featuring progressive women celebrities snarking on matters about which they have no competence, Carly Fiorina was said to have looked “demented,†her face a “Halloween mask†that could cause “nightmares.†So the same gang that attacked Donald Trump’s sexist mocking of Fiorina’s looks does the same thing to a woman with more combat tours in the sexist trenches than all five of the View cast put together. And a few of the View need to check their mirrors before they start making fun of other women’s looks.
. But more important, where’s the loyalty to the great feminist sisterhood upon whose behalf the progressives are fighting back against the “war on women� Those horses of hypocrisy left the barn way back when the feminist establishment and mainstream media savaged with gusto the victims of Bill Clinton’s sexual attacks. Today’s feminists still don’t care about real-life women as much as they care about protecting their lucrative ideology. As Carly Fiorina pointed out, it is women who have been hit hardest by Obama’s no-growth economic policies, but that doesn’t matter to the progressive feminists. They just keep peddling lies about an epidemic of well-off college girls getting “sexually assaulted,†and think that protecting the right of a woman to have a late-term abortion, and Planned Parenthood to sell the organs, is the direst challenge facing American women today.
Finally there was CNBC’s preposterous Melissa Harris-Perry, the college-educated half-white child of a college dean and a non-profit functionary. In other words, like our president, someone who is “black†only by dint of the racist one-drop rule, and who has more social capital and privilege not just than the 19 million white people officially living in poverty, but the millions of more who are barely scraping by in Obama’s crony-socialist economy. Her social advantages haven’t stopped Harris-Perry from pontificating about the injustices inflicted on black people with whom she has little in common. Like many other well-off blacks who serially play the race card, she apparently views the dysfunctional lives of poor blacks as some sort of bank account of misery on which she can draw at will to buy compensation for her own privilege.
In other words, a member in good standing of the racial grievance industry, one of the scolds who patrol our public discourse to unmask the “microagressions†and “dog whistles†of inveterate white racism. Her latest discovery of hidden racism, however, surely must set a record for rank stupidity. Last week on her show, she chided a Latino guest and advised him to be “super careful†using “hard worker†to describe Republican Paul Ryan. Can’t figure out the microagression? Let Harris-Perry, a Presidential Chair Professor of Politics and International affairs at Wake Forest University, explain: “I actually keep an image of folks working in cotton fields on my office wall because it is a reminder about what hard work looks like.†A Republican can be a hard worker only in the “context of relative privilege,†whatever that means. She threw in “moms who don’t have health care who are working†to score a microagression double.
So the only genuine hard work in all of American history has been done by slaves picking cotton and women without health care? Only someone embalmed in the ideological amber of the identity-politics university could say something so out of touch with the reality of most Americans’ lives. Kentucky coal miners engaged in the most deadly job in America, family farmers, long-haul truck-drivers, or small businessmen working 10-12 hours a day aren’t genuine “hard workers†because presumably they’ve been “relatively privileged†somehow.
This ridiculous statement is the reductio ad absurdum one would expect from a dishonest and empirically false notion like “white privilege.†But for truly privileged “blacks†like Harris-Perry, this racist idea is necessary for camouflaging the fact that they are some of the richest, healthiest, freest human beings of any color in the whole history of the planet. But with “white privilege,†they can masquerade as victims of racism, and thus leverage institutions run by stupid white people into bestowing on them lucrative careers as contributors to “diversity.â€
Meanwhile, the whole history of people like my grandfather, who in 1906 came from southern Italy––an illiterate peasant, as some official at Ellis Island designated him–– with 8 bucks in his pocket; or my old man, who left West Texas at 15, rode freight trains, did hard physical work in the CCC until the war, and then stood on his feet for 30 years cutting hair for a few bucks a head and raising cattle on his time off––the history of all those white people whose parents weren’t affluent like Harris-Perry’s or credentialed with college degrees, who had no capital other than their wit and character and strong backs, doesn’t exist in the warped moral world of race-hacks like Harris-Perry.
This week of progressive lunacy may not be surprising, but it does raise the question of how long the mass of sensible, fair-minded Americans of all colors finally get sick of the arrogance, self-righteousness, and rank hypocrisy of privileged elites pontificating to everybody else. Let’s hope November 8, 2016 gives us the answer.
In the past week we were treated to some spectacular examples of progressive lunacy. Perhaps the manifest badness of the Democrats’ presidential hopeful, coming on top of the disastrous Obama reign, is inducing panic as the progressive claim to superior intelligence and righteousness is rapidly evaporating.
The despicable bias and journalistic incompetence of the Republican debate moderators embarrassed even other progressives, who usually make at least a half-hearted effort to tart up their prejudices in the alluring rhetoric of neutral objectivity. Nor could the moderators practice even basic journalism. Becky Quick brought up the hoary “women earn 77% of what men do,†a phony statistic debunked numerous times. And the New York Times’ John Harwood flat-out lied about the Tax Foundation’s analysis of Marco Rubio’s tax reform plan. Worse, Harwood already had to retract an earlier version of the same lie, but then lied about the retraction. Meanwhile, an hour before the debate,
Harwood’s boss the New York Times was asking people online “who made the most ridiculous comment in the Republican debate.†The Times apparently didn’t anticipate that the answer would be the moderators.
Particularly obvious of media bias and incompetence were the rank meanness of many of the questions, and the sneering air of unearned intellectual superiority one typically expects from a bus-stop autodidact. The great irony, of course, is that that all the moderators put together don’t have the intellectual heft or real-world savvy of most of the Republican candidates. In a one-on-one debate between one of them and any random mainstream media reporter or anchor, I’d put my money on the Republican. The debate showed yet again that the left is now the stupid party, its adherents’ minds stuffed with faded and worn bumper-sticker ideas that were already passé when Nehru jackets were popular.
And let’s not forget that the same week the progressives of CNBC were not even pretending to moderate fairly the Republican debate, the progressive media totally ignored one of the biggest gaffes of the campaign, Hillary Clinton’s assertion that the wait-times at VA hospitals, which have led to 50 veterans dying in Phoenix alone, have “not been as widespread as it has been made out to be.†Crickets and tumbleweeds were the media’s response to this outrageous blunder and Hillary’s subsequent refusal to apologize.
But what do we expect of “journalists†who yawned when the Secretary of State responded to questions about why four Americans in Benghazi were murdered on her watch by screeching, “What difference does it make?†Or when she continued to claim she didn’t lie when she repeatedly said three years ago that the attack resulted from a protest against an obscure video, even though she told her daughter and the Egyptians on the night of the killings that it was a terrorist attack? And how come after Hurricane Katrina George W. Bush was held responsible and viciously pilloried for the ineptness of FEMA, the Democratic mayor of New Orleans, and the Democratic governor of Louisiana, but Hillary Clinton is not responsible for the “security contractors†who, while working for the State Department she was supposedly the head of, ignored 600 emails from Ambassador Chris Stevens begging for increased protection?
Petty meanness, rank stupidity, and glaring hypocrisy were on display elsewhere among the leftist media last week. On The View, a show featuring progressive women celebrities snarking on matters about which they have no competence, Carly Fiorina was said to have looked “demented,†her face a “Halloween mask†that could cause “nightmares.†So the same gang that attacked Donald Trump’s sexist mocking of Fiorina’s looks does the same thing to a woman with more combat tours in the sexist trenches than all five of the View cast put together. And a few of the View need to check their mirrors before they start making fun of other women’s looks.
. But more important, where’s the loyalty to the great feminist sisterhood upon whose behalf the progressives are fighting back against the “war on women� Those horses of hypocrisy left the barn way back when the feminist establishment and mainstream media savaged with gusto the victims of Bill Clinton’s sexual attacks. Today’s feminists still don’t care about real-life women as much as they care about protecting their lucrative ideology. As Carly Fiorina pointed out, it is women who have been hit hardest by Obama’s no-growth economic policies, but that doesn’t matter to the progressive feminists. They just keep peddling lies about an epidemic of well-off college girls getting “sexually assaulted,†and think that protecting the right of a woman to have a late-term abortion, and Planned Parenthood to sell the organs, is the direst challenge facing American women today.
Finally there was CNBC’s preposterous Melissa Harris-Perry, the college-educated half-white child of a college dean and a non-profit functionary. In other words, like our president, someone who is “black†only by dint of the racist one-drop rule, and who has more social capital and privilege not just than the 19 million white people officially living in poverty, but the millions of more who are barely scraping by in Obama’s crony-socialist economy. Her social advantages haven’t stopped Harris-Perry from pontificating about the injustices inflicted on black people with whom she has little in common. Like many other well-off blacks who serially play the race card, she apparently views the dysfunctional lives of poor blacks as some sort of bank account of misery on which she can draw at will to buy compensation for her own privilege.
In other words, a member in good standing of the racial grievance industry, one of the scolds who patrol our public discourse to unmask the “microagressions†and “dog whistles†of inveterate white racism. Her latest discovery of hidden racism, however, surely must set a record for rank stupidity. Last week on her show, she chided a Latino guest and advised him to be “super careful†using “hard worker†to describe Republican Paul Ryan. Can’t figure out the microagression? Let Harris-Perry, a Presidential Chair Professor of Politics and International affairs at Wake Forest University, explain: “I actually keep an image of folks working in cotton fields on my office wall because it is a reminder about what hard work looks like.†A Republican can be a hard worker only in the “context of relative privilege,†whatever that means. She threw in “moms who don’t have health care who are working†to score a microagression double.
So the only genuine hard work in all of American history has been done by slaves picking cotton and women without health care? Only someone embalmed in the ideological amber of the identity-politics university could say something so out of touch with the reality of most Americans’ lives. Kentucky coal miners engaged in the most deadly job in America, family farmers, long-haul truck-drivers, or small businessmen working 10-12 hours a day aren’t genuine “hard workers†because presumably they’ve been “relatively privileged†somehow.
This ridiculous statement is the reductio ad absurdum one would expect from a dishonest and empirically false notion like “white privilege.†But for truly privileged “blacks†like Harris-Perry, this racist idea is necessary for camouflaging the fact that they are some of the richest, healthiest, freest human beings of any color in the whole history of the planet. But with “white privilege,†they can masquerade as victims of racism, and thus leverage institutions run by stupid white people into bestowing on them lucrative careers as contributors to “diversity.â€
Meanwhile, the whole history of people like my grandfather, who in 1906 came from southern Italy––an illiterate peasant, as some official at Ellis Island designated him–– with 8 bucks in his pocket; or my old man, who left West Texas at 15, rode freight trains, did hard physical work in the CCC until the war, and then stood on his feet for 30 years cutting hair for a few bucks a head and raising cattle on his time off––the history of all those white people whose parents weren’t affluent like Harris-Perry’s or credentialed with college degrees, who had no capital other than their wit and character and strong backs, doesn’t exist in the warped moral world of race-hacks like Harris-Perry.
This week of progressive lunacy may not be surprising, but it does raise the question of how long the mass of sensible, fair-minded Americans of all colors finally get sick of the arrogance, self-righteousness, and rank hypocrisy of privileged elites pontificating to everybody else. Let’s hope November 8, 2016 gives us the answer.
Tarantino refuses to apologize for anti-cop comments!
NY POST ^ | November 3, 2015 | Chris Perez and Jamie Schram
Quentin Tarantino offered nothing even close to an apology on Tuesday for calling cops “murderers†— and instead pathetically claimed he has been victimized by police unions.
Speaking publicly for the first time since his inflammatory comments at a Washington Square Park rally on Oct. 24, the Pulp Fiction Âdirector insisted his words were all taken out of context. All cops are not murderers,†TarÂantino told the Los Angeles Times. I never said that. I never even implied that.
What they’re doing is pretty obvious. Instead of dealing with the incidents of police brutality that those people were bringing up, instead of examining the problem of police brutality in this country, better they single me out.
And their message is very clear. It’s to shut me down. It’s to discredit me. It is to intimidate me. It is to shut my mouth and, even more important than that, it is to send a message out to any other prominent person that might feel the need to join that side of the argument
At the rally against “police terror,†Tarantino said, “When I see murders, I do not stand by . I have to call a murder a murder and I have to call the murderers the murderers.†The 52-year-old filmmaker also told the LA Times that he won’t back down in the face of a threatened boycott of his new movie “The Hateful Eight,†to be released Christmas Day.
Quentin Tarantino offered nothing even close to an apology on Tuesday for calling cops “murderers†— and instead pathetically claimed he has been victimized by police unions.
Speaking publicly for the first time since his inflammatory comments at a Washington Square Park rally on Oct. 24, the Pulp Fiction Âdirector insisted his words were all taken out of context. All cops are not murderers,†TarÂantino told the Los Angeles Times. I never said that. I never even implied that.
What they’re doing is pretty obvious. Instead of dealing with the incidents of police brutality that those people were bringing up, instead of examining the problem of police brutality in this country, better they single me out.
And their message is very clear. It’s to shut me down. It’s to discredit me. It is to intimidate me. It is to shut my mouth and, even more important than that, it is to send a message out to any other prominent person that might feel the need to join that side of the argument
At the rally against “police terror,†Tarantino said, “When I see murders, I do not stand by . I have to call a murder a murder and I have to call the murderers the murderers.†The 52-year-old filmmaker also told the LA Times that he won’t back down in the face of a threatened boycott of his new movie “The Hateful Eight,†to be released Christmas Day.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Obamacare Is Dead: It Does Not Work Because It Could Not Work
National Review ^ | 11/04/2015 | Kevin D. Williamson
Regardless of whether there is a President Cruz or a President Rubio in January 2017, regardless of the existence or size of a Republican majority in Congress, the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has failed. The grand vision of an efficient pseudo-market in health insurance under enlightened federal management — the heart of Obamacare — is not coming to pass. Obamacare, meaning the operating model that undergirded the law that Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed with great fanfare — is dead, and it will not be revived. What remains is fitful chaos.
A brief refresher:
The fundamental problem with ACA is that under it, insurance ceases to be insurance. Insurance is a prospective financial product, one that exploits the mathematical predictability of certain life events among very large groups of people — out of 1 million 40-to-60-year-old Americans, x percent will get in car wrecks every year, and y percent will be diagnosed with chronic renal failure — which allows actuaries and the insurance companies that employ them to calculate premiums based on risk, thus funding the reimbursement of certain expenses incurred by the insurance pool’s members. Insurance is, by its very nature, always forward-looking, considering events that have yet to come to pass but that may be expected and, to a reasonable extent, predicted with some level of specificity. Under ACA, insurance is retrospective. ACA mandates that insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions, meaning events that already have happened, which renders the basic mathematical architecture of insurance — the calculation of risk among large pools of people — pointless. Insurance ceases to be insurance and instead becomes something else, namely a very badly constructed cost-sharing program.
Not all cost-sharing programs are bad ideas. Medi-Share, for example, is precisely the sort of voluntary, privately administered mutual-aid program that could — and, I believe, will — end up displacing government-run health-care programs entirely. But Obamacare is a very different kind of beast: It creates a deeply perverse incentive structure by combining compulsory coverage of pre-existing conditions with a mandate that is enforced in theory more than in fact. The mandate is necessary to prevent the ruthless exploitation of the preexisting-coverage rules: If insurers have to cover you no matter what, then there's no point in buying insurance -- thereby sharing in the costs -- until you are sick enough to need it.
As James Freeman reports in the Wall Street Journal, the ACA's plethora of exemptions -- there are at least 30 of them -- ensure that a great many people -- 12 million last year -- will simply opt out. “It is easy to avoid or limit exposure to the penalty with some simple tax planning,†he writes. In 2016, there were supposed to be 21 million people enrolled in ACA programs; the Obama administration currently predicts that the actual number will be somewhat less than half of that. This was entirely predictable; in fact, it was predicted in the pages of National Review, in my The End Is Near (and It’s Going to Be Awesome), and elsewhere.
Many of Obamacare’s failures came fast and early. Strike one: "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.†Strike two: Obamacare will save "the average family $2,500 a year on their premiums." Strike three: Obamacare will add "not one dime" to the deficit. We all knew that was coming, just as we knew that people would respond to the very strong incentives not to buy insurance by not buying insurance.
#share#Other failures took longer to become manifest. The architects of Obamacare are deeply distrustful of the role of for-profit companies in the health-care business because, in their nearly pristine ignorance, they falsely believe profits to be net deductions from the sum of the public good rather than measures of the creation of real social value. So they created incentives to set up co-ops, nonprofit enterprises that would administerObamacare plans in particular states and jurisdictions. It was obvious from the beginning that if Obamacare’s perverse incentives created insurance pools that were older and sicker rather than younger and healthier, these co-ops wouldn’t be economically viable: You need lots of young, healthy insurance subscribers to offset the costs associated with your older, sicker subscribers. Many of us — myself included — assumed that the federal government under President Obama would simply write these co-ops huge checks to keep them afloat. We were half right: The government is writing them huge checks, but they are failing anyway, so fundamental is their economic unsustainability. Half of the co-ops have gone belly-up already, including large, prominent, splendidly subsidized ones in Kentucky, New York, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Hundreds of thousands of customers have lost their coverage as a result. Hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money has been poured into these enterprises, to no avail.
Obamacare's partisans were confronted with the economic facts long before the law was even passed, and their answer was: "Never mind the economics, we're the good guys, and you want poor people to die." Democrats argued that Republicans literally wanted to kill poor people, that their plan was for the poor to "die quickly." This is a habitual mode of discourse among progressives: Reality doesn't matter; only the purity of Democrats' motives matters. Obamacare is what it is: Another damned five-year plan based on wishful thinking and very little else.
The fact is that Obamacare has fallen apart without Republicans’ dismantling it. Almost all of its basic promises have failed, it is an economic shambles, and it is a political mess: Unsurprisingly, people still don't like it. Less than a third of Americans support the individual mandate, three-fourths oppose Obamacare's tax on high-end health-care programs, and more voters oppose the law categorically than support it. A quarter of voters say the law has hurt them personally. The question isn’t why Republicans haven’t gotten around to repealing and replacing it — the answer to that question resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for a while, still — the question is when Democrats will get around to admitting that, purity of their hearts notwithstanding, they and they alone — not one Republican voted for Obamacare — have created a mess that has introduced nothing to American health care except chaos.
The basic principles of meaningful health-care reform are these: Let insurance be insurance; understand that ordinary, regular medical procedures, such as physicals and prostate exams, are not insurable events, and account for that in your calculations; the only way to mitigate the effects of scarcity on health care is to make it less scarce by expanding the supply of medical practitioners and facilities; the only way to make insurance more competitive, and therefore more affordable and more responsive to consumers, is to increase the number of players in the markets; the best way to deal with people who are, for example, profoundly disabled, children, or otherwise unable to provide for their own care, is direct, clear-eyed subsidy of their medical expenses, rather than laundering those payments through the insurance market; so long as practicing medicine pays less than filing frivolous lawsuits against doctors, there's going to be a lot of politically induced inefficiency in the system.
Of course markets work for most people, and of course there are exceptions to that. For 93 percent of the population, the solution to health-care reform is: Let markets do their thing. The only real argument is how big a check to write to those looking after the other 7 percent, and how to structure the payments. That's a real fight, too, but it isn't the one we’re having. Right now, the Republicans and the Democrats are two political coroners arguing over what time and cause of death to put on the paperwork; rigor mortis set in long ago.
-- Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent at National Review.
A brief refresher:
The fundamental problem with ACA is that under it, insurance ceases to be insurance. Insurance is a prospective financial product, one that exploits the mathematical predictability of certain life events among very large groups of people — out of 1 million 40-to-60-year-old Americans, x percent will get in car wrecks every year, and y percent will be diagnosed with chronic renal failure — which allows actuaries and the insurance companies that employ them to calculate premiums based on risk, thus funding the reimbursement of certain expenses incurred by the insurance pool’s members. Insurance is, by its very nature, always forward-looking, considering events that have yet to come to pass but that may be expected and, to a reasonable extent, predicted with some level of specificity. Under ACA, insurance is retrospective. ACA mandates that insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions, meaning events that already have happened, which renders the basic mathematical architecture of insurance — the calculation of risk among large pools of people — pointless. Insurance ceases to be insurance and instead becomes something else, namely a very badly constructed cost-sharing program.
Not all cost-sharing programs are bad ideas. Medi-Share, for example, is precisely the sort of voluntary, privately administered mutual-aid program that could — and, I believe, will — end up displacing government-run health-care programs entirely. But Obamacare is a very different kind of beast: It creates a deeply perverse incentive structure by combining compulsory coverage of pre-existing conditions with a mandate that is enforced in theory more than in fact. The mandate is necessary to prevent the ruthless exploitation of the preexisting-coverage rules: If insurers have to cover you no matter what, then there's no point in buying insurance -- thereby sharing in the costs -- until you are sick enough to need it.
As James Freeman reports in the Wall Street Journal, the ACA's plethora of exemptions -- there are at least 30 of them -- ensure that a great many people -- 12 million last year -- will simply opt out. “It is easy to avoid or limit exposure to the penalty with some simple tax planning,†he writes. In 2016, there were supposed to be 21 million people enrolled in ACA programs; the Obama administration currently predicts that the actual number will be somewhat less than half of that. This was entirely predictable; in fact, it was predicted in the pages of National Review, in my The End Is Near (and It’s Going to Be Awesome), and elsewhere.
Many of Obamacare’s failures came fast and early. Strike one: "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.†Strike two: Obamacare will save "the average family $2,500 a year on their premiums." Strike three: Obamacare will add "not one dime" to the deficit. We all knew that was coming, just as we knew that people would respond to the very strong incentives not to buy insurance by not buying insurance.
#share#Other failures took longer to become manifest. The architects of Obamacare are deeply distrustful of the role of for-profit companies in the health-care business because, in their nearly pristine ignorance, they falsely believe profits to be net deductions from the sum of the public good rather than measures of the creation of real social value. So they created incentives to set up co-ops, nonprofit enterprises that would administerObamacare plans in particular states and jurisdictions. It was obvious from the beginning that if Obamacare’s perverse incentives created insurance pools that were older and sicker rather than younger and healthier, these co-ops wouldn’t be economically viable: You need lots of young, healthy insurance subscribers to offset the costs associated with your older, sicker subscribers. Many of us — myself included — assumed that the federal government under President Obama would simply write these co-ops huge checks to keep them afloat. We were half right: The government is writing them huge checks, but they are failing anyway, so fundamental is their economic unsustainability. Half of the co-ops have gone belly-up already, including large, prominent, splendidly subsidized ones in Kentucky, New York, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Hundreds of thousands of customers have lost their coverage as a result. Hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money has been poured into these enterprises, to no avail.
Obamacare's partisans were confronted with the economic facts long before the law was even passed, and their answer was: "Never mind the economics, we're the good guys, and you want poor people to die." Democrats argued that Republicans literally wanted to kill poor people, that their plan was for the poor to "die quickly." This is a habitual mode of discourse among progressives: Reality doesn't matter; only the purity of Democrats' motives matters. Obamacare is what it is: Another damned five-year plan based on wishful thinking and very little else.
The fact is that Obamacare has fallen apart without Republicans’ dismantling it. Almost all of its basic promises have failed, it is an economic shambles, and it is a political mess: Unsurprisingly, people still don't like it. Less than a third of Americans support the individual mandate, three-fourths oppose Obamacare's tax on high-end health-care programs, and more voters oppose the law categorically than support it. A quarter of voters say the law has hurt them personally. The question isn’t why Republicans haven’t gotten around to repealing and replacing it — the answer to that question resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for a while, still — the question is when Democrats will get around to admitting that, purity of their hearts notwithstanding, they and they alone — not one Republican voted for Obamacare — have created a mess that has introduced nothing to American health care except chaos.
The basic principles of meaningful health-care reform are these: Let insurance be insurance; understand that ordinary, regular medical procedures, such as physicals and prostate exams, are not insurable events, and account for that in your calculations; the only way to mitigate the effects of scarcity on health care is to make it less scarce by expanding the supply of medical practitioners and facilities; the only way to make insurance more competitive, and therefore more affordable and more responsive to consumers, is to increase the number of players in the markets; the best way to deal with people who are, for example, profoundly disabled, children, or otherwise unable to provide for their own care, is direct, clear-eyed subsidy of their medical expenses, rather than laundering those payments through the insurance market; so long as practicing medicine pays less than filing frivolous lawsuits against doctors, there's going to be a lot of politically induced inefficiency in the system.
Of course markets work for most people, and of course there are exceptions to that. For 93 percent of the population, the solution to health-care reform is: Let markets do their thing. The only real argument is how big a check to write to those looking after the other 7 percent, and how to structure the payments. That's a real fight, too, but it isn't the one we’re having. Right now, the Republicans and the Democrats are two political coroners arguing over what time and cause of death to put on the paperwork; rigor mortis set in long ago.
-- Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent at National Review.
Keep Guantanamo Open — the Arguments for Closing It Don’t Add Up
National Review ^ | 11/04/2015 | Senator Tim Scott
I recently had the opportunity to travel to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base to review the detention facilities housing some of the world's most dangerous terrorists, as well as to meet the brave Americans guarding them every day. On the heels of the president's using Guantanamo as a major reason to veto the National Defense Authorization Act and continue his push to transfer these dangerous terrorists to domestic soil, this trip took on an added level of importance.
After visiting, it is clearer than ever to me that Guantanamo is the best place on earth to keep these terrorists. These are al-Qaeda members, terrorist financers, and other highly dangerous people.
So why does the president want to shut it down and have Congress, as his press secretary Josh Earnest said late last week, "get out of the way"? Let's walk through the arguments.
The propaganda war: Opponents of keeping the detention facilities open at Guantanamo believe that by closing it, we can stop terrorist groups from using it as a recruiting tool. This requires you to also believe that any new facility built would not be held up as a recruiting tool. And if you believe that, I have a nice, new bridge to sell you.
Here's what is actually occurring at Guantanamo: 250 assaults on our guards in the past year and a half ... and absolutely zero retaliations. Our troops are highly disciplined and dedicated to serving our nation, and this proves it. This number is rarely reported on, but it tells you more about what is happening at Guantanamo Bay than anything else.
At the same time, compliant detainees have their own portable DVD players, wireless headphones, and access to satellite TV and PlayStation. If they behave well, they can be out of their cells for 22 hours a day. But that doesn't make for very good propaganda.
Prohibitive cost: Folks like to throw out there that it costs $2.4 million per detainee annually at Guantanamo Bay and that it would be more cost-efficient to close the facilities and bring these terrorists to domestic soil.
Now anyone who looks at my voting record knows that I am a strong fiscal conservative. Part of what I dislike about how Congress budgets is the use of murky numbers and procedures that don't tell the full story -- Washington math. And Washington math is in full effect on this $2.4 million number.
As the president rushes to transfer terrorists out of Guantanamo, of course the per capita cost is going to appear to rise. (It is also important to note here the 30 percent recidivism rate among detainees who have left Guantanamo.) The president has sent more than 40 detainees on their way in the past few years, as part of his political calculations to close the detention facilities down, and a nice side effect of that is this shiny new number to throw out.
Second, built into these cost calculations are the salaries of hundreds of our troops guarding these terrorists. But our armed forces are not a private industry, and those salaries will not just disappear. Those troops will just be deployed elsewhere. That's not actually saving money -- and anyone who wants to save on the backs of our troops is barking up the wrong tree anyway.
And finally, it does not take into account that we would need to provide substantial upgrades to existing facilities or build a brand-new facility to hold these detainees. That would cost untold millions on its own.
We can hold them domestically: Here is where the rubber meets the road. There are detainees who are simply too dangerous to release and whom no country would agree to accept. So, if you close the Guantanamo detention facilities, you have to move the remaining terrorists somewhere on American soil. The administration has already publicly surveyed Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, the Naval brig outside Charleston, S.C., and the supermax facility in Colorado.
We can look at the Naval brig in Hanahan, S.C., as a prime example of why moving terrorists to domestic soil is not just a terrible idea but wholly unnecessary. This medium-security facility sits less than two miles from a residential neighborhood, a elementary school, and a high school; four miles from the Charleston airport; and 20 minutes from downtown Charleston -- one of the top tourist destinations in the world. It is also near vital infrastructure such as the Port of Charleston and multiple rail lines.
It simply does not make sense to transfer some of the most dangerous men in the world here, especially when we consider where they would be coming from. Guantanamo is surrounded by water, desert, and mountains. It is incredibly isolated. This is not an accident.
While it is extremely disappointing that the president has chosen to veto the NDAA in part because of his desire to close the Guantanamo detention facilities, I have secured commitments from congressional leadership that the language in the bill regarding this issue will not change. The men and women serving our nation at Guantanamo are doing an amazing job at a state-of-the-art facility -- one there is no need to replace.
-- Tim Scott is the junior United States senator from South Carolina.
After visiting, it is clearer than ever to me that Guantanamo is the best place on earth to keep these terrorists. These are al-Qaeda members, terrorist financers, and other highly dangerous people.
So why does the president want to shut it down and have Congress, as his press secretary Josh Earnest said late last week, "get out of the way"? Let's walk through the arguments.
The propaganda war: Opponents of keeping the detention facilities open at Guantanamo believe that by closing it, we can stop terrorist groups from using it as a recruiting tool. This requires you to also believe that any new facility built would not be held up as a recruiting tool. And if you believe that, I have a nice, new bridge to sell you.
Here's what is actually occurring at Guantanamo: 250 assaults on our guards in the past year and a half ... and absolutely zero retaliations. Our troops are highly disciplined and dedicated to serving our nation, and this proves it. This number is rarely reported on, but it tells you more about what is happening at Guantanamo Bay than anything else.
At the same time, compliant detainees have their own portable DVD players, wireless headphones, and access to satellite TV and PlayStation. If they behave well, they can be out of their cells for 22 hours a day. But that doesn't make for very good propaganda.
Prohibitive cost: Folks like to throw out there that it costs $2.4 million per detainee annually at Guantanamo Bay and that it would be more cost-efficient to close the facilities and bring these terrorists to domestic soil.
Now anyone who looks at my voting record knows that I am a strong fiscal conservative. Part of what I dislike about how Congress budgets is the use of murky numbers and procedures that don't tell the full story -- Washington math. And Washington math is in full effect on this $2.4 million number.
As the president rushes to transfer terrorists out of Guantanamo, of course the per capita cost is going to appear to rise. (It is also important to note here the 30 percent recidivism rate among detainees who have left Guantanamo.) The president has sent more than 40 detainees on their way in the past few years, as part of his political calculations to close the detention facilities down, and a nice side effect of that is this shiny new number to throw out.
Second, built into these cost calculations are the salaries of hundreds of our troops guarding these terrorists. But our armed forces are not a private industry, and those salaries will not just disappear. Those troops will just be deployed elsewhere. That's not actually saving money -- and anyone who wants to save on the backs of our troops is barking up the wrong tree anyway.
And finally, it does not take into account that we would need to provide substantial upgrades to existing facilities or build a brand-new facility to hold these detainees. That would cost untold millions on its own.
We can hold them domestically: Here is where the rubber meets the road. There are detainees who are simply too dangerous to release and whom no country would agree to accept. So, if you close the Guantanamo detention facilities, you have to move the remaining terrorists somewhere on American soil. The administration has already publicly surveyed Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, the Naval brig outside Charleston, S.C., and the supermax facility in Colorado.
We can look at the Naval brig in Hanahan, S.C., as a prime example of why moving terrorists to domestic soil is not just a terrible idea but wholly unnecessary. This medium-security facility sits less than two miles from a residential neighborhood, a elementary school, and a high school; four miles from the Charleston airport; and 20 minutes from downtown Charleston -- one of the top tourist destinations in the world. It is also near vital infrastructure such as the Port of Charleston and multiple rail lines.
It simply does not make sense to transfer some of the most dangerous men in the world here, especially when we consider where they would be coming from. Guantanamo is surrounded by water, desert, and mountains. It is incredibly isolated. This is not an accident.
While it is extremely disappointing that the president has chosen to veto the NDAA in part because of his desire to close the Guantanamo detention facilities, I have secured commitments from congressional leadership that the language in the bill regarding this issue will not change. The men and women serving our nation at Guantanamo are doing an amazing job at a state-of-the-art facility -- one there is no need to replace.
-- Tim Scott is the junior United States senator from South Carolina.
Trump Could Win Over the Hispanics Who Matter
PJ Media ^ | 11/04/2015 | Roger L. Simon
Conventional wisdom suggests that Donald Trump’s candidacy was dead on arrival with Hispanics. His strong stand against illegal immigration has been viewed as an instant turnoff.
However, one consultant suggests that Trump may actually do well with those Hispanics who matter in an electoral context. From the Washington Times:
Conventional wisdom suggests that Donald Trump’s candidacy was dead on arrival with Hispanics. His strong stand against illegal immigration has been viewed as an instant turnoff.
However, one consultant suggests that Trump may actually do well with those Hispanics who matter in an electoral context. From the Washington Times:
"This stuff you read about how Hispanics are going to run away from Trump in droves is a Northeastern myth," said longtime presidential campaign adviser Mark Sanders.Perhaps that clip of from a Las Vegas rally of a Colombian woman singing Trump’s praises wasn’t a fluke after all.
"Most Hispanics here in East Texas are here legally, they vote, and they are hard-line opponents of illegal immigration," said Mr. Sanders, a top adviser in Democrat Tony Sanchez's 2002 campaign to unseat then-Gov. Rick Perry. "The only one they want is Trump -- not Hillary, not Bernie. That's the conundrum for Democrats."
Mr. Sanders says Hispanics in East Texas "come here from rural backgrounds, from the lower end of the social and economic ladder. Most of their kids go to community colleges because it's all their families can afford, and then go directly into the military. They have hard-core patriotism -- just what Trump plays into," Mr. Sanders added.
Global Warming Activists Don’t Like When Someone Follows The Money
The Daily Caller News ^ | 11/03/2015 | Andrew Follett
Al Gore .. has levied his global warming activism from a net worth of $700,000 in 2000 into an estimated net worth of $172.5 million by 2015. He is not alone in his financial endeavor.
Funding of science, in this particular case, climate change science, is dominated by the federal government. We assert that this will cause recipients of [government] grants to publish findings that are in-line with government policy preferences (i.e., do not bite the hand that feeds you
...
Studies that receive financial support from the public sector do not have to disclose it as a conflict of interest, even when that support is in the millions of dollars. Recent studies that the Environmental Protection Agency is using to support the scientific case for its Clean Power Plan saw the EPA itself give $31.2 million, $9.5 million, and $3.65 million in public funds to lead authors according to EPA public disclosures.
The author who received $3.65 million, Charles Driscoll, even admitted to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the result of his study was predetermined, saying "in doing this study we wanted to bring attention to the additional benefits from carbon controls."
Universities typically received about 50 percent of the money that their researchers get in public funds if their research finds positive results, making them deeply dependent upon federal funding and likely to encourage studies which will come to conclusions that the government wants.
Al Gore .. has levied his global warming activism from a net worth of $700,000 in 2000 into an estimated net worth of $172.5 million by 2015. He is not alone in his financial endeavor.
Funding of science, in this particular case, climate change science, is dominated by the federal government. We assert that this will cause recipients of [government] grants to publish findings that are in-line with government policy preferences (i.e., do not bite the hand that feeds you
...
Studies that receive financial support from the public sector do not have to disclose it as a conflict of interest, even when that support is in the millions of dollars. Recent studies that the Environmental Protection Agency is using to support the scientific case for its Clean Power Plan saw the EPA itself give $31.2 million, $9.5 million, and $3.65 million in public funds to lead authors according to EPA public disclosures.
The author who received $3.65 million, Charles Driscoll, even admitted to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the result of his study was predetermined, saying "in doing this study we wanted to bring attention to the additional benefits from carbon controls."
Universities typically received about 50 percent of the money that their researchers get in public funds if their research finds positive results, making them deeply dependent upon federal funding and likely to encourage studies which will come to conclusions that the government wants.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
It’s True! A toilet was used as an aerial bomb during the Vietnam War!
War History Online ^ | 10/31/15
As American involvement in the Vietnam War began, the A-1 Skyraider was still the medium attack aircraft in many carrier air wings, although it was planned to be replaced by the A-6A Intruder as part of the general switch to jet aircraft. Skyraiders from Constellation andTiconderoga participated in the first U.S.
Navy strikes against North Vietnam on 5 August 1964 as part of Operation Pierce Arrow in response to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, striking against fuel depots at Vinh, with one Skyraider from Ticonderoga damaged by anti-aircraft fire, and a second from Constellation shot down, killing its pilot.
In contrast to the Korean War, fought a decade earlier, the U.S. Air Force used the naval A-1 Skyraider for the first time in Vietnam. As the Vietnam War progressed, USAF A-1s were painted in camouflage, while USN A-1 Skyraiders were gray/white in color; again, in contrast to the Korean War, when A-1s were painted dark blue.
In October 1965, to highlight the dropping of the six millionth pound of ordnance, Commander Clarence J. Stoddard of Attack Squadron 25 (VA-25), flying an A-1H, dropped a special, one-time-only object in addition to his other munitions – a toilet.
Once again history is stranger then fiction, and a lot funnier: USS Midway VA-25’s Toilet Bomb.
In October 1965, CDR Clarence J. Stoddard, Executive Officer of VA-25 “Fist of the Fleetâ€, flying an A-1H Skyraider, NE/572 “Paper Tiger II†from Carrier Air Wing Two aboard USS Midway carried a special bomb to the North Vietnamese in commemoration of the 6-millionth pound of ordnance dropped.
The following is an account of this event, courtesy of Clint Johnson, Captain, USNR Ret. Captain Johnson was one of the two VA-25 A-1 Skyraider pilots credited with shooting down a MiG-17 on June 20, 1965.
The following is an account of this event, courtesy of Clint Johnson, Captain, USNR Ret. Captain Johnson was one of the two VA-25 A-1 Skyraider pilots credited with shooting down a MiG-17 on June 20, 1965
“I was a pilot in VA-25 on the 1965 Vietnam cruise. 572 was flown by CDR C. W. “Bill†Stoddard. His wingman in 577 (which was my assigned airplane) was LCDR Robin Bacon, who had a wing station mounted movie camera (the only one remaining in the fleet from WWII).
The flight was a Dixie Station strike (South Vietnam) going to the Delta. When they arrived in the target area and CDR Stoddard was reading the ordnance list to the FAC, he ended with “and one code name Sani-flushâ€. The FAC couldn’t believe it and joined up to see it. It was dropped in a dive with LCDR Bacon flying tight wing position to film the drop.
When it came off, it turned hole to the wind and almost struck his airplane. It made a great ready room movie. The FAC said that it whistled all the way down. The toilet was a damaged toilet, which was going to be thrown overboard. One of our plane captains rescued it and the ordnance crew made a rack, tailfins and nose fuse for it. Our checkers maintained a position to block the view of the air boss and the Captain while the aircraft was taxiing forward.
Just as it was being shot off we got a 1MC message from the bridge, “What the hell was on 572’s right wing?†There were a lot of jokes with air intelligence about germ warfare. I wish that we had saved the movie film.
As American involvement in the Vietnam War began, the A-1 Skyraider was still the medium attack aircraft in many carrier air wings, although it was planned to be replaced by the A-6A Intruder as part of the general switch to jet aircraft. Skyraiders from Constellation andTiconderoga participated in the first U.S.
Navy strikes against North Vietnam on 5 August 1964 as part of Operation Pierce Arrow in response to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, striking against fuel depots at Vinh, with one Skyraider from Ticonderoga damaged by anti-aircraft fire, and a second from Constellation shot down, killing its pilot.
In contrast to the Korean War, fought a decade earlier, the U.S. Air Force used the naval A-1 Skyraider for the first time in Vietnam. As the Vietnam War progressed, USAF A-1s were painted in camouflage, while USN A-1 Skyraiders were gray/white in color; again, in contrast to the Korean War, when A-1s were painted dark blue.
In October 1965, to highlight the dropping of the six millionth pound of ordnance, Commander Clarence J. Stoddard of Attack Squadron 25 (VA-25), flying an A-1H, dropped a special, one-time-only object in addition to his other munitions – a toilet.
Once again history is stranger then fiction, and a lot funnier: USS Midway VA-25’s Toilet Bomb.
In October 1965, CDR Clarence J. Stoddard, Executive Officer of VA-25 “Fist of the Fleetâ€, flying an A-1H Skyraider, NE/572 “Paper Tiger II†from Carrier Air Wing Two aboard USS Midway carried a special bomb to the North Vietnamese in commemoration of the 6-millionth pound of ordnance dropped.
The following is an account of this event, courtesy of Clint Johnson, Captain, USNR Ret. Captain Johnson was one of the two VA-25 A-1 Skyraider pilots credited with shooting down a MiG-17 on June 20, 1965.
The following is an account of this event, courtesy of Clint Johnson, Captain, USNR Ret. Captain Johnson was one of the two VA-25 A-1 Skyraider pilots credited with shooting down a MiG-17 on June 20, 1965
“I was a pilot in VA-25 on the 1965 Vietnam cruise. 572 was flown by CDR C. W. “Bill†Stoddard. His wingman in 577 (which was my assigned airplane) was LCDR Robin Bacon, who had a wing station mounted movie camera (the only one remaining in the fleet from WWII).
The flight was a Dixie Station strike (South Vietnam) going to the Delta. When they arrived in the target area and CDR Stoddard was reading the ordnance list to the FAC, he ended with “and one code name Sani-flushâ€. The FAC couldn’t believe it and joined up to see it. It was dropped in a dive with LCDR Bacon flying tight wing position to film the drop.
When it came off, it turned hole to the wind and almost struck his airplane. It made a great ready room movie. The FAC said that it whistled all the way down. The toilet was a damaged toilet, which was going to be thrown overboard. One of our plane captains rescued it and the ordnance crew made a rack, tailfins and nose fuse for it. Our checkers maintained a position to block the view of the air boss and the Captain while the aircraft was taxiing forward.
Just as it was being shot off we got a 1MC message from the bridge, “What the hell was on 572’s right wing?†There were a lot of jokes with air intelligence about germ warfare. I wish that we had saved the movie film.
She Botched It - What we’ve learned about Hillary Clinton’s performance at the State Department
The Weekly Standard ^ | November 9, 2015 issue | Jay Cost
.....By then Libya's temporary government, the National Transitional Council, had moved from Benghazi to Tripoli, where the American embassy had been reopened. At the time, other governments were moving their missions out of Benghazi, and there had been talk of winding down the American mission. Yet Stevens-who had served as U.S. representative to the National Transitional Council from March to November 2011 and would be sworn in as ambassador to Libya in May 2012-did not know what was planned for the Benghazi mission. [Susan] Brooks [R-IN] asked:
[Stevens] was in Washington, D.C., or back in the States during that time, and in December Ambassador Stevens, your soon-to-be ambassador, didn't know what was going to happen with the compound in Benghazi. How is that possible?....
Clinton offered a jarring response:
Well, Congresswoman, one of the great attributes that Chris Stevens had was a really good sense of humor. And I just see him smiling as he's typing this. Because it is clearly in response to the email down below talking about picking up a few, quote, "fire-sale items" from the Brits.
This comment comes out of nowhere. Why mention Stevens's sense of humor in response to a serious question about the future of the mission?....... Seemingly taken aback, Brooks noted that the fire sale actually referred to barricades the British were selling at cut-rate prices because they and "other countries [were] pulling out" of Benghazi, and American diplomats were looking to buy "because we weren't providing enough physical security for the compound."
Clinton responded: "Well, I thought it showed their entrepreneurial spirit, Congresswoman.....I applaud them for doing so." Given that over the next year Clinton's State Department would fail to provide sufficient security for the compound, this was a cold-blooded statement........
.....By then Libya's temporary government, the National Transitional Council, had moved from Benghazi to Tripoli, where the American embassy had been reopened. At the time, other governments were moving their missions out of Benghazi, and there had been talk of winding down the American mission. Yet Stevens-who had served as U.S. representative to the National Transitional Council from March to November 2011 and would be sworn in as ambassador to Libya in May 2012-did not know what was planned for the Benghazi mission. [Susan] Brooks [R-IN] asked:
[Stevens] was in Washington, D.C., or back in the States during that time, and in December Ambassador Stevens, your soon-to-be ambassador, didn't know what was going to happen with the compound in Benghazi. How is that possible?....
Clinton offered a jarring response:
Well, Congresswoman, one of the great attributes that Chris Stevens had was a really good sense of humor. And I just see him smiling as he's typing this. Because it is clearly in response to the email down below talking about picking up a few, quote, "fire-sale items" from the Brits.
This comment comes out of nowhere. Why mention Stevens's sense of humor in response to a serious question about the future of the mission?....... Seemingly taken aback, Brooks noted that the fire sale actually referred to barricades the British were selling at cut-rate prices because they and "other countries [were] pulling out" of Benghazi, and American diplomats were looking to buy "because we weren't providing enough physical security for the compound."
Clinton responded: "Well, I thought it showed their entrepreneurial spirit, Congresswoman.....I applaud them for doing so." Given that over the next year Clinton's State Department would fail to provide sufficient security for the compound, this was a cold-blooded statement........
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
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Army Times ^ | May 7, 2017 | Todd South After carrying the M16 or one of its cousins across the globe for more than half a century, sol...
