THE ENTERPRISE--THE DEATH OF TRUTH & LIBERTY
Please forward this edition to as many people as you wish. Every American needs to know about these issues and their consequences.
There have been few times in my adult life when I have felt so much dismay, so much outrage, so much disbelief and so much anger about how our elected officials don't just ignore our wishes but in fact, do just the opposite of what the majority of us believe is right--and they do it as clandestinely and with as much obfuscation as possible. They hope to ram home their agenda regardless of what their constituents want, believe or how we feel. We, the people, must act. We must act in concert and in numbers. Spreading the word is the first step. The freedom of speech guaranteed in our Constitution is at risk. (I am fearful that in writing this, I will be targeted by powerful, yet nameless people in our government whose purpose is to subvert the Constitution and silence the voices of dissent.)
THE REVOLUTION: OVER 200 YEARS AGO, OUR FOREFATHERS REVOLTED AGAINST AN OPPRESSIVE DICTATORIAL GOVERNMENT
We must do it again. When nearly 60% of Americans are against the legislation being passed by the Democrats who control Congress, they are clearly acting in their own self-interest and not those of their constituents. Only a REVOLUTION in which "We the people," retake control of our government will stop this misbehavior. Our tool is the voting booth. Our enemy is bolstered by a biased mainstream media. But our resolve can carry us forward. Consider some examples of how misguided those in power are, and how ineffective their efforts are.
THE HEALTH CARE REFORM DEBACLE (Read the WSJ Editorial posted below)
On a snowy December night, while most of America slept or prepared for the coming Christmas and New Year holidays, a group of its elected "representatives" failed so miserably to represent the vast majority of their constituents, that history will record this series of events in awe and disgust. In matters of critical importance to the vast majority of Americans, Congress has crafted a bill that is so bizarre, so flawed and so permeated with partisan corruption that it will go down in history--and I fear, take our beloved country down with it. Under the guise of improving the American health care "system" this bigoted behemoth of a bill is so flawed that rational people cannot even summarize its flaws. This health care bill will create costly bureaucracies, and saddle the American government with trillions of dollars of costs, while punishing countless Americans with symbolic health insurance, taken from the aging mass of people who have paid for it all their lives, only to see it pulled from under them like a cheap rug.
THE GLOBAL WARMING HOAX EXPOSED (Read the bonus article by Cal Thomas posted below)
Meanwhile, across an ocean, not long ago, a group of so-called scientists were finishing a cover-up of the greatest hoax perpetrated since the Trojan Horse. An American politician, Democratic former Vice President, failed Presidential candidate, movie maker, Nobel prize winner (gag) and proven liar Albert Gore led the parade to manufacture a scare tactic so large that most cannot imagine it. In a field of science where projections of what weather will be tomorrow are only right a bit more than half the time, they took miniscule bits of data, fraudulently altered the data to show what they wanted it to show and wove a web of "consensus" that proves a frightening saying to be true: "If you tell a big enough lie, and tell it over and over, many will accept it as the truth."
THE GREATEST LIARS OF ALL TIME AND THE MOST DANGEROUS GOVERNMENT LEADERS IN DECADES (Read the article by Thomas Sowell posted below)
Politicians lie. Face it. They all do, to varying degrees. Some tell small lies and "manipulate the truth." Others tell whoppers and then squirm out of them. Al Gore during his Presidential run got caught in several. So did Hillary Clinton. I suspect every major candidate has "skeletons in his or her closet" and some of those are lied they have told to advance in politics or their career. Some, like Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Nancy Pelosi, et. al, simply deny having spoken the lie even though there is documented evidence to the contrary. President William Jefferson Clinton was one of the "slickest" and most skillful liars in recent political circles, and even he got caught in the Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones lies. He was also good at apologizing for his misbehavior, and this is a significant skill for liars to have. It almost exonerates them from having told "whoppers."
AND THE WINNERS ARE...President Barack Hussein Obama & the Democratic Congressional Leadership. No contest. Obama is not even much past his first year in office and he has already proven that most of his campaign statements were bald-faced lies. Pick any issue or area, and the lies are there. Almost any major campaign speech and promise has been broken--no shattered is a better word--and something entirely different is being done. Health care, budget responsibility, jobs creation, tax increases, transparency, and on and on. All lies--to get elected. Barack Obama slickly hoodwinked many American voters with articulate, teleprompter guided speeches that sounded great until he was in office. Americans should have been suspicious about a candidate with no resume, no background and less experience than anyone else in the primaries of either party. Nearly everyone outside the US that Obama deals with sees that while he fits the ABB (Anybody But Bush) criteria, they can't trust him either.
NOW HIS MISTAKES THREATEN OUR ECONOMY AND OUR NATIONAL SECURITY
Of course he's upset with recent terrorist activity. It negates his pacifist, "we'll talk to them" strategic plans. Iran has thumbed its nose at him. So has North Korea. His loving European friends are offering no help and no support. China is laughing. Russia is blustering. The Afghani Taliban is patiently waiting for his planned withdrawal date. Al qaeda fears the US Predator drones and its intense commitment to track down and destroy its organization. Only because Obama retained nearly all of Bush's defense and military staff is the problem no worse than it is. Hillary Clinton, who he shelved by naming her Secretary of State and sending her on the road, sounds like a voice of reason compared to Obama's two-faced "say one thing, do something else." Global warming is now a proven hoax, and so is "Cap & Trade." No tax increases? Who is he kidding. Budget deficits double or triple the insane level Bush allowed to happen. Staff filled with tax evaders like Geithner. Congressional committees chaired by proven criminals like Rangel. Do I need to go on?
I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE SAYING THIS ...
HISTORY WILL RECOGNIZE THIS--WILL WE?
I could list more, but these are enough to illustrate the problem, the threat to our liberty and truth. These events, taken to their inevitable conclusion will be recognized as the seminal "achievements" of Barack Obama's early first term, and of a Democratic Congress so corrupt that it boggles the imagination. On the heels of the financial crisis still working its way out, these "achievements" will cripple America for decades, and be rightfully identified as how Obama made his campaign statement come true: "America is the greatest country in the world—and we are going to change it."
WHAT CAN YOU DO?--SPREAD THE WORD
Read the following editorials from several sources, all admittedly "right leaning." Consider what their factual content says. Take out the hyperbole and opinion and weigh the facts. Then make a pledge to find new representation for Washington from where you live and vote. Support them, and elect them in 2010 and 2012. It IS time for CHANGE in Washington, and America can ill afford the kind being created by Obama and his Democratic Congressional cronies. Candidates require support in both words and action--and in contributions.
"HERE'S TO THE HEROES"---WATCH THIS INCREDIBLE VISUAL AND MUSICAL TRIBUTE-- IN PICTURES AND MUSIC OF THE TEN TENORS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL-0mdEg0U4&feature=related
Many brave men and women have sacrificed and died to protect our rights, our liberty and America's freedom. Please share this message, so everyone we can reach will stop this travesty they are calling "government," that is so callously trampling over the rights of so many Americans. 60% of Americans are NOT in favor of this "so called" Health Care reform and an even larger percentage (70%+) object to the irresponsible spending and the policies that are attempting to control the lives of Americans. These brave heroes are giving their time, their well being, and even their lives to protect our freedoms. Let's not allow a bunch of misguided politicians in Washington, DC take from us what these heroes sacrificed to protect.
ARTICLES/EDITORIALS THAT SAID IT BETTER THAN I CAN
That's plenty for now. THINK ABOUT HOW YOU WILL DO YOUR PART TO HELP THE REVOLUTION! Will you tell everyone you know why it's important. Will you persuade your children (assuming they need it) to start thinking along these lines. Will you help find and then support new candidates--or incumbents who have been like voices in the wilderness? I plan to do both. What else can we do? Ideas? Do you have contacts in influential places? Reach out to them. Do everything you can think of--and enlist others in THE REVOLUTION.
Best, John
BONUS MATERIAL--ARTICLES THAT SHOULD BE READ IF YOU MISSED THEM
For too long we Americans have been too complacent about the workings of Congress. We complain, but do nothing. We wince at their foolishness, stupidity or corruptness--but do too little. We let them take from us and give to whoever they choose, however unworthy they might be. Worst of all, they reward themselves for their "service" with special treatment that far exceeds what the rest of us enjoy.
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Another Failed Presidency
An article from American Thinker by Geoffrey P. Hunt
Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency since Woodrow Wilson. In the modern era, we've seen several failed presidencies--led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ. Failed presidents have one strong common trait-- they are repudiated, in the vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party. Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture to China.
But, Barack Obama is failing. Failing big. Failing fast. And failing everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal put her finger on it: He is failing because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe them. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control of his message, and is overexposed. Clarice Feldman of American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.
But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new president riding in on a wave of precedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his tenure and become a lame duck in six months? His poll ratings are in free fall. In generic balloting, the Republicans have now seized a five point advantage. This truly is unbelievable. What's going on?
No narrative. Obama doesn't have a narrative. No, not a narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect with us. He doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us. All successful presidents have a narrative about the American character that intersects with their own where they display a command of history and reveal an authenticity at the core of their personality that resonates in a positive endearing way with the majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose narratives not only touch our own, but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter than we are. Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even those whose politics don't align exactly with our own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, and Reagan.
But not this president. It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, and is historically illiterate and woefully small minded for the size of the task--all contributory of course. It's that he's not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper.
Moreover, he doesn't command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond with our experience.
In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he's dissed just about every one of us--financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job. Expect Obama to lament at his last press conference in 2012: "For those of you I offended, I apologize. For those of you who were not offended, you just didn't give me enough time; if only I'd had a second term, I could have offended you too."
Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a useful remedy for such a desperate state--staggered terms for both houses of the legislature and the executive. An equally abominable Congress can get voted out next year. With a new Congress, there's always hope of legislative gridlock until we vote for president again two short years after that.
Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them.
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Global warming is a falling doctrine
By: Cal Thomas
Examiner Columnist
January 14, 2010
PORSTEWART, NORTHERN IRELAND - A familiar philosophical question goes like this: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Here's another: If a doctrine falls, will enough believers admit they were wrong and withdraw support for policies associated with it?
The "doctrine" of global warming, now euphemistically called "climate change," suffered a severe blow last week as much of Europe was buried in record amounts of snow and subfreezing temperatures. "Experts" who believe in global warming, uh climate change, went on television where they bravely tried to make a distinction between weather, which they said was about what happens today, and climate, which is long term. Most of it fell on deaf -- and cold -- ears as growing numbers disbelieve the "experts," relying more on their own "lying eyes."
Writing Sunday in London's Daily Mail, columnist David Rose analyzed recent scientific data amassed by eminent climate scientists. Rose says that far from a warming planet, "the bitter weather afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years. Rose cites data from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, which found that, "Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 percent, since 2007." This, he says, challenges "some of the global warming orthodoxy's most deeply cherished beliefs, such as their claim that the North Pole will be free of ice by the summer of 2013."
During last month's climate summit in Copenhagen, more than 150 scientists with backgrounds in climate science wrote an open letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a global warming believer.
The letter begins, "climate change science is in a period of 'negative discovery' - the more we learn about this exceptionally complex and rapidly evolving field the more we realize how little we know. Truly the science is not settled." The scientists challenge 10 of the main claims of the global warming-climate change true believers and write, "... there is no sound reason to impose expensive and restrictive public policy decisions on the peoples of the Earth without first providing convincing evidence that human activities are causing dangerous climate change beyond that resulting from natural causes.
"Before any precipitate action is taken, we must have solid observational data that recent changes in climate differ substantially from changes observed in the past and are well in excess of normal variations caused by solar cycles, ocean currents, changes in the Earth's orbital parameters and other natural phenomena. That seems more than reasonable, but politicians in Europe and America want to rush through additional restrictions on how we live in order to seize more power. This is the major reason for their panic attack.
As new scientific evidence adds to the body of information, history and common sense, the power grab by the politicians is in peril. The hurry-up offense, to employ a football term, is being used to rush through legislation before the defense can devise an effective response. But the defense is now on the offense, and the offense is being forced to poorly play defense.
Should we do nothing about our consumption of petroleum? No, we should use this window of opportunity to decrease our reliance on petroleum; not because of "climate change," but to deprive the oil-producing nations of money too many of them use to underwrite terrorism. This should satisfy both the global warming disciples and deniers and make America and Europe less dependent on nations that wish to destroy our liberty. But threats to liberty are not limited to some oil-producing nations; they can also be found in the British Parliament and in the American Congress.
The falling doctrines now make so much noise that only those without hearing fail to notice.
Examiner columnist Cal Thomas is nationally syndicated by Tribune Media, Inc.
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DECEMBER 21, 2009, 5:13 P.M. ET
Change Nobody Believes In
A bill so reckless that it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas eve
And tidings of comfort and joy from Harry Reid too. The Senate Majority Leader has decided that the last few days before Christmas are the opportune moment for a narrow majority of Democrats to stuff ObamaCare through the Senate to meet an arbitrary White House deadline. Barring some extraordinary reversal, it now seems as if they have the 60 votes they need to jump off this cliff, with one-seventh of the economy in tow.
Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world's greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new "manager's amendment" that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what's in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning. After procedural motions that allow for no amendments, the final vote could come at 9 p.m. on December 24.
Even in World War I there was a Christmas truce.
The rushed, secretive way that a bill this destructive and unpopular is being forced on the country shows that "reform" has devolved into the raw exercise of political power for the single purpose of permanently expanding the American entitlement state. An increasing roll of leaders in health care and business are looking on aghast at a bill that is so large and convoluted that no one can truly understand it, as Finance Chairman Max Baucus admitted on the floor last week. The only goal is to ram it into law while the political window is still open, and clean up the mess later.
• Health costs. From the outset, the White House's core claim was that reform would reduce health costs for individuals and businesses, and they're sticking to that story. "Anyone who says otherwise simply hasn't read the bills," Mr. Obama said over the weekend. This is so utterly disingenuous that we doubt the President really believes it.
The best and most rigorous cost analysis was recently released by the insurer WellPoint, which mined its actuarial data in various regional markets to model the Senate bill. WellPoint found that a healthy 25-year-old in Milwaukee buying coverage on the individual market will see his costs rise by 178%. A small business based in Richmond with eight employees in average health will see a 23% increase. Insurance costs for a 40-year-old family with two kids living in Indianapolis will pay 106% more. And on and on.
These increases are solely the result of ObamaCare—above and far beyond the status quo—because its strict restrictions on underwriting and risk-pooling would distort insurance markets. All but a handful of states have rejected regulations like "community rating" because they encourage younger and healthier buyers to wait until they need expensive care, increasing costs for everyone. Benefits and pricing will now be determined by politics.
As for the White House's line about cutting costs by eliminating supposed "waste," even Victor Fuchs, an eminent economist generally supportive of ObamaCare, warned last week that these political theories are overly simplistic. "The oft-heard promise 'we will find out what works and what does not' scarcely does justice to the complexity of medical practice," the Stanford professor wrote.
• Steep declines in choice and quality. This is all of a piece with the hubris of an Administration that thinks it can substitute government planning for market forces in determining where the $33 trillion the U.S. will spend on medicine over the next decade should go.
This centralized system means above all fewer choices; what works for the political class must work for everyone. With formerly private insurers converted into public utilities, for instance, they'll inevitably be banned from selling products like health savings accounts that encourage more cost-conscious decisions.
Unnoticed by the press corps, the Congressional Budget Office argued recently that the Senate bill would so "substantially reduce flexibility in terms of the types, prices, and number of private sellers of health insurance" that companies like WellPoint might need to "be considered part of the federal budget."
With so large a chunk of the economy and medical practice itself in Washington's hands, quality will decline. Ultimately, "our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all," as Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier recently wrote in our pages. Take the $2 billion annual tax—rising to $3 billion in 2018—that will be leveled against medical device makers, among the most innovative U.S. industries. Democrats believe that more advanced health technologies like MRI machines and drug-coated stents are driving costs too high, though patients and their physicians might disagree.
"The Senate isn't hearing those of us who are closest to the patient and work in the system every day," Brent Eastman, the chairman of the American College of Surgeons, said in a statement for his organization and 18 other speciality societies opposing ObamaCare. For no other reason than ideological animus, doctor-owned hospitals will face harsh new limits on their growth and who they're allowed to treat. Physician Hospitals of America says that ObamaCare will "destroy over 200 of America's best and safest hospitals."
• Blowing up the federal fisc. Even though Medicare's unfunded liabilities are already about 2.6 times larger than the entire U.S. economy in 2008, Democrats are crowing that ObamaCare will cost "only" $871 billion over the next decade while fantastically reducing the deficit by $132 billion, according to CBO.
Yet some 98% of the total cost comes after 2014—remind us why there must absolutely be a vote this week—and most of the taxes start in 2010. That includes the payroll tax increase for individuals earning more than $200,000 that rose to 0.9 from 0.5 percentage points in Mr. Reid's final machinations. Job creation, here we come.
Other deceptions include a new entitlement for long-term care that starts collecting premiums tomorrow but doesn't start paying benefits until late in the decade. But the worst is not accounting for a formula that automatically slashes Medicare payments to doctors by 21.5% next year and deeper after that. Everyone knows the payment cuts won't happen but they remain in the bill to make the cost look lower. The American Medical Association's priority was eliminating this "sustainable growth rate" but all they got in return for their year of ObamaCare cheerleading was a two-month patch snuck into the defense bill that passed over the weekend.
The truth is that no one really knows how much ObamaCare will cost because its assumptions on paper are so unrealistic. To hide the cost increases created by other parts of the bill and transfer them onto the federal balance sheet, the Senate sets up government-run "exchanges" that will subsidize insurance for those earning up to 400% of the poverty level, or $96,000 for a family of four in 2016. Supposedly they would only be offered to those whose employers don't provide insurance or work for small businesses.
As Eugene Steuerle of the left-leaning Urban Institute points out, this system would treat two workers with the same total compensation—whatever the mix of cash wages and benefits—very differently. Under the Senate bill, someone who earned $42,000 would get $5,749 from the current tax exclusion for employer-sponsored coverage but $12,750 in the exchange. A worker making $60,000 would get $8,310 in the exchanges but only $3,758 in the current system.
For this reason Mr. Steuerle concludes that the Senate bill is not just a new health system but also "a new welfare and tax system" that will warp the labor market. Given the incentives of these two-tier subsidies, employers with large numbers of lower-wage workers like Wal-Mart may well convert them into "contractors" or do more outsourcing. As more and more people flood into "free" health care, taxpayer costs will explode.
• Political intimidation. The experts who have pointed out such complications have been ignored or dismissed as "ideologues" by the White House. Those parts of the health-care industry that couldn't be bribed outright, like Big Pharma, were coerced into acceding to this agenda. The White House was able to, er, persuade the likes of the AMA and the hospital lobbies because the federal government will control 55% of total U.S. health spending under ObamaCare, according to the Administration's own Medicare actuaries.
Others got hush money, namely Nebraska's Ben Nelson. Even liberal Governors have been howling for months about ObamaCare's unfunded spending mandates: Other budget priorities like education will be crowded out when about 21% of the U.S. population is on Medicaid, the joint state-federal program intended for the poor. Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman calculates that ObamaCare will result in $2.5 billion in new costs for his state that "will be passed on to citizens through direct or indirect taxes and fees," as he put it in a letter to his state's junior Senator.
So in addition to abortion restrictions, Mr. Nelson won the concession that Congress will pay for 100% of Nebraska Medicaid expansions into perpetuity. His capitulation ought to cost him his political career, but more to the point, what about the other states that don't have a Senator who's the 60th vote for ObamaCare?
"After a nearly century-long struggle we are on the cusp of making health-care reform a reality in the United States of America," Mr. Obama said on Saturday. He's forced to claim the mandate of "history" because he can't claim the mandate of voters. Some 51% of the public is now opposed, according to National Journal's composite of all health polling. The more people know about ObamaCare, the more unpopular it becomes.
The tragedy is that Mr. Obama inherited a consensus that the health-care status quo needs serious reform, and a popular President might have crafted a durable compromise that blended the best ideas from both parties. A more honest and more thoughtful approach might have even done some good. But as Mr. Obama suggested, the Democratic old guard sees this plan as the culmination of 20th-century liberalism.
So instead we have this vast expansion of federal control. Never in our memory has so unpopular a bill been on the verge of passing Congress, never has social and economic legislation of this magnitude been forced through on a purely partisan vote, and never has a party exhibited more sheer political willfulness that is reckless even for Washington or had more warning about the consequences of its actions.
These 60 Democrats are creating a future of epic increases in spending, taxes and command-and-control regulation, in which bureaucracy trumps innovation and transfer payments are more important than private investment and individual decisions. In short, the Obama Democrats have chosen change nobody believes in—outside of themselves—and when it passes America will be paying for it for decades to come.
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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If we hadn't stayed up past midnight Sunday, we wouldn't have known what was going on. Here we thought a vote on the proposed health care overhaul wasn't going to take place until Thursday night — Christmas Eve. But there they were, the United States Senate, at 1 a.m. Monday, rushing to vote in the middle of a snowstorm to close debate on the most important piece of legislation of our time — the nationalization of the U.S. health care system. And we've been scrambling ever since to make sense of it.
Let's see if we have this right:
• This was a vote on a Democrat-concocted scheme that Americans have rejected every time it's been proposed for 100 years and that is opposed again, by 54% to 41% by the public at large, by 2-to-1 by practicing physicians and by every last member on the Republican side of the aisle.
• The vote was taken without any members having read the main 2,074-page bill, let alone the 383 pages of amendments that were tacked on at the last minute to buy off senators, including Nebraska's Ben Nelson, Louisiana's Mary Landrieu and Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders.
• Despite growing public opposition, Democratic members had the nerve to call those who questioned their monstrosity "obstructionists" and worse. Rhode Island's Sheldon Whitehouse called health care bill foes "birthers," "fanatics" and "people running around in right-wing militia and Aryan support groups." Is this what Democrats meant when they said they seek bipartisan solutions to the nation's problems?
• The bill contains at last count 18 new taxes totaling an estimated $406 billion — including significant new levies on those earning less than $250,000, a major breach of Obama's pledge not to raise taxes by "one penny" on those in that income group.
A family of four that refuses to buy into a "qualifying" health insurance program will pay a "surtax" of as much as $6,750. At the same time, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that health insurance premiums will nearly double by 2016. As the nonpartisan Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation put it, "The House and Senate health care bills contain enormous tax hikes to accompany massive increases in government spending."
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Truth Is Victim When The Left Abuses Science
By THOMAS SOWELL
Posted 06:50 PM ET
Science is one of the great achievements of the human mind and the biggest reason why we live not only longer but more vigorously in our old age, in addition to all the ways in which it provides us with things that make life easier and more enjoyable. Like anything valuable, science has been seized upon by politicians and ideologues, and used to forward their own agendas.
This started long ago, as far back as the 18th century, when the Marquis de Condorcet coined the term "social science" to describe various theories he favored. In the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels distinguished their own brand of socialism as "scientific socialism." By the 20th century, all sorts of notions wrapped themselves in the mantle of "science." "Global warming" hysteria is only the latest in this long line of notions, whose main argument is that there is no argument, because it is "science."
The recently revealed destruction of raw data at the bottom of the global warming hysteria, as well as revelations of attempts to prevent critics of this hysteria from being published in leading journals, suggests that the disinterested search for truth — the hallmark of real science — has taken a back seat to a political crusade.
An intercepted e-mail from a professor at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England, to a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, warned the latter: "Don't any of you three tell anybody that the U.K. has a Freedom of Information Act" and urged the American professor to delete any e-mails he may have sent a colleague regarding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
When a business accused of fraud begins shredding its memos and deleting its e-mails, the media are quick to proclaim these actions as signs of guilt. But, after the global warming advocates began a systematic destruction of evidence, the big television networks went for days without even reporting these facts, much less commenting on them. As for politicians, Sen. Barbara Boxer has urged prosecution of the hackers who uncovered and revealed the e-mails!
People who have in the past applauded whistle-blowers in business, in the military or in Republican administrations, and who lionized the New York Times for publishing the classified Pentagon papers, are now shocked and outraged that someone dared to expose massive evidence of manipulations, concealment and destruction of data — and deliberate coverups of all this — in the global warming establishment.
Factual data are crucial in real science. Albert Einstein himself urged that his own theory of relativity not be accepted until it could be empirically verified. This verification came when scientists around the world observed an eclipse of the sun and discovered that light behaved as Einstein's theory said it would behave, however implausible that might have seemed beforehand.
Today, politicized "science" has too big a stake in the global warming hysteria to let the facts speak for themselves and let the chips fall where they may. Too many people — in politics and in the media, as well as among those climate scientists who are promoting global warming hysteria — let the raw data on which their calculations have been based fall into the "wrong hands."
People who talk about the corrupting influence of money seem to automatically assume that it is only private money that is corrupting. But when governments have billions of dollars invested in the global warming crusade, massive programs under way and whole political careers at risk if that crusade gets undermined, do not expect the disinterested search for truth. Among the intelligentsia, there have always been many who are ready to jump on virtually any bandwagon that will take them to the promised land, where the wise and noble few — like themselves — can take the rest of us poor dummies in hand and tell us how we had better change the way we live our lives.
No doubt some climate scientists honestly believe that global warming poses a threat. But other climate scientists honestly believe the opposite. That is why the raw data have had to be destroyed before the latter get their hands on it. This is tragically the case as regards many other issues, besides global warming, where data are made available only to the true believers and kept out of the hands of those who think otherwise.
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John L. Mariotti, President & CEO, The Enterprise Group, Phone 614-840-0959 http://www.mariotti.net http://mariotti.blogs.com/my_weblog/
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Please forward this edition to as many people as you wish. Every American needs to know about these issues and their consequences.
There have been few times in my adult life when I have felt so much dismay, so much outrage, so much disbelief and so much anger about how our elected officials don't just ignore our wishes but in fact, do just the opposite of what the majority of us believe is right--and they do it as clandestinely and with as much obfuscation as possible. They hope to ram home their agenda regardless of what their constituents want, believe or how we feel. We, the people, must act. We must act in concert and in numbers. Spreading the word is the first step. The freedom of speech guaranteed in our Constitution is at risk. (I am fearful that in writing this, I will be targeted by powerful, yet nameless people in our government whose purpose is to subvert the Constitution and silence the voices of dissent.)
THE REVOLUTION: OVER 200 YEARS AGO, OUR FOREFATHERS REVOLTED AGAINST AN OPPRESSIVE DICTATORIAL GOVERNMENT
We must do it again. When nearly 60% of Americans are against the legislation being passed by the Democrats who control Congress, they are clearly acting in their own self-interest and not those of their constituents. Only a REVOLUTION in which "We the people," retake control of our government will stop this misbehavior. Our tool is the voting booth. Our enemy is bolstered by a biased mainstream media. But our resolve can carry us forward. Consider some examples of how misguided those in power are, and how ineffective their efforts are.
THE HEALTH CARE REFORM DEBACLE (Read the WSJ Editorial posted below)
On a snowy December night, while most of America slept or prepared for the coming Christmas and New Year holidays, a group of its elected "representatives" failed so miserably to represent the vast majority of their constituents, that history will record this series of events in awe and disgust. In matters of critical importance to the vast majority of Americans, Congress has crafted a bill that is so bizarre, so flawed and so permeated with partisan corruption that it will go down in history--and I fear, take our beloved country down with it. Under the guise of improving the American health care "system" this bigoted behemoth of a bill is so flawed that rational people cannot even summarize its flaws. This health care bill will create costly bureaucracies, and saddle the American government with trillions of dollars of costs, while punishing countless Americans with symbolic health insurance, taken from the aging mass of people who have paid for it all their lives, only to see it pulled from under them like a cheap rug.
THE GLOBAL WARMING HOAX EXPOSED (Read the bonus article by Cal Thomas posted below)
Meanwhile, across an ocean, not long ago, a group of so-called scientists were finishing a cover-up of the greatest hoax perpetrated since the Trojan Horse. An American politician, Democratic former Vice President, failed Presidential candidate, movie maker, Nobel prize winner (gag) and proven liar Albert Gore led the parade to manufacture a scare tactic so large that most cannot imagine it. In a field of science where projections of what weather will be tomorrow are only right a bit more than half the time, they took miniscule bits of data, fraudulently altered the data to show what they wanted it to show and wove a web of "consensus" that proves a frightening saying to be true: "If you tell a big enough lie, and tell it over and over, many will accept it as the truth."
THE GREATEST LIARS OF ALL TIME AND THE MOST DANGEROUS GOVERNMENT LEADERS IN DECADES (Read the article by Thomas Sowell posted below)
Politicians lie. Face it. They all do, to varying degrees. Some tell small lies and "manipulate the truth." Others tell whoppers and then squirm out of them. Al Gore during his Presidential run got caught in several. So did Hillary Clinton. I suspect every major candidate has "skeletons in his or her closet" and some of those are lied they have told to advance in politics or their career. Some, like Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Nancy Pelosi, et. al, simply deny having spoken the lie even though there is documented evidence to the contrary. President William Jefferson Clinton was one of the "slickest" and most skillful liars in recent political circles, and even he got caught in the Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones lies. He was also good at apologizing for his misbehavior, and this is a significant skill for liars to have. It almost exonerates them from having told "whoppers."
AND THE WINNERS ARE...President Barack Hussein Obama & the Democratic Congressional Leadership. No contest. Obama is not even much past his first year in office and he has already proven that most of his campaign statements were bald-faced lies. Pick any issue or area, and the lies are there. Almost any major campaign speech and promise has been broken--no shattered is a better word--and something entirely different is being done. Health care, budget responsibility, jobs creation, tax increases, transparency, and on and on. All lies--to get elected. Barack Obama slickly hoodwinked many American voters with articulate, teleprompter guided speeches that sounded great until he was in office. Americans should have been suspicious about a candidate with no resume, no background and less experience than anyone else in the primaries of either party. Nearly everyone outside the US that Obama deals with sees that while he fits the ABB (Anybody But Bush) criteria, they can't trust him either.
NOW HIS MISTAKES THREATEN OUR ECONOMY AND OUR NATIONAL SECURITY
Of course he's upset with recent terrorist activity. It negates his pacifist, "we'll talk to them" strategic plans. Iran has thumbed its nose at him. So has North Korea. His loving European friends are offering no help and no support. China is laughing. Russia is blustering. The Afghani Taliban is patiently waiting for his planned withdrawal date. Al qaeda fears the US Predator drones and its intense commitment to track down and destroy its organization. Only because Obama retained nearly all of Bush's defense and military staff is the problem no worse than it is. Hillary Clinton, who he shelved by naming her Secretary of State and sending her on the road, sounds like a voice of reason compared to Obama's two-faced "say one thing, do something else." Global warming is now a proven hoax, and so is "Cap & Trade." No tax increases? Who is he kidding. Budget deficits double or triple the insane level Bush allowed to happen. Staff filled with tax evaders like Geithner. Congressional committees chaired by proven criminals like Rangel. Do I need to go on?
I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE SAYING THIS ...
HISTORY WILL RECOGNIZE THIS--WILL WE?
I could list more, but these are enough to illustrate the problem, the threat to our liberty and truth. These events, taken to their inevitable conclusion will be recognized as the seminal "achievements" of Barack Obama's early first term, and of a Democratic Congress so corrupt that it boggles the imagination. On the heels of the financial crisis still working its way out, these "achievements" will cripple America for decades, and be rightfully identified as how Obama made his campaign statement come true: "America is the greatest country in the world—and we are going to change it."
WHAT CAN YOU DO?--SPREAD THE WORD
Read the following editorials from several sources, all admittedly "right leaning." Consider what their factual content says. Take out the hyperbole and opinion and weigh the facts. Then make a pledge to find new representation for Washington from where you live and vote. Support them, and elect them in 2010 and 2012. It IS time for CHANGE in Washington, and America can ill afford the kind being created by Obama and his Democratic Congressional cronies. Candidates require support in both words and action--and in contributions.
"HERE'S TO THE HEROES"---WATCH THIS INCREDIBLE VISUAL AND MUSICAL TRIBUTE-- IN PICTURES AND MUSIC OF THE TEN TENORS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL-0mdEg0U4&feature=related
Many brave men and women have sacrificed and died to protect our rights, our liberty and America's freedom. Please share this message, so everyone we can reach will stop this travesty they are calling "government," that is so callously trampling over the rights of so many Americans. 60% of Americans are NOT in favor of this "so called" Health Care reform and an even larger percentage (70%+) object to the irresponsible spending and the policies that are attempting to control the lives of Americans. These brave heroes are giving their time, their well being, and even their lives to protect our freedoms. Let's not allow a bunch of misguided politicians in Washington, DC take from us what these heroes sacrificed to protect.
ARTICLES/EDITORIALS THAT SAID IT BETTER THAN I CAN
That's plenty for now. THINK ABOUT HOW YOU WILL DO YOUR PART TO HELP THE REVOLUTION! Will you tell everyone you know why it's important. Will you persuade your children (assuming they need it) to start thinking along these lines. Will you help find and then support new candidates--or incumbents who have been like voices in the wilderness? I plan to do both. What else can we do? Ideas? Do you have contacts in influential places? Reach out to them. Do everything you can think of--and enlist others in THE REVOLUTION.
Best, John
BONUS MATERIAL--ARTICLES THAT SHOULD BE READ IF YOU MISSED THEM
For too long we Americans have been too complacent about the workings of Congress. We complain, but do nothing. We wince at their foolishness, stupidity or corruptness--but do too little. We let them take from us and give to whoever they choose, however unworthy they might be. Worst of all, they reward themselves for their "service" with special treatment that far exceeds what the rest of us enjoy.
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Another Failed Presidency
An article from American Thinker by Geoffrey P. Hunt
Barack Obama is on track to have the most spectacularly failed presidency since Woodrow Wilson. In the modern era, we've seen several failed presidencies--led by Jimmy Carter and LBJ. Failed presidents have one strong common trait-- they are repudiated, in the vernacular, spat out. Of course, LBJ wisely took the exit ramp early, avoiding a shove into oncoming traffic by his own party. Richard Nixon indeed resigned in disgrace, yet his reputation as a statesman has been partially restored by his triumphant overture to China.
But, Barack Obama is failing. Failing big. Failing fast. And failing everywhere: foreign policy, domestic initiatives, and most importantly, in forging connections with the American people. The incomparable Dorothy Rabinowitz in the Wall Street Journal put her finger on it: He is failing because he has no understanding of the American people, and may indeed loathe them. Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says he is failing because he has lost control of his message, and is overexposed. Clarice Feldman of American Thinker produced a dispositive commentary showing that Obama is failing because fundamentally he is neither smart nor articulate; his intellectual dishonesty is conspicuous by its audacity and lack of shame.
But, there is something more seriously wrong: How could a new president riding in on a wave of precedented promise and goodwill have forfeited his tenure and become a lame duck in six months? His poll ratings are in free fall. In generic balloting, the Republicans have now seized a five point advantage. This truly is unbelievable. What's going on?
No narrative. Obama doesn't have a narrative. No, not a narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect with us. He doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us. All successful presidents have a narrative about the American character that intersects with their own where they display a command of history and reveal an authenticity at the core of their personality that resonates in a positive endearing way with the majority of Americans. We admire those presidents whose narratives not only touch our own, but who seem stronger, wiser, and smarter than we are. Presidents we admire are aspirational peers, even those whose politics don't align exactly with our own: Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Harry Truman, Ike, and Reagan.
But not this president. It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, and is historically illiterate and woefully small minded for the size of the task--all contributory of course. It's that he's not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper.
Moreover, he doesn't command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond with our experience.
In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he's dissed just about every one of us--financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job. Expect Obama to lament at his last press conference in 2012: "For those of you I offended, I apologize. For those of you who were not offended, you just didn't give me enough time; if only I'd had a second term, I could have offended you too."
Mercifully, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 devised a useful remedy for such a desperate state--staggered terms for both houses of the legislature and the executive. An equally abominable Congress can get voted out next year. With a new Congress, there's always hope of legislative gridlock until we vote for president again two short years after that.
Yes, small presidents do fail, Barack Obama among them.
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Global warming is a falling doctrine
By: Cal Thomas
Examiner Columnist
January 14, 2010
PORSTEWART, NORTHERN IRELAND - A familiar philosophical question goes like this: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Here's another: If a doctrine falls, will enough believers admit they were wrong and withdraw support for policies associated with it?
The "doctrine" of global warming, now euphemistically called "climate change," suffered a severe blow last week as much of Europe was buried in record amounts of snow and subfreezing temperatures. "Experts" who believe in global warming, uh climate change, went on television where they bravely tried to make a distinction between weather, which they said was about what happens today, and climate, which is long term. Most of it fell on deaf -- and cold -- ears as growing numbers disbelieve the "experts," relying more on their own "lying eyes."
Writing Sunday in London's Daily Mail, columnist David Rose analyzed recent scientific data amassed by eminent climate scientists. Rose says that far from a warming planet, "the bitter weather afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years. Rose cites data from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, which found that, "Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 percent, since 2007." This, he says, challenges "some of the global warming orthodoxy's most deeply cherished beliefs, such as their claim that the North Pole will be free of ice by the summer of 2013."
During last month's climate summit in Copenhagen, more than 150 scientists with backgrounds in climate science wrote an open letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a global warming believer.
The letter begins, "climate change science is in a period of 'negative discovery' - the more we learn about this exceptionally complex and rapidly evolving field the more we realize how little we know. Truly the science is not settled." The scientists challenge 10 of the main claims of the global warming-climate change true believers and write, "... there is no sound reason to impose expensive and restrictive public policy decisions on the peoples of the Earth without first providing convincing evidence that human activities are causing dangerous climate change beyond that resulting from natural causes.
"Before any precipitate action is taken, we must have solid observational data that recent changes in climate differ substantially from changes observed in the past and are well in excess of normal variations caused by solar cycles, ocean currents, changes in the Earth's orbital parameters and other natural phenomena. That seems more than reasonable, but politicians in Europe and America want to rush through additional restrictions on how we live in order to seize more power. This is the major reason for their panic attack.
As new scientific evidence adds to the body of information, history and common sense, the power grab by the politicians is in peril. The hurry-up offense, to employ a football term, is being used to rush through legislation before the defense can devise an effective response. But the defense is now on the offense, and the offense is being forced to poorly play defense.
Should we do nothing about our consumption of petroleum? No, we should use this window of opportunity to decrease our reliance on petroleum; not because of "climate change," but to deprive the oil-producing nations of money too many of them use to underwrite terrorism. This should satisfy both the global warming disciples and deniers and make America and Europe less dependent on nations that wish to destroy our liberty. But threats to liberty are not limited to some oil-producing nations; they can also be found in the British Parliament and in the American Congress.
The falling doctrines now make so much noise that only those without hearing fail to notice.
Examiner columnist Cal Thomas is nationally syndicated by Tribune Media, Inc.
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DECEMBER 21, 2009, 5:13 P.M. ET
Change Nobody Believes In
A bill so reckless that it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas eve
And tidings of comfort and joy from Harry Reid too. The Senate Majority Leader has decided that the last few days before Christmas are the opportune moment for a narrow majority of Democrats to stuff ObamaCare through the Senate to meet an arbitrary White House deadline. Barring some extraordinary reversal, it now seems as if they have the 60 votes they need to jump off this cliff, with one-seventh of the economy in tow.
Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world's greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new "manager's amendment" that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what's in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning. After procedural motions that allow for no amendments, the final vote could come at 9 p.m. on December 24.
Even in World War I there was a Christmas truce.
The rushed, secretive way that a bill this destructive and unpopular is being forced on the country shows that "reform" has devolved into the raw exercise of political power for the single purpose of permanently expanding the American entitlement state. An increasing roll of leaders in health care and business are looking on aghast at a bill that is so large and convoluted that no one can truly understand it, as Finance Chairman Max Baucus admitted on the floor last week. The only goal is to ram it into law while the political window is still open, and clean up the mess later.
• Health costs. From the outset, the White House's core claim was that reform would reduce health costs for individuals and businesses, and they're sticking to that story. "Anyone who says otherwise simply hasn't read the bills," Mr. Obama said over the weekend. This is so utterly disingenuous that we doubt the President really believes it.
The best and most rigorous cost analysis was recently released by the insurer WellPoint, which mined its actuarial data in various regional markets to model the Senate bill. WellPoint found that a healthy 25-year-old in Milwaukee buying coverage on the individual market will see his costs rise by 178%. A small business based in Richmond with eight employees in average health will see a 23% increase. Insurance costs for a 40-year-old family with two kids living in Indianapolis will pay 106% more. And on and on.
These increases are solely the result of ObamaCare—above and far beyond the status quo—because its strict restrictions on underwriting and risk-pooling would distort insurance markets. All but a handful of states have rejected regulations like "community rating" because they encourage younger and healthier buyers to wait until they need expensive care, increasing costs for everyone. Benefits and pricing will now be determined by politics.
As for the White House's line about cutting costs by eliminating supposed "waste," even Victor Fuchs, an eminent economist generally supportive of ObamaCare, warned last week that these political theories are overly simplistic. "The oft-heard promise 'we will find out what works and what does not' scarcely does justice to the complexity of medical practice," the Stanford professor wrote.
• Steep declines in choice and quality. This is all of a piece with the hubris of an Administration that thinks it can substitute government planning for market forces in determining where the $33 trillion the U.S. will spend on medicine over the next decade should go.
This centralized system means above all fewer choices; what works for the political class must work for everyone. With formerly private insurers converted into public utilities, for instance, they'll inevitably be banned from selling products like health savings accounts that encourage more cost-conscious decisions.
Unnoticed by the press corps, the Congressional Budget Office argued recently that the Senate bill would so "substantially reduce flexibility in terms of the types, prices, and number of private sellers of health insurance" that companies like WellPoint might need to "be considered part of the federal budget."
With so large a chunk of the economy and medical practice itself in Washington's hands, quality will decline. Ultimately, "our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all," as Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier recently wrote in our pages. Take the $2 billion annual tax—rising to $3 billion in 2018—that will be leveled against medical device makers, among the most innovative U.S. industries. Democrats believe that more advanced health technologies like MRI machines and drug-coated stents are driving costs too high, though patients and their physicians might disagree.
"The Senate isn't hearing those of us who are closest to the patient and work in the system every day," Brent Eastman, the chairman of the American College of Surgeons, said in a statement for his organization and 18 other speciality societies opposing ObamaCare. For no other reason than ideological animus, doctor-owned hospitals will face harsh new limits on their growth and who they're allowed to treat. Physician Hospitals of America says that ObamaCare will "destroy over 200 of America's best and safest hospitals."
• Blowing up the federal fisc. Even though Medicare's unfunded liabilities are already about 2.6 times larger than the entire U.S. economy in 2008, Democrats are crowing that ObamaCare will cost "only" $871 billion over the next decade while fantastically reducing the deficit by $132 billion, according to CBO.
Yet some 98% of the total cost comes after 2014—remind us why there must absolutely be a vote this week—and most of the taxes start in 2010. That includes the payroll tax increase for individuals earning more than $200,000 that rose to 0.9 from 0.5 percentage points in Mr. Reid's final machinations. Job creation, here we come.
Other deceptions include a new entitlement for long-term care that starts collecting premiums tomorrow but doesn't start paying benefits until late in the decade. But the worst is not accounting for a formula that automatically slashes Medicare payments to doctors by 21.5% next year and deeper after that. Everyone knows the payment cuts won't happen but they remain in the bill to make the cost look lower. The American Medical Association's priority was eliminating this "sustainable growth rate" but all they got in return for their year of ObamaCare cheerleading was a two-month patch snuck into the defense bill that passed over the weekend.
The truth is that no one really knows how much ObamaCare will cost because its assumptions on paper are so unrealistic. To hide the cost increases created by other parts of the bill and transfer them onto the federal balance sheet, the Senate sets up government-run "exchanges" that will subsidize insurance for those earning up to 400% of the poverty level, or $96,000 for a family of four in 2016. Supposedly they would only be offered to those whose employers don't provide insurance or work for small businesses.
As Eugene Steuerle of the left-leaning Urban Institute points out, this system would treat two workers with the same total compensation—whatever the mix of cash wages and benefits—very differently. Under the Senate bill, someone who earned $42,000 would get $5,749 from the current tax exclusion for employer-sponsored coverage but $12,750 in the exchange. A worker making $60,000 would get $8,310 in the exchanges but only $3,758 in the current system.
For this reason Mr. Steuerle concludes that the Senate bill is not just a new health system but also "a new welfare and tax system" that will warp the labor market. Given the incentives of these two-tier subsidies, employers with large numbers of lower-wage workers like Wal-Mart may well convert them into "contractors" or do more outsourcing. As more and more people flood into "free" health care, taxpayer costs will explode.
• Political intimidation. The experts who have pointed out such complications have been ignored or dismissed as "ideologues" by the White House. Those parts of the health-care industry that couldn't be bribed outright, like Big Pharma, were coerced into acceding to this agenda. The White House was able to, er, persuade the likes of the AMA and the hospital lobbies because the federal government will control 55% of total U.S. health spending under ObamaCare, according to the Administration's own Medicare actuaries.
Others got hush money, namely Nebraska's Ben Nelson. Even liberal Governors have been howling for months about ObamaCare's unfunded spending mandates: Other budget priorities like education will be crowded out when about 21% of the U.S. population is on Medicaid, the joint state-federal program intended for the poor. Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman calculates that ObamaCare will result in $2.5 billion in new costs for his state that "will be passed on to citizens through direct or indirect taxes and fees," as he put it in a letter to his state's junior Senator.
So in addition to abortion restrictions, Mr. Nelson won the concession that Congress will pay for 100% of Nebraska Medicaid expansions into perpetuity. His capitulation ought to cost him his political career, but more to the point, what about the other states that don't have a Senator who's the 60th vote for ObamaCare?
"After a nearly century-long struggle we are on the cusp of making health-care reform a reality in the United States of America," Mr. Obama said on Saturday. He's forced to claim the mandate of "history" because he can't claim the mandate of voters. Some 51% of the public is now opposed, according to National Journal's composite of all health polling. The more people know about ObamaCare, the more unpopular it becomes.
The tragedy is that Mr. Obama inherited a consensus that the health-care status quo needs serious reform, and a popular President might have crafted a durable compromise that blended the best ideas from both parties. A more honest and more thoughtful approach might have even done some good. But as Mr. Obama suggested, the Democratic old guard sees this plan as the culmination of 20th-century liberalism.
So instead we have this vast expansion of federal control. Never in our memory has so unpopular a bill been on the verge of passing Congress, never has social and economic legislation of this magnitude been forced through on a purely partisan vote, and never has a party exhibited more sheer political willfulness that is reckless even for Washington or had more warning about the consequences of its actions.
These 60 Democrats are creating a future of epic increases in spending, taxes and command-and-control regulation, in which bureaucracy trumps innovation and transfer payments are more important than private investment and individual decisions. In short, the Obama Democrats have chosen change nobody believes in—outside of themselves—and when it passes America will be paying for it for decades to come.
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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Socialism Creeps In As America Sleeps
From IBD Ediutorials
Posted 08:13 PM ET
Health Care: Democrats on the take and in the dead of night pass an execrable piece of legislation that they haven't read, the public doesn't want and only socialists could love. What has happened to this country?If we hadn't stayed up past midnight Sunday, we wouldn't have known what was going on. Here we thought a vote on the proposed health care overhaul wasn't going to take place until Thursday night — Christmas Eve. But there they were, the United States Senate, at 1 a.m. Monday, rushing to vote in the middle of a snowstorm to close debate on the most important piece of legislation of our time — the nationalization of the U.S. health care system. And we've been scrambling ever since to make sense of it.
Let's see if we have this right:
• This was a vote on a Democrat-concocted scheme that Americans have rejected every time it's been proposed for 100 years and that is opposed again, by 54% to 41% by the public at large, by 2-to-1 by practicing physicians and by every last member on the Republican side of the aisle.
• The vote was taken without any members having read the main 2,074-page bill, let alone the 383 pages of amendments that were tacked on at the last minute to buy off senators, including Nebraska's Ben Nelson, Louisiana's Mary Landrieu and Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders.
• Despite growing public opposition, Democratic members had the nerve to call those who questioned their monstrosity "obstructionists" and worse. Rhode Island's Sheldon Whitehouse called health care bill foes "birthers," "fanatics" and "people running around in right-wing militia and Aryan support groups." Is this what Democrats meant when they said they seek bipartisan solutions to the nation's problems?
• The bill contains at last count 18 new taxes totaling an estimated $406 billion — including significant new levies on those earning less than $250,000, a major breach of Obama's pledge not to raise taxes by "one penny" on those in that income group.
A family of four that refuses to buy into a "qualifying" health insurance program will pay a "surtax" of as much as $6,750. At the same time, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that health insurance premiums will nearly double by 2016. As the nonpartisan Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation put it, "The House and Senate health care bills contain enormous tax hikes to accompany massive increases in government spending."
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Truth Is Victim When The Left Abuses Science
By THOMAS SOWELL
Posted 06:50 PM ET
Science is one of the great achievements of the human mind and the biggest reason why we live not only longer but more vigorously in our old age, in addition to all the ways in which it provides us with things that make life easier and more enjoyable. Like anything valuable, science has been seized upon by politicians and ideologues, and used to forward their own agendas.
This started long ago, as far back as the 18th century, when the Marquis de Condorcet coined the term "social science" to describe various theories he favored. In the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels distinguished their own brand of socialism as "scientific socialism." By the 20th century, all sorts of notions wrapped themselves in the mantle of "science." "Global warming" hysteria is only the latest in this long line of notions, whose main argument is that there is no argument, because it is "science."
The recently revealed destruction of raw data at the bottom of the global warming hysteria, as well as revelations of attempts to prevent critics of this hysteria from being published in leading journals, suggests that the disinterested search for truth — the hallmark of real science — has taken a back seat to a political crusade.
An intercepted e-mail from a professor at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England, to a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, warned the latter: "Don't any of you three tell anybody that the U.K. has a Freedom of Information Act" and urged the American professor to delete any e-mails he may have sent a colleague regarding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
When a business accused of fraud begins shredding its memos and deleting its e-mails, the media are quick to proclaim these actions as signs of guilt. But, after the global warming advocates began a systematic destruction of evidence, the big television networks went for days without even reporting these facts, much less commenting on them. As for politicians, Sen. Barbara Boxer has urged prosecution of the hackers who uncovered and revealed the e-mails!
People who have in the past applauded whistle-blowers in business, in the military or in Republican administrations, and who lionized the New York Times for publishing the classified Pentagon papers, are now shocked and outraged that someone dared to expose massive evidence of manipulations, concealment and destruction of data — and deliberate coverups of all this — in the global warming establishment.
Factual data are crucial in real science. Albert Einstein himself urged that his own theory of relativity not be accepted until it could be empirically verified. This verification came when scientists around the world observed an eclipse of the sun and discovered that light behaved as Einstein's theory said it would behave, however implausible that might have seemed beforehand.
Today, politicized "science" has too big a stake in the global warming hysteria to let the facts speak for themselves and let the chips fall where they may. Too many people — in politics and in the media, as well as among those climate scientists who are promoting global warming hysteria — let the raw data on which their calculations have been based fall into the "wrong hands."
People who talk about the corrupting influence of money seem to automatically assume that it is only private money that is corrupting. But when governments have billions of dollars invested in the global warming crusade, massive programs under way and whole political careers at risk if that crusade gets undermined, do not expect the disinterested search for truth. Among the intelligentsia, there have always been many who are ready to jump on virtually any bandwagon that will take them to the promised land, where the wise and noble few — like themselves — can take the rest of us poor dummies in hand and tell us how we had better change the way we live our lives.
No doubt some climate scientists honestly believe that global warming poses a threat. But other climate scientists honestly believe the opposite. That is why the raw data have had to be destroyed before the latter get their hands on it. This is tragically the case as regards many other issues, besides global warming, where data are made available only to the true believers and kept out of the hands of those who think otherwise.
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John L. Mariotti, President & CEO, The Enterprise Group, Phone 614-840-0959 http://www.mariotti.net http://mariotti.blogs.com/my_weblog/
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