Saturday, December 14, 2013

VLADIMIR POSNER RETURNS, OBAMA CONNECTION IN THE '80'S:  Forgotten and unlamented soviet propagandist of the 1980's.  This should remind one of the "reasonableness" and erudition of paid propagandists for any cause, especially an evil on like the USSR.  These days we are getting a home-grown version of this guy from the lefty MSM.  Also worth noting is the reference to Obama's days as a student at Columbia in NYC when he took the Soviet position on Nuclear armaments and the like.

A DEFINITIVE TAKE ON THE OBAMA DISASTER:  Hard to say when this nightmare ends and what's left after it does.  There are no scales on this Canadian's eyes as is often the case with friendly foreigners.  One thing for sure, there will be major fallout from this mistaken presidency and this fraudulent "leader".

Friday, December 13, 2013

INCOME INEQUALITY IS THE LATEST DISTRACTION FROM THE TRAIN WRECK:

Attempting to distract Americans from the ongoing implosion of the Affordable Care Act, his alleged “signature achievement,” President Barack Obama pivoted for the umpteenth time last week, pulling “income inequality” out of his bag of tricks for yet another spin.

In a December 4 speech, he cited “growing inequality and lack of upward mobility” as “the defining challenge of our time.”

That’s interesting. During the Bush administration, income inequalitystabilized, while a 2007 Treasury Department study found that income mobility from 1996 through 2005 was “unchanged … from 1987 through 1996.”

The two problems began to worsen when the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy began in the spring of 2008. Further decay has taken place during Obama’s five-year stewardship, such as it has been, of the U.S. economy.

The president’s proposed “solutions” are the ones which have been serially tried and have always failed: a higher minimum wage, which creates higher unemployment and a larger permanent underclass; higher taxes on “the rich,” which hold back investment in future growth opportunities; and seeming limitless deficit spending, which continues to saddle future generations with growth-retarding and eventually (if not stopped) growth-killing obligations.

The best solutions are those which promote genuine private-sector growth. In these, the Obama administration is singularly disinterested. Those who doubt this assertion only need to look at the person whose help Obama has sought as his credibility and other crises deepen: John Podesta, chairman of the far-left Center for American Progress. Podesta is obsessed with income inequality, and is singularly focused on wealth redistribution through the tax code and other coercive means as the only viable solutions.

That Obama somehow needs to distract Americans from Obamacare’s virtually daily dose of bad news is obvious. What follows are just three of the latest outrages.

On the most recent edition of Fox News Sunday, Ezekiel Emanuel, aka Zeke the Bleak, one of the Affordable Act’s architects, told Chris Wallace that the president didn’t really lie when he repeatedly and unconditionally guaranteed that “you can keep your doctor, period,” because “if you want to (keep him or her), you can pay for it” out of your own pocket.

So the “solution” to the problem of the currently uninsured is to force people who like their doctors to self-insure, i.e., to become newly uninsured for what matters to them, while paying premiums for Obamacare policies under penalty of law for doctors they don’t favor, probably don’t need, and probably won’t use. We seemingly have no choice but to assume that this is exactly what the Obama administration wanted to see happen.

The second item concerns Obamacare’s prescription drug coverage.

Scott Gottlieb, a former senior health policy adviser and a currently practicing physician, told Fox News’s Megyn Kelly on December 9 that many participants will consider it substandard because the co-pays average ”about 40 percent … on branded drugs compared to about 25 percent in the private sector.” That’s intensely ironic, given the grief Obamacare apologists have thrown at supposedly inferior private individual plans. (Forgive the frequent Fox citations; as the rest of the nations’s establishment press cheers on Obamacare while consistently ignoring its serious shortcomings, Fox, with rare exceptions, mostly at CBS, is about the only broadcast news outlet exposing them.)

But there’s more — much more:

… the bigger issue is that the formula, the list(s) of drugs or the plans cover in many cases aren’t very long. And if the drugs aren’t covered, then you’re on your own. You basically have to pay for it entirely out of pocket. And the money that you spend on those drugs doesn’t count against your out-of-pocket limits and it won’t count against your deductible. This could cost patients with special conditions, patients who need special drugs, a lot of money. Literally tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Among those affected are AIDS patients:

Some plans sold on the online insurance exchanges, for instance, don’t cover key medications for HIV, or they require patients to pay as much as 50 percent of the cost per prescription in co-insurance — sometimes more than $1,000 a month.

The just-quoted Washington Post article attempts to frame this problem as one of “discriminatory plan design” engineered by intractably evil insurance companies. What a hoot. The exchanges themselves have approved the plan designs involved. Who do they think they’re kidding?

Emanuel’s arrogant dismissal concerning doctors — never forget that he has been selected to advocate the White House’s pet cause — also applies here. If you like your current prescription drug regimen, you can stay on it, but in many cases you’ll have to pay for it yourself. If you can’t afford it, well, too bad, so sad. Again, we have to assume that the administration is getting the result it wanted.

Thus, beginning on January 1, the exchanges will start serving as de facto financial barrier-building “death panels” for seriously ill patients even before the bureaucratic monster known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board has a chance to begin its own version of serious medical rationing. Sarah Palin was even more right way back in 2009 than she knew.

Finally, there are the administration’s bogus “enrollment” claims.

We’re supposed to believe that 365,000 households “enrolled” in Obamacare exchange plans as of November 30, even though the administration has acknowledged some double-counting. The far larger validity problem lies in estimates thatonly 5 percent to 15 percent of those who have “enrolled” (i.e., between roughly 18,000 and 55,000, assuming no duplicate enrollments) have paid their first-month premiums.

Time is running short. One health insurance industry expert believes “a plan will be lucky if half of applicants pay first month’s premium on time for January coverage.” Team Obama is so short of its original goal of 7 million enrollments thatit’s trying to deny that the target ever existed.

Obama’s repeat performance of his “income inequality” schtick indicates how desperate he and his administration are to distract the American people from the oncoming, virtually inevitable, and from all appearances deliberate crack-up.

CRONY CAPITALISM IS THE BANE OF CAPITALISM.  ADAM SMITH WARNED US.

On Friday, the Obama- and Clinton-allied Center for American Progress finally revealed its long-sought corporate donor list after heavy pressure arising from CAP’s quasi-lobbying history. That scrutiny ratcheted up following the announcement that CAP founder John Podesta would be formally joining the Obama administration. Both Politico and The New York Times called for the donor list to meet the public eye.

And so CAP handed over the list to the leftist Huffington Post. Incredibly, its 2013 donor list contains a myriad of massive corporations, including Apple Inc., AT&T, Bank of America, BMW of North America, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Discovery, GE, Facebook, Google, Goldman Sachs, PepsiCo, PG&E, the Motion Picture Association of America, Samsung, Time Warner Inc., T-Mobile, Toyota, Visa, Walmart and Wells Fargo.

The revelation that huge corporations have been footing the bill for the CAP shatters the myth that major corporations are right-wing repositories. In fact, it shows precisely the opposite: major American corporations including supposedly conservative ones like Walmart are largely in league with a massive government that supports massive subsidizing legislation. Crony capitalism is the order of the day, and it skews leftist – and impacts the donation patterns of America’s most profitable companies.

Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013). He is also Editor-in-Chief ofTruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

WESTERN LEADERSHIP ON DISPLAY:  Mr. Glover has a point.  While much is being made of this incidental Nelson Mandela's funeral, perhaps too much, there is something to Glover's point that we seem now to be governed by frivolous celebrity types whose gravitas is called into question by these actions.  Maybe this sort of activity on the part of politicians is simply the end result of the trivializing of everyone by a media always looking for unguarded moments of the rich and famous.  To what end?  Maybe prurient public interest in what the rich and famous are really like? Who knows?   But one would like to think the leaders are serious people not frivolous celebrity types, and this incident definitely lowers them in stature and seriousness.

IN SIMPLEST TERMS HEREIN IS THE ANSWER TO THE FAILURE OF OBAMACARE:  Where the incentives are wrong expect the worst.  The nest big challenge is to survive this disaster and to date there are no easy answers.  A best guess might be that a parallel free enterprise system will emerge that will simply bypass Obamacare leaving the ACA to serve the indigent and near indigent.  In the meantime this critical component of the economy has been unnecessarily destroyed for the sake of ambitious and venal politicians and their cohorts.  Everyone agrees and always has agreed the healthcare industry needs reforms.  However, reforming does not mean destroying and rebuilding from scratch, which is what the radicals in charge of our government have done.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

WHAT MORE CAN ONE SAY ABOUT THIS BUFFOON?

Jack Wheeler is a brilliant man who was the author of Reagan's strategy to break the back of the Soviet Union with the star wars race and expose their inner weakness. For years he wrote a weekly intelligence update that was extremely interesting and well structured and informative. He consults(ed) with several mega corporations on global trends and the future, etc. He is in semi-retirement now. He is a true patriot with a no-nonsense approach to everything. He is also a somewhat well-known mountain climber and adventurer.  Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler The O-man, Barack Hussein Obama, is an eloquently tailored empty suit. No resume, no accomplishments, no experience, no original ideas, no understanding of how the economy works, no understanding of how the world works, no balls, nothing but abstract, empty rhetoric devoid of real substance. He has no real identity. He is half-white, which he rejects. The rest of him is mostly Arab, which he hides but is disclosed by his non-African Arabic surname and his Arabic first and middle names as a way to triply proclaim his Arabic parentage to people in Kenya . Only a small part of him is African Black from his Luo grandmother, which he pretends he is exclusively. What he isn't, not a genetic drop of, is 'African-American,' the descendant of enslaved Africans brought to America chained in slave ships. He hasn't a single ancestor who was a slave. Instead, his Arab ancestors were slave owners. Slave-trading was the main Arab business in East Africa for centuries until the British ended it. Let that sink in: Obama is not the descendant of slaves, he is the descendant of slave owners. Thus he makes the perfect Liberal Messiah. It's something Hillary doesn't understand - how some complete neophyte came out of the blue and stole the Dem nomination from her. Obamamania is beyond politics and reason. It is a true religious cult, whose adherents reject Christianity yet still believe in Original Sin, transferring it from the evil of being human to the evil of being white. Thus Obama has become the white liberals' Christ, offering absolution from the Sin of Being White. There is no reason or logic behind it, no faults or flaws of his can diminish it, no arguments Hillary could make of any kind can be effective against it. The absurdity of Hypocrisy Clothed In Human Flesh being their Savior is all the more cause for liberals to worship him: Credo quia absurdum, I believe it because it is absurd. Thank heavens that the voting majority of Americans remain Christian and are in no desperate need of a phony savior. He is ridiculous and should not be taken seriously by any thinking American.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Illegal. Illiberal. Ill-Fated.  The rule of law ended with the bailout of the automotive industry, as noted in this article from Reason Magazine.

WHY OBAMA HAS FAILED THE ECONOMIC RECOVERY:  This analysis of one Obama speech reveals the failure of progressive economics and political leadership  The requirement that all politicians take and pass a course in the evolution of economics since the beginning of recorded history is demonstrated in this deconstruction of one Obama reelection speech.  Here we see Obama pandering to his labor base in a series of ill-informed  and quite stupid remarks about the US economy and what it takes to reignite growth.  In essence he has everything exactly backwards.  All of his prescriptions for  economic growth have been tried over and over again by democrat/progressive politicians from FDR to Obama and have failed repeatedly.  And yet here we are treated to the specter of the brilliant Harvard law school graduate resorting to them yet again.  In truth, democrat politicians resort to this strategy over and over because it all they have as a means to gain power, and the exercise of power is all they are about.   As long as these demagogues are able to convince their supine followers that they have their interests at heart, we will be subjected to an economy that evolves in fitful starts and stops.  When the forces of free markets, laissez faire principles and pure capitalism are in play the economy will grow, provide employment and rising incomes for everyone.  When the forces of government intervention, control and concomitant  crony capitalism are ascendent as is presently the case, economic stasis including joblessness and declining incomes will prevail.

TIME MAGAZINES PERSON OF THE YEAR:

Time published its shortlist of 10 finalists on Monday and will reveal the winner Wednesday. The magazine decides on the candidates by the impact they have had on the news over the past 12 months, and not what they have done — negatively or positively — to contribute to the news.

President Barack Obama is also on the list, along with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Pope Francis, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and gay rights activist Edith Windsor.

Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, has leaked some 20,000 secret government documents pertaining to matters of national security. 

Sebelius, meanwhile, spearheaded the launch of Obamacare this year but has been vilified for the disastrous rollout of the HealthCare.gov website, with many Republicans calling for her to be fired.

Obama, who was Time's pick last year, has been slammed for falsely promising under his signature healthcare reform law that people would be able to keep their insurance plans and their doctors. 

Assad has been accused of killing thousands of his own people in Syria, including women and children, who reportedly died from sarin gas.

Singer Cyrus stunned conservative — and many other — Americans when she performed a shocking dance routine called "twerking" during a duet with Robin Thicke on the MTV Video Music Awards.

And Cruz has been attacked by Democrats, and many in his own party, for causing the 16-day government shutdown in October in an attempt to prevent the launch of Obamacare. 

Monday, December 9, 2013

WHY I'M A CONSERVATIVE:

Ben Affleck on Republican Actors: 'I Probably Wouldn’t Like This Person If I Met Him'

By Noel Sheppard | December 9, 2013 | 11:32  18  51 Reddit0  0

A  A

Just how much do many Hollywood liberals hate conservatives?

In an interview with Playboy, Ben Affleck said, "When I watch a guy [on film] I know is a big Republican, part of me thinks, I probably wouldn’t like this person if I met him":

PLAYBOY: You developed a political profile campaigning for presidential candidates Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama. How did that come about?

AFFLECK: I grew up in a house with a mother who was a teacher and a Freedom Rider—very left-wing Democrats living in a heterogeneous working-class neighborhood. I picked up a lot of those values there, and I brought them with me when I showed up in Hollywood. In 2000 the Gore campaign said, “Hey, would you come do this with us?” And I did. I thought I had a responsibility, so I campaigned for Gore. Kerry was a Boston guy, and I felt an organic connection. And then Obama in 2008. Over time I became disillusioned, mostly with the pernicious effect of money in politics. I realized it was about raising $56,000 through a couple of dinners and those bundlers who bring in $1 million or $2 million. Those people are dedicated, and they believe in what they’re doing. I believe in why many of them are doing it. What I don’t believe in is that we now have the need to do it. And for me personally, it started to feel gross.

PLAYBOY: What part?

AFFLECK: Being used as a prop to schmooze people and try to milk the teat of the donor for money. We’d do it sparingly. Matt and I did a thing for Elizabeth Warren, whom we like and who won. We did a fund-raiser for Cory Booker, whom we also like. People now know me as a Democrat, and that will always be the case to some extent.

PLAYBOY: Does that polarize viewers?

AFFLECK: It does, and you can bifurcate your audience. When I watch a guy I know is a big Republican, part of me thinks, I probably wouldn’t like this person if I met him, or we would have different opinions. That shit fogs the mind when you should be paying attention and be swept into the illusion.

PLAYBOY: Still, won’t that happen whether you take positions on candidates or causes?

AFFLECK: I have misgivings about it, counterbalanced with the larger things I care about. I don’t blindly do this stuff when it makes it harder to do my own job. And there’s an awful lot of gross money-raising going on that has made me want to pull back a bit from pure electoral politics. [...]

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PLAYBOY: Will you campaign for Hillary Clinton in 2016?

AFFLECK: I haven’t abandoned it, but I look at working in politics again with a more jaundiced eye. Hillary does excite me, in the same way the potent symbolism of the first African American president was what thrilled people about Obama. It’s similar with Hillary and gender equality. The idea that 100 years after women got the right to vote, to have a woman president would be exciting.

Imagine not liking someone just because you don't agree with his or her political views.

Yet this is where the Left is in our nation today: openly hostile to everyone they disagree with.

Sadly, this does indeed permeate the media and end up being disseminated by it.

The more folks such as Affleck, people on MSNBC, and newspaper editorial boards condemn Republicans for merely having a different political viewpoint, the more divided the nation becomes.

Ironically, these same people complain about this division as well as the caustic tone of today's politics without any awareness that they're the ones responsible for it.

Convenient, isn't it?

Ben Affleck is probably a perfect example of a case of arrested development.  He's a leftie because his mother was a leftie and he hates Republicans because they look like someone he wouldn't like.  He lives in a make believe world, makes millions off the capitalist system,doesn't have a clue how that system works, supports and admires thievery people who would do away with that system, and best of all, feels "dirty" from raising money for people who are taking advantage of his movie fame. This is not a serious person!  This is an immature child pretending he's noble.