More lies, according to Harry Reid: Some of the country’s best cancer hospitals are excluded from every Obamacare policy.
“There’s no compassion in the Affordable Care Act.”
From a pastor who has discovered at the last moment that the insurance under Obamacare did not cover his life-saving chemo treatments, putting him $50,000 in debt.
But since we know that this pastor is lying, according to Harry Reid, he must be ignored.
And then there’s this liar: Obamacare leaves Las Vegas man owing $407,000 in doctor bills.
What is Harry Reid going to do with all these liars hanging around making up stories about Obamacare?
One liberal pundit proposes that Democrats embrace Obamacare in the coming election campaign.
Here’s a heretical idea. Rather than parsing the individual elements of the law, and trying to persuade voters on an à la carte basis, what about raising the stakes and defending the reform in its entirety as a historic effort to provide affordable health-care coverage to tens of millions of hard-working Americans who otherwise couldn’t afford it? Instead of shying away from the populist and redistributionist essence of the reform, which the White House and many Democrats in Congress have been doing since the start, it’s time to embrace it.
I hope they do it. For one thing, it would be refreshing to see Democrats actually campaigning honestly for once on what they actually believe in! For another, they would get creamed, because their fantasies about how wonderful Obamacare is have nothing to do with the horrible reality being experienced right now by millions of Americans.
A Health and Human Services (HHS) official has resigned in disgust from his job monitoring research misconduct because of his frustration with the federal bureaucracy.
His resignation letter is brutal.
“[M]y role as ORI Director has been the very worst job I have ever had and it occupies up to 65% of my time,” he wrote. ”That part of the job is spent navigating the remarkably dysfunctional HHS bureaucracy to secure resources and, yes, get permission for ORI to serve the research community. I knew coming into this job about the bureaucratic limitations of the federal government, but I had no idea how stifling it would be.” According to Wright, activities that in his capacity as an academic administrator that took a day or two, took weeks and months in the federal government.
He then recounts some examples, such the inability to get approval to spend $35 and the inability to hire someone because there was “a secret priority list.”
But hey, don’t worry, we know that HHS will do so much better running the healthcare industry.
Why conservatives should have no regrets dumping Mitch McConnell as the Republican leader in the Senate.
I have had very mixed feelings about McConnell, and was unsure about whether the campaign to get rid of him made sense, until I read this article. The author is devastating, very effectively noting that even though McConnell has generally been very conservative in his votes as a senator, as a leader he has routinely supported the election of RINOs over conservatives.
As the man who helps steer lobbyist dollars to get candidates elected, you all think McConnell is a solid conservative. [Then] why is he steering dollars and support to men like Charlie Crist, Arlen Specter, Trey Grayson, David Dewhurst, and Bob Bennett? McConnell may be voting the way you all want on the votes that matter to you, but he is clearly and indisputably working to get other men elected whose votes you’d despise in states where more conservative challengers could easily win and have won.
Fortunately, all of McConnell’s candidates above eventually lost, and we got instead Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee, names that have very effectively changed the political landscape by tilting it in a conservative direction. In other cases, however, McConnell’s candidates won, and thus we have guys like Jeff Flake, a Republican in name only, producing a profound lack of unity in the Republican party.
Getting rid of McConnell would tilt that landscape even more so in a conservative direction, and might finally give the Republicans the balls to really fight this fight instead of squabbling among themselves.
The House committee investigating the IRS’s political harassment of Obama’s opponents has now unveiled evidence showing that former IRS official Lois Lerner committed perjury in Congressional testimony at least four times.
The evidence also shows that she was aggressively working for the Democratic Party, using her power as an important IRS official to bend the tax laws to attack that party’s political opponents.
According to 2013 FBI statistics, all ten of the nation’s most dangerous cities are run by Democrats.
Could it be gun control? Or maybe the oppressive atmosphere of an over-regulated society? Or the lack of prosperity due to the squelching of freedom? Take your pick.
The senator who aggressively supported the federal government’s illegal spying on innocent Americans is shocked and offended that they also spied on her.
For liberals, the rules are never meant for them. Instead, the rules are made by liberals to be imposed on everyone else, whom they consider too stupid to deserve either privacy or freedom.
Update: I have to amend my previous sentence. It isn’t just liberals who think the rules should never apply to them. We also have to include pompous power-hungry politicians on the right as well.
Climategate continues: “What it is observed right now is utter dishonesty by the IPCC advocates.”
That’s the opinion of one of a number of scientists who were classified by a study to be part of the 97% consensus that supports human-caused global warming. The article asked them if the study’s classification was true, and their response was that the study was a fraud, a lie, a distortion, and simply untrue. The so-called 97% consensus was manufactured out of thin air, as many of the scientists included in it are actually global warming skeptics.
The quote that stood out most to me in the article was this one:
» Read more
To serve and protect? Here’s one cop’s take: “I give my left nut to bang down your door and come for your gun.”
Pushback: Connecticut police are now threatening to refuse to enforce that state’s new oppressive gun control law.
250 law enforcement officers in Connecticut have signed an open letter stating that they will not enforce the new anti-gun and magazine laws, which they consider to be a violation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Finding out what’s in it: A major union charges in a new report that Obamacare will reduce wages, cut hours, and limit access to health insurance for the lower middle class.
Union head Donald “D.” Taylor, in a note also being sent to Congress, demands changes and admits to being reluctant to bash a president his union supported. “Believe me; I enter this entire debate about the consequences of the ACA with a deep reluctance,” he wrote. “Unite Here was the first union to endorse then-Senator Obama. We support the addition of health care to millions of Americans. Yet facts are facts, and Obamacare will cost our members the equivalent of a significant pay cut to keep their hard-won benefits.”
In other words, he is a blind partisan fool. His partisanship is so strong that even now he is reluctant to attack the President or the Democrats for creating and forcing Obamacare on us. He also is so partisan that when they were writing the bill he accepted blindly what they were telling him and thus didn’t bother to read the law himself. Then again, he really didn’t have to read it, all he really had to do was listen to just a handful of conservative thinkers who were saying then that Obamacare would “reduce wages, cut hours, and limit access to health insurance.”
The most shameful part of this whole thing is that come the next election, this union chief and his union will almost certainly still back the Democrats blindly.
Finding out what’s not in it: Connecticut seniors are in an uproar because their AARP health insurance plan was forced to sever ties with their hospital and doctors because of Obamacare.
AARP was a big supporter of Obamacare. A majority of these blue-state seniors probably voted for Obama as well.I wonder if they will now wake up and change their support now, or remain blind followers of a disastrous policy.
Finding out what’s in it: According to two surveys a large majority of the previously uninsured are uninterested in signing up for Obamacare.
You can read one of the surveys here.
The main reason they are rejecting Obamacare is cost or “affordability challenges,” as the report so euphemistically call it. (See page 5 on the second link above). The simple fact is that the reason most of these people didn’t have health insurance before is because it didn’t make economic sense for them to buy it. Most are probably young and don’t need to visit a doctor very often. Why pay for insurance in that case? And since Obamacare has significantly raised the cost of insurance, these people have even less economic reason now to sign up.
Finding out what’s in it: Thousands of union workers in Las Vegas might go on strike because of the increased costs of healthcare, imposed on them by Obamacare.
On Feb. 20, thousands of housekeepers, porters, cooks, cocktail servers, and others represented by Nevada’s largest union, the Culinary Union Local 226, voted to end a contract extension the workers agreed to last summer. The union wants to maintain its current benefits — including health care coverage at no cost to workers, pensions, and guaranteed 40-hour workweeks.
Rising health care costs due to provisions in the Affordable Care Act could put those benefits in jeopardy, the union says.
I bet that most of these workers voted for Obama and Harry Reid. I also bet that most of them will continue to do so, despite the obvious policy failures imposed on them by these Democratic politicians.
Finding out what’s in it: According to the IRS, when Obamacare goes into full effect in 2016 the cost for its cheapest plan will average $20,000 per year per family.
Why I would never send my kids to public school: A 10-year-old is suspended for pointing “a level 2 lookalike firearm,” which happened to be his finger.
I don’t know which is stupider, suspending him for going “bang-bang” with his hand, or the school calling his hand “a level 2 lookalike firearm.”
A look at the President’s overall budget for science, which finds spending levels remain flat.
What makes this story significant is that the budget is really flat. Some agencies will get more money, others less, with the total spent about the same as the year before. They are not discussing, as had been typical in the past, the rate of increase in spending, where a reduction in that rate would be reported falsely as a “cut.”
Finding out what’s in it: After six months of trying and failing to cancel an unwanted Obamacare health insurance plan, a Florida man is now considering shutting his bank account to prevent the plan from automatically withdrawing money from his account.
Remember, the Democrats in Congress and President Obama refused to negotiate any changes to Obamacare in October, thereby forcing the government shutdown. They also were the only ones to vote for Obamacare. These facts must not be forgotten come November.
Working for the Democratic Party: Just hours before she was scheduled to testify about IRS harassment of conservatives at a House hearing, the head of a conservative organization was called by an IRS official, telling her that her organization’s tax exempt status had finally been approved, after waiting more than 3 years.
As she noted, “And this is not political?”
Bad news for free speech: A federal appeals court has ruled that schools can ban the American flag in order to prevent violence.
The court’s ruling: School administrators can force you to remove your American-flag tee if the alternative is a classmate punching you in the face. That’s because, per the Supreme Court, students don’t have the same free speech rights at school that adults do on other public grounds. At school, the name of the game is order and instruction; you’re entitled to free expression to the extent you don’t interfere with those goals, but once you do, the school’s entitled to limit your expression accordingly.
In other words, a bully can get the principal’s office to silence you by promising to beat your ass if they don’t.
This is, as Eugene Volokh notes, a classic “heckler’s veto” in that it rewards a violent actor by suppressing the speech that’s irritated him instead of punishing him for being violent.
So, according to this ruling, the only people who will have free speech will be those willing to threaten, and even use violence. A foolish and mindless ruling, if I ever saw one.
Working for the Democratic Party: Even as the IRS was admitting last year that its harassment of conservatives was a mistake, the agency was working up its new rules to make the harassment official policy, under pressure from Democratic elected officials.
And what about the new official policy?
The tax agency has floated an outline of new rules that would limit those groups’ ability to host candidates, distribute voter guides or conduct voter registration or get-out-the-vote drives. A three-month period for public comments closed on Thursday, and the IRS had posted more than 115,000 comments. They were overwhelmingly opposed to the proposed rules, with both conservative and liberal-leaning groups saying the rules would stifle their ability to participate in important public debates.
One joint comment, filed by a dozen groups ranging from the immigration advocacy America’s Voice and the liberal American Civil Liberties Union to the right-leaning American Conservative Union and tea party-aligned FreedomWorks, asked the Obama administration go back and start over on the rules.
Just in case Harry Reid might actually be listening, here is another round of Obamacare train wrecks.
Modern American intellectualism: Harry Reid insists in a speech on the Senate floor that the Obamacare horror stories being reported daily “are all untrue.”
He then attacks the sick patients themselves for telling these stories, calling them liars.
I call this modern American intellectualism because it jibs with the typical level of open-mindedness seen in modern intellectuals when it comes to climate science and any data that throws doubt on the theory of global warming.
A scientific study has found that name-calling and trolling on websites polarizes thought and blocks the ability of reasonable people to focus on the actual facts.
This confirms my reasoning for banning such uncivil behavior here on Behind the Black. If we want to understand the issues the first thing we need to do is to make sure we are discussing the issues, reasonably, sanely, and politely. Strong words are okay, but they better be backed up with facts and solid reasoning.
Posted from Alon Shvut, West Bank, Israel, local time 1 pm.
I wonder if this means anything: A district that the Democrats won by a big margin in 2013 voted big for a Republican in a special local election on Monday.
The Democrat in this district loudly ran in support of Obamacare. He not only lost bad, the Republican came with a hair of winning the most liberal urban areas in Norfolk City.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: Eric Holder describes his belief that district attorneys don’t have to enforce any laws they disagree with.
Holder’s real goal? Make the law less inconvenient so he and others in power can wield more power over everyone else. That goal is also shared by Obama as well as a large percentage of the politicians in DC from both parties. See for example this article about a man I disagree with strongly on many issues but who I know is totally on my side on this issue.
Finding out what’s in it: A report released by the Obama administration on Monday estimates that health insurance premiums for small and medium business will rise significantly in 2014 because of Obamacare.
The report claims that about one third of these businesses will see a decrease in cost, but the article points out that this is likely a very big overstatement and that the increases will likely be much higher than predicted. Based on history, we have every reason to believe this pessimistic prediction and dismiss the hopeful prediction of the Obama administration.
Leftwing fascism: A Democratic Congressmen threatens the loss of the FCC license of television stations which air an ad criticizing his vote in favor of Obamacare.
Then Rep. Gary Peters, who is the running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, went all-in Friday, having his lawyers send a letter to a Michigan television station citing the Post in demanding that AFP provide more evidence that Obamacare is as terrible as it really is. Mr. Peters’ lawyers wrote that “Unlike federal candidates, independent political organizations” — and by extension, Ms. Boonstra — don’t have a “right to command use of broadcast facilities.” They clinched with a threat that airing the ad could “be cause for the loss of a station’s license.”
More here.
Other that supporting a law that is causing great anxiety and pain and financial loss to millions of innocent Americans, now this Democrat is also out to squelch freedom of speech. What’s not to like?
