Flashback March 2011. Amazing how the elite media lets us forget about these litthe scandals isn’t it?
This has been going on repeatedly in this administration. To see the complete story and back ground, be sure to check out this great piece by Michelle Malkin.
Flashback March 2011. Remember Obama’s Deficit Commission??? The elite media dropped it like a hot potato.
UPDATE – Worlds largest bond fund dumps U.S. Treasuries – LINK.
Great interview. All credit to Erskine Bowles, who used to be one of the nastier partisan Democrat hired guns. He has almost completely adopted a near Steve Forbes like tax agenda, because that is the best way to raise government revenue. Bowles even makes the case that Democrats need to get real on spending cuts and that Republicans aren’t pushing hard enough. I am in awe. Bowles has even says that unions have over reached. I am sure Bowles is feeling the heat from his former colleagues. I never thought I would see myself typing these words; Erskine Bowles has earned my respect. My hat is off to his courage.
Bowles even uses the same analogy IUSB Vision [My old college blog – Editor] does almost verbatim from the link. The deficit in February was $232 billion (yes that is for a single month), which is substantially higher than the entire yearly deficit the last year the Republicans had fiscal control (2007).
Related: Sen. Durbin Tells FOX News Sunday: Dems Will Only Cut $10.5 Billion From Bloated Budget – UPDATED!
Remember when we said that the Democrats are pushing for a government shut down, which is why they keep moving the goal posts in trying to boost deficit spending? Well here is the proof. It is called acting in bad faith folks.
How could anyone who wants fiscal responsibility ever vote for any of these people again. You heard me. If you take exception to that comment please try to justify what we have just seen in the comments below.
Michelle Bachmann responds as well:
Mike Pence: If the Democrats want a shutdown so bad, do it and see what happens…
Boehner/Bachmann: Democrats rooting for a shutdown
Its true too. Every time the Republicans make a compromise the Democrats move the goal post. First it was move spending back to 2008 levels; then it was cut by $100 billion; then it was $61 billion’ then it was, 10.5 or 33 billion dollars depending on what Democrat you were talking to. How anyone, and I mean anyone who tells you that they are for fiscal responsibility and want to vote Democrat in 2012 is either duped or just lying to you.
[Editor’s Note – I posted this in March 2010. After repeatedly insisting that ObamaCare would never be able to ration care or ever have death panels and even after the self-proclaimed politifact.com labeled this their “lie of the year”; fast forward to September 2011, now the truth is reported so casually that even Robert Reich and Paul Krugman have admitted that death panel like rationing will be necessary and the ObamaCare “Independent Payment Advisory Board” is common knowledge. Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich were the first to call this what it was and deserve credit for doing so by stating the obvious: that the words “death panel” do not have to appear in the bill because Congress, by passing the ObamaCare law, has handed such overwhelming regulatory authority over to these faceless bureaucrats that they have the ability create law by regulation at the stroke of a pen.]
Bloomberg News reports about one of the ways health care will be rationed, notice it starts after the upcoming presidential election.
So will it become a death panel?
The legislation also creates an Independent Payment Advisory Board to suggest cuts in spending by Medicare, the government health program for the elderly and disabled, that could threaten payments for drug and device-makers. Starting in 2014, the panel’s recommendations would take effect unless federal lawmakers substitute their own reductions.
The president’s own cousin, Dr. Milton Wolf, said that this bill does harm and rations care in multiple ways – LINK:
As one example, consider the implications of Obamacare’s financial penalty aimed at your doctor if he seeks the expert care he has determined you need. If your doctor is in the top 10 percent of primary care physicians who refer patients to specialists most frequently – no matter how valid the reasons – he will face a 5 percent penalty on all their Medicare reimbursements for the entire year. This scheme is specifically designed to deny you the chance to see a specialist. Each year, the insidious nature of that arbitrary 10 percent rule will make things even worse as 100 percent of doctors try to stay off that list. Many doctors will try to avoid the sickest patients, and others will simply refuse to accept Medicare. Already, 42 percent of doctors have chosen that route, and it will get worse. Your mother’s shiny government-issued Medicare health card is meaningless without doctors who will accept it.
Obamacare will further diminish access to health care by lowering reimbursements for medical care without regard to the costs of that care. Price controls have failed spectacularly wherever they’ve been tried. They have turned neighborhoods into slums and have caused supply chains to dry up when producers can no longer profit from providing their goods. Remember the Carter-era gas lines? Medical care is not immune from this economic reality. We cannot hope that our best and brightest will pursue a career in medicine, setting aside years of their lives – for me, 13 years of school and training – to enter a field that might not even pay for the student loans it took to get there.
Of course, when the regulations written by bureaucrats get written how will they be interpreted and enforced? Several of Obama’s Czar’s and advisers have said in no uncertain terms that value judgements about who should get care need to be made, and we have reported those statements right here on this web site.
NEW – British National Health Service late cancer diagnosis kills 10,000 a year – LINK.
By Deroy Murdock
Imagine that your two best friends are British and Canadian tobacco addicts. The Brit battles lung cancer. The Canadian endures emphysema and wheezes as he walks around with clanging oxygen canisters. You probably would not think: “Maybe I should pick up smoking.”
The fact that America is even considering government medicine is equally wacky. The state guides health care for our two closest allies: Great Britain and Canada. Like us, these are prosperous, industrial, Anglophone democracies. Nevertheless, compared to America, they suffer higher death rates for diseases, their patients experience severe pain, and they ration medical services.
Look what you’re missing in the U.K.:
* Breast cancer kills 25 percent of its American victims. In Great Britain, the Vatican of single-payer medicine, breast cancer extinguishes 46 percent of its targets.
* Prostate cancer is fatal to 19 percent of its American patients. The National Center for Policy Analysis reports that it kills 57 percent of Britons it strikes.
* Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development data show that the U.K.’s 2005 heart-attack fatality rate was 19.5 percent higher than America’s. This may correspond to angioplasties, which were only 21.3 percent as common there as here.
* The U.K.’s National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) just announced plans to cut its 60,000 annual steroid injections for severe back-pain sufferers to just 3,000. This should save the government 33 million pounds (about $55 million). “The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients,” Dr. Jonathan Richardson of Bradford Hospitals Trust told London’s Daily Telegraph. “It will mean more people on opiates, which are addictive, and kill 2,000 a year. It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky, and has a 50 per cent failure rate.”
* “Seriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government targets,” Daniel Martin wrote last year in London’s Daily Mail. “Thousands of people a year are having to wait outside accident and emergency departments because trusts will not let them in until they can treat them within four hours, in line with a Labour [party] pledge. The hold-ups mean ambulances are not available to answer fresh 911 calls. Doctors warned last night that the practice of ‘patient-stacking’ was putting patients’ health at risk.”
Things don’t look much better up north, under Canadian socialized medicine.
* Canada has one-third fewer doctors per capita than the OECD average. “The doctor shortage is a direct result of government rationing, since provinces intervened to restrict class sizes in major Canadian medical schools in the 1990s,” Dr. David Gratzer, a Canadian physician and Manhattan Institute scholar, told the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee on June 24. Some towns address the doctor dearth with lotteries in which citizens compete for rare medical appointments.
* “In 2008, the average Canadian waited 17.3 weeks from the time his general practitioner referred him to a specialist until he actually received treatment,” Pacific Research Institute president Sally Pipes, a Canadian native, wrote in the July 2 Investor’s Business Daily. “That’s 86 percent longer than the wait in 1993, when the [Fraser] Institute first started quantifying the problem.”
* Such sloth includes a median 9.7-week wait for an MRI exam, 31.7 weeks to see a neurosurgeon, and 36.7 weeks – nearly nine months – to visit an orthopedic surgeon.
* Thus, Canadian supreme court justice Marie Deschamps wrote in her 2005 majority opinion in Chaoulli v. Quebec, “This case shows that delays in the public health care system are widespread, and that, in some cases, patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care.”
Obamacare proponents might argue that their health reforms are neither British nor Canadian, but just modest adjustments to America’s system. This is false. The public option – for which Democrats lust – would fuel an elephantine $1.5 trillion overhaul of this life-and-death industry. Having Uncle Sam in the room while negotiating drug prices and hospital reimbursement rates will be like sitting beside Warren Buffett at an art auction. Guess who goes home with the goodies?
A public option is just the opening bid for eventual nationalization of American medicine. As House Banking Committee chairman Barney Frank (D., Mass.) told SinglepayerAction.Org on July 27: “The best way we’re going to get single payer, the only way, is to have a public option to demonstrate its strength and its power.”
Barack Obama seconds that emotion.
“I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately,” Obama told a March 24, 2007 Service Employees International Union health-care forum. “There’s going to be potentially some transition process. I can envision [single payer] a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out.” As he told the AFL-CIO in 2003: “I happen to be a proponent of single-payer, universal health-care coverage. . . . That’s what I’d like to see.”
And why a public option just for medicine? Wouldn’t government clothing stores be best suited to furnish the garments Americans need to survive each winter? And why not a public option for restaurants? Shouldn’t Americans have universal access to fine dining?
All kidding aside, government medicine has proved an excruciating disaster in the U.K. and Canada. Our allies’ experiences with this dreadful idea should horrify rather than inspire everyday Americans, not to mention seemingly blind Democratic politicians.
Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
This post has gone viral on the internet and is posted on thousands of message board around the world and the most common response I have seen are some profoundly ignorant postings from leftists screaming that the WHO Report ranks the United States number 37th in care world wide, therefore we must stink. If said leftists had taken the time to actually read the report they would see that the WHO ranks the United States number one in patient responsiveness and care, but putting the United States as number one offends the WHO’s socialist sensibilities, so they had to find a way to lower America’s ranking. They were at least nice enough in the report to admit what they were doing and how they did it.
The WHO figures into the ranking weather or not the country in question has socialized health care, that means that if health care dollars come from the private sector, charities or the consumer the WHO lowers the ranking. WHO also skews the mortality rates by including people who die from crime and more importantly WAR.
When you look at the breakdown the United States according to WHO is number ONE in patient responsiveness and care – http://www.photius.com/rankings/world_health_systems.html
The WHO divides the report into sections – Here is the section on patient responsiveness and level of care – the United States is ranked number one – http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/annex06_en.pdf
The WHO ranks the United States overall as 37 because we don’t have socialized health care; meaning that doesn’t meet socialists standard of “fairness”.
http://www.who.int/whr/2000/en/whr00_en.pdf – look here and do a search for the words “fairness in contributions” to see for yourself.
This means that the ranking of 37 has little to do with the quality of care people receive and it has everything to do with ideology and politics.
UPDATE II – 12- 15- 09 An article coming to the same conclusion that we did above about the WHO report LINK.
[Flashback of a piece I wrote in March 2011 – Editor]
Too many journalists like to smear, too may far left activists like to smear, too may far left academics like to smear. Put it all together and you get Columbia Journalism Review (CJR).
An example is this story that came out accusing Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck of secretly hiring actors to call in.
FM “Morning Zoo” shows often use a service to have an actor call in with a crazy story everyone can laugh at. Anyone who has worked in radio knows this. FM “zoo” shows have to because those people who they call up for those great laughs have to be actors due to FCC rules. You see it is illegal to put someone on the air unless you can be reasonably sure they know who they are talking to.
So a CJR “reporter” decided to take such a known service and accuse them of calling political news/talk shows with no evidence whatsoever. Said reporter never even called the company who has the service for comment, nor did the reporter call Limbaugh or Hannity to even ask the question. Instead the reporter just made the allegation.
The story gets worse, the story is from Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), allegedly from the finest teaching journalism professors in the country. Journalism teachers who cannot follow the basic ethics rules found in any j-school textbook. CJR is partially funded by George Soros.
UPDATE – MSNBC lefty talker Ed Schultz admits he used hired actors coached by Congressional Democrats as callers. (H/T The Blaze)
His excuse is lame. When my radio show started we had nothing and I built it up with hard work and talent to beat the competition. I never used staged ringers as callers. A good host should be ready to go an entire show filled with great content and never have to take a call. The most obvious reason why is that at times technical difficulties will prevent you form taking calls. People do not listen to a show to hear callers so quite frankly callers are not that important. That is why I never took very many calls on my show.
What will CJR have to say now?
I will have more on CJR in my upcoming book.
[Flashback of a piece I wrote in March 2011 – Editor]
While most Americans are not aware of it, the EU has become expensive, wasteful, and more undemocratic. It is becoming a regulatory leviathan rife with corruption and power hungry genuine Maoists and other communists rising to the top. I wish I could say I was exaggerating. The EU is becoming a mess and the discontent is on the rise.
This is a series of six short videos.
By the way, if you thought that Chris Christie is tough, wait till you see this guy.
The EU pushes for proposals and is trying to impose limits on sovereignty without a democratic process. They create offices and insert bureaucrats with power given to them that no one votes for and no one knows who they are. Many of which end up being former communist bloc apparatchiks. MEP Farage gets so upset in this video going after one of these new made up office holders that he gets a bit personal, but in Euro politics this is much more widely accepted. Notice how Farage directly insults certain leftists, they object, which gives him the excuse to remind them of the horrible names that they have called the opposition to the Lisbon Treaty. Irony has a special beauty, especially when it leads you to the front door of hypocrisy. Which leads Farage right back to the undemocratic ways that the EU operates. It is not always fun to watch someone get insulted, but I encourage you to get through this as the end wraps it all together quite well intellectually.
Bureaucracy vs Democracy
Untold millions are suffering for your EU State dream to continue…
[Another great piece that I wrote on my old college blog.]
There are two predominant philosophies of journalism taught in this country. The “Walter Lippmann (so called) ‘objective’ model” and what one of my J-School profs called the “Looking out for the folks” model. The former is usually presented as the preferred model at most universities (especially the Ivy’s)
The Lippmann Objective Model is anything but objective. The Lippmann model says that journalists should associate themselves with an elite technical class of people so that these experts via/with the journalists can give the “proper” information to the public so that they can “vote the right way”.
At first, the Orwellian nature of the Lippmann Model is not so pointedly explained, but as time goes on reporters get it and the coverage of the elite media shows it. [If you doubt me I challenge you to follow this LINK and scroll down to the quote from Dr. Rahe and the excerpt from Lippmann’s book – Editor]
For example, the reporter and/or editor has a point of view he wishes to present. So he opens his rolodex and contacts an “expert” he knows will give him the sound-bite he wants and presents him as just an objective expert who they found at random. Or said reporter will have a man on the street section, but the reporter will call a few people he knows to be on that street, complete with the narrative that the reporter knows will present.
Oh? You think I’m kidding? OK just a few examples:
CNN Debates: Unbiased and Undecided Voters Turn Out to be Democrat Operatives (most of whom had appeared on CNN before)
Of course this is a trick commonly used by PR operatives:
Washington Post: Obama Town Hall Questioners Were Campaign Ringers
Obama’s Photo Op with Cheering Troops Staged
BUSTED: Democrats putting campaign ringers in town halls falsely claiming to be doctors!
Of course the Associated Press knows this goes on, but only appreciates it when leftists do it:
The “looking out for the folks” model is often quoted by Bill O’Reilly, but Bill, as he will tell you, is more of a commentator than a straight news man. The spirit of the kind of journalism O’Reilly did when he was a straight news man is closer to this model. The “looking out for the folks” model certainly resembles more of the ethical ideal in what people expect from journalism and is what “Lippmann Objective Model” media outlets claim to be on their face.
Enough with the preliminary goodies and on to the meat.
Oh the horror! Fox bureau chief told reporters to be ‘skeptical’
By Mark Tapscott
You think the most essential purpose of journalism and the reason the Founders included freedom of the press in the First Amendment was to insure independent reporting about government, politicians, and public policy issues, right?
Well, you must be wrong because Fox News Washington Bureau Chief Bill Sammon is getting a raft of garbage from liberal activists masquerading as journalists at Media Matters, some liberal bloggers and a scattering of real journalists who ought to know better.
Why? Politico’s headline captures the controversy perfectly: “Fox editor urged climate skepticism.”
A journalist being skeptical? Who would ever have thought such a thing could be. I don’t know, maybe anybody who has heard this (attributed long ago to a crusty desk editor at the illustrious City News Bureau in Chicago): “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.”
In other words, we journalists are paid to BE SKEPTICAL.
For the record, here’s what Sammon said in a Dec. 8, 2009, memo to his reporting staff shortly after the Climategate global warming email scandal erupted:
“Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data, we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.”
Now I am from out of town and all, but Sammon’s injuction sounds to me exactly like what editors are supposed to tell their charges – report what A claims and what B says about what A claims, but keep your personal views about both A and B out of it.
Note that Sammon includes both those who say the planet has warmed – i.e. global warming advocates – and those who claim the opposite, that the planet has cooled – global warming critics. How much more even-handed – dare I say it, fair and balanced? – can the guy be?
There is also the factual nature of Sammon’s statement that critics question data. Critics DO question the data for a warming planet. He doesn’t demand that his reporters agree with the critics about the data or tell viewers that the critics are right and the global warming advocates are wrong.
Yet, Salon’s headline claims the Fox news executive was “again caught demanding conservative spin.” And the lead that follows makes another false statement, claiming Sammon directed his “anchors and reporters to adopt right-wing spin when discussing the news.”
Are these people so arrogant as to think the rest of us are too stupid to see that Salon totally and completely misrepresented Sammon’s comment?
The back story here, of course, is that Media Matters is doing exactly what billionaire radical liberal financier George Soros paid it $1 million to do, which is to trash Fox News at every opportunity no matter what the facts might be in any given situation.
Watching this campaign unfold, it becomes clear that Fox News drives today’s extremist liberals into the same sort of eye-bulging, irrational, spittle-flying, blind rage that we saw back in the 1950s from the far right whack-jobs in the John Birch Society who claimed Ike was either a fool or a card-carrying commie.
Now, just so everybody reading this knows: Sammon is a former White House reporter for The Examiner. I count him as a friend, a respected colleague and a solid journalist. And Fox News puts me in front of a camera as a talking head once in a while.
So how long you think it will be before Sammon’s critics claim my comments here aren’t credible as a result? The reality is that the left-leaning MSNBC folks sit me down in front of their cameras to bloviate far more frequently than Fox does. Go figure.
So here’s something to ponder when the paid Fox detractors at Media Matters tell you Sammon and I are both former Washington Timesmen and are thus Republican mouthpieces:
I was inducted into the First Amendment Center’s Freedom of Information Hall of Fame a few years ago. I mention this not to boast, but because I was among a bunch of very smart people for whom I have great respect – even though they came predominantly from the liberal side of things.
But I don’t recall seeing anybody from Media Matters among the inductees.
Another great piece from my old college blog…
1 – Eliminate Bush Tax Cuts – Well you already know about this, but what you might not know is that Democrats do not propose really going after the rich at all. After all how will George Soros and Teresa Heinz Kerry fund the Tides Foundation and all the Democrats 527’s? Instead their tax hike proposals target productive wage earners and small businesses who take in over $250,000 on paper, but in reality most of that is put back into the business so these people are usually not wealthy at all. I will be posting an article soon that will prove to you that Democrats do not and have not had any real intention of taxing the very rich, but instead are very interested in sticking it to the productive. You class envy warriors are going to freak when you see it.
2 – Repeal the Patriot Act – as we said in number eight below, not only was this not repealed, the Democrats doubled down on it. Now we get to ask you if Obama is spying on YOUR library book list!
3 – Cap & Trade – Obama decided to let this die in the Senate without much presidential support. He decided to attempt to legislate on his own by abusing the supposedly highly limited regulation authority given from previous laws (unconstitutional: see Justice Scalia on “junior varsity Congress”).
4 – Illegal Immigrant Amnesty within one year – He had the majority and could have passed it, but knew that he didn’t have the political capital to pull this off and ObamaCare so bye bye.
5 – Close Gitmo – Another dumb idea and when they saw how bad some of the guys there were… well see number 6 below.
6 – Civilian trials for terrorists – A bad idea to begin with. The administration and a few less than sharp legal minds on our current court got a fresh lesson in why JOHNSON V. EISENTRAGER was good case law and should never have been tinkered with.
7 – Sign the Freedom of Choice Act – Umm this bill is no longer a legislative priority…..
8 – Put an end to warrantless wiretapping – Where are the so called “far left privacy advocates” now? The Obama Administration (along with a willing Democratic Leadership in Congress) has consistently (1, 2, 3, 4, 5,) pushed for more domestic spying ability and extended the Patriot Act. More spying includes including wanting more wire taps on the internet and arguing that you have no reasonable expectation of privacy in email or cell phones or… well I think you got the point. Of course who was the first TV personality to speak out on these privacy violations. Clue: He’s the new Oprah.
9 – Limit the influence of lobbyists – Wow. Well here is a list of about 20 links to press reports that remind us why under Obama Big Business Loves Big Government.
10 – Cut income tax for seniors – Well actually even though the deduction rate tables were reduced for one year for many people. Come tax time everyone had to pay up. HERE is a list of the new taxes that have been passed by the Democrats under Obama ($670 billion worth).
Political Arena 