Barack Obama’s Administration Kills a Military Fly Over
For 42 years, the God and Country Rally in Idaho has started its rally with a military fly over.
The God and Country Rally is a non-denominational rally that supports American soldiers.
For 42 years the Pentagon has carried out the military fly over.
Not any more.
In Barack Obama’s America, the military is no longer allowed to do such things if the group requesting the fly over is Christian oriented.
That’s not an exaggeration.
Let’s roll the tape:
Killing Grandma: How Sarah Palin Won the Healthcare Debate
My newspaper column went up after midnight last night and already one lefty is frothing at the mouth.
What did I do? Nothing more than quote Democrats’ own words.
Oh, and I pointed out that Sarah Palin won the healthcare debate after using the phrase “death panels.”
You can check out the column here. Here’s an excerpt:
Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm Emanuel’s brother and one of Obama’s health-care advisors, wrote in a January 2009 white paper that health care should be rationed in a way that “promot[es] and reward[s] social usefulness.” He said age could play a factor in determining who can and cannot access health-care resources. Emanuel also wrote, “[S]ervices provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens [in the body politic] are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.” Obama addressed this too, saying, “Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. … And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.” . . . . We will spend money we don’t have to pay for health care, or we will prioritize who gets treatment. It is an inevitable fact of life that the more the government outlays to keep you alive, the more your life becomes subject to a cost/benefit analysis.
Be sure to read the whole column and take note of the leftist crying in the comments.
The Mob Marches In: American Democracy in All Its Glory
Above is a picture taken by my friend Will Davis of the Monroe County Reporter in Forsyth, GA.
Forsyth only has 4,000 people. 700 of them turned out to speak to Congressman Jim Marshall (D-GA 08) about healthcare.
The line was long. The day was hot. More and more people came. Congressman Marshall, a Democrat running in a decidedly Republican congressional district (he’s also my former law school professor), was patient.
Marshall, like the people in his district, opposes the healthcare proposals winding their way through Congress. Marshall went so far as to say he’d vote against all five of the present proposals.
The crowd got a little rowdy, but people feel passionately on the issue. You’ll see though that they were not really a mob. They were not really protestors. They were citizens turning out to tell their Congressman they are greatly opposed to Barack Obama’s agenda.
And he listened. The media, of course, will not cover gatherings like this because there really is no news and it is not in a major metropolitan area. But peaceful assemblies like this are far more common than those we’ve seen on television — and even those were not chaotic masses of angry people as the media would have us believe.
This is American democracy in all its glory.
Dear Senator Mike Enzi and Heritage Foundation: Shut Up
[updated]: As if on cue, Stuart Butler from the Heritage Foundation, has decided to take issue with Sarah Palin’s use of the phrase “death panels.” Butler is defending Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm’s brother, who has written that we need not guarantee healthcare benefits to people with dementia because they cannot be full participants in the body politic.
Emanuel’s actual quote: “[S]ervices provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens [in the body politic] are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia.”
Butler is defending Emanuel and attacking Palin at the precise moment the Democrats are in full scale retreat on the issue because of Palin’s offensive. Sigh. These guys have the political instincts of amoebas. They cannot afford to hide behind being policy guys. That policy plays hand in hand with politics and political instincts must be brought to bear in this fight. If they cannot or will not, Heritage must shut these guys up before they cause great damage in the fight.
Because I am a big fan and come from a family of donors to the Heritage Foundation, I take no pleasure at all in writing this post. But this must be said.
The Heritage Foundation, which played a vital part in building conservative support for Romneycare in Massachusetts, is setting the stage for Republican capitulation on healthcare. This is the second time in less than a year that Heritage will have been instrumental in organizing a conservative collapse in opposition to big government. The first time was when Heritage gave conservatives cover to support TARP, calling it “vital and acceptable.”
Now with healthcare, because Heritage is trying to be “helpful”, confusion is starting to crop up among Republicans in Congress at a very critical time in the healthcare debate. Capitulation and compromise are now on the table using a bastardized version of a Heritage proposal.
[Editor's Note: It appears the Hill totally misread or misunderstood Congressman Price and I'm fixing throughout below. CNN has a more accurate description, according to Price's office, and have made changes below to correct the impression that Congressman Price was supportive of the cooperatives idea.]
Today, Congressman Tom Price rejected the possibility that he would support healthcare cooperatives as a compromise on reform.
Unlike Congressman Price, many on the Hill are following all of Heritage’s talking points. Because I can’t seem to get Heritage to realize just how badly it is about to shoot conservatives in the foot, I must endeavor to get Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY) to shut up.
Happy Warriors Until the End
In Pittsburgh this past weekend I spoke at Right Online. Rob Bluey asked if I would give the audience some advice. Let me share that with you now. If you aren’t a Christian, you may not understand this, but I’ll put it here anyway.
William Wilberforce, having become an evangelical, wrote to his good friend Prime Minister William Pitt. Wilberforce told Pitt he intended to get out of politics and dedicate himself to the Lord. Pitt relied on Wilberforce and saw Wilberforce could be someone strong and apply his faith to life if he just wouldn’t quit.
In Pitt’s reply to Wilberforce, Pitt wrote, “If a Christian may act in the several relations of life, must he seclude himself from them all to become so? Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not only to meditation only but to action.“
Pitt was no evangelical, but I think he got it there. Our faith compels us to action. But in our actions and our struggles, it often seems the Christ follower, a term I use to separate those who actually follow Christ from those who call themselves Christians by habit and nothing else, are dealt setback after setback.
On occasion our frustration gets the best of us. We get angry and frustrated. We sometimes want to sit it out — to go into seclusion and meditation.
CBO Tells Congress That Should Obamacare “Work”, It’ll Drive Up Costs
There is a new pro-Obamacare ad out by a group called “Americans for Stable Quality Care.” You can see the ad here.
The ad asks “what does health insurance reform mean for you?” One of the points is “a focus on preventing illness before it strikes.”
There’s a problem with that.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, preventative care will drive up the costs of Obamacare.
Doug Elmendorf, the CBO Director, responding to Congressman Nathan Deal, wrote that
Although different types of preventive care have different effects on spending, the evidence suggests that for most preventive services, expanded utilization leads to higher, not lower, medical spending overall.
Elmendorf went on to write
Researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care generally find that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness. An article published last year in the New England Journal of Medicine provides a good summary of the available evidence on how preventive care affects costs.3 After reviewing hundreds of previous studies of preventive care, the authors report that slightly fewer than 20 percent of the services that were examined save money, while the rest add to costs.
Now, lest anyone think either Elmendorf or I am knocking preventative care, we are not. Elmendorf notes that, “just because a preventive service adds to total spending does not mean that it is a bad investment. Experts have concluded that a large fraction of preventive care adds to spending but should be deemed ‘cost-effective.’ He’s right.
There’s just one problem that Elmendorf alludes to. The CBO cannot really score the run up in costs of preventative care under H.R. 3200, the Democrats’ healthcare legislation.
Assuming Obamacare is successful at increasing preventative care, the program will escalate costs. Then, also as Elmendorf alludes to, the government is going to have to decide who gets preventative care and who does not, if they want to contain costs.
In other words, we will get escalated unknown costs or we will get rationing, but most likely we will get both.
Back to School, Georgia
It’s sad. We have one more year before Evelyn goes off to school.
Yesterday she got moved up in Sunday School. In our church, at four, the child sits with the parents too. She won’t be four until the end of August, but since she’s an “advancing pre-K”, yesterday she attended big church for the first time.
I’ve really been depressed too. It’s a good thing she’s growing up. But it’s sad too. At least we still can watch Batman together. She’s a big fan of Batman: The Animated Series.
So sad. And she no longer calls me “daddy.” It’s “dad” now. And “mom” for Christy. Sigh.
Jack Conway Wants You to Know He’s Tough. Just Don’t Ask About His Hair Color.
Jack Conway (D-KY) is Kentucky’s Attorney General and like Joseph’s Coat of Many Colors, his hair goes from blond to brunette depending on the election cycle.
He’s so tough he called himself a “tough son of a bitch” at a campaign rally. His opponent in the Democratic Primary demanded he apologize for using profanity when kids were present, but Conway is so tough he refused to apologize before caving the very next day and profusely apologizing for everything other than his ever changing hair color.
When a guy tells you he is a tough SOB, he probably is not. But he might, like Jack Conway, be “Jack Tough”. And for “Jack Tough” men like Jack Conway, we dedicate this to you (it uses “SOB” so maybe NSFW):
The So-Called Astroturf Is Locally Grown
If the Democrats were honest about all the protests over healthcare, they would have to admit they are being outmaneuvered with their own tactics. That is why they are accusing protestors at townhalls of being astroturf. They are so used to planting anti-war protestors at events and using union thugs, they have never seen actual middle class working people take time off from their jobs to protest.
Here’s a clue for them — it is not lobbyist backed astroturf. It is not AFP and FreedomWorks hired guns showing up. The networks they have are actually not large enough to make it all happen.
What the Democrats are experiencing is the power of local radio. I’m getting asked by lots of people, “Okay, seriously, how are people finding out about these events and showing up?” Look no further than 97.1 FM in St. Louis. The morning guys there have been pushing people to take on Russ Carnahan over Cash for Clunkers and healthcare.
In Florida, it’s places like WCOA in Pensacoloa where my good friend Ron Frasier works. Lee Rogers at KSFO both on air and online has information on all the local townhalls and which congressmen to call.
It’s the same whether it’s Herman Cain in Atlanta or Chris Krok in Macon or Rick Roberts in San Diego or Alan Autry in Fresno or literally hundreds of other talk radio voices across the country.
It’s all being done on local radio, flying under the radar of the D.C. hacks at the DNC. That’s the real power here. It’s power the DNC and the left do not have. That’s why the left is going after Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Works, and the healthcare industry, while themselves relying on real thugs from the SEIU and AFL-CIO to threaten and intimidate the middle class workers taking time off to oppose Obamacare.
The real astroturf here is the left relying on unions and MoveOn.org to drum up sentiment against the middle class workers opposed to healthcare. The polls show a majority of Americans oppose Obamacare. The protests are real and local talk radio is giving voice and aid to the opposition.
The left cannot compete with local talk radio rallying local citizens to take local action. They can only use national news networks to smear the citizens and discredit their voices. The problem for them is that there are a lot more local radio shows and local people mad about Obamacare. And the more the left attacks them, the madder the middle class will get at the left.
It’s a win-win for opponents to Obamacare, which is why we’re seeing a sudden shift in tactics — Democrats arranging their own protests outside Republican congressional offices and sending union thugs to threaten and harass middle class protestors. Because no one is actually buying that these middle class working families in their polo shirts and Banana Republic jeans are doing any real harm, the Democrats will get union thugs to go start real, physical fights at townhalls to improve their version of events on the nightly newscasts.
It’s what losing dictatorships do — send in thugs to start violence in peaceful protests, then blame the peaceful protestors. We see it in Iran, China, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Indonesia, Korea, and other third world nations.
The Democrats know they are losing. Soon they’ll pick back up the Fairness Doctrine because of it.
Congressman Kratovil FAIL
Frank Kratovil (D-MD) is a freshman member of congress representing Maryland’s First Congressional District. He’s also extremely vulnerable.
You’d think he wouldn’t do stuff like this.
A young boy in the crowd asks the Congressman, “My grandfather is a retire war veteran. What are you going to do to make sure he is cared for with Health Care?”
Congressman Kratovil’s response? He starts talking about suicide.
See for yourself:
Why to make the kid go home worrying! Oh, as the Salisbury News points out, Kratovil never did directly answer the boy’s question after lecturing him on solider suicides.