The Strategy for Defending Obamacare: Misrepresentation and Diversion

Demonstrating for a fact that he does not read RedState, today the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne advocates the strategy I warned against over the past couple of weeks and he also demonstrates why debating with the delusional and dishonest is an exercise in futility. In an op-ed titled The noise around Obamacare he outlines the problem for the Democrat party and his solution:

The ace political and baseball prognosticator Nate Silver titled his book about prediction and statistical mastery “The Signal and the Noise.” Rarely has it been more important to distinguish between the two than in the uproar over the launch of the Affordable Care Act.

As Silver put it, “The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.”

[…]

Opponents of Obamacare want government to let the market do what the market does. That’s why the program’s critics have not come up with a plausible alternative to covering the uninsured — and why many in their ranks have been trying to hack away at Medicare and Medicaid. Their overarching purpose is to get government out of the way. If the market generates vast inequalities, this must be because such inequalities maximize efficiency.

Thus, foes of the new health-care law aren’t against it because its Web site worked badly or because the president once said that everybody could keep their current policies when it turned out that some in the small individual insurance market got cancellation notices. For those trying to kill the law, such noise is designed to distract attention from what they really think, which is that we should let non-elderly Americans sink or swim in the insurance arrangements that existed before Obamacare.

This is why people like Dionne should never be allowed to play with matches.

Via: Red State

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[VIDEO] Her Health Plan Was Canceled, New Options Are Double the Cost

An Illinois woman, Betsy Tadder, is one of the 1.5 million (and counting) Americans whose insurance plan was canceled because of Obamacare.

Right now, she pays $454 a month for a health insurance plan she likes. But once she’s officially loses her coverage, she’s offered options that are “unaffordable,” she told Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.”

Under the new policy, the cheapest option costs at least $871 a month, and includes benefits she doesn’t need, like pediatric dentistry and maternity coverage.

Now Tadder is trying to figure out what’s next. She said she thinks her family will be without health insurance by the end of this year.

Watch her full interview below.

Via: The Foundry

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Romney: Christie 'Could Easily Become Our Nominee and Save Our Party’

(CNSNews.com) - Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who lost the 2012 election to President Barack Obama, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that he believed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie could “easily” become the GOP presidential nominee in 2016 and “save our party.”

Christie most recently made national news when he decided to drop a legal challenge to rulings in New Jersey state courts that declared same-sex marriage legal there. And not long before that, he changed his position on the question of whether illegal aliens should get in-state tuition rates at New Jersey state colleges. Now he backs legislation that would give that privilege to illegal aliens.

These two moves won Christie a recent article from the Los Angeles Times that described him as having "staked his place near the political middle ground."

Romney’s statement that Christie could “save our party” came even as Time Magazine’s website published an excerpt from the upcoming book “Double Down: Game Change 2012” by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, that was featured above the masthead on the Drudge Report, and that describes a Republican vice presidential vetting process that resulted in Romney himself deciding not choosing Christie as his vice presidential running mate.

Via: CNS News

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Sauk Rapids Graphic Artist Challenges National Security Agency

SAUK RAPIDS, Minn. (WCCO) – It was Edward Snowden’s revelations of domestic spying by the National Security Agency that hatched the idea — graphic artist Dan McCall would take the NSA’s emblem and create a new look with a funny twist.

“When I got finished I thought, this is pretty good – I thought it was fun,” McCall said.

Soon, he was having T-shirts emblazoned with the NSA logo accompanied by the slogan, “peeping while you’re sleeping.” Under the parodied emblem was the statement, “the only part ofgovernment that actually listens.”

What McCall meant as pure parody, apparently wasn’t very funny to bureaucrats at the NSA.

(credit: CBS)

While he calls it parody they call a violation of the spy agency’s intellectual property.

Via: CBS Minnesota

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High Deductibles Chase the Middle Class from Health Services

In a recent conversation, a good buddy enraged by his new private insurance premiums and $5,800-per-year deductible said something that struck me as undoubtedly prophetic. 

"I'd literally need to be dying before I would start paying this ridiculous deductible for routine care."

Under ObamaCare, those who work for a living incur massive premium and deductible increases to subsidize those that cannot or will not provide their own insurance.  In the universe of ObamaCare, unless you are among the privileged dependency class that enjoys free health care, gone are the days when cautionary calls can be made to the doctor because a child has a stomachache or bad cough, because such calls will cost you five hundred bucks or so.

As with so many utopian policies of the progressive Left, ObamaCare is rife with unintended consequences that inflict pernicious pain and damage on society.

When Ideology Trumps All

In December of 2009, Mark Steyn adroitly warned, "Democrat operators ... know that what matters is to get something, anything across the river, and then burn the bridge behind you" and that single-payer, government-run health care is "the fast track to a permanent left-of-center political culture."

As recently as August 12 of this year, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid openly confirmed Steyn's prediction that ObamaCare is but a stepping stone toward achieving the ultimate goal of the progressive left: a single-payer system.

Via: American Thinker

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Obama’s real killing fields

There’s something ‘off’ about President Barack Hussein Obama allegedly telling aides while discussing drone strikes, I’m ‘really good at killing people’.

Obama doesn’t own up to anything, even including who he is.

Obama has a track record for never taking ownership of anything other than that which other people have accomplished over a lifetime of sweat.

In this latest revelation, one can almost hear strains of the Peter Gunn theme song, or with just a little imagination find Obama’s smirking omnipresent face on display down at the post office among ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ posters of yore. Portraying himself as the gun slinger in drone strikes is a bit of a stretch, as if there is anything Obama isn’t, it’s decisive.  All lobbing of bombs from Obama’s direction are made behind the hidden safety of other people, the most prominent of them wearing skirts.

If Obama truly told aides: “I’m really good at killing people”, he’s lying again, for many now know that Obama walks zombie-like in the tracks of Valerie Jarrett.

Largely missing in Obama’s alleged gun slinger drone talk is that he’s killing all not so softly with his signature ObamaCare: At least 3.5 million Americans have already received cancellation notices from their insurance companies (AP).  Bureaucrats are already lining up for the 15-member “death panel” that categorizes the elderly 70 and over as “units” though they’re still ‘Grandma‘ and ‘Grandpa‘ to their loving families.

Imagine the fate of a country whose president got elected to fundamentally transform a country to which he had contributed nothing and whose president supposedly boasted to aides in drone discussions, ‘I’m good at killing’.

Unlike some of the victims of ongoing false flag operations in the U.S., the victims of Obama’s drones are made of flesh and blood.

Via: Canada Free Press

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California: High-Speed Rail Faces Inevitable Complaints

Here’s the first rule all new council members learn: The sewer plant has to go somewhere. And the neighbors are never going to be happy about it.

Substitute “high-speed rail line” for “sewer plant” and you see one of the main problems the $68 billion construction project is facing.

A lot of folks who should know better don’t seem to realize that.

Take, for example, a recent Associated Press story about the troubles the rail project is facing in the Central Valley. The folks quoted in the story included a Fresno man who’s losing his restaurant to the project, a Hanford engineer whose home is on the proposed rail line, a raisin grower who will have to sell some of his farmland to the project and a Chowchilla almond farmer whose groves are endangered.

Of course these people are upset and want to see the project stopped. All the talk in the world about the benefits the rail project will bring to the state, their communities and the people of California, valid though it may be, doesn’t take away from the fact that they will lose their business/home/field/orchard.

The NIMBY position, which is behind a bunch of the complaints, charges and lawsuits that have bedeviled the high-speed rail project, stems from a perfectly logical question: Why should I have have to pay the price and deal with the inconvenience of this project?

Or, to put if more bluntly, “It’s not fair.”

That’s a cry that’s heard at every city council, school board, planning commission and board of supervisors meeting in the state whenever a major — or not so major — project comes up for a vote.

But if a project benefits the larger public, it has to go somewhere, despite the inevitable screams from the people affected by it.

No one’s saying that the high-speed rail plan isn’t a controversial subject. Although prep work on the first section from Madera to Fresno has begun, actual construction has been on hold while the state tries to deal with a Sacramento Superior Court decision earlier this year that questioned whether the current plan is the same as the one that was approved by voters when they overwhelmingly approved a $10 billion bond measure in 2008.

Via: California Political Review

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Expert: At least 129 million will ‘not be able to keep’ health care plan if Obamacare fully implemented

If Obamacare is fully implemented, 68 percent of Americans with private health insurance will not be able to keep their plan, according to health care economist Christopher Conover.

Conover is a research scholar in the Center for Health Policy & Inequalities Research at Duke University and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. In an interview with The Daily Caller, he laid out what he estimates the consequences of Obamacare’s implementation will ultimately be.

“Bottom line: of the 189 million Americans with private health insurance coverage, I estimate that if Obamacare is fully implemented, at least 129 million (68 percent) will not be able to keep their previous health care plan either because they already have lost or will lose that coverage by the end of 2014,” he said in an email. ”But of these, ‘only’ the 18 to 50 million will literally lose coverage, i.e., have their plans entirely taken away. This includes 9.2-15.4 million in the non-group market and 9-35 million in the employer-based market. The rest will retain their old plans but have to pay higher rates for Obamacare-mandated bells and whistles.”

Conover also says it is hard to imagine President Obama didn’t know these statistics when he was flacking for his health care bill by promising Americans they could keep their health insurance if they liked it.

“If President Obama himself believed this the first time he said it, he was poorly advised,” Conover said.

“The problem is that he said it at least 24 times, most of which occurred after his own rule-writers had estimated that 49-80 percent of small employer plans would have lost their grandfather status by 2013, along with 34-64 percent of large employer plans. The same rule estimated that each year 40 to 67 percent of non-group plans not already grandfathered would lose their grandfather status. Given how extensively presidential statements — especially to a joint session of Congress — are vetted and fact-checked, it is pretty inconceivable that President Obama was not aware that he was engaged in some degree of truth-twisting.”

See TheDC’s full interview with Conover below:

Some current and former Obama administration officials are now admitting that the president’s “if you like your health insurance, you can keep it” promise is not technically true. But, they argue, it is only not true for a very small percentage of those insured. Do you agree with that assessment?

Via: Daily Caller

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