If Bill O’Reilly proves anything (over and over again) it is that Gresham’s Law (generalized beyond economics) reigns supreme: Specious reasoning will always drive out careful thinking.
From The O’Reilly Factor, email segment for July 5:
“Bill, you keep asking what the Republicans have to replace Obamacare. Under the Constitution, there is no role for the Federal government in healthcare.”
–Felicia
O’Reilly:
“That’s not true, Felicia. The opening paragraph of the Constitution says the welfare of the people must be promoted. A just healthcare system comes under that banner.”
[Tom Woods] couldn’t resist answering this [for which we should all be grateful].
I don’t know much about the political bent of Esquire Magazine. Is it left-liberal? (Bound to be.) Is it comfortably mainstream? (Ditto.) It looks like a déclassé New Yorker.
What I do know is that for “finishing off a 16-year old Yemeni boy—the son of Anwar al-Awlakias”—this writer, other non-beltway libertarians, and reporters outside the orthodoxy (the good folks at RT are an example) called Obama a murderer AROUND THE TIME HE COMMITTED THAT MURDER, not a year later.
Tom Junod of Esquire, a seemingly affable fellow, has only NOW come out with a “highly critical article about President Obama’s drone strike program.” To CNN, “Junod described Pres. Obama’s presidency as ‘lethal,'” and “told anchor Brooke Baldwin “why he wrote the article and the work that went into it.”
Read it, if you don’t mind the cloying format: a letter to the beloved Strong Man.
The point is that the establishment—Democratic and Republican—decides when Truth should be allowed to emerge. It’s not a conscious process; but a reflexive one. It’s not that these interests know the truth when they see it. Rather, reflexively, they marginalize those who speak it, until such politically opportune times when the truth can be spoken. Then they act (quite sincerely) as though they discovered said truth and are performing a great public service by speaking it.
Those vested in the US “mission” in Afghanistan—we don’t have a legitimate one—will spin the execution of an innocent woman by the Taliban in the province of Parwan, as a Taliban-specific atrocity. In that case, the Taliban represents the rest of tribal Afghanistan’s (mostly Pashtun) people quite well.
CNN buried the truth according to Christine Fair, with the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, in a little-watched, Sunday morning segment, which was further pruned for the online article (“Taliban shoot woman 9 times in public execution as men cheer”):
“It’s really important to not see this exclusively in terms of the Taliban, but this is a set of practices that actually have existed and continue to exist throughout Afghanistan.”
Honor killings are as endemic to Afghanistan as the opium trade, only much older. Dare I say that these “customs” are as old as Sharia?
And, as Faire pointed out (and this writer has with respect to honor killings elsewhere), women are active in mediating these killings against other women, daughters included.
Here’s what a “Palestinian” woman, Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud, did to her child, after the girl – who had been raped and impregnated by her brothers – refused to commit suicide.
Plastic bag, razor, and wooden stick in hand, the mother entered her sleeping daughter’s room. “Tonight you die, Rofayda,” the wicked witch announced, before wrapping the bag tightly around the girl’s head. The murderess Qaoud then spent the next 20 minutes slicing away at Rofayda’s wrists, ignoring pleas of “No, mother, no!” Just to be sure, this alleged mother struck her daughter on the head with the stick after the poor child passed out.
Yet members of Qaoud’s community are nonplussed – they see the woman as driven by devotion to both community and family.
Presidents Barack Obama—who followed George Bush and the Republicans to Afghanistan—has run out of excuses for this nation-building expedition. A tribal society is never going to apprecaite the joys of gay marriage, the ballot box, and female emancipation.
Someone asserted in my presence the other day that Obama Care would not affect his physician (and by extension, his own medical care).
The poster person for this mathematical improbability is Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi promised(and she believes her own institutionalized stupidity) to expand government through this enormous entitlement program, and drastically reduce the deficit and debt at the same time.
Pelosi math aside, call Obama’s Affordable Care Act what you may—penalty, tax, plunder, rape—it’ll affect you and your physician.
The health care law “includes the largest set of tax law changes in more than 20 years,” according to the Treasury inspector general who oversees the IRS. The agency will have to hire thousands of workers to manage it, requiring significant budget increases that already are being targeted by congressional Republicans determined to dismantle the president’s signature initiative.
“Knowing the complexity of the health law, there’s no question that the IRS is going to struggle with this,” said Rep. Charles Boustany Jr., R-La., chairman of the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee. “The IRS wants more resources. Well, we need to start digging down into what are they doing with the resources and personnel.”
Treasury spokeswoman Sabrina Siddiqui said, “The overwhelming majority of funds used by the agency to implement the Affordable Care Act go to administer the premium tax credits, which will be a tax cut averaging about $4,000 for more than 20 million middle-class people and families.
…an insurance company would send the taxpayer and the IRS forms each year verifying that the taxpayer has qualified insurance. Taxpayers would file the forms with the IRS along with their returns, and the IRS would check them to make sure they match the information supplied by the insurance companies.
The IRS says it is well on its way to gearing up for the new law but has offered little information about its long-term budget and staffing needs, generating complaints from Republican lawmakers and concern from government watchdogs.
The IRS is expected to spend $881 million on the law from 2010 through 2013, hiring more than 2,700 new workers and upgrading its computer systems. “
UPDATE I (July 9): SHORTAGES. The deadly silence from the Obama Heads at The American Medical Association over the devastating survey conducted by the Doctor Patient Medical Association is understandable. Unlike the AWE (Ass With Ears) and his supporters, some doctors are able to anticipate the effects on the practice of medicine of an increase in demand for services with no adjustment in the price. Via the Daily Caller:
Eighty-three percent of American physicians have considered leaving their practices over President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, according to a survey released by the Doctor Patient Medical Association.
The DPMA, a non-partisan association of doctors and patients, surveyed a random selection of 699 doctors nationwide. The survey found that the majority have thought about bailing out of their careers over the legislation, which was upheld last month by the Supreme Court.
Even if doctors do not quit their jobs over the ruling, America will face a shortage of at least 90,000 doctors by 2020. The new health care law increases demand for physicians by expanding insurance coverage. This change will exacerbate the current shortage as more Americans live past 65.
Gerri Willis, who does good reporting, claimed that “the government has no way to enforce the individual mandate – the tax that scofflaws have to pay for failing to get health insurance coverage.”
That’s unless the IRS’s arsenal doesn’t count. Judge Andrew Napolitano corrects this misrepresentation:
