Democrats

Republicans Move to Repeal ObamaCare

Calvin Freiburger Congress, Democrats, GOP, health care, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, NewsReal, strategy

My NRB colleague Joseph Klein has a good look at the potential and pitfalls of the strategy. He notes that, since the Democrats still control the Senate and White House, ObamaCare won’t actually be repealed before 2012, but House Republicans have another way they can get policy results in the short term:

The Republican-controlled House also has the power of the purse, which its leaders say they intend to exercise by denying funding for implementing and enforcing key portions of Obamacare. But in order to make this stick, the Obama administration must be prohibited from moving discretionary monies around to make up for any shortfall in direct Obamacare funding. That means making it a criminal act for any Executive branch employee to use any monies appropriated by Congress to implement or enforce any portion of Obamacare unless there is an express Congressional appropriation specified for that purpose.

The time to impose such spending limitations with criminal sanctions is during the lead-up to the vote on raising the debt ceiling that will be occurring in a few weeks.  This is the opportunity for the Republicans who are serious about cutting discretionary spending across the board, and stopping any spending on Obamare, to exercise maximum leverage.

President Obama will either have to blink or face the consequences of a government shutdown due to his intransigence on Obamacare and other wasteful spending. That’s a battle the Republicans should win hands-down if they stick to their guns.

Indeed. Republicans squishy on the repeal because it won’t pass need to understand something: without the presidency or a veto-proof Congress, the GOP shouldn’t expect to pass much of its own legislation into law at all. The objective for the time being isn’t to pass good laws, but to block bad ones where possible and to keep forcing the Democrats to explain their position on things like health care to the American people, in particular their insistence on keeping something the country doesn’t want.

Without losing sight of other important business, Republicans should periodically reintroduce ObamaCare repeal bills until Election Day 2012, to keep the bill’s failings – and its supporters’ folly and hubris – fresh in the public’s mind.

The Democrats Hate Democracy

Calvin Freiburger Barack Obama, big government, bureaucracy, Congress, democracy, Democrats, health care, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Krauthammer, Left, liberalism
Exhibit A, courtesy of Charles Krauthammer:

A month ago, Medicare issued a regulation providing for end-of-life counseling during annual “wellness” visits. It was all nicely buried amid the simultaneous release of hundreds of new Medicare rules.


Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D.,Ore.), author of Section 1233, was delighted. “Mr. Blumenauer’s office celebrated ‘a quiet victory,’ but urged supporters not to crow about it,” reports the New York Times. Deathly quiet. In early November, his office sent an e-mail plea to supporters: “We would ask that you not broadcast this accomplishment out to any of your lists . . . e-mails can too easily be forwarded.” They had been lucky that “thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it. . . . The longer this regulation goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it.”

So much for Democratic transparency — and for their repeated claim that the more people learn what is in the health-care law, the more they will like it. Turns out ignorance is the Democrats’ best hope.
And regulation is their perfect vehicle — so much quieter than legislation. Consider two other regulatory usurpations in just the last few days.
On December 23, the Interior Department issued Secretarial Order 3310, reversing a 2003 decision and giving itself the authority to designate public lands as “Wild Lands.” A clever twofer: (1) a bureaucratic power-grab — for seven years up through December 22, wilderness-designation had been the exclusive province of Congress, and (2) a leftward lurch — more land to be “protected” from such nefarious uses as domestic-oil exploration in a country disastrously dependent on foreign sources.
The very same day, the president’s Environmental Protection Agency declared that in 2011 it would begin drawing up anti-carbon regulations on oil refineries and power plants, another power grab effectively enacting what Congress had firmly rejected when presented as cap-and-trade legislation.

For an Obama bureaucrat, however, the will of Congress is a mere speed bump. Hence this regulatory trifecta, each one moving smartly left — and nicely clarifying what the spirit of bipartisan compromise that President Obama heralded in his post-lame-duck December 22 news conference was really about: a shift to the center for public consumption and political appearance only.

Read the rest. It’s an outrage that this country has gotten to a point where unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats can make de facto laws outside of the legislative process, contrary to the will of the people, and that a political party called Democratic of all names relies upon this sleazy, un-American, anti-democratic process to implement its agenda. Let’s hope the incoming Congress has at least a few Republicans who have the spine to call this out as the disgrace it is.

New on NewsReal – Hawaii Governor Revives Birth Certificate Wars Because He Wants to End the Controversy. Yeah, Right

Calvin Freiburger Birthers, Democrats, dishonesty, extremism, Hawaii, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, NewsReal, Obama birth certificate, scandal, stupidity

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

Thankfully, TV and the blogosphere haven’t suffered any major Birther eruptions in a while, but Hawaii’s new Democratic governor, Neil Abercrombie, is poised to reignite the dumbest of Barack Obama’s scandals…in the name of putting a long-overdue stop to it. Abercrombie intends to settle the question of Obama’s citizenship status once and for all by releasing more previously-undisclosed birth records:

[T]he governor made clear in the CNN interview that he will push forward on this matter regardless of whether the White House is privately worried that it may bring more attention to the so-called “birthers” who continue to deny that Obama was born in America – despite evidence showing that he was.

“We haven’t had any of those discussions,” Abercrombie said of the White House. “It’s a matter of principle with me. I knew his mom and dad. I was here when he was born. Anybody who wants to ask a question honestly could have had their answer already.”

Asked if one option is to ask Obama to waive his privacy rights so that a copy of his actual birth certificate can be released publicly, Abercrombie cut off a reporter’s question.

“No, no, no – it’s not up to the president,” he said.  “It has nothing to do with the president.  It has to do with the people of Hawaii who love him, people who love his mom and dad. It has to do with respect the office of the president is entitled to. And it has to do with respect that every single person’s mother and father are entitled to.”

All the evidence we have overwhelmingly indicates that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii and is constitutionally eligible for the presidency. The facts are on Abercrombie’s side, as far as the question of Obama’s eligibility goes, but his dramatic talk of standing up to “a political agenda not worthy of any good American” reeks of partisan posturing.

Read the rest on NewsRealBlog.

New on NewsReal – Yet Another Reason ObamaCare Is Even Worse Than You Think

Calvin Freiburger Barack Obama, big government, bureaucracy, Democrats, health care, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Left, liberalism, NewsReal, politics

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

I don’t think this is quite what outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wanted the American people thinking about when she said we needed to pass ObamaCare to “find out what’s in it,” but a new Daily Beast column by Shikha Dalmia of the Reason Foundation is a perfect example of why that statement rightfully scared people half to death. Dalmia takes a look at aspects of the “reform” that haven’t gotten much attention thus far, but threaten to transform American healthcare into “one big entrapment scheme”:

[I]n an effort to offset [the “doc fix’s”] $20 billion price tag, it has included a little twist to squeeze working families called “exchange recapture subsidy.” Under this provision, the government will go after low-wage families to return any excess subsidies they get under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

When the government hands out subsidies, it will use a household’s income in the previous year as the basis for guessing what the household is qualified to get in the current year. But if the household’s income grows midyear, the subsidy recapture provision will require it to repay anywhere from $600 to $3,500, compared to the $450 that the law originally called for.

This will make it very hazardous for poor working families to get ahead. In the original law, the loss of subsidy with rising income already meant absurdly high effective marginal tax rates—the implicit tax on every additional dollar of income earned. How high? The Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon puts them at 229 percent for families of four who increase their earnings by an amount equal to 5 percent of the federal poverty level or $1,100. In other words, a family that added this amount to an income of $44,700 would actually see its total income fall by $1,419 due to the loss of subsidies.

The subsidy recapture provision—essentially a tax collection scheme—means that low-wage, cash-strapped families will have no escape from these perverse tax rates. Many of them will find themselves owing the government thousands of dollars in back taxes. Since it is unlikely that they will have this kind of money sitting around, they will face a massive incentive to either fudge their returns or work for cash to avoid reporting additional income. Either way, Uncle Sam will come after them, just as it does with recipients of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the negative income tax scheme that is the inspiration behind Obamacare’s subsidies. In 2004, EITC recipients were 1.76 times more likely to be audited than others, no doubt because it is easier for the government to recover unpaid taxes from poor people than “lawyered up” rich people.

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

New on NewsReal – Shepard Smith Goes Nuclear on GOP "Grinches" Over 9/11 Health Bill

Calvin Freiburger 9/11, Anthony Weiner, Congress, Democrats, dishonesty, GOP, Hannity, health care, Left, NewsReal, Shepard Smith

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

Many outlets, including the Huffington Post, Mediaite, and the Examiner, are increasingly taking notice of Fox News anchor (and longtime left-wing drama queen) Shepard Smith for his alleged courage and principle in distancing himself from the rest of the channel’s right-wing propagandizing. He’s currently being lauded for having taken up the cause of a controversial bill to provide medical care for 9/11 first responders, angrily unloading on Republican Grinches who would dare steal Christmas from American heroes:

We’re able to put a 52 story building so far down there at Ground Zero, we’re able to pay for tax cuts for billionaires who don’t need them and it’s not going to stimulate the economy. But we can’t give health care to Ground Zero first responders who ran right into the fire? Went down there to save people? Do people know what this city was like that day? People were walking over bridges, they were covered in ash, they were running for their lives, they were crying, their family members were dead. And these people ran to Ground Zero to save people’s lives. And we’re not going to even give them medicine for the illnesses they got down there? It’s disgusting, it’s a national disgrace, it’s a shame and everybody who voted against should have to stand up and account for himself or herself.

The Examiner’s Elliot Levin compares Smith to several of his Fox News colleagues, including Sean Hannity, who has endorsed the bill’s purpose but expressed reservations about the particulars, such as concern for potential abuse by illegal immigrants, suspicion about the Democrats’ refusal to pass it via simple majority in the House when they had the chance, and scorn for Rep. Anthony Weiner’s unwillingness to allow that reading a bill might be an important prerequisite for supporting it. Levin says:

While Fox’s primtime lineup of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and to a lesser degree, Greta Van Susstren, are all card-carrying Republicans and openly use their shows to press a conservative agenda, Smith, who anchors the 3pm and 7pm shows, is well-known and liked throughout the TV news world for his passionate and apolitical perspectives.

He has also broken away from the typical conservative line in the past on issues such as torture.
Smith is at his best when it comes to hard news stories, such as car chases, wars, and natural disasters, but when he steps into politics he epitomizes the Fox News slogan of ‘fair and balanced,’ speaking his mind regardless of what his fellow anchors may be saying or believing.

Smith’s caterwauling certainly makes good on the “balance” part of the Fox promise, but “fair” is questionable.

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

New on NewsReal – Celebs Butting Into Politics: Jon Voight Isn’t the Problem

Calvin Freiburger Barack Obama, conservatism, Democrats, foreign affairs, Hollywood, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Jon Voight, Left, Mediaite, NewsReal, nuclear weapons, Russia, START Treaty

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

They may be outnumbered by their leftist counterparts, but Hollywood does have its share of conservatives. Among the most vocal and unapologetic is Jon Voight, who appeared on last night’s “Hannity” (guest-hosted by the incomparable Mark Steyn to discuss President Barack Obama’s deadly ineptness on nuclear proliferation, as characterized by the White House’s precious START Treaty:

VOIGHT: I hear Obama trying to convince the American people that if we give up our nuclear weapons, this will set a fine example and all other countries will follow suit. What a dangerous and naive notion that is. If President Reagan wasn’t such a powerful force of strength, we never would have seen Premier Gorbachev take down the Berlin Wall […] every American citizen should be up in arms and calling their senators to reject this Obama’s START Treaty. It’s, you know, without our nuclear might, we would be subject to becoming a weak nation and what would follow would be much more severe than what we are currently going through with 9.6 unemployment, add that to the idea that our allies are very concerned about their safety and they are warning us not to reduce our nuclear power because their very protection is dependent on our strength.

At Mediaite, Mark Joyella is perplexed that Fox News would bring in a mere actor to discuss foreign affairs…


Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

New on NewsReal – Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’s Repeal Reminds Us That Joe Lieberman’s Still a Leftist

Calvin Freiburger Democrats, Don't Ask Don't Tell, homosexuality, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Left, military, NewsReal

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

With the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell finally coming to pass, the long-disgruntled gay Left finally has something to show for their support of Barack Obama. But right now the spotlight and accolades are going to a different Democrat with an estranged relationship to the Left. At the Daily Beast, Howard Kurtz sits down with Sen. Joe Lieberman to discuss his leadership on the issue, and whether or not it makes up for his heresy on the War on Terror:

Andrew Sullivan, the gay Atlantic blogger who has championed repeal of DADT, dubbed Lieberman a “civil rights hero.” But Alex Pareene, a liberal blogger for Salon, declared that “it’s still OK to hate Joe Lieberman”—the “single most annoying man in the United States Senate”—because he remains a “sanctimonious troll.”

Lieberman says he doesn’t know whether the battle will help him politically, and his relationship with home-state Democrats may have deteriorated beyond repair. A Quinnipiac poll last January gave him a 27 percent approval rating among Democrats, and several Dems are weighing a primary challenge for 2012.

I have no principled objection to political parties and movements establishing litmus tests—even single-issue litmus tests—for their candidates. That’s their prerogative. But it is telling that left-wing Lieberman haters have chosen national security of all issues with which to divide allies and enemies. Once upon a time, Americans on both sides of the aisle believed that politics stopped at the water’s edge; the Left has since fallen so far from that ideal that today, no cause, principle, or value is safe from partisan venom or opportunism.

Speaking of those principles, Lieberman’s critics also suffer from fatal tunnel vision. Sure, he agrees with conservatives on several foreign policy issues, but on just about everything else, he’s a true-blue leftist.

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

New at NewsReal – Eric Alterman Continues to Push Lie That Won’t Die: "Bush Stole Florida"

Calvin Freiburger 2000 Election, Bush, Democrats, dishonesty, election fraud, Eric Alterman, GOP, Gore, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, judicial activism, NewsReal, revisionist history, US Supreme Court

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

In Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, leftist Stanford University professor Richard Rorty says something that reveals a great deal—perhaps more than Rorty intended—about the psyche of the Left:

I do not think that there is a nonmythological, nonideological way of telling a country’s story […]Stories about what a nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation, but rather attempts to forge a moral identity. The argument between Left and Right about which episodes in our history we Americans should pride ourselves on will never be a contest between a true and a false account of our country’s history and its identity. It is better described as an argument about which hopes to allow ourselves and which to forgo.

If leftists operate under the assumption that nobody’s version of history is, or can be, objectively true anyway, then it follows that no amount of evidence or counter-argument will persuade them to abandon factually-unsustainable positions. Accordingly, leftists cling to many falsehoods that, no matter how many times they’re killed, just won’t die: the rich aren’t paying their fare share (wrong), human life doesn’t begin at fertilization (wrong), Saddam Hussein had no WMDs or ties to terrorism (wrong and wrong), the Founders didn’t care about slavery (wrong), the Red Scare was much ado about nothing (wrong), women still face pay discrimination in the workplace (wrong), the science is settled on global warming (wrong).

The latest example comes from left-wing media apologist Eric Alterman, who on the Daily Beast decides to revisit the 2000 presidential election, in which, according to leftist mythology, the Supreme Court helped George W. Bush steal the White House from Al Gore. Naturally, Alterman can’t resist opening with a dig at Dubya for being the worst president ever. But “even if Bush had been a great president,” he insists, “Bush v. Gore would have been a disgraceful decision”:

To prevent a careful recount of the vote, the self-professed conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court ignored the decision of lower federal courts, which four times had rejected similar stay requests from the Bush campaign. As a result, the majority could not cite any real, germane Florida statutory law to support its contention that the counting must be ended immediately. Instead, the court chose to overturn a state court’s election laws as interpreted by that state’s supreme court on the basis of a legal theory that the justices simply made up on the spot: that different counting standards violate the equal protection and due process provisions of the U.S. Constitution.

First, some background: Bush won Florida’s initial vote, albeit narrowly enough to trigger a full machine recount. This recount was conducted. Bush won again. Gore requested a manual recount in four heavily-Democrat counties, as he was legally entitled to do. However, as Mark Levin explains in Men in Black, under the law that would only lead to a full recount in those counties if a partial manual recount—“1 percent of the county’s total votes in at least three precincts”—indicated a vote tabulation error, which it didn’t. Therefore, Levin argues, “there was no statutory authority for the four counties to conduct full manual recounts of all the votes.” But two of the counties went ahead anyway. Thus, the recounts Bush’s lawyers sought to stop and Alterman’s esteemed lower courts sought to continue, weren’t legally authorized.  Further, state law placed a clear deadline, 5PM on November 14, by which recounts had to stop and results had to be turned in. In following the deadline, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris was only doing her job and letting the process take its course. It was the Florida Supreme Court, not the federal one, which “chose to overturn a state court’s election laws” by ruling not only against Harris and for Gore’s recounts, but by also ordering additional recounts—without bothering to provide either a deadline or standards of procedure.

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

New on NewsReal – "Hispanic Radicals Giving Beltway Democrats Nightmares Over DREAM Act

Calvin Freiburger Democrats, DREAM Act, GOP, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, illegal immigration, immigration, Jeff Sessions, Left, liberalism, NewsReal, progressivism

My latest NewsRealBlog post:

Congressional Democrats are determined to do something with their power while they still have it, and since they’re on the way out anyway, it might as well be something the American people really don’t want, like “comprehensive” immigration reform. This week, Sean Hannity spoke with Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) about the latest push for the DREAM Act.

The DREAM Act would offer a path to citizenship to illegal immigrants who meet the following criteria:

  • Must have entered the United States before the age of 16 (i.e. 15 and younger)
  • Must have been present in the United States for at least five (5) consecutive years prior to enactment of the bill
  • Must have graduated from a United States high school, or have obtained a GED, or have been accepted into an institution of higher education (i.e. college/university)
  • Must be between the ages of 12 and 35 at the time of application
  • Must have good moral character

Under the proposal, “good moral character” basically means being a law-abiding citizen, though “we cannot be 100% positive on which crimes would impact one’s application,” since the Act “has not outlined specific guidelines” on the subject. In other words, it’s another bill we have to pass in order to find out what it does. That’s progressive governance for you—let the democratic process decide vague, feel-good goals, but leave the little matter of how laws actually work to the unelected “experts” who’ll be implementing it.

Read the rest at NewsRealBlog.

Civility Is Overrated

Calvin Freiburger character assassination, civility, conservatism, debate, demagogues, Democrats, extremism, GOP, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, integrity, Left, liberalism, morality, political correctness, politics, respect, tone
At Politico, PR guy Mark DeMoss laments the lousy reception to the Civility Pledge he and Clinton hack Lanny Davis have been circulating:

It’s only 32 words. Yet, only two sitting members of Congress or governors have signed the civility pledge.


So what was it about civility that all the other 537 elected officials couldn’t agree to? Read it and decide for yourself.

  • I will be civil in my public discourse and behavior.
  • I will be respectful of others whether or not I agree with them. 
  • I will stand against incivility when I see it.

In May, Lanny Davis, my friend and co-founder of the Civility Project, and I sent a letter to all 535 members of Congress and 50 sitting governors inviting them to sign a civility pledge.


We made it easy, enclosing a response form, return envelope and fax number. I’m sorry to report, six months later, that only two responded: Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.).

This is a shame, DeMoss says, because the American people are sick of how nasty the political discourse has become, and because incivility is just plain wrong:
We share a conviction about the importance of at least trying to change a polarizing, uncivil political culture that now appears to be the norm.

Call it old-fashioned, but we believe debates should be won on the strength of ideas and words — not on the volume of our voices or the outrageousness of our ads. Yet some emails I’ve received on our website are so filled with obscenities that they could not be printed in a newspaper.

Incivility is not just a political problem, according to Yale law professor Stephen Carter. “Rules of civility are thus rules of morality,” Carter said, “it is morally proper to treat our fellow citizens with respect, and morally improper not to. Our crisis of incivility is part of a larger crisis of morality.” 

I hate to fit someone’s definition of “morally improper,” but the fact is, there’s way too much hand-wringing over civility in politics these days. For one thing, sleazy invective, while lamentable, has been around since the beginning, so not only is this not some new development, but if it was going to destroy the country, it would have done so by now.
That’s not to say politicians should be given a pass for trafficking in lies and rumors, far from it. But that brings us to the second, and far more important, reason these guys are barking up the wrong tree: we currently define negativity and incivility so broadly that they’re not only virtually meaningless, but they actually serve to stifle a lot of things that need to be said.
Simply put, there are a lot of bad people active, and bad things done, in politics today, things that deserve not just disagreement, but demand moral condemnation. Advocating the murder of unborn babies, lying about an issue, defaming someone, trying to violate the Constitution, controlling free speech…all these things run deeper than mere disagreements between equally-decent people. These are things that should shock and disgust men and women of goodwill, and compel them to drive them out of the sphere of public respectability – along with their practitioners.
Instead, our “civility” obsession all too often leads to pitiful spectacles like playing dumb about the integrity of backstabbers, and meekly wondering why opponents believe vicious lies about us (here’s a hint: they don’t). Such rhetorical cowardice and incompetence enables the dishonest and the hateful to go about their business without serious challenge, all but ensuring a culture that’s less civil, not more.
Real civility is a fine value, but a healthy political culture needs to understand it’s not the highest value. Every American must hold truth and justice as more important than decorum.