The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Does ObamaCare Suck Enough, Or Need It Suck More To Get Us To Single Payer?

Posted on | February 24, 2013 | 31 Comments

by Smitty

Troublesome stuff at the WSJ:

The provision, part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, requires health plans for individuals and small businesses to cover 10 categories of services, including prescription drugs, maternity care and physical rehabilitation. Many of the specifics of what is covered in those categories will be left to states to decide.
Insurers and some business groups have argued that mandating such coverage would make policies too expensive, and they had lobbied the federal government to scale back the scope of what needs to be covered.
But if anything, the final regulations released Wednesday beefed up the requirements for certain services beyond what regulators proposed in November.

It’s not fair to pretend that this pattern is new with the Obama Administration. Instead of elected representatives who are on the hook for their votes doing the governing, Progress means that the tools who stand for election are passing an outline, and un-elected officials are doing the heavy lifting. To say that this urinates all over the spirit of the Constitution is, I think, a reasonable assertion.

Read the whole thing, and understand that the details will only get more grizzly over time.

Over at Reason,

President Obama and other so-called progressives insist that the American people are not overly dependent on government. They also predict dire consequences if the automatic budget “cuts” known as sequestration take place March 1.
Both claims cannot be true. If modest across-the-board “cuts”—mainly cuts in the rate of growth—in military and domestic spending pose a threat to the American people and the U.S. economy, then the country is alarmingly dependent on government.

What’s needed here, both for ObamaCare and the government in general, is a moment where leadership emerges, is honest about how jacked up all this is, and points in a direction of reform. Rick Perry was probably the closest of the 2012 candidates to offering some of that.

Absolutely no good will come from our current course. These homo bureaucratus lemmings are going to feed the cancerous growth of legislation until the whole thing capsizes. And then the clowns who’ve wrought our Cloward-Piven destruction are going to double down with a Single Payer, which is really “Lacking a Single Prayer”.

Don’t let them suppositorize the escargot!

via Dan Riehl and PreciseBlogs

Update: linked at Aewl’s Abode and The Daley Gator.

Category: Uncategorized

FMJRA 2.0: Heavenly City

Posted on | February 23, 2013 | 3 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Ratings-Killer @Soledad_OBrien Fired by Obscure Third-Place Cable News Network

Senator Rand Paul Lays It Down Like Every Republican Should

Sources Tell Washington Post FBI Can’t Find Menendez’s Dominican Hookers

Rule 5 Sunday: Golden Ball & Chain

A Bit Of Doggerel For Governor McDonnell On ObamaCare

Politically Incorrect Questions You Can’t Ask Without Being Called a ‘Hater’

FMJRA 2.0: #WARRIORS

Another Controversial CPAC Scandal!™

The Left Loves Cop-Killers

Boyle on Menendez: ‘Miller Cut His Teeth in Democratic Scandal Management’

Thaddeus McCotter Remembers, If Not Honors, Millard Fillmore

About Paul Ehrlich and ‘The Most Spectacularly Wrong Book Ever Written’

Green: The Color of Stupidity

‘A Particularly Odd Argument’ by the Particularly Odd Bill Schmalfeldt

Connecting the Dots, Telling the Story

‘Beware the Ides of March’: Bill Schmalfeldt Threatens Lee Stranahan?

LIVE AT FIVE: 02.19.13

‘The Kook Who Knew Too Much’: Heroic Fantasy, Paranoia and Barrett Brown

Of Course It’s Not A Single Dime: It’s Trillions If Dimes

That Feeling When The Goal Is Known, But The Means Remain Ambiguous

Kooky Tuesday Continues: Is Social Media Breeding Monsters? Oh, Hell, Yes!

LIVE AT FIVE: 02.20.13

Enforcing the Liberal Media Omerta

Dishonest Bill Schmalfeldt Got Banned from Daily Kos for Anal Rape ‘Satire’

The Great Karl Rove Super PAC Scare

And Now, Helpless Victim Bill Schmalfeldt Heroically Suffers Glorious Martyrdom

Pete Domenici, Republican Sex Machine

Bill Whittle’s Virtual SOTU: Guns

Austin Gates Is a Victim of Abuse, Homophobia, and a Really Bad Haircut

Improv Actress With BFA Degree in Theatre — or Sex Education Expert?

Never Doubt That Kurt Eichenwald Cares Deeply About Gay Kids With Bad Haircuts

It’s Internet Crazy Day: Special Ironic Menendez ‘Healthy Youth’ Edition

Our Homogenous Elite

Top linkers this week:

  1. Lonely Conservative (8)
  2. Rick’s Rants (7)
  3. Daily Pundit (5)

Lots of near misses this week, but regardless, thanks to everyone for the linkagery! Deadline for next week’s FMJRA is Friday, March 1.


Category: FMJRA Award

Hey, Nice Try With the #DemandAVote Spambots #p2! Jacked and Busted! #tcot

Posted on | February 23, 2013 | 40 Comments

Why does the Left hate us so much? Mainly because we’re red-blooded, patriotic, God-fearing Americans, but also because we keep messing up their narratives. The Left (#p2) can’t stand the fact that conservatives (#tcot) are more active on Twitter, so that when they roll out a pre-fabricated Obama-approved #hashtag, it immediately (and hilariously) gets hijacked by us. Just for fun.

OK, so to push their gun-control agenda in Congress, Team Obama started the #DemandAVote hashtag, encouraging the Left to re-Tweet Obama’s message (i.e., demanding that Congress vote on the Democrats’ unconstitutional gun-control legislation).

That hashtag was instantly jacked by #tcot, but then @DefendWallSt discovered that many of the messages in favor of the Obama agenda were from spambots — phony sockpuppet accounts, usually with a blank “egg” avatar, evidently created by some Democrat P.R. operation to give the illusion that this message was more popular than it actually is. In a phrase, Twitter “Astroturf.”

 

So, not only did #tcot jack the hashtag, they busted the bots, and exposed the phoniness of the #p2 “grassroots” effort.

 

Category: Uncategorized

BREAKING NEWS: Dan Rather Is Still Alive, Imagines Someone Gives a Damn

Posted on | February 23, 2013 | 22 Comments

Call someone who’ll listen
And might give a damn . . .
But don’t you come around here
Handing me none of your lies.
Here’s a quarter,
Call someone who cares.

It may be necessary to remind younger readers that there was once a guy named Dan Rather, who worked at CBS News and was considered kind of important. Then in the middle of the 2004 election campaign, Rather decided to recycle a stale, bogus smear against President Bush, got caught, and was ushered off the national network platform he had disgraced for decades by his dishonest partisan bias. The Dan Rather file at Newsbusters is extensive.

So now, via Twitchy, we get this sermonette from Disgraced Dan:

“Good reporting and sourcing is in steep decline . . . We now have the new Internet . . . It remains so susceptible to manipulation, deception and distraction that it allows lies to get started and then spread like mildew in a damp basement.”

The Dan Rather “fake but accurate” threshold is so high, eh? I think our old buddy Dan needs a little Travis Tritt theme music:

 

Category: Media Bias

What Coordinated Messaging Looks Like

Posted on | February 23, 2013 | 11 Comments

The Left does this “Meme of the Day” trick all the time, but I thought this example (via Memeorandum) was particularly obvious:

House Republicans Strip Protections From
LGBT Victims In New Violence Against Women Act
— Think Progress

Top Dems Reject House GOP’s Violence
Against Women Act: ‘Simply Unacceptable’
— Talking Points Memo

VAWA 2013: House GOP Unveils Bill With No
LGBT Protections, Modified Tribal Provision
— Huffington Post

And further coverage by  MSNBC, Taylor Marsh, The Democratic Daily, Rachel Maddow, Booman Tribune and Daily Kos.

Andrew Breitbart loved to use the term “narrative” to describe how liberals deliberately control the media message for political purposes. Most of the time, it’s not a conspiracy, it’s a consensus. (The media votes 89% Democrat.) But every once in a while, you see the same message simultaneously transmitted in nearly exact terms by so many outlets . .. Yeah, the polite term is “coordinated messaging.”

James Carville famously observed that if you see a turtle on top of a fence post, you know it didn’t crawl up there by itself.

Just sayin’ . . .

 

Category: Media Bias

Progressive Tax-Exempt Group’s Secret Plan to ‘Eviscerate,’ ‘Cripple’ GOP

Posted on | February 23, 2013 | 19 Comments

Blueprint NC is “a nonprofit that coordinates the activities of liberal-leaning nonprofits” in North Carolina and when this 501(c) group’s communications director Stephanie Bass forwarded a strategy memo to member organizations, she included a disclaimer:

“CONFIDENTIAL to Blueprint, so please be careful — share with your boards and appropriate staff, but not the whole world.”

Oops. The memo got leaked to reporter Mark Binker at WRAL in Raleigh. The contents are quite disturbing and clearly partisan:

“The most effective way to mitigate the worst legislation is to weaken our opponents’ ability to govern by crippling their leaders (McCrory, Tillis, Berger, etc…)” the memo reads, referring to the governor, House Speaker Thom Tillis and Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger.
The memo goes on to describe a “potential two-year vision” during which the groups would “eviscerate the leadership and weaken their ability to govern.”

Matt Vespa at PJ Tatler has many more details on the shocking partisanship carried out by this tax-exempt 501 (c)(3) group.

Let me bring this a little closer to home for regular readers: Why do you think I’ve devoted so much coverage to Bill Schmalfeldt’s relentless harassment of Lee Stranahan?

Perhaps a better question: Do you suppose Stranahan was randomly selected for this harassment? Can’t you see that Lee’s association with Breitbart.com is the motive for the attacks on him, and isn’t it obvious that this is part of a much larger strategy by the Left to discredit, suppress or silence conservative journalists?

Thanks to journalists like Mark Binker and Matt Vespa, we know how Blueprint NC orchestrated an effort to “cripple” and “eviscerate” Republicans in North Carolina, but how many strategy memos like this — how many conference calls and private e-mails — never leak out of their “confidential” channels? And if the Left can shut down Lee Stranahan, what’s to stop them from shutting down Matt Binker or Matt Vespa or anyone else they decide to target?

People need to wake up to what’s really going on. The Left isn’t just trying to win elections and pass legislation. The Left has totalitarian ambitions to destroy all opposition and silence all dissent.

 

Category: Democrats, Journalism, North Carolina, Progressivism

Rule 5 and Immigration Policy

Posted on | February 23, 2013 | 17 Comments

Years ago, I propounded Rule 5 — “Everybody Loves a Pretty Girl” — as one of the secrets of blogging success. And I have also stipulated that, despite my somewhere-to-the-right-of-Tom-Tancredo stance against illegal immigration, I’m firmly opposed to a crackdown on beauty queens who have overstayed their visas: Bring me your tired, your poor, your Miss Universe contestants yearning to breathe free.

So . . . some people don’t seem to appreciate the humor in that.

“Tough room,” as they say.

Category: humor, Immigration, Rule 5

Dangerous Video Could Trigger Another Great Awakening If Too Many View

Posted on | February 23, 2013 | 36 Comments

by Smitty

This is lengthy, but worth your time, especially the first 38 minutes or so:

Positive arguments given by Dr. Craig include that God is the best explanation:

  1. why anything at all exists,
  2. for the origin of the universe,
  3. the applicability of mathematics to the physical world,
  4. for the fine tuning of the universe for intelligent life,
  5. intentional states of consciousness in the world,
  6. of objective moral values and duties in the world,
  7. of the historical facts concerning Jesus’ resurrection,
  8. of God’s ability to be personally known and experienced.

The first six are rather wonky, the seventh is more historical, and the final point is crucial for the discussion to be more than abstract.

The atheist opponent, Dr. Rosenberg immediately tries to alter the terms of the debate. The debate is not about theism; the debate is about whether faith is nuts. Watch the whole thing when you have a chance. Dr. Rosenberg seems consumed with the Problem of Evil, especially in the case of the Holocaust. I guess if I was Dr. Craig, I would have pointed out that the last century’s Holocaust was by no means the first to occur to the Jews, as a reading of the Old Testament shows.

As for Dr. Rosenberg’s arithmetic argument, he seems to have happened upon a possible model for angelic beings, other than Lucifer & cohort.

Category: Uncategorized
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