The Patriot Post Chronicle 9-15-2010

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The Patriot Post Chronicle 9-15-2010
From The Federalist Patriot
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The Foundation

"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious." --Thomas Jefferson

Editorial Exegesis

"'As a consequence of us getting 30 million additional people health care, at the margins that's going to increase our costs -- we knew that,' President Obama said at his press conference Friday in response to a question about rising health spending. That wasn't how he sold the plan, but, anyway, that's a truism. Here's another: The White House was always going to blame insurance companies for any cost increases, even when its own policies cause them. Witness Kathleen Sebelius's Thursday letter to America's Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade group -- a thuggish message even by her standards. The Health and Human Services secretary wrote that some insurers have been attributing part of their 2011 premium increases to ObamaCare and warned that 'there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases.' Zero tolerance for expressing an opinion, or offering an explanation to policyholders? They're more subtle than this in Caracas. What Ms. Sebelius really means is that the government will prohibit insurers from doing business if reality is not politically convenient for Democrats. ObamaCare includes a slew of mandated benefits for next year, such as allowing children to remain on their parents' plans until age 26 and 'free' preventative care (i.e., no direct out-of-pocket cost sharing for consumers). The tone of Ms. Sebelius's letter suggests that she doesn't understand that money is exchanged for goods and services, and that if Congress mandates new benefits, premiums will rise. ... ObamaCare gives Ms. Sebelius's regulators the power to define 'unreasonable' premium hikes, which will mean whatever they decide it will mean later this fall. She promised to keep a list of insurers 'with a record of unjustified rate increases' and then to bar them from ObamaCare's subsidized 'exchanges' when they come on line in 2014. In other words, insurers must accept price controls now or face the retribution of a de facto ban on selling their products to consumers four years from now. This is nasty stuff and an obvious attempt to shift political blame for rising insurance costs before the election. It's also an early sign of life under ObamaCare, when all health-care decisions are political and the bureaucrats decide who can charge how much for a service or product. Democrats built this system and they now own it politically. The least they could do is take credit for its consequences." --The Wall Street Journal1

Insight

"Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself." --economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006)

"Eloquence may exist without a proportionate degree of wisdom." --author Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

Upright

"Even America's bitterest enemies understand why we mark July 4th with parades, speeches and fireworks: to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. We're proud of our nation, and justifiably so. So why do we virtually ignore September 17th? That's the date, in 1787, when our Founding Fathers signed the Constitution. ... Yet today, on many issues, this vital document is frequently ignored, even undermined, by some of the very people who have taken a public oath to uphold it." --Heritage Foundation president Ed Feulner

"While America's liberal elite have not reached the depths of tyrants such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler, they share a common vision and, as such, differ only in degree but not kind. Both denounce free markets and voluntary exchange. They are for control and coercion by the state. They believe they have superior wisdom to the masses and they have been ordained to forcibly impose that wisdom on the rest of us. They, like any other tyrant, have what they see as good reasons for restricting the freedom of others." --economist Walter E. Williams

"Why has the left directed so much time and effort into demonizing ordinary Americans? Because the Tea Party's three primary planks -- limited government, fiscal responsibility and Constitutional fealty -- represent the greatest threat to liberalism since its flowering in the 1960s. A smaller, fiscally responsible government dedicated to a Constitution expressly designed to limit the power of the state is the death knell for those dedicated to the idea their worldview must be imposed on Americans by an ever-expanding state. The left's worst nightmare is an America comprised of largely self-sufficient, clear-thinking individuals left to their own devices." --columnist Arnold Ahlert

"Nearly all of the tax cuts Americans have seen the past year and a half advance some liberal moral or social good. The overriding goal of the stimuli and tax breaks -- from the things we build to the jobs we save to the tax credits we get -- is to pick economic winners, steer us in the right direction and wheedle citizens to be good boys and girls. To offer comprehensive, amoral cuts would be to admit ideological defeat. ... This president would never surrender to such indignity." --columnist David Harsanyi

"If you read this weekend's New York Times' hit job2 on would-be Speaker John Boehner and his 'lobbyist friends,' you might think, as the reporter clearly thinks, that John Boehner is cozier with lobbyists than most powerful politicians are. But did you know: · Nancy Pelosi has raised almost twice as much money from lobbyists this election as Boehner has? · At least 18 House Democrats have raised more lobbyist cash this election than Boehner has. · Chuck Schumer and Harry Reid have pocketed more lobbyist cash in the past 18 months than Boehner has raised in the past 6 elections, combined?" --columnist Timothy Carney

Dezinformatsia

Don't know much about history: "It's both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 -- instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today's public debate, discouraging because it's hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again." --New York Times columnist Paul Krugman ("What Krugman calls 'the miracle of the 1940s' is more commonly known as World War II, a ruinous conflict that cost some 60 million lives, including more than 400,000 American ones, and that entailed the near-extermination of Europe's Jewish population." --WSJ columnist James Taranto)

[nChrist]

________________________________________
The Patriot Post Chronicle 9-15-2010
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
________________________________________

Whose money is it? "Let me put this into perspective. First, it's not free. Extending the tax breaks to the top 3 percent of earners would cost between $650 and $700 billion. Extending it for the rest of us is going to cost a lot more, possibly $3 trillion. Everyone wants to pay less in taxes, but in an economy with a debt like America's, that may not be a brilliant idea." --CNN's Ali Velshi

Fun with semantics: "It will be the big battle to the finish line in November, and this is the question: How big a tax cut will you get next year?" --ABC anchor Diane Sawyer twisting language to say that keeping tax rates in place since 2003 constitutes a "cut"

Don't know much about Star Wars: "For far too long, [House Minority Leader John] Boehner and others have been dominating the political debate with insincere sound bites, Jedi mind games and plain bad economics. How can they claim to care about the deficit and insist on more tax cuts?" --New York Times editorial (Uh, the Jedi were the good guys.)

Newspulper Headlines:

Out on a Limb: "Obama's Blunt Take: Poor Economy Hurts Democrats" --Associated Press

Must Be a Really Slow Connection: "80 Years Given for Online Exposure" --Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, Va.)

Answers to Questions Nobody Is Asking: "How to Take a Watermelon Smash to the Face" --MSNBC.com

We Blame Global Warming: "In Lukewarm Industry, Chicken Wing Chains Stay Hot" --AdAge.com

Good News for the Commodities Markets: "Colonoscopy Isn't Necessarily the Gold Standard" --Los Angeles Times

Bottom Stories of the Day: "Jane Fonda to Tell All About Plastic Surgery Makeover" --Houston Chronicle website

(Thanks to The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto3)

The Demo-gogues

It's not his money: "We can't give away $700 billion to folks who don't need it." --Barack Obama promising to raise taxes on those earning $250,000 or more a year

Arbiter of who needs what: "You can't have Republicans running on fiscal discipline that we're gonna reduce our deficit, that the debt's out of control, and then borrow tens, hundreds of billions of dollars to give tax cuts to people who don't need them." --BHO repeating the class warfare rhetoric

"Under no circumstances do I believe we should give a blanket extension to the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. It won't fix our economy and it will add billions to the long-term structural deficit." --Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)

Hope 'n' Change: "We stopped the bleeding, stabilized the economy, but the fact of the matter is the pace of improvement has not been where it needs to be." --Barack Obama

Now he tells us: "Bending the cost curve on health care is hard to do." --Barack Obama backtracking on his earlier claims that ObamaCare "would bring down the cost of health care for millions -- families, businesses and the federal government"

Did he mention he's a Christian? "We are one nation under God. We may call that God different names, but we remain one. As someone who relies heavily on my Christian faith to do my job, I understand the passions that religious faith can raise. But I'm also respectful of people of different faiths even if they don't subscribe to the exact same notions as I do and that they are still good people." --Barack Obama

"The UN remains the single most important global institution. We are constantly reminded of its value." --Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the confab of socialist nations and third-world dictators that constitutes the UN

Village Idiots

Tea time: "The Boston Tea Party was protesting abuse of power. This is now trading public power for the abuse of private power." --Bill Clinton on the new Tea Party

What he meant was... "[T]he reality is that my response means exactly the opposite. My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn't work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious." --Fidel Castro setting the record "straight" after last week's admission that "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore."

Village victimitis: "The fact of the matter is, this [Ground Zero mosque] has been used for political purposes and there's growing Islamophobia in this country." --Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

Fine American: "If the [Ground Zero] 'mosque' isn't built, this is no longer America. ... I am opposed to the building of the 'mosque' two blocks from Ground Zero. I want it built on Ground Zero." --leftist documentarian Michael Moore

Hate of religion: "I'm against a mosque anywhere. I'm against a church anywhere, or a Hindu temple or a synagogue. ... [Houses of worship are] places that people go to retell nonsense stories from a time before men understood what a germ or an atom was, or where the sun went at night. They try to telepathically communicate with their imaginary friend. These are places that fleece people, and scare people and they perpetuate mass delusion. We shouldn't build any of them." --HBO's Bill Maher

Short Cuts

"According to government auditors, the stimulus money is being held up because there aren't enough government workers to oversee the spending. So follow me, in other words, government workers who aren't there are needed to spend money we don't have to create jobs that don't exist." --comedian Jay Leno

"The Democrats ... are like the arsonist who works for the fire department. They will argue that soaring poverty demands more government spending." --blogger John Hinderaker

"Looking back with pride, the British are commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, when Churchill said of the pilots fighting the Luftwaffe: Never 'was so much owed by so many to so few.' Looking ahead with trepidation, Americans are thinking: Never have so many of us owed so much." --columnist George Will

"President Obama ducked a question about being a Muslim on NBC and changed the subject to his birth certificate. His religion is a bit vague. Somebody asked him what he thought of the Apostles Creed and Obama said it was his favorite character in all the Rocky movies." --comedian Argus Hamilton

(Please pray for our Armed Forces standing in harm's way around the world, and for their families -- especially families of those fallen Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, who granted their lives in defense of American liberty.)

Links

   1. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703597204575483900330728436.html
   2. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/us/politics/12boehner.html
   3. http://online.wsj.com/article/best_of_the_web_today.html