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« on: August 12, 2013, 04:53:33 PM » |
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The Patriot Post Brief 8-12-2013
From The Federalist Patriot
Free Email Subscription
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Hope 'n' Change: The Planned Failure of ObamaCare
August 12, 2013
THE FOUNDATION
"Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph." --Thomas Paine
Publisher's Note: As your Patriot team returns from our annual "recess" family stay-cations, Barack Obama and family are headed off on their lavish vacation to Martha's Vineyard, where they will spare no taxpayer expense. Their dog Bo even flew there on his own plane. However, we're sure he will take a break from his celebrity golf outings to talk about the plight of the middle class.
If you missed our notices last week, today, by popular request from our Patriot ranks, we are launching our new email layout, which combines the best of the Brief, Chronicle and Digest in a faster-reading format. From here forward, our Monday, Wednesday and Friday editions will include a few selections from our most current analysis of news, policy and opinion, followed by a Brief Opinion section from syndicated columnists, and then a selection of witty and outrageous Chronicle Quotes. The new "all-in-one" layout provides you with the same great content you have come to expect from The Patriot Post over the last 17 years, but in a more concise and timely format.
GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
Hope 'n' Change: The Planned Failure of ObamaCare
In a rare press conference Friday, Barack Obama again defended his crumbling and unpopular health care law, boasting of a handful of goodies in it that people will supposedly enjoy. Those include insurance for "children" up to age 26 under their parents' plan, rebates for unspent premium money, subsidies for those who can't afford insurance (subsidies no longer to be verified against income) and don't forget "free preventive care, mammograms [and] contraception." Ah yes -- "free." Predictably, Obama blamed the GOP for the law's failures, because, "The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don't have health care."
Actually, according to the Congressional Budget Office, ObamaCare itself ensures that 30 million people won't have health care1. Oops.
The list of problems with the law's implementation only gets longer, too. As we've previously noted2, Obama unilaterally delayed the mandate that employers provide health insurance to employees. "I didn't simply choose to delay this on my own," he insisted Friday. "This was in consultation with businesses all across the country." Oh, he gained constitutional authority for delaying enforcement of part of a law after "consultation with businesses." We didn't realize that's how presidential authority was secured, but we imagine if a Republican is elected in 2016, he'll quickly gain support from businesses for scrapping the whole law.
Next, individuals are supposed to be able to buy health insurance over state exchanges on the Internet, similar to Expedia or other travel sites. But development is behind schedule meaning that critical security testing won't begin in a "beta" phase with a few users -- it will happen on opening day for everyone.
Likewise, training for the "navigators" who will help people sign up for these exchanges is not going well. Just three weeks ago, the administration said that 30 hours of training would be sufficient for these people to understand the monstrously complex law, but now they say 20 hours will suffice. We wonder if their training will be anything like what IRS agents received before the 2012 election -- how to delay and frustrate political opponents. Indeed, they'll have access to citizens' sensitive health records, and the order has already gone out to charitable hospitals that treat uninsured people3.
Despite all this, James Clyburn (D-SC) boasted, "The fact of the matter is, [Democrats] will be running on ObamaCare in 2014. In fact, we set it up to run on it in 2014."
They may run on it as-is for now, but their real goal is a single-payer government system. Hence the planned shortcomings of the current plan. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) gave away the game, saying, "Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes," we will eventually scrap an insurance-based health system. "What we've done with ObamaCare is have a step in the right direction, but we're far from having something that's going to work forever," he said. "Don't think we didn't have a tremendous number of people who wanted a single-payer system."
Conservatives must keep up the fight.
NATIONAL SECURITY
Warfront With Jihadistan: Al-Qaida's Rise
Eleven months after the jihadi attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, the U.S. has issued the first criminal charges. Ahmed Khattalah, leader of a Libyan militia, faces charges filed by the Justice Department in New York. We can likely thank CNN for the progress, if indeed you can call this progress. The network interviewed Khattalah4 in July, when he claimed that the FBI hadn't even questioned him. The delay followed by half-hearted legal charges is another sad example of Barack Obama's exercise of America's "smart power."
The timing of this news also serves to offset last weekend's closing of U.S. embassies in 22 countries, which was the result of an al-Qaida threat5. Covering up al-Qaida's involvement in the Benghazi attack was the Obama administration's primary objective during last year's presidential campaign. Evidently Obama didn't get the memo that the campaign is over, either, because he insisted again this week that the "core [of] al-Qaida is on its heels, has been decimated." The slight distinction he's now making is that it's al-Qaida's "core" that's decimated -- a technically specific semantics game he didn't play before.
The truth of al-Qaida's resurgence, however, is so evident that even John McCain sees it clearly: "You can't say that [al-Qaida's core is decimated] and at the same time have to close embassies and consulates all over the Middle East," McCain said. "Look, al-Qaida's on the rise, they have been on the rise, they have continued to penetrate." If only the commander in chief would quit denying reality.
ECONOMY
Mortgage Bubble Investigation Needs Investigating
In another Friday night news dump, the Obama Justice Department admitted that it cooked the books on its mortgage fraud investigation. A year-long initiative run by the Mortgage Fraud Working Group sought to get to the bottom of some of the fraud that caused the mortgage bubble. It claimed it had charged 530 people with mortgage fraud, which allegedly victimized 73,000 people. After Bloomberg reporters dug deeper, however, the Justice Department was forced to admit that they grossly overstated the numbers. It wasn't 530 people charged, it was 107; and it wasn't 73,000 victims, it was 17,185. Naturally, they chose Friday night to correct the record.
Columnist Ed Morrissey wrote6, "As it turns out, the original figure included people prosecuted or just sentenced in the same fiscal year, even though they had been charged with crimes long before the MFWG came into being. The victims were not limited to distressed homeowners, as the DoJ had originally claimed, and as Eric Holder himself bragged." Nor was this Eric Holder's first time in book-cooking class -- a similar thing happened in 2010 with the president's Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force called "Operation Broken Trust."
The Justice Department's website7 still claims, "The Department of Justice is committed to achieving the President's goal of making this the most transparent Administration in history." That all depends on the meaning of "transparent."
CULTURE
Second Amendment: Small Victories
In the wake of the Sandy Hook murders last December, leftists everywhere were using the caskets of dead children as a platform for their unconstitutional political agenda. The Journal News, a suburban New York newspaper, was no exception. The paper published an interactive map revealing the names and addresses of every handgun permit holder in two counties. Such disclosures endangered those gun owners and their property, as well as let criminals know which houses are not protected by Second Amendment Security8. One gun owner's home was burglarized, though his guns were in a safe. The newspaper stuck by their disclosure, but soon hired their own armed security guards because editor Caryn McBride felt "threatened." Local police did not concur. |
