On February 22, 2013,
in Uncategorized,
by magoo1310
It’s Friday, February 22nd, 2013….and here’s The Gouge!
We begin the day with our Money Quote, courtesy of the WSJ‘s Notable & Quotable column, and historian Paul Rahe writing at Ricochet.com, as he relates why revolutions occur….and why Chinese officials are reading Alexis de Tocqueville:
“….The answer to that question is that there is a very considerable literature on this. Some of it is Marxist.Much of it is Tocquevillian. Read his “Ancien Regime and the Revolution.”
One key indicator is that those with access to the levers of power within the ruling order cease to believe in the religion or ideology that legitimizes the regime. Another is that their underlings also gradually abandon the beliefs that render respectable the rule of their masters. This happened some time ago in China, and there very nearly was a revolution at the time of Tiananmen Square. Tellingly, the key players among the young at that time were often the children of party officials. At the time, the party split over how it should respond to the protests and quite a number of leading party figures ended up under house arrest for the rest of their lives. It did not have to end in the manner in which it ended. It could have gone the other way. It was a close-run thing.
I think it highly significant that leading figures in the Chinese communist party have recently instructed their underlings to secure and read Tocqueville’s book. People in China who are far more expert with regard to that country than any western Sinologist could possibly be are evidently thinking about the question I raised. . . .
The Tocquevillian account of revolution fits the Arab Spring, the eruptions in eastern Europe in the 1980s, and the collapse of the Soviet Union to a “T.”First goes belief in the legitimacy of the system. Then comes a trigger—an event which causes large numbers of people to say to themselves, “I cannot take this anymore.”Then, the crucial question is whether those in charge have the nerve to try to crush the rebellion and whether their underlings will follow orders. If the powers that be are hesitant, ambivalent, or divided, if their underlings are fed up, things can very easily come apart (as they did in eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union, and in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria). So far, the Chinese and the Iranians have kept a lid on things. But do not think for a second that these regimes are stable. In both China and Iran, skepticism about the regime’s legitimacy is commonplace.“
Great; but might Rahe just have well been writing about America….and the undoubted reaction of the unwashed masses to Team Tick-Tock’s ongoing onslaught against the 2nd Amendment?!?
Keep in mind, the NRA continues to poll significantly better than The Dear Misleader. And that’s with Douches Maximus….
….at the helm!
For more on the Party of America’s Enemies, the WSJ‘s Kimberly Strassel reports on why….
This Year, March 1 Is Groundhog Day
Why Democrats are wrong that ‘sequestration’ will be another political victory for themselves.
The sequester drama unfolding in Washington brings to mind that classic Bill Murray film, “Groundhog Day.” Only it is as if President Obama failed to catch the end of the movie, where the loop is finally broken.
The White House is playing the sequester exactly as it played the recent fight over the tax cliff and the earlier one over the payroll tax. Here the White House again warns of economic calamity, there Democrats again insist that it is up to Republicans to act. Here Mr. Obama again demands more taxes, warns that the clock is ticking, and coaxes the GOP toward a big backroom deal. The entire Democratic establishment wakes up every morning to “I Got You Babe.”
Weirder yet, the White House and its media acolytes seem convinced that the same victory is nigh.The administration actually believes—and Politico actually reported—that “Republicans are in a worse position than during the fiscal cliff fight.”Accordingly, the White House is now waiting for the GOP to play its role, succumb again to the Inevitable Awesomeness of Obama and accept his policy demands.
The wait will continue. Because what the White House and the press are missing is that Republicans want this debate.(Speaker Boner’s idiotic pronouncements in the Journal notwithstanding.) The sequester isn’t some GOP fallback position. It is a proactive strategy, their way of busting out of the “Groundhog Day” cycle and changing the Washington spending debate. They aren’t bluffing.
Why would they change course? The law, this time, is in their favor. On March 1, Washington automatically gets some modest spending restraint—which is exactly what is needed and what the GOP campaigned on.The Republicans have struggled with their sequester messaging, doing a poor job distinguishing between good policy (cutting spending) and bad process (across-the-board cuts). But what is clear is that 98% of Republican legislators see the necessity of sequester, and the few who don’t matter little, since their colleagues won’t allow a legislative change.
Republicans have been too often burned by Mr. Obama to consider big deals. That age is over. The polls? House Republicans are focused on those in their home districts, where voters will demand that they hold the line against new taxes. Republicans also now understand that to give Mr. Obama revenue through closing “tax loopholes” is to effectively kill the longtime GOP goal of real tax reform.
Mr. Obama will do his best to make the sequester look painful, warning of furloughs, layoffs, diminished security. But unlike the threat of the tax cliff—which would have immediately hit all American paychecks—the sequester may prove a harder calamity to sell.
Agencies will have 120 days to implement changes. While those agencies are currently predicting doom, they will in reality face pressure to impose cuts in ways that minimize harm. Government unions won’t let agency heads cut employees instead of fancy conference budgets.Moreover, this is a 2.5% cut in spending, not a government shutdown. Americans will continue to get their passports, cash their Social Security checks, and visit national parks.
What has to make the White House a tad nervous are the questions it is beginning to get from the savvier members of the press. Didn’t you folks in the White House also agree to $1.2 trillion in sequester cuts? Why are you now changing the goal posts, asking for taxes? Are you really saying you can’t find $85 billion in sensible cuts from a $3.8 trillion budget? Why not just ask the GOP for the flexibility to impose the cuts more wisely?
That last question will grow in prominence as the House GOP soon takes up legislation to continue funding the government. Republicans have vowed to lock the sequester cuts into that continuing resolution, though there is talk of including a provision that would give Mr. Obama more flexibility to administer the trims.
Honest we’re honest!
The White House has shown no interest in being given that authority.It prefers to campaign on Armageddon coming, and blame Republicans. But can it maintain that position if vulnerable Senate Democrats like North Carolina’s Kay Hagan (whose state is getting hit by the defense sequester) start calling for a flexibility provision? Democratic frustration is already bubbling up against a White House that is so convinced of its campaigning brilliance that it has devoted no resources to mapping out a legislative fallback position.
That has some Democrats nervous. They understand that the GOP isn’t budging. They are watching Republicans begin to define this battle on their own terms.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Thursday highlighted both government spending embarrassments and Mr. Obama’s “false choices,” noting that the president has the power to choose to “cut waste like smoking machines and EPA grants to foreign countries” rather than “degrade our military.” The president, said Mr. Cantor, can “eliminate slush funds” rather than “let criminals run through the streets.”
This is where the GOP needs and wants the fight to be—on big government, on Mr. Obama’s spending addiction, on the drag of federal spending on the private economy. That debate—take note—is already a far cry from the endless media focus on Republican divisions and weakness that dominated the tax-cliff and payroll fights and led to GOP defeats.
It is an end, as the GOP sees it, to the Groundhog Day loop. And it is why the sequester IS coming.
Not that the First Family should be expected to curtail their innumerable vacations:
Meanwhile, back where the rubber hits the road, as BigGovernment.com, via The New Media Journal reports:
Election Over, Obama Announces Medicare Cuts to Fund ObamaCare
During the 2012 election campaign, Democrats denied that ObamaCare made $716 billion in cuts to Medicare in order to provide funding toward $1.9 trillion in new entitlement spending over the next ten years. In an announcement on Friday, however, the Obama administration revealed that it would be significantly reducing funding for Medicare, a move that one health insurance analyst said “would turn almost every plan in the industry unprofitable.”
Health insurance stocks tumbled following the announcement that a big chunk of the Medicare cuts would come from the popular Medicare Advantage program, a market-oriented system in which participants can choose coverage by a private company that contracts with Medicare to provide all Part A and Part B benefits.
According to health care analyst Carl McDonald, the new rates proposed by the Obama administration will have the net effect of reducing payments to Medicare Advantage plans by seven to eight percent in 2014. McDonald projects:
“If implemented, these rates and the program changes CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] is suggesting would be enormously disruptive to Medicare Advantage, likely forcing a number of smaller plans out of the business and creating disarray for many seniors.”
According to Richard Foster, former chief actuary to the Medicare program, ObamaCare’s cuts to Medicare Advantage will likely force half of its current participants back into the old Medicare program, originated in 1965. It is estimated that this change will cost Medicare enrollees an average of $3,714 in 2017 alone.
So long, Grandma!
But as Phil Klein, writing at the Washington Examiner relates, Dimocrats aren’t the only politicians seeking reelection on the backs of taxpayers and the elderly:
Ex-Obamacare foe Gov. Rick Scott waves white flag on Medicaid expansion
When the history of President Obama’s drive for national health care is written, there are several moments that will be looked back upon as having cemented the law in place. There were “conservative” Democrats Ben Nelson and Bart Stupak dropping their objections to Obamacare to get the legislation across the finish line. There was Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the Supreme Court’s liberals to uphold the constitutionality of the law. There was President Obama’s reelection victory, which crushed any feasible path to full repeal. On Thursday, Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s delivered yet another blow to opponents to Obamacare by endorsing the law’s Medicaid expansion in his state.
Scott’s decision is of both symbolic and substantive importance. A former hospital executive, Scott made a national name for himself by spending as much as $20 million on ads during the health care debate opposing Obamacare through his group Conservatives for Patients Rights. With the exposure he gained in conservative circles, he launched his ultimately successful bid for governor in 2010. While he was governor, Florida led the 26-state suit challenging not only the constitutionality of Obamacare’s individual mandate, but also its provision that coerced states into expanding Medicaid eligibility. For opponents of the law, one the few silver linings in the June 2012 Supreme Court decision was that it gave states the choice of rejecting the expansion.
Following the decision, Scott appeared on Fox News with tough talk.“This is going to be devastating for patients,” he said of the law. “Devastating for taxpayers. It’s going to be the biggest job killer ever. We’re not going to implement Obamacare in Florida. We’re not going to expand Medicaid, because we’re going to do the right thing.” He went on to say that, “This is an expansion that just doesn’t make any sense.”
But on Wednesday, after months of heavy lobbying by Florida’s powerful hospital industry, Scott declared, “While the federal government is committed to paying 100 percent of the cost of new people to Medicaid, I cannot, in good conscience, deny the uninsured access to care.”He said he was swayed to back the expansion by the Obama administration’s agreement to grant the state more flexibility in administering Medicaid.
No, seriously; he promised me….just like Bart Stupak!
Scott argued that Floridians would be paying to help fund the Medicaid expansion in other states anyway, so they may as well get their share of federal funding. But going ahead with the expansion, Florida would be adding about 1 million beneficiaries to one of the costliest government programs. After the Supreme Court decision, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that adding 11 million people to Medicaid would cost $643 billion over the next decade — meaning a back of the envelope estimate is that Scott’s decision could ultimately cost federal taxpayers about $58 billion over the next decade.
To be sure, Scott argues that his decision is only temporary and contingent on federal taxpayers picking up the entire cost of the expansion. The way the law was written, the federal government agreed to cover the full cost for the first three years, and gradually raise the state contribution until it reaches 10 percent. Scott has proposed sun-setting the expansion to expire after three years, or earlier if the federal government backed off their commitment to fully fund it.
In practice, however, this sunset idea is incoherent.(Like any argument purporting to justify any policy backed by Der Obamao.)Scott is up for reelection in 2014, and no matter who is in office, it’s doubtful that after three years of allowing broader Medicaid eligibility, that the state would suddenly kick people off the program or prevent new Floridians from enrolling under eligibility standards that have prevailed for three years. Even Scott seems to acknowledge this by saying, “I want to be clear that we will not simply deny new Medicaid recipients health insurance three years from now.” Realistically, this was Scott’s one and only chance to resist the Medicaid expansion, and he folded.
No….seriously!!!
Scott’s proposal still has to pass through through the Florida legislature to become law. But in the meantime, he has become the seventh GOP governor to embrace the Medicaid expansion. The higher the number of states that agree to expand Medicaid, the more compelling the logic becomes for wavering governors to decide that they, too, must get their fair share. So Scott’s decision will likely lead to a further expansion of the program in other states.
As he was wrapping up his remarks, Scott insisted his decision was “not a white flag of surrender to government-run healthcare.” In actuality, waving the white flag is an accurate description of Scott’s decision.
As South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley recently noted:
The Affordable Care Act, known as ObamaCare, says expand first and worry about the rest later.
Connecticut expanded early under ObamaCare and just reported a $190 million Medicaid deficit – in spite of subjecting their citizens to a massive tax increase. California just raised taxes in part to cover their Medicaid deficit and yet needs $350 million more to pay for ObamaCare next year.
We’ll let this headline from Erick Erickson speak for us:
Which is why we’re convinced it’s not just about the money, but about the….
….power.
As Maggie O’Hooligan would say, “Hey, Governor Scott….”
On the Lighter Side….
And in Tales From the Darkside, yet another Liberal demonstrates the ends justify the means:
College: Fire professor who forced students to vote for Obama
A tenured professor who forced her students to sign pledges that they would vote for President Barack Obama last November should be fired, the college’s president recommended. Sharon Sweet, an associate professor of mathematics at Brevard Community College in Florida, is guilty of electioneering, harassment, and incompetence, according to a three-month investigation into her classroom behavior leading up to the November election.
The Board of Trustees will hold a hearing on the matter, and then vote on whether to adopt President James Richey’s recommendation that Sweet be fired.
According to a report on the investigation:
“Professor Sweet strongly encouraged or mandated that students from several classes sign a pledge card that stated, ‘I pledge to vote for President Obama and Democrats up and down the ticket.’ She also misrepresented her intentions to multiple students, indicating at various times that she was conducting voter registration for the college, that the pledge cards were non-partisan voter registration forms, and that the pledge was a ‘statistical analysis.’”
In the eyes of the college, Sweet clearly created a hostile environment for students, since many feared their grades would be affected if they did not sign the pledge. She remains on paid leave until the board votes to fire her.
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