A Plague On All Their Houses! Republicans' Unclean Hands! No Blue!

When politicians of all stripes, colors and party affiliations allowed themselves and their staffs to be opted out of 'Obamascare' and in the dark of night they , by their very actions, became totally irrelevant.

This act of perfidious disconnect sent a clarifying message, they do not see themselves subject to the same laws we, the 'stuckees,' must endure.

A plague on all their houses.
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Republicans, however, come in for particular criticism for, once again, casting aside their principles and throwing away a classic opportunity to set themselves apart. Lamentably, once again they could not rise to the occasion.

Notwithstanding the article below, in my eyes, Republicans have lost all standing in the court of public opinion because their hands are not clean. How pathetic!!! (See 1 below.)
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Obama, McCain and Graham flim and flam and they never seem to learn a damn thing! (See 2 below.)
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Excessive Liberal spending finally restricts more Democrat overspending.

Yes Liberals, money grows on trees but maybe there just are not enough limbs! (See 3 below.)
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Obama the vicious and nasty. Will history treat him kindly?  (See 4 below.)
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Has Norway had it with progressiveness? Realizing oil will not last forever and their welfare programs could become a burden, Norwegians are beginning to think rationally about the future of their small populated nation. Stay tuned! (See 5 below.)
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Hillary, if nominated and then elected, will be coronated according to  Donna Brazile!

That may be but I doubt she will wear blue! (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1)The President's ObamaCare Straw Man
By Joseph Smith



Leave it to President Obama, with one foot out the door, to sling one more verbal jab at any Republicans who have the temerity to oppose his health care law.

In a Friday afternoon presser before his vacation getaway, the president called efforts to defund and repeal ObamaCare the Republicans' "holy grail" and an "ideological fixation."

Which is not to be confused with Obama's own fixation on passing health care despite sustained opposition by more than half the country. 

The president went on to set up and knock down his own straw man, as The Hill reports:

The idea that you would shut down the government unless you prevent 30 million people from getting healthcare is a bad idea...

I'm assuming they will not take that path...I have confidence that common sense, in the end, will prevail.

Defending his delay of the employer mandate, the president said that going through Congress would be the "normal thing" to do, "[b]ut we're not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to 'ObamaCare[.]'"

And why would that be, Mr. President?

Does it have anything to do with the backhanded manner in which the law was passed, with zero Republican votes?

Could it have anything to do with a party with the audacity to impose their idea of transformation through social engineering that has seen consistent majority opposition for more than five years?

Or does it have anything to do with the fate of a nation having been determined by a Supreme Court chief justice who is accountable to no one on this earth parsing the meaning of a tax?

Or how about the 21 new taxes that arguably amount to the biggest tax increase in our history?

Or a job-killing and innovation-stifling medical device tax that is opposed by 33 Democrat senators (whose ox is gored by that tax)?

And what of the IPAB, or Independent Payment Advisory Board, aka death panels, that even one-time Democrat presidential candidate Howard Dean recently termed a "health care rationing body" that Congress should be "getting rid of"?

Does it matter that the health care law was passed with a rigged cost estimate of less than $1 trillion, using six years of costs and ten years of taxes, and that the ten-year estimate has now reached $2.6 trillion?

What of the fact that health insurance premiums are soaring despite the president's empty promise to reduce a "typical family's premium by up to $2,500 a year"?

Take also the president blithely claiming four years ago that:

... [i]f you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.

In reality, ObamaCare is worsening an already serious shortage of doctors, many employers are likely to drop health coverage, and there has been widespread reduction of work hours to avoid providing employee health insurance.

Does it matter that the ObamaCare economy has resulted in the creation of "seven times more part-time jobs" than full-time jobs?

Or that some insurers are packing their bags and leaving entire states?

Why have the administration's best PR efforts failed to move the dial on ObamaCare, with a recent Fox News poll showing that 63 percent of voters think the law needs to be changed, and a 57-percent majority feeling that implementation is "a joke?"

Which brings us to the extralegal machinations by the Obama administration to hide the bad news from as many unwitting Americans as possible.

Is delaying the employer mandate any indication of trouble in paradise? 

How about the recent announcement that the ObamaCare bureaucracy will be using the honor system, aka "just lie" when applying for premium subsidies, because they have no way to verify the veracity of such claims?

And is it not disturbing that our infinitely wise health care administrators in Washington are unable to decide whether or not our personal data is secure until the day before the exchanges are scheduled to open?

Then again, the exchanges may not be ready on schedule anyway, even after three and a half years of preparation.

Does it matter that a Congress with an approval rating in the teens gave itself new subsidies, just before adjourning for the August recess, to avoid the higher costs the rest of us commoners will face on the ObamaCare exchanges? 

And why did twenty-two House Democrats vote with Republicans last month to delay the individual mandate?  Are those Democrats hoping voters won't notice who owns ObamaCare?

Does it matter, Mr. President, that while you doled out some 2,000 waivers to your friends, the rest of us bitter clingers are forced to succumb to the will of a handful of all-knowing central planners for a most basic need?

Does it matter that more than half the states have rejected building ObamaCare exchanges, and many have also rejected the ObamaCare Medicaid expansion as well?

Does the fact that states without state exchanges are "not statutorily allowed to trigger enforcement" of the employer mandate have anything to do with delaying the mandate?  How about the fact that a lawsuit has been filed challenging the employer mandate on that basis?

What is it about ObamaCare that caused James P. Hoffa, president of the Teamsters Union, to warn Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in writing that ObamaCare would "shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40 hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class?"

And what are we to make of Hoffa's further statement that campaigning for the health care law "has come back to haunt us?"

And speaking of haunting, does anyone in this country look forward to being scrutinized by the IRS on every aspect of his or her personal health care decisions, especially after we learn of the politicizing and privacy abuses by that agency?

Is it not disconcerting that even the IRS employees' union is seeking a way out of ObamaCare?

And why are there more than 60 lawsuits challenging the Obama administration's contraception mandate and the ObamaCare attack on religious freedom, with the likelihood that "at least one of these cases may well reach the U.S. Supreme Court in the next term?"

And, for that matter, why is religious freedom such an obstacle for our beneficent government?

The president cannot answer any of these questions.  He tossed out a straw-man argument on Friday because he has no other defense.  

It is time for Republicans to stand up and put an end to this charade.

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2)Obama, McCain and Graham make a 'huge mistake' in Egypt

By Raymond Stock

On their current trip to Cairo, Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), two of President Barack Obama's most persistent critics on everything in foreign policy from Syria to Benghazi, have found common cause with him at last.

All three fear that the anti-American (and generally anti-human) Muslim Brotherhood (MB), whom they mistakenly see as "moderate," will disappear from the halls of power in Egypt, our most important Arab ally. They also evidently worry that the MB's leading figures, such as now-deposed (and arrested) President Mohamed Morsi—who had awarded himself powers greater than any previous ruler in Egypt's history—will not be free to plot a return to power in an ancient nation that he had nearly destroyed in only one year.

Echoing earlier White House warnings, the two senior senators suggested that we may cut off our $1.6 billion in annual (mainly military) aid, the very tie that binds our countries together, as it has for more than thirty preciously peaceful years. Not to comply with their demands, McCain and Graham said August 6, would be—as Graham put it--a "huge mistake."

The White House, McCain and Graham have warned that the aid may be cut if the MB's leaders are not freed from detention—they have been under arrest since President Mohammed Morsi was overthrown July 3 by the military in response to the historically huge popular demonstrations at the end of June. (Morsi has since been charged for having been part of a 2011 prison break alleged to have been carried out by Hamas.)

They further demand that the MB be brought into the new transitional government of technocrats appointed by the quietly charismatic (and mysteriously Islamist, but apparently independent) strongman minister of defense, General Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi--who had himself been appointed by Morsi. That new government, headed by Adly Mansour (a Supreme Constitutional Court justice) as interim president and respected economist Dr. Hazem Beblawi as prime minister, claims it has reached out to the MB, which refuses to respond to its overtures. Meanwhile, the Islamists are gathered in two major squares in Cairo, waiting for the security forces to clear them away—and for the chance to be martyred when they do.

In response to McCain and Graham's warnings, Mansour denounced what he called "unacceptable interference in internal politics." In this, even a nation infamous for its political xenophobia can be forgiven for seeing a not-so hidden hand attempting to steer the ship of state.

But by blundering this way, Obama, McCain and Graham are joining the departing U.S. ambassador in Cairo, Anne Patterson—widely mocked (with gross inaccuracy) as a hayzaboon, or old crone, for reportedly hectoring Egyptians not to rise up against the elected government (which had turned itself into an Islamist dictatorship)—on a list of new Ugly Americans. She unfortunately gave this advice shortly before the largest demonstrations ever seen in human memory were directed against her suspected client, Morsi. (Reflecting heightened paranoia, her possible successor, Ambassador Robert Ford—who had previously served in Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq and Syria—is under considerable Twitter fire in Egypt, bizarrely accused of having caused the strife that has recently plagued those countries.)

And by going this route, Obama, McCain and Graham are risking one of America's most crucial alliances. They would do so for a not-so-beautiful friendship with a far from benign band of brothers that actually wants to conquer and rule the world (not just the Middle East) in a revived Islamic caliphate. (It is the same risk that Obama took when, after brief vacillation, he abruptly dumped our country's long-term "friend," Hosni Mubarak, in 2011, knowing that Islamists like the MB would likely be the only force capable of winning many votes in the new "democracy.")

The Brother's goals are hardly secret, despite eight decades of adroit, religiously-sanctioned lying, ortaqiyya about their intentions. But they were elected, and so, it is said, we ought to support them. Then again, the U.S. cut off aid when Hamas, the MB's Palestinian branch, won parliamentary elections in 2006--because they refused to renounce terrorism, recognize the State of Israel, and accept agreements that the previous government had signed.

The MB undoubtedly believes that to get what it wants in the short-term—to halt the flow of American cash and equipment to its enemies in the military--is to continue to boycott the bogus "reconciliation" process. (Already, Obama has suspended the scheduled shipment of four F-16s last month, in a move that angered millions of Egyptians.)

If an aid stoppage should last, that could lead to the collapse of the transitional government and Morsi's reinstatement as president—the MB's irreducible demand. Hence they have resisted the senators' calls to dialogue with the new regime. There is no obvious reason for the Brotherhood to change this strategy.

The estimated eight-to-twelve billion dollars quickly coughed up by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to cover emergency imports of diesel fuel and wheat and to rebuild depleted hard-currency reserves are surely crucial for now. But if the military—Egypt's most prestigious institution and itself a pillar of the economy—should have nowhere else to go, Russia and China are always waiting in the wings, and would love to have a presence on both the Nile and Suez.

Refusing to recognize that popular will can mean more than just elections, America's "huge mistake" begins. Given that the ratio of MB opponents to supporters is now perhaps seven-to-one, added to the resentment that most Egyptians feel against any effort to tie vital aid to the tyrannical MB, and the wildly-popular al-Sisi's own fury at the Brotherhood for pushing him (and most Egyptians) into such a place, it is likely Morsi's side that will fail.

And with it, our own.

Raymond Stock, a Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum and a former Assistant Professor of Arabic and Middle East Studies at Drew University, spent twenty years in Egypt, and was deported by the Mubarak regime in 2010.

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3)The Blue State Reckoning

Liberal pension excesses are now jeopardizing liberal priorities.

The crisis of liberal state and city government is arriving, with Detroit in bankruptcy and now no less a Democratic potentate than Mayor Rahm Emanuel warning about the fiscal mess in Chicago. The partnership of public unions and liberal politicians is hitting the wall.

In its recent Annual Financial Analysis, the Windy City disclosed that it faces a $368 million budget deficit next year and as much as $1.5 billion by 2016. Moody's in July downgraded Chicago's credit rating three levels with a negative future outlook, citing the city's "very large and growing pension liabilities."

Mr. Emanuel told state lawmakers last year that Chicago's "day of reckoning has arrived." And now, without immediate reforms, Mr. Emanuel writes in a letter accompanying the fiscal report, "the outlook for future years is unsustainable."

He's right. Chicago has chronically underfunded its pensions, and starting next year it will have to meet a state-mandated schedule raising the city's pension payments to $479 million in 2014 and then to $1.07 billion in 2015. Chicago's four pension systems are only 36% funded, with an overall unfunded liability of $19.5 billion this year and growing.

One reason Mr. Emanuel can't afford these pension contributions is because he's locked into unaffordable union contracts for city workers. Personnel costs currently make up 78% of Chicago government expenditures, and base salaries alone make up two-thirds. Between 2003 and 2012, the city cut its workforce by 20% but personnel costs have still gone up 15%.

Nine of 10 current city employees are unionized, and Mr. Emanuel's team estimates that city workers (not including police and fire) got 16% pay raises between 2005 and 2012. That's not quite as lofty as the 16% pay raise over four years that the Chicago teachers union negotiated last year, but it adds up. Chicago's average annual cost per employee (including salary, health care and overtime) rose to $95,406 in 2012 from $58,299 in 2003.

Mayor Emanuel is the guy who rolled over last September for that new teachers contract rather than ride out an illegal strike that might have hurt President Obama, but he's had plenty of political accomplices. Chicago is required under state law to have its pensions 90% funded by 2040, but the state also says the city can't reform its pension obligations without consent from the dysfunction junction that is Springfield.

In May 2012 Mr. Emanuel asked the state to raise by five years a retirement age that can be as low as 50 depending on tenure and the kind of job; eliminate automatic cost-of-living increases for current retirees for 10 years; and have city workers raise their contribution to their retirement to 14% of salary from 9%. He also suggested giving younger workers the option to choose a 401(k) plan instead of a pension. Imagine that: a choice.

The mayor has been routed by the public unions that own the Democrats who run the state legislature. A state pension committee convened by Governor Pat Quinn has failed to come up with even a modest reform, leading the Governor to suspend lawmakers' salaries. House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton are suing for back pay but they still won't act on pensions.

Something has to give, and a likely candidate is city services. Mr. Emanuel recently laid off 2,100 Chicago education employees, including 1,000 teachers, and he blamed the layoffs on Springfield's pension failures. The pension benefits that unions have negotiated are now killing the jobs of their fellow union members. As in Washington, D.C., the entitlement excesses of liberalism are jeopardizing current liberal priorities.

Many people have been predicting this crack-up for years, the inevitable result of a political alliance in which unions elect Democrats who pad benefits for unions, which then spend to re-elect Democrats, who repeat the cycle. The music stops only when the taxpayers are tapped out or the city and state can't borrow any more. Detroit had its reckoning last month, and Chicago may be headed the same way unless its liberal politicians decide that a crisis of their own creation is a terrible thing to waste.

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4)Obama’s Political Incompetence

By John Steele Gordon

Obamacare, enacted more than three years ago, has been unraveling for over a year.  And there’s a good reason for that: it was never intended to become law at all.

Ordinarily one house of Congress passes a bill and the other house then substantially amends that bill or writes its own from scratch. No one worries too much about the actual language in these bills because they eventually go to a conference committee made up of both senators and representatives. There, the differences are ironed out and legislative draftsmen put the conference bill into final shape. That’s when they worry about the exact language, cross the T’s, dot the I’s, and reconcile conflicting provisions. After both houses pass this final, cleaned up legislation, it goes to the president for signing and becomes law.

But that process was aborted in this case. The Senate passed its version, full of sloppy language, impossible mandates, and contradictory provisions, on Christmas Eve 2009. It could do so because the Democrats at that point had a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority.

But then, the people of Massachusetts stunned the political world by electing a Republican to Teddy Kennedy’s old Senate seat in January 2010. Bye-bye filibuster-proof majority. If the House didn’t pass the exact same bill the Senate had passed, the two bills would have to be reconciled and the final bill sent back to the Senate, where the Republicans now could—and certainly would—filibuster it.

There were only two choices: have the House—where the majority has total control—pass the Senate bill with all its sloppiness, or cut the Republicans in on the deal sufficiently to pick up a couple of Senate Republicans. This being Obama’s Washington, of course, they opted to pass a crudely drafted, legislative horror show into law.

Now these political chickens are coming home to roost. Some provisions have had to be dropped because they were manifestly unworkable and others have been suspended by executive fiat. The language was so sloppy and ill-considered that one provision actually cut Congress members and their staffs off from their very cushy health-care subsidies. Obama waved his hand and said that a provision of the law that clearly says X actually says Y, and subsidies will continue to flow to Capitol Hill, if not to anyone else making $175,000 a year.

None of this, of course, is Obama’s fault. It’s the fault of the Republicans who were told, almost in so many words, to drop dead while the legislation was being drafted.

At his news conference, when he was asked about his unilateral suspension of a provision of the law, the president said that:

Now, what’s true, Ed [Henry, of Fox News], is, is that in a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the Speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law — it has to do with, for example, are we able to simplify the attestation of employers as to whether they’re already providing health insurance or not — it looks like there may be some better ways to do this; let’s make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do.

But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to “Obamacare.” We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so.

As the Wall Street Journal pointed out on Saturday, that is nonsense. No president is going to ask for legislation, always fraught with politics, when he already has the executive authority to act on his own.

But why is there not a normal, let’s-get-the-country’s-business-done political atmosphere in Washington these days? Could it have something to do with a president who says, in a scheduled press conference, such things as:

Now, I think the really interesting question is why it is that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail, their number-one priority. The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don’t have health care and, presumably, repealing all those benefits I just mentioned — kids staying on their parents’ plan; seniors getting discounts on their prescription drugs; I guess a return to lifetime limits on insurance; people with preexisting conditions continuing to be blocked from being able to get health insurance.

Republicans, of course, don’t oppose any of those provisions, except, perhaps, for 26-year-old “kids” on their parents’ health insurance. It is pure, unadulterated, unadorned, bald-faced political slander by the president of the United States against the party that controls one house of Congress. It is also political stupidity of a very high order.

Barack Obama is, by far, the most viciously partisan president in American history. Other presidents have been partisan, often deeply so, but were careful to take the high road so as to keep open lines of communication with the other party, without which governance cannot be successful in a democracy. Not Barack Obama.  His incompetence in everything political except winning elections is now costing him (and, inevitably, us) big time.

History will not treat this man kindly.

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5)Norway’s Right Turn 

A political shift as the country ponders the future of its welfare state 

By John Fund

The National Review cruise pulled in on Tuesday to this coastal city, which clearly is the center of the country’s fabulously successful oil industry.

Outside of Texas, it’s unlikely you would find a Petroleum Museum in the United States like the one that occupies a prominent place on Stavanger’s waterfront. We depend on the oil industry for our daily needs, but then either disparage it or ignore it.

Not so Norway. The museum in Stavanger, which opened in 1997, makes obligatory nods toward climate change and alternative fuels. But among the pictures of modern windmills and solar panels is the cautionary note that such technologies resemble a ketchup bottle in that they deliver either a lot at one time or nothing at all

The museum guides aren’t oil evangelists, but they make clear that oil from Norway is drilled following strict safety standards, and is then processed and shipped by a dependable NATO member. The profits are invested in stock markets all over the world rather than being siphoned off by corruption.

This country was transformed by the discovery of huge oil deposits off its shores in 1969. Although Norway’s state-owned oil company, Statoil, was quickly established to lead the development of the new oil discoveries, the industry has been open to private investment and participation on a scale seldom found outside the United States. That has led to an extremely efficient and profitable energy sector, which provides 36 percent of the national government’s revenue. The Government Pension Fund, into which much of the oil profits are channeled, had $445 billion in assets in 2010 and represented nearly 2 percent of the equity in European stock markets. The value of the pension fund’s assets approximately equals the value of all the real estate in Manhattan.

“Oil has turned Norway from a sleepy, largely rural economy into an economic powerhouse,” says Norwegian businessman Olaf Halvorssen. “So much money comes in to the government that Norway has largely escaped the trimming of the welfare state that many other European countries are going through.”

But more and more people recognize that the oil wealth won’t last forever, and a real debate is just starting in this country of 4.9 million people over what direction its economy should go. Norway will be holding elections for Parliament on September 9, just two weeks before Germany votes. If polls taken over the last year are accurate, the eight-year-old Labor-party government of Jens Stoltenberg is headed for a landslide defeat.

Normally, you would think it would be a shoo-in for reelection. Labor’s social democrats have long thought of themselves as the natural party of government — Labor has been the leading party in Norway for all but 16 of the last 78 years. While much of Europe is wracked by recession, Norway’s economy grew by 3 percent last year, and the unemployment rate is only 3.5 percent. Norway’s GDP per capita is now over $60,000 a year.

But Norwegians appear likely to elect a conservative coalition government for the first time in over a decade. Polls show the Conservative party leading with 32 percent of the vote, which should give it 58 seats in the 169-seat parliament, a dramatic increase from 2005, when it won only 23 seats. The Labor party has about 30 percent of the vote, and its left-wing allied parties are floundering. The Progress party — a populist party that supports low taxes and stricter limits on immigration, and that worries about Muslim extremism – has about 16 percent of the vote, and it and the Conservatives, together with their smaller allies, look to have a clear majority in the new Parliament. Both the Conservative party and the Progress party are headed by women — former local-government minister Erna Solberg and economist Siv Jensen, respectively — making it very likely that Norway will soon have its second woman prime minister.

The two parties agree on some basics: lower taxes and reform of the welfare system to encourage more entrepreneurship and less dependence on oil money. But the Conservatives have moved to the center in a bid to pick up disillusioned Labor voters — backing gay marriage and membership in the European Union. Being pro–gay marriage won’t hurt them (it has been legal in Norway since 2008), but the public is highly skeptical about joining the EU in the wake of the recent bailouts of insolvent nations — over 70 percent of voters turn thumbs down on EU membership.

Unlike the Progress party, the Conservatives accept the basis of the Norwegian welfare state and largely promise to make it more efficient. Solberg’s slogan is clearly humanist if somewhat gauzy: “Human beings, not billions.”

Siv Jensen is taking a different approach. An unapologetic admirer of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, she has appeared frequently at gatherings of U.S. conservatives such as CPAC to champion individual liberty. “We are rooted in Norwegian values and believe the best way to improve them is to create more opportunity,” she told me last year during a visit to the U.S. Her party has slipped in support since 2011, when it was (largely unfairly) linked to an insane gunman’s attack on Norwegian schoolchildren in which 77 people died. But it is still likely to enter a conservative government led by Solberg’s 

Conservatives, with Jensen a possible finance minister. It would be the first time Norway’s own variant on the Tea Party would ever have been part of a government. It will be interesting to see just how many compromises the Progress party will have to make as it transitions from noisy critic of the status quo to actually being part of the government. Here’s hoping it can help the Conservatives demonstrate that it is possible to reform the welfare state even when there is no immediate crisis facing it.

— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO

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6) Brazile: "If Hillary Clinton Gets In The Race, There Will Be A Coronation Of Her"

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: No question about that, but there does not appear to be all that much competition, yet understandably, with Hillary Clinton out there kind of freezing the field.

DONNA BRAZILE: I don't think so. Martin O'Malley has made some noise recently that he's interested. Of course we have Joe Biden, Kristen Gillibrand, the senator from the great state here of New York. Elizabeth Warren, there is a lot of buzz around her, and of course, Governor Cuomo here from New York. A lot of talk. And let me not forget Joe Biden, because he will call me this afternoon and remind me.

So while I do think it's too early to handicap the race, there is no question, if Hillary Clinton gets into the race, there will be a coronation of her, because there are so many Democrats who last time around supported her, who I think are anxious to see her back out there again.