Don't be melancholy we have only three more years of Obama!
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Even after five years of Obama as president the office still retains a vestige of its former cache but not to Iran which rejected Obama's open hand. (See 1 below.)
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'Obamascare' typifies what liberal politicians like to pass for the unwashed masses yet, exclude themselves from its burdens.
This legislation runs to hundreds of trees but Greens never raised a limb in protest.
Opticians would have made a fortune in new glassware sales but no one chose to read it.
Now the funding of this monstrosity is before Congress and its cost has escalated beyond even the most cynical estimate yet, because The Supremes decided it was Constitutional, it is the law of the land.
A few Republicans Senators are trying to defund it but do not have the votes and will be blamed for trying because the undertaker who controls the Senate is looking out for his party and could care less about the nation and the fiscal disaster it faces.
This is your government folks at its best and because more than half no longer have skin in the game, are dependent upon government largess and/or because they either cannot find work or have no desire to do so 'Obamascare' will become just another government suppository! (See 2 below.)
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Even Maureen, the darling of liberals, has begun to see Obama for the fraud he always was.
Obama just can't get a handle on how to stand tall . Has he lost his grip? Did he ever have one?
At least Chamberlain could carry his own umbrella. (See 3 and 3a below.)
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Dick
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1)He's Just Not That Into You
Iran's president can't even find a way to shake an eager Obama's hand.
As diplomatic humiliations go, Hassan Rouhani's refusal to accept President Obama's offer of an informal "encounter" and historic photo-op at Tuesday's meeting of the U.N. General Assembly may not be the most consequential. But it is among the most telling.
This isn't the first time an Iranian president has left his U.S. counterpart cooling his heels at Turtle Bay. In 2000, Bill Clinton sought a meeting at a U.N. luncheon with then-Iranian president Mohammed Khatami, another reputed moderate, who also declined the opportunity of an American handshake.
Back then, the explanation for Mr. Khatami's refusal was that internal Iranian politics would not have allowed it. On Tuesday, a senior Obama Administration official peddled a similar line after the Rouhani snub, telling reporters that Iranians "have an internal dynamic that they have to manage."
That's one way of putting it. Another way is that Iran's ruling clerics and Revolutionary Guard Corps remain ideologically incapable of reconciling themselves to the Great Satan. This shouldn't surprise anyone who reviews the 34-year-history of Iranian rebuffs to American diplomatic overtures, which makes the U.S. embarrassment on Tuesday all the more acute.
For days before the U.N. conclave, White House aides had broadcast the President's desire to shake Mr. Rouhani's hand. By Monday, the press was overflowing with leaked accounts of where and how it would happen. Having thus turned down the lights and turned up the mood music, it made the snub that followed especially potent. What the Administration is trying to spin as a function of complex Iranian politics was, in blunt fact, an expression of lordly contempt for what Iranian leaders consider to be an overeager suitor from an unworthy nation.
The contempt showed even more strongly in Mr. Rouhani's speech. That came a few hours after Mr. Obama's morning speech, in which the American promised Iran that "we are not seeking regime change, and we respect the right of the Iranian people to access peaceful nuclear energy."
To that olive branch, Mr. Rouhani responded by denouncing international sanctions as "violence, pure and simple," warning against the influence of "warmongering pressure groups" (no mystery as to who he has in mind there), and offering "time-bound" negotiations to resolve the nuclear issue. As Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren has pointed out, the offer that talks should be "time-bound" makes no sense if Iran is sincere about never developing nuclear weapons. But Iran's record over three decades is that it is not sincere.
In his speech, Mr. Obama reiterated that "we will not tolerate the development or use of weapons of mass destruction." It could not have been lost on the Iranians that Mr. Obama is in the process of tolerating exactly that in Syria. Mr. Obama also said that it is "in the security interest of the United States and the world to meaningfully enforce a prohibition" against the use of chemical weapons. But the lack of meaningful enforcement has been the President's policy for nearly a year.
Politics in the normal sense doesn't exist in Tehran, where the rules are set and the players chosen by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who is accountable to nobody. What Iran's leaders do understand is how to humiliate adversaries they consider to be weak. We hope Mr. Obama appreciates how he has been schooled.
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2)
The ObamaCare Wars Are Just Starting
The health law has set in motion long-run forces that could erode the political foundation of Medicare.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr..
The ObamaCare fight is turning hot and heavy. House Republicans have made an implausible threat to shut down the government to defund ObamaCare, but a plausible motive is to create fear, uncertainty and doubt (which already exists in abundance regarding ObamaCare) during the crucial sign-up period that begins next month.
On the flip side, the administration's last-minute decision not to require income documentation in the first year can only do wonders for enrollment. A handy Kaiser Family Foundation calculator shows how: A single person who estimates his 2014 income as $33,000 would get a measly $6. Change the estimate to $30,000 and, hey, get $507.
This is war—turning sectors of the economy into partisan battlefields is a cost of their agenda that liberals, with their pure faith in "programs," never factor in. But wars also have a way of leading to unexpected outcomes.
Consider the speed with which Trader Joe's, a grocery chain, went from goat to hero in the media last week for canceling insurance coverage for part-time workers. Bad Trader Joe's. But the chain would also give them $500 each to buy health insurance on an ObamaCare exchange, which would actually be a better deal for most employees. Good Trader Joe's.
The fine balance here is between two subsidies in our oversubsidized health-care system. Figuring out where these lines cross is the kind of thing that keeps economists busy. If all employees for whom it made sense to trade in the tax benefit for employer-provided insurance in favor of ObamaCare's direct tax credits did so, how many would shift?
According to a new Stanford study, 37 million (at an additional annual cost of $132 billion).
That's a huge number of people quitting our employment-based health insurance system. The only ones staying would be the affluent, who get the biggest tax subsidy because they're in the highest tax bracket. At a stroke, undermined is the political coalition that has long sustained one of the most destructive and regressive subsidies in our health-care system. And that's just one of the accidental features of the bundle of liberal compromises that make up ObamaCare.
ObamaCare also sets in motion long-run forces that could erode the political foundation of Medicare. Don't believe it?
ObamaCare already contains a large implicit subsidy for the old (regardless of income) in the form of protection of pre-existing conditions and its limitation on how much higher rates insurers can charge the old than the young.
Medicare, for its part, is already means-tested and will become more so. Millions of Medicare users already have opted for a private insurance option. How many ObamaCare customers might one day decide they'd also like to keep their private insurance rather than enroll in fee-for-service Medicare—especially as no signal has been clearer from Washington than the signal that Medicare quality will decline as reimbursements to doctors and hospitals are trimmed back?
Now let's just dream for a moment: If Medicare and the tax handout to employers declined in importance, what would be left would be ObamaCare plus Medicaid—essentially a schedule of declining subsidies (irrespective of age) that phase out with income.
Voila, this sounds a lot like the alleged GOP cure for our health-care system.
Our point is that when Washington legislates on a grand scale, it sets in motion a game whose long-run outcome nobody can predict.
ObamaCare, to be sure, was not reform—it was a piling on of subsidies that can only throw fuel on the fire of health-care inflation. Not even the usual mouthpieces pretend otherwise anymore.
But a society can't give a subsidy to everybody for the same reason you can't give a subsidy to yourself—you end up paying for your own subsidy and aren't better off. In fact, you are worse off thanks to the administrative overhead involved in taking money away from you and giving it back to you.
You are also worse off because of the perverse incentives engendered by diverting yours and everyone's health-care spending through a common pot.
These pathologies have undermined U.S. health care for two generations, and nothing has been solved, nothing has been fixed, due to ObamaCare.
It should be noted, finally, who is really rooting for the Affordable Care Act to be a train wreck: It's people on the left, like L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik, who anticipates that "glitches, loopholes and shortcomings" will lead to a single-payer system. It's people like Sen. Harry Reid, whom Mr. Hiltzik quotes telling voters back in Nevada that ObamaCare is "far from having something that's going to work forever."
Our health-care wars still have a long way to run.
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3)No Brief Encounter
By MAUREEN DOWD
The man formerly hailed as a messiah was having a bad day
The Iranians snubbed him. The Brazilians upbraided him. Ted Cruz fauxlibustered him. And you just know that, behind the scenes, the Russians were messing with him.
At the end of a long, hard day at the United Nations, he escaped into the sweaty and freighted embrace of the Clintons, who had to explain and defend the president’s own health care plan for him at their global initiative conference/Hillary 2016 pep rally. The choreography of diplomacy danced around the tantalizing possibility of a historic handshake that could end three decades of poison. (Even though the last climactic clasp, between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat, disappointingly proved that sometimes a handshake is just a handshake.)
With the welcome exit of the provincial Iranian fruitbat, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, could the country W. declared part of the “axis of evil” reach out to the country smeared as the “Great Satan” by Ayatollah Khomeini? Obama administration officials at the U.N. on Tuesday explained to reporters that there would not be a bilateral between President Obama and President Hassan Rouhani of Iran, or any sort of “formal meeting.”
“We’re not prepared for heads of state to negotiate or presidents to negotiate on the nuclear issue,” an official said, speaking on background. An “encounter” would be permissible. Not a long one, but an “informal, brief encounter.”
“So,” a reporter asked, “like a handshake?”
“Yes, that type of thing,” the official replied. “Exactly. On the margins here.”
Except that, after the White House spent a week suggesting that there could be a press-the-flesh moment, Rouhani snubbed Obama. And not on the margins.
Maybe the tweet-happy Iranian president was too busy retweeting Christiane Amanpour to have time to pretend to bump into the American president in a U.N. hallway. “Ultimately it became clear that that was too complicated for them at this time,” the Obama official said just before 3 p.m., trying to put a good face on the scuttled face-to-face, adding that “the Iranians, number one, have an internal dynamic that they have to manage” and they “were not ready to have an encounter at the presidential level.”
Even a brief encounter wasn’t brief enough.
“The assumption that a meeting per se could be decisive or help solve problems is absolutely wrong,” said the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham. “We think that we should wait until a proper time for such a meeting comes.”
Poor President Obama, trying to figure out if the Russians and Iranians are offering trick or treat to America on W.M.D., as he lurches about with a foreign policy played out extemporaneously and ambivalently in “Obama’s brain and Ben Rhodes’s mouth,” as The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier puts it. (An internal Israeli government document, The Washington Post reported, dismissed Rouhani’s charm offensive as “smile but enrich.”)
And poor Hillary Clinton, having to watch as the diplomatic breakthroughs, albeit haphazard and possibly illusory, happen on John Kerry’s watch, making her tenure look even more like that of a globe-trotting good-will ambassador. The president told the U.N. that his future diplomatic efforts would focus on Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Hillary largely steered clear of that conflict, knowing the domestic risks for the restoration of Clinton Inc.
The Obama snub is a replay of then-President Clinton’s dashed attempt at a brief encounter in 2000 at the opening of the General Assembly with the Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, who also tried to warm up relations with the West but got hampered by hard-liners at home. As The Times’s Mark Landler wrote, Clinton aides did everything they could to arrange a “coincidental” brief encounter — including asking that Clinton’s speech be just before Khatami’s and that Clinton be seated within chair-bumping range of Khatami at the secretary general’s lunch.
Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S., told an audience at the Core Club in Midtown Sunday evening that President Obama raised expectations in the Arab world with his 2009 Cairo speech that were never met. But the president, stymied on Syria and dealing with an American public that never wants to hear the words “Sunni” or “Shiite” again, had a straight-up message for the Arab world.
“The United States is chastised for meddling in the region, accused of having a hand in all manner of conspiracy,” he said in his speech. “At the same time, the United States is blamed for failing to do enough to solve the region’s problems and for showing indifference toward suffering Muslim populations.”
He said that America’s ill-suited forays into occupying Muslim countries are over: “Iraq shows us that democracy cannot simply be imposed by force.”
A handshake can’t be forced on someone who is not quite ready to come to grips.
We are encouraged that President Rouhani received from the Iranian people a mandate to pursue a more moderate course, and given President Rouhani’s stated commitment to reach an agreement, I am directing John Kerry to pursue this effort with the Iranian government in close cooperation with the European Union, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia and China.
Naturally, the mainstream media is seized with joy that Obama is embracing the “moderate” Iranian leader. The Los Angeles Times declares “President Obama, at United Nations, seeks 'diplomatic path' with Iran” and ABC News exclaims “At UN, Obama Welcomes Signs of Iranian Moderation.”
But is Iran’s new president Hassan Rouhani really moderate? Not so much.
Roozbeh Farahanipour, a young activist arrested, imprisoned and tortured during the 1999 student uprising against the Islamist regime in Tehran, wrote:
Don’t be fooled by Hassan Rouhani’s guise and his words of temperance, which mask a history of unabashed fanatical Islamic radicalism.[…]
In a matter of weeks after the announcement of Rouhani’s bid for candidacy, he was suddenly pegged as a “moderate” and “reformer.” […] In the blink of an eye, his history of deceiving the international community, supporting international terror and oppressing Iran’s citizens, disappeared from the headlines and common discourse.
Rouhani, who headed the Islamic National Security Council from 1989 thru 2005, including during the 1999 uprisings, is quoted as saying at that time:
“These students are too pathetic and worthless for us to have to begin changing our directives. The continuance of this mess is not acceptable for our regime and the people. I issued strict orders against these elements [the students] to confront and severely deal with these opportunists. Wherever they are, we will handle them and suppress them. People will witness what today's security and disciplinary forces, the heroic members of the Basij (auxiliary militia) will do to these rabble-rousers and thugs, if they dare to imagine that they can continue their so-called peaceful campaign. The agent that has united our people today, is simply indestructible; that agent is Islam and Islamic rule which is the absolute symbol of the Supreme Leadership.”
And how did the regime forces, under the order of Rouhani, “handle” and “suppress” the students? According to Farahanipour, “many students were being shot to death in their dormitories or thrown out of their windows, I was thrown into solitary confinement.”
Murder and repression… Moderate?
Rouhani has defended his duplicitous strategy as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator. At the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council, Rouhani explained:
“While we were talking with the Europeans in Tehran, we were [simultaneously] installing equipment in parts of the [nuclear] facility in Isfahan, but we still had a long way to go to accomplish the project. In fact, by creating a tranquil environment, we were able to finish the work in Isfahan.”
Lying and cheating… Moderate?
Iran’s official FARS News Agency quoted Rouhani’s message of support to Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, an American-designated terrorist group:
“No doubt, your tireless and dedicated efforts and those of Hezbollah warriors on the scene of resistance promise the decisive victory of the resistant Lebanese and Palestinian nations over the Zionist regime, which has always been supported by the Islamic Republic.”
Support for terrorist groups… Moderate?
According to Syrian state news agency SANA, at a Tehran meeting with Syria’s Prime Minister, Rouhani expressed his protection for Syria’s bloody dictator Bashar al-Assad, just days before Assad’s reported use of chemical weapons on his people:
“The Islamic Republic of Iran aims to strengthen its relations with Syria and will stand by it in facing all challenges... The deep, strategic and historic relations between the people of Syria and Iran ... will not be shaken by any force in the world.”
Backing brutal dictators... Moderate?
In his speech to the United Nations, President Obama said, “President Rouhani has just recently reiterated that the Islamic republic will never develop a nuclear weapon.” If Obama believes this statement, why doesn’t he believe Rouhani’s previous statements, above?
And why doesn’t the media? Murder and repression, lying and cheating, support for terrorist groups, backing brutal dictators... Where’s the coverage?
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