Low interest rates are like a low bar for jumpers. (See 1 and 4b below.)
===
Obama study N Korea and maybe you can learn something regarding Iranian negotiations. (See 2 and 2a below.)
===
Another Obama gasser! (See 3 below.)
===
Faber remains suspect, Roubini not a happy camper either and Porter Stansberry is concerned about the correlation between interest rates , when they go up, and stock prices. However, Porter believes Yellin will keep rates lower for several more years,. Thus, the risk in equities is reduced. (See 4, 4a and 4b below.)
===
Rush interviews David Horowitz and they discuss David's new book.
David has traveled many political roads starting as afar out radical, then becoming a somewhat calmer liberal and he is an arch conservative. It took him several decades but he finally saw the light. (See 5 below.)
====
George Will asks whether Medicaid will provide Obama his next crisis? (See 6 below.)
===
Dick
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1)
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| People called me crazy… "Right now is the greatest moment to be an investor in my nearly two decades in the industry," I wrote in the March issue of my True Wealthnewsletter. My headline for that issue was, "The Entire Stock Market Could Soar 95% in Three Years." Nobody wanted to believe me. Stocks had just finished 2012 with a 16% gain. But in 2013, stocks are already up 29%. And they're on pace for their best year since 1997, when stocks closed out the year for a 33% gain. So could stocks really keep going higher from here? Absolutely! Here's why… In short, over the last half-century, history has shown that when interest rates are low, stocks get more expensive… and yet you continue to make money! How can that be? What most people don't know is there is a strong relationship between interest rates and stock market values… This table shows what I mean:
As you can see, when interest rates are high, stocks are usually cheap at a P/E ratio of just 12. But when rates are low, stocks trade for much higher average P/E ratios… nearly 22. Today, interest rates are incredibly low, near zero. Yet stocks trade for a P/E ratio of just 16.8. That's below their long-term average P/E ratio… and well below the 22 P/E ratio they could trade for based on the table. Astoundingly, even though stocks become expensive when the Fed cuts rates below 2.5%, they do very well when interest rates are low… Stocks actually perform best when interest rates are low based on history (compared with "all periods"). Now, we know Janet Yellen – the newly appointed chair of the Federal Reserve – will follow Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke's course. That means keeping interest rates near zero until at least 2016. This likely gives us another two-plus years of safe stock market gains. And our potential is still huge… You see, stocks could return 28% over the next two years even if P/E ratios stay at current levels. (Specifically, Wall Street analysts estimate the earnings for S&P 500 companies will be $135 in 2015. That's about 28% more than today.) But I doubt P/E ratios will stay at current levels. I expect they will go up… Over the next two years, we'll see more folks and more dollars forced into the stock market. You can't live on zero-percent interest. So people will be "smoked out" of their safe investments, and they'll move into riskier assets like stocks. This could drive stocks up to their average P/E of around 22, given low interest rates. If that happens, the S&P 500 will soar to around 2,940 by the end of 2015… a 63% gain from here. I know this sounds crazy. But it's absolutely possible. The S&P 500 is up 21% in the nine months since I first wrote about this idea. Yet stocks are still incredibly cheap. Things are already moving in our direction. And there is no reason to expect them to stop. Yellen and the Federal Reserve will keep rates low for at least another two years. That is certain. This, in turn, will continue pushing money into riskier assets, like stocks and real estate. The market is up big over the last few years. But I strongly believe stocks could soar another 63% in the next two years. So you haven't missed it. Now is still a great time to put money to work in the U.S. stock market. Good investing, Steve ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2)North Korea Offers Lessons for Iran Nuclear Talks 
Korean Central News Agency via Korean News Service
Recent negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program failed to reach a comprehensive agreement. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, however, remains determined to move forward despite congressional misgivings. These nuclear negotiations with Iran are reminiscent of North Korea and the Six-Party Talks.
It has been 10 years since the U.S., North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia first sat at the negotiation table over Pyongyang’s nuclear program. However, the Six-Party Talks never achieved their aim of denuclearizing North Korea, since Pyongyang never implemented its commitments. North Korea has proposed coming back to the negotiating table but as an acknowledged nuclear state. Under those circumstances, the U.S. has no chance of achieving great success.
Bruce Klingner, Heritage senior fellow for Northeast Asia, was interviewed inThe Wall Street Journal and made four points regarding the lessons the U.S. should learn from its North Korean experiences:
In addition to these four points, the U.S. needs to ensure sufficient military defenses against the full spectrum of North Korean military threats. North Korea’s provocations, such as its nuclear tests and missile launches, show continually improving military capabilities. However, it seems that the U.S. does not consider North Korea or Iran as serious threats. The U.S. should ensure sufficient deterrence and not allow North Korea or Iran to gain advantage through diplomacy.
When negotiating, the U.S. should figure out how to deal with states that lack table manners. Otherwise, the U.S. could face yet another nuclear threat somewhere else in the world.
2a) 'Secret talks with Iran led Obama to shelve strike on Syria'
Times of Israel staff - 
Members of a UN investigative team take samples near the site of an alleged chemical weapons attack, in Syria, August 28, 2013 (photo credit: AP/United Media Office of Arbeen)
President Barack Obama’s last-minute decision not to carry out an intended punitive strike against Syria’s President Bashar Assad this summer, after Assad killed almost 1,500 of his own people with chemical weapons, was influenced by secret US back-channel discussions with Iran, Israel’s security and intelligence community reportedly believes.
The issue of Assad’s chemical weapons use came up in the secret US-Iran contacts held in recent months in Oman, Israel’s Channel 2 news reported Friday, and it quoted unnamed Israeli intelligence and security sources asserting Obama’s change of heart was affected by those contacts.
The report speculated that Iran persuaded Assad to agree to dismantle his chemical weapons capability in return for Obama not carrying out the intended attack.
The report underlines Israeli concerns, frequently stated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that Iran is fooling the US about its ostensibly moderate intentions, and that the US is being duped into unjustifiably warming relations with Iran, while Israel is gradually becoming isolated in its unbending opposition to Iran’s nuclear program. The same TV news broadcast alsoquoted unnamed Israeli government officials denouncing Obama for mishandling the Geneva nuclear negotiations, with the result that Iran has been granted the “right” to enrich uranium and economic sanctions pressure on Iran is collapsing.
The Obama administration last week acknowledged holding months of secret back-channel talks with Iran ahead of the interim deal on Iran’s rogue nuclear program that was signed last week by the P5+1 powers and Iran in Geneva. The president reportedly informed Netanyahu of those contacts when he visited the White House in late September soon after they became “substantive.” Israeli reports have claimed that the back-channel was opened much earlier than acknowledged by the Obama administration, and Israeli officials have privately protested that the US did not inform Israel fully of those contacts.
Friday’s Channel 2 report recalled that the Obama administration was so certain that its forces were about to attack Syria in the chemical weapons crisis at the end of August that US officials telephoned Israel’s prime minister and defense minister to give them “advance warning” the attack was about to take place. The phone calls were made shortly after Secretary of State John Kerry on August 31 had accused Assad’s regime of an August 21 chemical weapons attack that killed 1,429 Syrians. Israel’s leaders were told explicitly that the US would be taking punitive military action against the Assad regime within 24-48 hours.
Friday’s report said that Kerry personally telephoned Israel’s leaders to inform them of the imminent attack, and that Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague also made such a call. The calls were made so that Israel could take steps to defend itself against any potential Syrian retaliation that might target the Jewish state.
In fact, however, Obama on September 1 surprisingly announced that he would seek Congressional authorization before a strike on Syria. Ultimately Obama did not carry out the narrow, punitive action he had said he was planning, instead joining a Russian-led initiative for a diplomatic solution aimed at stripping Assad of his chemical weapons.
The Times of Israel reported claims Friday that the secret back channel of negotiations between Iran and the United States began several years ago, and that it has also led to a series of prisoner releases by both sides, which have played a central role in bridging the distance between the two nations.
In the most dramatic of those releases, the US in April released a top Iranian scientist, Mojtaba Atarodi, who had been arrested in 2011 for attempting to acquire equipment that could be used for Iran’s military-nuclear programs.
2b) Iran Nuke Deal a 'Nightmare' for the World
Chris Mitchell - CBN,
MOSCOW, Russia — While world powers met with Iranian negotiators in Geneva, Switzerland, a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow essentially fell flat.
Netanyahu is engaged in high-stakes diplomacy to prevent Russia and other Western countries from signing a deal with Iran over its nuclear program.
Netanyahu and Putin took different views from those talks. Putin was optimistic.
“We hope in the near future a deal will be announced acceptable to all the sides,” the Russian president said.
But Netanyahu warned once again about the danger of a nuclear Iran.
“For Israel, the biggest threat against us and against global security is Iran's effort to arm itself with nuclear weapons,” he said.
Some see Netanyahu's attempt to change Putin's mind as a long shot.
“I think the prime minister tried to convince Putin that agreement with Iran at the moment will be a bad idea,” Israel Public Radio's Moscow correspondent Yair Natov told CBN News. “But I think he knew that it would be a very hard task. And from what we saw in the press conference, I think both sides agreed not to agree.”
Netanyahu's Moscow visit is one part of an all-out diplomatic campaign by Israel to stop the international community from striking a deal with Iran that would allow it to get a nuclear device.
Israel doesn't want Geneva 2013 to become Munich 1938. That's when the Western powers appeased Adolph Hitler, and he took over Czechoslovakia. That agreement sowed the seeds of World War II.
Mark Regev, spokesman for the prime minister, called it a “dream deal” for Iran.
“The deal on the table is a deal that gives the Iranians exactly what they want,” Regev told CBN News. “It's a dream deal. They don't have to make any significant concessions and at the same time they get easing of sanctions. For them it's a dream deal — a dream deal — and we're concerned for the international community, it will be a nightmare.”
Regev said Iran is not just an Israeli problem.
“It's obvious the Iranian threat is a problem for Israel, that's clear,” Regev said. “I'll remind you that the Iranians are working on intercontinental ballistic missiles — missiles that can carry nuclear payloads.”
“Now they don't need those missiles for Israel because they've already got missiles that can target Israel,” he said. “Those missiles are being built for targets way beyond the Middle East — Europe and North America.”
But will Israel attack Iran's nuclear facilities?
In a statement designed to remind negotiators in Geneva a military option is very much alive, Israel's former national security advisor Ya'akov Amidror told the Financial Times, “…We have enough to stop the Iranians for a very long time.”
“We are not bluffing,” he continued. “We are very serious about preparing ourselves for the possibility that Israel will have to defend itself by itself.”
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3)
Government Opening Free Gas Stations in Poor
Neighborhoods
Oct 29, 2013 First 'Obama-station' Debuts in Detroit, Seventy Planned Nationwide As the battle over Obamacare rages in Washington, the White House is
quietly using a little known provision of the law to roll out a
nationwide network of free gas stations for minorities and the poor.
According to a report in The Detroit News this morning, the
administration is using its authority under the Affordable Care Act to
"improve transportation routes to hospitals" to dispense gasoline free
of cost in disadvantaged neighborhoods.
The $2 billion-a-year program aims to distribute 40 million gallons of
free gasoline each year through 70 new gas stations constructed in
major metropolitan areas. The Department of Health and Human
Services (DHS) will be responsible for operating the network, whose first station opened yesterday in Detroit.
"It's not something we're publicizing very much, for obvious reasons,
" explains Dori Salcido, assistant DHS secretary for public affairs. "But
under the law we are well within our rights to offer this service, and
we think it's good public policy.
"How are people supposed to get to the doctor's office if they don't
have gas in their cars? Health insurance is worthless if you can't make
your appointment. This is just another fine example of government
stepping in and solving big problems."
No Gas for You Although some developing oil-rich nations like Venezuela and
Indonesia subsidize gasoline for the poor, the practice has never
before been tried in the United States. The plans are proving
controversial with some taxpayers who are loathe to see their money go to subsidize others.
"So basically I'm being punished for not living in the ghetto," says
Colin Blair, a white person from the affluent Detroit suburb of
Farmington Hills. "I have three kids and a mortgage. Life isn't cheap
for me either. I could use some free gasoline too." An investigation
into the station's operations, however, reveals that Blair is unlikely to be able to use the service.
"Supposedly access to the station is determined by income," says
Ebony Jackson, manager of the first Obama-station. "But it's pretty
unrealistic to do an income check on each and every driver. So what
we do is basically let all the black people pump for free, and charge
all the white people the market rate."
The Obama-stations scandal was uncovered by Nolan Finley , a
conservative Detroit News columnist widely lauded for his g
;gl=us> on Obamaphones. Finley says the blatant racial bias in the program is only one of its many outrageous aspects.
"The stations have Obama campaign logo on them and giant photos of
the president," he explains. "He's trying to buy votes ahead of the
midterm elections. This is something you normally only see in third
world countries. I've never been more scared for our democracy."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4)
Faber: 'We're in a Gigantic Speculative Bubble'
By Dan Weil
!
Multiple asset markets have entered bubble territory, says Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom Boom & Doom Report.
"You have to say that we are again in a massive financial bubble in bonds, in equities, in [other] asset prices that have gone up dramatically," he told CNBC. "Farmland is up 10 times over the last 10 years. Bitcoins are up now, and who knows what will go up next. We are in a gigantic speculative bubble." The Standard & Poor's 500 Index has risen 29.1 percent so far this year. While Faber says he hasn’t sold stocks yet, he sees little value in them. The S&P 500 closed at 1,805.81 Friday. The market hasn’t seen a 10 percent correction in more than two years, and Faber thought a correction was overdue around 1,600. “But that doesn't make stocks good value,” he said. Faber compares the U.S. stock market to Asian markets earlier this year. They began 2013 on the upswing, and then in May began a swoon that has taken them down 30 percent in currency-adjusted terms, Faber says. “So we have to be careful in this kind of exponentially rising market.” Faber notes that Robert Shiller’s cyclically adjusted price-earnings (CAPE) ratio, which uses 10-year average earnings, stands at 25. “It's at the high level that would suggest relative low returns going forward,” Faber said. Meanwhile, short-term interest rates are almost zero, and long-term rates remain low compared to historical averages. The 10-year Treasury note yielded 2.74 percent late Friday. “So I think if you look at the next five to 10 years, expected returns [on stocks] will be very low,” Faber said. Still, he says the stock market can climb another 20 percent before it tumbles, as long as the Federal Reserve keeps cranking up the money-printing machine. For a long-term investor, the time to enter the stock market was late 2008 to early 2009, Faber says. The S&P 500 bottomed at 667 in March 2009. But, “if you’re a long-term investor, I think future returns will be very disappointing.” As for the bitcoin digital currency, which has soared by a factor of more than 90 since January to $1,230, the surge reflects an inflow of “excess liquidity,” Faber says. That same money can go into paintings, farmland, diamonds, etc., he says. “It shows there is a lot of liquidity that just flushes into one speculative sector of the market from another one.” When it comes to the outlook for stocks this month, some market commentators like to talk about a traditional "Santa Claus rally." But Mark Hulbert, editor of Hulbert Financial Digest, isn't buying it.“Don’t fall for the sales pitch,” he writes on MarketWatch. “The stock market’s average performance before Christmas is no better than mediocre. It is only in the last week of December that the market has strong seasonal winds blowing in its sails.” 4a)Roubini: Beware a Global Housing Market 'Train Wreck' Nouriel Roubini, the noted economist who correctly predicted the U.S. housing bubble and its collapse, now sees an impending housing market train wreck of global proportions, with housing markets in 18 countries vulnerable to a meltdown. In a column for Project Syndicate, Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, wrote that "signs of frothiness, if not outright bubbles" are evident in Asia, Europe and emerging markets. "What we are witnessing in many countries looks like a slow-motion replay of the last housing-market train wreck. And, like last time, the bigger the bubbles become, the nastier the collision with reality will be." Roubini said the symptoms of overheated conditions include fast-rising home prices, high and rising price-to-income ratios and excessive levels of mortgage debt as a percentage of household debt. He wrote that in developed countries, the housing excesses are being caused by very low interest rates fostered by a "wall of liquidity" from central banks. In emerging markets, the housing bubbles are being formed by efforts to manipulate currency rates, high inflation, lack of other investment alternatives and rapid urbanization whereby housing demand is outstripping supply, Roubini notes. According to Roubini, who is often bearish when it comes to investment assets like housing, equities and bonds, the affected overheated housing markets include those in Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom (London), Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Israel, Turkey, India, Indonesia and Brazil. Roubini said the global economy's new housing bubbles may not burst immediately because easy money from central banks and anti-inflation policies are still feeding them. "But the higher home prices rise, the further they will fall — and the greater the collateral economic and financial damage will be — when the bubble deflates," he predicted. A two-bedroom Beijing flat now costs an average of $330,000 — about 32 years of salary for the average worker, The Telegraph reported. "China's property moguls are uneasy — and fear the boom has become a bubble at risk of bursting," the Telegraph said. In Australia, the biggest banks are providing easy loan terms that have helped to fuel record house prices, according to Bloomberg. The proportion of Australian mortgages that represented more than 80 percent of a home's value surged in the third quarter to the highest since mid-2009. And mortgages in which borrowers pay only interest also risen to the highest in at least five years, according to figures cited by Bloomberg. 4b)What rising interest rates mean for stocks… Porter's biggest fear… Where to find double-digit yield right now… A bond genius' favorite place for money today… The yen's huge drop… We're in the midst of a currency crisis… We're living in a yield-starved environment The 10-year Treasury yield is at a two-year high of 2.8% today… That's up from the all-time low of around 1.6% in May… but it's still far lower than its historical average. Despite its best efforts, the Federal Reserve can't keep rates down forever. The question is, when will we see a more substantial increase in rates? While no one knows the exact time frame, rising interest rates will eventually make stocks cheaper.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5)Rush Limbaugh’s Conversation with David Horowitz
Reprinted with permission from The Limbaugh Letter.
So good to speak with a no-holds-barred enemy of the ruinous left, who — having once been the left’s “most important theorist” — knows from the inside out how critical it is to take the fight to them:
RUSH: How are you doing, David?
HOROWITZ: Hey, Rush! Good.
RUSH: Your latest book has an intriguing title, The Black Book of the American Left. If somebody walked up to you on the street and asked about it, how would you explain it?
HOROWITZ: It’s kind of my life mission, I guess. It’s my collected writings. I’ve written about a million and a half words in the last 20, 30 years, not counting my books, and these words have all been about one subject, it turns out. I didn’t realize this until I had somebody collect them. But it’s all about the left, and the battles I and conservatives have had with the left over race, the culture wars, and over the left’s lack of loyalty to this country in facing its enemies.
I organized those writings into ten volumes; each is a book that covers one area. This first volume, which Encounter Books is publishing this week, is called “My Life and Times,” about how I left the left and why. The second volume is called “Progressives,” about the nature of progressivism and why it’s connected to communism.
I think the most important thing I’ve done in this book is to show the continuity in the left with its communist forebears. These are not liberals. We should never call these people liberals. To begin with, they’re bigots. They’re bigoted against Christians, against America, against white people. They don’t like conservatives. They don’t want two sides to a question. We are liberal. I don’t know of a conservative who wants to shut off the conversation, but leftists do.
RUSH: What about their term “progressive?”
HOROWITZ: Progressive is certainly better than liberal, but none of these terms accurately describes them. Progressives believe that history is a forward march. Obama put a carpet in the Oval Office with this inscription: “The moral arc of the universe is bent towards justice.” No, it isn’t. What kind of a belief is that? The 20th century is probably the worst century on record for the number of people murdered and oppressed, and the 21st century will probably be worse. There’s no historical progress in the sense of a moral evolution. Progressives think that they’re on the side of history. That’s what drives them, that’s what makes them so arrogant, that’s what makes them despise us, because we don’t go along with their program, and so we’re standing in the way of historical “progress.”
RUSH: Now let me ask — you may think this question is silly. I ask it because I’ve had several epiphanies about this recently. Are you writing this book to persuade people to oppose communists, liberals, whoever — the left? Or are you writing it just to document them?
HOROWITZ: Ah. First of all, I think it was Santayana who said that in every generation we face a barbarian threat in our own children. This is something the left doesn’t understand. The left thinks people are born good and moral. No, they’re not. That’s why we need morality, religion, laws. So I would hope that young people would read this book and be warned against socialist “remedies.” According to a Pew poll, 49 percent of young Americans have a favorable view of socialism. What is socialism? It is a system that leads to mass misery, mass impoverization, and human slaughter. That’s what it means. Yet almost half of the young think it’s benign. So on the one hand, I would like to reach the young — although our schools, as one of the volumes will show, are completely dominated by the left and have been transformed into indoctrination centers for the left.
RUSH: You’ve documented that in previous books.
HOROWITZ: But I also think the most important message in these books is for conservatives. Conservatives do many things wonderfully well. They understand the Constitution. They understand how the economy works. But they are not so good at understanding how the left works. Conservatives are way too benign, benevolent, understanding. That’s why they’ll call people who are bigots liberals. Their thought is, “If these leftists want to be called liberals, sure, we’ll call them liberals.” I hope that my book will be a wake-up call to conservatives, that these are very dangerous people. Of course, Obama has done more waking up of conservatives than I could ever do. Unfortunately, he’s done it by having the power to show them what progressive “solutions” really mean.
RUSH: You’re lighting some fires here with me. I’ve been doing my radio show for 25 years, but I’ve believed what I believe for my whole life. This is fascinating to me — why do conservatives need to be awakened? Why don’t they see it, when it’s right in front of their face?
HOROWITZ: There are two tendencies or tics conservatives have that prevent them from seeing “liberals” as they really are. One is a complacency. They don’t think that things change radically; they’re skeptical of critics like me who say they can. Above all, they don’t see that we find ourselves in a war. They don’t want politics to be a war. They want politics to be about horse-trades and compromise.
RUSH: Now wait, is that Republicans or conservatives?
HOROWITZ: I think this is true of conservatives as well, Rush. It’s not true of you. There are some conservatives who get it, but an awful lot of them have a complacent attitude towards what’s happening, or at least did until Obama was elected.
RUSH: David, you’re zeroing in here on a major, major problem as I see it. I look at so-called conservative commentators in Washington who seem to be content to commentate, but they don’t have any interest in beating this back. I don’t want to mention names, but most of them are that way. Same thing with the Republican Party. You come from the left. You’re one of the founders of the New Left. You’ve emerged; you were in the inner circle. You’ve spent much of your career trying to explain who these people are, the destructive, vicious malice that they have.
HOROWITZ: Yes.
RUSH: And you don’t think — this is astounding to me — you don’t think that the Republicans or conservatives really yet comprehend the seriousness of the threat.
HOROWITZ: No.
RUSH: Wow.
HOROWITZ: No. Otherwise they wouldn’t be squabbling among themselves so much. There’s another thing going on, and that is that the left controls the language. Our universities, our schools, our mainstream media are gone — so if you pick a real fight with the left, you get tarred and feathered, as you know all too well. Conservatives are brought up in a healthy way; they mind their reputations, they don’t want to be bloodied, they don’t want to be looked at as kooks and extremists, which are the terms of abuse that are used.
RUSH: That’s true.
HOROWITZ: And that’s why it’s taken them so long to wake up. Obama is a compulsive, habitual liar. He makes Bill Clinton look like a Boy Scout. Clinton spun things and he did lie about something very personal and embarrassing to him, but Obama lies about everything, and all the time. And yet it’s taken five years for people to start saying this. Including conservatives. Take so-called single payer health care. Why do we use phrases like “single payer?” It’s communism! If the state controls your access to health care, which is what this is about, they control you. This is a fundamental battle for individual freedom, which is what conservatives are about, or should be. But who’s saying this about Obama’s plan to organize health care along communist lines?
RUSH: Let’s talk about persuasion a second. I’ve got true believers in my audience, and I’ve also got elements of the low-information or the swing-voter segment, and then a few leftists who listen. One thing I have discovered over the course of my career is that whenever I’ve used the word “communism” to describe, say, typical modern-day liberals, people say, “Oh, come on, Rush! They’re not communists!” It ends up being counterproductive, because I have found people don’t want to believe that about somebody like Obama. How do we go about persuading people that it is what it is?
HOROWITZ: That’s a very good question. I’m publishing these ten volumes in the hope of persuading some people that is indeed the accurate description for these “liberals” and “progressives.” I think the language problem is a very serious one. I once tried to launch the word “neo-communist.” We talk about neo-fascists, so how about neo-communists? But that doesn’t work. People look at you as a relic if you use the term. But you have to at least say what their agenda is, and their agenda is controlling, is destroying individual freedom. That’s the way I would do it. By continually reminding people of what their agenda is. It’s anti-individual freedom. You can’t talk about the national debt just as an accounting problem. It’s taking away the freedom of future generations. It means that you have to work for the government instead of yourself. Currently we work something like half our lives for the state. Every other day we’re working for the government instead of for ourselves. What Obama is doing is diminishing the realm of freedom. Conservatives need to keep bringing that up all the time.
For seven years I did this campaign on the university issue. My “Academic Bill of Rights” was just to get two sides to a question, that students should be assigned books on both sides of controversial issues and professors should let them make up their own minds. To restore democratic pluralism to the academic classroom. I got minimal support for this campaign from the Republican Party. This is part of the complacency problem. Conservatives gave up the schools. There are conservatives on boards of trustees. A lot of them are businessmen, not willing to engage in the battle, because the left is very good at tarring and feathering. Their name-calling and character assassination tactics are effective.
RUSH: In education, they hold your kids’ future in their hands. You bitch at the school, your kids can get a D or an F and it’s over. And they’re not afraid. They intimidate parents like this left and right.
HOROWITZ: That, too.
RUSH: You had a great piece [Nov. 4] in National Review —
HOROWITZ: “Uniting the Right.”
RUSH: You pointed out that Democrats are always in lockstep, in contrast to Republicans, who are all over the place rhetorically and strategically. You said, and I’m quoting here, “The result is that a morally bankrupt, politically tyrannical, economically destructive [Democrat] Party is able to set the course of an entire nation and put it on the road to disaster.” David, people always ask, my callers ask me, “Why don’t the Republicans do ‘x’? Why don’t they do this? Why don’t they do that?” So let me ask you why. Aside from what you’ve said, that there’s a fear of being castigated by the media, mischaracterized. I think media paralysis is a key answer to the question. Republicans simply don’t want to have mean things said about them. They want to be liked by the people who run Washington, D.C. But I don’t even see any pushback from the Republican Party. They’ll go after Ted Cruz and they’ll go after Sarah Palin and they’ll go after Mike Lee, but they won’t go after Obama.
HOROWITZ: Exactly. I have never seen Republicans conduct such bloody warfare as they do against conservatives. They don’t do that to Democrats, ever. And I think it’s great that all the people that you mentioned, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, are people, finally, who don’t care what The Washington Post says, don’t care what The New York Times says, and don’t care what the Republican establishment says. That’s the way it has to be done.
I will tell you that the big difference between the left and the right that I saw when I came into the conservative movement 30 years ago was that the right had no ground army. I watched as the Democratic Party was pushed to the left by the activists in the streets — the MoveOn.org people, the Netroots — until it’s now just a left-wing Party. It was Howard Dean, a 60s leftover, who launched the anti-Iraq war campaign that shifted the whole Democratic Party. But on the Republican side, there was nobody pushing from the right. There was no ground war, no force pushing on Republicans from the grassroots. Now we have the Tea Party.
RUSH: You come from the belly of the beast. We’ve talked about it before, your life, your parents, and how you escaped. You lived this stuff. You were a leader of the left in your youth. Talk about MoveOn.org — these are average Americans. They may make $50,000 a year. The Netroots, they’re a bunch of people in their pajamas, sitting there blogging and posting. What do they think is in it for them? They are not people Obama is prospering.
HOROWITZ: What’s in it for them is the fact that progressivism is a religion, or a crypto-religion. Like religious people, they believe the world is a fallen place. But they also believe that they can be its saviors. Salvation and redemption are not going to come from a divinity, but from the movement they are part of, from the organized left. What they get out of this is the consolation of religion. They get a sense of personal worth; they get a meaning to their lives. That’s what drives them. It’s not money. It’s much more powerful. When Whittaker Chambers left communism, he said, “I’ve left the winning side for the losing side.” Why did he think that? Because communists have ideas they’re willing to die for, and conservatives don’t. Conservatives have to get that idea. They have to understand that their freedom will be lost if we don’t stop the left.
RUSH: About stopping them. I remember last time I spoke to you officially like this it was after you had written The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, your critique of the Academy. I asked you, “Do you ever foresee the day where we’d beat them back?” You were doubtful that we would ever reclaim education. Can these people be beaten back? Can the right triumph ever again?
HOROWITZ: I remain an optimist, which brings me to the second problem with conservatives. In addition to their decency and their not wanting to make enemies and not wanting to turn politics into war, they’re fatalists. If you think you’re going to lose, you can’t win. That’s very basic. I believe there’s a lot of hope. The ideas of the left are bankrupt. They don’t work. We’re seeing this now with Obamacare. Ludwig von Mises wrote a book in 1922, titled: Socialism. He explained that you can’t centrally plan a large economy, and he showed why. 1922. That’s almost 100 years ago, yet the Democratic Party rammed through Obamacare, ignoring what the last 100 years has proved. They’re going to organize the health care of 300 million Americans with their computers. It’s lunacy. Yet it’s the policy of the whole Democratic Party. They’ve staked their political future on this.
RUSH: You think it will implode?
HOROWITZ: I think they’re going to go down in flames in the coming election. I’m hoping for that, and I can’t see how that won’t happen.
RUSH: I tell you, I hope you’re right, because these series of lies on keeping your policy and your premium getting cheaper, keeping your doctor, these are deeply personal lies that Obama’s told about health care, which is something they’ve elevated to the most important thing in people’s lives. They’ve done that. They’ve made it sound like you can’t go through life without health insurance. You cannot survive. You’re one paycheck away from ruin. You’re one disease away from ruin. And here’s Obama, lying through his teeth on one of the most deeply personal things, health care. Gallup recently had his approval number at 39, David.
HOROWITZ: It’s still way too high, considering who this guy is and what he’s done. When he loses the Jon Stewarts, he’s in serious trouble, but he’s so arrogant he doesn’t realize it. Habitual lying is a characteristic of the left. Leftists are delusional, but they’re not stupid. My parents never called themselves communists. They always described themselves as progressives. When I was a kid, Stalin was alive, and the slogan of the communist party wasn’t “dictatorship of the proletariat,” it wasn’t “a soviet America.” It was “peace, jobs, and democracy.”
Thus to sell Obamacare, they claimed — lied — that it’s to cover the uninsured. But it doesn’t even do that. Everything they said about Obamacare is a lie. Why? Because their real agenda is not health care. It’s to create a socialist state. To do that they need comprehensive control over people’s lives. I never thought I’d be saying this, because I didn’t see it even in a remote future, but we’re on the brink of a one-party state if they were to succeed. If you are ready to use the irs politically, if you have access to every individual’s financial and health care information, and if your spy agency can monitor all communications, you don’t need a secret police to destroy your opponents. Anybody you want to destroy, you’ve got enough information on them and control to stop them. That’s how close we are to a totalitarian state. They want to control your life — for your own good of course — even to the point of whether you can buy Big Gulps. That’s not incidental.
RUSH: No, it’s not. Now when this kind of thing happens, I sit around and I wonder about the average American, somebody who’s not an activist like you or me. Do they not see this, and if they don’t, how can they be made to see it?
HOROWITZ: I don’t think they see it. Most people are averse to politics and don’t pay that much attention. However, Obamacare is going to make them pay attention because his plan affects so many people. You have to start using moral language against these people. I want to hear our guys saying, “This is a threat to individual freedom. You are attacking the freedom of every American when you run up the debt like this. You are attacking the freedom of every American when you put them all in a government-controlled program like this. Government should not have this information.”
Conservatives are caught a little bit on this. We have a problem with the nsa issue. The left is very clear, since they despise America and they don’t care about our national security. But they’re right about the threat to individual liberty with the state having so much information. As I wrote in National Review, we need to make individual freedom our rallying cry. Every time they have a program that hurts individual liberty, we need to stop talking about it as though it was just about money. The money figures are so big, trillions, nobody can even grasp them, unless they’re very involved in the economy and understand it — and then they probably are Republicans.
RUSH: I hold no brief for Ron Paul, but he said something fascinating in hisfarewell address to Congress. He said the thing that surprises him most is what a tough sell freedom has become.
HOROWITZ: I agree.
RUSH: I do, too. Freedom requires personal responsibility. You’ve got 90 million Americans not working, David, but they’re all eating. They’ve all got big-screen tvs.
HOROWITZ: I know. It’s appalling to me. We need to use a moral language. Notice when the left attacks, it’s always using moral language. Racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever. These attacks sting. We don’t use language like that. We need to. It’s they who are racist. I’ve written a piece about this called, “Fight Fire with Fire.” Why are we letting them get away with their destruction of inner-city minority communities? Detroit, Chicago: why weren’t the disasters Democrats have visited on these cities huge in the Republican campaign last time? Democrats control these cities, they’ve controlled them for half a century and more. They’re ruining, destroying the lives of young black and Hispanic kids in these cities, and poor whites there as well. They’re 100 percent responsible for that, yet we never mention it.
It is beyond me. Conservative pundits probably read the Federalist Papers and they understand that we have a really wise system set up for competing interests, so you balance off this and that. They don’t want to be at war, and particularly a moral war, with other Americans. But that is the reality. The left has already made it that. Republicans are treated as though they’re of the Party of Satan. That goes with the religious nature of leftist beliefs. Progressives believe that they are creating the Kingdom of Heaven on earth and that people who oppose them are the Party of the Devil. That’s the way they fight. We have to use that kind of language. Fight fire with fire.
RUSH: You’re nailing it. You came up with something in this book that I think is worth repeating, and to me it’s brilliant. I would never have seen it had you not pointed it out. You write that the fall of soviet communism had the unforeseen effect of freeing leftists from the burden of defending failed Marxist states, which in turn allowed them to emerge as a major force in American life. That’s so right on. The failure of communism, ironically, led to a rebirth of it in this country. We wipe it out in the Soviet Union, and a shining example of its atrocities goes away, and it becomes a tougher sell to educate people what it is.
HOROWITZ: Exactly, and leftists saw that at the time. That’s the first thing they said about it. They looked on the bright side right away. That’s why connecting them to the communists is very important. It’s part of the battle. Republicans, and conservatives as well, have let the foreign policy issue, national security, slip off the political radar. Barack Obama is a supporter of the Islamofascists. He’s supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that wants to exterminate the Jews and kill Christians and destroy America. Obama and Hillary have supported them. Their Administration is infiltrated by Islamist agents. That’s why Benghazi is so important, and why I’m really encouraged that Republicans haven’t let it totally disappear.
RUSH: That was so frustrating when Mitt Romney let that go.
HOROWITZ: But that’s a perfect example, a perfect example. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have the blood of those American heroes on their hands. What Obama did and did not do is the most shameful act in the history of the American Presidency. It’s beyond politics. You turn your back on these heroic people who are fighting for their lives and calling for help? How un-American is that? And where is the language to describe that, coming out of the mouths of our political leaders?
To go back to our earlier discussion, it was the emergence of the Tea Party that made possible a Ted Cruz, a Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and others — there are actually quite a few in the House who are standing really tall.
RUSH: The Republican Party is trying to wipe them out, David.
HOROWITZ: It’s a battle, and I don’t think our people are going to be intimated. The grassroots will prevent that.
RUSH: They’re not going to be intimidated at all.
HOROWITZ: And you of course have had a tremendous role in this. When I came into the conservative movement 30 years ago, there was no ground force. There was no grassroots army. A grassroots army is very important because you can’t take away their perks. Washington can corrupt anybody who gets there, as evidenced by the impossibility of getting Congress to impose Obamacare on themselves. But you can’t bribe people at the ground level. They don’t have the privileges, so you can’t take them away, and that’s why they’re so important — and they’re the people who give power to the voices of resistance. They elected Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Mike Lee. I’m just hoping over time, there will be more like them.
You are without question the most important voice in having created this grassroots army. I think I told you once that I went to speak at the University of Idaho in Pocatello, Idaho 15 years ago. I always asked the students who invited me to speak, “How did you get your conservative ideas?” Before I got to ask the kid who picked me up from the airport, he popped a tape into his dashboard player, and it’s you. That’s how he got his conservative education. So now he is an adult, he has a family, and he’s probably involved in the Tea Party movement.
I think this is the key for conservatives. We should hold Republicans’ feet to the fire, but the main thing is to organize at the ground level, put the pressure on, and remember that the Democrats — not other Republicans — are the enemy. We need to be saying that “liberals,” “progressives,” are vicious, unscrupulous, they’re character assassins, and they’re racists. Nobody is holding them to account right now in the public discourse — yourself, Mark Levin, and people like you excepted. But when you began, Rush, it was just you. That was the conservative voice nationally: just you. Now we have a lot of media. This is where I derive my hope. I see tremendous developments in the conservative movement that probably conservatives don’t see as clearly as I do, because I saw these as missing elements when I came into the right.
RUSH: Well, you’re right about one thing, there is so much pessimism on our side, and it’s got to be overcome. Your book is fabulous. It’s a compendium, but so timely. Congratulations on it, because there is a lifetime of work in this. I really wish you the best, and I’m going to do everything I can to push it.
HOROWITZ: Thank you, Rush. I’m a small voice. I so much appreciate your support.
RUSH: You’ll always have it. This is really great, and I really appreciate you making time.
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6) George Will: Medicaid is Next Obamacare Crisis
As the White House touted improvements to the troubled HealthCare.gov website Sunday morning, conservative pundit George Will said the real test might be in six months when employers begin to weigh their options for 2015.
"Watch the employers, because if they start dumping people into … Medicaid – and the doctors then say, the burdens are too high and the reimbursement is too low; we're not seeing Medicaid patients – then all hell is going to break loose," Will said on "Fox News Sunday." Former Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., voted for Obamacare, and admitted Sunday it hasn't worked out like he expected. "Clearly, the rollout has been a disaster, and it's still a work in progress," Bayh told host Chris Wallace. Short-term, he said, the program has been "very problematic, and first impressions tend to be lasting." If things don't turn around in the next year, he said, it will be "problematic" for Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections. With the passing of the November 30 deadline to have the glitch-filled website functioning, James Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center told Fox News it may be a month before anyone can tell if there has been success in fixing the site. He said the appearance of a better-working site doesn't mean the system is functioning as it should. "The real test of HealthCare.gov is whether you make the right payment to the right people to the right insurance plans, he said. "It's very easy to fix the front-end enrollment if you turn off controls on the back end. And it's very clear from multiple media reports that the system is still not accurate when it makes payments to the insurance plans." The technicians are working around the problem instead of fixing it, he said. The government currently is making bulk payments to insurance companies who are self-reporting their sign-ups because the back end of the system isn't properly keeping an accounting. Neera Tanden, of the Center for American Progress, agreed that the true test is a month away, but as a supporter of the Affordable Care Act noted, "I think the idea of gloom and doom over that is overstated." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
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