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The realities of "The Affordable Health Care Act" on this business which could be a model for many more. :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuA2_P-m4Sk&sns=em
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Dershowitz would have advised Christie in other ways and now the dominoes are falling. (See 1 below.)
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Do The "LIV"s control? (See 2 below.)
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Are Kerry and the EU black mailing Israel with economic threats?
Tough minded Caroline Glick thinks so. Time will tell! (See 3 below.)
Meanwhile, al Qaeda, the organization which Obama told us was dead, is becoming a threat to Israel. (See 3a below.)
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Tom Coburn has had it with D.C. (See 4 below.)
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Krauthammer can find no war on women. Like the lies by McCarthy they are simply whiffs of imagination to divide and thus, are hard to refute. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1) Dershowitz: 'The Dominoes Are Beginning to Fall' for Christie
By Todd Beamon
Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax on Friday "the dominoes are beginning to fall" in the spiraling bridge-gate scandal engulfing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and said "I think he hasn't told the whole truth and is in trouble."
"The U.S. attorney should now subpoena the documents that were referred to in the letter and should sit down and talk to the governor," the former Harvard Law School professor said in an exclusive interview.
"The governor so far has not spoken to law enforcement nor has he spoken under oath, so legally, he can lie all he wants," Dershowitz said. "He's not obliged to tell the truth. Politically, he may be obliged to tell the truth, but legally he's not.
"But once he sits down and talks to law enforcement, he has to tell the truth, otherwise he can be prosecuted for a crime.
"They have to lock in his testimony as soon as possible, before he knows what all the dominoes are, and he has to give those answers," he added. "That what the U.S. attorney's office should do now. The sooner the better."
Dershowitz's comments came after the lawyer for a former Christie appointee for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey disclosed that his client had evidence that proved the Republican governor knew early on about the lane closures that snarled traffic on the George Washington Bridge for four days last September.
Alan Zegas, who represents David Wildstein, said in a letter that was published by The New York Times and The Star-Ledger that it was "the Christie administration's order" to close the lanes at the town of Fort Lee.
Wildstein resigned in December because of the scandal.
The two-page letter added that "evidence exists as well tying Mr. Christie to having knowledge of the lane closures, during the period when the lanes were closed, contrary to what the governor stated publicly in a two-hour press conference."
Zegas wrote to the Port Authority asking it to reconsider its decision not to pay Wildstein's legal bills, according to The Star-Ledger. Wildstein ordered the abrupt and unannounced closure of commuter lanes leading to the bridge, causing massive gridlock.
In a statement late Friday, Christie's office said he told the truth about what he knew about the politically motivated lane closings, and disputed the allegations in Wildstein's letter.
"Mr. Wildstein's lawyer confirms what the governor has said all along: He had absolutely no prior knowledge of the lane closures before they happened and whatever Mr. Wildstein's motivations were for closing them to begin with," the statement said.
"As the governor said in a Dec. 13 press conference, he only first learned lanes were closed when it was reported by the press and, as he said in his Jan. 9 press conference, had no indication that this was anything other than a traffic study until he read otherwise the morning of Jan. 8.
"The governor denies Mr. Wildstein's lawyer's other assertions," the statement said.
The U.S. attorney in New Jersey, Paul Fishman, said earlier this month that he would open an investigation into the bridge lane closings.
Fishman must give immunity to Wildstein — "and he's going to have to testify and tell the whole truth and be asked hard questions," Dershowitz said.
But regardless, Christie is in trouble, he told Newsmax, and "if he is smart, and he is smart, he's talking to somebody behind the scenes — a very good criminal lawyer.
"He hasn't disclosed that. He doesn't have to. He can keep that a secret."
More broadly, the former law professor said that Friday's disclosures illustrated a personal rift between Wildstein and the governor over the bridge scandal.
The men have known each other since high school, according to news reports, but Christie made negative comments about Wildstein at the Dec. 13 press conference.
"Gov. Christie really made his stupid mistake by treating Wildstein the way he did," Dershowitz said. "He provoked him. Christie showed his total ineptness when he said what he said about Wildstein at the press conference."
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2) Let's Hear It for The Low Information Voter
During the 1956 presidential campaign, an enthusiastic supporter called out to the Democratic candidate, Adlai Stevenson: "Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person. Stevenson wistfully called back: "That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!"
Once known as the "silent majority," now as the nation's "low-information voters," these citizens perform their civic duty on election day. But they have no real clue for whom or what they are voting. Yes, when it comes to their occupational callings, investment , or sport picks, they may be highly rational. It's just politics and public affairs that hold no interest for them. It has long been hoped that the silent majority would one day wake and grow politically engaged. In 2010, the Tea Party Movement did just that. But it yet speaks as no more than a marginal voice. The majority remains politically asleep. And this silence understandably draws the ire of those who can see the fiscal calamities to come and care deeply about the country's future. But perhaps the community of the concerned should reconsider its position. The "know-nothings" may yet hold the key to "taking our country back."
For one thing, low-information voters are not committed liberals or progressives. They are more given to common sense than some "higher" utopian vision. And it's easy to respect the mood that drives apathy. First, there is cynicism. Americans have little use for their elected leaders and disdain for the political process, as such. Politicians plead for their votes but rarely keep their word. Any position or solemn campaign "promise" can be "recalibrated" two weeks or two campaign miles down the road. "They are all only in it for themselves." Sadly, that's all true. But apathy is also fueled by skepticism. If the cynic believes there's nothing we can do about the hopelessly corrupt system, the skeptic believes that there's no way of knowing what to do. He easily sees that the so-called "experts" all sound persuasive one at a time, but sharply disagree when pitted together. Both the cynic and the skeptic withdraw, feeling helpless to put things right.
But most of all, public apathy is the simple desire to live and be left alone. It is a penchant to care most about the things that matter most: making a living, managing expenses, handling emergencies, and raising the kids. Leisure hours are given to rooting for favorite sports teams, escaping into entertaining fictions, and spending quality time with family and friends. Americans place a premium on the sphere of privacy. They go about their business and, to evade government's interfering ways, will do business "under the table" or "off the books." They'll fudge on their tax returns and trade in the "black market." "[N]ot since the days of Al Capone," a top tax official told NY Post columnist John Crudele, "has the underground economy been so pervasive." It was a story about "zappers," cash registers rigged to make transactions "disappear" and enabling store owners to avoid paying sales taxes. America's legendary spirit of independence is alive and well and living all over. Long accustomed to doing as they please, citizens aren't likely to put up with backbreaking taxes and onerous mandates forever, much less goose-step to any would-be-tyrant's tune. As Jefferson wrote, "Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing [or just reforming] the Forms to which they are accustomed." Most families do not yet feel the heavy yoke of government on their backs. Those that do, "vote with their feet."
Let the heavy hand of government really intrude on the pleasant routines of daily life, leaving no chance of escape, and Americans may well rise to the occasion. Could it happen? It wouldn't be unprecedented. By 2010, millions with no prior history of activism rose up against a new president's plans to take over the health-insurance industry and go $787 billion deeper into debt in a doomed effort to stimulate the economy. An earlier health reform measure, HillaryCare, spurred Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" and led to a Republican rampage in the next mid-term election. The 1978 Proposition 13 tax revolt in California resulted in a 50% reduction in property taxes that still stands. And just let our lawmakers fire a volley, i.e., draft a bill, for stricter gun control measures. When the smoke clears and the loud blast of public opinion sounds, the lawmakers hightail it to the tall grass.
So, why patriotism? Deep grief over the terrific loss of life, a blinding rage over the terrorists' success, even a consuming thirst for vengeance would need no further explanation. But there was something else at work. Americans who so proudly displayed the American flag did so to express their abiding devotion to "the republic for which it stands," aka "the land of the free." We love this land so much because, more than any other, it allows its citizens to live and be left alone. Yes, in the hustle and bustle of our busy lives, we tend to take our treasured possessions for granted. And as always, the full depth of the love is only felt upon their loss. In a flash, terror fatally struck the routine of daily life. Three thousand died just for going to their jobs that morning. And it wasn't just about the dead and grieving. Terror struck us all. For as it was said so often in the ensuing days, "if we do not feel safe we cannot feel free." Americans overwhelmingly supported the war on terror and joined the armed forces in droves to ensure the safety of their wives, parents and children.
Peace and prosperity between 1982 and 2008 have allowed Americans to ignore the stinking business of politics. Then the housing bubble burst and times got tough. Now, ObamaCare with its attendant hardships and sacrifices promises to reduce the pleasantness of daily life even more. The putative Affordable Care Act threatens people's well-being as nothing before it could. The need to give health care to all and contain the exorbitant cost of doing so will confound everyone's freedom to choose. It is the response to that impending impact (or perhaps some other unforeseeable threat) that will ultimately measure this nation's resolve to remain free. When will the average American wake up and reach for her ballot? When the agent from the National Institutes of Health is standing in her kitchen demanding to know precisely what she is feeding her family?
Over time, more and more families will come to feel the pinch of big government's blade against their throats. When friends, neighbors and coworkers are ready to listen, this is what they'll need to hear: since each person's well-being is to an enormous extent affected by prevailing social and economic conditions, since, in a countless variety of ways, those conditions are the product of a nation's political enactments, and since here, in America, we freely elect the men who write the laws, which create the conditions in which we all prosper or perish, each citizen needs to be informed about the political programs that are being proposed and implemented in his name and make his voice and vote felt.
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3) Scaring the Jewish state straight
By Caroline B. Glick
Fact-checking the political bogeymen --- American and Israeli
Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid delivered a scary speech on Wednesday. At the Institute of National Security Studies conference, Lapid warned that if we don't accept US Secretary of State John Kerry's framework for negotiations, the Europeans are going to take away our money.
Lapid claimed that Israel's economic future is dependent on surrendering Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to the PLO. If we don't, he said, the EU will abrogate its economic associationagreement with us. And such a move on Europe's part will cause serious harm to our economy.
According to Lapid, "If negotiations with the Palestinians stall or blow up and we enter the reality of a European boycott, even a very partial one, the Israeli economy will retreat, the cost of living will rise, budgets for education, health, welfare and security will be cut [and] many international markets will be closed to us."
On the other hand, if we give up Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, Lapid promises that we will all get rich.
It took less than 10 minutes for Lapid's remarks to be exposed as utter nonsense.
The EU delegation to Israel flatly denied that the EU is considering abrogating the associationagreement.
"There has been absolutely no consideration in the EU of the abrogation of the associationagreement. It is not in the cards," a statement by the delegation said.
As for the economic benefits Lapid promised Israel would reap from giving in to the PLO, here too, his claims do not withstand scrutiny.
First of all, Israel's economy will be dramatically weakened, not strengthened, by a deal with the PLO.
As Economy Minister Naftali Bennett explained last week, the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem would cause unprecedented damage to the economy. Like the de facto Palestinian state in Gaza, such a state would serve as a launching ground for missile attacks against Israel. And from Judea and Samaria, the Palestinians would have the capacity to destroy Israel's economy with just a few, relatively primitive projectiles.
As Bennett out it, "Imagine if just one missile per day fell on [Israel's technology hub in] Herzliya Pituah, what that would do to Israel's economy.
If even one plane which was supposed to land at Ben-Gurion Airport crashes [due to terrorism] per year, it would crush the Israeli economy."
Beyond what the Palestinians would do, there is no reason to believe — and every reason to doubt — that Europe would reward Israel in any way for giving its capital and heartland to the PLO.
In remarks last week meant to counter Bennett's statement, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni inadvertently explained the true situation Israel faces from Europe.
In Livni's words, "Europe is boycotting [Israeli] products. And, true, it is starting with the settlements, but their problem is with Israel, which is perceived as a colonialist state, so it won't only stop with the settlements but will [reach] Israel as a whole."
As we learned from our experience with the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, Israel's actions play no role in Europe's perception of the Jewish state.
Europe will not cease to perceive Israel as "a colonialist state" even if we remove ourselves, lock, stock and barrel to the 1949 armistice lines.
In the lead-up to the Gaza withdrawal, Livni promised that once Israel quit Gaza, its diplomatic position would improve dramatically. By ending the so-called occupation of Gaza, she argued, Israel would prove its good will, and the Europeans would stop attacking us and take our side against the Palestinians at the UN and other arenas.
In the event, not only did this not occur, but the EU refused to acknowledge that the so-called occupation of Gaza even ended. To this day, Europe castigates Israel for its mythical "occupation" of Gaza.
As Livni accidentally explained, as far as Europe is concerned, Israel's size is not the issue. Israel is the issue. True, Israel surrendered Gaza to Palestinian terrorists and removed every Israeli civilian and soldier from the territory. But since Israel is still stronger than the terror state in Gaza, Israel is still the "occupier."
By the same token, even if Israel were to quit Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem completely, as long as Israel remains more powerful than the Palestinians in the areas, Europe will castigate Israel as the "occupier."
And since the Palestinians and their allies will destroy Israel if it is ever less powerful than they are, Europe will stop condemning Israel as "a colonialist state" only if Israel ceases to exist.
At any rate, since the EU is not considering abrogating the economic association agreement, and since Israel will be economically worse off if it quits Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, why is the finance minister trying to scare us? First, he's doing it because everyone else is doing it.
Peace Now has joined the boycott, sanctions and divestment campaign.
Livni threatens Israelis so often with economic ruin that Foreign Ministry officials are complaining that she's giving foreigners ideas.
In Washington, the Obama administration has added the threat of Israeli economic devastation to its list of plagues that will befall the Jewish state if we don't give up our national heartland to the PLO.
In his remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, US Secretary of State John Kerry said, "Israel's economic juggernaut is a wonder to behold…. But a deteriorating security environment and the growing isolation that could come with it could put that prosperity at risk."
In other words, "Nice economy you got there Israel. It'd be a real shame if anything happened to it."
The second reason that Lapid is threatening us — along with Livni, Kerry and so many others — is that he has nothing else to say in support of the fake peace process.
Kerry's framework for Middle East peace offers neither anything new nor anything positive for the Israeli public to support. Were Israel to follow him down his garden path, we would receive neither peace, nor demographic security, nor national security nor national prosperity.
We will not receive peace because there is no Palestinian leadership interested in making peace, and there is no significant Palestinian constituency that supports peace. As Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz said at the INSS Wednesday, PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas is "the world's number one anti-Semitic leader."
Steinitz elaborated, "There is an anti-Semitic subtext prevalent throughout the Palestinian Authority's curriculum and the children programs.
The subtext is very clear — the State of Israel and the Jews should be destroyed.
"Abbas does not actively finance terror, but he who denied the Holocaust now denies the existence of a Jewish nation and its right to a state."
In this context, no negotiations will lead to peace. In Steinitz's words, "There is no peace process.
If an agreement is signed with the Palestinian Authority, it will be a diplomatic agreement, not a peace agreement."
And the vast majority of Israelis know this. And Livni, Lapid, Kerry and their ilk know we know this. So all they can do is threaten us.
The first place they went, after the promise of peace was blown up at cafes and bus stops countrywide, was demographics.
For 17 years, the Left has been relying on a falsified 1997 Palestinian census that exaggerated the Palestinian population by 50 percent, as a means of scaring Israelis into going along with its phony peace process.
Still today, Kerry, Livni, Lapid and their fellow travelers seek to intimidate us by constantly telling us that continued Israeli control over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem will bring about Israel's demographic demise.
But the lie at the heart of their argument is no longer possible to ignore.
As demographic expert Yoram Ettinger wrote last week in Yisrael Hayom, Jewish Israeli fertility rates are higher than Palestinian fertility rates in Judea and Samaria. In 2013, the Palestinian fertility rate was 2.91 children per woman and the Israeli Jewish fertility rate was 3.04 children per woman.
Today Jews make up 62-66 percent of the population in Judea, Samaria and sovereign Israel.
With a two to one majority, a higher birthrate, and positive immigration rates, far from being a strategic threat to Israel's national viability, demographics are one of Israel's strategic assets.
The only threat to Israel's demographic stability is the two-state formula. A Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem would permit the unlimited immigration of millions of foreign Arabs into its territory. Rather than securing Israel's Jewish majority, a Palestinian state would place millions of hostile Arabs on the outskirts of a rump Israel's major cities.
With their threat of demographic ruin losing its traction with the public, purveyors of the twostate plan now raise the threat of economic strangulation and ruin at every opportunity.
They understand that given the public's refusal to be drawn into their fantasies about "peace dividends," the only path before them is a mix of intimidation and political subversion. They hope that together these two tactics can force Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to submit to Kerry's dictates for Israeli territorial surrenders.
Regarding political subversion, last week Eli Lake at the Daily Beast reported that the Obama administration is appealing to retired Israeli security brass to lobby the public against the government, in support of Kerry's plan for Israel to surrender the Jordan Valley to the PLO.
According to senior defense sources, administration lobbying is not limited to retired generals.
The US is also recruiting currently serving IDF commanders to work on behalf of Kerry's plan.
The idea is to rally a large enough cadre of security brass in favor of surrendering the Jordan Valley to undermine the authority of Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, who has rejected Kerry's plan.
Beyond frightening the general public, the economic threats are geared toward subverting the economic leadership of the country. Until now, Israel's business leaders have been supporting Netanyahu's economic leadership.
The campaign's largest success to date came last week when a large delegation of Israeli business leaders joined the Kerry bandwagon and called for the partition of Jerusalem and surrender of Judea and Samaria in order to avoid economic penalties.
Clearly we are getting to crunch time.
Kerry is waiting for Netanyahu to agree to his framework. Until he does, Kerry, his allies and agents will escalate their threats and subversion.
So far, Netanyahu, Bennett and Ya'alon have competently exposed the lies behind the threats.
And they must continue on this course.
As we learned from Oslo and Gaza, nothing good comes from surrendering our rights and our land. And with Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem hanging in the balance, the stakes have never been higher.
3a) Al-Qaeda now frontline threat to Israel
Bruce Reidel Contributor
Al-Qaeda’s affiliates and al-Qaedism the idea are gradually, inexorably, surrounding Israel. Safe havens and bases are sprouting up north and south of Israel like never before in the history of the global jihad, fulfilling the dreams of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri. Israel remains a very hard target for terrorists and is fully capable of defending itself, but the challenges facing Israeli counter terrorists are becoming more difficult.
Israel has always been at the core of al-Qaeda’s narrative and ideology. From the beginning of bin Laden’s jihadist war on the ”Crusader-Zionist” enemy, Israel was a key target. The “liberation” of the holy mosques of Jerusalem actually came before the “liberation” of the holy mosques of Mecca and Medina in his writings. When he endorsed the attempt to blow up an American jetliner over Detroit on Christmas 2009, he said attacks like it would continue as long as America supported Israel. But until recently al-Qaeda and its affiliates found it hard to get to the promised land and attack Israel. Israeli and/or Jewish targets in Kenya or Tunisia or elsewhere were attacked, but Israel itself was too hard to get to.
Most of al-Qaeda’s activity until two years ago took place in parts of the Islamic world remote from the center of the Arab world and Israel. Al-Qaeda thrived in Pakistan, Yemen, Algeria and Iraq, but it had little presence in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The Arab Awakening has changed the geography of al-Qaedism dramatically. The Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda — the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) — gave birth to a Syrian branch, Jabhat al-Nusra, in 2012 that has thrived in the Syrian civil war. Now the two groups are competitors for influence in eastern and northern Syria. Israeli intelligence sources claim that they together command the loyalty of 40,000 fighters. An American intelligence source put the number at around 25,000. Many are foreigners drawn to Syria by the vision that they are part of a campaign to liberate Jerusalem after first defeating the Assad dictatorship. US officials estimate 7,000 foreign volunteers are in Syria from 50 countries. Even tiny Luxembourg has been identified as a country from which foreign volunteers have gone to fight and die in the Syrian jihad.
Jabhat al-Nusra has also created a Lebanese franchise, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, named after the iconic Palestinian ideologue who was bin Laden’s partner in Afghanistan in the 1980s war against the Soviet Union. With Lebanon’s Sunni community frustrated by Hezbollah’s dominance of the country, the situation is ripe for al-Qaeda to grow. Zawahri in January urged all al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria and Iraq to work together to set the stage for the final liberation of Jerusalem. Zawahri has backed Jabhat al-Nusra’s leader, Mohammad al-Golani, as the rightful leader of the Syrian war; Golani’s nom de guerre itself tells you his ultimate objective is Israel.
In the south, al-Qaedism is growing in Egypt in the wake of the army coup last summer that toppled the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood government. Zawahri had predicted from the start of the Arab Spring in Egypt that the army would stage a counterrevolution and he urged his sympathizers to prepare for an armed struggle, a jihad, to fight them. In the mind of al-Qaeda supporters, the coup validated their narrative: Peaceful, democratic change was an illusion, the Brotherhood was too weak and the army too determined to keep power. Al-Qaeda propaganda charges that the coup was arranged behind the scenes by the Saudi intelligence service with the silent blessing of Israel and the collusion of the Americans.
Now a number of groups have emerged in Egypt waging jihad on the military government. The most dangerous is Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, or Ansar Jerusalem, which has carried out a series of terrorist attacks in Cairo and other Egyptian cities and also in the Sinai Peninsula. On Jan. 25, the group took responsibility with a video for shooting down an Egyptian military helicopter with a sophisticated man-portable surface-to-air missile. Analysis of the video suggests the MANPAD (Man-Portable Air Defense system) was more advanced than the usual state of the art in the region. Zawahri has more than once praised the jihadists in the Sinai Peninsula for their operations, especially against Israeli targets like the gas pipeline that delivers gas from Egypt to Israel and Jordan. The group's name betrays its ultimate objective.
Israeli intelligence announced last month that they had foiled an al-Qaeda plot to attack multiple targets inside Israel, including the US Embassy in Tel Aviv. The embassy is a vulnerable target since it sits on a major road with virtually no standoff from traffic. The Israeli internal intelligence service, the Shin Bet, reported it had arrested a number of Palestinians who were said to be in touch with Zawahri indirectly via jihadists in the Gaza Strip who were involved in planning the attacks. There may have also been contacts with Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria. The Israelis indicated that several Russian Muslims, probably from Chechnya, would participate in the actual suicide attacks. The operation appears to have been thwarted fairly early in its aspirational phase — that is, before the planning was complete and the operatives in place. If the accusation that Zawahri were directly involved in the planning was true, it would suggest a more active operational level of activity for the Egyptian head of al-Qaeda than is usually adduced.
The Israeli intelligence community would be especially alarmed if al-Qaeda could develop an infrastructure in Jordan. Then the noose would be complete. Jordanian intelligence is extremely effective in fighting al-Qaeda, but the group has a long history of recruiting in the Hashemite Kingdom. The founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq was, of course, the Jordanian Abu Musab Zarqawi. Jordanian sources say that some 2,500 Jordanians are fighting with the two al-Qaeda groups in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra and the ISIS. Most are with Jabhat al-Nusra.
Israel has a long history of fighting terrorism and has exceptional capabilities to counter terror threats. It is a hard target with hard border security, including at airports and other entry posts. The Israeli intelligence and security services like the Shin Bet are among the best in the world. Al-Qaeda bases in Syria, Lebanon and Egypt are undoubtedly high on the collection priority lists of the Israeli security community.
The growth of al-Qaeda franchises and al-Qaedism in the neighborhood is the result of the Arab Awakening and the chaos it has produced, not some al-Qaeda master plan. Zawahri was caught off balance by the Egyptian revolution in 2011. But al-Qaeda is an adaptive ideology and it has taken advantage of the regional situation to fulfill the aspiration of its founders, bin Laden and Zawahri, to take the war to Israel’s border and someday into Israel itself.
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4) Tom Coburn: The Doctor Who Is Sick of Washington
Tom Coburn is leaving the Senate early with a proposal to save private insurance from the ravages of ObamaCare.
By Joseph Rago
Tom Coburn stood for Congress in 1994 as a political tenderfoot for two main reasons: As an obstetrician he thought government was impinging too much on his medical practice, and the nine-term House Democrat who held his Oklahoma district's seat favored the Clinton national health plan then under consideration. Another reason Dr. Coburn entered the race, he says, was that "the cowardice of career politicians governing to win the next election above all else made me sick." Twenty years later, he finds himself amid another health-care scrimmage—and in a similar political climate.
"It's no better today. It's still here. It's worse," says the junior senator from Oklahoma, sitting in a wing chair in his Capitol Hill office earlier this week. His prairie timbre is flecked with the contempt of overfamiliarity.
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Editorial board member Joe Rago on the politics of a new Republican plan to deregulate the nation's health-care market. Photo: Getty Images
"I don't think Washington can fix Washington," Dr. Coburn explains. "You're always going to have this built-in conflict of getting re-elected. Parochial interests will trump the best interests of the nation, and the actors will do what's expedient to be popular. It doesn't have to be that way. There's hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who could do these jobs well. All it requires is common sense and courage."
Those qualities will be appreciably diminished in Washington when Dr. Coburn retires at year's end. He is among Washington's few true conviction politicians—unalterably against federal debt, government waste and the abuse of power. He genuinely doesn't seem to care about being popular, or endearing himself to anyone; lately he has even grown a night-of-the-wolfman beard that is decidedly out of Beltway fashion.
Dr. Coburn was recently diagnosed with a recurrence of prostate cancer, which is why he is leaving before his term officially expires in 2016, but he still has work to do. Even if he has failed to change a political culture of self-interest and careerism, the doctor from Muskogee can still challenge his nominal party, the Republicans. This week, he and two colleagues released an ObamaCare replacement plan that offers innovative—and consequential—pro-market health-care reforms, intellectually akin to Paul Ryan's 2011 Medicare proposal.
Ken Fallin
"Everybody in the country knows what Republicans are against," Dr. Coburn says—namely, ObamaCare. "No, what we have to do is make sure Americans know what we're for. The whole idea is to empower patients, not bureaucracies, and to empower markets, not rely on market manipulation and mandates."
Few conservatives would disagree, but the GOP has been notably diffident and risk-averse on substance. Dr. Coburn observes that "nearly all the economists agree" that a source of America's long-running health-care dysfunctions is the tax exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance only. Like the company store, this open-ended subsidy makes it cheaper for businesses to compensate workers with in-kind benefits rather than with taxable higher cash wages.
Patients are thus insulated from choices about prices and value, but as a result price signals are suppressed and consumers end up paying more. And because this inefficient and regressive subsidy costs $250 billion a year in foregone revenue but doesn't flow to the individual market, it's scandalously unfair to people who don't get coverage through their jobs.
So far, so economically conventional. But politically, touching the insurance exclusion for businesses is dicey, as Republicans witnessed when John McCain was brutalized in 2008 for proposing to convert the exclusion into a universal flat tax credit for individuals, regardless of age, income or employment status. Such a reform could lead to disruptions as businesses shed coverage, and the Obama campaign savaged the McCain plan as a middle-class tax increase. Republicans in Washington have also followed the ObamaCare rollout and concluded (correctly) that voters don't like losing their insurance and doctors, especially amid false promises they could keep both.
The Republican majority, eager to oppose ObamaCare but wary of political tiger pits, has relied on championing "repeal and replace," details to come. Or pretending that U.S. health care was a free-market Shangri-La until the Affordable Care Act came along. Or resorting to self-destructive stunts like shutting down the government in the name of "defunding" ObamaCare.
In other words, the Republicans were baloney avoiding the meat grinder.
"I'd rather limit the damage and prevent future damage to the health-care system," Dr. Coburn says. "I'm worried. You don't really have insurance anymore, you have government-funded health care with no spreading of risk. You've eliminated the market. The Republicans want this to fail, but the consequence could be we have a meltdown in the insurance industry and you're left with nothing." At that point, with the health plans bankrupt or "nothing but bill payers, service agents," he says, Congress could cut out the middlemen and impose "the fallback of a government-run single payer system."
So Dr. Coburn approached his Senate friends Richard Burr of North Carolina and later Orrin Hatch of Utah. They consulted with experts and concluded that the goal should be more realistic and modest than either ObamaCare's grand ambitions or an equally grand market reconstruction. Instead, try to make the system better and cheaper for more people and preserve existing insurance arrangements as much as possible—while also introducing the market incentives for a more rational, more competitive system.
Dr. Coburn says Democrats passed ObamaCare by "working on emotions without facts. What we want to do is work on facts and be empathetic while we do it." He calls it "reform in an incremental fashion."
The Coburn-Burr-Hatch proposal would thus start to equalize the tax treatment of health insurance. The employer tax preference would be capped at 65% of the cost of the most high-end plans. People who prefer gold-plated benefits with first-dollar coverage would be exposed to some of the true cost of those plans, while most would see few changes.
Dr. Coburn & Co. would then redistribute this federal subsidy (instead of other people's incomes) to workers who don't have an insurance offer from their bosses. These subsidies would be refundable tax credits to low- and middle-income Americans and vary by age and income, and would be high enough to finance at least catastrophic coverage.
To start to repair and strengthen the insurance market, the plan would repeal the larger apparatus of ObamaCare—the exchanges, the individual and employer mandates, the taxes on industry and investment, and the central planning that requires health plans to overprice their products. Repealing ObamaCare becomes more of an evolving deregulatory project over time than a on-off switch.
"We've not had the creativity that could really come about in insurance," Dr. Coburn says. "All kinds of things could happen if you had a vigorous market that's truly competitive and you had everybody purchasing." People who maintained continuous coverage would be protected from premium spikes, if they developed a medical condition, though a "guaranteed renewability" rule.
Dr. Coburn's plan represents important intellectual progress, not least because it disowns perfection that is unattainable in any case. A new study by Doug Holtz-Eakin's Center for Health Economy economic-modelling group concludes that the Coburn plan will lower premiums by as much as 11% relative to ObamaCare and cover almost the same number of people. With the imprimatur of the Senate Finance Committee—which Mr. Hatch will likely chair if the GOP retakes the Senate this fall—the Coburn plan is the de facto ObamaCare alternative.
Dr. Coburn says the reaction among his colleagues has been "pretty good" so far, even if some conservative activists are trashing the plan as ObamaCare Lite. But the more telling reaction has been from liberals. Sometime Obama health adviser Ezekiel Emanuel took to the New York Times NYT -2.68% to trash the plan—misleadingly—while outfits like the Center for American Progress are working overtime on junkyard duty. They know that a credible, politically salable reform amid ObamaCare's convulsions is a threat to their own political control of the health markets.
What Dr. Coburn is really suggesting is a center-right governing vision for health-care reform—and politics at large. He calls it "a paradox about my political career" that his indifference to Washington popularity has made him more popular in Oklahoma. The double paradox is that his indifference to politics has tended to advance his political goals.
His convictions are so intense that he'll accept small or marginal gains so long as they constitute tangible progress. In an era of purported conservative purity but divided government that will last for at least three years and perhaps over several elections, Dr. Coburn's politics of pragmatic conviction may be the better option.
In 2000, Dr. Coburn kept his campaign promise to limit himself to three terms in the House and retired. He returned in 2005, disgusted by the George W. Bush spending binge and especially the Medicare prescription-drug benefit. He promptly made himself a senator non grata by exposing vanity-project spending like the $223 million "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska. Dr. Coburn suggested spending the money on a New Orleans bridge damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Eighty-two senators voted against him.
His colleagues retaliated by trying to prevent Dr. Coburn from practicing medicine. In the House, he was in the habit of flying home to Muskogee on weekends and seeing patients Monday mornings, and he was allowed by Senate rules to charge his patients enough to cover his expenses. But in 2005, the Senate Ethics Committee ruled that the arrangement would be a conflict of interest. "Somebody's going to come to me for a Pap smear to influence my vote?" he says. "I mean, give me a break."
So Dr. Coburn offered his services free of charge. Two years ago he stopped, when the yearly $40,000 to $80,000 payments for malpractice insurance became too much of a financial drain.
Such affronts explain why Dr. Coburn is leaving the Senate for reasons beyond his health. "I know myself well enough to know my patience has worn thin, of continuing to push boulders up an iceflow," he says. "Just take the wastebook for example."
That's Dr. Coburn's annual compendium of his staff's audits and quality control on federal spending, which has exposed abuses such as government-funded volumizing shampoo for dogs and the $35 million that Medicare paid out to fake clinics set up by the Armenian mob. "Why aren't there 535 wastebooks put out every year?" he says, incredulous about his fellow lawmakers' lack of interest. "Why I am I the only one digging? That's a question people ought to ask. The only reason it's novel is because nobody else is doing it."
He adds that "I think my biggest failing in the Senate is my inability to communicate effectively to change people's minds. I'm bringing them the facts." Perhaps the problem is them, not him.
The larger lesson he draws about modern government is that the natural tendency of the political class to accumulate power has exceeded the Constitution's boundaries, despite occasional spasms of reform that disrupt the inertia. The key, he says, is to put new limits on federal power, devolve responsibility to the states and change the institutional incentives.
"I don't think you fix this place until you have a convention of the states," Dr. Coburn says. "Only America can change Washington. I'm a big believer in term limits. I think it causes a different kind of person to want to come up here."
Even though he has blistered the current denizens of Capitol Hill, he admits to a bit of hedging: "Most of what I want to say I can't say, because then it will be printed and then I won't have any relationships left up here."
If Dr. Coburn is right about how easy it would be for Congress to be replaced a hundred-thousandfold, then he's the exception that proves the rule.
Mr. Rago is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
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5) How to debunk the ‘war on women’
By Charles Krauthammer
What is it about women that causes leading Republicans to grow clumsy, if not stupid? When even savvy, fluent, attractively populist Mike Huckabee stumbles, you know you’ve got trouble. Having already thrown away eminently winnable Senate seats in Missouri and Indiana because of moronic talk about rape, the GOP might have learned. You’d think.
Huckabee wasn’t quite as egregious, just puzzling and a bit weird. Trying to make a point about Obamacare mandating free contraceptives, he inexplicably began speculating that the reason behind the freebie was the Democrats’ belief that women need the federal government to protect them from their own libidos.
Bizarre. I can think of no Democrat who has ever said that, nor any liberal who even thinks that. Such a theory, when offered by a conservative, is quite unfortunately self-revealing.
In any case, why go wandering into the psychology of female sexuality in the first place? It’s ridiculous. This is politics. Stick to policy. And there’s a good policy question to be asked about the contraceptive mandate (even apart from its challenge to religious freedom). It’s about priorities. By what moral logic does the state provide one woman with co-pay-free contraceptives while denying the same subvention to another woman when she urgently needs antibiotics for her sick child?
The same principle of sticking to policy and forswearing amateur psychology should apply to every so-called women’s issue. Take abortion, which is the subtext of about 90 percent of the alleged “war on women,” the charge being that those terrible conservative men are denying women control of their reproductive health.
The charge has worked. Although the country is fairly evenly split on the abortion question, the Republicans’ inability to make their case in respectful tones has cost them dearly. In 2012, they lost unmarried women by 36 (!) points.
Yet there is a very simple, straightforward strategy for seizing the high ground on abortion in a way that transcends the normal divisions and commands wide popular support: Focus on the horror of late-term abortion — and get it banned.
Last year’s Kermit Gosnell trial was a seminal moment. The country was shown a baby butcher at work and national sentiment was nearly unanimous. Abortion-rights advocates ran away from Gosnell. But they can’t hide from the issue.
And the issue, as most succinctly defined by the late liberal Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is infanticide. Describing one form of late-term abortion known as partial-birth, Moynihan said: “I had once remarked that the procedure was too close to infanticide. And now we have testimony that it is not just too close to infanticide, it is infanticide.” How else to describe crushing the infant’s skull in mid-delivery before the head leaves the birth canal?
Conservatives need to accept that no such consensus exists regarding early abortions. Unlike late-term abortions, where there are clearly two human beings involved, there is no such agreement regarding, say, a six-week-old embryo.
There remains profound disagreement as to whether, at this early stage, the fetus has acquired personhood or, to put it more theologically, ensoulment. The disagreement is understandable, given that the question is a matter of faith.
This doesn’t mean that abortion opponents should give up. But regarding early abortions, the objective should be persuasion — creating some future majority — rather than legislative coercion in the absence of a current majority. These are the constraints of a democratic system.
Not so regarding a third- or late-second-trimester abortion. Here we are dealing with a child that could potentially live on its own — if not killed first. And killing it, for any reason other than to save the mother’s life, is an abomination. Outlawing that — state by state and nationally, as was done with partial birth abortion in 2003 — should be the focus of any Republican’s position on abortion.
A test case for this kind of policy-oriented political strategy is the governor’s race in Texas:Wendy Davis, the Democratic candidate, has a complicated personal history. Stop talking about it. (Her capacity for veracity is a legitimate issue, but for God’s sake why go into her parenting choices? That’s a snare and a distraction.) Talk policy — specifically, the issue that brought Davis to national prominence.
What was her 11-hour filibuster about? Blocking a state law whose major feature was outlawing abortions beyond 20 weeks. Make that the battlefield. Make Davis explain why she chose not just to support late-term abortion but to make it her great cause.
Stay away from the minefield of gender politics. Challenge the other side on substance. And watch them lose.
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