May 21, 2012
FSM HOT TOPICS
Exclusive: Oval Office Watch – Monday, August 31
by OVAL OFFICE WATCH August 31, 2009
Text of Obama Eulogy to Ted Kennedy - GO HERE TO READ THE PRESIDENT'S EULOGY.
President Obama’s weekly address HERE
Rhetoric Fails to Sway Voters on Health
Jonathan Weisman, Blogs. WSJ.com
In the rhetorical battle over health care, the forces backing President Barack Obama’s overhaul have spent years polling and using focus groups to find the precise language that would win over voters — an effort that doesn’t at the moment appear to be working.
When Obama told grass-roots organizers last week that the mandatory purchase of health insurance would “be affordable, based on a sliding scale,” the phrasing precisely mirrored language that had been poll-tested and put before batteries of focus groups by Democratic consultants over the past few years. See list of words here.
The words had been carefully chosen in an effort to take away the rhetorical targets of health-overhaul foes and replace them with terminology that would bring ordinary Americans on board. But under steady attack from opponents using more-emotional language, some of the president’s allies are rethinking the linguistic strategy.
“There are emotions on both sides, and some of these recommendations really avoid connecting to emotion in a way that we hoped would bring the temperature down and disarm opponents,” said John Rother, executive vice president for policy and strategy at AARP, the giant seniors lobby. “I don’t want to second-guess them, but the research is very much a product of where the debate was at the time. Times have changed. Temperatures have gone up.”
An Obama spokesman said at least one member of the administration had met with the group crafting the health-care language, but declined to comment on whether the research had affected Obama’s own language in discussing health care. Read more here.
Obamacare-Point and Counterpoint
Frank S. Rosenbloom, M.D., American Thinker.com
Mr. Obama has gone back on the campaign trail to try to sell his health care reform to the nation. Mostly hand-picked, sympathetic attendees have been showing up to his town hall meetings. He continues to make the same points regarding health care reform, which need to be addressed specifically. I hope to address more in future articles.
A government option will not result in rationing.
The major government options already in existence employ rationing every day. Prohibitively difficult preauthorization, statements of medical necessity, convoluted and complicated paperwork, and often impossible to meet requirements result in rationing on a huge scale. Furthermore, delay in payment, denial of payment for services already rendered and other tactics reduce access to medical care on a widespread basis. The government may not call this rationing but it is an insidious form of rationing that will be an integral part of any government plan. Medicare misuses and abuses its funding and is guilty of literally stealing from hospitals and physicians.
As an example of this thievery, due to a change in the corporate status of my practice I was required to apply for a new national provider identification number (NPI) in March of this year. Within several weeks, without exception, all of the private insurance companies had registered the number and were paying on claims. After five months and exhaustive work of over 140 hours by my office staff Medicare and Medicaid had still not paid on a single claim. Finally, on August 14, Medicare made their first payment on claims that were five months old. Yet, if we do not bill Medicare within three months of the date of service, Medicare will not pay us at all. Government regulation and control permeates the entire medical system.
Every point the president has made regarding his health plan is either a gross misrepresentation or an outright lie. The purpose of this plan is to ensure dependence on government and a financial windfall for his cronies, including trial lawyers, and has nothing to do with concern about the cost of medical care or about the health or lives of American citizens. Read article.
Obama's Karmic Freight Train
George Joyce, American Thinker.com
Ardent Obama supporters like Camille Paglia at Salon magazine articulated the seething frustration of many Americans when she said:
"I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way?"
But Obama did promise to "present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way." Little did any of us know however that hidden behind all the talk of hope and change and transparency was a calculated strategy to punish the very country that represented one of the few historical examples of legitimate hope and change.
Why then is there a karmic freight train headed in President Obama's direction? The reason is simple: instead of properly vetting candidate Obama, the media and much of the public were "caught up in the concept" of a person of color becoming president. For many, to vote for Obama was simply to establish proper progressive credentials.
The great American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to the law of karma as the law of "compensation." The essence of the law according to Emerson is that in nature and in life "every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and in certainty." Or, in more stark terms, "justice is not postponed." The Buddhist phrase is "every act will ripen" -- both good acts and bad.
What's crucial here is that the wise Emerson understood that a fawning media is the most dangerous ally on the playing field of karma.
Mr. Obama sat on the "cushion of advantages" just long enough to win an historic election. But because the entire charade was engineered by a willfully blind media caught up in concepts rather than facts Mr. Obama's "insanity of conceit" has festered rather than diminished. Frustrated with the compliant media, a spontaneous cross section of justifiably angry Americans flooded into town halls across the country to begin the painfully overdue process of finally vetting Barack Obama and his unhealthy socialist worldview.
If Aesop were to write a fable on this remarkable drama he might well call it "The Roosting Chickens Meet the Lame Duck." It's a fable John Kerry learned about during his campaign prior to the 2004 election. Read article.
Transparent Frauds
Ted Nugent, Human Events.com
There is nothing transparent in Washington, D.C. And a lot of people work really hard to make sure of that.
The illogical and burdensome laws and regulations produced by the lawyercrats in D.C. are purposefully written to confuse ordinary Americans just so we can't understand what the lawyercrats are doing to us.
Try to read and understand what the House's 1000-page health care bill does to your family’s healthcare. You can read until your eyes pop out and you won't understand it. Neither can the members of Congress who are out there telling you how wonderful it is. (They won’t even bother to read it.) No one knows what the whole thing does or what it costs. Because it's impossible to understand.
The only people who really know anything about what’s in it are the liberal pressure groups who know just where their sweetheart deals are buried. They know where to find those, at least.
The health care bill, like its ugly, wart-nosed sister -- the U.S. tax code -- is written in lawyercrat language that obfuscates the effect and purpose -- in short the truth -- of what’s being done. And this is transparency?
No one knows what to believe regarding the health care bill. What reasonable Americans do know is that placing our trust in Fedzilla is and always has been asking for trouble. Read article.
GOP thinks the unthinkable: Victory in 2010
Byron York, JWR.com
It's a possibility many Republicans speak of only in whispers and Democrats are just now beginning to face. After passionate and contentious fights over health care, the environment, and taxes, could Democrats lose big -- really big -- in next year's elections?
Ask them about it, and many Democrats will point to the continued personal popularity of Barack Obama. But that's not the story. "I think what's going to happen is Obama's going to be fine, and the Democrats in Congress are going to get their asses kicked in 2010," says one Democratic strategist who prefers not to be named. "This is following a curve like the Clinton years: take on really controversial things early, fail, or succeed partially, ask Democrats to take really tough votes, and then lose. A lot of guys are going to get beat, but the president has time to recover."
Most Republican hope focuses on the House of Representatives, but even there they have a huge job ahead. Democrats control 256 seats, and Republicans 178. Forty seats would have to change hands for Republicans to take charge.
On the other hand, 52 seats turned over when the GOP won the House in 1994. And even if Republicans don't get the 40 they need in 2010, they could dramatically narrow the gap between the parties, giving Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership less room to operate. Read article.
Post-modern leftism: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me
NewsRealBlog.com
The fact is that revolutionaries beginning with Rousseau and Robespierre and Marx have never had a plan. The ones who did and tried to build little utopian communities failed. But the really serious revolutionaries, the ones prepared to burn down the system and put their opponents up against the wall, they never have a plan. What they have is a vague idea of the heaven they propose to create on earth — in Marx’s case “the kingdom of freedom,” in Alinsky’s “the open society” — which is sentimental and seductive enough to persuade their followers that it’s alright to commit mayhem and murder — usually in epic doses — to bring it about. Otherwise, revolutionaries never give two seconds to the problem of how to make a new society work.
From Marx to Mao to Castro, revolutionaries have never had a clue. (Their excuse for the monstrous poverty and human suffering they create? — the capitalists are responsible, it’s the U.S. embargo.)
So if there is no plan, the devil is in the detail of the methods you use to get there. Each step of the way constitutes another block in the foundations of the world you are creating. The means tell you what the ends will be. Read article.
Whose Medical Decisions?
Thomas Sowell, Patriot Post.us
The serious, and sometimes chilling, provisions of the medical care legislation that President Obama has been trying to rush through Congress are important enough for all of us to stop and think, even though his political strategy from the outset has been to prevent us from having time to stop and think about it.
What we also should stop to think about is the mindset behind this legislation, which is very consistent with the mindset behind other policies of this administration, whether the particular issue is bailing out General Motors, telling banks who to lend to or appointing "czars" to tell all sorts of people in many walks of life what they can and cannot do.
The idea that government officials can play God from Washington is not a new idea, but it is an idea that is being pushed with new audacity.
What they are trying to do is to create an America very unlike the America that has existed for centuries-- the America that people have been attracted to by the millions from every part of the world, the America that many generations of Americans have fought and died for.
This is the America for which Michelle Obama expressed her resentment before it became politically expedient to keep quiet. Read article.
ObamaCare: No Dream For My Father
Carol Platt Liebau, Townhall.com
What a relief it was to learn from the President that he has no plans, as he recently put it, to “pull the plug on Grandma.” Cute phrase, isn’t it?
Certainly, it’s easy to be flip if, like the President, one is in one’s forties, in vibrant health – and powerful enough to ensure that loved ones will receive all the treatment they will ever need. But for those who will have to live as regular people under whatever health care regime America eventually adopts, it’s much more difficult to dismiss with a laugh what, exactly, ObamaCare would mean for the sick and the elderly.
I’m thinking of my father, who died just three weeks ago at the age of 83. Hospitalized with an acutely inflamed gall bladder, he was scheduled for surgery the next day before slipping unexpectedly into cardiac arrest.
Under the “reformed” medical system that the President seeks, it’s not pleasant to speculate about what the past few years would have meant for Dad. He was in fragile health; having survived prostate cancer 19 years ago and a triple bypass five years later, he had been undergoing peritoneal dialysis since a health crisis two years ago. There’s no doubt that he fell into the category the President has described as “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives” who “are accounting for potentially 80% of the total [cost of] health care.” So under ObamaCare, at what point would his life have been deemed to be no longer “worth” saving? Read article.
The Perspective Of A Russian Immigrant
Svetlana Kunin, IBD Editorials.com
In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, I was taught to believe individual pursuits are selfish and sacrificing for the collective good is noble.
In kindergarten we sang songs about Lenin, the leader of the Socialist Revolution. In school we learned about the beautiful socialist system, where everybody is equal and everything is fair; about ugly capitalism, where people are exploited and treat each other like wolves in the wilderness.
Life in the USSR modeled the socialist ideal. God-based religion was suppressed and replaced with cultlike adoration for political figures.
The government-assigned salary of the proletariat (blue-collar worker) was 30%-50% higher then any professional. Without incentive to improve their life, professionals drank themselves to oblivion. They — engineers, lawyers, doctors, teachers — earned a government-determined salary that barely covered the necessities, mainly food.
Raising children was a hardship. It took four to six adults (parents and grandparents) to support a child. The usual size of the postwar family was one or two children. Every woman had the right to have an abortion and most of them did, often without anesthesia.
There is a comparative historical reality that plays out the consequences of two competing ideologies: life in the USSR and in America. When the march to the worker's paradise — the Socialist Revolution — began in 1917, many people emigrated from Russia to the U.S. Read article.
We Have the Moral High Ground
Cindy Sheehan, Scoop.co.nz
"Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love." Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1958
"There comes a time when silence is betrayal…" Dr. King, 1967
I remember back in the good ol' days of 2005 and 2006 when being against the wars was not only politically correct, but it was very popular. I remember receiving dozens of awards, uncountable accolades and was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Those were the halcyon days of the anti-war movement before the Democrats took over the government (off of the backs of the anti-war movement) and it became anathema to be against the wars and I became unpopular on all sides. I guess at that point, I could have gone with the flow and pretended to support the violence so I could remain popular, but I think I have to fiercely hold on to my core values whether I am "liked" or not.
Killing is wrong no matter if it is state-sanctioned murder or otherwise. Period. Not too much more to say on that subject, except what I quote above from Dr. King. However, while the so-called left is obsessed over supporting a very crappy Democratic health care plan, people in far away countries are being deprived of their health and very lives by the Obama Regime's continuation of Bush's ruinous foreign policy.
However, while the so-called left is obsessed over supporting a very crappy Democratic health care plan, people in far away countries are being deprived of their health and very lives by the Obama Regime's continuation of Bush's ruinous foreign policy. Read article.
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Occupy Chicago freakout: The LRAD is coming, the LRAD is coming!
May 21, 2012 00:57 AM
Here is an LRAD. It’s a Long Range Acoustic Device better known as a sound cannon and it’s used to disperse unruly crowds. Here is an Occupy Chicago freakout over the LRAD (led by the same livestreamer who freaked out last night over a brief police stop): Two #LRAD s spotted heading to march.— Tim [...]
Michael Moore spreads hysterical, anti-police fable from his Occupy comrades
May 21, 2012 00:37 AM
The crockumentary film-maker should have read Twitchy first. As we told you Saturday night, the trio of Occupy Chicago livestreamers who freaked out over a brief, Chicago police pullover didn’t have their apartment raided, didn’t have any of their equipment damaged, were not “held at gunpoint,” and had none of their high-priced cameras, phones, and [...]
It will rain: Awww, Occupy Chicago's all wet; finally, free showers for all!
May 20, 2012 11:09 PM
Mother Nature is Chicago law enforcement’s best friend. Tonight, the rabble-rousers’ plans for anarchy got spoiled by rain. Twitter had fun as the Occupiers and their fearless livestream crews ran for cover, while a few of the mobsters hung around to harass officers on duty and break out in senseless chants: Fkin Streamers afraid of [...]
Marion Barry has change of heart after being saved by Filipino hospital staff
May 20, 2012 10:00 PM
In what reads like a bad Hollywood movie script Marion Barry has changed his mind about Filipino nurses. Just a few weeks after complaining about how many Filipino nurses work in Washington DC Barry's life was saved by Filipino nurses. That's right, the same people he wanted to push our of DC hospitals ended up treating his potentially life threatening blood clot.
May 20, 2012 06:15 PM
Violence erupts at the end of the NATO Summit protests. Earlier today, members of Black Bloc were arrested for plotting to attack police stations, Mayor Emanuel's home and President Obama's campaign headquarters. Their violence then turned to the protest; police in riot gear move in, wearing gas masks. Protesters are throwing things at police according to video, live photos and reports from on the ground in Chicago.
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