- MUST READS
- PRODUCTS
- RESOURCES
- MULTIMEDIA
- ENFACTLOPEDIA
- FSM AUTHORS
- ABOUT US
- CONTACT US
- FSM BLOG
- DONATE
- PRESS COVERAGE
SEARCH FSM
- IN THIS SECTION
October 3, 2009
Exclusive: Oval Office Watch – Saturday, October 3
"Socialism" and Sham in the Senate - SEE HERE.
The "Call 'Em Out" White House Targets Fox News - GO HERE.
Does America Need Health Care Reform?
Janice Shaw Crouse, Townhall.com
Numerous polls indicate that most Americans are very happy with the health care that they receive. Specifically, nearly 90 percent of Americans responded to a poll sponsored by ABC News, USA Today and the Kaiser Family Foundation saying that they were satisfied with the health care coverage that they already have. Such solid information stands in stark contrast to the media hype about the necessity for health care reform and the hysteria promoted by the White House about the dire health care circumstances facing Americans.
U.S. Health Care is First-Rate: Such information also flies in the face of the first-rate care offered throughout the nation — not just at the major medical centers like Johns Hopkins University and the Mayo Clinic. Most Americans live close to a hospital system that provides lifesaving care that is the envy of people in other nations. It is no secret that, even with all the flaws and shortcomings of the U.S. medical establishment, people — close to half a million annually — come to this country from around the world when they need specialized medical care.
American doctors and American hospitals provide care that is superior to that found anywhere else, and thousands of people are alive today as testament to that fact. The poorest American citizens have access to care that is far superior to that available to the richest citizens of most nations. Read article.
You Mislead! Fact-checking Obama.
Michael F. Cannon & Ramesh Ponnuru, NRO.com
It is a good thing that other congressmen did not follow Rep. Joe Wilson’s lead. If they yelled out every time President Obama said something untrue about health care, they would quickly find themselves growing hoarse.
By our count, the president made more than 20 inaccurate claims in his speech to Congress. We have excluded several comments that are deeply misleading but not outright false. (For example: Obama pledged not to tap the Medicare trust fund to pay for reform. But there is no money in that “trust fund,” anyway, so the pledge is meaningless.) Even so, we may have missed one or more false statements by the president. Our failure to include one of his comments in the following list should not be taken to constitute an endorsement of its accuracy, let alone wisdom.
1. “Buying insurance on your own costs you three times as much as the coverage you get from your employer.” The Congressional Budget Office writes, “Premiums for policies purchased in the individual insurance market are, on average, much lower — about one-third lower for single coverage and one-half lower for family policies.” It is true that individual insurance policies are generally 30 percent less comprehensive than employer-provided insurance, and comparable individual policies are about twice as expensive. But much of the extra cost is a function of the tax penalty on purchasing such insurance and the stunted market that penalty has yielded. Read article.
Obama "Czar" Ron Bloom's Socialist Vision for US Industry
Trevor Loudon, NewZeal.Blogspot.com
President Barack Obama named Ron Bloom the Manufacturing Czar for the United States on September 8, 2009-two days after communist "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones resigned under pressure.
To understand Ron Bloom's assigned role, it helps to know the environment he comes from.
The Obama administration has emphasized Bloom's investment banking and business background.
But Bloom has spent far longer in the labor and socialist movements than he has on Wall Street. There is even some evidence that Bloom specifically went into banking, in order to better serve organized labor.
Like Obama himself, Bloom has moved in circles close to Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)-an organization far more "socialist" than "democratic".
To illustrate DSA's radicalism I cite their journal Democratic Left, Spring 2007. The article by Detroit DSA chair and National Political Committee member David Green supports the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)-or "card check". Read article.
How’s That Multilateralism Going?
Jennifer Rubin, Commentary Magazine.com
Obama and his Left-leaning supporters in universities and the media swoon over the idea of “multilateralism.” Unilateralism is not only portrayed as simplistic, arrogant and chauvinistic but also as ineffectual. Multilateral meetings, multilateral institutions, and, well, anything “multi” is preferable over America just doing what it wants, even in consultation with a group of similarly minded allies (presuming we still have any after the way we’ve treated Poland, the Czech Republic, Honduras, and Israel). Multilateralism is considered by Obama and his ilk as smart and, in the right hands, a vastly superior methodology for solving the world’s problems. But how does multilateralism work in practice? We had two examples this week.
On the economic front we hear: “The Group of 20 nations agreed to establish an elaborate structure to coordinate economic policies, but without any enforcement mechanism to make countries live up to their word, critics warned the plan could be toothless.” Oh well, every country just does what it wants, it seems.
How’s global warming going? We learn:
Prospects for securing a global agreement this year to attack climate change dimmed Friday, as the Group of 20 largest economies asked their finance ministers for a “range of possible options” to finance deployment of technology to curb greenhouse gases, but dropped demands that a final proposal be drafted before the world climate summit in Copenhagen in December.
G-20 heads of government also dropped efforts to set a date for countries to eliminate fossil-fuel subsidies, despite a push for action on the issue by President Barack Obama.
The G-20’s resolutions on climate issues have been vague and lacking in hard deadlines, illustrating the reluctance of leaders to take tough action to curb the long-term threat of global warming at a time when their economies are struggling to recover from the more immediate effects of the financial crisis.
Once again, every country for itself. Read article.
Health Problems Health Care Can't Fix: President Obama and Michael Moore's inconvenient truth.
Alyssia Finley, Online WSJ.com
Maybe President Obama has watched too much "Sicko" because he sure likes to reiterate Michael Moore's bromides. In his joint address of Congress, he said: "We spend one and a half times more per person on health care than any other country, but we aren't any healthier for it."
But as Mr. Obama is fond of saying, “that simply is not true.”
While Americans may have a lower life expectancy than other affluent countries, the disparity is mainly due to Americans' poor personal health-care practices -- not to any flaw in health-care treatment. "The U.S. actually does a pretty good job of identifying and treating the major diseases. The international comparisons don't show we're in dire straits," says University of Pennsylvania's Dr. Samuel Preston, a researcher who has studied the matter.
The real problem, it turns out, is that Americans are accident-prone, health unconscious slobs. Until the mid-1980s, the U.S. had the highest per capita cigarette consumption in the developed world, and the U.S.'s obesity rate today is more than twice that of Canada and ten times that of Japan. These aren't problems of the health care system (i.e. in the diagnosis and treatment of disease). These are problems of behavior. Adjust that data for the higher U.S. incidence of homicide and obesity, and Americans actually have the highest life expectancy in the developed world.
This is the kind of inconvenient truth that the somewhat lax Mr. Moore is accustomed to overlooking. A svelte gym rat like Mr. Obama should know better. Read article.
Who is doing the governing?
Robert A. Bonelli, American Thinker.com
I don't want to sound petty, but I think considering how much time Mr. Obama is still spending campaigning, it is appropriate for the American people to question who is actually governing our nation?
Mr. Obama is constantly on television; frequently on the road appearing at rallies and delivering prepared speeches; submitting to interviews (he has been on 60 Minutes three times in the past six months!); and generally continuing to campaign. Yes, Ronald Reagan did go before the American people to get around an opposition Congress -- but the last I looked it is Mr. Obama's party that controls both the House and the Senate. The other striking difference between the new "constant communicator" Obama, and Mr. Reagan the "great communicator," was that Mr. Reagan always came to the American people with substance and clarity. All we hear from Mr. Obama is platitudes and rally-speak!
In effect, the president is back to his old Illinois State Senate habit of voting "present" when it comes to issue after issue. He has dithered on Afghanistan and avoided a hard decision. On health care, he has outsourced political leadership to Senate and House pols. There is still no written health care plan from the White House. Sometimes it looks like nobody is in charge.
Is Mr. Obama only a figurehead who is paraded out in front of the people to call for their support of ... what? Well it can't be his ideas because he is not clear on what those specific plans may be, and he certainly never provides any serious detail.
This question needs to be asked until the truth is known and all of the American people can deal with it: who is governing our nation? Read article.
A Community Organizer Takes On the World
David R. Stokes. Townhall.com
On the international front, lip service may be paid here and there to the concept of national self-interest, as when Mr. Obama told the good old boys and girls at the United Nations the other day: “Now, like all of you, my responsibility is to act in the interest of my nation and my people, and I will never apologize for defending those interests.” However, one just knows that a big fat conjunction is coming signaling the real point: “But,” (see, I told you) “it is my deeply held belief that in the year 2009 – more than at any point in human history – the interests of nations and peoples are shared.”
Really?
The president’s hyperbolic assignation of this year notwithstanding, is it even remotely true that China or Russia share our interests? And even leaving the roguish states out of the discussion, is it at all realistic to ask any nation to act against, or in any way minimize, its own interest – no matter how compelling or romantic the call? And is it even just a little bit ironic that in a speech with the line, “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation,” our president calls everyone to follow the magnanimous lead of America, now that the Bush administration has been replaced with a collection of more responsible political gnostics? Read article.
They’ll Get to It . . . Whenever
Jennifer Rubin, Commentary Magazine.com
What’s the big rush? That seems to be Obama’s modus operandi on any foreign-policy challenge. Iran has secret (well, not secret, since the president knew about it) nuclear facilities, but we can talk about it. December’s a good deadline. But really, what’s a “deadline” mean? September’s deadline came and went, right?
Likewise on Afghanistan: there is no time frame for even making a decision, according to Bob Woodward:
President Obama has not set a deadline for determining a new strategy or for committing more troops to the war in Afghanistan, despite an urgent request from his top commander, his national security adviser said Saturday.
In a lengthy telephone interview, retired Gen. James L. Jones outlined Obama’s plans for reassessing the war effort. Jones noted that although the administration has seen some progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it remains uncertain about the outcome of President Hamid Karzai’s contentious bid for reelection. . . .
Obama’s calculations about how to proceed in Afghanistan are occurring as the war is presenting a political challenge at home. Congressional Democrats have become increasingly skeptical about the war; Republicans voice support for McChrystal’s assessment and the likely troop request.
Jones stressed that the president and his advisers will spend the coming weeks focusing on strategy before addressing any troop request.
Military guru Joe Biden says one thing, Gen. Stanley McChrystal says another. Maybe they can get the general to change his mind, suggests National Security Advisor James Jones. Who knows? They’ll talk. Read article.
Latest NEA Controversy Isn’t the First
Stage Right, Big Hollywood.com
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is always one of the hottest topics in the theatre community. A huge amount of theatre in the US is created or presented at non-profit theatres that operate under the protection of or were first started with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The latest NEA controversy broken here at Big Hollywood by Patrick Courrielche has become a fascinating Rorschach test within the theatre community. The response has been disappointing yet predictable from the left-leaning proponents of the NEA and this administration.
To fully expose the inconsistencies and intellectually dishonest positions they have taken in their knee-jerk defense of everything Obama, we first need a little background for the Big Hollywood readers who might not remember all of the details in the recent history of controversies with regard to NEA funding in the theatre community.
NEA Primer: Now I don’t pretend to suggest that the following breakdown of the NEA struggles dating back to 1990 is a definitive or even thorough explanation of the recent history of left vs. right combat over the NEA. I encourage all of my readers to research and read about this issue. And, I especially want them to read the perspective of liberals/progressives/leftists who were in the middle of the struggle on the other side. It is informative and enlightening to read how they really feel about the subject.
That being said, the following synopsis of the NEA fights from twenty years ago is meant to be a short-hand account of the debate from the perspective of the right… from “Stage Right,” if you will:
The NEA was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the Federal Government for the purpose of funding artistic endeavors to enrich the cultural fabric of our society. Not coincidentally, many of the most influential non-profit theatres in America date their creation back to years between 1966 and 1979. The new influx of federal grants as well as many state and local granting agencies that followed the Fed’s lead helped in the creation of these new theatre groups.
Not coincidentally, many of the most influential non-profit theatres in America date their creation back to years between 1966 and 1979. The new influx of federal grants as well as many state and local granting agencies that followed the Fed’s lead helped in the creation of these new theatre groups. Read article.
Reader Comments: Submit Your Comment (0)
| Print This E-mail This |
|
