Comments On National Amnesia » Political Public Opinion

Obama’s National Healthcare Fetish

admin — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:36:43 +0000

It’s getting close to the time when the American public will have to “pay the piper.” That adage squarely fits with the coming of Barack Obama’s “National Healthcare” system. Donald Berwick, Obama’s radical socialist appointee to the position of “U.S. Healthcare Czar,” commented that he had a “romantic attraction,” (I’m paraphrasing), to the British National Healthcare Service which the British are now admitting is an abysmal failure. I was looking for a psychological term that would describe Berwick’s “sexual fantasy” with the failed British system – there is none. That said we can assume that Berwick is suffering from delusions much like his boss Obama and the rest of the radical left. Like the eugenicists of past and present Berwick seems incapable of realizing the human toll that will be exacted under “healthcare reform,” where cost will be considered over care. However, I think that perhaps Berwick might better serve us if he was the first in this administration to apply for a lobotomy under our new impending healthcare system. This would of course provide a much needed relief considering Berwick’s sexual “fetish” for the failed British system. We might also hope his fellow travelers on the left would also take advantage of that procedure because lets face it, given their socialist delusions they would have nothing to lose. Just my opinion….William McCullough

“The worst of all deceptions is self deception.”

Plato

National Health Service Is Coming To America

By Cal Thomas – Washington Examiner, July 29, 2010

Trust me you’ll be good as new!

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told a group of liberal activists meeting in Las Vegas they shouldn’t worry about not getting the single-payer provision in the new health care law. “We’re going to have a public option,” Reid said. “It’s just a question of when.”

Remember the objections conservatives and many Republicans raised during the debate about government-run health care and the danger of eliminating private health insurance, despite its many flaws?

Recall that Britain’s National Health Service was frequently cited as an example of where the U.S. health system might be headed: coverage for all, but with lower quality, long waits for major surgery and denial of care when the government decides the procedure is not “cost effective.”

Anyone who believes a U.S. health care system based on the NHS model can somehow fare better than Britain’s had better consider this recent headline and story from London’s Sunday Telegraph: “Axe Falls on NHS Services; Hip operations, cataract surgery and IVF rationed; Cancer care, maternity, pediatric services at risk.”

Rationing? Oh yes, and it is something the unconfirmed, recess-appointed U.S. health care czar, Donald Berwick, strongly favors.

British government leaders had promised to protect frontline services. The Obama administration also made similar promises in order to win enough support from members of Congress, most of whom never read the bill before they voted for it.

Here’s what America can look forward to if it follows the NHS model, according to an investigation by the Sunday Telegraph: “Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends.” Never has “take two aspirin and call me in the morning” sounded more callous.

Nursing homes for the elderly would be closed, the number of hospital beds for the mentally ill reduced and general practitioners would be discouraged from sending patients to hospitals. Accident and emergency department services would also be cut.

Thousands of jobs would be lost at NHS hospitals, reports the Telegraph, “including 500 staff to go at a trust where cancer patients recently suffered delays in diagnosis and treatment because of staff shortages.” Katherine Murphy of the Patients Association called the cuts “astonishingly brutal.”

She expressed particular concern at attempts to ration (that word again) hip and knee operations. “These are not unusual procedures,” she said. “This is a really blatant attempt to save money by leaving people in pain.”

What do politicians care about that? In Britain, as in America, top officials (including Berwick, who has lifetime health coverage given to him by the Institute for Health Care Improvement) will always have access to the best care, even while they decide the rest of us cannot.

This paragraph in the Telegraph story should send chills down the spine of every American: “Doctors across the country have already been told that their patients can have the operations only if they are given ‘prior approval’ by the Primary Care Trust, with each authorization made on a ‘case by case’ basis.”

When cost, rather than the value of life, becomes supreme, rationing will inevitably lead to other cost-cutting policies. And yes, despite protestations from those who favored Obamacare that “death panels” would not be part of the equation, you can count on them.

They will, of course, be called something else. We wouldn’t want to disturb any remaining moral sensibilities we might have.

It has taken the NHS 62 years to get to this point. America’s journey should be a lot shorter given the declared goals of Harry Reid and Donald Berwick.

It is more than ironic that this is taking place in the year when Britain is observing the centenary of the revered nurse Florence Nightingale. Given the prevailing attitude toward the value of human life and its care, her replacement might be the likes of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Hemlock, anyone?

Obama Aiding And Abetting Treason And Treachery?

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:50:18 +0000

William McCullough

” Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

Ovid

The media in a schizophrenic stampede has trampled the story of the WikiLeaks betrayal. In lockstep with the Obama administration they have downplayed this horrific display of treason by stating, one and all, that the classified intelligence leaked, was already known and simply is not a big deal. They are right to a point. The fact that Hamad Gul, Director of the Pakistani ISI, (Inter- Services Intelligence – 1987-1999),and his successor Mahmood Ahmed, had been aiding and abetting the Taliban, while receiving U.S. subsidies was known in the last years of the Clinton administration.

The then head of ISI gave money, weapons and intelligence to the Taliban when they began their move to overthrow the secular Afghanistan government in 1998. However Clinton, as we saw when he let Bin Laden escape our CIA teams, was too busy with the coming and goings on under his desk in the Oval Office to take any action.

That aside, many of the classified documents, stated as being inconsequential by the Obama administration and their media whores, are anything but that. According to the Times of London:

“Hundreds of Afghan lives have been put at risk by the leaking of 90,000 intelligence documentsto WikiLeaks because the files identify informants working with NATO forces.”

” The Times….found the names of dozens of Afghans credited with providing detailed intelligence to U.S. forces. Their villages are given for identification and also, in many cases, their fathers’ names. U.S. officers recorded detailed logs of the information fed to them by named local informants, particular including tribal elders.”

Apparently what is now taking place in the Obama administration is a minimalization of treason as practiced by those traitorous individuals who are committed to taking down and embarrassing the U.S., actions that seem to fit the Obama administrations agenda. The end result of the Obama administration’s omission of their responsibility to react to this treason, makes them complicit in any murder and torture of those Afghanis who are murdered by the Taliban and Al Qaeda as a result of these intelligence leaks. Just my opinion.

Obama Administration Afraid Of The Military Vote?

admin — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:26:57 +0000

You might be asking yourself that question when you read the following story. This in actuality is a post script to the last Presidential election where a large number of military personnel’s absentee ballots were not counted for technical reasons, technicalities that now favor the Obama socialists. Obama, Holder and their progressive handlers know that most members of the military polled since these miscreants took office, are opposed to the Chairman’s policies. Holder, protector of the New Black Panther Party army of thugs, seems to be determined to ignore the military by not loosening those technicalities that will make a substantial number of military votes count in the next election. This move once again brings to light, the progressive socialists agenda of marginalizing voters who they know are not on board with their repressive socialist agenda. Just my opinion….William McCullough

” Betrayal….the willful slaughter of hope.”

Stephen Deitz

DOJ Accussed Of Stalling On MOVE Act For Military Voters

By Jana Winter – Fox News, July 29, 2010

The Department of Justice is ignoring a new law aimed at protecting the right of American soldiers to vote, according to two former DOJ attorneys who say states are being encouraged to use waivers to bypass the new federal Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act.

The MOVE Act, enacted last October, ensures that servicemen and women serving overseas have ample time to get in their absentee ballots. The

result of the DOJ’s alleged inaction in enforcing the act, say Eric Eversole and J. Christian Adams — both former litigation attorneys for the DOJ’s Voting Section — could be that thousands of soldiers’ ballots will arrive too late to be counted.

“It is an absolute shame that the section appears to be spending more time finding ways to avoid the MOVE Act, rather than finding ways to ensure that military voters will have their votes counted,” said Eversole, director of the Military Voter Protection Project, a new organization devoted to ensuring military voting rights. “The Voting Section seems to have forgotten that it has an obligation to enforce federal law, not to find and raise arguments for states to avoid these laws.”

Adams, a conservative blogger (www.electionlawcenter.com) who gained national attention when he testified against his former employer after it dropped its case against the New Black Panther Party, called the DOJ’s handling of the MOVE Act akin to “keystone cops enforcement.”

“I do know that they have adopted positions or attempted to adopt positions to waivers that prove they aren’t interested in aggressively enforcing the law,” Adams told FoxNews.com. “They shouldn’t be going to meeting with state election officials and telling them they don’t like to litigate cases and telling them that the waiver requirements are ambiguous.”

Oct. 15, 2008: A U.S member of Combained Joint Task Force-101 filling out voter absentee ballot at a US military base in Bagram north of Kabul, Afghanistan.

Oct. 6, 2004: U.S. Army Sgt. George Scheufele fills out an absentee ballot while voting in the American presidential and congressional election while at Camp Eagle in the violent Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad, Iraq, , ahead of the Nov. 2 polls in the United States.

Oct. 15, 2008: A U.S member of Combained Joint Task Force-101 filling out voter absentee ballot at a US military base in Bagram north of Kabul, Afghanistan.

The MOVE act requires states to send absentee ballots to overseas military troops 45 days before an election, but a state can apply for a waiver if it can prove a specific “undue hardship” in enforcing it.

Sen. John Cornyn,R-Texas – who co-sponsored MOVE – wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on July 26 saying he is concerned that the Department of Justice is allowing states to opt out of the new law. Click here to read the letter.

“Military voters have been disenfranchised for decades, and last year Congress acted,” Cornyn said in a statement to FoxNews.com. ”But according to recent information, the Department of Justice has expressed reluctance to protect the civil rights of military voters under the new law. All our men and women in uniform deserve a chance to vote this November, and the Obama administration bears responsibility for ensuring that they have it.

“For far too long in this country, we have failed to adequately protect the right of our troops and their families to participate in our democratic process. The MOVE Act was supposed to end this sad history. The right to participate in democratic elections is fundamental to the American experience.”

Oct. 15, 2008: A U.S member of Combained Joint Task Force-101 filling out voter absentee ballot at a US military base in Bagram north of Kabul, Afghanistan.

Jim Webb’s Case Against Racial Preferences

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:35:06 +0000

Washington Examiner – Editorial

Hysteria over Shirley Sherrod last week unfortunately overshadowed a sensible, courageous and long overdue analysis of racial politics by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Webb put to rest the myth of white dominance that has “served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America.” Because of government-sponsored “diversity” policies, he wrote, white workers have become marginalized to serve an overbroad effort to make up for past wrongs.

Webb rightly notes that the old South was a three-tiered society, “with blacks and hard-put whites both dominated by white elites who manipulated racial tensions in order to maintain power.” He might have added that white elites used populist rhetoric to keep an entire third of the region’s population disenfranchised, in effect also making the Southern economy “backward.”

The kind of poverty — the effect of the Civil War combined with harmful Jim Crow laws — was hard to reverse. Because government was responsible, only government could reverse itself 50 years later. To remedy the legacy of Jim Crow, Webb argued, government instituted diversity programs that have grown far beyond their original purpose and “now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.”

This is progress, of course, and should not be mistaken as moral equivalence. Affirmative action and the pursuit of diversity is not a new form of Jim Crow. But these policies have overshot their mark by adversely affecting another group of people, namely poor whites, who have enough working against them, particularly in this recession. It’s bad enough to have the economy weighing you down; it’s worse when the government uses you to atone for sins you didn’t commit.

That a Democrat would come out with such a statement is remarkable too, given they party’s support for these policies. But this Democrat is different. Webb has frequently been accused of “sounding like a Republican” when it comes to racial preferences, but Republicans could only wish that were true. Many Republicans have been tin-eared in this area, a factor that played a big role in Webb’s win against incumbent Sen. George Allen, R-Va., who casually and insensitively referred to a Democrat operative with a racial pejorative at a campaign event.

Webb’s argument is rooted in a genuine desire to get past the “gotcha” politics of race and the unintended consequences of racial guilt. With luck and good sense, the nation will follow suit

Obama The Corporate Lacky Accuses GOP Of The Same

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:03:47 +0000

Remember that old adage of the pot calling the kettle black? It seems the “charming” Chairman is on a new kick against the GOP claiming that they are “lackeys” of corporate interests. This from a man who has stacked his administration with his biggest corporate donors, former executives from Goldman Sachs. One would be mentally challenged not to figure that those former executives represent the Wall Street banking interest who were given billions of our tax dollars. Let us also not forget the $ 500 million that Obama gave to the Brazilian oil consortium Petrogas whose largest investor, (to the tune of $ 800 million dollars), is George Soros another major Obama campaign contributor. The list goes on including PHARMA the pharmaceutical trade group who crafted Obama’s healthcare reform legislation and of course the insurance industry, both of whom are large contributors to both parties. Those few mentioned are no doubt just the tip of the iceberg. Obama’s corruption by corporate interests is just a dirty and deep as is anyone else’s in Washington. We might also note that the use of the term “lackey” was a favorite term that Chairmen Mao used to decribe American capitalists. Funny how socialists use the same old tired labels – isn’t it? Funny how they are just as corrupt as the capitalists they despise. isn’t it? Just my opinion….William McCullough

Obama Portrays GOP As corporate Lackeys

By Kara Rowland - (The Washington Times, July 27, 21010)

There’s more where that came from Comrade – ooops, I mean Barack!

President Obama on Monday aimed a new arrow at Republicans who he said are beholden to special interests, arguing that their expected filibuster this week of a new bill to rein in corporate spending on political ads is the latest in a line of votes in which the GOP has tried to protect special interests.

The broadside comes as Mr. Obama has sought to paint the fight over new campaign finance rules as yet another choice between businesses and average Americans — much as the president did in the fights over health care, new financial regulations and extended unemployment benefits.

Mr. Obama timed his remarks one day before senators vote Tuesday on whether to proceed with the legislation — dubbed the Disclose Act — which has passed the House. Democrats need at least one Republican to support the contentious measure for it to clear procedural hurdles.

“A vote to oppose these reforms is nothing less than a vote to allow corporate and special-interest takeovers of our elections. It is damaging to our democracy,” Mr. Obama declared in a brief statement to reporters in the Rose Garden.

The legislation is a response to a Supreme Court ruling in January that struck down limits on corporate and union spending in elections on the grounds that they violated the First Amendment. That case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, prompted Mr. Obama to chastise the court during his State of the Union speech this year.

The bill calls for new donor- and contribution-disclosure requirements on most groups that spend money on political ads but are not affiliated with a candidate or political party. The sponsor of the ad would be required to appear in the ad and claim responsibility for it.

Democrats tout the bill as a fair, common-sense approach, but critics have seized on loopholes that would exempt powerful lobbies such as the National Rifle Association and the AARP from the stiffened disclosure requirements. With fewer than 100 days until midterm elections, other opponents have cited the timing of the effort as proof that Democrats are trying to save their political futures.

“The Disclose Act seeks to protect unpopular Democrat politicians by silencing their critics and exempting their campaign supporters from an all-out attack on the First Amendment. In the process, the authors of the bill have decided to trade our constitutional rights away in a backroom deal that makes the Cornhusker Kickback look like a model of legislative transparency,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has decried the measure as unconstitutional, and the business lobby has warned lawmakers that it plans to score how senators vote.

In some ways, fierce opposition from corporations has played into Democrats’ strategy this fall to frame the elections as a choice between Mr. Obama‘s policies and what he says is a GOP still tied to Bush-era policies that favor special interests…. Read the rest of the story: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/26/obama-slams-gop-campaign-finance/