Story #1 tells of Obama’s campaign strategy. #2 looks at the Democrats war on stay at home moms. #3 looks at the question would Reagan have supported Obama’s Buffet Rule? #4 is Obamacare “fair”? #5 tells us of George Lucas vs the environmental fanatics. #6 looks at how the rest of the world looks at oil and how we do.
Today’s thoughts
Was the indictment of George Zimmerman for the Second Degree Murder of Treyvon Martin a careful judgment of the Special Prosecutor or was it a bone thrown to the angry mob?
It appears Obama is now going after Romney’s wife for staying at home to raise her family, deal with her MS and beat cancer. So who is really got a war on women going? And why are leftists so mean spirited?
Mitt Romney was not my first choice for the Republican nomination, but he is miles ahead in the presidential race.
The left’s hatred of Fox News isn’t due to bias in their reporting. It due to them covering issues the left wing media wouldn’t if it weren’t for Fox. Reporting bias shows up as sins of omission.
1. Obama’s 2012 Campaign
In 2008, a mostly unknown Barack Obama ran for president on an inclusive agenda of "hope and change." That upbeat message was supposed to translate into millions of green jobs, fiscal sobriety, universal health care, a resetting of Bush foreign policy, and racial unity.
Four years later, none of those promises will be themes of his 2012 re-election campaign. Gas has more than doubled in price. Billions of dollars have been wasted in insider and subsidized wind and solar projects that have produced little green energy.
Unemployment rates above 8 percent appear the new norm, when 5 percent in the past was dubbed a "jobless recovery."
From the Middle East to the Korean peninsula, the world seems on the brink. Modern racial relations are at a new low.
If borrowing $4 trillion in eight years was "unpatriotic," as Obama once labeled George W. Bush, no one quite knows how to term the addition of $5 trillion in new debt in less than four years. ObamaCare is unpopular with the public. Its constitutionality now rests with the Supreme Court.
After four years, the claims of "Bush did it" and "It might have been worse" grow stale. So re-election will rest not on a new agenda, or an explanation of what happened, but on a divide-and-conquer strategy. Translated, that means Obama will find fissures in the voting public over fairness, expand them, and then cobble together various angry partisans in hopes of achieving a bare majority. Such an us/them strategy is not new in American history…
It will be nasty, but that only works for a limited time. Obama is starting already and his charges will begin to seem trite by the conventions and will be recognized as nonsense by the election.
2. The Democrat’s woman misstep
…By last Friday, it was already apparent that the only thing stopping Mitt Romney from becoming the GOP presidential nominee were mere formalities, and talk had already begun among Obama's media allies that Ann Romney, the wife of our likely nominee, was going to be a huge asset for the Republican ticket. Attractive, charismatic, warm, well-spoken, intelligent, and likable on sight, she would do much to not only soften her husband's edges but also to help shore up the so-called gender gap.
As we've all seen since President Obama stabbed the Catholic Church in the back a couple of months ago, Obama is cynically plotting a path to re-election through a phony "war on women." Because he can't run on a failed record, the White House and the media are hoping this divisive tactic will scare enough women into voting against Romney.
When that's your sinister plot, a woman like Ann Romney is a serious problem.
So last night on CNN, Hilary Rosen attacked Ms. Romney. But almost immediately afterwards, the Obama campaign assured us Rosen doesn’t speak for them.
Baloney.
Obama might suck as a president but when it comes to campaigning and message discipline, this White House knows what it's doing (it doesn’t hurt to have the MSM carrying your water, either). Speaking of his wife Michelle just a few days prior to Rosen's attack, President Obama launched a little theme that should sound familiar after last night's fireworks:
"And once Michelle and I had our girls, she gave it her all to balance raising a family and pursuing a career--and something that could be very difficult on her, because I was gone a lot….
I’m surprised it took as long as it did for Hilary Rosen to apologize. It was a stupid mistake and when she doubled down it was even worse.
3. Would Reagan have support Obama’s “Buffet Rule?”
The world has gone topsy-turvy when a Democratic president approvingly cites Ronald Reagan on tax policy — and even suggests naming his legislative proposal after the Republican icon, since, as Obama put it, he “traveled across the country pushing for the same concept.”
Obama is talking about the so-called “Buffett Rule,” which seeks to raise the taxes of the super wealthy so they don’t pay less than middle-class Americans…
… YouTube clips of Reagan complaining about corporate executives paying less than secretaries or bus drivers have circulated on the Internet for a while. But are Reagan and Obama really talking about the same thing when they used similar anecdotes? As always, context is important…
… Why did Reagan give those speeches? Contrary to Obama’s suggestion that he was specifically arguing for a new tax provision aimed at the superwealthy, Reagan was barnstorming the country in an effort to reduce taxes for all Americans, mainly by cutting rates, simplifying the tax system and eliminating tax shelters that allowed some people to avoid paying any taxes at all.
In other words, Reagan was pushing for a tax cut for everyone, not just an increase on a few. (The highest tax bracket at the time was 50 percent.) He even wanted to cut the tax rate on capital gains from 20 percent to 17.5 percent…
Once again we see that truth and our current President are strangers to one another.
4. Obamacare and Young Adults
…Among the flaws that I identified with this purportedly narrow defense of the mandate is that it is factually inaccurate: Obamacare does not simply make people buy catastrophic coverage that would cover their own unaffordable risks at a price that reflects their actuarial risk; instead, as several of the Justices recognized, it makes them buy comprehensive policies for a wide range of services they don’t need in order to subsidize the law’s other costly requirements, at a price in excess of the actuarial risk that they pose to the system. Rather than being a scheme to insure against the risk posed by younger persons, the Affordable Care Act creates a system of a government-mandated privately-administered redistribution of wealth from the young and healthy to older baby boomers.
An AP reporter, however, recently suggested otherwise, cobbling together several comments from “insurance experts” under the provocative headline “Supreme Court misunderstanding on health overhaul?” According to the story, whereas the Justices “seemed to be under the impression that the law does not allow most consumers to buy low-cost, stripped-down insurance to satisfy its controversial coverage requirement[,]” “[i]n fact, the law provides for a cheaper ‘bronze’ plan that is broadly similar to today’s so-called catastrophic coverage policies for individuals.”
This story might be used by those desperately seeking a limiting principle for the mandate, but the story’s key factual contention is flatly false. As Chief Justice Roberts and Mike Carvin both correctly pointed out during oral argument, even a “bronze” plan must cover a wide array of costly “essential health benefits”—including contraceptives, maternity and newborn care, counseling, physical therapy, preventive services and pediatric oral and vision care—that drastically exceed the types of unpredictable and unaffordable costs covered by normal catastrophic plans (and which might potentially result in cost-shifting). As the article admits:
The health care law does impose a minimum set of “essential health benefits” for most insurance plans. Those benefits have yet to be specified, but are expected to reflect what a typical small-business plan now offers, with added preventive, mental health and other services.
That is precisely why premiums for bronze plans would cost between $4,500 and $5,000 per year under the Act (as estimated by the CBO), whereas true catastrophic plans are currently available for around $420 per year (as quoted online for a policy that covers a thirty-year-old nonsmoker, doesn’t cover preventative and other non-essential services, and carries a $10,000 deductible)….
http://volokh.com/2012/04/12/the-myth-that-the-individual-mandate-addresses-cost-shifting-by-the-uninsured-part-2-bronze-plans-are-not-the-same-as-catastrophic-coverage/
The reason the mandate is so important is because it is a shift of cost from older bigger users of healthcare to younger nonusers. And the reason it will balloon costs is that these young people will use the services more because they have to pay for them whether they use them or not.
5. Dealing with Fanatics
George Lucas is the newest victim of the green religion to recognize that there is no reasoning with religious fanatics intent on saving the world (and you), no matter what you want. The film maker has been trying to build a new movie making facility in Marin County for 25 years, bending over backward to be a good neighbor, dedicating enormous amounts of money to satisfy every demand.
But the green fanatics would have none of it, and have endlessly stymied the development, which would be invisible from the highway, and would provide many high paying jobs and substantial tax revenue. Just last week, they convinced the Marin Country Board of Supervisors to delay the project once again for even more studies…
The green Luddites strike again.
6. Obama and energy suicide
Energy Policy: A Chinese oil company is now the world's top producer. While we sleep and watch pump prices rise, China, India and even Cuba seek supplies the world over, including drilling off the Florida coast.
Global demand for oil is rising, as is its global price, as energy-hungry economies such as China, India and Brazil scour the earth for oil they know will be the energy of the present for some time to come.
Even those lacking their own technology are asking others to help them get more. For them, there is no such thing as "peak oil."
The U.S., however, stands alone as the only major country not actively seeking new supplies…
I’m not sure if it is ideology or stupidity that is driving the left in this country when it comes to energy. Their green initiatives don’t seem to be working very well.
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