What’s New Today
Story
# 1and #2 are our signs of desperation.
In the first we have a poll on which books are selling more
(conservative or liberals) by state.
Romney is ahead. #2 is a poll
that shows the Republicans are ahead by 10 points on Medicare. #3 asks the question, who killed Medicare as
we know it. #4 looks at the initial
reaction to Paul Ryan’s being picked by Romney.
It appears both Republicans and Democrats were happy. Who’s right?
#5 looks at what Obama has done and concludes he’s shrunk the stature of
the Presidency. #6 is an interesting
article which is a confession of an ex-liberal.
#7 will let you read all about the shaming code. #8 announces that on August 23 Romney will
outline his energy plan.
Today’s
Thoughts
There have been 2,527 Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) employees and co-conspirators convicted of corruption and other criminal misconduct since 2004, according
to a federal auditor.
One of the ironic parts
of the Medicare debate is that none of
this could have happened if Chief Justice Roberts hadn’t changed his vote and
kept Obamacare the law. The
Republicans would not have been able to talk about the $716 billion in cuts to Medicare to fund Obamacare. I believe the Democrats got a Pyrrhic victory with that ruling.
The latest two national polls that are out have Obama up by 1% and 4%. Looking at the demographics you find that Democrats have a 6% oversampling compared
to the Republicans in both polls.
Chicago Sun
Times: “After a summer with the wind at his back, President Barack Obama is seeing dark
clouds forming over his re-election fortunes as bad economic news and
political developments cast renewed doubt over his stewardship of the economy… …Mitt Romney appears to have turned away
a barrage of Democratic smear tactics and shifted
the campaign focus to the big-picture economic issues that favor him.”
Lie of the Day
Joe Biden’s hot streak
continued today from Minneapolis, Minn., where he said that Republicans sound like “squealing pigs” objecting to the
Democrats’ Wall Street regulations. I don’t know if I should put this
in the lie of the day, or start a new section just for Joe Biden. Is it a lie if the person talking can’t tell
the difference between a lie and what the voices in his head are telling
him?
1. Signs of Desperation—Red
or Blue Books
With
the presidential election just over two months away online book seller Amazon has come up with a novel way to anticipate
who will write the next chapter in America's political history.
The
world's biggest bookseller has created a
heat map to highlight whether Republican or Democrat slanted books are proving
most popular in each of the country's 50 states.
In
the map Democrat sales majorities are represented by the traditional blue
colour with right wing Republican sales depicted in red - the stronger the
colour the great the majority.
(AAA
Amazon)
It reveals that in book sales at least Mitt Romney is proving the biggest page turner with Republican-skewed books outselling Democrat tomes in all but six U.S. states….
…Overall
the best selling Republican book across
the country is Edward Klein's The Amateur. The book is a critique of the
way Obama has run the nation and describes the president as arrogant and
incompetent.
Meanwhile
topping the Democrat chart is Howard
Zinn's A People's History of the United States which tells the story of
America's history through the eyes of women, factory workers,
African-Americans, Native Americans, working poor and immigrant labourers….
Just another sign that Obama and the
Democrats are in big trouble.
2. Signs of Desperation
part 2—GOP 10 points ahead of the Democrats in Medicare
poll
…Adding credence to the
GOP's case: Polls conducted in 28 battleground districts for
the National Republican Congressional Committee, obtained by National
Journal, which suggest Republicans
aren't as vulnerable on the Medicare debate as the conventional wisdom
suggests. Their pollsters tested both the Republican message on Ryan's
plan (Ryan's plan doesn't touch anyone over 55, preserves Medicare for future
generations, invokes ObamaCare), and the Democratic message against it (end
Medicare as we know it through voucher system, seniors pay more out of pocket,
rates will go up). When the results of all 28 polls were
aggregated together, the GOP argument prevailed 46 to 36 percent….
The Democrats should be shaking in their shoes.
3. Who killed Medicare as we know it?
President
Obama is criss-crossing the country, warning that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan
would “end Medicare as we know it.” Attention, New York’s 3 million seniors:
Don’t be fooled. It’s the Obama health
law that destroyed Medicare, though the impact will not be felt for another
year or more.
Scientific evidence indicates
that the changes made by ObamaCare will shorten the lives of some elderly
hospital patients and make it hard for Medicare enrollees to get treated. The only thing left of Medicare
is the membership card.
ObamaCare cuts future funding
for Medicare by over half a trillion dollars in the next 10 years. Most cuts are made by slashing
what hospitals, physicians, hospice care and dialysis centers will be paid. Doctors will get less to care for a senior
than for a patient on Medicaid and only a third of what a doctor will be paid
to care for a patient with private insurance. New York, the hospital
capital of the nation, will be especially hard hit.
Last year, Richard Foster, chief actuary for Medicare, warned Congress that seniors will have difficulty finding doctors and institutions to accept Medicare. Doctors who do accept Medicare will not want to spend time doing procedures such as hip replacements, when the pay is so low. Yet the law bars them from providing the care you want for an extra fee. You’re trapped.
Foster
also warned that within a decade, 40
percent of health-care institutions could be forced to operate at a loss. New
York hospitals are bracing for the hit.
When
hospitals run in the red, they can employ fewer nurses and buy less diagnostic
equipment.
Cutting hospital payment rates has been
tried before, with deadly results. When
Medicare cut payments to hospitals in 1997, hospitals hit with the biggest cuts
saw death rates for elderly heart-attack patients go up relative to
higher-spending hospitals. A $1,000 reduction in what hospitals could spend on
a heart-attack patient led to a 6 percent to 8 percent higher death rate,
due to fewer nurses and other staff, according to a 2011 National Bureau of
Economic Research paper…
4. Who’s right?
In
the wake of Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, conservatives and liberals seemed almost
equally happy. To the right, the pick represented a bold decision to make a
forthright case against President Obama’s vision for the country and to
champion solutions to the problems that the president has only made worse.
Romney had put his party’s best policy thinker and one of its best
communicators on his ticket and was raring to make his case to voters. To the left, it seemed like a sop to
conservatives that would force Romney to defend a policy vision the public
would not buy. Romney had put his party’s most controversial budget cutter
on his ticket and ran the risk of being tagged with Ryan’s parsimony.
They cannot both be right.
But they do both think they are right, and look likely to act on that
conviction. That very fact will tend to
counteract the chief weakness of the Romney campaign thus far and to reinforce
the chief weakness of the Obama campaign.
Romney now looks set to run a campaign built around a stark
and specific critique of Obama’s economic failures hitched to a relatively vague but distinctly conservative
alternative vision focused on enabling growth in the near term and reforming
entitlements in the long term. Obama
looks set to run a campaign built around a highly detailed critique of a few conservative
ideas (not all of which his opponent has actually championed) and a
slash-and-burn offensive against Romney and Ryan as individuals.
If the first week of the Romney-Ryan
ticket was any indication, this is not
going to work very well for the Democrats. The Ryan pick, and the ensuing
liberal glee, almost immediately set off a debate about Medicare for which it
soon became apparent that the Democrats were woefully unprepared…
Woefully unprepared.
5. Obama: “Hey
America, I shrunk the Presidency”
In
its otherwise glorious history, the Oval Office has suffered its share of
scoundrels. Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, to name just two, certainly left
distinctive stains.
Yet
Barack Obama’s conduct puts him in a
class of one. Day in, day out, he
diminishes the traditions of an office that, starting with George
Washington, were created to keep the presidency above the soiling scrum of
partisan politics.
No. 44 specializes in a
small-mindedness fueled by arrogance and contempt. So much so that, if he loses
this election, he’ll already have earned the title for his next book: “Honey, I
Shrunk the Presidency.” Let us count the ways.
He has attended more fund-raisers
than any president in history,
turning Air Force One into a collection shuttle.
He
stands behind the grand seal of the United States of America to level scurrilous attacks on his opponent, by
name, and even names the opposing vice-presidential candidate. He’s more
respectful when he talks of Iran’s mad mullahs.
He leaks classified information
for political gain,
then feigns shock over complaints.
Oh,
and he lies virtually every time he
appears in public.
All
these offenses against decency are now in service to his campaign, an
enterprise that turns grubbier by the minute. All were on display during his press conference Monday…
This is a pretty accurate portrayal of
the man that was supposed to change everything.
Unfortunately he did, but not the way most of us anticipated he
would.
6. Confessions of an Ex-Liberal
…
Watching Obama's ascent within the Democratic Party was eye opening for me. I
began to educate myself more than I normally would prior to an election. Because the mainstream media was in the
tank for Obama, I started visiting conservative blogs. The more I read, the
more I learned. And bit by bit, my preconceived notions about conservatives
began to collapse while my view of liberals/progressives began to shift
dramatically. Over time, I started to embrace core principles of conservatism. Along the way, however, I brought along one
vestige of my liberal past: political activism.
In
2008, I worked tirelessly for the McCain/Palin
ticket. Although I was no great fan of John McCain and cringed at how he
ran his campaign, it was a no brainer that we had to stop Obama from gaining
power.
Part
of my activism involved going door to door, talking with voters. What I encountered time and again speaking
with conservatives was a dreadful kind of apathy. Some were not going to
vote. Those who were planning to vote were doing nothing more than that. It was
a real shocker because on the left political activism is very common.
It's been thrilling to see the
rise of the Tea Party and the proliferation of conservative blogs. It's inspiring to see many
former-liberals-turned-conservatives become powerful voices on the right.
Perhaps some of that is due to how new converts can be hyper zealous. Perhaps
some due to the habit of activism they carried over from when they were on the
left.
In
any case, this transformation from left to right triggers a question that
haunts me: Why are some people able to
take in opposing viewpoints? And perhaps more importantly, what are the
necessary elements for that to
occur?
As
far as I can tell, it seems there is often
a seminal event that starts the process. For many it was 9/11. For others
it was Obama's rise to power. At present, perhaps some who voted for Obama are
beginning to wake up to the horrific impact he is having on this nation, and
the world. (Emphasis on "perhaps" and "some.")
I
don't know how the mind considers information that is contrary to a person's
world view. Why do some people let such information in without instantaneous
rejection? Why do some take a few moments to reflect on it, even though it
flies in the face of everything they believe?...
This is an interesting look at the process of changing one’s
viewpoint. It’s not an easy
journey. From what I’ve seen Liberals
have their self-worth wrapped up in their beliefs of moral superiority over
conservatives and their acceptance by other liberals as being good human beings. When you abandon that, what do your replace
it with?
Just about any gregarious conservative can register the same complaint: his friends of a liberal persuasion firmly believe in evolution, the hydrocarbon menace, technogenic global warming, and the virtues of green energy; they are convinced that racism is still rampant in America, that all the ills of inner-city schools can be cured by throwing more money at them, that criminals are actually victims of society, that voter fraud is a myth concocted by evil conservatives, that cheating at the polls is a sacred right of minorities, that illegal immigrants have committed no crime even though the word "illegal" is self-explanatory, that George Bush attacked Iraq at the behest of Halliburton to grab Iraqi oil.
In short, it is always the same mantra, demonstrably stupid and illogical, yet fervently espoused by all ardent liberals, irrespective of their social status or educational attainments…
… The estimable Lee Harris, in his wonderful book The Suicide of Reason (Basic Books, 2007), explores the concept of the shaming code developed by Thomas Huxley. Huxley, widely known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his ferocious defense of evolutionary theory, thought long and hard about the inherent contradiction between man's "innate tendency to self-assertion ... as the condition of victory in the struggle for existence and the obvious fact that in the struggle for survival loners are losers and individuals who banded together increased their chances of survival." Upon reflection, Huxley came to the conclusion that the glue that holds together individuals in a group is the collective shaming code.
"It is this code that makes the members of the group feel as one," writes Lee Harris. "They are disgusted, angered, delighted and shamed by the same things. The unanimity of their visceral response is what provides the powerful sense of collective identity. It makes them feel and think as a tribal Us, in contrast to those tribes who are not disgusted by what disgusts us, or made angry by what makes us angry, and who feel no shame at what we think of as shameful[.] ... A tribe that shares a powerful visceral code that inhibits the natural tendency of the individual to self-assertion will present a united front against its enemies."
Therein lies the explanation of the total information blockade built around the highly dubious figure of Barack Obama by the left-leaning salons and the mainstream media, even including the respectable conservative media. It doesn't take unusual intelligence to see that the 44th president is a patent mediocrity with a totally contrived past. And yet, crickets. In 1600, Sir John Harrington penned these immortal words: "Treason doth never prosper; what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason." In other words, treason attains respectability once it becomes a prevalent trait of the social mores, part and parcel of society's shaming code. Today, it is the very same shaming code that causes polite society to rally around the "right-thinking" Obama and rebuff all attempts to expose him as the fraud that he is. Even the late, utterly fearless Andrew Breitbart refused to wade into the controversy around Obama's birth certificate, advising his followers not to "go there," because he believed that it was unproductive and harmful to the conservative cause. He understood the power of the shaming code….
8. Romney to lay out Energy Plan
And about time, too! Mitt Romney told the audience at a fundraiser today that he plans to unveil his comprehensive energy platform on Thursday of this week, and you can bet your bottom dollar I’ll be watching for it. As I’ve argued about a million times, there are fewer surefire methods of both boosting economic growth and government revenue, while simultaneously creating productive private-sector jobs and increasing our energy security, than ending our self-destructive quest to forcibly redesign the energy economy of the future.
Our self-destructive refusal to simply allow American entrepreneurship and ingenuity to tap into our own abundant energy resources, and meanwhile pour money we don’t have into energy technologies that fail the test of the market, while global demand soars is about as backwards a policy as it gets. I’d wager the issue will get even more potent if/when gas prices continue to rise, and a concrete pro-traditional (or at least not anti-traditional) energy platform compared to President Obama’s highly limiting approach could make a difference in swingier states like Ohio or Pennsylvania — and I am for it. The Hill reports:…
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/08/21/team-romney-ready-to-lay-out-comprehensive-energy-plan/
This is a no-brainer for the Republicans. The Democrats all of the above strategy which is really all of the above after we outlaw most of the traditional ones, raises the price of energy, cost the taxpayer’s money and depletes the treasury while destroying jobs. Going all out to utilize our energy resources does exactly what the author here states, boosts economic growth, boosts government revenue, creates jobs and increases our energy security. It doesn’t however reward cronies.
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