Tag: politics

The one benefit of Obamacare

Lost in all the reports of web site problems, presidential lies, and
millions of Americans losing their insurance have been the two real
crimes of Obamacare. The first crime is the way in which Obamacare does
not reform health insurance, but rather, eliminates it altogether.

Health insurance is a form of gambling. It is betting on one’s
ability to take care of one’s health except for the rare possibility of
unexpected and ruinously expensive catastrophes. It has very little to
do with going to the doctor, with birth control, or with the vast
majority of things that fall more properly under the heading of health
care services.

Read the rest at Absolute Rights.


NB: I was recently offered a regular spot as a contributor at Absolute Rights, and since I’m no longer blogging at Black Gate, I figured I have the time to do so without having a negative effect on my posts here. I’ll be posting political items there a couple of times per week, so you may wish to consider adding it to your regular rotation.

Just not that smart

Proud, yes. Arrogant, sure. But not particularly intelligent. I also very much doubt that Obama is a pathological liar. He strikes me as more the classic example of Dunning-Kruger, thinking he is very clever when he quite clearly is not.

NBC’s Chuck Todd scored a huge interview with President Obama Thursday and opened things by immediately drilling down on the president’s relentlessly repeated lie that under ObamaCare you can keep your current  insurance plan if you like it. The full interview is even more impressive than the clips that have been going around. Even after he elicits a “sorry” from Obama, Todd keeps after the point for almost ten minutes.

Ultimately, though, Todd came away with the impression that Obama doesn’t believe he lied. And Todd is probably right, which is a little unnerving.

During his own interview on the Hugh Hewitt show Friday with guest host Carol Platt Liebau, Todd said, “You know, he does not believe he lied on this, and that’s the sense I get.” Here is Todd’s entire quote:

You know, he does not believe he lied on this, and that’s the sense I get. I mean, I think that that’s, he’s taken issue with that before with folks off the record, and I got it’s a sensitive issue, felt like he did not sit there and say he intentionally lied. He said that he wanted to, he thought he was going to be able to keep this promise. I thought what was revealing in that answer, when I asked him that direct question about this, was this a political lie that you started to believe it, was he talked about well, you know, it turns out we had trouble in crafting the law.

If Obama has convinced himself he didn’t lie, that borders on pathological.

Stupid people tell stupid lies and deny that they did so on a regular basis. Remember, this is the same guy who went off on bitter clingers while trying to convince them to vote for him. We’re not dealing with a rocket scientist here, but rather an affirmative action president.

Why there is hope for Europe

And why it is more likely that it is America that will end up experiencing third world status:

As right-wing populists surge across Europe, rattling established political parties with their hostility toward immigration, austerity and the European Union, Mikkel Dencker of the Danish People’s Party has found yet another cause to stir public anger: pork meatballs missing from kindergartens.

A member of Denmark’s Parliament and, he hopes, mayor of this commuter-belt town west of Copenhagen, Mr. Dencker is furious that some day care centers have removed meatballs, a staple of traditional Danish cuisine, from their cafeterias in deference to Islamic dietary rules. No matter that only a handful of kindergartens have actually done so. The missing meatballs, he said, are an example of how “Denmark is losing its identity” under pressure from outsiders.

The issue has become a headache for Mayor Helle Adelborg, whose center-left Social Democratic Party has controlled the town council since the 1920s but now faces an uphill struggle before municipal elections on Nov. 19. “It is very easy to exploit such themes to get votes,” she said. “They take a lot of votes from my party. It is unfair.”

It is also Europe’s new reality. All over, established political forces are losing ground to politicians whom they scorn as fear-mongering populists. In France, according to a recent opinion poll, the far-right National Front has become the country’s most popular party. In other countries — Austria, Britain, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland and the Netherlands — disruptive upstart groups are on a roll.

This phenomenon alarms not just national leaders but also officials in Brussels who fear that European Parliament elections next May could substantially tip the balance of power toward nationalists and forces intent on halting or reversing integration within the European Union.

Unless you live in Europe, you probably cannot understand why its long term prospects are actually better than the USA’s. For some reason, probably because they only visit a few of the largest cities, Americans tend to be under the impression that there are far more Muslims in Europe than there are. They also don’t understand that left-wing European intolerance would make the average KKK member look like a multiculturalist.

Remember, both the post-Lenin Soviets and the National Socialists were left-wing parties that were strongly nationalistic. Whereas in the US, nationalism is very weak and only a right-wing phenomenon, in Europe, it spans the political spectrum. Notice that the votes for the “right-wing” nationalists come from Left and Right; in the UK, the BNP draws from Labor whereas UKIP is draining the Tory Party dry. Whereas the rise of the new parties has the mainstream parties visibly terrified, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street remain the object of late-night TV jokes.

There are three primary reasons for the difference in outlook between Europe and the USA. They are as follows:

  1. Parliamentary systems
  2. Trans-ideological nationalism
  3. No popular pro-immigrant mythology

The parliamentary systems are more favorable to third parties. Whereas the Tea Party has gone nowhere and accomplished nothing, several anti-central, anti-globalist parties are on the verge of taking control of their national parliaments. As in the USA, the established parties have allied against them, but that has only bought them a little extra time before being voted out. The American system is much more conducive to effectively barring policies and politicians deemed non-mainstream.

I’ve already explained the trans-ideological nature of European nationalism. A French Communist and a French Gaulist are both French before they are communists or gaulists. And to both of them, a Senegalese individual is still Senegalese and therefore not French, whether he is communist or a Gaulist.

The absence of the mythology of the melting pot is also important. No one in Europe except a few idiot university students genuinely believes in what isn’t true of the USA and has no application in Europe. The EU has turned out to be a fraudulent, corrupt, Germanic empire and most of Europe will celebrate when it inevitably collapses.

Now, I hope both the nations of Europe and the USA will come to their collective senses and cast off the multicultural myths that have Western civilization hurtling towards collapse and conquest. But, on the basis of the political tectonics, at this point, Europe actually, unexpectedly, appears to be in better shape, mostly because far more of them already recognize who their villainous elites are and what they have done.

Schadenfreude for the suckers

I have absolutely no sympathy for these idiots. Absolutely none at all. Go cry a freaking river, along with the Ann Althouses, David Brooks and Peggy Noonans of the world, all of whom bought into the idea that the Detroit model would be a good one for America:

Wagner and her husband retired early. She was a nurse for 35 years and championed Obamacare, until she received a letter from her insurance company saying it was canceling her policy.

“I was really shocked … all of my hopes were sort of dashed,” Wagner said. “’Oh my gosh President Obama, this is not what we hoped for, it’s not what we were told.’ “

She was shocked further to learn that for the same coverage she would pay 35 percent more and have a higher deductible. “Our premium for next year is going up to over $1,000 a month for two of us and we’re two fairly healthy individuals,” Wagner said.

This is just one minor Federal change to healthcare. Imagine how shocked and upset they are going to be when they finally realize what the long-term effects of the 60 millions immigrants, 50 million abortions, and 40 million additional women working they supported turn out to be.

Surrender

Invade the world, invite the world, elect the world:

Abdi Warsame made history Tuesday by becoming the highest elected Somali in the country, winning a seat on the City Council in a landslide. Two decades after a wave of East Africans arrived in Minneapolis to escape civil war, they emerged as a political force to elect one of their own for the first time to City Hall, jumping out of their seats at a Cedar-Riverside theater to cheer, clap and embrace one another as War­same took the stage.

It was part of a sweeping turnover on the City Council, where seven new members will be sworn in next year. Two other challengers knocked out incumbents by a 2-1 margin in wards spanning Uptown, the North Loop and Northeast, and the council seemed likely to have its first Hmong and Hispanic members when all votes are counted….

Warsame secured 64 percent of first-place votes for the Sixth Ward seat. He defeated 12-year Council Member Robert Lilligren, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe who strove to show that he could connect with East African voters even if he didn’t share the same cultural background.

Voter turnout in the ward exploded since the last council race in 2009, and Warsame won with three times as many votes as Lilligren garnered in his last election.

Warsame, 35, left Somalia as a child and spent much of his life in England. He moved to Minneapolis in 2006 and heads the tenant association for the Riverside Plaza, the high-rises that house 4,000 East Africans.

Mogadishu on the Mississippi’s newly elected leader is not an American. Not in any sense of the word except the legal one. He’s lived in America less than half the time that I’ve lived in Europe. Does anyone seriously believe that this man has any understanding of the 18th century English political principles that define what America is, let alone any genuine allegiance to them?

Marines were sent to Somalia to prevent Somalis ruling over Somalis. Now Somalis are ruling over Americans. In what used to be America.

Americans did not defend their liberty and now they are getting the non-American government they deserve.

The new rules of engagement

This is why it is necessary to punch back twice as hard. This is why
you cannot let the poisonous ones into your social circle. This is why
you cannot employ them. This is why you cannot indulge in conspicuous
tolerance. As Athol Kay has learned, those to whom the personal is the
political and the political is the personal have no decency and know no limits:

Back
in May 2011 Jennifer and I were taken to Human Resources and had a
rather odd conversation in the aftermath of being on Inside Edition.
Apparently we’re dangerously monogamous and offensively heterosexual
enough to have resulted in no less than six calls of complaint to our
employer. Like I said, I always figured I’d be taken to HR, but I really
didn’t expect Jennifer to be dragged into it too. Jennifer does have a
minor PR role for her company, so we do see their point, but even then,
it’s no one’s business but ours.

Thus at the time: Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir.

There’s
really not too much they can do to us directly, it’s not like you can
be fired for kissing your spouse on TV. But after that point, I start
feeling like the cross-hairs are firmly drawn on my back and I start
getting disciplined at work for things that frankly I don’t think I
would have been spanked for before that point. I.e. I see which way the
wind is blowing, work my ass off and in June 2012 I jump to MMSL
full-time.

Which brings us to now, or more correctly a couple months back.

Jennifer
gets a message on a Friday, she’s summoned to HR on Monday. Not told
what about. I’m unsure if the intent was to ruin our weekend, but it
seemed to achieve that goal. Considering Jennifer is the quintessential
good employee, it can only be MMSL related and I feel both shitty and
angry. We’re just on the very fine edge of me being able to carry the
two of us on MMSL income alone, so I Captain up and green light her
quitting her job at any point during that meeting.

It
turns out someone from a state agency funding Jennifer’s employer, has
been printing off a collection of blog posts and anonymously mailing
them to the CEO of her company. So anonymous letter, coming inside a
state agency envelope. HR really has nothing to say to her but, “Ahhh…
this is awkward, but you need to know what’s happening.” It’s also kinda
silly being outed to your employer 2.5 years after you were on national
television. The surprise factor lacks a little.

Anyway…
what it boils down to, is that someone reads this blog, actively
hunting for ways to fuck my wife over… and they are willing to play
dirty.

Notice that this was directed at the wife of a man who is an atheist from New Zealand and is not exactly a paragon of religious conservative middle America.

It is what the activist Left now does and it is one reason why I will not tolerate their trolls any longer. So let this be a
warning to every troll who comments here: do not say
anything here you do not wish to become public knowledge with your
personal information attached to it here for everyone to see. For the last two years, even the comments that were spammed and deleted have been saved; there are presently 181,807 comments in the database. I’ve tracked down two trolls in the past, and as it happens, both elected to stop
trolling here after discovering that I knew their real identities.

I didn’t publish their personal information here or send the long
compendium of insults, vulgarities, and obscenities they had spewed to
their friends, families, publishers, and employers. But I could have
easily done so. And now that it is clear that this is how the game is being played, well, those of us who are already accustomed to the public view can certainly ensure that everyone else’s actions are too.

How bad is Obamacare?

It’s so bad that the New York Times is back to acting as Obama’s personal PR agent again:

So bad that the New York Times has to issue one of its patented awful editorial board op-eds in order to try to defend the law–and the administration that has botched its implementation. The whole thing is a laugh riot from soup to nuts.

The very title of the piece–”Insurance Policies Not Worth Keeping”–signals to the reader that the Times is fully prepared to cover up, paper over, and outright ignore the fact that President Obama and his political allies repeatedly and deliberately misled the nation by promising Americans that if they liked their health care plans, they could keep them. We are told that the president “clearly misspoke” when he told Americans that they could keep their plans in all instances; for the Times, “clearly misspoke” is a euphemism for “repeatedly consistently and deliberately told the exact opposite of the truth,” given that the prevaricators in this instance were political actors the Times approves of when it comes time to hand out endorsements (and when it comes time for Times employees to go to the polls and vote).

This talk about “clearly [misspeaking]” is about as blatant a signal that the Times is ready to engage in journalistic fraud and malpractice as is the opening paragraph, which tells us that the reason news reports are focusing on the cancellation of insurance policies–and the revelation that the Obama administration and its political allies lied to the American people–is that congressional Republicans “have stoked fear and confusion.”

As though the stories of cancellations and sticker shock themselves–told straight and without any congressional Republican lobbying for the stories to be told–were not enough to make Americans fearful, and as though the unbelievably malfunctions that have been suffered by the website are not enough in order to make Americans confused and outraged.

It’s an interesting logic behind the New York Time’s aggressive PR campaign. Obama clearly said Americans could keep their health insurance policies. But now his landmark law is not permitting them to keep those policies. But the new policies are better! Therefore, we should all ignore the fact that he lied and focus on the fact that he is forcing Americans to accept better policies than the ones they would freely choose if left to their own devices.

Surely we should apply this logic to everyone’s daily food choices as well. After all, what one eats tends to determine one’s health. And sexual choices too. It doesn’t matter what you happen to prefer, not when it is eminently clear that certain forms of sexual activity are healthier than others. Forget the closet and the fat farm, Obamacare serves as precedent to fine fatties and homosexuals if they insist on continuing to engage in their expensive and socially deleterious activities.

In any event, all of this is but a temporary sideshow. We are assured by Porky that all these reports of problems are mere strategery by the political supergenius Obama, who is simply suckering in those clueless Republicans for a few weeks, just long enough to befuddle them and amaze the general public when he reveals that the Obamacare system is working more slickly than a pair of greased penguins sliding over glare ice.

Obama is a cunning and masterful politician, though. Consider how carefully he chose his words to extricate himself from a briar patch that would easily ensnare less brilliant strategerists:

“President Barack Obama told his enthusiastic supporters Monday night
that he never promised what video recordings show him promising at least
29 times.”

Or perhaps having the entire mainstream news industry running interference makes one look smarter and more successful. Who can say?

Twice as hard

The public persecution of Orson Scott Card is an indicator that it is time for the Right to, in Instapundit’s words, start punching back twice as hard.

A friend posted on Facebook about his interest in the new Ender’s Game film based on the classic novel by Orson Scott Card.  Another person chimed in with joy over a news story that Card would not profit personally based on the performance of the film.  Why would such a thing be an occasion for joy?  The answer is that Card (a Mormon) is a known opponent of same-sex marriage.

Card’s career of late has been affected by his view of marriage.  He lost prospective work writing for a Superman project when voices piped up in opposition to him.  Was it because of his poor writing?  No.  It was because of his politics.  These same people who villify Card and hope to destroy his career are surely the same persons who curse the “Red Scare” and “McCarthyism.”  What is the phenomenon in either case?  It is the attempt to prevent a person with a particular worldview from getting work or to prevent others from associating with that person.

The Right has long sabotaged itself through its pride in playing fair and refusing to bar leftists from employment on the basis of their ideological allegiances. Where did that get them? Barred from the mainstream media and the universities. What did that accomplish? Nothing more than the complete loss of the intellectual high ground.

Now that it is in the ascendant in the decision-making positions at the publishers and the large technology companies, we are seeing the same process at work. The leftists at Tor Books aren’t dumb enough to drop Card while he’s still their best-selling author, but they are going to prevent the next Card from publishing there. In fact, they have done so for years, if not decades.

It is no use for the Right to primly disapprove and declare “that’s not sporting, old chap”. When one side clings to the Marquess of Queensbury rules while the other is making use of the full range of MMA options, the outcome is certain. The Left is increasingly confident, in part because its numbers have been swollen through immigration and forty years of public school indoctrination, in part because, rather like Hitler, they simply don’t believe the other side has the backbone to stand its ground.

But the Right still has the bigger numbers. Despite the Left’s loathing of him, it is Card who is Tor’s best-selling novelist, not their left-wing poster girl. Despite the fact that I am not published by any major publisher, I have the most-trafficked blog of any SF/F writer. By every objective measure, the Right remains more culturally powerful than the destructive parasites of the Left. But it is an impotent, mostely unused power.

So, it is time to use it. It is time for the sleeping dog to wake up and bite back. It is time to treat them the way they have been treating us for decades. Don’t hire them. Don’t publish them. Don’t support them. Express social disapproval of them. If you suspect them of left-wing sympathies, if you suspect them of equalitarianism and feminism and other intellectual diseases, inquire further and then drive them into social quarantine. Force them to rely upon their own kind rather than subsisting like vampires upon the human cattle they despise.

Don’t whine about how they won’t let you into the clubs and companies they invaded and occupied and made their own, create new ones, make them bigger and better, and then, (and this is the crucial part), DO NOT LET THEM IN. To “foxnews” should be a verb in every right-winger’s vocabulary; Fox News is the model that shows how easily the Right can dominate and destroy the Left on the Left’s own turf so long as the Right stops trying to appease and accommodate the Left.

Punching back is punching back twice as hard, because the Right has more muscle.

So stop priding yourself on your open mind and your tolerance. Stop thinking you are going to shame them, or inspire them, or convince them into following your lead. Their minds are closed and they see you as an evil enemy. Accept that and treat them accordingly. Support your own kind, give preference to your own kind, and stop paying tribute to the enemy.

As for their vilification, wear it with pride. Feed on it and grow strong. I would be embarrassed, I would be downright disgusted with myself, were the intellectual dwarfs of the Left to approve of me in any way, shape, or form. Persecution either breaks a faith or makes it stronger, and the more they try to increase the pressure, the stronger and harder and more confident they will make us.

Mailvox: Porky predicts Obamacare

I find Porky’s political wise man act to be a little tedious, so I’m going to make sure I don’t forget this prediction by posting it here.  Porky wrote:

Are you incapable of seeing that the Obamacare rollout was a planned failure? Do you not understand the progressive tactic of lowered expectations?

The website will be functioning reasonably well by December (I suspect they’ve had the fix all along) at which time Obama will announce his glorious Christmas gift to humanity is “not perfect, but it’s improving every day and children and pregnant women are safe now.” The argument will have been successfully shifted from “should there even be socialized medicine” to “how can we make socialized medicine work.”

Mission accomplished. Another brilliant progressive tactic made possible by the type of foolishness we see in the OP.

So, Porky predicts there will be no delayed implementations, the Obamacare site registrations will be working smoothly within 30 days, and Obama will make a public announcement to that effect.

If he’s correct, I will congratulate him and take his predictions more seriously in the future. If he’s not, we’ll be able to safely dismiss his particular brand of political conspiracy theory.

The nonexistent magic of geographical relocation

Republicans are beginning to wake up to the fact that Karl Rove was an inobservant fool and George Bush the Younger’s “Hispanics are natural conservatives” strategy was political suicide from the start:

Most of the millions of immigrants we have welcomed came from countries
where the only government they knew was one that made all decisions
about economic and social policy. The current level of legal immigration
to America adds thousands of people every day whose views and
experience are contrary to the conservative value of limited government.

The influx of these new voters will reduce or eliminate Republicans’
ability to offer an alternative to big government, increased government
spending, and favorite liberal policies such as Obamacare and gun
control. New voters will lean on our hard-pressed health care system and
overcrowded public schools to demand more government services….

An enormous body of survey research shows that large majorities of
recent immigrants, who are mostly Hispanic and Asian, hold liberal views
on most policy issues and therefore vote Democratic two-to-one.

Considering that the German, Scandinavian, Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants have never quite managed to master the historically unusual concepts of limited government and the sovereign rights of Englishmen, I’ve never understood the idea that Hispanics, Asians, and Africans, whose political traditions are even further from the American revolutionary concepts, could reasonably be expected to adopt them faithfully en masse.

When one considers that two of the three major political parties in Mexico are both members of the Socialist International, can it really be surprising to anyone that the 30 million+ Mexicans in the USA tend to lean left? Geographical location does not tend to change either ideology or political identities.