Medary.com

Fox News: Black man pleads guilty to posing as Obama-hating white supremacist on Facebook.

It happens. Frankly, I expect it to become more common as Obama's overall approval ratings continue to drop, as I'm sure they will, as more and more people figure out who he really is.

When you have it all in your grasp, and it begins to slip away, the result can be panic.

Los Angeles Times:

It seems that, despite all the media attention lavished on e-mail appeals to his supporters, not everyone pushing for President Obama's embattled healthcare reform plan these warm August days is an idealistic volunteer in it for the sake of helping move the country forward and gaining medical attention for millions of uninsured Americans.

The website's large-type headline announces: "Work to Pass Obama's Healthcare Plan and Get Paid to Do it! $10-15 hr!"

It's a web ad on Craigslist: "You can work for change. Join motivated staff around the country working to make change happen. You can make great friends and money along the way. Earn $400-$600 a week."

So both sides appear to have paid lobbyists in this colossal summertime struggle for public opinion and control of the multi-billions flowing into the nation's burdened healthcare system.

Except, of course, that there has been no evidence--plenty of accusations, mainly from paid leftist web sites, but no evidence--that the anti-Obama, free-market health care movement is using paid rent-a-mobs. This is just in the fevered, biased imagination of the Los Angeles Times. On the other hand, Obama's allies are shameless in their own astroturfing, while vociferously accusing their opponents of doing what they themselves do every single day.

Via Jonah Goldberg at NRO Online--College Mounties break up erectile dysfunction ring

--headline from Digital Journal.

 

That's GOTTA hurt.

Christian Science Monitor:  Honduran protestors target Dunkin' Donuts, Burger King.

You can't make up stuff like that.

No, we're not all-health-care-all-of-the-time here.  Via Wattsupwiththat:

Aug. 13 (Bloomberg) — Australia’s Senate rejected the government’s climate-change legislation, forcing Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to amend the bill or call an early election.

Senators voted 42 to 30 against the law, which included plans for a carbon trading system similar to one used in Europe. Australia, the world’s biggest coal exporter, was proposing to reduce greenhouse gases by between 5 percent and 15 percent of 2000 levels in the next decade.

Isn't it time for some small sense of sanity to start seeping in here in America, too?

That doubles as my daily dose of alliteration for the day. Dang!

A comment on a thread at Classical Values:

I went round and round this week on my blog on Open Salon (yeah, some - no scratch that - many of them are rabid lefties)but many of them are otherwise sensible and reasonable people who like my writing and all that. I was trying to make the point that as an SA Tea Party committee member I could personally attest that no one was funding us, that we had raised all our operating funds from small donations, that we were all volunteers - and that we found out about a lot of town-hall events directly from our politician's websites and from a Moveon.org mailing list that one of us joined - and all I got out of it was being called a liar or clueless - and a racist. They are sunk so far in denial about their teleprompter-genius that I don't know what it would take to bring them out.

Sgt Mom   ·  August 13, 2009 12:37 PM

Personally, I think it's as simple as "Fear of the Other." Everybody has it, even sophisticated, literate leftists. And it manifests itself in this kind of utter, blind, unthinking irrationality, and an overwhelming desire to control those who are in any way different from you--different in thought, different in speech, different in behavior.

We see in the actions of the left today (and yes, of the right too) the increasingly vocal and energetic rejection of any action, concept, or person who lies outside everybody's personal comfort zone. Civil discourse is impossible when you believe The Other is totally incapable of understanding your point of view. The Left has been there for a while. The Right is now catching up.

One can hope that we are not becoming completely impervious to reason and understanding, because the alternative is open violence and civil war.

And that would be a bad thing indeed. But not as bad as living in fear under tyranny. That's what the Declaration of Independence was all about, after all. (See, this is one of the things that the Left does not understand about the Right--"it is better to die on your feet, than to live on your knees." That's why trying to ram this health care thing through is really, really, really playing with fire.)

Headline too strong?  Well, since Obamacare hasn't actually killed anyone yet, I suppose it is.  But that's the exaggeration in the headline, because Obama is a serial liar regarding health care reform (or, now, the better-focus-group-performing phrase "health insurance reform").

Heritage Foundation documents seven lies Obama told in his New Hampshire "town hall" rally.  To be fair, two of those seven are "merely" exaggerations and willful misinterpretations of what's before Congress, not outright lies, so I only include here the Five whoppers Obama is desperately trying to cram down everyone's throats:

1.  “I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter.” This is directly contradicted by candidate Barack Obama’s own website which quotes Obama at a rally in Ames, Iowa form 2008: “If I were designing a system from scratch I would probably set up a single-payer system. … So what I believe is we should set up a series of choices….Over time it may be that we end up transitioning to such a system.”

2.  “Under the reform we’re proposing, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” This statement is also plainly false. Again, as demonstrated above, the true purpose of Obama’s public option is to move Americans out of their private coverage and into government run health care. Independent, non-partisan analysis from the Lewin Group has confirmed the House bill, H.R. 3200, will do exactly that: About 88.1 million workers would see their current private, employer-sponsored health plan go away and would be shifted to the public plan.

3.  “We have the AARP on board because they know this is a good deal for our seniors.” This is just plain false. The AARP released a statement late yesterday directly contradicting the President: “While the President was correct that AARP will not endorse a health care reform bill that would reduce Medicare benefits, indications that we have endorsed any of the major health care reform bills currently under consideration in Congress are inaccurate.”

4.  “I said I won’t sign a bill that adds to the deficit or the national debt. Okay? So this will have to be paid for.” That is a nice promise, but so was Obama’s October 2008 promise that he would enact a “net spending cut.” We all know how that has turned out. The reality is that the Senate still has not figured out how to pay for their bill and the House bill would increase the budget deficit by $239 billion over the next ten years. CBO director Doug Elmendorf has said: “In sum, relative to current law, the proposal would probably generate substantial increases in federal budget deficits during the decade beyond the current 10-year budget window.”

5.  “My belief is, is that [Obamacare] should not burden people who make $250,000 a year or less.” Both the House and Senate bills partially pay for Obamacare by imposing “employer mandates” or “pay or play” provisions that require employers to pay higher taxes if (a) they do not offer health insurance, or (b) they offer it but have employees who decline it and instead use the government system. Multiple studies have shown that such provisions cause both lower wages and lost jobs for low-income workers.

UPDATE:  One more Obama lie, this time from the American College of Surgeons, via Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic:

 --  Yesterday during a town hall meeting, President Obama got his facts
     completely wrong. He stated that a surgeon gets paid $50,000 for a leg
     amputation when, in fact, Medicare pays a surgeon between $740 and
     $1,140 for a leg amputation.  This payment also includes the
     evaluation of the patient on the day of the operation plus patient
     follow-up care that is provided for 90 days after the operation.
     Private insurers pay some variation of the Medicare reimbursement for
     this service.

So, at what point will reasonable, open-minded people simply conclude that Obama just makes $hit up and whatever he says should be taken with the largest grain of salt available?

A must-read article at Salon.com:

I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.

. . .

As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a "death panel" under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin's shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate's unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished.

Surely, the basic rule in comprehensive legislation should be: First, do no harm. The present proposals are full of noble aims, but the biggest danger always comes from unforeseen and unintended consequences. Example: the American incursion into Iraq, which destabilized the region by neutralizing Iran's rival and thus enormously enhancing Iran's power and nuclear ambitions.

Unfortunately, the basic rule of comprehensive legislation isn't "do no harm" it's "let's pay off our donors, our special interests, and our cronies at the expense of everyone else." The health care bill is no different. It's not about health care, or health insurance. It's about power. They want what little power you still have over your health care. They know what's best for you and are quite willing to do anything at all to do it.

Other than that . . . as usual with Paglia, Read The Whole Thing.

Raising a ruckus at a Congresscritter's town hall meeting is getting a bit like students at a college basketball game storming the court after a big win.

Part of it is real emotion, part of it is "Look, Ma, I'm on TV" and part of it is kind of a fad.

Although personally I'm all for every politician being aggressively yelled at whenever he or she pokes his/her face out in public.  That's what they're for.

Remember the old Federal Express ads that said "when you absolutely, positively need it delivered overnight?"  No?  Here's one:

 

 

Now, consider that President Obama says, in defense of government health care, that "FedEx and UPS are doing just fine."  Well, that's true.  They're private companies, and compete with each other, and with the U.S. Postal Service.  How about that "public option?"  From the Heritage Foundation:

1.) The U.S. Post Office is the only entity allowed by federal law to deliver first class mail to your mailbox. In fact, Fedex and UPS are strictly prohibited from delivering “non-urgent” letters. If the government can fairly compete and is setting fair rules, wouldn’t the post office be open to competition at your mailbox?

2.) If Americans were offered “free” postage paid for by massive government spending and tax hikes, would Fedex and UPS still exist?

3.) The Post Office is on track to lose a staggering $7 billion this year alone. How will a government-run health care plan manage taxpayer resources more efficiently?

4.) Postmaster General John Potter says he lacks the “tools” necessary to run the Post Office effectively like a business. Would a government-run health care system have the tools it needs to run as effectively as the private sector entities it is replacing?

5.) On the one hand, the President remarks how great his public health care plan will be. On the other hand, he notes it won’t be good enough to crowd out your private insurance, i.e. the Post Office comparison. So which is it Mr. President? Will it be so great that private insurance disappears or so awful that it isn’t worth creating in the first place? 6.) But the most important question is this: if you have an urgent piece of mail you need delivered, life or death, who are you going to call?

 

When you're advocating for a major change in policy, shouldn't you . . . you know . . . actually use examples that help your argument rather than hurt it?