April 12th, 2010
“Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times have just run major stories on presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s difficulties in getting people to understand the difference between his Massachusetts universal-health-care plan, which featured an individual mandate, subsidies, and forbidding insurance companies to deny coverage for preexisting conditions, and the Obama-Reid-Pelosi plan, which features an individual mandate, subsidies, and forbidding insurance companies to deny coverage for preexisting conditions.”
“President Obama is putting Romney on the spot by telling Matt Lauer that his bill is similar to Romney’s. Daniel Gross of Newsweek recommends that Obama hire Romney — someone who has management experience, no current job, and “relevant experience in implementing a large-scale health-care reform program, ideally one that involved using an individual mandate and the private insurance system to attain near-universal health insurance” — to run ObamaCare.”
David Boaz looks at the new face of big government conservatism @ http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/04/12/can-romney-lead-the-fight-against-obamacare/
Posted in Health Care & Medicine | No Comments »
April 12th, 2010
“A former White House speechwriter, Mark Thiessen, has jumped to the defense of his former boss, writing for the Washington Post that George W. Bush “established a conservative record without parallel.” Even by the loose standards of Washington, that is a jaw-dropping assertion. I’ve been explaining for years that Bush was a big-government advocate, even writing a column back in 2007 for the Washington Examiner pointing out that Clinton had a much better economic record from a free-market perspective.”
Daniel Mitchell debunks a defense of Bush’s big government conservatism @http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/04/12/bush-was-a-statist-not-a-conservative/
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April 5th, 2010
“Congressional Democrats broadly expanded the powers of the Internal Revenue Service in health reform, says a new analysis from ranking Republicans on the House Ways & Means Committee.”
“Republicans on the Subcommittee on Oversight say that this means the IRS can seize tax refunds and can audit taxpayers in order to enforce the new “individual mandate tax,” [IMT] which penalizes taxpayers if they don’t buy health insurance.”
“The IRS could get an estimated 16,500 new workers at an additional taxpayer cost of $10 billion to enforce the insurance mandate, which already faces mounting constitutional challenges, these Republicans say.”
Read more: http://emac.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2010/03/22/irs-gains-broader-powers-under-health-reform/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogs%2Femac+%28Blogs+-+EMac%27s+Stock+Watch%29#ixzz0kGpYcPlE
Posted in Big Government, Health Care & Medicine | No Comments »
April 5th, 2010
“There’s a growing narrative that Iraq’s solidifying democracy makes the seven years of US war and occupation a worthy enterprise.”
“Some observers have even spun Iraq’s March 7 elections as proof that democracy promotion via military occupation can succeed. Don’t believe the hype. The Iraq war remains a mistake of mammoth proportions. And Iraq’s election represents a pyrrhic victory, as the economic, political, and moral costs of the occupation far outweigh any benefits.”
“First are the sacrifices in terms of blood and treasure. The broad consensus is that the war has cost the US economy well over $700 billion – with the meter still running. The Iraq war has also left nearly 4,400 American troops dead, more than 31,000 physically disabled, and countless more psychologically traumatized.”
Malou Innocent looks at the cost to America and to Iraq of the Iraq War @ http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11658
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March 30th, 2010
“Her Majesty’s subjects in the United Kingdom are now subject to the prying eyes and ears of a European intelligence agency with powers that rival Hitler’s infamous Gestapo, the Cold War-era KGB, and its progeny the East German Stasi.”
“Europol (a portmanteau of the European Police Office) was formally instituted in 1993 under a provision of the Maastricht Treaty and it became fully functional as of July 1, 1999. The agency is the European Union’s intelligence agency and as such conducts investigations across the 27 member states of the European Union.”
“…As of this year, the Hague has endowed Europol with the plenary powers of a full EU agency, with all the attendant rights and privileges.”
Joe Wolverton II looks at the European Police Agency @ http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/world-mainmenu-26/europe-mainmenu-35/3221-europol-granted-frightening-investigative-power
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March 26th, 2010
“Following months of heated public debate and aggressive closed-door negotiations, Congress finally cast a historic vote on healthcare late Sunday evening. It was truly a sad weekend on the House floor as we witnessed further dismantling of the Constitution, disregard of the will of the people, explosive expansion of the reach of government, unprecedented corporate favoritism, and the impending end of quality healthcare as we know it.”
Rep. Ron Paul looks at the high cost of healthcare reform @ http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/004010.html
Posted in Health Care & Medicine | No Comments »
March 18th, 2010
“In 1999, a year after winning a second and final term as Republican governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson became the most prominent politician in the United States to call for legalizing marijuana. He also said straightforwardly that he had used pot himself in the past….”
“In 2010 Johnson is hoping to gain notoriety for a different, though related, reason. At a time of deep and convulsive popular discontent with the economy and the politicians attempting to manage it, Johnson has launched a profile-raising 501(c)4 nonprofit organization called the Our America Initiative, pushing limited-government solutions to economic, environmental, social, and international issues.”
Reason Magazine interviews former Governor Gary Johnson @ http://reason.com/archives/2010/03/16/you-cut-spending
Posted in Libertarian Viewpoint | No Comments »
March 18th, 2010
“The U.S. is rarely at peace. It doesn’t matter which party or which politician is in power: American military forces will be on the move, invading a Third World nation here and threatening an emerging power there.”
“In January 2009 Republican George W. Bush yielded to Democrat Barack Obama, and the U.S. government increased military spending and expanded the war in Afghanistan. If a Republican is elected in 2012, recent history suggests that defense outlays will grow further, as Washington attacks another nation or two.”
“Enthusiasm for war crosses party lines — Robert Kagan recently wrote approvingly of the militaristic alliance between “liberal interventionist Democrats” and “hawkish internationalist Republicans” — both groups which have never met a war they didn’t want to fight. However, support for peace also is transpartisan. Such sentiments are perhaps strongest on the Democratic left, which increasingly feels disenfranchised by President Obama. A smaller contingent of libertarians, traditional conservatives, and paleo-conservatives has resisted the conservative movement’s adoption of war-mongering intervention as a basic tenet.”
Doug Bandow takes on the pro-war bipartisans @ http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=689
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March 18th, 2010
Chris Moody reports @ The Cato-at-Liberty blog:
In a Thursday panel at Cato on conservatism and war, U.S. Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) and John Duncan (R-Tenn.) revealed that the vast majority of GOP members of Congress now think it was wrong for the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003.
The discussion was moderated by Grover Norquist, who asked the congressmen how many of their colleagues now think the war was a mistake.
Rohrabacher:
“I will say that the decision to go in, in retrospect, almost all of us think that was a horrible mistake. …Now that we know that it cost a trillion dollars, and all of these years, and all of these lives, and all of this blood… all I can say is everyone I know thinks it was a mistake to go in now.”
McClintock:
“I think everyone [in Congress] would agree that Iraq was a mistake.”
Source (includes video):http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2010/03/18/gop-congressmen-most-republicans-now-think-iraq-war-was-a-mistake/
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March 10th, 2010
“…the real reason why ObamaCare is so unpopular is that it is proposing a giant expansion of the entitlement state precisely when this state everywhere is coming apart: here and abroad; at the federal level and the state; in the public sector and the private. Suggesting a giant government takeover of a sixth of the economy can’t be a popular selling point in a country whose DNA has a programmed hostility to Big Government.”
Shikha Dalma sees Obamacare bringing the Democrats down the way the Iraq War brought the Republicans down @ http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/09/obamacare-health-democrats-congress-opinions-columnists-shikha-dalmia.html?boxes=opinionschannelmostpopular
Posted in Health Care & Medicine | No Comments »