Boy, could we use the Gipper now...
The following video was provided by Heritage upon Reagan's 100th birthday...it's message still rings true:
"Let's honor him by recommitting ourselves to the conservative principles he championed, so that one day soon, we can tell future generations, 'it's morning in America, once again.'"
As does his address against socialized medicine, particularly at this precise moment in time...
Happy birthday, Mr. President! One day, we hope to rekindle that exceptional idea of what a 'Morning in America' should be...
H/t: WZ
Related link: Reagan’s Legacy: “The Sacred Value of Human Life”
ADDENDUM: Here's another fond reminder from theScoop...
In the above clip, he is speaking for the final time from the Oval Office. It is a testament to the power of the man’s legacy that his farewell still rings more positive, more uplifting, more full of hope, than even the soaring campaign and incoming speeches of presidents since. Yes, even the great Si Se Puede himself falls far short. Reagan shows us how to be optimistic rather than pessimistic, without being saccharine or pandering. Something a great many people would do well to learn these days.
Today is not just Ronald Reagan’s birthday. It is a birthday of sorts for the Republican Party. It is a time to remember how a great man stepped into the spot history had reserved for him and led us all to something better, something more. Led us to aspire to something bigger than ourselves. That dream of America that drove and guided us from a few colonies to the great shining city upon a hill.
Yes conservatives and Republicans will long remember and honor Ronald Reagan. Unashamedly. Unabashedly. And with a sense of melancholy. We wait for the next Ronald Reagan, even as we fear he will never come again.
Happy Birthday, Mr. President. You are sorely missed.
Here's the L.A.Times piece that's abuzz today...and we'll see more of these pop up as implementation rolls on, even from other lib rags...
LATimes: After overcoming website glitches and long waits to get Obamacare, some patients are now running into frustrating new roadblocks at the doctor's office.
A month into the most sweeping changes to healthcare in half a century, people are having trouble finding doctors at all, getting faulty information on which ones are covered and receiving little help from insurers swamped by new business.
Experts have warned for months that the logjam was inevitable. But the extent of the problems is taking by surprise many patients — and even doctors — as frustrations mount.
Aliso Viejo resident Danielle Nelson said Anthem Blue Cross promised half a dozen times that her oncologists would be covered under her new policy. She was diagnosed last year with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and discovered a suspicious lump near her jaw in early January.
But when she went to her oncologist's office, she promptly encountered a bright orange sign saying that Covered California plans are not accepted.
"I'm a complete fan of the Affordable Care Act, but now I can't sleep at night," Nelson said. "I can't imagine this is how President Obama wanted it to happen."
Hold it right there. WAKE UP CALL! Aliso, this is PRECISELY how Barack wanted it to happen. Destroy the private health care market completely with Obamacare; then when it all collapses, turn to a Big Government single-payer system (wait lines, health rationing and death panels in tow). He want YOU to come to THEM for your every need. This was never about your health...it was always about control.
Related link: Obama Fans Can't Believe Their President Wanted This to Happen
And this is not just a California thing...it's happening from Oregon doctor shortages...
tRS: Thousands of new Obamacare signups in Oregon are finding out they don’t have access to a doctor because there just aren’t enough to match the demand:
...to New York hospitals being forced to turn down cancer patients...
FreeBeacon: Stage-four cancer patient Bruce Johnston seems to be the latest victim of Obamacare’s terrible rollout, as his insurance under Obamacare was recently denied at Stony Brook University Hospital.
When told the hospital did not take his insurance, Johnston was shocked. “It leaves me high and dry,” Johnston said. “I mean, this is nothing to fool around with. This is my life.”
The hospital said it currently does not accept any of the 8 plans offered by the New York state exchange, citing low reimbursement fees that “wouldn’t come close” to the cost of providing treatment. The hospital has had to negotiate on a case by case basis with the insurance companies to cover patients in predicaments like Johnston’s.
...and all businesses in between, forced to choose whether to dump benefits or pass Obamacare costs along to employees...
HotAir: Remember when Democrats sold ObamaCare as a system that “bends the cost curve downward”? Tell that to employers, who face a make or break decision point this year when the employer mandate comes into full force for 2015. Do companies dump health insurance in order to control their costs, or pay the higher costs and pass them along to employees as reductions in compensation? Tim Armstrong explains to CNBC that employers — even one as large as AOL — can’t avoid what is a $7 million question to him (via Daniel Halper):
Employers, doctors, institutions, AMERICA can't afford the so-called Affordable Care Act (btw, which still won't cover everyone).
At some point, Aliso and millions more have to face facts that socialized medicine is a total disaster.
UPDATE: More bait-and-switch in California (via tRS)...
I'll say it...WE TOLD YOU SO!
Rush was back with us today, and commenting on the CBO report, Rush explains how Obamacare (and all the rest of the statists' agenda) was 'never gonna add up' and why he initially said, 'I hope he fails'...
"...every dire prediction, everything they were lying about, you were told in advance. And every prediction we made about what was going to happen to health care, the economy and jobs has been coming true since the first day of implementation, and the CBO just happened to come along this week and codify it in a so-called nonpartisan way. It is an utter disaster. It was never going to be anything but an utter disaster"
"I don't think gross negligence and incompetence covers this."
Nope. By design.
Related links: RUSH: ObamaCare Is A Success Because It’s Liberating People From The Responsibility Of Working
Why Did I Want Obama to Fail? The Answer is in the CBO Report on Obamacare
CNN/ORC Poll: Majority say Obama's policies will fail
Gotta love when Democrats dictate the terms of their opposition's existence, while wrecking the country. You see, we, the tea party, conservatives, constitutionalists, we're the extremists? Au contraire, Henry...
PJMedia: Retiring 20-term Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said that if the Tea Party wins against the GOP establishment, the party will cease to exist.
Waxman argued on MSNBC that “Congress can get things done on a bipartisan basis, but it doesn’t happen overnight.”
“We need to sometimes recognize it’s hard work and determination and looking for different combinations to bring people along. Right now it’s discouraging, because the Tea Party right wing Republicans are quite extreme. They think compromise is a dirty word, and to talk to the Democrats, they think is like complicit with the enemy, but it’s so far out, so extreme a view that I think other Republicans are going to reject it,” he said.
“Republicans are having a civil war right now, and if they get captured by the right wingers, they are going to become a extinct party.”
Related links: Rep. Henry Waxman Bashes Tea Party, Announces Retirement – Leaves Door Open for New Age Author Marianne Williamson
How the Tea Party Beat Henry Waxman
Remember, compromise and bipartisanship means submitting to the will of the Democratic statists. WE are the liberty-lovers who want to save the country from these destroyers.
It's apparent who the extremists are here. It's those seeking to continue the wreckage by hook or by crook...or by promoting imperial powers. Right, Sheila?
CNSNews: Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) says that the newly launched Congressional Full Employment Caucus will “give President Obama a number of executive orders that he can sign.”
Jackson Lee made the statement while gathered with Democrats on January 29th to announce the establishment of the Full Employment Caucus.
“We will be answering the call of all of America because people need work and we’re not doing right by them by creating work,” Jackson Lee said. “I believe this caucus will put us on the right path and we’ll give President Obama a number of executive orders that he can sign with pride and strength.”
“In fact, I think that should be our number one agenda. Let’s write up these executive orders, draft them of course - and ask the president to stand with us on full employment.”
(FYI...that Congressional Full Employment Caucus are essentially the same bad apples within the self-segregated Congressional Black Caucus.)
Well, it's not just Obama's, but that old lib myth keeps rising from the grave, and Obama's speechwriters dug it up once more for last week's SOTU address. Fortunately, even fellow leftists have had it with this myth...
AmericanSpectator: If you also suffered through the State of the Union address, you heard him praise Obamacare, claim he would slash bureaucracy, and of course, fight for income equality.
Obama pandered to the ladies, his tone becoming more passionate with every overly emotional word:
"Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment. A woman deserves equal pay for equal work."
You have probably heard that statistic—77 cents on the dollar. Speech after speech from the left side of town loves to rest their entire “we’re with women” campaign on that foundation—but its sinking sand.
To debunk this myth, we turn to—not a conservative female journalist, a Heritage white paper, or Rand Paul—but none other than Hanna Rosin, the uber-feminist author of The End of Men.
The Spectator reports that five months ago, Rosin practically buried the myth, only to be resurrected once more by this president...
The official Bureau of Labor Department statistics show that the median earnings of full-time female workers is 77 percent of the median earnings of full-time male workers. But that is very different than “77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.”
Women congregate in different professions than men do, and the largely male professions tend to be higher-paying. If you account for those differences, and then compare a woman and a man doing the same job, the pay gap narrows to 91 percent.”
A report in December says Millennial women have actually narrowed that to 93 cents on the dollar.
So...not only is Rosin proving that the $7.25/women vs. $8.02/men split is bunk, but this feminist is openly admitting that men tend to enter fields which generally pay more. And here's the kicker (remember, coming from the mouth of a radical feminist):
Rosin adds that the reason women are making less could largely depend on more complicated issues, such as maternity leave, marriage, and a lack of childcare options. Debates on those topics can be saved for another day.
What deserves immediate attention is how she cites one of the most important reasons that women make less than men—perhaps, “Women just don’t want to work the same way men do.”
Wow. So that '77 cents' stat...yeah, utter hogwash. Just another tool in the statist's satchel to divide us.
Related links: No, Women Don’t Make Less Money Than Men
Report: Only 1.6% of American Workers Make the Minimum Wage
Psss...here's something else from yesterday's CBO report. It's as if Obamacare is yet another Big Government takeover from beginning to end with no benefit for the American people...
IWF: Much of the rationale for passing the Affordable Care Act was that it would insure the uninsured.
The CBO report released yesterday found that, in addition to creating incentives to work less, the Affordable Care Act will leave 31 million Americans without health insurance by 2024.
Sean Davis recalls in a report on the CBO projections over at The Federalist that in a 2009 speech President Obama lamented before a joint session of Congress that “there are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.”
Well, I guess I’m with Jonah Goldberg: So What Was the Point of ObamaCare Again?
So while fundamentally transforming the health care industry that doesn't help the uninsured a bit, but does place one-sixth of the economy (integral to your life) in the hands of Washington bureaucrats, the Obama administration also disincentivizes people from joining the workforce to instead live off the welfare state, which by the way is running short on funds daily. And while we're at it, let's naturalize millions of unassimilated and illegal noncitizens who have no allegiance to America into the country!
From within, folks, from within.
Related link: Congressional Budget Office sends death blow to ObamaCare (if only)
Yet another Big Government scheme to get their hands on your money...
Forbes: If you were wondering how the federal government is going to unload those trillions of dollars in long-term Treasury bonds it’s been buying for the past five or so years—quantitative easing is the technical term—President Obama dropped an anvil hint in his State of the Union address last week. You’re going to buy them, with the retirement savings you’ll be putting in the President’s new MyRA program.
If ever there was a misnamed initiative this one ranks near the top. It’s a mash-up of My and IRA. It implies a greater level of possession than the familiar Individual Retirement Account, which came into being forty years ago during another retirement crisis—the 1970s, when a deep, stubborn recession drove corporate defined-benefit pension plans into the ditch.
This time, a deep, stubborn recession triggered by the Wall Street institutions that also sell IRAs drove a lot of individual retirement plans into the ditch. The fix was the Federal Reserve’s buying up a staggering amount of Treasury bonds to keep interest rates low and hopefully encourage investment and economic recovery.
Those bonds that our government now owns are yielding low rates at a time when most experts are predicting that rates will be rising again. When rates rise, the value of a bond falls. So U.S. Treasury bonds have become so unpopular not even China wants them.
That means the federal government is stuck with a lot of unpopular bonds and one sure-fire way to get rid of them is to sell them to the American public as a retirement savings vehicle. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Invest in U.S. debt, buy them with dollars already taxed, so no tax deduction, and Big Government gets its cut up front, using your money to borrow and spend more. And what do you get out of it? No control over your investment and no opportunity for growth in the market.
The piece also concludes with a disturbing prediction: "It wouldn’t surprise me at all if at some point in the near future there was a proposal in Washington to require a percentage of all IRA funds to be invested in debt of the U.S. government."
But don't worry. The Obama administration says when you think about it, 2.5 million fewer people working because of Obamacare is actually 'good news'...in a lazy-ass, unproductive Wonderland! Eh, go roll a spliff...
WT: Obamacare will push the equivalent of about 2 million workers out of the labor market by 2017 as employees decide either to work fewer hours or drop out of the job market altogether, according to estimates released Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office.
The analysis set off a furious debate in Washington. The White House argued that the reduction is positive because it means Americans will forgo jobs or extra work to stay home with their children or strike out on their own as entrepreneurs. Republicans, however, said the report amounted to an “I told you so” moment and that subtracting the equivalent of 2 million workers can’t be good for the economy.
The CBO said the number of workers dropping out of the labor force will grow from 2 million in 2017 to 2.5 million by 2024.
Although part of those numbers are attributed to job cuts, the vast majority represent workers who decide it makes more sense to stay home or work fewer hours, weighing the higher taxes they pay in the workforce versus their qualifications for benefits if they drop out.
Ahhh, it's hard work growing a welfare state...or maybe not so much. Man, we're in for a rude awakening when even the pretend money runs dry.
Related links: OH LOOK: CBO projects Obamacare to kill even more jobs over the next decade
ObamaCare Will Cost America More Than Two Million Jobs
White House Finds The “Good” In CBO Report Showing 2.5 Million Americans Leaving Workforce Because of Obamacare
White Dismisses CBO Obamacare Report Showing 2.5 Million Dropping Out of The Workforce As A “Small Percentage of The Economy”
Harry Reid On CBO Obamacare Report: This Is Great News, These 2.5 Million People Are “Free Agents”
ADDENDUM: This is kinda interesting. A fry cook who was shifted to part-time employment due to Obamacare confronts Obama...however, I don't even know if the guy knows what he just divulged, because it seems his main point was to complain about the minimum wage. Nonetheless, the President damn sure didn't want to address it. Here's how it went:
EPJ: During a Google Hangout session last week Friday, fry cook Darnell Summers told President Obama that his hours were cut due to the Affordable Care Act. “We were broken down to part time to avoid paying health insurance,” he said. Summers explained that he makes $7.25 an hour and has been on strike four times seeking a wage increase. “We can’t survive, it’s not livin’,” he said.
Obama responded by babbling that states should increase the minimum wage. “I am working to encourage states, governors, mayors, state legislators to raise their own minimum wage,” Obama said. “Obviously, the way to reach millions of people would be for Congress to pass a new federal minimum wage law. So far, at least, we have not seen support from Republicans for such a move.”
Got that? Summers got his hours cut from full time to part time because of the increased costs of Obamacare that his employer faced and Obama's solution is to call for a higher minimum wage, which would even add greater cost to the employer.
If the minimum wage is raised, as Obama calls for, Darnell under Obama is likely to experience full time to part time to no time and unemployment line time.
UPDATE: This morning in testimony before Congress, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf admits Obamacare creates a disincentive for people to work...and they're 'better off' for it, echoes the regime...
Related link: Pelosi: Obamacare allows workers to ‘escape’ their jobs
As if the game and the commercials weren't pathetic enough, you had to listen to this Squish interview the Liar's Liar preceding the not-so-Super Bowl...
Disclaimer: Listening may cause extreme eye-rolling and anger.
Note to Fox: Just stop.
Related links: In Super Bowl Interview Obama backs away from fundamentally transforming America
RUSH: Did You Think You Were Gonna Get The Truth On Benghazi 2 Hours Before The Super Bowl?
Bill O’Reilly: I don’t think Obama is trying to hurt people like the ‘hard right’ believes
ADDENDUM: Direct from DR...watch Obama get all FOLKSY during BillO's interview...
“Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.” ~ Ronaldus Magnus
Rush's synopsis of Pelosi's appearance on Jon Stewart's program last week is perfect! Beyond all of Pelosi's I-don't-knows, Rush focuses on one particular utterance from the horse's mouth: 'Well, it's not my responsibility.'
"That little sound bite is a perfect jumping-off point to illustrate for low-information voters, and everybody, what an INCREDIBLE overreach the federal government has underaken here.
Remember, this is the woman, Nancy Pelosi, who when asked what was IN the 2200 pages of Obamacare said, 'We have to pass it to find out what's in it.' What is that? We have to pass it to find out what's in it?
That exemplifies the arrogance, or the stupidity, of tearing apart a system...that insured 85% of the nation, and we tore that apart in order to supposed insure the 15% that weren't covered. ... We had a system where 85% of the nation had insurance, they were covered, and that was deemed 'unfair' by people like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and every other Democrat out there. That wasn't 'fair', that was not good 'social justice', that was 'immoral' because there were 15% who were not covered. So we tore up a system that covered 85% of the nation, and let's not forget that at the ER everybody is covered. By law, everybody is covered, illegals to boot, everybody's covered at the ER. So we tear up a system, best system IN THE WORLD, and in tearing it up, we have people like Pelosi. She was joining Obama, promising people, 'If you like your doctor, you're gonna have no problem keeping your doctor.' 'If you like your insurance plan, you'll be able to keep it.' They were telling us, 'Your premiums are gonna come down $2500.' We had a system that was insuring and taking care of 85% of the nation, but that was 'unfair.' So we tore it apart to cover, and 'be fair' with the 15% who weren't covered.
This is a CLASSIC example of the supposed 'Big Idea' being jammed through without thinking it through, and then incompetently executing it with a cast of amateurs, whose only qualification was their good intensions, supposedly."
Rush goes on to explain the Obama administration's portrayal of private health insurers as 'criminals' who were too greedy and couldn't be trusted, while the government had the 'supposedly larger hearts, which permitted them to care more, which permitted them to have more compassion, and which gave great weight to their great intentions.' And this is what we end up with: a system run by people who've never run anything.
"This little answer of hers, just stunning. They foisted this thing on us. They played dirty politics to foist this thing on us, and they want control of us with this, and now it's not their responsibility."
