Judge Napolitano says NO to the president:
And so does Charles Krauthammer, who refers the president’s characteristic “lawlessness.”
Author: Redactor
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Scandal Not Going Away
We’re past Day 195 of the IRS scandal.
I mean the one about how IRS agents processing applications for tax-exempt status gave an especially hard time to Tea Party and similar groups, asking endless intrusive questions and delaying legitimate tax-exempt status for years or never granting it at all.
The botches and disillusionment occasioned by the Obamacare non-rollout have pushed other Obama scandals off the front pages. But as Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice argues, the IRS scandal won’t be fading from memory any time soon.
First, details of the agency’s wrongdoing, initially said to be confined to a few renegade overworked Cincinnati agents, are still being revealed and at higher levels.
Second, the IRS is still being sued by Sekulow’s organization.
Third, the scandal reminds us of how mean, incompetent, and corrupt the IRS is in so many ways.
Fourth, the fish rots from the head. Even if President Obama didn’t call IRS and say, “Start targeting Tea Partier types,” his many condemnations of such groups all but explicitly invited the targeting.
Fifth, Obamacare and the IRS are joined at the hip, with the rogue agency charged with enforcing Obama-mandates. This is like treating food poisoning by clubbing the sufferer’s kneecaps. If you’re the guy getting your knees smashed, are you going to forget about the role and nature of the perpetrator any time soon?
Well, there are millions of people now with bruised kneecaps.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
To solve our problems, we need the freedom — to plan, to create, to market and profit. We need the freedom to use the capital we gain by solving problems — whether the capital comes in the form of money, knowledge, or reputation — to solve other problems.
That’s as true in medical industry as in any other productive endeavor. But medical freedom is shrinking thanks to taxes and regulations imposed by Obamacare and numerous previous interventions.
Consider the many life-saving gadgets and drugs that we now take for granted. Medical doctor Paul Hsieh observes that creating these does not happen automatically. Even slightly higher taxes or tighter regulations “can mean the difference between a product coming to market— or being abandoned as not worth the effort.” We know how existing devices save lives. What we don’t know is what lives will by lost for lack of inventions that never maker it to market but, in a freer political environment, would have. It is the difference between what Bastiat called “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen.”
How can we ensure the largest possible field for the invention and propagation of life-saving technology, like genetically cased medicine or 3D-printed body parts? For starters, get rid of new taxes on medical devices and eliminate FDA regulations. Chuck the whole apparatus of Obamacare. Then enact ever-more fundamental market reforms until patients, doctors, drug and device companies use their judgment completely unimpeded.
The debate about freedom in medicine shouldn’t be just about whether you will be allowed (!) to “keep your doctor.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.
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Mohandes K. Gandhi
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
First the hush-hush secrecy; then the lies. Now something even . . . worse?
President Barack Obama doesn’t think the American people can handle the truth. Neither do several progressive non-profit groups in Colorado that have produced a plethora of cringe-worthy ads promoting Obamacare.
One print ad, “Let’s Get Physical,” pictures a young women giving a thumbs up sign and showing off her birth control pills standing next to a scruffy-faced man-boy, with the text: “OMG, he’s hot! Let’s hope he’s as easy to get as this birth control. My health insurance covers the pill, which means all I have to worry about is getting him between the covers.* I got insurance.”
No worries, eh? The asterisk informs readers that, “The pill doesn’t protect you from STDs.”
Another advertisement, “Brosurance,” reaches out to young . . . drunkards. “Keg stands are crazy,” we’re informed. “Not having health insurance is crazier.” It continues: “Don’t tap into your beer money to cover those medical bills. We got it covered.”
Gee, thanks. In fact, both print ads end with the “thanks obamacare!” slogan.
So, can floundering Obamacare be saved by harnessing the awesome power of sex appeal and inebriation and huge dollops of kitsch and irony? Only if young people are as vacuous as these ads insinuate.
“Younger Americans may indeed be reckless enough to do keg stands and have unprotected sex on a regular basis,” Nick Gillespie wrote in Time, “but they’re not so dumb as the ‘Got Insurance?’ ads — or the architects of Obamacare — seem to think.”
Because, as Gillespie and others point out, Obamacare overcharges young people to supposedly lower costs for others. Let’s get real, bro.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Talk of the State
All it takes for the triumph of overgrown government is for good men to shut up.
Eric O’Keefe is talking — despite a gag order.
He spoke to the Wall Street Journal, which relates that in recent weeks a special prosecutor has
hit dozens of conservative groups with subpoenas demanding documents related to the 2011 and 2012 campaigns to recall Governor Walker and state legislative leaders.
Copies of two subpoenas we’ve seen demand “all memoranda, email . . . correspondence, and communications” both internally and between the subpoena target and some 29 conservative groups, including Wisconsin and national nonprofits, political vendors and party committees.
Eric O’Keefe (I could call him “Mr. O’Keefe,” but that would be odd, since he’s been a trusted friend and colleague for decades) heads Wisconsin Club for Growth, one of the targeted groups. He’s risking a lot by defying the gag order.
But he believes the public has a right to know.
And, considering that gag orders of this type, especially as applied to what looks like a crazed, partisan political witch hunt, are as un-American as you can get.
In case you were not aware, Eric authored an important book Who Rules America: The People versus the Political Class, after having served as the master strategist behind the nation’s most successful co-ordinated multi-state initiative campaign, for congressional term limits, in the early 1990s.
Eric’s now in the hot seat. Under the state’s “John Doe law” folks have been imprisoned — yes, political prisoners in the United States. And, according to the Wisconsin Reporter, most of those under investigation have remained “tighter than a drum,” not daring to speak out.
It’s always easiest for rulers when their opponents (and victims) are forced to remain silent.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Theodore Parker
Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.
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George Bernard Shaw
Political necessities sometimes turn out to be political mistakes.
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Too Much Truth
Both what to report and when to report it can be legitimately debated in an editorial room. But not whether to accept demands to conceal “unflattering” truth for the sake of being allowed to report at all.
That’s the “dilemma” some news organizations face when they wish to report from within a country whose government will deny access unless they toe the line.
The reportage by longtime Reuters journalist Paul Mooney, who specializes in China, has apparently been too candid. The Chinese government has denied him a visa. His career there may be over. What should Reuters do?
Not what Bloomberg News did when its reporting incurred the displeasure of Chinese officials. Bloomberg spiked an investigative report about the financial ties between billionaire businessmen and Politiburo officials, for fear of being ejected from the country. Bloomberg insists that it has merely delayed the story. But the motive is clearly a desire to appease the Chinese government, which has already blocked the Bloomberg News website inside China and refused new visas to Bloomberg journalists.
Instead of killing or deferring disapproved journalism, any news outfit threatened with expulsion by an authoritarian government should publish its honest reports and let the chips fall where they may. If kicked out, it should seek other ways to report on the country. Covert communiqués from careful Chinese citizens. Secondary sources if necessary. That’s better than actively cooperating with wrongdoers to hide their sins.
It’s really not too different from crime reporting. Crime bosses don’t like a nosy press, either.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.