Maybe Democrats Should Have Read Obamacare Before They Passed It

Kevin Glass  / Townhall Columnist

First, a fact. Obamacare's legislative text reads that tax subsidies administered by the IRS to help Americans pay for health insurance they are federally mandated to purchase reads that those tax subsidies will only apply to people who purchase coverage from insurance exchanges "established by the State." An exchange "established by the State" refers to state-run health insurance exchanges, established in ACA section 1311, as opposed to federally-run exchanges, established in ACA section 1321. The legislative language is pretty clear.

What ACA proponents want to say is that this just amounts to a "drafting error." Congress, of course, intended for the subsidies to apply to the exchanges run by the federal government; they just made a mistake.

It seems odd that we'd be able to divine the "intent" of the general will of 535 people, but some have now fallen back to asking if there was even a single legislator who thought that tax subsidies wouldn't apply to federal exchanges.

This is a good question, because it's unlikely that any legislator thought that would have been a good idea. But this gets to the heart of the problem with ACA: many legislators didn't know what they were crafting and voting on.

In the era of ACA's crafting, Republicans repeatedly brought up the point that legislators couldn't read the bill, because the legislative text hadn't been written. The Senate Finance Committee voted on what's called "conceptual langauge," but did anticipate that some states would not set up their own exchanges. Democrats also insisted that the "conceptual language" was enough to actually understand and vote on the law.

Max Baucus (D-Montana), chair of the Senate Finance Committee through which the health bill flowed, insisted that reading the law wasn't necessary.

“I don’t think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the healthcare bill,” Baucus said, according to the Flathead Beacon. “You know why? It’s statutory language. ... We hire experts.”

So that's what happened: in between the "conceptual language" and the actual legislative text, some experts who were writing the law thought it was a good idea to try to coerce states into creating their own exchanges by withholding tax subsidies from the federal exchanges. The actual legislators who voted on the legislation didn't know how the law would work, but they trusted the experts they hired.

One of the "experts" that helped write the law was Jonathan Gruber, an MIT health expert who also helped write Massachusetts' similar law. Gruber, in 2012, said that it was actually important that subsidies didn't apply to federally-run exchanges - and that it would be an incentive for states to set them up. The New York Times reported that he went to Capitol Hill to "help Congressional staff members draft specifics of the legislation."

Tom Carper (D-Delaware), who also served on the Senate Finance Committee, insisted that the legislative language wasn't important:

"I don't expect to actually read the legislative language, because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I've ever read in my life."

So, the Senate Finance Committee voted on "conceptual language" that established subsidies for exchanges without mentioning who those subsidies would apply to. They then hired experts, as Baucus said, who did intend for subsidies not to apply to federal exchanges, and those experts plainly wrote the law in the way that it wouldn't apply to federal exchanges. Democratic leadership then refused to post the legislative text for people to read in an adequate time period before passing the law, and as a result, Congress voted on legislation that was written by people who, yes, intended for tax subsidies only to apply to state-established exchanges.

Elections Are Coming And Republicans Are Wasting Their Time (Again)

David Horowitz / Townhall Columnist

 

It’s three and a half months to election time, and Republicans are spinning their wheels over whether they should appear moderate or loaded for bear, whether they should take the high road or the take-no-prisoners low road.

If you are a Republican candidate the first and most important thing to understand is this: It really doesn’t matter. Mitt Romney was a high-road candidate like every Republican presidential nominee since Ronald Reagan’s second run. Republicans love to tell uplifting stories that highlight the virtues of the opportunity society they intend to restore when elected. Well and good. But who is going to listen to your story when your opponents are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to portray you as a woman-hater, a racist, and a champion of the selfish rich?

Unless Republicans are thinking about an answer to this attack, they are wasting their time. Of course sometimes Democrats screw up so big they hand Republicans the election, and it doesn’t matter what their strategy is. 2014 may be such an election.

But strategy can also swing an unwinnable election, as the Democrats showed in 2012. And there’s no reason to think that Republicans will come up with an answer to the Democrat attacks by 2016.

These attacks are monotonous and predictable. Every cycle the Democrats roll out their war against women, war against minorities, war against the middle class. And just as predictably, Republicans fail to have an answer.

Democratic strategist Chris LeHane once said, “Everybody has a game plan until you punch him in the mouth.” Where is the Republicans’ punch in the mouth? There is none. And there will be none this year or in 2016 either.

How do I know this? Because the Republican National Committee has picked Cleveland for its presidential convention site. The smart choice would have been Detroit. The only way to confront the Democrats’ slanders is to throw the charge back in their faces. Detroit, whose population today is 85% African American, offers a dramatic way to do it.

In 1961, Detroit was the richest city in America. The ensuing fifty years of uninterrupted Democratic rule so ravaged the city’s economy that two-thirds of its population has fled, and those who remain are mired in poverty so deep that they will never escape.

What caused this disaster? The Democrats’ anti-business, pro-union policies drove away prosperity. Political animosity directed at whites drove the city’s tax base to the suburbs. In 2013, Detroit went bankrupt.

In one generation the Democrats reduced America’s number one industrial city to the level of the third world. Dozens of other major American cities, like Chicago and St. Louis, have been under the thumb of Democrats for just as long and are waiting in line to meet the same fate.

If there is a racist party in America, it is the Democratic Party, which imposes racial animosity on virtually every aspect of American life. It is the Democratic Party and its teacher union base that has trapped millions of Hispanic and African American children in failing schools. They are there because their parents can’t afford to do what Democratic officials all the way up to the White House do: send their children to private schools where they will get an education.

It is the Democratic Party that has lured low-income citizens into a welfare system that will keep them in poverty forever. It is the Democratic Party that puts the interests of government unions above those of ordinary citizens.

It’s time for Republicans to stop being so polite. They need to fight fire with fire. They need to call out Democrats who are responsible for racial injustice in our inner cities and for the hopeless futures that face the children trapped there.

Detroit would have been a richly symbolic setting from which to launch this attack. But if the GOP is willing to take off the gloves, Cleveland will do.

IDF Calls Out UN for Lying About Gaza Civilian Casualties

Pamela Geller / Atlas Shrugs

The UN is now the NGO for the global jihad.

They are nothing but the docile agent of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the manifestation of the caliphate,  the modern-day caliphate. Bat Ye’or said, “It seems that the OIC is restoring in the 21st century the Caliphate, the supreme controlling body for all Muslims.”

“IDF Calls Out UN for Lying About Gaza Civilian Casualties,” by Adam Kredo, Washington Free Beacon, July 24, 2014:

Israel is calling out a United Nations aid agency for falsely claiming that the Israeli Defense Forces did not permit civilians to evacuate a Gaza school where 15 people were killed today.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) laid blame for the civilian deaths on the IDF, claiming it never received approval from the IDF for an evacuation from the facility.

UNRWA—which has been under fire in recent days for allowing Hamas to use its facilities to store rockets—released a statement claiming: “UNRWA had been attempting to negotiate with the [IDF] a pause in the fighting during which they would guarantee a safe corridor to relocate staff and any displaced persons who chose to evacuate to a more secure location. Approval for that never came to UNRWA.”

Earlier, UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness had similarly accused the IDF of preventing a civilian evacuation.

“Over the course of the day UNRWA tried 2 coodinate [sic] with the Israeli Army a window for civilians 2 leave & it was never granted,” UNRWA spokesman...

Read the whole entry »

Hamas killed 160 “Palestinian” children to build jihad terror tunnels

Robert Spencer  / Jihad Watch

 

 

Why, it’s genocide! It’s murder! Oh, wait — if the “Palestinians” are the ones killing “Palestinian” children, then it doesn’t matter. There will be no international media outcry.

“Hamas Killed 160 Palestinian Children to Build Terror Tunnels,” by Myer Freimann, Tablet, July 25, 2014 (thanks to Jerusalem Posts):

As the death toll of Operation Protective Edge rises, the deaths of children are firmly in the spotlight—and rightly so. It pains all reasonable people to hear of children dying as the consequence of war. Hamas and its supporters display gruesome pictures of dead and wounded children in order to gain sympathy for their portrait of Israel as the villain intent on killing Palestinians. In response, Israel cites the need to stop Hamas from firing thousands of rockets at its own children, who are being forced to live in bomb shelters, as well as the need to eliminate the tunnels that Hamas dug into Israel in order to carry out terror attacks against Israelis. One tunnel opening was found underneath an Israeli kindergarten.

But who built those tunnels? The answer is Hamas, of course—using some of the same children who are now trapped under fire in Gaza.

The Institute for Palestine Studies published a detailed report on Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon in the summer of 2012. It reported that tunnel construction in Gaza has resulted in a large number of child deaths.

“At least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials”

The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, “much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies”.

Human rights groups operating in Gaza raised concerns about child labor in the tunnels as far back as 2008. Hamas responded by saying it was “considering curbs.” Following Operation Cast Lead in 2009 Hamas softened its position and the Interior Ministry established the Tunnel Affairs Commission (TAC) which, “In response to public concern at a rising toll of tunnel casualties, particularly of child workers…issued guidelines intended to ensure safe working conditions.” No mention is made in the report of the conditions that would result for both Palestinian and Israeli children from building tunnels that would be used to launch terror attacks.

Nor does it seem that Hamas paid much subsequent attention to ensuring the safety of the child workers that it used to build the tunnels that would wind up endangering the lives of many in Gaza. On a tour of the tunnels in 2011, Pelham noted that, “nothing was done to impede the use of children in the tunnels.”

Not only are Hamas misappropriating much of the humanitarian aid supplied to Gaza—800,000 tons of cement were used to construct the terror tunnels into Israel—they are also directly exploiting and endangering Gaza’s youth in their construction and operation.

What Choice?Troops at Ukraine Border, Moving Heavy Artillery

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Russia has now amassed around 15,000 troops along the border with Ukraine, the U.S. ambassador to NATO said on Friday, and the Pentagon warned that movement of Russian heavy caliber artillery systems across the border into Ukraine is "imminent."

The Pentagon went further, suggesting Russia is escalating the military action there. U.S.
Ambassador to NATO Douglas Lute offered the troop estimate during a security forum in Colorado, saying there were "now up again over about 15,000 Russian troops amassed along the border with Ukraine."

Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said the U.S. has seen the powerful rocket systems moving closer to the Ukraine border and they could be put into the hands of Russian-backed separatists as soon as Friday. He says he doesn't have an exact timeline.

U.S. officials warned this week that they had new evidence that Russia intended to deliver heavier and more powerful multiple rocket launchers to the separatist forces in Ukraine. Warren told reporters Friday that the delivery could happen at any time, adding "it's that close" to the border.

Warren also said that Russia continues to fire artillery across the border into Ukraine.

"For the last several days Russian forces using Russian artillery from Russian soil have conducted attacks against Ukrainian military positions in Ukraine," said Warren. "This is unquestionably an escalation from a military perspective."

He declined to say what impact the attacks have had on Ukraine's military, but said the attacks are coming from the southern border area, near Rostov-on-Don.

Warren said the U.S. has seen no indications of Ukraine firing back into Russia and there have been no reports of civilian casualties. He said the number of Russian troops along the border continues to slowly but steadily increase. Close to 12,000 are there now.

The Ukrainian army on Friday said soldiers had come under artillery fire from the Russian side of the border overnight and were attacked by rebels in several other places in the restive east.

What Choice?

by Bob Livingston  / Personal Liberty Digest

THINKSTOCK

“Choice” is one of the many altruistic-sounding code words the elites use to enslave you gradually, without your knowledge. I have told you about these words before and listed many of them.

The progressive left claims to be all about choice. A central tenet of the Democrat Party’s message is that it alone is the protector of choice. It claims to stand as a bulwark against the “Republican’s war on women” (more code words) and those “evil” people who want to eliminate a woman’s “right” to murder their unborn (and even partially born) babies.

This ensures a woman has a “right” to make a choice about her body and whether to purge it of the unwanted organism (that moral people call a baby) through an abortion. Of course, the 57 million babies killed since Roe v. Wade had no choice. No matter. They are just collateral damage for the “greater good” (more code words).

The progressive left and its propaganda arm corporate media tout Obamacare as a victory for choice. It is anything but.

Obamacare has forcibly eliminated the healthcare insurance many people chose to have — and were happy with — because it did not fit the egalitarian parameters established by a group of collectivist, elitist bureaucrats. Those with so-called “Cadillac plans” (more code words) were forced into more expensive and less expansive plans. Those who chose to have minimal or only catastrophic coverage have been denied that choice as well. All must have a one-size-fits-all health insurance policy that is both more expensive and often more restrictive.

Obamacare has also removed the choice that employers had of whether to offer insurance as a benefit, and just how much or little coverage to offer. The progressive left has gone apoplectic over the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision in which the rights of the corporate owner were upheld. It was a victory, of sorts, for real choice, in that it upheld the natural right Christians have to not subsidize something they find abhorrent.

Of course, the progressive left, which turns logic on its head at every turn, claims the ruling is a defeat for choice. This is nonsense. First, Hobby Lobby already provided 16 of 20 forms of birth control in its insurance coverage in addition to paying its employees wages that are above the “living wage” (more code words) the progressive left has established as a “right.” Second, neither the owners of Hobby Lobby or any other corporation have the power to prevent women from purchasing with their own money whatever form of abortifacient they would like to buy. Nor did Hobby Lobby seek to do so. It simply sought to have the choice not to pay for it itself.

But to the progressive left, the choice of Christian business owners — and Christians in general — always take a back seat to their altruistic notions of “greater good.”

The progressive left and their corrupt corporate media enablers are curiously silent on the ways Obamacare is waging a true war on women — and men — in the healthcare field and its gradualism that will eventually enslave all Americans to Big Medicine, Big Pharma, Big Insurance and Big Brother.

Big Brother sometimes uses a carrot and sometimes uses a stick in order alter behaviors and bend people to the will of the elitist do-gooders who sit in the halls of power making choices on behalf of the “greater good.” The carrot is redistribution of wealth in the form of removing money through taxes and inflation from the producers and offering it as incentives to people, corporations, and local and State governments in order to encourage certain behaviors. The stick is the threat to remove those incentives after people, corporations, and local and State governments become dependent upon those incentives.

Such is the case with an Obamacare provision that reduces Medicaid and Medicare funding by 2 percent in 2015 to healthcare organizations that do not obtain a staff flu vaccination rate of 90 percent or better. The corporate propaganda machine is silent on this, and healthcare organizations are as well. In fact, healthcare organizations are outright lying to their employees about the reason behind the flu vaccine mandates by claiming it is for the benefit and health concerns of the patients and health workers.

Healthcare workers are not given a choice in the matter — unless one considers the false dilemma of either having the vaccine or being fired as being given a choice.

Healthcare workers are even now being fired for their choice of refusing to have harmful substances injected into their bodies for reasons that do not exist or are greatly exaggerated. By the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s own statistics, flu vaccines are at best only 50 percent to 60 percent effective. But these figures come from an organization that is part of the Big Brother swinging door that sees people going back and forth between government, the medical-industrial complex and the regulatory agencies, creating a symbiotic relationship rather than a regulatory one — an organization that routinely promotes the lie that the flu kills 36,000 people annually.

In fact, the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration are nothing more than taxpayer-funded marketing arms for the medical-industrial complex. They are used to provide government-sanctioned legitimacy to a host of fake “diseases” created in labs along with their cures: expensive pharmaceuticals and tests for diagnosis, as I’ve told you before.

According to a report in the British Medical Journal, actual annual flu deaths are really measured in the dozens, not the thousands, as the CDC claims. Of hundreds of thousands of respiratory samples taken each year from U.S. patients and tested in labs, only 16 percent test positive for the influenza virus. And according to a report by the independent research firm The Cochrane Library, the average vaccine (which is produced before the onset of flu season and based on the previous year’s strains) must be administered to 100 adults to prevent one case of influenza. If the exact strain is matched, 33 adults must be vaccinated to prevent one case of the disease.

Yet despite its minimal efficacy, healthcare workers have lost their freedom to continue in their chosen profession unless they forgo their own right of self-determination and accept to have poisons injected into their bodies.

Many are making the choice to get out of healthcare work altogether. This includes doctors as well as nurses and other healthcare professionals. The decrease in the number of healthcare professionals combined with the increase in patients abusing their “free” healthcare will necessarily limit choice and options people have for seeing their physician or having a needed procedure at their preferred medical complex.

Some nurses have formed an organization called Nurses Against Mandatory Vaccines in order to support healthcare professionals and help them to regain their right to refuse forced medical procedures.

The mandates for forced medication of healthcare workers are just the beginning of the road to serfdom that Obamacare paves. A government that provides you with something — healthcare — can just as easily take it away. It will employ the carrot first and then the stick, in order to drive you into forced behaviors.

Obamacare is a nothing more than a great transfer of wealth designed to enslave the public and enrich Big Medicine, Big Pharma and Big Insurance by giving them a mass of new customers with guaranteed payoffs from the public Treasury.

Had Obamacare been about choice, it wouldn’t be a mandate.

Op-ed:  

Judging Israel differently  

By: Diane Sori

In defiance of Barack HUSSEIN Obama's and his brethren's goal of trying to finish off what the Nazis started...yesterday Israel's Security Council unanimously rejected...and rightfully so...John 'Swiftboat' Kerry's week long cease-fire proposal that favored Hamas and would do NOTHING but allow Hamas to regroup and rearm.

However, Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed to a short 12-hour so-called 'humanitarian cease-fire' to send in food, water, and such to hard-hit civilian areas. But even with this Israel will still face condemnation NOT only on the world stage for their rejection of Kerry's cease-fire proposal but also here in the U.S., as witnessed by Harry Reid and his Democratic ilk's unmitigated gall of trying to tie in Israel's $225 million emergency funding request for their Iron Dome defense system to an immigration bill that would fund the ILLEGALS entering our country. And they're doing it for NO other reason than come election time they can say Republicans who voted against the bill are either anti-Israel or anti-children.

Nice huh...playing politics at the expense of Israel...at the expense of the Jews...at the expense of children.

Proposing a $3.6 billion bill that would address the border crisis...most specifically addressing the issue of unaccompanied children entering ILLEGALLY...Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), the bill's author, chose to include the funding for Israel...and to include monies needed to fight wildfires of all things...in her proposal so that a rejection of the bill would amount to cutting all monies Israel needs to defend herself against those wishing to wipe her off the map.

And sadly, among those who condemn Israel every chance they get is the U(seless) N(ations). In fact, in the days just before Israel's rejection of Kerry's proposal, they launched an international inquiry on the Palestinians behalf into what they call Israel's human rights violations and crimes committed during this Gaza offensive. But the UN really needs to stop calling the kettle black as they are the very ones who have allowed Hamas to store its rockets and bombs beneath their United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) schools for displaced children.

But even sadder was the vote tally on said inquiry...which became the resolution the Palestinians wanted. And while the U.S. did vote NO on the resolution, 29 nations voted in favor of condemning Israel, and 17 nations abstained including all nine European Union members on the 47-member panel.

Never mind that Hamas deliberately stores their missiles under schools, hospitals, and civilian enclaves...never mind that they know Israel tries its best NOT to harm children or civilians...never mind that when any of their human shields are hurt or killed Hamas will parade their bloodied and lifeless bodies in front of the international media as they cry on cue for the cameras that those lost are victims of Israeli aggression...never mind all this as placing the blame on Israel is all that matters.

And Hamas uses these deaths for propaganda as the dead are worth more to their cause than are worth the lives of the living. Reasoning in their own disturbed minds that their actions are done in the name of allah as per the Hukm al-Tatarrus (the current islamic law on using human shields) which states in part that muslims are to “accept the idea of sacrificing the shield and engage in a fierce war using weapons of mass destruction," Hamas claims to be God's holy warriors...allah's warriors. But they're warriors in their minds alone...warriors who seek revenge against the Jews for their (self-perceived) injustices against muslims, but what they really are is cowards for when one hides behind women and children a holy warrior is something you are NOT.

And those western nations that vote against Israel time and again, as well as Barack HUSSEIN Obama himself, do NOT care about any of this for Israel's demise is their collective goal. This resolution vote, as with all previous votes against Israel, boils down to choosing to side with barbarians over choosing to side with the Jews. And there are only two reasons for this lack of support for Israel...the obvious being the UN and Obama's muslim ties and sympathies and the other involves the old hatreds...for the fact is many still blame the Jews for the death of Jesus. These are the same people who forget that Jesus was born, lived as, and died as a Jew...they forget that Jesus the Jew knew NOTHING of the Christians who came after...they forget that God could have stopped His death if He so chose...and they forget that only by Jesus' death could Christianity be born.

But NO matter as the bottom line remains that the destruction of Israel is Hamas' goal as witnessed by their very actions. Instead of fighting with those who only want to live in peace, Hamas could have chosen to use their abundant monetary resources to build schools, to pave roads, to build hospitals, but instead they chose to build bombs...to shoot rockets...choosing to fight a battle that in the end they will surely lose. And remember, each time Hamas asked for and got a cease-fire they and they alone broke it.

So while Israel will sadly continue to lose its sons and daughters in this current battle...that is unless they go forward with all guns blazing so to speak...the civilized man understands this is a fight to the death...a fight for Israel's very survival...a fight that allows for NO compromise with the enemy nor does it allow for negotiations with those who side with said enemy. And know that this is NOT a battle about the small sliver of land that is Israel, but is about Hamas' self-perceived call for revenge over events that happened during the time of the Old Testament...events orchestrated by the hand of God before the time of allah...even if it means that to seek that misguided revenge they have to kill their own people and blame it on Israel.

And that is indeed evil personified and the saddest thing of all.