Bloodthirsty Liberal

Somebody ought to give Betsey McCaughey a Medal of Honor or a Nobel or something.

She read the damn bill, something most congressmen and women have no intention of doing.

• Sec. 202 (p. 91-92) of the bill requires you to enroll in a “qualified plan.” If you get your insurance at work, your employer will have a “grace period” to switch you to a “qualified plan,” meaning a plan designed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. If you buy your own insurance, there’s no grace period. You’ll have to enroll in a qualified plan as soon as any term in your contract changes, such as the co-pay, deductible or benefit.

• Sec. 224 (p. 118) provides that 18 months after the bill becomes law, the Secretary of Health and Human Services will decide what a “qualified plan” covers and how much you’ll be legally required to pay for it. That’s like a banker telling you to sign the loan agreement now, then filling in the interest rate and repayment terms 18 months later.

On Nov. 2, the Congressional Budget Office estimated what the plans will likely cost. An individual earning $44,000 before taxes who purchases his own insurance will have to pay a $5,300 premium and an estimated $2,000 in out-of-pocket expenses, for a total of $7,300 a year, which is 17% of his pre-tax income. A family earning $102,100 a year before taxes will have to pay a $15,000 premium plus an estimated $5,300 out-of-pocket, for a $20,300 total, or 20% of its pre-tax income.

Show of hands, people. How many of you have that kind of money laying around unused?

I didn’t think so.

• Sec. 59b (pp. 297-299) says that when you file your taxes, you must include proof that you are in a qualified plan. If not, you will be fined thousands of dollars. Illegal immigrants are exempt from this requirement.

Somebody was just having fun because that’s just too funny.

But this isn’t:

In addition to reducing future Medicare funding by an estimated $500 billion, the bill fundamentally changes how Medicare pays doctors and hospitals, permitting the government to dictate treatment decisions.

• Sec. 1302 (pp. 672-692) moves Medicare from a fee-for-service payment system, in which patients choose which doctors to see and doctors are paid for each service they provide, toward what’s called a “medical home.”

…

• Secs. 1158-1160 (pp. 499-520) initiates programs to reduce payments for patient care to what it costs in the lowest cost regions of the country. This will reduce payments for care (and by implication the standard of care) for hospital patients in higher cost areas such as New York and Florida.

So if a procedure costs only $100 in Idaho, but $250 in NYC, the New York doc is going to be reimbursed as if her were in Boise? That’s cold.

But now the pièce de résistance:

• Sec. 399V (p. 1422) provides for grants to community “entities” with no required qualifications except having “documented community activity and experience with community healthcare workers” to “educate, guide, and provide experiential learning opportunities” aimed at drug abuse, poor nutrition, smoking and obesity. “Each community health worker program receiving funds under the grant will provide services in the cultural context most appropriate for the individual served by the program.”

Doctors get shafted, but community organizers get the grease. Now, that’s the Democratic Party I know (and used to vote for).

Even they think this bill is a stinker:

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland says the vote that House Democrats had scheduled for Saturday could slip to Sunday or early next week.

Hoyer acknowledged to reporters Friday that Democratic leaders don’t yet have the 218 votes needed to pass President Barack Obama’s historic health overhaul initiative.

We’re at the edge of the precipice. Let’s push them off.

So sayeth Nancy Pelosi to her caucus:

Byron York and the Washington Post agree on Nancy Pelosi’s plan to vote on her health-care bill this Saturday — she can’t afford to let Democrats go home to their districts before the vote. In fact, as John McCormack notes, she can’t even afford to keep her promise to have the bill on line for 72 hours before the vote so that their constituents can know what they’re doing. If they went home to face their constituents, Pelosi knows that they would never vote for her massive spending:

…

For party leaders, setting a weekend deadline for passage represented a calculated risk, one that could backfire if the vote — now expected late Saturday or Sunday — fails or must be delayed. But they feared that if members were given more time to consider the legislation, new issues could arise, particularly as lawmakers digest the results from Tuesday’s elections. Most ominous for Democrats were their losses in gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia, although the party did prevail in House special elections in New York and California.

This is your government in anti-democratic action, straight up. Which is fine, let ‘em try. But there will be unholy hell to pay.

For those not familiar with the quote that provides the title of the post, it’s from A Bronx Tale. Language and violence warning, and definitely NSFW—but once you get to the fight, the best stuff’s done.

And if you find that film analogy unconvincing, picture Nancy Pelosi as Ted Levine in Silence of the Lambs—and if you’ve never seen this scene, don’t start now. Don’t. Do not. It gave me the creeps just perusing it to see if it was the one I wanted.

It was. And don’t.

Sometimes we’re more serious than others when we employ the Liberal Fascism category.

This time we’re deadly serious:

[A] police officer recognized gangbangers, who discovered him and threatened him after discovering where he lived.

…

How would you like to be a New Jersey police officer and look out your window and see several known criminals, including a man you arrested several weeks ago and another who had just been released from prison for shooting a cop? And then find out that the men were sent into the neighborhood by the Democratic Party for GOTV operations – complete with lists of voters names, addresses and phones numbers!

That is what happened Sunday on a quiet street in Morris Township. The officer, who’s name we are with holding, specifically heard the men discussing that he was a police officer and that they now know where he lives. The officer confronted the men and they took off. He contacted the local police who responded and caught up with them and about a dozen other men a few blocks away. According to the police report, the men were known criminals and when asked why they were in the neighborhood they stated they were “campaigning for the Democratic Party.”

My question in the title is entirely serious. Why use cop-shooters and other known criminals to break in—knock on doors, when the New Black Panthers are just down the road in Philly?

They know all about poll monitoring, and the precedent is all set: they won’t be charged.

This particular passage from the piece Aggie linked to below rings especially true, today as it would have fifty years ago:

The different moral responses to Nazism and communism in the West can be interpreted as a result of the perception of communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions that were hard to realize without resorting to harsh measures. The Nazi outrages, by contrast, are perceived as unmitigated evil lacking in any lofty justification and unsupported by an attractive ideology. There is far more physical evidence and information about the Nazi mass murders, and Nazi methods of extermination were highly premeditated and repugnant, whereas many victims of communist systems died because of lethal living conditions in their places of detention. Most of the victims of communism were not killed by advanced industrial techniques.

They starved to death in the gulags for the greater good, in other words; instead of in the gas chambers for no good whatsoever. I’m sure that must have been some consolation.

Political violence under communism had an idealistic origin and a cleansing, purifying objective. Those persecuted and killed were defined as politically and morally corrupt and a danger to a superior social system. The Marxist doctrine of class struggle provided ideological support for mass murder.

Hollander doesn’t come out and say what I will: that these same flaws are evident—prominent!—in liberals today. The tendency on the left to romanticize socialism is disturbingly coincidental with a red-in-tooth-and-claw attitude toward those who might not agree. We’ve heard it ourselves; we’ve reported it here. Orwell did so sixty years ago.

This is not news—but, frighteningly, it is not history either. Khrushchev revealed Stalin’s dark secrets over fifty years ago; Gorbachev repeated the process over twenty. Yet the Russians are more familiar with the crimes of the Soviet Union than we are. In the media and academia, Reagan is reviled, Ted Kennedy lionized. Yet one faced down the abominable monster of Soviet communism; the other would have done anything (and did do much) to accommodate it.

We’ve had our own Khrushchevs and Gorbachevs. Daniel Patrick Moynihan decried the condition of the black family forty-five years ago, a condition hardly changed despite decades of Great Society programs (and which failure has been acknowledged by many blacks across the political spectrum). Former liberals, from Reagan himself to humble Aggie and I, have called BS on our earlier views and comrades, earning pity at best and disgust at worst.

“Communist atrocities as byproducts of noble intentions”: remember that line forever.

We’ve all met ‘em, and barely lived to tell the tale:

From a former Hill mom happy to be back home:

Kathryn, that picture is nothing new to the few Republican families who live on Capitol Hill. I can tell you true horror stories about the welcoming liberals who live up there. A few years back on Halloween one house had a sign up that said “No Candy for Little Republicans.” I once made the mistake of letting my two kids wear “W” shirts I picked up at the 2004 convention. The “W” shirt was a superman shirt but instead of an S in the middle there was a W. My boys loved them since they thought it was Superman. I thought it was pretty subtle. Not for the women at the park. We were accosted by fellow Moms. Insults were thrown not only at my little ones but at me and my parenting abilities.

My most favorite was when our car was bumper stickered! Someone actually went into our alley, into our driveway and placed anti-Republican bumper stickers ON our car. We didn’t have any pro-Republican signs up so I have to assume it was one of our very kind neighbors who actually knew us.

Trashing personal property, abusing children, incomprehensible rudeness—it’s only because they care about people so much. When they stone us, as in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, I’m sure they’ll be singing Kumbaya.

BTW, I am generally troubled by our Category creep, as the number of Categories in the right hand column grows and grows. But as you can see, I needed quite a few of them for this post.

President Obama’s movement to install socialized medicine is hemorrhaging moderate Democrat and Republican members of Congress. Who’s he gonna call?

Exploited children!

You can vote for your favorite pieces of Goebbelsian propaganda, but know that Organizing for America (Obama’s brown shirts) has employed a panel of expert judges to pick the best one, among whose luminaries we find: Wi.llia.m (or however he spells it), David Plouffe, Seth MacFarlane (of Family Guy), Rosario Dawson (from Rent), John Cho (from Harold and Kumar), and Olivia Wilde—what? Olivia Wilde? The Olivia Wilde who sends me subliminal love notes during episodes of House?

My Olivia Wilde?

Why didn’t somebody say something? Now I don’t know what to think.

So let me offer a hint to the producers of these little Triumphs of the Will: next time, pick mangier kids. These kids look too healthy, too well fed and cared for to make your point. Look in the DC schools. Without vouchers, the poor kids there are doomed.

Well, well, well, just when the Obama administration released its dogs on Fox news (Down, Emanuel! Sit, Jarrett! Heel, Axelrod!), they were having an old-fashioned love-in with members of the media of whom they do approve:

It’s impossible to say definitively that the most transparent administration evah was playing only to its cheerleaders. Even so, while Gloria Borger isn’t particularly ideological as far as I know, there’s little question where Robinson, Dowd, and especially Ifill stand.

On Monday, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow were among several people who attended an off-the-record briefing with Pres. Obama at the White House. Sources tell us other attendees at the two-and-a-half hour chat included Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Gwen Ifill of PBS and Gloria Borger of CNN. Perhaps not surprisingly, no one from Fox News was in the room.

Two and a half hours. Remember, Olbermann complained three years ago when Bush dared waste 90 minutes of taxpayer money chatting up his own ideological allies in the Oval Office. As for Fox News being conspicuously omitted from the guest list, I e-mailed Jake Tapper to see if he’d gotten an invite despite his willingness to pursue stories broken by Fox. Turns out he wasn’t included in the briefing either. Fancy that.

Needless to say, The One’s entitled to talk to whomever he wants, but playing pattycake with MSNBC’s primetime stars does further raise the question of why Beck and Hannity are problematic “opinion” shows while Olbermann and Maddow aren’t.

Two and a half hours: do you suppose any US servicemen were killed in Afghanistan in that time he could have spent making up his mind on what to do over there?

Who do you think pleasured Obama best, by the way? My money’s on Olbermann. As a jock-sniffer of the first order, he’s familiar with the territory down there.

Truth may be an ironclad defense in libel law—but if the president comes after you, it won’t be enough:

There’s nothing like a Friday evening news release to hide a Washington embarrassment. In last week’s episode, President Obama’s health appointees lifted their outrageous gag order against health insurers for the sin of informing their customers about how ObamaCare would affect their insurance.

In September, Humana Inc. sent a mailer to some 900,000 enrollees in its Medicare Advantage plans, the program that gives seniors a choice of private insurance options, warning that spending cuts would result in reduced benefits and some people losing their coverage. The Congressional Budget Office has said the same thing, but the Obama apparat went nuclear. At the behest of Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, Medicare’s administrators menaced Humana with fines and regulatory punishments, and even told all insurers participating in Advantage to shut up too—or else.

In its Friday ruling, Medicare slapped Humana on the wrist for disseminating information that it claimed was “misleading to beneficiaries”—even though it was perfectly true—but also lifted the gag order. Insurers will be allowed to communicate with enrollees, provided they get permission. This is basically a concession that the critics are right, especially considering that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius defended the policy as recently as two weeks ago while refusing to answer questions about this raw political coercion from a supposedly impartial federal bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, the Administration is now threatening to strip the insurance industry of its decades-long exemption from antitrust law. This would blow a hole in the industry’s profitability, as would ObamaCare for different reasons. The industry now faces a choice of playing ball with Democrats and getting punished, or trying to defeat the bill and being brutalized as an act of political revenge. This is the industry’s reward for spending millions to promote “reform” in the hopes of not becoming a political target. It’s still a target, and now it’s poised to lose the policy fight too.

Politics ain’t beanbag. But it’s a lot like piñata. Don’t play unless you’re prepared to see your guts spilled all over the floor. To borrow a word Keith Olbermann used to describe a diminutive Filipino-American woman (the bag of mashed-up meat with lipstick), it’s fascistic.

For an oak tree to sprout, a squirrel needs to eat and s**t an ACORN. Make of that what you will:

ACORN may be down, but don’t count it out.

The elaborate propaganda apparatus erected to support the Obama agenda is already at work spinning the downfall of the community organization into a vicious right-wing plot to destroy the presidency of Barack Obama, who sprouted from ACORN.

The group was cut off from some of its taxpayer dollars after conservative bloggers duped ACORN staffers into offering advice on setting up a child prostitution ring. ACORN had no defense — it was caught on tape and posted on the Web.

But ACORN is too important to Democrats and Obama in particular to allow it to wither away. Much of the taxpayer money that funds ACORN’s activism ends up benefiting Democratic interests.

Stories are showing up about ACORN’s diligent efforts to purge itself of bad apples. News reports document how ACORN’s ability to help foreclosure victims has been hamstrung by the misdeeds of a few gullible staffers.

…

Obama’s conversion of his election team to a permanent network of campaign offices to advocate for his policies — the latest opened in Detroit on Saturday — is unprecedented.

The administration gets away with such ruthless manipulation of public opinion because the media are derelict in watch-dogging this White House and its backers.

He had me at “elaborate propaganda apparatus”, but with mention of the dereliction of the media, I know I’m in the presence of greatness.

That is what underlies all that is wrong with this administration. They couldn’t get away with any of their socialist sleaze if the media weren’t a wholly owned subsidiary of David Axelrod. To say that they are in the bag for Obama is an insult to bags everywhere.

I don’t often turn to H.W. Bush to make a political point, but when the Gucci loafer fits…

Referring to the tone of national discourse he said, “I don’t like it. The cables (TV) have a lot to do with it.”

In the radio interview, Mr. Bush said the volume of criticism aimed at him when he was president was not as “day in and day out.”

The Republican elder statesman said, “It’s not just the right.” He complained, “there are plenty of people on the left.”

While he said he does not believe in personal name-calling, he singled out MSNBC personalities Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow calling them “sick puppies.”

“The way they treat my son and anyone who’s opposed to their point of view is just horrible,” Mr. Bush said.

“When our son was president they just hammered him mercilessly and I think obscenely a lot of the time and now it’s moved to a new president,” he added.

With a chuckle, Mr. Bush said his son’s critics “weren’t singled out as much as they should have been.”

…

Mr. Bush said verbal attacks on Mr. Obama “sometimes crosses the lines of civility.” He also said it crosses “party lines and ideological lines.”

Mr. Bush does not believe most of the attacks on Mr. Obama are racially motivated. He said, “You might find some racists out there but I don’t think the attacks per se have to do that he’s an African American.”

Careful, George. The sick puppies are not above erping on your shoes.

And in case you missed how sick that cur Olbermann is, let us remind you of his latest senseless attack:

By nighttime, Malkin and the lunatic fringe had decided Carney-Nunez was responsible for the song and whichever plot their fevered little paranoid minds saw behind it. She received death threats and hate-filled voice mails all thanks to the total mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred, without which Michelle Malkin would just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.

Well, he got the lipstick part right.

What do we do with mad dogs? We put them down. Instead, Olbermann is not only a valued member of the MSNBC lineup (and a lineup is very much where he belongs), but a key contributor to NBC’s Football Night in America. What you call your irony.