Month: November 2013

David Cutler`s Warnings 3-Years Ago About Obamacare (Bonus: Dianne Feinstein Spins)

Published by Papa Giorgio


Via HotAir:

…David Cutler, who worked on the Obama 2008 campaign and was a valued outside health care consultant wrote this blunt memo to top White House economic adviser Larry Summers in May 2010: “I do not believe the relevant members of the administration understand the president’s vision or have the capability to carry it out.”

Cutler wrote no one was in charge who had any experience in complex business start-ups. He also worried basic regulations, technology and policy coordination would fail.

“You need to have people who have understanding of the political process, people who understand how to work within an administration and people who understand how to start and build a business, and unfortunately, they just didn’t get all of those people together,” Cutler said.

The White House dismissed these and other warnings. It relied on appointed bureaucrats and senior White House health care advisers.

[….]

The White House didn’t heed this warning for the same reason they embarked on this project in the first place.  The bureaucrats and the activists thought they were smarter than the markets, and smarter than the people who have actual experience in the private sector.  It’s the same infection that creates the monumentally tone-deaf argument that people should be happy that the government forced them out of existing plans they chose for themselves in order to pay more for coverage that the consumers know they don’t need.  It’s unbridled hubris, and it produced this inevitable Greek tragedy that also doubles as farce.

Now, keep this in mind, too. Did the White House bring in ground-up business people and web-savvy firms to take over from the bureaucrats and the contractors who wasted $400 million on a web portal that doesn’t portal anything? No — they brought in Jeffrey Zients, one of Obama’s economic advisers, and kept everyone else in place. With this background in mind, just how likely will it be that the November 30th deadline for full functionality will be met?

More from HotAir. Dianne Feinstein spins Obama’s promises:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation yesterday in part to face the music.  Bob Schieffer led off this portion of her appearance by noting that the Obama administration has failed to deliver on many promises of ObamaCare, not the least of which was “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” Feinstein tries to explain that the promise was true … up until the bill passed.

No, seriously (via Eliana Johnson at The Corner):

More from HotAir:

So let’s get this straight.  The promise made by Barack Obama from 2007 forward all the way through the 2012 election, made dozens if not hundreds of times in those five years, meant that you could keep the plan you liked only if we never enacted the reform he proposed? I’ve heard some pretty fanciful spin on the “keep your plan” promise, but that really does take the cake.  “Never made clear,” indeed.

Here’s another question for Senator Feinstein. You voted for this bill and helped push it through Congress with zero Republican votes.  Why is it only now that we find out that you had no idea how this bill, drafted in the Senate by senior Democratic leadership, would impact Americans who liked the insurance they already had?…

(UPDATED w/Video) Obama Admin. vs the Military 101 ~ NAVY Jack

Published by Papa Giorgio


Gateway Pundit:

Ranking SEAL commanders recently banned the Navy Jack from SEAL uniforms. The Daily Caller reported:

The Navy Jack is the ‘don’t tread on me’ flag, one that has earned a revered place in America’s naval history and a beloved place in sailor’s hearts, through its use for over two centuries. This symbol of America’s naval ferocity has spanned our country’s entire existence, flying from the masts of the Continental Navy during the war of independence, to today’s War on Terror. In fact, an amendment to the Navy code called SECNAV Instruction 10520.6 clearly states that as of 31 May 2002 all ships are to fly the flag throughout the duration of the War on Terror.

So why would ranking SEAL commanders ban the historical symbol? Is the proverbial top bass banning the flag? Is President Obama?

Clearly the administration and sycophant “top brass” officers have degraded America’s military prestige; from hand-tying rules of engagement, to uniform regulations that make our military allegedly more compatible with foreign forces, to the banning of an awe-inspiring flag that traces its roots to the first U.S. Navy.

WIKI

In late 1775, as the first ships of the Continental Navy readied in the Delaware River, Commodore Esek Hopkins issued, in a set of fleet signals, an instruction directing his vessels to fly a “striped” jack and ensign. The exact design of these flags is unknown. The ensign was likely to have been the Grand Union Flag, and the jack a simplified version of the ensign: a field of 13 horizontal red and white stripes. However, the jack has traditionally been depicted as consisting of thirteen red and white stripes charged with an uncoiled rattlesnake and the motto “Dont [sic] Tread on Me”; this tradition dates at least back to 1880, when this design appeared in a color plate in Admiral George Henry Preble‘s influential History of the Flag of the United States. Recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that this inferred design never actually existed but “was a 19th-century mistake based on an erroneous 1776 engraving”.[1]

In 1778, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Sicily, thanking him for allowing entry of American ships into Sicilian ports. The letter describes the American flag according to the 1777 Flag Resolution, but also describes a flag of “South Carolina, a rattlesnake, in the middle of the thirteen stripes.”[2]

The rattlesnake had long been a symbol of resistance to the British in Colonial America. The phrase “Don’t tread on me” may be coined during the American Revolutionary War, a variant perhaps of the snake severed in segments labelled with the names of the colonies and the legend “Join, or Die” which had appeared first in Benjamin Franklin‘s Pennsylvania Gazette in 1754, as a political cartoon reflecting on the Albany Congress.

The rattlesnake (specifically, the Timber Rattlesnake) is especially significant and symbolic to the American Revolution. The rattle has thirteen layers, signifying the original Thirteen Colonies. And, the snake does not strike until provoked, a quality echoed by the phrase “Don’t tread on me.” For more on the origin of the rattlesnake emblem, see the Gadsden flag.

Protein Wisdom suggests the following:

…have it tattooed on your neck…. If one were to have the Navy Jack tattoed on his neck and Obama then demands its removal, be prepared to tell him that, if he wants it gone, he’d best be prepared take your head with it. Or else he should consider fuc$#*& right off.

Elitist Mentality Exudes from an Author of the ACA, Ezekiel Emanuel

Published by Papa Giorgio

Hear one of the ACA’s architects, Ezekiel Emanuel, amazingly elitist attitude and comments, one being that the individual insurance plan is a thing of the past.

  • “Insurance companies don’t want, insurance companies don’t want the individual market as it’s constructed. They see the future. That individual market is going away. They don’t want to invest in it.”

This authors elitist mentality shines through the bill that says IT knows better than the individual. Read more here

bystander-in-chief

Published by Papa Giorgio

NSA Spying On Chancellor Of Germany

Obama May Have Gone As Long As “Five Years Without Knowing His Own Spies Were Bugging The Phones Of World Leaders,” Including Merkel. “The White House cut off some monitoring programs after learning of them, including the one tracking Ms. Merkel and some other world leaders, a senior U.S. official said. Other programs have been slated for termination but haven’t been phased out completely yet, officials said. The account suggests President Barack Obama went nearly five years without knowing his own spies were bugging the phones of world leaders.” (Siobhan Gorman and Adam Entous, “Obama Unaware As U.S. Spied On World Leaders: Officials,” The Wall Street Journal, 10/28/13)

[….]

MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski Said The Notion That Obama Didn’t Know About The Merkel Affair Is “Embarrassing And Concerning.” BRZEZINSKI: “If the president doesn’t know this is happening. That’s sort of embarrassing and concerning.” (MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” 10/28/13)

ObamaCare Website Glitches

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney Confirmed Secretary Sebelius’ Claims That The Administration “Did Not Know” The Significance Of The Glitches Until After The Rollout Began. JAY CARNEY: “Jim thank you for that question. Secretary Sebelius was referring to what I have said and what the President himself has said, which is that while we knew that there would be some glitches, and actually said publicly that we expected some problems, we did not know until the problems manifested themselves after the launch that they would be as significant as they turned out to be.” (White House Press Briefing, Washington, D.C., 10/23/13)

IRS Targeting Conservative Organizations

Obama Said He First Learned About The IRS Scandal From News Reports. OBAMA: “Let me take the IRS situation first. I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this. I think it was on Friday. And this is pretty straightforward. If, in fact, IRS personnel engaged in the kind of practices that have been reported on, and were intentionally targeting conservative groups, then that’s outrageous.” (President Barack Obama, President Obama And Prime Minister Cameron Hold A Joint Press Conference, Washington, D.C., 5/13/13)

…Read More…

The Roll of Apologetics in Kirsten Powers Life

Published by Papa Giorgio

“The Hound of Heaven had pursued me and caught me—whether I liked it or not” ~ Kirsten Powers

Below, you will hear Kirsten Powers speak to the fact that she was a reluctant convert, almost brought into the faith kicking and screaming the whole way. C.S. Lewis speaks about this reluctant conversion as well:

…Lewis himself was converted “kicking and screaming” (Surprised 229). Some of the pain came because in fixing his faith on God, Lewis also discovered “ludicrous and terrible things about [his] own character” including immense pride (qtd. in Green 105). One of the pains associated with conversion involved the realization that he must repent and change. In another book, Lewis explained why he thought pain is necessary in conversion. He proposes, God [will force a Christian] to a higher level: putting him into situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before. It seems to us all unnecessary: but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us. (Mere 176) Suffering, for Lewis, can make a saint.

Lewis also conveys the agonies of conversion in his fiction, many times in more detail and intensity. Lewis the character feels the pains of not being prepared for Heaven as his Ghost-body is tortured by even walking on the solid, real grass. In the Dwarf episode, this pain is primarily an emotional one and results from his own twisted concept of love and the desire to solicit pity from Sarah. His pain illustrates that much of the pain we suffer is self-inflicted. Sarah tells Frank that in his attempt to use pity to “blackmail” others: “You made yourself really wretched” (Divorce 115-16). The Dwarf, through his selfishness, caused the problems that Sarah was sent to help him overcome. The pain of conversion comes from the healing of these problems…

Read More: The “Reluctant Convert” in Surprised by Joy and The Great Divorce

(H/T Breitbart) This was a fascinating read from Christianity Today… and highlights the roll of apologetics in a skeptics life:

From my early 20s on, I would waver between atheism and agnosticism, never coming close to considering that God could be real.

After college I worked as an appointee in the Clinton administration from 1992 to 1998. The White House surrounded me with intellectual people who, if they had any deep faith in God, never expressed it. Later, when I moved to New York, where I worked in Democratic politics, my world became aggressively secular. Everyone I knew was politically left-leaning, and my group of friends was overwhelmingly atheist.

[….]

To the extent that I encountered Christians, it was in the news cycle. And inevitably they were saying something about gay people or feminists. I didn’t feel I was missing much.

Speaking of going to Tim Keller‘s church with her Christian boyfriend, Miss Powers said this:

But then the pastor preached. I was fascinated. I had never heard a pastor talk about the things he did. Tim Keller’s sermon was intellectually rigorous, weaving in art and history and philosophy. I decided to come back to hear him again. Soon, hearing Keller speak on Sunday became the highlight of my week. I thought of it as just an interesting lecture—not really church. I just tolerated the rest of it in order to hear him. Any person who is familiar with Keller’s preaching knows that he usually brings Jesus in at the end of the sermon to tie his points together. For the first few months, I left feeling frustrated: Why did he have to ruin a perfectly good talk with this Jesus nonsense?

Each week, Keller made the case for Christianity. He also made the case against atheism and agnosticism. He expertly exposed the intellectual weaknesses of a purely secular worldview. I came to realize that even if Christianity wasn’t the real thing, neither was atheism.

I began to read the Bible. My boyfriend would pray with me for God to reveal himself to me. After about eight months of going to hear Keller, I concluded that the weight of evidence was on the side of Christianity. But I didn’t feel any connection to God, and frankly, I was fine with that. I continued to think that people who talked of hearing from God or experiencing God were either delusional or lying. In my most generous moments, I allowed that they were just imagining things that made them feel good.

Then one night on a trip to Taiwan, I woke up in what felt like a strange cross between a dream and reality. Jesus came to me and said, “Here I am.” It felt so real. I didn’t know what to make of it. I called my boyfriend, but before I had time to tell him about it, he told me he had been praying the night before and felt we were supposed to break up. So we did. Honestly, while I was upset, I was more traumatized by Jesus visiting me.

I tried to write off the experience as misfiring synapses, but I couldn’t shake it. When I returned to New York a few days later, I was lost. I suddenly felt God everywhere and it was terrifying. More important, it was unwelcome. It felt like an invasion. I started to fear I was going crazy.

I didn’t know what to do, so I spoke with writer Eric Metaxas, whom I had met through my boyfriend and who had talked with me quite a bit about God. “You need to be in a Bible study,” he said. “And Kathy Keller’s Bible study is the one you need to be in.” I didn’t like the sound of that, but I was desperate. My whole world was imploding. How was I going to tell my family or friends about what had happened? Nobody would understand. I didn’t understand. (It says a lot about the family in which I grew up that one of my most pressing concerns was that Christians would try to turn me into a Republican.)

I remember walking into the Bible study. I had a knot in my stomach. In my mind, only weirdoes and zealots went to Bible studies. I don’t remember what was said that day. All I know is that when I left, everything had changed. I’ll never forget standing outside that apartment on the Upper East Side and saying to myself, “It’s true. It’s completely true.”

I wish to mention that while apologetics played a roll in a person like Kirsten to come to the foot of the cross, ultimately, the Holy Spirit brings us to the point of KNOWING the truth of Christianity beyond mere probabilities:

…fundamentally, the way we know Christianity to be true is by the self-authenticating witness of God’s Holy Spirit. Now what do I mean by that? I mean that the experience of the Holy Spirit is veridical and unmistakable (though not necessarily irresistible or indubitable) for him who has it; that such a person does not need supplementary arguments or evidence in order to know and to know with confidence that he is in fact experiencing the Spirit of God; that such experience does not function in this case as a premise in any argument from religious experience to God, but rather is the immediate experiencing of God himself; that in certain contexts the experience of the Holy Spirit will imply the apprehension of certain truths of the Christian religion, such as “God exists,” “I am condemned by God,” “I am reconciled to God,” “Christ lives in me,” and so forth; that such an experience Provides one not only with a subjective assurance of Christianity’s truth, but with objective knowledge of that truth; and that arguments and evidence incompatible with that truth are overwhelmed by the experience of the Holy Spirit for him who attends fully to it.

 William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008), 43

Honor, Duty, and yes, *Tears*

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Via The Blaze) …As the plane pulled in with a full police and fire escort, front and back, DiScala said that when the jet door opened, another military officer addressed the escort onboard who was standing at attention. The officer then stepped onboard and addressed the passengers:

“I just addressed the escort,” he said. “It is a sworn oath to bring home, to the family, the fallen. Today you all did that, you are all escorts — escorts of the heart.” The officer then thanked the passengers and walked off the plane, DiScala wrote.

“As you can imagine, everyone was silent and no one got up,” he wrote, adding that, “I’m sure most had meteor-sized lumps in their throats and tears in their eyes like I did.”

After deplaning, DiScala said “a large number of passengers, who are normally in a hurry to get home or make a connection” were standing by the window in the waiting area to witness the Honor Guard and family of the fallen soldier waiting while LAX baggage handlers and a military loadmaster removed the flag-covered casket first from the cargo hold — a sight that was “humbling to say the least.”…

Prayers to the Family

Delta Flight 2255 from Atlanta to Los Angeles seemed to be an ordinary flight but it turned out to be everything but ordinary. When the somber captain got on the PA system about 45 minutes prior to landing to inform us we were transporting a fallen soldier the whole plane fell silent. Here’s my video and story http://www.johnnyjet.com/2013/10/fall…

From Johnny Jet:

…But this transcontinental flight turned out to be everything but ordinary. We later learned, when the captain got on the PA system about 45 minutes prior to landing, that we were transporting a fallen soldier. The plane went quiet as he explained that there was a military escort on-board and asked that everyone remain seated for a couple of minutes so the soldiers could get off first. He also warned us not to be alarmed if we see fire trucks since Los Angeles greets their fallen military with a water canon salute. See my video below.

A few minutes after touchdown, we did indeed have a water canon salute, which I’d previously only experienced on happy occasions like inaugural flights. This time, the water glistening on the windowpanes looked like tears.

Passengers in the airport must have been worried when they saw our plane pull into gate 69A, as we had a full police and fire escort, front and back.

I was on the left side of the plane and later realized that the family could be seen off to the right, standing with the United States Army Honor Guard. According to Wikipedia, each military branch has its own honor guard, usually military in nature, and is composed of volunteers who are carefully screened. One of the primary roles for honor guards is to provide funeral honors for fallen comrades.

…read more…

Again, Bills (taxes) Must Originate in the House, Obamacare Originated in the Senate

Published by Papa Giorgio

Not constitutional, ergo, not law — from a previous post:

c. Since this is a direct tax, via the Court, this has another Constitutional ground to lose on or for Congress to overturn on. That is this:

Article 1, Section 3, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution [Apportionment of Representatives; Direct Taxes]: Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union…

Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution, Paragraph 1 [Bills of Revenue Originate in House]: All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other Bills.

d. BECAUSE it is a tax, reconciliation can be used to repeal the law.

Now Breitbart

One of the big Democrat talking points about ObamaCare is to bleat that it’s “constitutional,” blessed by the Supreme Court, and is the “settled law of the land.” They never explain how this is supposed to intimidate the nominally free people of the Republican from changing or repealing it – presumably it is meant to be taken as the first law in history that must be obeyed without question, forever, more powerful and permanent than the Constitution itself

But it’s not true anyway.  Andrew McCarthy at National Review reminds us that, contrary to Democrat rhetoric, ObamaCare was not held constitutional by the Supreme Court.  Sorry, lefties, but it just wasn’t.  The bill as written would have been struck down.  Supreme Court Justice John Roberts rewrote the bill on the fly to make it constitutional.  

One of the ideas we occasionally hear floated to make the ruling class suffer the full pain of the law they inflicted upon the rest of us is to pass a bill requiring the enforcement of ObamaCare precisely as it was passed, since it has never legally been amended.  An orthodontist in Florida teamed up with Judicial Watch to file a lawsuit along these lines recently, with an eye to countering President Obama’s flagrantly illegal rescheduling of the employer mandate.  If such a suit was successful, it should logically lead to the Supreme Court striking down ObamaCare, since it was not constitutional as passed by Congress and signed by the President.

But the Affordable Care Act should have died the moment it left the Supreme Court anyway.  As McCarthy points out, the Roberts-rewritten law might have been (barely) held constitutional, at the cost of making Obama a shameless liar during all the years he claimed it wasn’t a tax… but that also made the ACA illegal, because it’s a tax bill, and those must originate in the House, while ObamaCare originated in the Senate.

…read more…

Now the National Review:

…We now know Obamacare was tax legislation. Consequently, it was undeniably a “bill for raising revenue,” for which the Constitution mandates compliance with the Origination Clause (Art. I, Sec. 7). The Clause requires that tax bills must originate in the House of Representatives. Obamacare did not.

[….]

…Obamacare originated in the Senate.

It was introduced in Congress in 2009 by Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who called it the “Senate health care bill” (a description still touted long afterwards on Reid’s website). Employing the chicanery that marked the legislation through and through, the Democrat-controlled Senate turned its 3,000-page mega-proposal into a Senate amendment. The Senate attached its amendment to a nondescript, uncontroversial House bill (the “Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009”) that had unanimously passed (416–0) in the lower chamber.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, it is now undeniable that Obamacare was tax legislation. It was also, by its own proclamation, a bill for raising revenue. Democrats maintained that the Senate proposal would reduce the federal budget deficit by $130 billion. More to the point, the bill contained 17 explicit “Revenue Provisions” — none of which was remotely related to the House bill to which the Senate proposal was attached.

Therefore, Obamacare is revenue-raising tax legislation, originated in the Senate in violation of the Constitution.

…read more…