Washington Post

Obama Spent BILLIONS On Failing Schools – No Change

Published by Papa Giorgio

Here is a portion of the WASHINGTON POST that Prager was reading:

One of the Obama administration’s signature efforts in education, which pumped billions of federal dollars into overhauling the nation’s worst schools, failed to produce meaningful results, according to a federal analysis.

Test scores, graduation rates and college enrollment were no different in schools that received money through the School Improvement Grants program — the largest federal investment ever targeted to failing schools — than in schools that did not.

The Education Department published the findings on the website of its research division on Wednesday, hours before President Obama’s political appointees walked out the door.

“We’re talking about millions of kids who are assigned to these failing schools, and we just spent several billion dollars promising them things were going to get better,” said Andy Smarick, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has long been skeptical that the Obama administration’s strategy would work. “Think of what all that money could have been spent on instead.”…

Larry Elder Slays Fools About Meryl Streep’s Golden Globe Speech

Published by Papa Giorgio

I previously uploaded some segments of Dennis Prager dealing with the issue as well (https://youtu.be/Hmr3cinSuSI). Since then more videos of Trump’s mannerisms have come out. In this show by Larry Elder, he takes calls from people who believe Trump really did mock a reporter’s disability. In fact, these mannerisms pre-and-post date the event Meryl Streep comments on showing her #Fakenews bully pulpit to spread miss-truths. Even Randy Quaid was moved to pen a forceful open letter to Meryl Streep.

Here is part of the article in the DAILY MAIL by Piers Morgan:

…Last night, Streep received a Lifetime Achievement award at the Golden Globes, and chose the moment to launch a very personal attack on Donald Trump.

She began by saying that Hollywood, foreigners and the press are ‘the most vilified segments of American society right now’.

At which point the cameras panned out to hundreds of the richest, most privileged people in American society sitting in the audience in their $10,000 tuxedos and $20,000 dresses, loudly cheering this acknowledgement of their dreadful victimhood.

She then said that if all the ‘outsiders and foreigners’ were kicked out of Hollywood, ‘you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.’

Wow.

I haven’t heard such elitist snobbery since Hillary Clinton branded Trump supporters ‘a basket of deplorables’. 

For your information, Ms Streep, tens of millions of ordinary Americans love football and the MMA and would be quite happy watching their favourite sports at the expense of the next Woody Allen film.

Her real target, though, was Trump. She’d come to take him down, and that is exactly what she proceeded to do.

‘There were many powerful performances this year that did breathtaking, compassionate work,’ she said. ‘But there was one performance that stunned me. It sank it hooks in my heart, not because it was good – there’s nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege and power and the capacity to fight back.’

Meryl’s bottom lip began to tremble.

‘It kind of broke my heart when I saw it,’ she cried, ‘and I still can’t get it out of my head. This instinct to humiliate when it’s modelled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, filters down into everybody’s life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing.’

Hmmm.

Really, Meryl?

For starters, the incident to which she referred didn’t happen last year, it happened in 2015. There’s even been another Golden Globes in between then and now, at which it was never mentioned.

Second, Trump has always furiously denied – and has again today on Twitter – he was mocking the reporter’s disability and a Conservative website produced video evidence of numerous other instances where he made the exact same gesture to fully able-bodied people when attacking them. (See here and decide for yourself)….

Ouch!!

Mark Levin Discusses the Electoral College (Plus: WaPo)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Here is a portion of the article by ALLEN GUELZO and JAMES HULME Mark Levin was reading from:

…After last week’s results, we’re hearing a litany of complaints: the electoral college is undemocratic, the electoral college is unnecessary, the electoral college was invented to protect slavery — and the demand to push it down the memory hole.

All of which is strange because the electoral college is at the core of our system of federalism. The Founders who sat in the 1787 Constitutional Convention lavished an extraordinary amount of argument on the electoral college, and it was by no means one-sided. The great Pennsylvania jurist James Wilson believed that “if we are to establish a national Government,” the president should be chosen by a direct, national vote of the people. But wise old Roger Sherman of Connecticut replied that the president ought to be elected by Congress, since he feared that direct election of presidents by the people would lead to the creation of a monarchy. “An independence of the Executive [from] the supreme Legislature, was in his opinion the very essence of tyranny if there was any such thing.” Sherman was not trying to undermine the popular will, but to keep it from being distorted by a president who mistook popular election as a mandate for dictatorship.

Quarrels like this flared all through the convention, until, at almost the last minute, James Madison “took out a Pen and Paper, and sketched out a mode of Electing the President” by a “college” of “Electors … chosen by those of the people in each State, who shall have the Qualifications requisite.”

The Founders also designed the operation of the electoral college with unusual care. The portion of Article 2, Section 1, describing the electoral college is longer and descends to more detail than any other single issue the Constitution addresses. More than the federal judiciary — more than the war powers — more than taxation and representation. It prescribes in precise detail how “Each State shall appoint … a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress”; how these electors “shall vote by Ballot” for a president and vice president; how they “shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate” the results of their balloting; how a tie vote must be resolved; what schedule the balloting should follow; and on and on.

Above all, the electoral college had nothing to do with slavery. Some historians have branded the electoral college this way because each state’s electoral votes are based on that “whole Number of Senators and Representatives” from each State, and in 1787 the number of those representatives was calculated on the basis of the infamous 3/5ths clause. But the electoral college merely reflected the numbers, not any bias about slavery (and in any case, the 3/5ths clause was not quite as proslavery a compromise as it seems, since Southern slaveholders wanted their slaves counted as 5/5ths for determining representation in Congress, and had to settle for a whittled-down fraction). As much as the abolitionists before the Civil War liked to talk about the “proslavery Constitution,” this was more of a rhetorical posture than a serious historical argument. And the simple fact remains, from the record of the Constitutional Convention’s proceedings (James Madison’s famous Notes), that the discussions of the electoral college and the method of electing a president never occur in the context of any of the convention’s two climactic debates over slavery.

If anything, it was the electoral college that made it possible to end slavery, since Abraham Lincoln earned only 39 percent of the popular vote in the election of 1860, but won a crushing victory in the electoral college. This, in large measure, was why Southern slaveholders stampeded to secession in 1860-61. They could do the numbers as well as anyone, and realized that the electoral college would only produce more anti-slavery Northern presidents.

[….]

Without the electoral college, there would be no effective brake on the number of “viable” presidential candidates. Abolish it, and it would not be difficult to imagine a scenario where, in a field of a dozen micro-candidates, the “winner” only needs 10 percent of the vote, and represents less than 5 percent of the electorate. And presidents elected with smaller and smaller pluralities will only aggravate the sense that an elected president is governing without a real electoral mandate.

The electoral college has been a major, even if poorly comprehended, mechanism for stability in a democracy, something which democracies are sometimes too flighty to appreciate. It may appear inefficient. But the Founders were not interested in efficiency; they were interested in securing “the blessings of liberty.” The electoral college is, in the end, not a bad device for securing that.

Did Trump Go Full Retard On That Reporter, Serge Kovaleski?

Published by Papa Giorgio

Let me further note on this rebuttal that at worst… Trump’s way of communicating is what is “full retard,” and not Presidential. Could you picture the Gipper doing this? Or Carly Fiorina, or Ted Cruz, or Bobby Jindal? Nope… that is because they respect the office. But this is what people wanted.

Dennis Prager takes calls on Trump mocking the disabled Washington Post (WaPo) reporter, Serge Kovaleski. The best rebuttal of the media’s narrative on this can be found at CATHOLICS 4 TRUMP.

I adapted [added to] some video from ANGIE GROVER, using it to bolster the point with the caller who has adopted the media narrative in full. Take note she does change her previous position.

And yes, Serge DID write about celebrations. Again, this is all well documented at Catholics 4 Trump.

WaPo’s Robert McCartney Changes View on Washington Redskins

Published by Papa Giorgio

Until his latest column on the issue, Robert McCartney (who is the Washington Posts senior regional correspondent, covering politics and policy in the greater Washington, D.C.), was very much against the Washington Redskins using said name.

He changed his mind because of the Washington Post’s poll showing 9-out-of-10 Native-Americans don’t care about the controversy. Mind you, this is nothing new poll-wise, and MY question would have been something like this:

➤ “why do you think it is that you have never heard about the majority of American Indians supporting the Redskins Football name and emblem before this?”
➤ “Do you think there may be a disconnect with ‘where’ you receive your news and reality -or- alternate viewpoints closer to the truth than where you currently do?”

Here I am thinking about the now famous quote by elite Manhattanite and New Yorker columnist Pauline Kael after Richard Nixon’s sweeping presidential victory in 1972: “I don’t know how Richard Nixon could have won. I don’t know anybody who voted for him.”

The same thinking applies to Mr. McCartney.

For more clear thinking like this from Dennis Prager… I invite you to visit: http://www.dennisprager.com/ ~ see also: http://www.prageruniversity.com/

Religion Creates Joy and Happiness

Published by Papa Giorgio

In a recent study this idea of religion and happiness is brought to the forefront:

Highly religious people say they’re happier, too, survey finds

(RNS) Look around. Three in 10 people you see claim they are pretty satisfied with life, happy, healthy and moral, too.

They’re the “highly religious,” 30 percent of U.S. adults who say they pray daily and attend church at least once a week.

“Religion in Everyday Life,” a new survey from Pew Research released Tuesday (April 12), teases out the particular ways they differ from the majority of U.S. Christians who are less observant and from non-Christians, including the “nones” who claim no religious identity.

The highly religious are overwhelmingly (95 percent) Protestant, Catholic or other Christians. Nearly half (49 percent) are white evangelicals. Most of the overall group (62 percent) are women.

And many are smiling. Four in 10 highly religious people say they’re “very happy” with the way things are going in life, compared to 29 percent of those who are not highly religious.

But, “we don’t know why they are happier“ or more satisfied with their health, said Pew researcher Besheer Mohamed, a co-author of the report.

“We see the patterns but we don’t know what is causing what. Is it that regular churchgoers get something from the church practice and involvement or is it that a certain sort of person is more likely to go to worship more frequently?” he said.

Nearly three in four (74 percent) highly religious people say they’re “very satisfied with family life” compared to 67 percent of those who are not highly religious.

And 47 percent say they gather with extended family at least monthly (compared to 30 percent of those not highly religious)…

(read it all)

THE WASHINGTON POST notes that happiness is greatly increased by religion:

A new study suggests that joining a religious group could do more for someone’s “sustained happiness” than other forms of social participation, such as volunteering, playing sports or taking a class.

A study in the American Journal of Epidemiology by researchers at the London School of Economics and Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands found that the secret to sustained happiness lies in participation in religion.

“The church appears to play a very important social role in keeping depression at bay and also as a coping mechanism during periods of illness in later life,” Mauricio Avendano, an epidemiologist at LSE and an author of the study, said in a statement. “It is not clear to us how much this is about religion per se, or whether it may be about the sense of belonging and not being socially isolated.”

Researchers looked at four areas: 1) volunteering or working with a charity; 2) taking educational courses; 3) participating in religious organizations; 4) participating in a political or community organization. Of the four, participating in a religious organization was the only social activity associated with sustained happiness, researchers found.

The study analyzed 9,000 Europeans who were older than 50. The report that studied older Europeans also found that joining political or community organizations lost their benefits over time. In fact, the short-term benefits from those social connections often lead to depressive symptoms later on, researchers say….

And we know the positive aspects of faith versus non-faith in the survival of the species/fittest:

Assuming the validity of the “underlying instinct to survive and reproduce” then, out of the two positions (belief and non-belief) available for us to choose from which would better apply to being the most fit if the fittest is “an individual… [that] reproduces more successfully…”?[1] The woman that believes in God is less likely to have abortions and more likely to have larger families than their secular counterparts.[2] Does that mean that natural selection will result in a greater number of believers than non-believers?[3]

[1] From my son’s 9th grade biology textbook: Susan Feldkamp, ex. ed., Modern Biology (Austin, TX: Holt, Rineheart, and Winston, 2002), 288; “…organisms that are better suited to their environment than others produce more offspring” American Heritage Science Dictionary, 1st ed. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), cf. natural selection, 422; “fitness (in evolution) The condition of an organism that is well adapted to its environment, as measured by its ability to reproduce itself” Oxford Dictionary of Biology, New Edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1996), cf. fitness, 202; “fitness In an evolutionary context, the ability of an organism to produce a large number of offspring that survive to reproduce themselves” Norah Rudin, Dictionary of Modern Biology (Hauppauge, NY: Barron’s Educational Series, 1997), cf. fitness, 146.

[2] Dinesh D’Souza points to this in his recent book, What’s So Great About Christianity:

Russia is one of the most atheist countries in the world, and abortions there outnumber live births by a ratio of two to one. Russia’s birth rate has fallen so low that the nation is now losing 700,000 people a year. Japan, perhaps the most secular country in Asia, is also on a kind of population diet: its 130 million people are expected to drop to around 100 million in the next few decades. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand find themselves in a similar predicament. Then there is Europe. The most secular continent on the globe is decadent in the quite literal sense that its population is rapidly shrinking. Birth rates are abysmally low in France, Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, and Sweden. The nations of Western Europe today show some of the lowest birth rates ever recorded, and Eastern European birth rates are comparably low.  Historians have noted that Europe is suffering the most sustained reduction in its population since the Black Death in the fourteenth century, when one in three Europeans succumbed to the plague. Lacking the strong religious identity that once characterized Christendom, atheist Europe seems to be a civilization on its way out. Nietzsche predicted that European decadence would produce a miserable “last man’ devoid of any purpose beyond making life comfortable and making provision for regular fornication. Well, Nietzsche’s “last man” is finally here, and his name is Sven. Eric Kaufmann has noted that in America, where high levels of immigration have helped to compensate for falling native birth rates, birth rates among religious people are almost twice as high as those among secular people. This trend has also been noticed in Europe.” What this means is that, by a kind of natural selection, the West is likely to evolve in a more religious direction. This tendency will likely accelerate if Western societies continue to import immigrants from more religious societies, whether they are Christian or Muslim. Thus we can expect even the most secular regions of the world, through the sheer logic of demography, to become less secular over time…. My conclusion is that it is not religion but atheism that requires a Darwinian explanation. Atheism is a bit like homosexuality: one is not sure where it fits into a doctrine of natural selection. Why would nature select people who mate with others of the same sex, a process with no reproductive advantage at all?

(17, 19.).  Some other studies and articles of note: Mohit Joshi, “Religious women less likely to get abortions than secular women,” Top Health News, Health News United States (1-31-08), found at: http://www.topnews.in/health/religious-women-less-likely-get-abortions-secular-women-2844 (last accessed 8-13-09); Anthony Gottlieb, “Faith Equals Fertility,” Intelligent Life, a publication of the Economist magazine (winter 2008), found at: http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/story/faith-equals-fertility (last accessed 8-13-09); W. Bradford Wilcox, “Fertility, Faith, & the Future of the West: A conversation with Phillip Longman,” Christianity Today, Books & Culture: A Christian Review (5-01-2007), found at: http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/mayjun/4.28.html?start=1 (last accessed 8-13-2009); Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3-32, esp. 24-29 — I recommend this book for deep thinking on the issue.

[3] Adapted from a question by a student at a formal debate between Dr. Massimo Pigliucci and Dr. William Lane Craig during the Q&A portion of the debate.  (DVD, Christian Apologetics, Biola University, [email protected], product # WLC-RFM14V).

Previously I have posted findings like these:

Social Scientists Agree:

  • Religious Belief Reduces Crime Summary of the First Panel Discussion Panelists for this important discussion included social scientists Dr. John DiIulio, professor of politics and urban affairs at Princeton University; David Larson, M.D., President of the National Institute for Healthcare Research; Dr. Byron Johnson, Director of the Center for Crime and Justice Policy at Vanderbilt University; and Gary Walker, President of Public/Private Ventures. The panel focused on new research, confirming the positive effects that religiosity has on turning around the lives of youth at risk.
  • Dr. Larson laid the foundation for the discussion by summarizing the findings of 400 studies on juvenile delinquency, conducted during the past two decades. He believes that although more research is needed, we can say without a doubt that religion makes a positive contribution.
  • His conclusion: “The better we study religion, the more we find it makes a difference.” Previewing his own impressive research, Dr. Johnson agreed. He has concluded that church attendance reduces delinquency among boys even when controlling for a number of other factors including age, family structure, family size, and welfare status. His findings held equally valid for young men of all races and ethnicities.
  • Gary Walker has spent 25 years designing, developing and evaluating many of the nation’s largest public and philanthropic initiatives for at-risk youth. His experience tells him that faith-based programs are vitally important for two reasons. First, government programs seldom have any lasting positive effect. While the government might be able to design [secular/non-God] programs that occupy time, these programs, in the long-term, rarely succeed in bringing about the behavioral changes needed to turn kids away from crime. Second, faith-based programs are rooted in building strong adult-youth relationships; and less concerned with training, schooling, and providing services, which don’t have the same direct impact on individual behavior. Successful mentoring, Walker added, requires a real commitment from the adults involved – and a willingness to be blunt. The message of effective mentors is simple. “You need to change your life, I’m here to help you do it, or you need to be put away, away from the community.” Government, and even secular philanthropic programs, can’t impart this kind of straight talk.
  • Sixth through twelfth graders who attend religious services once a month or more are half as likely to engage in at-risk behaviors such as substance abuse, sexual excess, truancy, vandalism, drunk driving and other trouble with police. Search Institute, “The Faith Factor,” Source, Vol. 3, Feb. 1992, p.1.
  • Churchgoers are more likely to aid their neighbors in need than are non-attendees. George Barna, What Americans Believe, Regal Books, 1991, p. 226.
  • Three out of four Americans say that religious practice has strengthened family relationships. George Gallup, Jr. “Religion in America: Will the Vitality of Churches Be the Surprise of the Next Century,” The Public Perspective, The Roper Center, Oct./Nov. 1995.
  • Church attendance lessens the probabilities of homicide and incarceration. Nadia M. Parson and James K. Mikawa: “Incarceration of African-American Men Raised in Black Christian Churches.” The Journal of Psychology, Vol. 125, 1990, pp.163-173.
  • Religious practice lowers the rate of suicide. Joubert, Charles E., “Religious Nonaffiliation in Relation to Suicide, Murder, Rape and Illegitimacy,” Psychological Reports 75:1 part 1 (1994): 10 Jon W. Hoelter: “Religiosity, Fear of Death and Suicide Acceptibility.” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, Vol. 9, 1979, pp.163-172.
  • The presence of active churches, synagogues… reduces violent crime in neighborhoods. John J. Dilulio, Jr., “Building Spiritual Capital: How Religious Congregations Cut Crime and Enhance Community Well-Being,” RIAL Update, Spring 1996.
  • People with religious faith are less likely to be school drop-outs, single parents, divorced, drug or alcohol abusers. Ronald J. Sider and Heidi Roland, “Correcting the Welfare Tragedy,” The Center for Public Justice, 1994.
  • Church involvement is the single most important factor in enabling inner-city black males to escape the destructive cycle of the ghetto. Richard B. Freeman and Harry J. Holzer, eds., The Black Youth Employment Crisis, University of Chicago Press, 1986, p.354.
  • Attending services at a church or other house of worship once a month or more makes a person more than twice as likely to stay married than a person who attends once a year or less. David B. Larson and Susan S. Larson, “Is Divorce Hazardous to Your Health?” Physician, June 1990. Improving Personal Well-Being
  • Regular church attendance lessens the possibility of cardiovascular diseases, cirrhosis of the liver, emphysema and arteriosclerosis. George W. Comstock amd Kay B. Patridge:* “Church attendance and health.”* Journal of Chronic Disease, Vol. 25, 1972, pp. 665-672.
  • Regular church attendance significantly reduces the probablility of high blood pressure.* David B. Larson, H. G. Koenig, B. H. Kaplan, R. S. Greenberg, E. Logue and H. A. Tyroler:* ” The Impact of religion on men’s blood pressure.”* Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 28, 1989, pp.265-278.* W.T. Maramot:* “Diet, Hypertension and Stroke.” in* M. R. Turner (ed.) Nutrition and Health, Alan R. Liss, New York, 1982, p. 243.
  • People who attend services at least once a week are much less likely to have high blood levels of interlukin-6, an immune system protein associated with many age-related diseases.* Harold Koenig and Harvey Cohen, The International Journal of Psychiatry and Medicine, October 1997.
  • Regular practice of religion lessens depression and enhances self esteem. *Peter L. Bensen and Barnard P. Spilka:* “God-Image as a function of self-esteem and locus of control” in H. N. Maloney (ed.) Current Perspectives in the Psychology of Religion, Eedermans, Grand Rapids, 1977, pp. 209-224.* Carl Jung: “Psychotherapies on the Clergy” in Collected Works Vol. 2, 1969, pp.327-347.
  • Church attendance is a primary factor in preventing substance abuse and repairing damage caused by substance abuse.* Edward M. Adalf and Reginald G. Smart:* “Drug Use and Religious Affiliation, Feelings and Behavior.” * British Journal of Addiction, Vol. 80, 1985, pp.163-171.* Jerald G. Bachman, Lloyd D. Johnson, and Patrick M. O’Malley:* “Explaining* the Recent Decline in Cocaine Use Among Young Adults:* Further Evidence That Perceived Risks and Disapproval Lead to Reduced Drug Use.”* Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 31,* 1990, pp. 173-184.* Deborah Hasin, Jean Endicott, * and Collins Lewis:* “Alcohol and Drug Abuse in Patients With Affective Syndromes.”* Comprehensive Psychiatry, Vol. 26, 1985, pp. 283-295. * The findings of this NIMH-supported study were replicated in the Bachmen et. al. study above.

Washington Post Surprised Gun Control Didn’t Work as Advertised

Published by Papa Giorgio

Editors note: below is a GRAPHIC video of a police officer being executed — filmed from a building. I can’t help to think that if this was in Texas someone from that same vantage point would have a clear shot to dissuade such an execution, and, maybe kill a bad guy (if the person was a good shot with a pistol).

  • “Three policemen had arrived on bikes but had to leave because the men were armed, obviously… Then the attackers took off in a car.” (HotAir)

Gay Patriot notes the Washington Posts amazement that gun control doesn’t work:

Since 1939, France has had the kind of “Common Sense Gun Control Laws” that groups financed by Mike Bloomberg claim to favor (although the laws don’t go far enough, in their view, because they still permit a small number of private citizens to own firearms.) The editorialists at the Washington Post are baffled why France’s strict gun laws failed to prevent the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

A genuinely troubling question: Why didn’t France’s gun laws save the Charlie Hebdo victims?

[….]

There is no right to bear arms for the French, and to own a gun, you need a hunting or sporting license which needs to be repeatedly renewed and requires a psychological evaluation.

You mean the Mohammedan terrorists refused to apply for gun permits or sit for psychological valuations, but decided to get guns anyway? Jamais dans la vie!…

…read more…

Keep in mind that police officer that was executed was unarmed as well as the three police officers that responded on bicycle to the Charlie Hebdo attack that turned tail and ran the other way. BECAUSE they were UNARMED!

  • CBS News relayed reports from Britain’s Telegraph newspaper that the first two officers to arrive “were apparently unarmed” and “fled after seeing gunmen armed with automatic weapons and possibly a grenade launcher.”
  • The UK’s Independent reported that “three policemen arrived on bikes but had to leave because [the attackers] were armed.” A policeman who had been assigned the position of bodyguard to Charlie Hebdo editor, Stephane Charbonnier, was killed, and one policeman on a mountain bike was killed, as well.

(Breitbart)

Sick!

WaPo Supports Hank Aarons Contention that Dissent Is Not Patriot

Published by Papa Giorgio

Hank Clear

Gateway Pundit posts a story about the editorial piece in WaPo saying Hank Aaron was right. Here is GP’s comments:

The Ku Klux Klan‘s first incarnation was in 1866. On September 28, 1868, a mob of Democrats massacred nearly 300 African-Americans. The Klan was involved in a wave of 1,300 murders of Republican voters in 1868. The group was an offshoot of the Democrat Party. Klan members often threatened opponents at night with torches and hoods outside their homes.

Last week baseball great and historic whiner Hank Aaron compared all of those Americans who oppose Obama to the KKK.

Today, the Washington Post agreed with Hank Aaron.

Do you remember when dissent was patriotic? Yeah, well now if you dissent you’re a Klansman. Keep it classy, Democrats.

47.1 Million Uninsured To Go ~ The 7.1 Million Number Examined

Published by Papa Giorgio

Ben Shapiro does a good job in highlighting 5 issues that throw a HUGE monkey wrench into the “success” presser Obama had yesterday. This is truly “cooking the books,” and one should note that over 6-million (so-far… lots more coming) have lost their health coverage. Only a million previously uninsured have signed up… the rest are people who had insurance, the bulk of which O-Care cancelled. Destroying healthcare for less than a million people is the definition of success in the liberal mind. Dumb.

“If those numbers hold, the actual net gain of paid policies among Americans who lacked medical insurance in the pre-Obamacare days would be just 858,298,” the Daily Mail reports. (Via The Blaze)

  1. It Doesn’t Measure How Many People Have Actually Paid. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted yesterday that of the 6 million people who had signed up for Obamacare at the time, “What we know from insurance companies…tell us that, for their initial customers, it’s somewhere between 80, 85, some say as high as 90 percent, have paid so far.” In other words, about five million people were signed up. As Aaron Blake of the Washington Post points out, “If between 80 and 90 percent of the six million have paid premiums, the number who are fully enrolled would be closer to five million than to six million.” With the increased number of sign-ups in the last days, that percentage number has likely dropped. This is not an unimportant distinction; insurance will not cover those who don’t pay.
  2. 7.1 Million Enrollees in the Private Exchanges Doesn’t Mean 7.1 Million Who Were Previously Uninsured. Some five million Americans saw their policies cancelled thanks to Obamacare. Those Americans were forced into the Obamacare exchanges by the government. According to a RAND Corporation study, only 858,000 previously uninsured Americans had actually joined Obamacare. That’s a far cry from 7.1 million. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in March 2010 that 37.3% of all uninsured Americans would gain insurance thanks to Obamacare in 2014. That estimate rose to 38.9% in March 2011. In February 2014, the CBO suggested that in 2014, 22.8% would gain insurance through Obamacare. The actual statistic: 12.5%. In other words, the original estimates were off by approximately 66%.
  3. The Chief Beneficiaries of Obamacare Have Been Medicaid Recipients and 26-Year-Old Basement Dwellers. There are approximately 6.1 million people who have gained coverage through Obamacare’s non-private exchange program. 4.5 million were beneficiaries of Medicaid expansion, and another 1.6 million 26-year-old “children” were forced onto their parents’ policies. That far outweighs any supposed gains in the private insurance market. As Chris Conover of Forbes writes, “At the end of the day, we appear to have covered 1 in 8 uninsured, but to get to this point, we have disrupted coverage for millions, increased premiums for tens of millions more and amplified the pain even further with a blizzard of new taxes and fees that will end up cost even the lowest income families nearly $7,000 over a decade.”
  4. The Huge Majority of Those Signing Up Are Getting Subsidies – and Even Those Who Are Subsidized Aren’t Signing Up. In order for Obamacare’s cost structure to work, millions of Americans must sign up to pay inflated prices; that would help pay for the subsidies to cover insurance company costs on those with pre-existing conditions. In March, the Obama administration reported that 83% of those who had signed up were eligible for subsidies. As Robert Laszewski estimates, in the end, just 27% of those who are eligible for Obamacare subsidies nationwide have signed up.
  5. How Much Will The Numbers Drop? These are all preliminary statistics. We now know that somewhere between 2% and 5% of people who paid their insurance bills in January did not do so in February, to go along with the high percentage of people who signed up and never paid at all (that number in Obamacare success story Washington state, for example, was 39% as of early February).

…read more…

The Hammer Reigns!

(The Corner) As GOP looks to regain the Senate this fall, and Charles Krauthammer said they should be “picking through the wreckage that is Obamacare.”

“You cover people with pre-existing conditions, young people up to 26, you are not going to cancel the insurance of the assumed million to a million and a half who have signed up, and you work around that and you do good reforms to be Republican and conservative reforms,” said Krauthammer. If Obama wants to veto those reforms, then he will carry the Democrats into 2016 “in really terrible shape,” Krauthammer explained. 

With just under two million people newly insured, Krauthammer questions if the cost of Obamacare was worth it. “The whole idea was about insuring the uninsured, so that’s going to leave about 40 million uninsured,” said Krauthammer.

Six million policies were canceled under Obamacare and millions of people have lost their doctors and hospitals. “The price of this overturning, uprooting, and revolutionizing 1/6th of the economy, the ecosystem of Medicare is staggering, for a million and a half uninsured. Is that the way it should have been done?”

(The above AND below is with a h/t to Daniel over at GP) Not only did Krauthammer go after the White House’s numbers, but Jennifer Rubin over at Right Turn, had this awesome piece:

….According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 48 million individuals in the United States were uninsured at the end of 2012. The actual number was 47.9 million total uninsured individuals; 9.5 million were non-citizens who are ineligible for Obamacare. This results in a net number of 38.4 million uninsured citizens, 35.1 million native-born and 3.3 million naturalized citizens. . . . It is estimated that nearly three million individuals have signed up for Medicaid for the first time. Let’s assume that all of these individuals gained coverage because of the newly expanded Medicaid program.

McKinsey & Co. conducted a study on enrollment through Healthcare.gov and the state insurance exchanges using data as of Feb. 1. At that time, 3.3 million had enrolled. McKinsey concluded that only 14 percent, or about 500,000 individuals, were “actual uninsured who have actually gained health coverage.” An additional 13 percent of uninsured individuals had signed up for Obamacare but had not paid the premium. Of those who had signed up by that time, 73 percent either had insurance and preferred to choose a plan on the exchange or enrolled because their individual plans were canceled.

On Thursday, the Obama administration announced that enrollment had reached six million. Using McKinsey’s findings of 14 percent gaining new coverage, only 900,000 previously uninsured individuals will have acquired insurance as a result of the exchanges.

In other words, all Republicans have to do is cover 900,000 new people in a cheaper and less disruptive fashion than Obamacare does and they’ve met the challenge. Heck, you could just give the 900,000 their own doctors and you’d have done the job.

The administration, with much help from the media, has tried a sleight of hand, making the goal of 7 million sign-ups the target. In fact, the goal was to significantly reduce the 30 million number and to make health care more affordable and accessible. And let’s not forget the promise was to do all that while allowing you to keep your plan and your doctor. Surely the GOP can do better, right?

Ouch… when this becomes public knowledge, thee will be hell to pay… just too late.

Powerline vs. WaPo ~ Interview w/John Hinderaker Added @end

Published by Papa Giorgio

The Washington Post just makes stuff up now… from whole-cloth! H/T to IOwntheWorld, via Powerline:

On Thursday, the Washington Post published an article by Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin titled “The biggest lease holder in Canada’s oil sands isn’t Exxon Mobil or Chevron. It’s the Koch brothers.” The article’s first paragraph included this claim:

The biggest lease holder in the northern Alberta oil sands is a subsidiary of Koch Industries, the privately-owned cornerstone of the fortune of conservative Koch brothers Charles and David.

The theme of the article was that the Keystone Pipeline is all about the Koch brothers; or, at least, that this is a plausible claim. The Post authors relied on a report by a far-left group called International Forum on Globalization that I debunked last October.

So Thursday evening, I wrote about the Post article here. I pointed out that Koch is not, in fact, the largest leaser of tar sands land; that Koch will not be a user of the pipeline if it is built; and that construction of the Keystone Pipeline would actually be harmful to Koch’s economic interests, which is why Koch has never taken a position on the pipeline’s construction. The Keystone Pipeline, in short, has nothing whatsoever to do with the Koch brothers.

Ethics Violations @ WaPo

  • Koch is not the largest leaser of tar sands land;
  • Koch will not use the pipeline if it is built;  
  • the Keystone Pipeline would harm the Kochs’  interest;
  • and the Koch brothers have not taken a position on the pipeline’s construction for that reason.

(Ethics Alarms)

My post garnered a great deal of attention, and Mufson and Eilperin undertook to respond to it here. It isn’t much of a response: they don’t deny the truth of anything Iwrote, and they don’t try to sustain the proposition that Koch is even in favor of the pipeline, let alone the driving force behind it. They lamely suggest that if Koch leased 2 million acres, rather than 1.1 million as they reported on Thursday, then Koch might be the largest leaseholder. But they make no attempt to respond to the official Province of Alberta maps that I posted, which clearly show that Canadian National Resources, Ltd., for example, leases more acreage than Koch.

The Post’s response attempted to explain “Why we wrote about the Koch Industries [sic] and its leases in Canada’s oil sands.” Good question! What’s the answer?

The Powerline article itself, and its tone, is strong evidence that issues surrounding the Koch brothers’ political and business interests will stir and inflame public debate in this election year. That’s why we wrote the piece.

So in the Post’s view, it is acceptable to publish articles that are both literally false (Koch is the largest tar sands leaseholder) and massively misleading (the Keystone Pipeline is all about Koch Industries), if by doing so the paper can “stir and inflame public debate in this election year?” I can’t top Jonah Goldberg’s comment on that howler:

By this logic any unfair attack posing as reporting is worthwhile when people try to correct the record. Why not just have at it and accuse the Kochs of killing JFK or hiding the Malaysian airplane? The resulting criticism would once again provide “strong evidence that issues surrounding the Koch brothers’ political and business interests will stir and inflame public debate in this election year.”

Read it all!

Democratic Money Grubbing Hypocrites Kowtowing to Billionaires

Published by Papa Giorgio

This bugs me to no end, I will post at the end of this a oft posted comparison to progressive billionaires versus more conservative billionaires and the impact this money has for-or-against our freedoms.

Michael Medved shows how Democrats and rational libertarians (the Koch Brothers) diverge on the issues most important to voters. Not to mention the hypocrisy of the left in all this. So much so that Washington Post’s Dana Milbank said:

✂ “Democrats’ climate-change filibuster is nothing but a lot of hot air”…. “This may be the first time in history that a group of senators filibustered themselves.”

The Washington Examiner’s Zack Colman points out some of the hypocrisy when he writes,

✂ “While Reid has grown more boisterous when it comes to the Koch brothers, Republicans have shot back that Democratic-aligned outsiders are starting to play the big money game as well. They have pointed to Tom Steyer, the billionaire former hedge fund manager, who has pledged to spend $100 million through his NextGen Climate PAC on climate and environmental issues ahead of the 2014 midterm elections.”

Powerline goes on to explain the reason behind a bunch of old, outdated politicians doing an all-nighter:

…Tom Steyer, a billionaire who has made a great deal of money on government-subsidized “green” energy projects, has become one of the Democratic Party’s most important donors. On February 18, he hosted a fundraiser at his home that netted $400,000. Harry Reid and six other Senators attended, along with Al Gore and a number of rich environmentalists. At that meeting, plans for last night’s talk-a-thon were already being laid.

The connection is simple: Steyer has pledged to contribute $50 million and raise another $50 million to help Democrats in the 2014 elections. The catch is that they have to emphasize global warming as an issue:

✦ Steyer’s advocacy group, NextGen Political Action, plans to spend at least $50 million of the former hedge-fund manager’s money, plus another $50 million raised from other donors. The group will refuse to spend money on behalf of Democrats who oppose climate regulation, but will not spend money against them either, according to Chris Lehane, a Steyer consultant.

So the Democrats are trying to walk a narrow line. They need to make noise about global warming to keep the cash flowing from Tom Steyer and other deep-pocketed environmental activists (some of whom, of course, are also “green” energy cronies)….

Plus, the comparison to these leftist radicals shrinking human freedom (growing government) versus allowing the proverbial us to make more choices in the individual sense (smaller government) is legend:

…First, the government needs to issue a mandate that all households must own at least one firearm. We will need a federal agency to ensure that people aren’t just buying cheap BB guns or .22 pistols, even though that may be all they need or want. It has to be 9mm or above, with .44 magnums getting a one-time tax credit on their own. Let’s pick an agency known for its aptitude on firearms and home protection to issue required annual certifications each year, without which the government will have to levy hefty fines. Which agency would do the best job? Hmmmm … I know! How about TSA? With their track record of excellence, we should have no problems implementing this mandate.

Don’t want to own a gun? Hey, no worries. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts says citizens have the right to refuse to comply with mandates. The government will just seize some of your cash in fines, that’s all. Isn’t choice great? Those fines will go toward federal credits that will fund firearm purchases for the less well off, so that they can protect their homes as adequately as those who can afford guns on their own. Since they generally live in neighborhoods where police response is appreciably worse than their higher-earning fellow Americans, they need them more anyway. Besides — gun ownership is actually mentioned in the Constitution, unlike health care, which isn’t. Obviously, that means that the federal government should be funding gun ownership….

…read more…

This is why people fear government, to answer John’s question.

Back to the excellent NewsBusters response to “Krystal Ball” on MSNBC:

Honestly, how does this woman have a job in a news division?

Oh. That’s right. MSNBC isn’t a news organization. How could I have forgotten?

Saying Republicans don’t want young people to buy health insurance is preposterous.

What conservatives don’t want is the government to force young people to purchase something that morbidity tables show will likely have absolutely no benefit for them until the distant future so that others who likely will benefit much sooner can get it either for free or far more cheaply.

Irrespective of what Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts foolishly ruled last year, this is neither Constitutional nor ethical.

As for these young people dying if ObamaCare is not enacted, that asininely assumes that people won’t have the money to pay for their care if they get sick or won’t purchase health insurance when they reach an age when they believe they need it.

For example, Ball mentioned prenatal care and tetanus shots. As a person that owns an insurance agency, I certainly would be telling a client looking to have children to purchase health insurance.

As for Pap smears, the Mayo Clinic recommends women over 21 do them every two to three years.

The cost varies state by state. In New York City, you can get one for as little as $150.

As such, a woman in that city doing it even once every two years would save thousands of dollars paying for it herself rather than buying health insurance.

As for cholesterol tests, these are now available online for as little as $40.

…read more…

This great, short, update comes via The Lonely Conservative:

The short answer to the question posed above is “Not even close.” It’s not the Koch Brothers or ALEC. Nope. The biggest spender in the dark money game is the Tides Foundation. Oh and by the way, Tides is a big liberal group.

Whenever “ALEC” and “dark money” are mentioned in the media, however, there ought to be a third name given at least equal attention – the Tides Foundation. That’s because Tides, the San Francisco-based funder of virtually every liberal activist group in existence since the mid-1970s, pioneered the concept of providing a cut-out for donors who don’t wish to be associated in public with a particular cause. It is instructive to compare the funding totals for Tides and ALEC.

A search of non-profit grant databases reveals 139 grants worth a total of $5.6 million to ALEC since 1998. By comparison, Tides is the Mega-Goliath of dark money cash flows. Tides received 1,976 grants worth a total of $451 million during the same period, or nearly 100 times as much money as ALEC. But even that’s not the whole story with Tides, which unlike ALEC, has divided and multiplied over the years. Add to the Tides Foundation total the directly linked Tides Center’s 465 grants with a combined worth of $62 million, and the total is well over half a billion dollars. (Read More)

So there.

READ MORE

Settled Science! Yeah Right (Prager Reads Krauthammer)

Published by Papa Giorgio

A great article by Charles “the Hammer” Krauthammer, can be found over at the Washington Post. In it, Krauthammer shows that science advances… and really… science is screaming at the climate deniers (the anthropogenic global warming crowd) to “advance.”

…”The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist in chief Barack Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.” Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge. Take a non-climate example. It was long assumed that mammograms help reduce breast cancer deaths. This fact was so settled that Obamacare requires every insurance plan to offer mammograms (for free, no less) or be subject to termination.

Now we learn from a massive randomized study — 90,000 women followed for 25 years — that mammograms may have no effect on breast cancer deaths. Indeed, one out of five of those diagnosed by mammogram receives unnecessary radiation, chemo or surgery.

So much for settledness. And climate is less well understood than breast cancer. If climate science is settled, why do its predictions keep changing? And how is it that the great physicist Freeman Dyson, who did some climate research in the late 1970s, thinks today’s climate-change Cassandras are hopelessly mistaken?

They deal with the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans, argues Dyson, ignoring the effect of biology, i.e., vegetation and topsoil. Further, their predictions rest on models they fall in love with: “You sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your model as being real.” Not surprisingly, these models have been “consistently and spectacularly wrong” in their predictions, write atmospheric scientists Richard McNider and John Christy — and always, amazingly, in the same direction.

Settled? Even Britain’s national weather service concedes there’s been no change — delicately called a “pause” — in global temperature in 15 years. If even the raw data is recalcitrant, let alone the assumptions and underlying models, how settled is the science?

But even worse than the pretense of settledness is the cynical attribution of any politically convenient natural disaster to climate change, a clever term that allows you to attribute anything — warming and cooling, drought and flood — to man’s sinful carbon burning.

Accordingly, Obama ostentatiously visited drought-stricken California last Friday. Surprise! He blamed climate change. Here even the New York Times gagged, pointing out that far from being supported by the evidence, “the most recent computer projections suggest that as the world warms, California should get wetter, not drier, in the winter.” ….

(WaPo)