Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, July 7, 2010


Happier times...
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6 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://blog.heritage.org/2010/07/06/morning-bell-remember-the-gulf/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell

Often, after a disaster of epic proportions, we are urged to remember the victims and the lessons of how to avoid a similar catastrophe. These reminders are necessary because after the moment of impact passes, people’s attention is drawn to other major events. Rarely ever, however, is the phrase used while the crisis continues unabated...

Remember the Gulf.

[I]t has now been 78 days since the Deepwater Horizon platform exploded, killing eleven workers, and setting in motion the spill still gushing today. Over that time, the outflow has gotten worse, goals have been missed and attention has waned.

[T]he administration continues to flounder. Obama’s cabinet, including the EPA, continues to let ridiculous regulations stand in the way of oil being removed from the water. Skimmers that discharge separated water containing less than 1% of oil residue are being met with bureaucracy. Local authorities were unnecessarily stopped from dredging to build protective sand berms...thousands of volunteers remain on the sidelines endlessly waiting for instructions. Skimmers remain docked at port.

BP has only captured a small portion of the oil they promised federal regulators in a March 24 report that went completely unquestioned. In fact, since the spill began, BP has only removed 60% of what it promised could be removed in one single day, and yet we have no accountability.

The national media may yet again ignore its watchdog role. When the president last took questions from the press at the G20, not one reporter asked him an oil spill related question. Government accountability cannot be achieved without the sunlight of a watchdog press corps. While networks still have anchors stationed in the Gulf, the stories today are largely of a human interest perspective, brutalized wildlife or tarball removal; rather than government accountability.

July 7, 2010 at 9:33 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_ed/view/20100707bad_posture_on_amnesty_funny_how_feds_lean_on_ariz_not_ri/

Today, Arizona. Tomorrow . . . Rhode Island?

Attorney General Eric Holder finally filed that long-rumored lawsuit challenging Arizona’s new immigration law. In his opinion, only the federal government has the legal authority to “enforce” (read “completely ignore”) border security. If the Obama administration were convinced that Arizona would treat illegal immigration the same way the feds do, they wouldn’t have bothered to sue.

Unfortunately, Arizonans seem to take the rule of law seriously. And this is a big problem for Team Obama.

Anyway, if enforcing immigration law is a bad thing for local cops to do, as Holder claims, why pick on Arizona? If he’s really upset that the same laws he has taken an oath to enforce might actually get (gulp!) enforced, why isn’t he suing Providence instead of Phoenix? They’ve been doing local immigration enforcement for years now.

As The Boston Globe-Democrat reported yesterday, “From Woonsocket to Westerly, the troopers patrolling the nation’s smallest state are reporting all illegal immigrants they encounter, even on routine stops such as speeding, to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

Rhode Island cops now routinely contact ICE when they suspect they’ve come across an illegal immigrant. Since 2006, the number of contacts they’ve made to ICE’s Law Enforcement Support Center in Vermont has nearly doubled, the Globe reported. How is this significantly different than Arizona’s proposed law?

* INTERESTING QUESTION, HUH? (WHY AM I ONLY READING ABOUT RHODE ISLAND NOW...???)

* IN ANY CASE, WHILE THE AUTHOR RAISES AN INTERESTING POINT, THE REAL QUESTION IS HOW HOLDER - OBVIOUSLY WITH PRESIDENT OBAMA'S APPROVAL - CAN SUE ARIZONA FOR ENFORCING FEDERAL LAW BUT NOT SUE STATES AND LOCALITIES WHICH FAIL TO ENFORCE FEDERAL LAW... OR... WORSE STILL... ACTIVELY, DELIBERATELY, AND OPENLY DECLARE VIA LOCAL "SANCTUARY" ACTS THAT THEY WILL DO ALL IN THEIR POWER TO ASSIST ILLEGAL ALIENS IN VIOLATING EXISTING FEDERAL LAW?

* REASONABLE QUESTION... NO?

(*SHRUG*)

July 7, 2010 at 10:24 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://blog.heritage.org/2010/07/07/morning-bell-the-rationer-in-chief/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell

When Linda O’Boyle was diagnosed with bowel cancer, her doctors told her she could boost her chances of survival by adding the drug cetuximab to her regimen. But the rationing body for Britain’s National Health Service, the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), had previously ruled that the drug was not cost-effective and therefore would not be paid for by the government. So O’Boyle liquidated her savings and paid for the drug herself. But this is not allowed under NHS rules. When government bureaucrats found out that O’Boyle had purchased the drug with her own money, she was denied NHS treatment and died within months.

* I'VE GOT A BUDDY WHO REFUSES TO UNDERSTAND THAT WHEN SARAH PALIN REFERRED TO "DEATH PANELS" THIS WAS EXACTLY THE SORT OF THING SHE WAS REFERRING TO - USING "DEATH PANEL" AS SHORTHAND - PERHAPS EVEN HYPERBOLE - BUT IN MY VIEW IDENTIFYING THE CONCEPT HONESTLY.

* RECALL, FOLKS, THE WHOLE "MAMMOGRAPHY INCIDENT" LAST YEAR AND HOW ONCE THE PUBLIC GOT WIND OF WHAT WAS BEING PLANNED ALL OF A SUDDEN - "COINCIDENTALLY" I'M SURE - THE "EXPERTS" RETHOUGHT THEIR POSITION ABOUT MAKING A REGULATORY DECISION THAT WOULD HAVE LED TO THE PREVENTABLE/POSTPONABLE DEATHS OF THOUSANDS OF WOMEN WHOSE BREAST CANCERS WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN CAUGHT EARLY ENOUGH UNDER THE PROPOSED RULE CHANGES.

* FOLKS... NO, WE'RE NOT BRITAIN... BUT THAT'S THE DIRECTION OBAMA AND THE DEMS WANT US TO GO IN.

Defenders of Britain’s health care rationing system may try to claim that this tragic death is an outlier in an otherwise acceptable government run health care system. They are wrong. It is the point of the system. As socialized medicine and infanticide advocate Peter Singer has argued in The New York Times, the NICE bureaucrats must ration care or else free government health care would bankrupt the British economy.

Singer supported NICE’s decision not to allow British citizens the kidney cancer fighting drug Sutent. As a result of this, and many other rationing decisions Britain, has one of the lowest cancer survival rates in the Western world.

Yesterday [President Obama] bypassed the Senate confirmation process and used a recess appointment to install Dr. Donald Berwick to be the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS is the agency that runs the Medicare and Medicaid programs). Dr. Berwick said of Britain’s health care system: “Cynics beware, I am romantic about the National Health Service; I love it.” And his love for Britain’s health care system is not in spite of its rationing, but because of it.

The fact that the White House chose to empower Dr. Berwick by recess appointment is particularly audacious. The recess appointment power was intended to be used for occasions when the Senate is out for moths at a time. The Senate is currently out of session for just 11 days. Worse, the Senate majority has never even scheduled a hearing so that Dr. Berwick’s rationing views could be given an “open” forum. In fact, Dr. Berwick has not even returned Senators’ written questionnaires.

* BTW... EVEN THE NYT TODAY ACKNOWLEDGES THAT THIS IS AN ACCURATE PORTRAYAL OF OBAMA'S ACTION... (*SHRUG*)

The White House defends the move by claiming “there’s no time to waste with Washington game-playing.” But then why did the Obama administration wait until April 2010, a full 15 months after President Obama was sworn into office, to nominate Dr. Berwick? Is it because they did not want Dr. Berwick’s well known and public support for rationing health care to affect the debate over Obamacare?

July 7, 2010 at 10:52 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/539411/201007061804/Are-Overdue-Reports-Concealing-ObamaCare-Impact-On-Medicare-.aspx

What is the Obama administration hiding?

Every year, the Annual Report of the Social Security Board of Trustees comes out between mid-April and mid-May.

Now it's July, and there's no sign of this year's report.

The Congressional Budget Office reported last week in its Long Term Budget Outlook that Social Security was already running a deficit this year. According to last year's Social Security Trustees Report, that was not supposed to happen until 2015, with the trust fund to run out completely by 2037.

(*SMIRK*)

Every year, the federal government has been raiding the Social Security trust funds to take that annual surplus and spend it on the rest of the federal government's runaway spending, leaving the trust funds only with IOUs backed by nothing but politicians' promise to pay it back when it's needed. Now even that annual surplus is gone.

(*SHRUG*)

The implications for Social Security aren't what the Obama administration is hiding by delaying the annual trustees reports. Those annual reports also include information regarding Medicare over the next 75 years. What the administration is trying to hide are sweeping draconian cuts to Medicare resulting from the ObamaCare legislation, which the annual report will document. The administration is trying to delay the report until mid-August, when it's hoping the country will be on vacation and won't notice. Or maybe the delay is because the White House is trying to bludgeon the chief actuaries for Medicare and Social Security into fudging the numbers.

* WON'T BE THE FIRST TIME! RECALL COUNTING THE "DOC FIX" AS A SAVINGS KNOWING FULL WELL IT WAS A COST?!

President Obama keeps telling us a fairy tale that he saved us from another Great Depression. But he is actually leading us into another Depression. The National Bureau of Economic Research scores the recession as officially starting in December 2007. Thirty-one months later, with unemployment still near 10% and the work force still declining, the NBER says it still cannot determine an official end to the recession.

The longest recession since World War II previously was 16 months, with the average being 10 months. By next month, it will be twice as long as the previous postwar record since the latest recession started. The markets echoed by many pundits are now suggesting a renewed double-dip downturn may be starting, with the comprehensive Obama tax rate increases next year poised to pour napalm on this developing bonfire.

* WELCOME TO THE AGE OF OBAMA...

July 7, 2010 at 11:16 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/539438/201007061858/The-Voice-Of-Tehran.aspx

Voice of America's mission is to promote U.S. interests abroad, which includes freedom in Iran. But VOA's Persian newscast has been hijacked...the propaganda that VOA is piping into Iran is helping the regime - thanks to deep-seated bias in favor of Tehran by Persian editors and producers whose salaries are paid by American taxpayers.

They've banned stories that cast the regime in a negative light, such as last year's violent postelection crackdown on protesters in Tehran. They even refused for several days to air video footage of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young Iranian woman whose murder became an international cause celebre.

* REMEMBER... THE "THEY" IN QUESTION ISN'T THE IRANIAN REGIME - IT'S VOA MANAGEMENT!

* FOLKS... (*SIGH*)... I COULDN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP IF I WANTED TO...

One popular Persian-speaking broadcaster lost her anchoring job, having been demoted by a managing editor who happens to be the son of one of the Iranian mullahs.

* EXCUSE ME...?!?!

(*MASSIVE MIGRAINE HEADACHE*)

Elham Sataki, former Washington-based anchor of VOA's "Straight Talk," says she was a victim of an effort to silence her pro-American, pro-democratic-reform views.

* AGAIN... (*SIGH*)... THIS IS OBAMA'S VOA WE'RE TALKING ABOUT. "WE" (OBAMA'S VOA) ARE SABOTAGING OUR OWN U.S. NATIONAL INTERESTS!

"Defendants have mismanaged and intentionally propagated anti-American propaganda and supported the Islamic regime in Iran through their control of broadcast content," her lawsuit charges.

Who are the Persian managers of VOA really working for?

* RHETORICAL QUESTION, I KNOW, BUT THE ANSWER IS... OBAMA. SERIOUSLY... PRESIDENT OBAMA. THE BUCK STOPS AT HIS DESK.

July 7, 2010 at 11:37 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=37935

[W]ar began in 2001 under George W. Bush and was backed by almost all Americans, who collectively cheered the downfall of the Taliban and the rout of al-Qaida from its sanctuary in Afghanistan.

Today, a majority of Americans do not believe the nine-year war in Afghanistan is any longer worth the rising cost in blood and money.

[B]y declaring it a "war of necessity" and tripling U.S. forces there, this president has made it "Obama's war" every bit as much as LBJ in 1964 and 1965 made Vietnam "Johnson's War."

When exactly did supporting Obama's war policy become a litmus test for loyal Republicans?

[I]f memory serves, the Bush-McCain party was repudiated in landslides in 2006 and 2008, giving Democrats the presidency, the House and a veto-proof Senate. And high among the reasons the country turned on the GOP is that, like Harry Truman and LBJ, the Bush-McCain GOP marched us into wars they could not win and could not end.

In November, the Republican Party will make gains. But the party will be deluding itself if it assumes this means America wants a return to the interventionist policies that brought us the Iraq and Afghan wars. The country will simply be saying: We reject Obama's liberalism as emphatically as we rejected Bush neo-conservatism.

July 7, 2010 at 5:34 PM

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