It will be interesting to see if the Obama Administration’s efforts to make sequestration into an actual, impactful disaster will work. It’s ridiculous to think the FAA cannot get by with only .6 billion dollars more than it did last year.
Category: Politics
Really? You don’t say.
I am torn between believing that people who voted for this law were not intelligent enough to realize this was inevitable, or believing that people who voted for this law *knew* this would happen and are hoping to leverage it into a single payer system that will completely destroy U.S. healthcare. Tough call.
(h/t [Right Coast](http://rightcoast.typepad.com/rightcoast/2013/04/baucus-warns-of-huge-train-wreck-enacting-obamacare-provisions-the-hills-healthwatch.html))
This is one of the most horrifying things I have ever read. The sanitized version is that a doctor who performed what he called “late-term abortions” is on trial for murder. The descriptions of the procedures, however, are simply horrifying. Though *The Atlantic* piece is worth reading, please be advised that it is an extremely unsettling read.
[Erick Erickson tackled the media blackout](http://www.redstate.com/2013/04/12/can-you-imagine-the-coverage-if-it-were-dogs/) on this story earlier today:
> Had Kermit Gosnell killed dogs, HLN would be giving it wall to wall coverage as they do all sorts of sensational trials. Nancy Grace would be in full outrage mode every night through the course of the trial. It’s sad that a man who engaged in horrific acts of barbarism will never be as known to the public as Casey Anthony or George Zimmerman because Gosnell’s crime is viewed as less than a crime by the vast majority of the producers of American news.
My hope is that the news producers are simply unaware of the events and, if any of those news producers actually read the court documents, they too would be horrified.
> Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Monday that she did not anticipate how complicated implementing the president’s signature healthcare law would be.
Seriously? Are you kidding me? It is for reasons like this that the law should not have been passed in the first place. What a disaster.
Categories
The Iron Lady Passes
Ben Domenech provides the other “must read” piece about Prime Minister Thatcher’s passing, especially for its parallels to the current rift within the Republican Party.
After reading various pieces on the loss of Prime Minister Thatcher, I can now confidently say that Mr. O’Sullivan’s piece is a “must read.”
Passing this could be hugely beneficial to students in North Carolina. Well done by Speaker Pro Tem Stam in bringing it to the floor.
> With the passing of Margaret Thatcher, we’ve sadly lost the last living member of that great triumvirate that included Ronald Reagan and John Paul II — those giants who defeated the evil empire of Soviet Communism and allowed the liberation of its captive nations. We’ve also lost one of the great champions of economic freedom and democratic ideals.
Well said. It is truly a sad day for those who believe in freedom.
Professor Jacobson quoting a [Breitbart](http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/04/05/Obama-Budget-to-Target-Success-by-Capping-Retirement-Accounts-at-3-Million) story on his Legal Insurrection blog:
> The budget President Barack Obama will submit on April 10 will contain a proposal that would prohibit individuals from accumulating more than $3 million in Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and tax-preferred retirement accounts.
> According to a White House statement, the Obama administration believes the current rules allow some wealthy individuals “to accumulate many millions of dollars in these accounts, substantially more than is needed to fund reasonable levels of retirement saving.”
> “The budget would limit an individual’s total balance across tax-preferred accounts to an amount sufficient to finance an annuity of not more than $205,000 per year in retirement, or about $3 million in 2013,” the statement said. “This proposal would raise $9 billion over 10 years.”
Outrageous and scary[^fn1]. First came the government calls as to what we can and cannot get for health insurance, now come the government calls for how much we are allowed to put away for retirement. Here’s hoping that the GOP can hold onto the house next year to keep the Democrats from actually being able to implement things like this.
[^fn1]: Not Cyprus level scary, since they are not trying to take money that people have already put away for retirement. Yet.
The fallout from this is going to be really interesting.
Well done, Governor. Well done.
Categories
Why Conservatives Were Behind Rand Paul
Erick Erickson nails it:
> Finally, when administration officials began asserting that the president might even have the power to launch drone strikes on American soil, Senator Paul decided he would hold up a major nomination to command the attention of the entire country. Many of us sat back and watched the impassioned speeches from Paul and the stirring words of Ted Cruz. We wondered why we had not witnessed this sort of spirited opposition during Obamacare.
> Yet that is exactly the point. Most of these senators are new to Washington. They have charted a new path forward, one that is not paved with backroom deals but with forthright demonstrations of courage and commitment to the principles that buoyed them into office. Instead of cutting a deal to invoke cloture and having Brennan’s nomination sail to confirmation, Paul has united a fractious Republican Party against this – that is everyone except for Obama’s dinner companion Lindsey Graham.
> …
> We didn’t send Republicans like Mitch McConnell to Washington to cut backroom deals and to passively and blithely ignore the injustices that are perpetrated by the statist class on a daily basis. Nor did we send Republicans to Washington to echo those injustices, like John McCain and Lindsey Graham do on a daily basis. It’s no coincidence that this effort was initiated by the disciples of Jim DeMint. And with the 2014 election cycle beginning now, it’s incumbent upon all of us to help send reinforcements to the ranks of our fighters.
Exactly.
> “It is CONFIDENTIAL to Blueprint, so please be careful – share with your boards and appropriate staff but not the whole world.”
Oops. It is no real surprise that liberal groups would have such a plan(*Come on, you think something like Obama’s “War on Women” thing just comes up spontanesouly?*), but it is a little surprising that it is a 501(c)(3) that is the one doing it. This might be the first time I have ever wanted the IRS to get involved with anything.
As you can imagine, there a ton of factors coming together to raise prices. Of course, the lack of investment in America’s possible oil resources is one of those factors.
Really interesting stuff. I always figured there was as source for a lot of these memes, and now Professor Jacobson has found it. He adds an excellent observation near the end of his post:
> There is nothing like Upworthy or BuzzFeed on the right. The closest we have come is Twitchy, Michelle Malkin’s brilliant website.
> Are you surprised that Obama won the youth vote even though his policies are a complete disaster for the young?
> We are losing the fight to the lowest of low information voters, who are pushed toward a liberal agenda by very smart and talented people who understand the power of social media in a way we don’t.
Winning this fight is going to take a lot more than simply rebranding the message at the national level. It is going to take embracing the way that people communicate in this day and age. Frankly, I think that is one of the few places where the Republican Party is actually behind.
> You know, CNN has played video of this. I don’t know how many times they have played this over and over and over again. They’re actually asking if this is the new Watergate, if this is the end of Rubio’s career. I have to admit, folks, I didn’t know he drank water. You ever seen a politician do that in public? You don’t see it. You don’t see ’em eat in public. You don’t see ’em drink water, particularly between sentences. Now, I’ve seen football players drink Gatorade and whatever the hell else is down there on the sideline between plays, but drinking water during a speech, dry mouth during a speech? If I wasn’t so strong I’d take the day off to deal with the emotional wreck that this has made me. But I’m hanging tough.
Rush is simply the best at what he does.
> To start with, the reason Gov. Pat McCrory and North Carolina lawmakers were faced with two difficult decisions about Obamacare is that it was a poorly conceived, sloppily written piece of legislation. Cobbled together from ill-fitting pieces in an attempt to please both the Center and Left of the Democratic Party, and to bribe certain members of Congress to vote for a measure their constituents did not favor, the bill contains contradictions, ambiguities, legal problems, and a huge transfer of policymaking authority from elected representatives (be they in Congress or state legislatures) to federal regulators.
Well said, Mr. Hood. Well said[^fn1].
[^fn1]: This paragraph does not cover the detail he goes into regarding why rejecting Obamacare is right for North Carolina. I encourage you to read the whole thing.
Dan Way, writing at the *Carolina Journal*:
> Buoyed by Gov. Pat McCrory’s announcement that he does not support expanding Medicaid rolls or creating a state-run health insurance exchange, a state House committee voted Tuesday over Democrats’ objections in favor of Senate Bill 4, legislation that rejects those same provisions of Obamacare.
> …
> In his statement today, McCrory said an administrative review on the Medicaid issues that included discussions with the White House, other governors, health care providers, and legislative leaders concluded it is “abundantly clear that North Carolina is not ready to expand the Medicaid system, and that we should utilize a federal exchange.”
> Recent Medicaid audits show North Carolina Medicaid “is broken and not ready to expand without great risk to the taxpayers and to the delivery of existing services to those in need,” McCrory said.
It looks like this process is in the home stretch. Now it is time to see if they can cross the finish line.
Dan Mitchell, Thomas Sowell, and the CEO of Wholefoods all agree: *fascism.*
Some of the best conservative minds take a look at the current state of the country. *SPOILER:* It is not particularly uplifting.