Columnist.
Pollster Celinda Lake's advice to fellow Democrats to take a midway position in the 2014 congressional campaigns is flawed because it can't be sold as honest. Reacting to results from her bipartisan Battleground Poll that show Obamacare to be a political loser, Lake said: "Don't defend it. Say it was flawed from the beginning and we're going to fix it." Note that she didn't advise to reject it outright, apparently because she knows that's never going to fly with Obama and the Democratic establishment and probably because it would be tantamount to an admission that the party has failed in its central policy "achievement."
It's fitting that the pro-abortion crowd dominating the Obama executive branch is not about to adopt a "live and let live" attitude toward its opponents in litigation concerning the government's effort to force corporations to subsidize the killing of human beings. The Affordable Care Act, an Orwellian title for a statute if there ever was one, requires employers to provide health care coverage for their employees that fully covers all forms of "contraception." Let's stop right there. Do you get the idea that the pro-abortion left is trying to force its ideology down our throats as much as it's trying to coerce its policy agenda upon us? These liberals want to not just have their way -- to force every last objecting employer to subsidize a procedure it morally opposes -- but lord it over us, as well, in a punitive, bullying way. It's not enough that the employee has a right to use the drugs; the employer must be forced to pay for it. In your face, again.
This is a headline we should never see in the United States: "Federal Judge: Yes, Arizona and Kansas Can Require Voters To Prove Their Citizenship." The fact that this issue would be disputed at all is astonishing. That it is legally contested is stunning. That the prime mover in initiating the legal challenge is our own federal government, which has a compelling interest in ensuring the integrity of the election process, is mind-blowing.
My humble advice to the GOP: Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Don't fail to grasp the significance of the Florida election. Make Democrats pay for their president and their shared agenda. Don't listen to any in the liberal media, the Democratic Party spin machine or any establishment Republican types who tell you Obama didn't get his metaphorical head handed to him in the Florida special election for a House seat last week. Ignore those who tell you that you can't tie this anchor around Democratic candidates who either supported Obamacare when it was being pushed or defiantly stand by it now. Rejoice that White House officials and many Democratic apparatchiks are denying that Obamacare was "on the ballot in Florida" and are applauding without an ounce of credibility that Obamacare has now turned the corner because the government's website is allegedly now functioning more efficiently.
With each passing day, President Barack Obama, leftism personified, demonstrates that leftism is characterized by anything other than the human compassion it claims as its exclusive possession. I've always said leftists are about not compassion or treating people with sensitivity and respect, much less equally, but control and bullying, all with an arrogant, mean-spirited air of superiority.
How I pray we don't get so numb to the endless nightmarish stories of Obamacare that we become fatalistic and resigned to its continued existence. As an antidote to that, I submit another update. First, Unite Here -- a major union for the hotel, gaming, food service, manufacturing, textile, distribution, laundry and airport industries -- has issued a report concluding that Obamacare will result in wages being reduced by up to $5 an hour, reduce worker hours and exacerbate income inequality. The report, titled "The Irony of ObamaCare: Making Inequality Worse," states: "Ironically, the Administration's own signature healthcare victory poses one of the most immediate challenges to redressing inequality. ... We take seriously the promise that 'if you like your health plan, you can keep it. Period.' UNITE HERE members like their health plans."
This week, the Senate, by a slim margin assured by opportunist Democrats up for re-election, rejected the nomination of Debo Adegbile, another radical Obama nominee, to head the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. The feckless Democratic senators who broke ranks with his royalness are probably responding to the latest polling data showing that Obama has reached his all-time low for job performance approval. The Fox News poll found that just 38 percent approve of the president's job performance and that 54 percent disapprove. Prior to this poll, his worst rating was 40/55 percent in November 2013.
Former Washington Post Managing Editor Robert Kaiser took to the opinion pages of the Post to lament the disintegration of the good old days in Washington when political life was wonderfully collegial and lawmakers had fun governing. Oh, the irony of this Beltway liberal's devoting 2,225 words to decrying conservatives for destroying something that liberals have largely been in charge of for years -- government and its growth. Kaiser sounds a lot like Chris Matthews, who often mourns for the days when politics was fun -- as if the process of governing is the only thing that matters. For Kaiser says he misses those days when liberal GOP lawmakers (though he doesn't identify them as such) "knew and cared a great deal about governing."
Why aren't more people outraged over the Obama administration's war on religious liberty? The administration insists on coercing full compliance with the Obamacare mandates, even when 99.9 percent compliance would fully serve its purposes, and chooses to impose its iron will even against American citizens' God-given and constitutionally and statutorily protected religious freedoms. Despite straight-facedly promising that he would protect the religious liberties of people and groups and would not violate their conscience rights by forcing them to provide or support contraceptive or abortion services, President Obama has vigorously engaged in a scorched-earth campaign to do just the opposite.
Any freedom-loving person would be outraged at the attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to inject itself into monitoring the practices of print and broadcast media organizations, but the outrage came almost exclusively from conservatives, which is highly instructive. But liberals and conservatives are on such different planets that they don't even agree that this development -- that only conservatives objected -- is instructive, which is also instructive. The Washington Post was hoist with its own petard in reacting with a subtly pointed headline, "Proposed FCC study of news organizations sparks conservative outcry," and exposing its own biases rather than those of conservatives.
There seems to be a common characteristic among those who follow the liberal orthodoxy, especially those in the old media. Their ideology and rabid partisanship prevent them from acknowledging, much less correcting, policy failures. My brother, Rush, expounds the "Limbaugh theorem," which holds that President Obama studiously avoids accountability for his disastrous agenda by positioning himself, with the willing aid of the media, as an outsider -- as one who is merely observing, rather than primarily causing, these failures. For five years, he's mostly blamed President George W. Bush. The old media never call him on it, for example, in reminding him that he promised to lead us out of this economic hellhole way before now.
Recently, I saw a Photoshopped depiction of Charles Manson next to an unborn baby, and the caption suggested that liberals are more interested in protecting Manson than they are the baby. It got me to thinking. Yes, it got me to thinking about the absurd positions modern liberals hold, which wouldn't be nearly so disturbing but for the fact that I'm not talking about fringe liberals. I'm talking about mainstream liberals, who control the Democratic Party, the old media, the executive branch of the federal government, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Supreme Court half the time, the mammoth federal bureaucracy, many state governments, our universities, our national educational establishment and other cultural institutions.
Each passing day is more incriminating for President Obama's Obamacare, as the news is like a relentless prosecutor amassing evidence against a serial killer. Yet the more evidence that rolls in condemning the president's "signature achievement" -- wouldn't you love to have that albatross hung around your epitaph? -- the more entrenched Obama becomes, making clear that his heart is not with the American people or their needs but stubbornly fixated on self. His singular goal is not to provide "affordable health care" but to slay those who are trying to take his "baby" away from him, with the deranged obsession of Captain Ahab.
President Obama must believe he's politically untouchable at this point, given his seeming indifference to the multitude of scandals, failures and other outrages for which he is directly responsible. I intended to write this column solely on the devastating Congressional Budget Office report putting the final nail in the Obamacare coffin -- or at least it would be the final nail in a sane world -- but everywhere I turn in the news, I'm bombarded with evidence of equally troubling nightmares. So, in fairness to balance and diversity, I decided not to dwell on CBO-gate alone but to share with you the smorgasbord of disasters.
I don't have a completely satisfactory answer when people ask me what we can do to combat the tyranny we are witnessing in this country, but one brave and principled Texas physician is showing how people can stand up. Dr. Kristin Held of San Antonio, whom I've befriended on Twitter and grown to deeply admire for her vocal advocacy against Obamacare, has taken the next step in her battle -- our battle. Last week, she wrote a letter to Aetna insurance company terminating her participation in its program because of unilateral changes she said the company had made to its contract with her.
Other than his fundamental dishonesty about certain conditions in America, what he stands for, his record, his failure to accept responsibility for his actions, his demonization, his divisive rhetoric, his arrogant promise to double down on his unconstitutional unilateral executive actions, his calls for yet more government instead of less, his foreign policy distortions and his diminution of the presidential office, President Obama's State of the Union address was pretty good. President Obama remains on his high horse about minimum wage, but he conveniently ignores that only 1 percent of the people in the U.S. labor force earn minimum wage, that the largest group among them is teenagers, that most are younger than 25, that most work less than 30 hours a week and that there are more than six times more minimum wage workers now than there were in 2007, shortly before he took office. More importantly, he doesn't admit that increases to minimum wage invariably lead to increased unemployment.
President Obama's policies continue to produce results that are the opposite of what he promises, yet he brazenly cites the abysmal state of *his* economy to announce -- indignantly -- that he will double down on his failures. Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven -- notorious leftist professors who devised a sinister plot to overburden the American economy to the point of collapse and then replace it with a socialist system -- would be quite proud of their understudy.
At a time when more and more Americans are coming to an awareness of how evil abortion is, President Barack Obama, the most fiercely pro-abortionist president in our history, is digging his heels in further. This week, he made his annual statement glorifying this hideous practice on the anniversary of the infernal 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, which greatly restricted abortion laws. Obama's statement was as unapologetic as it was grotesque, celebrating an abominable procedure that ought to be outlawed -- not glamorized, as the left does with it. Before you accuse me of hyperbole, be advised that Democratic National Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz wished Roe v. Wade a happy 41st birthday. "Happy"?
It's time for your latest Obamacare update, and it will come as no surprise to you that things are not getting any prettier for this monstrosity. Let's just take a jog down Obamacare Avenue and see what is popping out at us from the storefronts this week. Roll down your windows so you can get a clearer look...
This week, once again, we heard President Obama defiantly pronounce that he has no intention of letting a little thing like constitutional checks and balances get in his way and interrupt his royal prerogative. "We are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we're providing Americans the kind of help that they need," said Obama. "I've got a pen, and I've got a phone." What other president has ever talked like this?
