WSJ: True Lies About ObamaCare

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703886904576031630593433102.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

PolitiFiction

True 'lies' about ObamaCare.

So the watchdog news outfit called PolitiFact has decided that its "lie of the year" is the phrase "a government takeover of health care." Ordinarily, lies need verbs and we'd leave the media criticism to others, but the White House has decided that PolitiFact's writ should be heard across the land and those words forever banished to describe ObamaCare.

"We have concluded it is inaccurate to call the plan a government takeover," the editors of PolitiFact announce portentously. "'Government takeover' conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees," whereas ObamaCare "is, at its heart, a system that relies on private companies and the free market." PolitiFact makes it sound as if ObamaCare were drawn up by President Friedrich Hayek, with amendments from House Speaker Ayn Rand.

This purported debunking persuaded Stephanie Cutter, a special assistant to the President. If "opponents of reform haven't been shy about making claims that are at odds with the facts," she wrote on the White House blog, "one piece of misinformation always stood out: the bogus claim . . ." We'll spare you the rest.

PolitiFact's decree is part of a larger journalistic trend that seeks to recast all political debates as matters of lies, misinformation and "facts," rather than differences of world view or principles. PolitiFact wants to define for everyone else what qualifies as a "fact," though in political debates the facts are often legitimately in dispute.In fact—if we may use that term without PolitiFact's seal of approval—at the heart of ObamaCare is a vast expansion of federal control over how U.S. health care is financed, and thus delivered. The regulations that PolitiFact waves off are designed to convert insurers into government contractors in the business of fulfilling political demands, with enormous implications for the future of U.S. medicine. All citizens will be required to pay into this system, regardless of their individual needs or preferences. Sounds like a government takeover to us.

PolitiFact is run by the St. Petersburg Times and has marketed itself to other news organizations on the pretense of impartiality. Like other "fact checking" enterprises, its animating conceit is that opinions are what ideologues have, when in reality PolitiFact's curators also have political views and values that influence their judgments about facts and who is right in any debate.

In this case, they even claim that the government takeover slogan "played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health-care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats' shellacking in the November elections." In other words, voters turned so strongly against Democrats because Republicans "lied," and not because of, oh, anything the Democrats did while they were running Congress. Is that a "fact" or a political judgment? Just asking.

As long as the press corps is nominating "lies of the year," ours goes to the formal legislative title of ObamaCare, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. For a bill that in reality will raise health costs and reduce patient choice, the name recalls Mary McCarthy's famous line about every word being a lie, including "the" and "and."For instance, everyone can probably agree that Medicare's 75-year unfunded liability is somewhere around $30.8 trillion. But that's different from a qualitative judgment, such as the wisdom of a new health-care entitlement that was sold politically as a way to reduce entitlement spending. But anyway, let's try to parse PolitiFact's ObamaCare reasoning.

Evidently, it doesn't count as a government takeover unless the means of production are confiscated. "The government will not seize control of hospitals or nationalize doctors," the editors write, and while "it's true that the law does significantly increase government regulation of health insurers," they'll still be nominally private too.

"Net Neutrality" - Another Big Government Overreach ?

Some interesting commentary:

Charles Krauthammer:

On the FCC’s vote to implement net neutrality:

There is nothing in life that grows and thrives on its own that a liberal won’t come along and want to regulate and control. That is happening here.

I have not heard complaints about how free or fair or accessible the Internet is. In fact the FCC admits it’s trying to anticipate problems In the future. Government has a hard enough time trying to regulate what is happening now and they want to regulate what they think will happen in the future.

It’s particularly arrogant with the Internet which is evolving and changing rapidly as anything in the history of communications. I think that in and of itself is scary.

There is a procedural issue. They tried to do it in 2005 and were slapped down [by the courts] in 2008. Now the FCC is now trying to find a different basis of regulation. So instead of an information source it’s a telecom entity. Thus the FCC says it can regulate under the laws of the late ’30s regulating the phone company and its copper wires.

I think this is a hell of a stretch. It has no authority unless it is given a grant of authority from Congress. It ought to stay out of this.

Michelle Malkin:

http://michellemalkin.com/2010/12/22/internet-access-is-not-a-civil-right/

Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

When bureaucrats talk about increasing your “access” to X, Y, or Z, what they’re really talking about is increasing their control over your lives exponentially. As it is with the government health care takeover, so it is with the newly-approved government plan to “increase” Internet “access.” Call it Webcare.

By a vote of 3-2, the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday adopted a controversial scheme to ensure “net neutrality” by turning unaccountable Democrat appointees into meddling online traffic cops. The panel will devise convoluted rules governing Internet service providers, bandwidth use, content, prices, and even disclosure details on Internet speeds. The “neutrality” is brazenly undermined by preferential treatment toward wireless broadband networks. Moreover, the FCC’s scheme is widely opposed by Congress – and has already been rejected once in the courts. Demonized industry critics have warned that the regulations will stifle innovation and result in less access, not more.

Sound familiar?

The parallels with health care are striking. The architects of Obamacare promised to provide Americans more access to health insurance – and cast their agenda as a fundamental universal entitlement. In fact, it was a pretext for creating a gargantuan federal bureaucracy with the power to tax, redistribute, and regulate
the private health insurance market to death – and replace it with a centrally-planned government system overseen by politically-driven code enforcers dictating everything from annual coverage limits, to administrative expenditures, to the make-up of the medical workforce. The costly, onerous, and selectively-applied law has resulted in less access, not more.

Undaunted promoters of Obama FCC chairman Julius Genachowski’s “open Internet” plan to expand regulatory authority over the Internet have couched their online power grab in the rhetoric of civil rights. On Monday, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps proclaimed: “Universal access to broadband needs to be seen as a civil right…[though] not many people have talked about it that way.” Opposing the government Internet takeover blueprint, in other words, is tantamount to supporting segregation. Cunning propaganda, that.

“Broadband is becoming a basic necessity,” civil rights activist Benjamin Hooks added. And earlier this month, fellow FCC panelist Mignon Clyburn, daughter of Congressional Black Caucus leader and Number Three House Democrat James Clyburn of South Carolina, declared that free (read: taxpayer-subsidized) access to the Internet is not only a civil right for every “nappy-headed child” in America, but essential to their self-esteem. Every minority child, she said, “deserves to be not only connected, but to be proud of who he or she is.”

Calling them “nappy-headed” is a rather questionable way of boosting their pride, but never mind that.

Face it: A high-speed connection is no more an essential civil right than 3G cell phone service or a Netflix account. Increasing competition and restoring academic excellence in abysmal public schools is far more of an imperative to minority children than handing them iPads. Once again, Democrats are using children as human shields who provide useful cover for not-so-noble political goals.

The “net neutrality” mob – funded by billionaire George Soros and other left-wing think tanks and non-profits — has openly advertised its radical, speech-squelching agenda to crusade for “media justice.” Social justice is the redistribution of wealth and economic “rights.” Media justice is the redistribution of speech and First Amendment rights. The meetings of the universal broadband set are littered with Marxist-tinged rants about “disenfranchisement” and “empowerment.” They’ve targeted conservative opponents on talk radio, cable TV, and on the web as purveyors of “hate” who need to be managed or censored. Democrat FCC panelists’ have dutifully echoed their concerns about concentration of corporate media power. As the Ford Foundation-funded Media Justice Fund, which lobbied for universal broadband, put it: This is a movement “grounded in the belief that social and economic justice will not be realized without the equitable redistribution and control of media and communication technologies.”

For progressives who cloak their ambitions in the mantle of “fairness,” it’s all about control. It’s always about control.

John Fund @ WSJ

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703886904576031512110086694.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

START Treaty - Senate Failing to do its job

A special "Boo" to the Republican Senators who are caving to Obama admin on this. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/255783/corkers-case-start-convincing-letter-my-mother-andrew-c-mccarthy Corker’s Case for START: As Convincing as ‘A Letter from My Mother’ December 21, 2010 3:11 P.M. By Andrew C. McCarthy Patting himself and his fellow Senate Republicans on the back for selling out on President Obama’s New START treaty, Bob Corker absurdly claims that all is well because — despite treaty terms that patently disserve our national security — senators have held debates, and because he and Sen. Richard Lugar have drafted a swell “resolution of ratification” that purportedly addresses New START’s serial flaws. Meantime, an unidentified John McCain admirer tells Rich the crafty ol’ Maverick deserves kudos for pressuring Obama into writing a letter talking up missile defense. Whoopee! Don’t you feel better about the GOP now? This is the most craven sort of nonsense. These senators are trying to rationalize their inexcusable approval of a bad treaty they lack the backbone to vote down. Holding debates?It’s a commonplace to mock the U.N. General Assembly as a “debating society” because the term connotes how inconsequential its exertions are. As for the vaunted resolution of ratification, I defer to John Bolton and John Yoo. Writing in the New York Times last month, they explained that the Obama administration hoped to sell its “dangerous” bargain by diverting attention from the treaty itself. Attention would instead be focused on the ratification resolution, which they predicted would be loaded up with “a package of paper promises” — variously called “conditions,” “understandings” and “declarations” — that would purport to address concerns about missile defense, the condition of our nuclear arsenal, treaty limitations on conventional weapons, etc. Ambassador Bolton and Professor Yoo continued: Senators cannot take these warranties seriously — they are not a part of the text of the treaty itself. As Eugene Rostow, a former under secretary of state, put it, such reservations and understandings have “the same legal effect as a letter from my mother.” They are mere policy statements that attempt to influence future treaty interpretation. They do not have the force of law; they do not bind the president or future Congresses. The Constitution’s supremacy clause makes the treaty’s text the “law of the land.” Instead, Bolton and Yoo asserted, “[t]o prevent New Start from gravely impairing America’s nuclear capacity, the Senate must ignore the resolution of ratification and demand changes to the treaty itself.” This is exactly the duty from which Senate Republicans are abdicating. The ratification resolution is nothing. The presidential letter Sen. McCain is said to have extracted is less than nothing: it lacks even the patina of a legislative act and is about as enforceable as a presidential commitment to close Gitmo or televise the government’s health-care deliberations on C-SPAN. The administration is wrong on national-security policy and politically weakened by the midterm thrashing. The treaty is awful, which is why there are so many things to address in resolutions and letters. If you can’t get Republican senators to do the right thing under these conditions, then when? One more related point. Based on my argument in yesterday’s column that the Senate may not unilaterally rewrite treaties or enact amendments that alter treaty terms, a friend suggests there is daylight between my position and that of Bolton and Yoo. There is none. Yes, Bolton and Yoo recount Senate action that has resulted in treaties being altered, but here’s what they say: When it approved the Jay Treaty in the 1790s, which resolved outstanding disputes with Britain, the Senate consented only on condition that President George Washington delete a specific provision on trade. Washington and Britain agreed to the amendment, and the treaty entered into force. In 1978, the Senate demanded changes to the text of the Panama Canal treaties as the price of its consent This is no different from what I am saying. The Senate in these cases did not claim the power to change treaty terms or enact resolutions that pretended to fix deep problems without altering treaty terms. To the contrary, senators told Presidents Washington and Carter that there would be no consent unless they went back to the countries in question and got the problematic terms changed. The Senate can pass amendments that amplify American understandings about a treaty; the Senate cannot unilaterally alter the core understandings in an agreement — that latter would render it no longer an agreement, and hence not a treaty. Thus did Messrs. Bolton and Yoo conclude: “While the Constitution gives the president the prime role in the treaty process, the Senate has the final say. If 34 senators reject a treaty, no president can override them.” Voting to reject is the Senate’s duty when confronted with a treaty that disserves the national interests. It is the current Senate’s dereliction on New START — a fact no resolution or presidential letter can paper over.