Good Riddance to 2013

"Put simply, most Americans are happy to see 2013 go," reports the latest Economist/YouGov poll:  69% consider 2013 a "bad year" (15% 'very bad'; 54% 'bad'); 31% a "good year" (3% 'very good'; 29% 'good').

USA Today writes that people "aren't reluctant to wave goodby on New Year's Eve, a new AP-Times Square poll says, reflecting anxiety stretching from the corridors of power in Washing to corporate boardrooms, statehouses, and city and town halls. ... All told, 32% say 2013 was a better year for them than 2012, while 20% say it was worse and 46% say the tow years were really about the same."

Top-10-Lists, from movies to the Middle East

A roundup of the top 10 "Top 10 Lists" by Scott Johnson at Powerlineblog:

I thought readers might appreciate a sampling of the best, with only a little cheating on my part. Let’s take it from the top:

1. Ilya Shapiro Obama’s top 10 constitutional violations of 2013.

2. Peter Wood, The highs and lows of 2013: NAS picks higher ed’s top 10 stories.

3. D.G. Myers, 10 worst prize-winning American novels of all time.

4. David Swindle, Top 10 conservative columnists of 2013.

5. Kyle Smith Top 10 conservative books of 2013.

6. Jason Gay, Top 10 sports list for 2013 [subscription required].

7. Lee Smith, Middle East winners and losers 2013.

8. Dave Wiegand, Top 10 TV shows of 2013.

9. A.O. Scott, Top 10 movies of 2013.

10. Time staff, Top 10 everything of 2013.

What Conservatives Learned in 2013

Conservatives "thought that the most efficient method to evangelize the unconverted was to write and speak, exhorting those still shrouded in darkness to read conservatism's most light-shedding texts," writes George Will. "Now they know that a quicker, surer way is to have progressives wield power for a few years."

Will skips lightly through a few key debacles in liberal-progressives' rule over the last 75 years or so to remind readers that this isn't the first time they've been bitten by their arrogant overreach. His modern day examples—from Obamacare's Pajama Boy to Al Gore's global warming predictions—should bring a smile. Yet his point is serious and even uplifting:

Worries about the NSA's collection of metadata occurred in a context of deepened suspicions about government because of this year's revelations that the administration has corrupted the Internal Revenue Service, the most intrusive and potentially the most punitive domestic institution. Conservatism is usually served by weariness of government.

Stephens: Obama's Envy Problem

"As he came to the end of his awful year Barack Obama gave an awful speech," writes Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal. "The president thinks America has inequality issues. What it has—what he has—is an envy problem."

In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville noticed what might be called the paradox of equality: As social conditions become more equal, the more people resent the inequalities that remain.

"Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy," Tocqueville wrote. "This complete equality eludes the grasp of the people at the very moment they think they have grasped it . . . the people are excited in the pursuit of an advantage, which is more precious because it is not sufficiently remote to be unknown or sufficiently near to be enjoyed."

One result: "Democratic institutions strongly tend to promote the feeling of envy." Another: "A depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom."

That is the background by which the current hand-wringing over inequality must be judged. Inequality is not a problem simply because the rich get richer faster than the poor get richer. It's a problem only when the rich get richer at the expense of the poor [emphasis added].

Stephens argues that Mr. Obama's numbers (comparing present-day income with that of 1979) are simply wrong:

What Comes After Obamacare Fails

"The unraveling of the Affordable Care Act presents a historic opportunity for change," writes John H. Cochrane. "Its proponents call it 'settled law', but as Prohibition taught us, not even a constitutional amendment is settled law—if it is dysfunctional enough, and if Americans can see a clear alternative."

The Affordable Care bets ... that more regulation, price controls, effectiveness panels, and "accountable care" organizations will force efficiency, innovation, quality and service from the top down. Has this ever worked? Did we get smartphones by government pressure on the 1960s AT&T phone monopoly? Did effectiveness panels force United Airlines and American Airlines to cut costs, and push TWA and Pan Am out of business? Did the post office invent FedEx,UPS and email? How about public schools or the last 20 or more health-care "cost control" ideas?

Cochrane argues that the clear alternative is a free market solution in which health insurance is:

Killer Drones & Spying on Americans

The seriousness of law professor Jonathan Turley, followed by the humor of Jon Steward. Hurley argues that, with respect to using drones abroad for targeted killing purposes, "President Barrack Obama is at war with the rule of law." Steward "busts Obama on his lies about surveillance."

New 2014 Obamacare Taxes and Fees

"The cost of President Obama’s massive health-care law will hit Americans in 2014 as new taxes pile up on their insurance premiums and on their income-tax bills," reports the New York Post. "Most insurers aren’t advertising the ObamaCare taxes that are added on to premiums, opting instead to discretely pass them on to customers while quietly lobbying lawmakers for a break."

Among the new taxes and fees:

• a 2% levy on every health plan, which is expected to net about $8 billion for the government in 2014 and increase to $14.3 billion in 2018.
• a $2 fee per policy that goes to a fund called the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute.
• a 3.5% user fee paid by insurance companies to sell medical plans on the HealthCare.gov web site.
• a 2.3% medical-device tax that will inflate the cost of items such as pacemakers, stents, and prosthetic limbs.
• a 0.9% increase on the 1.45 percent Medicare payroll tax for single earners of $200,000 and families over $250,000, as well as an extra 3.8% Medicare tax on unearned income such as investment dividends, rental income and capital gains.

The 'No Names-Just Metadata' NSA Lie

"In defending the NSA's telephony metadata collection efforts, government officials have repeatedly resorted to one seemingly significant detail: This is just metadata—numbers dialed, lengths of calls," writes the Atlantic. "No names; just metadata. New research from Stanford demonstrates the silliness of that distinction. Armed with very sparse metadata, Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler found it easy—trivially so—to figure out the identity of a caller."

They write:

We randomly sampled 5,000 numbers from our crowdsourced MetaPhone dataset and queried the Yelp, Google Places, and Facebook directories. With little marginal effort and just those three sources—all free and public—we matched 1,356 (27.1%) of the numbers. Specifically, there were 378 hits (7.6%) on Yelp, 684 (13.7%) on Google Places, and 618 (12.3%) on Facebook.

What about if an organization were willing to put in some manpower? To conservatively approximate human analysis, we randomly sampled 100 numbers from our dataset, then ran Google searches on each. In under an hour, we were able to associate an individual or a business with 60 of the 100 numbers. When we added in our three initial sources, we were up to 73.

How about if money were no object? We don’t have the budget or credentials to access a premium data aggregator, so we ran our 100 numbers with Intelius, a cheap consumer-oriented service. 74 matched.¹ Between Intelius, Google search, and our three initial sources, we associated a name with 91 of the 100 numbers.

Their results weren't perfect (and they note that the Intelius data was particularly spotty), but they didn't even try all that hard. "If a few academic researchers can get this far this quickly, it’s difficult to believe the NSA would have any trouble identifying the overwhelming majority of American phone numbers," they conclude.

It's also difficult to believe they wouldn't try. As federal district judge Richard Leon wrote in his decision last week, "There is also nothing stopping the Government from skipping the [National Security Letter] step altogether and using public databases or any of its other vast resources to match phone numbers with subscribers."

Obama's Top 10 Constitutional Violations in 2013

"It was hard to limit myself to 10 items," writes Ilya Shapiro, editor-in-chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review, "but these, in my judgment, represent the chief executive’s biggest dereliction this year of his duty to 'preserve, protect, and defend' the Constitution, and to 'take care that the law be faithfully executed':”

1. Delay of Obamacare's Out-of-Pocket Caps. The Labor Department announced in February that it was delaying for a year the part of the health care law that limits how much people have to spend on their own insurance.
2. Delay of Obamacare's Employer Mandate. Delayed requirement that employers of at least 540 people provide complying insurance or pay a fine.
3. Delay of Obamacare's Insurance Requirements. Following millions of insurance cancellations, delayed requirement that people purchase Obamacare-approved insurance plans.
4. Exemption of Congress from Obamacare. The requirement that Congressmen and their staff get insurance on Obamacare exchanges was quietly 'reinterpreted' in August to allow Washington elite to maintain their generous congressional benefits instead.
5. Expansion of the Employer Mandate Penalty Through IRS Regulation. The law has no penalties for employers in states that don't set up health care exchanges, but so many states refused to create health care exchanges that IRS rewrote regulations to impose penalties on employers in non-participating states anyway.
6. Political Profiling by the IRS. IRS continued to target tax-exempt organizations (begun in 2010) that referenced any of the following in their missions:  Tea Party, Patriots, Israel, government spending, debt, taxes, Constitution, and Obamacare.
7. Outlandish Supreme Court Arguments. Between January 2012 and June 2013, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the Justice Department's extreme positions 9 times in cases ranging from criminal procedure to property rights, religious liberty to immigration, securities regulation to tax law.
8. Recess Appointments. Obama appointed three members of the National Labor Relations Board, as well as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, while Senate was in session.
9. Assault on Free Speech and Due Process on College Campuses. The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights created a national 'blueprint' for tackling sexual harassment that urges a crackdown on 'unwelcome' speech and requires complaints to be heard in quasi-judicial procedures that deny legal representation, encourage punishment before trail, and convict based on a mere "more likely than not" standard.
10. Mini-DREAM Act. President Obama, contradicting his own previous statements claiming to lack authority, directed the Department of Homeland Security to issue work and residence permits to the so-called Dreamers.

Merry Christmas!

Oh, joy! Feminists Shellacked!

Camille Paglia aims a broadside at the feminist culture in a thoroughly enjoyable piece, It's a Man's World, and It Will Always Be!

A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology. [snip]

When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.

Paglia argues that ...

• "[M]any ambitious professional women" in other nations "seem to have found a formula for asserting power and authority in the workplace while still projecting sexual allure and even glamour. This is the true feminine mystique, which cannot be taught but flows from an instinctive recognition of sexual differences."
• "[M]en are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall."
• The modern economy's "is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role — but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!"

Read and enjoy her full article at Time magazine.

Contraception Mandate Struck Down

"Yesterday, Judge Brian Cogan of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, not only struck down Obamacare's contraception mandate as applied to religious non-profit organizations, but also sent a strong signal that federal courts were losing patience with President Obama's many stitches of executive power," writes Conn Carroll.

Previous courts had ruled against President Obama's contraception mandate as applied to for-profit entities (see Sebelius v Hobby Lobby), but this was the first court to hold that participating in Obama's scheme to provide free birth control is a substantial burden on the free practice of religion (specifically the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and its affiliate organizations).

The contraception mandate "directly compels plaintiffs, through the threat of onerous penalties, to undertake actions that their religion forbids," Cogan wrote. "There is no way that a court can, or should, determine that a coerced violation of conscience is of insufficient quantum to merit constitutional protection."

The court "forcefully rejected three key Obama defenses of the mandate:"

• that there was a compelling interest in uniform enforcement of the contraception mandate;
• that Obamacare's contraception mandate, as implemented for religious organizations, id not, in face, mandate contraception; and
• that Obama's failure to convince Congress to "fix" Obamacare authorized him to enforce his contraception mandate in the manner he did.

Read more in Federal Judge Calls Obamacare "Totally Ineffective" While Striking Down Contraception Mandate.

Is Pope Francis Promoting Sin?

That's the gist of an article by Harvard School of Government professor Lant Pritchett, and his thought-provoking argument will resonate with many conservatives and make a few liberals angry.

By dwelling on inequality, the pope is promoting envy. The Catholic Church, I had always understood, disapproves of envy, deeming it one of the seven deadly sins. I would have expected Francis to urge people to think of themselves in relation to God and to their own fullest potential. Encouraging people to measure themselves against others only leads to grief. Resenting the success of others is a sin in itself.

Pritchett cites chapter and verse to buttress his argument on the sin of envy, among them references to Cain and Abel, the Ten Commandments, and Annanias and Sapphira. The self-described "full-time preacher of economics" continues:

I am all for reducing poverty. I’ve spent most of my career working on that issue. I’m all for economic growth that’s inclusive and that raises the productivity and incomes of the poorest. I’m for social justice and attacking inequities. I’m against the privilege and corruption that denies opportunities to others. I am all for fairness, not least in economic affairs, and for state intervention when necessary to serve that purpose.

What I’m against is talking about “inequality” as if that term denoted any of those concerns. Poverty matters; injustice matters. Mere inequality is beside the point. [snip]

It’s argued most wealth ... comes not from creating value in a competitive market but from abuse of power, manipulation of markets or the entrenched advantages of inherited wealth. A lot of wealth surely does arise in that way. But this isn’t an argument against my point; it’s precisely my point. When we complain about inequality in the abstract we aren’t thinking about what is or isn’t fair or just or equitable. Those distinctions turn on the process that caused the inequality. So let’s stop talking about inequality and talk directly about the things we ought to care about: absolute deprivation, abusive power, rigged markets and unearned privilege.

Read his full article, Why is Pope Francis Promoting Sin?

Women Wrong to Think Workplace Unfair

So argues Naomi Schaefer Riley:

No matter how well women are doing relative to men, it doesn’t matter. They’re still the victims of discrimination — or so they think.

This, when women today earn more college degrees and advanced degrees than men, and have lower rates of unemployment. How are the decks are still stacked against them?

The new Pew Social Trends survey reports that “Millennial women . . . are just as likely as older generations to believe that women face an uphill climb in terms of being treated equally by society and by employers.” Indeed, “Fully three-quarters of Millennial women compared with 57 percent of Millennial men say the country needs to do more in order to bring about workplace equality.”

On the other hand, Pew found that among workers between the ages of 25 and 34, women’s hourly wages are 93 percent of men’s. And Kay Hymowitz, author of “Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys,” says that she suspects that gap would disappear completely were the data disaggregated between women who had children and women who did not. In fact, a 2010 study by Reach Advisors found that young, single, childless women earned more than their male counterparts in most metro US areas.

Having children clearly makes all the difference. Hymowitz says the “whole way the conversation is framed is wrong.” Feminists and policy makers, she notes, say that they want “absolute parity and that anything less represents real discrimination and injustice.” In fact, though, the lack of parity is largely the result of the choices so many women make for the sake of the next generation — working part time, taking time off to raise kids, asking for less demanding assignments, etc.

For instance, 34 percent of Millennial women told Pew they’re not interested in becoming a boss or a top manager, compared to only 25 percent of men. The reason seems obvious: Some of the Millennial women may already be parents, and many of the rest are still thinking about how to balance these issues down the line. [snip]

Maybe, but it’s the constant media drumbeat about supposed unfairness that’s making women think the decks are stacked against them at all. Consider, even though many women seem to believe the playing field isn’t level when it comes to wages and hiring, Pew finds that “relatively few working adults report these types of gender biases at their own workplace.”

In other words, the impression isn’t driven by what we actually experience, but by what we’re constantly told by others.

Read her full article, Women Think the Workplace is Unfair ... This is Why They're Wrong."

Real Unemployment Rate 11%

"The official unemployment rate has fallen to a five-year low of 7%," writes Ed Carson in Investor's Business Daily. "But put away the champagne. That gradual decline reflects a historic drop in labor force participation. Without that drop, joblessness would be 11.3%, holding at 11% or higher in every month but one in the last 50 months."

Obama 'Legalizes' IRS Abuse of Tea Party Groups

Attorney Cleta Mitchell, who represents several conservative organizations abused by the IRS, told attendees at the Institute's 2013 summer DC Intern Seminar:

I'm not surprised that the agents in the IRS decided it was completely appropriate to single out and target, terrorize, and harass conservative organizations. I think we will learn — because I've had enough conversations with conservative and tea party leaders around the country who were visited by the FBI ... I think it will come out at some point that the FBI classified the tea party groups as domestic terrorists, or at least were investigating them to see if they were domestic terrorists.

Yesterday, in an article titled IRS Targeting, Round Two, Kim Strassel @ Wall Street Journal wrote that the Obama "Treasury and IRS are back at it — this time in broad daylight."

In the media blackout of Thanksgiving week, the Treasury Department dumped a new proposal to govern the political activity of 501(c)(4) groups. The administration claims this rule is needed to clarify confusing tax laws. Hardly. The rule is the IRS's new targeting program—only this time systematic, more effective, and with the force of law.

That this rule was meant to crack down on the White House's political opponents was never in doubt. What is new is the growing concern by House Ways and Means Committee investigators that the regulation was reverse-engineered—designed to isolate and shut down the same tea party groups victimized in the first targeting round. Treasury appears to have combed through those tea party applications, compiled all the groups' main activities, and then restricted those activities in the new rule.

Flynn: Progressives Took Our Booze

Progressives have an unquenchable desire to rule other peoples' lives. Today it's Obamacare. Nearly 100 years ago, it was Prohibition; and that didn't turn out well for them either.

Eighty years ago today [Dec 5th], progressives woke up groggy after their fourteen-year bender in state-imposed sobriety.  ... In the throes of a throbbing political hangover, they blamed the disaster on everybody but themselves.

Progressives may remain oblivious to their boorish behavior when they crashed the party and stayed for 13 years, 10 months, 19 days, 17 hours, 32 minutes, and 30 seconds (surely parched Americans marked the days as though trapped on a desert island). But Americans need not indulge their collective amnesia on today’s anniversary.

Eight decades later, progressives, inebriated by the righteousness of their ideology, blame everyone else for the sins of their forefathers. Projecting one’s errors upon others ensures a repetition of those errors. This may not today manifest itself in relation to alcohol. But the crusading spirit to sterilize their fellow man of impurities — of tobacco and transfats, Big Gulps and Big Macs, and so many delights that make life worth living — surely remains.

Read Daniel J. Flynn's full article, Progressives Took Our Booze: 80 Years Ago Today Americans Took it Back, at the American Spectator.

We can only hope Obamacare goes down in equally glorious flames.

Progressives' Religious Fervor

With Obamacare, "the American people have had an unfiltered look at what progressive policy means to them, and they don't like it," writes Derek Hunter, adding "desperate times require desperate measures. Enter the religious appeal."

In a column reeking of desperation on par with a kid hoping for a unicorn under his Christmas tree, the Washington Post’s Ryan Cooper compiled a list of reasons “Why millennials will come around on Obamacare.” Aside from a desperate lack of understanding of health policy and how people work, the second reason Cooper lists stands out. He writes, “Going without health insurance is morally wrong.”

I’ll give you a minute to let that sink in.

But wait, writes Hunter (after citing two other recent examples of progressives' moral guilt-tripping**),

These are the same people who spent the better part of the last half-century proclaiming “government can’t legislate morality” on any issue remotely moral. [snip]

Harvard: Younger Millennials would "Throw Obama Out"

"The most startling finding of Harvard University's Institute of Politics [study]: A majority of Americans under age 25—the youngest millennials—would favor throwing Obama out of office," writes Ron Fournier @ National Journal.

Obama's support among Millennials has dropped to 41 percent, down 11 points in a year, according to Harvard's study of 2,089 Americans ages 18 to 29 conducted Oct. 30 through Nov. 11.  Younger MILs ages 18-24 are more critical than older MILs.

When asked if they would want to recall various elected officials, 45 percent of millennials said they would oust their member of Congress; 52 percent replied "all members of Congress" should go; and 47 percent said they would recall Obama. The recall-Obama figure was even higher among the youngest millennials, ages 18 to 24, at 52 percent.

This age group offers little support to Obamacare, the health care law that depends on youthful exuberance and financial support to succeed.

According to the poll, 57 percent of millennials disapprove of Obamacare, with 40 percent saying it will worsen their quality of care and a majority believing it will drive up costs. Only 18 percent say Obamacare will improve their care. Among 18-to-29-year-olds currently without health insurance, less than one-third say they're likely to enroll in the Obamacare exchanges.  [snip]

In addition to health care, domestic spying is an issue that puts Obama on the wrong side of the rising generation. While split on whether Edward Snowden is a "patriot" or a "traitor" for revealing Obama's surveillance programs, strong majorities of 18-to-29-year-olds oppose the government collecting information from social networks, Web-browsing histories, email, GPS locations, telephone calls, and text messages.

Fournier adds that the "results conform with a story I did this summer with the help of the Institute of Politics (The Outsiders: How Can Millennials Change Washington If They Hate It?), arguing that while Millennials are deeply committed to public service they don't see government as an efficient way to improve their lives or their communities."

The full Harvard study is here.

Health Care: Conservative Alternatives

Despite the Left's claim, conservative-leaning legislators have "introduced at least four comprehensive alternatives to Obamacare," argues Ashe Schow, and he lists them ... for the record.

The Patients' Choice Act, introduced on May 20, 2009, in the House by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and in the Senate by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. [Key features included: create a health care market through state-based exchanges, penalties for insurance companies that didn't accept patients with pre-existing conditions, and expand Health Savings Accounts.] There is no Congressional Budget Office score for this plan, so claims should be taken with a grain of salt, just as with Obamacare.

The Empowering Patients First Act that was introduced on July 30, 2009, by Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga, would first repeal Obamacare and replace it with a "patient-centered" solution that would provide tax incentives for purchasing health insurance, improve HSAs [Health Savings Accounts], allow health insurance pooling among individuals and small employers, allow insurance to be purchased across state lines [and more].  Again, there's no CBO score for this bill, but it's an alternative nonetheless.

The Patient OPTION Act was introduced on Aug. 1 by Rep. Paul Broun, R-GA., and would first repeal Obamacare and then focus on a patient-centered solution that would allow individuals to deduct all health care expenses, including insurance, increase contribution limits for HSAs, move Medicare to a "premium assistance program," allow for health insurance polling by small businesses [and more]. There is no CBO score for this bill either.

The American Health Care Reform Act was introduced on Sept. 18 by Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., and would also fully repeal Obamacare. The law would then increase access to portable, affordable health insurance, expand federal support for state high-risk pools and cap premiums of those pools, allow people with pre-existing conditions to move between markets so long as they maintain continuous coverage, introduce tort reform [and more]. This bill does not have a CBO score either.

Liberals Facing a Tough 2014

Liberals are "praying that this weekend’s relaunch of the Obamacare Web site will save them from an electoral bloodbath in 2014. Their hopes are misplaced. Here are five numbers that suggest that public anger over Obamacare will only grow as Election Day 2014 approaches," writes Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post.

• 5.5 million - That is how many people the administration needs to sign up in just 23 days because Obamacare drove them out of their health-care plans.
• 50 million - That is how many Americans will be surprised to find their employer-based health plans dropped or substantially changed next year because of Obamacare.
• 53 - That is the percentage of Americans who now say that President Obama is not 'honest or trustworthy'.
• 12 - That is the number of Senate Democrats up for reelection in 2014 who are complicit in Obama's lie.
• 7 - That is the number of states with vulnerable Democratic-held senate seats that also have Republican governors.

Meta-Analysis: Abortion-Breast Cancer Linked

China's one-child policy has yielded a huge data base of information about the effects of abortion:  China has "an average 8.2 million pregnancy terminations ever year, and 40 abortions for ever 100 live births," writes Dr. Mary L. Davenport, immediate past president of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

In the US we are used to abortion advocates claiming that the risk of elective abortion is relatively trivial, and major medical organizations denying any link between abortion and breast cancer.

Now a powerful new study from China published last week by Yubei Huang and colleagues suggests otherwise. The article, a meta-analysis pooling 36 studies from 14 provinces in China, showed that abortion increased the risk of breast cancer by 44% with one abortion, and 76% and 89% with two and three abortions.

Huang's study shows an even stronger increase than the 30% higher risk found in the 1996 meta-analysis by Joel Brind and colleagues on abortion as an independent risk factor for breast cancer. The Brind meta-analysis, combining the results of 23 studies, gave a more complete view than any single study. But even though it was the most comprehensive study on the topic at the time, it was disregarded by establishment medical groups.

Dr. Davenport argues it is a "disgrace that a more honest discourse about difficult medical topics can be found inthe People's Republic of China than in the USA."

Chinese researchers and physicians are unencumbered by abortion politics, and do not cover up data showing long term effects of induced abortion, as do their US counterparts in governmental, professional and consumer organizations.

Full study available here.

Study: Men and Women's Brains Different

"Scientists have found that the female brain is 'hard-wired' to be better at multitasking," reports UK Daily Mail of a study involving MRI images of 949 young men and women's brains.

The researchers discovered that women have far better connections between the left and right sides of the brain, while men display more intense activity within the brain’s individual parts, especially in the cerebellum, which controls motor skills.

Men also have better connections between the front and back of the brain, giving them a better ability to quickly perceive information and use it immediately to carry out complex tasks.

This means they are better at things such as learning to swim or, as the old bone of contention has it, parking a car. Women are better at, for example, remembering a face, which means making connections between different parts of the brain. [snip]

The report said: ‘The results showed fundamental sex differences in the architecture of the human brain.

‘Male brains facilitate connectivity between perception and co-ordinated action, whereas female brains facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.'

The images below show the brain mapping that occurred in men (upper set) and women (lower set):

The Soundtrack of Progressive Destruction

"2013 has been a banner year for damning self-portraits of American progressivism," writes Daren Jonescu in an American Thinker piece so delicious that it's impossible to stop quoting.

"If you like your plan, you can keep it." This is a perfect iteration of the basic lie that has fueled modernity's "progress" down the drain of history -- or History, as progressive thinkers would have it. [snip]

You have heard this lie, and witnessed the tyrannical dialectic it sets in motion, your whole life, as have your parents and grandparents. Variations on this theme have become the soundtrack of late modernity's decline. The theme remains the same; only the melodic details are changed to suit the collectivist totalitarian agenda item of the moment.

"If you like your current healthcare arrangements, you can keep them" -- except that our intention is to delegitimize, denigrate, and finally outlaw all private healthcare arrangements.

"If you like your 'negative rights,' you can keep them" -- except that the new positive rights we are gradually introducing into the political lexicon will necessarily override your life, liberty, and property, not to mention trumping all the secondary rights derived from those initial three, such as speech, association, and religion.

College Students Should be Angry

Today's college students have a right to be angry. Many pay exorbitant prices — that burdens them with deep debt — for a degree of questionable worth with decreasing prospects of a good career and positive return on investment. That anger should be channeled toward liberal con artists who routinely sell them a pack of lies, starting with their colleges and universities.

From Investor's Business Daily, Colleges Substitute Western Greats With Gender Studies:

Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald shocked a New York City audience at the 2013 Wriston Lecture this month with some examples of what leftist academics have done to the American college curriculum.

"Until 2011," she noted, "students majoring in English at UCLA had been required to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton — the cornerstones of English literature.

"Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the 'empire,' UCLA junked these individual author requirements and replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a course each in gender, race, ethnicity, disability or sexuality studies, imperial, transnational or post-colonial studies, and critical theory." [snip]

UCLA is far from alone, "but the UCLA coup was particularly significant because the English Department there was one of the last champions of the historically informed study of great literature uncorrupted by ideological overlay," Mac Donald noted.

IBD argues that "for parents who assume a degree from a famous college with a long-established reputation gives the wisdom of the ages to their kids, a closer look might reveal they're paying a lot of money for ideology, not edification."

Sadly it's the college students—not their parents—who pay the greatest price for higher ed's con job, and they are likely to be the last ones to discover how very badly they have been short-changed.

Hook-up Culture Hurts Boys Too

"An entire generation of parents has spent years panicking about the effects of hookup culture on girls. But what about boys?" asks Ryan Sager @ Time magazine. "That’s the question Rosalind Wiseman takes on in this week’s issue of TIME."

For her new book, Masterminds and Wingmen, she delves into the world of boys. As the mother of two boys, she was eager to make sure that their side of the story was not left out. During two years of research, she interviewed hundreds of boys across the country — individually, in groups, over the course of extended e-mail correspondences — and their stories are really quite striking.

As Wiseman writes, we assume that boys are the perpetrators and beneficiaries of hookup culture — and thus we tend to ignore its effects on them. But those effects, it turns out, can be rather rough.

Boys and young men are much more complicated than our popular culture acknowledges. Here, then, are nine surprising things Wiseman discovered about boys, drawn both from her book and from her piece in this week’s magazine.

Rosalind Wiseman's full article, What Boys Want, is behind Time's paywall, but Sager's preview article, 9 Reasons 'Hookup Culture' Hurts Boys Too, is online, and the reasons he lists may surprise the ladies.

OCare: Progressives Pick Winners & Losers

"Unlike drug addicts, alcoholics, or the obese — all of whom represent higher-than-average medical costs — smokers are the only such group with a pre-existing condition that ObamaCare penalizes," reports William La Jeunesse at Fox News.

It allows insurance companies to charge smokers up to 50 percent more than non-smokers for an identical policy, depending on the state and any subsidies the person might qualify for. [snip]

A study by nonpartisan Institute for Health Policy Solutions found some smokers could pay as much as 33 percent of their income in health care premiums, well in excess of what ObamaCare considers "affordable" health care.

The study presented three scenarios:

1. The premium for a young, non-smoker earning roughly the minimum wage will cost $708. The same policy for a smoker would cost $3,308, or up to 400 percent more.
2. Before subsidies, a non-smoker who is 59 or older would also pay $708 for a "silver" or mid-level policy. However, a smoker of the same age would pay $5,908.
3. In a worst-case scenario, an older couple who smokes could be "literally impoverished" by ObamaCare premiums, said the report. That couple could pay an $11,352 health care premium, or one-half their annual income of $23,000. By comparison, a non-smoking person over 59 years old would pay 90 percent less, or just $952 after federal subsidies.

It seems that Progressives have an insatiable appetite for controlling other peoples' lives and choices, whether it's the amount of salt they eat or the size of the soft drinks they buy. Remember that Progressives were the primary drivers of the Prohibition of alcohol in the early 1900s, too. 

"Redistribution is a loaded word"

In a Sunday New York Times article, reporter John Harwood quotes William Daley (then Obama's chief of staff) saying that "redistribution is a loaded word that conjures up all sorts of unfairness in people's minds. It's a word that, in the political world, you just don't use." Headlined "White House Memo: Don't Dare Call The Health Care Law 'Redistribution'," the article continues:

These days the word is particularly toxic at the White House, where it has been hidden away to make the Affordable Care Act more palatable to the public and less a target for Republicans, who have long accused Democrats of seeking “socialized medicine.” But the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law and lies at the heart of the insurance market disruptions driving political attacks this fall. [snip]

Now some of that redistribution has come clearly into view.

The law, for example, banned rate discrimination against women, which insurance companies called “gender rating” to account for their higher health costs. But that raised the relative burden borne by men. The law also limited how much more insurers can charge older Americans, who use more health care over all. But that raised the relative burden on younger people.

And the law required insurers to offer coverage to Americans with pre-existing conditions, which eased costs for less healthy people but raised prices for others who had been charged lower rates because of their good health.

Study: Plan B Pill Useless for Women over 176 Pounds

"In a major blow to birth control proponents, the European equivalent of Plan B - known as the 'morning after pill' - now includes a warning that the contraceptive is not effective for women over 165 pounds and does not work at all for women over 176 pounds," writes Nicole Bailey. "The implications are staggering: according to the Centers for Disease Control, the average weight of an American woman over 20 is 166.2 pounds."

Feminist outlet Jezebel pointed out that the saga began with a 2011 study:

...a 2011 study out of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland that found that "the risk of pregnancy was more than threefold greater for obese women compared with women with normal body mass index, whichever EC [Emergency Contraception] was taken." They also found that the risk of pregnancy was particularly high if that emergency contraception was made of levonorgestrel, the hormone found in many of the major over-the-counter morning after pills sold in the United States, like Plan B One-Step. The study recommended that overweight women use IUDs.

HRA Pharma, the European manufacturer of a drug essentially identical to America's Plan B, has followed up on the findings of that study and concluded that it is time to warn women that "the drug is completely ineffective for women who weigh more than 176 pounds and begins to lose effectiveness in women who weigh more than 165 pounds," reports Mother Jones.

Feds Profit Mightily from Student Loans

The Left once railed against "big banks" for the profits they made on student loans. Now look who's raking in all those profits. Reports education reporter David Jess of the Detroit Free Press:

The federal government made enough money on student loans over the last year that, if it wanted, it could provide maximum-level Pell Grants of $5,645 to 7.3 million college students.

The $41.3-billion profit for the 2013 fiscal year is down $3.6 billion from the previous year but still enough to pay for one year of tuition at the University of Michigan for 2,955,426 Michigan residents.

It’s a higher profit level than all but two companies in the world: Exxon Mobil cleared $44.9 billion in 2012, and Apple cleared $41.7 billion.

It's an even rosier picture for the greedy federal government over the next decade:

This summer, Congress passed a law tying interest rates on loans to the market. The law set rates for all the loans at different levels, but based them all on the 10-year U.S. Treasury rate and allowed rates to change each year.

For Stafford loans, both the subsidized and unsubsidized, the interest rate is the Treasury rate plus 2.05%, with a cap of 8.25%. Graduate student loan rates are the Treasury rate plus 3.6%, with a cap of 9.5%, and the parent loans are the Treasury rate, plus 4.6%, with a cap of 10.5%.

While offering immediate relief to students, those rates are expected to rise in coming years and give the federal government $175 billion in profits from student loans over the next decade.

That’s got students who are paying steamed.

“Instead of making a profit on student loans, why doesn't the government try to help out the millions of students who are struggling financially and at the very least, lower the interest rates?” Wilk said “I don’t understand how the government expects this generation to support themselves after graduation, starting out with a mound of debt and in a lot of areas, no job.”

Gillespie: Youth Revolting Against Obama

"Millennials may be young," writes libertarian Nick Gillespie, "but they're not stupid."

Citing the latest Quinnipiac poll showing 54% of 18- to 29-year-olds now disapprove of the job President Obama doing (compared to 36% who approve), Gillespie argues (with strong uncensored language) that the love affair between Obama/Democrats and youth actually began waning immediately after Obama took office in 2008.

In 2008, Obama won 66 percent of votes cast by 18-29 year olds. In 2012, he racked up just 60 percent. More tellingly, the participation rate among younger voters dropped precipitously between those elections, with Obama pulling 2.4 million fewer votes from 18-29 year olds in 2012. The second time around, he just wasn’t putting young asses in the voting booth anymore.

Obamacare may be the "cherry on top of a shit sundae," says Gillespie, but there are lots of other fault lines including Obama's stimulus fail, foreign war and nearly-war policies, increased deportation of illegals, drone strikes, privacy invasion and a government with way too much power over their lives.

Yet the biggest reason for the soured relationship is likely to be personal economics:

As bad as Obama’s time in office has been for older Americans, nobody has taken it on the chin quite as bad as kids under 30, who are more likely to be unemployed, broke, and facing decades of sub-par wages if and when they do finally get a job.

Health Care is a Woman's Issue

It's been said that women make the majority of family health care decisions, so it's not surprising that women would be the most upset with the president's false promises about Obamacare and the disaster his law has become for them in terms of policy cancellations, higher premiums and deductibles, poorer coverage and fewer doctor choices.

Indeed women are upset with the president, according to the CBS News poll released Nov 20, 2013.

The President's overall job approval rating has declined among many demographic groups since last month, including independents (a 12-point drop), men (down 9 points), and women (a 10-point drop). More women now disapprove than approve of the job Mr. Obama is doing as president.

Only 39% of women now approve of Mr. Obama's job performance, while 54% disapprove.  In October, the numbers among women were 49% approve, 46% disapprove.

OCare - Middle Class Revolt

Liberals designed Obamacare to hook the middle class on a new wealth redistribution drug, and they believed a majority of voters would quickly become addicted. It's not working. HotAir.com quotes a National Journal poll showing "a majority expects to see the middle class get hammered by ObamaCare."

The survey also produced adverse judgments on what the law will mean for other groups. Just 39 percent said the law will benefit the middle class, while 53 percent said it would harm it. That was also down significantly since September 2012, but essentially unchanged since last July when respondents split 36 percent positive to 49 percent negative.

Blaming 'White Soccer Moms'

From Investor's Business Daily editorial, Duncan Blames Common Core Fight on 'White Soccer Moms':

Perhaps nothing personifies the arrogant nanny state paternalism of the Obama administration more than this statement by Duncan on Friday: "It's fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were, and that's pretty scary."

Secretary Duncan made his comments about the Common Care State Standards (CCSS) before a group of school superintendents in Richmond, Va., to a meeting of the Council of Chief State Schools Officers organization (CCSSO). This is one of the two organizations that own the public license to the Common Core State Standards.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative was devised by a group of the nation's governors and backed by the Obama administration in 2009 with the goal of setting a uniform standard for grades K-12 nationwide. Some 45 states, in many cases enticed by federal grants, have signed on. It has since morphed into what many consider an attempt to nationalize education and control what future generations think and know. [snip]

As Valerie Strauss points out in the Washington Post's "The Answer Sheet," New York was the first large state to implement the standards and give students new standardized tests supposedly aligned with the Core. Test scores plummeted by 30% this year. [snip]

Free minds are the last thing Common Core advocates have on their minds. Common Core contains statements in its lessons such as "The commands of government officials must be obeyed by all" and "The wants of an individual are less important than the well-being of the nation."

In the middle school, Common Core calls upon students to read only the First Amendment. Can't have 14-year-old minds learning about the other amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights, such as, say, the Second Amendment or the 10th — those defending the right to bear arms and limits on federal power.

Public education as we know it is a relatively recent phenomenon. This nation was built on the foundation of the proverbial little red schoolhouse and local control.

Now we are to be in thrall to ideologically driven teachers unions and education statists who seemingly share V.I. Lenin's terrifying belief: "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted."

Census Bureau 'Faked' Unemployment Data

"In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington," reports John Crudele at the New York Post in an article worth reading in its entirety.

The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.

And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.

And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.

“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.

Is there any government agency that Americans can trust these days?

---

UPDATE: Instapundit reminds us that Obama moved the Census Bureau control to the White House in first term.

O and Ocare Sinking Like Rocks

Arguing that "you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the unraveling of Obamacare," Jonah Goldberg describes the "Obamacare Schadenfreudarama" as "one of the most enjoyable political moments in my lifetime."

Alas, the English language is not well equipped to capture the sensation I’m describing, which is why we must all thank the Germans for giving us the term “schadenfreude” — the joy one feels at the misfortune or failure of others. The primary wellspring of schadenfreude can be attributed to Barack Obama’s hubris — another immigrant word, which means a sinful pride or arrogance that causes someone to believe he has a godlike immunity to the rules of life. ... In every tale of hubris, the transgressor is eventually slapped across the face with the semi-frozen flounder of reality.

Polls show the downward spiral for Obama and Obamacare. Last week it was the Quinnipiac poll. Obama's approval rating fell to 39%, and disapproval of Obamacare has risen to 55%. The shocker: 54% of young voters disapprove of Obama, and 51% of them disapprove of OCare.

This week it's the ABCNews/WashingtonPost poll. Obama's approval rating is down to 42%, and 57% disapprove of Obamacare. While hiding today's actual poll numbers, here's how the news story describes young adult voters:

At the same time, there’s also one core support group in which Obama is hurting – young adults, a group he won by an historic margin in 2008, and strongly again in 2012. The president’s overall approval rating has lost 23 points among adults age 18 to 29 since January, his steepest loss in any group. Their view that the country’s headed in the wrong direction has gained 20 points since May. And in just the past month, opposition to the health care law has jumped by 16 points among under-30s, with strong opposition up by 21 points.

Rhetoric has yielded to reality now that young healthy adults are getting hit by a law specifically designed to force them to "share their wealth" with older and less healthy folks. As Fox News reports, even college students are either seeing soaring premium cost increases in their previously cheap college health plans, or finding them cancelled entirely.

All of which explains this trend line produced by Gallup polling:



The pity is that it took so long for so many Americans to figure out what conservatives knew all along.

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UPDATE: More bad news for the president. Politico reports this additional tidbit from the ABC/WashPo poll:

As more bad poll numbers continue to pour in for President Barack Obama, a new survey finds that if the 2012 election matchup were held this month, Mitt Romney would hold the edge with the voters.

Romney topped Obama 49 percent to 45 percent among registered voters in the Washington Post-ABC News poll released Tuesday. Among all Americans, the 2012 rivals would be tied, at 47 percent.

[see also President Romney? Yes, If The Election Were Held Today ]

Government's Assault on Privacy

From McClatchy news today:

U.S. agencies collected and shared the personal information of thousands of Americans in an attempt to root out untrustworthy federal workers that ended up scrutinizing people who had no direct ties to the U.S. government and simply had purchased certain books.

Federal officials gathered the information from the customer records of two men who were under criminal investigation for purportedly teaching people how to pass lie detector tests. The officials then distributed a list of 4,904 people – along with many of their Social Security numbers, addresses and professions – to nearly 30 federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. [snip]

It turned out, however, that many people on the list worked outside the federal government and lived across the country. Among the people whose personal details were collected were nurses, firefighters, police officers and private attorneys, McClatchy learned. Also included: a psychologist, a cancer researcher and employees of Rite Aid, Paramount Pictures, the American Red Cross and Georgetown University. [snip]

The unprecedented creation of such a list and decision to disseminate it widely demonstrate the ease with which the federal government can collect and share Americans’ personal information, even when there’s no clear reason for doing so.

The President's Lawlessness

President Obama announced today that "he will allow" insurance companies to "renew for one year any health plans that do not meet Obamacare's coverage standards." The announcement prompted this reaction from Timothy Sandefur:

Amazing. The Obama Administration has decided to temporarily "fix" the mess they've made—by simply withholding enforcement of the law they championed. That is to say, by allowing people to break the law. Again. I mean, that's what happened with the Employer Mandate, also: it wasn't "delayed," as the news stories put it. What happened was that the Administration simply instructed administrative agencies not to enforce the law's requirements.

As Christina and I observe in an article coming in the next issue of Regulation, this sort of behavior indicates a profound failing with Obamacare: one that runs much deeper than the policy problems that have been the focus of recent debates. From its unconstitutional origin, to the rewrite that the Roberts Court put on the law, to the unconstitutional delegation of lawmaking power to unelected, independent bureaucrats, to the halting and unpredictable manner in which it is being enforced or not--depending on political pressure—Obamacare has been a sustained assault on the concept of the rule of law itself.

OCare Millennial Ads: Desperate and Insulting

Just how stupid does the Obama Administration think Millennials are?  Really stupid, if the new Obamacare ads are an indicator. Here's one of the OCare ads rolled out this week. It's supposed to motivate Millennials to sign up for OCare insurance to get the "free" birth control:


Arizona State University student Annica Benning @ College Fix calls the ads "insulting on many levels," including belittling the progress women have made over the years toward equality and independence.

In order to get the "free" birth control, of course, MILs must sign up for Obamacare insurance. In Colorado, where the ads were released, the Obamacare insurance premium costs an average $192.35 per month for adults age 27 (see Heritage Foundation state-by-state estimates).

So Colorado Susie’s cheap $9 per month birth control pills just went up to $192.35 per month.

For a laugh, we edited OCare's ad to bring a little honesty to it:

Who is responsible for this marketing wonder?  Per Michelle Malkin,

The “Got Insurance?” campaign is the lame brainchild of two “progressive” outfits with dubious nonprofit status: ProgressNow and the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative. Their previous claim to fame: a “Thanks, Obamacare” social-media movement to propagandize praise and gratitude for the federal mandate.

If the Democrats aren't careful, they'll wrestle the "Stupid Party" label from the GOP!

Pollster Kellyanne Conway on Cuccinelli, Christie & Women

Conservatives should take 3 key lessons from November's gubernatorial races, pollster (and Institute board member) Kellyanne Conway told NRO's Kathryn Lopez in an interview.

1. Obamacare is poison.  Despite no money, Virginia candidate Ken Cuccinelli closed a double-digit negative gap against Obamacare advocate Terry McAuliffe to a mere -2.5% on Election Day. Given another week [or, we could add, RINO donor support], Cuccinelli would likely have won.
2. The "War on Women" has run its course. NJ candidate Chris Christie's opponent, Barbara Buono, used the same "abortion, anyone, anytime, anywhere" playbook as McAuliffe in Virginia and lost to Christie by 34 points.
3. Don't play your opponent's game. Both sides [in the Virginia race] went negative early and stayed negative. Women prefer positive solutions to negative slights.

Conway has one piece of advice looking forward to 2016: 

What must be resisted is allowing a bunch of donors and consultants to proclaim “who can win” and “who can’t win” three years before the election. It is silly, unprovable, designed to pad the pockets of consultants and dissuade conservative candidates, and is never followed by the Left. They nominate non-household names (Carter, Clinton, Obama) and Republicans nominate people known best for having lost previously (Dole, Romney, McCain).

Obamacare, Common Core, and economic growth will be among the important questions to GOP primary voters. The ability to connect with and convince working-class voters and others who remain elusive to the GOP will also matter.

Read the full interview.

McCarthy: Obama's Massive Fraud

"If he were a CBO in the private sector" the headline of Andrew McCarthy's article continues, "he'd be prosecuted for felony fraud for his repeated claim, If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep it. Period.

Fraud is a serious federal felony, usually punishable by up to 20 years’ imprisonment — with every repetition of a fraudulent communication chargeable as a separate crime. In computing sentences, federal sentencing guidelines factor in such considerations as the dollar value of the fraud, the number of victims, and the degree to which the offender’s treachery breaches any special fiduciary duties he owes. Cases of multi-million-dollar corporate frauds — to say nothing of multi-billion-dollar, Bernie Madoff–level scams that nevertheless pale beside Obamacare’s dimensions — often result in terms amounting to decades in the slammer.

Obama's claims put him in the company of Martha Stewart, Bernie Madoff and Goldman Sachs for making statements he has known to be misleading and false since 2010.

Barack Obama is guilty of fraud — serial fraud — that is orders of magnitude more serious than frauds the Justice Department routinely prosecutes, and that courts punish harshly. The victims will be out billions of dollars, quite apart from other anxiety and disruption that will befall them.

The president will not be prosecuted, of course, but that is immaterial. As discussed here before, the remedy for profound presidential corruption is political, not legal. It is impeachment and removal. “High crimes and misdemeanors” — the Constitution’s predicate for impeachment — need not be indictable offenses under the criminal code. “They relate chiefly,” Hamilton explained in Federalist No. 65, “to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” They involve scandalous breaches of the public trust by officials in whom solemn fiduciary duties are reposed — like a president who looks Americans in the eye and declares, repeatedly, that they can keep their health insurance plans ... even as he studiously orchestrates the regulatory termination of those plans; even as he shifts blame to the insurance companies for his malfeasance ...

It is highly unlikely that Barack Obama will ever be impeached. It is certain that he will never again be trusted. Republicans and sensible Democrats take heed: The nation may not have the stomach to remove a charlatan, but the nation knows he is a charlatan. The American people will not think twice about taking out their frustration and mounting anger on those who collaborate in his schemes.

Hemingway: Marriage Culture, or Government Culture?

"The more we move away from a marriage culture, the more we move to a government culture," tweeted Mollie Hemingway following the Virginia election in which candidate Ken Cuccinelli won the 'married women' vote but lost the 'single women' vote. She explains more fully in Pick One: Marriage Culture or Government Culture, which is worth reading in its entirety.

The University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project came out with a fascinating report (“When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America by Brad Wilcox“) showing that marriage in America is becoming something of an elite institution, reserved for older individuals. Wealthy white people are getting married and having strong marriages. Other folks less so. Far less so. Delayed marriage has both costs and benefits. It’s worked out well for elite women and helped them have more career advancement. But the failure to marry has had some serious destabilizing effects on non-elite women.

One of those effects on non-elite singles is economic instability. According to the report, "[c]ompared to those continuously married, those who never marry have a reduction in wealth of 75 percent, and those who divorced and didn't remarry have a reduction of 73 percent."  Hemingway concludes:

It’s pretty simple, really. It may be popular to pretend that women and men are identical, but women and the children they love are the most vulnerable to the downsides of a culture where marriage is delayed or forgotten. We bear far more economic risk and suffer through the deleterious effects of instability. Women in strong marriages tend to have their basic needs cared for by their own family unit and the civil society closest to them. Women who are not in strong marriages tend to rely on the government. Voting patterns reflect how women’s incentives change with changes in their marital status.

We should never forget Julia, President Obama’s central character in the “War on Women” campaign. She lived “her entire life by leaning on government intervention, dependency and other people’s money rather than her own initiative or hard work,” as David Harsanyi wrote. And she never married.

No, we are not a democracy

If this short video can explain the difference between a republic and a democracy (and various other forms of government) so easily and effectively, why do our public schools teach it so poorly?   

Chart: Obamacare Premiums by State

The Heritage Foundation has put together this chart comparing the state-by-state cost of health insurance premiums before and after Obamacare. Millennial residents in 46 states and the District of Columbia will see increases in their premiums—a whopping 252.5% increase for Virginians, from $165 per month to $581.55 per month). Only in five states will residents see a reduction in premiums: Colorado, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Rhode Island. (View large image.)

Shutdown: Conservatives' Honorable Battle

"In the campaign to persuade America of their big lie — that the House Republicans shut down the govern — the White House and its media chorus appear to have won this round," writes Pat Buchanan. "This is an honorable battle lost, not a war. ... And if Republicans are paralyzed by polls produced by this three-week skirmish, they should reread the history of the party and the movement to which they profess to belong."

Recounting conservatives' long-term success following a similar internal party struggle in the early 1960s between the conservative Barry Goldwater camp and the liberal Nelson Rockefeller camp, Buchanan predicts that the "people who fought the battle of Obamacare will be proven right to have fought it, and America will come to see this."

House Voted 11 Times to Reopen Govt

For the record, Matt Vespa chronicles the 11 times the "House GOP voted to reopen the government but were blocked by Senate Democrats and the president" between September 20 and October 4, 2013.

Calculator for Obamacare Insurance Premiums

From NPR:

Nearly all Americans starting Jan. 1, 2014, or else they'll be liable for a tax penalty. If you've asked yourself, "How much will Obamacare cost me?"  We can help you find the answer.

A calculator produced by the Kaiser Family Foundation in collaboration with NPR allows shoppers to find out if they qualify for subsidized insurance coverage or Medicaid. Enter your ZIP code, income, age, family size and a few other factors into the calculator to get subsidy estimates and insurance premiums available for coverage sold on the marketplaces, or exchanges, once enrollment begins.

The calculator makes use of premium data from 46 states plus the District of Columbia. The remaining four states (Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York and Vermont) either set premiums using different formulas or haven't provided data yet.

Campus Discussion: Obamacare Likely to Fail

E-mail from a grad student on Obamacare class discussions:

We had a class discussion about why Obamacare is likely to fail. The professor is a major lib but he is not enthusiastic about Obamacare one bit. That is mostly due to the fact he would rather have a more radical “efficient” single-payer system but nonetheless he rarely has any nice things to say about it.

One valid point he made is how essential getting young people on board with Obamacare is to its success. If they can’t get the young people on board to pay the higher prices and subsidize the healthcare costs of the older population, the whole plan will be an epic failure.

His point was that even if they get the websites up and working by the January deadline, Obamacare may be dead on arrival because young people (at least for the foreseeable future) would rather pay the penalty fee than buy the insurance, most of which is outrageously priced. If young people “couldn’t afford to be insured” before O-care, how can they be expected to afford it now? Especially since employers are by-and-large cutting employee hours because of crippling costs to insure them all…

Anyhow, there is an interesting article that talks about this on Human Events: http://www.humanevents.com/2013/10/08/healthy-young-key-to-obamacare-arent-buying-it/

This is a “sleeping giant” that hasn’t gotten as much attention because of the shutdown but is sure to explode at some point.

Another looming problem that is creeping out of the woodwork is the fact that they are unable to calculate subsidy eligibility. There are some “calculators” floating around on the internet to estimate the cost but the govt. itself can’t tell you how much subsidy you qualify for until the deadline actually gets here. HUGE problem considering this was one of the big pitches of Obamacare…the poorest people who would qualify hypothetically for those subsidies to purchase healthcare coverage won’t even know how much it will actually cost them until the bill comes.

So I guess the big point is, even if they succeed in getting a one-year delay on the individual mandate, it is likely that Obamacare will implode on its own.  This is obviously both good and bad – depends on the extent of the damage to the economy by that point, also depends on what the proposed “next step” is…. far left may use it as an argument for a “more efficient single-payer system” (like my professor). I am not sure how well that would succeed, though stranger things have happened…

Hayward: Students Blame Obama for Shutdown!?!

University of Colorado students were asked, Who do you blame for the shutdown?  Their answers, captured in a 2:30 video posted by Steven Hayward at powerlineblog.com, are very entertaining! 

How Much Will 'We the People' Take?

"The Preamble to the Constitution clearly identifies our country's sovereign: 'We the people'," writes Mark Meckler. "Yet in 2013 is the government 'for the people', or is it actively against us?" He cites many examples of how the federal government actively pursues agendas in direct defiance of voters' wishes, including NSA's domestic spying on innocent Americans. Then there's Obamacare:

The majority of Americans opposed Obamacare, the most sweeping piece of social legislation in decades, before its passage. Yet Washington passed it in the most partisan vote in 100 years. The voters now oppose it by an even larger margin, and yet even now the politicians refuse the most modest revisions. Efforts to amend, repeal, or defund Obamacare are labeled as “hostage taking,” “terrorism,” and the acts of “anarchists.”

Examples of the federal government defying the will of the people are legion today. Instead of acting at our behest and representing us, they repeatedly defy us, even on issues on which we are not even closely divided.

As an example, the latest Marist/McClatchy poll shows that 83 percent of those polled believe laws requiring voters to “show identification in order to vote” are a “good thing.” Only 13 percent see those laws as a “bad thing.” A full 72 percent of Democrats see voter ID as a “good thing.” In fact, 65 percent of those who see themselves as “very liberal” favor voter ID laws. And yet the Justice Department, under the direction of this administration, continues to work to thwart voter ID laws passed in state after state. The will of the people is not honored – even though the Supreme Court has clearly upheld the constitutionality of voter ID requirements.

It's not that Americans haven't figured it out. In a new Fox News poll conducted Oct 1-3, 2013, "almost all voters—88 percent—say 'the government is in charge of the people'. That includes 83 percent of Democrats, 88 percent of independents and 94 percent of Republicans. Only 8 percent feel 'the people are in charge of the government'."

The question, says Meckler, is, How much will we take?

Reynolds: Washington Isn't Working

"There are two Americas, all right," writes Glenn Reynolds in USA Today. "One America can launch rockets. The other America can't even launch a website."

There are two Americas, all right. There's one that works -- where new and creative things happen, where mistakes are corrected, and where excellence is rewarded. Then there's Washington, where everything is pretty much the opposite. That has been particularly evident over the past week or so. One America can launch rockets. The other America can't even launch a website.

In Washington, it's been stalemate, impasse, and theater -- the kind of place where a government shutdown leads park rangers to complain, "We've been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It's disgusting." Well, yes. The politics don't work, the websites don't work -- even for the people who manage to log on -- and the government shutdown informs us that most of government is "non-essential." Instead of correcting mistakes or rewarding excellence, it's mostly finger-pointing, blame-shifting, and excuse-making.

Meanwhile, in the other America -- the one where people have their own money and ideas invested, and where they get the credit for their successes and pay the price for their failures -- things are going a lot better. Just a couple of examples:

Read his column.

Obamacare Follies (contd)

Welcome to the real world, Ms. Vinson and Mr. Waschura:

Cindy Vinson and Tom Waschura are big believers in the Affordable Care Act. They vote independent and are proud to say they helped elect and re-elect President Barack Obama.

Yet, like many other Bay Area residents who pay for their own medical insurance, they were floored last week when they opened their bills: Their policies were being replaced with pricier plans that conform to all the requirements of the new health care law.

[snip]

"I was laughing at Boehner — until the mail came today," Waschura said, referring to House Speaker John Boehner, who is leading the Republican charge to defund Obamacare.

"I really don't like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family's pocket each year, that's otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy."

Both Vinson and Waschura have adjusted gross incomes greater than four times the federal poverty level — the cutoff for a tax credit. And while both said they anticipated their rates would go up, they didn't realize they would rise so much.

"Of course, I want people to have health care," Vinson said. "I just didn't realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally."

[Obamacare's Winners and Losers in Bay Area, San Jose Mercury News, 10/5/13]

Fox News' Neil Cavuto on this 'stinking' law:

Carter: When the Bleeding Heart Becomes the Iron Fist

From Dave Carter @ ricochet.com:

Welcome to liberal utopia, where barriers are not erected against terrorists or illegal aliens on our nation's borders, but rather against citizens, and where wheelchair-bound veterans enroute to honor their comrades face tighter security than terrorists enroute to murder a US Ambassador.  This is where up is down, wrong is right, illegality is celebrated as progress, and where Constitutionalism is derided as racist.  No longer relegated to the fever swamps of academic fancy, utopia has acquired real estate and made known its demands.

"Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual…" the First Lady warned us, and she wasn't just whistling Alinsky either.  Under King Barack's Reign of Error, your life is no longer your own, for you are now commanded to enter into private contracts by virtue of your simple existence on the planet.  Why?  Because our Sovereign and his fellow travelers are compassionate, of course. Their hearts bleed for you,…almost as much as your pocketbook will bleed for them.

[snip]

The federal government has shut down some 17 times previously, and at no time were these memorials closed. Is our Sovereign so besotted with power, has his impudent leftism so robbed him of reason that he fails to understand what is so obvious: That in barricading Americans from memorials and icons that stand as testimony to an exceptional culture founded precisely on liberty from oppressive government, he perfectly validates the arguments of the right?

Read the full article, "When the Bleeding Heart Becomes the Iron Fist."