News of the Week for December 1^st, 2013

• Obama Scandals
• Gun Rights
• Hide the Decline
• Obamacare
• War & Terror
• National News
• Economy & Taxes
• International News
• Opinion

 

Obama Scandals

 

Why Did Obama Lie About Health Care?
At this point, everyone understands that President Obama and his fellow Democrats (including most if not all of the Democratic Senators who are up for re-election next year) lied when they told us that if we like our health care plan, we can keep it. That was only one of a number of lies that were used to sell Obamacare: the average family will save $2,500 annually; if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor, Obamacare will mitigate the budget deficit, and so on. But why? What was the end toward which this epic deception was the means?

Gun Rights

 

Why opposition to gun control has increased over the last half-century
Economist Bryan Caplan notes that support for gun control — specifically, banning handguns or pistols — has decreased dramatically since the 1950s and 1960s. Back in 1959 Gallup reported that 60% of Americans favored banning possession of “pistols and revolvers,” while now 74% oppose banning “the possession of handguns,” except by police.

Hudak will resign seat to end recall threat, hold Democrats’ Senate majority
State Sen. Evie Hudak has decided to resign rather than risk facing a recall election that, should she lose, would flip control of the senate to Republicans, FOX31 Denver was first to report Wednesday.

The Gun Confiscation Notice an NYC Resident Reportedly Received Will Likely Send Chills Down Your Spine
New York City has reportedly started sending out confiscation notices ordering gun owners to “immediately surrender” rifles and/or shotguns capable of holding more than five rounds of ammunition. It is illegal to possess a rifle or shotgun with the capacity to hold more than five rounds in the city, according to NYC Administrative Code 10-306 (b).

Hide the Decline

Environment &
“Green Energy”

 

Michael “Piltdown” Mann melts down at HuffPo
There’s really no way to describe this screed other than a meltdown.

Obamacare

Government in Healthcare

 

Almost 80 million with employer health care plans could have coverage canceled
Almost 80 million people with employer health plans could find their coverage canceled because they are not compliant with ObamaCare, several experts predicted.

Supreme Court Weighs New Health Law Dispute
President Barack Obama’s health care law is headed for a new Supreme Court showdown over companies’ religious objections to the law’s birth-control mandate.

Mark Halperin: Obamacare Contains “Death Panels”
The Affordable Care Act contains provisions for “death panels,” which decide which critically-ill patients receive care and which won’t, according to Mark Halperin, senior political analyst for Time magazine.

Kevin D. Williamson’s smackdown of Leftist healthcare talking points

#ObamaCare As Community Organizing Tool
A community organizer’s gotta community organize, you know. If ObamaCare can’t reliably hook people up with health insurance, at least it can create an engine for agitating Democratic constituencies.

Boy with cancer loses coverage after Obamacare launch
Bureaucrats won’t help unless he is ‘pregnant or an illegal alien’

 

War & Terror

 

Concern Mounts in China’s Air-Defense Zone
Beijing Sends Fighter Jets, Even as It Dials Back Warnings

National

 

Stark’s Revenge: Bad Blood Lingers With Former Foe
To avenge his defeat, former Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., has promised to put his financial means and political mettle toward ousting his successor.

NJ couple shows receipt & credit card bill refuting gay server’s ‘stiffed on tip’ story
After the story went viral recently that a gay waitress at a NJ restaurant was left a hateful note about her lifestyle in lieu of a tip, a family has come forward to say that they did in fact tip that waitress and never left any such note. And they’ve provided a copy of their receipt as well as what they claim is a credit card bill that disputes the waitress’ story.

Tupelo school officials investigate assignment
It’s one piece of paper that has certain social media sites buzzing and is now the subject of an investigation within the Tupelo Public School District.

Rand Paul’s Urban Agenda
Despite his good intentions, Paul shows us that Republicans still don’t understand cities’ needs.

Men and women have different regrets after sex, study suggests
Men most often regret not having sex with more people while women frequently regret having sex with the wrong partner, according to a recently released study.

SF Protesters to Obama: Please Be a Dictator!
When Obama’s motorcade rocketed around San Francisco on Monday, very few locals even noticed his presence, and fewer still cared. The crowds awaiting him at each presidential fundraiser were by far the smallest I’d seen in over five years of covering his visits here. Ticket sales to at least one of the events were so sluggish that prices had to be lowered to fill the empty seats. Out in the street, rubberneckers and protesters had dwindled to the bare minimum. This is what happens when a hero disappoints: you don’t turn on him in anger, but rather just tune him out and move on to other interests.

Bowie State Student Harassed by Administrators for Speaking Out About ObamaCare Disaster
So much for freedom of speech on a college campus. The bigots at Bowie State in Maryland have been giving this young man grief since he dared to criticize King Obama and have called him a wannabe grandson of Clarence Thomas. How nice. Here’s Eugene Craig with Megyn Kelly Tuesday night.

Family Forced to Dig Up Vegetable Garden or Face Fines
The one thing I really wanted when I lived in my post-college two-bedroom apartment was a place to grow vegetables. The thought of being able to walk outside and grab something for dinner was all too appealing for a newly minted dietitian. Much to my husband’s chagrin, the first thing I made him do when we moved into our house (after painting) was build two raised-bed vegetable gardens. I immediately packed them with seeds: spinach, romaine, red peppers, green peppers, onions, carrots, broccoli. You name it, I planted it.

Common Core third grade book goes full Dear Leader on Obama
The ground is being laid for future racial strife over Barack Obama once he is out of office. His fanatical supporters, especially in the African-American community which has remained solidly in his camp despite all his demonstrated incompetence and lies, are being set up to see him as a martyr.

An Academic Cartel?
How is a tenured professor like a drug lord? How is a new Ph.D. researcher like a street-level drug dealer?

Colleges Substitute Western Greats With Gender Studies
Education: Parents pay a fortune to send their kids to big-name colleges, and they expect strong scholarship in return. More and more, what they’re getting ranges from drivel to leftist indoctrination.

Berkeley on the Hudson?
My conservative cousin from New York writes occasionally for Power Line about the City in which he has lived his entire life. In this post, he reflects on the election of a new mayor

‘Genderqueer’ rising: Colleges welcome kids who identify as neither male nor female
The weekly meetings of Mouthing Off!, a group for students at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, always start the same way. Members take turns going around the room saying their names and the personal pronouns they want others to use when referring to them — she, he or something else.

 

Economy
& Taxes

 

About Half of Kids With Single Moms Live in Poverty
Children raised in single-parent households in the U.S. are far more likely to live in poverty than children with both parents present, according to Census figures released Monday. As a result, far more black and Hispanic children are raised in poverty than white kids.

Debtor’s Prisons Make a Comeback
It’s like a Dickens novel come to life. The Economist has an eye-opening write up on the rise of “debtor’s prisons” in the American criminal justice system. Here’s how it works in a nutshell: people who can’t afford to pay fines for things like expired license tags and speeding tickets are put on probation under the supervision of private firms whose income comes from adding additional monthly fees to the balance the accused already owes. Those who continue to be delinquent are then sometimes thrown into prison, until a family member or friend can pay them out.

 

International

 

Two Opposing Parties Claim Win in Honduras Presidential Election
The conservative ruling party and a leftist coalition both claimed victory in the Honduras presidential election.

Why two best friends, 40, with non-life threatening diseases want to take their own lives after being inspired by euthanasia talk
Nancy Vermeulen, 43, suffered serious complication from anti-obesity surgery and can now only consume liquids
Pegie Liekens was diagnosed with MS in 2011

Is Christianity Dying in Britain?
Like an Old Testament prophet telling the Israelites that they were doomed, Lord Carey has been warning Anglicans for years of their possible annihilation. The Church is “one generation away from extinction,” he declares. The reality is less dramatic, but the story is not altogether wrong.

The single most objectionable thing about the EU (in a crowded field)
Shall I tell you the worst thing about the EU? It’s not the waste or the corruption or the Michelin-starred lifestyles of its leaders. It’s not the contempt for voters or the readiness to swat referendum results aside. It’s not the way that multi-nationals and NGOs and all manner of corporate interests are privileged over consumers. It’s not the pettifogging rules that plague small employers. It’s not the Common Agricultural Policy or the Common Fisheries Policy. It’s not the anti-Britishness or the anti-Americanism. It’s not even the way in which the euro is inflicting preventable poverty on tens of millions of southern Europeans.

“Liberal” Sweden allows paedophile to adopt a child
Sweden has a reputation for being very “liberal”. But whose liberty are they protecting in allowing a child rapist to adopt? Political correctness goes madder than usual. And it’s all a bit sick, no?

Montreal School Board Caves To Homosexual Group, Replaces “Mother” And “Father” With “Parent 1” And “Parent 2”
The good news is that unlike the Toronto District School Board, the Montreal School Board hasn’t (yet) added Parent 3, Parent 4, and Parent 5.

Venezuela’s Maduro accuses 99 percent of businesses of “price gouging,” vows to punish more “capitalist parasites”
Venezuela’s nationwide municipal elections are just over a week away, and Nicolas Maduro — Hugo Chavez’s personally selected successor, as Maduro is excessively fond of vehemently reminding people — is putting his new ‘emergency’ decree powers to work to continue to fight against the “economic war” that his political opponents and imperial foreign powers are waging in concert against him. Or, at least, the economic war Maduro is pretending that these shady forces are waging against him, the better to contrive an outside enemy responsible for Venezuela’s deep-seated economic troubles rather than naming the country’s socialist system of price controls and top-down intervention as the true culprit.

 

Opinion

 

Ace of Spades’ Talking Points for Talking With Your Obnoxious Progressive Family Members About Obamacare This Thanksgiving
1. Hey remember when you said that Obamacare was going to work great, and then, when people asked you how it actually worked, you sort of implied they were stupid for not knowing, and yet you never provided any evidence that you had any idea of how it was supposed to work yourself? Yeah, you were wrong to do that.

Do Single-Family Homes Threaten the Planet?
A plan to squeeze most residents of the San Francisco Bay Area into multifamily housing offers a test case of whether land-use bureaucracies nationwide, encouraged by the Obama administration, should be allowed to transform American lifestyles under the pretext of combating climate change.

Obamacare’s Threat to Liberalism
here’s a term of art that the Obama White House uses to describe its neurotic supporters who instantly race to the worst-case scenario: They are known as “bed-wetters.” Two months into the dysfunctional life of healthcare.gov, however, that seems a perfectly appropriate physiological reaction.

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert comic, wants to kill his father and kill you if you don’t agree

Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World
In “Inventing Freedom”, Daniel Hannan reflects on the historical origin and spread of the principles that have made America great, and their role in creating a sphere of economic and political liberty that is as crucial as it is imperiled. Hannan argues that the ideas and institutions we consider essential to maintaining and preserving our freedoms — individual rights, private property, the rule of law, and the institutions of representative government — are the legacy of a very specific tradition that was born in England and that we Americans, along with other former British colonies, inherited.

The War on Human Nature
For nations as for individuals, pretending self-interest doesn’t exist is perilous.

Happy Genocide Day!
It happens every Thanksgiving: leftists crawl out from under their rocks and tell us that the holiday is a shameful celebration of “genocide.” These days, their preferred medium is Twitter.

And the Winner of the Most Idiotic Leftist Rant Against Thanksgiving Is…

Thanksgiving Rule 5 and Massive Linkfest

Fifty States of Gray: New Proposal To Reorganize the U.S. Map
Cartographer Neil Freeman proposes to reorganize the America map fairly based on population and electoral votes. Is this a proposal for electoral parity, or will it further empower blue voters in urban areas?

America’s Coastal Royalty
The real national divide isn’t between red and blue states.
By Victor Davis Hanson

So total is the Left’s cultural ascendancy that no one likes to mention the socialist roots of fascism
‘I am a Socialist,’ Hitler told Otto Strasser in 1930, ‘and a very different kind of Socialist from your rich friend, Count Reventlow’.