Month: November 2019

The New York Times war against online political speech it disapproves of continues apace. Technology reporter Mike Isaac made the front of Tuesday’s Business section with “Dissent Erupts At Facebook.” The Times cleverly featured excerpts from a letter posted by “dissenting” Facebook employee, broadcasting their opposition to free political speech on the platform, in a large typeface within a graphic that took up the entire top of the front Business page in print. The message resonated even louder by being packaged within an ostensibly objective news story.

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An Arizona driver is being rewarded and hailed an “angel” thanks to a heart-stopping video showing the moment she prevented a tragic accident with her own car. Shannon Vivar, 27, was driving through a busy intersection in Phoenix with her mother and young son when she inadvertently saved the lives of a couple pushing their…

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I confess, I was iffy about her new plan when I thought it involved a government takeover of health care and massive new federal spending.

But a government takeover of health care, massive new federal spending, and a comprehensive amnesty for America’s millions of illegal immigrants?

Where do I sign up?

This very]]>

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More than 2 million Californians recently were left without power after the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric—which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year—preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.

Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so overregulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents, and infectious diseases.

Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.

Taxpayers in California, whose basket of sales, gasoline, and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while immobile on antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous, and under nonstop makeshift repair.

Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon—the result of high taxes, hyper-regulation, and green mandates—add insult to the injury of stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state’s failing high-speed rail project.

Residents shrug that the state’s public schools are among the weakest in the nation, often ranking in the bottom quadrant in standardized test scores. Elites publicly oppose charter schools, but often put their own kids in private academies.

Californians know that to venture into a typical municipal
emergency room is to descend into a modern Dante’s Inferno. Medical facilities
are overcrowded. They can be as unpleasant as they are bankrupting to the
vanishing middle class that must face exorbitant charges to bring in an injured
or sick child.

No one would dare to connect the crumbling infrastructure, poor schools, and failing public health care with the non-enforcement of immigration laws, which has led to a massive influx of undocumented immigrants from the poorest regions of the world, who often arrive without fluency in English or a high school education.

Stores are occasionally hit by swarming looters. Such Wild
West criminals know how to keep their thefts under $950, ensuring that such
“misdemeanors” do not warrant police attention. California’s
permissive laws have decriminalized thefts and break-ins. The result is that
San Francisco now has the highest property crime rate per capita in the nation.

Has California become premodern?

Millions of fed-up middle-class taxpayers have fled the state. Their presence as a stabilizing influence is sorely missed. About one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California. Millions of poor newcomers require enormously expensive state health, housing, education, legal, and law enforcement services.

California is now a one-party state. Democrats have supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature. Only seven of the state’s 53 congressional seats are held by Republicans. The result is that there is no credible check on a mostly coastal majority.

Huge global wealth in high-tech, finance, trade, and academia poured into the coastal corridor, creating a new nobility with unprecedented riches. Unfortunately, the new aristocracy adopted mindsets antithetical to the general welfare of Californians living outside their coastal enclaves.

The nobodies have struggled to buy high-priced gas, pay exorbitant power bills, and deal with shoddy infrastructure—all of which resulted from the policies of the distant somebodies.

California’s three most powerful politicians—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and Gov. Gavin Newsom—are all multimillionaires. Their lives, homes, and privileges bear no resemblance to those of other Californians living with the consequences of their misguided policies and agendas.

The state’s elite took revolving-door entries and exits for granted. They assumed that California was so naturally rich, beautiful, and well endowed that there would always be thousands of newcomers who would queue up for the weather, the shore, the mountains, and the hip culture.

Yet California is nearing the logical limits of progressive
adventurism in policy and politics.

Residents carefully plan long highway trips as if they were
ancient explorers charting dangerous routes. Tourists warily enter downtown Los
Angeles or San Francisco as if visiting a politically unstable nation.

Insatiable state tax collectors and agencies are viewed by
the public as if they were corrupt officials of Third World countries seeking
bribes. Californians flip their switches unsure of whether the lights will go
on. Many are careful about what they say, terrified of progressive thought
police who seem more worried about critics than criminals.

Our resolute ancestors took a century to turn a wilderness
into California. Our irresolute generation in just a decade or two has been
turning California into a wilderness.

(C) 2019 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

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Few factors are more critical to economic growth than health care. And few threaten future economic growth more than health care spending.

That conundrum lies behind continued political agitation over health care, both in the U.S. and throughout the highly developed world.

Advances in medicine have eradicated diseases, extended life expectancy, reduced infant mortality, and increased productivity. But rising medical spending also has suppressed wages, pressured government budgets, and siphoned public resources from infrastructure, education, and other investments.

Health spending constituted 17.9% of U.S. economic output in 2017 and will continue its inexorable growth.

There is a silver lining. Five-year cancer survival rates have improved, mortality rates for heart disease have declined, and chronic diseases are better managed.

More people are employed in the health sector than in any other segment of the economy, and the growth in health care jobs appears to be recession-proof. The U.S. is the global leader in biomedical research and development, strengthening the domestic economy.

But there are ominous signs.

Perhaps most ominous is the growing burden health spending has placed on taxpayers. Health entitlements are the largest and fastest-growing component of the federal budget and the leading cause of long-term fiscal instability.

Health entitlement programs are crowding out other government spending. In 1989, the federal government spent 57% more on nondefense discretionary programs like education, job training, and transportation than it did on health entitlements. Since then, health spending has tripled in real terms and is now twice what Washington spends on nondefense discretionary programs.

An aging population accounts for much of that increase. Medicare has 61 million enrollees and is adding an average of 1.6 million beneficiaries annually. Spending per beneficiary exceeds $14,000, a figure projected to compound at an average annual rate of over 5% during the next decade.

But an older population doesn’t completely explain the spending increase. Congress has expanded existing federal programs and created new ones. Federal spending on Medicaid and other income-related health programs has more than tripled in real terms over the past 30 years and will continue growing.

This year, the government will spend 6% more on health entitlements than on Social Security. In 30 years, that gap will grow to 50%.

America’s fiscal crisis, in short, is a health spending crisis.

Private health spending also has grown, burdening businesses and workers. More than 178 million Americans have job-based coverage, the leading source of health insurance in the U.S.

This coverage is the fastest-growing component of employee compensation, depressing wages. A study by the Council for Affordable Health Coverage found that rising health insurance premiums caused earnings to decline between 1999 and 2015 for workers in the bottom 40 percentiles of earnings.

Total public and private health spending is the highest in the world. Per capita U.S. spending on medical care was $10,586 in 2018, compared with an average of less than $4,000 among nations that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Some use that figure to argue in favor of turning all health financing over to the federal government. Other countries, the reasoning goes, centrally finance health care and spend less than Americans do. Therefore, health spending would decline if the U.S. government adopted the policies of other governments.

The argument is flawed. First, a Rand Corp. analysis of “Medicare for All” found that the plan would increase health spending, enlarging the gap between the U.S. and other countries.

Second, the U.S. is hardly unique in struggling with rising health spending. U.S. health spending is projected to grow more slowly than the OECD average through 2030, meaning it will outperform many countries with centralized financing.

Shifting the entire burden of health financing onto the U.S. government is more likely to worsen fiscal strains than to relieve them.

A more promising avenue is to pursue reforms that provide privately and publicly insured patients, as well as employers who sponsor coverage for their workers, with information and incentives to use medical services more efficiently.

Public and private health insurance arrangements typically do the opposite: concealing prices from patients and making medical care appear free (or nearly so). Such arrangements render patients bystanders and feed a perverse dynamic in which medical prices rise without reference to value.

In virtually every other sector of the economy, innovation gives us more for our money (think mobile phones, computers, cars and appliances). Applying those same forces to health spending would put downward pressure on prices while preserving quality.

Price disclosure and financing structures that incentivize consumers may not be sufficient to contain the health care spending spiral, but they are essential to its success.

Originally published by Fox Business

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The chairman of the Republican Study Committee criticized the impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, deriding them for being conducted “in secret.”

“The problem right now is they’re doing this all in secret,” says Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., “They’re having these secret depositions and these top secret hearings in a basement somewhere.”

“I’m on the House Judiciary Committee, for example. I’m the committee [with] jurisdiction over impeachment. I am not allowed to review any of the documents, any of the testimony that’s been presented this far,” Johnson added during the fourth episode of the caucus’ “Elephants in the Room” Facebook discussion with lawmakers.

The episode was shot shortly before the House voted 232-196 to pass a resolution outlining the details of the impeachment process. 

Johnson says he’s reached out to Democrats, including Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who is spearheading Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, to try to set up a time to review the impeachment proceedings. 

“I sent a letter … to Chairman Schiff and the chairman of the other two committees, Democrat chairmen who are engaged in this, and I said, ‘Here’s the House rule. It says I have a right to review these,’” Johnson said. “’I want to know a date and time when I can come do that.’ Nothing. It’s crickets.”

Rep. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., who joined Johnson for “Elephants in the Room,” told The Daily Signal that Congress will have to answer to the American people for the impeachment probe process.

“If we’re going to undo the results of the 2016 election, if we’re going to go against the votes of 64 million Americans, it should be a higher bar, not a lower bar [for the impeachment process],” Marshall said. 

Johnson added that the impeachment process has been an abuse of power. 

“It allows Adam Schiff to be basically the counsel, the judge, and the jury over this,” Johnson said.

He also discussed that the impeachment push seemed “predetermined,” saying:

We all know they [House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats] started working on impeachment of the president the day he took his oath of office. … They changed the narrative several times along the way, but they’ve always been trying to get to this desired end. This is very Machiavellian. The means justify the end, I guess, and if they have to steamroll over all the Republicans in Congress, over the will of the American people, over due process, over the rules … That’s what we’ve gotten. 

So, at the end of the day … people will make up their minds about the legitimacy of that process.

The Republican Study Committee recently released a new health care plan that, among other provisions, would increase how much people could contribute pre-taxes to health savings accounts, and would create guaranteed coverage pools designed to help Americans with preexisting conditions. 

Johnson says the new plan would help drive down health care costs and help Americans with “preexisting conditions, … with chronic illnesses, and serious health concerns” get access to care. 

Marshall, a doctor, said the Republican Study Committee plan “empowers people by giving them more choices.”

“It personalizes health care by putting decisions for health care back in the hands of those who know best. And that’s the patient and the physician, not the federal government,” says Marshall. 

The Kansas Republican said the plan was “180 degrees opposite” from Democrats’ health care proposals. “They’re proposing complete takeover of your health care by the federal government,” he said. 

Johnson also mentioned he and other Republican Study Committee members had met with Trump at the White House to discuss the health care plan.

“I showed him some of the headlines, one from Fox News that said the Republican Study Committee’s health care plan is the fulfillment of President Trump’s challenge and his promise to make the Republican party the party of health care,” Johnson said. “He was grateful for that and encouraged by it.”

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In those monster movies so popular at Halloween, it usually takes a while for the killer to be revealed. But when he is, the terror he inspired among his targets often comes to a frightening conclusion for viewers.

This analogy perfectly fits the impeachment scenario now playing out in Washington. The nation is beginning to see the ugliness of the establishment, people who believe they have a divine right (if they believed in the divine) to run the federal government.

If that right is ever challenged, that’s when the long knives come out.

Secret testimonies, barring Republicans from calling their own witnesses or cross-examining the ones Democrats have subpoenaed, and now a federal judge’s ruling that secret grand jury records from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation must be turned over to House Democrats—this is how the establishment fights back.

A Wall Street Journal editorial called it “political damage control” when Democrats criticized a decision by the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into the genesis of the allegation of Russian “collusion” with the 2016 Trump campaign:

Democrats know that the Hillary Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Mr. Trump, and Fusion hired former British spook Christopher Steele, who compiled a dossier of allegations about Mr. Trump from Russian sources that turned out to be false.

Worse, Fusion funneled the dossier to the FBI, which used it to persuade the secret FISA court to issue a warrant to eavesdrop on Trump official Carter Page. Democrats now want to discredit any attempt to hold people accountable if crimes were committed as part of this extraordinary dirty trick.

If the trail of the Russian collusion fraud leads back to Democrats and the Clinton campaign, it will undermine the credibility of what Democrats are trying to do with Ukraine and President Donald Trump’s phone call to its president during which he allegedly demanded Ukraine’s help in digging up dirt on Joe Biden and his overpaid son, Hunter Biden.

It is a charge the president has repeatedly denied.

U.S. Attorney John Durham, at Attorney General William Barr’s behest, is heading a criminal probe. It appears the goal of the Democrats is to advance impeachment to a vote in the House before it comes out.

To hurry the process along, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the full House will vote Thursday to begin the public phase of the inquiry. This will include the establishment of rules and due process rights for the president.

On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh got to the heart of the matter, saying:

I think what [Rep. Adam] Schiff and Pelosi and this entire so-called impeachment inquiry is really all about is derailing the Barr investigation. And I think that’s why they’re in such a hurry … they’re trying to convince the American people that Trump is guilty and should not be president before Barr and Durham and [Justice Department Inspector General Michael] Horowitz have time to reveal anything.

And there’s one downside to what happened here. We now have an official criminal investigation. That means that Durham and Barr can impanel a grand jury. And this is why the McCabes and the Brennans and the James Clappers are running around today in a near panic.

[Andrew McCabe is the former deputy director and acting director of the FBI, John Brennan is the former CIA director, and James Clapper is the former director of national intelligence.]

The unfairness of it all is what strikes many people. Polls are fluid; some indicating a majority favor the investigation, but oppose impeachment and the president’s removal from office, especially this close to the next election. Let the people decide is the mantra one hears in some voter interviews.

Trump’s greatest weapon, other than truth, is what he has done for the economy, judges, and the pro-life movement. Perhaps no Republican could have done it better.

These are winning issues. The establishment knows it and that’s why this horror movie continues to play out. Call it trick or trick.

(c) 2019 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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We are now knee-deep in the throes of the constitutionally directed authority of the U.S. House of Representatives, the people’s chamber, to call into question the behavior of the most well known sitting public official, the president of the United States.

In the history of our great republic, the House has completely executed this power and impeached an officeholder in just 19 instances—17 of the federal judiciary and two sitting American presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. Two other U.S. presidents have faced impeachment inquiries: Richard Nixon and now Donald Trump.

It’s important to recall this history lesson because the framers of our Constitution intended that the removal of a sitting federal official of high office be particularly, if not excruciatingly, difficult.

The Founders were well aware of bitter partisanship, even in 18th-century America, and so they wanted to insulate officeholders as best they could from the flimsy political whims of the people’s house in Congress.

That being said, I do disagree with the president and his supporters when they call the current proceedings unconstitutional and when they suggest that Democrats have no authority to act.

This process is one of the most powerful instruments an institution of government can wield. It is a necessary check, in our system of checks and balances, to maintain the proper balance of power between all branches of government in our great democracy. It is an instrument that deserves to be hallowed through all time if we are to guarantee that no one person can set themselves above the law.

Yet the actions of House Democrats, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are running counter to the spirit and even the letter of the authority they swore to uphold. As a result, they are making this current impeachment attempt decidedly un-American.

Let’s begin with the impeachment process itself. It goes without saying that something is wrong if the chamber has not yet been able to officially inaugurate these proceedings, as the House has been able to successfully do so many times before, with a full vote of the body.

Why have they not held a vote to officially begin the inquiry? The failure to do so may seem petty or inconsequential to the average observer. However, the act of formally tallying the voice of every sitting member of that body should be heard and recorded for all Americans to see. After all, the framers wanted to make it difficult to remove a sitting president, to “undo” an election by the people.

With this intention in mind, shouldn’t these 435 individuals stand up and be counted on the critical question of whether they should unring the bell of liberty that called for Trump to hold office in the first place?

This dilemma brings us to the only logical conclusion as to why Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, and Adam Schiff don’t want to hold a vote: to protect those rank-and-file members in vulnerable pro-Trump districts.

Yes, the House Democratic Caucus is divided on the question of removing a sitting president, even one as controversial as Trump. Pelosi knows this. Unfortunately, the most liberal in her party have pushed and pushed for this, so she has had no choice but to acquiesce.

Still, Pelosi must protect those 30 to 40 Democrats, which means there will be no formal vote launching the inquiry. Instead, there has been cloak-and-dagger closed-door interviews of the president’s very accusers and alleged whistleblower. Is that American? What happened to the writ of habeas corpus—the right to face one’s accuser?

Pelosi’s “protection at all costs” approach toward her party’s vulnerable members is costing the speaker and the Democrats. It unnecessarily leaves those Obama-Trump swing voters doubting Democrats’ sincerity in trying to find actual high crimes and misdemeanors that this president may have committed. Furthermore, it gives Romney-Clinton voters a reason to return to the Republican fold.

Perhaps the worst element of House Democrats’ actions is the dangerous precedent they set for future Congresses.

How many times has the House of Representatives been controlled by a different party than the sitting president’s? Scores. Do future House majorities now have complete license to pursue impeachment on shaky evidence, without a formal vote and with inquiries led behind closed doors? Is that the instrument of impeachment the American republic needs or wants? I think not.

History will not be kind to this Congress. Its track record will speak of no major legislative wins, even fewer federal basics such as spending bills to keep the government running, anemic judicial appointments, and an outsized obsession with sinking this president on political grounds. That’s not what Americans voted for, and this obsession will not be helpful to the Democrats come the 2020 election cycle.

To use the sacrosanct tool of impeachment in such a constitutionally cavalier way betrays everything that the House Democrats signaled they stood for when Pelosi took the gavel. Her caucus knows better, and she’ll spend the rest of her speakership trying to justify using a uniquely American protection in such an un-American manner.

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