RUTHFULLY YOURS

By 1968, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was finally done in by his “credibility gap” — the growing abyss between what he said about, and what was actually happening inside, Vietnam.

“Modified limited hangout” and “inoperative” were infamous euphemisms that Nixon-administration officials used to mask lies about the Watergate scandal. After a while, few believed any of the initial Reagan-administration disavowals that it was not trading “arms for hostages” in the Iran–Contra scandal.

George H. W. Bush thundered during his campaign that voters should “read my lips: no new taxes,” only to agree later to raise them. Bill Clinton’s infamous assertion that he “did not have sexual relations with that woman” was followed by proof that he did just that with Monica Lewinsky.

The George W. Bush administration warned the nation about stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and never quite recovered its credibility after the WMD were not found. No one believed Bush when he told incompetent FEMA deputy director Michael Brown that in the midst of the Katrina mess he was doing a “heck of a job.”

Yet the distortions and lack of credibility of the Obama administration have matched and now trumped those of its predecessors. The public may have long ago forgotten that Obama did not close down Guantanamo as promised, or cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, or stop the revolving door of lobbyists coming in and out of the executive branch.

The public may even have forgiven the president when the stimulus bill never lowered unemployment as promised, or when his misleading boasts about vast increases in oil and gas production came to fruition despite, not because, of his efforts.

One Quick Fix to Ease the Coming Doctor Shortage Atul Nakhasi
The White House proposes to cut on-the-job training for new M.D.s just when we need more physicians.

Ryan Scully wanted to be a doctor from the moment he began volunteering as a paramedic and firefighter during his freshman year of college. In medical school at George Washington University, he passed all of his preclinical and clinical requirements, as well as two national licensing exams required of all medical students. Just before graduation in 2012, though, he learned that he had not been accepted into a residency training program necessary for gaining his certification as a practicing physician. He would receive his M.D. degree in May with the rest of his class—but without a hospital training spot, he could not practice medicine.

Last year 1,761 M.D.s shared the same fate. And now the White House wants to set aside even less money for doctor training while reorganizing the nation’s insurance market. At a time when the new health-care law is expected to create a demand for more physicians, a proposed $11 billion budget cut over the next 10 years guarantees there will be fewer doctors. This could have a serious effect on the health of the nation.

On-the-job training of doctors is a long and complicated business, and since the introduction of Medicare in 1965 the federal government has assumed some of the cost of graduate medical education, particularly at the country’s teaching hospitals. The rationale for funding by Medicare, Medicaid, the Department of Veterans Affairs and others—nearly $12 billion a year—has been that the nation’s doctors and medical researchers will contribute to the public good, either by treating patients or contributing to advances in medicine.

In 2001, the year before Ray Kelly began his second tour as New York’s police commissioner, the city suffered 649 murders. In 2012, there were 419—a drop of 35%. The number of reported rapes fell by 27%; robberies 28%; burglaries 41%. The students at Brown University, an Ivy League school in Providence, R.I., think this is worth booing. Mr. Kelly was at Brown Tuesday to discuss “Proactive Policing in America’s Biggest City.” But nobody got to hear Mr. Kelly’s speech because he was shouted off the stage.

Brown is the school where in 1984 students voted overwhelmingly to insist that the campus health services stockpile suicide pills “in the event of nuclear war.” Campus administrators declined that demand, but the politically trendy, morally nihilistic campus spirit lives on.

Now student rage is aimed at the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policies, which account for much of the drop in the crime rate, especially in minority neighborhoods, and of which Mr. Kelly has been a vocal champion. Students also object to “community policing,” especially among Muslims, a tool the NYPD has used to keep the city safe from terror.

We realize that most Brown students have only a faint acquaintance with real life, and none of them know what New York City was like in the 1970s and ’80s. But it is revealing to see where the Constitutional right to free speech stands in the esteem of students at one of the most liberal campuses in America.

Judging by their profuse apology to Mr. Kelly, Brown officials are embarrassed by the episode. Mr. Kelly will certainly get over it, but at a better school the children who acted out at Brown would be expelled.

Do not panic. Everything is under control.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Transmen and Transwomen and people of uncertain gender identities, some of you may be alarmed by recent reports of malfunctioning health care websites and policy cancellations.

Do not be alarmed. We know what we are doing.

Health care plans are not being cancelled. Opportunities are being transitioned. Some people are being moved from bad health care plans to good health care plans with higher deductibles and higher premiums that will provide transmen with maternity care and people of uncertain gender identities with drug counseling and mental health treatment.

This is a good thing. Warning. This is a good thing.

You are being transitioned. Why do you resist?

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by John Duffy, a Film Producer from the South Bronx, Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv, and Orestes Matacena, a Filmmaker whose latest project is SwastikaTheMovie.com, dedicated to the memory of the Jewish resistance in the streets of Warsaw in WWII.

The Gang gathered this week to discuss Orestes Matacena’s new film project, SwastikaTheMovie.com, which sets out to pay tribute to all those who fought in the resistance against the Nazi occupation in Europe, the Middle East and Africa during WWII. The guests analyzed why the lessons of that resistance are so crucial for our generation to grasp — as the West confronts IslamoFascism and the Obama administration’s destructive agenda. The segment ended with an analysis of Obama’s Broken Website, focusing on the meaning of The ObamaCare Meltdown:

Part I:

Part II focused on Breaking Ranks With The Left, with each guest sharing their brush with the totalitarian inferno. The segment ended with an analysis of What Obama Wants, shedding light on the Radical-in-Chief’s endgame — and what Americans can do best to safeguard their freedoms:

Part II:

Just after midnight on Wednesday, Israel Hayom reports, 26 Palestinian security prisoners were set free by Israel. Twenty-one were sent to the West Bank, five to Gaza.

All of these prisoners were convicted either of murder or attempted murder. They constitute the second of four groups of 26 prisoners who are being released periodically during the current Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. For Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, freeing them was an iron-clad condition for entering the talks at all. Israel acceded to it under heavy U.S. pressure, spearheaded by Secretary of State John Kerry.

“…Palestinians in Ramallah and Gaza,” Israel Hayom informs us,

celebrated the release of the prisoners. The 21 prisoners returning to the West Bank attended an official reception at the Mukataa in Ramallah, where…Abbas greeted them personally.

“We welcome our brothers the heroes coming from behind the bars to a world of freedom and liberty,” Abbas was quoted as saying.

None of the American diplomatic personnel in Israel attended this reception. That may not seem worth pointing out. Wouldn’t it be a diplomatic slap to Israel? And wouldn’t it contradict American values to attend a celebratory reception for terrorist killers?

Indeed, it would. But why, then, did it not unacceptably contradict American values to pressure Israel to free them in the first place?

Indeed, these 26 are a nasty lot. Here are just a few examples from a partial list compiled by Israel National News:

Awad Masalkha took part in the murder of Yigal Vaknin…and also murdered another Jew, David Reuven…, an Iraqi-born father of three who ran a mini-market…. In 1991, Awad and other terrorists entered the mini-market, attacked Reuven, tied him up and beat him to death. He was 59….

Those Americans who watched Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s testimony yesterday before the House Energy and Commerce Committee might be forgiven for thinking they were in an alternate universe. Despite her assertion that Americans should ”hold me accountable” for the ongoing debacle, Sebelius later claimed she was never warned by anyone that the scheduled roll out of the Healthcare.gov website would be the disaster it turned out to be. Furthermore, she stood by the assertion that the president has been “keeping his promise” with regard to the idea that Americans who liked their insurance policies could keep them. Fittingly, during the entire three and a half hours the Secretary testified, the Healthcare.gov website was down.

Sebelius’s contention that she was not warned of the problems with the website is a lie. CNN reveals they obtained a confidential report showing that while website creator CGI executives were publicly testifying about achieving milestones, they warned the administration a month before the launch that there were “a number of open risks and issues” associated with the website.

Undoubtedly, Americans are far more interested in the far bigger lie perpetrated by this administration, highlighted by the exchange between Sebelius and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). “Before, during and after the law was passed the president kept saying if you like your health care plan, you can keep it, so is he keeping his promise?” asked Blackburn. “Yes, he is,” Sebelius replied. When Blackburn noted the reality that 300,000 people in Florida and 28,000 in Tennessee had their policies terminated, Sebelius contended that “they can get health insurance.”

The president didn’t promise people they could get health insurance. “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what,” Obama said in remarks made to the American Medical Association in 2009.

Just a few years ago, some American citizens came together to demand change. They were fed up with decades of out-of-control government growth, confiscation of their hard-earned income through ever-increasing taxes, and unending regulations invading every aspect of their lives. Things were racing out of control.

Every aspect of American society was changing, and not for the better. Freedoms and rights that are guaranteed under the Constitution – the founding document of our nation and law of the land, were disappearing. Elected representatives turned a deaf ear to concerned citizens. It seemed those in power simply didn’t care. No matter the outcome of elections, nothing changed. There was a sense of hopelessness, helplessness, and frustration as concerned citizens saw the America they loved disappearing.

The answer? Enter the TEA Party – declaring “Taxed Enough Already.” It was time to make their voice heard. It was time to directly confront the government and demand that it stay within the confines of the Constitution that every single elected official at every level of government pledged to uphold.

They organized. They rallied. They confronted members of Congress at local meetings. And their voices were heard. The TEA Party movement spread across the nation like wildfire. Many people were excited that finally the national debate was about concerns over the ever-expanding government. Some officials embraced the TEA Party. Some feared it.

Most who participated were political novices, experiencing their first direct activism. Concerned citizens, many were just parents who had spent their time raising the kids, and had been unaware of just how massive the government had gotten. They were about to get the shock of their lives.

Lesson: Believing the president is dangerous to your health.

Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamas-health-care-reform-has-been-a-lie-from-day-one#ixzz2jINjNBOa
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

Florida Blue canceled policies for 300,000 Floridians, Kaiser Permanente dropped 160,000 individual plan holders in California, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina mailed out 160,000 cancellation notices.

It’s happening nearly everywhere. People were promised they could keep their health insurance plan. That was a lie. They were duped and dropped.

The liar is none other than the president of the United States. On June 15, 2009, President Obama told a town hall meeting: “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise … if you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”

The fine print in his health law proves that he never intended to keep that promise.

Sec. 1251(a)(1) of the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) says that no one can be required to give up a plan in effect on March 23, 2010, when the law was passed. Those plans are “grandfathered.” But following that guarantee is a list of costly requirements that made it difficult for insurers to keep offering your plan.

It gets worse. Union plans were “grandfathered” with none of those fine-print tricks and exceptions. Sec. 1251(d).

The law also left open the possibility that the president could impose additional requirements on grandfathered plans (except union plans). Two months after ObamaCare was passed, the IRS, Department of Labor and Department of Health and Human Services – all reporting to the president – churned out hundreds of additional rules to make it even harder for grandfathered plans to survive.

The rule makers knew that they were turning the president’s promise into a flimflam. They estimated that up to 69% of individual plans and 89% of small-group plans would be canceled by the end of 2013 as a result of their rules (Federal Register, June 14, 2010).

Walter Laqueur is the author of, among other books, Weimar, A History of Terrorism, Fascism: Past, Present, Future, and The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union. His newest book, Optimism in Politics and Other Essays, is due out from Transaction in January.

How many pages of print need be devoted to an event that amounts to no more than a small footnote, if that, in the history of British academic life? In the case of the dueling protagonists of Isaac & Isaiah, a new book by the British historian and novelist David Caute, the unfortunate answer is: quite a few. Luckily, there is much else of inadvertent interest in the story Caute tells.

Both Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) and Isaac Deutscher (1907-1967) were born to Jewish parents in Eastern Europe, but otherwise they had little in common. Berlin, who arrived in England as a schoolboy, eventually became a central and much celebrated figure of the British intellectual and academic establishment and was knighted in 1957. Deutscher, who arrived in his thirties, established himself within a few years as a well-known biographer and political commentator and a self-proclaimed exemplar of the human type known as the “non-Jewish Jew,” a term he may have coined.

Caute presents his chosen pair as the “most influential scholars of cold-war politics.” This is not accurate. Berlin, whose many interests included Russian social and political thought, was not and never claimed to be an expert in Soviet politics—the field that preoccupied Deutscher almost entirely. Nor was Berlin ever a political activist, while Deutscher, by contrast, had been a member of the Polish Communist party, later a Trotskyite, and thereafter a faithful fellow traveler and well-wisher of the Soviet Union. Finally, although Deutscher acquired a remarkable mastery of the English language—in a 1967 review of one of his biographies, I noted not only his forceful style but his unique ability to make his protagonists come alive—whether he was a scholar by inclination or accomplishment has remained a matter of controversy to this day.