New Coke Health Care?

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by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner 

The president has compared the rollout disaster of Obamacare to temporary tech New_Coke_canglitches with a new-model iPhone. But a better comparison is the disastrous 1985 campaign to replace Coca-Cola with “New Coke,” a new sweeter formula that was supposed to stop Pepsi from gaining more market share. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in slick ad campaigns, and all sorts of sales strategies, the public simply revolted at even the idea of the new formula, and a few years later, after all sorts of face-saving measures, the Edsel-like effort quietly was dropped.

The problem with Obamacare is that the few things the public liked — kids covered until 26 on their parents’ plans, no coverage problems with preexisting medical conditions, etc. — were all front-loaded and still unpaid for; and all the things people will dislike — higher premiums, more taxes, bureaucratic red tape and incoherence, higher deductibles, higher costs to businesses, fewer doctors and less choices, more government borrowing to pay for the program, exemptions for pet constituencies, etc. — are all on the horizon. Continue reading “New Coke Health Care?” →

‘Unacceptable’

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by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner 

President Obama announced that the messy rollout of Obamacare is “unacceptable.” Like “game-changer” used in conjunction to threats in Syria and Iran, “unacceptable” does not necessarily mean something will stop. Instead, we should understand the president’s definition of “unacceptable” in its narrowest meaning of “unpleasant” rather than more expansively as an assertion that something will not continue to occur. Continue reading “‘Unacceptable’” →

The Bay Area’s 1 Percenters

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If you’re hip and liberal, your kids don’t have to go to school with the gardener’s kids.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 

Strip away the veneer of Silicon Valley, and it is mostly a paradox. Almost nothing is what it is professed to be. Ostensibly, communities like Menlo Park and Palo Alto are elite enclaves, where power couples can easily make $300,000 to $700,000 a year as mid-level Photo Credit: Chris Smart via Flickrdot.com managers.

But often these 1 percenter communities are façades of sorts. Beneath veneers of high-end living, there are lives of quiet 1-percent desperation. With new federal and California tax hikes, aggregate income-tax rates on dot.commers can easily exceed 50 percent of their gross income. And hip California 1 percenters do not enjoy superb roads and schools or a low-crime state in exchange for forking over half their income.

Housing gobbles much of the rest of their pay. A 1,300-square-foot cottage in Mountain View or Atherton can easily sell for $1.5 million, leaving the owners paying $5,000 to $6,000 on their mortgage and another $1,500 to $2,000 in property taxes each month. Add in the de rigueur Mercedes, BMW, or Lexus and the private-school tuition, and the apparently affluent turn out to have not all that much disposable income. Continue reading “The Bay Area’s 1 Percenters” →

Islamic Doctrines Justify Sex Jihad (With Video)

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by Raymond Ibrahim // RaymondIbrahim.com 

Note: A 15-minute video of men and women from various nations discussing their experiences with the sex jihad in Syria, translated from Arabic to English by my colleagues, appears beneath this article (you may need to click on “CC” (closed caption”) for the English subtitles to appear).

burka-124601533266629000As news of the sex jihad continues toproliferate in Mideast media, and as the West continues to bury its head in the sand—here for example is Der Spiegel’s attempt to portray as “false” the “tales of rebels engaging in ‘sex jihad’ and massacring Christians”—it is instructive to note that even the practice of sex jihad has specific doctrinal validation in Islam (which should hardly be surprising considering that “adult breastfeeding” also has validation).

First there is the general justification for sex jihad, namely that, because Muslim men waging jihad have become sexually frustrated in their camps, losing morale and quitting the theatre of war, Continue reading “Islamic Doctrines Justify Sex Jihad (With Video)” →

The Democratic Disasters to Come

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by Victor Davis Hanson // PJ Media 

The defunding wars are over. The accusations are fading. We are back to reality. Of course, America’s long-term prospects, at least in comparison with other countries’ futures — whether in terms of demography, military power, food-production constitutional stability, energy sources, or higher education — are bright.Photo Credit: roberthuffstutter via Flickr

But short term, we are walking over landmines that threaten to blow up the normal way of doing business, and pose far more harm for Democrats than for Republicans.

Zero Interest

The real story about the debt is that by the end of Obama’s eight years, he will have matched the borrowing of all previous presidents combined.  Yet incredibly, the present huge sum of $17 trillion in debt is serviced at the same cost that we paid over 15 years ago. Such free use of money without raging inflation is almost historically unprecedented — and it won’t last.

Indeed, we are paying today about the same amount in aggregate annual interest payments, in non-inflation-adjusted dollars no less, as in 1997 — even though the 2012 figure of $17 trillion in debt is about three times larger than it was a decade-and-a-half ago. That anomaly is possible only because today’s interest rate of about 2.2% is only a third of what it was back then. Continue reading “The Democratic Disasters to Come” →

Where Now?

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by Victor Davis Hanson // NRO’s The Corner 

The government gridlock is, to use now politically incorrect metaphors, only one lost battle in a long campaign, and we are now back to the original proposition of watching the administration try to implement Obamacare. We know the president does exceedingly well when he can campaign against the forces of darkness, but when attention, even for a moment, turns to his own efforts — Obamacare; the stimulus; Solyndra; cash for clunkers, Benghazi; the AP, IRS, and NSA scandals; gun control; Syria, etc. — as it will now for a few weeks until the next psychodramatic “war” against someone, he flounders. Continue reading “Where Now?” →

Obama, Heed Thyself

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He used to know some important things.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 

Republicans and Democrats are still name-calling in their arguments over the government shutdown, out-of-control federal spending, and the implementation of Obamacare. Yet if both sides would agree to just follow the earlier advice of Photo Credit: thierry ehrmann, abode of chaos via FlickrPresident Obama, tempers might cool. And had President Obama himself just listened to earlier guidance from Barack Obama, his opponents might have had no cause for either a government shutdown or another debt-ceiling crisis.

In 2006, Obama rightly called for an end to the Bush administration’s intemperate deficit spending that had resulted in an annual deficit of $250 billion that year. Accordingly, Senator Obama voted to shut down the government rather than automatically to extend the debt ceiling. He explained his resistance this way: “Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”

Obama rightly added an additional warning in forcing an impasse over further borrowing: “Every dollar we pay in interest is a dollar that is not going to investment in America’s priorities. Instead, interest payments are a significant tax on all Americans — a debt tax that Washington doesn’t want to talk about.” Continue reading “Obama, Heed Thyself” →

Barack Obama and the Bad Ideas of Progressivism

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by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine 

Barack Obama’s serial gross incompetence has elicited all sorts of explanatory theories. He’s a closet socialist, an Alinskyite radical, a secret Muslim, or an anti-American internationalist. Though some of Obama’s words and deeds give support to all these speculations, I prefer a simpler explanation. Obama is a Progressive––not a vague “progressive,” the elastic moniker liberals started using when the word “liberal” became politically toxic. Continue reading “Barack Obama and the Bad Ideas of Progressivism” →

Jihad vs Terrorism: Listen to What Islam’s Authorities Say

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by Raymond Ibrahim // RaymondIbrahim.com

A recent Arabic article appearing in Egypt’s Al Ahram newspaper titled “Is Terrorism Jihad?” written by Islamic law expert Dr. Abdul Fatah Idris offers important lessons—from the fact that jihad does involve subjugating non-Muslims to why the Western mentality is still incapable of acknowledging it. Continue reading “Jihad vs Terrorism: Listen to What Islam’s Authorities Say” →