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31
3DHS / Secret Service says "Kill him" allegation unfounded
« on: October 15, 2008, 10:38:26 PM »
SCRANTON ? The agent in charge of the Secret Service field office in Scranton said allegations that someone yelled ?kill him? when presidential hopeful Barack Obama?s name was mentioned during Tuesday?s Sarah Palin rally are unfounded.

The Scranton Times-Tribune first reported the alleged incident on its Web site Tuesday and then again in its print edition Wednesday. The first story, written by reporter David Singleton, appeared with allegations that while congressional candidate Chris Hackett was addressing the crowd and mentioned Oabama?s name a man in the audience shouted ?kill him."

News organizations including ABC, The Associated Press, The Washington Monthly and MSNBC?s Countdown with Keith Olbermann reported the claim, with most attributing the allegations to the Times-Tribune story.

Agent Bill Slavoski said he was in the audience, along with an undisclosed number of additional secret service agents and other law enforcement officers and not one heard the comment.

?I was baffled,? he said after reading the report in Wednesday?s Times-Tribune.

He said the agency conducted an investigation Wednesday, after seeing the story, and could not find one person to corroborate the allegation other than Singleton.

Slavoski said more than 20 non-security agents were interviewed Wednesday, from news media to ordinary citizens in attendance at the rally for the Republican vice presidential candidate held at the Riverfront Sports Complex. He said Singleton was the only one to say he heard someone yell ?kill him.?

?We have yet to find someone to back up the story,? Slavoski said. ?We had people all over and we have yet to find anyone who said they heard it.?

Hackett said he did not hear the remark.

Slavoski said Singleton was interviewed Wednesday and stood by his story but couldn?t give a description of the man because he didn?t see him he only heard him.

When contacted Wednesday afternoon, Singleton referred questions to Times-Tribune Metro Editor Jeff Sonderman. Sonderman said, ?We stand by the story. The facts reported are true and that?s really all there is.?

Slavoski said the agents take such threats or comments seriously and immediately opened an investigation but after due diligence ?as far as we?re concerned it?s closed unless someone comes forward.? He urged anyone with knowledge of the alleged incident to call him at 346-5781. ?We?ll run at all leads,? he said.

http://www.timesleader.com/news/breakingnews/Secret_Service_says_Kill_him_allegation_unfounded_.html

32
3DHS / Chat's open
« on: October 15, 2008, 10:26:32 PM »
Come on in

33
One of Barack Obama's most potent campaign claims is that he'll cut taxes for no less than 95% of "working families." He's even promising to cut taxes enough that the government's tax share of GDP will be no more than 18.2% -- which is lower than it is today.

It's a clever pitch, because it lets him pose as a middle-class tax cutter while disguising that he's also proposing one of the largest tax increases ever on the other 5%. But how does he conjure this miracle, especially since more than a third of all Americans already pay no income taxes at all? There are several sleights of hand, but the most creative is to redefine the meaning of "tax cut."

For the Obama Democrats, a tax cut is no longer letting you keep more of what you earn. In their lexicon, a tax cut includes tens of billions of dollars in government handouts that are disguised by the phrase "tax credit." Mr. Obama is proposing to create or expand no fewer than seven such credits for individuals:


- A $500 tax credit ($1,000 a couple) to "make work pay" that phases out at income of $75,000 for individuals and $150,000 per couple.

- A $4,000 tax credit for college tuition.

- A 10% mortgage interest tax credit (on top of the existing mortgage interest deduction and other housing subsidies).

- A "savings" tax credit of 50% up to $1,000.

- An expansion of the earned-income tax credit that would allow single workers to receive as much as $555 a year, up from $175 now, and give these workers up to $1,110 if they are paying child support.

- A child care credit of 50% up to $6,000 of expenses a year.

- A "clean car" tax credit of up to $7,000 on the purchase of certain vehicles.

Here's the political catch. All but the clean car credit would be "refundable," which is Washington-speak for the fact that you can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer -- a federal check -- from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this "welfare," or in George McGovern's 1972 campaign a "Demogrant." Mr. Obama's genius is to call it a tax cut.

The Tax Foundation estimates that under the Obama plan 63 million Americans, or 44% of all tax filers, would have no income tax liability and most of those would get a check from the IRS each year. The Heritage Foundation's Center for Data Analysis estimates that by 2011, under the Obama plan, an additional 10 million filers would pay zero taxes while cashing checks from the IRS.

The total annual expenditures on refundable "tax credits" would rise over the next 10 years by $647 billion to $1.054 trillion, according to the Tax Policy Center. This means that the tax-credit welfare state would soon cost four times actual cash welfare. By redefining such income payments as "tax credits," the Obama campaign also redefines them away as a tax share of GDP. Presto, the federal tax burden looks much smaller than it really is.

The political left defends "refundability" on grounds that these payments help to offset the payroll tax. And that was at least plausible when the only major refundable credit was the earned-income tax credit. Taken together, however, these tax credit payments would exceed payroll levies for most low-income workers.

It is also true that John McCain proposes a refundable tax credit -- his $5,000 to help individuals buy health insurance. We've written before that we prefer a tax deduction for individual health care, rather than a credit. But the big difference with Mr. Obama is that Mr. McCain's proposal replaces the tax subsidy for employer-sponsored health insurance that individuals don't now receive if they buy on their own. It merely changes the nature of the tax subsidy; it doesn't create a new one.

There's another catch: Because Mr. Obama's tax credits are phased out as incomes rise, they impose a huge "marginal" tax rate increase on low-income workers. The marginal tax rate refers to the rate on the next dollar of income earned. As the nearby chart illustrates, the marginal rate for millions of low- and middle-income workers would spike as they earn more income.

Some families with an income of $40,000 could lose up to 40 cents in vanishing credits for every additional dollar earned from working overtime or taking a new job. As public policy, this is contradictory. The tax credits are sold in the name of "making work pay," but in practice they can be a disincentive to working harder, especially if you're a lower-income couple getting raises of $1,000 or $2,000 a year. One mystery -- among many -- of the McCain campaign is why it has allowed Mr. Obama's 95% illusion to go unanswered.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122385651698727257.html

34
3DHS / Editorial: FEC Should Start Obama Audit Now
« on: October 14, 2008, 07:31:19 PM »
Turns out that ?Doodad Pro? and ?Good Will? are not the only phony contributors to Barack Obama?s presidential campaign. The New York Times finally bestirred itself to apply some basic investigative journalism attention to the Democratic presidential nominee?s donor list. The Times found nearly 3,000 other questionable donors like ?Jgtj Jfggjjfgj? and ?Dirty West? after what the paper admitted was just a cursory look at the Illinois senator?s September financial filings. But then Times reporters Michael Luc and Griff Palmer revealed an incredible level of naivety by stating ?it is unclear why someone making a political donation would want to enter a false name.?

Unclear? What other motive could there be for using a phony name and a nonexistent address to make multiple small donations using a single credit card than to evade U.S. election laws? Such journalistic gullibility may explain why bloggers have been on this story for months and the Times is only now noticing. The Atlas Shrugged blog first broke the story of such suspicious donors behind Obama back in July after noticing little gems like this in the Illinois senator?s official FEC filings:

Name:  Hbkjb, jkbkj
City: Jkbjnj
Works for:  Kuman Bank
Occupation:  Balanon Jalalan
Amount:  $1,077.23

In case you are wondering, there is no such thing as the Kuman Bank. It is difficult to see how the Obama campaign could have mistakenly accepted such an obviously duplicitous donation - and thousands more like it - in good faith. Yet the campaign is now claiming to be the victim of ?Internet fraud.?

Then there?s the question of whether foreign nationals are contributing to the Obama campaign. There is more than enough evidence to warrant a full-scale investigation by the Federal Election Commission, including the $32,332.19 that appears to have come from two brothers living in a Hamas-controlled Palestinian refugee camp in Rafah, GA (that?s Gaza, not Georgia). The brothers? cash is part of a flood of illegal foreign contributions accepted by the Obama campaign. Potentially at issue, according to a complaint filed last week by the Republican National Committee, is as much as half of the $427 million he?s already collected. In any case, a complete FEC audit became an even more urgent matter after MSNBC reported that Obama?s Muslim outreach director quietly met with top Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) officials in an uncharacteristically unpublicized event in Springfield, Virginia on September l5th. The FEC?s primary job is to protect the integrity of our federal election process. With this many red flags flying and barely three week left before election day, there?s no time to lose if voters are to have all the information at hand before casting their ballots.

http://www.dcexaminer.com/opinion/FEC_Should_Begin_Obama_Audit_Now.html

35
3DHS / Fairy-tale candidate
« on: October 14, 2008, 07:10:46 PM »
James Carter and James Miller III
Tuesday, October 14, 2008


COMMENTARY:

Once upon a time and far, far away from mainstream America, lived a U.S. senator named Barack Obama. Mr. Obama had a gift, a truly wondrous gift. He could spin troublesome facts into political gold. And perhaps, with enough spinning, he could even spin himself into the White House.

Bill Clinton understood this. He called Mr. Obama's spin "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen." Like other fairy tales, this one requires a total suspension of disbelief. Jack (of Jack and the Beanstalk fame) had his magic beans. Mr. Obama has his magic facts. Consider the following so-called facts:

-- Magic Fact No. 1: Senator Obama will cut income taxes "for 95 percent of working families, 95 percent."

It would be truly magical to be able to cut income taxes on 95 percent of working families when only 68 percent of tax filers actually pay the federal income tax. According to the Internal Revenue Service, of the 136 million income tax returns filed in 2006, 43 million returns reported positive adjusted gross income but had no income tax liability because of assorted deductions, exemptions and tax credits.

So how do you give a tax cut to someone who doesn't pay income taxes? Mr. Obama proposes a massive program of "refundable tax credits." Those on the receiving end would simply get a check from the federal government. In other words, they would pay a "negative tax."

By wrapping a thoroughly liberal position - larger welfare benefits - in the mantle of tax cuts, Mr. Obama has very nearly managed to neutralize one of the defining issues of this presidential campaign. If that sleight of hand isn't magic, we don't know what is.

-- Magic Fact No. 2: Mr. Obama pays "for every dime" of his proposals.

According to the nonpartisan National Taxpayers Union Foundation, Mr. Obama has offered 73 proposals that would collectively increase federal spending $365.6 billion annually. That's literally a $1 billion-a-day spending increase. And, unfortunately, that figure doesn't include the cost of Mr. Obama's 88 other spending proposals for which no reliable cost estimates exist.

How does Mr. Obama propose to pay for these new and expanded spending programs? He begins by squeezing defense spending. He would then repeal "the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans." (Never mind that the Bush tax cuts are already scheduled to expire and that the revenue is already included in the government's budget forecasts.) Finally, he would "close corporate loopholes, [and] stop providing tax cuts to corporations that are shipping jobs overseas."

These steps would not come close to paying for the senator's spending proposals. Assuming they offset $100 billion of new spending, paying for the other $265.6 billion (still ignoring the cost of Mr. Obama's other 88 programs) would require an across-the-board income tax increase of 19 percent. And, of course, this figure does not reflect the tax increase that would be necessary to pay for Mr. Obama's "tax cuts."

The IRS reported earlier this year that the top-earning 5 percent of taxpayers shouldered 60 percent of the federal income tax burden in 2006. If Mr. Obama insists upon having a tiny fraction of Americans shoulder the cost of his spending and tax proposals, the tax increase on those taxpayers would have to be huge - far larger than the 19 percent tax increase described above. This would slow investment, employment and economic growth - and, yes, total governmental receipts.

Sen. Hillary Clinton once threatened, "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." Perhaps she would have been Mr. Obama's ideal running mate after all.

-- Magic Fact No. 3: Economists overwhelming favor Mr. Obama's economic policies.

The Obama campaign likes to say it has the support of professional economists. Yet, that "fact" is based on two, methodologically flawed polls circulating the Internet. True enough, majorities of those surveyed said they favor Mr. Obama's economic policies. What else would you expect from a poll where Democrat responders outnumbered Republicans by nearly 3-to-1? Only 17 percent of the surveyed economists were Republican. In the second poll, Democrats outnumbered Republicans nearly 5-to-1. Only 10 percent of the respondents were Republican.

Meanwhile, more than 500 economists from across the country, including five Nobel Laureates, have signed a statement supporting Sen. John McCain's economic plan. (For the text of the statement and a complete list of the signatories, see www.economistsformccain.com.)

The fairy tale candidate may yet become the fairy tale president. But will the story end with "and the American people lived happily ever after?"

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/14/fairy-tale-candidate/

36
3DHS / Obama's Kenya ghosts
« on: October 14, 2008, 06:27:44 PM »
Mark Hyman
Sunday, October 12, 2008


COMMENTARY:

About 50 parishioners were locked into the Assemblies of God church before it was set ablaze. They were mostly women and children. Those who tried to flee were hacked to death by machete-wielding members of a mob numbering 2,000.

The 2008 New Year Day atrocity in the Kenyan village Eldoret, about 185 miles northwest of Nairobi, had all the markings of the Rwanda genocide of a decade earlier.

By mid-February 2008, more than 1,500 Kenyans were killed. Many were slain by machete-armed attackers. More than 500,000 were displaced by the religious strife. Villages lay in ruin. Many of the atrocities were perpetrated by Muslims against Christians.

The violence was led by supporters of Raila Odinga, the opposition leader who lost the Dec. 27, 2007, presidential election by more than 230,000 votes. Odinga supporters began the genocide hours after the final election results were announced Dec. 30. Mr. Odinga was a member of Parliament representing an area in western Kenya, heavily populated by the Luo tribe, and the birthplace of Barack Obama's father.

Mr. Odinga had the backing of Kenya's Muslim community heading into the election. For months he denied any ties to Muslim leaders, but fell silent when Sheik Abdullahi Abdi, chairman of the National Muslim Leaders Forum, appeared on Kenya television displaying a memorandum of understanding signed on Aug. 29, 2007, by Mr. Odinga and the Muslim leader. Mr. Odinga then denied his denials.

The details of the MOU were shocking. In return for Muslim backing, Mr. Odinga promised to impose a number of measures favored by Muslims if he were elected president. Among these were recognition of "Islam as the only true religion," Islamic leaders would have an "oversight role to monitor activities of ALL other religions [emphasis in original]," installation of Shariah courts in every jurisdiction, a ban on Christian preaching, replacement of the police commissioner who "allowed himself to be used by heathens and Zionists," adoption of a women's dress code, and bans on alcohol and pork.

This was not Mr. Odinga's first brush with notoriety. Like his father, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, the main opposition leader in the 1960s and 1970s, Raila Odinga is a Marxist He graduated from East Germany's Magdeburg University in 1970 on a scholarship provided by the East German government. He named his oldest son after Fidel Castro.

Raila Odinga was implicated in the bloody coup attempt in 1982 against then-President Daniel Arap Moi, a close ally of the United States. Kenya has been one of the most stable democracies in Africa since the 1960s. The ethnic cleansing earlier this year was the worst violence in Kenya since that 1982 coup attempt.

Mr. Odinga spent eight years in prison. At the time, he denied guilt but later detailed he was a coup leader in his 2006 biography. Statue of limitations precluded further prosecution when the biography appeared.

Initially, Mr. Odinga was not the favored opposition candidate to stand in the 2007 election against President Mwai Kibaki, who was seeking his second term. However, he received a tremendous boost when Sen. Barack Obama arrived in Kenya in August 2006 to campaign on his behalf. Mr. Obama denies that supporting Mr. Odinga was the intention of his trip, but his actions and local media reports tell otherwise.

Mr. Odinga and Mr. Obama were nearly inseparable throughout Mr. Obama's six-day stay. The two traveled together throughout Kenya and Mr. Obama spoke on behalf of Mr. Odinga at numerous rallies. In contrast, Mr. Obama had only criticism for Kibaki. He lashed out against the Kenyan government shortly after meeting with the president on Aug. 25. "The [Kenyan] people have to suffer over corruption perpetrated by government officials," Mr. Obama announced.

"Kenyans are now yearning for change," he declared. The intent of Mr. Obama's remarks and actions was transparent to Kenyans - he was firmly behind Mr. Odinga.

Mr. Odinga and Mr. Obama had met several times before the 2006 trip. Reports indicate Mr. Odinga visited Mr. Obama during trips to the U.S. in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Mr. Obama sent his foreign policy adviser Mark Lippert to Kenya in early 2006 to coordinate his summer visit. Mr. Obama's August trip coincided with strategizing by Orange Democratic Movement leaders to defeat Mr. Kibaki in the upcoming elections. Mr. Odinga represented the ODM ticket in the presidential race.

Mr. Odinga and Mr. Obama's father were both from the Luo community, the second-largest tribe in Kenya, but their ties run much deeper. Mr. Odinga told a stunned BBC Radio interviewer the reason why he and Mr. Obama were staying in near daily telephone contact was because they were cousins. In a Jan. 8, 2008, interview, Mr. Odinga said Mr. Obama had called him twice the day before while campaigning in the New Hampshire primary before adding, "Barack Obama's father is my maternal uncle."

President Kibaki requested a meeting of all opposition leaders in early January in an effort to quell the violence. All agreed to attend except Mr. Odinga. A month later, Mr. Kibaki offered Mr. Odinga the role of prime minister, the de facto No. 2 in the Kenyan government, in return for an end to the attacks. Mr. Odinga was sworn in on April 17, 2008.

Mr. Obama's judgment is seriously called into question when he backs an official with troubling ties to Muslim extremists and whose supporters practice ethnic cleansing and genocide. It was Islamic extremists in Kenya who bombed the U.S. Embassy in 1998, killing more than 200 and injuring thousands. None of this has dissuaded Mr. Obama from maintaining disturbing loyalties.

http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/oct/12/obamas-kenya-ghosts/

37
3DHS / Spread the Wealth Around
« on: October 14, 2008, 06:19:35 PM »
Obama to Plumber: My Plan Will 'Spread the Wealth Around'

Barack Obama told a tax-burdened plumber over the weekend that his economic philosophy is to "spread the wealth around" -- a comment that may only draw fire from riled-up John McCain supporters who have taken to calling Obama a "socialist" at the Republican's rallies.

Obama made the remark, caught on camera, after fielding some tough questions from the plumber Sunday in Ohio, where the Democratic candidate canvassed neighborhoods and encouraged residents to vote early.

"Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" the plumber asked, complaining that he was being taxed "more and more for fulfilling the American dream."

"It's not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they've got a chance for success too," Obama responded. "My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody ... I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

Obama's remarks drew fresh criticism on the blogosphere that the Illinois senator favors a breed of wealth redistribution -- as well as a rebuke from the McCain campaign.

"If Barack Obama's goal as President is to 'spread the wealth around,' perhaps his unconditional meetings with Hugo Chavez, Raul Castro, and Kim Jong-Il aren't so crazy -- if nothing else they can advise an Obama administration on economic policy," McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb said in a written statement to FOXNews.com. "In contrast, John McCain's goal as president will be to let the American people prosper unburdened by government and ever higher taxes."

Obama frequently rails against what he calls a Republican concept that tax breaks for the wealthy will somehow "trickle down" to middle-class Americans.

Obama says he will not raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year.

However, McCain's aides and supporters argue that Obama wrongly wants to raise taxes on businesses in a time of economic distress.

Both candidates spent Monday discussing how they would resurrect the ailing economy. McCain again pointed to his plan to buy up cumbersome mortgages from homeowners and renegotiate them. Obama unveiled what he called an economic rescue plan for the middle class, which included a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures.

http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/10/13/obama-plumber-plan-spread-wealth/

38
3DHS / The Cabinet of Dr. Obama
« on: October 12, 2008, 10:05:46 PM »
Dissecting the health care proposals of Obama and McCain.
by Yuval Levin
10/20/2008, Volume 014, Issue 06


Over the past few weeks, in a series of television ads, in stump speeches, and in the presidential and vice presidential debates, the Obama campaign has sought mightily to attack John McCain's proposal for health care reform. It's vehemence and tenacity have been striking, especially given how little McCain himself has actually had to say about his plan. Ironically, their misleading critiques actually hint at the strengths of McCain's proposal, and point to the serious vulnerabilities in Obama's own approach to health care politics.

At the core of the McCain health care agenda is the most important conservative policy innovation since welfare reform: the transformation of the benefit now given to employer-provided health coverage into a health insurance tax credit made available to all. For almost 70 years now, the federal government has given a significant tax preference to employer-provided health insurance. When your employer takes money out of your wages to purchase coverage on your behalf, the money is not counted as part of your gross income, so you don't pay any taxes on it. But if you purchase insurance yourself, not through an employer, the money you use to do so gets taxed.

This makes employer-provided insurance vastly more appealing and places a serious burden on those to whom it is not available or who prefer coverage other than what their company offers. It has prevented the development of a genuine market in individually purchased health insurance and therefore artificially keeps insurance costs high. It has kept consumers from having a clear sense of what their health care costs, and so has inflated the price of care itself as well as the price of coverage. It has severely reduced the options available to families, making it more difficult to find insurance that meets their particular needs. It has tied health insurance to employment, leaving people uncertain about career moves and insecure about the future of their coverage. And it has vastly increased the number of Americans without health insurance, since not every business can afford to provide coverage, and those whose employers don't offer it cannot readily find affordable options on their own.

And yet, for all its troubles, the employer-based system is quite popular with the people it serves. Nearly 90 percent of them, in a recent Kaiser Foundation poll, rated their insurance as good or excellent. They would certainly like to see costs go down and to feel more secure about their coverage, but they do not want their existing coverage taken away from them. This obviously poses an enormous challenge for reformers: How can the problems of the current system be addressed without displacing the millions of Americans who are satisfied with it?

The McCain solution is to change the incentives for consumers, but not for employers, so that people find themselves with more options, but are not forced out of their current insurance arrangement. Rather than exempt from taxation all the money used by employers to buy insurance, he would treat it as income but then provide individual taxpayers (regardless of how they obtain their coverage) with a credit that more than covers the taxes. The effect of this, from the point of view of individuals and families, would be to make employer-provided coverage just one option among many.

All American taxpayers, regardless of whether they now have health insurance or where they get it, would receive a $2,500 health care tax credit ($5,000 per family) under McCain's plan. If you now have health insurance through your employer and would like to keep it, you can do that and the economics of the arrangements would change only slightly, and (for all but the top 5 percent of taxpayers) for the better. The money your employer takes out of your wages for your insurance would be taxed, but the new credit would more than cover the additional taxes, leaving you with the insurance you have now, and with a little more money in your pocket at tax time (between $700 and $1,600, according to the estimates of the Tax Policy Center). Things don't change for your employer, and they get a little better for you.

In last week's town hall debate, Barack Obama attacked this feature of the plan as an example of "one hand giveth and the other hand taketh away." But the giving and the taking occurs only on your income tax form, and in the end you're left with the insurance you want to keep and more of the money you've earned. The point of all the giving and taking, meanwhile, is to make options available for those not satisfied with the current system, or not served by it.

If you now receive insurance coverage from your employer but are unhappy with it or would rather find coverage that stays with you through different jobs or better suits your family's needs on your own, the McCain plan would give you the same tax benefit for insurance you choose as you now get only for insurance your employer chooses. If you decline your employer's insurance, the portion of your wages spent on coverage becomes regular take-home pay, which you can use to buy insurance. The additional wages are taxed, but again the new credit would cover those taxes and even leave you with a little extra. You would have just as much money to spend on insurance as your employer did. In addition, the McCain plan would vastly increase the scope of competition in the individual insurance market by permitting insurers to sell policies across state lines. It would thus create both new buyers and new sellers and start to build a genuine individual insurance market, which would bring down costs.

Finally, if you don't have insurance at all now, the new tax credit would put your family $5,000 closer to affording it. Most of the uninsured are not poor (or else they would qualify for Medicaid), and for many families without coverage an extra $5,000 and a real market to buy in would make the difference and allow them to obtain health insurance. A recent analysis of the McCain plan by noted health care economist Roger Feldman and a team at Health Systems Innovation (HSI) found that it would reduce the number of uninsured Americans by 27 million--well over half of the present total--and all without forcing anyone who now likes their coverage to lose it.

The McCain approach essentially puts employer-purchased and individually purchased health insurance on a level playing field, giving people more options and a better chance to find and afford the coverage they need.

The Obama campaign's attacks on the plan have mostly sought to confuse the public about its benefits by speaking about the parts without acknowledging the whole. Senators Obama and Biden both mentioned the taxation of health benefits in recent debates, and their campaign has run ads pointing to it as well, but all have failed to note the tax credit that more than makes up for it. The net tax burden on middle class families declines under the McCain plan, while insurance options improve. If they do mention the tax credit, they suggest it is all that families would have if they left their employer coverage--as Joe Biden put it in his debate with Sarah Palin, you would have to "replace a $12,000 plan with a $5,000 check you just give to the insurance company." But that ignores the simple fact that employer-purchased health care is purchased with employee wages. Right now, employers pay workers less in cash wages because they pay so much in premiums. With McCain's reform, workers who opt out of coverage will get more take home pay and a tax credit to more than make up for lost employer contributions to health care.

But perhaps the most dishonest charge concerns the prospects for the employer-based system itself. The Obama campaign has implied that McCain's plan would unravel the system and cause workers to be dropped from their employers' health plans. "Twenty million of you will be dropped," Joe Biden said in the vice presidential debate. In fact, the McCain plan does not alter the basic financial incentives facing employers. Workers might choose to leave employer coverage, but the McCain plan would not force them out.

Indeed, it is Barack Obama's health care plan that raises the prospect of masses being dropped from the employer-based insurance system, and his vulnerability on this crucial front may explain some of his intense defensiveness on health care. In the second presidential debate, Obama sought to address this concern through a brazenly misleading depiction of his own plan. "If you've got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it," he said. "All I'm going to do is help you to lower the premiums on it." But you can only keep your plan if your employer doesn't eliminate it, and Obama's health care proposal, unlike John McCain's, gives your employer a powerful incentive to do just that.

Where McCain seeks to address the problems of our health insurance system by building a market for private individuals, Obama seeks to do so by building a public-insurance system. His plan would force all but the very smallest businesses to either provide insurance coverage that meets the plan's requirements (which the Obama campaign has not specified, but would surely involve extensive particular coverage mandates like those in the federal employee health plan, which exceed what most popular employee plans provide today), or pay a tax to the government. Many employers would thus face the choice of increasing their insurance costs to comply with the new coverage requirements or dropping their workers' coverage. Obama, meanwhile, would create a new government-run insurance program (funded by the new tax on employers who don't offer coverage) that would compete with private companies to cover people who are not insured by employers.

In effect, the Obama plan creates an incentive to drop employees from existing plans, and then takes private insurers out of the race to cover them by using price controls to make the public option cheaper. The plan's goal is to drive Americans into a public Medicare-like insurance system by default.

The effect would be dramatic. An analysis by the Lewin Group suggests this approach would result in between 32 million and 52 million people moving from employer-provided coverage to the public system (depending on the rate of the "pay or play" tax on employers, which the Obama campaign has yet to specify). A recent analysis by HSI argues that "The offering of a public health plan will practically eliminate the group market medium PPO plan design that has been the most popular [employer-based] plan to date."

The Obama plan would also cost more than $400 billion a year, would impose a new burdensome tax on employment through the pay or play provision at a time of already rising unemployment, and, according to the Tax Policy Center, would increase the health care costs of taxpayers in the top 40 percent of the income range. All of this, HSI estimates, will reduce the number of uninsured Americans by about 25.5 million people, while McCain's plan would reduce it by more than 27 million.

Simply put, Barack Obama's criticisms of the McCain health care plan--that it would raise taxes and decimate employer-based coverage--apply far better to his own proposal.

The case for McCain's plan can be made very plainly: If you like your coverage as it is, the plan will let you keep it and you will pocket a little more money at tax time. If you don't like your coverage now, the plan will give you a lot more options to choose from and let you use the same money your employer now uses to pay for them. And, if you don't have insurance today, the McCain plan will offer you more options, reduce costs in the market for individual insurance, and put you $5,000 closer to having health insurance. Obama's plan would push tens of millions of people out of private insurance they like and into a vast government program. It would, moreover, raise taxes on hiring in hard economic times and break the federal budget.

It is John McCain, not Barack Obama, who should be pushing hard on health care in the next debate..

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/680cwvaz.asp?pg=1

39
3DHS / Obama & Friends: Judge Not?
« on: October 12, 2008, 04:23:04 AM »
By Charles Krauthammer

Convicted felon Tony Rezko. Unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. And the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. It is hard to think of any presidential candidate before Barack Obama sporting associations with three more execrable characters. Yet let the McCain campaign raise the issue, and the mainstream media begin fulminating about dirty campaigning tinged with racism and McCarthyite guilt by association.

But associations are important. They provide a significant insight into character. They are particularly relevant in relation to a potential president as new, unknown, opaque and self-contained as Obama. With the economy overshadowing everything, it may be too late politically to be raising this issue. But that does not make it, as conventional wisdom holds, in any way illegitimate.

McCain has only himself to blame for the bad timing. He should months ago have begun challenging Obama's associations, before the economic meltdown allowed the Obama campaign (and the mainstream media, which is to say the same thing) to dismiss the charges as an act of desperation by the trailing candidate.

McCain had his chance back in April when the North Carolina Republican Party ran a gubernatorial campaign ad that included the linking of Obama with Jeremiah Wright. The ad was duly denounced by the New York Times and other deep thinkers as racist.

This was patently absurd. Racism is treating people differently and invidiously on the basis of race. Had any white presidential candidate had a close 20-year association with a white preacher overtly spreading race hatred from the pulpit, that candidate would have been not just universally denounced and deemed unfit for office but written out of polite society entirely.

Nonetheless, John McCain in his infinite wisdom, and with his overflowing sense of personal rectitude, joined the braying mob in denouncing that perfectly legitimate ad, saying it had no place in any campaign. In doing so, McCain unilaterally disarmed himself, rendering off-limits Obama's associations, an issue that even Hillary Clinton addressed more than once.

Obama's political career was launched with Ayers giving him a fundraiser in his living room. If a Republican candidate had launched his political career at the home of an abortion-clinic bomber -- even a repentant one -- he would not have been able to run for dogcatcher in Podunk. And Ayers shows no remorse. His only regret is that he "didn't do enough."

Why are these associations important? Do I think Obama is as corrupt as Rezko? Or shares Wright's angry racism or Ayers's unreconstructed 1960s radicalism?

No. But that does not make these associations irrelevant. They tell us two important things about Obama.

First, his cynicism and ruthlessness. He found these men useful, and use them he did. Would you attend a church whose pastor was spreading racial animosity from the pulpit? Would you even shake hands with -- let alone serve on two boards with -- an unrepentant terrorist, whether he bombed U.S. military installations or abortion clinics?

Most Americans would not, on the grounds of sheer indecency. Yet Obama did, if not out of conviction then out of expediency. He was a young man on the make, an unknown outsider working his way into Chicago politics. He played the game with everyone, without qualms and with obvious success.

Obama is not the first politician to rise through a corrupt political machine. But he is one of the rare few to then have the audacity to present himself as a transcendent healer, hovering above and bringing redemption to the "old politics" -- of the kind he had enthusiastically embraced in Chicago in the service of his own ambition.

Second, and even more disturbing than the cynicism, is the window these associations give on Obama's core beliefs. He doesn't share the Rev. Wright's poisonous views of race nor Ayers's views, past and present, about the evil that is American society. But Obama clearly did not consider these views beyond the pale. For many years he swam easily and without protest in that fetid pond.

Until now. Today, on the threshold of the presidency, Obama concedes the odiousness of these associations, which is why he has severed them. But for the years in which he sat in Wright's pews and shared common purpose on boards with Ayers, Obama considered them a legitimate, indeed unremarkable, part of social discourse.

Do you? Obama is a man of first-class intellect and first-class temperament. But his character remains highly suspect. There is a difference between temperament and character. Equanimity is a virtue. Tolerance of the obscene is not.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/09/AR2008100902328.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

40
3DHS / Not a good recommendation for a president.
« on: October 12, 2008, 04:13:20 AM »
It is what it is: Obama allied with scoundrels

By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

In the best tradition of Bill Clinton?s declaration that the answer to the question of whether he was having an affair depended on ?what the definition of is is,? Sen. Barack Obama was clearly concealing the truth when he said that William Ayers was ?just a guy who lives in my neighborhood.?

The Ayers-Obama connection was, in fact, an intimate collaboration that it led to the only executive or administrative experience in Obama?s life.

After Walter Annenberg?s foundation offered several hundred million dollars to American public schools in the mid-?90s, Ayers applied for $50 million for Chicago. His purpose was to ?raise political consciousness? in schools.

After he won the grant, Ayers? group chose Obama to distribute the $50 million, and the future senator raised another $60 million from other civic groups to augment it. In doing so, he was following Ayers? admonition to grant the funds to ?external? organizations, like American Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), to pair with schools and conduct programs to radicalize and politicize the students.

Reading, math and science achievement tests counted for little in the grants, but the school?s success in preaching a radical agenda determined how much money it got.

Obama should have run screaming at the sight of Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn. Ayers has admitted bombing the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, and his wife was imprisoned for failing to cooperate in solving the robbery of a Brink?s car in which two police were killed. Far from remorse, Ayers told The New York Times [NYT], in September 2001, that he wished he ?could have done more.? Ayers only avoided conviction when the evidence against him turned out to be contained in illegal wiretaps. He was, in fact, guilty as sin.

So let?s sum up Obama?s Chicago connections. His chief financial supporter was Tony Rezko, now on his way to prison. His spiritual adviser was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, of ?God damn America? fame. And the guy who got him his only administrative job is former terrorist Ayers.

Not a good recommendation for a president.

http://news.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_ed/view.bg?articleid=1124922&srvc=next_article

41
3DHS / Mister Magoo Goes to Washington
« on: October 10, 2008, 01:13:49 AM »
Obama and the failure of the Annenberg Challenge.

By David Freddoso

Barack Obama would have you believe that, after 20 years of friendship, he had no idea the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was a bomb-throwing racial demagogue. And that after 15 years of what he described as a close friendship, he had no idea Tony Rezko was a crook.

Similarly, this week, his campaign claimed that when Obama entered William Ayers?s home in 1995 to raise money for a state-senate run, the future presidential hopeful didn?t know Ayers was a former terrorist.

So by his own account, Obama wanders through life completely unaware of his surroundings.

To be fair, there is no conclusive proof that Obama was ever filled in on Ayers. A lot of the most well-known information came out since the fundraiser: Ayers wrote a 2001 memoir claiming credit for bombing the Pentagon. He posed for that famous photograph trampling the American flag. He said that he had not done enough during his terrorist days to force America out of Vietnam. He told the New York Times that the patriotic outburst of national unity after the 9/11 attacks made him ?want to puke.?

Perhaps Obama really did know nothing about Ayers?s unrepentant terrorism at that fundraiser, and even that same year, when Obama became the first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge ? an education-reform project Ayers had founded, on whose board Obama would serve until it ended in 2001 (he was chairman until 1999).

But Obama?s work on the Challenge says a lot about the candidate?s leadership abilities.

The Challenge, which operated in 210 Chicago schools between 1996 and 2001, comprises the only serious executive experience in Obama?s career. In 2000, during his failed run for Congress against incumbent Rep. Bobby Rush (D., Ill.), Obama bragged about his role in the project. During a televised debate, Obama argued that his relative lack of experience in office was no reason he would not be a good congressman.


?My experience previous to elected office equips me for the job,? Obama said. ?I have chaired major philanthropic efforts in the city, like the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, that gave $50 million to prompt school-reform efforts throughout the city.?

So how did he do?

The final technical report of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge is available online here. We learn that the program received a $50 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, on the condition that they raise at least twice as much (they did slightly better than the requirement, spending $160 million total when all was said and done) and commission their own evaluation. The report includes a lengthy description of the Challenge?s goals and methods, and a 33-page description of the methodology used to measure its progress. The bottom line is in the report?s executive summary:

    Our research indicates that student outcomes in Annenberg schools were much like those in demographically similar non-Annenberg schools and across the Chicago school system as a whole, indicating that among the schools it supported, the Challenge had little impact on student outcomes.

In the last two years of the project, certain schools were identified as ?breakthrough? schools. Annenberg?s board dedicated more money and resources to these. The report notes on page 73 (114 in the PDF):

    There were virtually no statistically significant differences between Breakthrough and other Annenberg schools in these student outcomes.

Bear in mind that Chicago schools set a pretty low bar to begin with. The four-year graduation rate in the city?s high schools, depending on how you measure it, is as low as 54 percent. According to one recent study, only 6 percent of entering freshmen in Chicago public high schools will obtain college degrees by age 25. Only 31.4 percent of Chicago high-school juniors met or exceeded state standards on the Prairie State Achievement Examination.

Obama?s campaign points out that Barack Obama was only a boy when William Ayers and his friends were plotting bombings and placing bombs. They point out that Obama does not and never has supported terrorism. And they are correct on both points.

But forget about the terrorism. We can assume, albeit charitably, that he had no idea about Ayers even as late as 2000. What?s more important is that Obama was an adult when he was given responsibility for the Annenberg Challenge, that responsibility represents his only significant executive experience, and the Challenge was a waste of $160 million in other people?s money.

With that kind of experience, just think what Obama could do as president of the United States.

42
This happened to a woman I know.  Over $1000 was taken from her account after she'd used her debit card at a gas station in Reno.  I'm not sure how it was resolved since you don't have the same protection against fraudulent charges like you do with a credit card.  I know when I use my card at the pump, I never have to input my pin code. It always displays a messages that says to "insert card and remove quickly" and sometimes it will require that I enter my zip code...so I'm hoping that means my card is safe to use at the pump.

Paying at the pump just got more risky

Becki Turner got the call from her bank?s fraud department on Labor Day. The investigator wanted to know if she had withdrawn $500 from an ATM in California over the holiday weekend. She hadn?t. She couldn?t. Turner was home in Puyallup, Wash.

?I was just flabbergasted,? she says. ?I had the card with me, the ATM was in another state, and the person using the machine had to have my security code.? Turner worried crooks had gotten into the banking system and stolen her password.

It wasn?t anything that complicated. Puyallup police say thieves snagged her account information ? along with the debit card numbers and PIN codes of hundreds of other people ? at two
gas stations in the area.

They did it by installing their own hard-to-spot card reader, called a skimmer, on top of the card reader built into the pump. The skimmer is able to grab the account information from the card without interfering with the legitimate payment transaction.

The crooks used the stolen data to create (or clone) fake debit cards that were used at ATMs in Washington State over the Fourth of July weekend and in Northern California on Labor Day weekend. The bad guys like three-day holidays because it gives them more time to use the cards before the unauthorized withdrawals are spotted.

?We are looking at a sophisticated, very well-organized group of individuals,? says Detective Jason Visnaw with the Puyallup Police Department. When all the victims from these two incidents are identified, the total loss could reach half a million dollars.

Why steal debit card numbers? ?With a credit card you have to go and buy merchandise and then you have to fence it or pawn it,? Det. Visnaw explains. ?With a debit card, you?re getting cash money.?

This is not an isolated case. Gas pumps are being compromised in cities across the country. ?We don?t view it as an epidemic, but there are cases open in at least a half dozen states right now,? says Ed Donovan, spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service. These investigations are underway in California, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Washington.

Donovan tells me the Secret Service believes some of these crimes are inside jobs, involving someone at the service station.

Gas pumps are just the latest target

Skimming credit cards and debit cards is not new. Portable card readers make it possible for anyone to copy the information stored on a card?s magnetic stripe. This information is not encrypted so it?s easy to steal.

?You just run it through the skimmer and it has all the information right there in plain text,? says former White House cyber security advisor Howard Schmidt. ?It?s very easy to imprint that data on another magnetic strip and use it somewhere else.?

The first skimming cases were reported at restaurants and stores where dishonest employees ran cards through their reader before ringing up the sale. As technology improved, the bad guys developed skimmers for ATMs. Now they?ve added gas pumps.

The skimmers are designed to slip over the real card reader. They can be hard to spot. And quite frankly, most of us would never look for something like this anyway. We want to pay and go.

So how do they get your PIN number? They can hide a little camera in the skimmer or on the pump. It shows your fingers as you type in the number.

There are also fake keypads that slip over the real keypad that can transmit the PIN code as you enter it.

In Las Vegas, police have discovered even more sophisticated technology ? wireless transmitters installed inside the pump. ?They can actually sit in the parking lot with a laptop and get real-time information as victims use their card,? explains Lt. Robert Sebby of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Because there?s nothing on the outside of the pump, there?s no way you can tell the pump is compromised.

Not a safe way to pay

Nancy and Jim Tew no longer use their debit cards to pay at the pump ? and for good reason. They both had their debit card numbers stolen at one of those gas stations in Puyallup, Wash.

Nancy Tew found out about the theft when her card was rejected at the grocery store. ?To my astonishment, I had no money in the bank,? she said.

The thieves used her account number at ATMs in Hollywood, Calif., to steal $600. They got $900 from her husband?s checking account. She tells me it was ?totally bizarre and really scary? to be targeted like that and not even know it.

The Tews now pay for their gas ? with cash or debit card ? at the register. That may sound paranoid, but other victims of this skimming attack tell me they now do the same thing.

Police in Puyallup and Las Vegas now advise residents not to use their debit card at a gas pump because there?s no way to be sure it hasn?t been tampered with.

That?s smart advice and here?s why. Debit cards do not offer the same fraud protection as credit cards. If crook armed with a skimmer snags your credit card number and uses it to buy things, you can dispute the charges with the credit card company. You won?t owe a thing while they investigate.

If the crook grabs your debit card number, he can go to a cash machine and pull money out of your checking account. It could take days for the bank to investigate and put that money back into your account. During that time checks could bounce or you might not be able to pay your bills. That?s why the only way I pay at the pump is with a credit card.

43
3DHS / Hail-Mary Vote
« on: October 09, 2008, 11:05:57 PM »
Understanding those mysterious Catholics.

By Raymond Arroyo

The Catholic vote is a bit like an apparition of the Virgin Mary. It is a clear article of faith to some, a murky delusion to others. Nevertheless, this block of 67 million Americans is crucial to electoral victory and a prime target for both political parties this season. Pity that they don?t really understand what motivates these voters or how the messages they send out are being interpreted by Catholics.

Admittedly they are a mysterious lot, a group that is neither monolithic nor partisan. At present 49 percent of Catholics are Democrats while 40 percent are registered Republicans. A portion of these voters are known to swing wildly in presidential elections. This year they represent a third of voters in do or die battleground states like Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. On the whole Catholic voters are offended by injustice, have a reflexive concern for the poor, and are committed to protecting life in varying degrees. Despite their diversity, there are cultural characteristics of Catholic voters that for whatever reason have been largely ignored or underappreciated by the two major political parties. Here are a few that I have observed in my travels and during conversations with Catholics across the country:

The Madonna Complex: The veneration of the Virgin Mary in Catholic practice has uniquely prepared the Catholic people, men and women, to warmly accept female leadership. Not just any leader mind you, but a leader who is at once nurturing and firm: a mother. This is one of the reasons Hillary Clinton trounced Obama 59 percent to 41 percent among Catholic voters in the Pennsylvania primary. It is also why Sarah Palin has caused such a sensation among Catholic woman, even self-described Democratic women. She represents an underground feminism that has long existed but is seldom celebrated. When I recently asked a bi-partisan group of Catholic women in California if they felt that Sarah Palin was like them, I was loudly corrected. ?She IS us,? they said.

?Stained Glassers?: If Evangelicals are ?people of the Book,? Catholic voters are ?people of the look.? Far beyond what they hear or read, Catholics have a keen sensitivity to what they observe and intuit firsthand. I believe this is a natural outgrowth of Catholic worship where gesture, image, and tonality are as important as language. Like people staring at stained glass windows, they watch candidates looking for sensibilities similar to their own. One of Bill Clinton?s Catholic outreach gurus once told me that even though his candidate could not connect with Catholic voters on the issues, he could, with image and lingo slowly create a ?mosaic? pleasing to Catholics. Clinton handily won the Catholic vote. This helps explain the fascination and attachment that so many Catholics across the country feel for Sarah Palin after seeing her give exactly one speech. They appreciated the grit of her talk in St. Paul, but it was the image of the candidate and her family, particularly the way she caressed her Down syndrome baby, Trig, that left an indelible mark on Catholics. This impression has already shown itself in the polls. How long Palin can preserve it depends on what she does in the days ahead.

Sheep Watch Their Shepherds: The term ?Bimbo Eruptions? became common parlance in Washington during the Clinton administration, but this season, at least for Catholic voters, the term ?Bishop Eruptions? might be more appropriate. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph Biden, both Catholics, dragged the issue of abortion into the presidential race a few weeks ago. After publically misrepresenting Catholic teaching on when life begins, the pols were reprimanded by no less than 30 bishops, some even inviting Pelosi and Biden to refrain from communion. In spite of efforts to finesse the issue, the skirmish reminded Catholics that the bishops consider abortion a ?foundational? issue. It also revealed how far removed the Democratic party?s position on abortion is from that of the Church. For Catholics who attend Mass each week the defense of human life is the preeminent issue. This is one of the reasons why McCain enjoys a 16-point lead in the latest Pew poll among church-going Catholics. I was shocked to learn during my travels that even a month after the fact, many Catholics are just now becoming aware of the ?bishop eruptions.? A man in Ohio told me: ?these politicians are trying to distort Church teaching for their own ends.? One woman in Denver said she thought it was an attempt to ?topple the bishop?s authority.? The sheep still follow their shepherds. To run afoul of them this political season is a profound error.

The real swing voters in this election will be the Easter/Christmas Catholics ? those who infrequently attend church, but consider themselves in the fold. They too will be influenced by the cultural tug of the faith described above. How to capitalize on the inherent tendencies of Catholic voters will be for the candidates to discover. But it will take real savvy and sensitivity to win over this block ? and a few novenas couldn?t hurt.

? Raymond Arroyo, the news director at Eternal Word Television Network, is a New York Times best-selling author and the editor of Mother Angelica?s Private and Pithy Lessons From the Scriptures (Doubleday).

44
3DHS / So why do people want government-controlled healthcare again?
« on: October 09, 2008, 10:43:34 PM »
Don't treat the old and unhealthy, say doctors

Doctors are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives.

Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.

Fertility treatment and "social" abortions are also on the list of procedures that many doctors say should not be funded by the state.

The findings of a survey conducted by Doctor magazine sparked a fierce row last night, with the British Medical Association and campaign groups describing the recommendations from family and hospital doctors as "out?rageous" and "disgraceful".

About one in 10 hospitals already deny some surgery to obese patients and smokers, with restrictions most common in hospitals battling debt.

Managers defend the policies because of the higher risk of complications on the operating table for unfit patients. But critics believe that patients are being denied care simply to save money.

The Government announced plans last week to offer fat people cash incentives to diet and exercise as part of a desperate strategy to steer Britain off a course that will otherwise see half the population dangerously overweight by 2050.

Obesity costs the British taxpayer ?7 billion a year. Overweight people are more likely to contract diabetes, cancer and heart disease, and to require replacement joints or stomach-stapling operations.

Meanwhile, ?1.7 billion is spent treating diseases caused by smoking, such as lung cancer, bronchitis and emphysema, with a similar sum spent by the NHS on alcohol problems. Cases of cirrhosis have tripled over the past decade.

Among the survey of 870 family and hospital doctors, almost 60 per cent said the NHS could not provide full healthcare to everyone and that some individuals should pay for services.

One in three said that elderly patients should not be given free treatment if it were unlikely to do them good for long. Half thought that smokers should be denied a heart bypass, while a quarter believed that the obese should be denied hip replacements.

Tony Calland, chairman of the BMA's ethics committee, said it would be "outrageous" to limit care on age grounds. Age Concern called the doctors' views "disgraceful".

Gordon Brown promised this month that a new NHS constitution would set out people's "responsibilities" as well as their rights, a move interpreted as meaning restric?tions on patients who bring health problems on themselves. The only sanction threatened so far, however, is to send patients to the bottom of the waiting list if they miss appointments.

The survey found that medical professionals wanted to go much further in denying care to patients who do not look after their bodies.

Ninety-four per cent said that an alcoholic who refused to stop drinking should not be allowed a liver transplant, while one in five said taxpayers should not pay for "social abortions" and fertility treatment.

Paul Mason, a GP in Portland, Dorset, said there were good clinical reasons for denying surgery to some patients. "The issue is: how much responsibility do people take for their health?" he said.

"If an alcoholic is going to drink themselves to death then that is really sad, but if he gets the liver transplant that is denied to someone else who could have got the chance of life then that is a tragedy." He said the case of George Best, who drank himself to death in 2005, three years after a liver transplant, had damaged the argument that drinkers deserved a second chance.

However, Roger Williams, who carried out the 2002 transplant on the former footballer, said doctors could never be sure if an alcoholic would return to drinking, although most would expect a detailed psychological assessment of patients, who would be required to abstain for six months before surgery.

Prof Williams said: "Less than five per cent of alcoholics who have a transplant return to serious drinking. George was one of them. It is actually a pretty successful rate. I think the judgment these doctors are making is nothing to do with the clinical reasons for limiting such operations and purely a moral decision."

Katherine Murphy, from the Patients' Association, said it would be wrong to deny treatment because of a "lifestyle" factor. "The decision taken by the doctor has to be the best clinical one, and it has to be taken individually. It is morally wrong to deny care on any other grounds," she said.

Responding to the survey's findings on the treatment of the elderly, Dr Calland, of the BMA, said: "If a patient of 90 needs a hip operation they should get one. Yes, they might peg out any time, but it's not our job to play God."
_______________________________

Brits resort to pulling own teeth

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Some English people have resorted to pulling out their own teeth because they cannot find -- or cannot afford -- a dentist, a major study has revealed.

 Six percent of those questioned in a survey of 5,000 patients admitted they had resorted to self-treatment using pliers and glue, the UK's Press Association reported.

England has a two-tier dental care system with some dentists offering publicly subsidized treatment through the National Health Service and others performing more expensive private work.

But more than three-quarters of those polled said they had been forced to pay for private treatment because they had been unable to find an NHS dentist. Almost a fifth said they had refused dental treatment because of the cost.

One respondent in Lancashire, northern England, claimed to have extracted 14 of their own teeth with a pair of pliers. In Liverpool, one of those collecting data for the survey interviewed three people who had pulled out their own teeth in one morning.

"I took most of my teeth out in the shed with pliers. I have one to go," another respondent wrote.

Others said they had fixed broken crowns using glue to avoid costly dental work.

Valerie Halsworth, 64, told British television's GMTV she had removed seven of her own teeth using her husband's pliers when her toothache became unbearable and she was unable to find an NHS dentist willing to treat her.

Halsworth admitted that the first extraction had been "excruciatingly painful." But she added: "It got that painful that I just had to do something... When you have taken a tooth out... the pain has gone."

Sharon Grant, chair of the Commission for Patient and Public Involvement in Health, which commissioned the survey, said: "These findings indicate that the NHS dental system is letting many patients down very badly.

"Where NHS dental services are available, people are happy with the quality of treatment provided but many find the NHS fee system confusing and expensive, with some patients taking out loans to pay for treatment or more worryingly taking matters into their own hands."

45
3DHS / Focus, People
« on: October 08, 2008, 12:02:46 AM »
A life-or-death election.

By Anne Bayefsky

Since the time of Hitler, civilization has never been so close to the brink of total catastrophe.  This American election will decide whether civilization as we know it will survive.  As much as economic questions are currently front and center, with blame to go all round, this is not an election primarily about corporate greed, or individuals living beyond their means, or government neglect of economic oversight. Nor is it about whether we should have gone into Iraq where, like it or not, American boots on the ground have begun to create an emerging democracy. This election is about whether there will be a nuclear holocaust.

Alarmist? I sure hope so. Isn?t it about time that we got to the point about the stakes in this election? How many more pundits do we have to watch talking about the minutae ? a candidate?s look, an accent, a stumble, a slogan? We have four weeks to talk about the thing that matters most: a nuclear-armed Iran, and which candidate will prevent it.

The question that must be put point-blank to both presidential and vice-presidential candidates is: ?Will you authorize the use of force in time to stop Iran from acquiring the capacity to make nuclear weapons ? yes or no??

Wouldn?t your beliefs for and against abortion fade if you thought nobody would be born into a world fit for living things? Wouldn?t your worries about health care pale if you thought the mutilation, cancer, and death of millions upon millions, sure to follow nuclear war, would occur in your lifetime? Wouldn?t your concerns about affording a college education fade if you thought your children will have the grim task of fighting a war of horrifying devastation instead of going to school?

Wake up. There is a genocidal maniac on the verge of reaching the point of no return in his ability to make a nuclear weapon. A fanatic with the stated ambition to murder five million Jews living in Israel ? to start. A villain who has already funded and armed a terrorist war against the Jewish state that in 2006 forced one-third of Israel?s population to live underground for almost a month. In other words, an individual who is ready, willing, and able to give the nuclear trigger to a terrorist group ? to terrorists who cannot be bargained with because they prefer their death to your freedom. As for the suggestion that the Mullahs are more powerful and nicer guys, the millions brutalized and subjugated in Iran tell a different story. 

I don?t know why it is possible after the Holocaust, to have such widespread denial of man?s capacity for evil. Nor do I understand why Ahmadinejad?s virulent anti-semitism and call for the destruction of Israel are dismissed as irrelevant factoids when calculating the Iranian threat. Time has a story about ?experts? who believe that Iran seeks an atomic bomb not because they have any interest in using it or passing it to others who will, but to deter, to ensure its security. According to Thomas Fringar, chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council: ?Iran?s biggest strategic concern is obtaining security assurances and accords,? and it is the United States ?which the Iranians consider a mortal threat.? These ?experts? have it exactly backwards. If Iran were really driven by such security concerns, these concerns could be alleviated without spending a nickel ? by stopping its nuclear-weapons campaign and its funding of terrorists.

No amount of ignorance, stupidity, or wishful thinking will change the reality that there are people who are prepared to kill you and your family for no good reason at all. Not because of poverty, or envy, or discrimination or because of anything you?ve done. But because they hate you ? whether you live in Jerusalem, Washington, London, or Paris. They hate everything you stand for ? liberty, tolerance, equality. And their minds are made up. Closed ? period ? to the entreaties of na?ve foreign diplomats or would-be presidents and vice presidents.

During the vice-presidential debate, Joe Biden denied the undeniable fact that Senator Obama said he would sit down with the Iranian President without preconditions: ?Barack Obama, he did not say ?sit down with Ahmadinejad.?? Perhaps he should read Barack?s website:  ?The Obama-Biden Plan: Obama supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions.?

So let?s look at the differences between the presidential tickets on what to do about the nuclear weapons ambitions of a would-be mass murderer.

On the one side:

Vice-Presidential Debate

    DEBATE MODERATOR:  ?Let?s move to Iran and Pakistan?.Senator Biden. What?s the greater threat, a nuclear Iran or an unstable Afghanistan??

    SENATOR BIDEN:  ??I always am focused?I have been focusing on for a long time, along with Barack, on Pakistan?.Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be very, very destabilizing?[T]hey are not close to getting a nuclear weapon that?s able to be deployed.??

    SENATOR BIDEN: [on Iran] ?Our friends and allies have been saying, Gwen, ?Sit down. Talk. Talk. Talk.??And if we don?t?what makes you think the allies are going to sit with us??


Ask yourself: does preventing a nuclear holocaust involve winning a popularity contest?


First Presidential Debate

    Senator Obama [on preventing a nuclear Iran]: ?Now here?s what we need to do. We do need tougher sanctions. I do not agree?that we?re going to be able to execute the kind of sanctions we need without some cooperation with?Russia and China?[W]e are also going to have to?engage in tough direct diplomacy with Iran and this is a major difference I have with Senator McCain.?

News flash: Russia and China have told us to take a hike on tough sanctions, Barack. Any other ideas?


Obama Website:

    If Iran continues its troubling behavior, we will step up our economic pressure and political isolation.

?If? it continues? Anybody in Iran trembling?

And on the other side:


Vice-Presidential Debate

    DEBATE MODERATOR:  ?Governor, nuclear Pakistan, unstable Pakistan, nuclear Iran? Which is the greater threat??

    GOVERNOR PALIN: ?An armed, nuclear armed especially Iran is so extremely dangerous to consider. They cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons period.?


First Presidential Debate

    Senator McCain: ?If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it is an existential threat to the State of Israel and to other countries in the region?[W]e cannot [allow] a second Holocaust. ?Have no doubt about the ultimate result of them acquiring nuclear weapons?What Senator Obama doesn?t seem to understand that if without preconditions you sit down across the table from someone who has called Israel a ?stinking corpse,? and wants to destroy that country and wipe it off the map, you legitimize those comments. This is dangerous. It isn?t just naive; it?s dangerous. And so we just have a fundamental difference of opinion.?

Barack Obama isn?t just inexperienced. It isn?t naivet? that drives him. I take him at his word. He and his vice-presidential candidate believe in ?talk, talk, talk? regardless of the hourglass or the stakes or the intentions of the person across the table. No amount of learning on the job is going to change their way of thinking. Approving the use of force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is a Rubicon they will not cross ? before civilization as we know it comes to an end.

So when you cast your ballot this election, make no mistake: you are voting for or against a nuclear holocaust. Not because Barack Obama wants such a horror, but because he will not prevent it.  He will still be talking when the point of no return in Iran?s nuclear program is reached. And the balance of power in the world will ? with terrible consequences ? have changed forever.

 ? Anne Bayefsky is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and at Touro College. She is also editor of www.EyeontheUN.org.

 


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