“Affordable” Care Strikes Again – Spouses and Children Hit Hardest

Last week I reported on new rules released by the unelected bureaucrats at the IRS.  In the process of defining 'Affordable,' for the purpose of enforcing the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obama-Care), families that cannot “afford the employer coverage that they are offered on the job will not be able to get financial assistance from the government to buy private health insurance on their own.”

This week, the unelected bureaucrats at the Department of Health and (in)Human Services announced that as a result of their defining the meaning of affordable, for the purpose of enforcing the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obama-Care), they may not be able to subsidize the difference in costs between some individual and family plans.  If neither the employer nor the employee can afford to cover the difference, spouses and children would go uninsured.

Obama-Care  forces coverage that many Americans neither need or want.  That exposure drives up the risk and the price.  As the price rises the government becomes even less able to keep the promises it could have never kept in the first place.  And since the cost has already exploded well beyond their capacity to pay for it, the unelected bureaucrats are already busy cutting corners to put on a good show.

The Democrats, through Obama care, are creating the very thing they insisted they were going to fix, except that it will now cost exponentially more and the uninsured will not be victims of their own circumstances, they will be priced out or pushed out of the insurance market by the very legislation they were promised would guarantee them coverage.

So now that we know you will not get to keep your coverage, it might be a good time to ask if you still think you'll keep your doctor, or hospital, or even your job, as employers are forced to cut other costs to comply with the health care costs forced upon them by the state?

You might also want to consider if your benevolent masters, the ones who are arbitrarily kicking women and children off their health insurance, will also cut drug therapies, procedures, or any number of other things you might need to ensure your quality of life, because they happen to be too expensive, and as far as the state is concerned, you're not really worth it.

You are reading  "“Affordable” Care Strikes Again – Spouses and Children Hit Hardest"   by  Steve Mac Donald originally posted at GraniteGrok.com (Home)

Steve has been recognized as the Americans For Prosperity Blogger of the month for December 2012

From Top To Bottom The Democrat Party Lacks Principles

The blatant double standards exercised by Democrats is regard to what is outrageous becomes clearer every day.  Here in New Hampshire, spewing hate-speech and laughing at inferred acts of violence are pushed aside when we know that were it the Republicans making ‘off-hand’ remarks of a similar nature, the left would never let it go…. it would be an example of the underlying hate they hold for (insert name here), and would disqualify them for office….and yet not one Democrat has the honor to stand up and say as much when it’s them.

And at the national level the Obama Super PAC has called Mr. Romney many things and most recently a murderer.  But like everything else wrong with the Democrat party, from the violence to the slurs, to the racism, none of them, at least in New Hampshire, has the ‘teabag’ to admit that this is just as wrong as if Republican’s had done it.

The accusation of murder comes to us from Priorities USA, the Obama Super PAC.   The assumption is that because

“a company that Romney used to own closed down a steel mill (several years after Romney left that company) and that meant that the wife of the husband who lost his job at that steel mill (one Joe Soptic) didn’t have any insurance after the wife left her job several years after the layoff and several years after all of that the wife was diagnosed with cancer and then died.”

Did you get that?

So the kid growing up in the wake of the Obama economy, who never finds work and has to turn to crime to better his lot in life..every crime he commits, including murder, is Barak Obama’s fault.  And you know what?  That actually has a leg to stand on.  Becasue in the Obama economy, you don’t build anything without the help of the government, so that has to include everything you destroy as a result of it as well.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Fast and Furious have been tied directly to the deaths of around three-hundred minorities (potential future immigrants–illegal or legal), from their own ridiculous gun running program.  An American, Brian Terry is dead too.  Killed by guns given to their killers by the Obama Administration.  So Obama and Holder have committed murder.

The Democrats who are not defending the Administration are pointing fingers or simply silent.  Very brave, that lot.

So since Holder is only the AG becasue Obama appointed him, and Obama only appointed him becasue people elected Obama President, I guess every Democrat in America is responsible for the death of Brian Terry and 300 Mexicans.

This game is kind of fun.

How does that Ad go?  “New Hampshire Democrats murdered border patrol agent and 300 minorities.”

I bet that would get the armchair decency crowd off their collectivist Donkey’s ass and in an proper up-roar.  But we’re talking about Dear leader, whom they will collectively insist is not responsible for what a Super PAC does.  Or is he?

Surrogate smears are not new, in fact they are a staple of retail politics.  Super PAC’s just make them more well funded and widely distributed.  And while some may argue this is bad, I think it gives an observant and educated electorate a greater opportunity to fisk the claims and even find connections no one wanted anyone to make.  And this Ad is a great example.

It’s a lousy ad.  And when that Ad backfires Obama and his zombies will want to be able to distance themselves, but back in May an Obama Campaign spokesperson introduced the guy in the ad to reporters in a conference call.  Red State has the audio.  So this is not just some guy the Obama Super PAC scrounged up to play six degrees of “Look Romney is a murderer. ” In all likelihood the  Obama’s campaign found him first.

But they didn’t just outsource him to the smear PAC, they are running their own campaign ads with footage of the same guy, in the same clothes, in the same room, at the same time.  (same link above)

So which came first?  The OfA ad or the Super PAC smear, because they were shot the same day.  (Can I say shot?  Is that too divisive of a word?)  They are either sharing footage or were all present.  In either case that suggests collusion.

So the real impact of this ad may not be the long stretch it has to take to make its impossible point (one that even the liberal media is getting incensed at), but that the attack was clearly coordinated with the Super PAC from inside the Obama campaign, in violation of the law.

Break out the flying monkeys to call this some kind of Right wing conspiracy theory.  Go ahead New Hampshire Democrats.   The music is playing.  We know how you are.  Start dancing.

You are reading "Democrat party lacks principles"  by Steve Mac Donald originally posted at GraniteGrok.com (Home)

Oh, And By The Way…The Government DID NOT Create The Internet

by Steve MacDonald 

Mr. ‘Spread-the-Wealth’ “You-didn’t-build-that” Obama is having another bad week after reading a bit too much off the left side of the TelePrompTer.  His Divine Luminance seem to have forgotten what country he is trying to lord over.   When he tried to tell actual business owners that their success can only be the result of the work of many (with the sanction of the state and it’s many gifts to all mankind) he reminded everyone who has ever worked to make something out of nothing that Mr. Obama has no frame of reference; he has never made anything…but a speech. (And he doesn’t even make those he just delivers them.)

Oh, And by the way…someone tell the socialists who write his speeches and load up his prompter that the government did not create the internet.

It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.

If the government didn’t invent the Internet, who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet’s backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.

But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.

According to a book about Xerox PARC, “Dealers of Lightning” (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers realized they couldn’t wait for the government to connect different networks, so would have to do it themselves.

The inconvenient truth is that what government involvement there was had a negative effect on the development and expansion of Internet technology.

“The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished. . . . In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia.”

So, Mr. Obama.  Your precious government?  It didn’t build that either.

H/T

Daniel J. Mitchell/ TownHall.com

Crovitz: Wall Street Journal

You are reading "Government did not Create The Internet"  by Steve Mac Donald originally posted at GraniteGrok.com Home

Obama Golfs With Guy Who Solicits Whores

I suppose it is the state of media and their love affair with Mr. Obama that when in the midst of a hatchet job on a potential opponent over accusations of sexual misconduct that the leader of the free world gets a pass for golfing with a guy convicted of soliciting prostitutes.

Politco/White House Stenographer Jennifer Epstein

Obama is(sic) played with two White House staffers — Marvin Nicholson and Pete Selfridge — and with high school classmate Bobby Titcomb, according to a pool report. In April, Titcomb was one of four men arrested as part of an undercover prostitution sting. He was later released on $500 bail. In May, Titcomb didn’t appear in court as his lawyer offered a no contest plea

Whatever your own thoughts, prostitution is still illegal in most places and rumor has it the girls are not treated particularly well.  So there is something to be said for the timing and optics given the "influential men treating women as sex objects" smear Politco has been waging on Mr. Herman Cain.  While Cain is defending himself from Obama's pit bull David Axelrod, most of the Staff at Politco, and a dyspeptic conga-line of publicity-seeking-future-reality-star/potential-tell-all-book-deal-signing gold-diggers, Mr. Obama is casually hitting a little white ball around exclusive Hawaiian country clubs, in golf slacks and a pricey polo, with a guy who solicits sex from whores.

Hey.  Hookers are a shovel ready job, right?! 

Titcomb and Obama attended the Punahou School together, have been close for decades and are frequent golf buddies. Before Monday, the two last golfed together during the president’s 2010 Christmas vacation. The Obamas regularly attend hours-long parties at Titcomb’s Oahu home.

A judge said that the charges against Titcomb would be dismissed in six months if he didn’t have other run-ins with the law. That six month period has ended. Titcomb was also required to pay a $500 fine and to donate to a criminal injury compensation fund.

Titcomb has faced other minor run-ins with the law, including a conviction on a contempt of court charge in 1986 and several driving violations, including leaving the scene of an accident in 1989. 

Leaving the scene is a minor violation?  Not for the 99% it's not--that would be the real 99% not the 0.99% whiny brat criminal losers at the #OccupyImorality movement.  Though I think we can see why Democrats relate to the latter.

Overall it is the matter-of-factness of this that I find most instructive.  Politico wrote hundreds of stories about Herman Cain on an obvious mission to smear him.  The smear is driven by assumptions and hear-say, and allegations without evidence.   But the president golfing with a guy who has had past run-ins with the law, and tried to pay a hooker for sex, is reported (by a woman) like a whistle stop in some germane travel guide.   Are Obama's criminal associations and questionable peer group so beneath the pale that this warrants little more than a "been there done that?"

"Dom Obama played a round of golf (use your best Brando/Godfather accent) with a domestic terrorist, communist sympathizers, a guy who ruins people to protect the Boss, and whose this guy--one arrest for soliciting a prostitute?  Get outta-here you amateur."

Or perhaps Politico's real objection on their Cain smear--short of the obvious desire to make sure Obama can still play the race card until November 2012--is not how women are treated in general by men in positions of power, but that the women did not complain about failing to receive proper compensation first?

Cross Posted:Obama Golfs With Guy Who Solicits Whores

We Now Know Obama's 2012 Campaign Slogan

If you have heard any of the remarks on Obama's  Ditch-dodging--Blame Bus-Two Minutes Hate "listening tour" then you know exactly how the soon to be former President plans to spin the challenges that continue to plague the nation and his presidency.

It's not his fault.  Doesn't matter, it's not his fault. And after 32 months of on-the-job-training, finger pointing continues to be the only tool in the Obama campaign tool box.

So to help the campaign in my own little way, I've done them the service of providing the perfect audio sound bite to make this case.

(Had an issue with converting the audio--sorry, you will have to jump here to hear it.)

cross posted at GG