The Oxford Dictionarydefines “collateral damage” as a military euphemism “Denoting inadvertent casualties and destruction in civilian areas in the course of military operations.”
Joel B. Pollak reports for Breitbartthat on Sunday, October 14, 2018, at the 92nd Street Y in New York, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was interviewed by Paul Krugman, the left-wing New York Times columnist and Nobel economic laureate who predicted, the day Donald Trump won the presidency, that Trump would trigger “a global recession, with no end in sight.”
In a long, rambling monologue, during which she stumbled on her words and appeared to lose her train of thought, Pelosi made a veiled threat that there may have to be “collateral damage” to Americans who do not agree with the Democratic Party agenda. She said:
“We have to have total clarity about what we do, when it comes to everything — a woman’s right to choose, gay marriage … whether it’s about immigration, whether it’s about gun safety, whether it’s about climate … I think that we owe the American people to be there for them, for their financial security, respecting the dignity and worth of every person in our country, and if there’s some collateral damage for some others who do not share our view, well, so be it, but it shouldn’t be our original purpose.”
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) has openly called for violence against Trump administration officials, and Republicans around the country have complained of intimidation and assault on the campaign trail in the run-up to the midterm elections.
Meanwhile, Pelosi got a taste of the vitriol Democrats have been heaping on President Trump, his supporters, and Republican legislators.
On Wednesday, Oct. 17, in Miami, Florida, a group of sign-carrying Cuban Americans confronted Pelosiin a narrow alley as she and her entourage entered a building through a back door. Some accounts said it’s a restaurant; Big League Politics says it’s a Democrat office where Pelosi met with Demonrat Andrew Gillum, who is running for governor in Florida.
The protesters shouted at Pelosi:
“Look at the piece of sh*t Pelosi right here.”
“You f*cking communist. Get the f*ck out of here.”
“F*ck you and your f*cking Democrats.”
“F*ck Nancy Pelosi.”
Even after Pelosi had entered the building, the protesters banged on the door with their fists, shouting “Open up!”, “Cowards!” and “Socialism sucks!”.
H/t GiGi
~Eowyn
Better than Drudge Report. Check out Whatfinger News, the Internet’s conservative frontpage founded by ex-military!
18 U.S. Code § 2383 defines “sedition” as “Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto”.
Paul Krugman, 64, is an economist, a “Distinguished Professor” at CUNY, and a New York Times columnist. Wikipedia describes him as “born to a Jewish family”. In an op/edfor the New York Times on February 27, 2017, Krugman comes dangerously close to sedition by:
Calling the election of Donald Trump a “white nationalist takeover of the U.S. government” and therefore racist. That, in turn, implies that both the election and the Trump presidency, which Krugman calls a “ruling clique,” are illegitimate.
Calling the only weeks-old Trump presidency “malfeasance,” the legal definition of which is “The commission of an act that is unequivocally illegal or completely wrongful”.
Claiming the MSM have been “bullied and bribed” by Trump into becoming “de facto propaganda organs of the ruling clique,” which is so ludicrous, it’s almost funny because if that were true, then Paul Krugman would not have his seditious op/ed published.
Proceeding from that premise, Krugman then applauds Democrats for their anger and outrage and urges them against making any compromises with the Trump administration, which of course would make governing impossible.
Are you angry about the white nationalist takeover of the U.S. government? If so, you are definitely not alone. The first few weeks of the Trump administration have been marked by huge protests, furious crowds at congressional town halls, customer boycotts of businesses seen as Trump allies. And Democrats, responding to their base, have taken a hard line against cooperation with the new regime.
But is all this wise? Inevitably, one hears some voices urging everyone to cool it — to wait and see, to try to be constructive, to reach out to Trump supporters, to seek ground for compromise.
Just say no.
Outrage at what’s happening to America isn’t just justified, it’s essential. In fact, it may be our last chance of saving democracy.
Even in narrowly partisan terms, Democrats would be well advised to keep listening to their base. Anyone who claims that being seen as obstructionist will hurt them politically must have slept through the past couple of decades. Were Democrats rewarded for cooperating with George W. Bush? Were Republicans punished for their scorched-earth opposition to President Obama? Get real.
It’s true that white working-class voters, the core of Donald Trump’s support, don’t seem to care about the torrent of scandal: They won’t turn on him until they realize that his promises to bring back jobs and protect their health care were lies. But remember, he lost the popular vote, and would have lost the Electoral College if a significant number of college-educated voters hadn’t been misled by the media and the F.B.I. into believing that Hillary Clinton was somehow even less ethical than he was. Those voters are now having a rude awakening, and need to be kept awake.
Outrage may be especially significant for the 2018 midterm elections: the districts that will determine whether Democrats can take back the House next year have both relatively well-educated voters and large Hispanic populations, both groups likely to care about Trump malfeasanceeven if the white working class doesn’t (yet).
But there is a much bigger issue here than partisan politics, important as that is, given the evident determination of a Republican Congress to cover up whatever Mr. Trump does. For democracy itself is very much on the line, and an outraged populace may be our last defense.
Mr. Trump is clearly a would-be autocrat, and other Republicans are his willing enablers. Does anyone doubt it? And given this reality, it’s completely reasonable to worry that America will go the route of other nations, like Hungary, which remain democracies on paper but have become authoritarian states in practice.
How does this happen? A crucial part of the story is that the emerging autocracy uses the power of the state to intimidate and co-opt civil society — institutions outside the government proper. The media are bullied and bribed into becoming de facto propaganda organs of the ruling clique. Businesses are pressured to reward the clique’s friends and punish its enemies. Independent public figures are pushed into collaboration or silence. Sound familiar?
But an outraged populace can and must push back, using the power of disapproval to counter the influence of a corrupted government.
This means supporting news organizations that do their job and shunning those that act as agents of the regime. It means patronizing businesses that defend our values and not those willing to go along with undermining them. It means letting public figures, however nonpolitical their professions, know that people care about the stands they take, or don’t. For these are not normal times, and many things that would be acceptable in a less fraught situation aren’t O.K. now.
For example, it is not O.K. for newspapers to publish he-said-she-said pieces that paper over administration lies, let alone beat-sweetening puff pieces about Trump allies. It’s not O.K. for businesses to supply Mr. Trump with photo ops claiming undeserved credit for job creation — or for business leaders to serve on “advisory” panels that are really just another kind of photo op.
It’s not even O.K. to go golfing with the president, saying that it’s about showing respect for the office, not the man. Sorry, but when the office is held by someone trying to undermine the Constitution, doing anything that normalizes him and lends him respectability is a political act.
I’m sure many readers would rather live in a nation in which more of life could be separated from politics. So would I! But civil society is under assault from political forces, so that defending it is, necessarily, political. And justified outrage must fuel that defense. When neither the president nor his allies in Congress show any sign of respecting basic American values, an aroused public that’s willing to take names is all we have.
Paul Krugman has a habit of making extremist, threatening rhetoric. In a NYT op/ed in 2009 on why Congress must pass Obamacare into law, Krugman wrote, “A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy.”
See also:
The propaganda from the Main Stream State Controlled Media about an economic “recovery” is just that — propaganda.
We’re not even in an economic recession any more. America is in a second Great Depression.
Just because we don’t see soup lines like in the first Great Depression doesn’t mean we’re not in one. For that matter, it was liberal economist Paul Krugmanwho, a year ago, had said America is in an economic depression. He said then that the reason we don’t see soup lines is because the poor today get their welfare in the form of checks and ATM cards. They don’t have to stand in line for food, and so government welfare has made the Second Great Depression invisible.
And the face of the Second Great Depression increasingly is white.
According to an article by the Associated Press, titled “Signs of Declining Economic Security,” survey data “exclusive” to the AP show that a shocking 4 out of 5 U.S. adults are jobless, near poverty, or rely on welfare for at least parts of their lives.
Economic hardship is particularly on the rise among “white” Americans, their pessimism about their families’ economic futures at the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, a majority of whites (63%) call the economy “poor.”
Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in government data: As many as 76% of white adultshave experienced or are experiencing economic insecurity by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press. The gauge defines “economic insecurity” as experiencing unemployment at some point in their working lives, or a year or more of reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150% of the poverty line.
Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79%, which means as many as 4 out of every 5 U.S. adults are jobless, or living near poverty, or dependent on welfare.
If those trends continue, by 2030, close to 85% of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity.
The reason why we know less about struggling white Americans is because they are “the invisible poor.” Unlike racial minorities who tend to live in big cities like Detroit and Chicago, lower-income whites are generally dispersed in suburbs and small rural towns— in Appalachia, the industrial Midwest, and across the heartland — where more than 60% of the poor are white.
William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty, noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama’s election, while struggling whites do not. Wilson warns, “There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front.”
Here are some more of the AP survey findings:
Whites (over 19 million) account for more than 41% of America’s poor,subsisting on $23,021 or less for a family of four. In fact, the number of poor white Americans is nearly double the number of poor blacks.
In 2011, 12.6% of adults in their prime working-age years of 25-60 lived in poverty. But measured in terms of a person’s lifetime risk, a much higher number — 4 in 10 adults — falls into poverty for at least a year of their lives.
The risks of poverty has been increasing in recent decades, particularly among people in their peak earning years of ages 35-55. For that age group, their risk of poverty increased from 17% during the 1969-1989 time period, to 23% during the 1989-2009 period.
For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households living in poverty with children now equals or even surpasses the number of blacks, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. White single-mother families in poverty stood at nearly 1.5 million in 2011, comparable to the number for blacks, and more than the 1.2 million Hispanic single-mother families.
More children — 1 in 10 — are living in high-poverty neighborhoods, defined as those with poverty rates of 30% or more. This puts the children at higher risk of teen pregnancy or dropping out of school. Among those at-risk children living in high-poverty neighborhoods:
17% are nonHispanic white, an increase from 13% in 2000, even though the overall proportion of white children in the U.S. has been declining.
39% are Latino, an increase of 1% from 2000.
37% are black, a sharp decrease from 43% in 2000.
Going back to the 1980s, never have whites been so pessimistic about their futures, according to the General Social Survey, which is conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. Just 45% say their children will do better than them, based on the way things are in America. That percentage increases to 49% among working-class whites. In last year’s presidential election, Obama won the votes of just 36% of working-class noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since 1984.
As news on the Great Cyprus Bank Robbery keep getting worse, the latest being the country’s corrupt finance minister Michael Sarris saying that as much as 80% of “large” bank deposits can be confiscated, Americans should be on the alert to copycat moves by our feral government and bankers. All the more because the American Left are applauding the theft of Cypriots’ bank savings.
Tyler Durden of ZeroHedge warns us that when bankrupt insolvent governments “run out of fingers to plug the dikes,” history shows that they fall back on a very limited playbook.
Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog has enumerated 8 steps in the playbook of bankrupt governments: 1. Direct confiscation: As Cyprus showed us, bankrupt governments are quite happy to plunder people’s bank accounts, especially if it’s a wealthy minority. Aside from bank levies, though, this also includes things like seizing retirement accounts (Argentina), increases in civil asset forfeiture (United States), and gold criminalization. 2. Taxes: Just another form of confiscation, taxation plunders the hard work and talent of the citizenry. But thanks to decades of brainwashing, it’s more socially acceptable. We’ve come to regard taxes as a ‘necessary evil,’ not realizing that the country existed for decades, even centuries, without an income tax. Yet when bankrupt governments get desperate enough, they begin imposing new taxes… primarily WEALTH taxes (Argentina) or windfall profits taxes (United States in the 1970s). 3. Inflation: This is indirect confiscation– the slow, gradual plundering of people’s savings. Again, governments have been quite successful at inculcating a belief that inflation is also a necessary evil. They’re also adept at fooling people with phony inflation statistics. 4. Capital Controls: Governments can, do, and will restrict the free-flow of capital across borders. They’ll prevent you from moving your own money to a safer jurisdiction, forcing you to keep your hard earned savings at home where it can be plundered and devalued. We’re seeing this everywhere in the developed world… from withdrawal limits in Europe to cash-sniffing dogs at border checkpoints. And it certainly doesn’t help when everyone from the IMF to Nobel laureate Paul Krugman argue in favor of Capital Controls. 5. Wage and Price controls:When even the lowest common denominator in society realizes that prices are getting higher, governments step in and ‘fix’ things by imposing price controls. Occasionally this also includes wage controls… though wage increases tend to be vastly outpaced by price increases. Of course, as any basic economics textbook can illustrate, price controls never work and typically lead to shortages and massive misallocations. 6. Wage and Price controls– on STEROIDS: When the first round of price controls don’t work, the next step is to impose severe penalties for not abiding by the terms. In the days of Diocletian’s Edict on Prices in the 4th century AD, any Roman caught violating the price controls was put to death. In post-revolutionary France, shopkeepers who violated the “Law of Maximum” were fleeced of their private property… and a national spy system was put into place to enforce the measures. 7. Increased regulation: Despite being completely broke, governments will dramatically expand their ranks in a last desperate gasp to envelop the problem in sheer size. In the early 1920s, for example, the number of bureaucratic officials in the German Weimar Republic increased 242%, even though the country was flat broke from its World War I reparation payments and hyperinflation episode. The increase in both regulations and government officials criminalizes and/or controls almost every aspect of our existence… from what we can/cannot put in our bodies to how we are allowed to raise our own children. 8. War and National Emergency: When all else fails, just invade another country. Pick a fight. Keep people distracted by working them into a frenzy over men in caves… or some completely irrelevant island. ~Eowyn
Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former White House Chief of Staff, famously said, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Rahm was merely making explicit what the Left had been practicing for decades — the exploitation of some public tragedy by reflexively blaming the Right.
As an example, the Left blamed the “climate of hate” in conservative Dallas and the “paranoid style” of American (conservative) politics for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, despite the convicted killer Lee Harvey Oswald being an avowed Marxist!
It’s the same liberal modus operandus in the recent Tucson, Arizona mass murders. Before anyone even knew who and what the shooter was, the Left and their complicit accomplices in the MSM already began pointing their fingers at “right wing hate rhetoric” as the culprit. Even after the facts began pouring in about Jared Lee Loughner — that he was apolitical, paid scant attention to the news, did not listen to talk radio, but instead is a drug-addled mentally-disturbed loser who worshipped at a skull-bedecked homemade altar — the Left’s scapegoating and demonization of Conservatives persist, undeterred by facts or the truth.
Paul Krugman himself engages in hate speech (A BKeyser design)
True to Rahm’s injunction, the Left did not let the crisis go to waste. In the aftermath of the Tucson tragedy, the father of Christina Green, the 9-year-old girl killed in the massacre, pleaded with the nation that his daughter’s death should not be exploited as a justification to crush constitutional rights. But the Left are doing exactly that.
First, Demonrat California Sen. Barbara Boxer sprang into action to censor the conservative organization Patriot Post. Below is a letter from the Patriot Post explaining what happened:
A staff member from California Demo Sen. Barbara Boxer’s office discovered a small image of an old sticker from the humor section of PatriotShop.US, targeting liberals for defeat prior to 2013. This image clearly was intended as humor but is no longer on our site. Only a small number of people had ever actually seen it.
Boxer believed that this three-inch image was too dangerous to be seen in public, lest it incite murderous violence. Ostensibly, to make her point, she enlarged the image dramatically, distributed copies of it at a televised news conference, and displayed it for the entire nation to see. (One may presume that her audience included more than a few psychopaths who otherwise would never have seen this image … good thinking Babs!)
We now find ourselves in the good company of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and many other conservatives who stand accused by the Left of provoking murderous attacks through words and imagery. However, Boxer’s public accusations pose a serious problem for us. While we have a large following, we remain a grassroots organization, not a well-funded political or media conglomerate. By midweek, Boxer and her entourage of histrionic sycophants were actively endeavoring to have the entire PatriotShop.US site censored — and shut down. (And we thought Democrats wanted to create jobs.)
To date, our team has done an outstanding job of repelling Boxers efforts to silence us, and we will do everything in our power to continue to defend our First (and Second) Amendment rights. We write simply to ask for your prayers on behalf of our steadfast defense of Essential Liberty.
— The Patriot Shop Staff
Then, we learn that the FBI is compiling a list of Americans deemed a potential threat because they criticized their representative – and targeting them with home visits. As Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars reports:
An Ozark man who ran a blog last year critical of Republican Congressman Billy Long was shocked to see an FBI agent turn up on his doorstep asking questions. The agent was accompanied by Green County Sheriff Jim Arnott, who had stepped outside of his jurisdiction to become involved in this act of political repression directed against Clay Bowler, a resident of Christian County.
The FBI agent wanted to know if Bowler was a threat to Long because he had used an Internet blog to highlight claims of cronyism and corruption involving the Congressman before the southwest Missouri election in November, in which Long defeated Democrat Scott Eckersley to replace outgoing Rep. Roy Blunt.
The most heated confrontation Bowler had with Long was when he asked him a question about political donations Long had made. The video clip of the incident shows Bowler calmly asking Long a question as the Congressman walks away. He ran a website called “Long is wrong” in an attempt to prevent Long from being elected last year. The website has since been discontinued and Bowler hasn’t had any contact with Long since September.
Even the FBI agent who visited Bowler had to agree that his actions represented no kind of threat whatsoever. “I’m not a threat to Billy Long,” Bowler said Thursday. “I find the whole thought very funny, because I’m such an advocate for constitutional rights that I would never do anything that would put in jeopardy those constitutional rights like the Second Amendment”….
“Arnott confirmed to KSPR News that Bowler isn’t the only local person who’s been scrutinized in the wake of last weekend’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Gifford (D-AZ) during a meet-and-greet with constituents in Tucson, Ariz,” states the report, affirming that the authorities are compiling new lists of Americans who are now considered to be potentially violent threats for the crime of asking their own public servants uncomfortable questions. Separately it was reported that the FBI was preparing to visit other bloggers in the area.
Targeting anyone who exercises their First Amendment right to redress their grievances against local representatives who are paid to serve them with home visits accompanied by FBI agents only has one outcome – it chills free speech and discourages other Americans from speaking out against the government. These tactics also have the impact of making asking questions of elected officials, the lifeblood of a free society, seem somehow abnormal or suspicious.
Once again, vultures are still busy circling around last weekend’s tragedy, using it as a vehicle through which to advance their own authoritarian and anti-American agendas of political repression. Dissent is the highest form of patriotism, and any move to imply that asking questions of public officials or engaging in criticism of government is somehow suspicious or indicative of a violent individual is a damning indictment of everything America is supposed to stand for. Circumstances like these should only encourage Americans to become more vocal in their dissent while they still have any semblance of free speech left at all.
See also my post on death threats made against this blog, “Death Threats Against Birthers.” H/t beloved fellow Tina for the article below. ~Eowyn Top 10 Examples Of Liberal Hate by Human Events – January 11, 2011
Even before details were clear about the Arizona shooting, Left-wingers tried to assess blame for the tragedy to Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the Second Amendment. When it became clear that the gunman was a deranged lunatic whose political philosophy was more in tune with the loony Left than the Tea Party, liberals continued to cry out against a so-called climate of hate perpetuated by Right-wingers. Perhaps those making that charge have forgotten the hatefulness and violent words coming from their own. Here are the Top 10 Examples of Liberal Hate.
(1) Palin Derangement Syndrome: The Left’s obsessive hatred of Sarah Palin is well-chronicled and is often accompanied by violent rhetoric. Let these three examples suffice: (1) Keith Halloran, a New Hampshire Democratic candidate, said on a Facebook thread that he wished Palin had been aboard the Alaska plane that crashed, killing five including Sen. Ted Stevens; (2) Another New Hampshire Democrat, Timothy Horrigan resigned from the state legislature after writing this gem on Facebook: “Well a dead Palin wd be even more dangerous than a live one . . . she is all about her myth & if she was dead she cldn’t commit any more gaffes”; and (3) foul-mouthed comedian Sandra Bernhard warned Palin she would be “gang-raped by my big black brothers” if she tried coming to New York.
(2) Obama packing heat: Barack Obama has repeatedly sprinkled his political campaigning with words more appropriate to a street thug than the President of the United States. During his 2008 campaign he said in June, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” and in September, “I want you to go out and talk to your neighbors. . . . I want you to argue with them, get in their faces.” He kept it up during the recent midterm election with this comment: “If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends . . . .”
(3) Courtland Milloy’s spit wish: Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy said that after the health care vote he wanted to spit on and assault Tea Party members: “I know how the ‘tea party’ people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their ‘Obama Plan White Slavery’ signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads.”
(4) Krugman’s flip flop: New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was first out of the box connecting the Arizona shooting to Right-wing speech that created a climate of hate, intoning, “the purveyors of hate have been treated with respect, even deference, by the GOP establishment.” He must have for gotten his own words in December 2009 during the health care debate when he wrote, “A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy.”
(5) Bush Derangement Syndrome: Before it fades into history, the liberal hatred of President Bush should be recalled. Codepink, Michael Moore, rap stars and Hollywood comedians hurled vitriol against the President. A movie was made about his assassination. But as an example of violent rhetoric, special attention should be given to remarks made by New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi, who later apologized for describing fellow Democrat Sen. Charles Schumer as “the man who, how do I phrase this diplomatically, who will put a bullet between the President’s eyes if he could get away with it.”
(6) Daily Kos’ hypocrisy: Markos Moulitsas, of the liberal Daily Kos, was also quick to indict the Right for the Arizona tragedy, tweeting that Sarah Palin had “accomplished her mission,” a reference to her midterm elections bulls-eye target of politicians that included Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. However, his Daily Kos website blog also included Gifford’s district on a list of congressional districts “bulls-eyed” for primary challenges. And just last week, the website included a post declaring that Giffords was “dead to him” after she voted against Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House.
(7) Exterminate Republicans: This is what passes for a theater review in the Village Voice: Michale Feingold, while reviewing the play “King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe,” wrote: “Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.”
(8) Hang Drudge: Liberal talk radio host Mike Malloy suggested stringing up Internet king Matt Drudge, saying, “Drudge? Aw, Drudge, somebody ought to wrap a strong Republican entrail around his neck and hoist him up about 6 feet in the air and watch him bounce.”
(9) Outright assaults: Sometimes the hatred on the Left exceeds talk and escalates to violent assaults. Cases in point: In August 2009, members of the Service Employees International Union beat up Kenneth Gladney for distributing “Don’t Tread On Me” flags at a Missouri town hall meeting. In June 2010, Nathan Tabor was punched in the face by a Democrat during a Tea Party protest in North Carolina. Last October, Human Events reporter Emily Miller was physically assaulted while interviewing Rep. Charlie Rangel during the “One Nation Working Together” rally at the National Mall in Washington.
(10) Greenpeace “knows where you live”: Greenpeace advocated mass civil disobedience last April with this blog item on its website: “The proper channels have failed. It’s time for mass civil disobedience to cut off the financial oxygen from denial and skepticism. . . . If you’re one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically elected governments into submission, then hear this: We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.”
Remember the Left and the MSM making fun of the TEA Parties and Sarah Palin for raising the alarm that Obamacare would include euthanasia or “death panels” — triage “end of life” counseling to discourage the elderly and the very sick from partaking in costly medical procedures? Reacting to those warnings, Obama promised that his healthcare reform plan would not “pull the plug on grandma.”
Contrary to the derisions heaped on Palin and the TEA parties, their warnings were neither paranoic nor fanciful. In November 2009, the House actually passed a measure known as Section 1233 of the healthcare reform bill which would allow Medicare to pay for consultations about “advance care planning” every five years. But Section 1233 was not included in the final Obamacare legislation.
Now, as reported by NewsMax, the New York Times tells us that the Obama administration is doing exactly that — “pulling the plug on grandma.”
In “Obama Returns to End-of-Life Plan that Caused Stir,” Robert Pear of the NY Times reports on December 25 that on December 3, the Obama administration issued a new Medicare regulation detailing “voluntary advance care planning” that is to be included during patients’ annual checkups. The regulation aimed at the aged “may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment.”
The new provision, which will go into effect on Jan. 1, allows Medicare to pay for voluntary counseling to help beneficiaries “deal with the complex decisions families face when a loved one is approaching death.” In contrast to the defunct Section 1223 that would have these “advance care planning” consultations every 5 years, the new Medicare rule allows annual discussions as part of a patient’s “wellness” visits.
Elizabeth D. Wickham, executive director of LifeTree, a pro-life Christian educational ministry, told the Times that she is concerned that such end-of-life counseling would encourage patients to forgo or curtail care, thus hastening death. “The infamous Section 1233 is still alive and kicking,” Wickham said. “Patients will lose the ability to control treatments at the end of life.”
The rule was issued by Dr. Donald Berwick, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, according to the Times. He is a longtime advocate for rationing medical procedures for the elderly, arguing that rationing will have to be implemented eventually, stating, “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care. The decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”
Before Obama tapped Berwick for the Medicare post, Berwick had long applauded Britain’s National Health Service, which uses an algorithm to determine whether the aged are worthy of additional expenditures for medical care and advanced treatments.
Berwick has argued Seniors appear to be a major target for precious resources under the Obamacare plan. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Obamacare cuts nearly $500 billion in Medicare benefits to seniors as the federal government adds 30 million uninsured Americans to private and public healthcare systems.
The cost of caring for the elderly has not been lost on Berwick. “The chronically ill and those towards the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here . . . there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place,” he said.
Berwick is not alone in arguing for triage death panels.
Last month, economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman told ABC News that rising Medicare costs could be dealt with only by “death panels and sales taxes.” He added: “Medicare is going to have to decide what it’s going to pay for. And at least for starters, it’s going to have to decide which medical procedures are not effective at all and should not be paid for at all. In other words, it should have endorsed the [death] panel that was part of the healthcare reform.”
In effect, what has happened is this:
Bypassing Congress and in contravention of the popular will, Obama has reinserted “death panels” into America’s health care system via an administrative rule added to Medicare.
Why do we even other to have a Congress to represent the people and pass laws when Obama the President can just rule by fiat?
Worse still, Obama did this nearly a month ago, but America’s news media only just found out.
H/t beloved fellow May. ~Eowyn
UPDATE (Jan. 7, 2011):
After the New York Times published its article on the Obama administration’s sneaky re-introduction of “death panels,” the news hit the blogosphere and conservative talk radio. Four days after the new policy took effect, on January 4, 2011, the Times reports that the Obama administration abruptly reversed course: All references to “end-of-life planning” as part of the annual physical examinations covered under the new Obamacare law will be deleted from Medicare regulations!
Sunlight really is the best disinfectant.
Founded 12-23-2009. Burned down by WordPress 8-15-2018 with 63M hits. Resurrected 8-23-2018. DDOS attacks began 11-10-2018. Massive Spam attacks on 12-3-2018.
Cinderella Broom
Dave
DCG
Deplorable Patriot
Dr. Eowyn
Grif
Joan
TrailDust