The president pushed the health care bill through Congress using a series of fables — health insurance horror stories that turned out to be false. Michelle Malkin chronicles just a few of the false anecdotes told by President Obama in making the case for Obamacare. The most famous was the false claim that his mother’s health insurer tried to avoid paying for his dying mother’s treatment based on a pre-existing condition — when it in fact did no such thing and paid her benefits in full. (As the Washington Post notes, Obama’s misleading stories about his mother’s final months “often spoke as if he had been at his mother’s side,” even though he actually failed to visit her at all in the months leading up to her death from cancer.)
As Malkin notes, Obama’s “sham-ecdote” about his mother “is just the latest entry in an ever-expanding catalogue of Obamacare fables,” which include the following:
– Otto Raddatz. In 2009, Obama publicized the plight of this Illinois cancer patient, who supposedly died after he was dropped from his Fortis/Assurant Health insurance plan when his insurer discovered an unreported gallstone the patient hadn’t known about. The truth? He got the treatment he needed in 2005 and lived for nearly four more years.
– Robin Beaton. Also in 2009, Obama claimed Beaton — a breast cancer patient — lost her insurance after “she forgot to declare a case of acne.” In fact, she failed to disclose a previous heart condition and did not list her weight accurately, but had her insurance restored anyway after intense public lobbying.”
– Natoma Canfield. The White House made the Ohio cancer patient a poster child for Obamacare in 2010 after she wrote a letter complaining about skyrocketing premiums and the prospect of losing her home. After Obama gave Canfield a shout-out at a health care rally in Strongsville, Ohio, and promised to control costs, officials at the renowned Cleveland Clinic, which is treating her, made clear that they would “not put a lien on her home” and that she was eligible for a wide variety of state aid and private charity care.
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Terroirist blogger David White has posted a good commentary on the Specialty Wine Retailers Association report on alcohol wholesaler spending: “Toward Liquor Domination.” He highlights some report findings such as:
- Over the past three election cycles, wholesalers have spent more than $15.4 million dollars on contributions to federal campaigns.
- At the state level, wholesalers have contributed more than $58 million to political campaigns over the past three election cycles.
- At both the state and federal level, the wholesaling industry has spent roughly twice as much on political campaigns as the rest of the alcohol industry, combined.
According to the SWRA, such spending has a big impact:
The success of the American alcohol wholesaler in buying protection from competition has put the other sectors of the alcohol industry under their control, reduced state tax revenues, and severely limited consumer access to new products.
Read more on the Terroirist. A copy of the report is available online, and Tom Wark provides some highlights on Fermentation.
It’s summer and, not surprisingly, environmental activists at the Environmental Working Group (EWG) are publishing summer-themed scare reports. This year, they “update” their a prior claim that sunscreens cause cancer. Specifically, they attack vitamin A, which is listed as retinyl palmitate in the EWG “Skin Deep Cosmetics Database.”
EWG bases it claim largely on a federal National Toxicology Panel draft report that cites a handful of rodent studies and mixed research on humans as to both benefits and potential risks. The NTP report also noted on page 165: “[T]he topical application of RP [Retinyl Palmitate] to human skin appears safe at the recommended cosmetic concentrations.”
Ironically, if people trust EWG about the need to avoid sunscreens because they saw headlines on EWG’s report, they may actually face increased cancer risks. And unlike EWG’s skin-deep science, there is considerable evidence that overexposure to the sun causes skin cancer. In fact, it is the leading cause of skin cancer.
Despite this reality, EWG pursues this incredibly irresponsible campaign attacking sunscreens. The Skin Cancer Foundation has weighed in:
After reviewing the recently released report from The Environmental Working Group, The Skin Cancer Foundation’s renowned experts have come to the conclusion that there is no scientific evidence to support claims that retinyl palmitate (vitamin A) is a photocarcinogen in humans.
Dermatologists expressed similar views in The New York Times during 2008. The Foundation’s comments on EWG’s latest stunt can be found in the news section of their website. A search on the Skin Cancer Foundation’s website pulls up a list of their many refutations of EWG hype.
For more information on EWG’s scare tactics related to cosmetics see my article on Pajamas Media.
The central theme of my new book Stealing You Blind is that America is over-governed – at federal, state, and local level (there’s a primer on the book’s themes at NRO today, in the shape of a rather combative Q&A interview with me).
Of course, just complaining about over-government does no good. We need solutions. At the Examiner today there’s a brief excerpt from the book’s conclusions in which I call for a drastic slimming-down of federal bureaucracy (I talk more about abolishing the Commerce Department here and here and will be writing even more about this soon):
Attempting to reduce the size of government program-by-program is almost certainly a fool’s errand. With a trillion-dollar deficit looming every year, ending earmarks or finding even $60 billion of “wasteful” programs is not going to help much.
There needs to be an immediate and radical reduction in the size of government and its functions. Whole government departments need to be swept away.
At the state and local level, we can look even more at privatization as a good option. One example is municipal fire departments, which are often privately-run anyway. Matt Melchiorre and I write about how viable this is over at the American Spectator today. We conclude:
SSFD’s success refutes the idea that fire services can only be provided by government. Now, as local governments across America look for ways to bring their budgets under control, true privatization of emergency fire services should be an attractive option. No doubt, empire-building politicians and public employee unions will try to scare the public into continuing on as before, stoking fears of their houses burning down. The Southside Fire Department, however, shows they are crying wolf.
Over-government is a massive problem, but it’s not an insuperable one.
Although New York City reversed its position on urban beekeeping in Spring 2010 and legalized the practice, there are apparently still some government employees with nothing better to do than harass apiarists and their pollinator companions:
The cash-strapped Bloomberg administration has mounted a “sting operation” against city beekeepers — ticketing a Douglaston man an unbelievable $2,000 for not watering his beehive.
“It’s outrageous. It’s difficult to understand how this could happen,” Tip Sempliner said.
And here’s why: there is a beehive waterer a few feet from the hive.
When asked if it’s logical to assume the bees could fly two feet to get the water, Sempliner said, “I don’t know if they’d bother. They could just step out of the hive and fall in the water.”
But that’s not all. Sempliner’s property is right on Little Neck Bay and he has several fresh water ponds nearby, so if the bees don’t like their water dish. There are many other bee-utiful options.
The city has since backed off from giving Sempliner a fine and has instead issued him a warning. But despite this, the fact that the city considers beekeeping a public health threat is beyond stupid: honey bees are simply not dangerous, even when they swarm (provided you don’t try to attack them) due to poor hive management. These bees, in addition to being a fun hobby for some residents, are essentially harmless insects that play a key role in pollination. See here for the honey bees’ greatest hits.
While some people may be kept up at night believing that swarms of urbanized bees will begin chasing down children and the elderly, these fears are based solely on ignorance. Rather than going after beekeepers for not dumping water on hives (bees need access to water, which is why wild hives are often found in tree limbs overhanging bodies of water, but they don’t need to be drowned in it), the city — if anything at all — should be trying to educate the public to assuage the irrational hatred of these noble honey-makers.
The EPA has donated millions to the very environmental groups that routinely sue it. Then, when they sue it, it gives them millions more in attorneys fees — even when such fees would appear to be barred by provisions in the Equal Access to Justice Act. This includes millions to groups that have sued it over greenhouse gas-related issues.
The net result of many of these lawsuits is court rulings or consent decrees that effectively expand its jurisdiction. As Walter Olson notes, the EPA has a symbiotic relationship with the groups that sue it. And this is not unusual for government agencies: as he notes in his book Schools for Misrule, many government agencies are delighted when they are sued by liberal special-interest groups that demand that they spend more money and assume more responsibilities, and collude with them to produce a court ruling or settlement that expands their power and budget. I comment on this phenomenon here. Earlier, I wrote about how the Obama administration uses discrimination lawsuits against federal agencies to transfer wealth to trial lawyers and left-wing special interest groups.
Obama is now refusing to sign off on any deal to lift the $14 trillion national debt ceiling unless it preserves wasteful green-jobs spending that has wiped out thousands of American jobs. He also refuses to give up rail boondoggles and waste-ridden stimulus programs that destroyed jobs (stimulus money has gone to prisoners and dead people, wasteful welfare spending, abandoned bridges, and redundant government buildings). His administration’s rail projects are expensive white elephants that will be used by very few travelers at an enormous cost per mile, and will not enable trains to go anywhere near as fast as they do in Europe, Japan, or China (making his claim that they are “high-speed” rail deeply misleading). Obama also refuses to trim increases in education outlays, even though there is plenty of waste and duplication in federal education spending, which has skyrocketed (and some education spending seems positively harmful, like the $130,000 in stimulus money was recently spent for a book that demonized white people and encouraged teachers to treat students differently based on their race).
Have a listen here.
Earlier this week, General Electric (GE) CEO Jeffrey Immelt gave a speech at a conference on free enterprise. Energy Policy Analyst William Yeatman points out the irony of a career rent-seeker extolling free markets. GE spent $47 million in 2007 lobbying for an incandescent light bulb ban, cap-and-trade carbon regulations, and other government policies that would tilt the playing field in GE’s favor. Its compact fluorescent and LED bulbs offer a higher profit margin.Yeatman also discusses a bill currently winding through Congress that would repeal the lightbulb ban.
In National Review this week, Wayne Crews and I make the case for including regulatory reform in a debt ceiling package. “Any hike in borrowing authority should be conditioned on passage of major elements of bills pending in Congress to reform the regulatory process,” we argue. “The GOP should give the Obama administration the chance to back up at least some of its rhetoric on overregulation.”
It has now come to my attention that there is a precedent for including reg relief measures in a debt ceiling bill. In 1996, after months of deadlocking on budget negotiations that resulted in a government shutdown and a six-month delay in hiking the debt ceiling — at that time the shutdown took precedence in the headlines over the debt ceiling breach — the GOP Congress passed the Contract with America Advancement Act of 1996 that was signed by President Clinton.
This law included a hike in the debt ceiling to $5.5 trillion (almost a third of what the debt ceiling is now — ah, those were the days!), but it also included some GOP priorities. Among them was a subsection entitled the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act. Included in this measure were the Congressional Review Act to set up a procedure for blocking regulations by both houses of Congress and provisions to include more judicial review of agency actions to ensure regulations weren’t overly burdensome to small business.
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The Omaha Public Schools spent $130,000 in federal stimulus funds to buy a diversity manual for 8,000 teachers, administrators, support staffers — even janitors, reports the Omaha World-Herald. “The book tells teachers not to treat all children the same or try to be ‘color-blind.’ Instead, they should recognize and ‘esteem’ the group identity of students of color.” The book tells educators to “take action for social justice” by opposing “white privilege.”
“Recognition and esteem are limited to non-white races, as the book insists that “white is a culture” that is “privileged” and therefore suspect. A representative of the school district claims “that the book is intended only to ‘open a dialogue.’ But the book is filled with quizzes and tests that ensure that teachers hold the proper political views. If they don’t, they are instructed to report ‘what they will do to “align yourselves with the values expressed”’ in the book.”
This isn’t the only thing stimulus money was wasted on. The $800 billion stimulus package was so wasteful that two economists say it destroyed 550,000 jobs. Schools waste vast amounts of money, including millions on racist and Marxist ideologies masquerading as diversity training. Thomas Sowell earlier explained why people spend ever-increasing sums of money on higher education, even when the content of the education students receive is almost useless:
The widespread use of high school diplomas and college degrees as employment screening devices by employers has led to a belief that increasing education will increase opportunities, and/or that the reason for escalating educational “requirements” is a corresponding increase in the knowledge necessary to perform a given job. The well-organized education lobbies exploit these beliefs to the fullest. In fact, however, educational ”requirements” are often used by employers who are wholly unconcerned about the specific content of the education, but who regards a diploma or degree as an indication of the job applicant’s willingness to persevere and his grades as a rough index of his mental capability. The educational requirements are a hurdle which eliminates enough job applicants to narrow the employer’s choice down to manageable proportions. By making it possible for more young people to go over a given hurdle, society also makes it necessary for employers to raise the hurdle in order to weed out the same proportion of applicants. The result has been an upward spiral of credentials and requirements with more and more young people being forced to endure more and more years of education that they do not want in order to qualify for jobs where the education is not needed.
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