Just another far-Leftist Jew who hates Christians

The addled-brain rant below has been taken seriously enough to warrant several replies (e.g. here). But it really deserves no reply. What oozes from it is hate and contempt towards Christians -- and that is still common among American Jews. Let the many attacks by the ADL on Christian observance and discourse stand as one pointer to that.

The rant below is hate speaking, not reason. It is a sad thing that being Jewish in America is a strong predictor of the politics of hate -- Leftism -- but it is also a fact and knowing that fact helps one to understand and dismiss the lies of Seymour Hersh. Hersh has run out of real scandals to expose so now he is inventing one. And what he invents shows what is in his heart.

Note that I have said nothing derogatory about all Jews. But I hope I have been as derogatory to Leftist Jews as they deserve. I have nothing but admiration for the small but brilliant band of Jewish-American conservatives, some of whom I quote frequently

The only thing that could perhaps be noted in mitigation of Hersh's hate is that on other occasions he has shown that he doesn't like his fellow Jews much either. Maybe he is just a mental case upon whom we should take pity.

The journalist Seymour Hersh has uncovered some sinister conspiracies during his long career, but his latest revelation is drawing some puzzled reactions and denunciations.

In a speech this week in Doha, Qatar, Hersh advanced the notion that US military forces are directed and dominated by Christian fundamentalist "crusaders" bent on changing "mosques into cathedrals".

An account of the speech in Foreign Policy magazine says Hersh alleged that General Stanley McChrystal, the retired head of the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command and briefly the top commander of US forces in Afghanistan, was among several senior officers who were supporters of exclusive Catholic organisations such as Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta.

Neoconservative advisers to the former president George Bush believed "we're gonna change mosques into cathedrals", Hersh, a writer for The New Yorker, said in the speech. "That's an attitude that pervades, I'm here to say, a large percentage of the Joint Special Operations Command."

The command is the part of the military focused on missions to kill enemy leaders, primarily in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its operations are almost always secret.

He added: "This is not an atypical attitude among some military - it's a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They're protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century."

As for the President, Barack Obama, Hersh said he had been blind to the drift in America's foreign policy. "Just when we need an angry black man," he said, "we didn't get one."

A spokesman for General McChrystal said he "is not and never has been" a member of the Knights of Malta, an ancient order that protected Christians from Muslim encroachment during the Middle Ages and has since become a charitable body.

The spokesman, David Bolger, said Hersh's statement linking the general to the group was "completely false and without basis in fact".

Hersh's attempts to link the religious groups to the Pentagon brought a denunciation from the Catholic League president, Bill Donohue, who said Hersh's "long-running feud with every American administration … has disoriented his perspective so badly that what he said about the Knights of Malta is not shocking to those familiar with his penchant for demagoguery".

Pentagon sources say there is little evidence of a broad fundamentalist conspiracy within the military. Although there have been incidents in which officers have preached to subordinates, the military discourages partisan religious advocacy.

SOURCE

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A Big Step Forward for Civil Discourse

MSNBC has declined to renew Keith Olbermann's contract. It's an ironic coda to the last two weeks of left-wing inveighing about the supposed right-wing "climate of hate," isn't it? In any case, the linked report suggests there had been long-simmering tension between MSNBC's biggest name and those in the network who had to work with him. The discord must have been pretty extreme for the network willingly to part with their biggest audience draw.

What's more, though the linked piece notes that those at Comcast played no role in the decision to let Olbermann go, it's also true that the deal providing Comcast with majority control of NBC is imminent -- and Comcast is likely to be much less tolerant of hijinks like Olbermann's than GE was.

Obviously, I wish Olbermann well, personally. But it can't be denied that his disappearance from the airwaves -- along with his hysterical denunciations of various conservatives and Republicans as "the worst person in the world" and all that -- is a great leap forward for the much-ballyhooed cause of "civility." Who would have thought that MSNBC would lead the way into the brave new "nolabel" world?

SOURCE

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Has Massachusetts Experience Put ObamaCare On A Path To Repeal?

Of the 410,000 newly insured in Massachusetts, three in four are either paying nothing or very little for their insurance. They've also been successful in continuing to pull down massive subsidies from Washington to support the overhaul.

Spending has exploded. Medicaid, a problem in every state, is destroying Massachusetts. The health overhaul was really Medicaid expansion, and with the rolls up nearly 25% since 2006, Massachusetts is struggling to pay the bills.

The other promises turned out to be bogus as well. Despite the near-universal insurance, the state still spends $414 million on uncompensated care, an expense that Romney and his architects promised would disappear. Emergency-room use has not dropped as predicted. From 2006 to 2008, emergency room use under Mass Care increased by 9%. And private employer insurance costs, far from dropping, have continued to increase.

A 2010 study published in the Forum for Health Economics & Policy found that health insurance premiums in Massachusetts, prior to its overhaul, increased at a rate 3.7% slower than the national average. Post-overhaul, they are increasing 5.8% faster.

The individual mandate, as onerous as it is, is set at a level to encourage gaming the system. A family with an income of $55,000 in 2014 will face the choice of paying $4,428 a year for health insurance or a $550 fine. Given that insurance will be available on demand, it's rational to pay the fine until a serious illness strikes.

Indeed, there is no strong demand for insurance among the uninsured. The individual market has existed for years and is lightly subscribed. The new high-risk pools created by ObamaCare are very undersubscribed. Bureaucrats projected that 375,000 would sign up by now. The actual number is 8,000.

The lie that Massachusetts never promised to control costs is amplified by the belief that Obama's plan would do so. Other than price controls, commissions recommending best practices and a stealth HMO program for Medicare renamed Accountable Care Organizations, there's little to control costs in the near term.

This brings us back to the Bay State, where politicians, bureaucrats and health policy sages have embarked on what they bill as phase two of the health care overhaul. Now that nearly everyone is insured, the effort is to replace the decentralized reimbursement system with a global budget.

In other words, give hospitals and doctors a pool of money and tell them to make do. Change the incentive from providing the best possible care to the best care the bureaucrats can possibly afford.

"Clearly we are going to have less resources," Gary Gottlieb, CEO of Partners Health Care in Massachusetts, recently told a medical conference. "The most extraordinary ICU and the most extraordinary technology, without necessarily the evidence that it extends life ... is not going to be accessible to us." A government-run HMO. Welcome to your future.

More HERE

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No, Ezra Klein, ObamaCare Wouldn’t Have Saved Child

An old lie revived by a Leftist. How desperate are you if you have to go back to events of 2007 to make a point and then still fail to say anything reasonable?

Ezra Klein invokes a heartbreaking analogy to criticize the GOP for seeking to repeal ObamaCare. But this sad case has nothing to do with the new health law. Klein writes:

In February 2007, Deamonte Driver died of an infected tooth. But he didn’t really die of an infected tooth. He died because he didn’t have consistent insurance. If he’d had an Aetna card, a dentist would’ve removed the tooth earlier, and the bacteria that filled the abscess would never have spread to his brain. Deamonte Driver was 12. His insurance status wasn’t his fault.

Except that there is nothing in ObamaCare that would make Deamonte Driver eligible for Aetna or any other form of private insurance. What’s more, Klein surely knows this.

As the Washington Post article about Driver that Klein links to clearly states in the fourth sentence, Driver’s family had “lost its Medicaid.” Driver’s mother had been moving around homeless shelters, and she suspected “that the paperwork to confirm their eligibility (for Medicaid) was mailed to the shelter in Adelphi, where they no longer live(d).”

Under ObamaCare, if you earn less than 100% of the federal poverty level, you are only eligible for Medicaid. You are not eligible for a premium subsidy to help you buy private coverage on an insurance exchange. Presumably, someone like Driver’s mother who is living in homeless shelters is making less than 100% of the federal poverty level.

The only people who qualify for either Medicaid or a premium subsidy are those between 100% and 133% of FPL. Klein knows this, as Ron Pollack of Families USA helpfully explained it to him.

Despite this, Klein says that the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) “means health-care coverage for more than 30 million Americans,” that “the repeal legislation Republicans are pushing does nothing to replace the coverage the Affordable Care Act would give to those people,” and, thus, that the GOP offers no “solution for the Deamonte Drivers of the world.” He further knocks Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., for complaining that he had to wait 28 days for his congressional health insurance to kick in. “(Harris) knows his taxpayer-subsidized insurance is important. But what about Driver’s?” Klein asks.

Nice try, but ObamaCare doesn’t offer any solution for the Deamonte Drivers of the world either. In fact, to the extent that Medicaid played a part in his death (Driver’s mom had difficult finding a dentist because few dentists accept Medicaid due to its lousy reimbursement rates), ObamaCare puts more Deamonte Drivers at risk by expanding Medicaid to 133% of FPL.

And there is one other thing in the article that gives the lie to Klein’s claim that with an “Aetna card” Driver’s tooth would have been removed “earlier.” As the article notes:

When Deamonte got sick, his mother had not realized that his tooth had been bothering him. Instead, she was focusing on his younger brother, 10-year-old DaShawn, who “complains about his teeth all the time,” she said. ...

It was on Jan. 11 that Deamonte came home from school complaining of a headache. At Southern Maryland Hospital Center, his mother said, he got medicine for a headache, sinusitis and a dental abscess. But the next day, he was much sicker.

Eventually, he was rushed to Children’s Hospital, where he underwent emergency brain surgery. He began to have seizures and had a second operation. The problem tooth was extracted.

If a mom doesn’t realize that her child’s teeth are bothering him and the child doesn’t receive regular dental checkups (Deamonte didn’t, according to the article), then chances are very slim that he’d ever have a bad tooth removed until it was too late.

That was all right there in the article for Klein to read. Perhaps the next time he wants to pull on readers’ heartstrings he should do it without pulling a fast one.

SOURCE

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The Philadelphia Horror: How Mass Murder Gets a Pass

Let's give the "climate of hate" rhetoric a rest for a moment. It's time to talk about the climate of death, in which the abortion industry thrives unchecked. Dehumanizing rhetoric, rationalizing language and a callous disregard for life have numbed America to its monstrous consequences. Consider the Philadelphia Horror.

In the City of Brotherly Love, hundreds of babies were murdered by a scissors-wielding monster over four decades. Whistleblowers informed public officials at all levels of the wanton killings of innocent life. But a parade of government health bureaucrats and advocates protecting the abortion racket looked the other way -- until, that is, a Philadelphia grand jury finally exposed the infanticide factory run by abortionist Kermit B. Gosnell, M.D., and a crew of unlicensed, untrained butchers masquerading as noble providers of women's "choice." Prosecutors charged Gosnell and his death squad with multiple counts of murder, infanticide, conspiracy, abuse of corpse, theft and other offenses.

The 281-page grand jury report released Wednesday provides a bone-chilling account of how Gosnell's "Women's Medical Society" systematically preyed on poor, minority pregnant women and their live, viable babies. The report's introduction lays out the criminal enterprise that claimed the lives of untold numbers of babies -- and mothers:

"This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy -- and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels -- and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it."

Echoing the same kind of dark euphemisms plied by Planned Parenthood propagandists who refer to unborn life as "fetal and uterine material," Gosnell referred to his deadly trade as "ensuring fetal demise." Reminiscent of the word wizards who refer to the skull-crushing partial-birth abortion procedure as "intact dilation and evacuation" and "intrauterine cranial decompression," Gosnell described his destruction of babies' spinal cords as "snipping."

More HERE

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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