In one of those “I guess we have to mention it, but we’ll get it out of the way quickly” reports, the Associated Press on Monday, April 12 tersely told its readers the following about the failure of an attempt in California to repeal California’s Proposition 8 (reproduced in full for fair use and discussion purposes):
What AP chose to avoid telling the rest of the nation is why “more established gay rights groups” were not involved in the 2010 repeal campaign. In a Friday OneNewsNow.com item, Randy Thomasson of SaveCalifornia.com explained why:
“California homosexual activist groups are afraid of the conservative backlash against Barack Obama, and so they didn’t want to go on this year’s ballot,” Thomasson explains. “So the small homosexual activist group that tried to didn’t get the funding that they wanted.”
As a result, petition signatures fell short of the needed 695,000. But Equality California, the largest pro-homosexual activist group in the state, is shooting for a position on the 2012 ballot.
… Same-sex “marriage” activist organizations are counting on new graduates, mainly those graduating from school by 2012 who have been indoctrinated in their schools to accept the homosexual lifestyle, going to the polls. That is why Thomasson finds it important that parents teach their children the truth about the lifestyle and traditional family values.
In other words, “more established gay right groups” made a cynical political calculation that it was more important to avoid hurting Barack Obama and the Democratic Party than it was to try to push their initiative through this year. These groups’ constituencies should be upset should be upset by their additional two years of dithering. It would seem reasonable to contend that the AP didn’t want the rest of the country to know this.
The political calculation just noted would seem to imply one of two things:
If we’re to believe the conventional wisdom in some quarters, Tea Party activists aren’t really on board with the longstanding social issues such as opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. If so, Prop 8 repeal proponents made a serious miscalculation, because under this logic Tea Partiers would be expected to tip the balance in their direction.
Tea Party activists are more socially conservative than essays such as this one are letting on, and Prop 8 might have failed by more than it did in 2008 if it were on the 2010 ballot.
I believe it’s Door Number 2.
The full text of Prop 8 is, “Shall the California Constitution be changed to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry providing that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California?” It passed in November 2008 by a 52.3% – 47.7% margin, or over 600,000 votes out of almost 13.1 million cast. Since its defeat, as chronicled consistently by Michelle Malkin, sore losers have been targeting people who they know gave money to the Prop 8 effort or who voted for the measure with a wide variety of personal and professional reprisals.
“They are not gangsters,” Mr. Clinton said. “They were elected. They are not doing anything they were not elected to do.”
John at Powerline recalls, as do I, that the first reference I recall seeing to “gangster government” was made last year not by a Tea Partier or a GOP politician. It was instead by Michael Barone, the usually measured columnist who doubles as a walking election encyclopedia.
In a May 6, 2009 column decrying the way President Obama’s car czars were ripping off certain classes of secured creditors in the Chrysler bankruptcy, Barone wrote:
Think carefully about what’s happening here. The White House, presumably car czar Steven Rattner and deputy Ron Bloom, is seeking to transfer the property of one group of people to another group that is politically favored. In the process, it is setting aside basic property rights in favor of rewarding the United Auto Workers for the support the union has given the Democratic Party.
… We have just seen an episode of Gangster Government. It is likely to be part of a continuing series.
And it has been. Unsecured Government/General Motors bondholders were the next group to get the short of the stick. In Illinois, Obama crony and now U.S. Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias applied gangster techniques to intimidate banks involved with Republic Windows (Obama inserted himself into this situation) and Hartmarx.
An integral part of the political thought process in this administration seems to be, “What can we do, with the help of the media, to embarrass, humiliate, and intimidate our opponents?” Often it works (see AIG, Humana); sometimes it doesn’t, after which the establishment press assists in making the “never mind” look innocuous (see Henry Waxman’s cancellation of hearings whose purpose was to go after companies that dared to properly account for and disclose the anticipated costs of complying with ObamaCare).
Sorry, Bill Clinton. Michael Barone was prescient and right, and you are wrong. This is a Gangster Government, headed by a a punk president. They’re doing lots of things they weren’t elected to do, many of them things they specifically promised not to do.
Mike Hemmer can’t remember the plane crash that left him critically injured last Lent, but he does recall the awe he felt when a priest anointed him a few days later in an Amsterdam hospital. “I remember just kind of an overwhelming feeling of wow, this is for me,” said Hemmer, who has always had a strong Catholic faith. “It was powerful.” God’s grace has been evident in many ways for Hemmer, his wife Shirley, and their three children in the year since the 2009 Ash Wednesday crash that injured 86 and claimed the lives of nine people, including three of Hemmer’s Boeing colleagues sitting nearby.
The Hemmers, active members of St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Federal Way, Washington, have been helped by countless earthly angels, starting with the medic who knew that Hemmer’s survival depended on being airlifted from the crash scene.
“If they hadn’t, he wouldn’t have made it,” Shirley Hemmer said.
In Amsterdam, a pair of Boeing employees took Shirley under their wing. Back home, people all over the Puget Sound area prayed for Hemmer’s recovery. Friends and family members stayed with the kids. And scores of people tackled household chores for the family.
No ordinary day
Shirley Hemmer remembers Feb. 25, 2009, starting as a typical weekday. Her teenagers, Jennifer and Eric, had left for school. Her daughter Abby, a student at St. Vincent de Paul School, was just getting up.
Mike, a Boeing test manager, was returning via Amsterdam from a business trip to Turkey. He was planning to pick up some tortellini for Jennifer’s 18th birthday celebration that night.
The family’s world changed when Shirley saw a TV report about a Turkish Airlines plane crashing short of the runway in Amsterdam.
“I knew it was his plane. Of course, I denied it at first,” Shirley said, checking Mike’s itinerary to be sure.
Shirley decided to stay home with Abby, and called St. Vincent School Principal Wanda Stewart to tell her what was happening. Stewart offered to send someone to be with Shirley.
“Within an hour someone was here,” Shirley said. “Just with that one phone call, I had the support. It was amazing.”
After a “roller-coaster” day, Shirley finally learned that night that Mike was alive, had undergone two surgeries and was lying unconscious in an Amsterdam hospital.
Mike had been sitting in the plane’s third row, in business class. The impact of the crash shattered his upper left arm and caused a compound fracture in his right forearm, broken bones in both legs, a broken nose, a fractured eye socket and two crushed wisdom teeth.
His survival “is truly a miracle,” Shirley said. “The other miracle is that he had no internal injuries, no spinal injuries and no brain injuries,” she said. …
On Wednesday, Congressman Henry Waxman cancelled hearings, or what Michelle Malkin referred to as “show trials” in her Friday syndicated column, designed to put the spotlight on companies that dared to do what they legally had to do in response to the passage of ObamaCare: tell the public the estimated impact on their bottom lines relating to a specific tax law chance that was included in the legislation.
Despite the legal requirement, the headline of the Associated Press’s coverage on the day of the announcement described the companies’ announcements as “gripes.” AP Business Writer Matthew Perrone called them “concerns,” and acted as if the companies backed down, when the only qualification involved a questionably and largely unrelated item, i.e., what might happen if the law manages to lower overall health care costs.
That journalistically inaccurate narrative gave Waxman an undeserved way out of the heavyhanded mess that he created.
Here are the related paragraphs of Perrone’s pathetic piece:
Dems cancel hearing on business health care gripes
Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday canceled a hearing called to hear concerns by AT&T and other corporations about new employer costs in the health care overhaul, saying the companies now believe the overhaul could ease their costs if implemented properly.
AT&T, Caterpillar, AK Steel and other companies said last month they would be forced to take billions of dollars in writedowns because of changes in how health care subsidies will be taxed.
But Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., issued a statement late Wednesday, saying he canceled a hearing scheduled for next Wednesday at the request of several companies that want more time to see how the law is implemented.
“Companies like AT&T, Verizon, and a range of stakeholder associations are hopeful that the benefits of the new law will outweigh the costs,” Waxman stated.
… Under the Medicare prescription drug program, companies that provide prescription drug benefits for retirees have been able to receive subsidies covering 28 percent of eligible costs. But they could deduct the entire amount they spent on these drug benefits – including the subsidies – from their taxable income.
The new law allows companies to only deduct the 72 percent they spend.
However, company executives have apparently changed their minds about the extent of that cost.
The 2nd- and 3rd-last paragraphs of the excerpt describe a specifically quantifiable change in tax treatment. The items that Perrone said “apparently changed their minds” of the companies is unrelated, as Malkin noted in her column (links included were in original):
An April 14 memorandum from the Committee on Energy and Commerce Majority Staff informed the Democratic hounds that the “companies acted properly and in accordance with accounting standards in submitting filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission in March and April.” Indeed, after haggling about the overall impact of the health care mandate on firms’ annual company cash flows, the staff memo acknowledged that notifying shareholders of these big one-time company write-downs was “required” by law.
No apology from Locke, Waxman or his Democratic co-bully on the committee Rep. Bart Stupak has been forthcoming. Instead, the ruling majority seems bent on pressuring private companies to peddle the “beneficial” impacts of the law. The committee staff extracted statements from the targeted companies that “if” implemented “right” and “correct(ly),” Obamacare “could” achieve “long term savings for the country” and their businesses. And “if” donkeys were elephants, they “could” spray water from their trunks.
As Elizabeth MacDonald of Fox Business Network points out, the Democrats continue to distort a Business Roundtable study — cited in Waxman’s threat letters to Deere, Caterpillar, Verizon and AT&T — in order to bolster their claims that Obamacare will create cost-savings of $3,000 on average per worker over 10 years. But “the study is not based on the new bill,” she reports, and is premised on Congress adopting free-market changes and malpractice reform abandoned by the Democrats.
The statements mentioned in the second paragraph of the Malkin excerpt do not change by even one iota what the companies were legally required to disclose. Malkin’s third paragraph demonstrates that the supposed “mind change” cited by the AP’s Perrone depends not on “how the law is implemented,” but on the passage of whole new laws, something no one can predict with certainty. That’s some pretty deep deception, even by the AP’s non-standards. Shame on Perrone for carrying it out.
Expect more volunteer defense to be played by the press apparatchiks like the AP’s Matthew Perrone in the coming months.
Local grandma says home invaders threatened to “kill me” Carolyn Maples says three armed thugs put guns to her head, dragged her inside her Knoxville home, and threatened to kill her.
Carolyn Maples has a message for a neighbor who she says saved her life. “I say thank you and god bless you for saving my life,” said the 65-year-old grandmother.
On Thursday three gunmen showed up at her door intent on doing harm, according to Maples.
“I just knew I was gonna die, I really did, cause I knew they were gonna kill me,” said Maples.
Maples said in the blink of an eye “guns were to my head, and they told me to give them the car keys, and grabbed my pocketbook, and drug me in the house.”
Police arrived minutes after an alert neighbor spotted trouble and called for help.
“They could’ve really hurt her, and if it wasn’t for that lady I really believe that they would have,” said Maples’ daughter Stephanie Maples.
After ransacking Maples’ home in search of cash and jewelry, the trio of robbers made a mad dash for freedom with a police k-9 in hot pursuit.
Another neighbor saw the attempted escape. “One of them ran out the back door and he went toward that alley, and that dog caught him and chewed him up a little bit,” said Doyle Strader. …
The Cato Institute (HT Right Ohio and an e-mail I received at about the same time) shows that ObamaCare is RomneyCare 2.0, and simultaneously demonstrates why a Romney nomination for president by the GOP in 2012 is a death wish:
UPDATE: A full transcript, with a few links added –
David Boaz, Executive Vice President at Cato Institute: For the past year, conservatives have been campaigning against Obama’s health are plan.
Now they want to repeal it, they want file lawsuits to overturn it in the courts. And yet their front-running presidential candidate is Mitt Romney, who authored a very similar plan when he was governor of Massachusetts.
He was kind of quiet during 2009. Now in 2010 he’s out there putting himself forward to be the leader of the Republican Party. And in particular, he’s campaigning against ObamaCare. But as President Obama himself has pointed out, Romney is the guy who created the prototype for ObamaCare.
Michael F. Cannon, Director of Health Care Policy Studies at Cato: When you run down the list of the elements in the Obama plan and the Romney plan, they are all identical: the individual mandate, the requirement that insurance’s cover sick people at the same premiums as everyone else. The creation of a new government bureaucracy called an exchange that regulates health insurance. The subsidies to help people purchase private health insurance and comply with that mandate. The expansion of new government programs.
Romney (on Fox’s O’Reilly Factor): It’s very different than ObamaCare in a couple of important ways.
Cannon: In every important respect the Obama plan and the Romney plan are identical.
Boaz: President Obama rammed a health care bill through Congress on a straight party-line vote. No Republican supporters. But he still likes this image of himself as bipartisan. So he’s been going around saying, “Hey, I got some ideas from the Heritage Foundation, I got a lot of ideas from Mitt Romney’s plan in Massachusetts.”
And that’s something Romney is trying to out from under. Romney doesn’t want Republicans to think that he provided the model for ObamaCare. And a lot of times, Obama exaggerates this bipartisan idea. But in this particular case, Obama’s got a point.
RomneyCare did model a lot of the ideas that ended up being the framework for Obama’s plan. And that’s the connection Romney doesn’t want people to see.
Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, March 22, 2010: This legislation looks an awful lot like what happened in Massachusetts, and I’m sure Governor Romney hates every time I say that.
Boaz: How can he lead the charge against a health care plan that is modeled on his own? How can he go around denouncing a government takeover and an intrusion into people’s rights when he authored a very similar plan?
Romney (on what appears to be Larry King’s CNN show): I know some people say, “gee your Massachusetts health care plan isn’t conservative.” I say, “Oh yes it is.”
Boaz: Well he’s getting a lot of flak from conservatives who don’t think an individual mandate sounds like the limited government that they thought conservatives believe in. So he’s come out saying, “Well it’s a matter of personal responsibility and that’s a bedrock conservative principle.”
Romney (on CNN’s Larry King show): No more free riders. People have to take personal responsibility.
Romney (in a Heritage Foundation speech on January 6, 2006): You may call this an individual mandate. I don’t. I call it the personal responsibility principle. (Note: A defense from Heritage of what was in the works in Massachusetts in early 2006 is here — Ed.)
Boaz: His concept of responsibility, which is also President Obama’s concept, is that the government decides what you have to do, like you must buy health insurance, and then the government will decide what benefits you get.
Other people think personal responsibility means (that) you make the decisions about your life, and you accept the consequences of your decisions.
Cannon: Both the Romney plan and the Obama plan are essentially a government takeover of the health care sector of the economy. You can make a valid argument that only the state government should be able to do that and not the federal government.
Romney (on Fox’s O’Reilly Factor): States should be able to solve state problems.
Cannon: But if you’re making that argument to people who are opposed to any government takeover of health insurance, they’re probably not going to find that persuasive.
Boaz: Daniel Gross wrote a column in Newsweek saying that Obama needs a really smart guy to run his health care plan. He said he needs somebody with strong management experience, somebody who doesn’t have a job right, now, and somebody who has experience implementing government-mandate, insurance-exchange health care plan.
And who is that person but Mitt Romney?
Who indeed?
UPDATE 2 — From the “What further evidence do you need?” Department:
Romney’s Health Care Administrator Moves to ObamaCare
Jon Kingsdale was appointed by Romney in 2006 to run the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, which operates the state exchange that serves as a health insurance marketplace for Massachusetts citizens. Kingsdale announced Thursday that he is stepping down from that position to pursue opportunities in implementing the national reforms, according to reports.
The national health care legislation requires all states to establish exchanges like the one in Massachusetts. And like the Massachusetts plan, the new law requires everyone to purchase health insurance either through the exchanges or by some other means.
“We should all feel very proud of having created the model for national health reform,” Kingsdale wrote in his resignation letter, the Washington Post reports. “The power of the Bay State’s example is enormously consequential. I believe that national reform would not have happened without it.”
Thanks, Mitt (/sarc).
UPDATE 3:Maggie’s Farm links and posts a Galen Institute item that appeared in a mid-March edition of the Wall Street Journal detailing how poorly RomneyCare is working out in the Bay State.
Suffice it to say that Governor Romney is probably not the man to lead the resistance to Obamaism. If he isn’t yet toast, I can’t help but think he should be.
Regarding a Romney candidacy (not Romney himself, of course): Burn baby burn.
While (Missouri Congressman Roy) Blunt has reached out to Tea Party activists, Portman has kept them at arm’s length so far.
Portman’s spokesperson is quoted saying that “the campaign is ‘working actively’ to schedule appearances with ‘about a dozen’ Tea Party groups.” Maybe she meant “a few dozen people.”
The Ohio Elections Commission will hear a complaint that one side says is part of the Ohio Republican Party’s “war” against Tea Party candidates for the state GOP’s governing body.
A commission panel found probable cause yesterday to have a full hearing on a complaint that mailings from the Ohio GOP and Chairman Kevin DeWine in state central committee races improperly say candidates are endorsed by the party when they are not. A hearing date has not been set.
Thea Shoemake, who is running for the state committee in the 14th District, thinks the party mailings are meant to keep candidates aligned with the Tea Party movement off the GOP’s 66-member governing body. (1)
“They’ve declared war on the Tea Party candidates,” said Shoemake, of Cincinnati (6), who is vice chairwoman of the Clermont County Republican Party’s central committee.
Jason Mauk, executive director of the Ohio Republican Party, called that “laugable,” (sic) noting that the party is actively backing some incumbent committee members who also are supported by Tea Party groups. (2)
But Shoemake said she and other Tea Party candidates are upset that state GOP mailers include the Tea Party logo and references to “Tea Party values.” (3) (4) (5)
“It’s clear that if the Ohio Republican Party can’t co-opt the Tea Party and get their votes, they’ll try to destroy it,” she said. “No one wants to leave the party; we want to strengthen it. But that said, how long do you stay in an abusive relationship before you leave?”
At the end of Niquette’s piece, Mauk claims that this is all just “a family feud that gets hashed out and then put aside.” I would contend that hashing out this feud will require Kevin DeWine and others who have orchestrated this scam on Ohio’s GOP voters to step aside.
(1) – ORPINO (the Ohio Republican Party In Name Only) has not met to endorse the Central Committee incumbents named in its “endorsed candidates” mailing. It is “laughable” to claim they are endorsed when they are not. It will be more “laughable” to claim “we were going to do it anyway” after an ex post facto endorsement, which I understand may be in the works.
(2) – According to the list circulated by Steve Christopher posted here (corroborated at the “Candidates” page at the Medina County Friends and Neighbors web site) earlier this week, “some” really means “roughly 10 incumbents out of 66 available slots.”
(3) – This means that ORPINO, one of whose alleged bedrock values is a respect for property rights, used what it doesn’t own to make roughly 56 of its State Central Committee’s 66 incumbents appear to be supported by the Tea Party movement when they are not (roughly 40 of the 56 are in contested races). This is every bit as clear a case of premeditated deception as when a former congressman who hadn’t been in office for 12 years ran for Congress in 2005 in Ohio’s Second District district calling himself “Congressman McEwen.” The Ohio Elections Commission handed him a well-deserved reprimand, and should have done more. The OEC should do the same, and more, to ORPINO and Kevin DeWine in early May.
(4) – Additionally, in the case of Jon Husted, ORPINO has made it appear that its Secretary of State candidate has significant Tea Party activist support, when in reality most Tea Partiers bitterly oppose him. Many have gone on record favoring his primary opponent Sandy O’Brien.
(5) – Further, in the case of Dave Yost, ORPINO has made it appear that its Auditor candidate has Tea Party activist support, when in reality at least 55 Tea Party groups and Tea Party-sympathetic organizations holding REAL “Tea Party Values” have formally endorsed his primary opponent Seth Morgan.
(6) – Memo to Mark Niquette — Shoemake lives in a township in Clermont County that is not part of “Cincinnati,” which is in Hamilton County, even though the address has a Cincinnati zip code.
What’s in a name? For two new parents, one name has meant the difference between life and death.
It’s a touching story about a local soldier, Craig Macy, who was shot while serving in Iraq. A fellow soldier saved his life and now Craig is naming his first-born son after the man who saved him.
Charles Owen Macy was born on Wednesday morning in Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital. Charles is named after now Lt. Col. Charles Crosby, who ran into the street during a firefight in Iraq and pulled a wounded Craig Macy to safety. Now Craig and his wife Shauna are honoring those heroic actions by naming their first-born son after Charles Crosby.
Craig said, “There was a lot of uncertainty involved with that, but looking back on it, it’s a day I’m pretty proud of to be able to serve with people like that and to be able to do stuff like that.”
“It’s a beautiful thing. Charles. It’s a beautiful thing that he has a story behind him without even being in this world for 12 hours or less than 24 hours,” said Shauna.
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Talk about running interference.
