Stones of the River

With and Without
Millions of people facing the cancellation of health insurance policies will be allowed to buy catastrophic coverage and will be exempt from penalties if they go without insurance next year, the White House said Thursday night.

The New York Times headline should read: 
OBAMA ALLOWS MILLIONS TO BUY JUNK POLICIES FROM BAD APPLE INSURERS!

Will MSNBC's hosts react with outrage? After all, they said over and over again that these policies were evil. What will they say now? If history is any guide, they will ignore the issue entirely and run stories on Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz.

The Times is good enough to remind us of previous, ahem, delays:

On July 2, the White House abruptly announced a one-year delay, until 2015, in a provision that requires larger employers to offer coverage to their workers or pay penalties. 

On Nov. 27, it deferred a major element of the law that would allow small businesses to buy insurance online for their employees through the federal exchange.

Earlier, in April, the administration said that the federal exchange would not offer employees of a small business the opportunity to choose from multiple health plans in 2014.

And in October 2011, the administration scrapped a long-term care insurance program created by the new law, saying it was too costly and would not work. (New York Times, 12/19/2013)


Slip Sliding
But Mr. Obama must decide whether such a recalibration would unreasonably increase the risk of terrorists slipping through the surveillance net. For all of his campaign speeches, that was a risk he was not willing to take once in office. Yet in recent months, he has discussed eventually ending the war on terrorism. (New York Times, 12/20/2013)

War ends when one side surrenders. 


Inheritance
Mr. Obama came into office having run against Mr. Bush’s first term but inheriting his second. Before leaving office, Mr. Bush had already moderated his counterterrorism program in hopes that it would survive his presidency. He stopped waterboarding, emptied secret C.I.A. prisons, transferred many prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and secured bipartisan legislation on detention, interrogation and surveillance. (New York Times, 12/20/2013)

The Times looks back kindly and nostalgically on W. 
After spending years savaging him. 
Hypocrites.


Softie
President Obama, expanding his push to curtail severe penalties for drug offenses, is expected on Thursday to commute the sentences of eight federal inmates who were convicted of crack cocaine offenses. Each inmate has been imprisoned for at least 15 years, and six were sentenced to life in prison. (New York Times, 12/19/2013)

Liberals are not soft on crime. 
Liberals are not soft on crime. 
Liberals are not soft on crime. 
Liberals are not soft on crime. 
Liberals are not soft on crime. 
Liberals are not soft on crime. 
Liberals are not soft on crime. 
Liberals are not soft on crime. 
Liberals are not.....


Trust
In every one of these mass shootings, there was someone in a position to say before the attack, "Trust me, this person is a psycho." Try getting Jared Loughner or James Holmes through any mental illness hearing in which they're required to speak. (Though both might end up being offered their own shows on MSNBC.) 
...
Democrats absolutely will not address the one thing that was screaming out from all of the mass shootings: a crazy person committing the crime. We can't medicate them and we can't lock them up because the ACLU has handcuffed society's ability to deal rationally with the mentally disturbed. 

Not only will Democrats refuse to address the problem of the mentally ill on their own, but they will fight to the last ditch to protect any crazy person's right not to take his medication. (AnnCoulter.com, 12/18/2013)

The great Coulter takes up RedStateVT's cause celebre: mental illness, Democrats and mass shootings.


Deliverance
Trying to harness the widespread electoral and celebrity support that delivered him to City Hall, Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio on Thursday unveiled his newest campaign, to win a tax on high-earning New Yorkers to vastly improve the city’s prekindergarten and after-school programs. (New York Times, 12/20/2013)

Despite numerous long-term scientifically controlled studies showing absolutely no long term benefit to early education, Comrade Bill and his Liberal cohorts push on. They are so invested in their own moral superiority that they ignore the facts.

Unfinished Work

Keeping On
He’s an anti-ideological leader in an ideological age, a middle-of-the-road liberal skeptical of the demands placed on a movement leader, a politician often disdainful of the tasks that politics asks him to perform. He wants to invite the nation to reason together with him when nearly half the country thinks his premises and theirs are utterly at odds. Doing so is unlikely to get any easier. But being Barack Obama, he’ll keep trying. (E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post, 5/26/2013)

Dionne's love sonnet to Obama reminds us just how hard it is to be Obama. What with the Tea Party and everything....

And so RedStateVT will offer up again (for the umpteenth time) why Republicans do not trust Obama (and it has nothing to do with the birth certificate stuff that Dionne feels compelled to mention in order to delegitimize all of Obama's critics):

Obama and the Dems used parliamentary tricks to pass a healthcare bill that Republicans unanimously voted against. Never mind the argument that Obamacare was a Heritage idea. It does not matter. No Republicans supported it.

Obama got his bill but he forfeited for the rest of his term(s) any chance of Republicans working with him. 

Dionne and fellow bloggers can call Obama a moderate or a middle-of-the-road guy or a non-ideologue until they are blue in the face. We are not buying it. 

And speaking of the Tea Party, close followers of the political scene (e.g. RedStateVT) note that the Legitimate Media has stepped up their usual negative rhetoric on the Tea Party and (particularly) its pernicious effect on the Republican Party. The reason is, of course, obvious. They cannot have the Tea Party viewed in a sympathetic way by the public as a result of being targeted by the IRS. And so - to achieve the Liberal idea of balance - we get the hit pieces. 


Seemingly
Was there really any meaningful connection between the bloody Boston rampage and international jihadism? It seems likely that an al-Qaeda Web site taught the Boston bombers how to build their pressure-cooker bombs, but what about the alienation they obviously felt? What about their mental health? (Eugene Robinson, Washington Post, 5/27/2013)

Washington Post columnist Robinson concurs with Obama that the Bush War on Terror is over. (Yes, there are going to be things like the Boston Marathon bombing and that guy in Britain who decapitated a soldier, but not to worry!)  We'll refrain from a larger discussion about the dangers of the Obama/Robinson mindset because Robinson gives us an unexpected gem here. 

You already noticed it, didn't you?

Yes, the "mental health" of the  domestic terrorists. Liberals absolutely refused to talk about mental health when it came to Adam Lanza and the Newtown massacre. 

Refused. 

Why? 

Because they wanted to make the issue about gun control and gun control only. Now because they do not want to talk about Islamic fascism they suddenly do want to talk about mental health. Thankfully you have RedStateVT to expose the hypocrisy.