Consumer Misreported

Weasel Zippers

"Someone got assaulted somewhere in a woodshed.
"Via ConsumerReports:"....


Obamacare opponents have misrepresented Consumer Reports' position

"Pundits opposed to the new health care law and some media outlets have tried to suggest that our coverage of the troubled HealthCare.gov site means that Consumer Reports has turned against the Affordable Care Act.  

"Not true. Consistent with our mission to inform and protect consumers, particularly in this complicated health care market, our advice remains the same: The best place to buy coverage on your own is through the Health Insurance Marketplace in your state. That guarantees you will get comprehensive coverage, and it's the only way you can lower the cost of your premiums and possibly even your deductibles and copayments."....

 Separate_Reality commented:   

"Don't forget the light bulb fiasco......a few years back, Consumer Reports backed those morons in Congress and pimped for the curly fluorescent bulbs. Both ideas were stupid and it only accomplished running every single light bulb manufacturer from the US to China, Mexico, and other nether regions."

Obamacare's Next Bout: More Legal Challenges

Thomas P. Miller  "Obamacare is off to a bad start — and potentially greater threats to its health care exchanges are looming."

"Obamacare is off to a bad start — and potentially greater threats to its health care exchanges are looming."

 

Thomas P. Miller is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of When Obamacare Fails: The Playbook for Market-Based Reform.

Thomas Sowell on Race-Hustling Results

Thomas Sowell   "Years ago, someone said that, according to the laws of aerodynamics, bumblebees cannot fly. But the bumblebees, not knowing the laws of aerodynamics, go ahead and fly anyway.

"Something like that happens among people. There have been many ponderous academic writings and dour editorials in the mainstream media, lamenting that most people born poor cannot rise in American society any more. Meanwhile, many poor immigrants arrive here from various parts of Asia, and rise on up the ladder anyway.".... 
Below: two memorable pull-quotes from this article:

You don't hear about racial "leaders" like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson among Asians or Asian-Americans. Here and there you may see some irresponsible academics peddling that line in the classroom -- some of whom are of Asian ancestry, since no race of human beings is completely lacking in fools.

 

No one can claim that there was no anti-Semitism in America, any more than they can claim that there was never any anti-Asian discrimination. There was plenty of both. But that is very different from following "leaders" whose message would only keep them grounded, after the skies were open to them as never before.  

U.S. Foreign Policy from the Founders' Perspective

 By George Friedman at STRATFOR   "This week I thought it would be useful to consider how the founders might view foreign policy. I argued that on domestic policy they had clear principles, but unlike their ideology, those principles were never mechanistic or inflexible. For them, principles dictated that a gentleman pays his debts and does not casually increase his debts, the constitutional provision that debt is sometimes necessary notwithstanding. They feared excessive debt and abhorred nonpayment, but their principles were never completely rigid.

"Whenever there is a discussion of the guidelines laid down by the founders for American foreign policy, Thomas Jefferson's admonition to avoid foreign entanglements and alliances is seen as the founding principle." Read more.

There is much to argue against one nation being "the world's policeman", but  what does civilization do if there is a world criminal?  TD

George Friedman is the Chairman of Stratfor, a company he founded in 1996 that is now a leader in the field of global intelligence. Friedman guides Stratfor’s strategic vision and oversees the development and training of the company’s intelligence unit.

Obama Said This with a Straight Face

“Thousands of people are signing up and saving money as we speak.”

Heritage  "Yes, President Obama actually said that yesterday about Obamacare. As we all know, for the vast majority of people, the opposite is true.
"SIGNING UP? Most people have found it impossible to sign up for coverage through the Healthcare.gov website. In fact, some of the people standing behind the President during his speech—who were supposed to represent “success stories”—have not yet obtained coverage.
"SAVING MONEY? Heritage research revealed that in 43 out of 47 states with information available, premiums are higher in the Obamacare marketplaces than in the individual insurance market."....

Whose Islam?

Mark Steyn  "The "war" part of the war on terror is pretty much over, and we're now fighting it culturally, rhetorically. Which is not something we do well. Take the British prime minister and his traditional nothing-to-do-with-Islam statement, issued in the wake of the Kenyan shopping-mall carnage:"....

"....David Cameron assured us that the unfortunate incident was "a betrayal of Islam. . . . There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act.' "
....
"It was a busy weekend for Nothing to Do with Islam. Among the other events that were nothing to do with Islam were the murder of over 85 Pakistani Christians at All Saints' Church in Peshawar and the beheading of Ricardo Dionio..." And on and on and on..

Dare we hope that this is true? "Hospitals face whole new world under health law"

Let us hope this is true, because I cannot imagine our government doing something that would bring about anything but mediocrity.
The question remains, at what cost?

USA Today   "One thing about the Affordable Care Act is clear: Hospitals will exist in a world where they are rewarded more for the quality of care than for the volume of patients they treat."

More on our media and the death of honest journalism

Mark down 2013 as part of the Dark Days of Journalism.
LA Times bans letters from climate skeptics;  "Paul Thornton, editor of the paper’s letters section, recently wrote a letter of his own, stating flatly that he won't publish some letters from those skeptical of man’s role in our planet’s warming climate. In Thornton’s eyes, those people are often wrong -- and he doesn’t print obviously wrong statements."  Much more on this here.
Hat tip to David N. Wagner in flyover country.

The pattern of free speech censorship by this same source   “ 'Useless Discourse”, perhaps?" was the phrase used by representatives of Jewish Voice for Peace a couple of years back when they came to the UC Irvine campus and referred to opinions of those who support the state of Israel. That meant that Israel supporters really shouldn’t  have a right to free speech nor a right to feel comfortable on college campuses."
Did they teach you about Yellow Journalism in school?

Yellow journalism, in short, is biased opinion masquerading as objective fact.

MSNBC's Matthews: Tea Party Racist by Using Word 'We'  "...Chris Matthews explained that Tea Party use of the word “we” was racist, and that Tea Partiers presumably still counted black people as “three-fifths” of a person. The leg-tingling host who last week explained that the term “black hole” was racist when applied to the city of Newark, added “we” to his hit list of bigotry..." 

Juan Williams Slams MSNBC: ‘I Don't Think They Even Have Any Pretense of Balance’

Media Ramp Up Rhetoric Against Right  "Just two years after launching the New Tone-era, media elites are now openly wishing conservatives dead while comparing them to terrorists, criminals, and segregationists."

MLK speaking in 1967 about the silencing of antiwar protestors
“Nothing can be more destructive of our fundamental democratic traditions than the vicious effort to silence dissenters.”
Back then it was a matter of not trusting government; today we are told to not trust anyone opposed to government's power.
Once people rebelled against government's power over us,  But today people riot in the streets, calling for government to run our lives for us. And the media have become their willing enablers.

Just words?

Even Oprah isn’t on board with ObamaCare

NY Post

"As the White House was gearing up to sell ObamaCare to the American people last summer, Valerie Jarrett, the president’s pointwoman on a host of issues, phoned Oprah Winfrey.

"She invited the Queen of All Media to join celebrities, including Amy Poehler, Jennifer Hudson and Alicia Keys, to meet with President Obama and discuss how they could generate publicity for his health-care law.

"Oprah refused."

The Love-fest is Over--Oprah and Obama No Longer BFFs
"Apparently Oprah was promised tremendous access to the White House, and exclusive material she could use for programs on her OWN network as a reward for her campaigning during the 2008 campaign.

"Now this may surprise you, but the President didn't keep his promise."

Here's how the UK Daily Mail covers it: The President asked Oprah to help him promote Obamacare 'but she refused because she feels burned by the White House'  "According to Klein, the slight is just the talk show host's latest way of getting back at the Obama administration for failing to live up to the alleged promises that they agreed to when Winfrey campaigned for Obama in 2008."

In a move out of Orwell or the Soviet Union, television shows are being asked to include propaganda about ObamaCare  Here's a line from "Breaking Bad":

Lung cancer, am I right? Say, did you know that under the Affordable Care Act, your pre-existing health condition is no longer anything to worry about?

orlandosentinel

Conservative Arguments Stand No Chance With Media Who Drool over Protester with Confederate Flag.

The dummy should have known that when he broke that flag out of his closet. Unless he is a Democrat plant, in which case we should expect more such sights since libs have found out how well this works.

Read the visceral slams by Democrats in this post and look for intelligent arguments.

 

Media Drool over Lone Million Vet March Protester with Confederate Flag 

"On Sunday, with throngs of veterans marching through Washington D.C. to protest President Obama’s closure of war memorials, the media focused on one man in particular: a random dude with a Confederate flag at the White House. In the apparent belief that they had found the conservative Professor Moriarty standing behind the current government shutdown, media members descended as one on the flagman:"...  

 

From a TW post several days ago: One Confederate flag at the veterans rally? What do we make of a Soviet flag at a pro-Obama rally? That Che Guevara poster at an Obama office?  "Yet the mainstream media doesn't seem to find this worth mentioning."

 

The Obama campaign disavowed this as I'm sure the right will disavow the Confederate flag. But the MSM was more than happy to buy the Obama disclaimer.

 

 

 Patricia at Hold the Liberal Media and our Politicans accountable! writes:

Stop saying the confederate flag is the symbol of the Republican Party.
The Confederate flag has always been the flag of the defeated Democrat Party that lost the Civil War to the Republican Party.

Have you seen the movie,"The Help"? In real society back then, those ladies would have been mostly Democrats. 

Moral Incoherence in the Call for Academic Boycotts Against Israeli Scholars

Scholars For Peace in the Middle East  "....why argue the case for academic boycotts specifically targeting Israeli scholars and academic institutions?   Reciting the list of Israel’s perceived ongoing human rights abuses against the long-suffering Palestinians is, of course, a favorite pastime of the academic Left, in the U.S., Britain, and Ireland (not to mention, ironically, inside of Israel’s own universities), so it is no surprise that the litany of complaints lodged on behalf the victim group of the moment show themselves here as justification for the shunning of Israel scholars from campuses worldwide.

The problem, however, is that this view of Israel is the result of a long campaign of historical distortion, outright lies, and propaganda on the part of the Arab world and their apologists and same-thinking colleagues on campuses in the United States.

"The Journal of Academic Freedom [Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions] issue demonstrates the extent to which American academic organizations continue to be an arena for BDS activists, many of whom move from one platform to another. This usefully demonstrates again the organized nature of BDS and the determination of activists to penetrate all aspects of academia. The use of “academic freedom” as a means to vilify and expel Israel from the global academic community is certain to intensify." Via ISRAELI FRONTLINE

Yeah, well boycott this! Again: Arabs Fly Nazi Flag Near Road  "In a recent key speech, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu quoted numerous historical sources showing that the leader of the Palestinian Arabs in the first half of the 20th century, Mufti Hajj Amin Al-Husseini, was “one of the initiators of the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe,” and that he was constantly encouraging the Nazi leadership to annihilate the Jews, throughout the war. He cited evidence that the Mufti even visited the gas chambers at Auschwitz with Adolf Eichmann." Poor Arab victims of the Jews.

Why Europe Has a Problem with Israel   "Why do so many in Europe feel so much hostility to the most open and liberal democracy in the Middle East? Daniel Gordis, President of the Shalem Center, zeroes in on the source of the problem in this fascinating look at the complex relationship between Europe, Israel and the Arab World."