Democratic Primary Debate: Do Democrats Want an Impossible Revolution or More of the Same?

The debate within the Democratic primary can be boiled down to this: Bernie Sanders is calling for a revolution. Hillary Clinton is defending the current regime.

That debate, long lurking below the surface in the Democratic contest, was displayed more clearly than ever in tonight’s primary debate, which feature Clinton and Sanders repeatedly clashing over whether to build on President Obama’s legacy or to cast it aside in favor of more radical change.

This divide was particularly apparent in the back-and-forths over health care and financial reform. The Sanders and Clinton camps have been arguing all week over the merits of single-payer health care, with Sanders making the case that only a single payer system can truly provide the sort of guaranteed universal coverage that Democrats have long promised, and Clinton arguing that even attempting a single-payer system would jeopardize all of the gains that Democrats have made with Obamacare.

Asked about the squabble, Clinton said that with Obamacare, “we finally have a path to universal health care...I do not to want see the Republicans repeal it, and I don't to want see us start over again with a contentious debate. I want us to defend and build on the Affordable Care Act and improve it.”

http://reason.com/blog/2016/01/17/democratic-primary-debate-do-democrats-w

IN HIS FINAL YEAR, OBAMA REAPS WHAT HE HAS SOWN

of the union is strong and that the American economy is robust, back in the real world, the cracks were starting to show. For years, economists who understand the consequences of government interventionism in markets have warned that the policies of easy money, reckless spending, debt financing, and tight regulations could only lead to disaster. The mirage of short-term job growth, low inflation, and a booming stock market had to come to end. While it was impossible predict exactly when it would happen, logic and history dictated that the fiscal house of cards Obama has spent the last seven years meticulously building must, eventually, come crashing down.

Now, in the final year of his presidency, it appears as if that moment may have finally come. The Dow Jones has been in freefall, losing close to 1,500 points just since the beginning of the year. Retail sales were down in December, and many fear that this is only the beginning. These ominous symptoms stand in stark relief to the president’s confident assurance in his State of the Union Address that “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.” Maybe the cozy insulation of the White House is preventing him from seeing that which is clear to the rest of us.

Then again, maybe he’s just spooked and doesn’t know how to respond. I know I would be, in his shoes. It’s starting to feel a lot like the beginning of the housing crisis in 2007 all over again, only this time Obama doesn’t have a George W. Bush to blame. The responsibility rests squarely on his shoulders, with the struggling economy a direct result of his misguided policies. While the young man who walked into the White House in 2009 thought he could turn back the tides through sheer charisma and oratory, the battered president of today has exhausted every arrow in his quiver, only to find himself right where he started. He literally doesn’t know how to get the economy growing again, nor, apparently, do any of his advisers.

http://spectator.org/articles/65219/his-final-year-obama-reaps-what-he-has-sown

WHAT ARE ELECTIONS FOR?

If Republican voters have consistently delivered a message through all the fluctuating polls over the past months, that message is those voters’ anger at the Republican establishment, which has grossly betrayed the promises that got a Republican Congress elected.

Whether the issue has been securing the borders, Obamacare, runaway government spending or innumerable other concerns, Republican candidates have promised to fight the Obama administration’s policies — and then caved when crunch time came for Congress to vote.

The spectacular rise, and persistence, of Republican voter support for Donald Trump in the polls ought to be a wake-up call for the Republican establishment. But smug know-it-alls can be hard to wake up.

Even valid criticisms of Trump can miss the larger point that Republican voters’ turning to such a man is a sign of desperation and a telling indictment of what the Republican establishment has been doing for years — which they show pathetically few signs of changing.

http://spectator.org/articles/65223/what-are-elections

Bernie Sanders: Unfit to Be President

During the last Democratic presidential debate, Bernie Sanders described himself as “revolutionary.” He railed against Wall Street, and how he was going to raise taxes on the billionaires who are, he states with righteous [sic] indignation, the exploiters of our society. He promises to use this money to provide free tuition to students in public institutions and to rebuild our deteriorating infrastructure. Further, he hopes to institute a single-payer healthcare system and thereby do an end run around the rapacious medical professions, as well as the insurers and pharmaceutical industries. You see, the medical-industrial complex is regularly ripping off the public. (The left always like to use terms like “military-industrial complex” and “prison-industrial complex” so why not add this term?) Therefore, Sanders concludes that if the always benign U.S. government insures the people, insurance companies will no longer control the prices or the health issues that are covered by policies. He admitted to one of the debate moderators, Andrea Mitchell, that everyone would pay a little more in taxes, but the savings from not paying insurance premiums and other out-of-pocket medical costs would amount to about $5,000 per year.

Further, Sanders invoked the name of Pres. “Teddy” Roosevelt, trust buster extraordinaire, as an example to follow regarding the huge investment banking houses and insurers. He vows to break them up because they are now so much richer and more influential in the running of our economy than they were prior to the bailouts under the stimulus package of 2008-2009. He is disgusted that despite the fact that Goldman Sachs had to pay substantial fines for wrongdoing, it is still considered “too big to fail,” and has provided two secretaries of the Treasury, one in a Republican administration and the other in a Democratic administration.


http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/01/bernie_sanders_unfit_to_be_president.html

Leftist McCarthyism in Israel Funded by Soros and Other US Leftists

It is the NIF's response to the campaign by the student Zionist movement Im Tirtzu against 'Shtulim' (plants) in Israel, meaning foreign-funded anti-Israel subversives.  In the NIF ad, it shows Yitzhak Rabin with the slogan "THEY already took care of that plant," meaning "THEY" collectively murdered Rabin.  By THEY the NIF does not mean Yigal Amir and his brother.  It means all Israeli critics of the left.

For decades, the mantra of Israel's anti-democratic left has been that Rabin's death was caused by the exercise of freedom of speech by non-leftists in Israel, especially when they criticized Rabin and called him names.  Their conclusion is that criticism of the left by non-leftists is a clear and present danger that produces murder and so must be suppressed.  Just how they know that assassin Yigal Amir's behavior was not caused by his attending law school has never been explained.  In any case, the catechism of the left, which includes most journalists, is that the Rabin murder was caused by "incitement."  Curiously, they are not reminding people what Rabin really thought of leftist NGO B'tselem!

It is hard for people outside Israel to appreciate just how hostile the Israeli media and much of the public are to freedom of speech.  This hostility is manifested in the "incitement" bogeyman.  One cannot read five lines in the anti-Israel leftist daily Haaretz without seeing screaming warnings and condemnations of "incitement" – meaning criticism of the left by non-leftists.  In other newspapers, the count is not far behind.


http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/01/leftist_mccarthyism_in_israel_funded_by_soros_and_other_us_leftists.html

Father challenges Hillary Clinton to lie detector test for son killed at Benghazi

Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods, one of the four men killed at Benghazi told One America News reporter Neil W. McCabe that despite denials by Hillary Clinton, he sticks by his story that Clinton told him a YouTube video was responsible for the attacks on American diplomatic facilities and personnel at Benghazi, Libya. Woods said Clinton was calling call him, and other family members of the men killed, liars. The retired administrative law judge said Clinton should take a lie detector test alongside him to see who is telling the truth.

http://www.oann.com/father-challenges-hillary-clinton-to-lie-detector-test-for-son-killed-at-benghazi/ 

How Corporations and Politicians Lie With Numbers — and How Not to Be Fooled

Americans, as P.T. Barnum once noted, are not all that difficult to fool, and our nation’s somewhat weak math skills don’t help. A Pew Research Center report issued last year, which studied test results of 15-year-olds, ranked the United States 35th in the world in math. Not only has this weakness in understanding numbers created opportunities for mass exploitation by Big Pharma and other industries, it has led to needless and mostly unwarranted fear. While Americans don’t understand math, be assured that corporations do, and they happily use it to mislead and obfuscate in the name of selling their products.

Big Pharma doesn’t only target consumers with its misleading advertising; it also targets your doctor. And why not? Sadly, a medical degree doesn’t necessarily mean your doctor is a numbers whiz. In a report in the journal Psychological Science in the Pubic Interest on doctors’ ability to analyze relevant statistics, they were asked, “If my mammogram is positive, what are the odds that I actually have cancer?” Doctors were given all the information needed to answer that question accurately, and a startling number of them still got it wrong. In fact, only 20 percent of them got it right. (The answer, by the way, is a 10 percent chance.) Of those who got it wrong, 60 percent erred drastically on the side of doom, saying the chances of having cancer were 80 to 90 percent. So if your doctor was in that group, and you got a positive mammogram result, she would have told you that you almost certainly have cancer.

The pharmaceutical business, no surprise, is a big numbers abuser. How many advertisements have we seen touting the wonders of a particular drug? “Lowers risk of heart attack by 50 percent!” Well, yes it does lower the risk by half. Dig a little deeper and you discover that your risk of heart attack has dropped from two in a million all the way down to one in a million. That’s a 50 percent drop! Of course, your original two-in-a-million risk wasn’t all that risky, and side effects from the drug might include a few nasty things, but hey, details.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/01/how-corporations-and-politicians-lie-with-numbers-and-how-not-to-be-fooled.html