Which part of Obamacare do bumper sticker supporters love most?

After the passage of Obama’s War on Health three years ago – otherwise known, laughably, as the “Affordable Care Act” – cute little “I [heart] Obamacare” bumper stickers have floated around communities throughout the United States as a way for people to pledge their support for rising costs of healthcare. But inquiring minds want to know…which part of Obamacare do they love the most?

Do they love the fact that this law is forcing employers to cut the hours of unskilled workers so they fall below the threshold of “full time”, or cutting back on hiring because of the increasing costs of healthcare? Part-time workers have increased by almost 20% in the last three years alone. Coincidence?

Or maybe they love the planned layoffs that the costs associated with these new healthcare regulations are prompting many smaller businesses to consider as they cope with the known – and unknown – burdens of Obamacare?

They may love the fact that the younger and healthier population will be raked over the coals as Obamacare gets fully implemented, losing access to their low cost plans of today in favor of more expensive policies of tomorrow – as reported by the Huffington Post (yes, THAT Huffington Post).

Perhaps they love the wholesale increase in premiums and fees that are associated with Obamacare, like the premium tax now paid by insurers (and passed on to their customers, of course)? Some estimates put the increase in premiums at a whopping 169% and, according to Forbes Magazine, an average of $3,065 per person.

But maybe that’s not it. I bet they love the fact that Obamacare will add another $6.2 trillion to our nation’s deficits over the coming decades, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

Closely related, maybe it warms their hearts to know that the true cost of Obamacare is a whopping $233 billion MORE than the government advertised when the legislation was signed into law?

It is possible that lovers of Obamacare enjoy bureaucracy. According to the Associated Press, applying for coverage and benefits under Obamacare is as complex as doing your taxes and requires a 21-page form to be filled out and submitted.

Another possibility is those who support Obamacare find hope in a recent survey that found 60% of U.S. doctors, due to Obamacare, are far less optimistic about the future of medicine and healthcare in the United States.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “The congressional Democrats who crafted the legislation ignored virtually every actuarial principle governing rational insurance pricing”. Do bumper sticker supporters of Obamacare love that part, too?

Now that is true love.

Newtown, CT gun permit applications double after shooting

Posted by Steve Adcock

Article Highlights

Permit applications more than double after shooting

Town received nearly 80 permits in 3 months, beating average

Police say residents fear Washington and/or state gun grab

In news that you probably will not hear on your nightly telecast, the Newtown, CT police department said that since the December 14th school shooting, they have received well over double the applications for gun permits compared to the same time period in previous years.

Police say the cause is primarily due to a fear that the government will take away city resident’s right to own firearms.

“A good percentage of people are making it clear they think their rights are going to be taken away,” said Robert Berkins, records manager for Newtown police.

Yearly, Newtown issues about 130 gun permits. Thus far, the city of about 27,000 residents has received nearly 80 permit requests through the first three months of the year, a pace that is sure to shatter the city’s average. It is unclear how many permits the city has actually issued.

Gun control proponent admits “Constitution is not the gospel”

Posted by Steve Adcock

In an opinion piece published by the Christian Science Monitor, a Republican and veteran of the War in Iraq and proponent of gun control regulations on “assault rifles” wrote that the Constitution is “not the gospel” and is instead a “living document”.

The piece, published today, details the author’s disappointment that Diane Feinstein’s unpopular assault weapons ban – which would have banned 157 different weapons, not all of them “assault rifles”, will not be included in the Senate’s soon-to-be-released gun control proposal. What is particularly disturbing is what the man, a veteran of Iraq, believes our Constitution to be.

He wrote (emphasis mine), “I also like to inform my gun-advocating colleagues and friends that the Constitution is not the gospel and has been amended 27 times since its signing in 1787, including for the provisions of universal suffrage and the abolition of slavery. As demonstrated throughout the course of American history, the Constitution has proved to be a living document, which has reflected the state of affairs and needs of its citizenry.”

The implication is clear – to him, the Constitution doesn’t really represent a document that limits the powers of the federal government – as written. Apparently because the Constitution contains 27 amendments, it no longer constrains the powers of the federal government. It’s a “living document”, so as a result, it is effectively meaningless.

His larger point was to argue that the use of assault rifles, such as the AR-15 (pictured to the right), are not necessary for self defense, and therefore should be banned. His argument is simple, but unfortunately, that simplicity fails the smell test of how effective these bans actually are, not to mention how often these guns are used in crime.

“As a former Army officer with extensive experience with military assault rifles, such as the M16 and M4 (variants of the AR-15), both used for the offensive purpose of neutralizing or killing as many combatants as possible in the shortest duration possible, I can attest that these types of weapons cross the commonsense threshold of a weapon of self-defense,” he argued.

In all due respect to the former Army officer, he is using his experience in a combat zone to argue in favor of laws for everybody at home. Not only is this nonsensical on its face, but it needlessly confuses the real issue of personal defense and the right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms. A trained military officer should know this.

The rights of the people to keep and bear arms “for self defense” is not the constitutional right afforded to Americans – but I suppose, when you do not recognize the Constitution to be “the gospel” of government power and the guarantee of people’s rights in the United States anyway, those little tidbits become less important, don’t they? But more than that – who gives this man the right to determine what is necessary for self defense? This man is entitled to his own opinion, but enforcing that opinion on the larger population is where problems come into play.

In fact, the former Army officer considers the ownership and use of AR-15s to be selfish and, ironically, “inconsistent with the Constitution that I swore to support and defend while I was deployed to Iraq.” Inconsistent, you mean, with the document that you appear to be throwing by the wayside? The document you consider to be a “living document” and not the be-all-end-all of our nation’s founding principles? Surely you see the irony.

In the same editorial, the author first disregarded the importance of the Constitution, then later uses the Constitution to support his point of view. This is flat disgraceful.

I deeply respect your service to our nation, sir, but your insistence that the use of AR-15s is selfish and that our Constitution – which you do not appear to respect – does not protect the right of the people to own those weapons, is absurd. I expect more from someone brave enough to fight in combat zones for their nation.

The Constitution that you took an oath to uphold protects the right to keep and bear arms, and the 27 amendments to the Constitution proves how important the document is.

If the Constitution wasn’t gospel, there would be no need to amend it, would there?

The Iraq War’s unhappy 10-year anniversary

Posted by Gene Healy

At about 9:30 p.m. on March 19, 2003, the shooting phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom began, with an unsuccessful “decapitation strike” aimed at top Iraqi leadership, including Saddam Hussein. Shortly thereafter, President George W. Bush told the American people in a nationally televised address that we’d gone to war “to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”

Ten years later, the future of “Iraqi Freedom” is unclear at best, but it’s evident that there wasn’t much to disarm and that the world was never in grave danger.

What has the Iraq War cost us, and what lessons, if any, have we learned?

Placing all the blame for the war on neoconservatives lets everyone else off far too lightly, it seems to me. The 2002-03 rush to war was abipartisan flight from responsibility.

In 2002, very few of our elected representatives were interested in doing basic due diligence before exercising the solemn responsibility that the Constitution gives Congress in the power “to declare War.” From late September 2002 on, copies of the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate on the Iraq threat were available to any member of the House or Senate who wanted to review it. Only a handful even bothered. Then-Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. — our current secretary of state and his predecessor — weren’t among the six senators who took the time to read the report before voting for war. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., explained that getting away to the secure room to read the NIE — a short walk away across the Capitol grounds — is “not easy to do” and that NIEs make for “extremely dense reading.”

The Beltway intelligentsia didn’t comport itself any better. In a recent article for the New Republic, “The Eve of Destruction,” TNR’s John B. Judis describes “what it was like to oppose the Iraq War in 2003.” Lonely: “within political Washington, it was difficult to find like-minded” opponents of the war. “Both of the major national dailies — The Washington Post and The New York Times (featuring Judith Miller’s reporting) — were beating the drums for war,” as were most of “Washington’s thinktank honchos.”

Not all of them, however. In a 2001 debate on Iraq with former CIA Director James Woolsey, my Cato Institute colleague, then-Chairman William Niskanen, argued that “an unnecessary war is an unjust war” and one we would come to regret having fought.

Niskanen was right. A new report from the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University tallies up the costs: nearly 4,500 U.S. troop fatalities, an eventual budgetary cost of some $3.9 trillion and more than 130,000 civilians as “collateral damage.”

Amateur ornithologist Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., calls the dovish Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a “wacko bird” for raising questions about unchecked presidential war-making. Still, Paul ruled the roost at last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference, winning CPAC’s presidential straw poll.

The Christian Science Monitor reports on another poll of CPAC attendees, in which “only 34 percent said the US should adopt a more muscular role [abroad]; 50 percent said the US should pull back, leaving it more to allies to take care of trouble spots.” George Will reported on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that what he saw at CPAC was “the rise of the libertarian strand of Republicanism, which has an effect in foreign policy that is a pullback from nation-building and other ambitions aboard that they never countenance from government at home.”

Bill Niskanen, who passed away last year at the age of 78, never tired of reminding conservatives that war is a government program — and an especially destructive one at that.

The message may be starting to sink in.

Article originally published at the Cato Institute: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/iraq-wars-unhappy-anniversary

Colorado Sheriff refuses to enforce state’s new gun laws

Posted by Steve Adcock

Article Highlights

CO requiring background checks for private sales, magazine limits

Sheriff considers new gun regulations to be false security

New state laws expected to be signed by Governor

Arguing that the state’s new controls on guns offer nothing but a false sense of security to state residents, Weld County Sheriff John Cooke said that he will not enforce any of the new regulations in his jurisdiction after they take effect.

“They’re feel-good, knee-jerk reactions that are unenforceable,” the Sheriff told the Greeley Tribune. ”Criminals are still going to get their guns,” he added.

The Colorado state legislature passed several gun measures in the past weeks, including a 15-round magazine limit and a $10 background check for every firearm transfer, even if the transfer is person-to-person rather than a sale from a licensed gun shop. The bill originally restricted magazine capacities to 10-rounds, but a last minute amendment to the bill upped the limit to 15.

Sheriff Cooke said he, and other sheriffs from the state, will not enforce the new gun regulations due to the difficulty of tracking gun owners (which, coincidentally becomes more and more difficult as gun regulations increase) and how little the new regulations will effect senseless gun crimes.

El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa told a group of residents in Colorado Springs last week that he, too, will not enforce the state’s new regulations.