The president's Rolodex of radicals has grown even fatter after bloggers revealed fresh details about his earlier ties to socialists. Yet the major media continue to keep a lid on it.
Read the full editorial at the newspaper's website.
After three years, the divisiveness in America is worse than ever. Political name calling has become a national disgrace. The economy is still very weak. Unemployment has risen to over 9 percent. The poor got poorer. His massive, mostly unsuccessful, spending programs have added over $4 trillion to our national debt. His supporters try to ignore these fundamental facts and blame his failure on everyone or everything else.
Robert J. Samuelson, writing in The Washington Post, warns Barack Obama and his socialist administration that the collapse of the Greek economy should be a lesson for the United States.
From Samuelson's latest:
What we're seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn't Greece's problem alone, and that's why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven't fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies.
Americans dislike the term "welfare state" and substitute the bland word "entitlements." Vocabulary doesn't alter the reality. Countries cannot overspend and overborrow forever. By delaying hard decisions about spending and taxes, governments maneuver themselves into a cul-de-sac. To be sure, Greece's plight is usually described as a European crisis -- especially for the euro, the common money used by 16 countries -- and this is true. But only to a point.
Syndicated columnist and liberal icon Nat Hentoff plans to publish a three-part series on the many troubling aspects of Obamacare. Hentoff is scared to death about a government takeover of health care and says you should be too.
The highlights below are from his first column, "Be scared: Obamacare endangers Americans' lifespans"
Hentoff writes:
Much of the press coverage of the Democrats' health-care legislation, now fiercely embattled in Congress, focuses on the public option, the actual long-term costs and tax increases, and the amendment barring funding for abortions, but the cold heart of Obamacare is its overpowering of the doctor-patient relationship — eventually resulting in the premature ending of many Americans' lives for being too costly.
To call the dangers of this legislation "death panels" obscures the real-life consequences to Americans, not only the elderly, of a federal government-run health-care bureaucracy. In the Senate bill, for instance, Medicare doctors whose treatments of certain, mostly elderly, patients costs more than a set government figure each year, will be punished by losing part of their own incomes.
Is this what presidential candidate Barack Obama meant by "Change we can believe in?" Even if you voted for him, is this the change you will believe in if your doctor is overruled by the government in his or her treatment decisions about you?
Remember those federal bureaucrats recently ruling on breast cancer screening? Dr. James Thrall, chairman of the American College of Radiology and a Harvard Medical School professor, said the resulting furor of dissent by doctors showed (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 18) that rulings "based on costs and large group averages, not individuals" lead him to fear that, "we are entering an era of deliberate decisions where we choose to trade people’s lives for money."
Is there anything you want to say to your representatives in the House or Senate before the final vote is taken? If you don't act urgently now, you may become part of another collective statistic — American annual death rates.
I'm scared, and I do mean to scare you.
We do not elect the president and Congress to decide how short our lives will be. That decision is way above their pay grades.
Tony Phyrillas is the editor and content manager of The Mercury, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning daily newspaper in Pottstown, Pa. Phyrillas has won national and state awards for political commentary, including first place for column writing in 2010 by the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors. Phyrillas has been featured on National Public Radio and The New York Times and is a frequent commentator on radio and television programs. He co-hosted 'Talking Politics with Tony Phyrillas & Mike Pincus' on WPAZ 1370 AM from 2008 to 2009.
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