Socialism is Slavery

By Marion Smith

This op-ed originally appeared in the New Hampshire Union Leader on May 1, 2018.

One year ago today, an activist named Daniel Llorente interrupted the Workers’ Day march in Havana, Cuba. Wearing the Cuban flag T-shirt, Daniel unfurled an American flag over his head and ran in front of the procession replete with photos of Fidel Castro. He was tackled by undercover agents of the state.

The Cuban regime tries to take credit for the improvement of their people’s lives. It staked its legitimacy on the supposed emancipation and well-being of the working class. But the Cuban regime showed its colors by silencing Llorente and thousands of Cuban dissidents. Socialist regimes denigrate the very workers they claim to represent.

When the International Socialist Conference declared May 1 International Worker’s Day in 1898, it advocated for child labor laws, improvements in pay and safety regulations, and for the rights of workers to form independent organizations to advocate on their behalf. But by embracing Karl Marx’s theories of human nature and violent action, the early Socialists undermined their own aspirations.

Far from ushering in a more equitable society, socialist movements that subscribed to Marxist ideology engendered a new form of slavery in the modern world. In the USSR, unenthusiastic work was considered a treasonous offense, “counter-revolutionary sabotage” that resulted in prison or death. Whenever a factory or harvest underperformed arbitrary regime quotas, the laborers were blamed for sabotaging the revolution. When the 1932 Ukrainian harvest underperformed after Stalin collectivized farms, he blamed the farmers and workers and forced them to starve en masse. Millions perished.

Marxist ideology is still being used to hold more than a billion people captive around the globe. China, where Xi Jinping just proclaimed the Communist Manifesto’s continued relevance, continues to use a system of Laogai, or forced labor camps, and dictates where the working class can live and work based on a “social credit” system. Venezuela’s socialist regime seized the means of production. Venezuela’s military runs the grocery stores while Nicolas Maduro denies humanitarian food aid to his political opponents. The average Venezuelan has lost more than 20 pounds in the last year.

Millennial Americans who rightly take offense at the greed and inhumanity sometimes exhibited by global corporations must remember that workers’ rights have not improved thanks to international socialism. Workers are only truly empowered in a free society because employers and employees are able to negotiate with each other equally under the law. In a socialist system where the regime owns the means of production, the owner, manager, employer party apparatchik is the law. Workers who would demand better treatment face repression, imprisonment, or worse.

Although Cuba has ratified all of the international labor conventions against forced, demeaning, and dangerous labor conditions, “it willfully fails to comply with them,” writes the AFL-CIO. The Cuban regime recently banned all independent labor unions.

The superiority of independent labor over Communism was known to the shipyard workers of Gdansk, Poland when they founded the Solidarity trade union. With the support of the United States, Solidarity helped bring down Communism in Eastern Europe.

If May 1 really is about workers, then don’t celebrate socialism. Celebrate free enterprise that allows workers to thrive. Let’s celebrate a free society in which individuals are able to pursue their dreams, provide for their families, and bargain collectively.

For dissidents like Daniel Llorente who want freedom and prosperity, the American flag symbolizes hope. America manifests the noblest Western traditions of free and honest enterprise. On this May 1, Americans would do well to remember that Socialism is not the best hope of workers, it is their ultimate enslavement.

Marion Smith is executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C.

This op-ed originally appeared in the New Hampshire Union Leader on May 1, 2018.

by Rep. Mark Meadows

April 26, 2018 12:00 AM

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/mark-meadows-james-comey-probably-misled-congress-now-he-must-answer-these-5-questions

James Comey has recently embarked on a media blitz to “tell his story” and sell his new book. Perhaps, instead of cashing in, it is time for the former FBI director to come before Congress and clarify some of his previous troubling comments that don’t seem to square with the evidence.

Here are five questions Comey needs to answer:

Question 1: Did Comey and his FBI improperly coordinate with former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Department of Justice during the height of the Clinton email investigation?

On July 7, 2016, Comey testified under oath before Congress, following his public statement in which he recommended against referring Hillary Clinton for prosecution to the Department of Justice for her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. Comey said the following:

I did not coordinate that (statement) with anyone. The White House, the Department of Justice, nobody outside the FBI family had any idea what I was about to say. I say that under oath. I stand by that. There was no coordination.

There is a growing body of evidence that Comey misled Congress with this claim.

For example, texts exchanged between the FBI’s Peter Strzok and Lisa Page demonstrate Comey added language assuring there was “no coordination” between the FBI and DOJ following the public scrutiny created by the infamous tarmac meeting between Lynch and former President Bill Clinton. The DOJ was so involved in the steps the FBI had taken to wrap up the Clinton email investigation they provided language to articulate the investigation’s findings and case law the FBI used to support their conclusion. Documents produced to Congress also demonstrate the FBI and DOJ met frequently to discuss developments in the investigation. These facts suggest significantly more coordination between the FBI and DOJ than Comey originally testified about.

Question 2: Why did Comey leave out pertinent facts when he briefed then-President-elect Trump on the Russian dossier?

According to his own memos, Comey briefed Trump in January 2017 on the Russian dossier. Looking at Comey’s memos, it appears he failed to mention the FBI had already terminated their relationship with the author of the dossier, Christopher Steele, for failing to “maintain confidentiality” after he had leaked sensitive information to the media. This made Steele an unreliable source by the FBI’s own standards. Conveniently, Comey also neglected to tell the president about the dossier’s origin as a campaign opposition research project, funded by the Democrats and Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

If this briefing on the dossier was truly in the president’s interest, as Comey claims, then it’s certainly curious as to why this information was not shared.

Question 3: Did Comey and James Clapper coordinate to give the Russian dossier credibility and leak its contents to the media?

In the January 2017 briefing, Comey told Trump news organizations “like CNN” had the Russian dossier but were looking for a “news hook” to report on it. Remember, while no outlet had published anything on the dossier to that point, it conveniently took less than a week after the briefing for the dossier’s allegations to become public … via CNN.

This raises the question: Did Comey and then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper work together to organize the dossier briefing for the purpose of giving CNN what they wanted — a “news hook”?

Months after the briefing, Comey testified under oath the dossier was “salacious and unverified.” Documents produced to Congress demonstrate FBI officials raised concerns related to the legitimacy of the dossier. The timeline and evidence we have for this time period suggests, yes, it was Comey and Clapper who held a briefing with Trump on a “salacious and unverified” dossier, approached the media with the details of that briefing, and provided cover (a news hook) for reporting the allegations.

Question 4: Why did Comey fail to mention he had secretly hired his friend, law professor Daniel Richman, as a “special employee” of the FBI?

Comey testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and claimed he asked “a good friend” and “professor at Columbia Law School” to provide the contents of one of his memos to a reporter. Congressional investigators now know Comey misled the public with this testimony, since he had quietly hired this same friend, professor Dan Richman, as a “special government employee” of the FBI to work on “special projects.” Comey did not have any other special advisers from the outside hired as special government employees.

That Comey would offer a special job and give a high-level clearance and full access to his friend, when there are 35,000 employees at the FBI, is odd, and certainly relevant. Why did he fail to tell the public about this?

Question 5: Did Comey give his memo to anyone else?

If Comey gave his memos to a personal friend he had hand-picked as an FBI “special employee,” the question becomes: How many other people did he give these memos to?

Congressional investigators have received information that Comey may have misled the public on how many people he shared his memos with. If so, it is Comey’s responsibility to the public to come to Congress and correct the record by answering whether he truly gave this information to only his friend, as he testified.

Comey owes the American people far more than a public relations tour, a few memos, and a new book. He owes them the truth. It’s time he comes before Congress and gives it to them.

Rep. Mark Meadows, a Republican, represents North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District.

FEE – The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong.

Today (Sunday, April 22) is Earth Day 2018 and time for my annual Earth Day post…..

In the May 2000 issue of Reason Magazine, award-winning science correspondent Ronald Bailey wrote an excellent article titled “Earth Day, Then and Now” to provide some historical perspective on the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. In that article, Bailey noted that around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, and in the years following, there was a “torrent of apocalyptic predictions” and many of those predictions were featured in his Reason article. Well, it’s now the 48th anniversary of Earth Day, and a good time to ask the question again that Bailey asked 18 years ago: How accurate were the predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970? The answer: “The prophets of doom were not simply wrong, but spectacularly wrong,” according to Bailey. Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “green holy day” (aka Earth Day) started:

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

Click here to read more.

The Tribune Papers – One of America’s favorite hymns was written by a Swedish pastor, Carl Gustaf Boberg, after witnessing an awesome thunder storm in 1886. We know that hymn, O Store Gud (O, Mighty God) as How Great Thou Art. Ninety years ago, in the late 1920’s, when the Swedish State Lutheran Church had begun losing its spiritual and moral influence because of advancing theological liberalism within, the “evangelical free churches” in Sweden were both numerically strong and influential. The evangelical free churches were vibrant, growing, and having a political and social impact as well as moral and spiritual influence. In the late 1920’s approximately 23 percent of the members of the Riksdag (Swedish National Parliament) were members of these evangelical free churches. Usually, the members of the evangelical free churches retained nominal membership in the Swedish State Lutheran Church. The modern and increasingly liberal Church of Sweden (Svenska Kyrkan), although no longer a state church, remains an important social and political force in Sweden.

There were weaknesses in the evangelical free churches, however, that would soon cause their numbers and influence to be swept away like a house of cards before a strong wind. One of the characteristics of the Swedish evangelical churches was that in reaction to the formalism of the Swedish State Lutheran Church, they tended to avoid doctrinal confessions and theological precision, preferring a more experiential Christianity. They also had a tendency to devalue the intellectual side of Christianity and their own culture in favor of their more emotion-oriented, experiential brand of faith.

Click here to read more.

Huffington Post – Dick’s Sporting Goods won’t be returning their unsold assault-style rifles to manufacturers. Instead, the company says it’s chosen to destroy all of them.

Dick’s announced in February ― following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida ― that it would stop selling assault-style rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines in all of its Field & Stream stores, where these items had been sold by the large sports retailer.

The company also announced that it would no longer sell guns to people under the age of 21 at any of its stores.

A company spokeswoman told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last week that the retailer was “in the process” of destroying the unsold inventory of rifles, which include AR-15s and other military-style semi-automatic weapons, at its four distribution centers nationwide.

“We are destroying the firearms in accordance with federal guidelines and regulations,” the representative said, adding that weapon parts would be sent to a salvage company to be recycled.

Click here to read more.

NC Speaker Tim Moore – Raleigh, N.C. – As families and businesses across the country complete the final touches on their returns for Tax Day 2018, the annual deadline highlights billions of dollars of relief provided to North Carolinians this decade.

The state General Assembly secured a lower income tax rate, corporate tax rate, sales tax rate, and a substantially higher zero-tax bracket for residents since 2011.

State House Speaker Tim Moore (R-Cleveland) detailed North Carolina’s surge in economic competitiveness following the tax relief in The Hill, The Washington Times, and Forbes, in just the last year.

“Families being able to save or spend their money instead of having it taxed away helps North Carolina’s overall economy,” Moore wrote.

“Top-tier wage and job growth, tax relief and lower unemployment are a winning combination for North Carolina.”

North Carolina’s historic tax relief will continue to take effect through 2019. Here are more tax facts and highlights of how the relief benefits North Carolina.

Click here to read more.

FEE – After more than two dozen failed attempts, Socialism has proven itself to be a disastrous philosophy. Socialism is extremely in vogue. Opinion pieces which tell us to stop obsessing over socialism’s past failures, and start to get excited about its future potential, have almost become a genre in its own right.

For example, Bhaskhar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin magazine, recently wrote a New York Times article, in which he claimed that the next attempt to build a socialist society will be completely different:

This time, people get to vote. Well, debate and deliberate and then vote—and have faith that people can organize together to chart new destinations for humanity. Stripped down to its essence, and returned to its roots, socialism is an ideology of radical democracy. […] [I]t seeks to empower civil society to allow participation in the decisions that affect our lives.

Nathan Robinson, the editor of Current Affairs, wrote in that magazine that socialism has not “failed.” It has just never been done properly: Click here to read more.

Click here to watch a very interesting video on the Battleship North Carolina.

Click here to visit Battleship NC Website.

UNC-TV ARTS – Author & film historian Frank Thompson works to research & recover silent films made in NC. His focus is currently on Asheville & environs, where a wealth of films were shot during the silent era. Mr. Thompson compares those films to documentaries or time capsules for the way they have preserved their locales as they were at the time of filming, giving audiences a glimpse back into the past. Check out his Facebook page by clicking here.

Pictured: Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Engels and Marx. Mao, Stalin, and Lenin rank among the top 10 murderers of their own people for all times.

The Tribune Papers, By Mike Scruggs – On April 13, 1975, on the eve of the fall of Cambodia and 17 days from the fall of South Vietnam on April 30, New York Times columnist Sydney Schanberg posted an article headlined “Indochina Without Americans: For Most a Better Life.”

The author’s point—typical of liberal journalists during the Vietnam conflict and since—was that because of the possibility of civilian casualties from American bombing, most Cambodians would be better off under Communism.

But although there were occasionally some collateral casualties connected to American bombing in Cambodia, American bombers were bombing Khmer Rouge forces trying to overthrow the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, not Cambodian villages. In fact, U.S. policy emphatically stressed that the risk of collateral civilian casualties should be minimized. My own combat experiences in Southeast Asia confirmed that this policy was often stated and strictly enforced.

Yet despite enormous evidence to the contrary, most liberal journalists convinced themselves and many of their readers that the Americans were the villains and that the North Vietnamese and Cambodian Khmer Rouge Communists were nationalist reformers who would stabilize Cambodia after a few scores were settled. Governed by these distorted presuppositions, Schanberg and the New York Times found it difficult to imagine how the lives of ordinary people in Indochina “could be anything but better with the Americans gone.”

Click here to read more.

 

SCHOOL SAFETY EDUCATION AND AWARENESS AFTERNOON 

WITH HENDERSON COUNTY SHERIFF CHARLES MCDONALD

Hendersonville, NC:  On Saturday, April 7th, between 1PM and 3PM,  a group of parents, grandparents, and tax payers of Henderson County will meet with Sheriff Charles McDonald about school safety.  In attendance will be Commissioner Grady Hawkins, and School Board member, Lisa Edwards, and a report from Representative Cody Henson for a School Safety Education and Awareness afternoon at Fruitful Seasons Pistol Packing, 1927 Spartanburg Hwy, Hendersonville, NC 28792.

Event is free and open to the public.

Other local and state officials have been invited.  The purpose of this meeting is to find out what plans are in place, how resources are being coordinated, the time line of implementation, and to assure the concerns of parents, grandparents, and citizens of our county are heard.  Our tax dollars need to be put to the best use to protect our children.

Hope you can join us for an open discussion on a path forward to be better prepared for the unthinkable.

Know a teacher or a coach who would want to take advantage of this great opportunity?  Free Conceal Carry Classes for Teachers and Coaches with Debra Jackson at Fruitful Seasons Pistol Packing.  WLOS coverage.

Contact Jane Bilello

H: 828 692 3117  C: 209 986 3845

The New American – The recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and other mass shooting in the past few years have prompted the usual outcries for more gun control from those who choose to disregard the Second Amendment. Among those clamoring for more restrictions on gun ownership were thousands of students who were manipulated into attending the “March for Our Lives” demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and other cities on March 24. Some observers have said that these demonstrations reminded them of National Socialist Adolf Hitler’s “Youth Parades,” a favorite propaganda gimmick of anti-gun Nazis.

Fortunately, the calls for more gun control have also inspired several reports in the media noting that Switzerland, despite having one of the highest rates of gun ownership in the world, has an overall murder rate near zero. Among these was a March 24 report in Business Insider by science reporter Hilary Brueck. In her report, Brueck noted that Switzerland hasn’t had a mass shooting since 2001, when a man attacked the local parliament in Zug (the capital of the Swiss canton of the same name), killing 14 people and then himself.

The report went on to state that Switzerland, a nation of 8.3 million people, has about two million privately owned guns. Despite this large number of guns in private hands, the country had only 47 homicides in which firearms were used in 2016 and the country’s overall murder rate is near zero.

Business Insider explored some of the cultural differences between the United States and Switzerland and, in particular, the role that firearms ownership and training plays in Swiss society. Brueck cited some of the traditional gun-related events that are popular in Switzerland. One such event is Knabenschiessen, a traditional target shooting competition in Zürich every September. The festival has officially been held since 1889, but unofficially dates back to the 17th century and was first mentioned in a document in 1656. The competition is open to 13- to 17-year-olds who either reside or are enrolled in a school in the canton of Zürich. It was originally open only to boys, but girls have been eligible to enter since 1991.

More significantly, Business Insider notes that Switzerland’s history of having an armed citizenry has helped keep the Alpine country neutral for more than 200 years. Switzerland hasn’t taken part in any international armed conflicts since 1815.

Click here to read more.

The New American – There is only one sensible solution to the escalating crisis in South Africa: Self-determination for the Western-minded, Afrikaans-speaking Christian majority in the Western Cape. At least, that is how a growing number of concerned people across the country and among South Africans abroad see the issue. Organized efforts to achieve independence for the Cape region are already underway. At least one local tribal leader, Khoebaha Calvin Cornelius III, whose formal title roughly translates into “king” in English, has already declared independence from the Communist-controlled South African regime. Other voices hope for Afrikaner self-determination in an interior region of the country where they once governed themselves within the Boer republics. And a growing number of embattled Afrikaners and Boers are making (peaceful) preparations in anticipation of what they believe is a looming civil war and societal collapse.

Click here to read more.

FEE – Estonia is the living example that human progress is closely linked to economic freedom. The question of why some countries are rich and prosperous whereas others seem to be condemned to the scourge of poverty has been around for centuries. Many factors have been argued to be the determinants of prosperity: geographical, cultural, historical, etc.

Yet, since at least the publication in 1776 of The Wealth of Nations, we know that political and economic institutions play a decisive role in this respect. Free trade, a reliable legal framework that protects private property and enforces contracts, and sound money are necessary conditions for countries to thrive.

The emergence and consolidation of growth-boosting institutions took hundreds of years in countries like the UK and the US. However, in recent decades we have seen that the right policies can significantly speed up economic development.

Estonia is a paradigmatic example of this.  Click here to read: The Story of Estonia.

FEE – We are quickly approaching the annual one-hour event in energy self-flagellation and green nitwittery known as Earth Hour, which takes place tomorrow on Saturday, March 24, at 8:30 p.m (local time). Our friends at Earth Hour are asking people around the world to “set aside an hour to host events, switch off their lights, and make noise for the Earth Hour movement.”

In 2009, Canadian economist Ross McKitrick was asked by a journalist for his thoughts on the importance of Earth Hour. Here is his excellent response on why he “abhors” Earth Hour, reprinted below in its entirety (my emphasis):

I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.

Click here to read more.

Click here to read Offshore Fossil Fuel Exploration and Production: A Review Of Some Facts By John Droz, Jr.*

Click here to read Energy & Environmental Newsletter.

The New American – Family Visits Gun Range — Their Kids Get Suspended From School. You wouldn’t think your kids could get suspended from school just because you exercised your constitutionally guaranteed rights off campus, but this is apparently what happened to one New Jersey family. It’s not that the school district jumped the gun, either — rather, the punitive action was prescribed by official policy. As Fox News reported Sunday:

A New Jersey high school came under fire Friday after it allegedly suspended two students over a gun photo taken during a family visit to a shooting range.

News of the unnamed students’ suspension circulated through a Lacey Township Facebook group, according to NJ.com.

Amanda Buron, a Lacey resident and family friend of one of the suspended students said one of the photos shared on SnapChat featured four rifles, magazines, and a gun duffel with the caption “fun day at the range,” NJ.com reported.

Buron said the two students received a five-day in-school suspension after the picture drew the attention of Lacey Township High School officials, who argued that it violated the school’s policy on weapons possession.

The school district shortly faced community backlash for the alleged suspension, with many calling for people to appear at the school board’s next meeting on Monday to protest the decision.

Click here to read more.

Speaker Tim Moore – Raleigh, N.C. – The first meeting of the state House Select Committee on School Safety will include presentations from students, the State Bureau of Investigation, and the Center for Safer Schools, according to a tentative agenda released by the committee’s chairs Monday.

The offices of state House Reps. David Lewis (R-Harnett) and John Torbett (R-Gaston) released the preliminary agenda that also includes personnel from the N.C. Emergency Management Division, the Task Force for Safer Schools, the N.C. School Psychology Association and Meridian Behavioral Health Services.

The committee will start at 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday, March 21, 2018 and work until 12:00 p.m., then reconvene from 2:00 – 5:00 p.m. for committee discussion in the afternoon.

Click here to read more.

Also, check out National School Shield

American Thinker – The horrific Parkland, Florida H.S. massacre tears at the conscience of us all. It also predictably invited the tired, unworkable policy fix from the left: let’s just ban guns! How the left imagines that this might fix these awful tragedies is beyond reason. Worse, leftists obnoxiously claim that NRA members and others who disagree with them don’t care. Incredible. Of course, raw emotion always clouds good judgment.

We should dissect this tragic event with critical thinking, not emotion. The scripted prescriptions offered at the CNN town hall meeting hours later contributed nothing to this effort. Shame on CNN and all the adults who conspired with that fake news giant creating that circus TV moment. And more shame on those who manipulated traumatized children to promote their agenda.

Let’s admit: psychologically disturbed people (of any age) are a danger to their community, their families, and themselves. Some sort of intervention into their failing paths is essential. We rarely hear this because political correctness censors it, but most of us know that this is the root of these horrors. Pull a weed’s leaves from your lawn, and it just returns. We must dig deeper and get dirty hands if we truly want to rid our lawn of this weed.

Let’s also admit: tortured souls will utilize any device to wreak their havoc, including cars, trucks, knives, baseball bats, IEDS, poisons (like anthrax), and of course guns.

Click here to read more.

It is no secret that leftists are big supporters of a politically correct culture. They see no issue with constantly stifling the free speech of anyone who disagrees with the narrative of the mainstream. They regularly clamp down on free speech in the name of protecting the sensibilities of all those who happen to disagree. This policy has become so widespread on college campuses throughout the nation that it goes beyond merely condemning what people happen to say or feel, to physically placing the potential “victims” of your speech into so-called “safe spaces” in order to shield them from the dark and scary world of differing opinions.

Now we have a situation where students graduate with not only mounting debt and no discernible job skills, but also a juvenile fear of a different worldview being expressed to them. These are the future leaders of our country, and their situation perfectly illustrates the madness of the modern regressive left.

Despite all this lofty rhetoric of protecting people’s feelings and sensibilities, the left has not actually given up on degrading or insulting language. Leftists require only that their ideological opponents adhere to these rules – to themselves, the rules do not apply. Thus, if they want to insult you or force their own ridiculous opinions down your throat, you must oblige them.

One of the left’s favorite tactics is calling opponents “uneducated.”

The term perfectly encapsulates the idea that those who are “uneducated” are in fact “stupid” or “dumb” without actually saying as much. It is a brilliantly smug and indirect tactic to demean the opposition’s intelligence and, consequently, whatever opinion the opposition happens to hold.

Click here to read more.

By Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Mike Lee, Rep. Mark Meadows, Rep. Jim Jordan

Today we are closer than ever to sending ObamaCare to the ash heap of history and opening the door for much-needed market-based solutions to health insurance.

With the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Republicans banded together to eliminate the unpopular ObamaCare individual mandate. Now the Trump administration is determined to find a better way to address our nation’s health-care needs.

But despite these positive developments, both Democrats and Republicans in Washington are considering policies that would not only retain ObamaCare for the indefinite future, but also expand this health-care disaster beyond even President Obama’s ambitions.

These proposals would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by shoveling billions of additional dollars in deficit spending into the pockets of insurance companies, which have been losing money on ObamaCare’s exchanges because of the law’s misguided one-size-fits-all approach.

The real solution is obvious: we need to do away with this massive, expensive and unfair government program, instead of throwing money at a handful of corporations to tolerate it. But few have accused Washington of ever recognizing the obvious.

Several competing proposals appear to be on the table. One would direct the Obama-created bailout known as cost-sharing-reduction (CSR) payments to go to ObamaCare insurance companies. Another would create an entirely new reinsurance program to funnel billions of taxpayer dollars directly to insurers in order to convince them to stick with ObamaCare.

Republicans should reject both approaches.

Before now, Republicans correctly saw CSR payments for what they were – flagrant bailouts of favored ObamaCare insurance companies – and refused to be complicit in that bailout.

Republicans also recognized that CSR payments lacked sufficient pro-life protections, allowing taxpayer funding for abortions. These problems with CSR payments still remain – but the attitude among some Republicans has strangely and suddenly changed.

The reinsurance program proposals under consideration today would create a new backdoor bailout similar to one originally found in ObamaCare.

ObamaCare created a three-year reinsurance program, tantamount to a bailout, which thankfully ended in 2016. The Obama administration mismanaged this bailout so badly that it failed to collect enough insurance slush money, and then sought to fudge its mistakes by taking money from the Treasury and redirecting it into the pockets of insurance companies.

Back in 2016, top GOP committee chairmen from both the House and Senate called this scheme “the great Obamacare heist.” And now some would seek to reproduce it.

This Frankenstein combination of a new Republican-created insurance bailout plus funding ObamaCare’s existing pro-abortion CSR bailout is exactly what we counseled against in March last year. If we ignore the years of promises we made to the people on ObamaCare, the voters would, quite rightly, distrust Republicans for years to come.

Fortunately, there’s another way. We can treat health insurance as the product it is and allow the principles of choice and competition to provide cheap, effective options, as we do for almost every other purchase in our society. Consumer freedom is the most effective way to lower premiums and make health insurance more affordable.

We should expand health savings accounts so Americans get a tax-free way to pay for health expenses, allow people to purchase plans that work for them, and make these plans portable between jobs. These three simple things will go a long way toward promoting market competition that benefits consumers and reduces the cost of health care for everyday Americans.

Republicans stand at a moment of great opportunity, one we’ve been promising to seize for over eight years. We can listen to the American people – who delivered historic Republican majorities that promised to move our nation past broken government intrusions into the health insurance market – or we can double down on this failed system by bailing out ObamaCare. We know which one we choose.

Sen. Mike Lee represents Utah

 

 

 

 

Rep. Mark Meadows represents North Carolina

 

 

 

 

Rep. Jim Jordan represents Ohio.

 

 

 

 

Ted Cruz is a Senator for the State of Texas, and together with his wife Heidi, and their daughters Caroline and Catherine, is proud to call Texas home.

 

 

 

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/03/14/sens-cruz-lee-reps-meadows-jordan-must-end-obamacare-bailout-now.html

The New American – On March 14, 2018, one month after the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, activist groups are planning walk-outs and protests around the country to demand gun control, especially banning “assault weapons,” to avoid a repeat of last month’s murders.

While the concern for life is notable, if the protesters get their way, America will see more murders, not less. Here’s why:

• 98 percent of all mass shootings in the United States have occurred in gun-free zones, and new laws emphasizing increased gun control will almost certainly mean that little is done so that people in these zones can defend themselves, leaving them targets.

• Both the National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Centers of Disease Control — anti-gun groups — scrutinized the world’s gun-control laws and found that no gun-control measure in the world actually reduced violent crime and murders. None. The New York Post had this to say about the report by the Academy of the Sciences: The 328-page report entitled Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review, which was “based on 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, a survey that covered 80 different gun-control measures and some of its own empirical work … couldn’t identify a single gun-control regulation that reduced violent crime, suicide, or accidents.”

Click here to read more.

What makes people think that the insane and criminal will obey laws?

From a meeting with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Republican Women for their January Luncheon with NC Supreme Court Justice Barbara A Jackson and NC GOP Chairman Robin Hayes. Thanks to Leo Phillips for the invitation. Here’s a short interview conducted by Leo with Justice Barbara Jackson. Click here to visit her website.

Click here to watch video.