When reality hits
Harvard University professors are finally learning what much of the rest of the public already learned about the policies perpetrated by their law school graduate, President Barack Obama, and which they have fully endorsed.
Even though the school remains “a very generous employer,” as termed by a health economist at the university who was an advisor to Obama’s 2008 campaign, the Affordable Care Act is causing the professors to pay more out-of-pocket health care costs in premiums and deductibles in 2015.
According to The New York Times, the changes, according to Mary D. Lewis, a professor who specializes in the history of modern France and has led the opposition to the increases, are tantamount to a pay cut and “will be timed to come at precisely the moment when you are sick, stressed or facing the challenges of being a new mother.”
Reality, indeed, can be tough.
“Harvard,” said David M. Cutler, the aforementioned health economist, “is a microcosm of what’s happening in health care in the country.”
It’s just worse when it happens to you.
God-less Pledge
What, if anything, NBC has against the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, it won’t say.
A promotional video currently running on the network for its upcoming series “Allegiance” includes the recitation of the pledge — “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” — but not the other two words.
The series revolves around a Central Intelligence Agency analyst who specializes in Russian affairs and whose parents are Russian spies.
Asked by Fox News why the words were removed from the video, the network did not respond.
But it’s not the first time the network has excluded the words. During coverage of the U.S. Open in 2011, the network omitted them. After outrage then, NBC released a statement saying the move had been “a bad decision.”
Tortured speech
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, got so confused recently in an MSNBC interview with host Tamron Hall about the Paris terror attack that she wound up comparing surveillance with torture. After a brilliant start in which she confidently said “we cannot fight wars as we did in the Revolutionary War,” she began to get lost right about Sept. 11, 2001.
“But the one thing we made a commitment to after 9/11,” she said, “is that we would not allow the terrorists to terrorize us. I, frankly, believe that we cannot use an excuse. These are franchise terrorists, and how could we possibly know what they’re doing? I don’t want to use that excuse anymore on behalf of the American people or in fact, in fighting global terrorism. So we have to be able to frame a pathway forward with our international allies as to how we weed out the likes of those who did that devastating deed yesterday. But I wouldn’t say that we need to pull back on the concepts of torture that we oppose.”
So soon they forget
Outgoing Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who says he is “still considering” a run for the 2016 Democratic nomination for president, is sad he lost the love of even the home folks in the November 2014 election.
Republican Larry Hogan won an upset victory over O’Malley’s hand-picked successor, Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, in the race for governor.
“I can tell you my feelings were hurt,” O’Malley said in a speech at the University of Chicago, according to CNN. “We had a lot of really good things in Maryland.”
And, like President Obama telling the media his policies were on the ballot in the November election, he said, “I was on the ballot.” Voters, though, apparently fixated on the governor’s record of large tax increases and hefty government spending and looked elsewhere.
With that upbraiding from his fellow Marylanders, O’Malley said he’s going to wait until spring before deciding on the 2016 presidential run.
When ‘rarely’ is often
MSNBC host Chris Matthews often gets his mouth going so fast, his brain doesn’t have time to engage. That may be responsible for his recent statement that he “rarely” compares Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to disgraced 1950s Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-Wis., with whom the current senator has a bit of a facial resemblance.
However, the Washington Free Beacon called the host’s bluff. Indeed, the online newspaper assembled a montage of the 31 times Matthews compared the two. He, among other things, said they had the same “sinister, self-assuredness,” that Cruz was “aping the reckless charges” of the former senator, that Cruz “is Joe McCarthy” and that he is “bad news,” that Cruz “uses the tactics of Joe McCarthy” and even that Cruz is McCarthy “reincarnated.”