Florida is volatile, this cycle: the combination of redistricting, the adding of two seats, and the status of Florida as a battleground state has caused for a lot of jockeying for positioning and seats.  It was pretty much a relief to speak to Col. E.J. Otero, USAF (Ret.), who simply wants to toss out the liberal Kathy Castor from the 11th district. As usual, we talked about CPAC and this race.

Col. Otero’s site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Moe Lane

Florida is volatile, this cycle: the combination of redistricting, the adding of two seats, and the status of Florida as a battleground state has caused for a lot of jockeying for positioning and seats.  It was pretty much a relief to speak to Col. E.J. Otero, USAF (Ret.), who simply wants to toss out the liberal Kathy Castor from the 11th district. As usual, we talked about CPAC and this race.

Col. Otero’s site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Moe Lane

I mean, Ron Paul won the thing a few years ago, right? (After running off and finding out..)

Yes, he won last year and the year before. Romney won in the years 2007-2009. So, apparently, he’s familiar with what it takes to get votes there. That and the local Republican establishment is well represented there. I almost wish Ron Paul had shown up so his groupies could have shown the value of the straw poll there once again. (That is… a CPAC straw poll win and five bucks gets you a cup of coffee at Starbucsks.)

Oh, and According to Drudge, Romney has established himself as the frontrunner again, since he won in Maine, where apparently about five thousand people participated.

Hold on, I want you to get the full monty on this one. FIVE THOUSAND people delivered a large north eastern state. He had a bit over 2000 people to vote for him in Maine, and he walks away with the “win”.

I guess the stunning thing is that Maine even delivers delegates with so few votes. Or maybe there are only a couple of dozen Republicans in Maine. Who knows.

I guess the only positive aspect of an unfortunate death like Whitney Houston’s is that it actually makes more headlines than the false narrative that anyone actually wants Mitt Romney to be president.

People, please watch the other hand.  What you are seeing is not what is really going on.  This past week has seen a concentration of volatile issues related to women’s rights.  We’ve seen the military open more positions to women.  We’ve seen the controversy over where Susan G. Komen distributes its grants.  Perhaps most importantly, we’ve seen the Obama administration attempt to trample the religious freedoms of certain faiths in America, in the name of “women’s rights”.  Pay attention here.  What you are seeing is not what it seems.

Everything this White House does between now and November must be viewed through the prism of re-election.  The White House cares no more about women, than it does about the unemployed poor, but it desperately wants their votes.  We’ve seen the start of massive vote buying in the Administration’s $25 billion dollar shake down of the mortgage banking industry.  That money won’t help anyone long term, but it will keep them in their “underwater” homes at least through the election.

Similarly, the Komen attack no doubt orchestrated by the Progressive Left looks ingenuous at best.  It is hard to understand why such a tempest was raised over $680 thousand dollars from an organization that is funded to the tune of $363 million by our Federal Government.  As I argued in my previous post, this is about the right of an organization to distribute its assets in any why it sees fit.  The highly vocal outcry from the Left is pandering to women and women’s groups, and has nothing to do with any interpretation of “women’s rights”.

Now we have the Obama camp trying to beat the Supreme Court by preemptively initiating elements of Obamacare.  Attempting to force religious institutions to provide health insurance to its employees including contraceptive benefits was only the first round of the misdirection.  Everyone is now giggly about Obama’s apparent “compromise”, which does nothing but force insurance companies to offer free contraceptive benefits to employees who are denied at work.  It is not much of a stretch to see this expanded to all health insurance policies.  Watch the other hand:  All employers and employees who pay health insurance premiums, will be paying for contraception coverage regardless of religious or social beliefs.  Further, this sets the stage for eventual government funded abortions as a part of Obamacare.

All of this is just the latest round of Obama’s re-election strategy of “dividing to conquer”.  The more he can divide us and pit us against one another, while pandering to special interests and voting blocks, the better his chance of getting another four years to complete the carnage of his “fundamental change”.  Nothing that comes out of this Administration is as it seems.  We need to ask why political events are happening at this particular time, what is really happening and where is it going to lead?

During the next nine months, Conservatives will be facing a political enemy like none before.  We can’t be confused or sidetracked by all the crap that will come our way.  We can’t be diluted by disputes within our own ranks, and we can’t be misdirected by the bobbing and weaving of our opposition.  Most important, we must not lose sight of the ultimate goal:  Removing Obama and his Socialist cronies from office.

This election will not be about social issues, or foreign relations or even the economy.  It will be about how we and our children will live in America for the next 50 years or more.  It will be about a social structure and belief system that made this Country great, and allowed it to become the most powerful, successful society on the face of the earth.  It will be about the rewards and consequences of success and failure and our reliance upon innovation, ingenuity and risk.  Ultimately, it will be about living our lives under the thumb of a government that can’t control its own avarice or thirst for power.  Government did not make this Country great; the freedoms of its people did.

Originally posted on 02/11/2012 at ConservativeCompass.com

This particular interview with Richard – we’ve talked with him before about the race – is of interest for another reason: Dave Weigel of Slate happened to reference it in his day-in-the-life article about Richard Mourdock at CPAC.  I don’t have any actual beef with Weigel’s reporting of anything that I was involved with – I did ask those questions, more or less, and I was ready to get started on the entire interview rodeo – but it may prove instructive to see the difference between the interview, and the way Dave described it.  Nothing pernicious, but interesting.

Said interview is below:

…and Richard’s site is here.

Moe Lane

This particular interview with Richard – we’ve talked with him before about the race – is of interest for another reason: Dave Weigel of Slate happened to reference it in his day-in-the-life article about Richard Mourdock at CPAC.  I don’t have any actual beef with Weigel’s reporting of anything that I was involved with – I did ask those questions, more or less, and I was ready to get started on the entire interview rodeo – but it may prove instructive to see the difference between the interview, and the way Dave described it.  Nothing pernicious, but interesting.

Said interview is below:

…and Richard’s site is here.

Moe Lane

From the diaries…

Insurance (n): financial protection against loss or harm: an arrangement by which a company gives customers financial protection against loss or harm such as theft or illness in return for payment premium.

So, the Obama administration has just announced that all employers will henceforth pay for birth control medications and abortifacients. Setting aside the (substantial) conscience issues that many religiously-motivated employers have with this government compulsion, how exactly is this even “insurance”?

Consider traditional forms of insurance, such as fire, flood, or life insurance. When someone buys these types of insurance, they are protecting themselves against catastrophic financial harm from an unanticipated, unambiguously disastrous event. Nobody would wish a fire or flood on themselves, and by pooling resources, millions of insurance policy holders spread the risk of such events so that everybody pays a little to ensure that nobody suffers the full impact when it happens to them.

In this light, what we are calling “health insurance” is not health insurance at all. It’s more of a purchasing pool which gives people the right to consume certain goods and services paid by a third party. I can’t think of any other product we buy this way. Imagine paying a flat fee to Safeway for the right to pick up our weekly grocery haul (perhaps with a small co-pay at the cash register) – and calling it “food insurance.” Even stranger – imagine having your employer pay that fee on your behalf as part of your compensation package. Double down on strangeness – imagine the government organizing purchasing pools for people who can’t afford “food insurance,” setting standards on what employers must pay for in their “food insurance” policies, etc.

When you buy groceries, you buy only what you need; you economize by comparing prices across brands and stores; you pay attention to the quality measures that matter to you, such as taste and freshness. Suppose, instead, you knew that you’d be paying $50 regardless of what was in your cart. You might load up on expensive meats and packaged foods, and blow past the plain-tasting generic aisle. (Even if you didn’t, you can bet your neighbor will. So you might as well, right?) To hold down costs, the grocery store might stop carrying premium brands; or it might impose controls, such as no more than two visits per month, and approval by a dietary specialist as a condition to enter the expensive deli section. What do you suppose would happen to the availability, quality, and cost (the real cost, not the out-of-pocket co-pay) of groceries if this was how they were paid for? (Hint: it’s exactly what has happened to health care.)

Getting back to the new Obamacare mandate: Obama’s HHS has decided that our so-called “health insurance” policies must cover the cost of birth control and abortifacients. I may have found the explanation. In March 2008, candidate Obama famously offered the following remark at a town hall meeting. Speaking about his daughters, he said: “If they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.” (That phrase – “punished with a baby” – is very revealing.) Perhaps this new mandate finally provides a rationale for calling it insurance. It makes sense if you take the view that a pregnancy is nothing but a disaster against which one should take precautions, and a baby is merely a financial catastrophe against which one should be protected.

From the diaries…

Insurance (n): financial protection against loss or harm: an arrangement by which a company gives customers financial protection against loss or harm such as theft or illness in return for payment premium.

So, the Obama administration has just announced that all employers will henceforth pay for birth control medications and abortifacients. Setting aside the (substantial) conscience issues that many religiously-motivated employers have with this government compulsion, how exactly is this even “insurance”?

Consider traditional forms of insurance, such as fire, flood, or life insurance. When someone buys these types of insurance, they are protecting themselves against catastrophic financial harm from an unanticipated, unambiguously disastrous event. Nobody would wish a fire or flood on themselves, and by pooling resources, millions of insurance policy holders spread the risk of such events so that everybody pays a little to ensure that nobody suffers the full impact when it happens to them.

In this light, what we are calling “health insurance” is not health insurance at all. It’s more of a purchasing pool which gives people the right to consume certain goods and services paid by a third party. I can’t think of any other product we buy this way. Imagine paying a flat fee to Safeway for the right to pick up our weekly grocery haul (perhaps with a small co-pay at the cash register) – and calling it “food insurance.” Even stranger – imagine having your employer pay that fee on your behalf as part of your compensation package. Double down on strangeness – imagine the government organizing purchasing pools for people who can’t afford “food insurance,” setting standards on what employers must pay for in their “food insurance” policies, etc.

When you buy groceries, you buy only what you need; you economize by comparing prices across brands and stores; you pay attention to the quality measures that matter to you, such as taste and freshness. Suppose, instead, you knew that you’d be paying $50 regardless of what was in your cart. You might load up on expensive meats and packaged foods, and blow past the plain-tasting generic aisle. (Even if you didn’t, you can bet your neighbor will. So you might as well, right?) To hold down costs, the grocery store might stop carrying premium brands; or it might impose controls, such as no more than two visits per month, and approval by a dietary specialist as a condition to enter the expensive deli section. What do you suppose would happen to the availability, quality, and cost (the real cost, not the out-of-pocket co-pay) of groceries if this was how they were paid for? (Hint: it’s exactly what has happened to health care.)

Getting back to the new Obamacare mandate: Obama’s HHS has decided that our so-called “health insurance” policies must cover the cost of birth control and abortifacients. I may have found the explanation. In March 2008, candidate Obama famously offered the following remark at a town hall meeting. Speaking about his daughters, he said: “If they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.” (That phrase – “punished with a baby” – is very revealing.) Perhaps this new mandate finally provides a rationale for calling it insurance. It makes sense if you take the view that a pregnancy is nothing but a disaster against which one should take precautions, and a baby is merely a financial catastrophe against which one should be protected.

One of the interesting things about CPAC is, of course, that you can meet a whole lot of different candidates.  Below was my conversation with Dan Bongino, who is a former US Secret Service agent now running for Senate in Maryland against Ben Cardin – and if you don’t remember who Ben Cardin is, don’t worry.  Cardin’s an amazingly generic Senator who, on his good days, aspires to be as memorable as Herb Kohl.

Anyway, Dan and I talked a bit about CPAC and the race below:

Dan’s site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)