These are the ads that liberal supporters of ObamaCare don't want you to see. The reason? They're effective!
The left is having a temper tantrum.
Reading a couple of liberal scribes over the past 24 hours, we can almost hear the huffing and puffing, the indignant stamping of feet; reading their tweets, we can nearly hear the feverish pitch of their whines. Oh, the outrage. Won’t somebody please think of the children? On and on.
The cause? These hysterically creepy ads Generation Opportunity released urging young people to opt out of Obamacare on Oct. 1.
Complaints have ranged from the mundane to the delusional, with the ever-reliable folks at MSNBC seeing racism in the ads’ diverse set of actors. But brushing aside the panicked innuendos the left brings to every waking moment, all the young folks over at Generation Opportunity are seeing are clicks. Awareness of their cause. Alertness to their message.
Because seriously, when is the last time an anti-Obamacare ad went viral?
And viral it went. Published on Thursday, the videos have already racked up over one million hits combined. In the first 24 hours, over 100 publications wrote them up.
Creepy Evan McMurry at Mediaite whined:
Generation Opportunity, a Koch Foundation-funded anti-Obamacare group, plans a $750,000 campaign of "Opt Out" ads aimed at convincing college students to forego the Affordable Care Act's exchanges.
If conservative groups feel they have a valid financial argument against the Heritage Foundation's idea of the individual mandate Obamacare, then they should make it. But if "straight-to-video slasher flick meets tea party iconography" is the best vehicle for your message, it says a lot about the message itself.
If McMurry could be bothered to do a little actual research then he'd know that the serious arguments have and continue to be made regarding the looming disaster that is ObamaCare. Or he could just ask the unions what they think about it. And, of course, there's the usual Koch Bros derangement syndrome. Apparently only left-wingers are allowed to be funded by billionaires.
No, what really has the proggies panicking is the fact that they are now realizing that they don't have a monopoly on either talented young activists or the ability to produce viral messaging. McMurry himself recently was shocked to discover that Republicans actually know how to use GIFs to get a message out to young people.
"This is written for young people, by young people," Generation Opportunity president Evan Feinberg, 29, told The Daily Caller. "A lot of groups message to young people through traditional political ad campaigns because that's all they know how to do. We think these videos went viral because we put ourselves in the minds of our friends, classmates, coworkers, and asked what would we find creepy? Funny? What would get the message across for us?"
Well, it turns out the answer isn't some long-winded commentary on health-care policy in the United States. It's comedy. Dark comedy.
"That was always the goal: To use creepiness to get the buzz," one outside consultant who worked on the project told TheDC. "Otherwise it would have just another center-right ad — not 'holy shit,' which is what it was."
"Messaging from a 70-year-old, center-right perspective has not helped us reach young people," the consultant added.
The bottom line is this: The progs are in a tizzy because this is exactly the kind of stuff that they'd be praising...if their side had done something this clever.
A pair of Taliban homicide bombers detonated their explosives outside a historic church in northwestern Pakistan earlier today, killing 78 people in the deadliest-ever attack on the country’s Christian minority, officials said.
"There were blasts and there was hell for all of us," said Nazir John, who was at the church with at least 400 other worshippers. "When I got my senses back, I found nothing but smoke, dust, blood and screaming people. I saw severed body parts and blood all around."
Survivors wailed and hugged each other in the wake of the blasts. The white walls of the church, which first opened in the late 1800s, were pockmarked with holes caused by ball bearings or other metal objects contained in the bombs to cause maximum damage. Blood stained the floor and was splashed on the walls. Plates filled with rice were scattered across the ground.
The 78 dead included 34 women and seven children, said Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan. Another 37 children were among the 141 wounded, he said.
The number of casualties from the blasts was so high that the hospital was running out of caskets for the dead and beds for the wounded, said Mian Iftikhar Hussain, a former information minister of surrounding Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province who was on the scene.
It's a blessing to be able to attend church on Sunday morning without having to worry about bombing attacks carried out by Islamofascists. Being a Christian in some parts of the world is a life-or-death proposition. If the United States and the United Nations are serious about standing up for minority and human rights then they should at least loudly condemn such atrocities. But I'm not holding my breath...
Tom Shillue hosts and welcomes guests Ellison Barber and Remy Munasifi. Plus, TV's Andy Levy joins the panel.
CNN's Don Lemon Rethinks Gun Control After CDC Report Debunks Liberal Narrative
During a discussion on The Tom Joyner Radio Show, Lemon entered into a discussion about gun violence. While we might expect to see a diatribe concerning emotional rhetoric, to his credit, Lemon focused on the logic of gun control policies and cited a study that has altered his thinking on the subject.
Obama commissioned a study by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to investigate gun violence. While the move was largely thought to be an effort to drum up some support for his anti-gun push, the report actually discovered what gun rights advocates have known all along. Gun control doesn't work.
Lemon candidly admitted,
"It just might make you rethink your stance, your view, on the issue. It did for me. It's making me rethink it."
The lengthy report, in summary, states:
1) That most gun deaths are actually suicides, not gun violence.
2) Armed citizens are less likely to be injured by an attacker
3) There are anywhere between 500,000 to 3 million defensive uses of guns per year.
4) Most criminals procure their weapons from illegal means- such as friends or black market, making it impossible to remedy throw legislation.
5) mass shootings and accidental firearm casualties account for a small fraction of gun-related deaths and both are declining.
The report emerged in June, but has largely been ignored by the mainstream media and has not been mentioned by the Obama Administration. Of course, the findings directly contradict the narratives pushed by anti-gun zealots.
Still, with these surprises coming from the left, it is refreshing to see that some liberals are slowly awakening to several key narratives that simply don't make sense.
Greg welcomes guests Sherrod Small and Miss NY USA, Joanne Nosuchinsky. Plus, TV's Andy Levy joins the panel.
It's Time to Defund Obamacare
The movement to defund Obamacare has reached a critical moment. According to news reports, House Republicans are deciding this morning whether they will use a government funding bill to stop the unfair, unaffordable, and unworkable health care law.
With less than two weeks until the government takeover of health care, it's time for Republicans and Democrats to put aside party politics and do right by the American people: Stop Obamacare before it's too late.
Four new polls over the past week have confirmed mounting concerns about the law. You could lose your current health coverage, see your hours cut at work, and end up with bureaucrats coming between you and your doctor.
Here's a sampling of where Americans stand on Obamacare:
- 68 percent are concerned about the impact on their personal health care under Obamacare (Fox News poll, September 17)
- 51 percent want Congress to cut funding for Obamacare (Rasmussen Reports, September 17)
Americans recognize that Obamacare is bad for our country. Labor unions have sought relief from it; Democrats have called it a "train wreck," and Washington’s political class is getting exemptions or special treatment.
The American people aren't so fortunate. But their message appears to be breaking through to Capitol Hill.
Greg welcomes guests Jedediah Bila and Gavin McInnes. Plus, TV's Andy Levy joins the panel,
Creepy clown freaks out town, goes viral
A spooky clown, dressed in white face paint with huge drawn-on eyebrows, a curly red wig and a ruffled collar -- and looking exactly like Pennywise clown from the Stephen King-inspired 1990 horror film, "IT" -- has appeared in several locations throughout Northampton, England since Friday, Sept. 13. The city, some 67 miles outside of London, is an industrial town known historically for its shoemakers and churches.
Why the clown is there and what he or she is doing has baffled local residents and social media users around the world. Thousands of people have been following the story on Twitter since the sightings began, using the hashtag #NorthamptonClown.
Images of the clown have scattered the Internet, giving credence to the legend of the creepy character.
Shocker: New Survey Finds Nearly Every Federal Employee Rejects ObamaCare
A new survey of 2,500 federal employees and retirees found that 92.3 percent believe federal workers should keep their current health insurance and not be forced into ObamaCare. Only 2.9 percent say they should become part of the new health insurance exchanges.
I suspect a similar percentage of private sector employees would also like to keep their coverage, but most won't get that option. What I'd like to know is how many of those federal employees so eager to avoid ObamaCare themselves supported forcing everyone else in it.
There's more. The survey, conducted by FedSmith.com, "an information portal for sources of information impacting the federal community and those interested in the Federal Government's activities," found that 96.1 percent think federal retirees should be able to stay with their retirement health insurance. Only 3.9 percent think they should get "Medicare in lieu of their current option."
To put it simply: Federal employees and retirees almost unanimously prefer to stay in their generous taxpayer-funded health insurance program, known as the Federal Employees Health Benefit Plan (FEHBP), rather than being dumped into liberalism's two greatest monuments to government-run health insurance, ObamaCare and Medicare.
Speaks volumes, doesn't it?
What a surprise! Richard Dawkins, a world-renowned, hate-filled bigot, can't bring himself to condemn pedophilia. This despite the fact that he uses the issue as cover for his never-ending rants against the Church. And his mindless, sycophantic followers don't have the intellectual capacity to recognize the hypocrisy or the common decency to reject it.
Richard Dawkins defends "mild pedophilia," says it does not cause "lasting harm"
In a recent interview with the Times magazine, Richard Dawkins attempted to defend what he called "mild pedophilia," which, he says, he personally experienced as a young child and does not believe causes "lasting harm."
Dawkins went on to say that one of his former school masters "pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts," and that to condemn this "mild touching up" as sexual abuse today would somehow be unfair.
"I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don't look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can't find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today," he said.
Plus, he added, though his other classmates also experienced abuse at the hands of this teacher, "I don't think he did any of us lasting harm."
Child welfare experts responded to Dawkins' remarks with outrage - and concern over their effect on survivors of abuse.
As noted by the Religion News Service, Peter Watt, director of child protection at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, called Dawkins' defense of sexual assault "a terrible slight" to victims of such abuse.
"Mr. Dawkins seems to think that because a crime was committed a long time ago we should judge it in a different way," Watt continued. "But we know that the victims of sexual abuse suffer the same effects whether it was 50 years ago or yesterday."
Atheism is nihilism.
THE SELF-INTERESTED SOCIETY
In spite of these facts, two remarkable beliefs have come to be widely held about free, Western societies.
The first is that human beings are naturally selfish creatures, and that they can only become virtuous by overcoming their natural self-partiality. This moral opinion descends from some versions of Christianity, was powerfully taken up by French moralists in the seventeenth century, contributed to satirical views of commerce in the early eighteenth century, was influentially refuted by Adam Smith, and was revived to plague us once more by the Marxists (and other ideologists) in the nineteenth century. But the individualist, in pursuing self-interest, is not, according to our critics, overcoming self-partiality.
The second and related view is that Western Civilization is technically prodigious but has basically failed to overcome prejudice, superstition (e.g. religion), bigotry, racism, imperialism, national selfishness, and other such evils from which only the wisdom of international organizations can save us. This curious form of civilizational self-hatred results not from judging that we are worse than others but from the belief that since we have more control over our nature, we ought to have been able to do better.
THE PLOT TO SAVE AMERICA
One oft-overlooked aspect of the Constitution's genius is the Framers' humility. They had two animating ideals to guide the Republic they designed. The first, of course, was liberty: The United States would be the first Republic in history in which sovereignty was vested in "We the People," not the central government; in which the central government's function was to serve rather than rule the people; and in which the citizen's autonomy over his life and property was presumed - the central government permitted to burden it only in limited and strictly defined ways. The second ideal was separation of powers: The recognition that power was necessary but inherently corruptive. For liberty to survive, power would need to be divided in a calculated manner, not just among the three branches of the new central government, but also among the central government, the states (which were to retain sovereignty notwithstanding the creation of the Union), and individual citizens.
The Framers were confident about these enduring ideals for a flourishing, free society. Nevertheless, they were sage enough to realize they were mere men. They had undoubtedly made errors. Though they disagreed with the anti-Federalists, the persuasive force of many contentions lodged in opposition to the Constitution was not lost on them. Moreover, even if the compromises they made and the balance of power they struck were suitable to the conditions of the late eighteenth century, they understood that those arrangements might not be suitable forever. History is dynamic. To persevere, a Constitution would need a process for self-correction and for maintaining its animating ideals through changing times.
ORE OR ORDURE?
Grimly reconciled though one may be to the annual flood of books by and about the Beat Generation, it's particularly depressing to see Jack Kerouac's poetry, of all things, enshrined in the Library of America, that magnificent series designed to preserve for posterity the treasures of our national literature. To read through these seven hundred–odd pages of Kerouac's staggeringly slapdash effusions set in elegant Galliard, outfitted with the usual meticulous editorial apparatus, and bound - like Twain's novels and Lincoln's speeches - in a beautiful Library of America volume is enough to trigger a serious attack of cognitive dissonance.
Earnest souls who are prepared to give Kerouac's outpourings every possible chance, and who yearn for guidance and insight from someone who admires them, can expect no help from the editor Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell, whose introduction mixes pages and pages of quotations from the poems themselves with doses of hyperbole about the composition of verse. ("To be a poet's poet is to hurt. To hurt singularly, to hurt incomprehensibly, to suffer a wound that never heals, a wound not meant to heal because bleeding is the very nature of this wound - it is a divine gift - it is the wound of a savior.") She does manage to make a couple of coherent points - namely, that Kerouac was deeply Catholic and grew up surrounded by death - but this doesn't even begin to help us figure out what to make of these poems, throughout which, consistent in his indifference to technique, Kerouac is clearly speaking to no one but himself.
TV's Andy Levy hosts and welcomes guests Jill Dobson, Buck Sexton, and Veronica Mosey.
'Red Eye': The Official Litmus Test for Squares
So by now, you know Stephen Colbert ran an obviously sarcastic clip from Fox News's Red Eye as an example of right-wing rage at President Obama - "the equivalent of running something from The Onion as a real news story," host Andy Levy charged Thursday night.
What you might not know is this is the second time in just the last week that the Red Eye gang has completely punked the media spheres that could never imagine something cool or relevant happening on Fox. Last Thursday, Greg, Bill, and Andy booked indie music icon Ariel Pink as a guest on the show - a guy whose politics are pretty typically post-9/11 far left.
The infamous hipster music publication Pitchfork wrote up the appearance Saturday and placed it as the site's featured story. Tagged "WTF," authors Jenn Pelly and Evan Minsker thrice caveated their use of a positive adjective: "The idea of pop eccentric Ariel Pink appearing on a Fox News program is actually kind of incredible, in its own way."
Greg welcomes guests Kirsten Haglund and Jesse Joyce. Plus, TV's Andy Levy joins the panel.
Gallup: Number of Americans Who Trust Government To Fix Country's Problems At All-Time Low
Americans' trust and confidence in the federal government's ability to handle international problems has reached an all-time low, with 49% saying they have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence, two percentage points below the previous low of 51% recorded in 2007.
These new data come from Gallup's annual Governance survey, conducted Sept. 5-8, 2013, while Congress was debating the use of military force in Syria, but prior to President Barack Obama's nationally televised address on Syria, and Russia's proposal to avert U.S. military action.
Between 57% and 66% of Americans said they had a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in the U.S. government to handle international problems during Obama's first term. This represents a generally higher level of confidence than Americans expressed during the latter years of the Bush administration, when the U.S. was engaged in protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The historical high point on this measure (83%) came in October 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Americans also expressed high levels of confidence in the government on international matters in 1972 and 1974, when the question was first asked, even as the controversial Vietnam War was drawing to a close.
Personally, I have no doubt that the victim was on a one-way ride to her own rape and murder. Obviously the man who was arrested is technically innocent until proven guilty but it seems pretty clear what happened. It's a story that is both horrifying and inspiring at the same time.
It's terrifying to think about this kind of thing happening to me or somebody I know. It's something that happens all too frequently these days. I like to think that I'd do whatever I had to in order to escape or survive.
But I would also hope to be blessed enough to have a couple of people in another car who were paying attention and also willing to risk possible embarrassment (if it turned out to be a false alarm) in order to make sure that nothing bad happened to a fellow human being. It's the second time in the last two months that alert good samaritans have helped stop a kidnapping like this. Thank God for happy endings! As somebody wise once said:
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Dashcam Shows Deputy Rescuing Alleged Kidnapping Victim
Greg welcomes guests Jo Ling Kent and Eric Metaxas. Plus, TV's Andy Levy joins the panel.
NBC/WSJ poll shows 2:1 opposition to raising the debt ceiling
The polling news hasn't improved much for Barack Obama, even without a military attack on Syria in the offing. A new poll from NBC and the Wall Street Journal shows Americans lining up 2:1 against the debt-ceiling increase Obama needs, and his credibility dropping on a wide range of issues:
Americans overwhelmingly do not think Congress should raise the nation's debt limit as President Barack Obama and Congress prepare once again to wage battle over the issue, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
By a 44-22 percent margin, Americans oppose raising the debt ceiling, which again puts the president in the difficult position of needing to make the case for an unpopular policy with a deadline quickly approaching.
The poll results come as the U.S. Treasury Department says the country will reach its debt limit by mid-October. The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates the limit will be reached by Oct. 18, and the U.S. could default by Nov. 5.
"People’s first instinct is how fed up they are with Washington and spending," said Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the poll with Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart. "This is a very difficult issue in terms of public opinion."
Democrats have now lost the foreign-policy edge they gained over George W. Bush on Iraq. Republicans have a seven-point lead over Obama on that area. Their once huge lead on health care has now dwindled down to single digits. During the Bush administration, Democrats had an edge of more than 20 points on the federal deficit; now Republicans have a double-digit lead there, too.
Add all of that to the faceplant this week on Syria, and Obama goes into the budget fight in the weakest state of his presidency. Can Republicans leverage that into a win over ObamaCare that at least delays the onset until the midterms give them more power to dismantle it?
