Monthly Archives: December 2014

AP refers to the “higher cost of health care” in passing

The debate about whether Americans will pay more for health care under Obamacare continues in the program’s early days, with the usual liberal chorus claiming that costs will not increase significantly—economic logic, facts, and everyone else’s observations to the contrary.

The Obama Administration yesterday released a study indicating that people covered under the program would indeed generally see their premiums increase in 2015.  (It seems nearly moot yet journalistically necessary here to remind ourselves that Obamacare’s main premise was that it would lower health-care costs.)

Meanwhile yesterday, an Associated Press story, “These Retailers Could Use Some Holiday Cheer,” probably unwittingly characterized the status quo with the following sentence:  “Stores face cautious shoppers who are juggling stagnant wages and higher costs for food and health care.”

Therefore it’s amusing that a reference to the “higher costs for . . . health care” becomes a throwaway line in a humdrum article by AP, that most conventional (and left-leaning) mainstream news source.  Perhaps higher costs for health care will now join turmoil in the Middle East or partisan gridlock in Washington in the journalistic lexicon as one of those mundane default conditions that don’t even need explaining.

If the White House saw the article, they would be advised to get out in front of this as they do so well.

 

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Filed under Big Government

John Kerry joins the French on the “Daesh” bandwagon

At a meeting in Brussels among the 60 countries fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Secretary Kerry refers to the group as “Daesh.”

Some Arabic media, notably the Gulf News, Dubai’s flagship newspaper, added “Daesh”–which is sort of an acronym of the terrorist group’s name in Arabic—to its style guide in an obvious effort to obscure the “Islamic” element of the name.  The name hasn’t really caught on in the West, except, naturally, for the French, who object to associating Islam with a group that it claims, absent any evidence, that “the vast majority of Muslims finds despicable.”

We haven’t found an explanation of the usage from Sec. Kerry’s office, but we can assume that it’s due to the same concern for political correctness.

The U.S. government apparently hasn’t devised a consistent policy on the group’s name.  Rear Admiral John Kirby, Defense Department spokesman, usually refers to the group as “ISIL” (pronounced “eye-ess-eye-el”), for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.  President Obama usually refers to the group as “ISIL” (pronounced “eye-sl”), probably choosing that moniker over “ISIS” to obscure the “Syria” element of the name, lest we be reminded that his bungling of the “red line” has been a major enabling force for the group.

None of this is to make light of our mandatory—existential—fight against the group and its enablers.  Let’s hope the Brussels meeting was productive.

At least the terrorists hate the name.

 

 

 

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Filed under Foreign Affairs

UPDATE: NCAA’s treatment of Penn State was a sham

Joe Nocera of the New York Times reports that Penn State knew that it didn’t have any jurisdiction to penalize Penn State’s football program as a whole for the horrific private actions of former coach Jerry Sandusky.

We lamented the punishment at the time as an affront to the “rule of law,” so to speak, and unfair to the team.  Naturally, liberals in the media (including Nocera, as he decently admits in the current column) enjoyed lambasting the university’s “football culture” that supposedly contributed to the abuse.

It is fair to criticize the Penn State administration for enabling Sandusky, but it does not follow that the NCAA should punish the players on the field.  It’s a bit too late for the students, players, and fans, but at least we can hope that the NCAA applies more rational oversight in the future.

 

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