Category Archives: Health
Tim Kaine Personally Opposed
Tim Kaine says he’s personally pro-life but supports the constitution which, he says, supports abortion. In fact, in order to become Hillary’s running-mate, Kaine had to take a vow of silence about late-term partial birth abortion.
Kevin Williamson in NR Online thinks Kaine is pro-stupid. And he has an interesting take on personal beliefs:
I very much doubt that I am the only person in the world who is Catholic in part because he is pro-life, and not the other way around. My religious views have changed over time, but my opposition to abortion never has. One of the things that drew me to the Catholic Church years ago was the mystery of how that particular corporation, practically alone among the important institutions of the world, fully appreciated the inhumane violence of abortion, understood the ways in which that violence echoes far outside of the local Planned Parenthood abattoir, and placed that knowledge at the center of its public affairs.
Intellectually, Tim Kaine’s argument about abortion is incoherent and indefensible; it is, in fact, illiterate. He argues that while his own Catholic devotion points him in a pro-life direction, the fact that we are a pluralistic society with a constitutional guarantee of religious freedom precludes him from supporting initiatives that would enshrine certain Catholic preferences in law. That did not stop him from campaigning against capital punishment and from using his gubernatorial powers to that end (the Catholic position on the death penalty is not absolute and, given the history of the church, hardly could be; its prohibition of abortion is absolute) any more than the First Amendment has stopped any cookie-cutter progressive with an Italian or Irish surname from citing the example of Jesus when arguing for this or that social-welfare program. (Never mind, for the moment, that this misconstrues that example.) Back in the ancient days when he was running for president, Barack Obama cited his faith in explaining his opposition to homosexual marriage. But it is not the hypocrisy that rankles so much as the stupidity: There are millions, perhaps billions, of people on this planet who oppose abortion who are not Catholics, who are not bound by Catholic practice, who are not informed by Catholic teaching. There are pro-life Jews, Protestants, Mormons, Muslims (though those who denounce the so-called Religious Right as the “Christian Taliban” would do well to appreciate how liberal sharia actually is on the question of abortion), Hindus, pagans, agnostics, atheists, chiropractors, witch-doctors, and people who believe in horoscopes. My friend and colleague Charles C. W. Cooke is a pro-life non-believer.
Elephant In Debate Room
CNN says Hillary Clinton won the debate. Donald Trump disagrees but most other polls aren’t backing him up, so far.
Trump seemed to get the best of Hillary in the first 30 minutes when they tangled over trade rules. He caught her on the wrong side of President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Trade Deal, pointing out that she had called it the “gold standard.” Hillary denied this and then replied it wasn’t her responsibility and that she had changed her mind. So Trump insisted that she say it was Obama’s fault:
TRUMP: You called it the gold standard of trade deals. You said it’s the finest deal you’ve ever seen.
CLINTON: No.
TRUMP: And then you heard what I said about it, and all of a sudden you were against it.
CLINTON: Well, Donald, I know you live in your own reality, but that is not the facts. The facts are — I did say I hoped it would be a good deal, but when it was negotiated…
TRUMP: Not.
CLINTON: … which I was not responsible for, I concluded it wasn’t. I wrote about that in my book…
TRUMP: So is it President Obama’s fault?
CLINTON: … before you even announced.
TRUMP: Is it President Obama’s fault?
CLINTON: Look, there are differences…
TRUMP: Secretary, is it President Obama’s fault?
CLINTON: There are…
TRUMP: Because he’s pushing it.
CLINTON: There are different views about what’s good for our country, our economy, and our leadership in the world. And I think it’s important to look at what we need to do to get the economy going again. That’s why I said new jobs with rising incomes, investments, not in more tax cuts that would add $5 trillion to the debt.
At that point Trump seemed to be mopping the floor with her. But Hillary quickly got under his skin by trashing his business acumen and ethics.
She took a page from the Harry Reid playbook to claim Trump doesn’t pay income taxes. Incredibly, The Donald seemed to agree by saying, “it makes me smart.” For the record, PolitiFact doesn’t agree. It rates her claim mostly false.
But after that Trump seemed Low Eenergy.
Elephant In Debate Room
The elephant in debate room was the fact that Immigration, Benghazi, and the Clinton Foundation didn’t make the cut. Those issues were never brought up by moderator Lester Holt or Trump.
Unburdened of that baggage, Hillary dragged her prey off into the tall grass. There she dismembered the small handed one with accusations of racism and sexism.
She claimed the Stop and Frisk law was ruled unconstitutional and moderator Holt backed her up. She also insisted the murder rate continues to decline. In truth, Stop and Frisk was never ruled unconstitutional. And the FBI released a report the next morning showing the murder rate had surged 10.8% in 2015.
Hillary went on to back up her racism charge using Tulsa and Charlotte as “tragic examples.” Trump lacked the energy to point out that Black people rioted in Charlotte where a black man was killed by a black police officer who worked for a black police chief.
Deplorable Basket Case
At an LGBT fundraiser on Friday Hillary said, “you can put half of Trump’s supporters in a basket of deplorables.” Then she went on to say that those in the basket are sexist, Islamophobic, racist, homophobes who jaywalk. I made up the jaywalk part.
She also smeared Trump in the same way a couple weeks ago with a rant about the alt right. And her campaign ran an ad with a guy in robes saying Trump believes what he believes.
This from a gal who called Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan Wizard as well as U.S. Senator from West Virginia, her friend and mentor. (Wonder how her mentor would feel about the way she treats his coal miners.)
Anyway, all that got under Ben Stein‘s skin:
This woman, who just uttered the most vile slanders against men and women whose only sin is supporting a candidate who dares to oppose her, who dares to oppose the media/Wall Street/White House buddy system, says that only she is “temperamentally fit” to be President. Really? Temperamentally fit to work for the KGB is more like it.
Come to think of it, she does have an obsession with secrecy. She kept her Friday pneumonia diagnosis quiet until several hours after suffering some sort of seizure at a 9/11 event on Friday.
Donald Trump wished her a speedy recovery.
Deplorable
Until now, Clintonians considered it a deplorable conspiracy to question Hillary’s health.
Now her health has become a deplorable issue.
FDA Gives Mylan Monopoly Jolt On EpiPen
Reuters reports that Mylan will produce “the first generic version of its allergy auto-injector EpiPen.” The generic version will sell for $300. That’s half the price of the “branded product.”
Mylan Monopoly
This will be the first generic EpiPen because the FDA has dragged its feet approving any other generic version. So Mylan has a near monopoly on a life saving product. Now it also has a monopoly on the generic version.
That monopoly enabled Mylan to increase the list price of an EpiPen two pack from $100 in 2008 to $600 today. The company is offering the generic version in response to criticism of its price hikes.
Here’s a WSJ editorial blaming the FDA for the Mylan monopoly.
Aetna Says Bye Bye to ObamaCare
The four biggest insurers are going wobbly on ObamaCare.
What initially looked like a great deal for them – customers federally mandated to buy their product – doesn’t seem to be working out as they had hoped. Bloomberg Businessweek reports that insurers are loosing hundreds of millions of dollars on Obamacare.
Aetna Says Bye Bye
So Aetna now says bye bye to ObamaCare by way of pulling out of exchanges in 11 of the 15 states it serves. UnitedHealth and Humana are following suit. UnitedHealth is ditching 31 of its 34 states, and Humana is leaving 9 of 19 states.
In July the Justice Department blocked a proposed merger between Aetna and UnitedHealth. At the time Aetna wrote that without the cost savings of the merger it would leave the exchanges.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton supports a government funded public option to compete on the exchanges with the remaining private insurers.
