TheFrontPageCover
~ Featuring ~
Proposed Gun Laws Would Do Nothing to
Prevent Mass Killings, and Everyone Knows It
By Michael Filozof
.
A Resurgence of Old-school
Courageous Americans
By Lloyd Marcus
{ americanthinker.com } ~ Following the horrific El Paso and Dayton shootings, I boycotted media. As expected, Democrats and fake news media were despicably giddy, thrilled for another opportunity to push for disarming law-abiding gun owners... and falsely demonizing Trump and his supporters. I boycotted media because was I could not stomach wimpy Republicans and #NeverTrumpers running to microphones to surrender to anti-American leftists' spin of the facts. I thought, “I am not going to allow cowards supposedly on our side to raise my blood pressure.” A case in point is John Kasich, who raced to the CNN microphones to further the insidious lie that Trump is responsible for the shootings. What is wrong with Kasich, and why does he call himself a Republican? Some on our side do not comprehend that Democrats and fake news media are not interested in truth and fairness. Attempting to play nice with these anti-American progressives is insane. Progressives are like unruly children. They must be firmly told no and sent to their rooms. Progressives must be defeated. Allowing progressives to dominate public education, social media, the fake news media, and entertainment media has gotten us into this mess. Christian churches abandoned God's command to be salt by foolishly staying out of politics. Consequently, we are one election away from transformation into a socialist country in which debauchery is government-mandated. The Democratic Party has become a cesspool of pure evil and anti-Americanism. Their demonic behavior is expected. It is upsetting when people on our side surrender to the Democrats' false premises rather than staying on offense and strongly pushing back with the truth....
A two-step plan for price
transparency in health care
by James C. Capretta
{ realclearpolicy.com } ~ The Trump administration recently issued a second hospital price transparency rule that builds upon the rule released last year requiring hospitals to post their “chargemaster” rates, or list prices, online... The new proposed rule, if finalized, would go a step further by requiring hospitals, beginning in 2020, to disclose the rates they have negotiated directly with insurance plans. Today, these private-payer rates are considered confidential and proprietary by both the hospital and insurance industries and are not made available to the public. The rule requiring disclosure of chargemaster rates, which went into effect in January, is making it easier to find list prices for thousands of hospital billing codes, but this information is not terribly useful for most consumers. Hospitals offer discounts off of their list prices to insurance plans, and most patients have insurance. Hospitals sometimes use chargemaster rates when billing patients without insurance, but that is rare. Even many uninsured patients end up getting discounts when they settle their bills. Tying price data to insurance billing codes also makes the information less relevant for consumers because the terminology used is not intended for a lay audience. Moreover, it is not possible for a consumer to find the “all in” prices for services that involve multiple billing codes. For instance, when a patient needs a hip replacement, there will be fees for the surgery, the anesthesia, the operating room, the lab tests, imaging services, and follow-up care. The current regulation requires hospitals to disclose pricing for the component parts but not for the full package, which is what would be relevant for consumers. The administration’s new regulation would force the disclosure of the discounted rates paid by insurers and also would promote more consumer-friendly price data for a list of 300 “shoppable services.” Hospitals would be required to identify services that are more amendable to consumer discretion because they can be scheduled by using accessible descriptions and identifying prices for ancillary services that usually accompany a primary charge. While this is a step in the right direction, it does not go far enough. Promoting a stronger consumer role will require far more disruption of the status quo. In particular, two steps are necessary: a required pricing list established by the federal government of strictly standardized services, and universal reference-based payments by insurance plans for services on the required pricing list... https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2019/08/08/a_two-step_plan_for_price_transparency_in_health_care_111253.html?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT0Rka05UVTFORGd3TUdFMyIsInQiOiJIek1Pc014Z0NPVGd6N2hJOG0rSnhXNXhcL0xSbEU1c2p3eWsyWjB5UWVXMndQTjNRTDl4TUNxbkpidndSQjZPZ3hSRHpLUTQ0Y00zeVV6WXYydzZubFZiR3Y5TnNFU2FLSGxGekhTbFwvdVVoUjhWR0hOZGptY3I4NDk4N0lWSWI4In0%3D .
Palestinians: In Need of a Mirror?
by Bassam Tawil
{ gatestoneinstitute.org } ~ Palestinians are again celebrating the murder of a Jew – this time 18-year-old Dvir Sorek, an unarmed off-duty soldier who was fatally stabbed and whose body was discovered August 8... on rocky ground in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc near Bethlehem. Not even a single Palestinian has condemned the ruthless killing of the teenager. The Palestinian Authority (PA), whose leader, Mahmoud Abbas, has previously said that he is opposed to terrorism, apparently does not see a need to denounce the killing of Sorek. Instead, the Palestinian Authority continued to issue multiple statements condemning Israel for "violating international law" for building new housing units for Jewish families in the West Bank. The statements, issued hours after the terrorist attack in Gush Etzion, made no reference to the murder of the Jewish teen. In the eyes of the Palestinian Authority leadership, the inauguration of a new neighborhood in a settlement is a "major crime" that needs to be brought before the International Criminal Court. Here is what Mahmoud Abbas's spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudaineh, had to say about the building of the housing units in the settlement of Bet El, north of the West Bank city of Ramallah: "This act is condemned and rejected and in violation of international resolutions, including UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which says settlement activity constitutes a flagrant violation of international law. These continued provocations and hostile acts require practical decisions." Just as Israeli security forces were conducting a manhunt for the terrorist or terrorists who killed the Jewish teenager, Abbas instructed his foreign ministry to file a complaint against Israel with the International Criminal Court over its policy of settlement construction. Abbas also instructed his envoy to the UN, Riad Mansour, to hold consultations with members of the Security Council in preparation for holding an emergency session to condemn Israel's settlement activity... https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14689/palestinians-need-mirror .
Taliban leader quashes Eid cease fire,
urges followers to continue jihad
By BILL ROGGIO
.
A Health Care System That's
the Envy of the World
By Valerie Sobel
{ americanthinker.com } ~ The following events did not take place in the Soviet Union or Cuba. None of this inhumanity was a figment of my imagination. I'm narrating the details without hyperbole... Recently, I took a ride through one amazingly affordable health care system — the one scumbag/liar-nObama and other notable Democrats paint as the "envy of the world." See how quickly you can figure out where this envy of the world dwells. Got your seat belt on? This liberal utopia is a bit bumpy.You enter a hospital emergency room. For two months prior, you suffered abysmal pain, unable to shower, straighten out, or sit. You're the Hunchback of Notre Dame, debilitated with no reprieve. When one of your legs isn't numb from hip to toe, you experience sharp stabbing sensations that make you want to slit your wrists. Yet you do exactly what your nation's one-tier medical system instructs you to do: you visit a family doctor who routinely suggests an MRI. And since you live in the proud lap of liberalism, which ensures the all-inclusive equity of suffering, you are told that your MRI is a mere twelve months away. A referral to a spine clinic was offered at a six months' wait. Lucky for you, a generous dose of an opioid was prescribed in the interim. The 60 Oxycontin pills the most addictive opioid on the market, with a street value of $60/pill were augmented by 270 pills of Gabapentin, a drug designed to deceive your brain into thinking you are not in pain. You walk away a guaranteed addict with a pocket full of mind-altering chemicals. By now you should be entirely consoled by the idea that many are in the same boat of egalitarianism for suffering and queues. The thought of equitable misery is expected to work as an instant pain-reliever. This barbaric philosophy is at the crux of government policies that outlaw private health care in this country. This is how my friend's journey through the cartel of socialist policies began... https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/a_health_care_system_thats_the_envy_of_the_world.html .
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Proposed Gun Laws Would Do Nothing to
Prevent Mass Killings, and Everyone Knows It
By Michael Filozof
{ americanthinker.com } ~ The country is again in an uproar following the latest mass shootings in Texas and Ohio. In response to the hysterical clamor in the media to "do something," politicians in both the Democratic and Republican Parties want yet again! more gun laws Republicans, including President Trump, are proposing a "red flag" confiscation law that would enable police to summarily seize an individual's guns based on hearsay. Such a law would blatantly violate the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. In practice, these laws would have no significant effect on actual shooters, but would ensnare people like Donald Montgomery, a retired police officer from Long Island who sought insomnia treatment — and was declared "mentally ill" and had his guns permanently seized under scumbag-Andrew Cuomo's notorious "SAFE" Act. Republicans should know better, but apparently, they don't. Democrats are calling for a national ban on semi-automatic "assault weapons" and magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds. If elected, there is no question that they will enact such a ban. Some are even calling for a national confiscation, patterned on the confiscations in Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.
What is absolutely certain is that such a ban will have no impact whatsoever on mass shootings. It is entirely possible to commit mass murder with weapons that do not fall under the label of "assault weapons," and a significant number of mass shooters have done so. In 1949, World War II veteran Howard Unruh murdered 13 people with a German Luger pistol with an 8-round capacity. In 1966, University of Texas shooter Charles Whitman employed a bolt-action Remington hunting rifle in his spree. In 1993, Jamaican immigrant Colin Ferguson, motivated by anti-white hatred, murdered six people and wounded 19 on the Long Island Railway with a 9mm pistol. In 2006, Korean immigrant Seung-Hui Cho murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech with a brace of pistols, a 9mm Glock and a .22 caliber Walther. Two thousand nine Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan used a Fabrique Nationale pistol to kill thirteen and wound thirty victims. Twenty thirteen Navy Yard killer Aaron Alexis used a stolen 9mm pistol and a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun. The Thousand Oaks, California killer murdered thirteen people with a .45 cal. pistol in 2018.
I could go on listing examples of mass shootings committed without so-called "assault weapons," but the facts are easily available to anyone with the intellectual honesty to research them. Unfortunately, almost no one in the media or the Democratic Party has such honesty. The demonization of "assault weapons" is merely a pretext to get gaggles of ignorant, squealing soccer moms who don't know a muzzle from a buttplate to demand what the Democrats have always wanted: total gun control.
Indeed, if you look at the history of gun control, there is almost no firearm that Democrats haven't wanted to ban. Their modus operandi has always been to employ demagogic politics after sensational killings to advance the agenda of complete disarmament.
During the 1930s, shootings with machine guns were rare, but saturation press coverage led to the 1934 National Firearms Act, which effectively banned them. However, gangster Clyde Barrow, who helped inspire the legislation by committing numerous robberies and murders with machine guns, didn't purchase his Browning Automatic Rifles legally; they were stolen from a National Guard Armory. Sixty years later, the ban didn't stop two crooks, a scam artist and a Romanian immigrant, from illegally modifying rifles for fully automatic fire and engaging in a protracted shoot-out with the cops during a bank robbery in North Hollywood, California.
In 1963, communist Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy with a surplus Italian rifle he had ordered in the mail. Instead of banning communists, Democrats banned the mail order of guns. In 1968, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King with a pump-action Remington hunting rifle. He bought it at a sporting goods store, not through the mail. That same year, Palestinian immigrant Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy with a cheap .22 revolver; Democrats then proposed banning "Saturday Night Specials." And in 2005, the Democrat-led California Legislature banned single-shot .50 cal. rifles — even though no crimes had ever been committed with them.
Too small, too big, too powerful, too weak — it doesn't matter; Democrats want to ban them all. Democrats are fond of saying mass shootings don't happen in other countries that have gun control, but that claim is so easily disproven as to be farcical. Even in nations that have enacted laws that Democrats dream of — gun bans, confiscations, and universal registration — there have been a number of mass shootings. A universal registration requirement and the total prohibition on AK-47s in France failed to stop the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan shooters from killing 142 people. The British handgun and semi-automatic rifle confiscations did not prevent Derrick Bird from murdering 12 and wounding 11 with a legally registered bolt-action .22 and a shotgun in 2010. The Egyptian ban on all rifles failed to prevent jihadists from killing over 300 at a Sinai mosque in 2017, and India's ban on all firearms and ammunition was ineffective in stopping the Mumbai massacre in 2008. Nor did strict Russian gun laws stop the Beslan slaughter of 330 schoolchildren in 2004, or the mass shooting in Crimea in 2018.
The supposedly "conservative" intellectual Charles Krauthammer gave away the endgame in 1996: confiscation of all guns. Referencing the 1994 scumbag/liar-Clinton "assault weapons" ban, Krauthammer acknowledged that the ban would have little effect on actual homicides: Passing a law like the assault weapons ban is a symbolic — purely symbolic — move. ... Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation. ... De-escalation begins with a change in mentality. And that change in mentality starts with the symbolic yielding of certain types of weapons. The real steps, like the banning of handguns, will never occur unless this one is taken first, and even then not for decades. The postmodern welfare state seeks to ban all guns because it is ultimately totalitarian. It seeks to regulate and provide happiness and entertainment for the masses, so long as they agree to sacrifice their individuality and independence. Tocqueville prophesied in 1833 that democracy would create a new kind of despotism:
Above this race of democratic men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? ...
The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
That is the real goal of proposed gun confiscations and "red flag" laws: to completely disarm the public, destroy all individuality and all independence, and have the population eating from the hand of the government as if they were domesticated animals.
All in the name of "safety" and "happiness," of course.
As of this writing, they are frighteningly close to achieving it.
Above this race of democratic men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? ...
The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
That is the real goal of proposed gun confiscations and "red flag" laws: to completely disarm the public, destroy all individuality and all independence, and have the population eating from the hand of the government as if they were domesticated animals.
All in the name of "safety" and "happiness," of course.
As of this writing, they are frighteningly close to achieving it.
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