The Foundation
“Governments tend not to solve problems, only to rearrange them.” – Ronald Reagan
Conservative Talk: What did they say?
Michale Barone | Obama Slights Our Friends, Kowtows to Our Enemies
Barack Obama’s decision to postpone his trip to Indonesia and Australia — to a democracy with the world’s largest Muslim population and to the only nation that has fought alongside us in all the wars of the last century — is of a piece with his foreign policy generally: attack America’s friends and kowtow to our enemies.
Examples run from Britain to Israel. Early in his administration, Obama returned a bust of Churchill that the British government had loaned the White House after 9/11. Then Obama gave Prime Minister Gordon Brown a set of DVDs that don’t work on British machines and that Brown, who has impaired vision, would have trouble watching anyway.
More recently, Obama summoned Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, permitted no photographs, laid down non-negotiable demands and went off to dinner.
Some may attribute these slights to biases inherited from the men who supplied the titles of Obama’s two books. Perhaps like Barack Obama Sr., he regards the British as evil colonialists. Or perhaps like his preacher for 20 years, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he regards Israel as an evil oppressor.
But the list of American friends Obama has slighted is long. It includes Poland and the Czech Republic (anti-missile program cancelled), Honduras (backing the constitutionally ousted president), Georgia (no support against Russia), and Colombia and South Korea (no action on pending free trade agreements).
In the meantime, Obama sends yearly greetings to (as he puts it) the Islamic Republic of Iran, exchanges friendly greetings with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, caves to Russian demands on arms control and sends a new ambassador to Syria.
What we’re seeing, I think, is a president who shares a view, long held by some on the American left, that the real danger to America often comes from America’s allies. Read the entire article HERE.
Mark Levy | Pharmaceuticals, November Strategy and Beef Stew
Dear Mark: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen SebElius was on MSNBC this week and basically said that one of the goals of the health care bill was to reduce pharmaceutical companies’ profits by $90 billion. How will going after pharmaceutical companies help the health care situation? — Healthy Hank in Hondo
Dear Healthy: If the government goes after pharmaceutical profits, there will be less money for research and development. Less research means fewer new drugs, and fewer new drugs means more people will die. More people dying means fewer people require health coverage from the government. Badda boom, badda bing, health care costs go down.
Actually, the pharmaceutical industry is just one more evil villain to be punished and subsequently controlled by the Barack Obama administration. Referring to reducing pharmaceutical profits, Sebelius went on to say, “That’s part of the strategy moving forward.”
The reason the pharmaceutical industry is such an easy target is because prescription drugs are the out-of-pocket expense patients actually see. Most patients can’t tell you the price of an MRI or a colonoscopy, but they darn sure can tell you the co-pay on their cholesterol or erectile dysfunction medicines.
Pharmaceutical spending as a percentage of overall health care costs has remained around 10 percent for the last 40 years. So, even if the administration eliminated 100 percent of pharmaceutical profits, the decrease in health care costs would be minimal, at best.
The real culprit in the rising cost of health care is not the insurance industry, as Democrats would have you believe, but people themselves. As a whole, people eat too much, drink too much, smoke too much, tan too much, ingest too many illegal drugs and practice too much unsafe sex. People maintain unhealthy lifestyles but expect miracle pills to bail them out. Read the entire article HERE.