The Right Lane updated 2.23.13

The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, free markets and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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Companies are Dropping Health Coverage for Spouses to Cut Costs

By denying coverage to spouses, employers not only save the annual premiums, but also the new fees that went into effect as part of the Affordable Care Act. This year, companies have to pay $1 or $2 “per life” covered on their plans, a sum that jumps to $65 in 2014. And health law guidelines proposed recently mandate coverage of employees’ dependent children (up to age 26), but husbands and wives are optional. “The question about whether it’s obligatory to cover the family of the employee is being thought through more than ever before,” says Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health. While surcharges for spousal coverage are more common, last year, 6% of large employers excluded spouses, up from 5% in 2010, as did 4% of huge companies with at least 20,000 employees, twice as many as in 2010, according to human resources firm Mercer. These “spousal carve-outs,” or “working spouse provisions,” generally prohibit only people who could get coverage through their own job from enrolling in their spouse’s plan. Such exclusions barely existed three years ago, but experts expect an increasing number of employers to adopt them: “That’s the next step,” Darling says. HMS, a company that audits plans for employers, estimates that nearly a third of companies might have such policies now. Holdouts say they feel under pressure to follow suit. “We’re the last domino,” says Duke Bennett, mayor of Terre Haute, Ind., which is instituting a spousal carve-out for the city’s health plan, effective July 2013, after nearly all major employers in the area dropped spouses.

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Feinstein To Rig Gun Control Hearings

Dianne Feinstein Is Scheduling Another Senate Gun-Confiscation Hearing... And This Time Around, She's Not Going To Allow Pesky Pro-Second Amendment People, Like You, Spoil Her Party.

The Washington Times reported that Senator Feinstein was apparently "unhappy with the list of witnesses" who testified at the last hearing and "says she plans to hold a separate hearing with witnesses more inclined to back gun control."  Why hold another hearing...? The answer is simple. The American people are winning the battle to stop Feinstein and Barack Obama from eradicating the Second Amendment, but they believe that they can win if they simply change the national dialogue by stifling any and all voices of dissent.  Oh yes... she'll hold her new hearing... she'll stifle any voice of opposition... and she believes her lackeys in the media will give her the political cover she needs to trample on your God-given Constitutional rights. Can you say "Sandra Fluke?"

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Obama and Holder Are Called Out for Not Enforcing Existing Gun Laws  By Cyrus Afzali

A group of 23 Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee Friday sent letters to President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder demanding existing gun laws be enforced before additional limitations are passed. The committee, which has held hearings in recent weeks on ways to prevent gun violence, again called into focus statistics that show a dramatic drop in federal weapons prosecutions over the past decade.  The letters cite a Syracuse University study that show firearms prosecutions under  President George W. Bush peaked at 11,015 in 2004 while the Obama administration has prosecuted about 7,774 firearms cases in 2012.

“A prosecution rate this low is not indicative of a Department of Justice that takes the act of illegally attempting to acquire a firearm seriously,” Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., said in a statement accompanying the letters. “We must all be looking for ways to prevent senseless acts of violence and the taking of innocent life but the best place to start would be enforcing the laws that Congress has already enacted.” Highlighting the crime rise in Chicago, the president’s hometown, the lawmakers pointed out that the Northern District of Illinois, which includes Chicago, is ranked the lowest of all federal court districts in firearms prosecutions despite a surge in gun-related violence.  “In a city like Chicago, which saw 506 murders last year, it is appalling that the U.S. attorney’s office in that jurisdiction only prosecuted 25 federal firearms cases during 2011,” the group wrote.  The letter also points out that of the 76,142 gun permit requests that were denied following background checks by federally-licensed firearms dealers, only 4,732 were referred for prosecution. Of that total, only 62 prosecutions resulted.

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Why Is This Month-Old Clip of an Ex-Secret Service Agent Suddenly Going Viral?  Mike Opelka

Dan Bongino lost his race for the U.S. Senate last Fall and the former Secret Service agent was finally closing up shop on his campaign offices when his phone started ringing like crazy. Television and radio shows were calling to ask Dan if he was free… free to talk about this brief speech he gave on January 19th at a Guns Across America rally in Annapolis Maryland. "It is about control, not gun control.  In fifteen years of doing my job I never disarmed a criminal that had lawfully attained the weapon.:  Please watch to hear a powerful speach!  Watch

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Forrest Gump At Treasury

Senate Democrats are in a hurry to confirm Jack Lew as Secretary of the Treasury before anyone notices his biography. Otherwise, liberal lawmakers might be embarrassed voting for a man who represents everything they’ve been campaigning against. Investor in Cayman Islands tax haven? Check. Recipient of a bonus and corporate jet rides underwritten by taxpayers at a bailed-out bank? Check. Executive at a university that accepted student-loan “kickbacks” for steering kids toward a favored bank? Check. Excessive compensation with minimal disclosure? Check. Like a financial Forrest Gump, Mr. Lew keeps walking into the frame of the business-political dramas of the last decade. But unlike the lovable movie character, Mr. Lew is playing the villain of liberal financial lore. One very compelling role, highlighted by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), was Mr. Lew’s star turn as an administrator at a university that encouraged students to borrow from his future employers at Citibank.

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Biden: ‘The American People Are With Us’ On Gun Control

Taking his campaign for “common sense” gun control reform to its ground zero, Vice President Joe Biden announced yesterday that the American people are completely onboard with the administration’s proposed gun control policies. “You should all know the American people are with us,” Biden announced. “They should know. You all should know. There is a moral price to be paid for inaction.”

Biden spoke at Western Connecticut State University, just miles away from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, where 20 students and 6 educators were murdered in December. The shooter, Adam Lanza, had been previously enrolled at Western Connecticut State, and several of the family members of those who were slain were present at yesterday’s speech.  Very sad events.  However, it does not give the VP the license to lie

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New York Times Headline: ‘Why Taxes Have to Go Up’

Friday’s lead editorial encapsulates the liberal mindset that drives the New York Times: “Why Taxes Have to Go Up.” And not just on the rich — the Times argues that the rich must pay more first in order to build “consensus” for raising taxes on the middle class as well. In Times-land, there is no such thing as a spending problem, only a failure to sufficiently raise taxes on everyone.

“Spending is the problem,” declared the House speaker, John Boehner. “Spending must be the focus.” Reflecting the views of many of her Republican colleagues, Representative Martha Roby said Wednesday that Mr. Obama “already got his tax increase” as part of the January agreement over the “fiscal cliff” and that no further increases were necessary. Both are wrong. To reduce the deficit in a weak economy, new taxes on high-income Americans are a matter of necessity and fairness; they are also a necessary precondition to what in time will have to be tax increases on the middle class. Contrary to Mr. Boehner’s “spending problem” claim, much of the deficit in the next 10 years can be chalked up to chronic revenue shortfalls from the Bush-era tax cuts, which were only partly undone in the fiscal-cliff deal earlier this year. (Wars and a recession also contributed.) It stands to reason that a deficit caused partly by inadequate revenue must be corrected in part by new taxes. And the only way to raise taxes now without harming the recovery is to impose them on high-income filers, for whom a tax increase is unlikely to cut into spending.

After arguing vaguely and unpersuasively that higher taxes are a "needed step...to lay the foundation for a healthy budget in the future," the Times concluded with the class war card: "But there will never be a consensus for more taxes from the middle class without imposing higher taxes on wealthy Americans, who have enjoyed low taxes for a long time." No wonder the Times is going broke, people cannot read the Times and eat breakfast at the same time!!

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Is Senator Ted Cruz Our New McCarthy? by Jane Mayer New Yorker Magazine

Last week, Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s prosecutorial style of questioning Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for Defense Secretary, came so close to innuendo that it raised eyebrows in Congress, even among his Republican colleagues. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, called Cruz’s inquiry into Hagel’s past associations “out of bounds, quite frankly.” The Times reported that Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, rebuked Cruz for insinuating, without evidence, that Hagel may have collected speaking fees from North Korea. Some Democrats went so far as to liken Cruz, who is a newcomer to the Senate, to a darkly divisive predecessor, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, whose anti-Communist crusades devolved into infamous witch hunts. Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, stopped short of invoking McCarthy’s name, but there was no mistaking her allusion when she talked about being reminded of “a different time and place, when you said, ‘I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such-and-such a date,’ and of course there was nothing in the pocket.”   Boxer’s analogy may have been more apt than she realized. Two and a half years ago, Cruz gave a stem-winder of a speech at a Fourth of July weekend political rally in Austin, Texas, in which he accused the Harvard Law School of harboring a dozen Communists on its faculty when he studied there. Cruz attended Harvard Law School from 1992 until 1995. His spokeswoman didn’t respond to a request to discuss the speech. Cruz greeted the audience jovially, but soon launched an impassioned attack on President Obama, whom he described as “the most radical” President “ever to occupy the Oval Office.” (I was covering the conference and kept the notes.) He then went on to assert that Obama, who attended Harvard Law School four years ahead of him, “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” The reason, said Cruz, was that, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”  

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We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt." --Thomas Jefferson

"During the summer 2011 debt ceiling battle, President Obama's White House came up with the idea of sequestration. It is a mechanism designed to trigger automatic spending cuts in the event that a congressional 'super committee' couldn't agree to at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. Congress passed the White House proposal, and Obama signed it into law. And in November 2011, Obama vowed, 'I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending. There will be no easy offramps on this one.' How times have changed. With the automatic spending cuts scheduled to go into effect March 1, it's now Obama who is imploring Congress to undo them. As is his wont, he's resorting to demagoguery to make his case. Surrounding himself with first responders during a speech on Tuesday, Obama predicted a virtual apocalypse if the cuts he once supported now go into effect. 'Emergency responders like the ones who are here today -- their ability to help communities respond to and recover from disasters will be degraded,' he said. 'Border Patrol agents will see their hours reduced. FBI agents will be furloughed. Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go. Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks, which means more delays at airports across the country. Thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off. Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids. Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to primary care and preventive care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings.' ... Over a decade, the $1.2 trillion in scheduled cuts are barely more than a rounding error when compared with the $48 trillion the federal government would otherwise spend, according to the Congressional Budget Office. To say the sequester will not be painful for many would be untrue. But if Obama wants to preserve his credibility, he should probably stifle the Chicken Little routine. The historical and continued growth in government spending will not even stop to take a breath, because the 'cuts' in spending are actually just reductions in the projected growth of government spending. ... If Obama can't manage an ever-growing budget like this one without turning criminals loose on the population, then perhaps he's out of his league serving as president." --The Washington Examiner