Mountain Views News          Saturday, January 24, 2015

15

OPINION 

Mountain Views-News Saturday, January 24, 2015 

JOE Gandelman An Independent’s Eye

Mountain 
Views

News

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Susan Henderson

CITY EDITOR

Dean Lee 

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Joan Schmidt

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LaQuetta Shamblee

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John Aveny 

CONTRIBUTORS

CoCo Lasalle

Chris Leclerc

Bob Eklund

Howard Hays

Paul Carpenter

Kim Clymer-Kelley

Christopher Nyerges

Peter Dills 

Dr. Tina Paul

Rich Johnson

Merri Jill Finstrom

Lori Koop

Rev. James Snyder

Tina Paul

Mary Carney

Katie Hopkins

Deanne Davis

Despina Arouzman

Greg Welborn

Renee Quenell

Ben Show

Sean Kayden

Marc Garlett

RICH Johnson

Get ready for our 
already ugly and 
violent 21st century 
to be the century 
of soft targets for 
terrorists. The 
number of places 
where people feel 
safe will diminish 
as terrorists pick 
new venues to 
increase body counts -- and grab more of 
that new and mainstream media publicity 
that helps with recruit-ment.

What humanity is seeing now is yet another 
shift in how people kill people. During World 
War I, new technology changed the way 
warfare was waged. The 20th century later 
gifted humanity history's most inhuman, 
evil and powerful madman: Nazi Germany's 
Adolf Hitler. Hijackings and terrorism 
blossomed in the 1960s. In following decades 
so did serial killer killings, school shootings, 
mass murders and the rise of that religious 
terrorism so hypocritically excused and 
enabled by some.

Then came 9/11, a financially costly terrorist 
operation that expertly exploited American 
airport and airplane security vulnerabilities 
to use passenger-crammed airlines as 
missiles in an operation de-signed to 
maximize the kills. "Greatest Generation" 
World War II veterans such my father, 
Richard Gandelman, who thought they had 
buried barbaric mass brutality with Hitler's 
death, were shocked by 9/11. 

Enter ISIS, the world's largest producers of 
snuff films, urging its true believers to kill 
Americans and other enemies wherever they 
see them. Those are the softest of soft targets.

And the attention is turning to soft targets.

In Sydney, Australia, "Islamist" terrorist 
Man Haron Monis, who was well known 
to authorities there, chose the Lindt Cafe 
as his target for a 16-hour December siege 
that ended in the death of two hos-tages 
and Monis himself. Sydney brought back 
(bad) memories of the 2008 Mumbai, India 
massacre on several "soft targets" including 
a mall, cafe, hospital and a Jewish Chabad 
house -- ending in 164 dead.

The world had barely absorbed Sydney's 
finale when the shocking and sickening 
news broke that six heavily armed Taliban 
militants wearing suicide vests murdered 133 
school children 12-years-old and up at the 
Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan. 
And so the Taliban continued its tradition of 
killing or trying to kill kids. Some warped 
minds still consider them "brave" warriors.

Look for the Taliban and other terrorist 
groups to strike at more soft targets in 
Pakistan, because the country carved out 
of India is like a ripe apple ready to be 
harvested. The forbidden fruit is Paki-stan's 
nuclear program. If ISIS is cutting off the 
heads of journalists, businessmen, women 
and children, and if the Taliban is routinely 
murdering kids, exactly what do you think 
they'll do if they acquire a nuclear weapon?

Just as hell will be the final limit for those 
who mercilessly murder kids, the sky is the 
limit when it comes to massacring people 
in free and even not-so-free societies. First, 
merely pick a place where people congregate, 
feel relaxed about where they are and/or 
where their loved ones are. Second, send in or 
manipulate some l-o-s-e-r who thinks killing 
others and himself is a virtue and -- voila! -- 
there you have it. The headlines. The shock. 
The cost for the murderers' bosses is low. The 
publicity over the outrage is big.

The list of possibilities of soft targets is 
seemingly endless: pre-schools, malls, 
churches, syna-gogues, fairs, festivals, 
sporting events, swap meets, conventions, 
rock concerts. 

Everyone these days talks about "trending" on 
the Internet. So how is humanity "trending" 
so far in the 21st century?

Not very well at all.

Just as some websites are dominated by 
boorish, hyper partisan "trolls" who name 
call and push free speech to the limit of 
slander in their clamor to get noticed, we now 
have news cycles dominat-ed by bloodthirsty 
terrorist and wannabe terrorist "trolls" who 
clamor to be feared, and exploit state-of-the-
art social media technology to spread their 
message and their branding of brutality. 

They mercilessly and sadistically butcher 
their enemies, inflict maximum damage, and 
exterminate the opposition -- which actually 
HELPS them sign up more recruits -- who 
think it's cool.

Somewhere down there where it's very hot, 
Adolf must be smiling.

I WANT MY MOMMY

Ran across these pearls of wisdom from young 
children years ago and figured it might be fun to pass 
it on to you again.

 Why did God make mothers?

 Think about it. It was the best way to get more people

 To help us out of there when we were getting born.

 

How did God make mothers?

 God made my mom just the same like He made me. He just used bigger 
parts.

 

What are moms made out of?

 God makes mothers out of clouds and angel hair, and everything nice 
in the world, and one dab of mean. They had to get their start from men’s 
bones. Then they mostly use string, I think.

 

What kind of little girl was your mom?

 I don’t know because I wasn’t there, but my guess would be pretty bossy.

 My mom has always been my mom and none of that other stuff.

 

How did your mom meet your dad?

 Mom was working in a store and dad was shoplifting

 What did mom need to know about dad before she married him?

 His last name. She had to know his background. Like is he a crook. 
Does he make at least $800 a year. Did he say no to drugs and yes to

 chores?

 

Why did your mom marry your dad?

 My dad makes the best spaghetti in the world. And my mom eats a lot.

 My grandma says that my mom didn’t have her thinking cap on.

 

What’s the difference between moms and dads?

 Moms know how to talk to teachers without scaring them.

 Moms work at work and work at home. Dads just got to work at work.

 Dads are taller and stronger, but mom’s have all the real power 
because that’s who you gotta ask if you want to sleep over at your 

 friends.

 

What does your mom do in her spare time?

 Moms don’t do spare time.

 Mom says she pays bills all day long.

 

Thank you moms everywhere for being moms. There is little more valuable 
in the land.

 Another shameless plug for the upcoming JJ Jukebox Concert. Saturday, 
January 31st at the Peppertree Grill on Sierra Madre Blvd. 6:30 – 8:30 or 
9:00. Great pop rock songs from the 1960s and 1970s. Adding songs by 
Gerry and the Pacemakers and another hit from the Monkees. Come for 
dinner and make reservations by calling (626) 355-8444.

 Also friend Jane Fuller will be performing at a special Valentine’s 
Dinner at Corfu Restaurant (also on Sierra Madre Blvd). Great food and 
romantic music from one of the best singer songwriters I have had the 
pleasure to know. Call the restaurant for more details. (626) 355-5993.


GET READY FOR TERRORISM ON SOFT TARGETS

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LEFT TURN / RIGHT TURN

GREG Welborn

REPUBLICANS KNOW THEIR OBAMACARE 
CASE IS BOGUS. HERE’S THE PROOF.


A PRESIDENT PRACTICING 
INSANITY

By Brian Beutler 

 On Thursday, the government filed its 
brief to the Supreme Court in the case 
that will determine whether Obamacare 
subsidies disappear in three dozen 
states. Its argument is comprehensive, 
but one part of it speaks directly to the 
political history of the law, and the fact 
that everybody, including Republicans 
in Congress who now claim out of 
convenience that the law plainly limits 
subsidies to states that set up their own 
exchanges, always understood it to 
authorize subsidies everywhere.

 The government confines this part of 
its argument to the legislative debate in 
the run up to the law’s passage in early 
2010, but it could make the point more 
succinctly (and perhaps convincingly) 
by fast forwarding to early 2011. These 
days, Republicans up to and including 
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell 
confidently pronounce that “the language 
of the law says … subsidies are only 
available for states that set up state 
exchanges.” But that’s not what they 
believed four years ago.

 When Republicans took over the House 
in 2011, the political environment 
in Congress changed dramatically. 
Obamacare couldn’t be repealed, but 
it became fair game for damaging 
modifications, and the GOP took aim at 
it and other domestic spending programs 
whenever opportunities to offset the 
cost of new legislation arose. One of 
the first things Congress did back then 
was eliminate an Affordable Care Act 
provision that would have significantly 
expanded the number of expenses 
businesses are required to report to the 
IRS. Even before the law passed, business 
associations were livid about the “1099” 
requirement, and created such an uproar 
over it that the question quickly became 
how, not if, it would be repealed. Even 
Democrats wanted it gone.

 The only problem was that the reporting 
requirement was expected to raise over 
$20 billion. Under GOP rule, it could only 
be offset with spending cuts elsewhere in 
the budget. As it happens, they found 
those spending cuts elsewhere in the 
ACA itself. Specifically, Republicans 
paid for repealing the 1099 provision by 
subjecting ACA beneficiaries to stricter 
rules regarding when they have to 
reimburse the government for subsidy 
overpayments. Make more money than 
you anticipated, and the government will 
claw back your premium assistance come 
tax season.

 The congressional budget office scored 
the plan as essentially deficit neutral, and 
Republicans voted for it overwhelmingly. 
But you see the problem here. If the ACA 
plainly prohibits subsidies in states that 
didn’t set up their own exchanges, then 
there would be no subsidies in those states 
to claw back. And by April 2011, when the 
clawback passed, we already knew that 
multiple states were planning to protest 
ACA implementation and let the federal 
government set up their exchanges, 
including giant states like Florida, 
which now has a million beneficiaries. 
They would have needed a different, or 
additional, pay for.

 Obamacare’s legal challengers might 
chime in here to insist that their case 
is impervious to revelations like these. 
CBO’s analyses were premised on the 
idea that every state would set up its own 
exchange, and Republicans (and many 
Democrats) based their votes on what 
CBO told them. Other Democrats who 
actually understood the scheme may 
have simply pretended not to notice the 
problem. Nevertheless, they’d say, the 
law was designed to withhold subsidies 
from people whose states didn’t establish 
exchanges, and to ruin the individual and 
small-group insurance markets in those 
states, without providing any notice to 
either. In a perverse way, the absurdity of 
the challengers’ argument is it’s greatest 
strength. Because the scheme they insist 
Congress intentionally created was so far 
from Congress’ mind, it’s hard to find 
contemporaneous evidence that Congress 
absolutely didn’t mean to condition these 
subsidies. In much the same way, we can’t 
be sure that Congress didn’t mean to 
denominate those subsidies in Canadian 
dollars. A $ isn’t necessarily a $ after all.

 But this familiar line of defense crumbles 
here. It is facially plausible—though 
incorrect—to posit that at the time the 
law passed, CBO believed subsidies 
would be available everywhere because it 
simply assumed every state would set up 
an exchange. But that assumption didn’t 
hold in April 2011. Something else must 
explain CBO’s 1099-repeal score, and the 
Republican votes that followed it. What 
we have in the form of this bill is clear 
evidence that everyone who voted for it 
(including every single Republican, save 
the two GOP congressmen and one GOP 
senator who weren’t present) understood 
the Affordable Care Act to provide 
subsidies everywhere.

 Congress repealed the 1099 provision 
at an important moment—after multiple 
states announced that they would step 
back and let the federal government 
establish their exchanges, but before the 
IRS issued its proposed rule stipulating 
that subsidies would be available on both 
exchanges. The only thing Congress had 
to go on when it stiffened the clawback 
mechanism was its own reading of the 
Affordable Care Act, and Congress 
behaved exactly as you would expect. It 
operated with the understanding that 
subsidies were universal.

 Today, many Republicans will tell you 
that the law plainly forecloses subsidies 
through the federal exchange. Six 
senators—John Cornyn, Ted Cruz, Orrin 
Hatch, Mike Lee, Rob Portman, and 
Marco Rubio—and ten congressmen—
Marsha Blackburn, Dave Camp, Randy 
Hultgren, Darrell Issa, Pete Olson, 
Joe Pitts, Pete Roskam, Paul Ryan and 
Fred Upton—have even filed an amicus 
brief with the Supreme Court, which 
begins, “The plain text of the ACA 
reflects a specific choice by Congress 
to make health insurance premium 
subsidies available only to those who 
purchase insurance from ‘an Exchange 
established by the State….’ The IRS 
flouted this unambiguous statutory 
limitation, promulgating regulations that 
make subsidies available for insurance 
purchased not only through exchanges 
established by the States but also through 
exchanges established by the federal 
government.”

 All of them, save Cruz, who was elected 
in 2012, voted for 1099 repeal.

In its brief, the government argues that 
“it was well understood that the Act 
gave ‘States the choice to participate in 
the exchanges themselves or, if they do 
not choose to do so, to allow the Federal 
Government to set up the exchanges.’ 
And it was abundantly clear that some 
States would not establish their own 
Exchanges.“ It was more than well 
understood. Congress actually endorsed 
that very proposition. Courtesy of The 
New Republic www.newrepublic.com

Were it not my task to write a decent 
length column, I could easily summarize 
President Obama’s 2015 State of The Union 
Address as follows: the middle class has 
been decimated on his watch, and he’s 
insisting that the Congress allow him to fix 
the problem by implementing more of the 
policies which hurt the middle class in the 
first place. That’s it; no further guide or 
decoding is needed. The words were straight 
forward and easy to understand. It lasted 
just about an hour, much less time than it 
took to write my summary. But since I do 
have to put together a column of reasonable 
length, let’s explore the underlying theme 
of presidential insanity. After all, one of the 
better definitions of insanity is doing the 
same thing but expecting different results. 
That’s what President Obama wants to do.

 The President put forward a plan to spend 
another $300+ billion financed by increased 
taxation of savings and investments. 
Been there, done that, doesn’t work!! The 
President’s last 6 years have been nothing 
but increased government spending financed 
by increased taxes. The historical record is 
crystal clear. 

 The great “fiscal cliff” deal increased 
income tax rates on the top earners by 20% to 
30%, with an additional Obamacare surcharge 
thrown on top of that. On the receiving side, 
according to the Congressional Budget Office, 
transfer payments to middle income families 
increased almost 25% during this president’s 
tenure, and the affective average tax rate for 
this same middle income group fell 24%. 
You’d expect to find that the middle class is 
better off from all this, but the opposite has 
occurred. Middle class after-tax income has 
dropped during this period.

 The reality is that taxing “the rich” to give 
to others doesn’t improve the circumstances 
of those receiving the money. They may get 
something from the government, but they 
lose even more in other areas. These stats 
couldn’t be any clearer. Median household 
income stood at approximately $55,000 
in 2007. All the taxing, all the spending 
(remember $1 trillion deficits), all the transfer 
payments didn’t do anything to improve 
the middle class whose median household 
income dropped to roughly $52,000. It may 
not seem like a lot in dollar terms, but it 
represents about a 6% haircut.

 Ask yourself how much better off you’d 
be if your boss reduced your paycheck by 
6%. Factor in the fact that prices have risen 
13.4% over that time period according to the 
Bureau of Labor Statistics, and you have the 
makings of a first class economic disaster for 
the middle class!

 The other notable thing that didn’t happen, 
which the President seems to believe will now 
magically happen, is closing the income gap 
between rich and poor. Remember, this is the 
president who claimed that income inequality 
posed a fundamental threat to our way of 
life. If true, the guy largely responsible for 
that is President Obama, and now he wants 
to double down on the same policies which 

caused the income gap 
to widen.

 The President’s list 
of give-aways sounds 
very attractive to the 
uninformed. Tax 
credits here, subsidies there, free community 
college tuition over there, etc. If I were going 
to receive some of those, I might be tempted 
to be happy, to see President Obama as my 
savior. My attitude would change, of course, 
when I realized that I would have to pay for 
all that. You see, there just is no such thing as 
a free lunch or a “tax on the rich”.

 You can’t isolate the rich like that. We all 
have choices; we all choose where, when and 
how much to work. The vast majority of us 
are pretty practical when it comes to figuring 
that out. If you raise someone’s wage, they 
usually work harder. Decrease it, and you 
shouldn’t be surprised if they work less for 
you, or just plain quit.

 Why would we think the rich are any 
different? If you increase taxes on how much 
they earn, don’t they have the choice of not 
earning as much? Of course they do. It is 
exactly this choice – and their inevitable 
decision in the face of increased taxation 
– which devastates the middle classes and 
the lower income groups as well. If the rich 
won’t invest their money into companies 
which want to expand or into startups which 
want to build something new, then the jobs 
which those companies create will decrease 
or grow scarce. The second key concept here 
is that any tax can ultimately be passed on to 
consumers. If you tax a manufacturer (the 
“rich”), the tax simply gets priced into the 
products sold. Obama’s policies are having 
the added effect of increasing the cost of all 
the things we have to buy.

 The President’s policies diminish economic 
growth, hurt job prospects, decrease real 
wages and increase prices of consumer 
goods and services. The President’s policies 
aren’t doing the middle class any good at all. 
They’re devastating them, and doing more of 
the same will only hurt them more.

 President Obama can give a really good 
speech, and arguably he’s a really smart guy. 
But there are a lot of really smart guys who 
aren’t very wise. President Obama’s 6th 
State of the Union Address shows he’s still 
making some really bonehead decisions, and 
they represent the insanity of doing the same 
thing while expecting different results.

 About the author: Gregory J. Welborn is 
a freelance writer and has spoken to several 
civic and religious organizations on cultural 
and moral issues. He lives in the Los Angeles 
area with his wife and 3 children and is 
active in the community. He can be reached 
mailto:gregwelborn2@gma/5l.com

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