Newsflash Wonder Woman: Women Already Use the Majority of Healthcare

Newsflash Wonder Woman: Women Already Use the Majority of Healthcare

 

BY HELEN SMITH 

Actress Lynda Carter, star of the "Wonder Woman" television series from 1975 to 1979, speaks to reporters at the Library of Congress in Washington on June 16, 2017. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

I love that Lynda Carter thinks that more women need to legislate healthcare to make things at least "gender neutral":

WASHINGTON – Actress Lynda Carter, the original Wonder Woman, called for some female senators to be added as members of the Senate healthcare reform working group that is currently crafting an Obamacare replacement.

Carter also said there should be “no conversation” about gender politics until America is “gender neutral.”

“That there are 13 men on the health panel and no woman is a goddamn shame. I have to say that maybe people don’t understand that I worry about my father. I worry about my brother. I am at an age where I see people who need help and we are half the world. You need the voices of women,” Carter said on Friday following a discussion at the Library of Congress as part of their “Library of Awesome” exhibit.

“If women outlive men, I think we need the voices of women,” she added. “And I would really hope the president and these people on this panel would have some reason and some intellect behind their decisions here and put some women on there.”

Honey, if there is to be no conversation about gender politics until America is gender neutral, we'll wait a long time. Men are treated like second-class citizens when it comes to healthcare programs and assistance and other government revenues. Carter seems to be under the false impression that women are given less than men in the healthcare system (especially with "uncaring" men legislating), but this is simply not true: women use the majority of resources. It could be that chivalrous male legislators give more to women than female legislators would. Who knows? So maybe Carter should be careful what she wishes for.

Maybe instead of griping that women are not on the panel, Wonder Woman could put some time into a bit of research about how women are already receiving the majority of healthcare in this country. From the CMS.gov statistics:

All Payers: Total Personal Health Care

In aggregate, females spending was $1,231 billion and accounted for 56 percent of total personal health care (PHC) spending(females accounted for just over 50 percent of the population). Male spending was $962 billion and accounted for the remaining 44 percent. Per capita health spending for females was $7,860, 25 percent more than that for males, $6,313. In aggregate, female spending was higher than male spending for every category of PHC goods and services.

So, if Carter really wants things to be gender neutral, maybe we need to even things out to 50/50 in healthcare and make sure that men receive their fair share of healthcare benefits. That, however, is not a conversation that misinformed (or sexist and entitled) celebrities want to have.

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https://pjmedia.com/drhelen/2017/06/22/newsflash-wonder-woman-women-already-use-the-majority-of-healthcare/

SEATTLE DISCOVERS GRAVITY IS NOT SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED

 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN ECONOMY, MINIMUM WAGE

Well not quite gravity, but close enough for post-modernist work. You know how liberals like to attach taxes on cigarettes so we’ll buy fewer of them, and on alcohol so we’ll drink less, etc? Funny, though, how the basic lesson of supply and demand and price sensitivity falls by the wayside when it comes to the minimum wage.

We’ve commented on this invincible ignorance repeatedly (such as here, here, here, here, and here), but can’t resist doing so again. The Washington Post reports today on the results of the mandated minimum wage hikes in Seattle:

A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news for liberals

By Max Ehrenfreunde

When Seattle officials voted three years ago to incrementally boost the city’s minimum wage up to $15 an hour, they’d hoped to improve the lives of low-income workers. Yet according to a major new study that could force economists to reassess past research on the issue, the hike has had the opposite effect.

The city is gradually increasing the hourly minimum to $15 over several years. Already, though, some employers have not been able to afford the increased minimums. They’ve cut their payrolls, putting off new hiring, reducing hours or letting their workers go, the study found.

The costs to low-wage workers in Seattle outweighed the benefits by a ratio of three to one, according to the study, conducted by a group of economists at the University of Washington who were commissioned by the city. The study, published as a working paper Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, has not yet been peer reviewed.

On the whole, the study estimates, the average low-wage worker in the city lost $125 a month because of the hike in the minimum.

Congratulations Seattle—you’ve managed to lower wages by $1,500 a year for the people who can least afford it. But I’m sure you feel good about how you’re fighting again inequality.

Before heading off, let’s note that subtle little dig at the end of the second to last paragraph: “. . . has not yet been peer reviewed.” I’ll bet this is the last you hear of this complaint. First, it will hold up under peer review just fine. Second, NBER is the gold standard organization for this kind of economic work. They don’t publish crap. Third, Seattle picked these researchers themselves to look into the matter; it’s not a study from the American Restaurant Association or something. Finally, one additional witness from the story:

“This strikes me as a study that is likely to influence people,” said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the research. He called the work “very credible” and “sufficiently compelling in its design and statistical power that it can change minds.”

Autor is one of the leading figures in this domain.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/06/seattle-discovers-gravity-is-not-socially-constructed.php

THE NEXT LIBERAL LAMENTATION

 BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN JUDICIAL NOMINEES, JURISPRUDENCE, SUPREME COURT

What’s the most hated Supreme Court decision on the left of the last few years? Why, Citizens United, of course, which leftists blame for just about every bad imaginable. Aggrieved leftists often compare it to the Dred Scott decision —seriously, they do.

So if Justice Anthony Kennedy announces his retirement from the Court tomorrow, can we expect to see liberal headlines saying, “Left Celebrates as Author of Modern ‘Dred Scott’ Decision Retires”? Because it was in fact Kennedy who wrote the Citizens United opinion. And let’s not forget that he was also in the four-justice conservative minority that wanted to strike down Obamacare in toto in 2012 (it was Roberts that let us down on that one, as you’ll remember). I suspect Kennedy may also share the growing reservations among jurists about the Chevron doctrine of judicial deference to the administrative state.

The point is, Kennedy has been unreliable and inconsistent from every point of view—he totally botched property rights again (you’d have thought he’d learned a lesson from the 2005 Kelo case) with his opinion this last week in Murr v. Wisconsin—but there is a lot for the left to dislike about Kennedy, too. I actually doubt he’ll retire; I think he rather likes being the de facto Chief Justice once again, which he wouldn’t be if Merrick Garland had been confirmed last year and the Court had tilted decisively left. But with the arrival of Gorsuch, he’s back to being in the catbird seat on every important case.

But if he does retire tomorrow, watch for liberals to lose completely whatever little sanity they have left. Just take in the Washington Post‘s Ruth Marcus (who hates Citizens United, but omits any mention of Kennedy’s provenance of the decision in her plea for Kennedy to stay on):

The terrifying and terrible prospect of Justice Kennedy retiring

The end of the Supreme Court term looms, and with it the prospect — the terrifying prospect — of a retirement. . .  [H]is departure would be terrible for the court and terrible for the country. It could not come at a worse time. . .

Justice Kennedy, perhaps it is unfair to pile all this onto your shoulders, but is it really wise to subject an already divided country to even more turbulence? And to another nomination by this president, with his evident ignorance of the role of the judiciary and disdain for judicial independence?

Your career has been characterized by insistence on civility, respect for the dignity of all individuals and commitment to the rule of law — qualities absent in our president. Just read Trump’s tweets and ask yourself: Do I really want my successor named by this man?

This isn’t an argument. It’s a primal scream from someone who still can’t accept the outcome of an election. (Also missing: a note about Harry Reid going first in nuking the filibuster for judicial appointments, which will allow Trump more latitude in making a Court appointment. Thank you once again Harry!)

Let the terror begin. And if Senate Republicans are smart, they’ll add in hefty funding for mental health services for liberals in their Obamacare repeal/replace bill.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/06/the-next-liberal-lamentation.php

TRUMP INSIDERS DENOUNCE DEMOCRAT LEAKS

 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN DEMOCRATS, TRUMP JUSTICE DEPARTMEN

The Free Beacon has an interesting story, based on interviews of unnamed Trump administration officials, about the Obama minions, some still embedded in the bureaucracy, who are leaking furiously to the Washington Post and the New York Times:

A new wave of leaks targeting the Trump administration has actively endangered ongoing intelligence and military operations being conducted by the United States and its allies, sparking anger and concern inside and outside the White House, according to multiple conversations with senior U.S. officials intimately familiar with the situation.

The classified leaks, which are being handed to sympathetic journalists by former Obama administration officials who left the government and by holdovers still serving in the Trump administration, have damaged a number of ongoing operations, ranging from American efforts to prevent Russian infiltration of the United States to Israeli efforts against ISIS, sources said.

The Democrats pretend to be concerned about Russia, but have no compunction about interfering with the Trump administration’s efforts to deal with the Russian threat (which Obama, to his everlasting shame, didn’t). The Obama administration never pretended to be concerned about Israel’s security, so I guess we can’t accuse them of hypocrisy on that one.

Anger is running so high that multiple current U.S. officials have named some of the former Obama officials they believe are behind the unauthorized disclosures, which Trump officials say are aimed at kneecapping the current administration and also rewriting the record of the Obama years.
***
The leaks have been traced to a number of former Obama administration officials, including Ben Rhodes—the former National Security Council official responsible for creating an in-house ‘echo chamber’ meant to mislead reporters and the public about the landmark nuclear deal with Iran—and Colin Kahl, former Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser.

Another source, this one a senior administration official who is also intimately familiar with the situation, confirmed the assessment to the Washington Free Beacon.

“Those responsible for the disastrous foreign national security policy of the Obama administration for the last years—Ben Rhodes, Colin Kahl—they provide the marching orders to a broader group of people that are associated with the broader [Democratic Party] Podesta-Clinton network, and now they’re trying to rewrite history at the cost of American national security,” the official said.

The leakers and reporters need to be criminally prosecuted. We keep hearing that the Trump administration is serious about doing this, but it is time for action. I am not a criminal lawyer and don’t presume to give advice to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former U.S. Attorney and long time member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But I would think one way to proceed is to impanel a grand jury and subpoena the reporters who have illegally published leaked information, and ask them their sources. There is no federal shield law, so as I understand it, if they refuse they can be imprisoned indefinitely. (This happened to Judith Miller.) The sources don’t seem to be much of a mystery, and the reporters and editors obviously aren’t. So it is time for the law to come down hard on the leakers and their enablers.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/06/trump-insiders-denounce-democrat-leaks.php

OUR LEADING HATE GROUP

 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN FREE SPEECH, ISLAM, THE LEFT

The concept of a “hate group” could be useful. In practice, however, it is like the concept of “hate speech,” applied to shut down heterodox speech and confine the public square to dissemination of officially approved thought. The concepts somehow overlook the likes of the the hilariously misnamed Southern Poverty Law Center and its works, which direct something far beyond the Orwellian Two Minutes Hate to the likes of Charles Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. If there is such a thing as a “hate group” — as I say, it could be a useful concept — the SPLC is it. Indeed, I think it may be our most influential hate group.

Earlier this year our friends at American Greatness took note with Mike Sabo’s column “The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate group.” This past week the Wall Street Journal published Jeryl Bier’s scrupulously reported column “The insidious influence of the SPLC” (unfortunately, behind the Journal’s subscription paywall). Jeryl notes, for example:

Aided by a veneer of objectivity, the SPLC has for years served as the media’s expert witness for evaluating “extremism” and “hatred.” But while the SPLC rightly condemns groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Westboro Baptist Church and New Black Panther Party, it has managed to blur the lines, besmirching mainstream groups like the [Family Research Center], as well as people such as social scientist Charles Murray and Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a critic of Islamic extremism.

A clear illustration of the SPLC’s pervasive and insidious influence is the March riot at Middlebury College, where Mr. Murray had been invited to speak. “The SPLC is the primary source for the protesters at my events,” Mr. Murray told me. “It is quotes from the SPLC, assertions by the SPLC that drive the whole thing.”

Mr. Murray’s politics are libertarian, but the SPLC labels him a “white nationalist.” In reporting on the Middlebury fracas, numerous news organizations repeated the SPLC’s characterization without noting it was false. The AP even put it in a headline: “College Students Protest Speaker Branded White Nationalist.”

Sometimes understatement can be an effective rhetorical device. Jeryl tactfully suggests the true nature of the SPLC:

The SPLC’s work arguably contributes to the climate of hate it abhors—and Middlebury isn’t the worst example. In 2012 Floyd Lee Corkins shot and wounded a security guard at the Family Research Council’s headquarters. Mr. Corkins, who pleaded guilty to domestic terrorism, told investigators he had targeted the group after learning of it from the SPLC’s website. The SPLC responded to the shooting with a statement: “We condemn all acts of violence.”

Last week the SPLC found itself in the awkward position of disavowing the man who opened fire on Republican members of Congress during baseball practice. “We’re aware that the SPLC was among hundreds of groups that the man identified as the shooter ‘liked’ on Facebook,” SPLC president Richard Cohen said in a statement. “I want to be as clear as I can possibly be: The SPLC condemns all forms of violence.”

Jeryl notes in a parenthetical comment in his concluding paragraph: “[The SPLC] did not respond to three inquiries for this article.” That is silence speaking.

One more example of the SPLC at work. The SPLC has gone to work on anti-radical Muslim activist Majiid Nawaz. The SPLC has labeled Nawaz an anti-Muslim extremist along with Frank Gaffney, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others. Nawaz appeared on Bill Maher’s HBO show on Friday. Josh Feldman covered the interview for Mediaite. RCP has posted the video here. I’m embedding it below.

 

 

The New York Times Magazine profiled Nawaz in the article “Majiid Nawaz’s radical ambition.” The Atlantic took up the SPLC’s stigmatization of Nawaz in a column by David Graham. (I don’t appreciate Graham’s workout on the “Islamaphonia” shtick in the column, but it’s good on Nawaz.) Nawaz responded to the SPLC designation in this Daily Beast column.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/06/our-leading-hate-group.php

Trump Boy Scout Speech Is Nazi Hitler Youth Rally, Left Says

CURIOUSLY, NEWSWEEK DOESN’T SEEM TO BE DOING MUCH TO REFUTE THIS ANALOGY: Trump Boy Scout Speech Is Nazi Hitler Youth Rally, Left Says.

The Boy Scouts as the Hitler Youth – run with that analogy, lefties – run hard with it. I’m so old though, I can remember when Newsweek declared that America had entered into a lengthy period of socialism, nationally:

Earlier: If you missed it last night, our look at the rest of the MSM predictably losing what’s left of their sanity over Trump’s Boy Scout appearance. If only Trump could play Congress so reliably.

UPDATE: At Power Line, John Hinderaker writes, “President Trump addressed the Boy Scout Jamboree in West Virginia last night. His speech sparked controversy, as he veered from his prepared text to riff on politics. As usual with President Trump, however, the Left’s reaction is disproportionate to anything he actually did…Was it inappropriate for the president to criticize Democrats and the media in this sort of appearance? I think it was. But when do the Democrats ever forgo an opportunity to attack Trump? Never, as far as I can see. And who was it who politicized the Boy Scouts, trying either to drive them out of existence or to radically transform them?  The Democrats. No wonder Trump got such a warm reception last night.”

And no wonder the DNC-MSM had such a sense of amnesia last night.

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/271058/

DEMOCRATS, FBI COLLABORATED ON TRUMP SMEAR

 BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN DEMOCRATS, FBI

The New York Post has an explosive report on the infamous “dossier” that tried to smear Donald Trump in order to swing the presidential election to Hillary Clinton. The source of the dossier is a Democratic Party opposition research firm called Fusion GPS:

The Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this month threatened to subpoena the firm, Fusion GPS, after it refused to answer questions and provide records to the panel identifying who financed the error-ridden dossier, which was circulated during the election and has sparked much of the Russia scandal now engulfing the White House.
***
Fusion GPS was on the payroll of an unidentified Democratic ally of Clinton when it hired a long-retired British spy to dig up dirt on Trump. In 2012, Democrats hired Fusion GPS to uncover dirt on GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. And in 2015, Democrat ally Planned Parenthood retained Fusion GPS to investigate pro-life activists protesting the abortion group.

No surprise there. What is shocking is the FBI’s apparent involvement in the effort to smear Trump with false rumors:

The FBI received a copy of the Democrat-funded dossier in August, during the heat of the campaign, and is said to have contracted in October to pay Steele $50,000 to help corroborate the dirt on Trump — a relationship that “raises substantial questions about the independence” of the bureau in investigating Trump, warned Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

It raises more questions than that. Why was the FBI meddling in a U.S. presidential election? Partisan interference in the election by public agencies like the FBI and major news sources like NBC are far more worrisome than anything Russians allegedly might do from afar.

The FBI, too, is trying to stiff Congress’s investigation into the fake dossier:

Senate investigators are demanding to see records of communications between Fusion GPS and the FBI and the Justice Department, including any contacts with former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, now under congressional investigation for possibly obstructing the Hillary Clinton email probe, and deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, who is under investigation by the Senate and the Justice inspector general for failing to recuse himself despite financial and political connections to the Clinton campaign through his Democrat activist wife. Senate investigators have singled out McCabe as the FBI official who negotiated with Steele.

Like Fusion GPS, the FBI has failed to cooperate with congressional investigators seeking documents.

It appears that the Democratic Party has successfully corrupted the FBI as well as the CIA.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/06/democrats-fbi-collaborated-on-trump-smear.php

Process vs. Product: Why the Dems Keep Losing

Process vs. Product: Why the Dems Keep Losing

 

BY ROGER KIMBALL 

Supporters of the Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff after his loss in Georgia on Tuesday night. Credit David Goldman/Associated Press

In her much-read New York Times column “Donald Skunks the Democrats,” Maureen Dowd skates quite close to the truth before swerving off into mendacious Timesland fantasy.

Writing in the aftermath of Jon Ossoff’s embarrassing defeat by Karen Handel in Georgia, Dowd begins by acknowledging the obvious:

You know who is really sick and tired of Donald Trump winning, to the point where they beg, “Please, Mr. President, sir, it’s too much”?

Democrats.

Yep.  The Democrats, as Dowd, says, “just got skunked four to nothing in races they excitedly thought they could win because everyone they hang with hates Trump.”

“To skunk,” verb, transitive: “to defeat someone overwhelmingly in a game or contest, especially by preventing them from scoring at all.”

Why did this happen? Dowd peeps gingerly over the inky ideological carapace of the Times: “If Trump is the Antichrist, as they believe, then Georgia was going to be a cakewalk, and Nancy Pelosi was going to be installed as speaker before the midterms by acclamation.”

“If.” But what if not? The Georgia race, just like all the other special elections since November 9, “turned into another soul-sucking disappointment.”

Does that mean—could it be—that Donald Trump is not the Antichrist after all?

The logic of Dowd’s argument hints at that awful possibility.  But that flicker of sanity is quickly extinguished by a cataract of Demspeak. Dowd quotes Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio. Yes, it’s Trump 4, Dems zero, Ryan admits.  But why? How could this be?

Trump does robo calls. He tweets. He talks about the races. He motivates his base, and he moves the needle, and that’s a problem for us. Guys, we’re still doing something wrong here because a) he’s president and b) we’re still losing to his candidates.

Memo to Tim Ryan (and please pass it along to Maureen Dowd): Republicans are winning all over the country, as much or more in local and states races as in national ones, not because Donald Trump makes robo calls, because he tweets, or because he “motivates the base.”

Nope, the Republicans are winning everywhere because people like what they are selling. They especially like what Donald Trump is selling: an America-first attitude that unapologetically makes the U.S. economy and U.S. national security top priorities.

Nebraska Dem. Official on Scalise: 'I'm Glad He Got Shot ... I Wish He Was F*cking Dead'

This is the hard truth that Dowd skated close to but couldn’t quite face. According to Dowd,

The Republicans have a wildly unpopular, unstable and untruthful president, and a Congress that veers between doing nothing and spitting out vicious bills, while the Democratic base is on fire and appalled millennials are racing away from Trump. Yet Democrats are stuck in loser gear.

The Dems are in “loser gear,” alright, but this fact is puzzling to Dowd because 1) she can’t grasp the deep popularity of Trump’s central policies and 2) she somehow believes that the appalling behavior of the Democratic “base” is a net positive.  It isn’t.

Dowd says that “Trump’s fatal flaw is that he cannot drag himself away from the mirror.”  But who is the more egregious narcissist, Donald Trump or a Democrat like Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, who told Dowd: “We congenitally believe that our motives are pure and our goals are right”?

I think Rahm is right about that cluster of beliefs. It’s a species of self-infatuation that owes a lot to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was always going on about his superior “virtue” even though he behaved in a disgusting way.  He nevertheless believed that because he was saturated by the emotion of virtue and was convinced by the purity of his motives it didn’t matter (to take one example) that he deposited the five or six children he fathered with his mistress in an orphanage.

Just so, Rousseau’s great disciple Maximilien Robespierre was also “on fire,” which is why he could speak in glowing terms of “virtue and its emanation, terror.”  Who can doubt that all those CNN broadcasters who spew obscenities about Donald Trump, the comics who pose for a photo with a bloody severed head in the likeness of the president, the “ethics” professors who attend rallies and bash Trump supporters over the head with bicycle locks, the disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporters who try to murder Republican congressmen as they practice for a baseball game—who can doubt that they and their fellow-travelers would relish a turn operating the guillotine as did Robespierre?

Rahm Emanuel went on to say that “you’ve got to run a good campaign. In elections, politics matter. Oooh, what a surprise.” That’s supposed to be the worldly-wise, bracingly cynical voice of experience.  “See what a grown-up I am: I know you have to win elections to wield power.”

But what Rahm, Tim Ryan, Maureen Dowd, and the other anti-Trump Wise Hats  don’t see is that the fundamental issue is not “motivating the base,” running a slicker campaign, and figuring out how to the game the polls, the focus groups, and the public’s credulity. The central issue is solving the problems that people have in their everyday lives.  Pace Maureen Dowd, Trump is actually doing that. Sure, everyone she “hangs with hates Trump.” But even as she screams about how “pathetic” and “nuts” Trump is, his administration is moving ahead on the issues that actually matter to people, from immigration and jobs to taxes, health care, and national security.

The Democrats believe that process, sufficiently leavened by the emotion of virtue, is enough to win power.  Trump has understood that product matters more than process and that professions of virtue are hollow when unsupported by results.

https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2017/06/25/process-vs-product-why-the-dems-keep-losing/