The Family Values Meltdown Continues
The GOP's meltdown over marriage and the sanctity of life continues. Tuesday, former Republican Senator Larry Pressler announced his support for same-sex "marriage," calling it the "new conservative position." Tellingly, Pressler made his announcement on Al Gore's Current TV.
He could not be more wrong. There is nothing conservative about redefining marriage. And there is nothing conservative about turning to unelected judges to invalidate the will of the American people. That is called liberal judicial activism, and conservatives have rightly opposed it for decades.
In 2006 the voters of South Dakota approved a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. If Larry Pressler was entertaining the notion of a political comeback, I suspect he would not get half the votes he did last time after coming out of the closet to support redefining marriage. He is another out-of-touch politician who thinks he knows better than the people of his own state.
But Pressler joins other politicos like former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman and Nicolle Wallace in denouncing supporters of normal marriage as bigots. When Pressler was in the Senate, he was always someone conservatives had to worry about.
Pressler voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and publicly campaigned for him in 2012. Huntsman, of course, served in the Obama Administration while Obama was taking over the healthcare system, raising taxes and promoting abortion. Nicolle Wallace, who I debated on Fox News Sunday last week, famously aimed her vitriol during the 2008 campaign at Sarah Palin rather than Barack Obama.
My point is simply this: The Republicans who are now coming out and insisting that the party should downplay values issues have never been full members of the team to begin with. They are part of the same establishment that bitterly fought Ronald Reagan.
Huntsman, Pressler and Wallace don't understand Middle America and do not appreciate the values of hard-working, men and women of faith. There are millions of blue collar folks -- Nixon's Silent Majority and former Reagan Democrats -- who vote for Republicans because of values issues not because of GOP promises to protect billionaires from tax hikes.
The more GOP elites signal their disdain for values voters, condemning their deeply held religious values as bigotry, the more they risk losing them. In the end, the very elites who claim they are trying to save the party will end up causing its crack-up.
Obamacare Is Raising Costs
Obamacare was urgently needed, we were told, because healthcare was too expensive. Obamacare will lower premiums by $2,500, right? Wrong! This week brought yet more evidence proving what conservative critics said all along: Big Government solutions will only increase costs.
The latest study comes from the Society of Actuaries -- professionals, not partisans. According to their report, Obamacare will increase the costs insurance companies pay on medical claims by an average of 32%. In some states, the increases are massive: 80% in Ohio, 68% in Indiana, 67% in Maryland, 62% in California.
Try as they might, liberals have yet to find a way to suspend the fundamental laws of economics. If you raise costs for businesses, you raise costs for consumers. Obamacare's regulations are dramatically raising costs for insurance companies, and that means higher -- not lower -- healthcare premiums for you.
Big Government Still Wasting Billions
In spite of all the apocalyptic warnings about how painful the sequester spending cuts will be, we continue to learn about the myriad ways in which Big Government is still wasting your hard-earned tax dollars.
According to Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), "We (the federal government) spend about $8 billion a year maintaining properties that we have no use for." Breitbart.com reports that the government sold a federal building last month for $20 million. But the sale took ten years to complete because of red tape!
And while the White House remains closed to schoolchildren and tourists, and workers are facing furloughs, the Obama Administration has spent over $1 million on puppets and nearly $900,000 to studyNew Zealand mud snails.
It's your money, folks. Washington doesn't earn a dime. Whatever it spends on empty buildings or puppet shows it has to first take from hard-working taxpayers.