It was on this day in 1814 that a young American lawyer and poet named Francis Scott Key wrote what was to become his most famous poem, “Defence of Fort McHenry,” while on board a British Navy ship in Chesapeake Bay. Key had been negotiating with the British for the release of a prisoner they had taken in their raid on Washington, but because he had heard about the Navy’s plans for attacking Baltimore, he was not released until after the battle. That was how he came to witness the bombardment of Fort McHenry from the deck of H.M.S. Tonnant on the night of September 13. When the sun rose the following morning, and Key saw the Stars and Stripes flying over Fort McHenry, the sight inspired him to write a poem. Soon afterward, Key’s words were set to the melody of a popular song by English composer John Stafford Smith, and it quickly became known as “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
“The Star-Spangled Banner” became the national anthem of the United States on March 3, 1931. Often criticized for being difficult to sing and/or for glorifying warfare, it remains stubbornly popular with the American people; and two centuries years after its composition, its ability to send a shiver up the patriotic spine and bring a tear to the patriotic eye remain intact.
John Newton was born in London on July 24, 1725. At the age of eleven he went to sea with his father, a ship’s captain. After his father’s retirement, John signed on with a merchant ship sailing to the Mediterranean. He later served a brief and unsuccessful stint in the Royal Navy, after which he joined the crew of a slave ship bound for West Africa. But the ship’s crew found him troublesome, and they left him with an African slave dealer named Amos Clowe, who gave him to his wife as her slave.
In 1748 Newton was rescued by friends of his father and returned to England. He continued his involvement in the slave trade for many years, despite his own experience as a slave, and despite having undergone a religious conversion on one of his voyages. He did not become a true abolitionist until many years after a stroke had forced him to retire from active involvement in the slave trade.
In 1788, Newton published a pamphlet, Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade, in which he described the horrible conditions on the slave ships, and wrote that “It will always be a subject of humiliating reflection to me, that I was once an active instrument in a business at which my heart now shudders.” He joined in the efforts of William Wilberforce and other abolitionists in Parliament to outlaw the slave trade, and he lived to see the passage of the Slave Trade Act on March 25, 1807. Nine months later, he died in London, the city of his birth.
John Newton is best remembered today as the author of the hymn “Amazing Grace.” In 1982, 175 years after his death, he was inducted into the Gospel Music Hall of Fame.
If you’re as old as I am, you’re old enough to remember when America had a president who loved God and his country and wasn’t shy about saying so. Was it really only thirty years ago?
“It’s been one full week since the flagship technology portion of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) went live. And since that time, the befuddled beast that is Healthcare.gov has shutdown, crapped out, stalled, and mis-loaded so consistently that its track record for failure is challenged only by Congress.
“The site itself, which apparently underwent major code renovations over the weekend, still rejects user logins, fails to load drop-down menus and other crucial components for users that successfully gain entrance, and otherwise prevents uninsured Americans in the 36 states it serves from purchasing healthcare at competitive rates – Healthcare.gov’s primary purpose. The site is so busted that, as of a couple days ago, the number of people that successfully purchased healthcare through it was in the “single digits,” according to the Washington Post.
“The reason for this nationwide headache apparently stems from poorly written code, which buckled under the heavy influx of traffic that its engineers and administrators should have seen coming. But the fact that Healthcare.gov can’t do the one job it was built to do isn’t the most infuriating part of this debacle – it’s that we, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $500 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.” —Andrew Couts, We Paid Over $500 Million for the Obamacare Site And All We Got Was This Lousy 404
“The House Republicans’ fourth (and latest) offer asks for only two changes in Obamacare: First, eliminate the subsidy for members of Congress, which has outraged the public. And second, delay for a year making insurance mandatory for individuals. Let anyone enroll in Obamacare who wants to. But don’t penalize individuals for being uninsured in 2014 when the president has already postponed the penalty on big companies for not insuring workers.
“‘The Affordable Care Act is a law that passed the House, it passed the Senate, the Supreme Court ruled it constitutional … and it is settled,’” said Obama.
“Not so. The health program the president is imposing on us is not the Affordable Care Act. The president has dismembered and mangled it. Gone is the employer mandate, the cap on out of pocket expenses, income verification and over half the deadlines specified in the law. The President delayed or did away with these features, without asking Congress. Illegally. Then he added 1,472 waivers and connived a subsidy for members of Congress that no one else in American earning $174,000 a year could get. The Supreme Court has ruled twice that presidents cannot delay, amend, and repeal parts of laws.” —Betsy McCaughey, Obama’s Dangerous Claim to Executive Power
“By funding uncontroversial and broadly popular programs while not automatically funding everything else, the Republicans are trying to trick the government into setting priorities, building bipartisan coalitions, and engaging the public in how to spend their tax money. Obama seemed to think this was self-evidently foolish, which tells you much about what the president thinks of the taxpayers.
“Then the president added, almost as an afterthought: ‘And you know, we don’t get to select which programs we implement or not.’ Since Obama chooses which parts of which laws he wants to implement and enforce at will, as if Congress were a supercommittee brainstorming ideas rather than a coequal branch passing laws, I’m guessing he would explain that he is again being take too literally when he’s obviously just posturing.” —Seth Mandel, Obama Stumbles Despite Friendly Press
“[Obamacare] was presented as an act of charity, a plan to cover the uninsured. That was the issue as they presented it. But the actual goal of Obamacare’s socialist sponsors was a single payer system – government healthcare — which would put the state in control of the lives of every American, man, woman and child. That is the reason that none of the promises made about Obamacare was true, beginning with his campaign lie that Obamacare government health care was not a program he would support. Obamacare will not cover 30 million uninsured Americans, as Obama and the Democrats said it would; Obamacare will not lower costs, as they promised it would; Obamacare will deprive many Americans of their doctors and healthcare plans, as they assured everyone it would not; Obamacare is a new tax, as they swore it wouldn’t be. All these promises Obama and the Democrats made were false because they were only a camouflage for their real goal actual goal, which was universal control. …
“If you want to fight the left you have to fight fire with fire. That means first and foremost you have to hold them to account for hurting the people they are pretending to help. Whose opportunities are going to be wrecked by Obamacare? Health care taxes will go up for those who pay taxes – the middle class – while their incomes will go down. Already Obamacare is cutting the workweek to 30 hours. Whose pocket books do you think that is hitting?” —David Horowitz, The Threat We Face
“President Obama has made many promises about his signature health care plan, but one of the simplest was an assurance that it would lower national health care spending and save every family thousands of dollars.
“But now government actuaries have reached a different conclusion, finding that ObamaCare will actually increase health care spending by $621 billion over the next 10 years. …
“Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center says the actuaries ‘made it very clear in their projections that the health care law did not bend the cost curve down. It bent it up,’ he says, adding, ‘there will be increase in national health spending associated with the implementation of the health care law.'” —Jim Angle, Government Actuaries Say Obamacare Will Increase Health Care Spending
“I’ve worked on massive database projects in the private sector, and I suspect that Chung is correct. We do know that some testing took place, which is why everyone involved in the project was sending up warning flares for months about its status. HHS and the White House might have rolled it out with full knowledge of its incompetence hoping that they could provide enough assistance to jolly people along, but I don’t think that was the case. The failure caught them flat-footed last Tuesday, and the failure of the weekend retooling effort seemed to do the same. It looks as though no one bothered to actually sit down and try to go from A to Z in the system themselves.
“By the way, in one such project in my experience, the company got rid of the program managers when the team didn’t deliver … after eight months. There isn’t a private-sector firm in the world that would have tolerated a web-portal project taking 42 months and delivering this kind of train wreck.” —Ed Morrissey, Did Anyone Bother to Test the Obamacare Software First?
“Canadian provincial health officials last year fired the parent company of CGI Federal, the prime contractor for the problem-plagued Obamacare health exchange websites, the Washington Examiner has learned.
“CGI Federal’s parent company, Montreal-based CGI Group, was officially terminated in September 2012 by an Ontario government health agency after the firm missed three years of deadlines and failed to deliver the province’s flagship online medical registry. …
“Officials at the U.S. government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services awarded six technology contracts worth $87 million to CGI Federal for Obamacare website work, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
“The CMS officials refused to say if federal officials knew of its parent company’s IT failure in Canada when awarding the six contracts.
“CGI Federal built Obamacare’s Healthcare.gov, which went live Oct. 1 but has since experienced multiple technical problems, including crashes, refusal to load and sign-on, or to provide accurate information.” —Richard Pollock, Canadian Officials Fired IT Firm Behind Troubled Obamacare Website
“President Obama has officially canceled his trip to Asia. He said he didn’t want to be in Indonesia not doing anything to solve the crisis when he could be in Washington not doing anything to solve it.
“Actually, it’s the perfect time for President Obama to go to Asia. I mean, what better time to leave Joe Biden in charge of the country than during a shutdown?
“This shutdown is hurting everyone. Today, Michelle Obama told fat kids, ‘You’re on your own. Eat a Happy Meal. I don’t care.'” —Jay Leno
“Obama’s exploitation of the government shutdown (never let a good crisis go to waste) is a classic old method mastered by the likes of CPUSA. It’s standard operating procedure. What you’re witnessing is Barack Obama’s ‘shutdown campaign’ — and with the liberal media dutifully on his side to amplify the effort.
“Here today, in our new America, our own federal government has gotten into the propaganda business full throttle. Its exploitation of the shutdown is shameless. Sure, we expect congressional Democrats to accuse Republicans of starving children, old people, kittens, puppies, fish, and birds; of wanting to kill your grandmother; of gleefully polluting the atmosphere; of hating black people, gays, Latinos, women; of hoping no child gets an education or a school lunch. You know the drill. Democrats do this regardless of whether they have the White House. …
“But the performance has reached a higher, uglier decibel level under the Obama administration. This is hardly a surprise, given Barack Obama’s upbringing, mentors, radical associates, and the crucial fact that he was a community organizer who studied and taught Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. That was Obama’s formative experience for his job today, and it has equipped him for the task at hand. …
“As has been reported, and is unmistakably evident to all but the most naïve, federal employees have been ordered to exploit this crisis, to make the government shutdown as uncomfortable as they can. The White House is actively soliciting complaints from the general public on ‘how the government shutdown has affected you.’ These testimonies are tools sought for the propaganda kit; the better to agitate with.” —Paul Kengor
“Almost a million non-essential government employees were let go. Well, isn’t that the problem, that there’s that many non-essential employees?” —David Letterman
“Government wants you to play a role in the ‘shutdown’ of the federal government. Your role is to panic.
“Republicans and Democrats both assume that shutting some government is a terrible thing. The press concurs. ‘Shutdown threatens fragile economy,’ warns Politico. ‘Federal workers turn to prayer,’ laments The Washington Post.
“If the public starts noticing that life goes on as usual without all 3.4 million federal workers, we might get dangerous ideas, like doing without so much government. Politicians don’t want that. They’d rather have us worry about how America will cope.
“President Obama gave a speech where he actually said we need to keep government open for the sake of people like the person working for the Department of Agriculture ‘out there helping some farmers make sure that they’re making some modest profit,’ and the Department of Housing and Urban Development ‘helping somebody buy a house for the first time.’
“Give me a break. Farmers don’t need bureaucrats to teach them how to make a profit, and Americans can buy first homes without HUD helping a chosen few. Americans would make more profit and afford better homes if they didn’t have to spend a third of national income on federal taxes.” —John Stossel
“Nonessential government services have been put on hold. Flight safety inspectors furloughed. National monuments closed. The Grand Canyon is closed — they filled it with spackle. Passport offices have been closed too. Interesting fact: Passport lines take exactly the same amount of time whether the passport office is open or not.” —Jimmy Kimmel
“Could this be the end of Monument Syndrome? Across the country, ordinary Americans are rising up in revolt against the old Washington tactic of closing public parks and memorials during selective government ‘shutdowns’ to score political points. Tax-paying tourists are tossing off the orange traffic cones and ‘Barrycades.’ Enough is enough. …
“From closing down parts of the ocean around Florida to booting elderly citizens from their private homes on Lake Mead to shutting down private restaurants and farms that just happen to sit on federal land, the Democrats’ overreach has finally backfired.
“The explanation for this ridiculous Obama obstructionism can be summed up in one word: Control. Control of the people. Control of the partisan narrative. Monument Syndrome, perfected under the Clinton administration, is about inflicting the most visible pain on citizens to demonize political opponents. Big-government advocates in the media enabled the manipulators.
“For decades, taxpayers were passive pawns in this gamesmanship. No more. Monument Syndrome, R.I.P.” —Michelle Malkin
“Democrats have shut down government because they want to fine you for not buying a product you don’t want from a website that doesn’t work.” —Rep. Steve Stockman
“The shutdown means the national zoo is closed. Who’ll feed the animals? Is anyone even there to lock them up at night? Pretty soon starving lions and tigers could charge out of the zoo. They’d devour the fattest, dumbest people on Capitol Hill. Actually that might be the answer to all of the problems.” —Craig Ferguson
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