By John Seiler

I’ve discovered the best short description yet of Obamacare. It comes in a slam against Mitt Romney by Joe Klein in Time magazine. Klein is a big backer of Obamacare, and of tyrannical central government in general. He writes:

“The insurance companies had to cover everyone, and the government had to require everyone to buy into the system. The insurers needed the larger pool of healthy policyholders to offset the cost of covering those who were already sick. And so I was prepared to whap poor Romney upside the head for this phony concession.”

Based on that, here’s an even shorter one, by me:

“Healthy young people without insurance are robbed to subsidize the insurance companies, who get more customers and bigger profits.”

The complaint about healthy young people without insurance is, “But if they get sick, then we have to pay for it.” No we don’t.

In the pre-1965 system, which was much better than this one, most people didn’t have insurance. My father didn’t have it for our family until 1970, even though he was a district judge in Michigan beginning in 1960.

In those happy days, you paid cash for care, which meant competition kept prices down. And if you were broke, then charity covered you. Almost all doctors performed charity work at much reduced rates. And hospitals donated their services to the poor.

Today, the existing system bloats the profits of Big Insurance, Big Hospital, Big Pharma and Big Politics. Obamacare will make that even worse.

If you’re a healthy young person, Obamacare is going to rob you once again. Just as you’re robbed already to pay for Social Security and Medicare, which are going broke and won’t be there for you. And just as you’re robbed by Big College, Big University and the Big Banks for $100,000 college loans you’ll never be able to repay.

You’re slave hooked up to the machines. Welcome to the real world.

By Joseph Perkins

“Climate change,” declares the home page for the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research, “poses an immediate threat to California’s economy, environment, and to public health.”

The Brown administration is “taking action” to avert the worst global disaster since the meteorite (or meteorites, the science is unclear) that wiped out the dinosaurs, but it is being obstructed, the Brownies lament, by those who dare to question the prevailing wisdom on climate change; who “oppose the move to renewable energy and clean transportation.”

Well, the guv’s Office of Planning and Research — OPR, in bureaucrat speak — just isn’t going to stand for it anymore. So it has devoted its entire Website to taking on the evil climate change “deniers.”

“Just as we reached a point where we stopped debating whether cigarette smoke caused cancer,” the site declares, “we need to end the climate change debate and focus on how to solve the problem.”

And that begins by debunking claims of climate change “deniers,” who, as the Brown administration sees it, are on a moral par with devil-worshipping tobacco executives.

The deniers share certain traits, OPR states. “Many have little or no expertise in climate science.” Also, “Many receive funding for their efforts from industries with a financial interest in ignoring climate change.”

Of course, many if not most of those who subscribe to the climate change orthodoxy — that human activity accounts for much of the global warming trend observed in recent years — also have little or no expertise in climate science.

That includes Al Gore, for instance, whose 2006 climate change documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won two Academy Awards (one of which was for Best Original Song), and propelled the former Veep into stardom. He also won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on “climate change.”

Your tax dollars

As to the insinuation that climate change “deniers” have been corrupted by funding from industries that couldn’t care less if Mother Earth is suffering hot flashes, that dirty industry money pales in comparison to the $2.6 billion the Obama administration proposed last year to fund research reinforcing climate change alarmism.

The reason the Brown administration has gone to such extraordinary lengths to discredit climate change “deniers” is because it blames them for polls indicating that “only about half of less than half of the American public is convinced that emissions from human activities bear responsibility.”

But it’s not because of climate change “deniers” that Americans are skeptical that global warming poses an “immediate threat” to life as they know it. It’s because they have heard similar warnings before of impending climate catastrophe that proved to be false alarms.

In 1975, Newsweek magazine published a scary jeremiad titled, “The cooling world.” It warned that “after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the Earth’s climate appears to be cooling down.” Time magazine ran cover stories such as, “The Cooling of America.”

Newsweek cited scientific studies, just as Gov. Brown’s OCR does on its website. And it warned of disastrous consequence if government did nothing, same as OCR.

The scientific community was dead wrong on global cooling four decades ago. All climate change skeptics — not “deniers” — are saying is that maybe, just maybe, the threat of global warming might be similarly overstated.