This is obscene. A million bucks of taxpayer money will be spent on a public relations firm to sell the Obamacare insurance exchange in California. They even intend to enlist Hollywood to write Obamacare into TV show plots.

Realizing that much of the battle will be in the public relations realm, the exchange has poured significant resources into a detailed marketing plan — developed not by state health bureaucrats but by the global marketing powerhouse Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, which has an initial $900,000 contract with the exchange. The Ogilvy plan includes ideas for reaching an uninsured population that speaks dozens of languages and is scattered through 11 media markets: advertising on coffee cup sleeves at community collegesto reach adult students, for example, and at professional soccer matches to reach young Hispanic men.

And Hollywood, an industry whose major players have been supportive of President Obama and his agenda, will be tapped. Plans are being discussed to pitch a reality television show about “the trials and tribulations of families living without medical coverage,” according to the Ogilvy plan. The exchange will also seek to have prime-time television shows, like “Modern Family,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and Univision telenovelas, weave the health care law into their plots.

From Bagehot’s column in The Economist, an experiment in the UK to note: 

 …There are currently 66,000 children in care, meaning they have been removed (voluntarily or otherwise) from their biological parents. The majority are shuffled between short-term placements with foster families.

This is where a new scheme comes in, trying to keep families together and children out of foster care:

JACKIE BAPTISTE’S working day begins at seven o’clock, when she goes to a council house, drags someone else’s children out of bed and packs them off to school. The social worker is not a woman to be trifled with. “They might tell me to F-off, but it’s only words,” she shrugs. Sometimes she films the desperate attempts of a mother to control her brood, then plays the recording back, offering tips on how to do it right. She attends parent-teacher meetings, appointments with doctors and counselling for alcoholism and domestic violence, all the while holding the hands of her adult charges. In a typical week she will see the same family five or six times, as part of Westminster council’s Family Recovery Programme. She is part of a growing movement, and the product of a remarkable political consensus. 

Click here to read it all. 

This is, in a way, a bit horrifying to a small government conservative. What a healthy small government Republic needs (see the Bill Whittle video I posted yesterday) is a virtuous citizenry. The primary vehicle for transmitting values and virtues to society used to be the church. Too many churches have devolved into places of entertainment, soothing sentiments, and purveyors of tolerance (tolerance of that which is not virtuous), instead of preaching the values and virtues of a good and self-governing people, and taking troubled families under their wings in a teaching capacity. Where the church has failed, the government now tries to meddle. While they may have some success, the government is an inadequate mechanism for teaching the values that will lead to stable healthy family units, families that can serve as the foundation of a more self-governing citizenry. 

But there is an additional problem. The UK, like the USA, is financially bankrupt. All these “programmes” are running on borrowed money and borrowed time. When the government fails, will the church be able to step in and assert the role it should have been playing all along? Color me not hopeful. 

Unbelievable. Fresh nutritious bagels were turned away by city authorities.

Outlawed are food donations to homeless shelters because the city can’t assess their salt, fat and fiber content, reports CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer.

Also banned was carrot soup that a synogogue had been donating to shelters for years, because the Nanny Mayor wants to monitor fat and salt content of food for the homeless. 

Liberal elites will not be satisfied until they can tell you where to live, what to drive, how to heat your home, what you are allowed to eat, and who gets what level of health care. 

Bloomberg is a control freak gone mad. He knows best for you. If you’re homeless and you can’t have some delicious carrot soup, that’s what is best for you. 

I feel like breaking things when I read stuff like this. Please, can’t we just run our own lives?

Breitbart.com has uncovered video exposing US Attorney General Eric Holder’s position in 1995: that the public (especially the children) needs to be “brainwashed” against guns. Guns should be made “shameful” like government campaigns have made cigarette smoking. 

A change in societal attitudes would pave the way for stricter gun control, stricter registration, perhaps even confiscation of some or all guns in the hands of private citizens. 

Holder’s view is certainly in opposition to the trends in American public opinion. 

Gallup polling noted last October that “Americans have shifted to a more pro-gun view on gun laws, particularly in recent years, with record-low support for a ban on handguns, an assault rifle ban, and stricter gun laws in general… Perhaps the trends are a reflection of the American public’s acceptance of guns. In 2008, Gallup found widespread agreement with the idea that the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right of Americans to own guns. Americans may also be moving toward more libertarian views in some areas, one example of which is greater support for legalizing marijuana use. Diminished support for gun-control laws may also be tied to the lack of major gun-control legislation efforts in Congress in recent years.”

In short, Americans want more freedom, less nanny-state control.