Have you heard the joke about the family of duck hunters that took down an entire billion-dollar TV network?

It’s no joke. A&E just stepped in duck poop. They made the biggest mistake in the history of Hollywood – they showed us how leftists in Hollywood (and D.C.) really think.

And America said, “DUCK YOU!”

That has to make tyrants and control freaks like Obama, Hollywood, and the leftist thought police scared to death.

Something amazing is happening in America. An awakening. More people showed support for the star of “Duck Dynasty” in 24 hours than signed up for Obamacare in its first few months. Which means at this point in time, Americans are starting to come to the conclusion we’d be better off with a duck hunter in the White House than Obama. Heck, we couldn’t possibly do any worse.

In other words, the tables have turned and middle America is waking up from the shock, disarray, intimidation and distractions of the Obama years. It’s amazing to even say it out loud, but middle America, conservatives, and…gulp…Christians are coming out of the closet.

A duck hunter has inspired us.

What they are saying out loud is, “We have rights too. We deserve free speech too. We’ve had enough of your oppression and intolerance towards our values and beliefs- and we’re NOT going to take it anymore.”

This Nov. 7, 2013 file photo shows Phil Robertson, the Duck Commander, holding the 1 millionth duck call assembled for 2013 at company’s warehouse in West Monroe, La. (AP Photo, The News-Star/Margaret Croft)

A&E claims the “indefinite suspension” (ie firing) of Phil Robertson is about “branding.” What they are insinuating is they couldn’t possibly allow a close-minded, Neanderthal gay basher to remain as the face of their billion dollar brand.

Well guess what? The new brand for A&E is “the Christian-hating, Bible-bashing, intolerant TV network.”

Sorry, but that brand won’t sell. The brand of intolerance towards Christians, in a nation still dominated by Christians who actually believe in God, guns and the Bible, is not a viable brand. In other words, the tables have turned and A&E is “DUCKED.”

Let me first explain my background. I’m a lifelong Republican conservative. My heroes are Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater. I’m a leading conservative commentator and bestselling conservative author of “The Ultimate Obama Survival Guide.”

Yet I’ve always differed from my fellow conservatives on one issue – gay rights. Like my hero Barry Goldwater, I have no problem with gays. Goldwater is the father of the modern day conservative movement, yet he too was pro-gay rights. He once said of gays in the military, “I don’t care if they’re straight, I only care if they shoot straight.”

Ronald Reagan was also open-minded towards gays, as a result of a lifetime spent in Hollywood in the acting business. I’ve always been pro-gay rights. I believe what people do in their private bedrooms is none of government’s business.

But this isn’t a gay rights issue. The firing of Phil Robertson, star of “Duck Dynasty” is a free speech issue. It’s symbolic of the biased, one-sided way the media and leftist elites treat free speech. People have every right to express opinions considered “progressive” or “politically correct” nowadays. But the same rules don’t apply to salt-of-the-earth, apple-pie, middle Americans who believe in God, country, guns, and yes, the Bible.

You mean Christians and conservatives don’t have the right to free speech just like Hollywood leftists?  You mean Christians or conservatives don’t have the right to express their views in the workplace, without fearing for their jobs?

Phil Robertson only expressed his personal opinions. Those opinions are shared by millions of Christians not only in America, but across the globe. Agree or disagree, he had every right to express that opinion, without losing his job. I may disagree with the exact words he chose, but I stand arm-in-arm with Phil to support his right to say it.

Oh by the way, Phil is a reality TV star. His success and popularity is based on his opinions. A&E fired a reality star for having controversial opinions? Are you kidding me? I suggest A&E executives need to visit a psychiatrist’s couch.

The Duck Dynasty scandal is about intolerance. But the intolerance is on part of Hollywood and A&E. The star of a reality show is allowed to have opinions. If you don’t like them, you have no right to ban them. That’s tyrant’s behavior. That’s McCarthyism. That’s the attitude of police states we find in countries run by tyrants like Stalin, or Fidel Castro, or Huge Chavez, or the old East Germany. Is this what America has become under Obama?

I don’t have to agree with Phil Robertson to stand behind him. I support free speech. If it can happen to Phil, it can happen to anyone of us. I’m a TV and radio personality. I have opinions. I won’t change them, or back down. If you don’t like them, change the channel. That’s called FREEDOM.

Defenders of A&E and Hollywood claim this is about “branding.” They say a private business (like A&E) has the right to decide it’s brand and fire anyone hurting its brand.

That would be true if this was a fair two-way street. I too support private property rights for business owners (like me) to run our businesses anyway we want. Only the CEO should decide who works for his company, not government.

But this is not the way the rules currently work in America. Because if any private business said “I won’t serve a customer because of his race or sexual orientation”- would that decision be allowed by government?

If a businessman, in his own private business, decided to fire any employee that supports gay marriage, would that decision be allowed? If a CEO fired employees because they were atheist, would that decision be allowed? If a CEO fired a woman because she was an outspoken supporter of abortion, would that decision stand?

How about if a CEO concerned about his brand said, “You’re fired because your outspoken support of gay rights is killing my business”- would that decision be allowed?

More specifically, how about a TV network firing the star of a reality TV show because they made remarks in an interview supporting abortion or gay marriage or stem cell research. Would government, courts, or Hollywood accept that decision? Leftists and gay rights organizations would beg government to intervene. And we’d see $100 million class action lawsuits galore.

So it’s a lie to say that private businesses have a right to fire who they want. The law is only used to protect leftist and “progressive” views. This was never about “branding.” It was about the shock and horror when people who drink Obama-Kool-Aid realized that their biggest TV star actually believes in something they don’t. They had to rush to silence him.

Why? Because Obama, Hollywood and the leftists are petrified of free thought. They keep their modern day Tammany Hall going through intimidation. They cannot afford to allow conservative or Christian values to be affirmed by a pop culture celebrity- for fear it might start a trend. It might stir up the masses. It might encourage conservatives to speak out. It might embolden Christians to quote the Bible without fear. Hollywood cannot allow that. Americans might actually be inspired to fight back. Someone might escape the thought-police plantation.

A duck hunter may have just lit the spark that started a revolution. Phil Robertson just went from TV phenomenon to American hero. Americans are now unchained. We are free to speak our minds. Here’s what we have to say to control freak tyrants like Obama the Hollywood elite thought police.

“DUCK YOU!”

By Wayne Allyn Root, The Blaze

With the Dec. 23 deadline looming for signing up for health insurance under ObamaCare, consumers rushing to purchase new coverage may be in for a rude shock if they focus principally on finding the least expensive premiums, according to experts.

That’s because many people buying coverage on the federal exchanges either to replace old policies or to obtain coverage for the first time could get hit with deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs much higher than is typical in employer-sponsored health plans.

Perhaps more importantly, they may find themselves excluded from some of the best hospitals in the country and their affiliated doctors.

Deductible Sticker Shock

Gail Wilensky, a senior fellow for Project HOPE and the Medicare director for the first Bush Administration, said on Monday that consumers should be as mindful of deductibles and the hospitals and doctors in network as the monthly premium costs in shopping around.

“What you’re buying is not just the benefits specified in the law but whom you will have access to in getting the service delivered,” she said in an interview. Many of the policies being offered on the federal and state exchanges carry annual deductibles that often top $5,000 for an individual and $10,000 for a couple, according to The New York Times.

“Right now, most of the focus has been on the cost of the monthly premium and occasionally people have remembered to . . .look at what the deductible and the co-insurance is, because that is as important as the premium,” she added. “Whether a hospital is in or out of network is really the third piece: don’t forget to look at what you’re buying.”

Like most insurance policies, the lower the premium the higher the deductible. For example, in El Paso, Tex., for a couple both age 35, one of the cheapest plans on the federal exchange, offered by Blue Cross and Blue Shield, has a premium of less than $300 a month but an annual deductible of more than $12,000, according to the Times. In the case of a 45-year-old couple purchasing insurance on the federal exchange in Saginaw, Mich., a policy with a premium of $515 a month carries a deductible of $10,000 a year.

Some of the Best Hospitals Are Off Limits
Americans purchasing health insurance on the federal and state exchanges may be in for an even bigger shock when they discover some of the best hospitals in the country out of reach, even when those hospitals were previously available to them under their personal policies. That’s because most of the top hospitals in the country will accept insurance from only one or two companies operating under Obamacare.

Obamacare regulations and government subsidies are likely to make insurance more affordable for millions of Americans, as President Obama and senior aides have repeatedly boasted. But many insurers have responded to Obamacare caps on premiums by offering top-tier hospitals and physicians far less money for services rendered. And they’re responding by strictly limiting the number of policies they will accept.

Watchdog.org  recently looked at the top 18 hospitals nationwide as ranked by U.S. News and World Report for 2013-2014 – contacting each hospital to determine their contracts and policies. The government watchdog group found that many of the best hospitals in the country were simply opting out of Obamacare – much to the detriment of people in search of the best or most specialized health care.

Both Ohio and California have a dozen insurance companies on their exchanges, yet two of the states’ premier hospitals — Cleveland Clinic and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center — have only one company in their respective networks.

A few, such as top rated Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, are mandated under state law to accept all insurance companies. Other than that, the hospital with the largest number of insurance companies is University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland with just four. Fully 11 of the 18 hospitals had just one or two carriers, according to Watchdog.org.

Amid a drive by insurers to limit costs, the majority of insurance plans being sold on the new health care exchanges in New York, Texas and California will not offer patients access to Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City or MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, two top cancer centers, according to the Financial Times.

“We shouldn’t be surprised by this,” Wilensky said. “There was a lot of pressure that exchanges placed on insurance plans to keep premiums low, and the benefits are specified in law for each of the four levels of health care plans. If the benefits are specified and the premiums are pressed low – sometimes lower than the insurance companies thought was appropriate, a major way to try to accommodate that financial pressure is to limit the number of physicians and hospitals.”

“And by limiting the number of physicians and hospitals, you may get those that you include to accept a lower reimbursement,” she added.

Consumers have until Dec. 23 to enroll in new health insurance under Obamacare to qualify for coverage beginning Jan. 1. However, open enrollment will continue through the end of March.

Enroll America, the group leading efforts to enroll Americans in ObamaCare, is facing accusations again that it has violated its tax-exempt nonprofit status by engaging in partisan politics — following the release of a video in which a top official seems to brag about his political connections.

The complaint was filed Friday by the group with the IRS.

In the video, Christopher Tarango, a communications director for the group, says: “I’m doing Enroll America right now. But I’m also, I shouldn’t be saying this, but I’m also helping out with HD 50, so that’s as partisan as it gets.

“There’s a lot of talent that got sucked into Organizing for Action. I mean, there’s a lot of talent that got sucked into Enroll America, but we are all Obama people.”

Tarango was referring to a Texas House race when he says “HD 50,” in the video, secretly record by Project Veritas in an Austin coffee shop on Nov. 8, according to Cause of Action.

Tarango also seems to be telling an actor posing as a Democratic political operative that he might be able to help in a deal to sell ObamaCare applicant information, after first rejecting the notion.

He suggests he knows a high-ranking company official “well enough that, to feel like if we had a few beers, this would not be the craziest conversation that he’s ever heard.”

Cause of Action — a self-described nonprofit, nonpartisan government accountability group — also wrote a letter Nov. 13 to Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott asking him in part to evaluate whether entities such as Enroll America and Battleground Texas have violated the IRS code and his state’s laws.

The letter followed at least one other video by the conservative group Project Veritas and called into question the validity of so-called “navigators” that help Americans sign up for ObamaCare.

“Despite its claims of serving the public good, it appears that Enroll America has abused its tax-exempt status by using donor contributions for political and other impermissible purposes,” the group said Friday.

Cause of Action also argues Tarango’s comments indicate Enroll is “engaging in political activity by coordinating with the pro-President Obama group Organizing for Action, a 501(c)(4) organization.

Battleground Texas is a 527 political action committee. The letter this week to the IRS suggests some people who helped get Obama elected in 2012 are now with that group.

This is the second IRS complaint filed by the Cause of  Action against Enroll American.

The group filed the first complaint in July, asking the IRS to investigate Enroll America’s tax status due to failing to operate for a charitable purpose.

The group purportedly collected $3.8 million in donations just in 2011.

This spring, House Republicans started a probe into Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius soliciting donations from companies her agency might regulate, to help sign up uninsured Americans for ObamaCare.

Sebelius asked charitable foundations, businesses executives, churches and doctors to donate money to Enroll America and other nonprofits that are helping to implement Obama’s health care overhaul.

The agency has said there is a special section within the Public Health Services Act that allows the secretary to solicit financial support for nonprofit organizations conducting public health work.

I have read a number of articles discussing the most recent Hollywood installment of The Hunger Games — Catching Fire — and am astonished that they appear to entirely miss the point of the story.

A recent opinion article on FoxNews.com by Sandra Lee Dixon bemoans the violence against children depicted in the series, and this book in particular, sharing her opinion:

Supporters say the themes that arise are important for the national conversation: the world is not always nice, children need to learn about war and destruction, and artists can help us experience such things vicariously and discuss them. My take: there is more admirable literature that already addresses these themes.

We don’t need the overt violence and the panicked faces of the characters for a coming of age story to teach us to say no to excesses of wealth and power.

Sandra entirely misses the point of the story. It is not to promote a national dialog on violence or the evils of concentrated wealth, or even their destructive influences on society’s children.

Indeed, societies and nations where widespread violence exists are horrible places for all humanity, and especially heinous for children. The nationalization of violence is especially prominent where totalitarian governments control–exactly as depicted in The Hunger Games.

In this story, the democratic republic of the United States of America has been usurped by a totalitarian regime–one which controls every aspect of American’s lives: the economy, health care, food distribution, labor, production, etc.  Does any of this sound familiar? At some point in the story’s past, the government took over total control, dictating where citizens could live, what they could produce, what they could eat, and what activities they could engage in.  Anything familiar yet? There is no way to fight against the government, because all weapons have been taken from the citizens, and only the government can have them.  Anything? How about this–friends of the regime share its power and control of the masses, and have access to the wealth created by the citizens through over-taxation and confiscation of their property.

The bottom line is that the Hunger Games is an accurate portrayal of a controlling totalitarian government and its elite ruling class in our own future if we continue on the path we were currently pursuing. The only question is this: will we rise up and overthrow tyrants as they are in the process of usurping our constitutional form of government, or will we wait until it is too late and the struggle is nearly impossible–as it is in The Hunger Games?

PUBLIUS

Republican lawmakers are pushing back hard against the Obama administration’s decision to delay next year’s open enrollment season for health coverage under ObamaCare until after the 2014 midterm elections.

The Department of Health and Human Services announced Friday it would allow consumers to start signing up for coverage under ObamaCare on Nov. 15, 2014, a month later than originally scheduled. The change does not affect those trying to enroll this year.

Congressional Republicans accused the administration of shifting the dates for political reasons, to hide a spike in 2015 premiums, though information may already be available about 2015 premiums before the elections on Nov. 4.

“That means that if premiums go through the roof in the first year of ObamaCare, no one will know about it until after the election,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said in a statement. “This is clearly a cynical political move by the Obama administration to use extra-regulatory, by any means necessary tools to keep this program afloat and hide key information from voters.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., accused the White House of moving next year’s open enrollment date to shield Democrats up for reelection next year who supported the law.

“The only American consumers this change will help are Democratic politicians who voted for Obamacare, because it delays disclosure of some of the law’s most insidious effects until after the election,” Alexander said in a statement.

He said he plans to introduce legislation that would require insurers to provide Americans with “proper notice” of premium increases before open enrollment period on the exchanges starts.

The administration says the change is to allow insurers more time to prepare and submit premiums.

“This change is good news for consumers, who will have more time to learn about plans before enrolling and an open enrollment period that’s a week longer,” an HHS official told Fox News.

This year, 17 states and Washington, D.C., posted the data publicly ahead of the administration. “We’ll definitely start seeing some premiums earlier from state insurance departments,” said Larry Levitt of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

However, there is one possible way that Democrats could benefit politically. If lighting strikes twice and the website sputters again during the next open enrollment season, that second act would not take place until after the voting is done.

Separately, the administration also announced a small schedule change in this year’s open enrollment season, pushing that deadline to Dec. 23. The administration has rebuffed calls to delay or extend the current enrollment period beyond March 31, 2014.

A new and independent analysis of ObamaCare warns of a ticking time bomb, predicting a second wave of 50 million to 100 million insurance policy cancellations next fall — right before the mid-term elections.

The next round of cancellations and premium hikes is expected to hit employees, particularly of small businesses. While the administration has tried to downplay the cancellation notices hitting policyholders on the individual market by noting they represent a relatively small fraction of the population, the swath of people who will be affected by the shakeup in employer-sponsored coverage will be much broader.

An analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, shows the administration anticipates half to two-thirds of small businesses would have policies canceled or be compelled to send workers onto the ObamaCare exchanges. They predict up to 100 million small and large business policies could be canceled next year.

“The impact I’m mostly worried about is on small young, entrepreneurial firms that will suddenly face much higher health insurance premiums if they want to offer health insurance to their employees,” said AEI resident scholar Stan Veuger. “I think for a lot of other businesses … they can just send their employees to the exchanges or offer them a fixed subsidy every month to buy health insurance themselves.”

Under the health care law, businesses with fewer than 50 workers do not have to provide health coverage. But if they do, the policies will still have to meet the benefit standards set by ObamaCare.

As reported by AEI’s Scott Gottlieb, some businesses got around this by renewing their policies before the end of 2013. But the relief is temporary, and they are expected to have to offer in-compliance plans for 2015. According to Gottlieb, that means beginning in October 2014 the cancellation notices will start to go out.

Then, businesses will have to either find a new plan — which could be considerably more expensive — or send workers onto the ObamaCare exchanges.

For workers, their experience could mirror that of the 5 million or so on the individual market who already received cancellation notices because their plans did not meet new standards under the Affordable Care Act.

President Obama announced last week that insurance companies could offer out-of-compliance plans for another year. But that only means the cancellation notices will resume late next year.

The business community has already been hit with another side effect from ObamaCare. Because the law will require businesses with more than 50 full-time workers to offer health coverage, there are reports that companies are shifting employees to part-time status to avoid hitting the threshold.

Though the administration describes these accounts as anecdotal — and has already delayed the employer mandate by a year — studies suggest otherwise.

The International Franchise Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have studied the impact and say the president’s health care law has resulted in higher costs and fewer full-time positions.

A survey showed 31 percent of franchise businesses, and 12 percent of non-franchise businesses, have already reduced worker hours. It also showed 27 percent of franchise businesses, and 12 percent of non-franchise businesses, have replaced full-time workers with part-time employees.