Would you know what to do if you, with only a knife and your wits, encountered a bear in the woods? Meet Mr. Elbert Guillory, state senator from Louisiana, who would suggest that you get in close, inside the bear’s paws and under its chin.

Along with being a bear-killing state senator, Mr. Guillory is notable for urging African-Americans to pull away from the Democratic Party, especially Louisiana’s vulnerable Senator Mary Landrieu. “While you dig through the couch looking for gas money,” admonishes Mr. Guilliory, “she flies around in private jets funded by taxpayer dollars. Mary hasn’t helped us at all.”

Elbert Guillory, born in 1944 in the segregated South, grew up under Jim Crow laws. He now calls the Democrats the “party of Jim Crow,” stressing that today’s welfare state is a product of a continued racist legacy and that President Obama’s attitude to the plight of the black community harbors a “malevolent” indifference.

Mr. Guillory is intent in hammering the message home to Louisiana’s African-American community, of whom 93% cast their ballots for Democrats in 2012: “Our self-initiative and self-reliance have been sacrificed in exchange for allegiance to our overseers who control us by making us dependent on them.”

Read more about Elbert Guilliory here in NRO and see Mr. Guilliory in the following video.

The Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell goes three for three in this compelling expose.

1. The crowd in Washington benefits enormously from a complicated tax system, a Byzantine regulatory regime, and a bloated budget.
2. The Republicans will take the Senate.
3. Nothing will change in Washington

Until We The People force the change needed. And the required revolution will necessarily involve some unpleasantries, as the French are about to find out. You see, in France a third party, the far right Front National, is setting up for a takeover in the next French presidential election. Socialist President Francois Hollande, if it is possible, has an approval rating of about half Obama’s grizzly, election-losing rating. And potential #2 candidate Nicolas Sarkozy was so rotten as president last time around it is hard to envision even the French putting him back in office. As a radical nationalist, anti-EU, anti-Muslim third party candidate, Marine Le Pen is making a whole lot of noise. Debbie and I have seen this coming for over four years and have written regularly on the astounding ascendancy of such a polarizing far right candidate.

From the archives. Originally posted January 24, 2014.

Are you aware that under ObamaCare more than $1 trillion of taxpayer funds go to insurance companies? For what?

Why subsidies for insurance companies to help people sign up to buy their products—products that by law citizens and companies are required to purchase. Here Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner explains the ugly meltdown of O’Care.

To avoid the death spiral, the Obama team estimated that it needs roughly 38 percent of people buying coverage via the exchanges to be under age 35. But data the administration released this month suggest that it’s turning out to be just 24 percent so far.

Data from individual states appears equally troubling. In New York, only 27 percent of exchange enrollees are 35 or younger, while 53 percent are over age 45. In New Jersey, 35-and-unders made up only 23 percent of enrollees; in Connecticut, less than 20 percent.

Oh, and a Reuters survey finds that new enrollees are also less healthy than ObamaCare’s designers hoped, too. Humana, one of the nation’s largest insurers, reports that so far enrollment in its exchange-based plans has been far “more adverse than previously expected.”

Worried about the insurance companies taking a bath on this? Don’t: ObamaCare’s designers set up a $25 billion reinsurance fund to protect insurers from losses due to adverse selection, funded by a $63-a-year tax . . . er, fee on all health policies.

So the “death spiral” may well leave ObamaCare exchanges covering far fewer Americans than planned, but the insurance industry will be OK because we’ll essentially be bailing it out.

This on top of the fact that ObamaCare already directs more than $1 trillion of taxpayer funds to insurance companies in the form of subsidies to help people buy their products — products that the law mandates that people and companies purchase. You can’t say that ObamaCare has no winners.

But those winners won’t include most of the rest of us, who’ll end up paying higher taxes and higher premiums, while getting less health care.

Listen as closely as you like on Tuesday, but I suspect the president won’t be saying much about this. And, really, can you blame him?

Related video:

Monica Crowley in the Washington Times asks an important question: Why are the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommending mandatory quarantine for personnel returning from Ebola-struck regions in Africa, yet the Obama administration calls three weeks in quarantine “overreach”?

Maybe we need hazmat suits to protect us from our leaders.

The president has two primary jobs: to protect and defend the Constitution, and to protect and defend the American people from all enemies foreign and domestic. At the state level, governors have the same two fundamental obligations.

The Ebola virus is a unique threat: It’s highly contagious, doesn’t discriminate in choosing its victims, kills about 70 percent of those it infects, and currently there is no vaccine.

It is a clear and present danger to the American people.

So when President Obama refused to institute basic, common-sense precautions to protect and defend us from the Ebola contagion — such as a temporary travel ban from Ebola-stricken West Africa and mandatory quarantine for medical workers and others who’ve had direct contact with Ebola patients — three governors took on the job themselves. After all, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had encouraged state health departments to devise their own plans for dealing with Ebola patients.

In a joint news conference last week in which they denounced the “honor system” of self-monitoring, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced that their states would require mandatory isolation for returning health care workers. Illinois Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn then quickly instituted his own state’s quarantine. Several other politically diverse states also added quarantines. A nervous public welcomed the moves.

The White House did not.

Mr. Obama and his team, realizing how impotent he appeared in the face of Messrs. Cuomo’s and Christie’s action, began a full-court press to get them to reverse course.

They dispatched Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to question the “science” of mandatory quarantines and to argue that they could end up dissuading volunteers from traveling to West Africa. These new explanations appeared only after the administration’s first stated reason for opposing a travel ban — that we’d be unable to fly medical personnel in and out of the hot zone — made no sense.

The pressure on Messrs. Cuomo and Christie intensified when the first returning health care worker, nurse Kaci Hickox, was placed in an isolation tent after landing at Newark International Airport. Ms. Hickox — a CDC employee — threw a fit. Saying she had been repeatedly tested, remained asymptomatic and was subjected to “inhumane” treatment, she threatened to sue.

To no one’s surprise, Mr. Cuomo immediately caved. His new policy required only at-home quarantine with twice-daily medical visits. He also announced that New York taxpayers would foot the bill for any lost wages incurred by the quarantined.

When Mr. Christie refused to do a similar about-face, the political gun turrets turned on him. Given that they were not also turned on the other governor who stood firm — Illinois Democrat Pat Quinn — a cynic might suggest that Christie had been set up for an attack. He is, after all, a leading potential Republican candidate for president, and his quarantine action made him look decisive, strong, authoritative.

So the administration swung into action, calling his new regulations “overreach.” Never mind that he and Mr. Cuomo had announced them together, or that Mr. Quinn had announced them as well.

That is Pat Buchanan’s forecast and my count as well. For me the big news here is that Obama will not get to put another liberal on the Supreme Court.

As it stands today, Republicans will add seats in the House and recapture the Senate on Tuesday.

However, the near-certainty is that those elections will be swiftly eclipsed by issues of war, peace, immigration and race, all of which will be moved front and center this November.

Consider. If repeated leaks from investigators to reporters covering the Ferguson story are true, there may be no indictment of officer Darren Wilson, the cop who shot Michael Brown.

Should that happen, militant voices are already threatening, “All hell will break loose.” Police in the city and 90-some municipalities in St. Louis County, as well as the state police, are preparing for major violence.

…

And the president himself will invite a social explosion if he proceeds with White House plans for an executive amnesty for millions of illegal aliens residing in the United States.

…

There are also two simmering issues of foreign policy likely to come to a boil and split Congress and country before Christmas.

First is America’s deepening involvement in the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, for which Obama has never received Congressional authorization. When Congress returns for its lame-duck session, opponents of this latest Mideast war will be demanding that a new war resolution be debated and voted upon.

…

Lastly, Nov. 24 is the deadline for the negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program. If Obama decides that an agreement is acceptable to him and our European allies, and moves by executive action to lift some sanctions on Iran, he could face a rebellion in this city and on Capitol Hill.

Yet, should no agreement be reached, and the talks with Iran break off, there will be mounted a major drive by the War Party for the United States to exercise the military option to resolve the issue.

New battles at home, new wars abroad — this remains, unfortunately, the future prospect as well as the old reality.

With midterm elections just days away and some predictions pointing to a strong showing by Republican candidates, what would a Republican-controlled Congress actually mean?

Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner warns that we should not expect big changes should Republicans make major gains. ObamaCare is not going to be repealed, and there will be no big entitlement or tax reform. Barack Obama will still be the president with the power of the bully pulpit, the veto pen, and executive order.

As discouraging as the above may sound, Mr. Tanner writes that there are, however, many bright spots.  The Keystone pipeline becomes a lead-pipe cinch. Energy-related bills should get bipartisan support. And substantial changes could be made to O’Care, like repealing the medical device tax and the much-postponed employer mandate.

Should the GOP takes control of the Senate, voters can expect the direction of the political discourse to be about a budget resolution, lower taxes, and economic growth. Read more here from Michael Tanner on why control of the legislature process is a reason to be optimistically cheerful.