(Jdg
2:16 NKJ) ¶ Nevertheless, the LORD raised up judges who delivered
them out of the hand of those who plundered them.
As there
is a parallel between the first forty years of Israel under the Law and the
first forty years of the Church under Grace alone (1st Cor. 10.1-4,5,6-10,11,12-13).
There is
a parallel between the era of the Judges in Israel and the era of the
post-apostolic Church (Jdg 21.25 1Sam 3.1),
Direct
revelation is now complete, And the Lord raises up leaders to deliver His
people from the hand of those who plunder them.
In the
last century many saw Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Lech Walesa, John Paul
II, and Billy Graham as such.
Today a
new crisis has arisen, in the form of the Affordable [Health] Care Act. (Much
more correctly called ObamaCare, since it seems to mirror the moral values of
our president.) (
Today
many are praying that the Lord will "raise up judges" to deliver
Americans from the plundering through exorbitant taxes and exorbitant
insurance payments and exorbitant deductibles and exorbitant co-payments and
excessive paperwork and excessive internet frustration, and excessive continuity
of care disruption, and excessive rotten treatment, and excessive suffering and
excessive disability and excessive early death, of our president's Affordable
[Health] Care Act juggernaut. (Every word of the augmented official
title of ObamaCare is an outrageous lie. It makes us more liable to bankruptcy,
less healthy, and less cared for. And it is not an "Act" in
accordance with the spirit of the Constitution and the rules of the Congress.)
But
perhaps a new star may be arising in the West. Many see Nebraska U.S. Senate
candidate Ben Sasse as the Great White (In a non-racist sense, of course, Any
reference to Jess Willard and the womanizing Jack Johnson is co-incidental,
naturally,) Hope who will deliver us from the inordinate afflictions of our
president's pet project..
ObamaCare
Nemesis Ben Sasse links: (Text from campaign and interview copied
below list of links.)
Home . Sasse
For Nebraska . com / About - Ben http://bit.ly/1ktK0mz
Sasse
Interview - Conservative Intel .com - http://bit.ly/KPDiYB
|| Ctl-f sasse
ObamaCare
Nemesis - National Review cover story - http://bit.ly/1hDq0Mq
Ben
Sasse from Wikipedia http://bit.ly/1hDC1Bt
[National
Review] ordains Sasse the next big thing - Conservative Intel .com - http://bit.ly/1eKzvnY
About
Ben [/] Ben Sasse is a fifth-generation Nebraskan who fixes broken
institutions.
When
announced as president of the 130-year-old Midland University in 2009, Ben was
37, making him one of the youngest chief executives in American higher
education. At the time, Midland was on the verge of closing. Since then, Ben's
hometown college has been Nebraska's fastest-growing school four years in a
row.
Ben
regards the six summers he spent walking beans and detassling corn as core
lessons in the value of hard work – and the toughest jobs he’s ever held. After
Trinity Lutheran Elementary and Fremont High School, he was recruited to
wrestle at Harvard, and then quarterbacked the football team at Oxford. He
earned a Ph.D. at Yale, where his dissertation on American conservatism during
the Cold War won both the Field Prize and the George Washington Egleston Award.
He began
his business career with the Boston Consulting Group, and subsequently joined
McKinsey and Company, advising leaders in times of crisis. He has helped turn
around companies in industries ranging from airlines to manufacturers, and has
challenged failed strategies in organizations from the FBI to the government of
Iraq. An expert on healthcare delivery, he has spent much of the last decade
advising hospital boards and healthcare providers on becoming more
patient-focused.
Ben
served as start-up chief of staff for Congressman Jeff Fortenberry, and was
appointed to multiple posts by President George W. Bush. Most recently, he was
Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which
is unfortunately the federal government’s largest agency. In that role, he
crusaded tirelessly against the false promises and fiscal unsustainability of
entitlement spending.
One of
the nation's leading critics of Obamacare, Ben speaks, writes, and appears
regularly on television to advocate for repealing and replacing this failed
2,300-page law. His market-oriented solutions place patients and health
providers at the center of a system that reduces health costs for families and
taxpayers.
Now in
his fifth year at the helm of Midland, Ben built an entrepreneurial culture at
what is now Nebraska's fastest-growing college. Since his installation, Midland
has created a four-year graduation guarantee, launched an MBA program, and
added a performing arts initiative and eleven new varsity athletic teams. Midland
is now rescuing the bankrupt Dana College, aiming to serve even more Nebraska
kids and to revitalize the historic campus in Blair.
Ben and
Melissa Sasse, married for 18 years, homeschool Elizabeth (12), Alexandra (9),
and Breck (2) less than a mile from where Ben grew up. Their cause is to ensure
that the America we leave our grandchildren is as free and as great as the
America we were blessed to inherit from our grandparents
From: Home
. Sasse For Nebraska . com / About - Ben http://bit.ly/1ktK0mz
Sasse
Interview - Conservative Intel .com - http://bit.ly/KPDiYB
|| Ctl-f sasse
Ben
Sasse is an underdog as a U.S. Senate candidate. He has some things going for
him. He’s a turnaround-businessman and a former Bush administration HHS
assistant secretary. He is a wonkish conservative with a deep knowledge of
Obamacare — someone who claims to have actually read the entire law. But Sasse
has never run for elective office before. He has almost no name recognition in
Nebraska. And his current position as president of a liberal arts university
isn’t exactly your typical springboard to political office.
What’s
more, Sasse is now facing one of the state’s most formidable Republican
politicians – Shane Osborn, a military hero and a former state Treasurer (whose
interview with Conservative Intel will go up here later this week).
It
wasn’t surprising a few months ago when Sasse showed up as an asterisk in our
poll of the open-seat Nebraska Senate race. But he has since earned our
attention – and everyone else’s. He outraised the rest of the #NESen field by a
country mile, setting a new GOP fundraising record for an open seat ($815,000)
in the first two months of his candidacy. And he raised more than half his cash
from inside the state.
Sasse
made news again recently when he received the endorsement of the Senate
Conservatives’ Fund – a controversial group for its role in the government
shutdown and its decision to assist a primary challenge against Senate Minority
Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
What
follows is an edited transcript of our interview with Sasse.
+++
Conservative
Intel: Tell me a little bit about what would possess someone in your position,
who hasn’t run for office before, to take the plunge? What’s on your mind and
why do you feel the need to do this?
Ben
Sasse: I am worried about the world we’re leaving to our kids and grandkids. I
think we’ve got a crisis in the country and I think there’s a crisis in the
conservative movement. I think we have a moral obligation to leave America as
great, as free, and as opportunity filled for our kids and grandkids as we
inherited from our grandparents, and I don’t think that’s the path we’re on. As
President Reagan said, we’re always only one generation away from the
extinction of freedom. We have to teach it to our kids. We’re not doing that
right now. We’re creating a dependency culture.
President
Obama advances visions of government, which are just completely opposed to most
of the American experiment, the American idea, the nature of the American work
ethic. And we have a conservative movement right now without a lot of
leadership able to explain in a winsome way what’s glorious about the American
tradition. We are the greatest country in the world, not because we have the
greatest bureaucrats, but because we believe in freedom and our people actually
build stuff.
CI: Tell
me a little bit more about your background as a turnaround guy. Tell me about
Midland University.
Sasse:
Most of my career has been doing private sector business stuff. I’ve worked for
a number of private equity firms, and usually I like to work in sectors that
have lots of chaos. So I typically do three to six-month crisis projects. That
has led to some not-for-profit work in the past and some governmental work. I
had two stops in government work with President Bush. I was chief of staff for
legal policy…not long after 9/11. And I was an assistant secretary at HHS for
the last couple years of the Bush administration.
But my
wife and I are raising our kids near where I grew up and in the spring and
summer of 2009 this 130-year-old college in our town was going to declare
bankruptcy. My grandpa was – didn’t go to college – farm kid who when he came
back from World War II worked his way up from finance clerk to become a vice
president of finance and development at this little college in my town, a
Lutheran liberal arts school – 130 years old. And in 2009, they just had a
number of crises. They lost 40-ish percent of their enrollment. They were
losing four million dollars a year, which is a huge number.
And they
asked me to take over the presidency, and I turned them down a couple of times.
I’m not an academic administrator, and the speed with which I usually try to
fix stuff, I didn’t think that would necessarily sit with an academic
environment. They had a big enough crisis that the board kept leaning on me to
consider it, and made it clear that the crisis was big enough that I could
actually do some real stuff and try to fix it. So we went in and did a pretty
substantial turnaround. Now we’re the fastest growing school in the Midwest.
The second fastest growing school in Nebraska has grown about 14 percent in the
last four years – we’ve grown two-and-a-half-fold. We ended tenure. We have a
faculty that really buys into a lot of accountability measures for both
students and for improving teaching quality…
We had
to buy out a lot of faculty at first because enrollment had fallen off a cliff,
so we bought out a lot of faculty because of our undersubscribed nature. But
since then we’ve had two years of – I I don’t know it for a fact, but I think
we have probably had the largest two annual raises in the history of the
institution in the last two years….
…We’ve
been the fastest growing school in the state four years in a row, and we’ve
grown from 590 students to almost 1,300 students in the last four years. And we
did this as a team. We built a really good team. All my vice presidents are
rock stars. We’ve – we’re a nimble, small college, which is a pretty rare
thing.
CI: Let
me ask you another question about something you’re – you probably think of as a
success – the fundraising haul that you brought in. I think a lot of people
were very surprised to see you raise that much money. Can we expect those,
kinds of, totals going forward?
Sasse:
It’s a fair question. I don’t know about any of that stuff. I’m not a
politician and I’ve never done this before. We’re just talking about the
meaning of America, and the greatness of this country, and what the American
work ethic means, and how we need to recover a shared story about what we can
be as a people.
Right
now a lot of our people are depressed that the country’s on a wrong track
politically and culturally. And we’re not dealing with big issues. We’re
screaming at each other all the time and we’re talking about what America means
and we’ve had this unbelievably positive response….
CI: The
conservative movement is definitely in a fractious state, with what’s happened
in Washington recently. What’s your view of that whole conflagration that just
occurred and where would you have viewed yourself as being? What side would you
have been on?
Sasse:
Yeah, I think business as usual doesn’t work. And when I listen to the people
in Nebraska that’s the main thing I hear them talking about. I don’t hear the
people in Nebraska diving into great detail about legislative tactics and all
the stuff – with no disrespect to journalists, who have an important job to
translate these issues for voters who have day jobs that need to be putting
food on the table for their kids. But they’re not talking about legislative
strategy. They’re talking about whether or not we’re sounding alarm bells. And
I’m on the side of sounding alarm bells.
We’re in
a critical moment in the history of the nation and Obamacare is a disastrous
piece of legislation. It’s not implementable, but when it fails we’re going to
ultimately do something next. And the question is do we drift into a
single-payer system or do conservatives actually have some ideas?
Right
now it feels like after Obamacare feels single-payer is the most likely outcome
and I think we have to do lots of different stuff than we’re doing right now.
So I’m on the side of sounding the alarm.
CI: You
say you have actually read the whole Obamacare Bill. You’re a former HHS
assistant secretary.
Sasse:
Correct.
CI: What
does it look like when Obamacare gets repealed? Conceptually, how do you do
that without causing the same disruption to people that they’re causing by
starting this program?
Sasse:
That’s a very fair question. And let’s acknowledge that there is no good
solution from where we sit right now. Health care was a mess before Obamacare
was passed; health care is a mess as they’re implementing it, and healthcare
will be bumpy when we actually transition out of this centralized system to
something that actually delivers improved quality at a lower cost and allows
more people to have access to insurance. It’ll be a bumpy transition state, but
let’s start with what the trouble actually is.
The
problem four and five years ago – when Senators Clinton and Obama were debating
in the 2008 primary what healthcare reform plan they were in favor of.
Ironically, you could just run sound bytes right now of, then candidate, Obama
ran against the actual plan of now President Obama – Mrs. Clinton loses the
race, but gets her healthcare law implemented.
The
problem then wasn’t that we had too little government in healthcare; it was
that we already had too much. The reason that a lot of farmers, and a lot of
ranchers, and a lot of small businesspeople in Nebraska are uninsured is
because the individual insurance market is unstable because of overregulation
by the government and because of tax code biases in favor of people who work
for large firms rather than farmers and ranchers. So a lot of what’s broken in
healthcare was already the government’s doing. I don’t deny that it’s going to
be disrupted and bumpy to get back out of it, but this system won’t work. We
can do better than this.
CI:
Right, right. Now, do you have an opinion, or are you familiar at all with the
Republican Study Committee proposal for replacing Obamacare? Congressmen Phil
Roe and Steve Scalise came up with something in the House. Are you familiar
with it?
Sasse: A
little bit. I think there are four or five plans out there that different
conservatives have and we ultimately need to coalesce around some of those, and
there are some good ideas in congressman Roe’s plan, no doubt. We’ve got a
movement where we didn’t talk about this – which was a real problem to the
American people four and five years ago. To be totally clear I’m not
criticizing them at all; I’m backing up to a larger point.
CI:
Yeah.
Sasse:
There are a lot of health policy people – people interested in health policy
nationally who couldn’t tell you anything about any of the conservative ideas.
We can complain about media bias all we want, but that’s also because the
conservative moment has done a horrible job of articulating a constructive
conservative governing vision. So I agree with the, sort of, premise of your
question – that there are conservative plans out there, but we can’t
communicate them as a movement in a way that anybody regards as credible right
now.
We got a
lot of work to do to demonstrate to the American people that we acknowledge
that there are big problem. And just because we believe there are big problems
doesn’t mean we accept the Democrats’ premise that the government can fix it
all centrally.
CI: Now,
to move back to where this was coming from – the crisis in conservatism. You
just received the endorsement of the Senate Conservatives Fund. They’re a bit
of a controversial group now because previously they didn’t go up against
incumbents, but they’re running against the Senate minority leader at the
moment in Kentucky. And obviously, they were very much involved in this recent
fight. Where do you – you’re happy to have their endorsement; I would assume?
Sasse:
Absolutely. We’re grateful for a broad coalition of people coming together to
support us and know that Obamacare does need to be repealed, defunded, delayed
– all of the above – and replaced with something that actually works for the
American people. So we’re very grateful for their support of the Senate
Conservatives Fund and a lot of other groups that we are courting, and chief
among them the broad cross-section of conservative coalition folks in Nebraska.
CI:
Where would you say the biggest disagreements are between yourself and Shane
Osborn?
Sasse:
I’m not running against anybody. I’m running for the future of our kids and
grandkids…..What I do is try to bring people together and solve problems. I’ve
been doing business turnaround stuff for 20 years, and I think that the
leadership of both of these parties in Washington – they don’t know how to
solve problems in ways that actually present the American people with anything
better than zero sum games.
I think
[the recent budget deal] is a perfect example. It’s outrage that we’re led to a
final choice – the night of the debt-limit approaching – that you have to
choose between yet another mere kicking of the can down the road, or continuing
a dysfunctional shutdown. I mean, it’s a bad choice and there are better
options and we can find better solutions that than.
And
that’s what I’m about, and that’s what this campaign’s about, and that’s what
we’re doing. The voters in Nebraska are going to make their choice and I hope
that we have an issue-centric policy-serious conversation about the future of
America.
CI: Does
the United States go to war too often? What was your opinion of the Syria
conflict and whether we should have gotten involved?
Sasse: I
think that the American people rightly understand that the first duty of
government is to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic. The government
has an obligation to be prepared to fight a war on two fronts to keep this
country safe. We have the greatest fighting men and women the world has ever
known. And the American people want, and the people in Nebraska want, to make
investments to do that. And then they want to be incredibly reticent ever to
use force unless you absolutely have to.
It has
to be a compelling national security interest. There has to be clarity about
how there’s an actual military objective that’s definable and then you go in
with sufficient force to actually get it done and then you get back out.
I have
not heard the President make any compelling case to the American people about Syria.
And what I hear the people in Nebraska saying is, that if we would go to war in
Syria why wouldn’t be at war in 20 other places around the globe at the same
time?
CI:
Right.
Sasse:
He hasn’t made the case for why this is a compelling American interest and how
it differs from all the other places where people try to use militaries for
do-gooder stuff. And that’s not what we want to do.
CI:
Thank you very much for your time.
From: Sasse
Interview - Conservative Intel .com - http://bit.ly/KPDiYB
|| Ctl-f sasse
I2C
140110a Jdg 2v16 Ocare Nemesis / I2C / 140110 1119 / Judges 2:16 Ocare Nemesis
