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Dead Legislation Walking
The Foundry, Heritage.org
Another day, another stream of health care fantasy from the White House. A quick look at two health care events from yesterday, one in Glenside, Pennsylvania, and the other in Tawas City, Michigan, clearly exposes the yawing gap between the Obama administration’s health care rhetoric and cold hard legislative reality. First in Glenside, President Barack Obama turned up the volume on his already tired “final push” for health care reform. In addition to the usual litany of false claims about the legislation in Congress (in fact, you don’t get to keep your doctor, it isn’t paid for, it doesn’t reduce costs) President Obama also repeated his new line from his doctors-in-lab-coats address last week:
We have now incorporated almost every single serious idea from across the political spectrum about how to contain the rising cost of health care … Our cost-cutting measures mirror most of the proposals in the current Senate bill…
But, as we pointed out last week, there is one not-so-minor difference between the Senate bill and the President’s new proposal: the Senate bill actually exists. Now, Democrats may be telling their conservative counterparts that they will have reconciliation legislative text in front of the Budget Committee by tomorrow, but don’t hold your breath.
The “fixes” that the White House is promising wavering House Democrats they will make all sound easy at first glance: 1) scaling back the tax on high-end health insurance policies; 2) closing the Medicare D loophole; 3) boosting insurance subsidies; 4) increasing Medicaid payments; and 5) fixing the Cornhusker Kickback. But when you take a second look, you see that all of these “fixes” will cost more money.
Just look at the Cornhusker Kickback, which the President chose to address, not by taking away Nebraska’s special Medicaid payments, but by extending those extra Medicaid payments to every state! Every single item in the President’s proposal either increases spending or reduces new revenues. And he didn’t put forward any way to pay for them. If passing health reform were as easy as giving away free candy, Obamacare would be law already. Finding a way to pay for all these fixes is going to be just as difficult as every earlier effort to pay for this bill. So don’t expect any solutions anytime soon.
And we haven’t even mentioned “abortion” yet, which brings us to Tawas City where Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) hosted his own health care townhall. Now the Associated Press headline may read “Stupak: Health bill abortion fight can be resolved” but then the AP actually reports “Rep. Bart Stupak said he expects to resume talks with House leaders this week…” In other words, there is no agreement yet. And what kind of timeline is Stupak looking at for such an agreement? WJRT reports:
“[Stupak]’s confident a bill will pass sometime this year.” “Sometime this year” is a bit longer of a timeframe than the White House deadline of next Thursday. But even more importantly, look at the process Stupak suggests for final passage: “According Stupak, until the House and the Senate bills and the president’s proposals become one piece of legislation, health care will remain in limbo.” Considering that everyone agrees that abortion cannot be fixed in reconciliation, Stupak’s position is a total rejection of the White House’s current plan to have the House pass the Senate bill now on the promise that the Senate might come back and try and fix it sometime in the future. Stupak clearly wants “one piece of legislation,” and the only way to accomplish that is to scrap the current Senate bill and start over. Read article.
The end of the road for Barack Obama?
Simon Heffer, Telegraph.co.uk
It is a universal political truth that administrations do not begin to fragment when things are going well: it only happens when they go badly, and those who think they know better begin to attack those who manifestly do not. The descent of Barack Obama's regime, characterised now by factionalism in the Democratic Party and talk of his being set to emulate Jimmy Carter as a one-term president, has been swift and precipitate. It was just 16 months ago that weeping men and women celebrated his victory over John McCain in the American presidential election. If they weep now, a year and six weeks into his rule, it is for different reasons.
Despite the efforts of some sections of opinion to talk the place up, America is mired in unhappiness, all the worse for the height from which Obamania has fallen. The economy remains troublesome. There is growth – a good last quarter suggested an annual rate of as high as six per cent, but that figure is probably not reliable – and the latest unemployment figures, last Friday, showed a levelling off. Yet 15 million Americans, or 9.7 per cent of the workforce, have no job. Many millions more are reduced to working part-time. Whole areas of the country, notably in the north and on the eastern seaboard, are industrial wastelands.
"Obama's big problem," a senior Democrat told me, "is that four times as many people watch Fox News as watch CNN." The Fox network is a remarkable cultural phenomenon, which almost shocks those of us from a country where a technical rule of impartiality is applied in the broadcast media. With little rest, it pours out rage 24 hours a day: its message is of the construction of the socialist state, the hijacking of America by "progressives" who now dominate institutions, the indoctrination of children, the undermining of religion and the expropriation of public money for these nefarious projects. The public loves it, and it is manifestly stirring up political activism against Mr Obama, and also against those in the Republican Party who are not deemed conservatives. However, it is arguable whether the now-reorganising Right is half as effective in its assault on the President as some of Mr Obama's own party are.
Mr Obama benefited in his campaign from an idiotic level of idolatry, in which most of the media participated with an astonishing suspension of cynicism. The sound of the squealing of brakes is now audible all over the American press. Read article.
Romney: Obama is another Jimmy Carter
Thomas Burr, Salt Lake Tribune.com
Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Friday that President Barack Obama is hurting, not helping, the economy in a way not seen "since the days of Jimmy Carter."
Speaking to the National Press Club as part of a media blitz launching his new book, Romney said that Obama has put too much focus on health care reform and not enough on jobs.
Threats to raise taxes on capital gains and add a tax on carbon emissions, Romney added, along with rising deficits also are thwarting the economy.
"These are the types of things that have led to the reaction in the private sector that says this is a frightening time," Romney said. "And rather than encouraging the private sector to grow and add jobs, it has had exactly the opposite effect that the president might have intended. I think this has been the most anti-investment, anti-entrepreneur, anti-employment, anti-job agenda since the days of Jimmy Carter."
Romney pitched his new book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, at the Friday event a week before he appears in Salt Lake City for a March 13 speech at the Calvin L. Rampton Salt Palace Convention Center.
The former Massachusetts governor, who oversaw the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, said that Obama has toured the world apologizing for U.S. actions when he should be talking about how great the country is and how it has helped other nations. Read article.
Democrats Seek Scapegoats In Terror War
Bradley Blakeman, FoxNews.com via StupidFrogs.org
Despite what the president wants Democrats in Congress try to target intelligence agents as the fight over how to wage the War on Terror continues.
President Obama has repeatedly promised not to second guess the interrogation methods, or seek to punish interrogators, who were acting in good faith when following orders while questioning terrorists and enemy combatants captured and detained during the Bush administration.
Recently, Democratic lawmakers -- in direct contradiction to what the president has said about the issue (not wanting to “look back,” etc.) -- have begun searching for scapegoats.
There is no doubt that the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress have fundamental differences with the prior administration about how to treat terrorists. They see the larger “War on Terror” as a law enforcement action as opposed to a true act of war.
Now it appears that Democrats want and need scalps to hold high as they seek to deflect attention away from their disastrous decision to try those responsible for 9/11 in civilian federal court as just blocks from Ground Zero. So whose scalps do they want? Well, they know that they cannot go after former President Bush, Vice President Cheney or any ex-presidential appointees so they are trying to target intelligence agents who were just doing their jobs.
The men and women Democrats now seek to demonize are heroes. Read article.
Why Obama Defies the Public on Health Care
Byron York. Townhall.com
"There have been a lot of comments from every Republican about the polls," President Obama said near the end of the Feb. 25 White House summit on healthcare reform. "What's interesting is when you poll people about the individual elements in each of these bills, they're all for them."
What Obama was addressing was a dilemma that drives Democrats crazy. Polls show the public supports some parts of the Democratic national healthcare-reform plan, but adamantly opposes the comprehensive bill now dying a slow death on Capitol Hill.
Why do people support some elements of the bill while opposing the bill overall? Some Democrats blame Republican misinformation. Some believe it's because the bill isn't yet a reality; people would love it, they say, if only it were passed. Others say the public just doesn't know what is best.
Few Democrats can accept the possibility that voters are telling them their whole approach is wrong. Big, comprehensive legislative proposals just make people nervous.
"We don't do comprehensive well," Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander said at the health summit. "We've watched the comprehensive, economy-wide cap and trade. We've watched the comprehensive immigration bill ... we've watched the comprehensive healthcare bill. And they fall of their own weight." Read article.
Obama versus Insurers and the People
David Limbaugh.com
President Barack Obama's obsessive, opportunistic demonization of insurance companies in his quest to pass his not-yet-written health care proposal is growing tiresome. Aren't you getting sick of a president attacking American citizens and businesses as if they -- not Obama's beloved government -- were the enemy?
His repeated implication that insurance companies are the primary reason for rising health care costs is politically expedient, but it's still untrue. Government is the main culprit.
Throughout his yearlong push for Obamacare, he has called insurance companies every name in the book. He has blamed them for soaring costs, bludgeoned them for taking profits, condemned their executives' salaries and savaged them for denying coverage for pre-existing conditions.
He even says insurers are the final arbiters of who gets care and who doesn't: "And insurance companies freely ration health care based on who's sick and who's healthy, who can pay and who can't."
Obama has framed the entire debate as if it were an insurance problem. In his theatrical speech on March 3 -- while flanked from all sides by white-coated props -- he said, "We began our push to reform health insurance last March," as if the thrust of his health care efforts has been to rein in insurers and little else.
Though Obama surely hates insurance companies, we all know he is up to much more than just punishing them. This is about a government takeover, even if it takes several incremental steps. Vilifying insurers sells better than glorifying government to a center-right nation generally suspicious of government. Read article.
Al Gore ClimateGate: Mistakes - Not Just a Few
Maggie's Notebook.Blogspot.com
A hugely gaseous polluter, former Vice President Al Gore, does more to pollute in a single day than the average American does in an entire year - more than 20 times the national average. And that is only his carbon footprint measured by electrical usage.
But Gore buys carbon offsets to cover his footprint. In other words, he pays some amount figured to value a ton of carbon emissions, and whomever he buys the carbon offset (carbon credit) from, pays young boys in third world countries to plant trees in that amount, or something similar. If the trees die, are burned off, plowed under, or the money for trees magically ends up in someone's pocket, nothing is offsetting anything.
Under the radar is Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). While on the Board of the charitable Joyce Foundation, Barack Obama helped award more than $1 million in grants to test the viability of a carbon credit market, and then to launch the privately-owned concern. Gore's partner, Maurice Strong, (more about him a few paragraphs down) is on the Board of CCX. Obama's Cap and Trade legislation will likely be a boon to CCX. Maybe it's a Chicago-thing.
He says it is "worth noting" that scientists "probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century," whatever the word "underestimated" means to him. The oceans are not rising. In 2008, soon-to-be president, Barack Obama said "this was the moment the oceans began to slow...., but no, the oceans never began to rise. The claims of rising oceans have been withdrawn. Nature Magazine published the article making the claims, and now, for the first ever, have retracted the data. Read article.
Reform, on Ice
Editorial, NY Times.com
President Obama gave immigration reform only one vague sentence in his State of the Union address. Despite that, and the poisonous stalemate on Capitol Hill, the White House and Democratic Congressional leaders insist that they are still committed to presenting a comprehensive reform bill this year — one that would clamp down on the border and workplace, streamline legal immigration and bring 12 million illegal immigrants out of the shadows.
The country needs to confront the issue, to lift the fear that pervades immigrant communities, to better harness the energy of immigrant workers, to protect American workers from off-the-books competition. What’s been happening as the endless wait for reform drags on has been ugly.
The administration has doubled down on the Bush-era enforcement strategy, unleashing the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local law enforcement agencies and setting loose an epidemic of misery, racial profiling and needless arrests. The intense campaign of raids and deportations has so clogged the immigration courts that the American Bar Association has proposed creating an independent court system that presumably would be better able to command adequate resources.
Tensions and anger in immigrant communities are rising. Religious and business groups are urging change — for moral reasons and because they believe that bringing immigrants out from the shadows would help the economy. Young students who have patiently waited for the Dream Act — a bill to legalize immigrant children who bear no blame for their status — are frustrated. Groups across the country are planning to march on Washington this month, demanding action on reform. Read article.
