March 18, 2010
Actual Cost of Obamacare: $2+ Trillion
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Fired Teacher Hangs Obama in Effigy... In Classroom
Superintendent Frances Gallo, the administrator who fired all the teachers at Central Falls High School when they refused to work slightly longer hours to help their students (at $30/hr), found an unlikely backer in President Obama. The fired teachers will complete this semester, but will not be back in the fall.
Now, the teachers—mostly Democrats—are peeling the Obama campaign stickers off their cars, and some are doing worse. Gallo was forced to sneak into Central Falls High in the dead of night to find just how far one teacher had gone to denounce Obama:
Gallo knew Obama's endorsement would create further uproar. She just didn't know how bad it would get.She continued making her way through the school, clearing the first two floors. She was disheartened by the newspaper postings but relieved she hadn't found the offensive item.
One floor to go.
She climbed the steps and entered a classroom.
There it was.
"You couldn't miss it."
An Obama doll, about a foot tall, hung by its feet from the white board; the doll held a sign that said, "Fire Central Falls teachers," she says.
Racists.
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CBO Numbers Cited By Dem Leadership are Bogus; Could It Backfire?
Matthew Continetti notes that Steny Hoyer to various new organizations about the CBO's health care cost estimate are speculative, based upon preliminary numbers that does not take into the account reconciliation proposal, review, and refinement.
In other words, they're crap. The media ran with Hoyer's claims without having the evidence in-hand.
Will the media hold Hoyer and his Democratic allies accountable for this subterfuge, or are they in on the fix?
And will this lie damage already faltering Democratic efforts to force through a bill that the public clearly doesn't want passed?
Update: To lie was their goal all along:
If it kicked in right away, the decade-long estimate would obviously be well into the trillions. So they simply stalled it for four years, incurring just $17 billion in costs — or 1.8 percent of the total 10-year estimate — through 2013 so that wavering Democrats could go back to their districts and tell baldfaced lies to their constituents about the pricetag. A perfect ending to this travesty.
In what can only be cast as a desperate act, the Democratic leadership is trying to convince members of their Party to out-and-out- lie to their constituents.
I guess we'll find out Sunday if on-the-fence Dems are willing to make that lie.
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You Lie! CBO Report On Health Care Merely Garbage In, Garbage Out
Leave it to tax-and-spend liberals to trumpet a $940 billion boondoggle as some sort of cost-savings measure.
Especially since the numbers don't really exist.
But let's go with the lie for a moment.
Hey, if I drive competent people out of an entire sector of the economy and replace them with dim-witted drones (think TSA airport screeners with access to your most personal information), I can trumpet "savings" of a sort as well.
You just won't like the result.
Of course, the Democrats can claim deficit reduction in the CBO's numbers because the Congressional Budget Office merely calculates the data they are given; they do not weigh in on whether those figures are arrived at by honest data or data which has been manipulated.
As is so often the case, the numbers provided the CBO by House Democrats is more rigged with more tricks than Dolly Parton's superstructure.
The CBO figures trumpeted by Democrats is based on junk, because junk is what they fed them.
Here are some graphs that represent the true costs of health care reform. They don't represent the latest tweaks in the House bill, but instead were compiled from a nearly identical House plan and the Senate plan.
First, a graph based upon an earlier CBO report of a previous version of the House Bill (source).
Now the Senate Bill (source).
One thing you'll note in any honest representation of the Democratic health care rationing scam is that it is going to cost us hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars to create a system when none are turned away, but all are equally miserable.
There can be health care reform. There will be health care reform. But it can be done without bankrupting our nation, or growing a federal government already intent on devouring our individual liberties.
Let's scrap this trainwreck, and start over with a bill that make sense, that all Americans can get behind.
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Obama Not Bothered by Possibly Un-Constitutional "Procedural" Deem-and-Pass Scheme; Dem House Leaders Set Selves Up For Future Ethics Charges
The president, in an interview with Fox News' Bret Baier, responded for the first time to the controversy over a plan to use a parliamentary maneuver to allow the House to pass the Senate's health care bill without forcing members to vote for it directly.The esoteric procedure has drawn fierce protest from Republicans, who say Democrats are trying to avoid accountability. But the president said there will be no doubt about where lawmakers stand on health care reform.
"I don't spend a lot of time worrying about what the procedural rules are in the House or Senate," Obama said. "What I can tell you is that the vote that's taken in the House will be a vote for health care reform."
At Volokh, experts suggest that using deem-and-pass (or "demon pass" as some have dubbed it) will bring the Constitutionality of the legislation in question, as it would assume a controversial law passed without directly voting on it, seemingly in clear violation of the Constitutional requirement. While supporters of the Demcratic scheme are quick to point out that deem-and-pass has been used previously by both Democrats and Republicans, the simple fact of the matter is that it has never before been used to force through legislation that did not have clear majority support.
Deem-and-pass has been used to pass legislation unpopular with voters but with scant opposition in Congress; using it as a trick to avoid possible rejection in an open vote is clearly against what the Founders intended, and arguably grounds for ethics charges to be brought against Democratic leaders who are clearly acting in bad faith.
While there is little chance that the current Congress would bring up Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Louise Slaughter, and other Democratic architects of the scam up on charges, the possibility exists that a November revolt that returns the House to Republican control could see such charges pursued. Based upon the public's strong opposition to the current health care rationing bill, such ethics cases would likely find overwhelming public support.
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March 17, 2010
Obama Tea Bags Kucinich for Health Care Vote Switch
The first rule about Air Force One Mile High Club is not to talk about Air Force One Mile High Club.
When reached for comment, the President said:
"mfoown mmm um hmm do ohhhhh..."
Congressman Kucinich later claimed the experience was the most fun he's had in the air since the last time he was abducted by aliens.
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AP: Goods News! Your Insurance Premiums Will Rise Under Obamacare
Even the Associated Press is forced to admit that Obama is purposefully misleading the American public on the costs of Obamacare:
Buyers, beware: President Barack Obama says his health care overhaul will lower premiums by double digits, but check the fine print.Premiums are likely to keep going up even if the health care bill passes, experts say. If cost controls work as advertised, annual increases would level off with time. But don't look for a rollback. Instead, the main reason premiums would be more affordable is that new government tax credits would help millions of people who can't afford the cost now.
[snip]
"There's no question premiums are still going to keep going up," said Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a research clearinghouse on the health care system. "There are pieces of reform that will hopefully keep them from going up as fast. But it would be miraculous if premiums actually went down relative to where they are today."
The statistics Obama based his claims on come from two sources. In both cases, caveats got left out.
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MA Treasurer: Obamacare Could "Wipe Out" The National Economy In Four Years
He should know. As he notes in Businessweek, he's living it:
The Massachusetts treasurer said Tuesday that Congress will "threaten to wipe out the American economy within four years" if it adopts a health care overhaul modeled after the Bay State's.Treasurer Timothy Cahill -- a former Democrat running as an independent for governor -- said the 2006 law has succeeded only because of huge subsidies and favorable regulatory changes from the federal government.
"Who, exactly, is going to bail out the federal government if this plan goes national?" He asked.
In a nation of more than 300 million only half of us pay taxes, and Democrats would force upon us to pay for the health insurance of all. A child can see that simply isn't a sustainable model, especially with the debt load of existing entitlement programs weighing down on us.
Simply put, a vote (or a shifty and probably un-Constitutional "deeming") in favor of Obamacare is irresponsible and unsustainable. We can only hope that Democrats in Congress are more loyal to their nation than Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.
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Hawaii Considers Birther Smackdown
Dear Birthers: Hawaii has had it up to here:
Birthers beware: Hawaii may start ignoring your repeated requests for proof that President Barack Obama was born here.As the state continues to receive e-mails seeking Obama's birth certificate, the state House Judiciary Committee heard a bill Tuesday permitting government officials to ignore people who won't give up.
"Sometimes we may be dealing with a cohort of people who believe lack of evidence is evidence of a conspiracy," said Lorrin Kim, chief of the Hawaii Department of Health's Office of Planning, Policy and Program Development.
So-called "birthers" claim Obama is ineligible to be president because, they argue, he was actually born outside the United States, and therefore doesn't meet a constitutional requirement for being president.
Hawaii Health Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino issued statements last year and in October 2008 saying that she's seen vital records that prove Obama is a natural-born American citizen.
But the state still gets between 10 and 20 e-mails seeking verification of Obama's birth each week, most of them from outside Hawaii, Kim said Tuesday.
I've never quite understood the logic of those who claim Barack Obama was born somewhere other than the United States.
Claiming that he was born in Kenya is simply absurd and doesn't pass a smell test; why on Earth would a very pregnant woman with decidedly limited funds make an international flight to a third-world country so close to her due date? A competing claim that he was instead born in Canada is more plausible logistically, but you still run into the eternal question: why? Why would Stanley Dunham leave her husband and family while pregnant to go to another country to give birth?
Who does such a thing?
No doubt about it; Barack's mom was a strange duck who was just as nutty politically as her son grew up to be, but there is no indication she was insane. I don't see any reason to suspect she gave birth anywhere but in Hawaii, and I've yet to hear a single plausible explanation to the contrary.
Barack Obama is an idiot, and incompetent, and arguably an embarrassment to the nation, but he's our mistake.
It's time to deal with that truth.
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March 16, 2010
Attack Thwarted On Lenin's Corpse
Rest easy, liberals... Lenin wasn't hurt.
The man, named as Sergey Karpentsov, is quoted as saying he wanted to let loose a volley of bullets at Lenin's carefully embalmed corpse, one of the Russian capital's most popular and ghoulish tourist attractions."My main demand is the quick bulldozing of the mausoleum which contains the body of the anti-Christ," he said. "I wanted to open fire on the tomb with an assault rifle but I was advised not to do that in case the tomb is armour-plated."
[snip]
Police say they spotted Karpentsov behaving strangely near the mausoleum and that he viciously beat a police officer who confronted him before shooting and wounding the man.
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"Agents of Incompetence Series" Noted by Field & Stream
This may not be that big a deal to many of you, but growing up I devoured every issue of Field & Stream as it came in. Their writers were (and are) superb, and of those, David E. Petzal has always been one of my favorites.
So I thought it was very cool this morning when I found out Petzal had written a post on The Gun Nut that linked approvingly to my "Agents of Incompetence" series at Pajamas Media.
And now, we have our friends in the U.S. Customs and their pals in the ATF, who have impounded 30 M4-replica Airsoft rifles, claiming that they can be converted to real M4s. This story comes our way courtesy of reporter Bob Owens, and it has to be read in full to be appreciated. Go to it by clicking here, and if you don’t drink now, you will afterward.
Pretty cool, to me at least. If you didn't see the series yet, you can catch it via the links below:
Agents of Incompetence: ATF Seizes Gun Shipment Labeled 'Toys' — But They Really Were Toys
Agents of Incompetence: ATF Seizes ‘Toys,’ Then Touts Their Danger (Part II)
Agents of Incompetence: Customs, ATF Dodging All Questions About Toy Guns (Part III)
I sent in a Freedom of Information Act this morning asking the BATF for all communications, documentation, video and photographic evidence, along with a record of emails and communications between BATF and CBP.
Considering the Obama Administration's track record with FOIA I can't say I'm confident I'll get the answers I seek, but it it worth trying, all the same.
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You Can Lead the House to Slaughter, But You Can't Make Them Think
The political tension and suspense is building on Capitol Hill as Democratic leaders try to find ways to bribe, blackmail or bully enough House Democrats into casting their votes for Obamacare. If they fail to muster enough votes, House Democratic leaders are considering a short-circuiting of the required voting process through procedural trickery that could force a Constitutional crisis (or not).
We've been looking at health care reform for over a year, but all Congress has come up with is the underhanded theft of a sixth of the economy, supplanting it with yet another unfunded bureaucracy that will follow Social Security and Medicare into insolvency and potentially trigger national bankruptcy.
If I were to speak to Representatives today who was still trying to decide how to vote on this pending legislation, I'd ask them to answer the following questions for themselves:
- Will imposing more bureaucracy improve patient customer service and satisfaction?
- Will imposing more bureaucracy be more likely to increase or decrease the quality of care?
- How much will the imposition of this new bureaucracy slow the research and development of new treatments and cures?
- What is the probability that this new bureaucracy would provide services less expensively and more efficiently than the private sector?
- Can you assure us that you completely understand the implications of taking over one-sixth of the nation's economy?
It is very hard to believe that any Congressperson could truthfully conclude that forcing Obamacare upon Americans would result in better customer service, better care, and the continued drive to find new cures in a cost-effective manner, without posing a significant threat the nations' economic future.
They therefore have to conclude that this is horribly flawed legislation, and it most be voted against if the best interests of their constituents are really what Representatives have in mind.
The only question now is whether House Democrats will show integrity and stand up to their cynical leaders, or if they will instead cave to an ideological agenda that compromises the trust of their constituents.
I fear the later, but would love to find myself surprised by a rare display of spine.
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March 15, 2010
More White House Duplicity: Cancer Patient Not Threatened With Home Loss
Obamacare has been an incompetently-run, dishonest enterprise from the beginning, so I guess it should come as no surprise that just as the President has lied about lied about the dire need for this flawed legislation, he's lied about the lack of options for his newest political prop:
Natoma Canfield, the cancer-stricken woman who has become a centerpiece of President Obama's push for health care reform, will not lose her home over her medical bills and will probably qualify for financial aid, a top official at the Cleveland medical center treating her told FoxNews.com.Though Canfield's sister Connie Anderson said her sibling is afraid she'll lose her house and Obama warned at an Ohio rally Monday that the patient is "racked with worry" about the cost of tests and treatment, she is already being screened for financial help.
Lyman Sornberger, executive director of patient financial services at the Cleveland Clinic, said "all indications" at the outset are that she will be considered for assistance.
[snip]
...Sornberger said that even if Canfield doesn't qualify for charity care or Medicaid, "there's probably eight to 10 options that a patient has" to find payment.
"It doesn't stop there," he said.
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Dear Mr. President: Thank You For Creating Natoma Canfield's Problems
When Barack Obama delivers his upteenth "the time for talk is over" speech about Obamacare in Ohio today, he will try use the story of cancer patient Natoma Canfield as a heart-wrenching anecdote to justify the government seizing control of 20% of the nation's economy. What he will not do is explain is tell the truth about what Natoma Canfield cannot find affordable insurance, which is a problem that he and his fellow politicians artfully created.
In what appears to be White House boilerplate, there are stories being run by various legacy media outlets today lamenting Ms. Canfield's condition and her loss of insurance.
Once again, President Obama and his serially dishonest allies will try to slander an insurance company as being heartless and greedy, a soulless, profit-seeking entity that exists to wring as much money away from people as possible before tossing this infirm away as a discarded husk. In today's particular bit of theater, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield will play the villain, but only the name changes from one episode to another. Democrats have latched on to the strategy of trying to convince Americans that it is the insurance companies at fault for higher health care.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Like any major industry in the United States, the health care industry exists to provide a much-needed service in exchange for profit, and it employs millions of Americans towards that end. Those employed directly or indirectly by the industry are your friends and neighbors, sons and daughters. 1 in 6 jobs is related to the health care industry.
The insurance industry is a major component of the health care industry, and a vital part of making health care affordable by sharing costs. But health care insurance is becoming less affordable for many Americans. That we can't deny. What politicians—and liberal Democrats in particular—are desperate to conceal is the undeniable fact that they are directly responsible for making health insurance so expensive by creating barriers to competition and driving prices up.
What Barack Obama will not mention in his speech in Ohio today is the truth. He will not lay the blame for the rising cost of insurance at the feet of his fellow politicians and bureaucrats that have created mountains of laws and regulations that have crippled the ability of insurance companies to compete with each other in a free market system for your dollars. He will not admit that his allies have created blockages to bringing your health care costs down. Red tape, callousness, inefficiency and bloat are the signatures of government intrusion into the private sector, and power-hungry politicians such as Mr. Obama are the root cause of the increasing price of insurance. They are not the solution.
Barack will not mention this truth. Barack cannot acknowledge this truth. In the bizarro insular world he inhabits, more government is good. Bureaucracy equals efficiency. Tight government control is superior to individual initiative, ingenuity, and drive.
When Barack Obama uses Natoma Canfield as a prop today, he will see her as justification for intrusion, not as a person. To him,and those like him, Canfield represents a dim and anonymous Public That Must Be Taken Care Of instead of individuals with dreams and aspirations. In his perfect future world, she and we will be numbers in the system to be cost-justified and managed from cradle to grave.
If Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and the Democratic party were remotely interested in decreasing the cost of health care and increasing its quality, they would be creating a bill of deregulation, freeing companies to seek efficiencies and compete for your health care dollars across state lies, undercutting each other to as they compete for your business much as Geico competes with State Farm competes with Allstate for your car insurance.
Has anyone you know ever been bankrupted by the cost of car insurance?
Wouldn't it make far more sense to let health insurance providers have the freedom to compete that car insurance companies have?
But Barack Obama isn't in Ohio to make insurance cheaper for Natoma Canfield. He hasn't been on a year-long campaign of subterfuge to make coverage better, or the process and bureaucracy less tedious. Obamacare isn't about any of those things.
Above all, Obamacare is about growing government, asserting control, and forcing submission to an ever-growing nanny state. Barack Obama is in Ohio today to tell the world he knows better than you do what you need.
But Obamacare isn't the solution.
Obamacare is the cancer.
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March 12, 2010
Blunt Enough for You?
A little honesty on the Democrat's death panel from one of their own trying to stop it:
"Their position says that women, especially those without means available, should have their abortions covered." The arguments they have made to him in recent deliberations, he adds, "are a pretty sad commentary on the state of the Democratic party."What are Democratic leaders saying? "If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That's one of the arguments I've been hearing," Stupak says. "Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America? If money is the issue — come on, we can find room in the budget. This is life we're talking about."
Maybe Democrats can find a nice token of appreciation for those who abort their useless, too costly children.
The last bunch enamored with this concept desired a little more pageantry with their savagery. They liked passing out yellow stars to their victims.
Democrats treat the unborn with even less respect. Just a figure on a ledger.
One they would prefer to round off as a mistake.
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Shock: CNN Promotes Sanka Party
Talk about a "made for TV movie."
CNN is touting the Coffee Party as an alternative to the Tea Party movement, noting the number of CP followers on Facebook already outstrips that of the Tea Partiers.
Funny, I don't recall hearing of any actual Coffee Party protests. As for the group out of central casting that CNN interviewed, I thought they were as diverse as any pair of film directors organizing their third fake grass roots campaign could hope to find.
Update: On second thought, calling them the Kopi Luwak Party is probably more appropriate than Sanka, considering their desire to swill massively overpriced crap that no person in their right mind would ingest, and which would bankrupt anyone who swallowed it regularly.
Update: More on one of the CP members from Tim at Left Coast Rebel.
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You Know What We Need To Pass Health Care? Bundling in the Government Takeover of Student Loans
The Democrats don't have the votes in the Senate to force through an attempt to drive banks out of the student loan business, so someone decided they could avoid debate and defeat by adding the loan legislation to Obamacare's health care rationing scheme.
Democrats believe that what will make America a better place is turning it over to bureaucrats, and are so enamored with their superior beliefs that they intend to ram them through any way they can, no matter how duplicitous. One can only imagine the other items Democrats have hidden away in their economy-killing boondoggle.
They simply must be stopped, before they bankrupt us all after seizing every bit of freedom and self-determination they can.
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Howell Raines: Why Can't I Be You?
Howell Raines, who championed advocacy journalism in the name of liberalism at the Times during his brief stint as executive editor, is lamenting the fact that the kind of journalism he practiced hasn't succeeded in quashing all alternative viewpoints.
Of course, he phrases it a bit differently:
One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration -- a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals.
If Raines had a "professional conscience" there is the distinct possibility that he would still be the executive editor of the New York Times instead of posting grouchy op-eds on the pages of his old competitors.
But Raines was by any measure a horrific editor with a fear-based leadership style, and a Stalinist penchant for purging those who did not bow down to him:
According to insiders, Raines is the kind of 1950s-style autocrat who manages through humiliation and fear. Aside from right-hand men Gerald Boyd and Andy Rosenthal and a core of loyalists, morale is said to be at a new low. There are many rooms in that palace and nobody sees the whole picture. But, says one source, "the old timers who lived through the worst of [former executive editor] Abe Rosenthal say they have never seen anyone be so arrogant, so petty, so mean. Vindictiveness is in." Another source says, "It's no longer about managing down. It's about paying obeisance to the king." Among cognoscenti, 43rd Street is now known as the "republic of fear."
It is very much in his nature for Raines to call for the heads of those who would have ideas that do not conform to his own, or those who do not bow down to his latest infatuation with a silver-tongued fraud. Luckily, America caught on to Barack Obama far faster than they did Jayson Blair.
As always, the autocratic Raines will be the last to figure it out.
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