These articles are based on Fact and Truth. Challenges are invited.
To date, no such challenge has succeeded.
The day’s top political news:
$160,000 Per Stimulus Job? White House Calls That 'Calculator Abuse'
Obama’s White House claimed 640,329 jobs have been created or saved because of the $159 billion in stimulus funds allocated as of Sept. 30.
Officials acknowledged the numbers were not exact, saying that states and localities that reported the numbers have made mistakes.
In recent days, the Recovery Act board has been reviewing all the numbers, with many inaccurate ones having been posted. Call it “spin” – big time.
CBO Puts House Health Bill Total Cost At $1.055 Trillion
The Congressional Budget Office says a U.S. House health-care system re-write would extend health insurance to 96% of the nonelderly U.S. population by 2019, and spend $1.055 trillion to do so.
Penalties imposed on individuals who did not purchase insurance, and employers who did not offer coverage to their workers, would raise $161 billion over that time-frame. That brings the net cost of the bill to $894 billion through 2019, CBO said.
The $1.055 trillion estimate also does not include $245 billion needed to stop Medicare payments to doctors from decreasing, which the House plans to address through separate legislation introduced Thursday. “Death panel” provisions endure.
http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/capitolalertlatest/025891.html
Oinion:
Democrats want to include ACORN in participation in the new bank regulation scheme from Barney Frank
News just in:
Alabama Congressman Spencer Bachus charges what he calls “a whopping potential conflict of interest in Democrat efforts to make the ACORN organization eligible to participate on a financial “Oversight Board” – a new bureaucratic entity that would be created if new Democrat proposed financial legislation becomes law.
Bachus is the top Republican on the Financial Services Committee – Chairman of the Committee is Barney Frank who is an author of the legislation.
ACORN is under investigation for illegal voter registration activities in more than a dozen states, and recently was involved in a major scandal when some of its staffers were caught conspiring with undercover reporters in schemes to avoid taxes, and to operate prostitution enterprises, using young teen aged girls smuggled into the US from Latin America.
The Financial oversight legislative amendment making ACORN eligible for participation is sponsored by one of Chairman Frank’s fellow Democrats – Congresswoman Maxine Waters of California.
Waters is among ACORN's most faithful congressional supporters. Her amendment reads like it might well have been written for her by an ACORN staffer or a Congressional staffer formerly associated with the discredited organization.
Bachus attacked the pro-ACORN provision, saying: “By making representatives of ACORN and other consumer activist organizations eligible to serve on the Oversight Board, the amendment creates a potentially enormous government sanctioned conflict of interest. ACORN-type organizations will have an advisory role on regulating the very financial institutions from which they receive millions of dollars annually in direct corporate contributions and benefit from other financial partnerships and arrangements. These are the same organizations that pressured banks to make subprime mortgage loans and thus bear a major responsibility for the collapse of the housing market", Bachus said.
Maxine Waters is no stranger to weird positions and thinking. She raved on for weeks claiming the CIA is responsible for drug abuse problems in places such as her San Jose base.
Of course, Maxine’s claims were beyond ridiculous, but that doesn’t bother Maxine or her power base back home.
In a hearing last year, Maxine let slip her preference for using a socialist approach for solving an American problem. So it is not unusual for Maxine be sponsor for such an unthinkable piece of legislation.
ACORN faces prosecution for vote fraud in over a dozen states and its staffers were video taped offering advice through which taxes could be avoided for a plan that was claimed to be planning to set up brothels using young teen age girls smuggled into the US from Latin America.
There have been suggestions from some in Congress that ACORN might meet a description of a criminal enterprise. However, its tentacles run deeply into political circles even after federal funding is claimed to have been cut off.
Congressman Spencer Bachus is to be congratulated for bringing this latest scam involving ACORN to public notice. However, since the Financial Services Committee and Congress as a whole, are dominated by Democrat, the Frank scheme is almost certain to be approved.
Buddy
The day’s top blogs:
1.
America's Obama Obsession About To End?
Victor Davis Hanson: Fewer And Fewer Americans Now Believe That Obama Is A Uniter
(National Review Online) Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal. He writes the Campaign Spot for National Review.
For 30 months the nation has been in the grip of a certain Obama obsession, immune to countervailing facts, unwilling to face reality, and loath to break the spell. But like all trances, the fit is passing, and we the patient are beginning to appreciate how the stupor came upon us, why it lifted, and what its consequences have been.
How Obama Won
Barack Obama was elected rather easily because, in perfect-storm fashion, five separate trends coalesced last autumn.
1) Obama was eloquent, young, charismatic - and African-American. He thus offered voters a sense of personal and collective redemption, as well as appealing to the longing for another JFK New Frontier figure. An image, not necessarily reality, trumped all.
2) After the normal weariness with eight years of an incumbent party and the particular unhappiness with Bush, the public was amenable to an antithesis. Bush was to be scapegoat, and Obama the beginning of the catharsis.
3) Obama ran as both a Clintonite centrist and a no-red-state/no-blue-state healer who had transcended bitter partisanship. That assurance allowed voters to believe that his occasional talk of big change was more cosmetic than radical.
4) John McCain ran a weak campaign that neither energized his base nor appealed to crossover independents. McCain turned off conservatives; many failed to give money, and some even stayed home on Election Day. Meanwhile, the media and centrists who used to idolize McCain's non-conservative, maverick status found Obama the more endearing non-conservative maverick.
5) The September 2008 financial panic turned voters off Wall Street and the wealthy, and allowed them to connect unemployment and their depleted home equity and 401(k) retirement plans with incumbent Republicans. In contrast, they assumed that Obama, as the anti-Bush, would not do more bailouts, more stimuli, and more big borrowing.
Take away any one of those factors, and Obama might well have lost. Imagine what might have happened had Obama been a dreary old white guy like John Kerry; or had Bush's approvals been over 50 percent; or had Obama run on the platform he is now governing on; or had McCain crafted a dynamic campaign; or had the panic occurred in January 2009 rather than September 2008. Then the trance would have passed, and Obama, the Chicago community organizer and three-year veteran of the U.S. Senate, would have probably lost his chance at remaking America.
Obama's Assumptions
I note all this at length because Obama seems to act as if this right-center country - one that polls oppositely to his positions on most of the major issues (deficits, spending, nationalized health care, homeland security, Guantanamo, cap-and-trade, etc.) - has given him a mandate for a degree of change not seen in nearly 80 years.
Apparently, Team Obama figured that with sizable majorities in both the House and the Senate, Obama would snap his fingers, Congress daily would pass bills redefining America, and Obama would stay in perpetual campaign mode to hope and change the country to accept his agenda. Governing would be like campaigning, as audiences fainted hearing the details of a 1,500-page health-care bill or of ever more sins from America's past.
But, after just a few months in office, that proved not to be the case. Just as a number of planets had to line up precisely to allow an inexperienced hard-left ideologue to be elected president, so there would have had to be a similar configuration to allow him to govern successfully.
Bitter Truths
1) Obama had to match his unity rhetoric with brotherly action. In fact, he has done the opposite.
At one time or another, Obama and his supporters have, rather scurrilously, insulted doctors, insurers, the police, tea-partiers and town-hallers, opponents of his health-care plan, non-compliant members of the media, and a host of other groups as either greedy, dishonest, treasonous, unpatriotic, mob-like, racist, or in general worthy of disrespect.
Fewer and fewer Americans now believe that Obama - after just nine months of governance - is a uniter. In Obama's world, doctors carve out children's tonsils for profit, racist morons rant at legislators about losing their private health care, and trillions in borrowed money must be paid back by the greedy rich whose capital was unearned in the first place.
When his base supporters lambaste him for softness, they are lamenting his inability to become an effective partisan - not a lack of partisanship in general. In surreal fashion, liberals demand that the ideologue Obama become more ideological precisely at the time his ideologically driven agenda is souring millions of non-ideological Americans.
2) His opposition is no longer ossified, but decentralized and grass roots. One of the oddest proofs of that statement is the sudden leftist furor at tea parties, town halls, the media, dissent, and free speech. As long as Obama was opposed by calcified Republicans in Congress, there was no real danger to him. But once the opposition proved populist, panicked liberal elites started demonizing populism - and Obama now finds himself opposed to the popular grievance-mongering that was once the mother's milk of our Chicago organizer's existence.
3) Obama campaigned on the notion that even if voters might not like his policies, they most assuredly would like him. Even that spell is now lifting. The more the American public gets to know Barack Obama, the less they find him appealing.
On matters racial, their campaign-season unease with his connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his toss-offs like “typical white person,” and his stereotyping of rural Pennsylvanians has not been allayed; rather, it has been amplified by Eric Holder's Justice Department, Obama's own statement that the Cambridge police acted “stupidly” in arresting Professor Gates, and the use of the race card by prominent Democrats from the likes of Rep. Charles Rangel to Gov. David Paterson of New York.
Much of the newly stirred public suddenly assumes two things from the Obama administration: that the president himself will periodically say something racially insensitive or unwise; and that his supporters will call opponents of his policies racist. If we have wearied of all that in nine months, think what four years of it will do to the public mood.
In just nine months the phrase “Chicago style” has gone from something old-time that evokes Al Capone or Mayor Daley to something very real, contemporary, and scary - as David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, Valerie Jarrett, and others try to strong-arm the opposition, demonize the media, and manipulate government largesse to either penalize or reward recipients on the basis of their degree of support for Obama.
Could the most imaginative right-wing political operative have invented the idea of a National Endowment for the Arts official gleefully considering quid pro quo grants, administration officials trying to persuade other media outlets that a network critical of Obama is “not a news organization,” or an administration communications director bragging about how her team sandbagged the American media and took them to the cleaners? We can believe there might be one statement like Van Jones's slander of “white people,” or Sonia Sotomayor's “wise Latina” boast, or Anita Dunn's lengthy praise of the mass-murdering Mao, but not an entire series of them. At some point, the American public snaps out of it, and sighs, “Wow, these people really are nuts!”
4) “Bush Did it” was the IV drip of the Obama campaign, always there to infuse a fresh life-saving excuse into every Obama fainting spell. But the problem now is that it has been more than nine months since Bush left office, and Obama's “mop up” metaphors are getting stale. Worse still, the reasons the public soured on Bush are precisely the reasons it may well sour more on Obama, inasmuch as he took Bush's problems like deficits, soaring federal spending, bailouts, and unemployment and made them far worse.
Yet Obama has given no credit for the good that Bush did, and therefore must remain mum about the other “Bush Did It”s, like quiet in Iraq; the homeland-security protocols, from renditions and tribunals to wiretaps and intercepts; AIDS relief for Africa; friendly governments in Britain, France, Germany, India, and Italy; and domestic safety since 9/11. If Bush is at least partly responsible for all these things as well, were they therefore bad?
Now What?
Obama very soon is going to have to make a tough choice, far tougher than his current “present” votes on the option of sending additional troops to Afghanistan.
As the midterm elections near, and his popularity bobs up and down around 50 percent, Obama can do one of two things.
He could imitate Bill Clinton's 1995 Dick Morris remake. In Obama's case, that would mean, abroad, cutting out the now laughable apologies for his country, ceasing to court thugs like Ahmadinejad, Chávez, and Putin, keeping some distance from the U.N., and paying closer attention to our allies like Britain and Israel. At home, he could declare victory on his sidetracked agenda and then start over by holding spending in line, curbing the deficit, stopping the lunatic Van Jones-style czar appointments, courting the opposition, and tabling cap-and-trade. I think there is very little chance of any of the above, whatever voters may have thought during the campaign.
Or, instead, Obama could hold the pedal to the floor on the theory that, as a proven ideologue, he must move the country far left before the voters catch on and stop him in his tracks in November 2010. That would mean more of the “gorge the beast” effort to spend and borrow so much that taxes have to soar, and thus redistribution of income will be institutionalized for a generation. He would push liberal proposals no matter how narrow the margin in the Senate. He would keep demonizing Fox News. In Nixonian fashion he might continue to hit the stump, ratcheting up his current “they're lying” message and energizing his left-wing base by catering to the unions, gays, minorities - and liberal Wall Street special interests.
If he chooses the former, he might well be a more successful version of Bill Clinton given that his appetites are far more in check.
But if, as is likely, he chooses the latter, he will polarize the country in a way not seen since 1968, set back racial relations to the 1960s, do to the reputation of big government what LBJ did from 1964 to 1968, and, in the manner of what Jimmy Carter wrought, turn voters off liberal foreign policy for a generation.
2.
Speaker Pelosi Ignores
One thing is clear. Your concerns about a government takeover of health care have been totally ignored by Speaker Pelosi and her allies, who worked behind closed doors to write this bill. After months of debate, the bill they introduced today is essentially the same bill the American people have already flat-out rejected.
Government-run insurance? Still in the bill. Higher taxes? You betcha. An individual mandate that restricts choices and innovation by requiring Washington to define what qualifies as health insurance? Check. A job-killing employer mandate, a budget-busting expansion of the Medicaid entitlement, and countless provisions that set Washington bureaucrats firmly between you and your doctor? Better believe it.
What about comprehensive lawsuit abuse reform and a ban on taxpayer funded abortion? Not surprisingly, those important items are still not in the bill.
There is one major and obvious difference between H.R. 3962 and H.R. 3200, however. At 1,990 pages, the new version is almost twice as long as the old one. H.R. 3962 has all the “government takeover” of H.R. 3200 with an extra thousand pages thrown into the mix. That’s a whole lot of government involved in personal, private health care decisions.
The American people want reforms that provide them with more choices, more competition, more innovation, higher quality, and lower costs. That’s the approach taken by the numerous patient-centered bills introduced by Republicans, including my own Empowering Patients First Act, H.R. 3400. Unfortunately, our ideas have been consistently and intentionally dismissed by the majority party.
But passage of this monstrosity is by no means certain. Though we expect a vote on this bill in the next week, there is still time to make your voice heard. Please forward this email to your friends, family, and co-workers. Get the word out and don’t delay. The future of American health care is in the balance, and we are on the clock.
3.
Hoyer gives Rs a substitute ... with a catch
Tony Romm
House Democratic leader Steny Hoyer (Md.) said that Republicans will have a shot at passing a substitute healthcare bill when the lower chamber debates the landmark legislation late next week.
But, there's a catch: The Republicans have to have their alternative scored by the CBO and posted online at least 72 hours before being considered on the floor.
Hoyer gave the news to his GOP counterpart Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) during the end of the week colloquy on the floor Thursday night.
Republicans have insisted that they "will be ready" with ideas to include in legislation that the leaders put forward as a substitute to the Democratic bill.
Hoyer's conditions that the GOP alternative have a "score" adds an unanticipated wrinkle to the minority party's plans. But, the majority leader pledged to push for the CBO to move on a GOP alternative as soon as it is ready.
It's unclear however, when the Republicans will be ready with their leadership-endorsed bill. At least 30 GOP lawmakers have introduced healthcare measures to date but, an alternative offered by the Republican Study Committee Chairman Tom Price, H.R. 3400, has garnered the most co-sponsors of the lot.
4.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/HealthCare/wm2599.cfm
Major Faults with the Health Care Bills
I don't know how anyone could go through all 1990 pages but here is the Heritage Foundation's crack at it.
Nina Owcharenko
Current efforts by Congress to "reform" the health care system are centered on several flawed policy initiatives that will transfer more power and decisions to Washington and away from patients and families.
Rather than create a massive government-based health care system and dislocate people from their existing private coverage, policymakers should focus on putting the health care system on a path where individuals and families are in control of their health care dollars and decisions.
Shortfalls of the Health Care Bills
The following five provisions are the cornerstone of the House and Senate bills and unavoidably result in legislation taking health care reform in the wrong direction.
1. New Public Plan and Federal Exchange. Both the House and Senate bills would create a new government-run health care plan through the establishment of a federally run national health insurance exchange. The result: widespread erosion of private insurance and substantial consolidation of federal control over health care through the exchange.[1] As is evident in the details of the House bill (H.R. 3200), there is no level playing field for competition between the government plans and private health plans. Plus, the incentives in the legislation guarantee that millions of Americans will lose their existing employer-based coverage.
2. Federal Regulation of Health Insurance. Both the House and Senate bills would result in sweeping and complex federal regulation of health insurance. Moreover, it would take oversight away from states and concentrate it in Washington.[2]
3. Massive New Taxpayer-Funded Subsidies. Both the House and Senate would expand eligibility for Medicaid, but they would also extend new taxpayer-funded subsidies to the middle class. Such commitments would result in scores of Americans dependent on the government to finance their health care.[3] This is unfortunate because Congress could have reformed the tax treatment of health insurance to enable people to keep their existing private coverage and buy better private coverage if they wished to do so.
4. Employer Mandate. Both the House and Senate bills would impose an employer mandate for employers who do not offer coverage and for those whose benefits do not meet a new federal standard. An employer mandate would hurt low-income workers the most and would also stifle much-needed economic growth.[4] Employer mandates are passed on to workers in the form of reduced wages and compensation. This is exactly the wrong prescription for businesses, especially during a recession.
5. Individual Mandate. Both the House and Senate bills would require all people to buy health insurance. There is no doubt that such a mandate would result in a tax increase on individuals and families whose health insurance does not meet the new federally determined standards. This means that Congress will, for the first time, force Americans to buy federally designed packages of health benefits, even if they do not want or need those benefits.
It also means that health benefits will tend to become increasingly costly as powerful special interest groups and representatives of the health industry lobby intensively to expand the legally mandated health benefits, medical treatments and procedures, and drugs that all Americans must buy under penalty of law.
A Better Direction for Health Care Reform
Congress should stop and take a step back from these divisive House and Senate measures. Instead of trying to overhaul one-sixth of the American economy and seize an unprecedented amount of political control over health care decisions and dollars, policymakers should consider proceeding with smaller, incremental improvements. Policymakers need to proceed slowly and deliberately, making sure that the initial steps they take are not disruptive of what Americans have and want to keep, actually work, and do not result in costly and damaging and unintended consequences. There are three broad areas where Members can and should find consensus:
1. Promote State Innovation. Congress should preserve the states' autonomy over their health care systems and give them greater legal freedom to devise solutions that meet the unique characteristics of their citizens. In addition, individuals should also have the freedom to purchase coverage from trusted sources and not be restricted by where they happen to live. This means that Americans should be able to buy better coverage across state lines. Congress should respect and encourage personal freedom and diversity.
2. Establish Fairness in the Tax Treatment of Health Insurance. There is little disagreement that today's health care tax policy--which favors coverage obtained through the workplace--distorts the market and is inequitable. Instead of expanding government-run programs like Medicaid, policymakers should offer tax relief to those individuals who purchase private health insurance on their own, regardless of where they work.
At the same time, Congress should make sure that tax relief goes only to taxpayers. Congress should also devise a voucher program, giving low-income citizens the opportunity to get private coverage if they wish to do so. There is a broad bipartisan consensus that Congress should help low-income working families with direct assistance to enable them to get health insurance.
3. Get Serious About Entitlement Reform. Medicare and Medicaid, the giant health care entitlement programs, are not only increasingly costly, but they are also not delivering value to the taxpayers. The best way to secure value to patients (not government officials) is to compel health providers to compete directly for consumer dollars by allowing seniors and the poor to choose the coverage that is right for them using the money that is already available to them in these programs. This will "bend the cost curve" while at the same time allowing private-sector innovation to flourish.
Consumer-Driven Reform
Americans want to fix the problems in the health care system--but not at the expense of their own coverage. It is time policymakers recognize the lack of support for a major overhaul. But instead of continuing to protect the status quo, Congress should advance improvements that put the health care system on a path to reform.
Such improvements should be focused on increasing choice and competition not by turning control over to Washington but by empowering individuals and families to control their health care dollars and decisions.
Nina Owcharenko is Deputy Director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
