BILL BURTON IS ANOTHER SCUMBAG PUPPET FOR OBAMA

BILL BURTON IS JUST ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF A BRAINSWASHED FOOL IN THE OBAMA ADMINISTATION. A truly brainwashed SCUMBAG ! LOOK HIM UP ON THE NET. BILL BURTON'S LIES ! YOU WILL FIND MANY MANY OF THEM.
Everytime you turn around he is telling another lie. Today he defends a new position. THIS DAMN ADMINISTRATION JUST KEEPS ADDING TO THE DEBT THIS COUNTRY IS INCURRING DUE TO THE POLICIES OF OBAMA. CZARS OUT THE YING YANG AND NEW DEPARTMENTS OUT THE YING YANG. Spending all this moeny is no problem to him. He is running AMERICA INTO THE GORUND. That has been his intention from the very start. WHAT A SICKO SCUMBAG THEY ALL ARE.
Why don't you ask the 9-11 victims familes how they feel about interrogations. The damn murderers get treated better than the victims. This is administation is made up of a bunch of brainswashed scum. They bow to their New Messiah.


WASHINGTON — Barack Obama has approved creation of a new, special terrorism-era interrogation unit to be supervised by the White House, a top aide said Monday, further distancing his administration from President George W. Bush's detainee policies.

The administration has also decided that all U.S. interrogators will follow the rules for detainees laid out by the Army Field Manual, according to senior administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the decision. That decision aims to end years of fierce debate over how rough U.S. personnel can get with terror suspects in custody.

The new unit does not mean the CIA is now out of the interrogation business, deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton told reporters covering the vacationing Obama at Oak Bluffs, Mass.

Burton said the unit will include "all these different elements under one group," and it said that it will be situated at the FBI headquarters in Washington.

The unit would be led by an FBI official, with a deputy director from somewhere in the government's vast intelligence apparatus, and members from across agencies. It will be directly supervised by the White House, but the senior administration officials insisted the unit's agency bosses will make operational decisions, not the White House.

The officials also said that in cases where terror suspects are transferred to other countries, the U.S. will work harder to ensure the suspect is not tortured.

Separately, Burton said that a recommendation now before Attorney General Eric Holder to reopen and pursue prisoner abuse cases is a decision solely for Holder to make without any intervention from the president.

The structure of the new unit the White House is creating would depart significantly from such work under the previous administration, when the CIA had the lead and sometimes exclusive role in questioning al-Qaida suspects.

Obama campaigned vigorously against Bush's interrogation policies in his successful run for the presidency. He has said more recently he didn't particularly favor prosecuting Bush administration officials in connection with instances of prisoner abuse. Obama still believes "we should be looking forward, not backward," Burton said Monday.

Nonetheless, the spokesman added, Obama believes the attorney general should be fully independent from the White House and he has full faith in Holder to make the decision on whether to reopen several such cases with an eye toward possible criminal prosecution. "He ultimately is going to make the decisions," Burton said of Holder.

CIA Director Leon Panetta said in an e-mail message to agency employees Monday that he intends "to stand up for those officers who did what their country asked and who followed the legal guidance they were given. That is the president's position, too," he said.

Panetta said some CIA officers have been disciplined within the agency for going beyond the methods approved for interrogations by the Bush-era Justice Department. Just one CIA employee— contractor David Passaro— has ever been prosecuted for detainee abuse.

"The CIA has played a vital role in the work of the task force, and its substantive knowledge will be essential to interrogations going forward," agency spokesman George Little said Monday.

Obama campaigned vigorously against President George W. Bush's interrogation policies in his successful run for the presidency. He has said more recently he didn't particularly favor prosecuting Bush administration officials in connection with instances of prisoner abuse. But the issue now before Holder for consideration would have the new administration do precisely that: reopen several such cases with an eye toward possible criminal prosecution.

The new interrogation unit will be known by the acronym HIG.

The administration was publicly confirming the new interrogation unit on the same day that the CIA inspector general was to unveil a report on Bush administration handling of suspects. Details were expected to show that highly questionable tactics were used.

Now, all such questioning will fall under the rules of the Army manual.

The manual, last updated in September 2006, authorizes 19 interrogation methods used to question prisoners, including one allowing a detainee to be isolated from other inmates in some cases.

The manual prohibits forcing detainees to be naked, threatening them with military dogs, exposing them to extreme heat or cold, conducting mock executions, depriving them of food, water, or medical care, and waterboarding.

Subjecting prisoner abuse cases to a new review and possible prosecution could expose CIA employees and agency contractors to criminal prosecution for the alleged mistreatment of terror suspects in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Holder reportedly reacted with disgust when he first read accounts of prisoner abuse earlier this year in a classified version of the IG report. And the Justice report is said to reveal how interrogators conducted mock executions and threatened at least one man with a gun and a power drill. Threatening a prisoner with death violates U.S. anti-torture laws.

A federal judge has ordered the IG report made public Monday, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The accounts of the White House-supervised interrogation unit and the ethics recommendation to Holder were first reported, respectively, by The Washington Post and The New York Times.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705325517/Official-New-interrogation-unit-set-up.html

A MATTER OF TRUST~YOU CAN'T TRUST THE GOVERNMENT ANYMORE OR ANY COMPANIES !

READ THE ARICLE BELOW..
AND I SAID ....
Thank you for your honesty in writng this article. You are right about all you said in your article. Very seldom do I read anything ABC publishes and I certainly do not watch any ABC news on TV anymore.
As you said trust is an important thing. I understand why newspapers are no longer read anymore.
I do not read them myself nor do I buy them anymore. Only my local neighborhood papers and sometimes you have extrmeist writng in those papers too!
I too have been a victim of Comcast being down while I am in the middle of doing stuff on the net. The TV being out does not bother me half as much as my interent cable being out. LOL I too never gave up my lnad line. I had comcast pitch to me the thing about their phone service. Tried it and gave it back to them before they came out with their new phone serivce. Don't trust any of thier phone services. I told them Thanks, but no thanks !
I always call and make them give me credit for a days service !
Our government now days has been taken over by a bunch of radical sheep.
Yes people have a huge distrust in government and RIGHTLY SO !
I TRUST NO ONE IN OUR GOVERNMENT ! NOT ONE PERSON. They have been glorified mobsters and are not afraid to let you know how they stand. And...if you don't like it that is your problem.
How we are going to get out of this mess I have no clue, but as an American I know we will endure. We always have managed, somehow, someway.
Thanks again for your column today. Keep up the good work.
GOD BLESS AMERICA !

A Matter of Trust
In a Growing Marketplace, Maintaining Customer Trust Is Important
COLUMN By MICHAEL S. MALONE WITH ABC NEWS

I'm writing this column from table No. 3 at Peet's Coffee in Cupertino, Calif.

Why am I here, instead of working from my own home office two miles away? Therein lies a story.

Simply put, my Comcast cable service crashed Wednesday afternoon at 4 p.m. That not only means my Internet access is down on all five of our family computers, but my cable television is down, as well. In fact, the only service still working in our house is the landline phone, and that's only because, when Comcast offered that service, as well, my wife replied, "I don't trust you people not to screw that up, as well. I need something in this house I can depend on to work right."

And, in fact, she used that phone to call Comcast to report the outage. And I took off for Peet's to file this column.

How annoyed I am at this loss of service, a service I depend upon to make my living? A little bit less than load-the-Winchester angry, but a whole lot more than kids-having-a-drunken-party-next-door pissed off. The cable TV I can live without -- although it makes the kids a little more bored and truculent than usual -- but that's because I spend more time these days on the Internet than television.

But the loss of my wireless router and, thus, my Internet connection, has got me wandering about in a Lear-like confused rage. This is my livelihood, my entertainment, my connection to the bigger world. I can't get my e-mail, I can't research my story, I can't find out what's going on out there.

OK, but I'm actually angrier than the loss of those things would predict. After all, I can go into any Starbucks, Peet's, or even Mickey D's these days and find a wireless hot spot. And Comcast promises to come out today -- hey, thanks! -- to find out what's wrong.

No, I think the real source of my anger is what can best be described as a betrayal of trust. There is no greater source of anger in this world than just that sort of violation. Open the newspaper or turn on the news (as if I could right now) on any given day and probably half of the stories involve just such a betrayal: adultery, breaches of contract, anger at politicians, blown drug deals, embezzlement, child molestations, angry consumers, etc., etc. Seen from this perspective, it sometimes seems that almost every form of human friction devolves into some kind of betrayal of perceived trust.

What is surprising about this is that, despite the fact that we live in a largely scientific, empirical world -- one in which natural scientists, sociologists and economists have come up with yardsticks and equations to measure and quantify almost every kind of human behavior -- we really have no common and accepted measure for trust. And, it follows, because we lack that measure, we have no precise way of knowing when that trust changes, when it fails, or what the consequences will be of that failure.

Michael Malone: Don't Know the Value of Anything
Not that there haven't been attempts. A few years back, I wrote a book with the Swedish economist, Leif Edvinsson, entitled "Intellectual Capital." The impetus for the book was the growing realization in the business and financial communities that we really had no idea what anything was worth anymore. That is to say, we had all of the traditional accounting measures: inventories, capital equipment, etc. But the gap between that sum and what the stock market seemed to believe the company was actually worth was growing by the day. For example, how could Intel, which at the time had about $20 billion in revenues, be worth more than the entire U.S. automobile industry?

In fact, the only accounting entry that seemed to be stretching to encompass these changes was that little item called "goodwill," traditionally a kind of mulligan to cover the difference between the book value and sale price of traditional companies. But, nowadays, such goodwill might be three times the book value of the firm, meaning if we were willing to admit it, that we really don't know the value of anything anymore. [That's even more true now than it was then, which helps explain the increasing volatility of the world economy.]

Edvinsson and I (along with a number of other folks working with the same idea at the same time) set out to find real measures and real numbers for these other "intangible" assets, a company's hidden "intellectual" capital.

In the end, we came up with a whole bunch of different measures, from executive turnover to the number of patent filings to customer satisfaction ratings. Other folks came up with other measurement schemes. Some worked pretty well, others less so. A few of the measures have been unofficially adopted by companies and industry analysts, although none yet officially so.

Someday, I suspect that intangible asset measures will be an accepted part of all balance sheets. But it won't happen anytime soon.

Looking back, if there is one part of our research I would have emphasized a whole lot more, and would have tried harder to quantify, it is the matter of Trust. Writing at about the same time, in his book of that name, political scientist Francis Fukuyama got it right: Trust is the single most valuable currency of the modern global economy, the maker and breaker of nations.

Everywhere you look, the question of trust is defining winners and losers in the Internet age. Why are newspapers dying? Not just because technology passed them by, but because they violated readers' trust that they would deliver timely, accurate and unbiased news. Why is Apple Computer so successful? Because it has upheld its customers trust that Steve Jobs will continue to give them interesting, innovative and "cool" products. Why have a handful of bloggers earned huge audiences, while millions of others have not? Because we trust those few to either consistently entertain us, or we trust their judgment in selecting interesting items for us to read, or we trust that their world view is just like our own and their ability to enunciate those views even better. Why is the xBox 360, a superior game player, falling behind Nintendo and Sony? Because gamers don't trust Microsoft to continue delivering the best games.

But it is even more complicated than that because Trust is not just a static characteristic, it also changes. A company that delivers a highly trusted product or service can suddenly find that it is losing that trust because the underlying technology has moved on and left it behind. If your customers expect you to be state-of-the-art in performance, quality or price, anything less is a betrayal of their trust.

Michael Malone: A Matter of Trust
Success, too, can lead to a betrayal of Trust. So can an evolution in customers. In the tech world, the most famous example is that of the scandal that nearly killed Intel Corp.: the software bug in the Pentium microprocessor chip. There had always been bugs in processors, but because most of the people using the early microprocessors were scientists and engineers, they expected them, worked around them, and waited for Intel or Motorola to send them fixes. But with Pentium, and the transformative marketing campaign that surrounded it -- "Intel Inside" -- Intel now found itself with a gigantic customer base of everyday consumers ... people for whom such a bug was a catastrophe, a betrayal of trust by the company, and a source of real fear by unsophisticated users. Intel initially dismissed the growing controversy -- and, then, in a move that may have saved the company, reversed itself and agreed to replace all of the faulty chips.

As the world grows more complex, the marketplace expands to encompass billions, and the stakes go ever higher -- so does the importance of Trust. And nowhere is the burden of trust greater than when we enter into a relationship that requires us to abandon all alternatives. Because Trust can never be perfect, it always helps to know that if that Trust begins to falter, we have someplace else to go, an escape hatch.

This human need, I suspect, is what underlies the angry response right now to the Obama administration's health care plan. Progressives and other social engineers always make the same mistake: They find what they believe is the One Best Way, the empirically most efficient, reasonable and fair process, and then seek to impose it on the entire population as the Right Thing To Do. What they inevitably fail to appreciate (because they are Utopians) is that they are demanding from the populace almost infinite Trust -- in matters of life and death, something most sensible adults will, wisely, never give -- while at the same time stripping away every other alternative. This is guaranteed to create fear, a sense of helplessness ... and ultimately, anger.

In a smaller way, that same impulse helps to explain my anger at Comcast right now. I entered into the agreement trusting that the cable company would provide me with reliable service.

In the meantime, as long as I'm trapped and helpless, I think I'll have a latte.

This is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNews.com "Silicon Insider" columnist since 2000.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Technology/customers-lack-trust-companies-michael-malone-writes/Story?id=8376254&page=1

DAVID ALEXROD JUST ANOTHER CROOK IN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

Hey Axelrod...Joe the plummer has something for you !


Axelrod's ties targeted in health fight

Critics of President Obama’s health-care overhaul are zeroing in on his senior adviser David Axelrod, whose former partners at a Chicago-based firm are the beneficiaries of huge ad buys — now at $24 million and counting — by White House allies in the reform fight.

The unwelcome scrutiny, largely from Republicans, comes at an inopportune time as Obama seeks to shore up support for health care reform. It revolves around two separate $12 million ad campaigns advocating Obama’s health care plan that were produced and placed partly by AKPD Message and Media, a firm founded by Axelrod that employs his son and still owes Axelrod $2 million.

A separate firm, GMMB, is also handling the campaigns. Both AKPD and GMMB did millions of dollars of work on Obama’s presidential campaign, continue to tout their connections to the campaign and still maintain close ties to his inner circle.

The two firms were hired to make the health-care ads by a pair of linked coalitions supporting Obama’s health-care overhaul proposal — Healthy Economy Now and a newer offshoot unveiled last week called Americans for Stable Quality Care.

The Associated Press reported this month that Healthy Economy Now paid AKPD and GMMB to produce a $12 million national ad campaign echoing White House talking points supporting the health care overhaul.

And a spokesman for Americans for Stable Quality Care, which essentially supplanted the now-defunct Healthy Economy Now, confirmed that it is using the two Obama-linked firms to produce and air a separate $12 million ad campaign launched Thursday designed to shore up support among the conservative House Blue Dog Democrats and to target swing senators. The ad, which is airing in a dozen states, is the opening salvo in a campaign planned for this fall that will cost tens of millions of dollars more.

The coalitions are a strange-bedfellows mix of business, labor and health care groups including the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (better known as PhRMA), the American Medical Association, the Service Employees International Union and the liberal group FamiliesUSA.

Neither coalition would reveal how much AKPD or GMMB was paid for its work on the ads. The firms will likely net only a fraction of the $24 million total campaign price tag, but — unlike with election campaign spending — there are no mandatory reporting requirements for such so-called issue advocacy.

Some of the Healthy Economy Now ads began airing in June, around the time PhRMA was negotiating with the Senate Finance Committee on an eventual agreement to win the drug lobby’s support for a health care overhaul by capping the costs the drug industry would absorb to $80 billion over 10 years.

The deal, which was blessed by the White House, has angered some progressive activists and liberal House Democrats, who until recently counted Big Pharma as both an impediment to health care reform efforts and a Republican-aligned lobby.

Republicans are aggressively seeking to capitalize on the AKPD connection, and the House Republican Conference distributed a one-page talking points memo Tuesday asserting the White House-PhRMA deal raises “serious questions as to whether the drug lobby is helping to bankroll a multimillion dollar severance package for one of the President’s senior advisers.”

The memo points out that the drug industry will profit handsomely from the deal and asks whether Axelrod “recused himself from the PhRMA ‘deal,’ or will he work to defend an agreement with an industry that is directly funding his son’s work, and indirectly funding his own $2 million severance package?”

PhRMA vice president Ken Johnson said his group wasn’t involved in selecting AKPD or GMMB, and that, in fact, he had no idea the coalitions had picked the former Axelrod firm until he was asked about it by a reporter from Bloomberg.

“We’re very involved in reviewing ad copy and determining targeted districts and states, but not in determining which consultants are hired to carry out the campaign. That’s left to the people who you hire to manage it,” he said, adding that PhRMA had not hired either firm for ad buys the group aired on its own, which will likely dwarf the buys it helped fund as part of the coalition.

He declined to comment on the House GOP criticism, except to say, “Unfortunately, we’re a talking point and I’m not going to talk about the talking point.”

Spokesmen for Healthy Economy Now and Americans for Stable Quality Care said their groups paid AKPD and GMMB to produce the ads because they are considered top ad firms, not because of any connection to Axelrod or the White House.

Indeed, AKPD is widely recognized as a talented Democratic consulting firm with significant experience on health care-related issues.

They “are among the best in the business, so it was a no-brainer to hire them to help out this new effort to explain what health care reform means for Americans,” said Phil Singer, a spokesman for Americans for Stable Quality Care.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Tuesday dismissed a reporter’s question about whether Axelrod was profiting from the health care fight.

“That's ridiculous,” Gibbs said during a Tuesday afternoon briefing. “David has left his firm to join public service.”

AKPD’s continued payments to Axelrod are based on “an agreement, I think, that was made because David started and owned the firm. He left the firm, and if I'm not mistaken, is being paid for the fact that he created it and sold it, which, I think, is somewhat based on the free market.”

Financial disclosure records show that Axelrod, while preparing to take a job in the White House at the end of last year, sold AKPD for $2 million. And the records show that he sold a separate corporate public relations firm he founded called ASK Public Strategies for $1 million at the end of 2008.

AKPD is now owned by a group of consultants who helped steer Obama’s campaign, mostly while working at the firm, and ASK is owned Axelrod’s former partners there. Both firms will pay his buyouts in preset annual installments starting at the end of this year, terms that were settled on prior to Axelrod’s White House service.

AKPD officials declined to speak publicly about the arrangement, but a source familiar with the firm’s operations and finances said it is not reliant on the revenue from the Healthy Economy Now and Americans for Stable Quality Care campaigns to fulfill Axelrod’s annual payments, which the source described as “a fraction” of AKPD’s operating costs.

Additionally, the source said David Axelrod never discussed the coalitions’ campaigns with representatives from the firm or the coalitions themselves. The source added that Axelrod’s son Michael is a junior-level AKPD employee who has worked there for fewer than five years and is not involved in the coalitions.

It’s difficult to determine the clientele of ASK or AKPD, since neither are required to report them. But Axelrod’s disclosure statement shows that before he left the firms, both represented clients with business interests that stand to be affected by administration policy.

AKPD, for instance, represented the AFL-CIO, while ASK has worked for power concerns including Exelon and Commonwealth Edison Co. that could be affected by the administration’s push for a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions. The company also has worked for the nonprofit corporation formed to lure the 2016 Olympics to Chicago, an effort that the Obama administration has thrown its weight behind. White House officials have said Axelrod was not involved in the Olympic push.

On his first day in office, Obama unveiled a strict ethics policy barring officials from working on issues “directly and substantially related” to their former clients or employers for two years.

The White House vigorously denied that Axelrod violated the spirit of that policy. And, in fact, Axelrod's buyout agreements were cleared by the independent Office of Government Ethics, which is headed by a director appointed in 2006 to a five-year term by former President George W. Bush.

“David Axelrod has fully complied with the toughest ever ethics rules for administration officials, including divesting from AKPD before the administration began,” said Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt. “The notion that Mr. Axelrod should decline to participate in all health care policy work because his former firm — from which he has divested himself — has retained a single client which he has had no contact with is absurd.”

Nonetheless, the selection of Axelrod’s former firm to push the president’s top initiative raises appearance questions, particularly since Axelrod’s son Michael still works there, said Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation, which advocates for stricter government disclosure and ethics rules.

“The big issue seems to me whether there is a quid pro quo with PhRMA,” said Allison, adding “there’s no evidence that Axelrod steered the business to the firm. But the fact that special interests like PhRMA and the American Medical Association working hand in glove with the White House picked a firm that is so close to the White House shows how incestuous Washington can be.”

OBAMA is a prisoner of the cult of neoliberalism

Can Obama be deprogrammed?
The president is a prisoner of the cult of neoliberalism









Aug. 4, 2009 In my first foray into political life in the 1970s, I worked during college on the staff of a liberal Democrat in the Texas state Senate. Only a few years earlier, Patty Hearst had been kidnapped and brainwashed by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and a moral panic about cults seducing college kids was sweeping the nation. One result was the rise of a new, thankfully ephemeral profession: "deprogrammers" who for pay would kidnap a young person from a cult and break the spell, by means of isolation, interrogation and maybe reruns of "The Waltons."

A reactionary Republican state senator from the Houston area, who was heartily despised by my senator, introduced a bill granting parents the right to hire deprogrammers to kidnap adult children who belonged to what the parents regarded as cults and then confine them in motels for several weeks, subject to psychological coercion, without notifying the authorities. Needless to say, this deprogramming law was the greatest threat to the tradition of habeas corpus until another reactionary Texan was installed in the White House in 2001. The bill was laughed to death, when, during a hearing, the sponsor was asked if it could be used to deprogram young people who had joined a certain well-known cult. "Why, yes, Senator," the Republican replied, "it would apply to cults like the Unitarians."

Boy, do we need deprogrammers now, to liberate Barack Obama from the cult of neoliberalism.

By neoliberalism I mean the ideology that replaced New Deal liberalism as the dominant force in the Democratic Party between the Carter and Clinton presidencies. In the Clinton years, this was called the "Third Way." The term was misleading, because New Deal liberalism between 1932 and 1968 and its equivalents in social democratic Europe were considered the original "third way" between democratic socialism and libertarian capitalism, whose failure had caused the Depression. According to New Deal liberals, the United States was not a "capitalist society" or a "market democracy" but rather a democratic republic with a "mixed economy," in which the state provided both social insurance and infrastructure like electric grids, hydropower and highways, while the private sector engaged in mass production.

When it came to the private sector, the New Dealers, with some exceptions, approved of Big Business, Big Unions and Big Government, which formed the system of checks and balances that John Kenneth Galbraith called "countervailing power." But most New Dealers dreaded and distrusted bankers. They thought that finance should be strictly regulated and subordinated to the real economy of factories and home ownership. They were economic internationalists because they wanted to open foreign markets to U.S. factory products, not because they hoped that the Asian masses some day would pay high overdraft fees to U.S. multinational banks.

New Dealers approved of social insurance systems like Social Security and Medicare, which were rights (entitlements) not charity and which mostly redistributed income within the middle class, from workers to nonworkers (the retired and the temporarily unemployed). But contrary to conservative propaganda, New Deal liberals disliked means-tested antipoverty programs and despised what Franklin Roosevelt called "the dole." Roosevelt and his most important protégé, Lyndon Johnson, preferred workfare to welfare. They preferred a high-wage, low-welfare society to a low-wage, high-welfare society. To maintain the high-wage system that would minimize welfare payments to able-bodied adults, New Deal liberals did not hesitate to regulate the labor market, by means of pro-union legislation, a high minimum wage, and low levels of immigration (which were raised only at the end of the New Deal period, beginning in 1965). It was only in the 1960s that Democrats became identified with redistributionist welfarism -- and then only because of the influence of the New Left, which denounced the New Deal as "corporate liberalism."

Between the 1940s and the 1970s, the New Deal system -- large-scale public investment and R&D, regulated monopolies and oligopolies, the subordination of banking to productive industry, high wages and universal social insurance -- created the world's first mass middle class. The system was far from perfect. Southern segregationist Democrats crippled many of its progressive features and the industrial unions were afflicted by complacency and corruption. But for all its flaws, the New Deal era is still remembered as the Golden Age of the American economy.

And then America went downhill.

The "stagflation" of the 1970s had multiple sources, including the oil price shock following the Arab oil embargo in 1973 and the revival of German and Japanese industrial competition (China was still recovering from the damage done by Mao). During the previous generation, libertarian conservatives like Milton Friedman had been marginalized. But in the 1970s they gained a wider audience, blaming the New Deal model and claiming that the answer to every question (before the question was even asked) was "the market."

The free-market fundamentalists found an audience among Democrats as well as Republicans. A growing number of Democratic economists and economic policymakers were attracted to the revival of free-market economics, among them Obama's chief economic advisor Larry Summers, a professed admirer of Milton Friedman. These center-right Democrats agreed with the libertarians that the New Deal approach to the economy had been too interventionist. At the same time, they thought that government had a role in providing a safety net. The result was what came to be called "neoliberalism" in the 1980s and 1990s -- a synthesis of conservative free-market economics with "progressive" welfare-state redistribution for the losers. Its institutional base was the Democratic Leadership Council, headed by Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and the affiliated Progressive Policy Institute.

Beginning in the Carter years, the Democrats later called neoliberals supported the deregulation of infrastructure industries that the New Deal had regulated, like airlines, trucking and electricity, a sector in which deregulation resulted in California blackouts and the Enron scandal. Neoliberals teamed up with conservatives to persuade Bill Clinton to go along with the Republican Congress's dismantling of New Deal-era financial regulations, a move that contributed to the cancerous growth of Wall Street and the resulting global economic collapse. As Asian mercantilist nations like Japan and then China rigged their domestic markets while enjoying free access to the U.S. market, neoliberal Democrats either turned a blind eye to the foreign mercantilist assault on American manufacturing or claimed that it marked the beneficial transition from an industrial economy to a "knowledge economy." While Congress allowed inflation to slash the minimum wage and while corporations smashed unions, neoliberals chattered about sending everybody to college so they could work in the high-wage "knowledge jobs" of the future. Finally, many (not all) neoliberals agreed with conservatives that entitlements like Social Security were too expensive, and that it was more efficient to cut benefits for the middle class in order to expand benefits for the very poor.

The fact that Robert Rubin's son James helped select Obama's economic team may not be irrelevant.

The transition from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism began with Carter, but it was not complete until the Clinton years. Clinton, like Carter, ran as a populist and was elected on the basis of his New Deal-ish "Putting People First" program, which emphasized public investment and a tough policy toward Japanese industrial mercantilism. But early in the first term, the Clinton administration was captured by neoliberals, of whom the most important was Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Under Rubin's influence, Clinton sacrificed public investment to the misguided goal of balancing the budget, a dubious accomplishment made possible only by the short-lived tech bubble. And Rubin helped to wreck American manufacturing, by pursuing a strong dollar policy that helped Wall Street but hurt American exporters and encouraged American companies to transfer production for the U.S. domestic market to China and other Asian countries that deliberately undervalued their currencies to help their exports.

By the time Barack Obama was inaugurated, the neoliberal capture of the presidential branch of the Democratic Party was complete. Instead of presiding over an administration with diverse economic views, Obama froze out progressives, except for Jared Bernstein in the vice-president's office, and surrounded himself with neoliberal protégés of Robert Rubin like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. The fact that Robert Rubin's son James helped select Obama's economic team may not be irrelevant.

Instead of the updated Rooseveltonomics that America needs, Obama's team offers warmed-over Rubinomics from the 1990s. Consider the priorities of the Obama administration: the environment, healthcare and education. Why these priorities, as opposed to others, like employment, high wages and manufacturing? The answer is that these three goals co-opt the activist left while fitting neatly into a neoliberal narrative that could as easily have been told in 1999 as in 2009. The story is this: New Dealers and Keynesians are wrong to think that industrial capitalism is permanently and inherently prone to self-destruction, if left to itself. Except in hundred-year disasters, the market economy is basically sound and self-correcting. Government can, however, help the market indirectly, by providing these three public goods, which, thanks to "market failures," the private sector will not provide.

Healthcare? New Deal liberals favored a single-payer system like Social Security and Medicare. Obama, however, says that single payer is out of the question because the U.S. is not Canada. (Evidently the New Deal America of FDR and LBJ was too "Canadian.") The goal is not to provide universal healthcare, rather it is to provide universal health insurance, by means that, even if they include a shriveled "public option," don't upset the bloated American private health insurance industry.

Education? In the 1990s, the conventional wisdom of the neoliberal Democrats held that the "jobs of the future" were "knowledge jobs." America's workers would sit in offices with diplomas on the wall and design new products that would be made in third-world sweatshops. We could cede the brawn work and keep the brain work. Since then, we've learned that brain work follows brawn work overseas. R&D, finance and insurance jobs tend to follow the factories to Asia.

Education is also used by neoliberals to explain stagnant wages in the U.S. By claiming that American workers are insufficiently educated for the "knowledge economy," neoliberal Democrats divert attention from the real reasons for stagnant and declining wages -- the offshoring of manufacturing, the decline of labor unions, and, at the bottom of the labor market, a declining minimum wage and mass unskilled immigration. One study after another since the 1990s has refuted the theory that wage inequality results from skill-biased technical change. But the neoliberal cultists around Obama who write his economic speeches either don't know or don't care. Like Bill Clinton before him, Barack Obama continues to tell Americans that to get higher wages they need to go to college and improve their skills, as though there weren't a surplus of underemployed college grads already.

Environment? Here the differences between the New Deal Democrats and the Obama Democrats could not be wider. Their pro-industrial program did not prevent New Deal Democrats from being passionate about resource conservation and wilderness preservation. They did not hesitate to use regulations to shut down pollution. And their approach to energy was based on direct government R&D (the Manhattan Project) and direct public deployment (the TVA).

Contrast the straightforward New Deal approaches with the energy and environment policies of Obama and the Democratic leadership, which are at once too conservative and too radical. They are too conservative, because cap and trade relies on a system of market incentives that are not only indirect and feeble but likely to create a subprime market in carbon, enriching a few green profiteers. At the same time, they are too radical, because any serious attempt to shift the U.S. economy in a green direction by hiking the costs of non-renewable energy would accelerate the transfer of U.S. industry to Asia -- and with it not only industry-related "knowledge jobs" but also the manufacture of those overhyped icons of the "green economy," solar panels and windmills.

While we can't go back to the New Deal of the mid-20th century in its details, we need to re-create its spirit. But short of confining them in motel rooms and making them watch newsreels about the Hoover Dam, Glass-Steagall, the TVA and the Manhattan Project, is it possible to liberate President Obama and the Democratic leadership from the cult of neoliberalism?

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/08/04/neoliberalism/index.html

CORRUPTION IN WASHINGTON ! THIS IS A VERY SICK GROUP !

Obama's healthcare horror,Heads should roll -- beginning with Nancy Pelosi's!

Obama's healthcare horror
Heads should roll -- beginning with Nancy Pelosi's!
I must confess my dismay bordering on horror at the amateurism of the White House apparatus for domestic policy. When will heads start to roll? I was glad to see the White House counsel booted, as well as Michelle Obama's chief of staff, and hope it's a harbinger of things to come. Except for that wily fox, David Axelrod, who could charm gold threads out of moonbeams, Obama seems to be surrounded by juvenile tinhorns, bumbling mediocrities and crass bully boys.

Case in point: the administration's grotesque mishandling of healthcare reform, one of the most vital issues facing the nation. Ever since Hillary Clinton's megalomaniacal annihilation of our last best chance at reform in 1993 (all of which was suppressed by the mainstream media when she was running for president), Democrats have been longing for that happy day when this issue would once again be front and center.

I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a "death panel" under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin's shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate's unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished.

Surely, the basic rule in comprehensive legislation should be: First, do no harm. The present proposals are full of noble aims, but the biggest danger always comes from unforeseen and unintended consequences. Example: the American incursion into Iraq, which destabilized the region by neutralizing Iran's rival and thus enormously enhancing Iran's power and nuclear ambitions.

What was needed for reform was an in-depth analysis, buttressed by documentary evidence, of waste, fraud and profiteering in the healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Instead what we've gotten is a series of facile, vulgar innuendos about how doctors conduct their practice, as if their primary motive is money. Quite frankly, the president gives little sense of direct knowledge of medical protocols; it's as if his views are a tissue of hearsay and scattershot worst-case scenarios.

Of course, it didn't help matters that, just when he needed maximum momentum on healthcare, Obama made the terrible gaffe of declaring that, even without his knowing the full facts, Cambridge, Mass., police had acted "stupidly" in arresting a friend of his, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Obama's automatic identification with the pampered Harvard elite (wildly unpopular with most sensible people), as well as his insulting condescension toward an officer doing his often dangerous duty, did serious and perhaps irreparable damage to the president's standing. The strained, prissy beer summit in the White House garden afterward didn't help. Is that the Obama notion of hospitality? Another staff breakdown.

Both Gates and Obama mistakenly assumed that the original incident at Gates' house was about race, when it was about class. It was the wealthy, lordly Gates who committed the first offense by instantly and evidently hysterically defaming the character of the officer who arrived at his door to investigate the report of a break-in. There was no excuse for Gates' loud and cheap charges of racism, which he should have immediately apologized for the next day, instead of threatening lawsuits and self-aggrandizing television exposés. On the other hand, given that Cambridge is virtually a company town, perhaps police headquarters should have dispatched a moderator to the tumultuous scene before a small, disabled Harvard professor was clapped in handcuffs and marched off to jail. But why should an Ivy League panjandrum be treated any differently from the rest of us hoi polloi?

Class rarely receives honest attention in the American media, as demonstrated by the reporting on a June incident at a swimming pool in the Philadelphia suburbs. When the director of the Valley Swim Club in Montgomery County cancelled its agreement with several urban day camps to use its private pool, the controversy was portrayed entirely in racial terms. There were uninvestigated allegations of remarks about "black kids" made by white mothers who ordered their children out of the pool, and the racial theme was intensified by the director's inept description of the "complexion" of the pool having been changed -- which may simply have been a whopper of a Freudian slip.

DINGEL'S TOWN HALL MEETING~THUGS THREATENED MANS LIFE !

SEE VIDEO BELOW. APPALLING. GOD BLESS THIS MAN !

Protester: My family was threatened after I spoke up at Dingell town hall
posted at 5:05 pm on August 10, 2009 by Allahpundit

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That’s what you get for being un-American, pal. Someone in the comments to our Headlines item on Pelosi’s and Hoyer’s op-ed this morning suggested it was part of a wink-wink-nudge-nudge scheme by Democrats to legitimize violence against protesters.

I won’t go that far — questioning her opponents’ patriotism is actually par for the course for Madam Speaker — but it truly is amazing to think how many “climate of hate” pieces have been written about the right’s rhetorical excesses vis-a-vis the near total pass the left’s gotten over the past week.

We’ve had congressmen screeching about “political terrorists,” “brown shirts,” and “rabid animals,” Senators denouncing “un-American” activities, the DNC running ads about “angry mobs,” the president himself telling his opponents to shut up and get out of the way, and the Democratic brain trust now setting up a “war room” to respond to health-care “attacks.”

Glenn Beck’s said repeatedly on his show that he supports nonviolent resistance only, but a fat lot of good that’s done him with liberals more interested in the “subtext” of his messaging; pray tell, what “subtext” should we glean from the dehumanizing venom being spit by the Democratic leadership over the past 10 days?
Be happy, I guess, that they’ve finally found a war they can support unequivocally, where for once there’s no need to ponder the “root causes” that alienated the other side.

OBAMA AND DEAD FISH EMANUEL'S BROTHER DR. DEATH HATES OLD PEOPLE

Emanuel: Believes in withholding care from elderly for greater good.


DEADLY DOCTORS
OBAMA ADVISERS WANT TO RATION CARE


THE health bills coming out of Congress would put the de cisions about your care in the hands of presidential appointees. They'd decide what plans cover, how much leeway your doctor will have and what seniors get under Medicare.

Yet at least two of President Obama's top health advisers should never be trusted with that power.

Start with Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. He has already been appointed to two key positions: health-policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research.

Emanuel bluntly admits that the cuts will not be pain-free. "Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely 'lipstick' cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change," he wrote last year (Health Affairs Feb. 27, 2008).

Savings, he writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, "as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others" (Journal of the American Medical Association, June 18, 2008).

Yes, that's what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.

Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they'll tell you that a doctor's job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.

Emanuel, however, believes that "communitarianism" should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those "who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia" (Hastings Center Report, Nov.-Dec. '96).

Translation: Don't give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson's or a child with cerebral palsy.

He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: "Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years" (Lancet, Jan. 31).

The bills being rushed through Congress will be paid for largely by a $500 billion-plus cut in Medicare over 10 years. Knowing how unpopular the cuts will be, the president's budget director, Peter Orszag, urged Congress this week to delegate its own authority over Medicare to a new, presidentially-appointed bureaucracy that wouldn't be accountable to the public.

Since Medicare was founded in 1965, seniors' lives have been transformed by new medical treatments such as angioplasty, bypass surgery and hip and knee replacements. These innovations allow the elderly to lead active lives. But Emanuel criticizes Americans for being too "enamored with technology" and is determined to reduce access to it.

Dr. David Blumenthal, another key Obama adviser, agrees. He recommends slowing medical innovation to control health spending.

Blumenthal has long advocated government health-spending controls, though he concedes they're "associated with longer waits" and "reduced availability of new and expensive treatments and devices" (New England Journal of Medicine, March 8, 2001). But he calls it "debatable" whether the timely care Americans get is worth the cost. (Ask a cancer patient, and you'll get a different answer. Delay lowers your chances of survival.)

Obama appointed Blumenthal as national coordinator of health-information technology, a job that involves making sure doctors obey electronically deivered guidelines about what care the government deems appropriate and cost effective.

In the April 9 New England Journal of Medicine, Blumenthal predicted that many doctors would resist "embedded clinical decision support" -- a euphemism for computers telling doctors what to do.

Americans need to know what the president's health advisers have in mind for them. Emanuel sees even basic amenities as luxuries and says Americans expect too much: "Hospital rooms in the United States offer more privacy . . . physicians' offices are typically more conveniently located and have parking nearby and more attractive waiting rooms" (JAMA, June 18, 2008).

No one has leveled with the public about these dangerous views. Nor have most people heard about the arm-twisting, Chicago-style tactics being used to force support. In a Nov. 16, 2008, Health Care Watch column, Emanuel explained how business should be done: "Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda. If the automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration's health-reform effort."

Do we want a "reform" that empowers people like this to decide for us?

Betsy McCaughey is founder of the Committee to Reduce Infec tion Deaths and a former New York lieutenant governor.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/07242009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/deadly_doctors_180941.htm?page=0
By BETSY MCCAUGHEY

OBAMA'S DEATH BILL~JUST SAY NO TO OBAMA AND HIS CRONIES

This health care bill sux ! It is totally disgusting that people in congress put such shit together like this. Unreal.
Obama and his cronies are heartless scum.
Rationing and more. CALL IT THE DEATH BILL !

READ THE BILL. READ THE BILL. SEE LINK BELOW.

Page 22: Mandates audits of all employers that self-insure!

Page 29: Admission: your health care will be rationed!

Page 30: A government committee will decide what treatments and benefits you get (and, unlike an insurer, there will be no appeals process)

Page 50: All non-US citizens, illegal or not, will be provided with free healthcare services.

Page 95: The Government will pay ACORN and Americorps to sign up individuals for Government-run Health Care plan.

Page 102: Those eligible for Medicaid will be automatically enrolled: you have no choice in the matter.

Page 167: Any individual who doesn’t have acceptable healthcare (according to the government) will be taxed 2.5% of income.

Page 203: "The tax imposed under this section shall not be treated as tax." Yes, it really says that.

• Page 335: Government mandates establishment of outcome-based measures: i.e., rationing.

Page 425: More bureaucracy: Advance Care Planning Consult: Senior Citizens, assisted suicide, euthanasia?

• Page 425: Government provides approved list of end-of-life resources, guiding you in death.

Page 427: Government mandates program that orders end-of-life treatment; government dictates how your life ends.

Page 430: Government will decide what level of treatments you may have at end-of-life.

Thus far, the proposed legislation makes no mention of "Soylent Green", but congress still has some tinkering to do before the final product is ready

READ THE ENTIRE BILL THUS FAR HERE: Read it ! AND WEEP.
http://edlabor.house.gov/documents/111/pdf/publications/AAHCA-BillText-071409.pdf

OBAMA AND The Obsolete Man: Refusing To Let The Soul Of America Die

No Sheeples Here: The Obsolete Man: Refusing To Let The Soul Of America Die

We are witnessing a transformation—an insidious alteration of the greatest nation on Earth—the United States of America. President Obama and his minions seek to change the political landscape of our beloved country and take our hard-fought freedoms away from us all. I need not enumerate his radical ideas here—you are already familiar with them.

The demagoguery of the left in recent days reminded me of a portentous parable by Rod Sterling called The Obsolete Man.

The story begins:

“You walk into this room at your own risk, because it leads to the future; not a future that will be, but one that might be. This is not a new world: It is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advancements, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like every one of the super states that preceded it, it has one iron rule: Logic is an enemy, and truth is a menace.”
America was founded by brave men and women who sought freedom from the oppression of tyranny and were willing to die for that freedom. Their refusal to yield to tyranny launched the American War for Independence in 1775. Thirteen tiny colonies waged war against a mighty enemy and Patrick Henry dared to proclaim:


"They tell us Sir, that we are weak—unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs, and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature has placed in our power.”
Thomas Paine sounded the call to arms with, “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.”

Elie Wiesel, who survived Auschwitz, Buna, Buchenwald and Gleiwitz and dedicated his life to ensuring that none of us forget what happened to the Jews during Hitler’s reign of terror, gives notice that,


“It may well be that our means are fairly limited and our possibilities restricted when it comes to applying pressure on our government. But is this a reason to do nothing? Despair is not an answer. Neither is resignation. Resignation only leads to indifference, which is not merely a sin but a punishment.”
In town hall meetings all across this great nation, Americans have begun challenging their Senators and Congressmen on ObamaCare. Evocative of history’s failed dictators, the White House, the Democratic Party and their union hoods have locked citizens out of public meetings because logic is an enemy and truth is a menace.

The American citizenry is not stupid. It is not comprised of extremists and it is not Nazi-like. Mock us at your peril.

Looming in the not too distant future are the elections of 2010. The left’s belief that they are “better than us” will come with a heavy price at the ballot box. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man, that state is obsolete.

The Twilight Zone episode with Burgess Meredith playing a character who defies a totalitarian government.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
Henry David Thoreau
Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
Henry David Thoreau
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
Henry David Thoreau
Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
Henry David Thoreau
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
Henry David Thoreau

OBAMA HAS CALLED ON HIS THUGS TO GO TO TOWNHALL MEETINGS NOW~WHAT A JERKOFF !

You all need to follow the link to this post. Obama has sent out a email to all his cronny Kool aide drinking followers instructions about going to town hall meetings to defend his HEALTH/DEATH POLICY.
This is unreal what he has had his staff send out to all on his email list. UN BELIEVEABLE !! DAMN...THESE PEOPLE ARE VERY VERY SICK.
TAKE AMERICA BACK FORM THESE THUGS AND MOBSTERS. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN THIS COUNTRY. Be afraid be very afraid.





HCAN Playbook For Thwarting Town Hall Protesters



http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/documents/2009/08/hcan-playbook-for-thwarting-town-hall-protesters.php?page=1

RAY LAHOOD IS A LIAR !! ANOTHER OBAMA CROONIE !

Did Secretary LaHood lie to Congress? (Updated with better audio)
By: David Freddoso
Commentary Staff Writer
08/05/09 8:08 AM EDT

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the ranking member on the Government Oversight Committee, has written White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel requesting information about whether Emanuel coordinated a political multi-agency response to Republican criticisms of the stimulus.

Specifically, the question is whether he put four cabinet secretaries up to writing bullying letters to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, R. The letters asked whether Arizona wanted its stimulus funds cut off, shortly after Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., suggested repealing the stimulus package. In this Politico story by Jonathan Martin, two administration officials have confirmed Emanuel's involvement in demanding that the secretaries write the letters.

[A]fter seeing [Sen. Jon] Kyl [R-Ariz.] and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) again paint the legislation as a failure on Sunday talk shows, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel directed that the letters from the Cabinet secretaries be sent to Brewer, according to two administration officials.

If this is true, then Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood lied to Congress two weeks ago, during testimony before the House Budget Committee. LaHood, who wrote one of the letters to Brewer, had to be asked seven times in a July 24 budget hearing whether anyone in the White House had encouraged him or put him up to writing Brewer.

Unsatisfied with LaHood's evasive and repeated answer that he "needed no encouragement" to write the letter, Rep. Scott Garrett, R-N.J., finally complained to the chairman: "Mr. Chairman, would the witness please answer the question?" (The committee's audio and video are of poor quality, but you can hear the whole exchange between Garrett and LaHood here.

LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, finally answered "No." But if Martin's reporting is correct, then LaHood was lying.

OBAMA AND HIS TIES WITH AARP..CROOKS AND CROONIES~AARP SUX !

Mark Tapscott: Tripping up AARP's dance with Pelosi and the Democrats
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
August 6, 2009 Washington Wink-Winks were flying fast Monday when a memo surfaced from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi describing the Democrats' plan to "partner" with AARP, SEIU and others in an August recess PR blitz for Obamacare and against Republicans who oppose it.

Triple Ws are the lame excuses Washington elitists like Pelosi and AARP activists hide behind whenever they are caught red-handed. Then they deny what is obvious to everybody else while winking reassurance to their momentarily puzzled supporters that they don't really mean the denials.

Here's how it came down Monday. Connie Hair of Human Events reported on the Pelosi memo, including this key graph:

"The Leadership is working in close coordination with the White House and outside groups (including but not limited to HCAN, Families USA, AFSCME, SEIU, AARP, etc.) to ensure complementary efforts during August. The President, Secretary Sebelius and other principals in the reform debate will be working throughout the month to hold events, promote the message in the press and move the reform effort forward."

Nothing unusual there. Congressional leaders always launch PR blitzes at opponents during the August recess, right? Working with activist allies is part of the game: They ask the leaders' planted questions at constituent forums and town halls, help generate favorable home-town press from like-minded journalists, and issue "reports" full of glowing praise for favored lawmakers.

But Hair's story caught my eye because it flatly contradicted a Friday declaration in The Washington Examiner by AARP CEO Barry Rand that "AARP has not endorsed any of the bills currently being debated in the Congress."

The WWWs started coming thick and fast as soon as I asked AARP about the Pelosi memo. The 40 million-member group's vice president, Drew Nannis, immediately got on the phone with Pelosi's staff, and within a few minutes came back with the claim that the memo Hair published was just a "draft" composed by an "over-zealous staffer."

Nannis also said AARP would just be "answering our members questions" and - here's the clever clincher - "AARP is participating in AARP's campaign." He even kindly secured a copy of the "final" Pelosi memo, from which the offending paragraph magically disappeared.

It was all I could do not to ROFL at this display by multiple specimens of the rapidly proliferating breed constantly seen and heard going to and fro in the nation's capitol, the Boobus Liberal Extremis Elitum Politico (BLEEP).

Washington BLEEPs come with either brilliant blue or fading red markings, but all of them think gullible tax-paying Joe Six Packs believe them when they toss out lines like the "over-zealous staffer" bit to explain away a memo describing what everybody else in town with a pulse and brain waves already knows.

Of course AARP is helping Democrats confront hordes of outraged constituents. Many of those shouting the loudest are seniors who now see that they've been had by politicians and organizations they once trusted.

Remember, AARP has more than a billion dollars in assets and nearly a billion in annual revenues from membership dues, profits on insurance sales and endorsements, seminars, and other money-making ventures tirelessly aimed at every American age 50 or older. And it spends more lobbying than any other non-corporate Washington special interest.

Most seniors oppose Obamacare, yet the Washington AARP staff is a major employment center for Democratic activists, policy wonks, campaign contributors, and propagandists. The group's lavish Washington headquarters is a BLEEP hot house.

That's why I doubt that anybody reading this column can name one bill in Congress that AARP has supported in the past decade to freeze or cap any federal entitlement. To the contrary, more than 50 pages are needed on its official disclosure report to list all the issues on which AARP lobbies to keep government growing.

The AARP guys weren't the only BLEEPs rolling out the Triple Ws Monday. When I asked Brendan Daly, Pelosi's spokesman, why the "over-zealous staffer" included the graph mentioning AARP in the memo in the first place, his response was: "It shouldn't have been."

Shrewd BLEEPS know some questions from Joe Sixpack are best ignored, no matter how foolish it makes the Washington guy look.


Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott's Copy Desk blog on Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott's Copy Desk blog on washingtonexaminer.com.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Tripping-up-AARP_s-dance-with-Pelosi-and-the-Democrats-8068565-52520252.html

OBAMA THE LAME DUCK PRESIDENT AFTER ONLY 6 MONTHS IN OFFICE~BOOT HIM OUT NOW, WHY WAIT ?

Is the American public getting steamrolled by a lame duck president?
By: J.P. Freire
Associate Commentary Editor
08/04/09 12:57 PM EDT
While every president gets a honeymoon in his first hundred days to push legislation he deems important, no one told that to President Obama who's been pushing a wide variety of unpopular measures in the hopes he can get away with it. It seems that every initiative he's taken up has either soured in the public's mind or meets with public indifference. At this rate, Obama may become a lame duck mere months into his presidency.

Here are a few examples:

Just today a new Rasmussen poll finds that 54 percent of Americans oppose giving more money for the "Cash for Clunkers" program, while only 33 percent support it. The additional funding was approved by Congress on Friday.

In June, Gallup found that the majority of Americans did not want to shut down Guantanamo Bay, despite it being one of Obama's main campaign promises.

In mid-July, most Americans felt that cap-and-trade would hurt the economy, contrary to a fierce push by Obama and Democrats in Congress. In fact, Democrats needed to grease the wheel among their own party to get support for the bill. In an all-too-weird coincidence, yes-voters wound up getting a nice bit of campaign cash in the days prior to the vote.

Gallup's Frank Newport writes that Obama's efforts to push a health care fix are met with skepticism by most voters because they don't see it as that great a crisis, though they do recognize that costs are a problem. Part of the problem? The American public is very concerned with fiscal restraint. "The push for healthcare reform is occurring in an environment characterized by high levels of concern about fiscal responsibility, government spending, and the growing federal deficit. Americans are being asked to approve major new healthcare expenditures at a time when they are not yet convinced that the last massive outlay of government money -- the stimulus -- has made an impact."

Another poll shows that 41 percent of Americans expect their taxes to go up under Obama, despite Obama's consistent promises not to hike them. That may be because Obama has already raised taxes -- on cigarettes -- and just this past weekend, both his own Treasury Secretary and economic adviser refused to go on record ruling out a tax hike.

People are so frustrated with bailouts that 46 percent of Americans said they'd be more likely to buy Ford because it didn't get a bailout.

Public support for the stimulus is tepid, given that, according to Rasmussen, 25 percent say it has helped the economy while 31 percent think it has hurt. Gallup finds a similar problem, though it chalks many of these issues up to partisanship: "Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to say the stimulus has made and will make both the economy and their family's financial situation worse, and Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to say the opposite. Independents are evenly divided about the economic stimulus' effect on the economy, for better or for worse, to date or in the future. They are slightly more negative than positive about its effect on their own families." So much for the post-partisan presidency.
How is it that every item on the President's agenda has met either strong disapproval or sheer indifference from the American public, when this was the presidency glorified as a realigning moment? Heck, when Obama came into office, CBS/NYTimes ran a poll showing that most Americans were happy to see government grow. Now, even the rabidly Pro-Obama bloggers at FireDogLake are wondering what went wrong:

President Obama is not very new anymore. We have all seen him operate, and he has so far not produced legislation that is “change we can believe in." But, rather, legislation that seems to reinforce the trend away from democracy and towards plutocracy. So, how can folks trust him to deliver this kind of change with health care reform?

Better question: How can folks trust him to deliver any kind of change whatsoever?

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Is-the-American-public-getting-steamrolled-by-a-lame-duck-president-52442432.html

OBAMA & HIS SCUMMY CRONKIES ARE SPYING ON US ALL NOW. FISHY ???? OUTRAGEOUS !

REPORT THIS...FISHY ????!! OBAMA AND HIS CROONIES ARE SPYING ON US ALL NOW THAT DO NOT AGREE WITH HIM ON HIS HEALTHCARE BS.....MAKE MY DAY...REPORT THIS. LOL

Imagine telling an old person that they are not worthy of life and their treatment is too expensive. Go home and take a pain pill. What a frigging idiot jerk off creep.

Obama's dissident database could be secret -- and permanent
By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
08/06/09 4:47 AM EDT
The White House request that members of the public report anyone who is spreading "disinformation" about the proposed national health care makeover could lead to a White House database of political opponents that will be both secret and permanent, according to Republican lawyers on the Senate Judiciary Committee who are examining the plan's possible implementation.

On Monday, White House director of new media Macon Phillips posted a note on the White House web site complaining of "disinformation about health insurance reform." "These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation," Phillips wrote. "Since we can't keep track of all of them here at the White House, we're asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."

In a letter to Obama Tuesday, Republican Sen. John Cornyn wrote that, given Phillips' request, "it is inevitable that the names, email address, IP addresses, and private speech of U.S. citizens will be reported to the White House." Cornyn warned the president that "these actions taken by your White House staff raise the specter of a data collection program."

"I can only imagine the level of justifiable outrage had your predecessor asked Americans to forward emails critical of his policies to the White House," Cornyn continued. "I urge you to cease this program immediately."

Senate Judiciary Committee lawyers studying the proposal say that although there is no absolutely settled law on the matter, the White House plan is likely not covered by the Privacy Act, which prohibits government agencies from keeping any records "describing how any individual exercises rights guaranteed by the First Amendment unless expressly authorized by statute or by the individual about whom the record is maintained." Therefore, it appears the White House can legally keep records of the emails and other communications it receives in response to Phillips' request.

Those lawyers also point out that the White House is not covered by the Freedom of Information Act, which means it would not have to release any information on the plan to members of the public who make a request.

In addition, the lawyers say the collected emails likely will be covered by the Presidential Records Act, which requires the White House to preserve and maintain its records for permanent storage in a government database. Phillips' request suggests that whatever information the White House receives on health-care reform "disinformation" will be used to further the goal of passing a national health-care makeover, which is, of course, one of the president's main policy initiatives. Such material, and whatever the White House does with it, would qualify as presidential records. Only after more than a decade would such records be publicly available.

"So the White House, whether by design or accident, has requested information from the public that will become 'records' under the Presidential Records Act, yet would be impermissible for any government to otherwise collect under the Privacy Act," writes one Judiciary Committee source. "Where were the lawyers in all of this? What is their legal basis for authorizing the collection of these records?"

Linda Douglass, head of communications for the White House Office of Health Reform, says the White House is "not compiling lists or sources of information" on opponents of health care reform. But if "fishy" information is indeed collected, as Phillips' request suggested, the laws involved mean that the information obtained by the White House could not only be secret but permanent. A dissident database, in whatever precise form it ultimately takes, could be around for a long time to come.

-Byron York

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Obamas-dissident-database-could-be-secret----and-permanent-52571822.html

OBAMA HATES OLD PEOPLE~WE WILL ALL BE OLD ONE DAY !

Obama Says We Shouldn't Treat Old Folks to Save Money And the Media Goes Deaf

I am wondering when the euthanasia folks are going to start touting this one? I mean, it sure seemed to me as if the most caring, most civil, most intelligent president evah just said that healthcare could be cheaper if we don't give old folks and the infirm the full measure of care they now get. It appeared that Obama said we should just let them die or suffer because they aren't worth the effort. Imagine if Bush had said something like this? The left wouldn't have hesitated to call him any manner of names. Oddly, though, the Old Media have not had so much as a raised eyebrow over his statements on Wednesday.

Obama said during the ABC Special on Wednesday night that a way to save healthcare costs is to abandon the sort of care that "evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve" the patient's health. He went on to say that he had personal familiarity with such a situation when his grandmother broke her hip after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Obama offered a question on the efficacy of further care for his grandmother saying, "and the question was, does she get hip replacement surgery, even though she was fragile enough they were not sure how long she would last?"

But who is it that will present the "evidence" that will "show" that further care is futile? Are we to believe that Obama expects individual doctors will make that decision in his bold new government controlled healthcare future? If he is trying to make that claim it is a flat out untruth and he knows it.

Does your homebuilder negotiate with your city hall over whether you get a building permit, or does the permit get levied no matter what? Does a cop decide if you really broke the law, or does he simply arrest you and let the courts hash it out? Does your tax preparer negotiate with the IRS or is he supposed to just calculate your tax bill on their terms and have you pay the required amount?

Government does not work by negotiation. Government does not work from the bottom up. It works from the top down. This singular fact means that no doctor will be deciding if you are too old or infirm to get medical care. It will be a medically untrained bureaucrat that sets a national rule that everyone will have to obey. There won't be any room for your grandma to have a different outcome than anyone else's.

So, what will it be then? Who will decide when medical care is just too expensive to bother with? Who will be left to perish because they just aren't worth the lifesaving effort? Well, for sure it won't be any members of Congress or anyone that works for the federal government because they won't be expected to suffer under the nationally socialized plan. It also won't be Obama's buddies in the unions who are about to be similarly exempted from the national plan, at least if Senator Max Baucus has his way.

Ah, but we are told that Obama's ideas on healthcare are "evolving," dontcha know? During the recent campaign for president (that was only 7 months ago, if you'll recall) Obama insisted that he would never tax your healthcare benefits from work. He even ridiculed McCain for proposing such a plan. Lately, however, he's "evolved" toward saying that such a new tax is on the table. What about his stance against fining people and businesses that don't join his UberPlan? He was against that sort of coerciveness before. Now he's "evolved."

Originally, he said it was "healthcare for all," but as of Wednesday night, it seems he's "evolved" to say that only those worth the bother should get healthcare. The rest should be left to died and/or suffer. If he does any more "evolving" we'll all be finding just who is "worth" what as far as he and his Democrats are concerned. Somehow I'd guess that many of you reading this today won't quite be worth as much as certain others!

Let's hope none of us are ever in a position to find out if Obamacare deems our grandmothers worth saving.

And what ever happened to the left's mantra that healthcare is a "right" and that money should never enter into a life or death decision? Now The One is saying it's just too darn expensive to save the old and infirm? Will our friends on the left now disown Obama the "murderer"?

Even worse, why has the media remained mum on the possibility that President Spock, Doctor of life, just said that old folks are too expensive to treat? Hello, CNN, NBC, New York Times... anyone?

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/warner-todd-huston/2009/06/26/obama-says-we-shouldnt-treat-old-folks-save-money-media-goes-dea