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.

Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Waxman, ARE UN-AMERICAN NAZIS !

Hey, Nancy,Steny Hoyer,Henry Waxman,You want Swastika's, I will give you a Swastika. You communist pigs. The only UN-AMERICANS I SEE ARE "YOU" AND ALL YOUR DAMN CRONIES IN CONGRESS.
People will not stop expressing themselves, THIS IS A FREE COUNTRY, AND WE HAVE THE FREEDOM ON SPEECH TO EXPRESS OURSELVES.
You will nto take that away ! Not now, not ever ! You forget who you work for !!! America does not belong to you glorified creeps In Washington DC. American belongs to US...THE PEOPLE !

Nancy, YOU need to resign and take all your croonies with you.
You are slime. You do not care about America or its people. You are a sick indiviual, an old hippie with burned out brain cells from smoking too much pot and taking too many drugs. I bet you are on Prozac now ! WITH ALL THAT BOTOX IN YOUR UGLY FACE THAT WE THE TAXPAYERS HAVE PAID FOR IT'S NOT WONDER YOU NEED PROZAC.

You are obcessed with bringing down AMERICA ! WHY ????
You are 70 years old and it time for you to retire and get out of our lives.
You are the sorriest speaker America has ever had ! Obama is bad enough but YOU Nancy take the cake.
If you think for one minute that WE THE PEOPLE are going to sit back and let 535 MEMBERS OF CONGRESS Take over our lives then you have another thought coming women !! Americans are speaking out. And...it sure as hell not in favor of you.

This country is for the people, and by the people, and of the people, not for the congress and by the congress. You only represent us as citizens and if you cannot represent what the people want from their government and only what YOU want.
Get the hell out of government as you do not belong there.
YOU ARE SCUM !!!!

Anatomy of Nancy Pelo-cchio’s Astroturf brigade

Anatomy of Nancy Pelo-cchio’s Astroturf brigade
By Michelle Malkin • August 7, 2009 11:43 PM
Madame Speaker Nancy Pelosi (affectionately known as Nancy Pelo-cchio among us “political terrorists” on the Right) snuck into a Denver health care clinic today, where she was greeted by 200 grass-roots protesters against socialized medicine — and a handful of Obama-bots and union members carrying identical HCAN signs.
I already noted this morning how one of the Obamacare activists yanked an anti-Pelosi sign out of a protester’s hands. Brown shirt, anyone?
There’s much more.
Denver photojournalist El Marco was at the event and has an amazing pictorial essay detailing how Pelo-cchio’s Astroturf brigade had to be coached by professional organizers — including several day laborers who didn’t speak English and couldn’t tell what the signs they were holding read. And they accuse Tea Party folks of being puppets?!

http://michellemalkin.com/2009/08/07/nancy-pelo-cchios-astroturf-brigade/

Cash for Clunkers~We pay you drive~

Cash For Clunkers Bust

Why do things like this happen? A government plan to take older cars off the road, now thanks to them, Americans shopping for a used car (read NOT the rich) get to pay higher prices for whatever they buy, or buy less car. Who knows, maybe they go without that new used car. Just great. And it happens because a bunch of meddling politicians with a feel good plan have no experience with, or appreciation for how markets work.

You think this is bad? Wait until they finish meddling with GM and the Financial Industry, we'll all be lucky if we aren't broke. This is not new people. It is not a rare event. It happens every time the government takes our money and meddles in the private sector. And that just points to the double nature of this hit, which makes it all the more insulting.

They take our money through taxes, then maybe take a little more so they can buy up old cars, or to service the debt on what they borrowed to buy them in the first place. And what do taxpayers get in return? Higher prices for used cars.

That's called sticking it to you coming and going. Usually people who do that are called crooks, or scam artists and end up in jail. These crooks end up in government cars also paid for by our dime. And when they want to take the family on vacation? They schedule a junket overseas that just happens to hit on the hot spots where the well-heeled like to play. We don't get to go, we just get to pay. And with Obama and the Dems, all we can expect is more, more, more for them, them, them. Isn't it time people stood up together to this craziness and said, hey, what about me for a change? See here for the rest of this miserable tale.

Bleech!!

The much ballyhooed Cash for Clunkers program has had the unintended consequences of driving up the cost of new and used vehicles and used auto parts, according to independent studies of the auto markets. The Cash for Clunkers program demonstrates the danger of government trying to micro-manage supply and demand, and is a warning as to the dangers of Democratic plans for health care restructuring and a cap-and-trade system.

http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2009/08/cash-for-clunkers-bust.html

http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451c1db69e20120a533cde1970c

SO NO TO THE HEALTH CARE OVERHAUL PRESENTED TODAY, OVER 1,000 PAGES

I am not oppossed to people who are legal residents of the United States that cannot afford Health Care being able to get it someway, but, why should the RICH pay for it and why should the burden be shifted to the states ?
The rest of this countries states will end up like CALIFORNIA. BROKE AND BUSTED.
There is a way that Health Care for the poor that are not on medicare or medicare can be helped to get coverage.

The government needs help all the time sending out things to folks in the mail and a lot of other things. Let these people that need health care stuff envelopes for Uncle Sam. That will help pay for the healthcare.
I am sure that our socialist left congress can come up with a better plan that what they have concocked this time around.

The bill they have on the floor now that is over 1,000 pages long that none of us will probably have the chance to read it? It is all the small things in the bill that people do not read. Those are the items of interest that is always missed.

CALL YOUR HOUSE OF REPRESENTAVE AND TELL THEM NO TO THIS BILL. NO NO NO ! DO YOU REALLY WANT NANCY AND HER GANG TELLING YOU THAT YOUR GRANDMOTHER HAS NTO GOT LONG TO LIVE AND TO JUST LET HER DIE. I DON'T THINK SO. !q!

Health Care Overhaul Threatens States

Even as California struggles with a catastrophic fiscal crisis and other states scramble to avoid the same fate, Democrats in Washington are proposing health care measures that would add hundreds of billions of dollars of spending to state budgets.

Thus far, very little of the debate surrounding the push to overhaul the nation’s health care system has focused on the federalism concerns raised by several provisions within legislation pending in Congress. Taken together, the measures will impose a raft of new financial and regulatory obligations on individual states.

Most directly, Democratic plans to extend health care coverage to all Americans are contingent on a massive expansion of Medicaid. The program, which covers about 40 million people now, would gain 15 million to 20 million new beneficiaries if Democrats get their way.

The Congressional Budget Office pegged the cost of such an expansion at $500 billion over 10 years, but the total cost is likely higher because the estimate only counts the projected burden on the federal government. Under the current arrangement, Washington picks up about 57 percent of the cost of Medicaid and states pay for 43 percent. While the latest draft of the bill by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee has the federal government subsidizing the Medicaid expansion for the first five years, after that, the burden will gradually shift back to the states.

“There’s an air of unreality here,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, a member of the HELP committee. “The language is, ‘we’ll shift it back to the states’ as if the states had the money or a printing press. But this isn’t just a little increase. This is a bankrupting increase for most states.”

Alexander, who had to balance a state budget when he served as governor of Tennessee, quipped, “Any Senator that votes to expand Medicaid the way it is currently being proposed in Democratic bills ought to be sent home to serve as governor for eight years and try to manage the program.”

He said that financing this Medicaid increase would require Tennessee to introduce a new 10 percent state income tax. He also noted that as it is, the economic stimulus package passed in February already expanded Medicaid by $85 billion over two years, imposing costs on the states thereafter.

Ray Scheppach, executive director of the National Governors Association, testified before the committee last month that the state executives were concerned about the proposed expansion.

“Governors oppose changes to the Medicaid program that will result in an unfunded mandate imposed on the states,” Scheppach said. “Any increase in the mandatory minimum eligibility threshold will cost states tens of billions of dollars per year.”

Another problem posed by the Medicaid expansion involves access. If Congress approves lower payments to doctors to cut the cost of the program, it means that more providers will stop accepting Medicaid patients and thus reduce the quality of available care.

Alexander proposed an amendment to the HELP bill (also known as the “Kennedy bill” after the committee’s chairman, Sen. Ted Kennedy) that would have prevented any Medicaid expansion from adding to the financial burden of the states. But Democrats struck it down, leaving the issue to be resolved in the Finance Committee, which oversees the program.

But Medicaid is only one of many areas in which Democrats seek to use the power of the federal government to impose their health care vision on states.

The Kennedy bill would also create health insurance exchanges called “Gateways” in every state, allowing individuals to use government subsidies to purchase a private health care plan or a new government-run plan. While the legislation claims to offer flexibility in how states set up the exchanges, any state that refuses to establish an exchange within four years will have one imposed from Washington.

Among the hundreds of new powers the unelected Secretary of Health and Human Services would be granted by the legislation is the authority to “establish and operate a Gateway” in a state that does not create one on its own. And once this happens, all of the new insurance regulations created by the legislation “shall become effective in such State, notwithstanding any contrary provision of State law.”

Every individual in the state would be required to purchase “qualifying” health insurance and employers would be forced to provide insurance or pay a tax. And once again, the HHS Secretary (currently Kathleen Sebelius) would be tasked with “establish(ing) criteria” to define “qualifying” coverage.

Michael Greve, an American Enterprise Institute scholar who focuses on federalism, said that any state that accepts Medicaid money would have to go along with any conditions the federal government attaches to it. “The central problem is the temptation by the states,” he said.

However, he said that the imposition of health insurance exchanges on the states raises much more complex legal issues involving the hotly contested concept of “conditional preemption,” which is when the federal government tells states to enact a given regulation or else have the federal government do it for them. Greve said his hunch is that the current U.S. Supreme Court would find such a provision unconstitutional.

As legislation moves through Congress, at least one state is trying to protect its citizens against federal overreach. Last month, the Arizona state legislature voted to include a referendum on the 2010 ballot that would amend the state constitution to prevent anybody in the state from being forced to participate in any health care system. Practically speaking, the provision would mean that people and businesses in Arizona would be exempt from insurance coverage mandates.

“This is an effort to create a federalism shield to protect the rights of Arizonans,” said Clint Bolick, a director at the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, who supports the measure.

In 2008, Arizona voters narrowly rejected a similar proposal by less than 9,000 votes out of more than 2.1 million cast after then Gov. Janet Napolitano campaigned vigorously against it. But Bolick said that the 2010 proposition has different language that prevents opponents from arguing that it would affect existing state programs.

The legislation would not seek to address the issue created by the imposition of an insurance exchange on the state, but Bolick said such a provision could be challenged under the “anti-commandeering” principle. This applies when “the federal government enlists the state as if it were an agent of the federal government,” he said. “That raises constitutional alarm bells.”

Christie Herrera of the American Legislative Exchange Council, which boasts 1,800 conservative state legislators as members, said that efforts are already underway in five other states (Indiana, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Wyoming) to imitate the Arizona example if it succeeds next year.

Health care has already been the subject of several failed state experiments. In 1994, Tennessee expanded Medicaid coverage, but by 2003 its health care system was deemed “not financially viable” and Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen was forced to rein in the program.

In 2006, then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney signed health care legislation in which the state government forced individuals to obtain coverage and offered them subsidies to purchase government-designed plans on a government-run exchange. The result has been skyrocketing costs and longer waits in doctors’ offices. A Rasmussen poll taken last month found that just 26 percent of voters in the overwhelmingly liberal state said the effort was a success.

Instead of learning from these failed experiments, Democrats in Washington are planning to use federal power to muscle all states into replicating them.



http://spectator.org/archives/2009/07/14/health-care-overhaul-threatens

Nancy Pelosi would sell her mother for a vote, a real piece of slime.

Chaos, arm-twisting gave Pelosi win

After lawmakers had devoured the last of the Kalua Pig at last Thursday night’s White House Luau, Nancy Pelosi summoned her team back to the Capitol — to ensure the climate change bill wasn’t the next thing roasted on the spit.

Pelosi and her top lieutenants would spend the next four hours whipping, cajoling, begging and browbeating undecided Democrats — and triple-checking their whip lists to decide who was a solid “yes” and who was prevaricating on the cap-and-trade legislation.

Yet no matter how many calls they made — or how many times they checked and rechecked their list — Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) kept coming up between 12 and 20 votes short of the 216 votes needed to win.

“We didn’t have the votes — and we had to have this vote,” said a leadership aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “This was the big one for us. [Pelosi] staked her prestige on this one. ... This was her flagship issue, and this was a flagship vote for us.”

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 passed by only 219-212, after an epic day replete with Republican ambushes, petty betrayals, hastily rearranged flights and disappearing acts.

Yet for all the apparent chaos, the action was commanded by a House speaker maneuvering with the urgency of someone who knew her reputation was on the line.

Despite Republican promises to punish battleground state Democrats for supporting a “cap and tax” plan, Pelosi and her fractious caucus passed their most serious test to date.

And whatever the fallout, aides say that both Pelosi and President Barack Obama now know that their majority can hold together — barely — when placed under withering pressure — which may bode well for the equally arduous trials on health care reform.

At the end of it all, Pelosi, who floated in and out of the House cloakroom all day, impossible to miss in an arctic-white linen pantsuit, gambled big and pulled off one of the most important legislative victories of her career, a win she views as a personal vindication, according to those close to the San Francisco Democrat.

“There’s no question about it,” Clyburn said after the vote. “She went back to her whipping days of old. She is an incredibly good whip. I’m trying to learn from her every day.”

Despite the most coordinated push yet between Democrats on the Hill and the Obama White House, the outcome was not certain until the very end, according to two dozen aides and members of Congress interviewed by POLITICO.

“It was really never a solid [216],” one person said afterward.

Party leaders agreed to bring the bill to the floor during a meeting Monday night, even though some of the members present had reservations about forcing vulnerable Democrats to cast votes on a package that may not go anywhere in the Senate.

In the days leading up the vote, the number of Democratic “yes” votes was locked at 200, according to people familiar with the tally. Every time they’d pick up one vote, another would slip. Democratic leaders needed a cushion to help protect the most vulnerable among them, and they didn’t have it.

As the frustration grew, an aide joked in one meeting that White House staff should give fence-sitters the same colored leis so that the president and his Cabinet secretaries would know who to buttonhole. The desperation was such that others in the room paused for a split second to consider the joke before abandoning it as a logistical impossibility.

During the luau, Clyburn set up shop in the Oval Office with Obama to meet with wavering Democrats, like freshmen Reps. Frank Kratovil Jr. of Maryland and Eric Massa of New York. Members of Clyburn’s whip team patrolled the White House lawn, cornering colleagues and making the case for the bill.

As the week wore on, Pelosi was directing former Vice President Al Gore whom to call, but everyone decided late Wednesday night that the list of undecided members was small enough that he should stay in Nashville, Tenn., to make calls.

On the day of the vote, the bleary-eyed tag team of Pelosi and Clyburn camped out in the cloakroom, just off the House floor, for nearly three hours.

One of Pelosi’s first targets was Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), a key fence-sitter who wanted more money generated from the carbon trading to be directed to the research and development of green technology.

Pelosi talked to him again and again, but he wouldn’t budge. Her message to him was the same as it was to others: It wasn’t worth voting against the bill because of what wasn’t in it.

According to witnesses, Pelosi perched herself on the arm of Holt’s chair and went nose to nose with him for a half-hour warning him that his no vote could scuttle the entire climate change effort — and that liberals would have another chance to make their case once the bill came back from the Senate.

Around 2 o’clock, he became a “yes.”

Next up was Austin, Texas, liberal Rep. Lloyd Doggett, who had seemed to be leaning toward the bill during a Thursday night visit with Obama in the Oval Office — but then infuriated the White House midday Friday by declaring the measure too weak on polluters to win his vote.

An exasperated White House staffer told POLITICO it was “stunning that he would ignore the wishes not just of his president but of his constituents and the country.”

Then Pelosi began working Doggett as the two stood in the back of the chamber near the railing, making the same perfect-is-enemy-of-the-good argument she had used against Holt. Doggett ended up voting “yes.”During the vote, Washington Rep. Jay Inslee, one of the taller members of the House, guarded the doors on the floor leading out to the Speaker’s Lobby, warning members not to leave the floor in case anyone needed to switch his or her vote. But that didn’t stop some Democrats, like Colorado Rep. John Salazar, from voting no early and sneaking out to avoid getting pressured by party leaders.

Leadership aides say Texas Rep. Ciro Rodriguez promised Pelosi he’d vote yes, but voted no and sprinted from the chamber. California Rep. Xavier Becerra tried unsuccessfully to flag him on his cell phone — and Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) bounded into the ornate Speaker’s Lobby off the floor shouting, “Rodriguez! Rodriguez!” as puzzled reporters looked on.

Pelosi forced members to postpone their trips abroad to stay in town for the vote, aides familiar with the situation said. At one point, she even promised to escort one member out to the airport in her motorcade to catch an early flight — as House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) stalled the proceedings with an hourlong reading from the 300-page manager’s amendment.

California Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a master of floor procedure who left the House on Friday to take a top job at the State Department, may have made the biggest personal sacrifice by postponing a dinner the night before her wedding to preside over the debate — her last as a member of Congress.

When another Californian, Rep. Joe Baca, declared himself undeclared, Pelosi and her whip team surrounded him — and burst out into applause when he cast one of the decisive “yes” votes, according to an eyewitness.

Members who wanted to be spared of the Pelosi treatment — slinked in and out of the chamber hoping the speaker wouldn’t notice them.

Rep. Bob Filner (D-Calif.) — another progressive who didn’t think the bill was strong enough — was an especially elusive target, according to leadership aides. Pelosi’s attempts to contact Filner early Friday weren’t successful, staffers say, but she began lobbying him furiously when he showed up for a series of procedural votes leading up to the fateful climate change measure.

After Baca and others had cast their “yeas,” the speaker walked up to Filner and calmly said, “It’s now your time to be on the record, Mr. Filner,” according to a witness.

He voted yes.