The Coming VAT: Poor Americans, Get Ready For GIANT Tax Increase

Remember candidate Obama’s ten thousand promises that he would absolutely not under any circumstances raise your taxes so much as one dime:

“But let me perfectly clear, because I know you’ll hear the same old claims that rolling back these tax breaks means a massive tax increase on the American people:  if your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime.  I repeat: not one single dime.”

April fools, you fools.

It turns out this is the same guy who is on tape at least eight times saying all the health care negotiations would all be on C-SPAN – and then he went to closed-door meeting after closed door meeting that resulted in a health care bill that NOBODY knows anything about.  It turns out that this is the same guy who promised he would unite the country in a bipartisan manner – and instead broke that promise and became the most polarizing and divisive president in history.   This is the same guy who said he would NEVER allow health care to pass by the awful partisan reconciliation tactic – and then he did exactly what he promised he wouldn’t do.  This is the same guy who demonized Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for doing what his own chief of staff had just done only the day before.

Yeah, well, that same guy is on the verge of breaking another one of his fundamental promises to the American people on taxes.  And it’s going to be the poor who Obama is going to hose the worst.

JUST LIKE I AND OTHER CONSERVATIVES ASSURED YOU HE WOULD DO BEFORE THE ELECTION.

The VAT (Value Added Tax) is a consumption tax which is both socialist and regressive – in other words, the worst of both worlds.

It will make Obama a liar yet again.  But seriously, what else is new?

White House economic adviser refuses to rule out VAT — six different times in one TV appearance
By: Mark Hemingway
Commentary Staff Writer
04/20/10 3:28 PM EDT

On Sunday, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration’s economic team was kicking the policy tires on a national value added tax (VAT) as a means of dealing with the deficit, among other things. But earlier today, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the administration was not considering a VAT.

If Gibbs is telling the truth, then why did White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, refuse six different to rule out a VAT? Americans for Tax Reform kept count:

MARK HALPERIN: Will the President ever consider tax reform that will involve a VAT? Would he ever consider it?

(Refusal #1) GOOLSBEE: Look, we are not, the  report — and I’m not sure where it came from cause it’s not anything I saw — was that they were contemplating a VAT, that is not true. We have stood up this bipartisan fiscal commission, which as I understand it is considering a whole bunch of things.

HALPERIN: But would he ever consider..

(Refusal #2) GOOLSBEE: He’s going to consider whatever comes out of that fiscal commission.

HALPERIN: So if they recommend a VAT, he would consider it?

(Refusal #3) GOOLSBEE: I’m not going to get into a linguistic game about it.

HALPERIN: Well it’s not a linguistic game.

(Refusal #4) GOOLSBEE: He’s looking to see what comes out of the fiscal commission. He’s going to look at it.

HALPERIN: We had a President for eight years who said ‘no new taxes, we’re not going to raise taxes’. This President said ‘no taxes on the middle class’. Arguably there are taxes in the healthcare bill that will hit the middle class. So again, a VAT would be a big change in America. Would he consider it, if the commission recommends it,  would he consider it?

(Refusal #5) GOOLSBEE: As you know, the President cut taxes for 95 percent of the workers in the stimulus. Many many billions of dollars. The President is committed to this bipartisan fiscal commission process and he’s going to seriously consider all the things that they put forward and he’s going to look at them. It doesn’t mean he’s supporting a VAT. We haven’t even contemplated a VAT.

HALPERIN: But if they recommend it, it’s not something he’d rule out?

(Refusal #6) GOOLSBEE: I’m not going to get into a hypothetical thing about it. He’s committed to a bipartisan fiscal commission.

It’s safe to say they are considering a VAT, all right.

So Obama officials refuse to dismiss the Obama-pledge-busting value added tax on the poor and middle class.

Surely Obama is against breaking his word?!?!

Nope.  He’s pretty much fine with that.

Obama suggests value-added tax may be an option
Apr 21 05:33 PM US/Eastern
By CHARLES BABINGTON
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama suggested Wednesday that a new value-added tax on Americans is still on the table, seeming to show more openness to the idea than his aides have expressed in recent days.

Before deciding what revenue options are best for dealing with the deficit and the economy, Obama said in an interview with CNBC, “I want to get a better picture of what our options are.”

After Obama adviser Paul Volcker recently raised the prospect of a value-added tax, or VAT, the Senate voted 85-13 last week for a nonbinding “sense of the Senate” resolution that calls the such a tax “a massive tax increase that will cripple families on fixed income and only further push back America’s economic recovery.”

For days, White House spokesmen have said the president has not proposed and is not considering a VAT.

“I think I directly answered this the other day by saying that it wasn’t something that the president had under consideration,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters shortly before Obama spoke with CNBC.

After the interview, White House deputy communications director Jen Psaki said nothing has changed and the White House is “not considering” a VAT.

Many European countries impose a VAT, which taxes the value that is added at each stage of production of certain commodities.

When CNBC asked Obama whether he could see a potential VAT in this nation, the president said: “I know that there’s been a lot of talk around town lately about the value-added tax. That is something that has worked for some countries. It’s something that would be novel for the United States.”

“And before, you know, I start saying ‘this makes sense or that makes sense,’ I want to get a better picture of what our options are,” Obama said.

He said his first priority “is to figure out how can we reduce wasteful spending so that, you know, we have a baseline of the core services that we need and the government should provide. And then we decide how do we pay for that.”

Volcker has said taxes might have to be raised to slow the deficit’s growth. He said a value-added tax “was not as toxic an idea” as it had been in the past.

Since then, some GOP lawmakers and conservative commentators have said the Obama administration is edging toward a VAT.

Mind you, Obama has ALREADY broken his promise to the American people when he shoved his ObamaCare boondoggle through Congress by a reconciliation process which he strangely ALSO promised not to use (as I already pointed out above).  That’s because ObamaCare contains twelve new taxes on people Obama swore up and down he wouldn’t tax.

You see, the most profligate spender in the history of the entire human race has a problem: he’s spent so much money, even if he confiscated all the wealth of all the wealthiest people in the country, it wouldn’t scratch the surface in the debts he’s created.  So he needs to come after you and your family to pay his debts.

White House Implosion Approaching

We’re seeing growing sings that all is most certainly not well in the Camelot Part Deux that liberals wanted to recreate in the Obama White House.  Obama himself is cracking under the stress, smoking too much and drinking too much.  I think we’d all like it if the man who had the responsibility of imposing his will on an Iran determined to develop nuclear ICBMs had at least enough willpower to impose his will on the next pack of cigarettes.  Meanwhile, Obama’s Chicago-thug “fearsome foursome” who form his paranoid inner circle are taking all kinds of heat – and showing signs of meltdown from all the gear-clashing.

Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel – Mr. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” himself – has been under fire from liberals who want to blame him for the near-total failure Obama’s first year has been.  But Emanuel has some allies in the press as well, who have come out to make a strong defense (mayhap with Rahm’s help?) at the direct expense of Obama.  I mean, the mainstream media is blaming the failure of the Obama administration on Emanuel’s lack of discipline and management skills, while other parts of the mainstream media argue that Rahm Emanuel is the only thing preventing Obama from ending up worse than Jimmy Carter.  I mean, you know there are a lot of hurt feelings and dead bodies in closets at the White House with this stuff going on.

And now we see the glue is coming off the veneer of David Axelrod, too.

March 6, 2010
Obama Message Maven Finds Fingers Pointing at Him
By MARK LEIBOVICH

WASHINGTON — David Axelrod was sitting at his desk on a recent afternoon — tie crooked, eyes droopy and looking more burdened than usual. He had just been watching some genius on MSNBC insist that he and President Obama’s other top aides were failing miserably and should be replaced.

“Typical Washington junk we have to deal with,” Mr. Axelrod said in an interview. The president is deft at blocking out such noise, he added, suddenly brightening. “I love the guy,” he said, and in the space of five minutes, repeated the sentiment twice.

Critics, pointing to the administration’s stalled legislative agenda, falling poll numbers and muddled messaging, suggest that kind of devotion is part of the problem at the White House. Recent news reports have cast the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, as the administration’s chief pragmatist, and Mr. Axelrod, by implication, as something of a swooning loyalist. A “Moonie,” dismissed Mr. Axelrod’s close friend, former Commerce Secretary William Daley. Or as the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, joked, “the guy who walks in front of the president with rose petals.”

Still, it is a charge that infuriates Mr. Axelrod, the president’s closest aide, longest-serving adviser and political alter ego. “I guess I have been castigated for believing too deeply in the president,” he said, lapsing into the sarcasm he tends to deploy when playing defense.

No one has taken the perceived failings of the administration more personally or shown the strain as plainly as Mr. Axelrod, who as White House senior adviser oversees every aspect of how Mr. Obama is presented. As such, Mr. Axelrod, the president’s mustachioed message maven, has felt the brunt of criticism over what many view as the administration’s failure to clearly define and disseminate Mr. Obama’s agenda and accomplishments for the country.

“The Obama White House has lost the narrative in the way that the Obama campaign never did,” said James Morone, a political scientist at Brown University. “They essentially took the president’s great strength as a messenger and failed to use it smartly.”

Mr. Axelrod said he accepts some blame for what he called “communication failures,” though he acknowledges bafflement that the administration’s efforts to stimulate the economy in a crisis, overhaul health care and prosecute two wars have been so routinely framed by opponents as the handiwork of a big-government, soft-on-terrorism, politics-of-the-past ideologue.

“For me, the question is, why haven’t we broken through more than we have?” Mr. Axelrod said. “Why haven’t we broken through?”

That question has dogged Mr. Axelrod in recent months and has preoccupied Mr. Obama’s inner circle, fueling speculation that the vaunted “No Drama Obama” team might be fracturing. Not surprisingly, the White House has no patience with the notion.

“You guys want to fit people into boxes and categories that are just not accurate,” Mr. Emanuel said.

Mr. Axelrod would not discuss what counsel he offered to Mr. Obama, though he denies any “fissure with my buddy Rahm” and any charge that he is too infatuated with the president to recognize the political risks of his ambitious agenda.

“Believe me, if we were charting this administration as a political exercise, the first thing we would have done would not have been a massive recovery act, stabilizing the banks and helping to keep the auto companies from collapsing,” he said. “Those would not even be the first hundred things he would want to do.”

But Mr. Axelrod argued that the president, confronted with “breathtaking challenges,” did not have the luxury of moving more slowly or methodically.

In a lengthy interview in his office on Wednesday, Mr. Axelrod was often defiant, saying he did not give a “flying” expletive “about what the peanut gallery thinks” and did not live for the approval “of the political community.” He denounced the “rampant lack of responsibility” of people in Washington who refuse to solve problems, and cited the difficulty of trying to communicate through what he calls “the dirty filter” of a city suffused with the “every day is Election Day sort of mentality.”

When asked how he would assess his performance, Mr. Axelrod shrugged. “I’m not going to judge myself on that score,” he said. But then he shot back: “Have I succeeded in reversing a 30-year trend of skepticism and cynicism about government? I confess that I have not. Maybe next year.”

The criticism of the administration’s communication strategy — leveled by impatient Democrats, gleeful Republicans, bloggers and cable chatterers — clearly stings Mr. Axelrod, as well as the circle of family, friends and fans he has acquired over three decades in politics as a consultant and, before that, a reporter for The Chicago Tribune.

“Every time I hear that the White House is getting the message wrong, it breaks my heart,” said Mr. Axelrod’s sister, Joan, an educational therapist in Boston. “I know he agonizes.”

Ms. Axelrod says that while her brother is devoted to Mr. Obama, he is not a sycophant. She paused when asked whether he admired the president too much. “He is very, very loyal, sometimes to a fault,” she said.

Added Mr. Gibbs: “The list of people who have to deliver bad news to the president is very small, and David is first on that list. I’m probably second.”

Mr. Axelrod’s friends worry about the toll of his job — citing his diet (cold-cut-enriched), his weight (20 pounds heavier than at the start of the presidential campaign), sleep deprivation (five fitful hours a night), separation from family (most back home in Chicago) and the fact that at 55, he is considerably older than many of the wunderkind workaholics of the West Wing. He wakes at 6 in his rented condominium just blocks from the White House and typically returns around 11.

Unlike other presidential alter egos, Mr. Axelrod is not viewed as a surrogate “brain” (like Karl Rove), a suspicious outsider (like Dick Morris in the Clinton White House) or a co-president (James Baker in the first Bush White House). Sometimes portrayed as a bare-knuckled Chicago operative, he is also a bantering walrus of a man in mustard-stained sleeves who describes himself as a “kibbitzer,” not a “policy guy.”

Sitting at his desk next door to the Oval Office last week, he was tearing into a five-inch corned beef sandwich on rye with a Flintstone-size turkey drumstick waiting on deck. “I am the poster child for the president’s obesity program,” he said.

A few minutes later, Mr. Obama walked in unannounced, scattering two aides like startled pigeons. “Hey,” Mr. Axelrod said by way of greeting (no “sir” or “Mr. President.”) Mr. Obama surveyed the spread on Mr. Axelrod’s desk with a slight smirk.

“What is this, King Arthur’s court?” he asked, then pulled Mr. Axelrod aside to talk about a health care speech he was about to deliver.

Mr. Axelrod is often at the president’s side; he sits in on policy and national security meetings and is routinely the last person he talks to before making a decision. He directs every aspect of the administration’s external presentation, overseeing polls, focus groups and speeches and appearing on the Sunday shows. Mr. Emanuel describes Mr. Axelrod as “an integrator of the three P’s” — press, policy and politics — “and how they make a whole.”

White House officials describe Mr. Axelrod’s focus as big themes rather than day-to-day sound bites. There has been no shortage of Democrats willing to second-guess his messaging approach.

“They made a big mistake right out of the box with the Inaugural Address,” said former Senator Bob Kerrey, adding that a president pledging bipartisanship should not have disparaged the previous administration in his speech, as many listeners believed Mr. Obama did.

Read the rest at the New York Times.

Of course, they are continuing to make the same mistake of blaming Bush over and over and over again on a daily basis over a year later.

And that does go to the core of the Obama failure: the inability to match his rhetoric with reality, or even his rhetoric with his own rhetoric.

The man who pledged bipartisanship and a transcendent ability to reach across the divide and bring the country together has blamed and demonized the Bush administration and the Republican Party every single time he “reached.”

The man who promised transparency, who promised repeatedly to open up the entire “bipartisan” health care negotiations on C-SPAN, has not never even bothered to try to do so (and dang I wish I could have seen the Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, Gator-Aid, and various other acts of illegal political patronage being negotiated), but has routinely had closed door meetings which were not open to the press, the public, or certainly the Republicans.  Meanwhile, the Democrats have been so byzantine, so secretive, so wheeling-dealing, that even senior Democrats have had to acknowledge they were completely in the dark as to what in the sam hill was going on.

And of course now we have the same Obama who basically said that reconciliation was a totalitarian act of “simply majoritarian absolute power” that was both unconstitutional and as partisan and evil as Karl Rove is, now saying that it’s okay as long as he’s doing it “to maintain his strong presidency.”

That’s just health care.  You can take almost any other issue and find the same thing with Obama.  Foreign policy?  Take Renditions.  Take Eavesdropping programs.  Take the Patriot Act.  Take  Gitmo.  Take the surge strategy.  Take the Iraq War.  Take the  Iranian nuclear threat.  And now, take military tribunals.  In every single one of these cases Obama personally demonized the Bush position, and then did the same thing himself without ever once having the integrity to say that George Bush had been right and he had been wrong.  Energy policy?  Obama so completely abandoned his own stated energy policy promises that a senior Democrat was forced to say that Obama “is beginning not to be believable to me.”

I have to say I feel sorry for the messengers who are being hounded for not being able to get the White House message out: it’s full of lies and deceit; how do you make all the Obama lies look good without telling a whole bunch of other lies?

Then you’ve got the fact that a whole bunch of Democrats across the spectrum are just furious with the Obama administration for massively expensive policies that didn’t work and for sheer flagrant incompetence.

How do you make a turd look good?

The one word that most accurately frames this piece is, “Wah.”  The people who most successfully demagogued mainstream media narratives when it came to George Bush and Republicans are the biggest bunch of thin-skinned whining crybabies I’ve ever seen.  Someone else is ALWAYS to blame with these people.

And when they demonize Republicans for their criticisms when the Obama team has done nothing BUT demonize Bush and Republicans, it is beyond disgusting and even beyond despicable.

What couldn’t be more obvious about Obama’s inner circle – political rather than policy experts all – is that all they can do well is campaign.  So they constantly campaign in campaign mode, and then cry the moment anybody suggests they’re doing anything because of “politics.”  I mean, think about it: the same man who lambasts the press for their “every day is Election Day sort of mentality,” is the guy who is closer than anyone to Obama – and  who spends all his time as the “integrator of the three P’s” — press, policy and politics — “and how they make a whole.”

I mean, how DARE you people accurately describe us as what we are, and consider policies from the same uber-political perspective that WE consider them.  HOW DARE YOU!

The Obama inner circle lives in a bunker and embraces a “bunker-view mentality” to the world.  In contradiction to their statements to the contrary, they are hyper-hyper sensitive to any skepticism at all.  And their growing problem is that the nastiest skepticism of all isn’t coming from “the right” or from Fox News, but from their very own left and from media that should be in their pockets.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take before it happens, but this president and this inner White House circle are heading for a meltdown of epic proportions.

Obama Calls For Tolerance And Civility While His Rabid Rodents Throw Hate Bombs

I hate Obama’s Marxist policies, certainly enough.  But the thing I despise most about Barack Obama is his galling personal hypocrisy.

He is a man who makes a false promise that he never keeps, and then continually congratulates himself about those very same promises.  He promised transparency that he never delivered, but keeps talking it up as though he really DIDN’T have  his meetings on “transparency” closed to the public and the media; and as though he really DID put the health care negotiations on C-SPAN like he promised at least 8 times on video; as though his ObamaCare WEREN’T so secretive that even senior Democrats admitted they were completely in the dark; and as though Obama really WEREN’T denying the media of access far worse than his predecessors had ever done.  He patted himself on the back for getting lobbyists out of Washington as if his administration DIDN’T have at least30 of them on the payroll; and attacked lobbyists at his state of the union as if he DIDN’T have a schmoochy meeting scheduled with them for the very next day.  He promised to end earmarks, then signed a bill that had nearly 9,000 of them – and just instructed Democrats to submit their earmark requests for the upcoming budget even as he told the country that he was “calling on Congress to continue down the path of earmark reform.”  And all I can say when Obama talks about reforming earmarks now is that it is too damn bad we didn’t elect John McCain.

The left is angry at Obama’s failed promises (a failed promise = a lie, by the way) as well.  Obama promised to close Gitmo.  He lied.  Obama promised to have had the troops home from Iraq by now.  He lied.  Obama promised to resolve the conflict in Afghanistan with his own personal magnificence.  And more than TWICE as many American soldiers gave their lives under Obama in Afghanistan in 2009 than during Bush’s last year in office.

Is it any wonder that he is the most polarizing president we have ever seen?

But Obama’s signature lie was his cynical promise from the most radically leftist Senator in Congress to transcend the political divide and bring the parties together.  Democrats, of course, blame Republicans; but it wasn’t the Republicans who promised to do it, was it?  The president who mockingly told Republicans “I won” when they tried to talk to him, and who repeatedly demonized Republicans for their “failed policies of the past,” is now actually upset that Republicans would take anything approaching the same attitude with him that he took with them.

We’re not supposed to be able to talk about HIS failed policies after he attacked us about a hundred million times with the very same claim?

Is it any wonder that his polls are now even LOWER than they were before he gave that deceitful state of the union?

Obama wants conservatives to lay down their arms even as his cockroach minions continue to shrilly attack them.  Apparently he truly thinks people are that stupid.

Here were Obama’s words at the national prayer breakfast (which he ultimately politicized, because the man just can’t help himself):

Obama at “national prayer breakfast”: The President calls for tolerance and civility

At the event of the “national prayer breakfast” in Washington on Thursday, U.S. President Barack Obama has urged his fellow countrymen to adhere to the ‘spirit of civility’, affirming that “civility is not a sign of weakness”.

The event which attracts leading political, religious and business leaders was witness to the famous oratorical power of the US president.

“Too often that spirit (of civility) is missing without the spectacular tragedy,” Mr. Obama said. “We become numb to the day-to-day crises. We become absorbed with our abstract arguments, our ideological disputes, and our contests for power. And in this tower of babble, we lose the sound of God’s voice.”

He remarked that we should be open to differing views and make a concerted effort to abandon the cynicism and skepticism that have done enough harm to American politics already.

Obama has repeatedly dishonestly demonized Republicans as obstructionists and hatemongers – which, for the record, is a very obstructionistic and hatemongering thing for him to do.

In his Q and A session with House Republicans, Obama said:

I mean, the fact of the matter is is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your own base, in your own party. You’ve given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion because what you’ve been telling your constituents is, “This guy’s doing all kinds of crazy stuff that’s going to destroy America.”

And how are Democrats supposed to embrace Republican ideas in a bipartisan fashion when Democrats just like YOU repeatedly demonize George Bush and demagogue Republicans for “the failed ideas of the past,” Mr. Hussein?

There’s a joke that Obama finally honored George Bush by naming the tectonic region beneath Haiti as “Bush’s Fault.”  It’s not far from the truth.

Does Barry Husein seriously not realize that every single Democrat in the Senate voted for ObamaCare (not withstanding the outright bribes such as the Louisiana Purchase and the Nebraska Purchase)?  Since when is it that every single Democrat voting for a Democrat bill is good, but every single Republican voting against a Democrat bill is bad?  Wouldn’t both Republicans AND Democrats be voting both for and against a bipartisan bill?

Since Democrats love to claim about how “bipartisan” they have been, I would love to see a Democrat offer me a list reciting 100 specific instances in which Obama or Democrats have said, “We’ll do this your way” on significant elements of any and all legislation.

It would be nice if Obama and Democrats paid attention to the giant log in their own eyes.  Just for once in their lives.

Meanwhile, Obama’s supporters are like frothing-mouth rabid vermin:

New York Slimes I mean Times columnist Frank Rich:

New York Times columnist Frank Rich would have rebelled against the notion that opposing President Bush’s policies was unpatriotic. But he can shamelessly declare that opposing Obama’s agenda is unpatriotic – even if you’re John McCain. Rich wrote on Sunday:

If [Harry] Reid can serve as the face of Democratic fecklessness in the Senate, then John McCain epitomizes the unpatriotic opposition. On Wednesday night he could be seen sneering when Obama pointed out that most of the debt vilified by Republicans happened on the watch of a Republican president and Congress that never paid for “two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program.”

Rich wasn’t going to find it ridiculous that Obama was blaming Bush for an “expensive” Medicare entitlement that Democrats voted for and/or felt wasn’t expensive enough – just as Obama blames Bush for the deficit effects of TARP, which he voted for.

It should be remembered that John McCain spent something like six years in the hellhole of the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam and suffered terribly physically as a result.  To accuse him of being “unpatriotic” after what he went through for his country is a disgrace from a disgrace of a newspaper.

Not to be outdone as a moral disgrace, Chris Matthews basically compared the Republican Party to the leftist communist regime that murdered well over a million people:

Chris Matthews: Far Right Republicans Like Cambodian Regime (VIDEO)

Huffington Post   |  Danny Shea First Posted: 02- 1-10 05:36 PM   |   Updated: 02- 1-10 05:59 PM

Chris Matthews compared the far right wing of the Republican Party to the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal Cambodian communist party led by Pol Pot, in MSNBC’s coverage of President Obama’s Q&A with House Republicans Friday night.

“The Republican Party is under assault from its far right,” Matthews said. “I don’t think I can remember either party being under assault by its extremes. I mean, there seems to be a new sort of purity test that unless you’re far right, you’re not a Republican, and this sort of tea party testing they’re doing now.”

Matthews called the party’s pull from the far right “frightening” in comparing it to the Cambodian regime.

“So what’s going on out there in the Republican Party is kind of frightening,” he said, “almost Cambodia reeducation camp going on in that party, where they’re going around to people, sort of switching their minds around saying, ‘If you’re not far right, you’re not right enough.’ And I think that it’s really – there’s going to be a lot of extreme language on the Republican side. And maybe, it will be a circular firing squad when this is all over.”

Just two days prior, Matthews came under fire for saying that he forgot President Obama was black for an hour while watching his State of the Union, a post-racial comment he would later clarify.

So let’s understand, this closet bigoted turd who is continuously aware of Obama’s blackness (light-skinned blackness with no Negro dialect only, mind you!) says that there’s a lot of extreme language coming from the Republican side — but only AFTER comparing those same Republicans to a communist regime that systematically murdered 1.7 million of their own people.

And speaking of bigoted turds….

Rachel Maddog I mean Maddow:

Maddow: Tea Party Conventioneers Are Racists In White Hoods
By Noel Sheppard
Sat, 02/06/2010

Rachel Maddow on Friday referred to attendees of the National Tea Party convention in Nashville, Tennessee, as white-hooded racists.

Continuing MSNBC’s sad tradition, Maddow first attacked one of the convention’s speakers: “The opening speech last night was given by failed presidential candidate, ex-congressman and professional anti-immigrant, Tom Tancredo who started the event off with a bang, a big loud racist bang.”

From there, she went after the audience (video embedded below the fold with transcript).

What a bigoted, vicious, racist thing of you to say, Rachel.  But according to Obama, who only attacks Fox News for being biased, Barry Hussein tacitly approves of every single word.

And we can get back to Barack Obama and pretty much the entire Democrat Party as repeatedly demagoguing the Republican Party as “the party of no” when it is now an openly acknowledged fact that they were never any such thing.

Cited from a recently written article:

For another thing, it isn’t true that Republicans have ever been “the party of no” and offered no ideas:

Despite the “lecture” by the commander-in-chief, as one member described it, Republicans had the opportunity to articulate the proposals they’ve sent to the president over the past year.

And for the first time, Obama acknowledged that House Republicans had crafted measures to stimulate the economy, reduce the budget deficit and reduce health insurance costs.

At a number of times during the rare, televised, question and answer session with members, the president said that he had read many of their proposals.

“I’ve actually read your bills,” the president said to a packed banquet room at Baltimore’s Marriott Renaissance hotel.

In other words, it is now a matter of public record that Democrats have been intentionally lying, misrepresenting, slandering, and demagoguing Republicans all along.  Why on earth should Republicans have cooperated with these vile people?

So Democrats can just shut the hell up with their accusations of Republicans saying or doing ANYTHING until they clean up the thousands of cockroach nests that constitute their political wing, and start being HONEST for once in their lives.

Personally, I am quite willing to cease fire on the rhetoric wars; all I need to see is for Barack Obama to denounce the mainline media for their lies rather than continually attacking Fox News; all I need to see is the Maddows and the Olbermanns and the Mathews of the news to be fired; all I need to see is for the left to quit demonizing and demagoguing.  And I will happily practice all the “tolerance” and “civility” Obama wants.

The problem is that that will never happen, because the left is demagogic and hypocritical to their very cores of their dried-out, shriveled little souls.

And the fact that Barack Obama is out in front of the cameras beseeching for “tolerance” and “civility” while his minions are viciously and hatefully attacking day after day without any rebuke from the president just proves my point.

Sarah Palin Demolishes Obama’s Pretentions State of the Deception Speech

From Sarah Palin’s Facebook page:

The Credibility Gap

Today at 2:17pm

While I don’t wish to speak too harshly about President Obama’s state of the union address, we live in challenging times that call for candor. I call them as I see them, and I hope my frank assessment will be taken as an honest effort to move this conversation forward.

Last night, the president spoke of the “credibility gap” between the public’s expectations of their leaders and what those leaders actually deliver. “Credibility gap” is a good way to describe the chasm between rhetoric and reality in the president’s address. The contradictions seemed endless.

He called for Democrats and Republicans to “work through our differences,” but last year he dismissed any notion of bipartisanship when he smugly told Republicans, “I won.”

He talked like a Washington “outsider,” but he runs Washington! He’s had everything any president could ask for – an overwhelming majority in Congress and a fawning press corps that feels tingles every time he speaks. There was nothing preventing him from pursuing “common sense” solutions all along. He didn’t pursue them because they weren’t his priorities, and he spent his speech blaming Republicans for the problems caused by his own policies.

He dared us to “let him know” if we have a better health care plan, but he refused to allow Republicans in on the negotiations or consider any ideas for real free market and patient-centered reforms. We’ve been “letting him know” our ideas for months from the town halls to the tea parties, but he isn’t interested in listening. Instead he keeps making the nonsensical claim that his massive trillion-dollar health care bill won’t increase the deficit.

Americans are suffering from job losses and lower wages, yet the president practically demanded applause when he mentioned tax cuts, as if allowing people to keep more of their own hard-earned money is an act of noblesse oblige. He claims that he cut taxes, but I must have missed that. I see his policies as paving the way for massive tax increases and inflation, which is the “hidden tax” that most hurts the poor and the elderly living on fixed incomes.

He condemned lobbyists, but his White House is filled with former lobbyists, and this has been a banner year for K Street with his stimulus bill, aka the Lobbyist’s Full Employment Act. He talked about a “deficit of trust” and the need to “do our work in the open,” but he chased away the C-SPAN cameras and cut deals with insurance industry lobbyists behind closed doors.

He spoke of doing what’s best for the next generation and not leaving our children with a “mountain of debt,” but under his watch this year, government spending is up by 22%, and his budget will triple our national debt.

He spoke of a spending freeze, but doesn’t he realize that each new program he’s proposing comes with a new price tag? A spending freeze is a nice idea, but it doesn’t address the root cause of the problem. We need a comprehensive examination of the role of government spending. The president’s deficit commission is little more than a bipartisan tax hike committee, lending political cover to raise taxes without seriously addressing the problem of spending.

He condemned bailouts, but he voted for them and then expanded and extended them. He praised the House’s financial reform bill, but where was Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in that bill? He still hasn’t told us when we’ll be getting out of the auto and the mortgage industries. He praised small businesses, but he’s spent the past year as a friend to big corporations and their lobbyists, who always find a way to make government regulations work in their favor at the expense of their mom & pop competitors.

He praised the effectiveness of his stimulus bill, but then he called for another one – this time cleverly renamed a “jobs bill.” The first stimulus was sold to us as a jobs bill that would keep unemployment under 8%. We now have double digit unemployment with no end in sight. Why should we trust this new “jobs bill”?

He talked about “making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development,” but apparently it’s still too tough for his Interior Secretary to move ahead with Virginia’s offshore oil and gas leases. If they’re dragging their feet on leases, how long will it take them to build “safe, clean nuclear power plants”? Meanwhile, he continued to emphasize “green jobs,” which require massive government subsidies for inefficient technologies that can’t survive on their own in the real world of the free market.

He spoke of supporting young girls in Afghanistan who want to go to school and young women in Iran who courageously protest in the streets, but where were his words of encouragement to the young girls of Afghanistan in his West Point speech? And where was his support for the young women of Iran when they were being gunned down in the streets of Tehran?

Despite speaking for over an hour, the president only spent 10% of his speech on foreign policy, and he left us with many unanswered questions. Does he still think trying the 9/11 terrorists in New York is a good idea? Does he still think closing Gitmo is a good idea? Does he still believe in Mirandizing terrorists after the Christmas bomber fiasco? Does he believe we’re in a war against terrorists, or does he think this is just a global crime spree? Does he understand that the first priority of our government is to keep our country safe?

In his address last night, the president once again revealed that there’s a fundamental disconnect between what the American people expect from their government, and what he wants to deliver. He’s still proposing failed top-down big government solutions to our problems. Instead of smaller, smarter government, he’s taken a government that was already too big and supersized it.

Real private sector jobs are created when taxes are low, investment is high, and people are free to go about their business without the heavy hand of government. The president thinks innovation comes from government subsidies. Common sense conservatives know innovation comes from unleashing the creative energy of American entrepreneurs.

Everything seems to be “unexpected” to this administration: unexpected job losses; unexpected housing numbers; unexpected political losses in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey. True leaders lead best when confronted with the unexpected. But instead of leading us, the president lectured us. He lectured Wall Street; he lectured Main Street; he lectured Congress; he even lectured our Supreme Court Justices.

He criticized politicians who “wage a perpetual campaign,” but he gave a campaign speech instead of a state of the union address. The campaign is over, and President Obama now has something that candidate Obama never had: an actual track record in office. We now can see the failed policies behind the flowery words. If Americans feel as cynical as the president suggests, perhaps it’s because the audacity of his recycled rhetoric no longer inspires hope.

Real leadership requires results. Real hope lies in the ingenuity, generosity, and boundless courage of the American people whose voices are still not being heard in Washington.

– Sarah Palin

She nailed it.

In Hindsight Of Massachusetts, Who Presented The Truth: Obama, Or Fox News?

A lot of things will change because of the election – mostly by Independents and even Democrats – of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts.

A lot of things that Democrats and the lamestream media believed were irrefutably true have been shockingly and conclusively demonstrated to have been totally false.

Did the voters in even the bluest of blue states like the Obama agenda?  No.  Did they like his health care boondoggle?  No.  Did they like the Democrats’ massive spending?  No.  Did they like the huge tax increases they see coming?  No.  Did they like the way Obama was handling terrorism?  No.

And that is now a carved-in-stone fact.  It follows the reality demonstrated by the previous statewide elections in Virginia and New Jersey.  Three states that voted for Obama in large numbers have now turned against him and ignored his personal appeals to vote for Democrats.

Pretty much exactly what Fox News was accurately reporting all along.

The mainstream media, the Democrat establishment, and the Obama White House have been lying to you.  They have been spreading propaganda.  They have advanced demagoguery.  They have broadcast their agenda rather than reality.  Fox News, virtually alone, has been reporting the facts all along.

Barack Obama promised that he would change the poisonous political dynamic and create a new era of bipartisanship.  Back in March of 2008, the New York Times correctly identified this as the CORE of Barack Obama’s promise to the American people.  But he lied.

Did Obama even attempt to live up to his core promise?  Not even close.

“Don’t come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis,” he admonished in a speech.

That speech – with that hard core partisan attack – was delivered within less than THREE WEEKS of his taking office.  Obama was claiming that Republicans didn’t even have a right to present their ideas, much less have any of their ideas or contributions considered.  Some attempt at “bipartisanship.”

And it wasn’t long before he expanded his demagoguery to include ordinary Americans and the Fox News network.  Obama attacked Tea Party demonstrators who were already unhappy with the direction Obama was leading the country, and he attacked the only news network that was reporting the actual truth:

At first it was reported that President Barack Obama wasn’t even aware of the nationwide Tea Party protests that occurred on April 15. But now he’s out criticizing them and the Fox News Channel.

In a town hall meeting in St. Louis on April 29, Obama was asked about fiscal discipline and entitlement reform. In his response, he took a shot at the Fox News Channel and the tea party movement, insisting he’s “happy to have a serious conversation” with them.

“So, when you see – those of you who are watching certain news channels that on which I’m not very popular and you see folks waving tea bags around, let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we are going to stabilize Social Security,” Obama said.

As has now been conclusively demonstrated in three separate statewide races in states that Obama had easily carried, the Tea Party protesters represent the will of the people, and Obama represents what the people don’t want.

Obama said, “we need a leader who can finally move beyond the divisive politics of Washington and bring Democrats, independents and Republicans together to get things done.”  And then he launched one attack after another against the American people and the press that was accurately reporting the facts.

Obama was like a pathological narcissist who couldn’t emotionally handle even the most legitimate criticism from Fox News.

Interviewed on CNBC Tuesday, President Obama vented his displeasure with FOX News, the cable network whose own senior vice president of programming has called it “the voice of the opposition” to the Obama administration. Here’s Obama:

“First of all, I’ve got one television station entirely devoted to attacking my administration.”

Clearly referring to FOX, the president continued:

“Well, that’s a pretty big megaphone,” he said. “And you’d be hard-pressed, if you watched the entire day, to find a positive story about me on that front.

“We welcome people who are asking us some, you know, tough questions,” he continued. “And I think that I’ve been probably as accessible as any president in the first six months — press conferences, taking questions from reporters, being held accountable, being transparent about what it is that we’re trying to do. I think that, actually, the reason that people have been generally positive about what we’ve tried to do is they feel as if I’m available and willing to answer questions, and we haven’t been trying to hide them all.”

But Obama was lying then, too.

This is the guy who is on video promising on at least eight separate occasions that he would put the health care debate on C-SPAN.  He didn’t.

The Obama-led Democrat “negotiations” (read ‘bribe sessions’) have been so closed and so secretive that even senior Democrats confess that they have been “in the dark.”

In fact, his lack of transparency and openness is literally comical.  This is the administration that literally had this: “a workshop on government openness is closed to the public.”

A separate laughable incident of Obama’s total lack of transparency comes via the LA Times blogs:

After a recent public sighting, fears had mounted that the one-time, long-term senator might rebel against traditional White House strictures and start acting on all the administration’s oft-promised promises of government transparency and official openness running back into 2008.

But the VP’s public schedule today puts all those fears to rest. […]

DAILY GUIDANCE FOR THE VICE PRESIDENT, Thursday, January 14, 2010:

In the morning, the President and the Vice President will receive the Presidential Daily Briefing and the Economic Daily Briefing in the Oval Office. These briefings are closed press.

At 11:30 AM, the Vice President will meet with Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood to discuss the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This meeting is closed press.

Afterwards, the President and the Vice President will have lunch in the Private Dining Room. This lunch is closed press.

At 1:00 PM, the Vice President will meet with Iraqi Vice President Adil Abd al-Mahdi in the Roosevelt Room. There will be a pool spray at the bottom of this meeting; gather time is 1:45 PM in the Brady Briefing Room.  [But note: the LA Times defines “pool spray” as “a coded message to media that a few select members will be allowed in to take pictures briefly — possibly for only a few seconds — as Biden and his guest pretend to continue their previously private conversation as if the meeting was open.”]

(UPDATE 2:20 p.m.: The White House issued its own report on this closed meeting. Both paragraphs are added below at the end of the VP’s schedule.)

Then, at 2:15 PM, the Vice President will meet with Earl Devaney, chairman of the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board. This meeting is closed press.    ###

In October, Democrats hypocritically touted their transparency immediately ahead of a closed-door meeting in which they secretly hammered out details of their ObamaCare boondoggle.

There have been a LOT of secretive closed-door meetings from this most transparent of all administrations.

CBS eventually and correctly concluded that “Obama Reneges On Health Care Transparency.”

Fox News was so far ahead of CBS on that story that it was like a cheetah racing a goldfish at a dog track.

Obama dramatically escalated his demagoguery in October:

Updated October 19, 2009
White House Urges Other Networks to Disregard Fox News

Senior Obama administration officials took to the airwaves Sunday to accuse Fox News of pushing a particular point of view and not being a real news network.

The White House is calling on other news organizations to isolate and alienate Fox News as it sends out top advisers to rail against the cable channel as a Republican Party mouthpiece.

Top political strategists question the decision by the Obama administration to escalate its offensive against Fox News. And as of Monday, the four other major television networks had not given any indication that they intend to sever their ties with Fox News.

But several top White House officials have taken aim at Fox News since communications director Anita Dunn branded Fox “opinion journalism masquerading as news” in an interview last Sunday.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN on Sunday that President Obama does not want “the CNNs and the others in the world [to] basically be led in following Fox.”

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod went further by calling on media outlets to join the administration in declaring that Fox is “not a news organization.”

“Other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way,” Axelrod counseled ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “We’re not going to treat them that way.”

Asked Monday about another Axelrod claim that Fox News is just trying to make money, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that while all media companies fall under that description, “I would say sometimes programming can be tilted toward accentuating those profits.”

But by urging other news outlets to side with the administration, Obama officials dramatically upped the ante in the war of words that began earlier this month with Dunn’s comments.

So Obama official after Obama official, and then Obama himself, denounce Fox News as “pushing a particular point of view.”

For Fox News, that “particular point of view” has been the truth – something the Obama administration utterly fails to comprehend.

What Obama wants is for Fox News to advance the same pro-liberal propaganda that so much of the rest of the media has dumped onto the airwaves like cafeteria slime.

Again, the proven, documented results of elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and now the incredible result of Massachusetts, prove that Fox News was telling the truth about what was going on all along.

The replacement for White House communications director Anita Dunn – who attacked the credibility of Fox News even as she declared that mass-murdering communist tyrant Mao Tse Tung was one of her two favorite philosophers — is right back to playing the demagogue for Barack Obama.

Based on their reaction, it is readily apparent that Obama cannot see through his ideological propaganda, and will therefore continue to sink in power and popularity.  Meanwhile, Fox News, as the dominant reporter of the truth, will continue to grow in both power and profitability.

All Immoral Democrat Gimmicks Aside, Senate Bill Funds Abortions

The Democrats’ deceit on health care is the most appalling thing I have ever seen.

They slash half a trillion dollars from the Medicare budget; dishonestly dodge the “Doc-fix“; force people to buy insurance in a flagrant abuse of the Constitution; raise taxes on people Obama REPEATEDLY SWORE he would not raise taxes on; and massively raise taxes in what amounts to an unfunded mandate for states across the board (well, except for Nebraska.  You get to pay their tab).  Not to mention they play every gimmick imaginable to create the illusion that the bill is “deficit neutral” so they can get a favorable CBO score.

Obama and Democrats – who demonized Republicans – promised that they would have the most open and transparent administration in history.  But they have been the most closed and opaque administration in history.  Obama promised he would put the health care care debate on C-SPAN for all to watch:

President Obama, “But what we will do is, we’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.”

Mind you, as Democrat National Committee Chairman Howard Dean pointed out, insurance companies have recently received all kinds of benefits from the Democrats behind closed doors.  Obama’s Democrats have become the people that Obama most fearmongered us about while on the campaign trail.

And in fact this has been such a secretive, closed-door, underhanded process that even many senior Democrats have publicly acknowledged being kept in the dark.

And we’ve literally got the chief executive of C-SPAN begging to cover the debate even as Democrats burrow the process even deeper into the underground sewers where they seem to live now.

These are fundamentally dishonest people who want to seize control of your ability to make medical decisions for yourself and your loved ones.

And we find out that even the “good” or “moderate” Democrats are bad.  Ben Nelson sold his vote – to the red-faced outrage of his own state – while dishonestly claiming he had protected taxpayer funds from being used to fund abortion.

And we find that that’s a lie, too.  Abortion IS funded by this bill, as even Democrats are openly acknowledging now (at least now that they got the vote they wanted).  Everything these Democrats are telling us is lies.

Kathleen Sebelius Admits, Covers Up Abortion Funding in Health Care Measure

by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
December 22, 2009

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is getting attention for an interview yesterday in which she essentially admits that the American public would be forced to pay for abortions under the Senate health are bill and then relies on accounting gimmicks to suggests that’s not the case.

Sebelius spoke with BlogHer interviewer Morra Aarons-Mele yesterday and praised the new abortion language the Senate adopted in Harry Reid’s manager’s amendment.

The language, submitted by Sen. Ben Nelson in conjunction with Sen. Bob Casey and pro-abortion Sens. Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray, opens the door to massive abortion funding.

“I would say that the Senate language, which was negotiated by Senators Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray, who are very strong defenders of women’s health services and choices for women, take a big step forward from where the House left it with the Stupak amendment,” the pro-abortion Obama administration official said.

Sebelius said she thinks the language does a “good job making sure there are choices for women, making sure there are going to be some plan options, and making sure that while public funds aren’t used.”

She added: “That would be an accounting procedure, but everybody in the exchange would do the same thing, whether you’re male or female, whether you’re 75 or 25, you would all set aside a portion of your premium that would go into a fund, and it would not be earmarked for anything, it would be a separate account that everyone in the exchange would pay.”

“It is a bit confusing, but it’s really an accounting that would apply across the board and not just to women, and certainly not just to women who want to choose abortion coverage,” Sebelius concluded.

Ed Morrissey, a HotAir blogger, noticed the interview and pointed out how Sebelius essentially admitted everyone would pay into the exchange but denied that public funds would be used for abortions.

“What constitutes the notion of ‘public funds?'” he asked. “If the government forces us to pay into a fund, and then controls the distribution of those funds, are those funds not ‘public?'”

“Sebelius praises the abortion-funding language in the Reid bill, as it maintains a flow of funds for abortion coverage that everyone — and she means everyone — supplies,” Morrissey adds.

Morrissey says the health care bill’s system of government funding of abortion is “only confusing if you bought Ben Nelson’s dodge that Reid had changed the abortion-funding language in any significant way.”

“If the government forces it citizens to pay into premium exchanges and then controls the distribution of that money, then it becomes a public fund in any interpretation. That’s especially true if its intent is to be a slush fund for bureaucrats to apply to whatever purpose they see fit,” he concludes.

Sebelius could eventually play a major role in abortion funding because of the Mikulski amendment, which makes it so the Obama administration can define abortion as “preventative care” and force insurance companies to pay for them.

So that’s how the Democrat’s prevent public funding to pay for abortion.  They dishonestly, with clear malicious intent, lie and hide behind bureaucratic gimmickry to not just use public money to pay for abortions while denying their doing it, but to go for broke in forcing public money in for abortions in the guise of “preventative care.”

Abortion is an incredibly important subject.  And how it is treated is vital to the entire health care process.  And to dishonestly pretend one thing while doing another is a glaring demonstration of how profoundly deceitful and disingenuous Democrats have become.

This outrage violates the American spirit and is yet another liberal fascist tyranny.

Thomas Jefferson put it best:

“To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” –Thomas Jefferson

I believe abortion is a moral crime.  I believe that abortion results in the unjustified homicide of an innocent human being.

And to go even further, I believe this health care bill constitutes the socialist statist takeover of the most important and sacred 1/6th of our economy.  I believe that this bill will all-too soon result in medical rationing, and the death by medical neglect of millions of innocent human beings to resolve the next budget crisis.

And according to every single major poll, most Americans agree with me.

But it doesn’t matter to Democrats.  They see an opportunity to redefine America and make it something more far more akin to Karl Marx and Chairman Mao than to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Obama Democrats Employ Unprecedented Secrecy After Claiming Unprecedented Transparency

Here’s Barack Obama, who is presented on 8 separate occasions saying he would make health care negotiations public by televising them on C-SPAN:

That’s eight lies from a cynical lying weasel.

Here’s the head of C-SPAN asking Obama to fulfill his often-repeated vow and televise the negotiations.  And how this underscores what liars Democrats who deceitfully talked about “transparency” truly are:

“The C-SPAN networks will commit the necessary resources to covering all of these sessions LIVE and in their entirety,” Lamb wrote. “We will also, as we willingly do each day, provide C-SPAN’s multi-camera coverage to any interested member of the Capitol Hill broadcast pool.”

Lamb reminded the leaders that “President Obama, Senate and House leaders, many of your rank-and-file members, and the nation’s editorial pages have all talked about the value of transparent discussions on reforming the nation’s health care system. Now that the process moves to the critical stage of reconciliation between the Chambers, we respectfully request that you allow the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every single American.”

Specifically, then-Sen. Obama said on the campaign trail that “we’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so the people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents and who is making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.”

Ah, yes.  Let’s talk about specifics.  Remember when Barack Hussein, the lying weasel in chief, said that?  Let’s repeat it in bold face:

“we’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so the people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents and who is making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.”

Here’s the former head of the Democratic National Convention exposing the lie of Obama pretending to be protecting the people from private insurance companies.  DNC Chairman Howard Dean recently said:

“This is a bigger bailout for the insurance industry than AIG,” former Democratic National Committee chairman and medical doctor Howard Dean told “Good Morning America’s” George Stephanopoulos today. “A very small number of people are going to get any insurance at all, until 2014, if the bill works.

“This is an insurance company’s dream, this bill,” Dean continued. “This is the Washington scramble, and I think it’s ill-advised.”

Not to mention the Louisiana Purchase II, when Obama bought Mary Landrieu’s vote for $300 million.  Not to mention the purchase of Ben Nelson’s shocking betrayal of his state that has Nebraska frothing mad with outrage.

John McCain recently exposed which party was “making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.” It’s the Democrats who would be exposed with one after another dishonest, self-serving deal.  And that is why they are dishonestly burying all the details of their corrupt, dishonest plan in secrecy:

Mr. McCAIN. My response is, I don’t know what deal has been cut in Senator Reid’s office, as the deal was cut with the pharmaceutical companies and the deal was cut with the AMA and the deal was cut with the hospital association. But I know what the effect is. I know what the effect is. The bill would slice $55 billion—-

Mr. BAUCUS. This is not on my time because he is going to filibuster over there.

Mr. McCAIN. The House bill would slice $55 billion over 10 years for projected Medicare spending on home health services while the Senate bill would take $43 billion. I know that. But I don’t know the details of the deal that was cut over where the white smoke comes out. I don’t know what the deal was. I know what the deal was with PhRMA. I know what the deal was with PhRMA. They told them they would oppose drug reimportation from Canada, and they told PhRMA they would not allow competition for Medicare patients.

So I don’t know the deal that was cut that bought them, but I know deals have been going on, and I know they are unsavory. I know people, such as the lady who was just referred to, Bertha Milliard, are not too interested in seeing their home health care cut.

Mr. BAUCUS. If the Senator will yield, with time being equally divided on both sides for this colloquy.

Mr. McCAIN. I don’t know what the deal was—-

Mr. BAUCUS. I can tell the Senator the deal. I am going to tell the Senator the deal.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arizona has the floor.

Mr. McCAIN. I don’t know what the deal was, but we will find out, just like the deals that were cut with all of these other organizations.

Mr. BAUCUS. I will tell the Senator what the deal was.

Mr. McCAIN. This place is full of lobbyists. I can’t walk through the hallway without bumping into one of their lobbyists. If the Senator keeps interrupting, he is violating the rules of the Senate. He needs to learn the rules of the Senate.

Here’s a CNN video detailing part of the exchange:

The CNN reporter speaking following the video confrontation between McCain and Baucus reminds us of the August closed-door deal between the Obama White House and the pharmaceutical companies.

And while John McCain exposes that the Democrat Party is the party of corruption, Max Baucus – the Democrat who had such a powerful hand in shaping the health care boondoggle – was exposing that he is a slobbering drunk on the very floor of the Senate.

And which party is making all the sweetheart deals that they don’t DARE allow the people to see, lest they gather in mass with pitchforks and torches to destroy the monster that lives in the White House?

Here’s one of the leaders of the Democrat Party acknowledging that the health care debate was so secretive and so byzantine that even HE didn’t have a freaking clue what was going on, let alone Republican lawmakers (and obviously the public) who have been completely shut out.

Sen. Durbin says he’s ‘in the dark’ on possible healthcare reform compromise
By Eric Zimmermann – 12/11/09 12:33 PM ET

The 10 Democratic senators who crafted a healthcare compromise are keeping its details a secret, says Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Friday.

Responding to a complaint by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that Republicans haven’t been told what’s in the new bill, Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, responded that he’s in the same position.

“I would say to the senator from Arizona that I’m in the dark almost as much as he is. And I’m in the leadership,” Durbin said on the Senate floor.

Here’s Barack Obama, the guy who dishonestly promised that he would put health care negotiations on C-SPAN, being even more dishonest as he summons Democrats (ONLY) for a second secretive, closed-door session.

Here’s the Democrats deciding to play a secret, behind-closed-doors game of ping pong with health care, with one-sixth of the US economy, with millions of Americans very lives, rather than have an open process.

Here’s lying demagogue Nancy Pelosi telling the very C-SPAN which she is barring from covering the negotiations so Americans can see what’s going on how “open” her process has been:

“There has never been a more open process for any legislation,” Pelosi said at a press conference.

And here’s that same lying demagogue Nancy Pelosi making a mockery of truth, of character, of decency, of virtue, of having any intention whatsoever of fulfilling promises:

Pelosi emerged from a meeting with her leadership team and committee chairs in the Capitol to face an aggressive throng of reporters who immediately hit her with C-SPAN’s request that she permit closed-door final talks on the bill to be televised.

A reporter reminded the San Francisco Democrat that in 2008, then-candidate Obama opined that all such negotiations be open to C-SPAN cameras.

“There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail,” quipped Pelosi, who has no intention of making the deliberations public.

Obama has been for secrecy, disingenuity, corruption, demagoguery, partisan ideology, and socialism.  He sure hasn’t been for the American people, whether on the campaign trail or since.

It’s rather like the stimulus.  Obama fearmongered the economy to get his $3.27 trillion stimulus-porkulus through Congress.  Obama falsely promised that unemployment wouldn’t go above 8% if it passed.  The legislation was raced through so quickly that no one could have even possibly read it.  Obama has said it was a success, citing the never-before-in-history-seen category of “created or saved jobs.”  But even then, he had to resort to a series of galling lies to sell his giant failed stimulus.  Not only were jobs created out of thin air (Obama claimed that a single lawnmower created 50 jobs through his website!!!) to fraudulently make a failed stimulus appear successful, but phantom congressional districts and even zip codes that don’t exist began to collect huge sums of stimulus money.  Meanwhile, the thoroughly dishonest Obama administration transformed their stimulus into a gigantic Democrat slush fund, with double the money going to Democrat districts and with no regard to unemployment.

And that’s what Barack Obama and the Democrat Party are doing to health care now.  Except that the catastrophe that they are going to create through health care will be a thousand times worse than the catastrophe they created through the stimulus.

The “change” Obama has brought to America has been hard-core partisanship and corrupt Chicago politics.

No wonder they absolutely WILL NOT allow you to know what’s really going on as they make deal after deal behind closed doors.

Most Transparent Health ‘Reform’ In History So Secretive Even Democrats Are ‘In The Dark’

Barack Obama promised to put the health care debate on C-SPAN so that everybody could be informed about and engaged with the process.

“That’s what I will do in bringing all parties together, not negotiating behind closed doors, but bringing all parties together, and broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are, because part of what we have to do is enlist the American people in this process,” Obama said at a debate in Los Angeles on Jan. 31, 2008.

The special interests and lobbyists, he said, “will resist anything that we try to do. … And the antidote to that is making sure that the American people understand what is at stake.”

Obama promised:

To achieve health care reform, “I’m going to have all the negotiations around a big table. We’ll have doctors and nurses and hospital administrators. Insurance companies, drug companies — they’ll get a seat at the table, they just won’t be able to buy every chair. But what we will do is, we’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents, and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies. And so, that approach, I think is what is going to allow people to stay involved in this process.”

Not negotiating behind closed doors.  Bringing all parties together.  Broadcasting the negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see.

Those were the words of Barack Hussein Obama, documented liar, fraud, and hypocrite.

In the age of Obama, lobbying and lobbyists has doubled.  Now THERE are some jobs Obama has “created or saved.”  And the leftist labor unions – who want everybody to pay massively more so they can get more – don’t want to pay taxes that they expect everybody else to pay.

On December 6, Obama went to the Capitol to push health care in a closed door session for a meeting with Democrat Senators in which he excluded Republicans and excluded the press:

At the Capitol during a rare Sunday session of the Senate, Obama delivered a closed-door pep talk to the fractious Democratic caucus that lasted about 45 minutes. Deep divisions remain over abortion coverage, but there was hope for compromise on whether the government should directly offer health insurance in competition with private companies.“They’re going to get it done,” Obama said as he left. He avoided specifics in the meeting with senators and took no questions.

How “open” and “transparent” of him.

Here’s the blunt, simple reality:

Washington, Oct 21 – For days now, a small group of Democrats in Congress and members of the Obama Administration have been meeting behind closed doors on Capitol Hill to hammer out the details of their costly government takeover of health care. This is despite President Obama’s repeated pledges on the campaign trail last year that these discussions would be open and televised.  One Capitol Hill newspaper has called these secret talks “a slap at … the taxpayers who will be asked to foot the bill for whatever reform plan does get adopted.” Now Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) has introduced a resolution demanding that these critical negotiations be conducted in the open “under the watchful eye of the American people.” With the fate of one-sixth of our economy in the balance, anything less than full transparency is unacceptable.

And now we find that Republicans – who have been shut out all along – are not the only ones who have been excluded in this byzantine, twisted, closed-door process:

Sen. Durbin says he’s ‘in the dark’ on possible healthcare reform compromise
By Eric Zimmermann – 12/11/09 12:33 PM ET

The 10 Democratic senators who crafted a healthcare compromise are keeping its details a secret, says Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Friday.

Responding to a complaint by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that Republicans haven’t been told what’s in the new bill, Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, responded that he’s in the same position.

“I would say to the senator from Arizona that I’m in the dark almost as much as he is. And I’m in the leadership,” Durbin said on the Senate floor.

Stop and think about it.  This process has become so byzantine, so closed, and so secretive, that even the #2 Democrat in the Senate is completely in the dark as to what is going on.  Ten Democrats – and a whopping load of special interests – are formulating the takeover of 1/6th of the American economy.

This came out of a discussion between Senators John McCain and Dick Durbin.

Mr. McCAIN. Could I ask my friend about the situation as it exists right now? Right now, no Member on this side has any idea as to the specifics of the proposal the majority leader, I understand, has sent to OMB for some kind of scoring. Is that the way we want to do business, that a proposal that will be presented to the Senate sometime next week and voted on immediately–that is what we are told–is that the way to do business in a bipartisan fashion? Should we not at least be informed as to what the proposal is the Senate majority leader is going to propose to the entire Senate within a couple days? Shouldn’t we even know what it is?

Mr. DURBIN. I would say to the Senator from Arizona, I am in the dark almost as much as he is, and I am in the leadership. The reason is, because the Congressional Budget Office, which scores the managers’ amendment, the so-called compromise, has told us, once you publicly start debating it, we will publicly release it. We want to basically see whether it works, whether it works to continue to reduce the deficit, whether it works to continue to reduce the growth in health care costs.

We had a caucus after this was submitted to the Congressional Budget Office, where Senator Reid and other Senators who were involved in it basically stood and said: We are sorry, we can’t tell you in detail what was involved. But you will learn, everyone will learn, it will be as public information as this bill currently is on the Internet. But the Congressional Budget Office has tied our hands at this point putting it forward. Basically, what I know is what you know, having read press accounts of what may be included.

Mr. McCAIN. Could I ask my friend from Illinois–and by the way, I would like to do this again. Perhaps when he can get more substance into many of the issues.

Mr. DURBIN. Same time, same place tomorrow?

Mr. McCAIN. I admit these are unusual times. But isn’t that a very unusual process, that here we are discussing one-sixth of the gross national product; the bill before us has been a product of almost a year of sausage-making. Yet here we are at a position on December 12, with a proposal that none of us, except, I understand, one person, the majority leader, knows what the final parameters are, much less informing the American people. I don’t get it.

Durbin acknowledges that Republicans have been kept completely in the dark (and fed on horse sh*t) because even he himself – the number two man in the Democrat Senate – has been kept in the dark.  He blames the Congressional Budget Office – because it’s either the CBO, or the Democrats, and he will not blame the Democrats.

Newsflash: the CBO does not have the power to prevent Democrats from releasing all the details of the Democrats’ bill.  Democrats have refused to release the details of the Democrats’ bill.

We are in a situation in which a tiny handful of Democrats are writing up an ideological and partisan takeover of a whopping chunk of the economy.  And if you think these people have any integrity at all, you need to reread this article, because you clearly didn’t understand what is coming out of Washington.

Grayson Grills Bernanke: ‘Where Did Our Half Trillion Dollars Go?’

Are you a C-SPAN addict?  Me neither.  It is the truly desperate soul who pauses during a channel surfing session on a C-SPAN channel of some boring Congressional proceeding.  Who wants to watch a bunch of arrogant stuffed-shirt elitists argue with one another in a series of one boring speech after another?

Ah, but every now and then something of significance actually happens – and when such a once-in-blue-moon event occurs – C-SPAN is there to capture the action.

Such a moment occured when Florida Republican Rep. Alan Grayson questioned Barack Obama’s arse-smooching Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

This is by no means an official transcript, but it does reflect the sense of part of the exchange.  Every American should watch it to learn just how screwed up our “experts” have made our system:

Grayson: I would like to direct your attention to page 26 of the report you handed out this morning which consists of your balance sheet.  And one of the entries on your balance sheet under assets is central bank liquidity swaps which shows an increase from the end of 2007 from $24 billion to $553 billion and change at the end of 2008.  What’s that?

Bernake: Those are swaps done with foreign central banks.  Many foreign central banks are short dollars, and so they come into our markets looking for dollars and drive up interest rates and create volatility in our markets.  What we’ve done is create a swap: we buy their currency and they buy ours.  That lowers interest rates across the globe.  They take the dollars, lend it out to the banks in their jurisdiction, and that helps bring down interest rates in the global market for dollars and meanwhile we’re not lending to those banks, we’re lending to the central banks; the central bank is responsible for repaying us.

Grayson:So who got the money?

Bernake: Financial institutions in Europe and other countries.

Grayson: Which ones?

Bernake: I don’t know.

Grayson: Half a trillion dollars and you don’t know who got the money?

Bernake: Uh, the loans went to the, the loans go to the central banks and they, uh, they put them out to their, uh, to their institutions to try to bring down short term interest rates in financial markets around the world.

Grayson: Well let’s start with which central banks got the money.

Bernake: They’re 14 of them which are listed, um, in our, i’m sure they’re listed in here somewhere.

Grayson: Who actually made that decision to hand out half a trillion dollars that way?

Bernanke: The Federal Open Market Committee.

More…

Grayson: All right. We actually looked at one of the arrangements and one of the arrangements is 9 billion dollars for New Zealand. That works out to $3000 for every single person who lives in New Zealand. Seriously, wouldn’t it have been better to extend that kind of credit to Americans than New Zealanders?

Bernake: It’s not costing Americans anything, we’re getting interest back and it comes back, not at the cost of any Amercian credit. We are extending credit to Americans, too.

Grayson: Well, wouldn’t it necessarily affect the credit markets if you extend half a trillon dollars in credit to anybody?

Bernake: We are lending to all US financial institutions in exactly the same way.

Alan Grayson: Well, look at the next page, the very next page has the US dollar nominal exchange rate which shows a 20% increase in the US nominal exchange rate at exactly the same time that you were handing out a half a trillion dollars. You think that’s a coincidence?

Bernake: Yes.

Alan Grayson (Breaks out laughing at the sheer absurdity of Bernanke’s calculated refusal to acknoweldge the obvious no matter how obvious it is…).

Watch the video and pass it along:

The purpose of this is not merely to slam Democrats.  George Bush wanted to do the most massive financial bailout in history – and while Democrats provided the MOST support for the $700 billion Bush-Paulson TARP bailouts – Republicans supported it too.  Enraged House Republicans voted down the measure after Nancy Pelosi used the opportunity to politically demagogue them, but enough of them ended up supporting the bailout plan.  Ultimately two-thirds of Democrats and one-third of Republicans voted to pass the measure.  John McCain supported it as a presidential candidate right along with Barack Obama.  And we have been throwing billions and even trillions of dollars around ever since.

Republicans were wrong.  Democrats were far more wrong, of course, because they are always far more wrong.  But Republicans should have put their foot down to prevent the financial-whiz-kid takeover of our entire political and economic system.

Something is incredibly sick with our system, because somehow that $700 billion TARP bailout has morphed into a $23.7 TRILLION TARP bailout, as the special inspector general for the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, Neil Barofsky, recently made public.

And Barack Obama’s and Turbo-Tax Tim Geithner’s Treasury Department – caught red-handed spending and loaning FAR more than they ever should have been allowed to spend and loan – managed to turn the issue into a quibbling over just how much money we could theoretically lose at one time.  When the bigger question was, “Just how does an authorization of $700 billion become an authorization for $23.7 trillion?”

The difference between Democrats and Republicans at this point is that Republicans – who now openly admit they spent too much when they were in power – have wised up.  Meanwhile, Democrats who attacked “dangerous” and “irrepsonsible” federal spending under Bush have taken “dangerous” and “irresponsible” to levels never before even dreamt of. Democrats are utterly determined to keep up the insane spending spree until we are utterly imploded with debts even our children’s children’s children’s children’s children will never be able to hope to repay.

Since TARP, Obama has passed a $3.27 trillion stimulus that didn’t stimulate, a 9,000 earmark-laden $410 billion omnibus bill, and a $3.55 trillion federal budget that adds more to the debt than all previous US presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush – combined.  And even as we play aound with $2 trillion more for health care “reform” and throw billions of dollars more into “Cash for Clunkers,” there’s no sign that we are on any kind of slowdown as we race toward the economic cliff ahead.

We are experiencing a sickness that might well be epitomized by Vice President Joe Biden’s statement: “We have to spend money to keep from going bankrupt.” They are the words of a fool – and yet fools are now in total charge of our country as they pursue their fools’ agenda.

They want to play their political power games, rewarding their political allies and punishing their political opponents.  They want to stay in power forever.  They want to sit in their offices with their staffs and their benefits and their various fiefdoms.  They don’t want to protect the United States from calamity.  They somehow think that America is eternal and can never be defeated or destroyed.  They’re going to be in for a great wake-up call – and the nation right along with them – when it all goes to hell due to their insane lack of responsibility.