Jobless Claims Rise ‘Unexpectedly’: Don’t Make This A Drinking Game Or You’ll Die

The mainstream media have made sure the word of the 2nd decade of the 21st century will be “unexpected.”  With “unexpectedly the top adverb.

I liked Indylindy’s take on the following story best:

Silly people, don’t you know the whole nation was healed last night? Who gives a damn if we have jobs?

We have Barry. /sarc

From Reuters:

Instant View: Jobless claims jump most in 6 months
NEW YORK | Thu Jan 13, 2011 9:03am EST

(Reuters) – U.S. jobless claims jumped unexpectedly last week to their highest level since October, suggesting the labor market is still in a rut despite signs of improvement in the economy.

The U.S. trade deficit narrowed unexpectedly in November as exports climbed to the highest level in more than two years, government data showed on Thursday.

U.S. producer prices rose more than expected in December as energy and food costs surged while underlying inflation remained subdued, highlighting a divergence that complicates the outlook for monetary policy.

KEY POINTS: * The number of Americans filing for first-time unemployment benefits rose to 445,000 from an upwardly revised reading of 410,000 in the prior week, the Labor Department said. * It was the biggest one-week jump in about six months, confounding analyst forecasts for a small drop to 405,000. * A Labor Department official noted the rebound occurred following the holidays, which may have hindered reporting of new claims and created a backlog. * The trade gap dipped to $38.3 billion from $38.4 billion in October, the Commerce Department reported. * Analysts surveyed before the report had expected the November trade deficit to widen slightly to $40.5 billion from October’s originally reported $38.7 billion. * November’s deficit was the lowest since January 2010. * Prices at the wholesale level climbed 1.1 percent after a 0.8 percent rise in November, the Labor Department said. * Economists had been looking for a repeat of that 0.8 percent advance in December. * Inflation excluding food and energy, however, rose just 0.2 percent, in line with forecasts. That left the year-on-year gain in core producer prices at 1.3 percent, just below analyst estimates.

If you are playing a drinking game using the word “unexpectedly” please stop immediately.  Because your liver will never last the final two years of the Obama presidency.

“U.S. jobless claims jumped unexpectedly…“

Drink…

And yes, I mean your Kool Aid has been spiked.

Another factor that isn’t getting anywhere nearly enough media coverage is inflation.  As the economy continues to falter under Obama’s failed policies, those unemployed people are facing higher and higher food and fuel prices.

Conservatives were saying throughout the 2008 campaign that “hope and change” were never concretely defined.  Well, two years into Obama, you get to see what “hope” and “change” looks like.  Still liking it?

If you voted for Obama, you deserve to starve in the dark and cold.  It’s those poor suckers who opposed his regime who are now suffering its effects anyway that I pity.

Democrats and mainstream media “journalists” continue to “blame Bush” for the fact that the unemployment rate increased 34.2% from when Bush left office under Obama’s watch.  Their demagogic “Don’t blame us for our policies” rhetoric reminds one of the old communist Soviet Union, whose miserable agricultural performance was attributed to 72 years of bad weather.

The mainstream media has no intention whatsoever of being objective or honest when it comes to covering the results of Obama’s economic policies.  When Republicans are running things, even good news is depicted as bad news, with stories about fears of what could happen, but whenever a Democrat is in charge, even the very worst news must be wrapped in some sort of positive context.

The “unexpected” is “expectedly unexpected” once you learn the constant bait-and-switch games the media plays to the Democrat White House’s fiddling tune.

Last month, when there would have been your usual Christmas hiring.  But the media didn’t point out that the unemployment rate reflected 1) a very temporary blip due to phenomena such as Christmas hiring followed by New Years layoffs, and 2) the even more frightening fact that the rate was mostly impacted by people who were so discouraged they’d stopped looking for work:

But the job growth fell short of expectations based on a strengthening economy. And the drop in unemployment was partly because people stopped looking for work. […]

But other factors can affect the unemployment rate, at least temporarily. One key reason for the drop was that the government no longer counts people as unemployed when they stop looking for work.

But the only thing that mattered to most mainstream media organizations was that that way-too-close-to-10% number went down from 9.7% to 9.4%.  And that favored Obama.  So they went out and sang songs of rejoicing about it.

It would have been quite easy to put a Republican spin on that employment story of December: Republicans win the biggest victory since 1928, and all of a sudden the unemployment rate takes a huge drop as businesses realize that there will be somebody to stop a president and Democrat Party out to destroy businesses.  But I’m not like the mainstream media: I don’t delete any of my stories, and people actually hold me responsible in comments.  And I held off on pimping the good job numbers because I was pretty sure that the “good” unemployment statistic was nothing more than a temporary blip that was being pimped by liberals.

Fact-Checking Obama’s Bogus Bullpuckey Stimulus Claims

Obama’s fearmongering Congress into rushing the stimulus through so fast that no one in Congress could even read it was utterly demagogic.  His continuous dishonest claims since about the “success” of this pork-ridden slush fund have been deceitful and despicable.

Obama doesn’t just lie, he tells giant lies.  Big Lies, to cite a phrase from history.

Here’s one of the Big Lies that Obama told during his stimulus anniversary media blitzkrieg:

“And economists from across the political spectrum warned that if dramatic action was not taken to break the back of the recession, the United States could spiral into another depression.”

But Obama’s claim that economists “across the political spectrum” had sided with him was an utterly contemptible lie a year ago, and it is an even bigger lie now.  Last February I preserved the following.  Please note the title:

With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true

Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we the undersigned do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.

And there were a whopping load of economists who signed on to that statement – at least a couple hundred, just at a glance.

That’s 200 economists saying, “YOU LIE!”

The truth was rather this: “‘Economists across the Spectrum’ Continue to Flee Stimulus bill.”

Obama supporters provided exactly two names of conservatives whom they claimed constituted their “across the spectrum.”  Both claims were bogus.

Another Big Lie was the invention of the never-before-seen category of “saved or created” jobs.  It’s a load of rotting baloney.  Harvard economics Professor Gregory Mankiw has said, “There is no way to measure how many jobs are saved.” Allan Meltzer, professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University has said “One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called ‘jobs saved.’ It doesn’t exist for good reason: how can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?” If George Bush had EVER tried to use this same “saved or created” category, he would have been simultaneously mocked as a fool and attacked as a criminal who was trying to deliberately deceive the American people.  But a liberal Democrat did it, so the mainstream media has merely duly reported the totally-made-up self-serving “statistic” as though it weren’t a frankly horrifying lie.

Now, according to a CBS/New York Times poll, only six percent of the people believe that the stimulus has actually created any jobs:

No matter what the truth is about the stimulus act, public perception is the real battle Democrats have to fight politically as 2010 elections loom. And they are fighting that battle hard, based on the amount of e-mail traffic and stimulus promoting events Democrats are holding across the country today. It’s not going to be easy based on a CBS News/New York Times poll released last week that showed just 6 percent of the American public thinks the stimulus created jobs. Boehner’s spokesman Michael Steele ran with that figure yesterday saying that more people believe that Elvis is still alive than believe the stimulus is working.

For the record, Michael Steele is correct: 7% believe that Elvis is alive.  About the same percentage who believe space aliens anally probed them, I imagine.

Unfortunately, that six percent largely consist of the mainstream media.

It’s nice to see someone in the media take him on over some of his claims, particularly an economist with the prestige of a John Lott.  He apparently limits his takedown to the content provided during one particular interview.  But it is still a devastating, point-by-point, presentation of an administration that could care less about the truth, or about reality:

Updated February 19, 2010
Fact Checking Team Obama’s Stimulus Claims
By John Lott
– FOXNews.com

A look at what the White House said about the stimulus and what they didn’t say…

On Wednesday, Fox News Channel’s Bill Hemmer interviewed Austan Goolsbee, the chief economist for the White House Recovery Board, on the one-year anniversary of the stimulus.

Here is a simple fact check of Mr. Goolsbee’s claims:

Hemmer: “What does the White House predict a year from now?”

Goolsbee: Let’s remember, you’re citing the claim that the unemployment rate wouldn’t go above 8 percent, but if you remember in that same projection they said that if we didn’t pass the stimulus it would only go to 9 percent, and it was above that before the stimulus even came into effect. What the administration and everyone else missed was the depth of the recession that was in place at the end of 2008 and at the beginning of 2009 when the President came into office.

In April, President Obama was busy touting the stimulus as having “already saved or created over 150,000 jobs.” Press releases from the administration were already being sent out claiming saved jobs on April 1. Even well before that, on January 25, Lawrence Summers, Obama’s chief economic adviser, promised that the benefits from the stimulus bill would be seen “within weeks” after passage. Yet, despite Mr. Goolsbee’s claim, the unemployment rate did not rise above 9 percent until May, well after these claimed jobs were supposedly being created.

As for the statement that the president was “surprised” by how bad the economy was, during his first radio address to the nation on Jan. 24, Obama claimed, “We begin this year and this administration in the midst of an unprecedented crisis that calls for unprecedented action.” In Obama’s first national press conference he talked about the United States finding itself in a crisis *12 times* and also took pains to emphasize that it was an “unprecedented crisis.” Given that the unemployment rate in 1983 reached 10.7 percent, if the president believed that we were indeed in an “unprecedented crisis” or at least the worst shape since the Great Depression, it is hard to see how the unemployment numbers could surprise him or those on his team.

The Obama administration has frequently claimed that they didn’t realize how bad the GDP numbers for the 4th quarter 2008 were when their first unemployment predictions were released, but the February 28 estimates were released well after the GDP numbers were out.

Mr. Goolsbee states that the economy was worse than he expected it to be. But there is another alternative explanation and that is that the stimulus created higher unemployment. In fact, my columns in this space predicted that during at the beginning of February 2009 that would be the case. Moving around a trillion dollars from areas where people would have spent it to areas where the government wants to spend it will move a lot of jobs away from those firms that are losing the money to those who are now favored by the government. Since people won’t instantly move from one job to another, there will be a temporary increase in unemployment.

But there’s still more. Here’s this from Hemmer’s interview:

Hemmer: “So you are saying that you are standing by the numbers and you guys were right all along.”

Goolsbee: What I’m saying is that the impact of the stimulus is very much what they predicted it to be. What they missed — and what everyone missed — was the depth of the baseline that was in place as the president came into office, yes.

Two graphs illustrate Obama’s promises versus what actually happened. Whether one uses the president’s predictions when he came into office or his later predictions as provided on February 28, the actual unemployment rate lies well above either of those predictions.

See the figure here.

If one looks at both the number of people unemployed and the number who have left the labor force, “I can’t see any [employment] benefit from the stimulus,” Professor Stephen Bronars, a labor economist at the University of Texas at Austin, told me.

See the figure here.

And then there’s this from Hemmer’s interview with Goolsbee:

Hemmer: [What if you] Use the unspent stimulus of $514 billion to pay down the national debt?

Goolsbee: Well, Bill, I got to tell you when the people who burned down the back half of the house are complaining about how much it costs to rebuild it, I think we’re in a bit of a strange spot. As you know, the deficit was projected, before the president took office, to be $1.3 trillion, and that’s because we were teetering on the edge of a depression and we needed to put the focus — as we did — on getting us away from the abyss. If we hadn’t done that the deficit would be catastrophically worse even than it is this year and than it was projected to be when the president came in. We should not reverse the second half of the stimulus. It’s needed to get us out of the woods. Look out the window, the unemployment rate is near 10 percent. Now, the stimulus was never capable of restoring the 8 million jobs hole that was created by the recession beginning in 2007. It did part of it and the private sector needs to the rest.

During the middle of October, 2008, after the bailout bill had been passed, then-Senator Obama claimed (during the third presidential debate): “we are now looking at a deficit of well over half a trillion dollars.” Virtually all of the huge 2009 budget deficit of $1.4 trillion has been blamed on the Bush administration — as if Mr. Obama’s $862 billion stimulus (over two years) and his $410 billion supplemental spending bill in March had nothing to do with it. Mr. Obama also asked for $350 billion in TARP money to be released by the Bush administration immediately before he entered the White House. Bush had no plans to spend that money, but, by releasing it before he took office, Mr. Obama is able to claim that the spending should be counted towards the Bush administration.

Then there was this:

Hemmer pointed out that the White House is starting a pushing to focus on the deficit. Isn’t that a contradiction from this administration?

Here’s the response:

Goolsbee: [No.] Because you’re getting confused between the short term and the long term. What we need is to put a focus on deficit reduction in the long term. Everyone agrees with that, [and] the president wants to put a focus [on it]. The reason the budget commission failed, as you know, is because 7 Republicans that sponsored the bill turned around and voted against it when it became clear it was going to pass.

Actually, it isn’t clear how the administration can blame Republicans for the defeat of the budget commission. Democrats controlled 60 seats in the Senate at the time, and they could have approved the commission without a single Republican vote. Sixteen Republicans did vote for the commission (along with 37 Democrats), but 23 Democrats and 23 Republicans voted against the commission. The Republicans voted against it because they worried that the commission would rely heavily on new — and higher — taxes to reduce the deficit.

This came next…

Hemmer noted that a new CBS News/New York Times poll shows that only 6 percent of Americans think that the stimulus has created jobs and 48 percent think that it will never create jobs.

Goolsbee: Well, look, that may be true. I’m just a policy guy. I’m not an expert on spinning and convincing. What I would say is if you go get the data from the private sector forecasters, from the non-partisan congressional budget, or you look at Recovery.gov or the reports coming out of the Council of Economic Advisers, you see they are all hovering around the creating or saving of 2 million jobs thus far. And so the key is [that] the hole was extremely deep. This brought us part of the way up out of this abyss hole. But we need to do more. The president has never said that this is sufficient.

It is a bit of an exaggeration that everyone is in agreement with these claims. Cary Leahey, an economist and senior managing director with Decision Economics, one of the forecasters surveyed by The Wall Street Journal, provided me with one explanation for why the stimulus increased unemployment: “With transitional moves in government spending [from the stimulus], there will be dislocations in the economy that will lead to higher unemployment.” But he emphasized that he thought those effects would be “short-lived, six to nine months, definitely not more than a year.” Of the other three sources, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, or if you look at recovery.gov or the reports coming out of the Council of Economic Advisers, all are controlled by Democrats.

Then there was this…

Hemmer raised the point that only two places in the country have gained jobs during the last year: North Dakota and Washington, D.C.

Goolsbee: Well, certainly, if they’re going to be treated to the kind of rationale that you’re describing, it’s going to be very tough. But if you look at what, as I’m trying to describe, the recession began in 2007 – 8 million jobs were lost. If you restore 2 million jobs, that’s 2 million people who are at work, who would have been out of work had we not done that. But that doesn’t fill the entire 8 million hole. And so for you to say they only created jobs in North Dakota, you’re making the mistake of saying, well, the stimulus should have created more than 8 million jobs or else it didn’t have an impact. But that’s just logically incorrect.

Mr. Goolsbee simply isn’t answering Hemmer’s question. Hemmer was asking about the change in jobs since the beginning of last year to evaluate the impact of the stimulus, while Goolsbee is also discussing job losses from the end of 2007. There was nothing “logically incorrect” with Hemmer’s question.

There is also a simple math error in Mr. Goolsbee’s statement. He claims that things would have been even worse than the 8 million drop in jobs if the stimulus hadn’t been passed. What he may have meant to say is that without the stimulus 10 million jobs would have been lost (the 8 million that were lost plus the 2 million that were saved by the stimulus and would have been lost without it). But if the Obama administration really believes this, the unemployment rate in January would have been 11 percent, not 9.7 percent, and the Obama administration never predicted that the unemployment rate would go to 11 percent without the stimulus.

In any case, Goolsbee’s reluctance to explain why jobs, since the beginning of last year, have only increased in the District Columbia, where a lot of government jobs have been created, and North Dakota is understandable.

John R. Lott, Jr. is a FoxNews.com contributor. He is an economist and author of “Freedomnomics.”

The first article that Lott linked to in the link titled “” has the following graph.  I leave you with it, as it pretty much shows at a glance just what a whopping load of failure Obama’s trillion dollar stimulus truly was:

‘Crazy Claims About Death Panels’ Sadly Not Crazy At All

Are you familiar with the phrase, “the banality of evil”?  The opening paragraph in the Wikipedia article on the subject summarizes the concept quite well:

The banality of evil is a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt and incorporated in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.  It describes the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.

Again and again, we have seen great evils inflicted by governments upon their people.  And we want to find monsters, because that’s who we want to believe would alone be capable of such monstrous evil.  But again and again, we find ordinary people – faceless bureaucrats performing faceless functions – had carried out what we later realize were monstrous deeds with a blithe acceptance of the premises of their government’s policies.

One of the reasons that these policies – later correctly described as “evil” – were allowed to begin, develop, build momentum, and ultimately turn monstrous is because too many people dismissed the possibility that such evil could ever happen.  “Our government would never do such a thing.”

Only it did.  It’s happened too many times before, and it will happen again.

With that introduction, let us look at the ubiquitously mocked term, “death panels.”  Nothing like that could ever actually happen.  Right?

Wrong.  If you go to Europe, it’s happening right now.  And the same sort of quasi-socialist liberals who want to create government health care here were created it there.

Terminally ill grandmother ‘left to starve’ by doctors

Hazel Fenton, an 80-year-old grandmother who was placed under a controversial care plan and left to “starve to death” after doctors identified her as being terminally ill, only recovered after the intervention of her daughter.

By Richard Savill
Published: 10:30PM BST 11 Oct 2009

Hazel Fenton pictured with her daughter Christine Ball Photo: ANDREW HASSON

Mrs Fenton, from East Sussex, is still alive and “happy” nine months after doctors declared she would only survive for days, withdrew her antibiotics and denied her artificial feeding, her daughter, Christine Ball, said.

“Without my persistence and pressure I know my mother would be dead now,” she added.

Mrs Fenton, a former private school house mother, had been placed on the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) scheme, which was originally developed as a way to care for cancer patients towards the end of their lives.

However, there has been recent criticism that not only cancer patients but others with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under the NHS scheme.

Last month six prominent British doctors and health care professionals wrote to The Daily Telegraph, expressing concern that some patients were being wrongly judged as close to death.

Under NHS guidance introduced in England, medical staff can withdraw fluid and drugs from dying patents and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away. But this approach can also mask signs of improvement, it has been argued.

Miss Ball, who had been looking after her mother before she was admitted to the Conquest hospital, Hastings, East Sussex, on Jan 11, said she had to fight hospital staff for weeks before her mother was taken off the plan and given artificial feeding.

Miss Ball, 42, a carer, from Robertsbridge, East Sussex, said: “My mother was going to be left to starve and dehydrate to death. It really is a subterfuge for legalised euthanasia of the elderly on the NHS. ”

Mrs Fenton was admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia. Although Mrs Ball acknowledged that her mother was very ill she was “astonished” when a junior doctor told her she was going to be placed on the plan to “make her more comfortable” in her last days.

On Jan 19, Mrs Fenton’s 80th birthday, Mrs Ball said her mother had lost “an awful lot of weight” but was feeling better, and told her she “didn’t want to die”.

But it took another four days to persuade doctors to give her artificial feeding, Miss Ball said.

Mrs Ball said the fight to save her mother had been made harder by the Mental Capacity Act. “I was told that we had no rights, and food and hydration were classed as treatment, which meant they had the right to withhold feeding. It gave a doctor the power to play god with my mother’s life,” she said.

Mrs Fenton is now being looked after in a nursing home near her daughter’s home.

A spokesman for East Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust said: “Patients’ needs are assessed before they are placed on the [plan]. Daily reviews are undertaken by clinicians whenever possible.”

At the same scripted event in which White House aides handed out white coats to create a propaganda moment, Barack Obama recently said:

“We have now been debating this issue of health insurance reform for months,” Obama said.  “We have listened to every charge and every counter-charge — from the crazy claims about death panels to misleading warnings about a government takeover of our health care system.”

Death panels.  Crazy, right?  Nothing like that could ever happen here.

Unless it occurs to you to stop and THINK, and ask yourself why you would think that corrupt House Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Charlie Rangel – or the Democrats who refuse to hold him accountable for his crimes – would be so much better than British liberals.

Provide your case that they are only evil over there in Britain, but our big government liberals here are ontologically good, and simply incapable of creating a system that would grow and degenerate until it tries to starve human beings to death.

There are all kinds of things going on in the United Kingdom and in Continental Europe that will very quickly be going on here, too, because too many of us just shut our minds off to the banality of evil that we have already seen time and time again.

And it’s already going on here.  Right now.  Under the very sort of medical system that Barack Obama wants to impose across the nation.

Take the story of Barbara Wagner, who was condemned to die by her state government medical system.  They denied her the drugs she needed to save her life, but agreed to pay for her to be euthanized.  Some faceless liberal bureaucrats “who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal” decided that Barbara Wagner’s life was not worth saving, but only worth taking.

The banality of evil.  Coming soon to a hospital or a doctor’s office near you.

And right now, Democrats are trying to expand the banality of evil.

The Wall Street Journal exposed that ObamaCare will cut essential cardiology and oncology care in order to lower the cost of the health system:

In President Obama’s Washington, medical specialists are slightly more popular than the H1N1 virus. Compared to bread-and-butter primary care doctors, specialists cost more to train and make more use of expensive procedures and technology—and therefore cost the government more money. Even so, the quiet war Democrats are waging on specialists is astonishing.

From Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus’s health-care bill to changes the Administration is pushing in Medicare, Democrats are systematically attacking specific medical fields like cardiology and oncology. With almost no scrutiny, they’re trying to engineer a “cheaper” system so that government can afford to buy health care for all—even if the price is fewer and less innovative ways of extending and improving lives.

And the results of such measures and others will be a holocaust of the elderly.  With all measures undertaken in the spirit of bureaucratic efficiency:

The Congressional majority wants to pay for its $1 trillion to $1.6 trillion health bills with new taxes and a $500 billion cut to Medicare. This cut will come just as baby boomers turn 65 and increase Medicare enrollment by 30%. Less money and more patients will necessitate rationing. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that only 1% of Medicare cuts will come from eliminating fraud, waste and abuse.

The assault against seniors began with the stimulus package in February.  Slipped into the bill was substantial funding for comparative effectiveness research, which is generally code for limiting care based on the patient’s age.  Economists are familiar with the formula, where the cost of a treatment is divided by the number of years (called QALYs, or quality-adjusted life years) that the patient is likely to benefit. In Britain, the formula leads to denying treatments for older patients who have fewer years to benefit from care than younger patients.

It is also highly relevant that Medicare denies treatment at a rate of more than double any private insurer’s average right now.  Is government care the thing you should most trust, or the thing you should most fear?

When Barack Obama mocks “the crazy claims about death panels,” it is ultimately up to you have to ask yourself just how much you implicitly trust the government to take care of you even when it is in the bureaucrats’ economic interests to allow you to die.  And it is up to you to decide if history is incapable of repeating itself.

Obama Increasingly Revealing His Dishonest Side On Health Care

It’s kind of funny.  Obama comes out and says:

“Now, let me just start by setting the record straight on a few things I’ve been hearing out here –“

and then proceeds to lie in the name of correcting the record.  Keith Hennesy goes into detail on 20 significant factual errors from Obama’s Portsmouth town hall (the link is to the first of 20 parts)

One of his most blatant lies was his statement about AARP:

– “We have the AARP on board because they know this is a good deal for our seniors.  (Applause.)”

– “Well, first of all, another myth that we’ve been hearing about is this notion that somehow we’re going to be cutting your Medicare benefits.  We are not.  AARP would not be endorsing a bill if it was undermining Medicare, okay?”

Obama DOESN’T have AARP – one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in the country – “on board.”  AARP has pointedly stated that they haven’t yet endorsed ANYTHING.  Obama’s press secretary says Obama merely “misspoke.”  But it was a profoundly self-serving “misspeaking.”  It’s like the grocery store or the bank: why do the errors always seem to be in their favor?

Obama’s out there “addressing ‘outlandish’ and ‘misleading’ claims about health reform.  But my God, he’s one the making the outlandish and misleading claims.

I mean, GEEZ!  This former community organizer has been angered that communities have organized.  And the Democrats are out demonizing conservatives for organizing even as Obama starts up his new “Organizing for America.”  Free speech was the highest form of dissent until Democrats took over everything and started demonizing any dissent.  Where do you go to get such naked chutzpah?

At his incredibly organized Portsmouth town hall event, Obama said:

“OK, I’ve only got time for a couple more questions.  Somebody here who has a concern about health care that has not been raised, or is skeptical and suspicious and wants to make sure that — because I don’t want people thinking I just have a bunch of plants in here.  All right, so I’ve got one right here  — and then I’ll ask the guy with two hands up because he must really have a burning question. (Laughter.)  All right, go ahead.”

The event was so scripted and so packed with Obama-friendly attenders that he literally couldn’t FIND someone who had a critical question.

What he got was this:

Her question:  “I saw — as I was walking in, I saw a lot of signs outside saying mean things about reforming health care.  How do kids know what is true, and why do people want a new system that can — that help more of us?”

And if a little girl that cute says that people “outside” are mean, then how can you possibly NOT believe here?

The Boston Globe reported:

Eleven-year-old Julia Hall asked: “How do kids know what is true, and why do people want a new system that can — that help more of us?”

The question opened the door for the president to respond to what he called an “underlying fear” among the public “that people somehow won’t get the care they need.”

Well, who was this little girl, who had been “randomly chosen” to ask a question after being “randomly picked by a computer” to attend the event?

Julia’s mother [Kathleen Manning] was an early Obama supporter and donor in Massachusetts during the presidential election, so she had previously met First Lady Michelle Obama, the Obama daughters Sasha and Malia, and Vice President Joe Biden.

In fact, she actually was a top mucky-muck in the Massachusetts Obama campaign operation.

What a shock that such a little girl with such a liberal Obama-supporting pedigree would be “randomly” selected to ask such a blatant set-up question (How come you’re so wonderful and the people who oppose your plan so evil?).  What are the odds that THAT kind of a coincidence would occur?

What are the odds that all the mean people with the mean signs somehow didn’t end up getting their names drawn in that “random” drawing so they could be INSIDE instead?

Given the fact that Obama is so scripted that he doesn’t even sneeze unless he’s told to by his teleprompter, pretty darn good.

The blatant audacity of hypocrisy.  These people are demonizing folks who are coming out to tell anybody who will hear them that they don’t want this terrible heath care bill as “plants” and “orchestrated” and “organized” (not to mention “angry mobs” and “racists” and “Nazis”).  But the plant simple truth is that these people are so phony that they can only assume that everybody else must be as phony as they are.

As I’ve mentioned before, we get Obama attending a phony, controlled, contrived, choreographed, orchestrated, organized, “Astroturf” town hall filled with plants even as his attack dogs demonize protesters as being “plants” and saying things like:

“I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter”

when he is on record having said:

“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program.”

and he is on the record as having said:

“The very first promise I made on this campaign was that as president I will sign a universal health care plan into law by the end of my first term in office.”

“I was for that thing before I said I had never been for that thing.”

You keep on clearing up them “misconceptions” from the other side, Barry Hussein.  Never mind all of your lies.

According to a Gallup poll released yesterday, the demonization of ObamaCare protesters has made 34% of Americans more sympathetic to the protests, versus only 21% who are less sympathetic of the protests.  Independents are sympathetic to the protesters by a more than than 2-1 margin.  And 61% of Americans believe the protests are “appropriate.”  Sorry, Nancy Pelosi.  I guess your riding in on that broom of yours to throw out swastikas and call Americans “un-American” isn’t working so good for you.

Harry Reid, the corresponding Democrat leader of the Senate, called town hall protesters “evil mongers,” and was clearly quite proud of his creativity.  I hope he’s as proud of his next job after he gets voted out of office.

Every poll is showing that support for the Democrats’ health care bill is plunging by the day.  Polls are showing that Obama’s own numbers are plunging massively, primarily as a result of his support for ObamaCare and for his demonization of average Americans who oppose his plan.  Obama now has only 47% support.  He no longer speaks for the country.  And he won’t listen as the country shouts at him.

But the less support Obama and the Democrats have, the more rabid they are in demonizing more and more and more ordinary Americans who oppose their agenda.

Democrats keep pounding on conservatives for “organizing.”  But 65% of independent voters now disapprove of Obama’s performance.

The Democrats are lying about their health care bill, and they are lying about the people who are increasingly opposing it.

Obama said:

Now, one of the things you’ve been doing in your campaign to change the situation is you’ve been striving for bipartisanship. I think it’s a wonderful idea, but my question is, if the Republicans actively refuse to participate in a reasonable way with reasonable proposals, isn’t it time to just say we’re going to pass what the American people need and what they want, without the Republicans?  (Applause.)

But not only have Republicans offered a plan for health care reform, but Fox News reported the irony that a Republican was actually offering a proposal at the very moment that Obama was claiming Republicans weren’t offering “reasonable proposals.”  And as for “reasonable,” there frankly aint a whole ought of Americans left who think YOUR proposal is reasonable, Mister President.

What do Republicans want?  They agree on seeking to implement cost control measures.  They want Congress to reign in the out-of-control and about-to-become-the-Titanic Medicare before we try to nationalize the remainder of our health care system.  They want to introduce “tort reform” such as “loser pays” or limiting huge “pain and suffering awards” (while keeping awards for actual damages) to prevent the lawsuits that are eating our medical industry alive.  They want to allow private insurance companies to be able to compete with one another across state lines.  There are 1300 private health care insurers; why not provide them with competitive incentive to lower their own costs?  They want to limit access to free health care to citizens rather than illegal aliens.  Republicans would like to see an end to federal and state mandates that require (as one examples) single males to purchase prenatal care and pap smear coverage which add to the costs of plans.  It’s not like the Republicans don’t have plenty of proposals; and it’s not like they’re not quite “reasonable” for a statist who wants government control above anything else.

Right now, the Democrats and Barack Obama are doing virtually everything they can – portraying Republicans as offering nothing, demonizing protesters, holding carefully orchestrated events of their own, ridiculing the notion of “death panels” while ignoring the fact that their plan WILL lead to rationing of care and passive euthansia – rather than actually BOTHERING TO DEAL WITH THE FACTS ON HEALTH CARE.

Sarah Palin was demonized for using the term “death panels,” but the egg is on the faces of those who demonized her:  she won, they lost.   The “death panel” language has been dropped from the Senate version.  And word is coming out that many Democrats are backing away from the government system that would actually result in “death panels” altogether.

But you have to understand that Barack Obama is the president who told a woman that her mother might be better off “taking the painkiller” than having life-prolonging surgery.  Barack Obama is the man who said this about his own grandmother having a hip replacement that would prolong her quality of life:

Q: And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.

THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?

I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

Q: So how do you — how do we deal with it?

THE PRESIDENT: …you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

In other words, a death panel.

It’s buried deep within the beaurocracy, but don’t think it won’t become a part of any “public option.”

And Barack Obama is the man who appointed top level officials such as Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, John Holdren, and Cass Sunstein.  Cass Sunstein, by the way, has introduced a concept known as the “nudge.”  Nudging and tweaking the vaugeries of the law to impose the socialist agenda.

They can blame Republicans all they want, but given their total control over government, it’s THEIR OWN FAULT that they don’t have a health care bill that isn’t anything but a twisted ideological monstrosity.

Stop the lies and the demagoguery, Mr. President.  Stop the partisan ideology.  If you really want to reform health care, stop demonizing the authentic outrage American people and actually listen to them.  Make your reform geninely bipartisan, and don’t offer any more “change” than the people are willing to accept.