Nancy Pelosi’s District ‘Somehow’ Ends Up With 20% Of ObamaCare Waivers

Remember how Nancy Pelosi famously crowed, “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of controversy“?

Whatever it is, it turns out that it smells like bull feces even in  überliberal San Francisco.  Why is that???

 20% of New ObamaCare Waivers Go To Nancy Pelosi’s District – Will Media Notice?
By Noel Sheppard | May 17, 2011

As NewsBusters previously noted, there were 204 ObamaCare waivers issued in April, and almost 20 percent of them went to establishments in former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) San Francisco district.

The Daily Caller’s Matthew Boyle reported Tuesday:

Pelosi’s district secured almost 20 percent of the latest issuance of waivers nationwide, and the companies that won them didn’t have much in common with companies throughout the rest of the country that have received Obamacare waivers.

Other common waiver recipients were labor union chapters, large corporations, financial firms and local governments. But Pelosi’s district’s waivers are the first major examples of luxurious, gourmet restaurants and hotels getting a year-long pass from Obamacare.

For instance, Boboquivari’s restaurant in Pelosi’s district in San Francisco got a waiver from Obamacare. Boboquivari’s advertises $59 porterhouse steaks, $39 filet mignons and $35 crab dinners.

Boyle noted a number of the establishments getting these waivers are very high-priced eateries in Pelosi’s district, many of which as a Bay Area resident I can attest to being some of the finest in the nation.

As Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey noted Tuesday:

[O]ne might think that a restaurant that charges $59 for a porterhouse steak as Boboquivari’s does could afford to fit its health care plan to Pelosi’s own specifications. The same goes for Café Mason, with its $60 entrees, and Tru Spa, which Allure Magazine calls “the best day spa in San Francisco.” If these kinds of high-tone joints can’t afford ObamaCare, then how can anyone else?

The odds of one Representative getting 20% of a batch of waivers from the Obama administration as a coincidence seems rather high. Once again, we have to wonder exactly how waiver applications are judged and approved. With its high percentage of unions and party leader constituents, this is looking more and more like a mechanism for political payoffs.

Indeed.

Just think if current Speaker John Boehner (R-Oh.) had procured these waivers for his district in Ohio. Can you imagine the media uproar?

Let’s see whether Pelosi’s shenanigans get much attention from her sycophants in the press.

Stay tuned.

While you’re staying tuned, consider the fact that over HALF of all ObamaCare waivers are being granted to UNIONS:

In what is fast becoming a weekly event, the Obama administration granted 200 more companies aivers from the Democrats’ sweeping health care law in the Friday night news dump. That brings the number of companies receiving waivers to 1,372. (You can get a full list of the companies exempted here.)

Not surprisingly, it helps to be a Democratic ally when seeking a waiver. The Republican Policy Committee reports that over half of the workers that have been exempted so far belong to unions:

The plans newly approved for waivers cover more than 160,000 people, bringing to nearly 3.1 million the number of individuals in plans exempted from the health law’s requirements.  Of the participants receiving waivers, more than half – over 1.55 million – are in union plans, raising questions of why such a disproportionate share of union members are receiving waivers from the law’s requirements.  The percentage of participants receiving waivers that come from unions also continues to rise – the number was 48% in April, and 45% in March.

Unions already received a generous concession in the health care bill. Their generous “cadilac” insurance plans were exempted from being taxed until 2018, adding about $120 billion to the bill’s cost over ten years. For more on how the administration has helped unions, see my story in THE WEEKLY STANDARD from a few weeks ago.

The total fiasco fondly known as “ObamaCare” is going to be a total disaster for America.  And even the liberals who actually have to make payrolls understand that.

Every Democrat who even APPLIES for a waiver ought to go to prison.  You voted for this load of sh*t, dammit YOU EAT IT.

Instead, Obama is very clearly granting waivers from his vile healthcare destroying law to his political supporters, such that the people who voted for Obama’s socialist takeover of America will be exempted from it, while those who decried it are going to get stuck with it.

It’s kind of like socialists who vote themselves other people’s money; only now they’re also voting for other people’s death panels, too.

Gabrielle Giffords Shooting: Don’t Blame Sarah Palin, Blame Jerod Loughner (Who If Anything Is A Leftist)

There was an early report (which I myself saw on CNN) that the shooter was an Afghan War veteran.

We now know that this is not the case.  Jared Loughner had previously attempted to join the Army but was rejected.  And that false report makes me remember a certain Obama DHS memo which warned us to keep our eyes peeled on those distrusted rightwing war veterans.

We can also report that shooter Jared Loughner was certainly not a conservative.  In his own words, his favorite books included The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf.  Communism is obviously as left wing as it gets, and see here about Nazism, which for what it’s worth means “National Socialism.”  In that article, I point out that:

Marxism simply redefined fascism as its polar opposite in order to create a bogeyman: If Marxism was progressive, fascism became conservative.  If Marxism was left wing, fascism had to be right wing.  If Marxism championed the proletariat, then fascism had to champion the bourgeoisie.  If Marxism was socialist, fascism needed to be capitalist.

I further offered that:

“The influence of Marxist scholarship has severely distorted our understanding of fascism.  Communism and fascism were rival brands of socialism.  Whereas Marxist socialism is predicated on an international class struggle, fascist national socialism promoted a socialism centered in national unity.   Both communists and fascists opposed the bourgeoisie.  Both attacked the conservatives.  Both were mass movements, which had special appeal for the intelligentsia, students, and artists, as well as workers.  Both favored strong centralized governments and rejected the free economy and the ideals of individual liberty.” [Gene Edward Veith, Jr., Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview, p. 26].

And I rightly concluded:

And if the Nazis didn’t represent the far left, they were at best the right wing of the extreme left wing.

I mean, seriously: the difference between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, and their respective oppressive, paranoid and murderous totalitarian regimes, is what, exactly???

Pathetically, the last and strongest bastion of Marxism in America today reside in our universities and are allowed to wear the title “professor.”  And then you find out that THE most leftist and THE most intolerant, “thought-controlling” field in America is that of university professors.  And they get to influence and shape minds just like Jared Lougher’s.

I would at this point mention another fact about Loughner that the AP brought out, how he  was “obsessed with how words create reality.”  And, like the atheism, that is a telltale of liberalism.  It is deconstructionism, it is existentialism, it is nihilism, it is postmodern.

Jonah Goldberg said it better than I could:

For more than sixty years, liberals have insisted that the bacillus of fascism lies semi-dormant in the bloodstream of the political right.  And yet with the notable and complicated exceptions of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom, no top-tier American conservative intellectual was a devotee of Nietzsche or a serious admirer of Heidegger.  All major conservative schools of thought trace themselves back to the champions of the Enlightenment–John Locke, Adam Smith, Montesquieu, Burke–and none of them have any direct intellectual link to Nazism or Nietzsche, to existentialism, nihilism, or even, for the most part, Pragmatism.  Meanwhile, the ranks of the leftwing intellectuals are infested with ideas and thinkers squarely in the fascist tradition.  And yet all it takes is the abracadabra word “Marxist” to absolve most of them of any affinity with these currents.  The rest get off the hook merely by attacking bourgeois morality and American values–even though such attacks are themselves little better than a reprise of fascist arguments.” — Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, p. 175.

Jared Loughner is also profoundly unAmerican.  His claimed favorite video at his Youtube account is of the US flag being torched.  Which clearly makes him a very different critter the left has characterized the “flag-worshiping” Republicans who read the Constitutions “like a sacred text.”

He is also profoundly anti-religious.  One of his statements – made in a blog rant about currency – is “No!  I won’t trust in God.”  He also wrote, “I’m a Nihilist, not someone who place who place trust in god!” And let’s see… which party was pro-God, and which one was “separation of church and state” again???

The Associated Press reports:

Loughner, an ardent atheist, began to characterize people as sheep whose free will was being sapped by the monotony of modern life.

Surveys clearly demonstrate that the less religious – or more atheistic – a person is, the more likely they are to be politically liberal.  Which is to say we’re not just saying Jared Loughner is a liberal based on rhetoric, but rather that he is probably a liberal based on the laws of statistics and probability.

In the words of several who knew him, “he was left wing,” he was “quite liberal,” he was a “political radical.” Oh, oh.  That doesn’t sound very Sarah Palinish of him.

The leftwing journalists and bloggers who are trying to make him a conservative are lying.  And blaming Sarah Palin for this despicable event is immoral.

You’ve got leftwing journalists writing stuff like this:

the tragedy wouldn’t change this basic fact: for the past two years, many conservative leaders, activists, and media figures have made a habit of trying to delegitimize their political opponents

But isn’t the New Yorker merely trying to delegitimize their political opponents, the conservatives?  I mean, how can the people who do what the left are claiming conservatives do possibly be legitimate?

Which means their argument and all their claims and stories become pure ad hominem.

The lying, deceitful left is failing to point out that Sarah Palin used “surveyor symbols,” not target symbols, to identify vulnerable districts.  And if you want to know which side used “target symbols,” please turn your ire to the Democrats which did precisely that.

Both sides “target” vulnerable seats.  Any Democrat who “targets” Sarah Palin is a vile piece of slime.  Because your party does the exact same thing [please see my update at the bottom of this article].

The only thing they can point to in demonizing Republicans is the fact that Rep. Gifford is a Democrat.  And that is clearly true.  However, she is a blue dog Democrat who has described herself as “conservative.”  And one of the murdered victims was a very conservative federal judge (Judge John Roll) who was appointed by George Bush.  Judge Roll was there to thank Rep. Giffords for trying to get more judges to deal with the massive illegal immigration crisis.

Another fact that should be pointed out is that conservative judge John Roll had more than 200 death threats in just one afternoon as a result of a legal ruling.  Tragically, the man had only recently stopped protecting himself and his family from these threats.

If anything, Jared Loughner is merely another of a long list of violent leftwing extremists (see also here, among many documented examples I can provide from my own blog).

This event ought to be something that transcends the political arguments and the debate over which party should run America that constantly goes on.  Because ANY act of violence which accompanies a political statement of any kind undermines ALL of us by eroding our freedom and liberty.

You cannot have a democratic republic in a police state.  And the more politically violent any group or individuals become, the more police powers become necessary to impose order.

I don’t care what your politics are; if you are an American, this is a terrible, tragic day and a genuinely evil event.

Update, January 9:  I would like liberals who blame the “toxic rightwing rhetoric” for the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords to respond to this little factoid:

The website Daily Kos has also deleted a diary about Rep. Gabrielle Giffords entitled “My Congresswoman Voted Against Pelosi, Now She’s Dead To Me,” but so far has not deleted a post by founder Markos Moulitsas that lists Giffords’ district among those on their “target list,” and noted that “Not all of these people will get or even deserve primaries, but this vote certainly puts a bulls eye on their district.” (emphasis ours).

Please explain to me why Sarah Palin’s use of surveyor symbols or whichever angry conservative comments resulted in Gabrielle Giffords being shot rather than leftwingers putting her on their “bulls eye” “target list,” or influential liberals like Moulitsas saying that Giffords is “dead to me.” Because I’d really like to know.

Copenhagen: Apparently The Only Way Obama Will Be Able To Lower The Oceans Is By Shutting Up

When someone said that no occupant of the White House had ever been able to walk on water, liberals rushed in to correct us: no previous occupant of the White House has been able to walk on water.

Barack Obama was going to be different.  He was going to be the Messiah who replaced God with Government, and would be anointed as the Savior of the world.

Obama told us:

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal… This was the moment — this was the time — when we came together to remake this great nation …”

I mean, wow.  It’s not like he didn’t promise the world, well, the world or anything.

Statements like that help you understand why liberals like Spike Lee went just a little bit beyond absolutely insane:

“It means that this is a whole new world. I think…I’ve been saying this before. You can divide history. BB Before Barack. AB After Barack.”

And why people like Nation of Islam racist demagogue Louis Farrakhan proclaimed Obama as The Messiah:

“You are the instruments that God is gonna use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth. And he has involved young people in a political process that they didn’t care anything about. That’s a sign. When the Messiah speaks, the youth will hear, and the Messiah is absolutely speaking.”

But something happened to Captain Amazing after he actually took office: a fundamental inability to even begin to walk his talk.

We all remember Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for his two signature accomplishments of Jack and Squat.  And that Nobel Prize for Accomplishing Nothing may be the symbol of the Obama administration.

We tend to forget about how he promised his stimulus would prevent unemployment from reaching 8% (it’s now 10.2% and rising), or how pathologically pathetic his administration has since been in fabricating statistics to show his $3.27 trillion porkulus has been anything other than an abject failure.

Obama can’t even pretend his useless policies work without spectacularly screwing up.  As ABC puts it:

Here’s a stimulus success story: In Arizona’s 15th congressional district, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that’s what the Web site set up by the Obama administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There’s one problem, though: There is no 15th congressional district in Arizona; the state has only eight districts.  And ABC News has found many more entries for projects like this in places that are incorrectly identified.

Oh, there’s more “there” there.  A lot more.  More dishonest butchery of employment statistics than you could ever hope to shake a stick at.

It turned out that not only was he basically not able to do anything to create jobs, but he couldn’t even do nothing right.  As Charles Krauthammer put it:

“When they speak seriously about this and how precise all of this is – 640,329 jobs saved –  comical precision.  And then it turns out a lot of these are fictional jobs in fictional districts, what happens is an administration that has already been satirized by Saturday Night Live as “do-nothing,” is now going to be seen as an administration that cannot even do nothing competently.”

Conservatives predicted his partisan stimulus slush fund would fail to deliver jobs.  And now liberals are finally recognizing it too:

NAACP, La Raza, AFL-CIO Tell Obama Stimulus Failed

With unemployment among blacks at more than 15 percent, the N.A.A.C.P. will join several other groups on Tuesday to call on President Obama to do more to create jobs.

The organizations — including the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group— will make clear that they believe the president’s $787 billion stimulus program has not gone far enough to fight unemployment.

They will call for increased spending for schools and roads, billions of dollars in fiscal relief to state and local governments to forestall more layoffs and a direct government jobs program, “especially in distressed communities facing severe unemployment.”

Reminds me of an article title I had way back in May: “Obama Stimulus Robin Hood In Reverse: Poor Get Poorer.”

Obama passed off a pretty clever (though blatantly fallacious) load of hooey onto an equally dishonest and ideological lamestream media when he ginned up the bogus “created or saved jobs” statistic.  As Allan Meltzer, professor at Carnegie Mellon University put it, “One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called ‘jobs saved’.”

But since then, his self-justifying  fabrications have been increasingly absurd and asinine.

To those brainwashed liberals who insist that the economy would have been worse if Obama hadn’t passed the stimulus, let me put it this way: the economy would have been worse if George W. Bush hadn’t done everything he did, too.  I mean, one load of baloney deserves another.

Obama has watched the American death toll in Afghanistan double from George Bush’s last year in office.  And his dithering over making the obvious decision to send the troops his own general requested has turned any momentum we may have been able to create into abject failure.  Both friend and foe alike should question Obama’s commitment, along with his competence.

Then we’ve had the mindboggling exhibition of incompetence in the Obama administration’s bungling of the H1N1 vaccine.  Lower the level of the oceans?  Obama can’t even raise the level of the flu doses!

And now even the liberals in Europe are turning on Obama as a colossal fraud and impostor.  As the German der Spiegel put it:

Barack Obama cast himself as a “citizen of the world” when he delivered his well-received campaign speech in Berlin in the summer of 2008. But the US president has now betrayed this claim. In his Berlin speech, he was dishonest with Europe. Since then, Obama has neglected the single most important issue for an American president who likes to imagine himself as a world citizen, namely, his country’s addiction to fossil fuels and the risks of unchecked climate change. Health-care reform and other domestic issues were more important to him than global environmental threats. He was either unwilling or unable to convince skeptics in his own ranks and potential defectors from the ranks of the Republicans to support him, for example, by promising alternative investments as a compensation for states with large coal reserves.

The Democrat-controlled Senate put off Obama’s cap-growth-and-tax-prosperity climate agenda until Spring (and good luck passing that economy killing monstrosity then!); and world leaders just said, “Better luck next time” with their climate change treaty.

Personally I cannot for the life of me understand why Obama’s plan –

“Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

– failed.  I mean, who wouldn’t want shockingly high energy prices? Who doesn’t want to freeze in the dark?

Sorry, Barry Hussein.  If you want to live up to your promise to lower the oceans and heal the planet, I guess you’ll just have to start doing a lot more shutting the hell up and saving the planet from all your useless hot air.  Because other than that, you did squat.