Somebody Had To Pay For All That ‘Free’ Stuff Obama Stuck Into ObamaCare; Turns Out It’s Companies And Their Workers

Sandra Fluke.  Remember her?  She’ll be a prime-time speaker at the Democratic National Convention.  Just to remind you about her, she was the liberal activist who got into Georgetown Law School – a Catholic institution – just so she could sue them.  As a Georgetown law school graduate, if she’s just AVERAGE, she’ll earn $165,000 a year her very first year out of school.  But she expects you to pay for her birth control, the cost of which she lied about (falsely claiming what cost $9 a month would cost $3,000 – unless you consider condoms which she could have got for free).

The Democrat Party is the party of elitists, liars and entitlements.  So why not have lying elitist future 1 percenter Sandra Fluke come to the Democrat Convention to talk about more entitlements?

Obama and the Democrat Party love to pretend they’re Santa Clause and give away lots of “free” stuff.  By “free stuff” I mean they like to force private companies to give things away that actually cost them a lot of money.

And pathologically stupid people, a.k.a. Democrats, just LOVE the free stuff.  Because they don’t have to pay for it and frankly since they don’t have to pay for it they really don’t care who DOES pay for it.

Now, increasingly, of course, Democrats are freeloading slackers who don’t have jobs.  The Democrat Party today is the Party of the Occupy Movement.  But it turns out that the money to pay for all of this “free stuff” that Obama has given away to try to get reelected is coming right out of businesses that do most of the hiring in this country.  And more to the point, it is coming out of employees who work at those companies.

Just remember, dishonest Democrats and their Liar-in-Chief swore up and down that their ObamaCare would bring costs DOWN.  They lied, because at their cockroach cores they are lying liars:

Rising insurance costs crimping companies’ plans
By Jonathan D. Epstein
Updated: August 26, 2012, 6:52 PM

Western New York’s three big health insurers are again seeking to jack up rates by significant amounts in some cases – and some employers are taking desperate measures as a result.

BlueCross BlueShield of Western New York is asking for double-digit hikes for most plans, while Independent Health Association and Univera Healthcare are seeking increases of mostly less than 10 percent.

The price hikes, detailed in the carriers’ filings with the state Department of Financial Services, mark another year in which premiums are rising much faster than the rate of inflation or household income.

That adds to the burden on households and businesses already straining from past increases. And it shows that, at least so far, the efforts by insurers, employers and medical providers to control the spiraling costs are having limited effect.

“The train wreck continues. It’s unfortunate, but it seems that whatever products the carriers develop, whatever wellness programs they put together, it just doesn’t seem like they can get a lot of answers that people are looking for,” said Gregory D. Leifer, director of life and employee benefits at brokerage firm Scott Danahy Naylon.

“It’s pretty much the same old story from year to year,” said Howard N. Silverstein, CEO of Choice Employee Benefits Group LLC in Williamsville. “The community-based products just are obviously a burden to many of the employers.”

That’s forcing many to make tough decisions, such as dropping or reducing coverage, or shifting entirely to newer plans with high deductibles and cost-sharing that puts much more of the burden on employees. Traditional HMOs or similar plans, with low co-pays, are becoming dinosaurs.

Some companies are slowing or delaying hiring to control health care costs.

“If they’re really looking to reduce their expenses, they’re going into these plans where there’s unfortunately more of an out-of-pocket cost to the employee or consumer,” said Nick Siradas, account manager for small groups at Lawley Insurance.

The new rates are not final yet. Under state law, the insurers’ rate requests are still subject to review by the state, which can approve them, reduce them or reject them. Last year, the state trimmed many rate hike requests across the state, though not so much for Western New York’s three carriers.

Consumers and business owners are writing to regulators to protest what they see as unreasonable hikes, and demand the state block them:

“I know of no one that is receiving these kinds of rate increases in their pay,” wrote one consumer. “I strongly encourage [you] to not consider any rate increase at this time.”

“This is ridiculous and is creating such a hardship not only on me but my employees and my payroll,” another wrote. “New York State cannot allow this … This is unconscionable.”

Meanwhile, carriers, businesses and consumers await the promised benefits of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act.  While some provisions have taken effect – such as expanded benefits for dependents until age 26 – they are more likely to drive up health care costs, not lower them, because they expand coverage.

The health insurance exchanges are supposed to help with expenses by bringing an estimated 32 million uninsured Americans into the system, so costs can be spread over a larger base with more competition.

But those provisions don’t kick in until 2014, and the details remain vague. So businesses are guessing about the impact, and many are skeptical the exchanges will yield desired results.

“They’re really not optimistic,” Silverstein said. “They’re in fear of these exchanges.”

“A lot of my clients are taking a wait-and-see attitude,” Siradas said. “Until the exchanges are in place, we won’t know what they’re going to do.”

Ron Alsheimer learned the rates for his company’s BlueCross BlueShield plans could go up 12 percent, after a similar hike this year. The premium for family coverage for Traditional Blue is now $3,700 a month.

Already, that’s crimped any plans for growing his company, Buffalo-based commercial real estate developer Plaza Group, which has 11 employees. Between health and workers compensation insurance, the costs of adding staff are prohibitive. “I wouldn’t consider hiring anybody else now, anybody who would need health insurance. It just isn’t worth it,” he said.

He turned to Buffalo-based HR Benefit Advisors to find a less expensive provider for the half-dozen employees that get coverage. “I’ve had enough. It’s just lunacy,” he said. “I want him to look into something that’s going to put a cap on this nonsense.”

[…]

Absolutely everything this wicked president promised has been a total lie.

We’ve ALL paid for Obama’s “free stuff.”  The median household income under Obama has been so godawful that Obama has actually cost the average family nearly DOUBLE than the “Great Recession” did.  During the recession, which officially lasted from June 2007 to June 2009, household incomes fell by 2.6%.  But since then, under Obama’s “recovery,” household incomes have plummeted 4.8%.

We need a president who will quit making bogus promises and start delivering results.  And history has proven that that president is definitely NOT Barack Obama.

It’s Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day. It’s Also Obama Religious Persecution Day.

It’s Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day!

Has it ever occurred to anybody to ask themselves “Why Aren’t Gay Activists Harassing Chick-fil-A, Protest Against Homophobic Muslim Mosques?”

For that matter, who don’t gay activists harass black people as haters?

Oh, I’m sorry.  It’s because liberals are abject moral hypocrites who demagogue hate merely to attack convenient targets without really standing for anything?  Never mind.  That would explain why Obama’s former demagogue-of-staff Rahm Emanuel demonized Chick-Fil-A because they don’t represent “Chicago values” and then simultaneously celebrated Loius Farrakhan and his homo-hating Nation of Islam, then.

It’s also Obama Religious Persecution Day!

Religious Persecution Begins, Targets College Students

The Cardinal Newman Society, a national organization to help renew and strengthen Catholic identity in Catholic higher education, issued the following statement:

August 1, 2012, marks the formal beginning of the persecution of Catholic colleges and universities that wish to remain faithful to the teachings of the Catholic Church.

As of today, the Obama administration is forcing Catholic colleges to help students and employees obtain no-cost sterilizations, abortion-causing drugs and contraceptives, and also “counseling” promoting these practices.

And who are the first victims of the Obama administration’s new Sexual Revolution? Catholic colleges and the parents of Catholic college students!

One year ago, when the Obama administration shocked the nation with “interim final” regulations for its HHS mandate, it publicly admitted that it had rushed the rules to ensure that college students get “contraceptive services” in the 2012-2013 school year. Many student insurance plans renew in August.

In other words, the Obama administration’s desire to support students’ sexual activity without even one year’s delay is precisely why:

1) they rushed to publish a poorly constructed religious exemption, and

2) they refused to accept comments on the interim regulations until after they were issued.

Many news publications have deceptively reported that the HHS mandate is delayed another year for religious institutions, without explaining that many religious colleges and employers cannot meet the Obama administration’s arbitrary criteria for the delay.

Catholic colleges that covered “contraceptive services” as of February 10, 2012, are ineligible for the delay. But infidelity is not the only reason why Catholic colleges may be affected:

· They may have complied with state laws which violate religious freedom.

· They may have been unaware of provisions included in their health plans by insurance companies or by college personnel in prior years.

· They may operate in areas without affordable coverage that excludes contraception.

Moreover, the past infidelity of a Catholic college is no excuse for the federal government to violate that college’s First Amendment right to uphold Catholic teachings.

And further, the Obama administration is violating the rights of Catholic parents who send students to Catholic colleges, reasonably expecting their religious beliefs to be upheld. There is no religious freedom when the federal government prevents Catholic families from freely choosing authentic Catholic education.

The fact of the matter is that this is an incredibly blatant example of persecuting religious beliefs and attacking religious freedom.

 Cardinal Donald Wuerl, archbishop of Washington, had this to say in an interview with Chris Wallace:

WUERL: This lawsuit isn’t about contraception. It is about religious freedom. Embedded in the mandate is a radically new definition of what institutes a religious community, what constitutes religious ministry — brand new and never fortified in the federal level. That’s what we are arguing about.
 
The lawsuit said we have every right to serve in this community as we have served for decades and decades. The new definition says you are not really religious if you serve people other than your own and if you hire people other than your own. That wipes out all of the things that we have been doing, all the things that we contribute to the common good — our schools, our health care services, our Catholic charity and even parish soup kitchens and pantries. All that’s wiped out.
 
WALLACE: Let me pick up on that, because the White House says — the famous accommodation by President Obama, that they changed the mandates so that the insurance companies that you are dealing with, to provide health insurance coverage to your employees have to provide the birth control for free and that the charities and the schools and the hospitals, don’t have to do anything.
 
WUERL: This is one of the reasons why we say the accommodation didn’t change anything, because so many of our institutions, certainly the archdiocese, is self insured. We are the insurer.

Obama is trying for force religious groups and charities out of business so he can impose his fascist socialist government to fill the vacuum of suffering he created by putting them into an impossible moral predicament: either abandon the theology that you have held for 1,500 years or abandon your charitable work and leave millions of people high and dry.  But it is the theology that drives that charity work in the first place.  Which makes it like yanking the floor out from under yourself and then trying to stand on thin air.

Liberals have been exploiting the poor for generations and have done NOTHING to help them beyond making them dependent and making them vote Democrat so they can keep staying dependent.

So on the one hand liberals are demonizing businesses like Chick-Fil-A and literally trying to use the raw power of government to punish them for exercising their free speech rights.  And they do so on the “moral grounds” that they ought to be able to punish “anti-gay views.”  And on the other hand the same damn liberals are trying to impose godawful unconstitutional restrictions that directly punish religious groups.  And the fact that their views are anti-religious views, anti-Christian views and anti-biblical views doesn’t mean a damn thing in a world gone PC-crazy.

Why Mitt Romney Would “Like Being Able To Fire” A Bunch Of Snivelling Lie-Pedalling Democrats (As Well As A Few Similar-Type RINO Republicans)

The skinny on the mainstream media propaganda talking points delivered daily from the Democrat Party is that “Mitt Romney likes to fire people.”

And of course that is a really terrible thing to ever want to do.

The Obama campaign sent out an email about Mitt Romney and “firing”:

“Mitt Romney, who just won the New Hampshire primary, says he likes to fire people,” reads the email, which also has “he likes to fire people” as the subject line.

That even AFTER Joe Biden more honestly confessed that the “fire people” line was being taken out of context.

DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz crawled all over this like the cockroach-shrew hybrid that she is:

The chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee on Tuesday pounced on Mitt Romney’s comment from the previous day about how he likes to “fire people,” saying it demonstrates the Republican candidate’s “insensitivity and callousness.”

“Is there anybody that likes firing people? Mitt Romney had the opportunity to be specific and talk about [how] he would let his insurance company go and switch insurance companies, but he didn’t,” Debbie Wasserman Schultz said on Fox News.

“He broadened it out and generalized and said that the likes firing people who provide services to him. It’s a pattern of insensitivity and callousness that Mitt Romney has shown throughout his entire campaign,” she added.

The Democrat Party even produced a slick video to demonize Romney:

What did Mitt Romney actually say?

Politifact puts it this way:

Once you look at the full context of Romney’s quote, it becomes clear that he was talking about the ability to get rid of a health insurance provider if its services are inadequate.

 “I want individuals to have their own insurance,” Romney said. “That means the insurance company will have an incentive to keep you healthy. It also means if you don’t like what they do, you can fire them. I like being able to fire people who provide services to me. You know, if someone doesn’t give me a good service that I need, I want to say I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me.”

 So Romney wasn’t referring to his work at Bain Capital — or being a boss who relishes firing employees — but rather the notion of switching service providers. He might as well have been talking about switching cell phone carriers or cable TV companies.

 Romney himself said as much later in the day: “Things can always be taken out of context. And I understand that that’s what the Obama people will do. But, as you know, I was speaking about insurance companies and the need to be able to make a choice. And my comments entirely reflected that discussion, which is we should be able to choose the insurance company of our choice.”

So Mitt Romney likes to fire people at insurance companies who give him poor service.

Please remember as the horror of ObamaCare progressively destroys our once-great health care system that Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee do NOT want you to be able to fire insurance companies who give you poor service.

That and that there are a lot of people in this country – mostly Democrats – who swim in an ocean of lies and want you to swim with them.

For the record, the mainstream media propagandists were frothing with horror and outrage when Mitt Romney “misquoted” Barack Obama:

The Romney video uses footage from Obama’s trip to New Hampshire in 2008. In the ad, text rolls over the screen reading, “On October 16, 2008, Barack Obama visited New Hampshire. He promised he would fix the economy. He failed.”

As video footage shows vacated business and foreclosed homes, Obama can be heard saying, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.”

But the ad does not make clear that in the speech Obama was actually quoting an aide to his Republican opponent at the time, Sen. John McCain.

The Romney campaign did not deny that it took the president’s words out of context and even provided Obama’s full quote in a press release accompanying the ad: “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.”

It’s a reference to an anonymous quote by a McCain adviser that appeared in an Oct. 2008 New York Daily News article.

“Now, the tables have turned – President Obama and his campaign are doing exactly what candidate Obama criticized,” the Romney campaign said in a statement. “President Obama and his team don’t want to talk about the economy and have tried to distract voters from his abysmal economic record.”

Democrats pounced on the ad as misleading.

“I mean, what — seriously? I mean, an ad in which they deliberately distort what the president said? I mean, it’s a rather remarkable way to start, and an unfortunate way to start,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters during the trip up to New Hampshire.

Let’s take a second to break that down.  According to some story somewhere, an unnamed McCain aid said “if we keep talking about the economy we’re going to lose.”  And Barack Obama jumped all over that and demagogued it to attack John McCain, as the video record documents.

Here’s the point: Barack Obama can demagogue his presidential rival, but it is somehow immoral to hold Barack Obama to the standard of his very own demagoguery.  How dare you try to hold Barack Obama to the same standard that Barack Obama held John McCain to???  When Barack Obama demonized John McCain as being afraid to talk about the economy, that was the blessed words of the messiah; when Mitt Romney points out that Barack Obama has his OWN DAMN ECONOMY TO BE EMBARASSED ABOUT, well, that is just evil.

Have you ever heard the words, “For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you”???

I know, I know, that was Jesus as quoted in Matthew 7:2, and Democrats hate Jesus and couldn’t care less about anything He said.

But it seems to me to be far more than fair – given Obama’s denunciation about McCain being afraid to talk about the economy in the campaign in 2008 – to point out that Obama is afraid to talk about the economy in 2012.

The National Journal says:

“It’s a decent bet that if this election is a referendum on the past four years, President Obama won’t get a second term.”

Even the New York Times – hardly a source favorable to conservatives – says of Obama running on his economy:

The bad news for Obama is that he has already missed his opportunity for a V-shaped recovery, and the prospects for a U-shaped recovery seem uncertain. In October, a panel of economists polled by The Wall Street Journal forecast 2.3 percent G.D.P. growth (adjusted for inflation) in 2012, somewhat below the election-year average of 3 or 4 percent and only enough to provide for modest job creation

Here’s the question: given that Barack Obama now faces the exact same dilemma on the economy that he demagogued John McCain for facing, just why is it that Mitt Romney “distorted” the truth in showing us what Barack Obama obviously in FACT said without spending the entire 30 seconds of a 30 second ad to “properly source” the remark that Obama made?

Bottom line: Mitt Romney’s campaign tells what is at wort a tiny little barely mistruth and gets hammered for it; Barack Obama’s campaign tells a demon-possessed whopper and basically gets off scott free.

That’s what happens in God damn America.

Why ObamaCare Passage Marks A Day That Shall Live In Infamy

The pundits have rightly compared the gigantic ObamaCare bill with the Roosevelt administration – if nothing else than because we haven’t seen any government program so gigantic since then.

In a way that is very fitting.  Because we can bookend December 7, 1941 and March 21, 2010 with the same prediction: a day that shall live in infamy.

December 7th was a disaster because FDR utterly failed to see a clear and present danger building on opposite sides of both oceans.  We failed to take precautions.  We failed to arm ourselves.  We even failed to protect ourselves.  What made it so criminal was that we had years of ample warning, but simply chose to ignore it.

March 21 was hardly a surprise, either.  Just as with December 7, a lot of Americans saw it coming, but lacked the power to do anything but point and shout about the coming disaster.  The major difference is that on December 7, 1941, our government failed to protect our way of life, whereas on March 21, 2010, our government actively attacked our way of life.

And now it is here.  And now that it is here, it will grow like a cancer.  Slowly at first – it doesn’t fully kick in until 2014 – and then it will erupt like a big poisonous mushroom.

Charles Krauthammer described what the passage of ObamaCare means with his usual brilliance:

“Nonetheless, it will be the law of the land as of tonight and we’re going to be a different country.  We are on our way, there is absolutely no chance we are not going to end up with national health care.   This is nationalizing health care, the insurance companies are now utilities, they are contractors. the government makes all of these decisions, only a matter of time and will probably happen after the Obama administration.  But he will be remembered as the father of national health care as they have in Canada or Britain and it starts tonight.”

Krauthammer is in no way exaggerating or politicizing the regulatory takeover of private insurance companies by the government under ObamaCare.  That can be demonstrated merely by examine what Dennis Kucinich said about ObamaCare and about the role of private insurance companies before he went ahead and voted for it anyway:

• “I don’t know what there is for my constituents”
• It’s “a license to just steal money from people”
• ObamaCare is a “giveaway to the insurance industry”
• This bill is “not going to protect consumers from these rapid premium increases
• It provides “no guarantees of any control over premiums”
• It is “forcing people to buy private insurance”
• It’s going to result in “five consecutive years of double-digit premium increases”
• “I just don`t see that this bill is the solution”
• “The insurance companies are the problem and we`re giving them a version of a bailout”
• “This bill doesn`t change the fact that the insurance companies are going to keep socking it to the consumer”
• It results in a “giveaway to the insurance industry”
• “You`re building on sand. There`s no structure here”
• If we pass this bill, “all we`re going to have is more poverty in this country”
• If we pass this bill, “people aren`t going to get the care that they need”

This remaking of private insurance companies as utilities, as contractors for the government, is fascism, pure and simple.  The government didn’t nationalize them, as it would do under communism, but it created a massive new set of regulations, and bureaucracies, and mandates, and taxes that quintessentially takes them over as agents of the state.  And that is what fascism is all about:

The entry under “Fascism” in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics reads in part:

Where socialism [i.e., communism] sought totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state operation of the means of production, fascism sought that control indirectly, through domination of nominally private owners. Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”–that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities.

And that is exactly what is happening.  Liberals may not like my term, but it couldn’t be more applicable here.  Obama demonized the insurance companies, and he will now regulate and control and dominate them “in the national interest.”

ObamaCare amounts to a regulatory takeover of the private health insurance companies.  They will be told what to do, how to do it, and how much to charge (although you might see them massively raise rates in preparation to protect themselves for the onslaught that is coming their way).  The government under Obama already owns General Motors and Chrysler.  His administration already essentially owns many banking institutions.  The government under Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac controls more than 90 percent of the nation’s secondary mortgage market.  And Paul Volcker acknowledged that “the federal government was responsible for up to 95 percent of all new home mortgages in the fourth quarter of 2009.”

Even the student loan industry was effectively nationalized under ObamaCare.

It’s naked fascism.  And that fascism which was slowly trickling onto us during the Bush years has now become an massive avalanche under Obama.

Fascism is bad, of course.  But the economic consequences of this fascist takeover of our health care system may be even worse than the political ones.

As for that, consider what Weekly Standard journalist Steve Hayes said (link includes video of the following):

“I think that if you take a step back from this the real story here is is the deficit and that story.  Everybody’s familiar with the debt clock; we’ve all seen how fast it moves.  This is going to put it on double time or triple time because when you go back and you look at the history of entitlements in the country, that’s the pattern.  There are promises that this is going to cut deficits or debt, and it never does.  You look back at at what FDR said when he signed Social Security into law in July 1935. He said it would act as a protection for future administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. He also said this is a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide the United States and economic structure of vastly greater soundness. Social Security today?  $43 Trillion dollar unfunded liability – that’s 400 thousand dollars per household in the United States today. And you go back to 1965.  LBJ did the same thing. You saw Nancy Pelosi carrying the gavel – it’s the same argument.  He said it would be $1.50 a month for the average worker.  $1.50 a month.  Three dollars per month after you’re 65.  Today, Medicare has a $57 trillion dollar unfunded liability.  $500,000 dollars per American household.  This will bankrupt the country.”

FDR said in 1935 when he signed Social Security into law:

It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.

$43 TRILLION dollars of unfunded liability.  That is $400,000 for every household in the country.  That is $184,000 for every single man, woman, and child in the country.  Please pay up now.

Does that sound like something that lessened the force of possible future ANYTHING? A protection to future administrations against the necessity of going deeply in debt???  Something that provides the United States with an economic structure of vastly greater soundness???  We’re doomed.

Maybe you don’t care that this giant boondoggle is going to crash and burn your country, and that your children or grandchildren will literally die as a result of your greed and selfishness.  But I do.

They promised us a bogus Utopia, and that Utopia is about to collapse into the fiery pit of hell.

What was it that Lyndon Johnson promised us when he sold his load of Medicare malarkey?

Now here is how the plan will affect you.

During your working years, the people of America–you–will contribute through the social security program a small amount each payday for hospital insurance protection. For example, the average worker in 1966 will contribute about $1.50 per month. The employer will contribute a similar amount. And this will provide the funds to pay up to 90 days of hospital care for each illness, plus diagnostic care, and up to 100 home health visits after you are 65. And beginning in 1967, you will also be covered for up to 100 days of care in a skilled nursing home after a period of hospital care.

And under a separate plan, when you are 65–that the Congress originated itself, in its own good judgment–you may be covered for medical and surgical fees whether you are in or out of the hospital. You will pay $3 per month after you are 65 and your Government will contribute an equal amount.

Let me tell you how Medicare affects me: It affects me with a $57 trillion unfunded liability.  It affects me with a bill of $500,000 for every single household in America.  It affects me with an individual bill (that every single man, woman, and child in this country owes) of $230,000.

The forerunner of the CBO underestimated the actual cost of Medicare by a whopping factor of 10.  If they repeat their little boo-boo, ObamaCare will cost $10 trillion dollars over ten years, and the United States will completely collapse as an independent nation-state.

And that’s $230,ooo on top of the $184,000 I owe for Medicare.  I owe $414,000.  And my household owns $900,000.  And great googly moogly, we don’t got it.  We’re on a speeding train that is going to keep hurtling along until it flies off a cliff and crashes.

Hey, I got an idea: let’s double that.  Hell, let’s triple it.

If you believe that the government is going to create a trillion dollar entitlement that ensures 47 million more people – (John Larson, chairman of the Democratic caucus, used the “47 million” figure on ABCs “This Week” just yesterday; he used it again on CNNs “State of the Union”) and spends less money than is spent now, you are an abject fool.

And that “47 million” clearly includes 17 million illegal immigrants.  The Democrats’ incredibly cynical plan is to take health resources from you and from your children and grandchildren and give those resources to illegal immigrants so they can capture the Hispanic vote.

The metaphor is a dozen people rushing into your house to eat your food and consume your resources while your own kids go hungry.  No one would do this.  But your government is doing it under Democrat Party tyranny.

The real cost of this bill is over $6 TRILLION.  The Democrats filled their legislation with gimmicks, such as assuming they would cut doctors’ Medicare reimbursements by 21% when they know they won’t, then putting that “Doctor fix” in another bill.  That will add $208 billion to the real cost of their plan.  Then they falsely start the bill’s ten-year score in 2010, when the benefits don’t start getting paid out until 2014.  That accounting deceit masks the fact that the REAL cost of the bill is $2.3 trillion.

The $6 trillion (PLUS!!!) figure comes from the biggest and most despicable shenanigan of all: all the money from American citizens who will be unconstitutionally forced to purchase health insurance isn’t counted in the CBO score.  At all.  Not one penny.

In other words, your ObamaCare – which really isn’t even deficit neutral at all – was sold as “deficit neutral” because it doesn’t count the trillions and trillions of dollars that American citizens will be compelled by their government to pay for health insurance.

ObamaCare amounted to the slitting of the national wrists.  And we’re going to start bleeding out until we either abandon it or die.

The Republicans have a few more tactics to fight this bill, but they amount to starting backfires to try to temporarily contain a massive hungry forest fire.  It won’t be enough, and it probably won’t ultimately succeed.

Thirty-eight states and counting are now working to preempt the ObamaCare disaster by protecting their citizens from this disgraceful and unconstitutional boondoggle.

Having this monster 2,700-page government takeover of health care may be the only chance this nation has of avoiding a very-near term financial implosion.

If this bill isn’t stopped, one day Americans will look back at the late great former United States of America and realize that that was the anvil that broke the camel’s back.

Martha Coakley Uses Lobbyists And Thugs To Claw Her Way To The Massachusetts Senate

First of all, on the health care industry big pharma and big insurance lobbyists that Martha Coakley featured at her fundraiser.

I wrote an article on it last night.  It provides a news article that actually identifies the names of these lobbyists, plus the companies/industries they represent.

Breitbart has a short, powerful video that features the galling liberal hypocrisy surrounding this event.  The featured line from a lobbyist is, “I hope they all use lobbyists to raise money,” while Obama promises to keep the big boys from buying all the seats at the table.

I responded to a comment of this article to another site by providing the following response:

One of the things you learn about fascism is that – while it is a form of socialism – it differs from Marxist socialism in that Marxism directly owns the means of production while fascism regulates, bribes, or coerces the means of production into doing what fascist leaders want.

Same result, different means.

So we find that Obama has already made deals with Pharma, and with many of the big players in the system.  He gets what he wants – power over one-sixth of the economy and literally power over peoples’ lives – and big Pharma/insurance get something they want – security that Obama won’t plough them under.

That’s Fascism. We saw a lot of the same sort of “dealmaking” with big business in Nazi Germany that we’re seeing today.

Communist China is now a hybrid of Maoist Marxism and fascism. Obama likey.

Jonah Goldberg also points out the “liberal fascism” of FDR’s New Deal. And, again, FDR co-opted large corporations to write the laws/regulations that would benefit themselves and drive under their smaller competitors.

That’s basically what’s going on now. The big players can make sweetheart deals with the government that will enable them to expand their market share even as the overall market shrinks to to Obama’s stupid policies.

Being “pro-capitalism” is NOT the same as being “pro-business.”

If conservatives can seriously get behind policies that will be beneficial for SMALL BUSINESSES (the true engines of a thriving capitalist system), they can become an unstoppable political force.

Less sweetheart deals; more sensible policies.

[Note: you can take a look at an economic encyclopedia’s definition of fascism and see if I understand it correctly].

Martha Coakley is clearly at least supporting more lobbyist money.  And so supporting more sweetheart deals resulting from more government controls goes hand in hand.

Now, it turns out that Martha Coakley is embracing liberal fascism in more ways than that major big one.

Fascists love thuggery.  And liberals certainly have had more than their fair share of it (e.g. union thugs – see some recent videos of union thugs at work here).

Coakley has her own goons, as Weekly Standard reporter John McCormack found out last night.

Here’s a video of the incident.  You can see John McCormack with his hands above his head to protect his recorder and demonstrate that he’s not the one doing any shoving.  You can see Coakley’s goon bodying up to McCormach and clearly shoving him around.  And you can see Martha Coakley stop, turn around, and look intently in the direction of the assault immediately prior to McCormack hitting the ground:

Here’s another video of the same assault.  You watch this and tell me that this liberal Democrat thug didn’t criminally assault John McCormack:

The assailant is a man named Michael Meehen.  The assault began shortly after Meehen came up and demanded McCormack’s press credentials.  Even though they were on a public street, McCormack displayed them.  When McCormack asked who Michael Meehan worked for, Meehan said, “I work for me.”  We now know he’s from Blue Line Strategic Communications, and has worked for John Kerry, Maria Cantwell, and was sent to Massachusetts by the DSCC to handle “messaging” for Coakley.

Here’s a picture from the video of Meehan knocking McCormack down:

Here’s a picture of a Weekly Standard reporter after being taken down.

Coakley cited “GOP stalkers” and “Brown operatives” (which itself is evidence of a paranoid nutjob) and claimed that “I didn’t see what happened, so I can’t say” to dodge questions about the incident.

But the photograph pretty much reveals that that one is as much of a lie as Coakley’s entire candidacy is being revealed to be:

I’m reminded of Sgt. Shultz’s line from the Hogan’s Hero comedy series: “I see nothing!”

Martha Coakley is an attorney general who doesn’t seem to give much of a damn about acts of criminal assault she witnesses with her own eyes.

You saw the whole thing, you liar.  And I guess we see which side is lying and which side in bleeding on the ground.

As assaulted reporter John McCormack put it:

“She knew that there was a reporter who asked her a question. We had met before. I asked her four questions. She saw me get knocked to the ground and kept walking,” said McCormack. “I wouldn’t say I was surprised. … She’s decided she’s entitled to the seat without answering questions on issues that are of national importance.”

I can’t say that I miss the days when political hopefuls jumped into bed with big money lobbyists to fund their campaigns in exchange for promises we never get to hear, because those days have never really left us.  All I know is that if you want more of that, then Martha Coakley is your woman.

I also can’t say that I miss the days when Benito Mussolini’s fascisti Blackshirts and Hitler’s Brownshirts made sure that any and all opposition was properly intimidated, either.  But apparently the woman who “sees nothing” while a reporter from a conservative publication is knocked down by her goon has brought back that old trend, too.

The debate-proof Democrat-dominated Senate has the following message for anyone contemplating taking away their total control:

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.

CBO Says Real 10-Year Cost of Senate ObamaCare Bill Still $2.5 Trillion

The American people will pay an additional one trillion dollars in taxes over ten years than they otherwise would have paid to finance the Democrats’ takeover of health care.  That is a brutal fact.

When the Democrats say their bill is “deficit neutral” what they mean is that they made drastic cuts in the Medicare budget and drastic increases in our taxes in order to create the illusion that it was deficit neutral.

Here’s some more brutal facts that your mainstream media will not tell you about regarding health care.

CBO: Real 10-Year Cost of Senate Bill Still $2.5 Trillion

With Obamacare, you get the good, the bad, and the ugly — except for the first part.

The Congressional Budget Office’s score is in for the final Senate health bill, and it’s amazing how little Americans would get for so much.

The Democrats are irresponsibly and disingenuously claiming that the bill would cost $871 billion over 10 years. But that’s not what the CBO says. Rather, the CBO says that $871 billion would be the costs from 2010 to 2019 for expansions in insurance coverage alone. But less than 2 percent of those “10-year costs” would kick in before the fifth year of that span. In its real first 10 years (2014 to 2023), the CBO says that the bill would cost $1.8 trillion — for insurance coverage expansions alone. Other parts of the bill would cost approximately $700 billion more, bringing the bill’s full 10-year tab to approximately $2.5 trillion — according to the CBO.

In those real first 10 years (2014 to 2023), Americans would have to pay over $1 trillion in additional taxes, over $1 trillion would be siphoned out of Medicare (over $200 billion out of Medicare Advantage alone) and spent on Obamacare, and deficits would rise by over $200 billion . They would rise, that is, unless Congress follows through on the bill’s pledge to cut doctors’ payments under Medicare by 21 percent next year and never raise them back up — which would reduce doctors’ enthusiasm for seeing Medicare patients dramatically.

And what would Americans get in return for this staggering sum? Well, the CBO says that health care premiums would rise, and the Chief Actuary at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says that the percentage of the Gross Domestic Product spent on health care would rise from 17 percent today to 21 percent by the end of 2019.  Nationwide health care costs would be $234 billion higher than under current law. How’s that for “reform”?

Even MoveOn.org says that the bill is “a massive giveaway” to private insurance companies. The CBO estimates that, from 2015-25, private insurers would receive $1.0 trillion in subsidies from the American taxpayer — the insurers’ apparent price for giving up their freedom and being controlled by the government. Congress would mandate that Americans buy the insurers’ product and would redirect massive sums of taxpayer money to make that mandate more feasible. So, if insurance companies are your idea of a worthy object of philanthropy, then Obamacare is for you.

And this is the bill that Ben Nelson has decided to support?

One hopes that Nebraska voters — and all other voters in other states who have sent Democrats to Washington — are making a list and checking it twice, keeping track of votes on Obamacare.

As Harry Reid keeps senators in session rather than letting them go home to be with their families and celebrate Christmas, it’s important to remember that this bill would not go into effect in any meaningful way until more than an Olympiad from now. Thus, it is the American voters — and not the current Democratic Congress or the current president — who will ultimately decide its fate. Providing reminders to representatives in both chambers of that in the coming days will be crucial to beating back the onslaught of proposed legislation that, even if it passes the Senate, would at least have to passed again by the House and would likely have to go back through both chambers in compromised form.

Posted by Jeffrey H. Anderson on December 19, 2009 07:49 PM | Permalink

There’s a frightening game being played with the truth.  And willingly or not, the CBO is helping the Obama administration lie to the American people.

A big part of the problem is that the CBO has to take Congress’ word for everything in their scoring – and the Congress (especially this Congress) is a bunch of liars.

If Congress has a huge spending bill, and tells the CBO that they will pay for it by picking the right numbers and hitting the mega-jackpot every year for the next 20 years, then the CBO must assume that the bill will be paid for – and thus “deficit neutral” in its scoring.

Maybe I’m not being clear enough.  So I’ll provide another example.  If Congress says that they will pay for their spending bill by summoning a winged fairy who will wave a magic wand and create a trillion dollars from nowhere, the CBO must count that trillion dollars in their scoring toward a “deficit neutral” bill.

Back in July, Obama summoned the director of the CBO, Douglas Elmendorf, to the White House. Republicans were outraged by this unprecedented event.  The Wall Street Journal had an article entitled, “Bullying CBO.”

Some have thought that Elmendorf was in fact intimidated, because their scores suddenly became much friendlier to ObamaCare.  But I personally believe it was simply a matter of the White House learning how to write a bill so that it would appear “deficit neutral” in a CBO score.  Democrats, in other words, learned how to use the right gimmicks to get the right results.

So if Congress says that it will increase taxes by a trillion dollars, then the CBO has to take it as gospel truth in its calculations.  But the fact of the matter is that tax revenues go down dramatically as tax rates go up (and see here also) for the simple reason that more and more people change their behavior and start sheltering their assets.  In the same way, when a bunch of new fees are imposed, people will start buying less and less of what will suddenly become more and more expensive.

The more of your own money you are allowed to keep, the harder you will work, and the more you will risk your money by investing.  The more you are taxed, the more you will adjust your behavior by protecting what you have, and the less you will be willing to take risks for a shrinking reward.

Bottom line: the federal government will collect far less in revenue than it thinks it will.  Revenues are already down dramatically as the White House and congressional Democrats have repeatedly vowed to end the Bush tax cuts (i.e. raise taxes) and increase taxes across the board.

In the same way, if Democrats tell the CBO that they will create savings by cutting the Medicare budget to the tune of half a trillion dollars and apply that “savings” to ObamaCare, then the CBO must assume that that will be the case.

It’s frankly difficult to believe that the Democrats will actually gut Medicare as they are saying they will do.  Will they really take $500 billion from Medicare?  Really?  And utterly outrage seniors who have counted on that benefit for decades?  If they do, they will pay dearly for it in every election until those seniors finally die.  If they don’t, you can add at least half a trillion dollars to what the Democrats say their bill will cost.

The same thing applies to the “doctor fix.”  Democrats will either follow through with their plan to make Medicare so expensive to doctors and hospitals that many medical professionals stop accepting it, or else they won’t.  If they do, the Medicare system will collapse.  If they don’t, then you can add hundreds of billions more to the cost of their health care plan.

The Washington Post put it this way:

“A plan to slash more than $500 billion from future Medicare spending — one of the biggest sources of funding for President Obama’s proposed overhaul of the nation’s health-care system — would sharply reduce benefits for some senior citizens and could jeopardize access to care for millions of others, according to a government evaluation released Saturday. The report, requested by House Republicans, found that Medicare cuts contained in the health package approved by the House on Nov. 7 are likely to prove so costly to hospitals and nursing homes that they could stop taking Medicare altogether.”

And to pay for that fiasco, the Democrats are playing games that even liberals recognize are gimmickry and trickery.

As the government increasingly takes over, costs are going to go up (as they always do when government starts administering programs) and quality is going to go down.

The very people people who are going to increase our health care spending by trillions of dollars are preaching fiscal responsibility and the need to reduce our spending even as they do it.

The hypocrisy, stupidity, and lunacy of the government is enough to make one scream.

No Abortion Funding In Health Care: Yet ANOTHER Liberal Lie Exposed

Barack Obama’s Health and Human Services Secretary – just as one of numerous examples – assured the public that there was no public funding for abortion in the Democrats’ health care plan.  From McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius pledged Sunday that President Barack Obama will support barring public funding for abortion in any health care overhaul legislation.

“That’s exactly what the president said and I think that’s what he intends, that the bill he signs will do,” she said on ABC’s “This Week.”

Abortion policy has been an ongoing concern throughout the health care debate. In July, the House Energy and Commerce Committee attempted to compromise on abortion funding as it wrote its version of the health care bill.

An organization that tends to run Democrat that calls itself “Factcheck.org” asked back in August:

Will health care legislation mean “government funding of abortion”?

President Obama said Wednesday that’s “not true” and among several “fabrications” being spread by “people who are bearing false witness.” But abortion foes say it’s the president who’s making a false claim. “President Obama today brazenly misrepresented the abortion-related component” of health care legislation, said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee. So which side is right?

An article from The Hill, dated yesterday, exposes “which side is right” for any who has eyes and at least half a brain:

Mich. Democrat: Pelosi ‘not happy with me’
By Bob Cusack – 10/27/09 01:30 PM ET

Rep. Bart Stupak said Speaker Pelosi is not pleased with his effort to change abortion-related provisions in the healthcare bill being crafted by the House.

During an interview on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” show, Stupak (D-Mich.) said he is undeterred in trying to ensure that taxpayer dollars do not pay for abortions. Stupak, who opposes abortion rights, acknowledged that some in his party are upset with his public campaign to change the bill.

“The Speaker is not happy with me,” Stupak said.

The Energy and Commerce subcommittee chairman said he has been working with Democratic leaders on a compromise, but they haven’t been able to strike a deal. Stupak pointed out that he and Democratic leaders have a fundamental disagreement on whether health plans that receive subsidies from the government should be allowed to provide coverage options on abortions.

Stupak wants a vote on the House floor to strike the language, and predicts he would have the votes to pass such an amendment.

“This has been federal law since 1976,” he said, noting that President Barack Obama has vowed not to allow healthcare reform to pay for abortions.

Democrat Stupak points out that “Obama has vowed not to allow healthcare reform to pay for abortions.”  But he sure isn’t telling Nancy Pelosi or Democrats that he won’t sign any bill that contains such language.  And – and this is an IQ test – do you really think that Obama would veto his coveted health care bill if it did not contain provisions to prevent taxpayer dollars from being used to fund abortion?  Really?

Keep in mind, Obama is a guy who loudly promised that he wouldn’t sign an Omnibus that contained earmarks, before signing one that contained 9,000 earmarks.  From the AP:

Despite campaign promises to take a machete to lawmakers’ pet projects, President Barack Obama is quietly caving to funding nearly 8,000 of them this year, drawing a stern rebuke Monday from his Republican challenger in last fall’s election.

And, yeah, the actual number turned out to be “nearly 9,000,” rather than 8,000.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, Obama HIMSELF was one of the porkers whose name was on the list of earmarkers:

Funny how items show up in spending bills without any notice — like an earmark for a president who promised not to seek any.

President Obama, who took a no-earmark pledge on the campaign trail, is listed as one of dozens of cosponsors of a $7.7 million set-aside in the fiscal 2009 omnibus spending bill passed by the House on Wednesday.

I think I can rest my case: if the ObamaCare bill has funding for abortion, Obama will break yet another promise and sign it.  Pinocchio, in the longest-nosed day of his life, was more honest than Barack Obama.

And it’s the same with death panels (and see here, and see here, and see here), or with coverage for illegal immigrants, or with the demonizing of private health insurance companies, or with the fact that Democrats will make the middle class pay taxes to finance their health care takeover, or any of the other blatant lies that Democrats keep telling.

Don’t trust them.  They are documented liars.  And they will continue to lie to impose their takeover of one-sixth of the economy.

Democrats Demand Private Insurers Assist In Demagoguing Themselves

Suppose I decide to target you for a demonization campaign, and rather than just go through your garbage and go through the whole process of gathering dirt on you, I just demand you provide all the dirt on yourself.  And I’ve got the full power of the government behind me.

We’re out to demagogue you, and you’d better help us.

Two House Democrats Seek Information From Insurers

WASHINGTON — Two powerful House Democrats have sent a letter to insurance companies asking them to provide detailed information about their conferences and retreats, executive pay, and other business practices.

The letter comes in the midst of a campaign by Democrats, as part of their push to build support for a health overhaul, to portray the insurance companies as the villains of the health-care system. Insurers say they are working with Congress on an overhaul and resent being cast as the bad guy.

The letter is from Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.), who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Bart Stupak (D., Mich.), who heads the panel’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

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An industry source replied when asked for comment: “This is nothing more than a taxpayer-funded fishing expedition designed to silence health plans.”

By Sept. 4, the firms are supposed to supply detailed compensation data for board members and top executives, as well as a “table listing all conferences, retreats, or other events held outside company facilities from January 1, 2007, to the present that were paid for, reimbursed, or subsidized in whole or in part by your company.”

Democrats seem to like going “fishing” these days.  The White House set up it’s own site to collect information on Americans who said anything “fishy” about their government takeover of health care before public pressure made them alter their operation.

These Democrats have raw, naked chutzpah.  They are the kind of people who shrilly demonized CEOs for flying private planes, and only to try to spend half a billion dollars to buy the very sort of planes they demonized private businesses from using.

These rat bastards routinely go on junkets to exotic lands, never fail to give themselves more pay raises and more benefits, and then self-righteously damn private businesses for looking after their own.

Waxman is a demagogue par excellence:

“It appears that the Republican Party leadership in the Congress has made a decision that they want to deny President Obama success, which means, in my mind, they are rooting against the country, as well,” [Waxman said].

Obama is America, and Waxman is the law.  And to fail to recognize either is its own form of treason.  He is a man who has long used the power of his gavel as a club to attack his political opponents.  Whether he was spearheading constant investigations into Bush White House for pure political retribution, or whether he was going after baseball players for public circus, he has always been the same demagoguing pig.

A liberal trumpets, “Henry Waxman strikes fear in every Republican!  Woohoo!”

And right now he is trying to strike fear in every insurance company CEO to intimidate them into meekly going along with the Democrat Party’s takeover of the health care industry.

Hope you don’t complain when a “Republican Waxman” comes along to strike fear in the heart of every Democrat when Republicans take over again.  It’s what you’ll deserve, and it’s what you get if you don’t stop using the most thuggish tactics in order to impose your agenda.

This IS a fishing expedition.  These companies haven’t broken any laws; and Congress doesn’t have any right to such information (which they could actually obtain on their own online if they had the first clue how to think for themselves).  Without question, Democrats just want to obtain this information which they will use in their campaign of demagoguery to attack and humiliate private businesses in order to impose their will upon them.

Letters demanding to allow Democrats to examine executive compensation and other business practices were sent out to 52 of the largest health insurers in the country – and not to any other industry groups – in a clear effort to threaten and intimidate those companies and the industry.

Harrad Sar wrote:

This move is nothing more than a flagrant violation of the office in which Waxman and Stupak hold. There is no constitutional authority or mandate that allows congress to intimidate and threaten the private sector through arbitrary investigation of private property ownership. This is a blatant move to silence all opposition to H.R. 3200 starting at the top.

And he is exactly right.

This is simply a continuation of the Constitution-be-damned tactics that the White House and Democrats have undertaken.  First they had their “fishy” effort to use the power of the White House to turn supporters into snitches.  This was so blatantly illegal that even the hardcore partisan liberal ACLU was forced to acknowledge that “the White House blog is a ‘bad idea that could send a troublesome message.'”  Then it started sending out unsolicited political emails from the White House – in fact from White House political adviser David Axelrod – urging people to support ObamaCare.  Can you even imagine the outcry of “constitutional crisis” that would have ensued had Karl Rove sent out unsolicited White House emails urging people to support the Iraq War?  And now Democrats are seriously talking about using budget reconciliation in a flagrantly unconstitutional manner: the Constitution requires that the federal government pass a budget, which is the only reason why the reconciliation process exists.  The Constitution does NOT require Congress to pass government health care.

Obama has been using thuggish tactics from the getgo of his administration.

An article entitled “A Study in Contrast” demonstrates the profound differences between the way that the Bush administration dealt with its critics versus the “Chicago thug” style Obama has taken.

Allahpundit points out:

The One can’t stop demagoging his critics for the simple reason that his image won’t allow it. As the risen Christ of American politics, his agenda is ipso facto good and just; treating his critics’ concerns as valid instead of the ravings of a lunatic mob would be like Jesus telling Satan, “Well, you’ve got a point there.” The whole Hopenchange mythos is at its core demagoguery.

Nancy Pelosi described ordinary Americans as “un-American” for exercising their rights of free speech and free assembly.  But she, Henry Waxman, and Democrats are the ones who are truly un-American.  Because they are using tactics right out of the classic book of fascism to impose their will on a country that obviously does not want what the Democrats are trying to impose by force.