Leading Democrat Expert On Health Care Turns Against Boondoggle ObamaCare

Apparently Ron Wyden joins such illustrious Democrat company as John Conyers (“What good is reading the bill…?”), Nancy Pelosi (“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it”), and Ben Nelson (“I don’t think you want me to waste my time to read every page of the health care bill”), in not bothering to read the evil ObamaCare bill that he personally voted for and vigorously supported.

I’m wondering if the only Democrat who actually bothered to read the health care takeover bill he voted for is John Dingell, who accurately said of the bill, “It takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.”

Here’s the story of Democrat Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) actively turning against the ObamaCare boondoggle:

SEPTEMBER 3, 2010
Wyden Defects on ObamaCare
The Oregon Democrat breaks ranks with the White House.

Most Democrats have come to understand that they can’t run on ObamaCare, but few have the temerity of Ron Wyden. The Oregon Senator is the first to break with the policy underpinnings of the bill he voted for.

Last week Mr. Wyden sent a letter to Oregon health authority director Bruce Goldberg, encouraging the state to seek a waiver from certain ObamaCare rules so it can “come up with innovative solutions that the Federal government has never had the flexibility or will to implement.”

One little-known provision of the bill allows states to opt out of the “requirement that individuals purchase health insurance,” Mr. Wyden wrote, and “Because you and I believe that the heart of real health reform is affordability and not mandates, I wanted to bring this feature of Section 1332 to the attention of you and the legislature.”

Now, that’s news. One of the Democratic Party’s leading experts on health care wants his state to dump the individual mandate that is among ObamaCare’s core features. The U-turn is especially notable because Mr. Wyden once championed an individual mandate in the bill he sponsored with Utah Republican Bob Bennett. We have differences with Wyden-Bennett, but it was far better than ObamaCare and would have changed incentives by offering more choices to individuals and spurring competition among providers and insurers.

Mr. Wyden should have known better than to vote for ObamaCare given his market instincts and health-care experience. Even so, the price for his support included the Section 1332 waivers that he is now promoting. In addition to the individual mandate, states may evade regulations about business taxes, the exact federal standards for minimum benefits, and how subsidies are allocated in the insurance “exchanges”—as long as the state covers the same number of uninsured and keeps coverage as comprehensive.

Medicaid also grants some indulgences toward state flexibility, even if those waivers are difficult to acquire. The Secretary of Health and Human Services would need to approve the ObamaCare alternative of Oregon or any other states, and the waivers don’t start until 2017, three years after ObamaCare is supposed to be up and running. It is also hard to see how anyone in the current Administration would grant them.

These practical realities aside, Mr. Wyden’s move may be more important as a political signal. Mr. Wyden is running for re-election this year. And while he is now well ahead of GOP challenger Jim Huffman, in a year like this one he has cause to avoid becoming Barbara Boxer or Patty Murray, who may lose because they’ve remained liberals from MSNBC central casting.

This sort of thing also isn’t supposed to happen to newly passed entitlements. Democrats have long believed that once an entitlement passes, however unpopular at the time, voters and business will grow to like it and then Republicans begin to come around. The exception was a catastrophic-coverage program to replace private “Medigap” policies, which Democrats passed in 1988 and repealed a year later amid a public furor.

On ObamaCare, Democrats are having the first political second thoughts, at least in this election season. Mr. Wyden is essentially saying that what his party passed is not acceptable, and if such thinking builds, opponents may have a real chance to replace ObamaCare with something better.

Democrats are now actively running from the Democrat Party and the Democrat Platform.  Democrats are running campaign ads that literally omit the fact that they are Democrats.  They are running as opponents of Obama and his agenda.  They are running in droves as opponents of Nancy Pelosi (even when such Democrats actually VOTED for her as House Speaker).

These same cowardly and corrupt Democrats who were in lock step passing Obama’s Marxist agenda are now claiming that they will offer an “independent voice.” But no, they won’t.

Never forget, “Democrat” actually stands for “Demonic bureaucrat.”  And whenever Obama or Democrat leadership needs a vote from a Democrat, they’ll get it.  Votes are largely assigned in the party machine.  Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid will allow vulnerable members to vote ‘no’ on their pork barrel bills if they have enough votes to pass them.  But virtually all of those representatives and senators who voted ‘no’ on bills like the $862 billion stimulus and ObamaCare would have voted ‘yes’ if it had been necessary for them to do so.

And just as many Democrats said they’d vote against ObamaCare until they voted for it (think Bart Stupak and his gang of supposedly pro-life Democrats) – often getting incredibly sweetheart deals for their treachery (think “Louisiana Purchase,” think “Cornhusker Kickback,” among others), the fact of the matter is that you can’t trust Democrats to follow through with whatever the hell they promise they will or won’t do.  If you like relentless liberal socialism, then vote for Democrats.  But don’t be stupid and vote for your Senator or Representative because they say they’ll oppose Obama.  Because the next time they’re needed, they’ll be right back on board, voting as they’re told to vote.

I mean, quit being Charlie Brown thinking Lucy will finally hold the football so you can kick it.  She won’t.  And Democrats won’t oppose the liberal agenda; they’ll support it, they’ll be its footsoldiers, just like they were the last two years.

ObamaCare is more than just bad.  It is evil and it will lead to rationing and Sarah Palin’s death panels in spades.  There are 160 new federal bureaucracies created under ObamaCare, in the nearly 2,400 incomprehensible pages of the bill, and every single one of them both individually and through bureaucratic pinballing will ultimately amount to a death panel.

The stimulus was equally awful for our economy.  And Americans overwhelmingly recognize that, just as they overwhelmingly recognize that ObamaCare was awful.

If you want less of this, please don’t vote for the party that imposed it.  Vote for the party that united against it: the Republican Party.

Democrats have repeatedly demagogued Republicans as “the party of no” even when THEY had been the party of no when Republicans were in charge.  But being the party of no is a GOOD THING when the party in power seeks to pass one awful, America-destroying bill after another.

White House Implosion Approaching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the rest at the New York Times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you make a turd look good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Jeopardized the country’? Pelosi And Rangel Jeopardizing Democrats

Following Nancy Pelosi’s vow that her Congress would be the most ethical in history, she has tolerated some of the biggest scumbags in history, such as William Jefferson, who was caught red-handed with $90,000 of bribe money in his freezer, and his fellow House Ways and Means committee member (and chairman) Charles Rangel, who was caught equally red-handed massively cheating on his taxes.

It should be pointed out that the House Ways and Means Committee writes the nation’s tax laws.

It’s almost as egregious a violation as, say, the Secretary of the Treasury being a documented tax cheat.  Oh yeah.  Never mind.

It is worth pointing out that if these guys had been Republicans, they would have been long, long gone.

A private citizen was attempting to confront Charles Rangel a full year ago.  And, of course, it was a well-known fact even as the Democrats were taking total power through a mainstream media campaign that falsely demonized the Republicans and falsely hyped the Democrats’ “change.”  It’s a shame that the mainstream media and the Speaker of the House were indifferent to this kind of corruption from the guy who writes everybody else’s tax laws.

Everybody should pay their “fair share” of taxes – unless they’re Democrats, that is.  Particularly Democrats who write or enforce the nation’s tax laws and selectively punish whomever they want to punish for doing the same damn thing they do.

Democrats are showing their true character.

I saw a “Kerry-Edwards” window sticker on a car from Minnesota in my church’s parking lot.  And I was utterly disgusted that somebody who actually thinks of himself or herself as a Christian supported such a putrefying pile of moral slime as John Edwards.

And of course, as a backdrop to all this, New York is having an impossible time finding a Democrat who isn’t lower than whale turds to govern the state.  Do you want the guy who rents prostitutes by the thousands, or do you want the guy who threatens beaten women to keep their mouths shut and not appear in court?  Patterson says he won’t run for reelection, and presumably New York Democrats are going to “hope” for the “change” that the third time’s the charm.

But let’s get back to Rangel.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – rather than make her claim to run the most ethical Congress in history anything other than the total depraved mockery that it always was – instead invented a “new threshold” which justifies keeping tax cheat Rangel in charge of writing tax laws.  From The Hill:

Rep. Charlie Rangel’s admonishment for violating House gift rules “is not good,” but his actions did not put the nation at risk in any material way, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday.

Pelosi said it is not her place to interfere in any investigations of the matter and said she would not get involved politically.

“But the fact is, is that what Mr. Rangel has been admonished for is not good,” she said on ABC’s “This Week.” “It was a violation of the rules of the House. It was not a–something that jeopardized our country in any way.”

I remember playing games with my kids.  They understood the concept of winning, but they did not understand the concept of fair play.  So they invariably kept changing the rules to benefit themselves at that particular moment of the game.

Which is exactly what Nancy Pelosi, the complete moral idiot and chief Democrat ethicist, is doing now.  With Charles Rangel, with reconciliation, with health care, with pretty much everything.

Well, it must be fine then.  It’s easy to be “the most ethical Congress in history” when you have such a personally vile sense of ethics.

It’s this kind of moral reasoning that leads to the Louisiana Purchase and the Cornhusker Kickback.  What is right and wrong is however we wish to define it at the moment; and we’ll change the rules again later when it fits our agenda to do so.

The Daily Beast, which runs decidedly to the political left, is running the following picture as “The Photo That Could Doom the Democrats“:

Of course, what the photograph depicts is Rangel on a foreign beach, enjoying the fruits of his tax fraud.

And the first words of the article are these:

Nancy Pelosi is protecting Rep. Charles Rangel, who failed to pay taxes on his Caribbean villa, among other miscues. But the ethically challenged congressional baron is endangering the Democrats’ control of Congress.

When we think about the “ethically challenged congressional baron,” we should immediately connect him to the ethically challenged congressional queen.

Throw the both out.  Throw the whole lot of them out.

Obama White House Accused By Democrat Of Federal Crime In Specter, Bennet Races

Richard Nixon was honest to a fault compared to Barack Obama – and Obama is displaying corruption in only a year (Nixon was into his second term before he got caught).

We have Obama on video telling what we now recognize were seven major lies in less than two minutes when he was lying his way to the presidency:

[Youtube link]

We’ve got Obama displaying a shocking pattern of corruption and lack of transparency in a case involving a friend and a sacred-cow program.  It is also a case of a president firing an Inspector General for the crime of investigating a crime in a manner that was not merely Nixonian, but Stalinist (link1; link2; link3; link4).  Rest assured that Obama has his own enemies list.

The case of the illegal firing of Inspector General Gerald Walpin is far from over as it works its way through the legal system.

Getting closer to what we now have before us, we have the cases of the Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, and a list of political bribery shenanigans that gets too long to follow.

All from an administration that deceitfully promised unprecedented transparency and openness and continues to shamelessly represent itself as being the best thing since sliced bread.

But this story – supported by the testimony of Democrats – may be in a whole new class of corruption:

White House Accused of Federal Crime in Specter, Bennet Races
By Jeffrey Lord on 2.22.10 @ 6:09AM

“Whoever solicits or receives … any….thing of value, in consideration of the promise of support or use of influence in obtaining for any person any appointive office or place under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.” — 18 USC Sec. 211 — Bribery, Graft and Conflicts of Interest: Acceptance or solicitation to obtain appointive public office

“In the face of a White House denial, U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak stuck to his story yesterday that the Obama administration offered him a “high-ranking” government post if he would not run against U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary.”
— Philadelphia Inquirer
February 19, 2010

“D.C. job alleged as attempt to deter Romanoff”
—Denver Post
September 27, 2009

A bombshell has just exploded in the 2010 elections.

For the second time in five months, the Obama White House is being accused — by Democrats — of offering high ranking government jobs in return for political favors. What no one is reporting is that this is a violation of federal law that can lead to prison time, a fine or both, according to Title 18, Chapter 11, Section 211 of the United States Code.

The jobs in question? Secretary of the Navy and a position within the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The favor requested in return? Withdrawal from Senate challenges to two sitting United States Senators, both Democrats supported by President Obama. The Senators are Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania and Michael Bennet in Colorado.

On Friday, Pennsylvania Congressman Joe Sestak, the Democrat challenging Specter for re-nomination, launched the controversy by accusing the Obama White House of offering him a federal job in exchange for his agreeing to abandon his race against Specter.

In August of 2009, the Denver Post reported last September, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Jim Messina “offered specific suggestions” for a job in the Obama Administration to Colorado Democrat Andrew Romanoff, a former state House Speaker, if Romanoff would agree to abandon a nomination challenge to U.S. Senator Michael Bennet. Bennet was appointed to the seat upon the resignation of then-Senator Ken Salazar after Salazar was appointed by Obama to serve as Secretary of the Interior. According to the Post, the specific job mentioned was in the U.S. Agency for International Development. The Post cited “several sources who described the communication to The Denver Post.”

The paper also describes Messina as “President Barack Obama’s deputy chief of staff and a storied fixer in the White House political shop.” Messina’s immediate boss is White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

Sestak is standing by his story. Romanoff refused to discuss it with the Denver paper. In both instances the White House has denied the offers took place. The Sestak story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, reported by Thomas Fitzgerald, can be found here, While the Denver Post story, reported by Michael Riley, from September 27, 2009, can be read here.

In an interview with Philadelphia television anchor Larry Kane, who broke the story on Larry Kane: Voice of Reason, a Comcast Network show, Sestak says someone — unnamed — in the Obama White House offered him a federal job if he would quit the Senate race against Specter, the latter having the support of President Obama, Vice President Biden and, in the state itself, outgoing Democratic Governor Ed Rendell. Both Biden and Rendell are longtime friends of Specter, with Biden taking personal credit for convincing Specter to leave the Republican Party and switch to the Democrats. Rendell served as a deputy to Specter when the future senator’s career began as Philadelphia’s District Attorney, a job Rendell himself would eventually hold.

Asked Kane of Sestak in the Comcast interview:

“Is it true that you were offered a high ranking job in the administration in a bid to get you to drop out of the primary against Arlen Specter?”

“Yes” replied Sestak.

Kane: “Was it Secretary of the Navy?”

To which the Congressman replied:

“No comment.”

Sestak is a retired Navy admiral.

In the Colorado case, the Post reported that while Romanoff refused comment on a withdrawal-for-a-job offer, “several top Colorado Democrats described Messina’s outreach to Romanoff to The Post, including the discussion of specific jobs in the administration. They asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.”

The Post also noted that the day after Romanoff announced his Senate candidacy, President Obama quickly announced his endorsement of Senator Bennet.

The discovery that the White House has now been reported on two separate occasions in two different states to be deliberately committing a potential violation of federal law — in order to preserve the Democrats’ Senate majority — could prove explosive in this highly political year. The 60-seat majority slipped to 59 seats with the death of Senator Edward Kennedy, a Democrat, and the election of Republican Senator Scott Brown. Many political analysts are suggesting Democrats could lose enough seats to lose their majority altogether.

This is the stuff of congressional investigations and cable news alerts, as an array of questions will inevitably start being asked of the Obama White House.

Here are but a few lines of inquiry, some inevitably straight out of Watergate.

* Who in the White House had this conversation with Congressman Sestak?

* Did Deputy Chief of Staff Messina have the same conversation with Sestak he is alleged to have had with Romanoff — and has he or anyone else on the White House staff had similar conversations with other candidates that promise federal jobs for political favors?

* They keep logs of these calls. How quickly will they be produced?

* How quickly would e-mails between the White House, Sestak, Specter, Romanoff and Bennet be produced?

* Secretary of the Navy is an important job. Did this job offer or the reported offer of the US AID position to Romanoff have the approval of President Obama or Vice President Biden?

* What did the President know and when did he know it?

* What did the Vice President know and when did he know it? (Note: Vice President Biden, in this tale, is Specter’s longtime friend who takes credit for luring Specter to switch parties. Can it really be that an offer of Secretary of the Navy to get Sestak out of Specter’s race would not be known and or approved by the Vice President? Does Messina or some other White House staffer — like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel — have that authority?)

* What did White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel know, and when did he know it?

* What did Congressman Sestak know and when did he know it? Was he aware that the offer of a federal job in return for a political favor — his withdrawal from the Senate race — could open the White House to a criminal investigation?

* What did Senator Specter know about any of this and when did he know it? .

* What did Governor Rendell, who, as the titular leader of Pennsylvania Democrats, is throwing his political weight and machine to his old friend Specter, know about this? And when did he know it?

* Will the Department of Justice be looking into these two separate news stories, one supplied by a sitting United States Congressman, that paint a clear picture of jobs for political favors?

* Will Attorney General Holder recuse himself from such an investigation?

While in recent years there have been bribery scandals that centered on the exchange of favors for a business deal (Democrat William Jefferson, a Louisiana Congressman) or cash for earmarks (Republican Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham), the idea of violating federal law by offering a federal job in return for a political favor (leaving two hotly contested Senate races in this instance) is not new.

Let’s go back in history for a moment.

It’s the spring of 1960, in the middle of a bitter fight for the Democratic presidential nomination between then Senators John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, Stuart Symington and the 1952 and 1956 nominee, ex-Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson.

Covering the campaign for what would become the grandfather of all political campaign books was journalist and JFK friend Theodore H. White. In his book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the President 1960, published in 1961, White tells the story of a plane flight with JFK on the candidate’s private plane The Caroline. The nomination fight is going on at a furious pace, and White and Kennedy are having another of their innumerable private chats for White’s book while the plane brings JFK back from a campaign swing where he spoke to delegates in Montana.

The subject? Let’s let White tell the story.

The conversation began in a burst of anger. A story had appeared in a New York newspaper that evening that an Eastern Governor had claimed that Kennedy had offered him a cabinet post in return for his Convention support. His anger was cold, furious. When Kennedy is angry, he is at his most precise, almost schoolmasterish. It is a federal offense, he said, to offer any man a federal job in return for a favor. This was an accusation of a federal offense. It was not so.

Let’s focus on that JFK line again:

“It is a federal offense, he said, to offer any man a federal job in return for a favor.”

With a fine and jail time attached if convicted.

What Larry Kane discovered with the response of Congressman Sestak — and Sestak is sticking to his story — combined with what the Denver Post has previously reported in the Romanoff case — appears to be a series of connecting dots.

A connecting of dots — by Democrats — that leads from Colorado to Pennsylvania straight into the West Wing of the White House.

And possibly the jail house.

“It is a federal offense,” said John F. Kennedy, “to offer any man a federal job in return for a favor.”

And so it is.

Obama – who is loudly and frequently patting himself on the back for how “bipartisan” he is, is the most radically ideological partisan who ever sat in the Oval Office.

And as Obama continues to push his ObamaCare boondoggle apparently to the very last Democrat, it is more than fair to ask: why on earth are we trusting these dishonest rat bastards with our health care system and literally with our very lives in the event that their government takeover succeeds?

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.

What Happens When A Demagogue’s Demagoguery Fails Him?

The Demagogue-in-chief was at it again the other day, telling Charles Gibson on ABC that if his ObamaCare takeover isn’t passed, the country will go bankrupt.  It’s really the other way around, given that this monstrosity will raise costs rather than lowering them, but demagogues don’t need facts – only fear.

Mind you, Demagogue-in-chief Obama has made extensive use of fearmongering to sell his snake oil health care poison all along.

And, of course, it was through naked fearmongering that Obama threatened and rushed his now-failed stimulus through Congress.  As the Wall Street Journal put it:

President Barack Obama has turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package.

Our economy is now actually suffering a higher unemployment than Obama said we’d experience if we didn’t pass his porkulus slush fund.  But, being a tried-and-true demagogue, Obama merely shifts the blame on that failure.

Obama is a man who knows his way around fearmongering, demonization, and intimidation.  It’s the Chicago Way, after all, if only the mainstream media had ever bothered to investigate Obama’s Chicago Way (which shall someday be called “Chicago’s Obama Way”).

Obama demonized the same banks and banking executives his administration was bailing out as he forced them through demagoguery to bow down to his controls.  In private his administration has done even worse, using what amounts to blackmail to cow executives.  Auto investors were forced to give up far more than they legally should have had to do because of naked intimidation.

And the administration that used a taxpayer-funded website to try to collect the names of people who opposed ObamaCare subsequently attacked private insurer Humana for trying to warn their clients about what was happening in a flagrant violation of 1st Amendment free speech rights.

I could go on and on on the demagogic tactics of this administration.  But I think I’ve demonstrated my point.

There’s a single short paragraph in a Hill article that came out yesterday that sums up Obama’s “leadership” style.  Threatening a liberal Democrat who has not always toed the Obama line, we had this unveiled threat:

“Don’t think we’re not keeping score, brother,” Obama told DeFazio during a closed-door meeting of the House Democratic Caucus, according to members afterward.

It was just a couple of days ago that we heard that Barry Hussein had threatened Senator Ben Nelson (D-Neb) with closing Offutt Air Force Base – which not only employs 10,000 people but serves as the strategically vital location for the US Strategic Command – as a naked threat to force Nelson to support ObamaCare.  But incredibly, at the same time the White House was frankly treasonously intimidating a US Senator with a threat against US national security, they were also trying to offer a bribe that would make even Mary Landrieu’s $300 million “Louisiana Purchase” look tame.

We’re now finding out that Ben Nelson is selling his vote, and just one of the goodies he will collect for his supporters is that the federal government will pay for Nebraska’s Medicaid tab — forever.  Which means that the taxes for Medicaid will go up in every single other state — forever.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger joined Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman in opposing  the current senate version of ObamaCare, with Schwarzenegger saying the unfunded expansion of Medicaid would cost California an additional $3 billion a year when the state is already deep into a budget crisis.  And that is now going to be $3 billion PLUS California’s share in paying for Nebraska’s exempted share.

You’d think that this kind of bribery and sweetheart dealing would be unconstitutional, but we now know that the Constitution means absolutely nothing to the Democrat Party.

And you don’t have to be a powerful Senator to get hundred million dollar bribes to vote “the Obama Way.”  Take a look at virtually unknown Democrat Jim Costas’ sudden good fortune and ask yourself how many other Democrats have had their votes purchased:

To get as far as the bill did so far, it appears the administration might have spread some money around. California Rep. Jim Costa was wavering but told a local newspaper last week that his vote could be contingent on getting some federal money for a new medical school in his district along with help for local hospitals.

When a constituent named Bob Smittcamp e-mailed him to complain about his vote for the House bill, the congressman explained he’d been offered the dollars he was looking for — $128 million in federal money.

“He responded to me by basically saying that he did not like many of the elements there were in the legislation. However, he was able to procure $128m for the University of California medical school in Merced,” Smittcamp told Fox News.

Now we officially learn, according to a study of Obama’s stimulus by George Mason University, that the Democrats are using the stimulus as a slush fund.  The study found no correlation between unemployment rate and stimulus funding; rather, Democrat districts have received DOUBLE the money received by Republican districts as the most partisan president in the history of America proved his true colors again.

Mind you, we’ve pretty much known that all along.  We can go back to July, when Obama directly threatened Arizona to cut off federal stimulus money unless the state’s leadership saw things his way.  So the study merely proved what everybody should already know.  But there is another lesson as well: that the flip side of using taxpayer stimulus money to bribe Democrats is using taxpayer stimulus money to intimidate Republicans.

And of course, that is why Americans should be terrified by this administration: a president who can pay bribes to buy political behavior can take money away to discourage other political behavior.

In any event, we have our answer to the question posed by the title: “What happens when a demagogue’s demagoguery fails him?”  Answer: a ton of naked bribery and insider-politicking using taxpayer stimulus money that was supposed to be used to create jobs, but is instead being used to buy Democrat’s votes for a federal government takeover of the health care system.

Did Obama Actually Threaten To Undermine National Security To Impose His ObamaCare Fiasco?

You’d never believe something like this could happen – until it does:

Source: Dems Threaten Nelson In Pursuit of 60

While the Democrats appease Senator Lieberman, they still have to worry about other recalcitrant Democrats including Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson. Though Lieberman has been out front in the fight against the public option and the Medicare buy-in, Nelson was critical of both. Now that those provisions appear to have been stripped from the bill, Lieberman may get on board, but Nelson’s demand that taxpayer money not be used to fund abortion has still not been met. According to a Senate aide, the White House is now threatening to put Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base on the BRAC list if Nelson doesn’t fall into line.

Offutt Air Force Base employs some 10,000 military and federal employees in Southeastern Nebraska. As our source put it, this is a “naked effort by Rahm Emanuel and the White House to extort Nelson’s vote.” They are “threatening to close a base vital to national security for what?” asked the Senate staffer.

Indeed, Offutt is the headquarters for US Strategic Command, the successor to Strategic Air Command, and not by accident. STRATCOM was located in the middle of the country for strategic reasons. Its closure would be a massive blow to the economy of the state of Nebraska, but it would also be another example of this administration playing politics with our national security.

Posted by Michael Goldfarb on December 15, 2009 12:41 PM

Obama, willing to undermine national security and cut 10,000 jobs to give Nelson an offer he can’t refuse on his ObamaCare?  How’s that hoax and chains working out?

This isn’t negotiation.  It’s extortion.  And quite possibly treason.  Obama should literally be impeached and driven out of office for this.

The US Strategic Command, so vital to American security that it was located in the heart of America to protect it?  You might be able to protect something like that from the Russians and the Chinese, but you can’t protect it from our real enemies, who now live in Washington.

Now you want the good old fashion Louisiana Purchase-style negotiation, where Democrats are simply paid massive bribes from Obama’s porkulus slush fund to vote with the Democrat leadership, then that is apparently going on, too:

The White House and Democratic Leadership in the Senate has told Senator Nelson they will close every military base in Nebraska — a threat that is not credible, really — but they have also offered Senator Nelson between $300 million to $500 million in earmarks, according to key hill health care operatives. These hundreds of millions will be available for whatever he wants to spend them on in Nebraska.

Given Senator Nelson’s hard core earmarking history as an appropriator, the word on the street is that this is the real carrot that could get Nelson to agree to some cover amendment that would allege to protect the innocent unborn from government funding of abortion, but, in fact, would not.

Mary Landrieu, with her measly $300 million bribe to whore her vote:

On the eve of Saturday’s showdown in the Senate over health-care reform, Democratic leaders still hadn’t secured the support of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), one of the 60 votes needed to keep the legislation alive. The wavering lawmaker was offered a sweetener: at least $100 million in extra federal money for her home state.

And so it came to pass that Landrieu walked onto the Senate floor midafternoon Saturday to announce her aye vote — and to trumpet the financial “fix” she had arranged for Louisiana. “I am not going to be defensive,” she declared. “And it’s not a $100 million fix. It’s a $300 million fix.”

With all due respect, that amounts to a sleazily-dressed woman indignantly saying, “I’m not a ten dollar whore; I’m a thirty dollar whore!”

Bribery has been used by this administration before.  At an earlier point in the health care “debate,” we saw this:

To get as far as the bill did so far, it appears the administration might have spread some money around. California Rep. Jim Costa was wavering but told a local newspaper last week that his vote could be contingent on getting some federal money for a new medical school in his district along with help for local hospitals.

When a constituent named Bob Smittcamp e-mailed him to complain about his vote for the House bill, the congressman explained he’d been offered the dollars he was looking for — $128 million in federal money.

“He responded to me by basically saying that he did not like many of the elements there were in the legislation. However, he was able to procure $128m for the University of California medical school in Merced,” Smittcamp told Fox News.

So now you know what the real purpose of the “stimulus” was: to “stimulate” Democrats to vote for despicable bills.

Now, I don’t know for certain that that Senate Aide reported the truth, and that Barry Hussein actually threatened to close down Offutt Air Force Base.  There isn’t enough sourcing, and the mainline media have demonstrated that they WILL NOT cover stories that are critical of their ideological bias until they are dragged into covering them.  A perfect recent example is the ClimateGate story, which Fox News ran a story on two weeks ago entitled, “Climate-Gate Heats Up But Mainstream Media Ignore Firestorm.”  It’s a huge story revealing major scientists at the core of the United Nation’s “facts” on global warming were revealed to be cooking the books, suppressing information, purging data, and using the peer-review process to undermine their opponents.

On the other hand, I HAVE seen a desperation, and a desire to use any tactic, in order to impose this monstrous health care takeover on a public that doesn’t want it according to every single poll.

From Rasmussen:

Monday, December 14, 2009

// <![CDATA[//

Fifty-six percent (56%) of U.S. voters now oppose the health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats. That’s the highest level of opposition found – reached three times before – in six months of polling.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 40% of voters favor the health care plan.

Perhaps more significantly, 46% now Strongly Oppose the plan, compared to 19% who Strongly Favor it.

Overall support for the health care plan fell to 38%, its lowest point ever, just before Thanksgiving. This is the fourth straight week with support at 41% or less. With the exception of a few days following nationally televised presidential appeals for the legislation, the number of voters opposed to the plan has always exceeded the number who favor it.

So as hard as it is to some to believe that a president of the United States would actually threaten to dramatically undermine the national security of the United States in order to get his health care and save his presidency, I do believe it.

Democrats Actually Voting To Raid Medicare To Fund ObamaCare

If you are a senior and like your Medicare, then you are a pure idiot for voting Democrat, that’s all I can say.

Medicare cuts focus of Senate health care debate

By ERICA WERNER, Associated Press Writer Erica Werner, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans forced Democrats to vote in favor of cutting billions from providers of home care for older people as partisan debate flared Saturday during a rare weekend session on President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

Obama planned to travel to Capitol Hill on Sunday to help Democrats resolve internal disputes that stand in the way of Majority Leader Harry Reid bringing the 10-year, nearly $1 trillion legislation to a vote.

Ahead of his visit, Republicans, bent on making Democrats cast politically risky votes, offered their third amendment in the debate so far showcasing more than $400 billion in cuts to projected Medicare spending that would pay for the bill, mostly for subsidies to help extend coverage to millions of uninsured.

Like the other two, this one went down to defeat, on a vote of 53 to 41. The measure by Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb., would have eliminated $42 billion in cuts over 10 years to agencies that provide home health care to seniors under Medicare.

Four moderate Democrats joined all Republicans present in voting for the amendment: Sens. Jim Webb of Virginia, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas and Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

Underscoring the pressures on the moderates, Lincoln, who faces a difficult re-election next year, initially cast a “no” vote with the Democratic majority but switched to “yes” in the course of the 15-minute vote. Republicans accused her of flip-flopping, but Lincoln said later that she changed her vote after considering how important home health care is to Arkansas.

“That’s why they give us 15 minutes,” said Lincoln.

The more consequential action was taking place behind closed doors Saturday as Democrats struggled to find a compromise on a proposed government insurance plan that would compete with private insurers. Lincoln and several other moderate Democrats are opposed to the government insurance plan in the bill, and Reid, D-Nev., doesn’t have a vote to spare in his 60-member caucus.

Back in 1995, Democrats actually accused Republicans of “cutting Medicare” when they tried to merely slow the rate of growth – even though the actual spending would still increase.    Now the Democrats are flat-out CUTTING Medicare and trying to argue that their cuts are “savings.”

The “more than $400 billion” is actually $460 billion, which is seriously flirting with half a TRILLION dollars in cuts to a Medicare program that was already facing bankruptcy by 2017 – two years earlier than government actuaries estimated only last year.

The Democrats’ logic is to replace a bankrupt government program that will only crash against the seniors it was supposed to cover with a vastly larger government program that will crash with a far larger implosion against everybody.

The federal and states government already controls 61% of health care spending in the United States.  Government control, and government spending, have increased year after year.  I submit to you that too much government control of health care is the real problem, not “the evil insurance companies.”  In point of fact, more than half of Americans who have private insurance have it through not-for-profit insurers; and private insurance company profits are actually incredibly modest in relation to other industries.

Barack Obama has repeatedly said that if you liked your current plan, you could keep it.  That is yet another Obama lie: the fact of the matter is that 11 million seniors very much like their Medicare Advantage programs, and Barack Obama is trying to stop them from keeping it.  And those 11 million are just the tip of the iceberg: the Wall Street Journal demonstrates that some 133 million workers are going to wake up in five years and find out that ObamaCare destroyed their employer-based Erisa coverage.  That’s not nearly all the people that Obama and the Democrats are going to screw with their health care boondoggle – but it’s more than enough.

Seniors are going to die under the Democrats’ plan.  The logic is unavoidable: 1) the plan calls for young, healthy people to buy expensive insurance policies – which they have never purchased before – in order to “spread out risks” for the entire system.  2) If they don’t purchase the coverage, they will be called upon to pay a fine.  The problem is that the fine is much lower than the price of the insurance coverage.  3) Therefore young people largely WON’T purchase the insurance, and will instead pay the fine, knowing that since they CAN’T be rejected for any “pre-existing condition” (such as not being insured), they can’t be turned down if they get sick/injured and then need coverage.  For what it’s worth, a lot of other adults will be encouraged to do the same thing.  4) Therefore, the Democrats’ plan will not raise nearly as much as they think.  And 5) the need to severely ration care will be critical.

The Wall Street Journal rightly calls this fiasco “The Worst Bill Ever.”  Why?

As Congress’s balance sheet drowns in trillions of dollars in new obligations, the political system will have no choice but to start making cost-minded decisions about which treatments patients are allowed to receive. Democrats can’t regulate their way out of the reality that we live in a world of finite resources and infinite wants. Once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, medical rationing is inevitable—especially for the innovative high-cost technologies and drugs that are the future of medicine.

The Dean of the Harvard Medical School gave it a “failing grade.”  Dr. Jeffrey Flier argued that:

In effect, while the legislation would enhance access to insurance, the trade-off would be an accelerated crisis of health-care costs and perpetuation of the current dysfunctional system—now with many more participants. This will make an eventual solution even more difficult. Ultimately, our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all.

The California Medical Association came out strongly against the Democrat plan:

The state’s largest doctors group is opposing healthcare legislation being debated in the Senate this week, saying it would increase local healthcare costs and restrict access to care for elderly and low-income patients.

The California Medical Assn. represents more than 35,000 physicians statewide, making it the second-largest state medical association in the country after Texas. […]

d“The Senate bill came so short that we could not support it, even though we solidly support healthcare reform,” said Dr. Dev GnanaDev, medical director at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in San Bernardino, who also serves on the association’s executive committee.

Doctors who oppose the Senate bill are concerned that it would would shift Medicare funding from urban to rural areas, move responsibility for Medicare oversight away from Congress by creating an Independent Medicare Commission and, ultimately, decrease Medicare reimbursement rates.

The “Independent Medicare Commission” is just one of the many “death panels” this bill would create.  One hundred and eleven death panels, to be precise.

Rasmussen, the nation’s most accurate pollster, points out that Americans are opposed to the Democrats’ plan:

Support for the president’s health care plan fell to 38%, its lowest ever, just before Thanksgiving. Followed by two weeks at 41%, this marks the lowest extended period of support for the plan yet. With the exception of a few days following nationally televised presidential appeals for the legislation, the number of voters opposed to the plan has always exceeded the number who favor it.

“This suggests that public opinion about the health care plan is hardening,” says Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports. “Despite the fact that most American believe our health care system needs major changes, most are opposed to what Congress is currently doing about it.” […]

While one of the chief stated goals of the plan proposed by the president and congressional Democrats is to lower the cost of health care, 57% say costs will go up if the plan is passed. Twenty-one percent (21%) say costs will go down, and 17% believe they will stay about the same.

Similarly, only 23% think the quality of health care will get better if the plan is passed, while 54% predict that it will get worse. Sixteen percent (16%) expect quality to stay about the same.

Other polling shows that 47% trust the private sector more than government to keep health care costs down and the quality of care up. Two-thirds (66%) say an increase in free market competition will do more than government regulation to reduce health care costs.

Sixty percent (60%) of voters nationwide believe passage of the health care plan will increase the deficit. Seventy-five percent (75%) also think it is at least somewhat likely that middle class taxes will have to be raised to cover the cost of the plan. Fifty-nine percent (59%) say such a tax increase is Very Likely.

Only 27% favor a single-payer health care system where the federal government provides coverage for everyone.

So what do the Democrats – who promised unprecedented “openness” and “transparency” – do?  Barack Obama went to the Senate and had a
“closed-door meeting” that slammed the door shut in Republicans’ faces.  This is a hard care ideologically leftist partisan takever, funded by flat-out bribes paid for by the taxpayers.

Entrenched Democrats bought Mary Landrieu’s vote to proceed with their partisan boondoggle in what amounts to  the Louisiana Purchase, Part Deux.

And of course they have a trillion dollars in porkulus slush fund money to bribe and purchase whoever else they need to fundamentally screw the American people and destroy our way of life.

Is this seriously how you want the future of American health care to be decided?