Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
I lifted this from a previous recent post that had a slightly different point:
Joe Biden mocked a lot of things in his debate Thursday night. He mocked Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney, of course. But he also began to grin like the village idiot pretty much every time Paul Ryan began an answer, as if to point out that the world’s most intolerant lunatics can’t emotionally handle a different opinion in any way, shape or form.
And it’s a classic comparison: I don’t know how Jack Torrance (Nicholson’s character in the movie) would have debated any differently than Biden if he wasn’t allowed to take his axe to the debate. In fact, I’ll bet Jack Torrance would have been slightly more polite than Joe Biden, and refrained from interrupting Paul Ryan 85 times the way Biden did.
CNN (which for the record declared Ryan the winner in their polling by a 48 percent to 44 percent margin) had an interesting find that was somewhat surprising: it said that women thought that Paul Ryan had won the debate by a larger measure than men did – which is exactly the opposite that one would expect given that women are considerably more likely to vote Democrat than men.
I have a feeling that many women put themselves in Paul Ryan’s shoes and saw Joe Biden as an overbearing, domineering, patronizing rat bastard who would mock them and denigrate them and smirk while a woman was talking so that everybody would know he thought she was an idiot. And they didn’t like it. And that debate performance may hurt Obama more than a lot of people realize right now for the very reason that it emotionally turned off the very women voters that Obama is most counting upon.
A female Republican pollster on Huckabee’s program pointed out that Obama and Biden actually depicted the two kinds of men women most loathe: Obama as the passive, uncaring, uninvolved man who couldn’t even generate the emotional energy to manufacture a little bit of eye contact; and Biden as the overbearing, loutish, patronizing, dismissive blowhard.
Personally I’d rather see Jack Nicholson’s face mocking me from the side of the door he’d just smashed in with his axe. I mean, yes, Jack Nicholson in character would try to kill me; but Joe Biden in character would try to destroy me, my entire family, my way of life and my entire nation.
Some Democrat apologist said that she appreciated Biden’s performance because Joe interrupted Ryan every time Ryan stretched the truth. You know what I would have done if I’d been on that panel? I would have interrupted that idiot woman every time she spoke and said she was stretching the truth so I could interrupt her. Pretty soon, after being cut off – oh, I don’t know, for the eighty-fifth TIME – she would hopefully realize how vile the tactic that she applauded Biden for truly was. Because you know what? BOTH sides think the other side is lying – and if I act like Democrat Nazis and decide that I have a right to interrupt a liberal every single time I think they’re saying something that isn’t true, well, guess what: that Democrat will NEVER get to complete a damn sentence.
Morally intelligent people – and yes, I know, that excludes the entire universe of Democrats – understand that the purpose of a debate is for both sides to present their views, and for the AUDIENCE to get to decide who is lying and who is telling the damn truth. And that would have happened Wednesday night if liberalism didn’t equal fascism.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) criticized GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney on Friday for traveling to Louisiana to survey damage left by Hurricane Isaac, saying his vice presidential pick aimed to block disaster relief last fall as a member of the House of Representatives.
“It is the height of hypocrisy for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan to make a pretense of showing sympathy for the victims of Hurricane Isaac when their policies would leave those affected by this disaster stranded and on their own,”Reid said in a statement.
Romney visited Lafitte, La., Friday to meet with Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) and first responders to the hurricane. “I’m here to learn and obviously to draw some attention to what’s going here,” Romney told Jindal, according to a pool report. “So that people around the country know that people [down] here need help.”
But Reid didn’t see it that way. He used the visit as an opportunity to bring up Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget, which he said would “gut disaster funding, making it much harder to get aid to our fellow Americans in their time of need.”
“This is yet another example of Mitt Romney’s extreme right wing agenda, which asks middle class families to sacrifice in order to protect millionaires and billionaires from paying their fair share,” Reid said.
Ryan campaign spokesman Brendan Buck responded with a counterattack.
“Paul Ryan believes providing aid to victims of natural disasters is a critical obligation and should be treated as a high priority within a fiscally responsible budget,” he said. “It’s sad that some see these heartbreaking events as opportunities to distort his record and play politics.”
President Barack Obama plans to visit Louisiana on Monday. Romney adviser Stuart Stevens told reporters he didn’t think it was inappropriate to precede Obama’s visit, ABC’s Emily Friedman tweeted.
When reporters asked White House Press Secretary Jay Carney about Romney’s visit, he took a far more diplomatic tone than Reid had.
“I think that it’s always important to draw attention to the fact that individuals and families and business owners are profoundly affected … that’s an important thing to do,” Carney said.
First of all, let’s say I’m talking to a typical liberal puke who is living in mommy’s basement believing that jobs are for capitalists and that he or she is entitled to live off of somebody or anybody else; you own something. On Harry Reid’s demonic cockroach view, if you would be opposed if government barged into your house and took EVERY SINGLE THING YOU OWNED– your house (or mommy’s house anyway), your car, your clothes, your furniture, etc., etc. – to give them to disaster victims, then you are a bad person and you by definition don’t give a damn about anybody.
If you oppose ANY cut in government spending in ANY way, shape or form, if you don’t want infinite spending on disaster relief, you are a vile human being who should be demonized. That’s Harry Reid’s view. If you don’t want the State to have control over EVERYTHING so that it can offer relief with YOUR money, you’re evil. You don’t care about anybody. Only communists who want the government to have total dictatorial control over everything and everybody care.
Let me put it this way: let’s take Harry Reid’s position. Couldn’t we do more for these poor disaster victims if we just taxed a little more? And couldn’t we do even more if we just taxed a little more than that? Democrats demonize the rich (like the good Marxists they are) and say we can have more money to help the poor if we just taxed the rich more; but we could have a LOT more money if the government just took it all on the Democrats own “logic,” right?
FACT: A study by the Joint Tax Committee, using the same static methodology that I refer to in my opening paragraph, calculate that the government will “lose” – again, because Democrats are communists and literally believe that they own EVERYTHING the people earn, such that such that the government “loses” money if it doesn’t tax people more – $700 billion in revenue if the tax cuts for the top income brackets are extended. And that sounds bad, doesn’t it? But they also conclude in that same study that the Bush tax cuts on the middle class will cost the Treasury $3 TRILLION over the same period. If we can’t afford to “give” the rich$700 billion, then how on earth can we afford to “give” the middle class” $3 damn TRILLION? And then you’ve got to ask how much the Treasury is losing by not taxing the poor first into the poorhouse, and then into the street? And how much more revenue could we collect if we then imposed a “street” tax? That’s the way the old Soviet Union worked; if you DIDN’T work you were defined as a shirker and you went to the gulags to be a slave laborer until the system ground you into dirt.
You need to understand something about history: the Marxists who took over Russia and “fundamentally transformed it” into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were just like Obama and the Democrats when they took over. They promised the damn world with their “hope and change” Utopia. About the only thing you can say in comparison to the Marxist Soviets is that they weren’t as grandiose in their promises as Obama was; because at least the Soviets never promised they would lower the level of the oceans and heal the damn planet like Obama did. But the rubber met the road, and once the Soviets got their power with their promises of “hope and change” for everybody that the “rich” would pay for and those promises failed, well, things started getting increasingly nasty.
Why did this happen? You need to understand something: if you take away the incentive to work harder and smarter by taking away the reward for working harder, for longer hours, risking more, saving more, investing more, then the incentive to work diminishes. It is a necessary result of the class warfare that the communists played in Russia and that the Democrats are playing now. And as fewer and fewer people work, and the rich are demonized and taxed and then demonized and taxed some more, you will necessarily get exactly what we are seeing: fewer people working, fewer people paying taxes, more people on welfare and disability. That’s when you get to the “dark side” of what Michelle Obama predicted: “Barack Obama will require you to work… Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.” And Arbeit Macht Frei.
Obama heralded something that the human race had never seen: a trillion dollar annual deficit. Not only was Obama the first president or leader to ever do that in human history, but he’s pulled off this insane feat every single year of his presidency. One year – just one year – the reckless Marxist racked up a $1.6 trillion budget deficit making his bullcrap promises. The day is going to come when Democrats get the power they want, and they will take over just as leftists have taken over every government they dominated. And then will come the gulags. There will just be no other way out, just as there was no other way out for the Russian communists.
So I presume that no liberal is reading this: because that would mean that said liberal hadn’t given up his or her computer to some victim in Louisiana and is therefore a greedy little rich bastard. And we can safely say that all liberals are currently walking around naked because shame on them if they are wearing clothes that a hurricane victim could be wearing. Or eating food that should go to a disaster victim.
Liberals are in love with the “generosity” that they display every time they spend money that they seized from somebody else.
That proof of abject liberal hypocrisy out of the way, let’s talk about what hypocrites liberals are.
This picture of George Bush was all Democrats needed to demonize Bush for refusing to visit the Katrina disaster area:
Democrats jumped all over Bush as “detached and uncaring” for merely flying over the disaster.
It didn’t matter that Bush flew over because had he landed he would have been taking up enormous security resources that would have been better spent helping victims. Democrats aren’t people who care about facts or reality; all they care about is rhetoric and demagoguery.
But my God, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida and Alabama – IN OTHER WORDS EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THE GULF STATES– are now under Republican control, and yet you’ve got demon-possessed roachboy Harry Reid saying that Republicans literally don’t give a damn about Republicans.
When the Democrat leader of the United States Senate is allowed to make these kind of outrageous and morally insane remarks, it is all the proof you need to know that the Democrat Party is the Party of Roaches.
If Mitt Romney had NOT visited Louisiana to see the aid for victims of Hurricane Isaac, Harry Reid would have demonized him all the more. Because Harry Reid is a demon-possessed little cockroach and demonizing hate is all that flows in his roach veins.
FORT BLISS, Texas — President Obama was planning to visit storm-stricken Louisiana before GOP rival Mitt Romney announced his plans, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One Friday morning.
Romney’s campaign announced his trip to New Orleans — he is touring areas hit by Hurricane Isaac this afternoon — hours before the White House announced Obama would cancel a planned Monday campaign event in Cleveland to divert to Louisiana.
Carney offered no details about where in Louisiana Obama would travel during his Monday trip.
“In terms of the President’s travel, obviously when you’re president of the United States, coordinating travel carries with it I think unique logistical challenges,” Carney said. “And it was the assessment of the president’s team, working with all the people involved in operations as well as people on the ground that Monday would be — was a good day for the president to visit.”
So the man who dropped everything and visited the disaster zone did it because he didn’t care; but the man who is campaigning, campaigning, campaigning and won’t be able to show up until Monday because he’s too busy campaigning hasn’t visited (but he would have! says his mouthpiece) because he cares so deeply.
Let’s get a few things straight about the presidential race between President Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. It’s not a dead heat anymore.
Everyone knew this was going to be a close race, but as of this week, Mr. Romney moved slightly ahead of President Obama. Not by much, maybe a couple of points, but he clearly has begun to move into the lead.
Heading into July, the race clearly was a tie, with the Gallup Poll showing each candidate at 46 percent in its head-to-head daily surveys. But something happened this week that appears to have changed the political equation.
Perhaps it was Mr. Romney’s choice of veteran Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the powerful House Budget Committee. Or more evidence of the Obama economy’s persistent weakness and soaring gasoline prices. Or the tough TV ads Mr. Romney’s campaign has begun running after months of being punched around by an avalanche of negative ads in the battleground states.
Whatever the reason, the numbers began slowly but clearly to edge Mr. Romney’s way, and Mr. Obama’s numbers took a nose dive on his job-approval ratings.
The first indication that Mr. Obama’s shaky presidency was taking a tumble came Monday, when the Gallup Poll’s daily tracking survey showed his job-approval numbers plunging to 43 percent and his disapproval climbing to 50 percent.
Then, on Wednesday, Gallup’s candidate matchup suddenly was leaning in Mr. Romney’s direction, 47 percent to the president’s 45 percent. That’s where things stood heading into Friday.
While a number of factors are contributing to Mr. Obama’s slight decline and Mr. Romney’s rise in the national polls, there is no doubt the economy and jobs are the biggest factors driving this race.
Gallup proved that Thursday when it released new poll numbers showing voters were giving Mr. Obama some of the worst scores of his failed presidency on the economy, job creation and four years of $1 trillion-plus deficits that most trouble the American people.
White House morale, which reportedly is declining fast, must have sunk even further when staffers looked at Mr. Obama’s bleak approval-disapproval numbers on these issues:
Creating jobs: 37 percent approval and 58 percent disapproval.
The economy: 36 percent approval and 60 percent disapproval.
The federal budget deficits: 30 percent approval and 64 percent disapproval.
These aren’t just disastrous job-approval scores, they are among the worst in recent presidencies, including the one Mr. Obama followed in 2009.
“Obama’s ratings on the economy are significantly worse than all three prior successful presidential incumbents at this same point in their first term,” Gallup reported Thursday.
“His 36 percent approval rating on the economy is well below George W. Bush’s rating in August 2004 (46 percent), Bill Clinton’s in August 1996 (54 percent), and Ronald Reagan’s in July 1984 (50 percent),” Gallup said.
It’s worth noting that in Reagan’s case, the 1984 election was all about Reagan’s tax-cut-driven recovery versus tax increases proposed by Democratic nominee Walter Mondale. Reagan won in a landslide, carrying 49 states.
In many ways, the central election issues in 1984 were the same ones we are fighting over today. Tax cuts get the economy back on its feet, stimulate capital investment, create more jobs and produce more revenue to boot.
Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan are embracing lower taxes, just as John F. Kennedy, Reagan and, eventually, even Bill Clinton did, to build the economy, while Mr. Obama and the Democrats are running on raising taxes to grow the government and increase spending.
Mr. Obama and his party charge that lowering taxes will worsen the deficit, when one of the chief culprits driving the Obama deficits, besides his spending binge, is slower 1.5 percent economic growth and an 8.3 percent jobless rate. People who don’t have jobs don’t pay income taxes.
Meantime, another issue is emerging in the campaign that is hurting Mr. Obama’s quest for a second term, and that is his directive to rewrite the welfare reform law of 1996.
That directive will grant waivers to the states to override the welfare reform law, according to a study written by two top analysts at the Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector and Kiki Bradley.
“The new welfare dictate issued by the Obama administration clearly guts the law and seeks to impose its own policy choices — a pattern that has become all too common in this administration,” they wrote.
In a nutshell, Mr. Obama’s directive says the “traditional TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) work requirements can be waived or overridden by a legal device called the Section 1115 waiver authority,” they said.
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service said in a separate study of that section, “Effectively, there are no TANF waivers.”
The Romney campaign has been hitting the airwaves with an ad lambasting the administration for its backdoor attempt to undermine the welfare reforms. The Obama campaign has counterattacked, charging the ad is a lie and that Mr. Romney sought the same kind of waiver authority as governor.
Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler, while criticizing the Romney ad, said “There is something fishy about the administration’s process on this memorandum.” He gave the Obama camp “a solid three Pinocchios” for its shaky waiver claim against Mr. Romney, saying “there is little evidence that is the case.”
Increasingly, as Mr. Obama’s disapproval numbers have been getting worse, his campaign has been making up things that aren’t true. A sense of desperation and hysteria is creeping into its bipolar rhetoric, with Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. warning voters (guess who?) that Mr. Romney will “put y’all back in chains.”
Historically, Gallup says, presidents who won a second term had near 50 percent job-approval ratings. But with Mr. Obama’s ratings stuck in the mid to low 40s, it looks as if the end is near.
Donald Lambro is a syndicated columnist and former chief political correspondent for The Washington Times.
What is most promising of all is that Obama has enormously outspent Romney the last several months – even as Romney has actually outraised Obama during those months – due to the campaign laws that prevent Romney from spending money he has raised for the general election until he is the official nominee of his party. After the GOP convention near the end of August, it will suddenly be ROMNEY who has the huge money edge over Obama. Obama has spent hundreds of millions lying and slandering and demonizing – and it basically hasn’t done him any good. And in less than three weeks it will be Romney on serve.
The race is close. But it is very possible that Romney is beginning to break through.
Pray. Contribute/donate. Volunteer. And vote. For the love of God and the love of America.
TAPPER: One of the concerns about health care and how you pay for it — one third of the funding comes from cuts to Medicare.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: “Right.
TAPPER: A lot of times, as you know, what happens in Congress is somebody will do something bold and then Congress, close to election season, will undo it.
OBAMA: Right.
TAPPER: You saw that with the ‘doc fix.’
OBAMA: Right.
TAPPER: Are you willing to pledge that whatever cuts in Medicare are being made to fund health insurance, one third of it, that you will veto anything that tries to undo that?
OBAMA: Yes. I actually have said that it is important for us to make sure this thing is deficit neutral, without tricks. I said I wouldn’t sign a bill that didn’t meet that criteria. The full transcript of the interview can be read here.
-Jake Tapper
Democrats live by the mantra, “Facts are terrible things. And they have to be buried at all cost.”
Especially when that “cost” comes out of the guts of Medicare.
Here’s the prepared text of Paul Ryan’s address in Norfolk, Virginia:
Thank you Governor Romney, Ann. I am deeply honored and excited to join you as your running mate.
Mitt Romney is a leader with the skills, the background and the character that our country needs at a crucial time in its history. Following four years of failed leadership, the hopes of our country, which have inspired the world, are growing dim; and they need someone to revive them. Governor Romney is the man for this moment; and he and I share one commitment: we will restore the dreams and greatness of this country.
I want you to meet my family. My wife Janna, our daughter Liza, and our sons, Charlie and Sam.
I am surrounded by the people I love, and I have been asked by Governor Romney to serve the country I love.
Janesville, Wisconsin is where I was born and raised, and I never really left it. It’s our home now.
For the last 14 years, I have proudly represented Wisconsin in Congress. There, I have focused on solving the problems that confront our country, and turning ideas into action; and action into solutions.
I am committed, in heart and mind, to putting that experience to work in a Romney Administration. This is a crucial moment in the life of our nation; and it is absolutely vital that we select the right man to lead America back to prosperity and greatness.
That man is standing next to me. His name is Mitt Romney. And he will be the next president of the United States.
My dad died when I was young. He was a good and decent man. I still remember a couple of things he would say that have really stuck with me. “Son you are either part of the problem or part of the solution.”
Regrettably, President Obama has become part of the problem,…and Mitt Romney is the solution.
The other thing my dad would say is that every generation of Americans leaves their children better off. That’s the American legacy.
Sadly, for the first time in our history, we are on a path which will undo that legacy. That is why we need new leadership to become part of the solution – new leadership to restore prosperity, economic growth, and jobs.
It is our duty to save the American Dream for our children, and theirs.
And I believe there is no person in America who is better prepared – because of his experience; because of the principles he holds; and because of his achievements and excellence in so many different arenas – to lead America at this point in its history.
Let me say a word about the man Mitt Romney will replace. No one disputes President Obama inherited a difficult situation. And, in his first 2 years, with his party in complete control of Washington, he passed nearly every item on his agenda. But that didn’t make things better.
In fact, we find ourselves in a nation facing debt, doubt and despair.
This is the worst economic recovery in 70 years. Unemployment has been above 8 percent for more than three years, the longest run since the Great Depression. Families are hurting.
We have the largest deficits and the biggest federal government since WWII.
Nearly 1 out of 6 Americans are in poverty–the worst rate in a generation. Moms and dads are struggling to make ends meet.
Household incomes have dropped by more than $4,000 over the past four years.
Whatever the explanations, whatever the excuses, this is a record of failure.
President Obama, and too many like him in Washington, have refused to make difficult decisions because they are more worried about their next election than they are about the next generation. We might have been able to get away with that before, but not now. We’re in a different, and dangerous, moment. We’re running out of time — and we can’t afford 4 more years of this.
Politicians from both parties have made empty promises which will soon become broken promises–with painful consequences–if we fail to act now.
I represent a part of America that includes inner cities, rural areas, suburbs and factory towns. Over the years I have seen and heard from a lot from families, from those running small businesses, and from people who are in need. But what I have heard lately troubles me the most. There is something different in their voice and in their words. What I hear from them are diminished dreams, lowered expectations, uncertain futures.
I hear some people say that this is just “the new normal.” High unemployment, declining incomes and crushing debt is not a new normal. It’s the result of misguided policies. And next January, our economy will begin a comeback with the Romney Plan for a Stronger Middle Class that will lead to more jobs and more take home pay for working Americans.
America is on the wrong track; but Mitt Romney and I will take the right steps, in the right time, to get us back on the right track!
I believe my record of getting things done in Congress will be a very helpful complement to Governor Romney’s executive and private sector success outside Washington. I have worked closely with Republicans as well as Democrats to advance an agenda of economic growth, fiscal discipline, and job creation.
I’m proud to stand with a man who understands what it takes to foster job creation in our economy, someone who knows from experience, that if you have a small business—you did build that.
At Bain Capital, he launched new businesses and he turned around failing ones – companies like Staples, Bright Horizons and Sports Authority, just to name a few. Mitt Romney created jobs and showed he knows how a free economy works.
At the Olympics, he took a failing enterprise and made it the pride of our entire nation.
As governor of Massachusetts, he worked with Democrats and Republicans to balance budgets with no tax increases, lower unemployment, increase income and improve people’s lives.
In all of these things, Mitt Romney has shown himself to be a man of achievement, excellence and integrity.
Janna and I tell Liza, Charlie and Sam that America is a place where, if you work hard and play by the rules, you can get ahead.
We Americans look at one another’s success with pride, not resentment, because we know, as more Americans work hard, take risks, and succeed, more people will prosper, our communities will benefit, and individual lives will be improved and uplifted.
But America is more than just a place…it’s an idea. It’s the only country founded on an idea. Our rights come from nature and God, not government. We promise equal opportunity, not equal outcomes.
This idea is founded on the principles of liberty, freedom, free enterprise, self-determination and government by consent of the governed.
This idea is under assault. So, we have a critical decision to make as a nation.
We are on an unsustainable path that is robbing America of our freedom and security. It doesn’t have to be this way.
The commitment Mitt Romney and I make to you is this:
We won’t duck the tough issues…we will lead!
We won’t blame others…we will take responsibility!
We won’t replace our founding principles…we will reapply them!
We will honor you, our fellow citizens, by giving you the right and opportunity to make the choice:
What kind of country do we want to have?
What kind of people do we want to be?
We can turn this thing around. Real solutions can be delivered. But, it will take leadership. And the courage to tell you the truth.
Mitt Romney is this kind of leader. I’m excited for what lies ahead and I’m thrilled to be a part of America’s Comeback Team. And together, we will unite America and get this done.
If you don’t like Paul Ryan, one simple truth remains: Ryan’s plan is at least 222 trillion times better than anything the Democrats have on the table. Unless you like eating national bankruptcy.
Barack Obama is the president of 54.5 million abortions. Barack Obama is the president of homosexuality. Barack Obama is the president of God damn America. And recognize as you look at historic droughts and never-before seen food prices and shocking increases in the price of your gasoline and other essentials, recognize that there is a cost of doing business in God damn America.
If Barack Obama wins in November, I just saw how it will happen:
While searching for this article as a man who has written about this subject before, I did a Yahoo search with the following keywords: Paul Ryan Medicare budget doesn’t take benefits from people over 55. I chose those keywords because in point of fact it is absolutely TRUE that Paul Ryan’s budget not only does not take one penny of benefits from those who are already ON Medicare, but from those who are ten years away from retirement.
All the articles on the first page that Yahoo fed me were biased toward the left. That was no accident. If you are looking for the truth, you can still find it in America; but you have to sort through a lot of lies from the mainstream media in order to find it. Mark Twain famously quipped that a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth could put its boots on. The mainstream media has done everything it could to HIDE the truth’s boots. But the lies are like paved superhighways.
Too many Americans believe things that are simply blatantly false because they’re too ignorant, too lazy and too apathetic to take the time to search for the truth that the left is trying to keep the people from seeing.
I’m looking for specific facts that my keywords plainly describe, but the mainstream media and internet search engines like pro-liberal Google and Yahoo say, “No! You can’t see those! You have to look through all of these lies first, and then good luck finding what you’re looking for while we try to prevent you from succeeding.”
Contrary to the false and frankly demonic ad featuring a Paul Ryan-lookalike pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair off a cliff, Paul Ryan’s plan does not affect people who are 55 or older. They can keep their current plan exactly as it is. In describing his proposal, Ryan puts it in black and white:
Let me be clear, nobody age 55 or older will see any changes to the way Medicare currently operates.
Democrats are not merely being dishonest in the way they are misrepresenting the Ryan plan for Medicare; they are being demonically dishonest.
Do you want to know who is ripping off Medicare for people RIGHT NOW? Barack Obama is ripping off Medicare. The Democrat Party is ripping off Medicare – to the tune of $716 BILLION from a Medicare program that is already massively threatened by bankruptcy:
Last week, a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report updated the amount of money Obamacare robs out of Medicare from $500 billion to a whopping $716 billion between 2013 and 2022.
According to the CBO, the payment cuts in Medicare include:
A $260 billion payment cut for hospital services.
A $39 billion payment cut for skilled nursing services.
A $17 billion payment cut for hospice services.
A $66 billion payment cut for home health services.
A $33 billion payment cut for all other services.
A $156 billion cut in payment rates in Medicare Advantage (MA); $156 billion is before considering interactions with other provisions. The House Ways and Means Committee was able to include interactions with other provisions, estimating the cuts to MA to be even higher, coming in at $308 billion.
$56 billion in cuts for disproportionate share hospital (DSH) payments.* DSH payments go to hospitals that serve a large number of low-income patients.
$114 billion in other provisions pertaining to Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP* (does not include coverage-related provisions).
*Subtract $25 billion total between DSH payments and other provisions for spending that was cut from Medicaid and CHIP.
In total, Obamacare raids Medicare by $716 billion from 2013 to 2022. Despite Medicare facing a 75-year unfunded obligation of $37 trillion, Obamacare uses the savings from the cuts to pay for other provisions in Obamacare, not to help shore up Medicare’s finances.
Medicare is on the verge of bankruptcy, not in a thousand years or even fifty years; but in FOUR YEARS. It will go broke by 2016 on its current path if you understand that Obama took money out of the program but is disingenuously counting that money twice as if you can Rob Peter to pay Paul but somehow Peter and Paul both have all of Peter’s money.
You need to realize just how much dishonesty is going on in the government bean-counting: our real debt isn’t the $15.9 trillion you hear about; our real debt is $222 trillion. It went up $11 trillion from last year. And it is going to keep going up until America implodes into chaos and anarchy.
We are facing disaster. We’ve got to start making cuts or Medicare along with our entire government system will financially implode.
Democrats are demonizing ANY change in Medicare. And in so doing Democrats are demanding that Medicare go bankrupt and that senior citizens die deaths of medical neglect.
Paul Ryan is saying we’ve GOT to make changes in this program in order to save the Medicare system. Please stop letting the media and the Democrat Party lie to you and read what Paul Ryan is actually saying.
Ryan’s Medicare reform plan is demonized as a “voucher system.” It is not. But you should understand that Ryan is trying to allow people to take better advantage of a fact that neither the government nor the insurance companies want you to know about: that paying cash provides the best discount of ALL for medical care; and that if people were allowed to be able to make their own choices and negotiate their own prices for care, patients would pay LESS even as the doctors and medical professionals were able to earn MORE:
Here is an article from the Los Angeles Times – hardly a conservative think tank, lefties – that underscores this simple FACT:
Many hospitals, doctors offer cash discount for medical bills The lowest price is usually available only if patients don’t use their health insurance. In one case, blood tests that cost an insured patient $415 would have been $95 in cash.
May 27, 2012|By Chad Terhune
A Long Beach hospital charged Jo Ann Snyder $6,707 for a CT scan of her abdomen and pelvis after colon surgery. But because she had health insurance with Blue Shield of California, her share was much less: $2,336.
Then Snyder tripped across one of the little-known secrets of healthcare: If she hadn’t used her insurance, her bill would have been even lower, just $1,054.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Snyder, a 57-year-old hair salon manager. “I was really upset that I got charged so much and Blue Shield allowed that. You expect them to work harder for you and negotiate a better deal.”
Unknown to most consumers, many hospitals and physicians offer steep discounts for cash-paying patients regardless of income. But there’s a catch: Typically you can get the lowest price only if you don’t use your health insurance.
That disparity in pricing is coming under fire from people like Snyder, who say it’s unfair for patients who pay hefty insurance premiums and deductibles to be penalized with higher rates for treatment.
The difference in price can be stunning. Los Alamitos Medical Center, for instance, lists a CT scan of the abdomen on a state website for $4,423. Blue Shield says its negotiated rate at the hospital is about $2,400.
When The Times called for a cash price, the hospital said it was $250.
“It frustrates people because there’s no correlation between what things cost and what is charged,” said Paul Keckley, executive director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, a research arm of the accounting firm. “It changes the game when healthcare’s secrets aren’t so secret.”
Snyder’s experience is hardly unique. In addition to Los Alamitos, The Times contacted seven other hospitals across Southern California, and nearly all had similar disparities between what a patient would pay through an insurer and the cash price offered for a common CT, or computed tomography, scan, which provides a more detailed image than an X-ray.
Health insurance still offers substantial value for consumers by providing preventive care at no cost and offering protection from major medical bills that could bankrupt most families.
But cash prices — typically available for hundreds of common outpatient services and tests — have a real appeal to millions of consumers who are on the hook for a growing share of their medical costs as employers and insurers cut back on coverage and push more high-deductible plans.
Some doctors are trying to spread the word about cash prices and they’re urging patients to pressure hospitals and insurers to offer a better deal.
[…]
In the view of Robert Berenson, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and vice chairman of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, big hospitals are exerting their market power to charge ever-increasing rates and major insurers go along with it because they can pass along the costs to employers and consumers. Insurance industry officials say that health plans negotiate the lowest prices they can, but that they also need to include prominent hospitals favored by customers in the network, and those institutions can command higher prices.
Hospital executives say they don’t like to charge insured patients more, but say that’s a result of the country’s broken healthcare system.
At Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, where Snyder got her CT scan, the hospital’s chief financial officer said insured patients like her pay more to subsidize the uncompensated care given to the uninsured and low reimbursements for Medicaid patients.
“We end up being forced to charge a premium to health plans to make the books balance,” said John Bishop, the hospital’s finance chief. “It’s a backdoor tax on employers and consumers.”
Those higher prices charged by hospitals and other medical providers drove up healthcare spending at double the rate of inflation during the recession even as patients used less medical care, according to a new study by the Health Care Cost Institute.
Snyder, the salon manager, stumbled across the two-tier system accidentally. She has filed suit against her insurer, saying she hopes her case will lead to more disclosure of the price options, and ultimately lower treatment costs for patients.
The Long Beach woman said she sought treatment in 2009 for a pain in her abdomen. First her doctor ordered a CT scan of her abdomen and pelvis at Liberty Pacific Medical Imaging, an independent facility near Long Beach Memorial.
She got approval from Blue Shield, and she paid the negotiated rate of $660. Snyder underwent surgery on her colon, and her doctor ordered another CT scan in January 2010 because she felt lingering pain.
This time, her surgeon referred her to the hospital’s imaging center. Snyder said she assumed her bill would be about the same because it was the identical test. Instead, Blue Shield’s rate with Long Beach Memorial was $3,497 and the insurer told Snyder she owed $2,336, records show.
Incensed by having to pay nearly four times as much for the second scan, she started searching for an explanation. That’s when she discovered that the hospital’s cash price was less than half what she owed through her insurance.
In a complaint filed last month in Orange County Superior Court, Snyder accused Blue Shield of unfair business practices, breach of good faith and misrepresentation over her medical bills. The suit seeks class-action status on behalf of other Blue Shield customers.
A spokesman for Blue Shield said the case has no merit and the nonprofit insurer negotiates the most favorable rates it can.
In a court filing, Blue Shield said it “cannot promise or represent that there could not be providers who will charge someone less out-of-pocket cost for a service than she would pay if the Blue Shield contract rate applies.”
Snyder said she went back to work last year at a hair salon in Seal Beach, partly to help pay her insurance premiums of $700 a month.
“It kills me that I’m paying that much in premiums,” she said, “and it’s better to pay cash out of my own pocket.”
Health-policy experts say the growing awareness of cash prices should accelerate the trend toward increased disclosure of all types of medical costs. But entrenched interests are likely to resist.
“The insiders in the healthcare industry don’t want to lose control over this information,” Keckley said. “But price transparency is inevitable.”
So even if you want to demonize the Ryan Plan as a “voucher system” as DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz does, please understand that if you had a damn voucher, you could save massively over what the corrupt boondoggle system the Democrats created back in 1965 is charging today.
This is crucial for you to understand: a liberal will read this article and say that it’s the insurance companies’ fault and that Republicans are in the pockets of the insurance companies. That is a LIE. Republicans have been trying to reform the health care system by allowing insurance companies to offer plans across state lines. Here is a Wall Street Journal article arguing for that very thing; here is a Daily Kos article blatantly acknowledging that Republicans want to allow competition across state lines. Democrats have stopped them at every single turn in order to force insurance companies to be forced to pay for sex change operations and the like. What you get is states that have only ONE insurance carrier. California, with over thirty million people, has only six insurance carriers who can do business in the state. And what you get is huge regulation and huge boondoggles. Just imagine if 200 health insurance companies could compete for your business. Given the above-documented FACT that doctors and hospitals are happily willing to charge far less for cash, how is it not an obvious common-sense FACT that we could radically drive down the costs of health care if we could ONLY have competition that Democrats have prevented???
You’ve got to understand that the free market system is the only thing that can save the American health care system. But Medicare has increasingly taken over that system since 1965 and ObamaCare will complete that takeover until the system collapses. And you’ve got to realize that Democrats viscerally DESPISE that free market competition and want to either dominate health care by nationalizing it or by regulating it to death.
Paul Ryan recognizes that the government has NOT made health care better or cheaper; it’s made it worse and more expensive.
Here is an article that further explains Paul Ryan’s bold plan in answer to Obama’s socialized medicine boondoggle:
Last year, Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.), Chairman of the House Budget Committee, unveiled the Path to Prosperity, an impressive fiscal plan that, for the first time in memory, put one chamber of Congress squarely on the record as favoring significant entitlement reform. Today, Ryan has put forth the sequel. Let’s compare the health-care provisions of Version 2 to those of Version 1.
The headline is that the new plan scraps Ryan’s old Medicare proposal, which involved full privatization of Medicare in the form of “premium support,” for a partial privatization which incorporates the option for seniors to stay on traditional Medicare, using a framework known as competitive bidding. The new Medicare proposal is lifted from Paul Ryan’s collaboration with Democratic senator Ron Wyden (Ore.), which I called a “game changer” when it was released in December.
Other health care-related provisions are basically the same: repeal Obamacare, and block-grant Medicaid. Ryan’s proposal seeks to move toward “patient-centered reform,” which he describes as including malpractice reform, purchasing insurance across state lines, and expanding consumer-driven insurance plans. Notably, he advocates allowing employees to opt out of employer-sponsored care, and giving workers the option to take their employer’s insurance contribution and devote it to buying plans for themselves:
There is a consensus of willing leaders from both parties coalescing around the right way forward in health care. Reform should address government-imposed inequities and barriers to true choice and competition. Common-sense solutions include enacting medical liability reform, ensuring Americans can purchase quality coverage across state lines, and expanding access to consumer-directed health care options. Addressing distortions in the tax code could begin by giving employers the opportunity to offer their employees a free choice option, so that workers could be free to devote their employer’s health coverage contribution to the purchase a health insurance plan that works best for them.
Medicaid: The devil’s in the block-grant details
Ryan’s proposal for Medicaid reform involves “converting the federal share of Medicaid spending into a block grant indexed for inflation and population growth.” This contrasts meaningfully with a plan put forth by four House members on the conservative Republican Study Committee: Reps. Todd Rokita (Ind.), Tim Huelskamp (Kans.), Paul Broun (Ga.), and Jim Jordan (Ohio). The RSC proposal aims to keep Medicaid spending flat, with no inflation adjustment, after block-granting it to the states.
Insofar as block-granting Medicaid has become a consensus idea within the GOP, the devil will devolve into the details: What should be the growth rate for the federal block grants? Should profligate states like New York continue to get big grants at the expense of stingy states like Texas, or should the block grant be administered on a per-beneficiary basis?
Medicare: Adapting Wyden-Ryan for the House budget
In coordination with today’s news, Ryan’s team put together a well-produced video on Medicare’s structural problems, and what premium support and competitive bidding seek to do about it:
The new GOP budget would create a “Medicare Exchange”—much like Obamacare’s insurance exchanges but with a public option—for future retirees who are under the age of 55 today. Critically, the level of premium support would be determined by the second-least expensive plan in a region, or traditional fee-for-service Medicare, whichever was lower. Seniors would keep the savings if they chose a cheaper plan:
The second-least expensive approved plan or fee-for-service Medicare, whichever is least expensive, would establish the benchmark that determines the premium-support amount for the plan chosen by the senior. If a senior chose a costlier plan than the benchmark plan, he or she would be responsible for paying the difference between the premium subsidy and the monthly premium. Conversely, if that senior chose a plan that cost less than the benchmark, he or she would be given a rebate for the difference. Payments to plans would be risk-adjusted and geographically rated. Private health plans would be required to cover at least the actuarial equivalent of the benefit package provided by fee-for-service Medicare.
This is meaningfully different from PTP 1, in which seniors didn’t gain any savings from choosing a plan cheaper than the premium support level, and where traditional Medicare was not an option.
Another key detail: Ryan’s plausible assumption is that competitive bidding could drive Medicare spending down without hard spending caps. However, as a backstop, the proposal caps the growth of Medicare spending at GDP plus 0.5 percent, which—not coincidentally—matches the targeted Medicare growth rate in President Obama’s budget.
The PTP 2 growth rate cap of GDP + 0.5% is meaningfully higher than that of PTP 1, which grew Medicare at the rate of inflation, something that was a principal source of criticism from the left (Alice Rivlin called it “much, much too low” ).
A key question is: what will the CBO do? Will the CBO score this new plan with the GDP plus 0.5 percent Medicare growth cap? Or will CBO give Ryan any credit for the benefits of competitive bidding?
Robert Coulam, Roger Feldman, and Bryan Dowd estimate that competitive bidding could shave 8 percent off of Medicare spending: a modest amount, given the program’s rapid growth rate. In the late 1990s, the City of Denver implemented a Medicare competitive bidding demonstration project, and found that bids came in at 25 to 38 percent below those of traditional Medicare. Unfortunately, that demonstration project, like nearly all others of its type, was shuttered due to fierce opposition from interest groups opposed to competitive pricing: hospitals, doctors, and other providers of medical supplies and services.
Overall health care savings: $2.5 trillion vs. Obama budget
In the 2013-2022 time frame, Ryan claims that this new version of the Path to Prosperity will reduce spending by $2.5 trillion, relative to President Obama’s budget: $205 billion from Medicare, $1.6 trillion from Obamacare, and $770 billion from Medicaid and other health-care programs. (Of course, the proposal would also repeal Obamacare’s tax hikes, making the actual deficit-reducing number smaller.)
One key question will be how PTP 2 interacts with the Budget Control Act, the debt-ceiling agreement from last summer. Democrats, and even some Republicans, are arguing that PTP 2 violates that agreement, and is therefore a non-starter in the Senate. I’ll update this post with further info on that subject as it becomes available.
Congressional Democrats and their allies are already on the attack against the new budget, reiterating the ridiculous claim that Ryan seeks to “end Medicare.” If this assertion was Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” last year, it’s even more dishonest this year, when Ryan’s plan preserves the option to stay in traditional, fee-for-service Medicare. But have a look at this new video from “ Americans United for Change”:
Sounds to me like they’re united against change, but what do I know? It will be up to voters to decide whether or not they want fiscally responsible government.
UPDATE 1: At the AEI press conference, Ryan explained that the tables included in PTP 2 are based on CBO scoring, though he was not asked whether the CBO score includes any credit for competitive bidding. In addition, he explained that the rationale for using GDP plus 0.5 percent for the Medicare premium support growth rate was driven in part by recently slowing growth in Medicare spending.
UPDATE 2: Igor Volsky of ThinkProgress argues, erroneously, that PTP 2 would allow private insurers to “cherry-pick the healthiest beneficiaries from traditional Medicare and leave sicker applicants to the government.” Indeed, the plan risk-adjusts the premium support levels so as to prevent that practice: a well-established methodology. Igor also worries that the plan wouldn’t reduce costs, but rather increase them, because he ignores the cost-reducing effects of competitive bidding. Gene Sperling, President Obama’s National Economic Director, repeats the adverse selection critique in Politico. This is clearly going to be the go-to line of attack for progressive wonks.
UPDATE 3: The CBO has released its evaluation of PTP 2. It turns out that the CBO merely projected future spending using Ryan’s specifications (in the case of Medicare, GDP + 0.5%). Here is a chart that describes how the Ryan plan would reduce Medicare spending relative to current law (the middle bar is the more realistic “alternative fiscal scenario”).
For example, in 2023, spending for a 65-year-old, in 2011 dollars, would be $6,300 under the baseline scenario (no doc fixes), $6,600 under the alternative scenario (includes doc fixes), and $5,900 under the Ryan plan.
In the report, CBO expresses its traditional view that reduced spending on Medicare could have mostly negative consequences, including:
Reduced access to health care; diminished quality of care; increased efficiency of health care delivery; less investment in new, high-cost technologies; or some combination of those outcomes. In addition, beneficiaries might face higher costs, which could in turn reinforce some of the other effects.
Note how “increased efficiency” is sandwiched in there between multiple dire alternatives. Democrats will be sure to seize on this.
UPDATE 4: Paul Ryan’s office confirmed to me that the CBO did not score the competitive bidding provision, and offered these comments:
On competitive bidding and premium support, it is critical to note CBO’s self-admitted “gap in the toolkit” when it comes to analyzing these reforms:
Here’s a video of Foster’s testimony that Ryan is referring to:
UPDATE 5: The conservative Club for Growth has come out against the Ryan plan, because it doesn’t balance the budget quickly enough, and (incorrectly) because it turns off the automatic spending cuts in the Budget Control Act, says President Chris Chocola. The Hill reports that Rep. Tim Huelskamp (co-sponsor of the block-granting initiative I mention above) will vote against the Ryan plan. This shows atrociously bad judgment on their part. The debt-ceiling agreement is a triviality relative to the critical importance of reforming entitlements.
UPDATE 6: The House Budget Committee passed the Ryan plan by one vote—19 to 18—due to two Republican defections: Huelskamp, as mentioned above, and Justin Amash (R., Mich.)
“Which of the two do you want me to release to you?” asked the governor. “Barabbas,” they answered. “What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called Christ?” Pilate asked. They all answered, “Crucify him!” “Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!” When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he said. “It is your responsibility!” All the people answered, “Let his blood be on us and on our children!” Then he released Barabbas to them. But he had Jesus flogged, and handed him over to be crucified. — Matthew 27:21-26
I was quite surprised to hear that Mitt Romney had announced that tomorrow was “the big day” to announce his vice president selection. Like most, I assumed he would be making it immediately before the GOP National Convention.
I was also somewhat surprised to hear that, apparently, Romney had called Marco Rubio and told him that he would NOT be the running mate on the ticket.
We don’t know who it will be, of course, but there’s been a fair amount of intelligent conservative speculation that it may very well be Paul Ryan.
That will be an incredibly bold choice from a man who has a been cautious for most of his life, but this is what I believe Romney’s reasoning is:
Marco Rubio would have been a good choice if Romney was thinking in terms of winning more Hispanics or winning Florida. And Rob Portman would have been a good choice if Romney felt that he would need Portman’s pull to carry Ohio. Nikki Haley or Kelly Ayote would have been a decision to pursue “the women’s vote.” But none of these excellent choices would define the race the way Paul Ryan would.
Paul Ryan is all about the budget – and by that I mean more than ANYODY – and the need to get dead serious about reducing our spending. Versus Democrats who haven’t bothered to even TRY to pass a budget for 1,199 days and a president who has not received a SINGLE DEMOCRAT VOTEfor one of his depraved and lunatic budgets in three years. Meanwhile as Obama and Democrats have made reckless irresponsibility their “governing strategy,” we just found out our true debt and our real fiscal gap just grew by a massive $11 trillion to – and you’d better sit down – $222 TRILLION:
Republicans and Democrats spent last summer battling how best to save $2.1 trillion over the next decade. They are spending this summer battling how best to not save $2.1 trillion over the next decade.
In the course of that year, the U.S. government’s fiscal gap — the true measure of the nation’s indebtedness — rose by $11 trillion.
The fiscal gap is the present value difference between projected future spending and revenue. It captures all government liabilities, whether they are official obligations to service Treasury bonds or unofficial commitments, such as paying for food stamps or buying drones.
[…]
The U.S. fiscal gap, calculated (by us) using theCongressional Budget Office’s realistic long-term budget forecast — the Alternative Fiscal Scenario — is now $222 trillion. Last year, it was $211 trillion. The $11 trillion difference — this year’s true federal deficit — is 10 times larger than the official deficit and roughly as large as the entire stock of official debt in public hands.
This fantastic and dangerous growth in the fiscal gap is not new. In 2003 and 2004, the economists Alan Auerbach and William Gale extended the CBO’s short-term forecast and measured fiscal gaps of $60 trillion and $86 trillion, respectively. In 2007, the first year the CBO produced the Alternative Fiscal Scenario, the gap, by our reckoning, stood at $175 trillion. By 2009, when the CBO began reporting the AFS annually, the gap was $184 trillion. In 2010, it was $202 trillion, followed by $211 trillion in 2011 and $222 trillion in 2012.
If in fact Mitt Romney picks Paul Ryan, THATreckless fiscal insanity will be the central defining issue of the campaign.
More than any election in American history, this would be a true “monumental choice” election: do you want Obama and a welfare America that will utterly implode under the supermassive weight of hundreds of trillions of dollars of debt, or do you want to have at least a chance of national survival???
Many are saying that the Democrats are “licking their chops” over the prospect of running against Paul Ryan. Democrats have demonized Paul Ryan viciously, using a look-alike to depict him pushing an elderly lady in a wheelchair off of a cliff. But the actual reality is just the opposite – as the facts prove. For what it’s worth, the left was going to basically run against Ryan anyway.
Over one hundred million Americans are now on some form of welfare.
Food stamps have increased 53 percent since Obama took office, from 30 million receiving them in 2008 to 46 million people receiving them today. In the 1970s when the food stamp program began, one in fifty Americans were on them; one in seven Americans are on them now. And more Americans are filing for disability today than are getting jobs, with the number of Americans expected to go on disability expected to jump 71 percent in the next ten years. For the record, only 1 percent of people who go on disability ever return to work. You either think these are good things or you think they’re terribly bad things. And this November you’re going to vote which you think it is.
If you want to abdicate all personal responsibility and parasitically suck off the tit of a government that takes from the producers to hand out to those who vote Democrat until America collapses, then vote for Obama.
If you are looking around and saying, this can’t possibly continue. America is simply doomed on the path we’re on, then vote for Romney.
No one in America is more able to get our spending, deficit and debt under control than Paul Ryan.
If Paul Ryan is the guy, more than any other guy that Romney could pick, America will face a true choice in November.
This election will mark the greatest and most monumental choice for the direction of America and the world since the one I cite at the beginning of this article. I pray that we have more wisdom than that last momentous decision. Israel was wiped off the map less than forty years later as a result of their choice; our disaster will ensue far faster than that if we choose foolishly and wickedly for Obama.
Democrats put out an incredibly hateful and deceitful ad demagoguing Republican budget chairman Paul Ryan by having a lookalike push grandma off a cliff.
Turnabout is the fairest play of all. Especially given the fact that the ONLY party that is pushing grandma off a cliff is the DEMOCRAT PARTY and Barack Obama:
Interestingly, in the Democrat ad, grandma dies, underscoring that Democrats really DON’T give a flying damn about grandma and are willing to kill her if they can just score rhetorical points demagoguing Republicans as a benefit for her death.
Republicans refuse to let grandma die in their ad. Because unlike Democrats, they aren’t genuinely evil.
“ObamaCare created a commission — the Independent Payment Advisory Board — tasked with limiting spending on Medicare. Its recommendations will be binding, unless Congress can come up with equivalent cost-savings of its own. For the first time, an unelected group will be empowered to limit health spending for the vulnerable elderly.”
That’s your “death panel.” And it’s only ONE of 160 bureaucracies that will act as death panels if BigBrotherCare becomes law:
I’ve written about the horror of ObamaCare at length. Here’s the heart of that ObamaCare horror for the elderly: the Complete Lives System:
In a nutshell, as you get older, you start having more health problems requiring more trips to the doctor and more medical care. But ObamaCare understands that you’re probably retired and you’re a useless eater and it’s time for you to shove off and die with dignity. So fascist Democrats want to cut off spending on the elderly and apply it to younger proletariats who are working for the sake of Dear Leader and are therefore eligible to continue to live.
“I urge that the government should indeed focus on life-years rather than lives. A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.”
He wrote:
“Other things being equal, a program that protects young people seems far better than one that protects old people, because it delivers greater benefits.”
That’s why liberal intellectual and Obama advisor Robert Reich had this to say:
“Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I’m so glad to see you and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. And that’s true and what I’m going to do is that I am going try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people but that means you, particularly you young people, particularly you young healthy people…you’re going to have to pay more.
“Thank you. And by the way, we’re going to have to, if you’re very old, we’re not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It’s too expensive…so we’re going to let you die.”
One major event that is upcoming is this one: Medicare WILL go bankrupt by no later than 2017. And the Democrat Party is steadfastly refusing to do a damn thing about it or allow the Republicans to do a damn thing about it. When Paul Ryan courageously tried to save Medicare in his last budget, Democrats lied about him and demonized him personally.
So here’s to hoping that the US Supreme Court throws out a law that is literally intended to let millions of Americans die.
You have one last chance to vote to make the morally evil Democrat Party extinct this year. You’d better take it while you still can.
Personally, I have never understood how liberals skulls do not explode from trying to contain all the massive contradictions. Other than the fact that they are hypocrite liars without shame.
And, of course, Democrats who lecture us on “paying our fair share” while they either welch on their debts, refuse to contribute to charity, cheat on their taxes, or all damn three are a dime a dozen. Let’s have a few prominent examples: Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have largely welched on Hillary’s campaign debts. There’s Charlie Rangel, the man who chaired the committee that wrote the tax laws while not bothering to pay his own damn taxes. There’s “Turbo Tax” Timothy Geithner, the man in charge of the Treasury and I.R.S. who didn’t bother to pay his own taxes. There’s former Democrat candidate for president John Kerry, a millionaire, who tried to wriggle away like the worm he is from paying the taxes he should have paid on his yacht. There’s Kerry’s wife and fellow Democrat Teresa Heinz-Kerry, who in spite of inheriting the Heinz fortune actually pays less in taxes than the median American family. And then there’s a bunch of more garden variety cockroach Democrats such as Eric Holder, Tom Daschle, Bill Richardson, and Claire McCaskill. And the vile putrid bunch of Democrats running Bell, California.
These aren’t rich people who want to pay more in taxes; these are liberal elites who want YOU to pay more in taxes because they want to live off a government that keeps growing in size and in power.
Meanwhile, jobs get treated like cancer in the sense that we tax investment the way we tax cigarettes:
A key moment in the dueling Obama-House Republican visit to Silicon Valley Monday was when the wealthy, retired-early Google exec told President Obama to raise his taxes. Yes, you read that right.
“I don’t have a job, but that’s because I’ve been lucky enough to live in Silicon Valley for a while and work for a small startup down the street here that did quite well. So I’m unemployed by choice. My question is would you please raise my taxes?
“I would like very much to have the country to continue to invest in things like Pell Grants and infrastructure and job training programs that made it possible for me to get to where I am. And it kills me to see Congress not supporting the expiration of the tax cuts that have been benefiting so many of us for so long. I think that needs to change, and I hope that you will stay strong in doing that.”
After he was done meeting with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for an hour Monday after the FB event, we chatted with GOP Whip, Rep. Kevin McCarthy for a bit. Kevin is a self-described Bakersfield guy from the other side of tracks (and a family full of Democrats). So why shouldn’t wealthy guys pay more taxes?
“You know that small businesses are the greatest creators of jobs,” McCarthy said. Between 2001-2007, he said, “if you had a company of 500 people or fewer, you added 7 million jobs. If you had 500 or more, you lost a million. The way that small businesses are run, (those kind of tax increases) punishes them.”
And 60 percent of those small businesses, he said, were five years old or younger. But the former entrepreneur said it is a lot harder to start a small business now.
Plus, McCarthy said, “Would you be willing to give a company more money if they didn’t have a budget? We haven’t had a budget passed out of the Senate in two years.”
On Monday at his LinkedIn event, the President contended that “we’ve cut taxes about 16 times since I’ve been in office for small businesses.”
Rep. Paul Ryan told me Monday he wasn’t sure where Obama was getting those numbers. And the White House hasn’t responded to a question about where he pulled those numbers from.
“They’d probably be small nickel-and-dime policies,” Ryan told us. If Obama was talking about “temporary tax rebates, they are a poor substitute for permanently high taxes….” they give small business owners “tremendous uncertainty.”
Ryan’s a small town Wisconsin guy. (Folks very near and dear to our heart.) But he doesn’t think taxing millionaires is the answer, either.
“The reason we tax cigarettes in this country is to get people to stop smoking,” he told us. “If you tax capital more, you get less capital. If you tax job-creators more, you get fewer jobs.”
If the rich guy at the Obama event was referring to taxing his capital gains income, that’s not economically smart to tax, either, Ryan said. “That’s the seed corn for economy, which gets invested in entrepreneurs and start-ups and small businesses.” Raising taxes would cut that supply off at a critical time — when banks aren’t loaning to small businesses as much.
McCarthy said the Silicon Valley visit wasn’t just a way for the top GOPers to suck up to Valley types — and, more important, their wallets. (A job which Obama and fellow Dems have become quiet adept at.) Even though, yes, Cantor had a fundraiser while in town.
“We’re not going on personality, we’re going on policy,” McCarthy said. “For too long, Obama’s Adminstration has been about politics and not policy. So we have no fear about going in and talking about our policy.”
I’m still searching for the poor guy who creates all the jobs. So far I haven’t found him yet. Please let me know if you run into him.
Until then, I’ll continue looking to the men and women Democrats hate and attack for all the job creation. And I’ll figure that job creation will start occurring shortly after Obama and his liberal thugs in Congress are out of power.
Thanks for “fundamentally transforming” our economy, Barry Hussein!
We’re constantly being told that Obama has done a great deal to make our economy stronger. Because who wouldn’t rather have 9.1% unemployment than that 7.6% that Obama started out with.
The thing that most killed the US economy in 2008 was the sheer weight of godawful subprime mortgages that Democrats imposed on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and all the other mortgage lenders in order to create more “fairness” and allow everyone (especially racial minorities) to have “the right” to own a home whether they could actually afford to do so or not. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “Government Sponsored Enterprises,” all the investors knew. So even as Fannie and Freddie began bundling together thousands of riskier and ever riskier mortgages into giant mortgage backed securities to advance Democrat-enacted policies, large investment houses continued to gobble them up. After all, this was an arm of the United States Government – and the United States Government ALWAYS pays its debts.
Like all scams, it worked for a while. But as soon as there was a correction in the dramatically overvalued housing market, the whole boondoggle began to implode. And since Fannie and Freddie had bundled all kinds of bad mortgages in with the good ones, there was absolutely no way for anyone to know how much risk was contained in any of these giant investment vehicles all these giant private banking houses found themselves holding.
And suddenly the perception that Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “safe investments” turned into a “misperception.” And the fecal matter began to hit the rotary oscillator bigtime.
Fannie and Freddie were the first to collapse. The big private players who had played ball with them shortly followed.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 10— The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.
Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.
The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies. It would exercise authority over any new lines of business. And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.
Republicans were demonized for “deregulation” by the dishonest Democrat Party machine. But they TRIED to regulate what needed to be regulated. Democrats stopped them.
In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980′s.
”From the perspective of many people, including me, this is another thrift industry growing up around us,” said Peter Wallison a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. ”If they fail, the government will have to step up and bail them out the way it stepped up and bailed out the thrift industry.”
The timeline is clear: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were giant behemoths that began to stagger under their own corrupt weight, as even the New York Timespointed out:
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are so big — they own or guarantee roughly half of the nation’s $12 trillion mortgage market — that the thought that they might falter once seemed unimaginable. But now a trickle of worries about the companies, which has been slowly building for years, has suddenly become a torrent.
And it was FANNIE and FREDDIE that collapsed FIRST before ANY of the private investment banks, which collapsed as a result of having purchased the very mortgaged backed securities that the Government Sponsored Enterprises SOLD THEM. It wasn’t until Fannie and Freddie collapsed that investors began to look with horror at all the junk that these GSE boondoggles had been pimping.
The man who predicted the collapse in 1999 wrote a follow-up article titled, “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress For the Credit Mess.” It really should have read, “Blame DEMOCRATS.” Because they were crawling all over these GSEs that they had themselves created like the cockroaches they are. But Wallison is nonpartisan.
”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”
Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.
”I don’t see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,” Mr. Watt said.
Why was Barney Frank deceitfully claiming that Fannie and Freddie weren’t facing “any kind of financial crisis”? BECAUSE REPUBLICANS WERE RIGHTLY WARNING THAT THEY WERE.
REP. BARNEY FRANK, D-MASS.: “I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They’re not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward.”
So we blew up nearly COMPLETELY BECAUSE OF DEMOCRAT POLICIES. But Democrats along with an ideological mainstream media that is the worse since Joseph Goebbels was the Nazi Minister of Propaganda were ready. They ran on a platform that it happened while Bush was president, and that therefore Bush was entirely responsible for the thing he tried over and over again to fix while Democrats used their power to block those efforts.
Let me just say “Franklin Raines.” Raines as Fannie CEO presided over Enron-style accounting policies and got $90 million in his account because of those corrupt policies. But Raines was the first BLACK CEO of Fannie Mae. And even though he was a Democrat and a Clinton guy, President Bush lacked the courage to push the “first black Fannie Mae CEO” out. Which of course is the same reason that the “first black Fannie Mae CEO” didn’t do hard time in prison where he belonged. “Political correctness” is a demonic device by which liberals protect themselves – usually from going to prison where they ought to go. He got a sweetheart deal basically so Republicans wouldn’t be accused of being racists by
Democrats who of course call them racists no matter what they do. My main point is simply that it was Democrats, Democrats, DEMOCRATS who did this to us.
Morgenson focuses on the managers of Fannie Mae, the government-supported mortgage giant. She writes that CEO James Johnson built Fannie Mae “into the largest and most powerful financial institution in the world.”
But in the process, Morgenson says, the company fudged accounting rules, generated big salaries and bonuses for its executives, used lobby and campaign contributions to bully regulators, and encouraged the risky financial practices that led to the crisis.
And of course DEMOCRAT Jim Johnson who got rich plundering Americans was an OBAMA Democrat.
Morgenson – again a New York Times writer and not someone from Fox News – said of Fannie Mae on Larry Kudlow’s CNBC program on Monday, June 13: “Whatever Fannie Mae did, everybody else followed.” And of course they all followed right into an economic Armageddon created by Democrats for Democrats.
But who got blamed? Republicans, of course. George Bush and Republicans were to Obama and the Democrats what Emmanual Goldstein was to Big Brother in 1984. George Bush and Republicans were what the Jews were to Adolf Hitler. Fascists always need a bogeyman. And so the people who were truly to blame turned the people who tried futilely to stop them into the scapegoats. All with the mainstream media’s complicity.
The analogy would be holding the police officer who tried but failed to catch the rapist for the rape of the woman rather than holding the actual rapist who raped her responsible. But it was easier to say “This is the result of President Bush’s failed Republican policies” than it was to actually explain the facts to an enraged Attention Deficit Disorder-ridden ignorant pop culture – particularly when virtually no one in the biased mainstream media had any intention whatsoever of telling the truth.
Barack Obama – the ACORN community organizer who pushed these very America-killing policies – ran a demagoguing campaign promising to fix everything.
When adding in all of the money owed to cover future liabilities in entitlement programs the US is actually in worse financial shape than Greece and other debt-laden European countries, Pimco’s Bill Gross told CNBC Monday.
Much of the public focus is on the nation’s public debt, which is $14.3 trillion. But that doesn’t include money guaranteed for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, which comes to close to $50 trillion, according to government figures.
The government also is on the hook for other debts such as the programs related to the bailout of the financial system following the crisis of 2008 and 2009, government figures show.
Taken together, Gross puts the total at “nearly $100 trillion,” that while perhaps a bit on the high side, places the country in a highly unenviable fiscal position that he said won’t find a solution overnight.
“To think that we can reduce that within the space of a year or two is not a realistic assumption,” Gross said in a live interview. “That’s much more than Greece, that’s much more than almost any other developed country. We’ve got a problem and we have to get after it quickly.”
Gross spoke following a report that US banks were likely to scale back on their use of Treasurys as collateral against derivatives and other transactions. Bank heads say that move is likely to happen in August as Congress dithers over whether to raise the nation’s debt ceiling, according to a report in the Financial Times.
The move reflects increasing concern from the financial community over whether the US is capable of a political solution to its burgeoning debt and deficit problems.
“We’ve always wondered who will buy Treasurys” after the Federal Reserve purchases the last of its $600 billion to end the second leg of its quantitative easing program later this month, Gross said. “It’s certainly not Pimco and it’s probably not the bond funds of the world.”
Pimco, based in Newport Beach, Calif., manages more than $1.2 trillion in assets and runs the largest bond fund in the world.
Gross confirmed a report Friday that Pimco has marginally increased its Treasurys allotment—from 4 percent to 5 percent—but still has little interest in US debt and its low yields that are in place despite an ugly national balance sheet.
“Why wouldn’t an investor buy Canada with a better balance sheet or Australia with a better balance sheet with interest rates at 1 or 2 or 3 percent higher?” he said. “It simply doesn’t make any sense.”
Should the debt problem in Greece explode into a full-blown crisis—an International Monetary Fund bailout has prevented a full-scale meltdown so far—Gross predicted that German debt, not that of the US, would be the safe-haven of choice for global investors.
America is going down because her stupid citizens wickedly voted for corrupt dishonest Democrat fools – the very fools who imploded our economy – to have complete power. Nancy Pelosi took over dictatorial control in the House of Representatives, and Harry Reid took over the US Senate, in 2006.
Thanks to Obama, America is now worse off than Greece. But that didn’t stop Obama from offering to bail out Greece. Maybe it’s because George Soros is Greek; maybe because the American left has always adored the European-style socialism in spite of Thomas Jefferson’s warning that “the comparison of our governments with those of Europe is like a comparison of heaven and hell.” Maybe because Obama simply WANTS hell for America. But there you have it.
Republicans acknowledged they failed to live up to their values and spent too much. But the last Republican budget (Fiscal Year 2007) passed in 2006 had only a $161 billion deficit. The very next Democrat budget for FY 2008 had a deficit of $459 billion – nearly three times larger than the one they’d demonized Republicans for. Then their FY-2009 budget dwarfed that deficit with a black hold of red ink deficit of $1.4 TRILLION. That was more money than any government in the history of the world had ever contemplated. But Democrats dwarfed that the very next year with a FY-2010 budget with a $1.6 trillion deficit. And as for FY-2011, the Democrat Congress simply refused to perform its most basic duty of governance and didn’t even bother to pass a budget. Republicans are now forced to do the last disgraced Democrat-controlled Congress’ job for them – and Democrats are demonizing them for it.
That’s how this game is played. Democrats are fascist demagogues who shrilly launch into Republicans as they try to save the American people from unparalleled future suffering. They are people who ROUTINELY demonize, demonize, demonize until THEY are the ones forced to call for the very things they demonized and tried to prevent from happening. But by the time they react this time, just as before, it will be too late.
Try this on for size: our actual debt isn’t the $14 trillion we constantly hear about; it’s more like $200 trillion. And even THAT gargantuan number doesn’t take into account the massive debts that all the liberal labor unions have amassed in state pensions (e.g., California’s public pension system has unfunded liabilities of $500 billion). We cannot possibly hope to pay this – and yet Democrats demand more and more and more, and demagogue Republicans for even trying to cut millions when we need to cut TENS OF TRILLIONS or collapse.
Democrats run ads showing a look-a-like of Republican Rep. Paul Ryan pushing an old lady off a cliff; but they want every single senior citizen to die terribly as the Medicare system completely collapses while they refuse to do anything to fix it – as even Bill Clinton openly acknowledged.
We are going to end like the PIIGS – Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain- because we elected Democrat swine to ensure we perished like pigs.
When that happens to us it will be the worst nightmare in history. 300 million Americans are going to go into an insanity of panic – and of course the violence will begin with the left. If you don’t have an arsenal, someone will kick down your door and murder your whole family just to eat the food in your house. And that hell on earth will be entirely because you trusted Democrats like Anthony Weiner to run your health care, your pension, your economy, your life.
I hope you vote in 2012 like your very LIFE was at stake in these elections. Because this time it truly is.
Start Thinking Right 