ObamaCare Increases Health Cost By $311 Billion While Threatening Access To Care

Just in case you didn’t catch it, it’s official: ObamaCare was packaged and sold entirely based on lies.

CMS Study Shows Health Care Law Increases Costs–$311 Billion in 10 Years
By Tom White, on April 23rd, 2010, at 11:43 am

US Senate Morning Briefing

Last night, the chief actuary at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released his long-awaited report on the Democrats’ health care spending bill. The report states, “[W]e estimate that overall national health expenditures under the health reform act would increase by a total of $311 billion during calendar years 2010-2019. . . .” This was an assessment that was requested by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell prior to the final votes on health care in the House, but CMS told Republicans that they couldn’t complete an analysis in time for the vote. Given the report’s findings, it’s easy to see why Democrats decided to rush ahead with a vote before the report could be completed.Reporting on the CMS analysis last night, the AP wrote, “President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law will increase the nation’s health care tab instead of bringing costs down, government economic forecasters concluded Thursday in a sobering assessment of the sweeping legislation. A report by economic experts at the Health and Human Services Department said the health care remake will achieve Obama’s aim of expanding health insurance — adding 34 million Americans to the coverage rolls. But the analysis also found that the law falls short of the president’s twin goal of controlling runaway costs. It also warned that Medicare cuts may be unrealistic and unsustainable, driving about 15 percent of hospitals into the red and ‘possibly jeopardizing access’ to care for seniors.”

But in the run-up to the vote, indeed throughout the year-long debate on health care, Democrats and President Obama repeatedly insisted that their unpopular legislation would control costs and save the government money. In December, President Obama announced, “We agree on reforms that will finally reduce the costs of health care. Families will save on their premiums. Businesses that will see their costs rise if we do nothing will save money now and in the future.” Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) insisted at the beginning of debate in the Senate, “The Republican Leader just a few moments ago says that this bill raises costs. With all due respect to my good friend from Kentucky, that statement is false.” And Democrats repeatedly cited a CBO report saying that if all the Medicare cuts are implemented, the bill could save $130 billion over the next decade. This was pointed to by everyone from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to rank-and-file House Democrats like Ohio Rep. John Boccieri.

But as the AP story explains, “The [CMS] report acknowledged that some of the cost-control measures in the bill — Medicare cuts, a tax on high-cost insurance and a commission to seek ongoing Medicare savings — could help reduce the rate of cost increases beyond 2020. But it held out little hope for progress in the first decade. ‘During 2010-2019, however, these effects would be outweighed by the increased costs associated with the expansions of health insurance coverage,’ wrote Richard S. Foster, Medicare’s chief actuary. ‘Also, the longer-term viability of the Medicare … reductions is doubtful.’”

As Sen. McConnell said when President Obama signed the health care bill, “Most Americans out there aren’t celebrating today. . . . People oppose this bill not because they don’t know what’s in it, but because they know exactly what’s in it. . . . They know you don’t have to slash Medicare by half a trillion dollars to get lower premiums. . . . People know you won’t save money on health care by spending another $2.6 trillion on health care. . . . They know you don’t reduce the deficit by creating a massive new government program that even Democrats have described as a Ponzi scheme. They know you can go a long ways towards doing all these things without creating a brand new entitlement at a time when we can’t even cover the cost of the entitlements we have.”

Once again, studies by neutral observers have shown that Democrats’ claims about their health care bill just do not match reality. This was a flawed bill rushed through because Democrats wanted to “make history.” But Americans know better. At a time of record deficits and debt, this irresponsible health spending bill should be repealed and replaced with legislation that actually addresses health care costs.

All one has to do is look at Obama’s plunging polls in the aftermath of the passage of ObamaCare to verify that the American people did not want and do not want this “boondogglization” of the American health care system.  Polls across the board show Obama’s approval plunging dramatically since health care “reform” was shoved down the nation’s throat: Quinnipiac has Obama’s approval at a lowest-ever-measured 44% – with a majority disapproving of him; top-pollster Rasmussen has Obama at only 47% – with a whopping 52% disapproving of him; and the RCP average has Obama WELL below a 50% approval.  Barack Obama is no longer in any way speaking for or representing the American people.

It turns out this is the same guy who is on tape at least eight times saying all the health care negotiations would all be on C-SPAN – and then he went to closed-door meeting after closed door meeting that resulted in a health care bill that NOBODY knows anything about.  It turns out that this is the same guy who promised he would unite the country in a bipartisan manner – and instead broke that promise and became the most polarizing and divisive president in history.   This is the same guy who said he would NEVER allow health care to pass by the awful partisan reconciliation tactic – and then he did exactly what he promised he wouldn’t do.  This is the guy who repeatedly promised that he wouldn’t tax anyone making less than $250,000 a year – and now everyone knows he’ll break that central, fundamental promise.  This is the same guy who demonized Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for doing what his own chief of staff had just done only the day before.

I can go on.  For example, I can talk about how his administration promised up and down that the $787 billion (subsequently massively upwardly revised to $862 billion) stimulus – which will actually cost $3.27 TRILLION – would keep unemployment under 8%.  Obama sold a massive lie to sell a massive porkulus.  And now we’re paying for a fat pile of lies.

Now we find out that this fundamental liar told yet another massive, fundamental lie.

Now we find out that Barack Obama personally and repeatedly lied to the American people about the cost of his precious boondoggle ObamaCare:

“I pledged that I will not sign health insurance reform — as badly as I think it’s necessary, I won’t sign it if that reform adds even one dime to our deficit over the next decade — and I mean what I say.”

You loathsome, vile LIAR.

You said whatever you thought you needed to say to get the American people to jump into bed with you.  Then you raped them.  And then moved on to the next lie and rape.  And the next lie and rape after that.

Now, you think this is terrible news about the terrible ObamaCare power-grab?  You aint seen NOTHING yet.  Have a gander at this:

Not one of its major programs has gotten started, and already the wheels are starting to come off of Obamacare. The administration’s own actuary reported on Thursday that millions of people could lose their health insurance, that health-care costs will rise faster than they would have if the law hadn’t passed, and that the overhaul will mean that people will have a harder and harder time finding physicians to see them.

The White House is trying to spin the new report from Medicare’s chief actuary Richard Foster as only half bad because it concludes that, while costs will increase, only 23 million people will remain uninsured (instead of 24 million previously estimated).

But looking at the details of Foster’s report shows the many, many danger signs for Obamacare and how many of its promises will be broken:

1. People losing coverage: About 14 million people will lose their employer coverage by 2019, as smaller employers terminate their plans and workers who currently have employer coverage enroll in Medicaid. Half of all seniors on Medicare Advantage could lose their coverage and the extra benefits the plans offer.

2. Huge fines for companies: Businesses will pay $87 billion in penalties in the first five years after the fines trigger in 2014, partly because they can’t afford to offer expensive, government-mandated coverage and partly because some of their employees will apply for taxpayer-subsidized insurance.

3. Higher costs for consumers: Tens of billions of dollars in new fees and excise taxes will be “passed through to health consumers in the form of higher drug and devices prices and higher premiums,” according to Foster. A separate report shows small businesses will be hit hardest.

4. A program created to fail: The new “CLASS Act” long-term-care insurance program will face “a significant risk of failure,” according to Foster. Indeed, he finds, “there is a very serious risk that the problem of adverse selection will make the CLASS program unsustainable.”

5. Spending increases: Under the new law, national health spending will increase by $311 billion over the coming decade. And instead of bending the federal spending curve down, it will move it upward “by a net total of $251 billion” over the next decade.

6. “Free-riders”: An estimated 23 million people will remain uninsured in 2019, roughly 5 million of whom would be undocumented aliens; the remainder would be the 18 million who decline to get coverage and who will pay the penalty.

7. Spending reductions are fiction: Estimated reductions in the growth rate of health spending “may not be fully achievable” because “Medicare productivity adjustments could become unsustainable even within the next ten years, and over time the reductions in the scope of employer-sponsored health insurance could also become an issue.”

8. You can’t keep your doctor: Fifteen percent of all hospitals, nursing homes, and other providers treating Medicare patients could be operating at a loss by 2019, which will “possibly jeopardize access to care for beneficiaries.” Doctors are threatening to drop out of Medicare because cuts in Medicare reimbursement rates mean they can’t even cover their costs.

9. Coverage but no care: A significant portion of those newly eligible for Medicaid will have trouble finding physicians who will see them, and the increased demand for Medicaid services could be difficult to meet.

This is an objective report by administration actuaries that shows this sweeping legislation has serious, serious problems.

And there’s more: Joint Economic Committee Republicans explain in a new report the impact of a rarely mentioned $14.3 billion per year tax on health insurance, effective in 2014. They find this tax will be mostly passed through to consumers in the form of higher premiums for private coverage. It will cost the typical family of four with job-based coverage an additional $1,000 a year in higher premiums and will fall largely, and inequitably, on small businesses and their employees.

States are fighting back. The Florida legislature voted Thursday to place a state constitutional amendment on the ballot that would ban any laws that compel someone to “participate in any health care system.” It requires a 60 percent vote to succeed. The legislation is modeled after the American Legislative Exchange Council’s Freedom of Choice in Health Care Act, which has been introduced or announced in 42 states.

It just makes you want to cry.  Fifteen percent of hospitals are going to close, tens of thousands of doctors will leave medicine, and yet millions of people are going to start swamping the healthcare rolls.  If I wanted to destroy our healthcare system, that’s how I’d do it.

On top of that – something that will crash the system even sooner – is the fact that more and more healthier people will increasingly pay the fines and opt out of ObamaCare, will more and more sick people enter the system.  The result will be a social catastrophe.  Our very worst enemy couldn’t have engineered our downfall better.

Business after business have been and will continue to be writing down billions and billions of dollars in profits to cover the huge costs of ObamaCare.  These are businesses that would have hired workers, only now the skyrocketing costs of paying for ObamaCare for their employees will keep that hiring to an absolute minimum.

Barack Obama proudly and arrogantly said, “You Can Measure America’s Bottom Line By Looking At Caterpillar’s’” – and then he torpedoed Caterpillar’s bottom line.

Unemployment is going to be soaringly high for years – as even the Obama White House acknowledges.  Now you know why.

What’s the result of the Democrats’ idiotic policies?  Ask Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who just told us that sky-high “unemployment is likely to remain unacceptably high for a long time.”

The unemployment rate “is still terribly high and is going to stay unacceptably high for a very long time,” Geithner said.

Of course, if unemployment is going to stay “unacceptably high” for “a very long time,” you’re pretty much accepting it, aren’t you?

Meanwhile, there will be trillions of dollars in additional spending that Obama and the Democrats refused to allow the CBO to count: such as the SIX TRILLION DOLLARS it will cost Americans to buy ObamaCare policies or face fines.

The Titanic wasn’t as big of a disaster as ObamaCare.  If we can’t repeal and replace it, it will bankrupt the country.

The Coming VAT: Poor Americans, Get Ready For GIANT Tax Increase

Remember candidate Obama’s ten thousand promises that he would absolutely not under any circumstances raise your taxes so much as one dime:

“But let me perfectly clear, because I know you’ll hear the same old claims that rolling back these tax breaks means a massive tax increase on the American people:  if your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime.  I repeat: not one single dime.”

April fools, you fools.

It turns out this is the same guy who is on tape at least eight times saying all the health care negotiations would all be on C-SPAN – and then he went to closed-door meeting after closed door meeting that resulted in a health care bill that NOBODY knows anything about.  It turns out that this is the same guy who promised he would unite the country in a bipartisan manner – and instead broke that promise and became the most polarizing and divisive president in history.   This is the same guy who said he would NEVER allow health care to pass by the awful partisan reconciliation tactic – and then he did exactly what he promised he wouldn’t do.  This is the same guy who demonized Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for doing what his own chief of staff had just done only the day before.

Yeah, well, that same guy is on the verge of breaking another one of his fundamental promises to the American people on taxes.  And it’s going to be the poor who Obama is going to hose the worst.

JUST LIKE I AND OTHER CONSERVATIVES ASSURED YOU HE WOULD DO BEFORE THE ELECTION.

The VAT (Value Added Tax) is a consumption tax which is both socialist and regressive – in other words, the worst of both worlds.

It will make Obama a liar yet again.  But seriously, what else is new?

White House economic adviser refuses to rule out VAT — six different times in one TV appearance
By: Mark Hemingway
Commentary Staff Writer
04/20/10 3:28 PM EDT

On Sunday, the New York Times reported that the Obama administration’s economic team was kicking the policy tires on a national value added tax (VAT) as a means of dealing with the deficit, among other things. But earlier today, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the administration was not considering a VAT.

If Gibbs is telling the truth, then why did White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, appearing on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, refuse six different to rule out a VAT? Americans for Tax Reform kept count:

MARK HALPERIN: Will the President ever consider tax reform that will involve a VAT? Would he ever consider it?

(Refusal #1) GOOLSBEE: Look, we are not, the  report — and I’m not sure where it came from cause it’s not anything I saw — was that they were contemplating a VAT, that is not true. We have stood up this bipartisan fiscal commission, which as I understand it is considering a whole bunch of things.

HALPERIN: But would he ever consider..

(Refusal #2) GOOLSBEE: He’s going to consider whatever comes out of that fiscal commission.

HALPERIN: So if they recommend a VAT, he would consider it?

(Refusal #3) GOOLSBEE: I’m not going to get into a linguistic game about it.

HALPERIN: Well it’s not a linguistic game.

(Refusal #4) GOOLSBEE: He’s looking to see what comes out of the fiscal commission. He’s going to look at it.

HALPERIN: We had a President for eight years who said ‘no new taxes, we’re not going to raise taxes’. This President said ‘no taxes on the middle class’. Arguably there are taxes in the healthcare bill that will hit the middle class. So again, a VAT would be a big change in America. Would he consider it, if the commission recommends it,  would he consider it?

(Refusal #5) GOOLSBEE: As you know, the President cut taxes for 95 percent of the workers in the stimulus. Many many billions of dollars. The President is committed to this bipartisan fiscal commission process and he’s going to seriously consider all the things that they put forward and he’s going to look at them. It doesn’t mean he’s supporting a VAT. We haven’t even contemplated a VAT.

HALPERIN: But if they recommend it, it’s not something he’d rule out?

(Refusal #6) GOOLSBEE: I’m not going to get into a hypothetical thing about it. He’s committed to a bipartisan fiscal commission.

It’s safe to say they are considering a VAT, all right.

So Obama officials refuse to dismiss the Obama-pledge-busting value added tax on the poor and middle class.

Surely Obama is against breaking his word?!?!

Nope.  He’s pretty much fine with that.

Obama suggests value-added tax may be an option
Apr 21 05:33 PM US/Eastern
By CHARLES BABINGTON
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) – President Barack Obama suggested Wednesday that a new value-added tax on Americans is still on the table, seeming to show more openness to the idea than his aides have expressed in recent days.

Before deciding what revenue options are best for dealing with the deficit and the economy, Obama said in an interview with CNBC, “I want to get a better picture of what our options are.”

After Obama adviser Paul Volcker recently raised the prospect of a value-added tax, or VAT, the Senate voted 85-13 last week for a nonbinding “sense of the Senate” resolution that calls the such a tax “a massive tax increase that will cripple families on fixed income and only further push back America’s economic recovery.”

For days, White House spokesmen have said the president has not proposed and is not considering a VAT.

“I think I directly answered this the other day by saying that it wasn’t something that the president had under consideration,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters shortly before Obama spoke with CNBC.

After the interview, White House deputy communications director Jen Psaki said nothing has changed and the White House is “not considering” a VAT.

Many European countries impose a VAT, which taxes the value that is added at each stage of production of certain commodities.

When CNBC asked Obama whether he could see a potential VAT in this nation, the president said: “I know that there’s been a lot of talk around town lately about the value-added tax. That is something that has worked for some countries. It’s something that would be novel for the United States.”

“And before, you know, I start saying ‘this makes sense or that makes sense,’ I want to get a better picture of what our options are,” Obama said.

He said his first priority “is to figure out how can we reduce wasteful spending so that, you know, we have a baseline of the core services that we need and the government should provide. And then we decide how do we pay for that.”

Volcker has said taxes might have to be raised to slow the deficit’s growth. He said a value-added tax “was not as toxic an idea” as it had been in the past.

Since then, some GOP lawmakers and conservative commentators have said the Obama administration is edging toward a VAT.

Mind you, Obama has ALREADY broken his promise to the American people when he shoved his ObamaCare boondoggle through Congress by a reconciliation process which he strangely ALSO promised not to use (as I already pointed out above).  That’s because ObamaCare contains twelve new taxes on people Obama swore up and down he wouldn’t tax.

You see, the most profligate spender in the history of the entire human race has a problem: he’s spent so much money, even if he confiscated all the wealth of all the wealthiest people in the country, it wouldn’t scratch the surface in the debts he’s created.  So he needs to come after you and your family to pay his debts.

Tiger Woods, Barack Obama, And Really Lousy ‘Change’

I didn’t link Tiger Woods and Barack Obama together.  Golf Digest did that for me:

In any event, another similarity between these two is that both promised “change” – and neither seem to be very good at keeping their promises.

An article about Tiger Wood’s repeated vulgar outbursts – in diametric contrast to his promises of “change”:

Jim Nantz criticizes Tiger Woods’ vocal tantrums
By Shane Bacon

Before the Masters started, Tiger Woods told us that he had changed. His outbursts would be quieted, his club tossing would be softened and he was going to be a different guy on the golf course.

No matter if you bought that or not, it’s true that the weekend brought out some of the old Tiger. He screamed “Tiger, you suck!,” only to follow that up with a profanity unlike any other in the third round. On Sunday on the 13th hole, Woods screamed “Jesus Christ!” after a tee shot and he wasn’t complimenting the man upstairs.

It wasn’t something new with Tiger, but it is something he told us would be avoiding in the future. Jim Nantz, the voice of CBS at the Masters, had a chance to talk with Mike Francesa of WFAN on Monday, and let it be known that he wasn’t happy with the way Woods acted.

“If I said what he said on the air, I would be fired. I read in the USA Today and it was called “mild language.” Someone on my broadcast dismissed it as him having a camera in his face. Well, guess what? Phil Mickelson had a camera in his face all week and did you even hear him come close to approaching that? He didn’t hit every shot the way he wanted. Have you ever heard Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus use that kind of language? What are the parameters between what’s right or wrong?”

Nantz then admitted that this isn’t something that has disturbed him in the past, but the fact that Tiger promised us a change is why it rubbed him the wrong way. He mentioned that he doesn’t speak perfectly, but when the red light is on, he has things he cannot say.

[Video: See spoof of Phil’s feud with Tiger, featuring Elin.]

He also said that there are people watching the telecast that shouldn’t be subjected to such profanities.

“How about the father and son who are standing right there by the tee? How about the hundreds of people who are around that tee who hear that? How about the hundreds of letters I’ve gotten through the years from people who have been outraged at the language they’ve heard there and have written me and said, ‘Why don’t you guys ever say something about that?’ “

Nantz obviously has some great points here. If you’re going to cuss when the cameras are rolling over a live broadcast, that is one thing, but when you tell us you won’t and still do it, it sure makes you look bad. Especially for a guy trying to bulldoze his past image.

I’m reminded of someone else who promised us “change.”

Barack Obama has told many lies that simply fundamentally put to the lie Obama’s entire case for his presidency.  But here is his very worst lie of all, as summarized by the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — At the core of Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is a promise that he can transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars and build a new governing majority.

To achieve the change the country wants, he says, “we need a leader who can finally move beyond the divisive politics of Washington and bring Democrats, independents and Republicans together to get things done.”

But this promise leads, inevitably, to a question: Can such a majority be built and led by Mr. Obama, whose voting record was, by one ranking, the most liberal in the Senate last year?

I’ve got to say it: if Tiger’s wife, Elin Nordegren, actually believes Woods’ promises that “I’ve changed,” she will single-handedly do more to harm the image of blond women as intelligent than every single blond joke ever told.

I pointed out what a total lie Barack Obama’s core promise to the American people truly was.  Obama began to fearmonger, demagogue, and demonize from day one of his administration.  And a Pew Research poll underscored that fact: we find that Barack Obama is the most polarizing president in history.

There are many other major, massive lies from Obama.  His promise of game-changing transparency, for example, couldn’t have been a more dishonest lie.  Only yesterday, Obama offered yet another massive proof of just what a lie his claim about “transparency” is when he totally shut the press out of what was supposed to be a major global political event in a way that left much of the world’s press stunned.  Even the Chinese president was more open with the press than Obama.

Another fundamentally dishonest lie on the part of Barack Obama was his push for the use of the cynical and partisan political tactic of reconciliation to shove through his ObamaCare bill when he had specifically promised he would NOT do that.

Neither one of these men is credible.  Neither one of them deserve a scintilla of our respect.

The thing is that as bad as Tiger Woods was, as dishonest, and as cynical and manipulative as he proved himself to be, he doesn’t even hold a candle to the dishonesty of Barack Obama.

Parliamentarian Says Democrats Broke Reconciliation Rules: House Will Have To Vote On Bill Again

If at first your act of national rape doesn’t succeed, rape, rape again.

House Democrats violated reconciliation rules in passing their health care destruction act; now they will have to go back and vote all over again.

With the kind of incompetence Democrats have displayed trying to impose their health care takeover, one has to wonder how the massive monster they’re voting on is any less incompetent.

I doubt if this will change the ultimate passage of the bill; it’s hard to imagine Democrats suddenly becoming anything other than fools.  But at least it forces them to go on the record again.  That will only increase the outrage heading into November.

From Politico:

Senate Republicans have succeeded in forcing Democrats to send the health reform reconciliation bill back to the House for another vote, after Senate parliamentarian Alan Frumin ruled early Thursday morning that two minor provisions violated the chamber’s rules and couldn’t be included in the final bill.

Democrats believe the provisions — technical changes to language about Pell Grants for low-income students – are so minor that they don’t threaten to derail the reconciliation package, which includes a series of fixes to the reform bill that has already been signed into law by President Barack Obama.

But clearly Democrats are anxious to put the health care voting behind them – given the painful history of the past year of close votes and near-death experiences on the bill – and want nothing to pop up now that could give them headaches.

It’s also possible that Republicans can force more changes to the bill when the Senate reconvenes at 9:45 a.m., with a vote on the bill scheduled for 2 p.m. It wasn’t clear early Thursday morning when the House would vote, but both chambers are anxious to wrap up business to get out of town for the two-week Easter recess.

All told, 16 lines of text will be removed from the 153-page bill to strip the Pell Grant language, Majority Leader Harry Reid’s spokesman Jim Manley told reporters as business on the Senate floor wrapped up early Thursday morning.

The House has already passed the reconciliation bill, on Sunday night when it approved the landmark health reform measure. But since the House and Senate must pass identical versions of the reconciliation bill to put the fixes into law, the reconciliation piece must go back to the House for a second vote.

And the reconciliation bill includes several provisions that are must-haves for House members, including eliminating the Cornhusker Kickback and other state-specific deals and putting off a tax on “Cadillac” insurance plans until 2018.

“We are confident the House will quickly pass the bill with these minor changes,” Manley said Thursday morning.

We also find that the Democrats are ramming through even more high taxes and penalties than they’d already imposed.  Individuals and businesses who can’t afford to comply with these unconstitutional mandates will now face significantly higher penalties.

Democrats are going to say this is just a chintzy delay tactic, but that’s because they couldn’t care less about the will of the American people.

Here’s a snapshot of a CBS poll released yesterday that profoundly demonstrates that the American people want the Republican Party to keep fighting this hateful bill:

That’s close to an overwhelming 2-1 margin of Americans who want the Republicans to keep fighting to the last procedural tactic.  And 41% of Democrats as well as 66% of Independents are on board with the GOP.

We can look back at Democrats who told us the REAL intent of this horrific piece of legislation.

“The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways 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” – Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), known as “the dean of the House” for being the longest-serving member after taking over from his father in 1955.

You can hear him say it yourself on Youtube.

We can look back at Democrats who pretty much acknowledge that Democrats have a total disregard for proper conduct or for ethics:

‘There ain’t no rules around here — we’re trying to accomplish something.’ And therefore, when the deal goes down, all this talk about rules, we make ‘em up as we go along…” – Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL), a disgraced federal judge who was impeached by a vote of 413-3 for taking bribes.

We can look back at Democrats ackowledging their complete lack of integrity and their apalling inability to stop their reckless spending:

“If you don’t tie our hands, we will keep stealing” – Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA).

And we can look back at the total disregard for the will of the American people expressed by the top Democrat leadership:

“We will do whatever is necessary to pass a health care bill” – Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Speaker of the House

With “whatever is necessary” including every possible shenanigan under the sun.

Democrats have nakedly revealed themselves for the corrupt, lawless elitist thugs that they have been all along.

The senior staff who wrote the bill – and clearly know the most about it – took the incredibly suspicious step of specifically exempting themselves from its effects.  It might be good enough for your maggoty little children, but they weren’t going to put their own kids at risk.

Bad partisan ideologues passed a terrible piece of ideological legislation to take power over the people, uncaring of how much it cost or how many ethical and procedural standards had to be violated.

These are the people who literally voted to fund erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagara for sex offenders in order to ram their bill through.  If nothing else tells you that these people are true ideologues, that should.

The ‘Slaughter Solition’ As Epitome Of Obama ‘Transparency’

I’m sure anyone you meet can tell you all about the self executing rule that the Democrats are now relying upon to pass their health care boondoggle.

They will know all about the “Slaughter solution.”  It will be “transparent” to them.

Because this is the most “transparent” administration in history.

Right?

Wrong.

Democrats routinely demonized the Bush White House as “the most secretive administration in history.”  But it is now a documented fact that the Obama administration is at least 50% more secretive than Bush:

PROMISES, PROMISES: Is gov’t more open with Obama?
By SHARON THEIMER Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) – The government’s use of legal exemptions to keep records secret rose during President Barack Obama’s first year in office, despite promises of increased openness, an Associated Press review found.

The review of annual Freedom of Information Act reports filed by 17 major agencies found that overall, the use of nearly every one of the open-records law’s nine exemptions to withhold information rose in fiscal year 2009, which ended last October. […]

Major agencies cited that exemption to refuse records at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year, compared with 47,395 times during President George W. Bush’s final full budget year, according to annual FOIA reports filed by federal agencies. Obama was president for nine months in the 2009 period.

This lack of transparency – hypocritical as it is because Obama demagogued Bush while promising to be so much better – has taken root in health care.  His “transparency” is an outrageous and incredibly cynical lie just like all his other outrageous and incredibly cynical lies.

The Democrats are like the “Mr. Brooks” character portrayed by Kevin Costner: self-designated pillars of the community who are all the while actually brutal mass-murdering schizophrenic psychopaths.  They say one thing in public, but the very ugly truth is a very different thing behind closed doors.

It’s rather fittingly ironic that ObamaCare is going to be shoved down our throats with Constitution-schmonstitution shenanigans named “The SLAUGHTER Solution” and “the Self EXECUTING Rule.

Barack Obama – who was THE most liberal U.S. Senator in Congress the year he announced his candidacy for president (in 2007) – stated as his core promise that he would “transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars.”  But it turns out that he was a hard-core partisan ideologue radical.  It turns out that he is the most polarizing president in history.  It turns out that he would see this country erupt in flames not seen since the Civil War (when Republicans were as usual in the right and Democrats were as usual the party of genuine depravity) in order to impose an unpopular “fundamental transformation” onto the American people.

Now this lying demagogue – who attacked the reconciliation strategy as “majoritarian absolute power” right out of the ugliest pages of the Karl Rove playbook, and who claimed that anyone who would pursue such a strategy doesn’t believe in government – is now hypocritically and cynically embracing a strategy that makes reconciliation look positively tame.  I mean, at least you actually VOTED with reconciliation, even if that vote was a joke; with the “self executing” Slaughter solution, you don’t even bother with such pretension, but merely “deem” it to have been voted upon.

In the modernized version of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the line from today’s bandits is, “Vote?  We aint got no vote!  We don’t need no vote!  I don’t have to show you any stinking vote!”

Obama is the one who doesn’t believe in government.  The man who once said, “You’ve got to break out of what I call the sort of 50-plus-1 pattern of presidential politics. Maybe you eke out a victory of 50 plus 1, but you can’t govern,” and who once said, “Karl Rove doesn’t need a broad consensus, because he doesn’t believe in government,” now reveals himself to be the political anarchist who would blow up our entire political process in order to ram through his incredibly unpopular ideological agenda.

Our founding fathers went to war to rid themselves of a king who wasn’t half the tyrant Barack Obama has revealed himself to be.

And all the while he keeps brazenly trying to pass himself off as something he absolutely is not.

Reminds me of what the Bible says about the devil:

“But I am not surprised! Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor 11:14, NLT).

REAL Reason For ObamaCare: ‘To maintain a strong presidency, we need to pass the bill’

Obama says, “To maintain a strong presidency, we need to pass the bill.”

I thought ObamaCare was supposed to be all about reforming the health care system to make it somehow better.  Nope.  The REAL point of it is to “maintain a strong Obama presidency.”

Thanks but no thanks, Zero.

I mean, don’t get me wrong.  It’s a real tempting offer to support a hard-core partisan liberal big government takeover of our health care system to help you create the illusion that you aren’t such a total loser, after all.  But I think I’ll pass, just the same.

Bam feeling queasy
Pleads for health Rx – for sake of presidency
By GEOFF EARLE Post Correspondent
March 5, 2010

WASHINGTON — President Obama yesterday pushed wavering House members to OK health-care legislation for his own political standing and for theirs, as the battle came down to a bare-knuckle brawl for votes.

Obama met with groups of liberal and more conservative Democrats in the White House to try to assemble a winning coalition.

“To maintain a strong presidency, we need to pass the bill,” Obama told the liberals, according to Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who attended the meeting.

“He made a very pointed, very realistic case about how this is an opportunity that won’t come around for a long time.”

The heightened presidential pressure came on a day when Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) said a dozen centrist Democrats weren’t willing to swallow Senate language that they say provides federal funding for abortion.

“We’re not going to vote for the bill with that language in there,” Stupak, who leads a faction of anti-abortion Democrats who have voted for health reform, told ABC yesterday.

Congressional leaders say they want to bring Obama’s top legislative priority up for a vote by the end of the month.

On Wednesday, Obama called on Congress to stop debating and hold an “up-or-down vote” using a hard-line tactic called “reconciliation” and having the House take up the Senate-passed bill.

Now that push comes to shove, we see who this health care takeover is and always was about: Obama and the Democrats who don’t want to govern, but rule over us.

Not, “Do it for the people” who clearly don’t want this 2,700-page monstrosity, but rather, please do this for your messiah’s political standing.

And then we find that Obama “made a very pointed, very realistic case” for his chief of staff’s argument that “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”  Thus we have the continuation of the age-old philosophy of the demagogue: jump on a crisis and ride it to a self-serving power-mad agenda.

And in order to advance his self-serving, power-mad agenda, Obama calls upon a maneuver that he personally harshly attacked only a few years ago:

“You know, one of the arguments that sometimes I get with my fellow progressives–and some of these have flashed up in the blog communities on occasion–is this notion that we should function sort of like Karl Rove, where we identify our core base, we throw them red meat, we get a 50-plus-1 victory. But see, Karl Rove doesn’t need a broad consensus, because he doesn’t believe in government. If we want to transform the country, though, that requires a sizable majority.”–Center for American Progress, July 12, 2006

Obama told us how bad that Rove guy was just a few years ago.  Funny, but I don’t remember Karl Rove trying to ram through a partisan agenda that would take over nearly 20% of our economy.

So Obama demonized Karl Rove, but now he’s going to be worse, more partisan, and more destructive to government than Karl Rove ever was.

I understand why “Rove doesn’t need a broad consensus” given your demonization of him, Barry Hussein.  The bigger question now is, “Why don’t YOU need a broad consensus?”

Why is he going to do that?  Well, to “to maintain a strong presidency,” of course.

Could there even BE a more noble reason for Obama to ruin our health care system and our very system of government than to save his political ass?

Obama told us that reconciliation was “simply majoritarian absolute power” which was “just not what the founders intended.”

And just what did our founding fathers intend?

Writing to Thomas Jefferson, who had been out of the country during the Constitutional Convention, James Madison explained that the Constitution’s framers considered the Senate to be the great “anchor” of the government. To the framers themselves, Madison explained that the Senate would be a “necessary fence” against the “fickleness and passion” that tended to influence the attitudes of the general public and members of the House of Representatives. George Washington is said to have told Jefferson that the framers had created the Senate to “cool” House legislation just as a saucer was used to cool hot tea.

Ah, but that flies in the face of the demagogue’s “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste” philosophy.  And heck, it even flies in the face of “maintaining a strong presidency” now that Obama has foolishly bet his political farm on ramming through his ObamaCare boondoggle.

So now, by all means, let us ignore what the founders intended, let us have that “simply majoritarian absolute power.”  Let us take that scalding hot tea and pour it down the throat of the Senate.  Let us – again, in Obama’s very own words – “change the character of the Senate forever.”

Does the man whose core promise to the nation –

WASHINGTON — At the core of Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is a promise that he can transcend the starkly red-and-blue politics of the last 15 years, end the partisan and ideological wars and build a new governing majority.

To achieve the change the country wants, he says, “we need a leader who can finally move beyond the divisive politics of Washington and bring Democrats, independents and Republicans together to get things done.”

– now want to be the most poisonous political figure in our nation’s history?  Because this hard-core partisan takeover of our nation’s health care system and nearly a fifth of the nation’s economy is going to create the most bitter, partisan, and ugly war we’ve seen since the Civil War.  And that is a fact.

Again, in Obama’s very own words:

You’ve got to break out of what I call the sort of 50 plus one pattern of presidential politics which is you have nasty primaries where everybody’s disheartened and beaten up. Then you divide the country 45 percent on one side, and 45 percent on the other, and 10 percent in the middle and (unintelligible) and Florida behind. And battle it out and then maybe you eke out a victory of 50 plus one. Then you can’t govern. You know, you get Air Force One, I mean there are a lot of nice perks for being president. But you can’t, you can’t deliver on healthcare. We are not going to pass universal healthcare with a 50 plus one strategy. We’re not going to have a serious, bold energy policy of the sort I proposed yesterday unless you build a working majority.

Is it okay for a president to completely violate his word and credibility for the sake of his “strong presidency”?  He said “we’re NOT” going to do the thing he is now doing.  “Break OUT of the 50-plus-one pattern of presidential politics“?  Obama is storming the gates to rush IN.  No president has even TRIED to pass something to big and so fundamental and so radically transformative with this vile strategy.  Is it okay to totally divide the country and poison our system and our society this way for the sake of a “strong presidency”?

Let me put it this way: if Republicans take back the country, and use reconciliation to impose the “Hunt Every Democrat Down With Dogs and Burn Them Alive” Act, do you want Republicans to be able to justify their actions by quoting Barack Obama?

You Democrats, don’t you think for a SECOND that what you are doing now won’t one day come back at you with a vengeance that will leave you even more stunned and terrified than conservatives are today.

Obama’s “strong presidency” will see this country burning in flames.

Obama’s Lies And Hypocrisy In Calling For Reconciliation

Barack Obama is a liar and a hypocrite who is fundamentally not to be trusted.  And I can prove that charge with his very own words.

From March 3 via UPI:

Obama outlined his proposal that included several Republican-generated ideas and called on Congress to pass healthcare reform within the next several weeks. By calling for an up-or-down vote, Obama noted that several major bills passed by a simple majority — otherwise known as reconciliation, a parliamentary procedure — during several previous administrations, including that of George W. Bush.

Do you want to know how extreme reconciliation is?  Just ask Barry Hussein:

Obama’s Discarded Wisdom
Breitbart.tv has a terrific two-minute video featuring clips of Barack Obama commenting on the need to build consensus before attempting to enact major social legislation. (If the above link doesn’t work, try this one.) As a public service, we’ve transcribed the Obama comments:

• “My understanding of the Senate is, is that you need 60 votes to get something significant to happen, which means that Democrats and Republicans have to ask the question: Do we have the will to move an American agenda forward, not a Democratic or Republican agenda forward?“–CBS-TV election night interview, Nov. 2, 2004

• “The bottom line is that our health-care plans are similar. The question, once again, is: Who can get it done? Who can build a movement for change? This is an area where we’re going to have to have a 60% majority in the Senate and the House in order to actually get a bill to my desk. We’re going to have to have a majority, to get the bill to my desk, that is not just a 50-plus-1 majority.”–Change to Win convention, Sept. 25, 2007

• “You’ve got to break out of what I call the sort of 50-plus-1 pattern of presidential politics. Maybe you eke out a victory of 50 plus 1, but you can’t govern. You know, you get Air Force One–I mean, there are a lot of nice perks, but you can’t deliver on health care. We’re not going to pass universal health care with a 50-plus-1 strategy.”–interview with the Concord (N.H.) Monitor, Oct. 9, 2007

• “You know, one of the arguments that sometimes I get with my fellow progressives–and some of these have flashed up in the blog communities on occasion–is this notion that we should function sort of like Karl Rove, where we identify our core base, we throw them red meat, we get a 50-plus-1 victory. But see, Karl Rove doesn’t need a broad consensus, because he doesn’t believe in government. If we want to transform the country, though, that requires a sizable majority.”–Center for American Progress, July 12, 2006

Although the site that originated the video seems to be anti-Obama in orientation (it’s called Naked Emperor News, presumably meant to compare the president to the character in the fable), we must say that most of what Obama said back then is eminently sensible. He explained almost as well as we can why what he is doing now–pushing Congress to “transform the country” precisely via a “50-plus-1” strategy, is so foolish and dangerous.

Observers will disagree over what combination of ideological radicalism, egomania and sheer cynicism is motivating him, but what is clear is that President Obama is quite different from what Candidate Obama advertised.

Which is a polite way of saying he’s a galling hypocrite who deceitfully said one thing, and then actually did the very opposite thing.

Is Obama worse than Karl Rove, on his very own criterion???  If so, than Democrats should despise him more than they do Karl Rove, unless they too are the same sort of hypocrites.  Further, can we now take this to mean that Barack Obama does not believe in government in the same way he demonized Rove???

Is Obama now proving that he is a “government atheist”?

Barack Obama deserves to be reviled based on his very own standard of judgment.

This is a more substantial citation of one of the Obama quotes above:

You’ve got to break out of what I call the sort of 50 plus one pattern of presidential politics which is you have nasty primaries where everybody’s disheartened and beaten up. Then you divide the country 45 percent on one side, and 45 percent on the other, and 10 percent in the middle and (unintelligible) and Florida behind. And battle it out and then maybe you eke out a victory of 50 plus one. Then you can’t govern. You know, you get Air Force One, I mean there are a lot of nice perks for being president. But you can’t, you can’t deliver on healthcare. We are not going to pass universal healthcare with a 50 plus one strategy. We’re not going to have a serious, bold energy policy of the sort I proposed yesterday unless you build a working majority.

Obama specifically said he would disavow the very strategy that he is now embracing.

Barack Obama is at the very top of a list of vehemently reconciliation-damning quotes from Democrats compiled by Human Events:

Barack Obama 4/25/05: “The President hasn’t gotten his way. And that is now prompting a change in the Senate rules that really I think would change the character of the Senate forever…what I worry about would be that you essentially still have two chambers the House and the Senate but you have simply majoritarian absolute power on either side, and that’s just not what the founders intended.”

Would you like to know why Obama said the founding fathers never intended the thing that he is despicably now trying to do?  Here’s how the founding fathers described the US Senate:

Writing to Thomas Jefferson, who had been out of the country during the Constitutional Convention, James Madison explained that the Constitution’s framers considered the Senate to be the great “anchor” of the government. To the framers themselves, Madison explained that the Senate would be a “necessary fence” against the “fickleness and passion” that tended to influence the attitudes of the general public and members of the House of Representatives. George Washington is said to have told Jefferson that the framers had created the Senate to “cool” House legislation just as a saucer was used to cool hot tea.

Obama is now calling for that which he has already publicly recognized as being something that would “change the character of the Senate forever” in a way he acknowledged was “not what the founders intended.”

Can we all just agree that Obama is unAmerican now???

The Republicans were different back in 2005 from the Democrats today when this argument last took place.  And as usual, they were better.  They didn’t follow through using a procedure that was designed to pass a budget (which is what reconciliation was intended to resolve) for a frankly unconstitutional use.   They certainly didn’t use it to place nearly one-fifth of the U.S. economy under the thrall of their party, as Democrats are trying to do now.

Have the Republicans ever been hypocrites on the issue of reconciliation?  I’m sure they have.  But that’s besides the point in the sense that the Democrats – if they use the procedure now – stand utterly condemned as liars and hypocrites by their very own words:

Hillary Clinton 5/23/2005: “So this president has come to the majority here in the Senate and basically said ‘change the rules.’ ‘Do it the way I want it done.’ And I guess there just weren’t very many voices on the other side of the isle that acted the way previous generations of senators have acted and said ‘Mr. President we are with you, we support you, but that’s a bridge too far we can’t go there.’ You have to restrain yourself Mr. President.

Charles Schumer 5/18/2005: “We are on the precipice of a crisis, a constitutional crisis. The checks and balances which have been at the core of this Republic are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option. The checks and balances which say that if you get 51% of the vote you don’t get your way 100% of the time. It is amazing it’s almost a temper tantrum.

Harry Reid 5/18/2005: “Mr. President the right to extended debate is never more important than the one party who controls congress and the white house. In these cases the filibuster serves as a check on power and preserves our limited government.”

Dianne Feinstein 5/18/2005: The nuclear option if successful will turn the Senate into a body that could have its rules broken at any time by a majority of senators unhappy with any position taken by the minority. It begins with judicial nominations. Next will be executive appointments and then legislation.

Joe Biden 5/23/2005: This nuclear option is ultimately an example of the arrogance of power. It is a fundamental power grab.

Harry Reid 5/18/2005: “But no we are not going to follow the Senate rules. No, because of the arrogance of power of this Republican administration.”

Chris Dodd 5/18/2005: “I’ve never passed a single bill worth talking about that didn’t have a lead co sponsor that was a Republican. And I don’t know of a single piece of legislation that’s ever been adopted here that didn’t have a Republican and Democrat in the lead. That’s because we need to sit down and work with each other. The rules of this institution have required that. That’s why we exist. Why have a bicameral legislative body? Why have two chambers? What were the framers thinking about 218 years ago? They understood Mr. President that there is a tyranny of the majority.

Dianne Feinstein 5/18/2005: “If the Republican leadership insists on forcing the nuclear option the senate becomes ipso facto the House of Representatives where the majority rules supreme and the party of power can dominate and control the agenda with absolute power.”

Hillary Clinton 5/23/2005: “You’ve got majority rule and then you have the senate over here where people can slow things down where they can debate where they have something called the filibuster. You know it seems like it’s a little less than efficient — well that’s right it is. And deliberately designed to be so.”

Joe Biden 5/23/05: “I say to my friends on the Republican side you may own the field right now buy you won’t own it forever I pray God when the Democrats take back control we don’t make the kind of naked power grab you are doing.”

Charles Schumer 5/23/2005: “They want their way every single time. And they will change the rules, break the rules, and misread the constitution so that they will get their way.”

Hillary Clinton 5/23/2005: “The Senate is being asked to turn itself inside out, to ignore the precedent to ignore the way our system has work, the delicate balance that we have obtain that has kept this constitution system going, for immediate gratification of the present President.”

Max Baucus 5/19/2005: “This is the way Democracy ends. Not with a bomb but with a gavel.”

This is a procedure that should simply not be used to pass major legislation which essentially transform nearly a fifth of the economy, and which literally puts our lives and our freedoms on the line.

Major polls such as Rasmussen (44% favoring versus 52% oppose) and Gallup (42% favoring versus 49% opposed) across the board demonstrate that the American people do not want this 2,700 page monstrosity.  The American people not only oppose ObamaCare, but they oppose it by greater margins than that which propelled Obama into the White House.

Just how is it, given that the people clearly do not want this, that the Democrats have any right whatsoever to use a procedure which they themselves demonized to ram it through.

Cloward-Piven Alive And Well: Progressives CONTINUE To Push For Destruction Of U.S. System

The next time you see a progressive liberal, realize that there is a good chance that they would love to see you in a soup line – helpless, hungry, desperate, and ready for “change.”

Back in August of last year, I wrote an article entitled, “Politico Article Reveals Obama’s Cloward-Piven Strategy Backfiring.”  I pointed out quite a few facts of history which I believed were important.  For example, I cited an article that defined the radical leftist Cloward-Piven strategy:

In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.

The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1972 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judaeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.

Does that sound like something you’d like to see happen?  I hope not!  But you can bet that there are a lot of people on the political left right now who would love nothing more than having a crack at reshaping American society in their own image.

I cited the words of top Democrats like Obama’s chief of staff who said:

EMANUEL:  “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.  What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.  This is an opportunity….  And this crisis provides the opportunity for us, as I would say, the opportunity to do things that you could not do before.”

And of course, you have Obama saying “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

Change it exactly how, Barry Hussein?  And what about those of us who liked the United States of America our founding fathers gave us who don’t want it “fundamentally transformed”?

We haven’t known exactly what Obama meant by that. Because Obama turned himself into a “blank screen” while he was running for president:

“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

As I pointed out in a recent article:

A politician who has Obama’s ostensible verbal skills is, quite simply, not a “blank screen” unless he wants to be one.

Obama did not want us to know who he was, because we would have rejected him as our leader if we knew.

The more we finally learn about who Obama really is and what he really wants to do, the less we are going to like it.

We’re seeing more and more now.  The man has a record.  And sadly, it is a record of filling his administration with far leftist radicals – even with outright self-described communists (e.g., Van Jones, Mark Lloyd, Anita Dunn, Carol Browner, Ron Bloom, Andy Stern) – and of pursuing government takeovers of one sphere of our economy (e.g., auto manufacturing, banking industry, financial sector, health care system) after another.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why a man who professes himself to be a free market president would appoint a man who would say “We know that the free market is nonsense” as his manufacturing czar.  Ron Bloom is a man who said:

“We know this is largely about power, that it’s an adults only no limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun. And we get it that if you want a friend you should get a dog.”

You’re a “free market guy” who appoints a man who thinks the free market is “nonsense” and agrees with Mao to restore our incredibly important manufacturing sector?

For the life of me, I can’t understand how a man who says he’s a “free market guy” would appoint Andy Stern to his fiscal commission given statements such as the following:

– “Because workers of the world unite, it’s not just a slogan anymore.”

– “We like to say: We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.”

This same Andy Stern – whom Obama has invited to visit the White House more than ANY other person – described Obama’s “free market” program this way:

We now have a new metric. The president says he wants to judge the new economy whether it increases the number of people in the middle class. Whether we have shared prosperity, not just growth. Which is a fundamental different philosophy then what we’ve seen in this country to date. Now how do we distribute wealth in this country … clearly government has a major opportunity to distribute wealth – from the EITC, from tax policies, from minimum wages, from living wages – the government has a role in distributing wealth and social benefits. We are at historic crossroads … in terms of what our new president is trying to do and a different way we are going to try and evaluate the economy. And so all of sudden we are witnessing the first new American economic plan led by the government, not necessarily by the private sector.

(Video available here).

You’re a “free market guy” and you appoint a massive big government Marxist to figure out how to reduce government spending???  You’re a “free market guy” and you’re pushing a “fundamentally different philosophy” than anything this country has ever seen?  You’re a “free market guy” and you want to redistribute the wealth at the expense of growth?  You’re a “free market guy” and you have an economic plan led by the government, and not the private sector?

Really?

And, of course, for the life of me, I can’t understand how Barack Obama would have installed a man (i.e., Van Jones) who routinely said things like this –

• “I met all these young radical people of color — I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’”

• How’s that capitalism working for ya?

• And the white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people-of-color communities.

• “This movement is deeper than a solar panel! Deeper than a solar panel! Don’t stop there! Don’t stop there! We’re gonna change the whole system! We’re gonna change the whole thing!

– to be his Green Jobs Czar!

“Free market guy”?  Really?  And I’m not supposed to be either rolling on the floor laughing or barfing in a giant bucket WHY?

Obama told us that he chose his friends carefully, and “carefully” chose to be friends with “Marxist professors” and Marxist terrorist-bombers.  The problem is that he’s STILL choosing to surround himself with Marxists.

Obama says his administration has a “fundamentally business- friendly” agenda and are “fierce advocates” for the free market.

But fully 77% of American investors understand Barry Hussein very, very differently:

Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) — U.S. investors overwhelmingly see President Barack Obama as anti-business and question his ability to manage a financial crisis, according to a Bloomberg survey.

The global quarterly poll of investors and analysts who are Bloomberg subscribers finds that 77 percent of U.S. respondents believe Obama is too anti-business and four-out-of-five are only somewhat confident or not confident of his ability to handle a financial emergency.

To summarize to this point, “Mr. Blank Screen,” who wants to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” by “never letting a serious crisis go to waste,” calls himself a “free market guy” while repeatedly appointing communists to important “free-market”-positions.  But more than 3/4ths of American investors who earn their bread and butter from the aforementioned free market think he’s full of crap.

With that foundation, let us get back to the strategy of Cloward and Piven.

The following comes from a member of the leftwing in very good standing.  He’s written and worked for LeftTurn, Political Affairs, and Monthly Review according to his Wikipedia entry.  He lives in Chicago (Barry Hussein’s hometown), where he founded Youth Against Apathy.

I instantly hearken to Michelle Obama’s saying of her husband: “He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism.”

At a recent Brecht Forum, event, Jed Brandt said the following:

JED BRANDT, COMMUNIST: “We have to help bring this government down, we have to help destroy this system and that requires increasing the alienation that working class and oppressed people feel. The way change is going to happen in this country is through the destruction of what we call the United States of America.

I’m opposed to white supremacy not because it’s white people involved. I am opposed to the system we traditionally call imperialism and the idea that some people have rights and privileges that are not granted to all human beings. And the solution to that problem is called communism and socialism and we should put it in our mouths. We should say it when we say what is your politics? I am a socialist. I demand that we have health care for people and it’s not a demand that’s negotiable with health insurance companies.

We will take your insurance companies; we will take the farms in this country; we will shut down the military apparatus in this country and I am tired of being told to stuff my anger back in my pants.

[Youtube]:

Compare that to what Cloward and Piven were saying needed to happen way back in the 1960s:

Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands

Am I the only one who finds it interesting that the man who says “The way change is going to happen in this country is through the destruction of what we call the United States of America” is demanding that ObamaCare be passed in his very next breath?

I mean, if the Democrat talking points had any validity, wouldn’t this guy be who wants to see America destroyed be saying, “I want health care that features tort reform, competition across state lines, and all the other elements of the Republican plan???

This is where articles such as  Cloward-Piven Crisis Care should start making sense.  I myself offered my own article, “ObamaCare Is Cloward-Piven Strategy In Microcosm” to establish this connection well before hearing Jed Brandt make the connection.  I cited the world famous Mayo Clinic as pointing out that ObamaCare represents the idea of:

accelerating the financial ruin of hospitals and doctors across the country

I cited the Wall Street Journal which pointed out that:

Once health care is nationalized, or mostly nationalized, medical rationing is inevitable

I pointed out that the Dean of the Harvard Medical School said that:

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.

I pointed out the fears of the California Medical Association that ObamaCare:

would increase local healthcare costs and restrict access to care for elderly and low-income patients.

As we speak, we are talking about the destruction of America by means of a political technique that the Democrats themselves called “the arrogance of power,” “majoritarian absolute power,” “the precipice of a constitutional crisis,” “the abandonment of the concept of check on power,” and “a naked power grab.”

My favorite description and prediction comes from Max Baucus, who is now pushing for the very thing that he said would be “the way Democracy ends. Not with a bomb but with a gavel.”

I think that last is correct.  ObamaCare, forced down the throats of Americans by the unAmerican nuclear option, will indeed be the way Democracy ends.

ObamaCare – by whatever name it is called – will be the ultimate actualization of the Cloward-Piven strategy.  It will in short order overwhelm and collapse our social support network just as leftists have been dreaming about for decades.

As one Democrat said, “Never mind the camel’s nose; we’ve got his head and his neck in the tent.”

There’s your REAL “hope” and “change.”  Too bad it doesn’t represent your hope, and too bad it is change that you most certainly don’t want.

What To Look For In Defeating The Democrats’ Nuclear Option

I most certainly hope Carole is correct in her article below.  In any event, hers is a good article describing the key hurdles Democrats intent to force their ObamaCare boondoggle through will have to overcome.

Obama’s House Is Leaking Votes
By Carole on Feb 28, 2010

There’s been much speculation lately on the fate of Obamacare in the US Senate. The ins and outs of reconciliation, once a little known technicality in the rules of that legislative body, are now common knowledge to political junkies of all ideologies. But the actual death bed of the president’s unpopular and obscenely expensive plan will most likely be the US House of Representatives.

Even if Democrats have the 51 votes they need in the Senate and the Republicans decide against proposing a flood of amendments that could indefinitely stall the reconciliation bill, Mr. Obama and his accomplices would still have to get the votes needed to pass Obamacare in the House.

In November, the House passed its version of health care reform with just two votes to spare; prevailing 220-215 with the help of Representative Anh “Joseph” Cao (R-Louisiana) who has said he will not back it again. (source) And Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) won’t be able to count on all of her fellow Democrats this time around either.

Two major changes that will affect this round of voting:

The first is the radical change in the political climate since November of 2009. While some Democrats who claim to be fiscally conservative and who represent traditionally Republican districts were somehow able to ignore the messages sent by voters in New Jersey and Virginia, they cannot ignore the one sent from Massachusetts just last month. The election of Senator Scott Brown (R-Massachusetts) clearly demonstrated what is likely to happen to the careers of elected officials who support Obamacare despite the wishes of their constituents.

The second major difference between November’s vote on health care reform and the next one in the House is that the bill passed last year included the Stupak Amendment. Of the 219 Democrats who voted ‘yes’ last time, 40 did so only because the bill contained that amendment preventing taxpayer dollars from being used to fund abortions. Those 40 representatives will almost certainly switch their ‘yes’ votes to ‘no’ since the new version of the bill being pushed by President Obama would strip out the abortion restrictions in favor of Senate language that many consider unacceptable. (source)

Republican House Whip Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) recently outlined the House changes since that first health care bill passed and said he now believes there’s no way to pass health care in the House with only Democratic votes. According to Mr. Cantor’s count, Speaker Pelosi doesn’t have more than maybe 202 votes; well short of the 217 needed to pass the second (and hopefully final) Obamacare bill. (source)

The last time President Obama and his cronies came up short on votes for his signature domestic issue, they started bribing Senators with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to get the votes they needed. The public now wise to this tactic and Senators Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana), Blanche Lincoln (D-Arkansas) and Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) have become examples to their legislative brethren of what happens to the political prospects of anyone who chooses Team Obama’s arm twisting and bribes over the expressed wishes of their constituents.

I personally believe that the Senate Republicans would be wise to first inform/threaten to use their option to shut down the Senate with endless amendments, and then follow through if the Democrats actually try to use reconciliation (aka the ‘nuclear option’).

Why?  Because I think the public would turn further against the nuclear option if they understand how extreme this tactic is, and just what the consequences of pursuing it would be.

Here’s what Senator Robert Byrd, who not only wrote the reconciliation procedure but is a Democrat to boot, said of the Democrats’ attempt:

Americans have an inalienable right to a careful examination of proposals that dramatically affect their lives. I was one of the authors of the legislation that created the budget “reconciliation” process in 1974, and I am certain that putting health-care reform and climate change legislation on a freight train through Congress is an outrage that must be resisted.

Using the reconciliation process to enact major legislation prevents an open debate about critical issues in full view of the public. Health reform and climate change are issues that, in one way or another, touch every American family. Their resolution carries serious economic and emotional consequences.

The misuse of the arcane process of reconciliation — a process intended for deficit reduction — to enact substantive policy changes is an undemocratic disservice to our people and to the Senate’s institutional role. Reconciliation, with its tight time limits, excludes debate and shuts down amendments. Essentially it says “take it or leave it” to the citizens who sent us here to solve problems, and it prevents members from representing their constituents’ interests. Everyone likes to win, and the Obama administration, of course, wants victories. But tactics that ignore the means in pursuit of the ends are wrong when the outcome affects Americans’ health and economic security. Let us inform the people, get their feedback, allow amendments to be considered and hear opposing views. That’s the American way and the right way.

If the public says it wants an end to the partisan bickering, they need to realize that the nuclear option would create nothing short of a full-blown war that could poison our political system for years, even decades, to come.

If the Democrats who deceitfully keep talking about “bipartisanship,” they should bloody well get one.  And the American people should be told in advance what that total war the Democrats will be starting would look like.

Second, I think it is vital that the American people be informed of just what the Democrats themselves said about the use of the nuclear option just a few years ago.

The following is a very short summary of the statements (fully cited here) made by key Democrats about how vile the use of reconciliation would be:

• It is “a change in the Senate rules” that “would change the  character of the Senate forever.”

• It is “majoritarian absolute power” which is “just not what the founders intended.”

• It is “the precipice of a crisis, a constitutional crisis.”

• It evaporates “the checks and balances which have been at the core of this Republic.”

• It is “almost a temper tantrum.”

• It is the abandonment of the concept of “a check on power” and an     abandonment of that which “preserves our limited government.”

• It is something that “will turn the Senate into a body that could have its rules broken at any time by a majority of senators unhappy with any position taken by the minority.”

• It “is ultimately an example of the arrogance of power.”

• It “is a fundamental power grab.”

• It “is a tyranny of the majority.”

• It is “where the majority rules supreme and the party of power can dominate and control the agenda with absolute power.”

• It is a “naked power grab.”

• It is to “change the rules, break the rules, and misread the Constitution so that they will get their way.”

• It is “The Senate … being asked to turn itself inside out, to ignore the   precedent to ignore the way our system has worked, the delicate balance   that we have obtain that has kept this Constitution system going, for immediate gratification of the present President.”

• It is “the way Democracy ends. Not with a bomb but with a gavel.”

How can it possibly be that – when the Republicans merely CONSIDERED using it in a way that nevertheless didn’t come anywhere NEAR the Democrats’ takeover of our entire medical system representing one-sixth of our national economy – it was so terrible, but now it is somehow justified???

The fact of the matter is that the Democrats condemn their present course as genuinely evil in their very own words.

We need to defeat health care.  It is amazing that fully 60% of the health care system is now already controlled by the government, which is running it a mind-boggling deficit of unfunded liability.  On what planet is it sane to say we need to save a failing system that has been taken over by the government by giving the government even more total control?

An analogous example would be for me to hit your car engine with a sledge hammer.  And when it starts running really crappy I tell you that all I need to do to fix the problems is give it another couple of good hard whacks.

I end by citing an article that every American should read which reveals what our health care system will one day look like if the Democrats’ sledgehammer attack is allowed to proceed.

‘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.