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When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; When the government fears the people, there is liberty.  ~ Thomas Jefferson

 

Entries Tagged as 'Reality Check'

ObamaCare’s Hotel California: The state moves to impose price controls you can never leave.

September 28th, 2010 · Deception, Democrats, Economy, Federal Spending, Government Control, Healthcare, Immigration, Non-Transparency, Selling Out the US, States, Tax Dollars, Unemployment

California, the novelist Wallace Stegner famously wrote, is like the rest of America, only more so—meaning that wherever the country is headed, the Golden State is probably there already. So the state’s ObamaCare advance planning deserves closer scrutiny, given that it mirrors the regulatory and ideological model that the White House favors for everyone else.

In a matter of days, California will set a precedent for the future of the U.S. individual and small-business insurance markets via ObamaCare’s “exchanges,” where people will purchase coverage at heavily subsidized rates. The exchanges don’t start up until 2014, but the states were given wide bureaucratic latitude in how they’re run, and Sacramento is using this flexibility to convert them into a pretext for imposing de facto price controls on the insurance industry.

Jerry Seib and Gerard Baker discuss the renewed furor over health care, including the war of worlds between House Minority Leader John Boehner and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

That may be what Democrats had in mind when they passed the bill, but it’s particularly unfortunate because in principle exchanges could be a useful reform. States could sponsor transparent, neutral clearinghouses that compare costs and benefits among plans, encouraging insurers to compete to offer the products that consumers find most valuable. An exchange could operate much like travel websites such as Expedia.com, and a good one along those lines started in Utah last year.

California looked further east for inspiration—to Massachusetts, which has the only other exchange in the country. Known as the connector, it’s the centerpiece of the ObamaCare beta test that Mitt Romney passed in 2006 and is now the power center of the state’s public utility-style insurance regulation. In the daisy chain of “expertise” that is the health policy world, California’s regulations were shaped by Jon Kingsdale, a devout White House ally who used to run the Massachusetts connector and is now a consultant.

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Two of Obama’s closest advisers among those likely to leave in White House shuffle

September 23rd, 2010 · Accountability, Change of Power, Dissention, Obama Exposed, Obama Nominees

By Anne E. Kornblut and Scott Wilson Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 23, 2010; 2:36 AM

In his nearly two years in office, President Obama has relied on a very small clique of advisers that serves as his most trusted sounding board on politics and policy.

Members of his staff describe Obama as wary of outsiders and reluctant to widen his inner circle. As one of his advisers bluntly put it, the president “doesn’t like new people.”

Like it or not, he will soon be surrounded by them as an expected staff shuffle will deprive Obama of two of his closest aides and an influx of replacements will take their places within the West Wing.

The inner circle – Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, senior advisers David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, press secretary Robert Gibbs and Vice President Biden – is breaking up, or at least breaking open. Emanuel is widely expected to run for mayor of Chicago, and Axelrod is likely to leave this spring to prepare for Obama’s 2012 reelection effort.

Obama will soon lose other top advisers. His chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, announced that he will return to Harvard, where he is a professor; Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina is expected to join Axelrod in Chicago; and national security adviser James L. Jones is said to want out by the end of the year.

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The Obama Economy: How trillions in fiscal and monetary stimulus produced a 1.6% recovery.

September 7th, 2010 · Accountability, Change of Power, Deception, Democrats, Dissention, Economy, Ethics, Federal Spending, Greed, Money Lost, Non-Transparency, Obama Nominees, Obama's Scheme, Selling Out the US, Terrorism from Within, Unemployment

So two months before an election, and 19 months after the mother of all spending programs, President Obama said yesterday he’s rolling out one more plan to stimulate the economy. We’ll discuss the details when they’re released, but the effort itself is a tacit admission that his earlier proposals have flopped. As the autumn economic debate gets underway, it’s important to understand how and why we got here.

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The recession preceded Mr. Obama’s Inaugural by 13 months, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, and so did the President’s fiscal policy ideas. George W. Bush got there first. In February 2008, he and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed on a $168 billion combination of federal spending and temporary tax rebates that were supposed to maintain growth through the housing market decline that election year.

Larry Summers, who would later become Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, made the case for such a stimulus to boost domestic “demand” in late 2007. Any stimulus, he told the Brookings Institution, should be “timely, targeted and temporary.” Peter Orszag, then at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) before joining the Obama White House, made the same case.

The official GDP statistics did show a growth blip in the second quarter of 2008 to 0.6%, but third quarter GDP fell by 4%, and we all know what happened after the financial meltdown. Stimulus I failed.

Enter Stimulus II, the $814 billion plan that was also supposed to make up for lost private demand. It too was a combination of one-time tax rebates and spending, mostly on social programs like Medicaid rather than on “shovel-ready projects.” Mr. Summers promised this would have a 1.5 “multiplier” effect on GDP growth, and White House economists Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein famously predicted the spending would keep the jobless rate below 8%.

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Obama’s economic team considering new stimulus package

September 2nd, 2010 · Deception, Democrats, Economy, Money Lost, Obama's Scheme, Selling Out the US, Stimulus, Tax Dollars, Taxes, Terrorism from Within, Treason

White House considering major tax breaks for businesses, sources say

By Lori Montgomery – Thursday, September 2, 2010; 5:33 PM

With the recovery faltering less than two months before the November congressional elections, President Obama’s economic team is considering another big dose of stimulus in the form of tax breaks for businesses – potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars, according to two people familiar with the talks.

Among the options are a temporary payroll tax holiday and a permanent extension of the research and development tax credit, say people familiar with the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to describe private deliberations.

Permanently extending the research credit would cost roughly $100 billion over the next decade, tax experts said. And depending on its form and duration, a payroll tax holiday could let businesses keep more than $300 billion they would otherwise owe the Treasury.

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Gloom for Democrats as they look to November

September 1st, 2010 · Accountability, Change of Power, Congress, Obama Exposed, Republicans

By Dan Balz Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 31, 2010; 11:39 PM

The Gallup organization dropped a bomb on the political world this week. In shorthand, the pollsters said Monday that if the midterm elections were held now, Republicans would take control of the House – and probably by a comfortable margin.

On Tuesday, James Campbell, a professor of political science at the University of Buffalo, weighed in with a prediction based on his modeling of the political climate. He said that Republicans are poised to gain 51 or 52 House seats, at least 11 more than needed to depose the Democrats.

Election Day is still two months away, but the twin findings added to the fear among Democrats that their House majority – and possibly their Senate majority as well – is in jeopardy.

For decades, Gallup has asked voters the following question: “If the elections for Congress were being held today, which party’s candidate would you vote for in your congressional district?”

This week’s survey produced the largest lead for the Republicans in the history of asking that question: 51 percent to 41 percent. Ninety-six percent of Republicans said they would vote for the GOP candidate, while 88 percent of Democrats said they would support the Democrat. Independents, who helped power Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008, split 48 percent to 31 percent for Republicans.

This measurement (known as the generic ballot question) has sometimes been considered an imperfect or misleading indicator of House election results. Gallup begs to differ. Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup poll, said that Gallup’s final survey of likely voters before Election Day has been an accurate predictor of the two parties’ share of the national vote in House elections. The national vote, in turn, he added, is an excellent predictor of seats won or lost.

Four years ago, when Democrats won control of the House, the final Gallup survey of likely voters gave Democrats an advantage of seven percentage points over Republicans. Their actual share of the national two-party vote was eight points more.

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Obama administration intensifies efforts in Sudan as Mid-Term election nears

August 30th, 2010 · Deception, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Obama's Scheme

By Mary Beth Sheridan – Monday, August 30, 2010

The Obama administration, which came to office promising stronger leadership on Sudan, is now scrambling to salvage a 2005 U.S.-backed peace accord and prevent Africa’s largest nation from sliding back into civil war.

In recent weeks, the administration has doubled its diplomatic presence in South Sudan and dispatched a respected former ambassador to help with negotiations on an independence referendum for the region, which is scheduled for January.

President Obama and his advisers are also mulling over incentives to persuade Sudan’s leadership to cooperate with the referendum, officials say.

Former officials and activist groups worry that the flurry of action may be too little, too late. They say the Obama administration’s efforts over the past year have been hobbled by infighting and a lack of high-level attention.

“President Obama’s approach to Sudan may well lead to his being the one who ‘lost’ Sudan and the opportunities for peace” in the 2005 accord, said Roger Winter, who helped negotiate the deal that ended Sudan’s 21-year civil war. He added, however, that the recently intensified diplomatic effort offers some hope.

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In 2010, Obama’s poll numbers less of an asset for congressional Democrats

August 30th, 2010 · Accountability, Change of Power, Democrats, Dissention, Obama Exposed

By Chris Cillizza Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 30, 2010; 12:18 AM

Two years can change just about everything in politics.

In the 2008 campaign, Democrats running for the Senate did anything – and everything – to associate themselves with then-Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

With about two months remaining in the 2010 campaign season, however, Obama’s political fortunes have dipped in a handful of states holding competitive Senate races – complicating the winning math for Democratic candidates already struggling with a pessimistic electorate that remains deeply concerned about the country’s direction.

“In midterm elections, the presidential numbers serve like a weight on scale,” said one senior Democratic consultant who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about the playing field. “The heavier [or worse] the numbers, the harder it is for any person in the party to get back to even keel.”

Recent polls on Obama conducted for many of the nation’s top Senate races show that those who disapprove of the job the president is doing outweigh those who approve.

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The Death of Conservatism Was Greatly Exaggerated

August 28th, 2010 · Accountability, Change of Power, Deception, Democrats, Dissention, Federal Spending, Government, Government Control, Greed, Money Lost, Non-Transparency, Obama Exposed, Obama's Scheme, Tax Dollars, Taxes

In 2008 liberals proclaimed the collapse of Reaganism. Two years later the idea of limited government is back in vogue.

By Peter Berkowitz

Last August left little doubt that a conservative revival was underway. Constituents packed town-hall meetings across the country to confront Democratic House members and senators ill-prepared to explain why, in the teeth of a historic economic downturn and nearly 10% employment, President Obama and his party were pressing ahead with costly health-care legislation instead of reining in spending, cutting the deficit and spurring economic growth.

Still, whether that revival would have staying power was very much open to question. A year later—and notwithstanding the Democrats’ steadily declining poll numbers and the mounting electoral momentum that could well produce a Republican majority in the House and a substantial swing in the Senate—it still is.

Sustaining the revival depends on the ability of GOP leaders, office-holders and candidates to harness the extraordinary upsurge of popular opposition to Mr. Obama’s aggressive progressivism. Our constitutional tradition provides enduring principles that should guide them.

In late 2008 and early 2009, in the wake of Mr. Obama’s meteoric ascent, the idea that conservatism would enjoy any sort of revival in the summer of 2009 would have seemed to demoralized conservatives too much to hope for. To leading lights on the left, it would have appeared absolutely outlandish.

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Harry Reid weighs in on N.Y. mosque: An attempt to save his job

August 16th, 2010 · Deception, Democrats, Ethics, Federal Spending, Obama's Scheme, Selling Out the US

By Karen Tumulty
Now that President Obama has addressed and amplified the issue, the political debate over the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero is being felt far from Lower Manhattan, in political races across the country.

But candidates could find it difficult to straddle the issue, as Obama did, by expressing their support for religious freedom while refusing to take a stand on the construction of the Islamic center.

The latest to weigh in: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D), who is battling to keep his seat in Nevada.

In a statement issued by his spokesman, Jim Manley, Reid came out against the building of the Islamic center.

“The First Amendment protects freedom of religion,” Manley wrote in an e-mail. “Senator Reid respects that, but thinks that the mosque should be built someplace else.”

He added: “If the Republicans are being sincere, they would help us pass this long overdue bill to help the first responders whose health and livelihoods have been devastated because of their bravery on 9/11, rather than continuing to block this much-needed legislation.”

Reid issued the statement after the campaign of his Republican opponent in the election, Sharron Angle, demanded that he take a position.

“As the Majority Leader, Harry Reid is usually President Obama’s mouthpiece in the U.S. Senate, and yet he remains silent on this issue,” Angle communications director Jarrod Agen said. “Reid has a responsibility to stand up and say no to the mosque at Ground Zero or once again side with President Obama — this time against the families of 9/11 victims. America is waiting.”

By Washington Post Editor | August 16, 2010; 3:20 PM ET

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Democrats uncertain about approach to midterms: Honorably would be Novel!

August 16th, 2010 · Corruption, Deception, Democrats, Economy, Ethics, Greed, Selling Out the US, Tax Dollars, Taxes, Terrorism from Within, Unemployment

Reference:  Just some ideas that come to mind

 

By Paul Kane – Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 16, 2010

The Democrats passed the stimulus package. They passed health-care and Wall Street overhauls and revamped the financing system for higher education. Their other main priorities, on immigration and energy, appear to be headed nowhere.

So, what will they do next?

It’s a question that has left congressional Democrats, who have spent the past two years mocking Republicans for lacking an agenda, without a clear plan of their own to promote in the final 80 days of the 2010 campaign.

House Democratic leaders issued lawmakers three sets of talking points that included one package of new legislation, a collection of modest bills designed to revive the manufacturing sector. Senate Democrats have not exactly jumped to embrace those proposals, instead suggesting that between now and Election Day a more detailed agenda might be forthcoming.

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