Obama Goes All In
Mar 16, 2010 Opinion, Political
The health care takeover the Democrats have been working on for over a year is coming down to the final hours and the majority party is pulling out all the stops. They are working on unconstitutional methods to pass the bill, circumventing the normal process and lying about the bill being bipartisan in that they incorporated some Republican ideas.
They have a shell bill which is what they will pass and then when it goes to committee they will remove the items and replace them with the things they really want.
Barack Obama discusses the idea of courage and says that the time for politics is over and Congress should do what is right and put politics aside. Obama does this while playing politics because he is a product of the Chicago thug machine and he does not know what courage is and he is unaware of how to do something without involving politics. Additionally, Obama has allowed politics to get in the way because his desire NOT to fail on this issue has led to his political power play to get it passed. As for courage, if Obama had that trait he would have scrapped the bill and started over in a bipartisan fashion.
Obama delayed his working vacation for a few days to go around the country and …wait for it…engage in a political campaign for the bill. He is out there pushing hard for the bill. In essence, he is now “all in”, a term that describes a card player who throws all his money in the pot.
Obama is now all in on this like he was with the Chicago Olympic bid, the governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey and the Senate race in Massachusetts. His spin doctors worked hard to make each of these look as if they were not Obama failures but they were.
Now that he is all in on health care he has no place to hide. His spin masters will not be able to spin this in any way, shape, or form should the bill not pass.
If this bill does not pass then Obama will be seen as having failed, especially by his own party. It will look, and rightly so, as if he gave it all he had and could not get it done even with super majorities.
He will be a failure and he knows it.
Right now the votes are not there but that does not mean it will fail to pass. There are plenty of backroom deals being made and offers are flying about the halls of the Capitol to give members anything they want for a yes vote. Pelosi is twisting arms two at a time and doing everything to force people to fall in line and vote yes.
And yet she does not have the votes.
If they happen to pass this then America will be outraged with those who sold their votes, and that is the only way they change, just as they were with Ben Nelson. That anger will show on election day and despite what the pseudo intellectual pundits say, Democrats will lose big. The Democrats know this and it is a major reason that many are hesitant to vote yes.
This is a lose lose situation for the Democrats because they will lose if this fails and lose bigger if it passes.
Obama has put them between Barack and a hard place and now he too, is all in.
But he does not have to worry about being reelected this year.
He has three years to recover. His Democrats in the House do not have that luxury and they know they are being hung out to dry.
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Tags: Congress, election, health care, lies, takeover
Democrats Push Forward Despite Danger
Mar 13, 2010 Political
The Democrats are moving along at full speed in order to ram the health care takeover down our throats (though it might be more appropriate to indicate they are ramming it in another body part considering what they are trying to do to us). Nancy Pelosi is busing tightening leashes and Barack Obama has postponed his mini vacation for a few days to help usher this thing along.
[note]I hope he has as much success as he did getting the Olympics in Chicago and Democrats elected in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.[/note]
I told you before that this is not about health and it is not about care, it is about control. It is also something that Democrats must pass. They need this to secure a win on a signature issue for Obama. Democrats push forward at their own peril because, by and large, Americans do not want this. The reasons are many including those who do not want it because it is not liberal enough, those who do not like certain provisions and those who do not want any of it because they believe government does not belong in the health care business.
No matter what the reason, the opposition is too loud to ignore. The Democrats However, are good at doing just that. Last August Americans came out in force to town hall meetings and voiced their objections. The Democrat’s answer was to stop having town hall meetings.
Patrick H. Caddell and Douglas E. Schoen, two Democrat pollsters, are warning of Armageddon if the Democrats pass this monstrosity over the objections of the public. They freely admit that Democrats stand to lose seats in the midterm elections (a historical trend) but go on to say that Democrats will lose many more if they pass it.
Their blind persistence in the face of reality threatens to turn this political march of folly into an electoral rout in November. In the wake of the stinging loss in Massachusetts, there was a moment when the president and the Democratic leadership seemed to realize the reality of the health-care situation. Yet like some seductive siren of Greek mythology, the lure of health-care reform has arisen again.
~snip~
However, a solid majority of Americans opposes the massive health-reform plan. Four-fifths of those who oppose the plan strongly oppose it, according to Rasmussen polling this week, while only half of those who support the plan do so strongly. Many more Americans believe the legislation will worsen their health care, cost them more personally and add significantly to the national deficit. Never in our experience as pollsters can we recall such self-deluding misconstruction of survey data.
The writing is on the wall. Despite the claims that people like the bill when they know more about it, the reality is people do not like it and do not want it. Democrats proceed at their own peril.
The authors indicate that people agree that reform is needed and that some parts of the plan are appealing but that the plan in total is not liked. This has not stopped Democrats from moving on, full speed ahead. They continue to claim people will like it once they see what is in it (which we apparently cannot do until it is passed). This is untrue because people already know what is in it and they do not like it.
As Caddell and Schoen state; “…the battle for public opinion has been lost.”
But this will not stop Democrats from walking off a cliff.
And the bad thing for them is that if this does not pass, at this point in the game, those who voted for it will be in real trouble for backing a loser and against the wishes of those they are supposed to represent.
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Tags: caddell, deception, health care, Obama, polls, public support, schoen
Reconciliation Hits A Snag
Mar 12, 2010 Political
The process by which Congress wants to ram the health care takeover through has hit a bit of a snag. The House and Senate have not convened a conference committee to reconcile their respective bills and they do not intend to because that would require the Senate to go through its established voting procedures.
The scheme that has been devised is to use reconciliation, a process reserved for budget matters only, to pass a bill. Under the scheme, the House would have to vote for the Senate bill and then the Senate would use reconciliation to tweak the bill to please the members of the House. The problem is that once the bill is voted on by the House then there is a single, identical bill. It could be sent to Barack Obama and signed into law. This is one reason that many members of the House are not willing to vote for the Senate bill.
The House does not trust the Senate (and by extension, it does not trust Obama).
There were other schemes introduced to help ease the mistrust. The original plan to pass the bill and then tweak it is not popular because there is no guarantee the Senate would hold it until the tweaks are completed. That is now a non issue because the Senate parliamentarian has determined that reconciliation can only be used for an existing law. In other words, the Senate bill would have to be voted on by the House, signed into law by Obama and then reconciled with a simple majority of the Senate.
The House will not go for this because it does not want to take the chance that the Senate bill will become law without the changes the House wants.
So the Democrats are continuing to use convoluted logic to concoct new schemes. The House is considering enacting a rule saying that once they vote on the changes to the Senate bill the Senate bill will be deemed to have passed. In other words, they will vote for a rule change and if that rule change passes they will vote for the fixes to the bill and if that passes the Senate bill will be deemed to have passed. This would allow them to vote for what they want before they have a law to vote on.
It is likely that this is unconstitutional. And do they think Americans are so stupid that we cannot see what they are doing?
Just like Democrats though, change the rules during the game to get the outcome they want.
I have a feeling that this is going to take quite some time to work out because the Democrats are making up the rules as they go along and are doing everything, legal or not, to pass this albatross. This will likely not be voted on prior to the Easter break and if it makes it that far without getting a vote then it might not make it this year. Republicans have already indicated they will follow the reconciliation rules to the letter to keep any item that is not a budget item from passing. This means many of the fixes that the House wants will not make it through. The House Democrats, who are already uneasy, must be even more so after this latest news. They want to get this done soon because they have things to do.
Democrats have to get home to campaign for reelection. They have a lot of lies to tell and a lot of explaining to do.
Sources:
New York Post
Bloomberg
Washington Examiner
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Tags: Democrats, health care, lies, Obama, reconciliation, trust
Preexisting Conditions
Mar 11, 2010 Political
The health care takeover is on life support and all the socialist medicine in the world might not be able to save it. This has not stopped Barack Obama from campaigning around the country and it has not stopped those who think they have a right to government paid health care from holding rallies.
At a recent rally those with the microphone led crowds in chants about free health care for all.
Many young people do not understand that they will be required to buy their own health insurance. They complain that health insurance is too expensive but they will be forced to buy health insurance and there is no way the cost will go down.
The mandate to buy health insurance is needed to cover people with preexisting conditions. Insurance companies routinely refuse to cover people with preexisting conditions. I think there should be reform to require them to cover the preexisting conditions but also allows them to charge more for the insurance. Why should people, many of them young and healthy, be required to pay huge amounts of money in order to cover the elderly and those with preexisting conditions?
The left likes to tell us that since government can force you to have car insurance it is legal for it to force you to have health insurance. This is untrue because you have a choice NOT to drive. Since they use that analogy, let’s go with it a bit further. Car insurance companies require bad drivers to pay more money for car insurance. If this is allowed then why not require those with preexisting conditions to pay more for health care coverage?
The funny thing is that the same liberals who applaud employers who refuse to cover their workers who smoke (to keep costs down) demand that government require insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions which are not covered to, wait for it…
Keep costs down.
The health care takeover bill is losing Democrats and the trust issues and parliamentary manipulation might just well bury this thing in the graveyard of bad legislation.
Right where it belongs.
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Tags: Democrats, health care, mandates, Obama, preexisting conditions
Health Care Sob Stories More Common Than Actual Events
Mar 8, 2010 Political
Barack Obama says he reads letters that are sent to him and it is true that he has used some of them for political advantage. He walked into a meeting this past week and read a letter from some person regarding the increase in insurance premiums. He has used these kinds of letters to garner support for his health care takeover.
One thing we will never know is how many letters he gets telling him that the writer is happy with his health care. I bet Obama gets more letters of this nature than the ones where some poor schmo was wronged by an insurance company. Those letters always see the light of day. The other kind never will.
Interestingly, we are supposed to think about how bad our system is when Obama and his Democrats read these kinds of letters (the summit had letter after letter) but we are supposed to dismiss as unusual any story that shows the horrors of government run health care. Medicare denies services at a greater rate than the private companies, ignore it, not important. People dying in the UK under the health care system, ignore it because these examples are little stories and do not mean anything. Canadian politicians coming to the US for health care that is the best available, forget it, not worth mentioning.
Some old lady has to use her dead sister’s teeth, read the letter and make it the norm.
American Thinker has a great article describing the politics of the sad sack letter.
Doug Ross highlights the wonderful medical care in the UK and Canada where people lie in filth and are left to die and politicians come to America for the best care available, respectively.
The sob stories only seem common because that is all we hear. The same people who tell us how wonderful socialized medicine is and that these stories are rare expect us to believe that the letters read by politicians are representative of the system of health care as a whole.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Continually saying our health care is bad does not make the statement more true any more than continually continually saying attacks by Democrats were done by right wingers makes that claim true.
As an aside, Obama says not to worry because his plan will save us money. Of course this is absolutely untrue. Once again, saying something is so does not make it so. But, even if it did save money any potential savings would be offset by the 9.7 TRILLION DOLLARS Obama will add to the debt in the next decade. Even if his health care saved money (it does not), it will not be anywhere near 9.7 TRILLION DOLLARS.
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Tags: distortions, health care, lies, Obama, pentagon shooter, sob stories