Moe Lane of Redstate brings us this gem, which once again highlights the Obama administrations ineptitude when dealing with the media, including the media that put Obama in the White House:

Executive summary: David Axelrod conference-called lefty bloggers to beg for their help in the November elections (because they’ve been ever so useful so far in the 2010 election cycle); and apparently the lefty bloggers are feeling quite aggrieved and put-upon for being called upon to do as they’re bid. One even went so far to as to categorize the entire interaction between the Democratic establishment and the netroots in furtive, sexually shameful terms (one hopes that this… no, that’s too vicious a comment to make); apparently, this is something that happens often enough that it has the name of ‘hippie

The point the bloggers were making is how the White House publicly criticizes liberal bloggers from Robert Gibbs’ White House briefing room pulpit, but then quietly asks them to support the President and Democrats up for reelection this fall.

Things got ugly on the call between Axelrod and liberal bloggers when blogger Susan Madrak, apparently frustrated with Robert Gibbs recent accusations of liberal bloggers being too critical of the White House, shouted out “you want us to help you, the first thing I would suggest is enough of the hippie punching,” Madrak added. “We’re the girl you’ll take under the bleachers but you won’t be seen with in the light of day.”

In typical Chicago tough guy fashion, Axelrod proceeded to mix it up with Madrak, and when Axelrod attempted to minimize her concerns she stated, “Don’t make our jobs harder”, to which Axelrod replied “Right back at’cha. Right back at’cha.”

This type of exchange, and more importantly treatment of the very people that helped perpetrate the fraud that was “Hope and Change” on the American people, is all too common coming from the members of Obama’s inner circle.   They believe that they are so skillful that the “close of the moment” given today, will overcome the “bash of the moment” they handed out yesterday or last week.

The Obama administration has gotten away with it up to this point, because Obama is THEIR guy.  The liberal blogoshpere and media put him in the White House, foregoing the duty of reporting the truth, in order to get a far-left, liberal President in the White House.  Now, they find themselves with the dilemma of continuing to blindly support the man they elevated to President, or report the truth regarding his broken promises and failed policies.

Axelrod, Gibbs and company clearly believe that when push comes to shove, or hippie punching as we now know it, that the liberal blogosphere and MSM will continue blindly support President Obama’s agenda.  All they have to do is command their servants in the media to promote the party Obama line.

To quote Sarah, “How’s that hopey changey thing working out for you?”

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Our friends at the Gateway Pundit bring us this story of how far the President’s star has fallen:

Over at the left-wing Daily Beast, Gail Sheehy has a story that should make every Obamaite tremble in fear of November 2. As Sheehy reports it, in New York President Obama couldn’t even fill a room that holds 650 even though they slashed the ticket prices from $500 to $100 a person to get in.

On the 22nd Obama appeared in New York for a fundraiser but organizers found that attendees were harder to come by than ever. As Sheehy points out, this is six weeks before the elections. Less than two months and Democrats can’t garner enough enthusiasm to sell 650 tickets to see the president up close and personal.

Sheehy goes on to say that even after cutting the ticket price to $100 and sending out repeated email blasts begging Obama supporters to show up, the organizers only managed to get 450 people to show up in a room setup to hold 650 people.  Of the 450, a number of them were there to protest President Obama.

In addition, poor attendance resulted in the fund-raising dinner with President Obama later that evening to be slashed to the bargain price of $15,000 a plate, which is far less than the $30,000 a plate fund-raising dinner that he held not that long ago.

At last week’s CNBC Town Hall, an Obama supporter told the President that she and others were tired and worn out from defending him, and asked when they would see the change he promised.  This week the President only manages to fill 2/3 of a 650 person room in New York City.

The question isn’t how far has the President’s star fallen, it’s how much farther will it fall.

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This week we get the news that some health insurers have decided to stop offering child-only plans due to cost and Obamacare regulation compliance issues.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air explains:

Most of us outside of the White House understood that by forcing insurers to take on more risk while pressuring them to keep prices down, we would either see insurers stop offering certain policies or go out of business altogether.  ObamaCare advocates kept insisting that we had to help the children by proceeding apace with their government takeover of the industry.  The result?  Suffer the children:

Some of the country’s most prominent health insurance companies have decided to stop offering new child-only plans, rather than comply with rules in the new health-care law that will require such plans to start accepting children with preexisting medical conditions after Sept. 23.

The companies will continue to cover children who already have child-only policies. They will also accept children with preexisting conditions in new family policies.

Critics blast the insurers for their “immoral” decision, but they had little choice.  The federal government mandate requires them to accept any child at any time, regardless of any pre-existing condition, but doesn’t yet require parents of healthy children to buy policies for them.

There is a commercial out there that starts “this is the biggest no brainer since…” and I think that’s an appropriate phrase to use here.  Anyone that claimed this would not happen, or couldn’t have been foreseen, either had their head buried in the sand or have chosen to intentionally mislead others.

The very concept of insurance and risk pools has been ignored in the abomination law known as Obamacare.  Unless your goal is to drive insurance companies out of business (can you say single payer system?), it is not reasonable to tell insurance companies to increase coverage (no pre-existing conditions, no life time limits, etc.), but then tell them they can’t increase costs.

As opposed to the individual mandate as many Americans are, the reality is that the ONLY way that requirements such as no lifetime coverage limits and no pre-existing conditions can possibly work is to require every one in America to purchase coverage.  However, as the Obamacare law was designed to win elections in the November 2010 elections and get Obama re-elected in 2012, Pelosi, Reid and company chose to implement ‘benefits’ just before the mid-term elections, but wait until after the 2012 Presidential election to implement the unpopular aspects like the individual mandate.

Nancy Pelosi famously said that we have to pass the bill to know what’s in it, but the fact is that even now that it’s passed, most Congressmen and American citizens have not read the bill, and don’t know what’s in it.  More importantly, they still don’t understand the negative ramifications of the bill.

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Dear Friend,

I am closely monitoring thirty five House races and want to send you updates every week or so on the ones that most need your help. The most recent list is enclosed below. It has three new candidates: Rob Steele in Michigan, Morgan Philpot in Utah, and Mike Keown in Georgia. And it still has on it a number of candidates from the previous list who still need plenty of help. Everyone on this list can win. They just need your help.

Please help them out. All of them if possible. Our last mailer made a big difference, and many of went on the air for the first time with their ads! From there, the ads produce good polling numbers that attract national donors. But we need to catalyze the process.

Rob Steele, Michigan

My how time flies. John Dingell has been in Congress for 55 years! The all time record for the House. And Dad was in the seat for 23 before that! Now the dynasty could end and evict the 83 year old Dingell who, more than any other Congressman, wrote the health care bill. Dr. Rob Steele, a heart doctor, is opposing him and is only seven points behind! But nobody believes Dingell could lose. The truth is that Steele can win. Help him out.

To help Steele’s campaign, Go Here

Morgan Philpot, Utah

Utah, the most Republican state in the nation, should not have a Democratic Congressman but it does. But this may be Matheson’s last term because he is facing a strong challenge from Morgan Philpot who is only three points behind. It is just this kind of Democratic seat, buried in a heavily Republican district, which keeps Pelosi, Rangel, and Barney Frank in power. Please help Philpot. He urgently needs your help!

To help Philpot’s campaign, Go Here

Mike Keown, Georgia

Democratic incumbent Sanford Bishop gave scholarships to his daughter, his niece, his staffer’s wife, his staffer’s daughter, and other children of close friends of his wife. He needs to be defeated. He returned the money after he was caught — after he was caught. Mike Keown is mounting a stiff challenge and is tied in the polls. Help out Mike and get rid of a member of Congress who is a trifecta: A liberal, a Democrat, and corrupt!

To help Keown’s campaign, Go Here

Beth Anne Rankin, Arkansas

She is running against Mike Ross, the biggest hypocrite in Washington (quite a title!). When he could have killed Obamacare in committee, he voted for it — his was the swing vote. Then, on the floor, he voted no twice. He needs to be defeated. Rankin is a strong conservative voice who worked for Mike Huckabee when he was governor.

To help Rankin’s campaign, Go Here

Go to Dick Morris’s site to see the other candidates that he has highlighted this week who need your help.

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Multiple polls have shown that a significant portion of American voters either consider themselves a part of the Tea Party movement, or at minimum state they relate to the agenda that the Tea Party promotes.

One of the major problems is that most Tea Party members are in favor of limited government and spending, and feel that there is currently little difference between the Republicans and Democrats in Congress.  Many of them espouse a “flip the House” philosophy where by EVERY member of Congress would be replaced, not just Democrats.  It’s this fiscally conservative mindset, as compared to Republican mindset, that has led to many independents, and even Democrats, being attracted to the Tea Party movement.

Dick Morris discusses the myth of conservative vulnerability and explains why in today’s environment being a fiscal conservative is a quality many Americans are attracted to:

Yesterday’s primary victories of O’Donnell in Delaware, and DioGuardi in New York illustrates how the Tea Party is cleansing the Republican Party and installing true believers over professional politicians. It is a healthy trend that will continue to recreate the Party of Reagan.

But the conventional media, instead of hailing this trend, warns that conservatives cannot be elected and bemoans the victory of true believers saying that it is equivalent to handing seats to the Democrats and the liberals. This reasoning, which made sense in other times, is badly flawed in today’s political climate.

…

[T]hese days, social issues are in remission and economic/fiscal problems have, understandably, taken center stage. In this environment, purists of the right have a big advantage because nobody doubts the sincerity with which they embrace the goals of limited government, low taxes, and reduced spending. Politicians of all stripes – including most Democrats – vow allegiance to them as does the overwhelming majority of the electorate. In this environment, the distinctions of left and right give way to the difference between sincerity and insincerity, leaving the voters to judge. With candidates like Sharron Angle in Nevada or Christine O’Donnell in Delaware or DioGuardia in New York, voters don’t have to guess. They know real conservatives when they see them.

Rather than attacking candidates like O’Donnel, the GOP leadership should be embracing them.  It is the Tea Party and other grass-roots conservative movements that have created the huge enthusiasm gap between Republican and Democratic voters, NOT some new found love for the Republican party.

One of the Republican leadership’s greatest fears was that Tea Party candidates would run as third party candidates, not as Republicans, which would in most cases split the vote — handing winnable elections to the Democrats.  The Tea Party backers and candidates did their part, and backed candidates on Republican tickets.  However, the big-government, Republican establishment has not been upholding their end of the bargain.

If the Republican party doesn’t start to embrace the will of the people, the conservative, small-government candidates supported by the Tea Party and other conservative movements, they may find themselves facing 3rd party candidates in 2012.

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Real Clear Politics’ average of polls shows Republicans with a 6 point lead, which is a 25 point reversal from when Democrats led by nearly 20 points last summer.

A new AP poll shows that Republicans lead among likely voters is ten points (53/43) and the AP points to most Americans feeling America is heading in the wrong direction as evidence that the deck is strongly tilted against the Democrats in the upcoming mid-term elections.   In addition, the AP points to the 40-90% higher turnout than expected in the Delaware GOP primary as another indication of what to expect in November.

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey breaks down President Obama’s crumbling approval ratings, which clearly are a factor in the Democrat’s lack of support heading into the November elections:

The news continues to worsen for Obama.  He gets a 42/58 on the economy, a 38/61 on the budget deficit, 40/59 on immigration, , and 42/58 on unemployment.  Republicans outscore Democrats on trust on the economy (46/41), national security (54/37), federal deficit (47/40), taxes (48/42), and job creation (45/42).  And this is in a sample with a 44/40 split for Democrats, with leaners; without leaners, it’s 31/25 for Democrats.  If they can’t get better numbers than this from a six-point lead in the base sample, the Democrats are heading for the woodshed in less than seven weeks.

The question isn’t if the Republicans will gain seats, but how many.  Some analysts claim the GOP will easily take control of both the House and Senate, while others state it is unlikely they will take control of either.   One lesson Republican leaders, candidates and voters should learn from the recent British elections is that early leads in polls are not cause for victory parades.

The two greatest advantages that Republicans have in the upcoming elections are: President Obama’s lagging support, and the much higher enthusiasm among Republican voters — especially conservatives — as compared to the enthusiasm among Democrats.

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He, like most Americans, do not believe the mosque should be built so close to ground zero, and Andy is trying to do something about it.

Andy, along with construction workers, vendors and planners across the country are pledging to deny their labor to the building of the ground zero mosque.

Visit the 911 Hard Hat Pledge to learn more and see how you can help.

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Foolishly, most Americans assume that Congressmen actually READ the bills they are voting on and no what’s in it BEFORE they vote on it.  Silly us.

Politico recently reported that NO Democratic incumbents are using health care as one of the platforms they are running on for reelection.  What is supposed to be the crowing achievement of the Democratic party.  A decades old goal that has finally been reached.  The “this one’s for Teddy” accomplishment that will bring America in line with the rest of the civilized world.  Yet, not ONE single Democrat is running on the fact that they passed Obamacare.

The question of why, has to be asked.  Is it because they still haven’t read the bill and don’t want to be caught off guard by questions from voters who actually have read the bill?  Is it because they finally read the bill and realize that it contains a LOT of bad stuff that will raise costs and not keep their promise of “if you like your health care plan you can keep it”?  Is it because premiums are already going up for individuals and small businesses, due to the provisions of the law that go into effect next month?

Maybe it’s because roughly 2/3 of Americans aren’t in favor of the law.  Possibly, it’s because while Democrats took political cover by falsely claiming it would reduce the deficit, but now enough real data (including the docfix that they delayed to get a falsely positive CBO score) has come out to prove that it is far from a deficit reducing law.

Regardless of the reason, Democrats are running away from Obamacare as fast as they can as they campaign for reelection.  That should tell you something.

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey explains how the administrations attempt to front load the ‘good’ stuff in the bill to garner support, has actually already begun to backfire:

After the polls showed that the newly-passed ObamaCare bill remained deeply unpopular with voters, the Obama administration reshuffled the rollout in order to convince Americans what a great deal they would get.  By “front-loading” the most popular provisions to make them effective immediately, the White House hoped that the momentum would shift to support for the one legislative achievement of Barack Obama’s turn — or at least neutralize its negative influence.  Instead, ObamaCare remains as unpopular as ever, and the bill will come due just before the midterms:

Health insurers say they plan to raise premiums for some Americans as a direct result of the health overhaul in coming weeks, complicating Democrats’ efforts to trumpet their signature achievement before the midterm elections.

Aetna Inc., some BlueCross BlueShield plans and other smaller carriers have asked for premium increases of between 1% and 9% to pay for extra benefits required under the law, according to filings with state regulators.

These and other insurers say Congress’s landmark refashioning of U.S. health coverage, which passed in March after a brutal fight, is causing them to pass on more costs to consumers than Democrats predicted.

Even though the bill has passed, which according to Madam Pelosi should allow us to know what’s in it, a dirty secret that most still don’t understand is the incredible control that HHS will have of their health care.  Almost all aspects of insurance, and as a result insurance costs and covered (or not covered) treatments, will be dictated by HHS regulations.  HHS will dictate what insurance plans must contain.  HHS  will dictate how much an insurance company can charge.  HHS will determine whether or not you can keep the plan that you have and like, and CBO analysis shows that the vast majority of Americans will NOT be able to keep the plan they have, even if they like it — contrary to what President Obama promised.

If Democrats believed so strongly in Obamacare that they had no qualms about using parliamentary tricks and dirty politics to get it passed into law, why are they hiding from it now that they are trying to get re-elected?

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We all know that every time we purchase a new car, or new home appliances, that the new ones are more energy efficient than the old ones.  The only problem is that the cost savings often don’t justify the cash we have to lay out to get the new energy efficient models.  The same is true with businesses.

In many cases, when a businesses makes capital investments to upgrade a plant to make it more productive, a by product of that is replacing old, energy sucking, environment-polluting equipment with newer, more efficient, greener varieties.  However, like the consumer, it can be difficult to justify the capital outlay.

Christopher Horner of Big Government explains how President Obama’s plan to allow businesses to accelerate their deductions for capital expenditures will not only help the economy, but also help his green agenda:

The logic is simple and the Dutch actually showed (again, accidentally) how this works to reduce emissions: business do not replace capital equipment as early or often as they might like because the tax code disincentivizes it, with depreciation schedules instead of treating it like other business expenses. They therefore postpone purchasing newer, more efficient (and typically more energy efficient) equipment.

Change that, and they will pull through new technology into use.

In a way that is moving investments forward, a la cash for clunkers. But in other ways it is just smart and the right thing to do.

Here’s the downside: yes, you get emission reductions and not by harming economic growth, but actually encouraging it. However, the political class do not get to reward their constituencies with cap-n-trade wealth transfers from you and me to them, don’t increase the cost of energy, and obtain no new control over our lives.

And as many of you know, that is the whole point behind the scheme urgently needed to combat “climate change” (why not continental drift?) that actually would have no detectable impact, according to anyone, on climate.

It will be interesting to see if the President promotes this as helping America move to a greener economy, or if instead shies away from that type of statement.  While if he was true to his convictions about reducing carbon emissions and having a greener economy, he would embrace this type of change without mandate, the tax credits have two major flaws when viewed by his liberal base:  first, they will be seen as pro-business by his base who believe corporations should pay more tax, not less.  Second, it fails to redistribute wealth, which is one of the main goals of cap and trade, or cap and tax as many call it.

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Ed Morrissey of Hot Air breaks down the surprising Washington Post/ABC poll:

Three months ago, the WaPo/ABC sample had a nine-point Democratic advantage in the partisan split, with a D/R/I of 34/25/38.  Today’s poll has a D/R/I among registered voters of 31/26/37, with a five-point advantage still being too high and both Democrats and Republicans slightly underrepresented.  Both Rasmussen and Gallup this year have the actual partisan gap at a single point.

…

Obama’s 46/52 is the first underwater rating of his term in office from the Post/ABC poll, which shows readers what creative sampling can do.  He’s been underwater on the economy for most of the year, though, with a term-low 41/57 at the moment.  His numbers haven’t changed much on the deficit or on Iraq, despite his Oval Office speech on the latter.  He gets a 49/45 for following the Bush playbook, from 48/42 in July — hardly an improvement.

In April, WaPo/ABC showed that 39% believed that Obama’s economic policies were making the economy better, while 26% said they were making it worse, and 32% believed they had no effect. In the most recent poll, 30% said they were making the economy better, 33% making it worse, and 36% believe that Obama’s economic policies and hundreds of billions of dollars spent have had no effect on the economy.

In addition to showing failing support for President Obama and his economic policies, there was bad news for Democrats with the mid-term elections less than two months away.

• 40% of registered voters say they have move confidence in Democrats and 38% say they have more confidence in Republicans.  Three months ago Democrats had a 12 point margin. (note, this polls was heavily weighted in favor of registered Democrats)
• 47% of voters said they would vote for the Republican in their Congressional district, and 45% said Democrat.  However, when looking at those that said they were likely to vote, the numbers favored Republicans 53%/40%.
• 55%/39% voters say they would rather have Republicans in control to keep Obama in check, rather than Democrats in charge of Congress to support the President’s agenda — this gap is double what it was three months ago.

The American people clearly no longer believe in the President’s message of hope and change.   After 20 months of hearing the President blame George Bush and the Republicans for everything that goes wrong, even though Democrats have controlled Congress for four years and they had a near unprecedented super majority for Obama’s first year in office, voters are no longer buying what President Obama is selling.  Promise after promise has been broken, from campaign promises about being the most transparent administration ever to not raising taxes on those making less than $200,000 to unemployment not going above 8% if his union-endorsed spending stimulus bill was passed.

People are growing weary of the Campaigner in Chief who relies on the Teleprompter in Chief , and who has failed to become the Commander in Chief and lead this country in a time of great need.

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The recent bump in the unemployment rate to 9.6%, when we were supposed to see economic recovery during the summer of recovery, lends some credence to Morris’ concerns:

Why is unemployment remaining so high? Because the totality of Obama’s policies are dragging us into a depression.

• The prospect of dramatically higher taxes next year is freezing consumer spending, particularly in the upper income ranges which spend a third of America’s consumption.

• The huge changes that are looming in medical care brought about by Obama’s health care legislation are freezing new employment and expansion in the medical sector which accounts for 16% of GDP.

• The financial reform legislation has so raised the prospect of a federal takeover of any bank that makes “imprudent” loans that financial institutions are afraid to lend, freezing new job creation.

• The looming possibility of cap-and-tax legislation in the name of halting climate change is freezing any expansion in the manufacturing and energy sectors since these policies will force jobs to move overseas to locations that do not impose such a tax (e.g. India and China).

• The massive expansion in the deficit and in the resulting debt has so eroded confidence in our nation’s future that Americans are now saving 6% of their income, up from 1% in the past, sapping consumer spending.

• The threat of new rules for union elections that will spread private sector unionization is freezing business expansion plans.

President Obama is so focused on remaking America in the mold of Western Europe, that he appears blinded to the damage that he’s doing.  While his election was clearly a vote against Republicans following unhappiness with some of the Bush policies, President Obama and his administration viewed the election as a mandate for their liberal agenda.   This belief in a far-left mandate has allowed him to ignore the clear will of the people as reflected in polls, Town Hall meetings, and other events and just plow ahead with his far-left, liberal agenda — regardless of the cost to America.

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It's good to be the King

Here’s some more commentary on President Obama’s continued spending orgy.

While millions of Americans can’t find a job, millions more have given up looking, and millions more are struggling to keep their homes out of foreclosure, President Obama is living the high life.  Sending his wife to vacation in Spain at the tax payer’s expense, taking family vacations in Florida and Cape Cod, choosing golf over visits to the Gulf oil disaster, and taking Michelle to New York for ‘date night’, all while telling us we need to be more frugal.

Apparently, it’s good to be the King.

We now know that the summer of recovery actually was a description of his multiple family vacations and many rounds of golf with his fat cat buddies  Now that President Obama has ‘recovered’, he’s ready to spend more of your hard earned dollars.  Even though roughly a third of the $800+ billion of his first failed stimulus bill is still unspent, President Obama is pushing for a new $50 billion spending spree.  Doctor Zero details it:

President Obama “unveiled” his new “stimulus” plan in Wisconsin today.  It was a lot like watching an alcoholic unveil his new plan to get sober by switching to lite beer:

We’re going to “fire up sluggish economic growth” by plowing another fifty billion deficit dollars into roads, rail, and airports?  It’s hard to believe even the American media would be lazy enough to write such a headline with a straight face.

Does anyone seriously think our economy is just waiting for another fifty billion dollars’ worth of roads to come roaring back to life?  I guess business owners have all sorts of property staked out for new factories and shops.  They’re just waiting for someone to build roads leading to them.  Does all of this Administration’s economic knowledge come from playing “Sim City” computer games?

…

The Administration assures us its little espresso shot of new stimulus spending will be revenue neutral, paid for by “ending tax breaks for oil and gas companies.”  Oh, that’s just wonderful. Those tax hikes on oil and gas will be passed directly along to the consumer, in addition to hindering investment in the development of new energy resources.  The last thing a fragile, recessionary economy needs is an increase in energy costs.  I’m all in favor of tax simplification, but it has to be across the board.  Adding another few thousand pages to our ridiculous tax laws, to target unpopular companies for cash to fund more pork spending, plays up the worst aspects of a dysfunctional system.

The Obama plan:  Increase spending and debt until the point it is declared unsustainable, and then claim the only option is to raise taxes on corporations and the rich.

The result, businesses are not expanding due to concerns of looming tax increases, which means they also aren’t hiring.  No growth in hiring, means no growth in spending, which results in a floundering economy as confirmed by the recent falling GDP numbers.

Now, with hundreds of billions of unspent stimulus dollars, President Obama wants to spend another $50 billion in infrastructure spending which accomplishes two things, neither of which is economic growth:  first, it provides an excuse to raise taxes on energy companies; second, it let’s them put up more pretty signs around the country advertising how the Dem spending orgy is helping YOU, which they hope will overshadow 20 months of bungled administration policies and avoid a Democratic blood bath in November.

Does anyone really believe that after President Obama promised unemployment would stay below 8% if his first stimulus bill was passed (the one written in large part by union special interest groups), and after he promised the summer of recovery would turn the economy around, that now his latest spending bill will “fire up sluggish economic growth” as he claims?

So, is this really change you can believe in?

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The only problem is that the first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem.  Unfortunately for America, President Obama hasn’t reach the stage of accepting he has a spending problem.   So, the Democratic spending orgy is set to continue.

Ed Morrisey of Hot Air nicely sums up the latest round of spending the President is pushing:

What happens when over a hundred billion dollars in borrowed cash gets plunged into infrastructure spending and it fails to kick-start the economy?  According to this administration, spend another $50 billion on the same failed policy.  Barack Obama will unveil his new economic stimulus plan in Wisconsin today, while Russ Feingold looks for a place to hide:

US President Barack Obama unveils plans Monday to spend at least 50 billion dollars to expand and renew US roads, railways and airports, in a fresh bid to fire up sluggish economic growth.

Obama, under intense pressure over November’s mid-term congressional elections in which his Democrats fear heavy losses, was set to make the announcement in a speech in Wisconsin, an official said. …

A White House official said that the “bold” infrastructure plan will be front loaded and make significant investments in the first year, in a bid to stimulate the sagging economy and boost jobs growth.

While some don’t think another stimulus can pass before the mid-term elections, Morrisey isn’t so sure.  He points out that stimulus bills like this are a way for Congressmen to get pork for their states and districts, and “showing the pork” might be the only thing that can get some Democrats re-elected this fall.

The fact that $100 billion has already been spent on infrastructure as part of the Democrat’s massive $800+ billion stimulus bill last year and that it did nothing to create sustained job or economic growth doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the President’s decision to spend some more of your money — to create more debt for your children and grand children.

It’s important to see this for what it is, an attempt to win votes for Democrats in the fall.  Even Vice President Biden admitted that they had structured the first massive spending stimulus bill to spend the most money and create the most jobs in the first half of this year — well over a year after it was passed.  It was to be part of their now infamous recovery summer, which would so enthrall the masses that they would line up at the polling stations in November and vote to re-elect the Democrats that created this economic nightmare we are suffering through.

Unfortunately, as has been the case time and time again, the Obama administration underestimates the intelligence of the American people.   All indications are that come November he will find out just how badly he has underestimated their intelligence.

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Howard Portnoy is reporting that the original owners of the ground zero mosque building had an offer and agreement in place to sell the building for $18 million, only to back out of the deal at the last minute and sell the building for $4.8 million.  You don’t have to be a Good Will Hunting level math genius to know there’s something wrong with them apples.

Howard Portnoy of the Hot Air Green Room tells us how less is more when selling a mosque:

Unless the property is at 45-47 Park Place in New York City, aka the site of the controversial Ground Zero mosque. The original owners of the buildings at that address, the Pomerantz family, inexplicably rejected an offer of $18 million in cash, then sold to prospective mosque builder Sharif El-Gamal for $4.8 million.

The arrangement has a number of people scratching their heads – not least among them Kevin Glodek, the real estate developer who tendered the $18 million offer in 2007. According to the New York Post, an agreement had been reached between Glodek and majority owners Kukiko Mitani and Melvin Pomerantz. Glodek had even received keys to the extant buildings. Then suddenly the owners reneged on the deal only to accept another at one fourth the original amount.

I’m not, and never have been, one to jump on conspiracy theory bandwagons, so I won’t even attempt to put these dots together and provide a theory as to why the building owners would opt to sell a building for $13.2 million less than they could have gotten for the building.  I think anyone reading this would agree there is something wrong with this picture, but it’s not possible to determine what it is.

As to the mosque itself, I will provide a few thoughts, since I have not been covering the story this summer.

I, like most Americans, believe that they have an absolute legal ‘right’ to build the mosque in that location.  At the same time, I, like most Americans, believe they have an absolute moral ‘right’ NOT to build the mosque in that location.  3,000 people were murdered on that site, and like it or not, it cannot be overlooked that it was Islamic extremists that murdered those innocent people, and did great harm to our economy and national psyche, both of which have still not fully recovered.

It is also true that dozens or hundreds of innocent Muslims died during the terrorist attack.  Obviously, it is not fair to blame all Muslims for the 9/11 attacks, no more than it would be fair to blame all Baptists after a man raised a Baptist goes on a killing spree.  That said, the right thing to do would be to not build the mosque on that location, but move it to another building in lower Manhattan, farther away from ground zero.

If the goal is truly to bridge the Muslim and Christian world, then the wishes of the family members of those that died MUST be considered — the concerns of the citizens of this nation MUST be considered.  If the goal is to bring together Christians and Muslims, then there is only ONE right option.

On the other hand, if their stated goal is not their true goal, then unfortunately they have a legal right to build the mosque a stone’s throw from ground zero.

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However, while President Obama’s recovery summer was a complete and utter failure, it seems that he and Michelle Obama enjoyed their multiple vacations ranging from Spain to Florida to Cape Cod.  Of course, that didn’t fill the entire summer, so he had to fill in the gaps with some relaxing golf.   What was it that the President said about tightening belts?  ”When times are tough, you tighten your belts. You don’t go buying a boat when you’re trying to pay your mortgage. You don’t blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save on college. You prioritize, you make tough choices.”

It would seem that “it’s good to be the King” applies here, since that allows President Obama to use the old “do as I say, not as I do” approach leading our nation – to send his wife on a European vacation with tax payer’s money, followed by ‘family vacations’ in Florida and on Cape Cod, while millions of Americans are struggling to pay their mortgage and put food on the table.

Like so many other American’s, while the President was playing golf with his fat cat buddies, and he and his family were traveling the globe for their summer vacations, I was working and NOT taking a vacation.  The only vacation I was able to take this summer was a vacation from Liberal Whoppers.  With a busy summer and quite a bit of traveling for my day job that pays the bills, I had to take a brief hiatus from Liberal Whoppers.

As Labor Day signals the unofficial end of summer for most people, my vacation from Liberal Whoppers has now come to an end.  With less than 60 days to what will be one of the most important elections in recent history, Liberal Whoppers is back on the air and will be providing news and commentary leading up to the mid-term elections.

God Bless America

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The age of changing the way Washington works and the most transparent White House ever, appear to be as fictitious as the claims that no one earning under $250,000 will see one dime of a tax increase, the health care debate will be televised on CSPAN, and that there would be no lobbyists hired by the Obama administration.   How Fleetwood Mac put it?  Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies…

Ultra liberal Helen Thomas has railed against President Obama’s attempt to control the press saying that even “Nixon didn’t try to do that,” Thomas said. “They couldn’t control (the media). They didn’t try… I’m not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to fare-thee-well–for the town halls, for the press conferences,” she said. “It’s blatant. They don’t give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame.”

There is no better example than the way Robert Gibbs has not only refused for months to answer questions about the alleged Sestak bribe, but has also mocked the media that has asked him to explain Sestak’s claim that he was offered a job to drop out of the Senate race.  It’s the same level of arrogance displayed up and down the Obama administration, from Gibbs, to Axelrod, to Emanuel, to the President.

Dick Morris says that the Administrations arrogance and disregard for the law could be in for a rude awakening through something called universal jurisdiction:

The Pennsylvania Attorney General, Tom Corbett — who is the Republican nominee for Governor this year — has ample jurisdiction to convene a grand jury to get to the bottom of the scandal and answer the key questions:

1. Who offered a job to Sestak?
2. What job was proffered?
3. And did the president know of the offer?

Corbett’s jurisdiction stems from the concept of universal jurisdiction, now accepted virtually everywhere…  This principle gives jurisdiction to law enforcement in the place wherever any act occurred that may have resulted in a crime.

Thus, if Cong. Sestak was in one of his homes, in PA or VA, when he received a telephone call offering him a job if he withdrew from the PA Senate primary against Sen. Arlen Specter, law enforcement authorities in PA and VA — both of which have Republican state Attorneys General — can subpoena Cong. Sestak to testify before a state grand jury and compel him to answer the who, what, when, and where that everyone has a right to know.

The people of the United States and, particularly the people of Pennsylvania, want these questions to be answered honestly.  They will not settle for a Democratic stonewall that refuses to let the truth emerge.

After months of stonewalling, Robert Gibbs said on Sunday that “nothing inappropriate” took place.  If that was the case, then why did the White House refuse for months to answer questions about Sestak’s claim?  Why has the Obama controlled justice department failed to open an investigation and prove that nothing inappropriate took place?  Guilt? Arrogance? Contempt for the law?  Take your pick, but the end result is the same.  An allegation of serious misconduct has been made and the White House has ignored all requests to explain what took place with Joe Sestak.

It remains to be seen whether or not Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett chooses to investigate the alleged attempt to influence an election by bribery, because the Obama justice department has refused to do their job.

Either way, this story is likely not going away any time soon, and the arrogance that Robert Gibbs and the rest of the Obama administration has shown on this matter likely isn’t helping stop Obama’s free-fall in the polls.

Update: Shortly after posting this, I read on Hot Air that there are allegations that the White House offered other candidates jobs to drop out of races.  Specifically, that Andrew Romanoff was offered a job to drop out of the Colorado Senate race against Michael Bennett:

The White House denied it at the time, natch, but the Post cited “several top Colorado Democrats” for corroboration. Just wondering: How many of these strangely similar allegations, any or all of which could conceivably violate federal law, are needed before Eric Holder decides it’s worth taking a closer look? That’s not to say anything will come of it — Michael Mukasey, Bush’s AG, explained to Dave Weigel today how easy it is to phrase these offers in a way that makes them hard to prosecute — but surely it’s worth finding out what, precisely, was said. In fact, Mukasey himself called for a special prosecutor. How about it, champ?

The Top Kill procedure pumps heavy drilling mud into the well to stem the flow of oil. Once the oil flow is stopped, then they can pump concrete in to permanently seal the well.

That Allen’s comments to reporters:

The so-called “top kill” effort, launched Wednesday afternoon by industry and government engineers in Houston, has pumped enough drilling fluid to block all oil and gas from the well, Allen said. The pressure from the well is very low, but persistent, he said.

Once engineers have reduced the well pressure to zero, they will begin to pump cement into the hole to entomb the well. To help that effort, he said, engineers are also pumping some debris into the blowout preventer at the top of the well.

Allen said one ship that was pumping fluid into the well has run out of the fluid, or “mud,” and that a second ship is on the way. He said he was encouraged by the progress.

“We’ll get this under control,” he said.

Update: BP stopped pumping drilling mud for about 18 hours to analyze the results.  On Friday, they have tried a junk shot (shredded rubber and golf balls) and then began pumping drilling mud again.

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It would appear that small bump is gone and he has began his downward spiral again.

A new Rasmussen Reports poll has recorded the worst Presidential Approval Index yet recorded for President Obama.  The Rasmussen approval index is the difference between those likely voters that strongly approve of the President and those that strongly disapprove.  The new poll shows only 23% of voters strongly approve of the President, while 45% strongly disapprove (that’s more than the combination of those that strongly or somewhat approve of the President, which is only 43%).

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows that 23% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-five percent (45%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -22. That’s the lowest Approval Index rating yet measured for this president (see trends).

Enthusiasm for the president among Democrats, which bounced following passage of the health care law, has faded again. Just 48% of those in the president’s party now Strongly Approve of Obama’s performance. That’s down from 65% earlier.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air says that as bad as Obama’s overall approval rating is, his approval on key issues has to have the White House worried:

The internals for perceptions of Obama are looking very shaky indeed.  Only 39% approve of his performance on the economy; only 44% approve of his overall leadership.  Just 37% approve of his energy policies.  A microscopic 26% trust Obama in an economic crisis, and only 35% believe his ethics to be good or excellent.

Keep an eye on the numbers after Obama’s presser on Thursday.  He may get a bump just for showing up; if he does, expect him to start hitting the campaign trail ASAP.  If he doesn’t, don’t expect to see Obama much at all.

As bad as these numbers are, they are still bolstered by the largely glowing press coverage that President Obama is receiving from the mainstream TV and print media.   We are just starting to see key liberals in the media, and in some cases Congress, start to question President Obama on issues from his handling of the BP gulf oil spill, to the alleged Joe Sestak bribe, to his refusal to take questions from the press except when it is a one-on-one interview with a friendly reporter.

As the the national debt rises, the border situation escalates and the realities of the bait and switch Obamacare come to light, it’s becoming clear that more and more people have had enough of “hope and change.”

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As updates are made available, we will report on the progress of the top kill procedure.

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The last month has been no different, when he attacked Arizona’s attempt to curb the out of control illegal immigration that is bankrupting that state, along with focusing on attacking BP as yet another greedy business who will be kept in check by the President’s foot on their throat.  He’s repeatedly attacked corporate America and large financial institutions, and acts surprised when the stock market remains skittish and on the verge of another crash.

President Obama, time and again, tries to ride the populous wave, attacking whatever group he thinks will play best with American voters, regardless of whether their are any grounds for his attacks, or whether he has even read a short 16 page bill that he keeps mischaracterizing.

Dick Morris explains how President Obama is seeing a backlash in his approval numbers as a result of focusing more on populist politics than solving the serious problems America is facing:

The oil spill, the Arizona law, and the fallout from the Greek crisis are a trifecta of issues that are driving Obama’s job approval ratings to an all time low. After four months of hovering between a low of 46% and a high of 49% in the daily Rasmussen polls, Obama has dropped precipitously to only a 42% approval rating.

The three issues that are depressing his ratings have a great deal in common. In each case, the president originally seized on the issue to make populist political hay. Then, when the problem wouldn’t go away, voters began to realize that Obama is, in fact, the president and, logically enough, blamed him for the three ills that beset them.

When oil started to spill into the Gulf, President Obama saw a partisan opportunity to blame Republicans who had chanted “Drill, Baby, Drill” all during the summer of 2008 as high gasoline prices gave the McCain candidacy new steam. Even though he had, with lamentable timing, conceded and allowed expanded drilling a few weeks before the rig exploded, the impetus for drilling was clearly seen as Republican and the disaster hurt Republican ratings. Obama couldn’t resist also piling populist scorn on British Petroleum, lambasting big oil for the spill.

But then the oil did not stop flowing. Now the American people are tired of hearing about BP’s faults and are demanding presidential action to stop the spill. As the oil seeps onto the beaches of Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, it also seeps into Obama’s poll numbers and drags them down.

A week after the spill, at which point the Obama administration had done basically nothing to evaluate or mitigate the damages from the oil spewing into the gulf, Obama’s solution was to snap at a staff members, “plug the damn hole.”   A month later, with little more having come out of the White House than those four ridiculous words, the oils is still gushing into the gulf.

ALLAHPUNDIT of Hot Air talks about Obama’s brilliant solution, and about the press finally beginning to turn on Obama:

If Bush had uttered something as mindlessly self-evident as “plug the damn hole” during crisis management, there’d already be t-shirts on sale on lefty blogs with that phrase emblazoned over a picture of him looking like a baboon. What’s doubly bad for The One right now, of course, is that spill anxiety is reaching a crescendo just as the story of the White House trying to bribe Sestak to drop out of the race is taking off again. The left’s grudgingly turning on him over that too, first with Tim Kaine admitting over the weekend that, yeah, maybe the White House should come clean and today with Dick Durbin(!) piling on

A couple days ago we reported on the fact that while Obama administration officials are making the Sunday talk show rounds reiterating how they will keep the boot on BP’s neck and shove them out of the way if they don’t get the job done, the Louisiana marsh lands are awash in oil, because President Obama sat on the sidelines or stood on the stump  making sure he didn’t let this “crisis go to a waste”, rather than giving Louisiana permission to dredge up sand to create a barrier to protect the delicate marshlands.

The only real question is what the next phase of the White House plan to not let America’s blackened beaches and dieing coastal ecosystem be a crisis that they let go to waste.  Expect President Obama to try and exploit this tragedy in at least three areas:

1. Use this as an excuse to apply some type of windfall profits tax on oil companies, possibly in the guise of a clean up fund for future spills.
2. Announce a reversal of his largely worthless decision to open up new areas to off shore drilling.
3. Use this to hard sell green energy and his cap and trade bill.

President Obama will use the gulf oil spill, the Arizona illegal immigration crisis and any other crisis that strikes America for his own political gain.  He has shown that clearly in his first sixteen months in office and there is no indication that he plans to stop campaigning and start governing any time soon.

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First and foremost, before the massive oil spill could become Obama’s “Katrina” the liberal mainstream media would have to stop worshiping at the Altar of Obama and provide some unbiased reporting.  This type of reporting has been few and far between.

Allahpundit of Hot Air sums up the hypocrisy of the media:

Well, look on the bright side: If nothing else good comes from this disaster, at least now we have a roughly quantifiable sense of how long it takes for media outrage to build towards Obama versus towards Bush. Figure Dubya would have been under fire for dragging his feet on the spill after, what — maybe three days? It’s now 34 days since BP’s rig exploded and only yesterday did frustration really start bubbling on the Sunday chat shows.

Beyond the MSM mostly producing puff pieces or apologies for any of President Obama’s mistakes, there is the simple question of “did he do anything wrong?”

Initially, I looked at the “Obama’s Katrina” statements as nothing more than politics as usual.  An attempt by the right to return the favor for the blame that President Bush received due to the ineptitude of the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans.  I am not a proponent of unfairly criticizing President Obazma, only because the press and left unfairly criticized President Bush.

However, now that we are over a month in, President Obama is clearly handling this massive disaster in a disastrous way.  Not only is he attempting to gain populous, political points by attacking BP and big business, which is Obama as usual, but more importantly he isn’t do anything to address the problem.  As an example, Louisiana has been waiting to get approval from the Corp of Engineers to use dredging ships to create a sand barrier around the Louisiana barrier islands.  Doing this would protect the delicate marshlands, but the Corp of Engineers refuses to approve the dredging, claiming they have to determine what impact it will have on the area first.

What “impact”?  Could it possibly have more impact than millions of gallons of oil flooding the marshlands, killing plant and animal life?

Rather than getting his hands dirty and helping solve the problem by picking up the phone and giving Louisiana permission to dredge and build the sand barrier islands, Obama is simply trying to make political hay by attacking BP and big business.  Talking about how he will keep his foot on the neck of BP and make them clean up their mess.

It’s time for the President to realize the American people don’t care about where his foot is, they care about their coastline.  He needs to get off the political stump and get to work solving the problem.  Start working with the Gulf Coast Governors to come up with solutions. Get them the oil booms, ships and skimming equipment they need.  There will be plenty of time for Obama to exploit the disaster for his political gain ‘after’ the spill is under control and the cleanup is done.

Is it Obama’s Katrina?  No, it’s far worse than that.

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After Republicans made news several weeks ago by filibustering a vote to open debate on the Financial Regulation Bill, the final passage of the bill was aided by four Republicans who crossed over in support of the bill.  While Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe are liberal Republicans and often vote with the Democrats, it surprised many that Senators Scott Brown and Chuck Grassley also sided with the Democrats on another piece of legislation that passes a large chunk of the American economy over to Government control.

Maybe Brown thought this was the “people’s bill”.  In one of the first true tests of what type of Republican Senator Brown will be, many feel he came up well short of the mark.

Dick Morris explains why this bill is so dangerous, especially when stacked on top of Obamacare:

The bill authorizes the Secretary of the Treasury – a political appointee – to seize any financial company (bank or nonbank) simply because, in his opinion, it is too big to fail and in danger of insolvency.  This power can be used for political retribution, pressure for campaign funding, or any other abuse bureaucratic whim or partisan politics can conceive.  It is a power Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez would love to have!

The legislation also requires that any business that extends credit, in any form, needs to clear the loan instrument in advance with the new consumer protection agency.  The backlog of pending applications will strangle consumer credit.

Now the federal government has effectively taken over about one third of our national economy by passing Obamacare and regulatory reform in almost the same breath.

It’s hard to know exactly where to place this bill on the ‘alarm’ scale.  On the one hand, the bill failed to regulate what many would argue are the institutions that played a major role in the near economic collapse of the US economy, Fannie and Freddie, which also happen to be big financial supporters of the Democratic party.   It was Democrats like Barney Frank and Luann Waters, along with Obama adviser and former CEO of Fannie Mae, that blocked every attempt to impose reasonable regulations on Fannie and Freddie over the last 5-8 years.    Raines was reported to have earned about $90 million in his five years as Fannie Mae CEO, which he later had to partially repay in a settlement related to overstating Fannie’s earning by nearly 50% while he was CEO.

The role of Frank, Waters, Raines and other Democrats in what led up to the financial crisis is important, because the Democrats have used the economic melt down, caused in large part by liberal meddling and regulations, to declare a failure of the free market system and claim it proves that deregulation doesn’t work.  They hide the fact that they not only lowered the capital requirements for Fannie and Freddie and fought all Republican attempts to require levels of capitalization on par with banks that provide loans, but also mandated that  banks give a certain percentage of their loans to people that otherwise would not qualify for a loan.  They forced banks to provide loans to people who were likely to default on the loans, and as a result helped create the sub-prime nightmare that almost destroyed the American financial system.

Now, after liberal meddling created this mess, they say, “the Government is here to save the day” and pass a Financial Regulation Bill that gives the politically appointed Secretary of the Treasury the ability to seize any financial institution that he or she deems to be too large to fail.

Many believe that the true goal of Obamacare is to create an environment where insurance companies cannot remain profitable, and therefore cannot survive, so that the public insurance exchanges can be replaced with what President Obama and other Democrats have openly said is the end goal, which is a single payer, or national health care system.

While some scoff that off as paranoia and conspiracy talk, when you look at how the Democrats have managed to cause a near financial collapse, and use it as a justification for passing a bill that can lead to the takeover of the financial system, those paranoid ramblings start to look a whole lot less paranoid and a whole lot scarier at the same time.

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Photo by Gage Skidmore

Like with his father, Ron Paul, it’s easy to often find yourself saying “did he really just say that” when listening to Rand Paul speak.

Last year, fellow Libertarian Ron Paul was taped talking about how the CIA runs the military, the federal reserve, pretty much the whole country.   He’s been an outspoken proponent of eliminating the IRS, along with the Departments of Education, Energy, Commerce, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and FEMA to name a few.

The elder Paul also believes in a non-interventionist policy, possibly an isolationist one, and would close all US basis on foreign soil and bring all US troops back on to American soil.

When it comes to Rand Paul, we don’t know nearly as much as we do about Ron.  We know that he has also spoken of eliminating the Department of Education and the Federal reserve.  He’s in favor of closing GITMO and doesn’t believe terrorists should be tried in military tribunals.  Beyond that, we only have bits and pieces of what Rand believes, but it seems that he parallels his father’s positions in many areas.

The problem with Ron, and it appears Rand, is that while they often have a constitutional basis for their positions, when they voice them, they sometimes, for lack of a better word, come off a bit ‘wacko’.

In a recent interview with Rachel Madow, he allowed himself to get trapped.  The Talking Points Memo explains what he meant while appearing to oppose the civil rights act:

“Well, there’s 10 — there’s 10 different — there’s 10 different titles, you know, to the Civil Rights Act, and nine out of 10 deal with public institutions and I’m absolutely in favor of,” he told Maddow deep in their 15-minute interview. “One deals with private institutions, and had I been around, I would have tried to modify that.”

Got that? Rand Paul agrees with most of the Civil Rights Act, but not the part that deals with private businesses. And he won’t say whether or not that one part of the bill would have been a deal-breaker if he had been in Congress when the bill was up for a vote.

That’s it, essentially. Paul said many, many times in the interview with Maddow that he is not a racist, and that his motivation for saying what he’s saying about the civil rights act is not race, but rather allowing business owners their right to “free speech,” which in this case is the freedom to discriminate.

“Should we limit speech from people we find abhorrent? Should we limit racists from speaking?” Paul told Maddow. “I don’t want to be associated with those people, but I also don’t want to limit their speech in any way in the sense that we tolerate boorish and uncivilized behavior because that’s one of the things freedom requires is that we allow people to be boorish and uncivilized, but that doesn’t mean we approve of it.”

When it comes to spending taxpayer dollars, Paul says he is all for laws requiring equal accommodation for everybody.

This is classic Paul, whether Ron or Rand.  They have very strong convictions about individual and state’s rights, and when expressing those convictions you never know what exactly might come out of their mouth.

J.E. Dyer of the Optimistic Conservative wrote on Hot Air about the contrarian, Libertarian Rand Paul and two recent incidents that might haunt Paul between now and November:

There have been two incidents now, since the Kentucky primary, in which Rand Paul has failed to prostrate himself automatically before a political shibboleth.  One concerned the Civil Rights Act, the intent of which Paul has expressed full support for.  His quarrel is with the element of the Civil Rights Act that authorizes the federal government to regulate private businesses.

The other is Paul’s criticism of Obama’s “boot on the neck” comment about BP, and of the general societal attitude in the US that everything must be litigated and litigable fault assigned for any bad thing that happens.

The question we are left with is whether Rand Paul is going to be a blessing or a curse for the Tea Party.  After winning his primary battle, he quickly proclaimed it a victory for the Tea Party.  But, is it?  The Tea Party movement is already demonized by the main stream media.  More times than not, with outrageous assertions, if not out right lies.  When a self-proclaimed communist flies a plane into an IRS building, the headlines read “will unstable man’s attempt to destroy an IRS building spell doom for the Tea Party.”  The fact that there was no ties between the Tea Party and the left-wing whack job was irrelevant, because it was an opportunity to demonize the movement.

Now with Rand Paul being the new ‘face’ of the Tea Party candidate, every word he utters, every position he takes, every non-populist view he espouses will be tied to the Tea Party.

Blessing or Curse?  While it will take months to know for sure, there is one thing we can be sure of and that is that the main stream media will use every misstep that Rand Paul makes as chance to tear town the Tea Party movement.

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I am in the process of upgrading the WordPress theme, and now have to regenerate all the image thumbnails displayed on the home page and manually reapply a number of customizations to the theme’s code.

Everything should be back to normal shortly.

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Campbell Brown has been a dismal failure on CNN and trails not only prime time leader Bill O’Reilly, but also Keith Olbermann and Nancy Grace.  Olbermann averages less than a third of the viewers that O’Reilly brings in, but Brown is down around a sixth (~15%) of O’Reilly’s audience.

NewsBusters reports that to her credit, Cambpell Brown has resigned, realizing that there is no indication that her dismal ratings will grow:

Give Campbell Brown credit. Unlike many of her colleagues, who from all appearances will have to be dragged kicking and screaming away from their microphones once their networks can no longer afford to subsidize their dwindling audiences, Brown recognizes that she’s in a business that has to make money.

Brown’s evening CNN show has consistently failed to reach enough viewers to justify itself, and she concluded that there was no realistic hope of recovery. So, unlike a certain CBS Evening News anchor, Campbell Brown is doing the honorable thing, and resigning. She has told the network to find someone who might perform better.

Now, while that’s only a shocker in that CNN and Brown have finally come to their senses and realized that Foxnews and O’Reilly aren’t just experiencing a temporary bump, what is truly amazing about this story is how the always-biased Associated Press have reported this story.   The AP is attempting to spin Brown’s failure, along with the rest of CNN”s poorly performing prime-time lineup, as a result of their ‘non-biased’ approach to reporting the news:

Cable news viewers have increasingly turned to edgier, opinionated shows in prime-time, leaving behind CNN and its effort to be non-biased.

I included a link to a copy of the AP story that Newsbusters.org preserved on their website, anticipating that the AP might change that laughable part of their story, which they did.

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Now comes round two.  The Climate Change bill The Cap and Trade bill The American Power act is an attempt by Obama and the Democrats in Congress to emulate what they see as a model green economy, Spain.  Prior to the election, President Obama admitted that his view of a green economy would include massive cap and trade taxes applied to energy, which would make electricity (and other energy) sky rocket.  In his view, this is a good thing, as the increased cost to the American public will create the pressure needed to spur on the development renewable energy.

The fallacy with Obama’s approach is that every place that renewable and green energy production has been forced, energy costs have skyrocketed (one of the main factors in Los Angeles being on the verge of bankruptcy) and have caused massive economic burdens.

Pajamas Media has received a leaked report that documents the massive failure of Spain’s green economy.

But today’s leaked document reveals that even the socialist Spanish government now acknowledges the ruinous effects of green economic policy.

Unsurprisingly for a governmental take on a flagship program, the report takes pains to minimize the extent of the economic harm. Yet despite the soft-pedaling, the document reveals exactly why electricity rates “necessarily skyrocketed” in Spain, as did the public debt needed to underwrite the disaster. This internal assessment preceded the Zapatero administration’s recent acknowledgement that the “green economy” stunt must be abandoned, lest the experiment risk Spain becoming Greece.

The government report does not expressly confirm the highest-profile finding of the non-governmental report: that Spain’s “green economy” program cost the country 2.2 jobs for every job “created” by the state. However, the figures published in the government document indicate they arrived at a job-loss number even worse than the 2.2 figure from the independent study.

The document itself, which is actually a slide presentation, doesn’t go into a lot of detail (presumably, an oral presentation accompanied it), but it does show large increases in green energy and renewable energy costs, which resulted in large increases in energy costs being passed on to the end consumers (industry and individuals).  This also appears consistent with California’s complete failure when it legislated renewable energy be used in the state and completely underestimate the cost burden that would be put on the state, and cities such as Los Angeles.

Despite these dismal failures in California and Spain, President Obama continues to promote his cap and trade agenda, which will put a massive financial burden on an already reeling American economy with the imposition of large energy tax increases to industry and consumers.

Combine the massive cap and trade taxes (estimated to be between $1,000 – $3,500+ per family) with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the expected increase in the death tax next year (which doesn’t just hit the rich, but also family businesses like farms that are passed on to children), all the Obamacare fees and taxes that will be passed on to consumers, and the looming VAT tax.

That’s a massive new tax burden on American citizens.  Not just the rich, but ALL Americans, or at least all Americans that are working and paying taxes.

If we thought the economy was in bad shape the last 18 months, just wait until all those new taxes start piling up.

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When a conference is held to actually discuss and debate climate change and what impact man is having, the main stream media is nowhere to be seen.

Rick Tzupeck of Big Journalism describes the Heartland conference and the utter lack of coverage by the main stream media:

You would think that a conference that features some of the world’s leading scientists talking about a hot-button issue like global warming would attract a bit of old media attention. The Heartland Institute’s Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, currently being held in Chicago, features distinguished scientists like the University of Colorado’s Dr. William Gray, Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon, MIT atmospheric physicist Dr. Richard Lindzen, former astronaut and United States Senator Dr. Harrison Schmitt and the guy who broke the hockey stick, Steve McIntyre. But, while there are a number of bloggers here, while Pajamas Media is here, while the European press is here – including the BBC – and while I’m here, the MSM is nowhere to be found.

…

It’s refreshing to write about climate change and note a lack of consensus. That’s science the way it’s supposed to be: researchers attacking a problem from different angles, finding different answers and learning from each other’s work. It’s one-hundred eighty degrees the opposite of the cheerleading competitions that the IPCC conferences, like the most recent one in Copenhagen, have become.

So why does the old media ignore the rich, diverse opinions and research that this conference offers? Not only is there no one here from the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN, the Chicago Tribune didn’t even send a reporter (one of their columnists did show up however), even though the venue is within walking distance of Tribune Tower. Remarkable. Is the MSM drinking its own stale Kool-Aid, convinced that the science really is “settled” and that oil money just has to be behind any contrarian opinion? Or are they just so embarrassed now that the wheels are coming off of the global warming bus that they just can’t face the public? Probably a little of both.

Is anyone that watches the main stream media coverage of climate change surprised by this?  Like with recent political elections, the mainstream media has transitioned from disinterested observer that reports the facts to political activist.  Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but it seems that unlike the polar bear, reporters with integrity are becoming an endangered species.

There are few people, even among devout global warming skeptics, that state unequivocally that man is not at least part of the problem of global warming.  However, contrary to what Al Gore may have told you, the debate isn’t over and those scientists that are putting politics aside are simply asking for an honest debate where science and fact are the basis for that debate, rather than politics and winning government grants being the primary motivation.

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Call it a continuation of the Obama global apology tour.  Call it a continuation of the administrations attacks on America and long standing American allies, while bowing to and hugging the dictators of the world.  You can call it a lot of things, but unfortunately you can’t call it good diplomacy or common sense.

Posner said in addition to talks on freedom of religion and expression, labor rights and rule of law, officials also discussed Chinese complaints about problems with U.S. human rights, which have included crime, poverty, homelessness and racial discrimination.

He said U.S. officials did not whitewash the American record and in fact raised on its own a new immigration law in Arizona that requires police to ask about a person’s immigration status if there is suspicion the person is in the country illegally.

…

QUESTION: Was there any areas in which China sort of turned the tables and raised its own complaints or concerns about U.S. practices around the globe or at home? Can you give some examples there -

ASSISTANT SECRETARY POSNER: Sure. You know, I think – again, this goes back to Ambassador Huntsman’s comment. Part of a mature relationship is that you have an open discussion where you not only raise the other guy’s problems, but you raise your own, and you have a discussion about it. We did plenty of that. We had experts from the U.S. side, for example, yesterday, talking about treatment of Muslim Americans in an immigration context. We had a discussion of racial discrimination. We had a back-and-forth about how each of our societies are dealing with those sorts of questions. …

QUESTION: Did the recently passed Arizona immigration law come up? And, if so, did they bring it up or did you bring it up?

ASSISTANT SECRETARY POSNER: We brought it up early and often. It was mentioned in the first session, and as a troubling trend in our society and an indication that we have to deal with issues of discrimination or potential discrimination, and that these are issues very much being debated in our own society. [emphasis added]

As usual, Ed Morrissey of Hot Air sums it up nicely:

In other words, China didn’t even mention it — the Obama administration did.  They managed to apologize for a law that, technically and practically speaking, the Department of Justice hasn’t even yet reviewed.  Eric Holder hasn’t read the sixteen-page bill after a month of criticizing it, and it seems highly doubtful that Posner has even “glanced” at it.  Besides, the same law has existed in California for years — and the White House hasn’t so much as breathed a word about California’s penal code.

It doesn’t make the Obama administration sound “mature” to call Arizona racist for tasking its law enforcement agencies with enforcing the law.  It makes them look illiterate, closed-minded, and weak.  Maybe Posner should focus on China’s long record of oppression, slave labor, political executions, and heavy-handed censorship — and join Arizona in demanding that the federal government start enforcing the laws that have existed for decades on immigration.

This is an ongoing theme with this administration.  Whitewash the wrongs done by countries like China, Iran, Venezuela, etc., while at the same time demonizing America and apologizing for our sins.

It would be bad enough if the sins were real, but more often than not, like with the Obama administrations constant politically-motivated mischaracterization of the Arizona law, the apologies aren’t for real sins, but instead are simply anti-American statements meant to gain the favor of the leaders of China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and the Muslim community.

Obama’s foreign policy appears to be a twisted variation of Field of Dreams “build it and they will come.”

Obama’s Field of Dreams approach is “tear down and demonize America and the rest of the world will open their arms and embrace us.”

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Prior to Napolitano’s admission — yes, that Janet Napalitano, the one that is responsible for the security of our borders and our ‘homeland’ — Eric Holder spent weeks criticizing the Arizona law, implying the law was discriminatory and racist, while later admitting in a Congressional hearing that he hadn’t read the 16 page bill he had been criticizing every time he stepped in front of a camera or was approached by a reporter.

ALLAHPUNDIT of Hot Air tells us about Napolitano’s admission that she hasn’t read Arizona’s highly criticized law:

First Holder, now this. Second verse, same as the first: It would take 20 minutes to read through the statute and less than two to read the key provisions that have raised concerns about racial profiling. But if you read it then you’re responsible for what you say about it, and we can’t have that with the midterms less than six months away. So here’s the deputy border-enforcer-in-chief admitting that she hasn’t found the time yet to review “in detail” an immigration law that’s been the talk of the country politically for about a month now.

Two top ranking Obama Administration officials, one our nation’s top attorney and the other in charge of our homeland security, have both failed to read a 16 page law, yet of have paraded in front of the media for weeks claiming the Arizona law is racist, discriminatory and unconstitutional.  Since those assertions clearly weren’t based in fact, and neither top official could be bothered to take a couple minutes to read a law they have been criticizing for weeks, we have to ask ourselves what other assertions of ‘fact’ these two have made over the last 16 months have been nothing more than biased political propaganda.

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However, as the title says, I am back in the saddle again and will be highlighting the top news each day and providing my insight and commentary to go along with it.

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The American Spectator reports that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was given the analysis by the Medicare actuary, which showed that Obamacare would have many negative side effects.  Sebelius refused to review, and as a result publicize, the report, claiming she didn’t want to influence the vote.  By not wanting to influence the vote, she meant she didn’t want to do anything to hurt the chances of Obamacare passing, even if that meant burying facts that Congress and the public should have had BEFORE the final votes were taken.

The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama’s health care “reform” law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius’s staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken.

Grace-Marie Turner of National Review Online summarizes the report that Sebelius buried until after the Obamacare vote:

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.

Whether you are for or against Obamacare and a move towards nationalized health care, it is hard to defend burying a report by the Medicare’s office of the actuary that detailed the negative impacts that passing Obamacare would cause.  Anyone that watched the votes on C-SPAN or simply watched President Obama’s sales pitches leading up to the votes would know that the picture that Democrats painted was far different than what the Medicare actuary and the CBO stated.   Obama and Congressional Demorats painted a picture of reduced costs, increased coverage, deficit reduction and so much more.

There is also a report that the White House Legislative Affairs office received a copy of the report prior to the Congressional vote.  Ed Morrissey of Hot Air discusses this:

If the Obama administration had this information before the vote — and it should be noted that this comes from a single, anonymous source — then it deliberately misled Congress on the cost estimates.  That may not be a crime, but it’s highly unethical at the least, and makes Barack Obama’s claims to operate with transparency absolutely laughable, if true.  As the Prowler’s source points out, the entire reason CMS provided an analysis was to ensure that everyone knew the ramifications of passing this legislation.  Deliberately withholding it would have stripped Congress of that transparency, if that’s indeed what happened.

The CBO, once you dug into the numbers, clearly showed that Obamacare would not reduce the deficit, but instead massively increase it.  The CBO report stated that premiums would rise faster under Obamacare than if no legislation was passed.  The HHS report, once  Sebelius stopped burying it, showed the same, an increase in costs, and millions losing their coverage or being unable to find physicians willing to treat them.

Are the lies and Chicago style politics ‘really’ the change that American’s voted for in November of 2008?

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I hope to get back to my normal schedule within a few days.

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Hillary is an interesting prospect, because as a former Senator, tradition indicates that Republicans in the Senate won’t filibuster the vote on her confirmation.  After spending over a year fighting to pass the hugely unpopular Obamacare, there is speculation that President Obama does not want the Senate tied up for months fighting over a High Court nomination, which will be the result if Obama nominates someone from far-left.  While Hillary is certainly liberal, as a former Senator her nomination will likely move to an up or down vote much quicker than almost anyone else that Obama might nominate.

It would seem that Orrin Hatch broke this story, but it is unclear where he heard it:

Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, one of the top Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Monday morning that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been mentioned as a possible nominee to the Supreme Court.

“I even heard the name Hillary Clinton today, and that would be an interesting person in the mix,” Hatch said on NBC’s “Today Show.”

The senator said he would not pre-judge whether any potential nominee would be an appropriate candidate to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, but he had general praise for the secretary of state.

“I happen to like Hillary Clinton, I think she’s done a good job for the Democrats — Secretary of State’s position,” Hatch said, “and I have high respect for her, and think a great deal of her.”

At the same time, putting her on the Supreme Court would eliminate another major problem that Obama sees looming.  While as an incumbent, traditional thinking would be that Barack Obama will walk through the Democratic primary, the fact is that his approval rating continues to fall.  He has passed a hugely unpopular health insurance bill, has massively increased the national debt, put through the largest tax increase in US history and appears headed towards a broad-based tax increase to pay for his massive increase in social programs.

Hillary Clinton might be the only candidate that could give Obama a real challenge in the Democratic primary, and putting her on the Supreme Court almost assures him of smooth sailing to the Democratic nomination in 2012.

Ed Morrissey discusses some of the benefits Obama would gain from putting Clinton on the High Court:

Politically, Obama gets a win by putting another woman on the court.  Unlike with at least one of the apparent short-listers (Elana Kagan), no one will doubt Hillary’s liberal bona fides.  But best of all, Obama would be dispatching the one Democrat who could conceivably win a primary race against him in 2012 if his numbers continue to fall.  Once on the Supreme Court, Hillary would not step down to run for President, and Bill Clinton would be effectively neutralized as well.

Morrissey goes on to discuss some possible negatives of a Clinton nomination. First, at 63, she is older than liberals would like, since she might only be on the court for 20 years.  Second, nominating her replacement for Secretary of State could lead to a contentious vote.  It would give the Republicans an opportunity to highlight the many diplomatic and foreign policy blunders by the Obama administration.

When it’s all said and done, I do not think that Hillary will be nominated.  All indications are that President Obama is ignoring his falling approval and the continued decline in support for Obamacare, and instead is emblazoned by the passage of Obamacare.  Just as he did following his election, he mistakenly sees the passage of Obamacare as a re-affirmation of a mandate to push his far-left agenda.  Look for Obama to nominate a far-left candidate that will put progressive ideology over adherence to the Constitution.

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Rasmussen also found that both a national sales tax and taxes on junk food and soft drinks remain very unpopular.  These are two taxes that have been associated with the Democrats in Washington.  The justification for the junk food taxes is that these foods are unhealthy and therefore the nanny (US Government) will penalize you for eating it.  The national sales tax or VAT tax is expected to be pushed as the solution to pay for the massive deficit that Obama, Pelosi and Reid have created over the last 15 months.

It was reported last week that 47% of Americans will pay NO federal income tax.  Yet a new Rasmussen poll shows that the vast majority of Americans (66%/25%) believe America is already overtaxed.

Allahpundit of Hot Air breaks down the numbers:

If you think the “over 100K” crowd is grumbly now, check back with them after a few years of Obamanomics. As for the “under 50K” group, the amazing number really isn’t the “less than fair” column; after all, aside from the occasional hyperrich progressive imbecile, no one believes he or she should be paying more tax. The amazing number is, of course, the “more than fair” column. Surely this group forms the bulk of that 47 percent that pays no federal income tax — in fact, a couple with two kids making slightly over $50,000 can now achieve zero federal tax liability — and yet, somehow, 36 percent still say they’re paying too much. Why?

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On Thursday Van Irion, a Congressional candidate and Constitutional lawyer, filed a lawsuit against Obamacare following the Tennessee Attorney General’s refusal to do so:

Third District Congressional candidate Van Irion said in just three days, more than 500 individuals and companies from 30 states have joined his federal lawsuit “against Obamacare.”

On Thursday, the attorney filed a constitutional challenge to the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” in Chattanooga Federal Court. He filed suit two days after Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper announced that his office would not be filing suit on behalf of Tennessee citizens

In the days since filing the lawsuit, Irion says that he has had over 600 people request to join the suit:

“We’ve been stunned at the response,” Irion said. “We immediately started getting requests to join the lawsuit from people and companies all across the US. We then decided to represent any US citizens and companies. The count is now 600 and we expect to reach 1000 plaintiffs within a week.”

Once Irion has collected enough names of people and companies wishing to join this lawsuit, he will file a motion to join all of those individuals to his lawsuit and expects that the case will be certified a class action at that point.

Click the following link to get a copy of Irion’s complaint Shreeve v Obama et al or visit Van Irion’s site for more information or to sign up to join the class action suit.

To get an idea of who Irion is, here’s an interview where he talks about his beliefs about the constitution and what he would do if he was elected and sent to Washington:

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2008 House Election Results

Ok, let’s first say that even Silver says this a low percentage possibility, but based on the Rasmussen generic ballot 79 seats could be the number the Republicans pick up.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight breaks it down:

If the House popular vote were exactly tied, we’d expect the Democrats to lose “only” 30 seats on average, which would be enough for them to retain majority control. It would take about a 2.5 point loss in the popular vote for them to be as likely as not to lose control of the chamber. So Democrats probably do have a bit of a cushion: this is the good news for them.

Their bad news is that the House popular vote (a tabulation of the actual votes all around the country) and the generic ballot (an abstraction in the form of a poll) are not the same thing — and the difference usually tends to work to Democrats’ detriment. Although analysts debate the precise magnitude of the difference, on average the generic ballot has overestimated the Democrats’ performance in the popular vote by 3.4 points since 1992. If the pattern holds, that means that a 2.3-point deficit in generic ballot polls would translate to a 5.7 point deficit in the popular vote — which works out to a loss of 51 seats, according to our regression model.

…

And what if, for example, the Rasmussen case comes into being? Rasmussen has the Democrats losing the generic ballot by 9 points (and has had similar numbers for awhile). A 9-point loss in the House popular vote would translate into a projected 65-seat loss for Democrats. Or, if we adjust the Rasmussen poll to account for the fact that the Democrats’ performance in the popular vote tends to lag the generic ballot, it works out to a 12.4-point loss in the popular vote, which implies a loss of 79 seats!

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This really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone but the most naive amongst us.  Even before he was elected, many detailed the path that Barack Obama would lead us down if he was elected.

First, massively increase the deficit through a rapid expansion of government and huge increase in entitlement programs.

Second, declare that if the deficit spending is not gotten under control, the US will face bankruptcy.

Third, claim raising taxes is the only option to prevent the out of control deficit and the doom predicted in step two.

We have seen nearly a trillion dollars spent under the guise of stimulating the economy, even though most of the spending had little to do with jobs or infrastructure, and more to do with expanding social programs and funneling money into Democratic districts.

The Democrats rammed through Obamacare, which will likely have a true ten year cost of a trillion dollars or more.

Now, with Obama running up the deficit annually almost as much as President Bush did in eight years, a White House advisor slipped and publicly stated what many of us knew was coming down the road.  However, Obama wanted this to come from his “blue ribbon” deficit reduction panel, rather than having one of his advisers let it slip.

Allahpundit of Hot Air reports on how White House adviser Paul Volcker let the cat out of the bag:

We all know it’s coming, but I’m reasonably sure Volcker missed a memo instructing advisors not, repeat not, to mention this publicly until, oh, say, the day after Election Day 2012.

As it is, look for Gibbsy’s spin tomorrow to be, “B-b-but he was Reagan’s Fed chairman!”

Volcker, answering a question from the audience at a New York Historical Society event, said the value-added tax “was not as toxic an idea” as it has been in the past and also said a carbon or other energy-related tax may become necessary.

Though he acknowledged that both were still unpopular ideas, he said getting entitlement costs and the U.S. budget deficit under control may require such moves. “If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes,” he said.

While this isn’t a definitive declaration from the White House that Obama will push for a VAT tax,  the fact is that the Democrats spending spree is unsustainable, and there are only two choices.  Stop spending, or pass a broad-based tax increase.  Clearly, Obama and company have no intention of curtailing their spending, so that means it’s only a matter of time until they push for an across the board tax increase, most likely in the form of a VAT tax.

To quote the former Governor of Alaska, “how’s that hopey, changey thing working out for ya?”

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Greta Van Susteran had a great interview with Harry Reid.  During the interview, Greta talks about the Scott Brown victory.  Sticking to the Democratic talking points, Reid threw Coakley under the bus, making a quip about her three week vacation.  Greta quickly countered by explaining how Coakley was up huge in the polls right up until Reid and Ben Nelson cut a backroom deal subsidizing FOREVER all increases in Medicaid costs that Nebraska incurred due to Obamacare.

Harry Reid then attempted to claim that the deal was great for America and that he only made the deal with Nelson because he knew that in the end every state would get the same special deal.

Go to Gretawire to view the entire interview.  It’s worth taking a few minutes to watch the full interview.

Allapundit of Hot Air comments on Reid’s ridiculous comments, but more importantly reports on another Masscare failure:

[Reid] talking about how the Cornhusker Kickback was “terrific for our country.” Meanwhile, in other news today, Massachusetts insurers have temporarily stopped writing new policies because the state won’t let them raise premiums. Nothing to see here, move along.

It’s bad enough that Harry Reid cut the backroom deals with Nelson, along with the deals for Florida, Louisiana, Vermont, Massachusetts and others.  However, the fact that he can stand there and lie, and that he actually thinks that voters will believe him, is almost beyond belief.

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Quite frankly Senator McCain, or ‘my friend’ as you would say, this is exactly why you were not a viable Presidential candidate.  This flip-flopping on something that you made a major part of your campaign is laughable at best, but since you were the GOP’s candidate for President, it’s hard to actually find it funny.

Allahpundit at Hot Air has a series of videos where McCain or the McCain camp touted his maverick status, including pointing out that the McCain camp referred to their campaign jet as Maverick One.

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On Friday, President Obama made a much publicized trip to an advanced battery technology manufacturer and among other things touted how his economic program had halted a two year slide with 160,000 jobs having been added in March.  After explaining how great his policies have been for America, President Obama took questions.

One woman asked if it was wise to add more taxes with the Health care law, since as she put it, “we are over-taxed as it is.”

President Obama showed initial irritation with the question, and quickly took the offensive with:

Well, let’s talk about that, because this is an area where there’s been just a whole lot of misinformation, and I’m going to have to work hard over the next several months to clean up a lot of the misapprehensions that people have.

Obama went on to spend over 17 minutes on his 2,500+ word answer.  President Obama wandered all over the place, from talking about the disinformation about Obamacare to how the US was (before his bill was passed) the only advanced country that allows citizens to have no health insurance (note he said 15 million, vs. the 30+ million he has used in the past when referring to the uninsured.

In the end, he wandered all over the place for 17 minutes, rarely addressing the actual question, which is about whether it’s smart to add more taxes when people are already over taxed.  About three minutes into the 17 minute filibuster, he said “and the final point is that” and continued to talk for over 14 minutes longer.

Here is the first 6 minutes of the answer from the DrudgeReportUSA YouTube channel:

Here’s the full transcript of that one question and answer:

Q    Thank you, Mr. President.  We’re honored to have you here today.  I’m Doris Ravis (sp) from Lake Wylie, South Carolina.  I work at Celgard.  We have wonderful CEOs that take care of us and have really helped the company grow.  My question is, though, in the economy times that we have now, is it a wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care?  Because it — we are over-taxed as it is.

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, let’s talk about that, because this is an area where there’s been just a whole lot of misinformation, and I’m going to have to work hard over the next several months to clean up a lot of the misapprehensions that people have.  Here’s the bottom line:  Number one is that we are the only — we have been up until last week the only advanced country that allows 50 million of its citizens to not have any health insurance, and the vast majority of those folks work.  It’s just that they don’t happen to work for a company that is either big enough or generous enough to provide them any coverage.

So that’s point number one.  There is a moral imperative that is important.  Number two, you don’t know who might end up being in that situation.  See, those of us who have health care right now ask ourselves, well, is this something that should be a priority right now, but anybody here who lost their job and then COBRA ran out, or COBRA wasn’t subsidized the way the Recovery Act made sure COBRA paid 65 percent of the cost of COBRA — and if you had somebody at home who was sick, or you had a child who got sick, you’d suddenly say to yourself, well, now I see the need.

And so part of what we have to do is always say to ourselves, there but for the grace of God go I — and have a basic safety net.  So that’s point number two.

Point number three is that the way insurance companies have been operating, even if you’ve got health insurance you don’t always know what you got, because what has been increasingly the practice is that if you’re not lucky enough to work for a big company that is a big pool, that essentially is almost a self-insurer, then what’s happening is, is you’re going out on the marketplace, you may be buying insurance, you think you’re covered, but then when you get sick they decide to drop the insurance right when you need it.  Or when you get sick they try to find what they consider to be a preexisting condition that would justify them canceling your policy.  Or there’s some fine print in there where you’ve got a lifetime limit, and it turns out you thought you had coverage, but it turns out the coverage only goes up to a certain point and then afterwards you have to start paying out of pocket.  And even after paying all those premiums, you’re now in the hole for $100,000 or $200,000, and you’re going bankrupt and you’re losing your house.

And the final point is that the costs of health care — setting aside anything we did in reform, I mean, if we just allowed the current trajectory to go on — is out of control.  I haven’t talked to Bob about what his costs are looking like for Celgard employees, but I can tell you that health care costs have gone up, the price of health care has gone up three times faster than wages.  So either the company is having to swallow those costs, which means that’s less money that they could use for hiring new workers or investing in new plants and equipment, or they’re passing on those costs to their employees in the form of higher premiums, higher deductibles, higher co-payments.

And what’s happening federally is, because the costs are so out of control, all the programs that we already have — Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program — all those things are completely out of control.  So if you’re concerned about the deficit, what you’re really concerned about is the cost of Medicare, Medicaid, and all the other programs that are already in place.

So here’s what we did.  What we said is, number one, we’ll have the basic principle that everybody gets coverage.  And the way we’re going to do that is to say that most people individually shouldn’t buy health insurance on their own because they have no leverage and the insurance companies take advantage of it.  Instead what we’re going to do is we’re going to set up a big pool, a marketplace, that allows everybody to buy into this pool — that members of Congress, by the way, will be a part of so you know it’s going to be a good deal — because members of Congress, they’ve got to look out for their own families; they wouldn’t vote for it if it wasn’t going to be a good deal.  And just like Walmart is able to leverage a really good price from its suppliers for everything because they’re such a big purchaser, well, this pool will be a big purchaser and it will be able to get a better deal from insurance companies.

So that’s point number one.  That will drive down the prices for people who are participating and it will allow everybody to get a decent deal on insurance.  And what we do is we provide tax credits to people who still can’t afford it so that they can afford it.  That’s point number one.

Point number two is we’ve got the strongest insurance reforms in history.  So all those things I told you about — you not being able to get insurance because of a preexisting condition; you finding yourself getting dropped even though you’ve been paying premiums for 15 years and suddenly they just decide, sorry, we don’t want you because you’re getting sick — those policies will be over.  And so you will be protected as a consumer to make sure you’ve got security and protection if you’ve got insurance already.  That’s the second thing we do.

The third thing we do is we actually put in place a whole bunch of mechanisms to start reducing the actual cost of health care.  So, for example, one of the things that we do is to say we’re going to start encouraging paying doctors not based on how many tests they take, but based on the quality of the outcome — does somebody end up healthy.

And it turns out that a lot of times if you go to the doctor you get one test.  Then you go — referred to a specialist, you get another test.  Then maybe you go to a third person, the surgeon, you get a third test — it’s all the same test but you’re paying three times.

So what we’re trying to say is, we’ll pay you for the first test and then e-mail the test to everybody.  Right?  (Applause.)  Or have all three doctors in the room when the test is being taken.

But that’s an example of the kinds of things that save money and will start reducing costs over the long term.  So what we’ve done is we’ve embedded in how Medicare reimburses, how Medicaid reimburses, all these ideas to actually reduce the costs of care.

So our hope is that over time, over the next three, four, five, six years, because of all these changes, that we’ve actually saved money from this, even though more people are covered.

And so now you’ll hear the critics and the Republicans say, now, that just defies common sense.  If you’re adding 30 million more people, then it’s got to cost more money.  And you can’t pretend like somehow that’s going to help us on the deficit.  I’ve heard this criticism, I understand it.

But let me give you an example.  If you’ve got a house and you’ve got a big hole in your roof, and it’s raining and snowing through that roof and there are some people who are inside the rooms where the roof is okay and they’re nice and warm, and then you got a few — your family members in that room where there’s a big hole in the roof and they’re shivering, and they’re cold — if you repair the roof, that’s going to cost some money.  But if all the water damage from your floors and all the heat that’s going out of the roof, you count all those savings, over time it may turn out that it actually is saving you money and, by the way, all those family members now are warm, too.  You’re not the only one who’s warm, right?  That’s essentially what we’re trying to set up.

Now, last point I want to make.  All those savings that we’re anticipating, we don’t even count those when it comes to making sure that this is deficit-neutral.  Here are the two ways that we’re paying for this thing:  Number one, we are eliminating a whole bunch of waste, fraud, and insurance subsidies that were being paid out under Medicare that aren’t making our seniors any healthier.  I mean, you’ve got a pretty sweet deal for insurance companies right now in a program called Medicare Advantage where they get $18 billion a year paid to them to manage a Medicare program that about 80 percent of seniors are getting directly from the government, and it’s working just fine.  It’s just a subsidy to them that doesn’t make anybody healthier.  So what we’re saying is, well, let’s eliminate the subsidy.  So that’s about how we pay for half of this thing.

The other half of it, it is true that we have identified some additional taxes that we think are fair.  And let me describe, just to give you an example — I don’t think this will affect you, but I don’t know — I don’t know your family’s circumstances.  Right now, if you’re on salary, you get your salary from Celgard or any of the companies around here, you’re paying your Medicare tax on all of that, right?  You see it on your — it’s part of your FICA.  But if you’re Warren Buffett and you get most of your money from dividends and capital gains, you don’t pay Medicare tax on that.  You’re eligible for it.  You’re going to get the same Medicare benefits as anybody else.  But because your source of income is what’s called unearned income — capital gains and dividends — you don’t have to pay this.

Well, I’m thinking to myself how is it that the guy who is cleaning up the office is paying the Medicare tax and the guy who is making capital gains isn’t?  So what we said was, look, if you make more than $200,000, $250,000 a year, then that money that you make over $200,000, $250,000 a year that’s unearned — that’s from capital gains and dividends — you should have to pitch in to Medicare just like everybody else, because you’re going to be using it like everybody else.  So it’s a concept of fairness.  (Applause.)

Now, what the Congressional Budget Office has said — I’m sorry, by the way, these questions sometimes are — or these answers are long, but I want to make sure you guys — that I’m really answering your question.  I hope you feel like I really want to respect the importance of your question.  What the Congressional Budget Office has said is that as a consequence of the savings from the waste and fraud, combined with the new revenue sources I just mentioned, that this thing is going to actually reduce our deficit by over a trillion dollars — over a trillion dollars.  We’re actually saving money for the government — because we closed the roof, the house is now insulated, it’s warm.  And by the way, in the meantime we’ve got a whole bunch of people who were left out in the cold who are now being taken care of.

That’s the concept.  But I know that for a lot of people, they’ve got a legitimate concern about, gosh, it just seems like government spending is out of control.  I understand that.  I feel that.  But understand what happened:  When I walked in, we already had a $1.3 trillion deficit.  That’s an annual deficit of $1.3 trillion.  That’s — the day I got sworn in, before I did a thing, we had $8 trillion in accumulated debt from the war in Iraq — not paid for; the prescription drug plan, Medicare Part D — not paid for; Bush tax cuts — not paid for.

So we already had all this debt that had just been piled up, but nobody had noticed because things were going kind of good.  Just like a lot of folks didn’t notice their credit card was going up or that their home equity loans were going up because when things are going good you tend not to notice.

So all that debt had already accumulated.  We then had to spend $787 billion on the Recovery Act to do all the things — unemployment insurance; COBRA; what’s called FMAP, which is essentially helping states to keep their budgets afloat so that they didn’t have to lay off teachers and cops and firefighters — all of which if that had happened would have further depressed the economy and we would have recovered a lot later; the investments we’re making in clean energy and things like Celgard to help spur economic growth.

So we had to spend that, but that’s only a fraction of what our debt was.  And in addition what happens is when the economy goes south, there are fewer tax revenues.  And so you’re putting more money out to help people with unemployment insurance and things like that, but you’re getting less money in because folks are out of work and businesses aren’t making money.

Bottom line is, we now have a significant debt that has to be paid down.  That’s why I’m freezing government spending.  That’s why we reinstated what’s called pay-as-you-go.  You can’t start a program without paying for it.  Our health care program is paid for.

But the big thing, if you’re really worried about leaving debt to the next generation, which I know you are, the most important thing we’re going to have to tackle is our health care costs, because Medicare is by far — Medicare and Medicaid are the biggest things that are looming in the horizon in terms of what our debt is going to be.  Nothing else comes close.

If this health care bill never existed, if I didn’t do anything about it, we’d actually be a trillion dollars worse off over the long term.  But even with the saving we’re getting from health care, we’re still going to have to do more.  And if you don’t believe that, go on our Web site — www.whitehouse.gov — and you can look at how the federal budget works.

A lot of people think if you just eliminated foreign aid we could balance the budget, or if you just eliminated earmarks you could balance the budget.  Earmarks — pork projects, what everybody calls pork — those account for about 1 percent of the budget, less than 1 percent.  Foreign aid accounts for about 1.5 to 2 percent of the budget.

Most of the budget is Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, defense spending, and interest on the national debt.  That accounts for about 70 percent of the budget.  And so all this other stuff that sometimes we argue about, that’s not the big stuff.  We’re going to have to tackle the big stuff if we’re going to get our budget under control.

Boy, that was a long answer.  I’m sorry.  (Laughter.)  But I hope everybody — but I hope I answered your question.  (Applause.)  All right, I’m going to — I’ve got to make this the last question.  I’m going to ask this young man right here.

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This characterization has been evident for a while, but since Obamacare passed, it has become clear that attacking the Tea Party is at the center of the Democrats plan for the mid-term elections.

The fact that the Democrats, including the White House and liberal press, are attacking the Tea Party movement this aggressively shows just how much the left fears the Tea Party and the impact its members will have in November.

If the result of the Winston Group poll that The Hill reported today are accurate, Obama’s aggressive attack strategy may backfire come November:

The national breakdown of the Tea Party composition is 57 percent Republican, 28 percent Independent and 13 percent Democratic, according to three national polls by the Winston Group, a Republican-leaning firm that conducted the surveys on behalf of an education advocacy group. Two-thirds of the group call themselves conservative, 26 are moderate and 8 percent say they are liberal.

The Winston Group conducted three national telephone surveys of 1,000 registered voters between December and February. Of those polled, 17 percent – more than 500 people — said they were “part of the Tea Party movement.”

“It’s a good sample size,” said David Winston, the polling firm’s director. “It will certainly give us an initial base to follow where these folks are.”

In addition. the poll found:

• 61% believe infrastructure spending creates jobs
• 63% believe reducing unemployment is more important than fixing the deficit
• 71% view the GOP favorably
• 75% view the Democratic party unfavorable
• 95% believe that “Democrats are taxing, spending, and borrowing too much”
• 80% disapprove of the job President Obama is doing
• 82% disapprove of Obamacare

In addition to the Winston Group poll, Ed Morrissey of Hot Air details the demographics of the Tea Party that a Gallup poll found:

Is the Tea Party as racist as the media and leading Democrats have portrayed?  Gallup’s demos of the Tea Party look very close to that of the overall American demos on ethnicity.  Whites make up 79% of the Tea Party and 75% of the population; blacks, 6% of the Tea Party and 11% of the population; and “other” in the Tea Party exactly matches the general population at 15%.

Numbers like that from a group where 40% are Democrats and Independents, and that is being continuously attacked by the White House, Congressional Democrats and the main stream media, appears to be another indication of how bloody November may be for the Democrats.

The Scott Brown victory in January was due to Independents and moderate Democrats voting against the Democratic candidate in large part to send a message to the Democrats in Washington.  While it was a local election, it became a national campaign.  As the Democrats clearly did not get the message from the Brown election in Massachusetts, don’t be surprised if a great number of Independents and moderate Democrats opt to resend that message in November.

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President Obama’s demands on Israel seem to have done nothing more than damage US/Israel relations and give the Palestinians an excuse to refuse to hold legitimate peace talks.

Dick Morris poses two questions that President Obama should be asking himself:

Why is President Barack Obama so obviously humiliating Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu? Why is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton negating everything she said when she represented New York state and piling on the Jewish state?

Morris goes on to explain the cycle where by the Palestinians continue to demand more from Israel, while using US aid and land that Israel conceded to stage attacks on Israel.

Any peace deal with the Palestinian Authority will not be binding on Hamas, and the pattern of Gaza will likely play out again: First, Israel cedes land to the Palestinian Authority. Second, Hamas seizes the newly ceded land through elections or military action. Third, Hamas refuses to recognize the peace deal and uses the newly acquired territory as a base from which to launch further attacks against Israel.

Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome each time.

When Hillary Clinton and President Obama explode in indignation against Israel for building apartments in East Jerusalem, they deliberately miss the point: There is no reason for Israel to catalyze peace negotiations when there is no single entity that is both committed to peace and speaks for the entire Palestinian people. Without a peace partner, negotiations are either a trip to nowhere or a slippery slope to more Gaza-like concessions that do nothing but strengthen the enemies of Israel without providing any advancement to the cause of peace.

The merits of building in East Jerusalem or the need for a moratorium on all settlement construction are quite irrelevant as long as a substantial body of Palestinian opinion wants a war with Israel and the prevailing political authority in Gaza insists on the Jewish state’s eradication.

So why are Obama and Clinton so intent on raising the profile of the construction issue and publicizing it? One suspects an effort is afoot to link Israeli resistance to the peace process with the ongoing loss of American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, if not to the global terrorism of al Qaeda.

As President Obama continues to verbally chastise Israel, embarrasses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by treating him worse than a third world dictator and sends US aid to the Palestinians, it’s hard to figure out what his end game will be.  Unless the President’s goal is destroying US/Israel relations, in order to garner support from those that wish to see Israel destroyed, it’s hard to understand the actions of the Obama administration.

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From the National Review Online, comes details of this latest abuse of power by the Democrats:

Second: On average, Democratic districts received one-and-a-half times as many awards as Republican ones. Democratic districts also received two-and-a-half times more stimulus dollars than Republican districts ($122,127,186,509 vs. $46,139,592,268). Republican districts also received smaller awards on average. (The average dollars awarded per Republican district is $260,675,663, while the average dollars awarded per Democratic district is $471,533,539.)

ALLAHPUNDIT of Hot Air says that on top of the the Democratic cronyism, the ‘questionable’ jobs saved numbers are declining, just at the time when Vice President Biden claimed we were supposed to see the greatest impact:

Not only that, but the number of jobs “created or saved” has actually declined in the last quarter, leaving the amount of money spent per job at a cool … $286,000. As for the accusation of political favoritism, I’ll defer to de Rugy since she’s the economist.

This latest abuse of power likely won’t surprise too many Americans.  The Gateway Pundit today reported on a new Gallup poll that shows 53% of Americans believe that the Democratic leaders in Congress abused their power in jamming Obamacare through, while only 40% believed it was an appropriate use of power.

So Mr. President, is this what you meant when you said you would change the way Washington works?

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Last year President Obama’s arrogance resulted in French President Sarkozy reportedly calling President Obama Naive and grossly egotistical in regards to Obama’s response and handling of Iran’s nuclear program.  A response that to date appears to be a complete failure.

Now, President Obama showed a complete lack of respect to a visiting head of state, when after negotiations did not go to his liking, he simply walked out on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu:

For a head of government to visit the White House and not pose for photographers is rare. For a key ally to be left to his own devices while the President withdraws to have dinner in private was, until this week, unheard of. Yet that is how Binyamin Netanyahu was treated by President Obama on Tuesday night, according to Israeli reports on a trip viewed in Jerusalem as a humiliation.

After failing to extract a written promise of concessions on settlements, Mr Obama walked out of his meeting with Mr Netanyahu but invited him to stay at the White House, consult with advisers and “let me know if there is anything new”, a US congressman, who spoke to the Prime Minister, said.

“It was awful,” the congressman said. One Israeli newspaper called the meeting “a hazing in stages”, poisoned by such mistrust that the Israeli delegation eventually left rather than risk being eavesdropped on a White House telephone line. Another said that the Prime Minister had received “the treatment reserved for the President of Equatorial Guinea”.

…

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, cast doubt on minor details in Israeli accounts of the meeting but did not deny claims that it amounted to a dressing down for the Prime Minister, whose refusal to freeze settlements is seen in Washington as the main barrier to resuming peace talks.

Prior to humiliating the Prime Minister by walking out rather than having dinner, Obama refused to allow press or photographers access to his meeting with Netanyahu.  Obama failed to hold a joint press conference, or even issue a press statement, both of which are expected when hosting a visiting head of state.

Apparently, President Obama decided to play hard ball and insult Netanyahu as retribution for what he saw as Israel showing disrespect to Vice President Joe Biden.  ALLAHPUNDIT of Hot Air explains:

In a nutshell, the right-wing part of Netanyahu’s government announced the building of new settlements in east Jerusalem on the day Biden came to visit, which allegedly sent The One into a snit over what he considered to be an insult. Never mind that Netanyahu himself apparently didn’t know about the timing of the announcement and that building in east Jerusalem, which would almost certainly remain Israeli in any peace deal, was routine. Obama wants to make a show of standing up to the Zionist entity for our Islamic “partners in peace” in the naive belief that that’ll help bring about the ever elusive solution to the crisis.

Some have said that he treated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu like a third world dictator, but the fact is we have seen President Obama bend over backwards time after time to the dictators he thinks he can convince to become US allies simply by showing them the ‘softer’ side of the United States, while time and again he shows a lack of respect to our long-time allies.

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The Republicans found a provision that guaranteed Pell grants into the future without providing funding for them, leaving that to a future Congress.  As this provision does not reduce spending, it was not eligible to be in the reconciliation bill.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air touches on two points related to sending the bill back to the house:

If that’s all that gets struck from the bill, the only effect will be to lengthen the debate on health care.  Obviously, that’s exactly what the Republicans want.  With 62% of voters wanting the GOP to keep fighting against ObamaCare, their leadership has no reason to let up.

The big surprise here is that House leadership allowed themselves to screw up on minor points.  The process of reconciliation isn’t that arcane, and they certainly had the time to double-check their work.  They’ve been working on this strategy since Scott Brown won his election in mid-January.  To have the bill boomerang back because of Pell grants in a health-care bill is an embarrassment.

While this is mostly a delaying tactic by the Republicans, there is some significance to the delaying tactics.

First, a CBS poll released yesterday, which was conducted in the two days leading up to the House health bill vote, showed that 62% of American, including 41% of Democrats, wanted the GOP to continue to fight against Obamacare.  In addition, that survey showed 57%/18% that people believed that regardless of the Democrat’s claims of a great CBO score, that the bill would in fact increase the deficit.

Second, House and Senate Democrats had not only been working on the Reconciliation strategy since the Brown victory, but had spent weeks leading up to the vote working directly with Senate Parliamentarian Alan Frumin to insure that errors like this were not contained in the bill.  So, not only is it an embarrassment that these small errors existed, but also highlights the fact that the Democrats piggy backed a takeover of the student loan program onto Obamacare.

Finally, in addition to the minor victory of sending the bill back to the house for a new vote, and as a result keeping the ‘process’ in the news cycle, yesterday’s GOP tactics served another purpose.  The Republicans put forth close to three dozen amendments.  While they had no real hope that any would pass, many of the amendments were put forth, because voting against them will look bad for vulnerable Democratic Senators in November.  For instance, voting against an amendment that would forbid raiding Medicare to pay for the Obamacare bill.

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President Obama and the far left have been reinvigorated with the passing of Obamacare.  While only a few weeks ago it seemed that Obama’s far left agenda had been stalemated and unlikely to have any real chance of being pushed through Congress, many believe that has now changed.

As Nancy Pelosi so famously said, “we will have to pass the bill to see what’s in it”.  Unfortunately, for the American voters, that has been the truth.  Many lies have been told about Obamacare, such as the President stating over and over that if you like your insurance plan, you can keep it.  Those that have read the bills know that isn’t the case, since it requires that once your plan changes (premium amount, deductible change, any coverage change — like a change in Rx benefits) require that you must move to a plan that is exchange-qualified.  That means for most people, once that regulati0n goes into affect, at their next plan renewal (when in most cases, something in the plan changes) they will have to move to an exchange-qualified plan and CANNOT keep the insurance plan they like.

It is likely that there will be a short-term bump in public opinion for Obamacare, as the President starts his PR campaign, which he will soon take on the road.  President Obama will keep focusing on the small number of popular consumer protections that go into effect quickly, while either not mentioning, or misstating the many negative regulations that will soon go into effect and will be hugely unpopular once voters understand what they mean.

However, it’s important to note that while a Gallup poll released yesterday did show a bump in public support for Obamacare, a new Bloomberg survey shows that a majority of Americans believe that health care is a private matter and that Obamacare is a federal take over of health care.  It also found that six out of ten Americans believe that individuals should be responsible to make sure their health care needs are met.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air discusses the Bloomberg Survey:

If Democrats felt heartened after yesterday’s Gallup poll showing a plurality of support for their new ObamaCare plan, Bloomberg’s survey should bring them back to Earth.  The survey asked over a thousand adults their opinions of the ObamaCare bill during and after its passage, and like almost every poll taken in the last several months, a majority of respondents opposed it.  Moreover, a majority also consider it a government takeover of the American health-care system.

…

It also presents another problem for Democrats, which is that they will own every failure within the American health-care system from this point forward.  Had Republicans successfully blocked ObamaCare, they would have owned them, but now it all falls on the Democrats.

The fact that people can’t really keep their insurance if they like it, is just one aspect of Obamacare that will likely result in a backlash from voters. It’s one thing for people to say “yes, everyone should be covered, if it doesn’t change my coverage”, but that sentiment changes very quickly when people realize that their insurance coverage will soon change drastically, and for many Americans that will also mean higher premiums.

Since Obama, Pelosi and Reid know they have to ride the wave of positive press and re-energized liberal base, expect a major push to pass the remaining big, liberal agenda items.  What can we expect to see a major push to pass?

Immigration reform:  They started talking about this last week in order to wrap up some needed votes on the Health care bill, but this isn’t just about buying votes for Obamacare.  The Democrats see offering amnesty to illegal immigrants as an immediate increase in the size of the block of voters that automatically vote Democrat.  Most of the illegals given amnesty will receive some form of government subsidy, including for Obamacare, and therefore will want to keep the Democrats in office in order to keep their entitlements.

Cap and Trade:  Senator Kerry has already said that the Senate needs to move quickly to pass Cap and Trade.  They realize that weekly more cracks are forming in the ‘science’ surrounding global warming, or climate change as it’s now called, and therefore they must strike quickly.  Like with Obamacare, the American public does not believe Cap and Trade should be passed, but after just passing one major piece of legislation in contradiction of the will of the people, expect a major push to pass another.

Card Check:  President Obama owes the unions his election, a fact that Andy Stern of SEIU keeps publicly reminding him, when he says that the SEIU spent over $60 million to get President Obama elected.  Unions are one of the main contributors to the Democratic party.   Union membership in private sector companies is near an all time low, which is troubling to both union leaders and Democrats that count on that major source of funding and votes.  Card Check, or Employee Free Choice Act as the Democrats falsely named it, will eliminate the secret ballot and as a result, bring back ugly intimidation by union organizers.

These are not the only items on the far-left wish list, but they are among the most important to the liberal base and the most damaging to the United States.   Like Obamacare, these have been on the liberal wish list for a while, and the only chance of passing them is with the type of massive majority that the Democrats hold in Congress.  Like with Obamacare, they will push to get them passed quickly, hoping to leave enough time between the passage of these bills and the November elections, counting on these unpopular bills to no longer be in the public’s focus when they go to the voting booth.

In the coming days, I will post more information on each of these upcoming pieces of legislation.

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I am not able to list all the states that joined the Florida suit or provide a link to the AP report.

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Their plan was to argue that the following statement by Steny Hoyer indicated that the Reconciliation bill violated the Congressional Budget Act Of 1974, which states that any bill that contains “recommendations with respect to” Social Security, will be out of order and therefor ineligible for budget reconciliation.

“The Congressional Budget Office estimate of the health care legislation shows an increase in Social Security revenues… CBO projects that the resulting increase in wages will generate $29 billion in additional FICA contributions to the Social Security Trust Fund.” (“Health Care Reform Update,”

Late Monday, Alan Frumin, the Senate Parliamentarian ruled in favor of the Democrats when the Republicans made the argument that delaying the Cadillac tax would impact Social Security, which would constitute “recommendations with respect to” Social Security, there by making the House bill ineligible for reconciliation.

Senate Republicans Monday afternoon argued to Frumin that a provision of the reconciliation package approved by the House violated Section 310g of the Budget Act. Had Frumin ruled in the Republicans’ favor, the bill would have been stripped of its reconciliation status.

Frumin heard arguments from Democratic and GOP Senate staff, and he ultimately ruled in favor of the Democrats. The Republicans argued that a provision dealing with the excise tax on “Cadillac” insurance plans impacted Social Security. The Budget Act does not permit reconciliation legislation to affect Social Security.

Most considered this a long shot, as it was a weak and indirect effect on Social Security, so therefore the ruling isn’t too surprising. The reason the GOP wanted this one is that it would make the entire bill out of order, where most other points of order that the GOP wins would only require that the specific clause or language (that is ruled out of order) be removed from the reconciliation bill.

It’s important to note several things.

First, even if the reconciliation bill was ruled out of order, the Senate bill passed yesterday will still become law when President Obama signs it tomorrow morning.

Second, any changes that are made to the House reconciliation bill, which the Senate is set to consider, would require the bill to be sent back to the House for another vote.  The bill that the Senate ultimately votes on must be the exact language that the House passed.  So, whether a change comes from a ruling by the Senate Parliamentarian, a change made by Senate Democrats, or an amendment that is passed (whether offered by Democrats or Republicans), it will require the bill to go back to the House for another vote.

Third, it is also possible that this could happen multiple times, which is the “ping ponging” that reporters and Congressmen sometimes refer to in articles or interviews.

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President Obama set the tone for both Houses of Congress, when leading up to the passage of the first stimulus bill, his response to Republican leadership concerns about not being involved in drafting the stimulus bill was simply to state that he didn’t have to involve them, because as he said “I won”.

Dick Morris has been warning Democrats for a while that there will be a very steep price for defying the will of the American public.  He now says they will pay a heavy price in November for that defiance:

The Democratic Party’s decision to deform our health care system in the name of reforming it amounts to a suicide pact. With America decrying the legislation by 60-40 margins, the legislators lined up and dutifully drank the Kool-Aid.

…

The anger of the voters at this total disregard of public opinion will power Republican candidates throughout the nation and will impel one of the greatest reversals of Congressional alignment in history.

But the aftershock of this political earthquake is yet to come. It will be upon us in the fall when Congress must decide whether to proceed with the Medicare cuts (particularly to cut in doctors’ reimbursement rates) or to postpone or cancel them and add the cost to the federal deficit.

…

This vote transforms the political landscape in a way that we have not seen in our lifetimes and the results will be cataclysmic for the Democratic Party

The next seven months will be interesting.  Starting today, the Democrats will begin selling the benefits of Obamacare in an attempt to mitigate the damage in the mid-term elections come November.   Only time will tell how successful they will be with their sales job.

As to paying for their defiance, one has to now wonder about the Stupak bloc.  They claimed that their principles could not be compromised.  Bart Stupak said that if the Senate language, which provides for the public funding of abortion, was not amended then Stupak and his group could not and would not vote for it.  They did.

The White House wrote them a “here’s some cover for the mid-term elections” Executive Order, but they know, and the American public will soon know, that the Executive Order does nothing to prevent the public funding of abortion that Stupak has been decrying for months.

Not too many people thought the President could get this many Congressmen to fall on their swords for him.  If Dick Morris is right, the dismantling of the Democratic majority might be Obama’s greatest accomplishment.

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The most likely challenge to succeed, and the one most states are focusing on, is the individual mandate.  This would result in an unprecedented extension of federal powers, where by the federal government can force US Citizens to purchase a product (in this case health insurance) or be penalized or taxed if they don’t.

The Washington Post laid out the case (or lack there of) of several court challenges that the health care bills could face.  Here is the WaPo analysis of the merits of the two most likely supreme court challenges:

The individual mandate.

Can Congress really require that every person purchase health insurance from a private company or face a penalty? The answer lies in the commerce clause of the Constitution, which grants Congress the power “to regulate commerce . . . among the several states.” Historically, insurance contracts were not considered commerce, which referred to trade and carriage of merchandise. That’s why insurance has traditionally been regulated by states. But the Supreme Court has long allowed Congress to regulate and prohibit all sorts of “economic” activities that are not, strictly speaking, commerce. The key is that those activities substantially affect interstate commerce, and that’s how the court would probably view the regulation of health insurance.

But the individual mandate extends the commerce clause’s power beyond economic activity, to economic inactivity. That is unprecedented. While Congress has used its taxing power to fund Social Security and Medicare, never before has it used its commerce power to mandate that an individual person engage in an economic transaction with a private company. Regulating the auto industry or paying “cash for clunkers” is one thing; making everyone buy a Chevy is quite another. Even during World War II, the federal government did not mandate that individual citizens purchase war bonds.

If you choose to drive a car, then maybe you can be made to buy insurance against the possibility of inflicting harm on others. But making you buy insurance merely because you are alive is a claim of power from which many Americans instinctively shrink. Senate Republicans made this objection, and it was defeated on a party-line vote, but it will return.

The Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, Gator Aid and other deals.

Some states are threatening lawsuits to block the special deals brokered by individual senators in exchange for their votes. Unless the reconciliation bill passes the Senate, such deals could remain in place. Article I of the Constitution allows Congress to tax and spend to “provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” Normally, this is no barrier to legislation benefiting a particular state or city. Congress can always argue that, say, an Air Force base in Nebraska benefits the United States as a whole. But the deals in the Senate bill are different. It is really hard to identify a benefit to all the states from exempting one state from an increase in Medicare costs or allowing only the citizens of Florida to get Medicare Advantage.

While it seems that there is probably wiggle room in regards to the special deals for Nebraska and other states, it is much harder to defend the individual mandate.   The Democrats will claim that the commerce clause will come into play, and therefore gives the federal government the right to regulate it and therefore require citizens to purchase insurance just for the right of living and breathing.  What’s next?  A requirement to by only GM cars?

One ironic side note.  The commerce clause is used to regulate interstate commerce, but the Democrats refused to even consider the interstate sale of insurance, or allowing insurance to be sold across party lines.

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In essence, it seems that reconciliation cannot be used to impact social security in any way. However, in the reconciliation bill the House Democrats state that they will raise additional revenues for social security.

Presumably, this was added as one of the many ‘marketing’ clauses in the bill, which allows Democrats to tout the benefits as they campaign leading up to the mid-term elections in November.

Ace of Ace of Spades explains this last ditch effort:

So the GOP’s floating of this objection is an 11th hour attempt to make House Democrats realize reconciliation won’t happen, so as to make them vote “No.”

Here’s the argument:

DON STEWART, McCONNELL SPOKESMAN: “Republicans have been trying to set up a meeting with Senate Democrats since yesterday to discuss this fatal point of order but have been met with nothing but silence. We suspect Democrats are slow walking us so as to have the House vote first. Since Senate Democrats refuse to meet with us and the arliamentarian, we’ve informed our colleagues in the House that we believe the bill they’re now considering violates the clear language of Section 310g of the Congressional Budget Act, and the entire reconciliation bill is subject to a point of order and rejection in the Senate should it pass the House.”

BACKGROUND

DEMOCRAT LEADERSHIP RELEASE: “The Congressional Budget Office estimate of the health care legislation shows an increase in Social Security revenues… CBO projects that the resulting increase in wages will generate $29 billion in additional FICA contributions to the Social Security Trust Fund.” (“Health Care Reform Update,” Office of Rep. Steny Hoyer, 3/21/10)

CONGRESSIONAL BUDGET ACT: “LIMITATION ON CHANGES TO THE SOCIAL

SECURITY ACT.—Notwithstanding any other provision of law, it shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any reconciliation bill or reconciliation resolution reported pursuant to a concurrent resolution on the budget agreed to under section 301 or 304, or a joint resolution pursuant to section 258C of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985, or any amendment thereto or conference report thereon, that contains recommendations with respect to the old-age, survivors, and disability insurance program established under title II of the Social Security Act.” (Congressional Budget Act Of 1974, Sec. 310g, P. 31)

So, I think, the attempt to divert SS payments into this bill is illegal (and of course it’s a gimmick in the first place to get a better CBO number, once again double-counting a revenue source) and so the reconciliation will fail.

ALLAHPUNDIT of Hot Air is one of those that remains skeptical:

If this was something other than a hail mary, wouldn’t the GOP have floated it yesterday or the day before, when waverers hadn’t yet tied their own hands by publicly committing to yes? It feels desperate, even if there’s something to it, and no one wants to run away from an enemy who they know is desperate. Which is another way of saying don’t count on any Stupakers getting cold feet over this.

Former Senator Rick Santorum is making a case that Harry Reid not only knows that the entire reconciliation bill could get tossed, but that it may very well be Reid’s plan.

Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders in the Senate have been trying to get Reid to have the Parliamentarian make a ruling on the social security issue.  Reid has refused to get such a ruling:

“Now here’s the interesting thing,” Santorum said. “Mitch McConnell and the Republican leadership have been pleading with [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid to meet with the parliamentarian to get a ruling on this before the House votes. Senate Democrats have refused to meet with the parliamentarian to get a resolution on this issue. So as a result, there’s still the open question.”

Asked if Senate Democrats were sandbagging House Democrats, Santorum said: “My old friend Dick Armey used to say, when he was the Republican [majority] leader and he would talk about the Democrats, he said, ‘The Democrats are the opposition, the Senate is the enemy.’ In this case, the Senate truly is sandbagging House Democrats who are voting for this thinking it’s going to be fixed, and it’s not going to be fixed.

Santorum said the errant attempt at using reconciliation is being done at the behest of the president and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

So, it would seem that Reid may very well know that there is a substantial chance that the entire reconciliation bill could be tossed due to the social security issue, which would leave health care where he wanted it all along — the Senate health care being the law of the land, full of all the kick backs and special deals.

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Stupak claims that this executive order will address all concerns about public funds being used to pay for abortion, but Stupak did not address the mandate that all men and women buying insurance from exchange-qualified health care plans will be required to pay $1 a month (or more) that will go into a pool to pay for abortions within that plan.

Further, that Executive Order can be rescinded by President Obama or a future President, and more importantly does not trump legislation enacted by Congress.  Therefore, the Executive Order does nothing except give Stupak cover in the upcoming mid-term elections.

The following is a draft of Obama’s Executive Order posted on Major Garrett’s Foxnews blog:

EXECUTIVE ORDER

- – - – - – -

ENSURING ENFORCEMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF ABORTION RESTRICTIONS IN THE PATIENT PROTECTION AND AFFORDABLE CARE ACT

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (approved March ¬¬__, 2010), I hereby order as follows:

Section 1. Policy.

Following the recent passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“the Act”), it is necessary to establish an adequate enforcement mechanism to ensure that Federal funds are not used for abortion services (except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered), consistent with a longstanding Federal statutory restriction that is commonly known as the Hyde Amendment. The purpose of this Executive Order is to establish a comprehensive, government-wide set of policies and procedures to achieve this goal and to make certain that all relevant actors—Federal officials, state officials (including insurance regulators) and health care providers—are aware of their responsibilities, new and old.

The Act maintains current Hyde Amendment restrictions governing abortion policy and extends those restrictions to the newly-created health insurance exchanges. Under the Act, longstanding Federal laws to protect conscience (such as the Church Amendment, 42 U.S.C. §300a-7, and the Weldon Amendment, Pub. L. No. 111-8, §508(d)(1) (2009)) remain intact and new protections prohibit discrimination against health care facilities and health care providers because of an unwillingness to provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions.

Numerous executive agencies have a role in ensuring that these restrictions are enforced, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).

Section 2. Strict Compliance with Prohibitions on Abortion Funding in Health Insurance Exchanges. The Act specifically prohibits the use of tax credits and cost-sharing reduction payments to pay for abortion services (except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered) in the health insurance exchanges that will be operational in 2014. The Act also imposes strict payment and accounting requirements to ensure that Federal funds are not used for abortion services in exchange plans (except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered) and requires state health insurance commissioners to ensure that exchange plan funds are segregated by insurance companies in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, OMB funds management circulars, and accounting guidance provided by the Government Accountability Office.

I hereby direct the Director of OMB and the Secretary of HHS to develop, within 180 days of the date of this Executive Order, a model set of segregation guidelines for state health insurance commissioners to use when determining whether exchange plans are complying with the Act’s segregation requirements, established in Section 1303 of the Act, for enrollees receiving Federal financial assistance. The guidelines shall also offer technical information that states should follow to conduct independent regular audits of insurance companies that participate in the health insurance exchanges. In developing these model guidelines, the Director of OMB and the Secretary of HHS shall consult with executive agencies and offices that have relevant expertise in accounting principles, including, but not limited to, the Department of the Treasury, and with the Government Accountability Office. Upon completion of those model guidelines, the Secretary of HHS should promptly initiate a rulemaking to issue regulations, which will have the force of law, to interpret the Act’s segregation requirements, and shall provide guidance to state health insurance commissioners on how to comply with the model guidelines.

Section 3. Community Health Center Program.

The Act establishes a new Community Health Center (CHC) Fund within HHS, which provides additional Federal funds for the community health center program. Existing law prohibits these centers from using federal funds to provide abortion services (except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered), as a result of both the Hyde Amendment and longstanding regulations containing the Hyde language. Under the Act, the Hyde language shall apply to the authorization and appropriations of funds for Community Health Centers under section 10503 and all other relevant provisions. I hereby direct the Secretary of HHS to ensure that program administrators and recipients of Federal funds are aware of and comply with the limitations on abortion services imposed on CHCs by existing law. Such actions should include, but are not limited to, updating Grant Policy Statements that accompany CHC grants and issuing new interpretive rules.

Section 4. General Provisions.

(a) Nothing in this Executive Order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect: (i) authority granted by law or presidential directive to an agency, or the head thereof; or (ii) functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b) This Executive Order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c) This Executive Order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity against the United States, its departments, agencies, entities, officers, employees or agents, or any other person.

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First, it’s important to note that while this is a slim sliver of hope, Foxnews and many other agencies believe that Pelosi has 216, if not more.  They believe that Pelosi continues to try and win yes votes only to pad the numbers so that no Democrats can be pointed to as the ‘deciding vote’ during the upcoming mid-term elections.

That said, less than an hour ago, The Hill reported that Pelosi is still short of 216 and that Stupak’s office is still calling him a firm no:

If every member votes, Democratic leaders can only afford 37 defections. According to The Hill’s whip list, there are 39 Democrats planning to vote no.

Furthermore, The Hill also has seven Democrats in the undecided/unclear column: Reps Jim Cooper (Tenn.), Kathy Dahlkemper (Pa.), Paul Kanjorski (Pa.), Alan Mollohan (W.Va.), Mike Quigley (Ill.), Bobby Rush (Ill.) and Loretta Sanchez (Calif.).

There have been various reports on Sunday that Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) and other anti-abortion lawmakers have agreed to an abortion deal involving an executive order from the Obama administration. However, Stupak’s office are strongly denying those reports.

AllahPundit of Hot Air says that Stupak may decide the fate of Obamacare:

I thought for sure that Lincoln Davis and John Tanner voting no meant that Pelosi had made it and was now releasing vulnerable Dems, but it ain’t so.

If the Stupak bloc is still back in the driver’s seat, the question remains:  will Stupak stand by his word or will he simply look for some political cover to help him in November?

The Executive Order will do nothing to stop the mandate that every man and women buying exchange-qualified insurance plans will have to pay $1+ a month into a trust to pay for abortions.  This is the very language in the Senate bill that Stupak said he could not vote for, but now the rumblings are he will vote for it as long as Obama gives him a meaningless Executive Order for him to wave in the air in November and say, “see, I got something from Obama, re-elect me.”

UPDATE:

Ok, this doesn’t look promising.  AllahPundit is reporting that Stupak has scheduled a press conference for 4:00 PM EDT, which almost certainly means he is announcing his yes vote.

UPDATE 2:

While we need to wait about another five minutes for the Stupak Press conference, the Hill is reporting that a deal has been reached with the White House and the remaining members of the Stupak bloc will flip to yes:

“Eight or nine” Democrats, including Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), will announce the deal at a 4 p.m. press conference, according to an anti-abortion Democrat.

“We’ve changed [our votes],” said Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-Ohio).

Driehaus said he’s seen the executive order and can now vote for the healthcare bill.  He said Stupak has signed off, as well.

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Not only have all the legal/legislative experts that I have seen claimed that an Executive Order will not trump the Senate bill once it becomes law, but in addition I would have some question about the specifics about the language of the Executive Order.

It states that “none of the funds appropriated in this Act, and none of the funds in any trust fund to which funds are appropriated in this Act…” shall be used to cover abortions.  The question is what “appropriated” means in the context of the Senate health care bill.  The accounting trick that the HHS Secretary and House Senate Democrats applauded following the passage of the Senate bill, was that by not using any federal funds (tax dollars), but instead mandating that insurance policies must cover abortion, and that ALL people paying premiums for those policies would be required to pay an additional $1 a month (or the actual prorated cost of providing abortion coverage, whichever is higher), which would be held in a separate pot (separate from any federal funding) to cover abortion services.

NRO via the Patriot Room has provided this draft of President Obama’s Executive Order on abortion funding.

1. The Executive Order directs that the Hyde language found in sections 507 and 508 of the Labor HHH Appropriations Bill shall apply to the HR 3590.

SEC. 507.

(a) None of the funds appropriated in this Act, and none of the funds in any trust fund to which funds are appropriated in this Act, shall be expended for any abortion.

(b) None of the funds appropriated in this Act, and none of the funds in any trust fund to which funds are appropriated in this Act, shall be expended for health benefits coverage that includes coverage of abortion.

(c) The term ??health benefits coverage?? means the package of services covered by a managed care provider or organization pursuant to a contract or other arrangement.

SEC. 508.

(a) The limitations established in the preceding section shall not apply to an abortion ?

(1) if the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest; or

(2) in the case where a woman suffers from a physical disorder, physical injury, or physical illness, including a life-endangering physical condition caused by or arising from the pregnancy itself, that would, as certified by a physician, place the woman in danger of death unless an abortion is performed.

(b) Nothing in the preceding section shall be construed as prohibiting the expenditure by a State, locality, entity, or private person of State, local, or private funds (other than a State?s or locality?s contribution to Medicaid matching funds.)

(c) Nothing in the preceding section shall be construed as restricting the ability of any managed care provider from offering abortion coverage or the ability of a State or locality to contract separately with such a provider for such coverage with State funds (other than a State?s or locality?s contribution of Medicaid matching funds.)

2. Under this Act, Hyde language shall apply to the authorization and appropriations of funds under section 10503 of the Community Health Centers.

SEC. 10503. COMMUNITY HEALTH CENTERS AND THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE CORPS FUND. Pages 2355-2357 of H.R. 3590.

3. Under this Act, the Hyde language shall apply to the section 1303 of the HR 3590.

SEC. 1303. SPECIAL RULES. Pages 2069-2079 of H.R. 3590.

4. Under this Act, the Accommodation of Conscious is recognized.

(a) NONDISCRIMINATION.?A Federal agency or program, and any State or local government that receives Federal financial assistance under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act), may not?

(1) subject any individual or institutional health care entity to discrimination; or

(2) require any health plan created or regulated under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) to subject any individual or institutional health care entity to discrimination,

on the basis that the health care entity does not provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions.

(b) DEFINITION.?In this section, the term ??healthcare entity?? includes an individual physician or other health care professional, a hospital, a provider-sponsored organization, a health maintenance organization, a health insurance plan, or any other kind of health care facility, organization, or plan.

(c) ADMINISTRATION.?The Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services is designated to receive complaints of discrimination based on this section, and coordinate the investigation of such complaints.

5. Addition Conscious Provisions

?(1) Nothing in this Act shall require an otherwise qualified health plan, including an Exchange-participating plan, to cover any items or services to which the issuer, plan sponsor, or purchaser has a moral or religious objection, provided the plan is at least actuarially equivalent to a qualified health plan that covers the essential health benefits.

?(2) If a health plan is permitted not to cover items or services under paragraph (1), then the issuer, plan sponsor, or purchaser shall not be required to include such items or services in such plan as a condition of (A) being eligible for a premium tax credit or cost-sharing reduction, or (B) avoiding any assessable payment or any other tax, assessment or penalty under this Act.

?(3) Nothing in this Act shall prohibit a qualified health plan, including an Exchange-participating plan, from contracting with an individual or institutional health care provider that declines to provide, participate in, or refer for an item or service to which the provider has a moral or religious objection.

?(4) Nothing in this Subsection shall be construed to deny, alter, or modify any right or duty any person may have under state or local law, or under federal laws other than this Act.?

?(5) Nothing in this Subsection shall be construed to authorize a health plan to deny coverage for all medical care, or for life-preserving care, to an individual based on a view that treats extending the life or preserving the health of the individual as of lower value than extending the life or preserving the health of others because of the individual?s disability or other characteristic.?

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Back in December, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius explained that the Senate bill’s language used an accounting procedure (accounting trick) to provide funding for abortion:

“And I would say that the Senate language, which was negotiated by Senators Barbara Boxer and Patty Murray, who are very strong defenders of women’s health services and choices for women, take a big step forward from where the House left it with the Stupak amendment, and I think do a good job making sure there are choices for women, making sure there are going to be some plan options [that pay for abortions],” Sebelius said then.

“There would be an accounting procedure, but everybody in the exchange would do the same thing, whether you’re male or female, whether you’re 75 or 25, you would all set aside a portion of your premium that would go into a fund, and it would not be earmarked for anything. It would be a separate account that everyone in the exchange would pay,” Sebelius admitted about the abortion funding.”It is a bit confusing. But it’s really an accounting measure that would apply across the board”

It’s due to the fact that the Senate bill does provide for public funding for abortion (through a mandate for everyone in exchange qualifying policies to pay at least $1 a month that will go into a pool to pay for abortions) that has resulted in Stupak and some others refusing to vote for the Senate bill.

As I have been preparing this article, Ed Morrissey of Hot Air has reported that some news agencies (term used loosely) are stating that Stupak is now a yes vote:

It’s certainly a betrayal of his oft-proclaimed pro-life principles, however.  So far, the news has been reported by MS-NBC on its broadcast and website (as a banner headline) as “sources say,” and reported similarly by C-SPAN, but as of this moment, no written report has surfaced with any details.

This could be a false report, but it’s been no secret for the last few days that Stupak has worked hard to find a way to vote for this bill.  We’ll see if the promise of an executive order from Barack Obama did the trick.

Since Bart Stupak appears to be a very smart guy, it now appears he is just looking for some political cover that would allow him to vote with his party, even if it goes against the principles he has been saying he wouldn’t compromise.

Red State published the following letter from the Conference of Catholic Bishops that describes why the executive order is nothing more that a farce aimed at freeing up Stupak’s block to vote for the Senate bill:

We’ve consulted with legal experts on the specific idea of resolving the abortion funding problems in the Senate bill through executive order. We know Members have been looking into this in good faith, in the hope of limiting the damage done by abortion provisions in the bill. We believe, however, that it would not be fair to withhold what our conclusion was, as it may help members in assessing the options before them:

“One proposal to address the serious problem in the Senate health care bill on abortion funding, specifically the direct appropriating of new funds that bypass the Hyde amendment, is to have the President issue an executive order against using these funds for abortion. Unfortunately, this proposal does not begin to address the problem, which arises from decades of federal appellate rulings that apply the principles of Roe v. Wade to federal health legislation. According to these rulings, such health legislation creates a statutory requirement for abortion funding, unless Congress clearly forbids such funding. That is why the Hyde amendment was needed in 1976, to stop Medicaid from funding 300,000 abortions a year. The statutory mandate construed by the courts would override any executive order or regulation. This is the unanimous view of our legal advisors and of the experts we have consulted on abortion jurisprudence. Only a change in the law enacted by Congress, not an executive order, can begin to address this very serious problem in the legislation.”

Richard Doerflinger
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops

If in fact that Pelosi needs the votes of the Stupak block, combined with the fact that neither Pelosi or Reid have been willing to give an inch to Stupak on changing the public funding language in the Senate Bill that the House is set to pass, you have to wonder what other deal has been made with Stupak to buy his vote, considering the executive order will apparently do nothing to block the public funding of abortion.

Update:

Multiple news agencies are reporting that one of the Stupak holdouts, Marcy Kaptur, has switched to a yes vote:

Bad news for ObamaCare opponents.  Marcy Kaptur, one of Stupak’s bloc of pro-life holdouts, announced that she’s voting yes:

Kaptur claims that the President and HHS Secretary will work to ensure current federal law on abortion funding is maintained.

Looks like the Representatives in the Stupak bloc are simply looking for any shred of cover that will allow them to vote yes on Obamacare.

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As the day progressed, reports began to surface that Pelosi might still be short and that President Obama was considering issuing an executive order regarding the public funding for abortion.  The goal of the executive order would be to win the votes of Bart Stupak (D-MI) and nine other pro-life Democrats that won’t vote for the Senate bill while it contains public funding for abortion.

This evening, Gateway pundit is reporting that Pelosi remains short.  While we previously reported on Space and Matheson declaring their no votes, the news about Davis and about Clinton being brought in to make calls:

Glenn Reynolds reported– REPS. SPACE & MATHESON WILL BOTH VOTE NO. I’m also getting email reports that Rep. Lincoln Davis’s (D-TN) office is saying he will vote no, though I haven’t been able to find a published report to that effect.

There are reports that the socialists democrats even recruited Bill Clinton to make phone calls.

Gather.com has news that CNN is reporting that President Obama has recruited Bill Clinton to call undecided Democrats and try and convince them to vote yes for Obamacare:

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Just a quick update: despite what you may be hearing from Fox, which has strangely had a more optimistic count for Democrats than even liberal websites, Pelosi DOES NOT have the votes yet.

…

Update #1 (5:48 PM EST): Zack Space just came out as a “no.” The Firedoglake count has him at undecided, so by their count, we just hit 216 no votes for the very first time. Will it stick? Who knows, but getting over the threshold is important.

The liberal site Firedoglake has the current count at 205 no, 204 yes, with 12 undecided and 10 they believe are holding firm with Stupak.  If their numbers are right, and they got all the undecided votes, then Pelosi would either have to cave and offer a deal to the pro-life Stupak group and come up with some language to address the Senate bill’s public funding of abortion.

Since it is a near certainty that the Senate would not act on any resolution or bill to ‘fix’ the Senate health carebill and remove the public funding for abortion, that really only leaves two choices.  First, Stupak and his group vote no.  Second, they go back on their word and vote for a bill with public funding for abortion.  It’s possible that Pelosi will help them by giving them some political cover by including some language to remove the public funding for abortion, even when she knows the Senate will never act on it.

ALLAHPUNDIT of Hot Air reports on a possible executive order on abortion aimed to win Stupak 10:

NRO says this “still isn’t nailed down,” but it sounds like the final stumbling block may be some sort of executive order about abortion to bring the Stupakers on board. And the pro-choicers are apparently okay with it. Gulp.

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Ed Morrissey of Hot Air lays out a couple reasons that Pelosi may have dumped the deem-and-pass strategy:

So what does this mean?  Hard to say.  It could be that the heat on Democrats for using DemonPass made it too difficult to hold onto votes; Pelosi may have calculated that she’d net more votes if she split the bills properly.  On the other hand, it could also mean that Pelosi has all the votes she needs and no longer needs the self-executing rule to get the bill out of the House.

Based on reports from the people and news agencies following the vote account, along with comments from House members, it would seem that Pelosi now has enough votes to not only dump the deem-and-pass strategy, but also not cave into Stupak and the pro-life Democrats who want her to add language to force the Senate to remove their public funding for abortion that is currently in the Senate health care bill.

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From a top level source in the House comes the news that the Democrats are still short of the 216 votes they need to pass Obamacare. They have decided, however, to go for broke on Sunday and attempt to pass it whether or not they have enough support. They feel that only by forcing a vote can the force members off the fence. They hope that by employing all means at their disposal, they can round up enough votes for passage. But, if they don’t have the votes, they will allow the measure to be defeated. One source called it a “suicide run.”

The League of American Voters is strengthening its efforts.

GO HERE NOW to donate.

The Chamber of Commerce is now running new ads linking health care to the deficit and America’s possible loss of an AAA rating on its bonds.

Keep on phoning and keep on working!!!!!

Help The League Of American Voters Stop Obamacare And Prepare For Upcoming Battles — Go Here Now

As Morris says, the most important thing you can do is donate to help run ads exposing this deficit buster for what it is, and for those that oppose the bill to dial the phone and call those undecided and swing votes.

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When President Bush left office, 43% of people strongly disapproved of his job performance.  This was after years of fighting two unpopular wars, and a presidential campaign that saw Obama, Clinton and other Democrats sole strategy being to demonize President Bush and claim any Republican elected would simply be four more years of George Bush.

It is amazing, that after the years of war, near collapse of the economic system, and two plus years of Democratic Presidential candidates demonizing Bush, that Obama has equaled his strongly disapprove numbers in just a little over a year.

Today, Ed Morrissey of Hot Air reports on today’s Rasmussen Reports poll:

Today’s Rasmussen numbers from their daily presidential poll puts Barack Obama into an unusual position.  In just 14 months, he has made himself more unpopular than his predecessor, at least by the measure of strong disapproval.  Obama’s approval index has tied its lowest mark yet at -21:

Rasmussen describes the new low for President Obama:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 23% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-four percent (44%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -21. That matches the lowest Approval Index rating yet recorded for this President (see trends).

And from the “do they really not get it” category, Rasmussen explains what we have seen repeatedly over the last year, which is the more Obama pushes Obamacare on the American public, the lower his approval rating goes:

Each time the President leads a big push for his health care plan, his job approval ratings suffer. For Members of Congress, the impact may be more tangible. Just 34% say they’re more likely to vote for someone who supports this legislation. Fifty-percent (50%) are less likely to vote for a Member of Congress who supports the health care reform plan proposed by the President and Congressional Democrats. …

Overall, 45% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President’s performance. Fifty-five percent (55%) disapprove.

It is simply amazing that a President that had an approval ratings in the high 60′s or 70′s (depending on the poll) when he took office, now only has a 45% approval rating.  Even more stunning is he is approaching the point where half of America ‘strongly’ disapprove of the job he is doing.

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For instance, they are instructed not to use the total of 23 million people that will still be uninsured once the plan is in place, but instead to say 95% are covered. They say that 95% insured sounds better than 23 million uninsured. Also, the memo stated that saying that there would still be 23 million people uninsured after Obamacare is fully in force, would make President Obama’s statement to the joint sessions of Congress in September look bad, when he said that there were 30 million uninsured, which is why they needed to pass Obamacare.

While the memo warned in general about not getting into the specifics of CBO analysis numbers, it specifically warned that staffers and their bosses (the Congressmen) should not discuss the Medicare doc fix at all.  The memo stated that they would pass legislation with the doc fix in it after Obamacare was passed, but they did not include it in the Obamacare bill, because it would destroy the bills deficit neutrality.

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey has made the scanned memo available here.

Democrats in Congress are claiming the memo did not come from the Democratic leadership.  The Talking Points Memo has more details:

A senior Democratic leadership aide told TPMDC in an interview the memo, printed by Politico and leading the Drudge Report this afternoon a few days ahead of the health care vote Sunday, is “a hoax.”

“We have checked with every Democratic office, no one has ever seen it. It did not come out of a Democratic office,” the aide said, adding that media outlets printing the memo have not checked with leadership offices if the memo is authentic. A second Democratic leadership aide confirmed the memo was not sent by the Democrats. A third Democratic aide also said the memo is fake, citing the “draft” stamp and saying no one uses such things.

“If this were a Democratic communications person who wrote this, they should be fired, because this looks like Republican talking points,” the third Democratic aide told TPMDC.

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There are likely no areas where President Obama has equaled President Bush.  Bush didn’t do everything right, but he shot straight with the American public and he let the cards fall where they may.  A stark contrast to President Obama who routinely misstates the truth, attacks the former administration and outright lies about his mythical bi-partisan efforts.

The President’s approval rating has been on a steady decline.  Specifically there has been a steady and severe increase not only in the number of people that disapprove of him, but those people moving from the ‘somewhat’ disapprove category to the ‘strongly’ disapprove category.

Rasmussen reports, via The Volokh Conspiracy, has released new poll numbers that show after only a little over a year, the number of people that strongly disapprove of President Obama is equal to President Bush’s numbers when he left office:

When George Bush left office he was deeply unpopular: in Bush’s last month, according to Rasmussen 43% strongly disapproved of the job Bush was doing, while only 13% strongly approved, for a staggering negative rating of –30%. Rasmussen’s Thursday release shows that after 14 months in office President Barack Obama has achieved Bush’s 43% of the people strongly disapproving of his performance, but Obama is still 10% ahead of Bush in those who strongly approve (23% v. 13% for Bush).

I suspect that the main difference in their overall approval ratings is among African-Americans, not whites.

Imagine how unpopular Obama would be if the press and the late night comedians (who are at least as important as the press) treated Obama as they treated Bush.

It’s important to understand that when President Bush left office, not only had we been at war in Iraq and Afghanistan for years, but we just finished the longest Presidential campaign ever (Senator Obama started his campaign years before the election), with the Democrats main platform being the demonization of George Bush and the claims that any Republican elected would be four more years of George Bush.

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In that article, I outlined two major manipulations that President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have been utilizing to force the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to score the bill as costing less than one trillion dollars in the first ten years, and reducing the deficit during that same time frame.

The ‘manipulations’ that I highlighted, along with those I didn’t, might be the greatest scam or fraud ever perpetrated on American citizens in our countries history.

The two manipulations that I focused on were the ten years of tax revenue vs. only six years of Obamacare expenses, and Pelosi and Reid blocking all attempts to pass the Medicare ‘doctors fix’, until after the CBO scored the reconciliation bill and Obamacare is passed.

Unfortunately, with CBS and other news agencies touting the “CBO certified” numbers and trumpeting how Obamacare will reduce the deficit, many Americans don’t understand the true cost or that the CBO summary numbers are meaningless, because of the manipulative limitations that the Democrats required the CBO to follow.

The Weekly Standard breaks down the real cost of the bill:

For a variety of reasons, this tally doesn’t remotely reflect the bill’s real ten-year costs.  First, it includes 2010 as the initial year.  As most people are well aware, 2010 has now been underway for some time.  Therefore, the CBO would normally count 2011 as the first year of its analysis, just as it counted 2010 as the first year when analyzing the initial House health bill in the middle of 2009.  But under strict instructions from Democratic leaders, and over strong objections from Republicans, the CBO dutifully scored 2010 as the first year of the latest version of Obamacare.  If the clock were started in 2011, the first full year that the bill could possibly be in effect, the CBO says that the bill’s ten-year costs would be $1.2 trillion.

But even that wouldn’t come close to reflecting the bill’s true costs.  The CBO projects that over the next four years, less than two percent of the bill’s alleged “ten year” costs would hit:  just $17 billion of the $940 billion in costs that the Democrats are claiming.  In fact, the costs through President Obama’s entire presidency, should he be reelected, would be $336 billion.  What would the president leave behind for his successor?  According to the CBO, he would leave behind costs of $837 billion during his successor’s first term alone.  If his successor were to serve a second term, he or she would inherit a cool $2.0 trillion in Obamacare costs — about six times its costs during Obama’s own tenure.  This legislation is a ticking time-bomb.

To see the bill’s true first-decade costs, we need to start the clock when the costs would actually start in any meaningful way: in 2014.  The CBO says that Obamacare would cost $2.0 trillion in the bill’s real first decade (from 2014 to 2023) — and much more in the decades to come.

But $2.0 trillion wouldn’t be the total ten-year costs.  Instead, that would merely be the “gross cost of coverage provisions.”  Based on earlier incarnations of the proposed overhaul, the total costs would be about a third higher (the exact number can’t be gleaned from the CBO’s analysis, which is only preliminary and is not a full scoring) — making the total price-tag between $2.5 and $3 trillion over the bill’s real first decade.

How would we pay for all of this?  According to the CBO, by diverting $1.1 trillion away from already barely-solvent Medicare and spending it on Obamacare, and by increasing taxes on the American people by over $1 trillion.  Among the Medicare cuts would be cuts of $25,000 in Medicare Advantage benefits per enrollee — up from $21,000 in the previous scoring.

That is the time based manipulation and massive cuts to Medicare.  Here is why Pelosi and Reid refused to pass a new ‘doctors fix’, even though the last one will expire on April 1st, resulting in a 21% cut in Medicare reimbursements to doctors.  All in the name of getting a good, if completely fictional, CBO score:

We’d also pay for this through increased deficits.  Under strict instructions from the Democrats, the CBO gave Obamacare credit for over $400 billion (from 2014 to 2023) in phony “savings” that would allegedly result from cutting doctor’s payments under Medicare by over 20 percent and never raising them back up.  As the CBO notes, one of two things could happen:  Congress could either follow through on these severe pay cuts — in which case doctors would view all Medicare patients as if they have the plague — or, Congress could eliminate these pay cuts — as everyone in Washington expects to have happen under the so-called “doc fix” — in which case the CBO projects that this bill would raise deficits by over $100 billion from 2017 to 2019 alone.

Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) appeared on Fox and Friends and explains how the CBO score and deficit reduction numbers that Pelosi and other Democrats touted yesterday have nothing to do with the real costs:

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air comments on the IRS expansion buried in Obamacare:

We’ve heard the double-counting argument (and it’s a good one), but the IRS expansion makes for a better, more immediate argument. Do we need the IRS checking on us every month to enforce the health-insurance mandate? Do Americans think hiring an additional 15,000 IRS agents to get even more involved in our lives is a great idea for reform?

As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, the rumblings are growing that the Senate may not even pass the reconciliation bill.  Instead, they will simply let the House pass the current Senate bill, or should I say “deem it passed” and then refuse to take up the House reconciliation bill in the Senate.   Leaving tax payers not only with the massive increase to the deficit, but also all of the special deals the Senate bill contains.

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He promised that no families making less than $250,000 would receive a tax increase.  I suppose technically, forcing them to pay more for insurance coverage isn’t raising their taxes, but that doesn’t mean that it will be any easier on middle class families.

While Obamacare will add a 3.9% Medicare tax to investment income for the first time on families making over $250,000, the hardest hit families will likely be those having combined incomes around $100,000.

These folks will be too “rich” to qualify for ObamaCare’s subsidies, but probably too poor to easily afford the pricey insurance that the president’s plan forces them to buy.

Many of these $100K families will be obliged to buy a policy costing an average of $14,700 for the mid-level, “silver” health plan, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates. After income taxes, they’ll be spending almost a quarter of their net income for health insurance.

During the health care summit, President Obama stated as fact, a completely inaccurate statement.  He claimed that if Obamacare passed, insurance premiums would go down.  However, at that time, the CBO had already stated that while there would be a very minor decrease in premiums for large corporate plans, there would be a 10-13% increase in premiums for individuals purchasing insurance on their own.

The budget office concluded that premiums for people buying their own coverage would go up by an average of 10 percent to 13 percent, compared with the levels they’d reach without the legislation.

As always, it is very difficult to know whether the President simply doesn’t know what is contained in the health care bills he is forcing on the American public, or if he is being intentionally deceitful.

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In his interview with Bret Baier, the President stated that all ‘special deals’ were being removed from the Senate bill, except those provisions that would apply to all states.  He used the Louisiana provision as an example of one that has been incorrectly characterized as a special deal for Louisiana, when in fact it applies to all states.

Unless the Louisiana purchase has been rewritten in the reconciliation bill, then either President Obama intentionally lied or clearly doesn’t know what is in the Senate bill, which coincidentally House Democrats are terrified of voting on.

In his interview with Bret Baier, the President stated:

Something that was called a special deal was for Louisiana. It was said that there were billions — millions of dollars going to Louisiana, this was a special deal. Well, in fact, that provision, which I think should remain in, said that if a state has been affected by a natural catastrophe, that has created a special health care emergency in that state, they should get help. Louisiana, obviously, went through Katrina, and they’re still trying to deal with the enormous challenges that were faced because of that.

That also — I’m giving you an example of one that I consider important. It also affects Hawaii, which went through an earthquake. So that’s not just a Louisiana provision. That is a provision that affects every state that is going through a natural catastrophe.

Now I have said that there are certain provisions, like this Nebraska one, that don’t make sense. And they needed to be out. And we have removed those. So, at the end of the day, what people are going to be able to say is that this legislation is going to be providing help to small businesses and individuals, across the board, in an even handed way, and providing people relief from a status quo that’s just not working.

Now lets look at the Language of the Senate Bill:

8 ‘‘(2) In this subsection, the term ‘disaster-recovery

9 FMAP adjustment State’ means a State that is one of

10 the 50 States or the District of Columbia, for which, at

11 any time during the preceding 7 fiscal years, the President

12 has declared a major disaster under section 401 of the

13 Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assist

14 ance Act and determined as a result of such disaster that

15 every county or parish in the State warrant individual and

16 public assistance or public assistance from the Federal

17 Government under such Act and for which—

There is only one state, that in the preceding seven fiscal years, would qualify under the senate language.  Hawaii and their mythical earthquake would of course not qualify.

So, unless the reconciliation bill removes the “preceding seven fiscal years” and changes this to an ongoing relief for states where disasters are declared in every county following a natural disaster, it can and does only apply to Louisiana.

That then leaves us with two options.  Either the President intentionally lied to Bret Baier and the American public or contrary to his claims, he doesn’t know what the Senate language contains.

I think Cassy Fiano of Hot Air sums it up well:

This moment, from Bret Baier’s interview on Fox News with Obama, might just be one of the biggest “WTF?!” moments from Obama’s presidency yet. Obama is either completely making things up, living in an alternate reality, or really, really confused.

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The gang of three (Obama, Pelosi and Reid) are guilty of what is tantamount to lying to the American public.  They have crafted and re-crafted their health care bills, until they get CBO (Congressional Budget Office) scores that they can ‘sell’ as reducing the deficit over the next 10 years.

Two of the most blatant examples of this are:

1. Having ten years of tax revenues, but delaying the implementation of the majority of the health care bill for four years, so there are only six years of costs.
2. Continuously pulling the Medicare ‘doctors fix’ from House and Senate bills, because if the fix is delayed, the CBO is not allowed to count the $300+ billion of cost in their bill costing and deficit calculations.

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone could use the ‘budgeting’ scheme that Obama, Pelosi and Reid are using?  When you are trying to get a loan and the bank asks for your income and expenses, you could say, “well, this is how much my salary is for the year, but for my expenses, I’m not going to count January 1st through April 15th, because that would make it look like I couldn’t afford the house, so I am only going to count my bills after April 15th.”

No bank would accept that approach, but that is exactly the manipulation that exists in the Democrat’s health care bill, so that Obama, Pelosi and Reid can say, “it reduces the deficit over the first decade.”   Of course it does, if you manipulate the numbers, include ten years of tax revenues, but only six years of program costs, you are able to make it look good for that first ten years.

Even using this manipulation, Pelosi and Reid have had to play ping pong with the CBO, because even with four extra years of tax revenues, they have not been able to show any ‘paper’ deficit reductions, without including all kinds of subtle manipulations to the language of the bill, such as mandating fictional cost savings in certain programs.  As I write this, Pelosi has not been able to provide language for the health-care reconciliation bill, because the CBO score keeps coming back too high, which won’t allow them to perpetuate the lie that it will reduce the deficit.  The bill was supposed to be published online days ago.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air comments on Pelosi’s game of continuous CBS scoring:

The entire political world waited yesterday for a report from the Congressional Budget Office that would either allow Democrats to schedule a vote on Saturday for ObamaCare or collapse the effort altogether.  The six PM deadline came and went without a peep out of the CBO, pushing any potential vote into next week.  What happened?  The Washington Times reports today that the CBO has found itself buried under the task of continually re-scoring ObamaCare proposals — and they’re not alone.

The second, and equally egregious, manipulation relates to the doctors fix.  For years, the Medicare reimbursement schedule  has been flawed, and as a result, each year Congress passes a doctors fix, so that doctors will be paid a reasonable reimbursement.  This year, not passing the ‘doctors fix’ would result in doctor’s Medicare reimbursements being cut by 21%, which would result in most doctors immediately stopping the treatment of all Medicare patients.

However, there is a problem, in order to get a CBO score that shows Obamacare reduces the deficit over the next decade, the ‘doctors fix’ cannot be current law.  The CBO can only count the proposed legislation it is scoring and enacted law.  Reid and Pelosi have killed each bill that has been introduced that includes the doctors fix, because they know that their ‘fictional’ deficit reduction of $130 billion or so over the next decade, would immediately become a $200+ billion deficit increase.   Note: several independent reviews of the Senate bill show a REAL first decade actual cost adding $1 trillion to the deficit, vs. the fictional $130 billion deficit reduction.

The reason for this is that by delaying the doctors fix, the CBO is required to count that 21% that will be added back with the doctors fix, as a cut to Medicare.  So, from the CBO score’s perspective, Medicare has been cut by $300+ billion, when in fact it will be added back as soon as the doctors fix is finally passed.

The order of passage of the bills is key to Pelosi, Reid and Obama’s deception.  So, if health care does pass this weekend, then expect to see a doctors fix bill rushed through next week and signed into law.  It’s important to note, that the gang of three are all on record saying that Medicare reimbursements won’t be cut by 21%, but will be fixed separately, they just don’t come clean with the fact that the reason for doing them separately is to manipulate the CBO score.

Mr. President, is this what you meant by “changing the way Washington works”?  Is lying to the American public really the hope and change you promised?

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Cuccinelli warned Pelosi that her parliamentary trick might be unconstitutional, laying the groundwork for a Supreme Court challenge if Pelosi goes through with a vote on a ‘rule’, which would pass the Senate bill using deem-and-pass, rather than a straight up-and-down vote on the Senate bill, as has been promised by Pelosi and President Obama:

Virginia’s attorney general urged U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi not to use an arcane parliamentary tactic to pass health care reform without a direct vote, warning in a letter Wednesday that the move might be unconstitutional.

Republican Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli, who last month went to court to oppose the federal plan to regulate greenhouse gases, said in the letter that using the so-called “deem and pass” rule would expose President Barack Obama’s signature domestic initiative to a constitutional challenge.

Cuccinelli joins other Republicans who have opposed the possible maneuver, which both political parties have used in the past. Under the procedure, the Senate-passed health bill would be “deemed” to have passed if House members vote in favor of a rule governing another bill.

“Based upon media interviews and statements which I have seen, you are considering this approach because it might somehow shield members of Congress from taking a recorded vote on an overwhelmingly unpopular Senate bill,” Cuccinelli wrote in the letter to the Democratic speaker. “This is an improper purpose under the bicameralism requirements of Article I, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution, one of the purposes of which is to make our representatives fully accountable for their votes.”

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These thirty Democratic Congressmen all voted for Obamacare the first time around. But Pelosi cannot count on their votes again as Obama tries to jam the bill through using reconciliation in the Senate. These members are all vulnerable and are frightened of the voter backlash their support for Obamacare has kindled.

The League of American voters is running ads in each of their districts to press them to vote no on Obamacare. See their ad on the screen at left. And give us money to run the ad!

CLICK HERE TO DONATE FUNDS TO FIGHT OBAMA’S HEALTH CARE PROGRAM!

But also, pick up the phone and call these swing Congressmen. Let them hear from you! Here’s the list:

PLEASE CALL!	DC OFFICE	LOCAL OFFICE
Harry Mitchell	(202) 225-2190	(480) 946-2411
Gabrielle Giffords	(202) 225-2542	(520) 881-3588
Ann Kirkpatrick	(202) 225-2315	(928) 226-6914
Jerry McNerney	(202) 225-1947	925-833-0643
John Salazar	202-225-4761	970-245-7107
Jim Himes	(202) 225-5541	(866) 453-0028
Alan Grayson	(202) 225-2176	(407) 841-1757
Bill Foster	(202) 225-2976	630-406-1145
Baron Hill	202 225 5315	812 288 3999
Mark Schauer	(202) 225-6276	(517) 780-9075
Gary Peters	(202) 225-5802	(248) 273-4227
Dina Titus	(202) 225-3252	702-256-DINA (3462)
Carol Shea-Porter	(202) 225-5456	(603) 743-4813
Tim Bishop	(202) 225-3826	(631) 696-6500
John Hall	(202) 225-5441	(845) 225-3641 x49371
Bill Owens	(202) 225-4611	(315) 782-3150
Mike Arcuri	(202)225-3665	(315)793-8146
Dan Maffei	(202) 225-3701	(315) 423-5657
Earl Pomneroy	(202) 225-2611	(701) 224-0355
Steven Driehaus	(202) 225-2216	(513) 684-2723
Mary Jo Kilroy	(202) 225-2015	(614) 294-2196
Zach Space	(202) 225-6265	(330) 364-4300
Kathy Dahlkemper	(202) 225-5406	(814) 456-2038
Patrick Murphy	(202) 225-4276	(215) 826-1963
Christopher Carney	(202) 225-3731	(570) 585-9988
Paul Kanjorski	(202) 225-6511	(570) 825-2200
John Spratt	(202) 225-5501	(803)327-1114
Tom Perriello	(202) 225-4711	(276) 656-2291
Alan Mollohan	(202) 225-4172	(304) 623-4422
Nick Rahall	(202) 225-3452	(304) 252-5000
Steve Kagen	(202) 225-5665	(920) 437-1954

Let’s get busy to save health care in America! Thank you.

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Hot Air has an exclusive first look at a new study that uses the same accounting method that Pelosi’s left-wing group used, but eliminates the fictional cuts to medicare that everyone knows will not happen, and have only been put in the bill to help the CBO score and get the bill passed.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air:

Now, Americans for Tax Reform and the Beacon Hill Institute have conducted their own study using CAP’s methodology and determined that ObamaCare will destroy jobs, not create them.  Hot Air has an exclusive first look at the BHI executive summary:

Here’s an excerpt of the new report that is on Hot Air:

Once we dismiss purported cost savings such as the proposed Medicare cuts, the job gains produced by the CAP methodology become job losses. We  utilized the same econometric model used by the CAP authors to derive employment effects of PPACA, but with the unsupportable costs savings stripped from the model. We provide two estimates:

1. The first estimate applies the CAP methodology to the CMS estimate that the PPACA would increase national health expenditures by $24.8 billion over the baseline case by 2019. This estimate shows that PPACA would kill 120,000 jobs by 2019.
2. The second estimate applies the CAP methodology to a scenario in which we begin with the CMS estimate but in addition eliminate the $437 billion in Medicare cuts assumed by CAP and then factor in an additional $70 billion in discretionary spending that the CBO indicated would take place under the Bill. The addition of these figures would increase national health expenditures by $148.8 billion in 2019 and thus kill 700,000 jobs by 2019.

Visit Hot Air to see the entire report.

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A survey by the New England Journal of Medicine cites fears of increased patient loads and decreased pay, along with already having large debt loads, as reasons why they would not recommend the medical profession to others and would consider leaving if Obamacare passes.   Nearly 50% of primary care physicians are considering leaving or feel they will be forced out of their medical practices if Obamacare is passed.

CNS News reports on the New England Journal of Medicine Survey:

More than 29 percent (29.2) percent of the nearly 1,200 doctors who responded to the survey said they would quit the profession or retire early if health reform legislation becomes law. If a public option were included in the legislation, as several liberal Senators have indicated they would like, the number would jump to 45.7 percent.

The medical journal published the results in its March and April edition, saying: “While a sudden loss of half of the nations physicians seems unlikely, a very dramatic decrease in the physician workforce could become a reality as an unexpected side effect of health reform.”

Kevin Perpetua, managing partner for the Medicus Firm, reported that a reform bill could be “the final straw” in an already financially precarious industry.

“Many physicians feel that they cannot continue to practice if patient loads increase while pay decreases,” Perpetua said in the study. “The overwhelming prediction from physicians is that health reform, if implemented inappropriately, could create a detrimental combination of circumstances, and result in an environment in which it is not possible for most physicians to continue practicing medicine.”

“With an average debt of $140,000, and many graduates approaching a quarter of a million dollars in school loans, being a doctor is becoming less and less feasible,” Perpetua said. “Health-care reform and increasing government control of medicine may be the final straw that causes the physician workforce to break down.”

The survey shows that many doctors already find their situations difficult:

– 36 percent said that they would not recommend medicine as a profession to others, regardless of whether health-care reform passes;
– another 27 percent would still recommend medicine as a career, but not if the current reform proposal passes.

In total, 63 percent of doctors would not recommend the profession after health-care reform passes. Just 12 percent do not recommend becoming a physician now but think they would if current reform proposals pass.

Primary-care physicians, those who work in the critical fields of family and internal medicine, not only feel that they would want to quit but that they might be cast out of medicine. 46.3 percent of those physicians said that they would either want to leave medicine or that they would be “forced out” by the changes to the system.

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During today’s Situation Room on CNN, Jack Cafferty launched an attack on Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats.  Calling them out on the underhanded and cowardly tactics that are being employed to pass Obamacare.  Matthew Balan of News Busters provides some insight and the transcript:

On Tuesday’s Situation Room, CNN’s Jack Cafferty returned to targeting Nancy Pelosi, this time for endorsing the controversial “Slaughter Solution” to passing ObamaCare through the House of Representatives without a vote. Cafferty labeled the proposal “beyond sleazy,” and later flatly remarked, “This reeks!” The commentator even gave some rare kudos to House Republicans.

The full transcript of Jack Cafferty’s segment, which began 14 minutes into the 5 pm Eastern hour of Tuesday’s Situation Room:

CAFFERTY: Just when you think you’ve seen it all in Washington, along comes something like this. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may try to pass the controversial health care reform bill without making members vote on it- simply unbelievable. Pelosi says she might use a procedural tactic where the House will vote on the package of fixes to the Senate bill, and then that vote would signify that lawmakers- quote, ‘deem’ the health care bill to be passed.

Politically speaking, this is beyond sleazy. It’s meant to protect House Democrats, who are all running for reelection in November, from having to make a tough vote up or down on health care reform. Pelosi says of this process- quote, ‘I like it, because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill,’ unquote. In Nancy Pelosi’s world, accountability is a dirty word. The Senate bill, of course, contains many provisions that are unpopular among some House Democrats, including language on abortion funding and taxes on high-cost so-called Cadillac insurance plans.

This tactic has been used in the past, but never- never for something as big and important as the $900 billion health care reform bill- never. Republicans are jumping all over this, rightfully so. They’re painting it as a way for Democrats to avoid taking responsibility, which is exactly what it is. Some even suggest it’s unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, President Obama’s campaigning relentlessly, calling on lawmakers to pass health care reform- quote, ‘I want some courage. I want us to do the right thing,’ unquote. Well, the irony here is if Nancy Pelosi gets her way, it won’t take much courage at all on the part of our so-called representatives, will it?

Here’s the question: should Nancy Pelosi be allowed to push health care reform through the House without a vote? Go to CNN.com/CaffertyFile, post a comment on my blog. Wolf?

WOLF BLITZER (off-camera): We’re earning a lot about reconciliation, about ‘deeming’ bills passed into law. We’re getting a little civics lesson out there, aren’t we, Jack?

CAFFERTY: We’re learning a lot more about lack of political guts.

BLITZER: Yeah, but you and I know that’s been around for a while, right?

CAFFERTY: Not quite in this obnoxious form or noxious form. This reeks!

BLITZER: Jack Cafferty- telling it the way it is. Jack, thank you.

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As dirty as the process appears, the results of Obamacare will be so much worse.  Pajamas Media describes the liberal thinking that has led to the failures of the post office and the city of Detroit, and how the lessons we didn’t learn from their collapses will be re-lived in the health care system if Obamacare is passed:

Before casting “yea” votes in favor of a government health care grab later this week, wavering House Democrats may want to struggle out of the left’s ideological fog for a moment and consider the sad, but instructive, tales of the U.S. Postal Service and the city of Detroit.  Both are poster boys (excuse me, poster persons) for how government can get almost anything gloriously wrong.

That the U.S. Postal Service is swimming in red ink isn’t news. The nation’s postal service, despite its first-class mail monopoly, swims in red ink a lot. The important news to Americans as they follow Washington’s three-ring health care circus is that U.S. Postmaster General Joe E. Potter wants to drop Saturday mail delivery as a cost-cutting measure.

To repeat, the postmaster general wants to reduce service in an effort to staunch red ink. That’s service as in mail delivery, the U.S. Postal Service’s bread and butter. Imagine a hamburger joint announcing to its customers that it plans to stop selling hamburgers a day or two a week to cut costs. Of course, a hamburger joint wouldn’t limit the sale of hamburgers to keep its costs down. The guy who owns the hamburger joint would get creative in his marketing and pricing to sell more hamburgers. He might trim costs operationally but not at the expense of selling as many hamburgers as he and his help could flip. Why the difference? The hamburger joint can go out of business. The U.S. Postal Service, being immune to risk, cannot.

…

Detroit is upside-down liberal thinking gone wild — almost literally. What’s happening in the Motor City gives us a hint to what may lie ahead for government-run health care. Stick with me on this one.

Mayor Dave Bing, a former NBA standout, plans to raze areas of Detroit that are blighted or abandoned. Bing plans to replace ramshackle plots with green spaces and trees. The total area in Detroit that the mayor wishes to raze surpasses all of Youngstown, Ohio, in square miles. Mayor Bing says that razing decrepit and abandon sections of Detroit is a cost-cutting move that will save the city millions of dollars in police and fire services, among others.

What’s the joke many are telling:  Government Health Care — Post office efficiencies, with IRS compassion.

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While Stupak’s primary concern is the Senate bill’s public funding of abortion, that isn’t his only concern.  He says that there are other problems with the Senate bill that he and other House members fear will never be fixed if they agree to pass the Senate bill.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air comments on the interview:

Bart Stupak not only says that the dozen members in his coalition aren’t “really” wavering, the Democratic Congressman also says that abortion isn’t the only problem with the final ObamaCare push. Stupak notes that there are “250″ bills passed by the House languishing in the Senate, and wonders why anyone would assume the Senate would act any more enthusiastically on a reconciliation bill.

It would appear that Pelosi is busy playing Harry Reid’s game of lets make a deal, trying to win votes by cutting special deals, to meet their self imposed deadline of an up or down vote no later than the 21st.

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Last week, during one of President Obama’s Obamacare pep rallies, he claimed that his bill would save money and reduce the deficit by $1 trillion over the next decade.  Even with the double counting of the cuts to medicare, and without counting the ‘doc fix’ bill, the best CBO score that they were able to get is about $140 trillion deficit reduction over the next decade.  Of course, independent analysis of the bill from organizations like the Wall Street Journal state it will actually add around $1 trillion to the deficit over the next decade.  Yet, the President states that it will reduce the deficit by $1 trillion.

Even in light of the Teleprompter, one might assume that was a ‘mistake’.  Yet, he made the same statement again, a few days alter.  It appears that President Obama has reached the stage where the truth is irrelevant and he believes the means justify the ends, even if it includes lying to the American public.

Yesterday in Ohio, President Obama claimed that his health care reform would reduce health care premiums by 3,000 percent:

Monday in Strongsville, Ohio, President Obama said  that ObamaCare will reduce health insurance premiums by “3,000 percent.” Considering that a 50 percent decrease in premiums would mean that we’d be paying half as much as we now pay for health insurance and that a 100 percent decrease in premiums would mean that we’d be paying nothing for health insurance, President Obama is telling us that insurance companies will actually start paying us money to keep our health insurance.

President Obama has tried to create a wave of anger towards insurance companies in order to get support for Obamacare.  He routinely tells the American public that insurance companies are to blame for the high cost of health care.  Yet, as is often the case with this White House, the truth is far different than the rhetoric:

Whatever their sins, insurers are mainly intermediaries; they pass along the costs of the delivery system. In 2009, the largest 14 insurers had profits of roughly $9 billion; that approached 0.4 percent of total health spending of $2.472 trillion. This hardly explains high health costs. What people need to know is that Obama’s plan evades health care’s major problems and would worsen the budget outlook. It’s a big new spending program when government hasn’t paid for the spending programs it already has.

Mr. President, the campaign is over.  It’s time to stop making campaignesque lies, and start shooting straight with the American public.

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The following comes from the National Review via Sister Toldjah:

Sitting in an airport, on his way home to Michigan, Rep. Bart Stupak, a pro-life Democrat, is chagrined. “They’re ignoring me,” he says, in a phone interview with National Review Online. “That’s their strategy now. The House Democratic leaders think they have the votes to pass the Senate’s health-care bill without us. At this point, there is no doubt that they’ve been able to peel off one or two of my twelve. And even if they don’t have the votes, it’s been made clear to us that they won’t insert our language on the abortion issue.”

According to Stupak, that group of twelve pro-life House Democrats — the “Stupak dozen” — has privately agreed for months to vote ‘no’ on the Senate’s health-care bill if federal funding for abortion is included in the final legislative language. Now, in the debate’s final hours, Stupak says the other eleven are coming under “enormous” political pressure from both the White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). “I am a definite ‘no’ vote,” he says. “I didn’t cave. The others are having both of their arms twisted, and we’re all getting pounded by our traditional Democratic supporters, like unions.”

[...]

Stupak notes that his negotiations with House Democratic leaders in recent days have been revealing. “I really believe that the Democratic leadership is simply unwilling to change its stance,” he says. “Their position says that women, especially those without means available, should have their abortions covered.” The arguments they have made to him in recent deliberations, he adds, “are a pretty sad commentary on the state of the Democratic party.”

What are Democratic leaders saying? “If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That’s one of the arguments I’ve been hearing,” Stupak says. “Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America? If money is the issue — come on, we can find room in the budget. This is life we’re talking about.”

If Obamacare passes, Stupak says, it could signal the end of any meaningful role for pro-life Democrats within their own party. “It would be very, very hard for someone who is a right-to-life Democrat to run for office,” he says. “I won’t leave the party. I’m more comfortable here and still believe in a role within it for the right-to-life cause, but this bill will make being a pro-life Democrat much more difficult. They don’t even want to debate this issue. We’ll probably have to wait until the Republicans take back the majority to fix this.”

[...]

And the politics of the issue are pretty rough. “This has really reached an unhealthy stage,” Stupak says. “People are threatening ethics complaints on me. On the left, they’re really stepping it up. Every day, from Rachel Maddow to the Daily Kos, it keeps coming. Does it bother me? Sure. Does it change my position? No.”

ALLAHPUNDIT of Hot Air is skeptical about Stupak’s claim about Dems wanting to abort babies to save money:

Let’s think about this. Imagine you’re a pro-choice Democrat. You know Stupak is passionately opposed to funding abortion. You know he’s willing to chat with any conservative media outlet that’ll have him. You also know that Pelosi’s coalition is extremely fragile. Knowing all that, why would you hand him a political grenade this explosive? You’re not going to flip him; you know he’s going to run to NRO or Fox News to tell them what you said; and you know that it’s going to electrify opposition to the bill.

Not only did Stupak describe the Democrat’s reprehensible reasoning for encouraging abortion and wanting public funding for it, but he also described more examples of the Chicago-style politics that Obama brought to Washington.   When the bribery doesn’t work, they simply threaten members of Congress.

Is this really “change we can believe in”?

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He told President Clinton that his legislation (Hillarycare) was so complex and far reaching, and would effect so many people, that the American people needed to know what was in it, and that the Senators needed to know what was in it.

If you removed the date he refers to and the name Clinton, everything he says applies to what President Obama is trying to do with Obamacare.

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After defying the vast majority of Arkansas voters who opposed Obamacare, Lincoln voted for cloture and then voted to pass Harry Reid’s health care bill on Christmas Eve.

However, now that the calendar has changed from 2009 to 2010 and it has become an election year, Lincoln is attempting to reverse her position on the health care bill in an attempt to have a fighting chance at re-election in November:

As the Arkansas Senate race heats up, Sen. Blanche Lincoln wants to set the record straight on settling health care with a simple majority vote.

“I have put out a statement several weeks ago that I oppose using reconciliation for passing health care, and I still stand by that.”

In recent days, the Democrat senator has been questioned about exactly where she is on the issue, though she says her position has never changed. Reconciliation would allow Democrats to move forward with just 51 votes, rather than 60.

Lincoln is counting on Arkansas voters being uninformed and believing her new statements of opposition to reconciliation, which she believes will overshadow the fact she already voted for the wildly unpopular health care bill.

Based on the number of “Boot Blanche” billboards lining Arkansas highways, there will be plenty of reminders in November about Lincoln’s actual record in the Senate vs. the campaign-fantasy version she is attempting to create.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The government ran up the largest monthly deficit in history in February, keeping the flood of red ink on track to top last year’s record for the full year.

The Treasury Department said Wednesday that the February deficit totaled $220.9 billion, 14 percent higher than the previous record set in February of last year.

The deficit through the first five months of this budget year totals $651.6 billion, 10.5 percent higher than a year ago.

The Obama administration is projecting that the deficit for the 2010 budget year will hit an all-time high of $1.56 trillion, surpassing last year’s $1.4 trillion total. The administration is forecasting that the deficit will remain above $1 trillion in 2011, giving the country three straight years of $1 trillion-plus deficits.

AllahPundit of Hot Air puts this massive deficit in perspective:

All I can do is try to contextualize this for you: According to CBO, based on an analysis of the deeply deceitful numbers presented to it by Reid and Obama, the national panacea of health-care reform will save us $132 billion over the next 10 years. Which means the feds blew through our big decade-long ObamaCare refund in about … 17 days last month. (Savings from 2020 to 2029 are estimated to be $1 trillion, but follow the “deeply deceitful” link for insight into that. Even CBO scoffs at trying to predict any numbers that far out.)

This follows a day after the CBO said that it projected the deficit over the next 10 years to be $1.2 trillion higher than the Obama administration has estimated.  The CBO projects the deficit to be $9.7 trillion vs the $8.5 trillion the White House has estimated for the next decade.  That would put the national debt in 2020 well over $22 trillion, which is a number that many people consider unsustainable.

That $22 trillion national debt doesn’t even take into account the real costs of the health care bill if it is passed.  Through manipulation of the CBO scoring, the gang of three (Obama, Pelosi and Reid) were able to get a CBO score showing a deficit reduction over the next decade of $130 billion or so.  Independent analysis of the health care bill put the real cost at about $1 trillion over the next decade, which would raise the 10 year deficit to close to $11 trillion and the national debt in 2020 to over $23 trillion.

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There is a lot of material I would like to get to, obviously leading with health care and stimulus.

I hope to get back to my normal schedule tomorrow.

Thanks for you understanding with the lack of original content on Liberal Whoppers over the last two weeks.

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Joe Biden, speaking on the CBS Early Show, stated that the Stimulus Bill was designed in two stages, with the job creation portion of the bill in the second stage, which will kick in this year:

This is actually a pretty amazing assertion by the Vice President.  The White House ‘inherrited’ a country that was hemorrhaging jobs.  The Democrats in the House and Senate, along with President Obama, passed the stimulus practically overnight, without allowing debate on the bill, nor giving members of Congress a chance to read it, because it was critical that the bill was passed in an emergency fashion, because we needed to stop the job losses and start creating new jobs.  We all remember President Obama’s promise that if the Stimulus bill was passed that unemployment wouldn’t top 8%.

Now, Vice President Biden says that the bill was designed so that the job creation portion of the bill wouldn’t occur until the second year, which just coincidentally is an election year.

On its face, it appears that from the start Democrats sacrificed the American economy to create a massive spending bill that they hoped would create great photo ops and news stories 14-18 months after the bill was passed, just in time to help Democrats campaigning for the mid-term elections.

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The latest attack is being launched at the Governor of Virgina:

Democrats have targeted Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell in their effort to paint Republicans as hypocritical when it comes to stimulus money.

The Governor’s office confirmed Monday that Virginia will receive $24 million in federal funds over the next four years to use on health care information technology.

That money comes from funds made available to states by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

McDonnell has emerged as  a rising star in the Republican party since his landslide election victory last November.

McDonnell’s office released a statement on Monday heaping praise on the funding, “I thank U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius for approving Virginia’s application for cooperative funding…”

However, during his campaign McDonnell said the stimulus bill would bring dangerous long term debt.

The DNC wasted no time in jumping on the issue.

“The spate of Republicans being exposed for seeking stimulus dollars under the radar, proves that either Republicans were just being sarcastic when they assailed the stimulus and they actually love the Recovery Act, or their objections are based on politics and not principle,” said  Hari Sevugan, DNC spokeswoman.

As always, it’s hard to tell whether Democrats are really so totally confused on the difference between opposing a stimulus bill they believe is bad for the country and their state or district receiving stimulus money once the Democrats passed the bill.

Senators and House Representatives are sent to Washington to represent the best interest of the people in their districts.  Virtually all Republicans opposed the stimulus bill, because they didn’t believe the orgy of spending and the resulting deficit ballooning was good for the voters of their district, state and country.

However, once the Democrats in Congress passed the $850+ billion stimulus bill then Republicans have an obligation to their constituents to request funds for their home states and districts.  Their constituents, along with their children and grandchildren, will be paying for the trillions of dollars of new debt the Democrats are racking up, so therefore Republicans would not be doing their job if they ‘stood on principle’ and refused to take stimulus dollars.  The people of their districts are going to have to pay for this stimulus bill for a very long time, so therefore they must receive an equal share of it.

The reality is that the Democrats making these accusations of hypocrisy know that there is a big difference between Republican opposition of the bill, and those same Republicans now ‘accepting’ or ‘requesting’ funds for their districts.  However, that fact doesn’t matter.  This week has been decreed a “promote the stimulus” week by President Obama.  He has Cabinet members flying around the country for photo ops and to spin how great the stimulus bill has been.  Therefore, by default, the President’s decree also makes this an ‘honest free’ week.

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A school superintendent in Rhode Island is trying to fix an abysmally bad school system.

Her plan calls for teachers at a local high school to work 25 minutes longer per day, each lunch with students once in a while, and help with tutoring.  The teachers’ union has refused to accept these apparently onerous demands.

The teachers at the high school make $70,000-$78,000, as compared to a median income in the town of $22,000.  This exemplifies a nationwide trend in which public sector workers make far more than their private-sector counterparts (with better benefits).

This happened in a poor town, where reportedly 50% of students were currently failing their courses, and they had a graduation rate of only about 50%.  In order to try and turn the school around, the teachers’ union was asked to give a small number of concessions on time and extra help for the students.  They refused.

As always, Ed Morrissey of Hot Air offers a good perspective:

This is a good argument for getting unions out of the public-employee business altogether.  Not only does the marriage of unions and the public sector create too much of an impulse to expand bureaucracies, it twists the priorities away from public service and towards entitlement thinking.   To their credit, most educators, law enforcement, and emergency response personnel successfully resist that impulse, but this jaw-dropping standoff in Rhode Island shows that it does exist.

The average public sector job is in the $75-80k range, while the average private sector job is in the mid $40k range.  Support for unions and union memberships are near all-time lows.  When given a choice, employees around the country are saying no to unions. Professor Mark J. Perry on his Carpe Diem blog reports that in the ’50s nearly one in three employees were members of unions.  Now, the number is around 12%, or about one in eight workers.

However, there is one exception.   While the number of private sector union workers has been on a steep decline, in 2008 the number of public sector union workers actually exceeded private sector workers for the first time and continues to grow.

While most Americans are rejecting unions, the liberal arm of the Democratic party is fighting to revive one of their largest sources of campaign funds.  This is the reason that Reid, Pelosi and Obama are working hard to get card check passed.  If they succeed in passing card check, then union thugs will be able to intimidate workers into voting for unionization when they otherwise would not and America will suffer the consequences.

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President Barack Obama, defending his economic stimulus plan on its first anniversary, is dispatching his Cabinet across the country to try to calm an anxious public as Democrats head into potentially devastating midterm elections.

A weeklong push to highlight the stimulus program’s first year was starting with a Tuesday trip by Vice President Joe Biden to hard-hit Saginaw, Mich., to tour a small business, a jobs training program and a solar factory that all received Recovery Act dollars.

Obama’s fellow Democrats planned to tout programs putting people back to work under the $787 billion spending bill. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was touring a medical center in Atlanta on Tuesday; Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was promoting stimulus projects in Virginia and Texas the same day.

In all, senior administration officials are scheduled to visit 35 communities before Friday to counter Republican claims the massive deficit-spending program has failed. Obama plans to surround himself at the White House on Wednesday with people who have jobs because of the stimulus plan, then travel to Colorado and Nevada.

This is simply a continuation of the strategy that President Obama described following the Scott Brown win in Massachusetts.  It is centered on Obama’s belief that the American people don’t “get it”.  He has tried to make the case that he spent so much time creating and passing policy last year that he forgot to stop and clearly explain to the American voters exactly what he was doing.  He indicated that he assumed incorrectly that the American people would be smart enough for them to “get it”, if he simply kept working hard.  This from a President that has done more interviews, Town Hall meetings and prime-time TV appearances in his first year than any other recent President.

In keeping with his belief that if he just explains his unpopular policies, he will somehow make them popular, the White House is now blowing more tax dollars on a stimulus promotional tour.

While watching the press coverage of these promotional events, here are a couple things you probably won’t see his minions talk about.

First, since the stimulus money has trickled out, with only about 1/3 of it spent after the first year, and only 10% or so spent in the first six months, why was it necessary to pass it in an overnight rush, where nobody had a chance to read the bill before it was voted on?

Second, with Obama and the Democrats calling the GOP the party of no and claiming the Republicans are the reason there is no bipartisanship in Washington, will they give Obama credit for getting the ball rolling.  It was a year ago when in response to Republican leaders complaining to the President about being excluded from the stimulus discussions and raising objections to some parts of the $750+ $850+ billion stimulus bill, that the President responded to the Republican leadership by simply laughing and stating “I won” and therefore he would get to choose who was allowed to give input on bills.

Instead of being the great uniter as he promised, President Obama’s policies and personal arrogance has not only further divided Washington, but the entire country.  His Cabinet members making three dozen photo ops this week is not going to undo the damage that President Obama has done in his first year in office.

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Over the last month, they were breaking about a story a week, but in the last week the pace has been picking up.  Including two new examples of shoddy research or possibly intentional scientific fraud that has been reported on this week.

In addition, on Saturday, the former head of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, made a number of shocking admissions.  He claimed that he ‘lost’ the source temperature data that had been requested via freedom of information requests, and that is the reason why he failed to comply with those requests.  It’s important to note that in one of the leaked Climategate emails, he told Michael Mann (Penn State climate researcher)  that he would delete data files before releasing them via freedom of information requests.

The other revelations that Jones made were that there has been no statistically-significant warming in the last 15 years, and that he admitted that the medieval warm period might have been warmer than today.

Now on top of Jones’ moment of honesty, combined with his “dog ate my research” excuse, we have two major IPCC  Armageddon claims used by Gore and company that have now been proven false.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air details the first one, which appears to be a case of scientific fraud:

Another key element of the IPCC report on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) turns out to be based on deliberate decisions to use the most hysterical claims by advocates rather than on science.  The IPCC warnings of the African crop projections have a more demonstrably corrupt basis, as the report deliberately ignored actual science that showed little risk of crop yields — science funded by the British government at a cost of over £2.5 million.  Who compiled the IPCC Synthesis that ignored peer-reviewed science for the speculation of one Moroccan activist, whose report didn’t even agree with its cited sources?  Rajendra Pachauri’s own business — and he got over £400,000 for the work:

One of the most widely quoted and most alarmist passages in the main 2007 report was a warning that, by 2020, global warming could reduce crop yields in some countries in Africa by 50 per cent. Dr Pachauri not only allowed this claim to be included in the short Synthesis Report, of which he was co-editor, but has publicly repeated it many times since.

The origin of this claim was a report written for a Canadian advocacy group by Ali Agoumi, a Moroccan academic who draws part of his current income from advising on how to make applications for “carbon credits”. As his primary sources he cited reports for three North African governments. But none of these remotely supported what he wrote. The nearest any got to providing evidence for his claim was one for the Moroccan government, which said that in serious drought years, cereal yields might be reduced by 50 per cent. The report for the Algerian government, on the other hand, predicted that, on current projections, “agricultural production will more than double by 2020″. Yet it was Agoumi’s claim that climate change could cut yields by 50 per cent that was headlined in the IPCC’s Working Group II report in 2007.

What made this even odder, however, was that the group’s co-chairman was a British agricultural expert, Dr Martin Parry, whose consultancy group, Martin Parry Associates, had been paid £75,000 by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) for two reports which had come to totally different conclusions. Specifically designed to inform the IPCC’s 2007 report, these predicted that by 2020 any changes were likely to be insignificant. The worst case they could come up with was that by 2080 climate change might decrease crop yields by “up to 30 per cent”.

British taxpayers poured out money for the section of the IPCC report for which Dr Parry was responsible. Defra paid £2.5 million through the Met Office, plus £330,000 for Dr Parry’s salary as co-chairman, and a further £75,000 to his consultancy for two more reports on the impact of global warming on world food supplies. Yet when it came to the impact on Africa, all this peer-reviewed work – including further expert reports by Britain’s Dr Mike Hulme and Dutch and German teams – was ignored in favour of a prediction from one Moroccan activist at odds with his own cited sources.

On to the second false claim.  The Register in the UK did a story yesterday on a statistical review of  the raw data that debunks the IPCC claims of increased hurricane activity and intensity, which they claimed was more likely than not caused by human activity:

More trouble looms for the IPCC. The body may need to revise statements made in its Fourth Assessment Report on hurricanes and global warming. A statistical analysis of the raw data shows that the claims that global hurricane activity has increased cannot be supported.

Les Hatton once fixed weather models at the Met Office. Having studied Maths at Cambridge, he completed his PhD as metereologist: his PhD was the study of tornadoes and waterspouts. He’s a fellow of the Royal Meterological Society, currently teaches at the University of Kingston, and is well known in the software engineering community – his studies include critical systems analysis.

Hatton has released what he describes as an ‘A-level’ statistical analysis, which tests six IPCC statements against raw data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) Administration. He’s published all the raw data and invites criticism, but warns he is neither “a warmist nor a denialist”, but a scientist.

Hatton performed a z-test statistical analysis of the period 1999-2009 against 1946-2009 to test the six conclusions. He also ran the data ending with what the IPCC had available in 2007. He found that North Atlantic hurricane activity increased significantly, but the increase was counterbalanced by diminished activity in the East Pacific, where hurricane-strength storms are 50 per cent more prevalent. The West Pacific showed no significant change. Overall, the declines balance the increases.

“When you average the number of storms and their strength, it almost exactly balances.” This isn’t indicative of an increase in atmospheric energy manifesting itself in storms.

Even the North Atlantic increase should be treated with caution, Hatton concludes, since the period contains one anomalous year of unusually high hurricane activity – 2005 – the year Al Gore used the Katrina tragedy to advance the case for the manmade global warming theory.

…

Thre IPCC’s WG1 paper states: “There are also suggestions of increased intense tropical cyclone activity in some other regions where concerns over data quality are greater.” Hatton points out the data quality is similar in each area.

The IPCC continues: “It is more likely than not (> 50%) that there has been some human contribution to the increases in hurricane intensity.” But, as Hatton points out, that conclusion comes from computer climate models, not from the observational data, which show no increase.

“The IPCC goes on to make statements that would never pass peer review,” Hatton told us. A more scientifically useful conclusion would have been to ask why there was a disparity. “This differential behaviour to me is very interesting. If it’s due to increased warming in one place, and decreased warming in the other – then that’s interesting to me.”

Al Gore used the deaths of all those Katrina victims as nothing more than power-point aids to keep selling his global-warming snake oil.  He, and other global-warming activists  trumpeted how increased hurricanes would lead to countless death and destruction, and how the 50% reduction in African crop yields would lead to mass starvation.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air gives his take on the suspect hurricane claims:

In this case, it appears that the IPCC ignored readings from below the equator to bolster their claims.  Unlike in the MWP, we have plenty of measurements of storm activity in the Southern Hemisphere for that period.   If Hatton’s calculations are correct, the IPCC either ignored them or discounted them in the calculations.  Either way, the claims on storm intensity are now suspect, as is much of the IPCC’s claims and supposedly scientific process.

What some have long suspected, is being revealed as truth a little more every day.  Instead of the ‘debate being over’, we are finding that Gore and company are simply guilty of using fabricated scientific conclusions to continue their fear-mongering and Godless profiteering in their pursuit of making billions from their green empires.

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The woman that poses as Barack Obama on all his social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter is connected to the far-left organization MoveOn.org.

For those scratching their heads, the President in theory is a member of these websites. However, he obviously isn’t responsible for typing in the little messages that are going out to his followers almost 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal revealed the identity of the current Twitterer as Mia Cambronero.

Sheppard goes on to explain that Cambronero is a senior fellow at the New Organizing Institute, which is a radical branch of MoveOn.org.

Some might argue that it is no big deal if a woman that types messages on Twitter and Facebook for President Obama was previously a part of a political group like MoveOn.org.   Maybe that’s true, maybe not.  However, the important thing that this discovery reinforces once again, is how much President Obama has surrounded himself with far-left liberals and extremists.

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Responding to Biden’s apparent attempt to take credit for the positive results of the surge and other decisions that Senators Obama and Biden had opposed, Cheney had this to say about Iraq:

“If they’re going to take credit for it, fair enough, for what they’ve done while they’re there,” Cheney said Sunday. “But it ought to go with a healthy dose of ‘thank you, George Bush’ up front and a recognition that some of their early recommendations, with respect to prosecuting that war, were just dead wrong.”

…

Asked about Biden’s comments, former Vice President Cheney said, “If they had had their way, if we’d followed the policies they’d pursued from the outset or advocated from the outset, Saddam Hussein would still be in power in Baghdad today.”

Senator Barack Obama campaigned on his opposition not only of the Iraq war, but that he would fight President Bush’s decision to increase troop levels in Iraq (the surge) and later claimed that the surge was making things worse in Iraq:

Senator Obama January 2007:  “I am going to actively oppose the president’s proposal. I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

Senator Obama November 2007: “Not only have we not seen improvements, but we’re actually worsening.”

Senator Obama May 2008: “We don’t need more spin about the surge that was supposed to get the Iraqis to step up. We don’t need more leaders who just see what they want to see in Iraq. It’s time to recognize where we are in Iraq.”

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And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

…

Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.

‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

A Twitter follower, @redostoneage, pointed out a couple peer-reviewed studies documenting MWP in both China and South America.

Here is Asian temperature data from 2,300 year old trees that shows the Medieval Warm Period was Hotter Than today:

“Zhang et al. conclude that their proxy climate data “reveal that the North Atlantic MWP and the LIA were accompanied by climate changes on the northeastern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau,” while their comparison with Esper et al.’s data indicates that their data are also well correlated with long tree-ring chronologies from much of the Northern Hemisphere. The research team thus provides important evidence for the broad geographical reach of both the MWP and the LIA.”

In addition, C3 Headlines details this peer-reviewed study that describes the South American MWP:

“In the words of the research team, “the reasonably good correlation between our results (particularly SST) and other continental and marine archives from central-south Chile, Peru, and Antarctica … confirms the occurrence of globally important climatic anomalies such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.” And, of course, their SST data indicate that the current level of warmth in that part of the world still has a long way to go before equaling the warmth experienced there a thousand and more years ago, which suggests that the region’s current level of warmth is neither unprecedented nor unnatural…”

It’s not just the MWP that global warming advocates try and hide.  They also attempt to remove any mention of the Little Ice Age (LIA), because the famous hockey-stick fabrication graph and other ‘proof’ showing rapid temperature increases, typically start during the latter stages of the LIA.  The Little Ice Age was an extremely cold period that spanned 500-600 years from roughly the middle of the fourteenth century to the latter part of the nineteenth century.  During that 600 years, there were three distinct temperature minimums at 1650, 1770 and 1850.

By starting temperature graphs during the latter stage of a mini ice age, people like Al Gore are able to show what appears to be alarming increases in temperatures, but that is only because they are out of context.  The inconvenient truth that Gore and company fail to come clean with is that during a period around 800-1100 AD (just a couple hundred years before the beginning of the LIA) temperatures were much warmer than today.  During this time, England was full of vineyards and farming was abundant in Greenland (which has green in its name for a reason).

If man is causing warming now, what caused it 1200 years ago?  Was it all the gas-powered cars on the road?  Was it the coal-powered power plants?  Or, just possibly, was the warming then, like today, simply part of cyclical temperature changes the earth has gone through for millions of years?

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Ed Morrissey of Hot Air has dug up another story that broke in England today in the Times of London. This one is in regards to the inaccuracy of the temperature data at the heart of the claim that global temperatures have risen dramatically in recent decades.

The Times of London delivers a separate blow to the AGW movement today in a report on scientific review of the data used to claim man-made warming of the planet over the last few decades. Several researchers have found that the measurements of temperatures in the AGW record that showed temperature increases mainly came from land development and urbanization, not from actual temperature increases. They have made their findings public through peer-reviewed studies that come at a very bad time for the IPCC and AGW advocates:

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

Morrissey goes on to talk about Anthony Watts who runs the Watts Up With That site, and how he has been doing research to detail how construction of heat retaining and producing structures around monitoring stations have resulted in artificially high temperatures.  You can read about Watts’ project where he is doing a survey, including photographs, of every USHCN temperature station.

Here are a few pictures from http://www.surfacestations.org/ where the data and photographic evidence is being collected:

Now, in reality there are two factors that plague the temperature data in regards to urbanization around the temperature monitoring stations.  First, we have the general heat island effect, which is related to the heat retaining and producing effect that urban construction has and the ‘island’ of heat that surrounds urban areas.  Second, are the more direct impacts (pictures above) on the quality of temperature data, such as air conditioning units being installed a few feet away from a temperature gauge, or paving the area underneath a gauge.

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Phil Jones was the director of the East Anglia Climate Research Center (CRU) in England that was the site of the climategate scandal that broke last December.  In fact, many of the emails at the heart of the controversy were directly sent or received by Jones.  Shortly after the emails were leaked, Jones stepped down as the head of the CRU as an investigation of any wrong doing was conducted.

This weekend, in a conversation with the BBC, Jones admitted there are some questions about the facts that form the foundation of their claims of global warming, and he gave a flimsy excuse for why he failed to honor freedom of information requests.

The key revlelations were:

The dog ate my homework — Jones says that he has ‘misplaced’ the data and research used to make the ‘hockey stick’ graph that Gore and others used to scare the world into believing an armageddon was upon us.

What most of us already knew — that there has been no global warming since the mid ’90s, or as he says, no “statistically significant” warming.

He admitted that the Medieval Warming Period might have been warmer than today and that modern temperatures might not be unprecedented.

The UK’s Daily Mail has more on the revelations from Jone’s conversation with the BBC:

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

…

And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.

But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.

Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.

‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

‘Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented.

The “hockey stick” graph has already been shown to be mainly a creation of graph-scaling bias, but this gets to the heart of the entire argument.  During the MWP, farmers grew crops on Greenland for a couple of centuries.  Until now, AGW advocates insisted that the warming only took place in the northern hemisphere.  If that warming was indeed global, then it dwarfs anything seen in the 20th century, as these two charts from Climate Audit, via  Sonic Frog, demonstrate:

While it may seem like Jone’s revelation about the MWP is a minor one, it is important to note that it was a major theme in the leaked CRU emails.  There were numerous emails between Jones and other global-warming scientists discussing how important it was to not talk about the MWP.  They discussed using only temperature data after the MWP to avoid highlighting the extreme warming of the MWP.  When they did need to produce long term temperature data, they discussed picking and choosing which temperature proxy data to use so that they could tailor the data so that the MWP appeared ONLY as warm as modern temperatures, or even slightly cooler.

Rich Trzupek of Big Journalism explains how the Medieval Warm Period was buried:

Some proxy data indicates that the average planetary temperature was much higher than it is today, specifically during the Medieval Warm Period (approximately 1000 – 1400 A.D.). Indeed, the IPCC’s first report acknowledged that the Medieval Warm Period existed. (See the chart, taken from the first IPCC report). Since then, the IPCC, CRU, Al Gore and others have done their damnedest to “disappear” this event, chiefly by picking and choosing friendly proxy data that would make it go away.

If you want to see the emails for yourself, go to http://eastangliaemails.com/ and search on MWP or “Medieval Warming” and you will find plenty of emails where Phil Jones and others talk about how to keep the data and even the term Medieval Warming Period, out of the public’s view.

There are plenty of other revelations in the text of those emails.  While Jones yesterday said he may have ‘lost’ the data that was used to create the famous hockey stick graph, some of his emails tell a different story.  In this 2005 email between Phil Jones and Michael Mann (head of Penn State climate research department currently under investigation), Jones says that he will delete climate data before complying with the UK’s freedom of information law and releasing it:

Mike,

I presume congratulations are in order – so congrats etc !

Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? – our does !

The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.

We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.

…

Phil

[emphasis added]

It will be interesting to see how much press coverage Jone’s admissions receive in the US.  Over the last two months, there have been verified reports of inaccuracies and failures to rely on data from peer-reviewed journals in the UN’s IPCC reports almost weekly, but they are barely being covered in the US press.

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Not satisfied with the seemingly stalled health care reform efforts in Washington, state lawmakers in Richmond, Virginia want to make sure residents of the Old Dominion State aren’t subject to a federal mandate requiring citizens to buy health insurance.  This week the Virginia House of Delegates passed legislation that would make it illegal to do just that.

Many Democrats on Capitol Hill want a reform plan that would force citizens to buy health care or face severe penalties. Republicans in their near total rejection of the Democratic reforms have objected. The election of Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) and the apparent retreat of the White House and Congressional leaders on health care reform would appear to make a mandate unlikely. But Virginia lawmakers pushed ahead nonetheless.  It isn’t clear what actual impact the Virginia legislation (which according to the Richmond Times Dispatch is expected to be signed into law by Governor Bob McDonnell-R)  would have if federal lawmakers are able to pass a law with the mandate.  If the federal law preempted state prerogatives, lawsuits would certainly follow.

This bill was passed by a Democratically controlled legislature in Virginia.  It is sure to be the first of many such state laws passed.  A number of other state legislatures are currently working on similar bills, which if Obamacare is passed, will almost certainly result in the Supreme Court getting involved and deciding the question:

Can the federal government force an individual to buy something, whether that something is health insurance or a GM car?

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The invitations have gone out to leadership in both parties to attend Barack Obama’s ostensibly bipartisan summit on health care.  Is this the event of the social season, a political debate, or Kabuki theater?  Depending on who answers, it seems that no one is quite sure what to expect from any of the participants, assuming the debate takes place at all.

Many Republicans fear that this summit will be nothing more than political theater aimed at helping provide cover for the President and Democrats in Congress as they continue to work behind closed doors to come up with a plan to pass Obamacare via budget reconciliation.

The format that the White House has laid out has done little to alleviate Republican fears.  After opening remarks by President Obama, followed by a Republican and a Democrat, President Obama will moderate a discussion among the 37 law makers invited to the meeting.  Considering what the President has invested in the Democratic bill, along with the deals he has cut with union leaders, Pharma and the insurance industry, many don’t feel he can be an impartial moderator.

Making matters worse is the fact that the White House and Congressional Democrats have not been able to keep quiet the fact they continue to work on a compromise bill between House and Senate Democrats, along with trying to win the support of 51 Senators, which is needed to ram Obamacare through via reconciliation.

In fact, on the same day that President Obama sent out his summit invitations, a Democratic member of the Senate said the decision has been made to proceed with reconciliation:

“I think a decision has just been made — we’re just going to go ahead” with a reconciliation bill, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, told reporters on Friday.

All indications are that the Democrat’s strategy is to have their compromise bill, along with a reconciliation plan, ready to go prior to the Health-Care Summit on February 25th.

Then on the 25th, President Obama will hold his summit, which will have been carefully orchestrated to showcase the revised health care bill that the White House, Congressional Democrats and special interest groups have been working on behind closed doors for nearly two months.   Once the summit is over, they will be able to say, “we had the meeting, we tried to get Republican support, but they still want to do nothing but obstruct health care reform.  We have no choice but to pass health care reform by using reconciliation.”

This is all political theater, because if the White House and Democratic leaders were truly interested in coming up with a bipartisan solution, they wouldn’t be continuing to work on their partisan bill behind closed doors, and they wouldn’t have already made the decision to proceed with reconciliation.

Scott Brown ran in Massachusetts by saying, “I will be the 41st vote to stop the Senate health care bill.”  That promise resulted in nearly two thirds of the independents in the bluest of blue states voting for a Republican.  Add to that, poll after poll shows that the American public is not happy with the Democrat’s health care bills.

There can be no doubt left that the majority of Americans don’t want the Democrat’s health care bill, which they continue to work on in the back rooms of the White House and Congress.

Democrats are betting on the fact that voters have very short memories, as the mid-term elections are less than nine months away.

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President Obama ran on the promise that he would not raise taxes on any individual making less than $200,000 and any family making less than $250,000.  It was a promise he made repeatedly on the campaign trail and continued to make after being sworn in.

As many conservatives expected would happen, President Obama is laying the groundwork for an across the board tax increase.   The President now says he is ‘agnostic’ on tax increases on the middle class and open to any solutions to get the deficit under control.

President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.

Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all options for reducing the deficit, including tax increases and cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

“The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” the president said in the interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.”

Obama repeatedly vowed during the 2008 presidential election campaign that he would not raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 and households earning less than $250,000 a year. When senior White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner suggested in August that the administration might be open to going back on that pledge, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs quickly reiterated the president’s promise.

President Obama went on to say that the problem was not the spending increase last year, but simply that there is a ‘mismatch’ between the amount of money coming in and going out, and “that is going to require some big, tough choices that, so far, the political system has been unable to deal with.”

It isn’t very hard to read between those lines.  He’s agnostic on a tax increase on middle class families.  He doesn’t feel the spending Orgy that Reid and Pelosi have conducted and he has encouraged and signed into law, is the problem.  But, because there is a mismatch between the spending and revenue, tough choices must be made.  In other words, taxes will be raised on the middle class to pay for his $4 trillion budget and $1.6 trillion deficit.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air gives his take on Obama’s reversal on a middle class tax increase:

What changed? Obama’s economic policies have had the effect that we predicted they would during the campaign. The White House sees trillion-plus budget deficits for most of the next ten years, thanks to massively expanding federal budgets and the drag they put on economic growth. Either Obama has to drastically reduce federal spending and the intrusion it creates in American lives, or he has to hike taxes in a broad manner to generate enough income to offset the spending. Taxing just the upper 5% isn’t an option.

What Obama is signaling was predicted by conservative strategists and blogs since before candidate Barack Obama was elected.  It was always expected to happen in the order we are seeing it.  First, Obama would ratchet up spending in massive way.  Then, they would use the historic deficits to justify a broad-based tax increase.

It’s unclear in what form the tax increases will come, but they almost certainly will appear in some form or fashion.  It’s possible that we could see a national sales tax or VAT tax.  It could come in the form of increased gas and energy taxes.  However, the most likely scenario is simply an across the board increase in income taxes.

Common sense would say that the Democrats in Congress afraid of losing their majority in the November elections would probably not be willing to vote in a tax increase before the election.  That would mean they would have to pass a tax increase after the elections, but before the new Congress is sworn in.  That might be easier said than done, especially if Reid loses his reelection bid.

Instead, if the Democrats are not able to pass the tax increase they want, they can accomplish it by simply doing nothing and letting the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of this year.  Then, when the Republicans attempt to extend the Bush tax cuts, the Democrats will simply block any attempts to extend the tax cuts, which they will be able to do whether or not they still control both Houses of Congress next year.

The first President Bush felt the wrath of  American voters when he broke his “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge.  Time will tell if President Obama feels that same wrath.

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A new CBS News/New York Times poll shows the President’s continued decline:

Mr. Obama’s job approval rating stands at 46 percent, matching his previous low from early January. As many as 45 percent of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing – his highest disapproval rating to date. More than anything, Americans are critical of how Mr. Obama is handling domestic issues like the economy.

Still, the president is more often viewed as representing and understanding Americans’ interests more than either Congress or Republicans are.

Most Americans, 57 percent, say Mr. Obama is more interested in serving the American people rather than interest groups, while 35 percent say the opposite is true. By contrast, just 13 percent of Americans think Congress is more interested in serving the people they represent over special interests.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air has highlighted some of the specific areas where Obama’s approval has taken a big hit:

There is a lot more in the poll breakout, but here are a few highlights:

• Economy – down 10, 42/52
• Health care – down 20, 35/55
• Deficits – down 27, 31/58
• More people feel angry or dissatisfied (51%) at the Obama administration than enthusiastic or satisfied (47%)
• 56% think he has no clear plan to create jobs

Be sure to visit Hot Air to read the rest of Ed’s breakdown of the latest poll results.

President Obama has stated that the American voters just don’t ‘get it’.  He claimed that the backlash witnessed in Massachusetts was due to the fact that he was so busy creating and passing his policies, that he didn’t take enough time out to explain to the common people voters exactly how good for America his policies would be.

Fast forward a month, and President Obama has been on TV almost daily ‘explaining’ to the voters what his policies mean.  The fact is that the more President Obama ‘explains’ his policies, the lower his poll numbers go.

Here’s a free tip, Mr. President:  It isn’t that American voters don’t understand your policies, it’s that they don’t agree with those policies or the Chicago-style politics you are using to attempt to implement them.

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The Senate proposal, which is more narrow than the one analyzed by CBO, is estimated to cost about $10 billion. That would add 80,000 to 180,000 jobs over the course of a year. The U.S. economy, meanwhile, has lost 8.4 million jobs since the start of the recession.

That CBO analysis of a more generous “payroll tax holiday” found that it would only create 8-18 jobs per $1 million in cost.  Making it a very inefficient means of creating jobs.

While Reid had scheduled a vote on this second stimulus bill, he has yet to produce a bill for Republican Senators to read.  While the back-to-back blizzards that hit DC in the last week resulted in the scheduled vote being canceled, it is likely that the vote will be rescheduled before a bill is produced.  To date, Reid refuses to produce the bill or a draft of the bill.  Earlier in the week a draft of the new stimulus bill was leaked, but Democratic leaders responded by stating that the bill that would be voted on would look far different than the leaked bill.

Senator Mitch McConnell has asked with no success for Harry Reid to produce the bill for Republican Senators to review prior to voting on it:

McConnell also requested that Democrats formally release the bill text so his party could read it.

“My members need to be able to feel like they understand what they are being called upon to support,” McConnell said on the Senate floor.

Only about a third of the last $850+ billion stimulus bill has been spent, but that $250+ billion has proven to be totally ineffective.  As an example, the stimulus had money earmarked to create the kind of  ‘green jobs’ that President Obama keeps telling us will be the key to the future of the United States.  New information shows that 80% of the money going to develop wind power has gone to Chinese manufacturers:

“Most of the jobs are going overseas,” said Russ Choma at the Investigative Reporting Workshop. He analyzed which foreign firms had accepted the most stimulus money. “According to our estimates, about 6,000 jobs have been created overseas, and maybe a couple hundred have been created in the U.S.”

Even with the infusion of so much stimulus money, a recent report by American Wind Energy Association showed a drop in U.S. wind manufacturing jobs last year.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called the flow of money to foreign companies an outrage, because the stimulus, he said, was intended to create jobs inside the United States.

The good news is we are creating green jobs.  The bad news is that most of those jobs are in China.

Michelle Malkin gives some insight into “porkulus II“:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Tuesday that the Porkulus II plan – reportedly with an $85 billion price tag — was a “really nice piece of legislation.” But you’ll have to take his credibility-damaged word for it.

Despite anticipated votes on the bill before President’s Weekend, no one outside the Democrat leadership and K Street had seen an actual bill as of Tuesday afternoon. Few will read the whole thing before casting their hasty votes. And once again, we’ll only be informed of the last-minute sweeteners, Cash for Cloture handouts, and backroom deals after the ink of the president’s signature is dry.

Reportedly, public-sector unions are pushing hard to include their precious card-check plan, which would allow Big Labor bosses to sabotage workers’ rights to a federally supervised, private ballot election.

While the fact that only Democrats, lobbyists and union leaders have seen the bill is disturbing, possibly the most disturbing nugget here is about card check.  There have been increasing rumors that the Democrats will try and pass card check by attaching it to the second stimulus bill.  Obama, Reid and Pelosi are receiving increased pressure from unions like the SEIU that are angry that the millions of dollars spent to get Obama and other Democrats elected (likely $100+ million, as SEIU alone spent $60 million on Obama’s campaign) has not been repaid with legislation such as card check and other liberal, union friendly bills. Andy Stern of SEIU has threatened that if the legislation they have paid for isn’t passed, they might not finance the Democrats in the mid-term elections.

A brief explanation of card check.  It is the answer to shrinking union membership in the US.  The law would eliminate the secret ballot, and instead a company would become unionized if more than 50% of the employees signed a card saying they want a union.  Until now, in order to avoid union intimidation of employees, the open signing of these cards by a majority of the employees then led to a secret ballot.  In many cases, employees that were intimidated into signing a card to bring a vote, would then vote against the union during the secret ballot.  To prevent this from happening in the future, Democrats and union leaders want to eliminate the secret ballot and rely ONLY on the public ballot.  Anyone that saw union members shoving voters around during the summer town hall meetings, or saw reporters being harrassed and shoved around while covering the Massachusettes’ special election, understands the danger of relying only on public voting.  When two 300 pound pipe fitters knock on your door and invite themselves in and ask you to sign the card saying you want a union at work, what are you going to do?

Back to stimulus II.  Until we see a bill, we won’t know exactly what it contains, but based on what we know, only 10-15% of it will be tax incentives to hire employees.  Ed Morrissey of Hot Air further explains why the tax breaks won’t work:

In other words, if you’ve taken Econ 101, you know the problem with this bill.  Businesses hire people to meet demand, and they don’t hire people until that demand creates opportunity for profit beyond the price of the employee.   Otherwise, the business loses money and eventually fails, or more likely, reduces its work force to meet the actual demand for its products or services in order to survive.

…

To put it directly, this subsidizes nothing more than the normal business decisions made by growing companies.  It won’t incentivize anyone in their right mind to start a hiring spree.  That’s why the CBO scores it as low as they do.  And at that scoring, the best the proposal will do is increase jobs by 180,000 over the course of the year — which is less than we’ve lost in most of the months in 2009.

So, what will make up the remaining $70-120 billion of spending that this bill is likely to contain?  Until Harry Reid is willing to produce a bill, we can’t say for sure.  However, based on the draft that was leaked, it is simply going to be a laundry list of spending that has nothing to do with job creation.

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Dick Morris says that based on current Rasmussen polling, the Republicans could pick up 10 seats:

If the Republican Party wins every senate seat in which it now holds a lead, according to Rasmussen’s polls, it will capture eight Democratic seats while holding all of its own. The two remaining pickups, to assure control, could be in Indiana where former Senator Dan Coats may run against Senator Evan Bayh and in California.

The two remaining pickups, to assure control, could be in Indiana where former Senator Dan Coats may run against Senator Evan Bayh and in California. Even if Coats does not run, former Congressman John Hostettler is only behind Bayh by 44-41. And, in California, former Hewlitt Packhard CEO Carly Fiorina is also only three points behind Senator Barbara Boxer.

A lot is left to be written in this story.  The Republicans have to hold on to their own seats while picking up 10 Democratic seats.  This is no simple feat.  Public opinion needs to remain negative towards President Obama and the Democratic Congress for such a large swing to occur.

That public opinion will likely be defined by three key issues:

1. If the health care debate remains a long, drawn-out process marked by back room deals, many Independents will continue to lean right.  On the other hand, if it is quickly passed OR dropped, support from Independents could begin to return for the Democrats.
2. Jobs and the economy.  Most Republicans and Independents believe the stimulus has been a failure and waste of money.  If America continues to hemorrhage jobs, and if the second stimulus bill Jobs Bill appears to simply be more reckless spending and pay offs to liberal special interests, we will likely see Independents break the way they did in Massachusetts.
3. Card check and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).  There is talk that the Democrats may try and back door card check by attaching it to the second stimulus bill.  The theory being that if they can sell the bill to the public as having big tax breaks for small businesses and the middle class, and containing other benefits meant to create jobs, then the Republicans will have a hard time keeping all 41 GOP votes in line for a filibuster, even with card check hidden in the bill.  On top of that, Obama has signaled that if the Senate does not confirm Craig Becker to head the NLRB, that he could make him a ‘recess’ appointment, thereby bypassing Senate confirmation.  As polls have shown, America is no longer a union-friendly country.  There could be a large public backlash from Obama bypassing the Senate and putting one of Andy Stern’s VERY radical SEIU guys in charge of such an important position.  Especially considering the fact that SEIU spent $60 million dollars helping Obama get elected, and that Obama and Congressional Democrats paid the unions back when they cut a $60 billion deal to give union members tax breaks that no other US citizen would get.  This of course happened during their televised on C-SPAN closed-door health care meetings at the White House last month.  If Obama and Congressional Democrats ram through Becker’s appointment and slip card check through as an amendment on the second stimulus bill, it will confirm once and for all that the hope and change that Independents bought when electing Obama, really was just a campaign lie.

There are certainly some other issues on the table that could sway voters in either direction over the next nine months, but these three issues will go a long way in determining what message voters will send President Obama and Congressional Democrats in November.

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Today, President Obama made a surprise appearance in the briefing room and took questions for a little over 30 minutes.

Video of Obama’s question and answer session are embedded below in four parts.

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Earlier today, I was preparing a post questioning why the President hadn’t taken questions from the White House press corpses corps since July of last year.  Prior to today’s surprise press conference, the last press conference the President held, where he took questions from White House correspondents, was the now infamous blunder where he stated that the Cambridge police department acted stupidly and strongly insinuated they did so in a racist manner:

“I don’t know – not having been there and not seeing all the facts – what role race played in that, but I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two that he Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home,” Obama said in response to a question from the Chicago Sun-Times’s Lynn Sweet.

Gates, Obama allowed, “is a friend, so I may be a little biased here. I don’t know all the facts.”

However Gates, he continued, “jimmied his way to get into [his own] house.”

“There was a report called in to the police station that there might be a burglary taking place – so far so good,” Obama said, reflecting that he’d hope the police were called if he were seen breaking into his own house, then pausing.

“I guess this is my house now,” he remarked of the White House. “Here I’d get shot.”

Since that time, President Obama has made a great many appearances on TV, but almost always in highly controlled one-on-one interviews or staged town hall events, where the President is able to focus on the one or two points that are part of the message he wants to promote, rather than responding to the questions that the White House correspondents want answers to.

In President Obama’s first year, he only had question and answer sessions with White House correspondents 47 times vs. 147 times for President George W. Bush and 252 time for President Bill Clinton.  However, most of Obama’s Q & A sessions with the press corps came before August, with only 16 brief sessions since the President’s blunder that led to the now famous Beer Summit.

In contrast, Fox News reports that “Obama has granted 161 interviews, compared to 50 for Bush and 53 for Clinton.” It should be noted that only a few of those interviews have been granted to Fox News.

Helen Thomas, who had been a big supporter of the President and his agenda during his campaign and early in his Presidency, began to publicly grumble in July when she accused Robert Gibbs and the White House of controlling the press.  Stating that even President Nixon’s White House didn’t control the press like Obama’s administration does:

“Nixon didn’t try to do that,” Thomas said. “They couldn’t control (the media). They didn’t try.

“What the hell do they think we are, puppets?” Thomas said. “They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.”

Thomas said she was especially concerned about the arrangement between the Obama Administration and a writer from the liberal Huffington Post Web site. The writer was invited by the White House to President Obama’s press conference last week on the understanding that he would ask Obama a question about Iran from among questions that had been sent to him by people in Iran.

“When you call the reporter the night before you know damn well what they are going to ask to control you,” Thomas said.

“I’m not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to fare-thee-well–for the town halls, for the press conferences,” she said. “It’s blatant. They don’t give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame.”

On Monday, Chip Reid of CBS, Chuck Todd of NBC and Helen Thomas again complained about President Obama’s refusal to take questions from White House correspondents:

“It’s a source of great frustration here,” says Chip Reid, CBS’s White House correspondent. “It’s important for us to hold the president’s feet to the fire.”

NBC White House reporter Chuck Todd calls the situation a “shame,” saying the administration is trying to control the message rather than allowing Obama to be seen “unscripted.”

Hearst columnist Helen Thomas said the president has “gone an obscenely long time, not holding one.”

Apparently succumbing to the growing outcry from the White House press corps and the media in general, President Obama made a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room and took questions from the press corps for over a half hour today.

If you missed the press conference, we will have video of today’s Q & A session online shortly.

UPDATED:  You can watch a video of the press conference here.

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“I’ve been following politics since I was about 5,” said Mr. Matthews. “I’ve never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy. [Obama] comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament. This is surprising.”

Now, Matthews warns of charismatic leaders in his continued slamming of Sarah Palin.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air provides us with some commentary and a video mix showing Matthews hypocritical attack on Palin:

Matthews actually warns Robinson that “Charismatic leaders have done this country and this world a lot of harm,” apparently oblivious to his own track record over the last two years in being Barack Obama’s number-one fanboy.

Of course, we don’t forget it, and I’ve mashed this up with a couple of highlights from Matthews’ career as a journalist in the Age of Obama:

It is amazing that what is supposed to be a serious news organization continues to employ such partisan hacks that make zero pretense of being objective in their news coverage.

Anybody wondering why MSNBC’s ratings are falling through the floor?  Didn’t think so.

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This morning on Fox and Friends, during a live shot from the White House that was interrupted by a backhoe moving behind Goler and trucks beeping, Wendell Goler explained that the White House is moving a full grown tree.  It appears that they don’t want to cut down the tree, so they have a crew of people and equipment lined up to ‘save’ the tree.

Anyone want to calculate what kind of carbon deficit this little operation will create? How much energy and carbon emissions will it take to move this tree vs. the CO2 that tree will remove in its life?

I wonder if they have a tree surgeon on standby and an Arborist emergency room prepped, just in case the tree suffers a trauma during this delicate operation.

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It’s a billboard on I-35 in Wyoming.  To date, nobody seems to be taking ownership of the billboard, but Bob Collins of NPR has confirmed it is real, having seen it personally:

It was late at night and I wasn’t sure I’d seen the billboard correctly as I whizzed past it on I-35 in Wyoming last week on the way back from Wrenshall. But an e-mailer confirms I saw what I thought I saw.

It’s beginning to sweep along the Internet, accompanied by various claims that it’s a Photoshop fake. But it’s not. It’s real.

There’s no billboard ownership plate on this particular billboard, making tracing the person who had the cash to post it difficult to find. It’s time to crowdsource this puppy.

If any readers find out who put the billboard up, please send us a note.

UPDATE: The renters of the billboard have come forward — sort of:

Bev Master, office manager with Schubert & Hoey Outdoor Advertising, said the billboard — which the firm owns — was rented out by a “group of small business owners and individuals who just felt like Washington was against them.”

“They thought it was a funny way to get out their message,” she added.

However, Master told FoxNews.com the ad buyers wish to “remain anonymous.”

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