New Home Here.
This commenting system is just too much of a pain in the @ss. Don't want. So, I'm going to wordpress. Almost everything is over there (all the old posts) - still have to get my blogroll going. The comments didn't transfer, but alas I'll get over it.
Isthisblogon.com.
Even easier to find!
VDH sums up what happened last night:
President Obama has crossed the Rubicon with the health care vote. The bill was not really about medicine; after all, a moderately priced, relatively small federal program could offer the poorer not now insured, presently not on Medicare or state programs like Medicaid or Medical, a basic medical plan.
We have no interest in stopping trial lawyers from milking the system for billions. And we don’t want to address in any meaningful way the individual’s responsibility in some cases (drink, drugs, violence, dangerous sex, bad diet, sloth, etc.) for costly and chronic health procedures.
No, instead, the bill was about assuming a massive portion of the private sector, hiring tens of thousands of loyal, compliant new employees, staffing new departments with new technocrats, and feeling wonderful that we “are leveling the playing field” and have achieved another Civil Rights landmark law. (NB: do the math: add higher state income taxes in most states; the new Clinton-era federal income tax rates to come; the proposed lifting of limits on income exposed to FICA taxes; and now new health care charges — and I think you can reach in some cases a bite of 65%to 70% of one’s income.)
So we are in revolutionary times in which the government will grow to assume everything from energy use to student loans, while abroad we are a revolutionary sort of power, eager to mend fences with Syria and Iran, more eager still to distance ourselves from old Western allies like Israel and Britain.
Pelosism: In our brave new world, expect more of the lurid stories about the secretary of the Treasury not paying his FICA taxes. The multimillionaire Madame Speaker will spend more of the state’s millions on private jet travel as she lectures on carbon footprints and a culture of corruption. We will hear more about the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee hiding his income, or a member of the House Rules Committee bragging that, given the historic importance of health care, they are just making up the rules as they go along — and proud of it. Our guardian class has become the new French aristocracy at Versailles. They will rail about Citation jets for the CEO, and then fly federally-owned Gulfstreams; they will put us in Smart cars but limo in Yukons and Tahoes on “official business.” Our lifestyles will be as monitored as much as those who do the monitoring will not be at all.
From Obama. Edited for accuracy.
Carin --
For the first time in our nation's history, Congress has passed comprehensive health care reform.AmericaSocialists in America have waited a hundred years and fought for decades to reach this moment. Tonight, thanks to you, we are finally here.
Consider the staggering scope of what you have just accomplished:
Because of you, every American (, except that 30 million who still won't ) will finally be guaranteedhigh quality, affordablehealth care coverage.
Every American will be covered under the toughest patient insurance protections in history. Arbitrary premium hikes, insurance cancellations, and discrimination against pre-existing conditions will now be gone forever. Of course, the services you do receive will be approved by the government. And not every service may be available. Or, you may be advised - by your government - to instead simply take a pill. Except for folks like me, because my plan is different than yours.
And we'll finally start reducing the cost of care ( HA - I mean, it's even hard to say that with a straight face, but Rahm says I have to put that in here ) -- creating millions of government jobs, preventing families and businesses from plunging into bankruptcy except those companies that go out of business, or people who lose their jobs over this , and removing over a trillion dollars of debt from the backs of our children HA, ok, that's a pipe dream, right? We all know that's not gonna happen .
But the victory that matters most tonight goes beyond the laws and far past the numbers.
It is the peace of mind enjoyed by every American, no longer one injury or illness away from catastrophe. Except, of course, it's not like people aren't going to still get sick and die. I mean, there might even be more that die, because we're going to have to ration shit. I mean, you do know that, right?
It is the workers and entrepreneurs who are now freed to pursue their slice of the American dream without fear of losing coverage or facing a crippling bill. I mean, like Nancy said, why should a writer actually have to earn a paycheck and contribute to society in order to get shit from the rest of us? Am I right?
And it is the immeasurable joy of families in every part of this great nation, living happier, healthier lives together because they can finally receive the vital care they need. Except, of course, that healthier thing is just bullshit.
This is whatchangeSocialism looks like.
My gratitude tonight is profound. I am thankful for those in past generations past communist, socialists, and progressives whose heroic efforts brought this great goal within reach for our times. I am thankful for the members of Congress whose months of effort and brave votes made it possible to take this final step. But most of all, I am thankful for you useful idiots and the ass kissing media who didn't really look very hard at the back room deals and my hypocrisy regarding bipartisanship and transparency.
This day is not the end of this journey. Much hard work remains, and we have a solemn responsibility to do it right. As I said on the campaign trail, complete government control of health care would take time. This is just the first step to a single-payer system. But we can face that work together with the confidence of those who have moved mountains.
Our journey began three years ago, driven by a shared belief thatfundamental changea transformation to a social democracy is indeed still possible. We have worked hard together every day since to deliver on that belief.
We progressives have shared moments of tremendous hope, and we've faced setbacks and doubt. We have all been forced to ask if our politics had simply become too polarized and too short-sighted to meet the pressing challenges of our time, but we elites simply know more and better than you workers. This struggle became a test of whether the American people couldstill rally together when the cause was rightfigure out what we were actually up to -- and actually createthe change we believe in.Socialism right here in America.
Tonight, thanks to your mighty efforts, the answer is indisputable: Yes we can.
Thank you,
President Barack Obama
Cut and Pasted from JHoward at PW:
Highlights of report, which is entitled “The Wrong Prescription: Democrats’ Health Overhaul Dangerously Expands IRS Authority,” include:
-IRS agents verify if you have “acceptable” health care coverage;
-IRS has the authority to fine you up to $2,250 or 2 percent of your income (whichever is greater) for failure to prove that you have purchased “minimum essential coverage;”
-IRS can confiscate your tax refund;
-IRS audits are likely to increase;
-IRS will need up to $10 billion to administer the new health care program this decade;
-IRS may need to hire as many as 16,500 additional auditors, agents and other employees to investigate and collect billions in new taxes from Americans; and
-Nearly half of all these new individual mandate taxes will be paid by Americans earning less than 300 percent of poverty ($66,150 for a family of four.)
The Republicans noted that despite all these new mandates on Americans, the Democrats prohibit the IRS from imposing these same taxes and penalties on illegal immigrants.
Sigh.
The White House Office of Health Reform Director Nancy-Ann DeParle has been feverishly sending out unsolicited email messages to federal employees in an effort to build support for President Barack Obama’s health reform package over the last several weeks.
*****
The unsolicited emails also request that the federal employees take action in order to ensure that Obama’s health reform package is passed and the federal budget isn’t at risk for bankruptcy. One federal employee was so concerned about DeParle’s language in one email that he questioned whether his department’s budget would be cut or eliminated without passage of Obama’s bill. DeParle uses scare tactics that some assume are meant as threats:
“No ifs, ands or buts about it -- if we do nothing to reform our broken health care system, costs will continue to skyrocket and break the budgets of American families, small businesses and the Federal Government,” read the March 12th email from DeParle.
But should federal employees be subjected to partisan propaganda? What precedent does it send for the White House to use the federal work force for their partisan agenda? And shouldn’t we let State Department federal workers concentrate on pressing issues like the Israeli-Palestinian issue or the Iranian nuclear weapons issue? Why would Department of Transportation employees have to worry about forwarding The White House’s partisan emails to their address books?
Great job, guys!.
Oh, and about that WONDERFUL $940 billion (thanks Leon - forgot that zero) price tag the CBO came out with yesterday? Well [ed] ...
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. To be clear, those living in South Florida wouldn’t have to worry about this, as the newly politicized nature of health care would cause them to be exempted. These cuts would affect only less-fortunate seniors, namely those living in just about any other part of the country.
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.
The Other McCain offers up this depressing graphic:
Faaack. The Obama lay-away plan.
The Democrats are telling us ObamaCare will only cost $940 billion over ten years and cut the deficit.
....
Keep in mind that no government entitlement, especially one this big, has ever come in under budget. Look no farther than Massachusetts for proof. Or look at Social Security and Medicare.
But here’s what the Democrats probably don’t want you to know. Of the $940 billion, most of that will be spent in the last six of the ten years, so it’s like a lay away plan for health care.
Here’s the key table from CBO’s letter to Pelosi. Via Philip Klein, want to see what a shabby fraud these cost estimates are? Check out the line for “Gross Cost of Coverage Provisions”.
This is why they’re delaying the start of the program, of course. If it kicked in right away, the decade-long estimate would obviously be well into the trillions. So they simply stalled it for four years, incurring just $17 billion in costs — or 1.8 percent of the total 10-year estimate — through 2013 so that wavering Democrats could go back to their districts and tell baldfaced lies to their constituents about the pricetag. A perfect ending to this travesty.
Savory Sweet Life looks like an AWESOME food blog.
There's even a recipe to make potato chips in the microwave.
My son will be doing this today.
h/t Ace's.
I know there is a lot of back and forth, name calling, and outright nastiness here at ITBO. But today, I ask that we come together for one special cause. The recent earthquake in Hawaii.
I don't know why or how this one flew under the radar, but I'm sure people are suffering over there, and Obama wants to get HCR passed so they can get some of that filthy-lucre-aid money. But they need help NOW.
OBAMA: 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.
Another excellent article by Doc Zero.
If you have studied the history of socialism and communism around the world, you know what the inevitable results of a nationalized bread industry would be: hungry people staring at dusty shelves containing a few expensive loaves of low-quality bread. Humanity has invented few weapons that kill people more efficiently than collectivist agriculture.
Why is this always the tragic outcome of collectivism? After all, government control of goods and services is presented as a way to control costs. The bribes and shady backroom deals perpetrated in the service of ObamaCare are supposed to produce a system that increases “access to health insurance” and make it more “affordable.” The inevitable result will be a system that reduces the quality of care, makes it harder to come by, and increases its overall cost to American citizens.
The same thing has happened across decades and around the world, every single time the State has taken control of a private industry. There’s some grim amusement in watching a supposedly educated man like Paul Krugman make an utter fool of himself trying to pretend otherwise. (“In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.“)
No surprise here. A couple of the findings:
Health Reform and Primary Care Physicians
• 46.3% of primary care physicians (family medicine and internal medicine) feel that the passing of health reform will either force them out of medicine or make them want to leave medicine.
Health Reform, Public Option, and Physician Supply
• 72% of physicians feel that a public option would have a negative impact on physician supply, with 45% feeling it will “decline or worsen dramatically” and 27% predicting it will “decline or worsen somewhat.
• 24% of physicians think they will try to retire early if a public option is implemented.
• 21% of physicians would try to leave medicine if a public option is implemented, even if not near retirement age at the time.
An "interesting"* NYT image of Obama, as pointed out by Doug Ross, has:
1) the halo light behind him
2) a small superimposed image of the White House - Obama being "bigger" than the WH
3) Obama is pointing to heaven
4) Superimposed "cross" image using some sort of filter dead center in the middle of the image.
Let's first examine the headline: "As Health Vote Awaits, Future of a Presidency Waits, Too."
The Times' concern, laughably, is for the Obama legacy, not the hundreds of millions of citizens whose very lives will be impacted by a Rube Goldberg-esque, certain-to-fail, country-bankrupting, Soviet central-planner's wet dream. The Times, of course, has yet to report on the outrageous and illegal attempt to surreptitiously pass the Senate's health care bill. This effort, orchestrated by the House Rules Committee and known as the "Slaughter Rule", threatens to light the fuse on a full-blown Constitutional crisis.
The Slaughter solution cannot be squared with Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution.
...Last Christmas Eve, the Senate approved a health-care bill by 60 votes, overcoming a Republican filibuster. This is the bill that contains the so-called Cornhusker kickback, the Louisiana purchase, taxes on high-cost health insurance plans and coverage for abortions. Virtually no one now supports that version of the bill, but Senate Democrats no longer have enough votes to pass an alternative bill under ordinary procedures.
That is where reconciliation fits in. If the House passes the Senate bill and the president then signs it into law, reconciliation would permit Congress to pass new legislation making changes to that law. Reconciliation might not solve the abortion coverage problem or other nonbudgetary issues, but it would allow Democrats to correct most of the Senate bill’s offensive features.
The rub is that, according to the Senate parliamentarian, reconciliation is permitted only for bills that amend existing law, not for amendments to bills that have yet to be enacted. This means that, for the Senate to be able to avoid a filibuster, House Democrats first have to vote for the identical bill that passed the Senate last Christmas Eve. That means voting aye on the special deals, aye on abortion coverage, and aye on high taxes on expensive health-insurance plans. Challengers are salivating at the prospect of running against incumbents who vote for these provisions.
Enter the Slaughter solution. It may be clever, but it is not constitutional. To become law—hence eligible for amendment via reconciliation—the Senate health-care bill must actually be signed into law. The Constitution speaks directly to how that is done. According to Article I, Section 7, in order for a “Bill” to “become a Law,” it “shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate” and be “presented to the President of the United States” for signature or veto. Unless a bill actually has “passed” both Houses, it cannot be presented to the president and cannot become a law.
To be sure, each House of Congress has power to “determine the Rules of its Proceedings.” ...But House and Senate rules cannot dispense with the bare-bones requirements of the Constitution. Under Article I, Section 7, passage of one bill cannot be deemed to be enactment of another.
The Slaughter solution attempts to allow the House to pass the Senate bill, plus a bill amending it, with a single vote. The senators would then vote only on the amendatory bill. But this means that no single bill will have passed both houses in the same form. As the Supreme Court wrote in Clinton v. City of New York (1998), a bill containing the “exact text” must be approved by one house; the other house must approve “precisely the same text.”
These constitutional rules set forth in Article I are not mere exercises in formalism. They ensure the democratic accountability of our representatives. Under Section 7, no bill can become law unless it is put up for public vote by both houses of Congress, and under Section 5 “the Yeas and Nays of the Members of either House on any question . . . shall be entered on the Journal.” These requirements enable the people to evaluate whether their representatives are promoting their interests and the public good. Democratic leaders have not announced whether they will pursue the Slaughter solution. But the very purpose of it is to enable members of the House to vote for something without appearing to do so. The Constitution was drafted to prevent that.
Obama and Nancy and Harry have taken the stance that they must pass HCR by any means necessary. Even if it goes against our Constitution.
These are very scary times.
Reports have come out today that the Parliamentarian has not ruled that the President must sign a law before it is considered a law for reconciliation purposes. First, they came up with a strategy to get Obamacare passed in the House without the House ever voting on the bill, now they have come up with a strategy and a ruling to get the Obamacare bill to qualify as law without the President signing the law. President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid should not support efforts to violate the clear words of the Constitution to pass Obamacare.
****
Just to restate a shocking development in the Obamacare debate; Congressional leaders have found a way to ignore the Constitutional requirement that a law be signed by the President before it is considered a law. Outrage is not a strong enough word for the feelings many American’s have toward elites in Washington, D.C. who will do anything to pass Obamacare.
As to me twisting your comment, feel free to school me, name one rich white guy* who hung out at the WH under Bush and condemn him. Until you do I just figure you're hanging white sheets on the racist republican clothesline.
Bob, I'm not going to let you get away with this, so I'm bringing it up front and center. The issue wasn't that Jay-Z and Beyonce (and her mom) were hanging out at the WH. It was that they were in the Situation Room. Which requires top secret clearance-only to access.
The WHSR was established by President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961. That crisis revealed a need for rapid and secure presidential communications and for White House coordination of the many external communications channels of national security information which led to the President.(1) Since then, the mission of the "Sit Room" has been to provide current intelligence and crisis support to the NSC staff, the National Security Adviser, and the President. The Sit Room staff is composed of approximately 30 personnel, organized around five Watch Teams that provide 7-day, 24-hour monitoring of international events. A generic Watch Team includes three Duty Officers, a communications assistant, and an intelligence analyst.
The Sit Room has always been designed to hum nonstop. Mr. Bush goes there for regular meetings with his National Security Council and to talk via secure videoconference with foreign leaders. In times of emergency, the Sit Room becomes a crisis-management center.
Watch officers are glued to computers 24 hours a day, sifting through intelligence information from the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and other quarters. They monitor diplomatic cables and public sources such as Internet traffic and news dispatches, watching for developments big enough to warrant telling national security adviser Stephen Hadley, who decides whether Mr. Bush must be alerted.
With arguments like this ... how can you disagree?
“I want to be free to have health care!” exclaimed Joanna Durham, a resident of North Carolina, originally from Trinidad and Tobago, who led a small group in a chant of “Health care is a human right.”
“We are Americans and we are free to have health care!” She said she believes Americans deserved “free” care, like people in other countries receive. “Are we not in America? We have free speech, free press, we need free health care now! Right now!”
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2010/03/10/obama-health-care-supporters-storm-washington-hoping-for-arrests-but-end-with-health-care-whimper/2/#ixzz0hmPfjmcE
You know, if we made doctors work for free we'd go far in reducing health care costs. Just thinking out loud here. Going outside the box.
Oh, but there is more:
“If Republicans really cared about their children, they would all be vegans,” she continued. “I don’t believe its going to add to the deficit, if it’s handled right. Obama has plans to cut down on fraud and defensive medicine. It seems to work in other countries, like Canada.”
Dallabetta went on to explain why she thought Republicans were obstructionists. “I have an aunt in Oklahoma who hates Obama. At bottom she’s a bigot, very racist … and I think that’s the case for a lot of Republicans. I know they use the ‘n’ word around their dinner table all the time. They’re not going to say it outside their house but that’s really what’s going on behind closed doors.”
It's like she's a fly on the wall of my dinning room. If only I had a rational reason to oppose health care. No, Obama being black really takes care of all that for me. I can just reject it on principal.
I was skiing over the weekend, so I missed this whole dealo:
J.C. Arena at Big Hollywood has something to say about it.
Who loses credibility? Jay-Z.
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