(2) The Associated Press “fact check” on Obama’s claims: “Buyers, beware: President Barack Obama says his health care overhaul will lower premiums by double digits, but check the fine print. Premiums are likely to keep going up even if the health care bill passes, experts say.” Begorrah!
(4) Oh my Gosh! Dimocrats want Obama to postpone his vacation once again. They want Obama to stay in D.C. and work. This would mean, no vote by the Saturday deadline because not enough “yes” votes and too many “NO” votes.
(5) Oops! Our mistake. We forgot the Obama deadline was August 2009, September, October, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and St. Patrick’s Day 2010 so he could sign the scam bill and then fly off in triumph to Indonesia to meet up with protesters and bow before foreign potentates. That deadline is today, and it has already been missed.
(6) Bart Stupak says he still has a dozen “NO” votes. While PINOs (Progressives In Name Only) abandon all principles to fluff Obama (yup, that’s you Kooch), the anti-abortion/pro-life Democrats can be relied on in a fight. Disagree with Stupak or not, on the issues, he’s got guts and the type of guy you want in a fight with you. The PINOs? Cowards all of them. Remember the 60 signatures on one letter, the 95 signatures on another letter – all saying they would vote “NO” unless demands were met. Demands were not met and now they are voting “Yes”. The PINOs deserve all the misery they get.
(10) Important – ARE YOU AWARE – If there is no health bill presented by today, there probably won’t be a vote this weekend? Cancel the stampede.
* * * * * *
We’re in a jaunty mood this St. Patrick’s Day. Perhaps it is because of this rollicking, date appropriate song, which reminds us of some fun plucky ladies:
Gosh and Begorrah!
We’ll expand and explain some of the above items – as we watch the Obama decision making “mind” at work. It took Obama months to decide on a dog, he still has not decided on a place of worship, if any. Now he has the monumental task of deciding on V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N.
As we wrote a few days ago, Obama will meet protesters on his Indonesia vacation – if he goes. Now, Obama will hear protests about his plans to go on vacation:
“Several House members interviewed by POLITICO said Obama’s looming trip to Australia, Indonesia and Guam, while creating a natural deadline for 11th-hour health care talks, is once again becoming a problem as he tries to sell reluctant members of his own party on the reform legislation.
Last week, the president pushed back his planned Friday departure three days after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats groused he was leaving at a critical time.
“For the first time in eight months, the president is finally getting his hands dirty, and now he’s going to hop on the plane? Please,” said a Democratic congressman, requesting anonymity.
“These deadlines are sort of silly,” the member added. “Remember the first one? March 18th? That was sort of like putting a calendar on [White House chief of staff] Rahm’s [Emanuel’s] back and inviting members to throw darts at him.”
Another Democrat told POLITICO bluntly, “This trip is really getting in the way of things.”
House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) now suggests the final vote on the final health care package could take longer than anticipated – perhaps dragging out past Easter Sunday, April 4.
“The chances are good” the bill would get an up-or-down vote before Easter, “but I wouldn’t bet on it,” Clyburn told McClatchy newspapers.
“If the bill is so unpopular that it must be passed long before Election Day, could there be a problem with the legislation?
If health-care reform as proposed were so good for the nation, why wouldn’t legislators prefer to run on rather than away from that record? If you can’t run on the strength of the laws you pass, then either you shouldn’t be running or you shouldn’t be passing.”
Dennis Kucinich, after lambasting the Obama health scam, vowing to vote “NO”, now says he will vote “yes”. Unreliable PINO with zero credibility. Bart Stupak fights for his beliefs which is more than congressional PINOs will ever do. Congressional PINOs are cowards and sloths. Stupak fights (we might disagree with him, but the congressional PINOs (and their Big Blog boy affiliates) sold out on the abortion issue earlier and they no longer have credibility on this issue or any issue):
“Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak is still telling reporters he has a dozen pro-life Democrats who will vote against the bill if it doesn’t include the House-passed restrictions on abortion. When it was pointed out that there have already been some defections from his group, he said he picked up commitments from others.
The numbers are important because Democratic leaders need pro-life Democrats to support the bill in order to pass it.”
Mark Knoller, the record keeper at CBS notes “the National Debt has increased over $2 trillion since President Obama took office.” Obama racked up the $2 trillion debt in 421 days – it took George W. Bush four years to rack up $4.9 trillion.
“Rank-and-file Democrats did not talk about the details, but said that the CBO scores [of the House reconciliation bill] had come up short. ‘They were less than expected’ in terms of deficit reduction, said Rep. Gene Green, D-Texas, who plans to vote for the bill.”…
There are several things that Democrats are up against when it comes to the CBO score. The most important is that, based on reconciliation instructions, the “fix” bill must be shown to reduce the deficit by at least $1 billion. The challenge is, that’s after assuming that the Senate bill is law. In other words, the reconciliation bill can’t claim any of the deficit reduction from the Senate bill, but rather it must reduce the deficit relative to the Senate bill. Yet the changes that are being talked about will cost a lot of money. This includes eliminating the “Cornhusker kickback” and offering enhanced Medicaid subsidies to all states, increasing subsidies for the purchase of insurance, eliminating the so-called “donut hole” on Medicare prescription drug benefits, and whatever else they put in the bill. At the same time, delaying until 2018 the enactment of the “Cadillac tax” would be scored as a reduction in revenue, and thus add further to the deficit. They’d have to make up the gap through tax increases as well as try to siphon “savings” away from the student loan bill. (More on that here.) But evidently it seems like they’re running into trouble on this front.“
“On timing, Clyburn said in an interview with McClatchy Newspapers over the weekend that the vote could slide past Easter Sunday — April 4 — while others said they believe the package can clear the chamber late this week. [snip]
Democratic leaders who are furiously whipping votes behind the scenes also faced headwinds because they have not yet gotten the blessing of the Congressional Budget Office nor released the text of the reconciliation bill. That delay appeared to push a vote to Saturday at the earliest because House leaders want to give Members at least 72 hours to read the bill.
If the package isn’t unveiled Wednesday, Democrats would not be able to keep the 72-hour rule and vote before President Barack Obama is scheduled to leave for his trip to Indonesia and Australia. Obama has already pushed back his trip three days to try to accommodate the House vote; he is set to depart Sunday.“
That’s right – No bill, No text, No CBO, No votes, No vacation, No Hope, No change. Just talk. And vacations.
Corruption breeds corruption. After years of inbred corruption, Americans are witnessing the full flower of corruption.
In 2005 Republicans oozed out their own version of this year’s “Slaughter Rule”. Nancy Pelousy, Henry Waxman, and Louise Slaughter herself went to court to oppose the ugly Republican contrivance utilized to pass a raise in the debt ceiling. Pelousy, Waxman, and Slaughter argued in court that the Republican procedure was a violation of the Constitution, Article I, Section 7, and that an actual vote was required on an actual bill. Now, in March of 2010 Louise Slaughter, Nancy Pelousy, and Henry Waxman, bathe themselves in the same corrupt waters.
“The bad news for present purposes is that they lost the case. The D.C. Circuit in Public Citizen v. U.S. District Court upheld the procedure. Upheld in this case does not mean endorsed. The Court did not say the self-executing rule was constitutional. It said it could not reach the question due to the standards of deference that apply between departments of government: If the presiding officers of both houses of Congress attest that their respective chambers have passed a piece of legislation, the Court is required to accept those representations as conclusive.
That doesn’t mean it is proper for government officials to execute a procedure that violates the Constitution, nor does it mean that a presiding officer should attest something that is not true. It does, however, suggest that it may be an uphill battle to get a court to declare the process null and void.”
Eric Massa is right when he said “The leadership of the Democratic Party have become exactly what they said they were running against.”
“As Sunshine Week begins, I want to applaud everyone who has worked to increase transparency in government and recommit my administration to be the most open and transparent ever, an effort that will strengthen our democracy and ensure the public’s trust in their government. We came to Washington to change the way business was done, and part of that was making ourselves accountable to the American people by opening up our government.
After laying the groundwork for a decisive vote this week on the Senate’s health-care bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Monday that she might attempt to pass the measure without having members vote on it.
Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) would rely on a procedural sleight of hand: The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers “deem” the health-care bill to be passed.
The tactic — known as a “self-executing rule” or a “deem and pass” — has been commonly used, although never to pass legislation as momentous as the $875 billion health-care bill. It is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a late-week House vote, but she added that she prefers it because it would politically protect lawmakers who are reluctant to publicly support the measure.
“It’s more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know,” the speaker said in a roundtable discussion with bloggers Monday. “But I like it,” she said, “because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.”
“WE UNDERSTAND the administration’s sense of urgency on health-care reform. But what is intended as a final sprint threatens to turn into something unseemly and, more important, contrary to Democrats’ promises of transparency and time for deliberation.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Monday that she is leaning toward a parliamentary maneuver under which the House would vote on a package of changes to the Senate-approved reform bill, and the underlying Senate bill would then be “deemed” to have passed, even though the House had never voted on it. That may help some House members dodge a politically difficult decision, but it strikes us as a dodgy way to reform the health-care system. Democrats who vote for the package will be tagged with supporting the Senate bill in any event. Why not be straightforward about it?
Dodgy? Try calling it what it is: Corrupt! Arrogant! Incompetent!
“More worrying is that Congress and the country have yet to see the changes, for which Democrats hope to win quick House approval and which they then hope to speed through the Senate under a procedure that would bar filibusters. These changes — the so-called reconciliation bill — are not all minor “fixes”; some could have far-reaching consequences. Such changes deserve to be fully understood and debated before they are voted on. [snip]
The health-care debate has been going on longer than a year, and House members want to get it over with. They don’t want it hanging over them during the Easter recess. President Obama wants progress to have been made before he leaves for Indonesia on Sunday. These are understandable desires, but they don’t outweigh the need for a reasonable process on a matter of such importance.
It’s not the Lord that cometh. It’s a thief in the night. A murderer in the dark. Dirty business takes place in the dark of night, in the shadows of the day.
“Now, despite the deep reservations of a majority of Americans, congressional leaders plan to ram through their proposal this week – bypassing normal congressional procedures.
It is a distressing prospect. [snip]
Among themselves, Democrats cut a series of backroom deals that in any other context would be considered criminal payoffs and bribery.
Here’s how blatant it’s become: Last week, President Obama nominated for a federal appeals court the brother of a wavering Democratic House member from Utah.
This disgusting process, which Democrats brazenly wish to bring to conclusion this week, is being done with little regard for the opinions of a clear majority of Americans who, while they may believe health care reform is necessary, think this particular approach will take our nation down the wrong economic path. [snip]
Supporters of the Democratic plan can spin it any way they wish, but polls have consistently shown that a majority of Americans oppose their heavy-handed approach to reform. Americans may favor general principles such as universal coverage, but they are distrustful of the way this bill has been crafted and how it will change their relationship with their health care providers.[snip]
The legislation has major problems that have not even begun to be discussed in a serious way, and if Democrats have their way will not be debated at all. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, for example, calls the Senate bill “racially discriminatory” because of provisions that “in addition to being unconstitutional, will not improve health care outcomes for minority patients.”
And despite denials, the bill has worrisome implications for Medicare. According to an Associated Press news account, much of the reform bill is “financed with Medicare cuts the government’s own experts say could be unsustainable.”[snip]
Its blatant abuse is yet further damning evidence of congressional leaders’ arrogant, condescending attitude toward the people they ostensibly were elected to serve.”
Obama Hopium addicts, mostly boys on Big Blogs, believe the American people will not care about “process”. After all, they argue (and we agree with them on this point only) Americans have not cared about legislative “process” in earlier years. Let’s be the first to disabuse these Hopium addicts of their delusion. While we agree that Americans have never cared about legislative “process” in years past – Heath care is not just any ordinary chunk of legislation. Americans do and will care about their health care and Americans do and will care about the “process” Congress abuses to pass health care.
“THE health-care dance in Washington, D.C., has gone on long enough. Congress needs to focus on the economy and set health care aside.
This is a change of position for us. This page supported Barack Obama for president, enthusiastically. We have supported the health-care effort until now. We still support universal coverage as a social goal.
But the longer the fight goes on, the more it feels that the timing is all wrong. The economy is wounded. Employers are hurting. The time to think about loading employers with new burdens is when they are strong. Not now.
Right now, Congress needs to focus on the economy. [snip]
President Obama has promised that any health-care bill he signs will not add one dime to the deficit, which already has swelled beyond anything since World War II. The president has put himself in a position where he cannot keep that promise. He has let each house of Congress come up with its own health-care bills.
The result has been chaos: The public option is in then out; the Medicare buy-in for 55-year-olds is in, then out. When the congressional dance stops, the Senate may have 60 votes, but for what? It will satisfy neither Obama’s frugal promise nor progressives’ lavish hopes. Already the Democratic Party’s former chairman, Howard Dean, says the bill is not worth passing in this form.
You know he’s right when you hear statements that something has to be passed, for political reasons. This issue is too important for that. It should wait for a unified proposal and an economy on the mend.”
“Health reform: Down the stretch it comes. President Obama has gone so far as to postpone an overseas trip in a last-ditch push to get a comprehensive reform bill to his desk.
He shouldn’t waste his energy.
Not with unemployment justifiably the nation’s top concern and the possibility of a double-dip recession still looming. Remember how Obama said, in his State of the Union reboot, “Jobs must be our No. 1 focus in 2010“? Well, apparently he doesn’t.
Not with the American people abandoning the President’s prescription in huge numbers. Just one in four voters supports the reform bill as written; half want Congress to start over. Compare that with the popular support other major pieces of social legislation enjoyed before passage, like welfare reform (68%), Medicare (63%) and civil rights (60%).
Not with health care costs having risen 73% over the last decade – with Medicaid growing at 21% a year – and showing no signs of coming down to Earth. Controlling costs is the absolute, unconditional, a-blind-man-could-see-it prerequisite for expanding coverage.
Not with American health care quality actually quite impressive in many respects, including world-leading rates for patients surviving cancer and among the shortest wait times for hard-to-find treatments and surgeries.
Not with a half-dozen accounting gimmicks built into the legislation – including the fact that federal budget projections are based on 10 years worth of tax collections and just six years of spending increases.
Not with the Senate, lacking even a single Republican vote, having to resort to reconciliation, a little-used parliamentary maneuver, to get it through. Sure, it’s been used before – but not on anything that has such limited public support.
Not after all the cynical back room deals – deals Obama has committed to removing – having frayed the public trust. With legislation of this magnitude, that is not a renewable resource. [snip]
But reality has come a-knocking, quite persistently, and it’s saying: Enough already. Fix what’s broken, then move on.”
Whether or not there are constitutional questions left unresolved, the Arrogance! Incompetence! Corruption! is increasingly obvious:
“Many of our members would prefer not to have voted for the Senate bill,” said House Democratic Caucus Chairman John Larson of Connecticut. Once the Senate legislation is “deemed” to have passed as part of the rule governing debate, the House would vote only on the follow-up health care measure, known as a budget “reconciliation” bill.
However, using such a dicey procedure to enact President Barack Obama’s biggest domestic initiative — the most far-reaching social policy change in decades — could inflame a public that’s already annoyed at the legislation’s tortured path and disgusted with Congress. [snip]
Michael McConnell, a professor of law at Stanford University, wrote Monday in The Wall Street Journal that such procedures are unconstitutional. He cited a 1998 Supreme Court ruling that once one house of Congress approves an “exact text,” the other house must pass “precisely the same text” before the president can sign it into law. That’s been the generally understood principle of how a bill becomes a law for centuries.
However, Pamela Karlan, a professor of public interest law at Stanford, wasn’t so sure. “It’s kind of complicated,” she said, because, she and others said, it’s not entirely clear what “same text” or “exact text” means.”
“What kind of lack of confidence does that display? What kind of process in pursuit of effectiveness does that mean that we are adopting? What kind of demeaning of democracy is the objective of efficiency resulting in? [snip]
Mr. Chairman, clearly we can do better, and we owe the American people, this institution and ourselves. In these discussions on legislative process, I have always been forthright. When Democrats controlled the House, we did not always provide for fair debates.“
“Rep. Jason Altmire (D-Pa.), a member of the Blue Dog and New Democrat Coalitions, said that the plan to pass the plan using the so-called “deem and pass” procedure is “wrong” and unpopular among his constituents.
There’s a lot of discomfort with the reconciliation process, the self-implementing rule, where you wouldn’t have a formal vote on maybe the most important policy of the past 40 years,” he said on Fox Business Network. “I have a big issue with the way they’re doing the process. I think it’s wrong and my constituents don’t like it.”
Altmire, a no vote on the House’s healthcare bill in November who is now undecided, is seen by many as critical to passage.”
* * * * * *
Like thieves in the night, the Obama Dimocrats will attempt to pass Obama’s health scam. Obama Dimocrats will not vote on the Senate bill itself because they are afraid. [The same Dimocrats, like 2x4 Chuck Schumer, who made sure there was no convention vote in Denver.]
To Arrogance! Incompetence! Corruption! – add Cowardice!
The Cowards will shoot you in the back not face to face. It’s the Obama way. The Chicago Way – Arrogance! Incompetence! Corruption! Cowardice!
Did everybody but us forget about Obama’s bluff and buffoonery on Copenhagen? Does everyone but us fail to apply the lessons of Copenhagen to the health care debate and the current conventional wisdom that there will be a vote and the results will be passage of the Obama health scam?
We’re not referencing the Copenhagen climate conference which accomplished close to nothing or at least did not live up to the hyped hype – remember that was when the planet would begin to heal – but instead all the conference attendees heeled home-wards. We’re referencing the Copenhagen Olympics Obama flim-flam. Let’s review those events because the lessons have apparently been lost.
On October 1, 2009 we wrote an article which stated that “If the International Olympics Committee chooses Chicago as the host city for the 2012 Olympics, the Olympics will die.” In the article (The Chicago Olympic Tombstone) we noted how David Axelrod and Valerie Jarett had personal financial interests in a Chicago Olympics.
That Big Boob – Barack Obama has been slapped across the face severely. After traveling across the ocean to beg before the International Olympic Committee he has been refused. This is an unprecedented, dramatic slap in the face from the international community. Obama has humiliated America.
World leaders think of Obama as a “Sucker”, now even the lowest of international bureaucrats know they have nothing to fear from the Big Boob. In pursuit of personal glory Obama has humiliated America. DrudgeReport captures the moment with the headline: The Ego Has Landed – World Rejects Obama – Chicago Out In First Round.
Remember that? Does anybody remember that? Remember when conventional wisdom was that Obama would not be so stupid, such a boob, as to risk a last minute, high profile junket with Mary Todd Michelle and Oprah in tow unless a “YES” was a sure thing. Such was the boobery on display that on October 3, 2009 we wrote “Zero Sense” and these lessons for the ages (which apparently have already been forgotten):
Remember judgment? The senseless Hopium addled tried for years to convince us that Barack Obama had better judgment than Hillary or anyone because once upon a time in order to get the attention and money from a big dollar donor, he gave a speech about Iraq, to a very liberal audience, in a very liberal state, then did nothing ever again about Iraq and the video of the speech disappeared.
Now Americans are witnessing the zero sense displayed on a daily, hourly, basis, by the Big Zero himself. [snip]
Yesterday, the always speeding Obama rush-rush mobile hit a brick wall. Don’t Blame it on Rio. That brick wall is Reality. [snip]
What Obama wanted was a quick trip to Copenhagen, wasting millions of government dollars. Some planes wasted money lugging Michelle Obama and Oprah, other planes lugged the Obama limousine, other planes carried support personnel and equipment. It was a huge waste of money.
Obama timed it so that the “Yes” vote for Chicago would be announced shortly before he would arrive in Washington, D.C., in time to hold a triumphant publicity stunt press conference. Big Media would shower Obama in rose petals, and light incense to this colossus Caesar “while we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonorable graves.”
But the International Olympic Committee followed a different script. It is a script we have described and it is the template foreign leaders follow in their dealings with Barack Obama: flatter Obama in public and then slap his face.
Read all of “Zero Sense” if you need a refresher course in Obama boobery, thuggery, and flim-flammery. Read the whole article and refresh the memory of those we quoted regarding Obama’s boobery. We quoted the New York Times quoting the Weekly Standard:
Rarely has a president put his credibility on the line on the world stage in such a personal way and been slapped down so sharply in real time. [snip]
The defeat will be used as a political metaphor and raise painful questions. Why did he invest so much time, taxpayer money and, perhaps most important, presidential prestige in a losing effort? How did he misjudge the potential vote so badly that Chicago evidently was not even in the top tier? What does it say about a leader who may be far more popular abroad than his predecessor yet has trouble converting that esteem into tangible benefits for the United States?
Has that Obama bluff been completely forgotten? It appears so from the “sure thing” prognostications on health care this week.
We are supposed to believe that boob Obama would not postpone a vacation to Indonesia unless there was a sure victory such as was expected at Copenhagen (let’s thrown in the failure of the climate conference in Copenhagen too at this point). We are supposed to believe that Harry Reid would not dare move ahead without the vote a “sure thing” even though his history is, to be kind, less than stellar when it comes to being master of the Senate.
Further we are supposed to believe that Nancy Pelousy would not schedule vote scheduling votes unless it was all a sure thing (remember a very short time ago when Nancy could not count the collapsed support for Charles Rangel, defended him, then had to drop him like a hot potato, only to have Rangel dispute matters and finally leave on his own accord, maybe?)
We’re supposed to believe that a bill, which until this very Ides of March did not exist is a “sure thing”? Or is the “sure thing” supposed to be the House passing a “sure thing” bill which accepts, but does not vote on the already passed Senate bill, and then we are supposed to ignore what the Senate will do? Or is the “sure thing” that both the already passed Senate bill will be passed by the House and then the Senate will pass the reconciliation bill passed by the House? The “sure thing” is a shell bill which will be twisted into something entirely different as the week digresses.
We’re supposed to believe that because no one knows what will eventually emerge by the end of this week (which is already yet another missed deadline) that it is a strength? A “defender” of the effort thinks there’s a problem:
“The trouble is, the process just keeps getting worse.
Unlikely as this seems, confusion continues to deepen. Specialists – let alone ordinary voters – struggle to remember the differences between the Senate bill, the House bill, and the president’s unfinished merged proposal. In the last big push to get reform through, using whatever deals, scams, ruses and parliamentary evasions fall to hand, the public and their concerns are pushed ever more to the periphery of Washington’s vision. [snip]
Already beyond abstruse, now in the realm of surreal farce, the debate is thus becoming yet more inward-looking and unintelligible. Can language on abortion be included in a reconciliation measure? (Probably not.) Can the Senate parliamentarian be overruled? (What is the Senate parliamentarian?) All that is missing is a speech in favour of the plan by Groucho Marx. Recovering voters’ respect for the outcome, even assuming the outcome is good, looks an ever more distant prospect.”
The gamble on a “sure thing” that no one really knows, is supposed to be welcomed with love and flowers, in much the same way as Iraqis were supposed to behave according to the Bush W. government. There are doubters:
“Suppose that Mr Obama’s gamble pays off, however. Suppose Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House Democrats, assembles her majority and sets the reconciliation wheels in motion. Suppose all then goes smoothly, and the reform is enacted. Under this best possible scenario, what then? The White House and most Democrats say they would be rewarded in November’s mid-term elections for at least getting something done. This is doubtful. [snip]
Last week two respected Democratic pollsters said that the administration’s drive for comprehensive healthcare reform was a “march of folly”. The battle for public opinion had been lost, they said, and if the Democrats insisted on passing this bill regardless, the country will kick them in the teeth in November.”
The sure thing we suspect is a real sure thing is that “Moderate House Democrats facing potentially difficult reelections this fall have a message for President Barack Obama: Don’t call us; we’ll call you.”
“Thousands of followers of a conservative Islamic group held peaceful demonstrations Sunday in several Indonesian cities against the planned visit of President Barack Obama.
Witnesses and police said members of the Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir protested in East Java’s provincial capital of Surabaya, South Sulawesi’s capital of Makassar and three other cities. The group, an international network which believes Muslims should unite in a single global state governed by Islamic law, urged the Indonesian government to reject the American leader’s trip, scheduled for late March.”
We know a “sure thing” is protesters in Indonesia. [Andrew Sullivan should check out the photos with the following captions: "A Muslim student kicks a banner of President Barack Obama during a protest against his planned visit in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia, Friday, March …" "Muslim students step on a banner of President Barack Obama during a protest against his planned visit in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia," "A Muslim student holds a poster of President Barack Obama during a protest against his planned visit in Medan, North Sumatra, Indonesia," "A student holds a poster of U.S President Barack Obama as she protests against Obama's plans to visit Indonesia, outside the U.S. consulate in Med …"]
Another “sure thing” is that the votes sufficient to pass Obama’s health scam do not yet exist.
“Two top aides — senior adviser David Axelrod and press secretary Robert Gibbs — said Sunday the votes will be there.
Other Democrats aren’t so sure.
After nearly a year of haggling, most of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 252 Democratic colleagues still have concerns about passing the Senate bill, even with some fixes. Their objections range from the ideological to the procedural, and the shape of the final package hinges on an obscure, unelected official — Senate parliamentarian Alan Frumin.”
There are pitfalls, regarding abortion (the Obama Dimocrats sold abortion rights down the river last year and now they wave the abortion flag to convince the betrayed that they are now for abortion rights), the House rules (the solution du jour is the “Slaughter Rule” which creates a vote without an actual vote), parliamentarian Frumin who will determine what is allowed and what is not allowed, maybe, immigration, and more and more procedural traps.
What matters now is that the Obama health scam be defeated. If it is not defeated it must be made an issue (second only to the economy) this November. The Obama health scam is a massive transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to Obama pals Big PhaRma and Big Insurance.
The Obama health scam will be larded with other sweet deals designed to trap the unwary. College loan programs or abortion or anti-abortion shiny objects are distractions meant to… distract. Divide and conquer. The Obama health scam is a scam. It must be defeated.
The prognostications of passage are premature, at best. The prognostications of Chicago Olympics proved to be premature and ultimately a false HOPE. The prognostications of climate conference breakthroughs were premature as well.
Obama went to Copenhagen framed by the usual hype. The usual hype is at work again. This time the hype is to prevent the failure of the scam.
This time the Obama trip is not to Copenhagen.
This time the Obama trip is a one way to Waterloo.
Americans really needed universal health care. Instead we got a Pelousy bill which transfers taxpayer wealth to Big Insurance and Big PhaRma. Things continue to fall apart. So, as a pick-me-up, it’s time for a little bit of Hillary in the night.
Before Hillary, let’s get some unpleasant Obamaish business out of the way first.
* * * * * *
As we’ve written before, there is a lot for Hillary supporters to be thankful for. Back in 2007 we here at Big Pink were alone but now there are wonderful Pink-kissed websites to frolic with. One smart website is Not Your Sweetie, which continues to document how the Dimocratic attacks on Eric Massa and David Paterson are drive-by revenge killings. Not to sweep away the current allegations, but if Paterson and Massa had done as they were told, the Obama thugs would not have ordered the hit.
Investigators have found little direct evidence that Gov. Paterson tampered with a witness in a domestic abuse case against one of his top aides, the Daily News has learned.
While several key people have yet to be interviewed, the woman at the heart of the case, Sherr-una Booker, told probers she didn’t feel the governor threatened her in a phone conversation a day before a Feb. 8 hearing in the case.
Investigate Paterson and all the allegations thoroughly, but we suspect the perpetrators of the Paterson “hit” are at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s a hit job to benefit Andrew Cuomo, the former “racist” turned Obama hero. It’s a gang bang with Cuomo and Obama trying to wipe out David Paterson and the memory of Carl McCall. Charlie Rangel and Tim Geithner get away with tax evasion but Paterson is not so lucky:
Cuomo is also investigating charges that Paterson lied under oath about freebie Yankees tickets he got for Game 1 of the World Series. Kuby said Cuomo has a different problem there – the case “is total silliness,” he said. “We really will be laughed out of the Union if we prosecute our governor for cheering on the Yankees at a World Series game.”
Since taking on the investigations of Mr. Paterson, the state’s first African-American governor, Mr. Cuomo has seen a slip in his popularity, particularly among minority voters.
A poll released on Tuesday found that Mr. Cuomo’s approval rating among New York voters had dropped 13 percentage points to 54% in a week.
Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, suffered a decline of 22 points among nonwhite voters in New York, according to the Marist Poll.
Watch out Andrew! Remember the old Al Capone warning: “If they do it for you, they’ll do it to you.”
Obama simply cannot be trusted. Obama cannot be trusted on any issue. Obama cannot be trusted by his friends. Obama cannot be trusted by his enemies. Obama cannot be trusted.
Poor New Yorkers. They’ll have two hapless candidates, Cuomo and Lazio running for governor in November. Both deserve retirement, not promotion.
James Roosevelt, who was chair of the Rules and Bylaws Committee that decided to dock Michigan and Florida half of their delegates and award 4 of the delegates Clinton won in Michigan to Obama, as well as all of the uncommitted delegates, is the CEO of a health insurance company – Tufts Healthcare. Okay? Got that? The guy who made sure that Obama had the necessary to delegates to win the nomination – even to the point of assigning delegates another candidate won to him arbitrarily – is the CEO of a health insurance firm.
I’m thinking he considers Barack Obama a man of his word.
James Roosevelt will learn soon enough:
Obama simply cannot be trusted. Obama cannot be trusted on any issue. Obama cannot be trusted by his friends. Obama cannot be trusted by his enemies. Obama cannot be trusted.
Obama simply cannot be trusted. Obama cannot be trusted on any issue. Obama cannot be trusted by his friends. Obama cannot be trusted by his enemies. Obama cannot be trusted.
More warnings to Barack Obama on his sinking, unqualified and inexperienced boobery and bumbling. Non-Republicans Stanley Greenberg, James Carville, Kate Monninger and Andrew Bauman of Democracy Corps are hoisting the red flag and desperately yelling to the boob-in-chief. In a PDF document on the latest polls on the economy the non-Republicans say this:
“The biggest challenge facing Democrats in 2010 after passing health care is getting the economy right – and this is even more important than health care.
While economic growth is better than contraction and stagnation, it poses immense problems for progressives wanting the support of voters – starting with the growing gap between improving macro-level indicators and lagging micro-level ones, like job and wage growth. There is reason to believe – confirmed by this survey – that progressives are losing many blue collar and non-college voters as elites focus on “economic success.”
We’ll translate, “Obama you boob, we know you don’t know what to do about the economy, but stop it with the heath care scam already, you are killing the Dimocratic Party. Your situation comedy coalition is a joke and that cannot be hidden anymore.”
Here’s some more C.Y.A. advice from the pollsters and strategists and more proof we have been right all along that Obama’s situation comedy coalition is a joke and a disaster and that the Democratic Party committed suicide with the massive Mistake In ‘08. The pollsters, politely warn Obama:
“The second big and growing challenge is the gap between the hopes of the new progressive base voters who created a progressive majority in the country in the last four years – African-Americans and Latinos, young voters and unmarried women – and their own experiences in this economic crisis – loss of employment, wages and health care and cutbacks in state services. These voters are dominantly the “drop-off” voters – those who voted in the 2008
election but are not likely to in 2010. [snip]
The key findings are summarized below:
1. View of the economy worsens after one-year anniversary of the ‘stimulus.’ [snip]
2. The real economic indicators – job loss, reduced wages, and cuts in state services and state assistance – could fuel the blue-collar protest and demoralize the new base.[snip]
3. Knowing how people experienced the economic crash will help us understand how to reach them during the recovery.
4. The real economic indicators do show some gains and progressives must figure out how to use them effectively.
5. But always remember, the most important groups for this election may be experiencing and viewing all this differently.
6. Lack of confidence in Democratic approaches to the economy.
Other Democratic pollsters are sounding the same warnings. While Patrick Caddell has long since drifted away, Doug Schoen is still essentially a Democrat. Both note the same warnings as the Greenberg/Carville Democracy Corps. Caddell and Shoen:
In “The March of Folly,” Barbara Tuchman asked, “Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests?” Her assessment of self-deception — “acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts” — captures the conditions that are gripping President Obama and the Democratic Party leadership as they renew their efforts to enact health-care reform.
Their blind persistence in the face of reality threatens to turn this political march of folly into an electoral rout in November.
We laughed as we read, “At stake is the kind of mainstream, common-sense Democratic Party that we believe is crucial to the success of the American enterprise.” That Democratic party committed suicide in Denver guys.
First, the battle for public opinion has been lost. Comprehensive health care has been lost. If it fails, as appears possible, Democrats will face the brunt of the electorate’s reaction. If it passes, however, Democrats will face a far greater calamitous reaction at the polls. Wishing, praying or pretending will not change these outcomes.
Get the ShamWow! We’re laughing and the tears are flowing:
“Yes, most Americans believe, as we do, that real health-care reform is needed. [snip]
However, a solid majority of Americans opposes the massive health-reform plan. Four-fifths of those who oppose the plan strongly oppose it… Never in our experience as pollsters can we recall such self-deluding misconstruction of survey data.”
Get the 2×4, it’s an election year. Time to beat the senseless out of ‘em.
This is the key point:
“Health care is no longer a debate about the merits of specific initiatives. Since the spectacle of Christmas dealmaking to ensure passage of the Senate bill, the issue, in voters’ minds, has become less about health care than about the government and a political majority that will neither hear nor heed the will of the people.”
“Almost anyone who ever traveled with President Bill Clinton can tell a similar tale. At the end of a long day, Clinton would unwind by working the rope line. He would shake hands, clasp shoulders — and listen. When there were no stories left to hear, he would bound up the steps onto the plane, stretch out his arms and declare, “That was great!”
For his staff, this routine eventually lost its charm. But Clinton never tired of it. For him, politics began in the stories of those ordinary Americans. His continuing dialogue with them — in classrooms and on factory floors, at rallies and on television and, yes, along the rope line — kept him connected.
Obama simply cannot be trusted. Obama cannot be trusted on any issue. Obama cannot be trusted by his friends. Obama cannot be trusted by his enemies. Obama cannot be trusted.
After promising the gullible (Gay-groups, black groups, women’s groups, Jewish groups, etc.) that in 2010 he would finally get around to their issues, Obama is running away. With a diaper full of excuses though:
“President Obama said Thursday that he would proceed with an overhaul of the immigration system this year if he could attract substantial Republican support. But a leading Republican who supports an overhaul said an immigration bill could not go forward if the president used a legislative shortcut sidestepping Republicans to pass his health care bill.
That’s some qualifier! Translation: Obama says “screw you” to the fools that thought immigration reform was going to happen. Obama has also given the Republicans an excuse (none was needed anyway) to continue to vote “NO” to his repulsive nonsense.
Hey! immigration groups:
Obama simply cannot be trusted. Obama cannot be trusted on any issue. Obama cannot be trusted by his friends. Obama cannot be trusted by his enemies. Obama cannot be trusted.
You’ll get words, flowery words, but it’s all a lie.
“Democratic aides said House leaders wanted the vote to occur before a two-week spring break scheduled to start on March 26. Otherwise, they said, wavering lawmakers might buckle to pressure from critics of the bill, who plan to step up their campaign against it during the recess.
President Obama plans to leave Thursday on a trip to Indonesia and Australia. With his health care bill hanging in the balance, he faces intensifying questions about whether he should put off the trip, which was timed to coincide with his daughters’ spring break.
“President Barack Obama hosted a movie night at the White House for Hollywood heavyweights Tom Hanks and director Steven Spielberg on Thursday – at which they watched a preview of the star duo’s new World War Two miniseries “The Pacific.”
“Hardly any Democrat running for Congress seems to want to talk about healthcare.
Of the 26 leading Democratic House candidates contacted by The Hill, only one would commit to voting for the Senate healthcare bill if and when it comes to the House floor.
Out of the more than two dozen Democratic challengers and open-seat House candidates, only 10 commented for this story. Eight outright declined to comment.
Eight more didn’t respond to several days’ worth of requests via phone and e-mail.”
Not much is working, but Hillary is for sure working. She doesn’t stop. Hillary’s work ethic inspires.
In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the future king, Prince Harry, before a dangerous battle, vastly outnumbered by the foe, goes quietly among the troops. It’s the prologue to Act IV,
“With cheerful semblance and sweet majesty;
That every wretch, pining and pale before,
Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks;
A largess universal, like the sun,
His liberal eye doth give to every one,
Thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all
Behold, as may unworthiness define, A little touch of Harry in the night.
“We have had other secretaries of state who have cared deeply for the institution,” said Patrick F. Kennedy, undersecretary for management and a senior Foreign Service officer. “None who have done as much internal outreach.”
The foreign officers must be kept organized until such time as a real president is in charge.
“Those interviewed inside and outside the agency say Clinton has done a good job of heading off the historical tensions between career employees and quadrennial political newcomers by relying on the counsel of senior Foreign Service operatives and reaching out in general.
She has walked the halls and popped into offices unexpectedly, created an electronic “sounding board,” and held seven internal town hall meetings to listen to gripes about everything from policy to cafeteria food to bullying in the workplace. She installed six new showers that joggers requested, is taking steps to remedy overseas pay inequities and instituted a policy that allows partners of gay diplomats to receive benefits. She became a heroine to the Foreign Service when she went to bat to get funding for 3,000 new Foreign Service positions for State operations and the U.S. Agency for International Development — the first boost of this magnitude in two decades.
Jeffrey Feltman, assistant secretary for the Near East and a Foreign Service officer, is one of those whom Clinton surprised — and won over. He was already looking for a new job when she tracked him down at his barbershop 24 hours after she was sworn in to seek his advice. A few weeks later, she asked him to stay on.
“We’ve heard it before: Yes, diplomacy matters. Yawn. Sounds great, but we tend to be cynical about such language in comparison to the actual resources devoted to DOD versus State,” Feltman said. “She has tried to demonstrate that it’s more than lip service by fighting for resources . . . and listening to us.”
Added Kennedy: “She fully understands that when she came in there was a weak and degraded platform. You need it to be refreshed with new people and new blood, and that’s what we are getting in now.”
Wily Hillary outsmarted her opponents. Husband Bill keeps the political fires burning. Hillary runs an operation with global reach, while waiting:
“Clinton had one condition that eclipsed all others as she considered Obama’s offer to be secretary of state: She demanded hiring authority at the department. To Team Clinton, this meant every political job — about 200 — from the most senior level to the 20-something researchers. Historically, it is the president who fills these political positions, and no one can recall a Cabinet secretary in recent memory requesting and receiving this kind of hiring latitude.
So rare are Obama people at the agency that Alec Ross — an Obama campaign Internet star who aggressively sought to work for Clinton — is jokingly referred to as the “Obama guy.”
Guarding the door at Foggy Bottom last year was a trio from the top echelon of Hillaryland. Among them — Cheryl Mills, who was deputy counsel in the Clinton White House; Hillary Clinton’s White House chief of staff, Maggie Williams; and Tamara Luzzatto, her Senate chief of staff — they knew everyone who had ever worked for Clinton over the years and who hoped to join her at State. They also recruited high-profile experts who had not worked for Clinton — but neither were they associated with Obama.
Of the three, only Mills joined State, as Clinton’s chief of staff, along with other longtime confidants and charter members of Hillaryland: global women’s expert Melanne Verveer; protocol chief Capricia Marshall; her Senate spokesman, Philippe Reines; traveling aide Huma Abedin; speechwriter Lissa Muscatine; and Jacob Lew, Office of Management and Budget director under President Bill Clinton and a deputy secretary of state.”
Keep the Obama thugs and boobs out of foreign policy. They’ve caused enough trouble.
“According to three sources with knowledge of State personnel decisions who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the White House made one significant request last year: that Clinton tap as her deputy James Steinberg, a foreign policy expert who had worked for her husband but whom Obama passed over for White House national security adviser. There are differing views as to whether Clinton was enthusiastic about hiring Steinberg, but there appears to be a single view on whether he’s a good fit: Numerous sources inside and outside the department describe Steinberg as unhappy in the job. He did not respond to two requests for an interview.
After bringing on Steinberg, Clinton hired Lew for a second deputy’s slot — filling the job for the first time since it was created a decade ago. Those close to her insist that the intent was not to undercut Steinberg but to ramp up efforts to increase the agency’s budget and take back control of its ability to manage development programs. Lew has an office adjoining that of Mills, whose office connects to Clinton’s.”
Hillary and Hillaryland know how to deal with bureaucratic plants and oafs.
Hillary also knows how to get the information she needs.
“Several career employees said they were caught off guard initially by Clinton’s level of engagement in internal management, particularly coming on the heels of her more reserved predecessor, Condoleezza Rice. On her first tour of the building, before she was sworn in, Clinton requested a budget briefing. Kennedy said it soon became clear what she meant: not an overview, but a line-by-line review that took three sessions to complete.
Shamila Chaudary — a self-described “backbencher” — had toiled for years as a faceless expert on the Pakistan desk when one day she found herself invited to brief Clinton. Chaudary, 32, said the two sparred over whether it was prudent to engage non-governmental power centers in Pakistan, with Clinton expressing skepticism.
Chaudary held her ground, making the point that “we’ve been seen as not engaging with them, and it’s hurt us a lot.” She said that although she and Clinton “didn’t necessarily agree . . . she said that it’s very important for us to debate like this. . . . This is how she said she wants to do business.”
Within 48 hours of their meeting, Chaudary was promoted to a front-line job in the office of policy planning.”
Eric Massa is the Mark Foley of 2010. In 2006 the Mark Foley scandal clued in Americans who were not paying attention that something was dreadfully wrong in the Republican run congress. In 2010 it is Eric Massa who clues in Americans not paying much attention that something is dreadfully wrong in the Dimocratic run congress. In 2006 the American people threw the bums out. In 2010 the Dimocrats must suffer even greater devastating defeats, doom, death and disaster.
we all know if Massa was a “Yes” vote on HCR, this whole thing would never have seen the light of day.
Politico published a story today titled Nancy Pelosi aide knew of Eric Massa concerns in October Last October!, but nothing happened until March 2010 because every vote is needed but only when Eric Massa made clear he was a “NO” vote, Eric Massa had to go.
From the moment this story broke open we linked to the allegations which made Eric Massa an unsympathetic figure. We understood immediately that the story is not about Eric Massa, the story is about the Arrogance!, Incompetence!, Corruption! of the Dimocratic congress and the Barack Obama White House and Obamination Dimocratic Party.
Some smart Republicans know we are exactly correct (again) in our analysis. So today, the smart Republicans, the ones with a memory of 2006 did what needed to be done:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office was notified in October by then-Rep. Eric Massa’s top aide of concerns about the New York Democrat’s behavior, two congressional sources familiar with the matter said Wednesday night. [snip]
According to a person briefed on the call, Racalto was concerned that the lunch followed a pattern by Massa — who is married and has two children — of trying to spend time alone with young gay men with no ostensible work purpose. Racalto, according to this person, also alerted Frank’s chief of staff. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the matter.
The revelation about warnings to Pelosi’s office comes as the House ethics committee closed its short-lived investigation of allegations that Massa groped and sexually harassed several young, male staffers in his office, according to two sources familiar with the decision.
The committee concluded that Massa’s resignation put him outside the reach of any punishment it could impose and would render any findings irrelevant. The decision set up a political battle with House Republicans, who are already targeting congressional Democrats with campaign ads saying they have failed to look deeply enough into the ethical transgressions of their party members.
Republicans signaled Wednesday that they wanted the inquiry to continue, despite Massa’s departure. Senior Republicans in the House said the public deserves to know whether Democratic leaders were aware of the allegations of Massa’s misconduct longer than they have acknowledged and whether they failed to act to protect junior staffers.
GOP leaders cited as precedent the committee’s 2006 decision to investigate claims that Mark Foley, a Florida Republican, sent sexually explicit messages to former male pages. The committee’s decision came after Foley stepped down from Congress. That inquiry also examined how some House leaders ignored claims about Foley’s conduct while others tried to shield his behavior from public disclosure.
Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.) said it would be only fair for the committee to investigate how Democratic leaders handled the Massa case, given the panel’s decision in the Foley investigation.
The complaints about Massa’s gropes of young staffers began “as far back as January 2009″ reported the Washington Post. WHAT DID NANCY PELOUSY KNOW AND WHEN DID SHE KNOW IT? What and when was Obama told? What and when was Rahm told?
But she may be facing a moment as flummoxing as the one when Democratic Speaker Thomas Foley lost the vote on the rule to consider the crime and gun control bill in August 1994, or when Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert saw the Mark Foley scandal explode on the last day of the session in September 2006. Both were moments when highly competent and dedicated House speakers saw their majorities shattered beyond repair.
In Part I we stated that it was not the Iraq war which won the 2006 elections but rather, “In 2006 Americans saw the same type of arrogance, incompetence, and corruption, from Republicans that Americans see in 2010 from Barack Obama and his corrupt Dimocrats.” In Part I we also tied the Obama health scam to the Arrogance! Incompetence! Corruption! that rules Washington today. [We warned at the end of 2008 that a special prosecutor was needed to prevent the Chicago Hydra of Corruption from growing another head at the nation's capital.)
In Part II we expanded on the allegations of sexual impropriety by Eric Massa (we also discussed David Paterson) and made it clear that the focus should be not on what Eric Massa did but what Nancy Pelousy and the Obama Dimocrats knew and why they failed to act. We also tied the Massa allegations to the health scam scandal with these lovely quotes from Eric Massa:
“I was set up for this from the very very beginning. If you think that somehow they didn’t come after me to get rid of me because my vote is the deciding vote on the health care bill – then ladies and gentleman, you live in a world that is so innocent, as not to understand what is going on in Washington, DC.” “The leadership of the Democratic Party have become exactly what they said they were running against.”
“The entire nation has said, ‘let’s rewrite the health care bill. Let’s find what we can agree on.’ ‘No, no, no, we’re gonna ram this down the throats of the American people and anyone who stands in the way of doing that is gonna be smeared and they’re going to be kicked out of Congress, and we’re gonna have people like Steny Hoyer lying in the press.’”
“If they ram this health care bill through which apparently they’re going to do now, because I’m not going to be there to vote against it, then it’s going to rip this country to pieces”
The next day, Glenn Beck conducted a bad interview with Eric Massa, which reflected more on the culture clash of different mindsets and the inabilities of Glenn Beck to conduct the type of interview that needed to be conducted, than the actual things said by Massa. The interview was a dud and nothing new was said - except to the many people who had not heard this information before. That is what happened in 2006 when the Mark Foley scandal broke open.
Our first Arrogance, Incompetence, Corruption article appeared on March 4, 2010. On March 5, 2010 we began this series which compares the election of 2006 with the elections of 2010 (not the first time we made this comparison). It was also on March 5, 2010, before the Eric Massa story broke wide open - before Massa made the statements we quoted above about Dimocratic Arrogance! Incompetence! Corruption! - before, when the scandal was limited to the late, sex based attacks on Massa by the Dimocratic establishment, that Joan Walsh made the contrary argument. Joan Walsh wrote:
I predicted Wednesday that Republicans and the mainstream media would soon have a new but typically simplistic partisan line: that recent scandals involving Democratic Reps. Eric Massa and Charlie Rangel and New York Gov. David Paterson would make 2010 what 2006 was for Republicans -- the year voters punished the party for its corruption. Throw in oldies but goodies like former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, both Democrats, and I foresaw an avalanche of 2006-2010 comparisons. And I was right.
[snip]
But this is another dramatic case of the double standard the media can’t seem to avoid when it comes to Republicans and Democrats. The big difference between the two sets of scandals is that GOP corruption in 2006 was big-time, it was systemic — and much of it was covered up, ignored and, in some cases (House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, anyone?), perpetrated by congressional leadership. Nancy Pelosi’s team came in and developed ethics standards and investigation protocols that are working in the Rangel case, standards that many Republicans, including House Minority Leader John Boehner, opposed.
If you simply examine the corruption scandals, there is no comparison. (This post by the great Joe Conason is a must-read.)
In our next and final installment in this series (this weekend), we will draw the comparisons for hapless Joan. It’s not about Massa or his Massa-ges of young males’ body parts. It’s about Arrogance! Incompetence! Corruption!
And Roseanne Barr, has a Big Pink smile and an “I told You so” about Hillary (which reads at times word-for-word like a certain Big Pink website).
when the dems screwed Hillary, they screwed america out of health care and out of jobs. I knew it. I told you so. I got so sick to my stomach as I watched forty years of the work of women get washed down the drain by axelrod and emmanuel and dean, richardson kerry and kennedy.
When Oprah, who knows nothing about politics and who never in twenty years did one show on the subject, put the final nail in the coffin of the health care candidate, i was stunned. I lost my faith in everything, including God. I had seen the dismantling of the working class since 1980, and had fought against it so hard, doing everything i could, and using everything at my disposal. I thought, how can an entire generation of feminism die right when the hope for it was at its strongest. I pleaded with friends not to back Obama. I said, but you know Hillary is the health care candidate, and he has not even a plan for any kind of healthcare in his platform or in his campaign! I blogged every day on the subject for about a year.
I knew the phony progressive left was just a trick of Soros and billionaire criminals to take down health care. I knew Obama got more wall street money than any other candidate, and I knew he was a phony too, all the way, as I watched him snicker about Hillary, the woman’s candidate being “likable enough”. I didn’t like her vote on Iraq, but she promised to end the war, and I believed that she would. I knew that she would listen to women, not completely abandon them as Obama has done. I knew that she would listen to working people, before bankers, unlike what Obama has done.
They set her up like they always set up women, and after we do all the groundwork, they take it away, and then they divide the spoils between themselves and their old boy network. Now, it is all coming clear to all the idiots that the wrong person is in the white house. Another George Bush. He has not saved one home from foreclosure nor created one job. He just wants to get down on his knees in front of those republicans and grovel, and HE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE TO!
They triangulated race and class AGAIN!! They may have token black people in congress and the senate and the supreme court, and elsewhere, but they have never ever in this history of this country had ONE token poor person in anything.
Class, not race is our real national nightmare. Race and gender are second and third. Damn, so close to single payer and real change, now so far. My God, India has had more women at the top of its government by about 5X than we have.
From Ecclesiastes 3:1-15 MV
A time to mourn, a time to gather stones together:
It’s a time to fight.
——————————————————————————————————-
Perhaps it is because we at Big Pink were alone for so long throughout all of 2007 that we see things today through Pink colored glasses. But what is it with all the stupid depression these days?
Perhaps it is because one month into our existence we were under direct attack from Peggy Noonan, and Tim Russert himself attacked us on his creepy Sunday show, and rigged emails were sent to us from Politico and TechPresident, and there was a ceaseless campaign to destroy this website with hacks and phony Patricia/Wonk websites dedicated solely to attack us and our commentors, and the creeps at DailyKooks demanded our destruction, and Donna Brazile was emailing Hillary to take us down – that we see things through Pink colored glasses.
As we approach yet another anniversary this April we see how much we have advanced. We have many Hillary websites with many viewpoints online now. Back in 2007 we were alone. Today, we have Republicans fighting sexism and misogyny even if it is in their own self-interest (the best politics). Back in 2007 we were alone, and Obama and his thugs, along with Republicans (exception from some like, oddly, Pat Buchanan) indulged in daily sexism and misogyny.
Today, an attack on Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin or women gets a quick response from Hillary sites. Back in 2007, Youtube was an Obama attack machine against Hillary Clinton. Today, Youtube is an arsenal of explosives documenting Obama lies.
Back in 2007 we were alone in describing Obama as a thug and boob and a corrupt circus clown from Corrupt Chicago surrounded by corrupt circus clowns from Chicago. Today, all the narratives we created are routinely repeated.
Back in 2007 some Republicans bought into the Obama lies. Today, these Republicans are embarrassed if not yet totally Hopium free. Back in 2007 Dimocrats waited for the comet to join the celestial choirs and sing praises to Mess-iah Obama. Today, these Dimocrats at least suspect they were duped by the Dimocratic establishment into support for a stooge who makes George W. Bush look good. So what’s with the depression these days?
We’re not referring to the departed or the departing. People like our commentors “S” and “JanH” have family heartbreaks to deal with and they rightly need to take a leave from the battlefield in order to tend to the family fields. Even the most intrepid soldiers deserve, and need, a little R&R. There is no shame to recharge. There is not even shame in retreat (ask George Washington and Winston Churchill).
We are in Winter quarters waiting for the political Spring and the “muster” command. Waiting can be difficult. But let’s remember the mission. Puma Eyes has the eyes on the prize and remembers the mission:
Remember the mission. So what, if the cleanup job requires us to sweep out Dimocrats along with Republicans. Good riddance to all. There’s a job to be done.
We didn’t even get to enjoy the end of the Bush administration.
Another thing that has been bothering me is that I really wanted to be wrong about Obama but I wasn’t, and saying “I told you so” doesn’t make up for having my worst nightmares become true. If anything, he’s even worse than I feared.
But what really has me bummed out right now is the realization that there is no end in sight for the mess this country is in. The single biggest problem facing our nation is the illness in our political system. When I say “illness” I mean the equivalent of an inoperable cancer that has metastasized. If we fixed our political system then we would actually be able to do something about those other problems.
For most of my adult life I believed that the Democrats were the good guys so even when they were getting slapped around by the Republicans I could support them and hope that after the next election they would grow a pair and start standing up for the liberal ideals they campaigned on.
I finally realized that the majority of the Democrats who hold elected office are not only corrupt but they have the same agenda as the Republicans. Oh, the say they’re on our side, and when it’s time for them to represent us they might make some speeches andr play some parliamentary tricks but when the nitty meets the gritty they lose on purpose. Lots of times they don’t even bother to put on a dog and pony show anymore, they just vote to bail out Wall Street or take away our civil rights as if that’s what we wanted them to do.
Now as far back as I can remember the Republicans were corrupt and they tended to be pricks or assholes, and sometimes both, but they weren’t insane. Nowadays there’s a lot of GOPers that are crazy as shithouse rats. That not only includes the elected ones but the voters too. Then you got the tea baggers who don’t think the Republicans are crazy enough.
On the left side they’re getting just as bad, they’re just insane about different things. If you read both the left and right blogs on a regular basis you’d think think they inhabit completely different worlds. It’s almost like they don’t speak the same language.
Next fall we’re gonna have and election and right now it looks like the Republicans will gain seats in Congress, and maybe even get control of one or both houses. But no matter who wins, we lose. The same thing in November of 2012. – If either the Democrats or Republicans win, we’re screwed.
We’re not going to say “cheer up”. We are not even going to argue with the sentiments expressed even though we disagree with some of them and agree with some of them. What we will say is a Warholian “so what”? It’s a struggle, so what? It’s a mess, so what?
The boy and his sister had a tough day. They waited, organized, called out. They fought back in the only way they could.
We’re strapping on our Pink grenades every morning and getting into the fight. If we get depressed amid the lunacy, we’ll say “so what?” We’re in the middle of a fight not at the end of one. The time for hammock swings and Pink lemonade is not yet here.
We might not like it but we realize that the Tea Party people for now are allies. So we will not disparage them as “teabaggers”. Politics makes strange bedfellows and these are strange times. We have learned that we do need two parties in opposition to each other, and other parties to live and die in order to keep those two parties in check and to let the major opposition parties know our votes cannot be taken for granted.
We might not like it but we realize that there are two choices: live or die. We’re not going to die and go away. We’ll live to fight another day.
We might not like it but we realize we are not alone in our opposition now and will not be alone in attaining our goals later. Our partners will change but we are not alone any more.
We might not like it but we realize that we were correct all along about Obama and his thug machine and his situation comedy demographics coalition. The ones who should be in deep depression and shame are Obama supporters who allowed themselves to be duped by the Dimocratic establishment and elect a stooge.
As the clinicians say, “depression is anger turned inwards“. By that definition Obama supporters should be suicidally depressed. Good riddance.
Obama’s Michigan enablers are sent to jail (Monica Conyers sentenced to 37 months today) and more to go. Why should we be depressed? Let’s depress Obama supporters.
The Obama Dimocrats are forced to rabid tricks (such as the Slaughter Rule) to pass the Senate version of the Obama health scam, without a vote. It’s almost like the Democratic nomination – no vote is respected, mob rule Chicago rules.
The Eric Massa Naked Politics Scandals of Election 2010 will finish off Dimocrats this year. Eric Massa has told a vivid story about Rahm Emanuel naked in the congressional gym that rings with truth. The Eric Massa story is focusing the public attention in the same way that the Mark Foley scandal focused the public attention in 2006. Americans know that something is very very wrong.
At the end of the day, what’s most harmful to the White House is that Massa’s claim reinforces a very damaging narrative: that this Administration is run by a bunch of political thugs who do things “The Chicago Way;” that the White House and Democrats in Congress will do “whatever it takes” to pass this particular piece of health care legislation.
To have Massa ripping his party and the administration in such a public way right as they’re in the middle of trying to woo and cajole enough House Democrats to vote “yes” on the the health care bill is at the very least unhelpful and might possibly turn out to be a disaster.
In a move to counter Massa’s appearance on the Glenn Beck show and the Larry King show the Dimocrats are leaking allegations against Massa. The stories about Eric Massa have been circulating for months, if not years, and Dimocrats like Rahm Emanuel knew all the “rumors” about Eric Massa – for years. Only now, because Eric Massa is not bending to their will, are Dimocrats out to destroy Massa. We are not defending Massa (nor David Paterson) but we know a drive by shooting by Obama thugs when we see one.
23:23 “I’ve had union leaders tell me point blank ‘we are not going to contribute to your campaign unless you vote for this health care bill.’ Is that, or is that not a bribe?” 23:32
25:47 “I was set up for this from the very very beginning. If you think that somehow they didn’t come after me to get rid of me because my vote is the deciding vote on the health care bill – then ladies and gentleman, you live in a world that is so innocent, as not to understand what is going on in Washington, DC.”26:00 “The leadership of the Democratic Party have become exactly what they said they were running against.” 26:07
26:16 “The entire nation has said, ‘let’s rewrite the health care bill. Let’s find what we can agree on.’ ‘No, no, no, we’re gonna ram this down the throats of the American people and anyone who stands in the way of doing that is gonna be smeared and they’re going to be kicked out of Congress, and we’re gonna have people like Steny Hoyer lying in the press.’”20:33
69:49 “If they ram this health care bill through which apparently they’re going to do now, because I’m not going to be there to vote against it, then it’s going to rip this country to pieces” 69:54
Arrogance!, Incompetence!, Corruption!
————————————————————————————————————
Another breakthrough today. Eric Massa spoke. What Massa said we will discuss today. Eric Massa was not what our Part II was going to be about. We’ll post a Part III another day, in order to discuss Eric Massa today.
Let’s expand on that right-on-target update with three points. First of all, Rahm Emanuel – this is what Chicago Corruption Crime expert John Kass has written:
When the president installed Rahm as his chief of staff, the Washington media were turgid with respect, praising Rahm as a shrewd political alley fighter, a maestro of profanity, a former ballet dancer tough enough to send a dead fish to an enemy, just like a Hollywood gangster.
Naturally, the national media marveled that Obama selected a Clinton guy, Emanuel, to run things.
But Rahm is no Clinton guy. He’s a Daley guy.
Rahm Emanuel is a Daley guy. Second, Eric Massa. In our update we linked to a story discussing Eric Massa’s purported history of sexual interest in men. The history extends into Massa’s Navy days. The writer of the Eric Massa history, a confessed enemy of Massa, states he knew of allegations regarding Massa’s alleged attraction to men over three years ago. The Dimocratic House leadership acknowledges they were aware of “rumors” about Massa “for weeks” at the very least. More likely, whatever “rumors” about Massa existed were discovered during the vetting for his first run for congress.
Rahm Emanuel was in charge of the DCCC in 2006 when Eric Massa first ran for congress and Emanuel is not known to assist congressional first time candidates without thorough vetting. Whatever rumors about Massa existed in 2006, Rahm Emanuel knew them all before authorizing a single dollar to Eric Massa’s campaign (Massa was a special “Red to Blue” DCCC special candidate in 2006).
“Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill,” Massa, who on Friday announced his intention to resign, said during a long monologue on radio station WKPQ. “And this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me, and it will pass. You connect the dots.”
Massa, who voted against health care reform in November, accused Democratic leaders of driving him out of office in the cause of passing health care reform. “With the departure of Congressman Neil Abercrombie (D), who is running for the governorship of Hawaii, and with the tragic and very sad passing of my personal friend Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me and it will pass. You connect the dots.”
The comment that landed Massa in hot water, he claimed, was a sexual proposition he made in jest at a table full of drunken male staffers at a wedding reception on New Year’s Eve. He also said that the complainant was not the man he allegedly harassed, but an offended third party who witnessed the incident.
According to Eric Massa, “his chief of staff informed him in early February” of the charges filed against him. Early February, but only with every single vote a make or break vote, is the push on to get rid of Massa. Indeed, the “rumors” about Eric Massa were circulating “for months” but only now is there action.
Again, we do not defend Massa’s actions (or David Paterson’s actions). Eric Massa should stay in the House, not resign, and fight it out. But, if any of the allegations against him are true in any way, it would come out in an investigation by the House. Eric Massa has a lose/lose situation before him: stay and fight and be destroyed personally or quit and be called a “drama queen” (this “drama queen” anti-gay slur appears to be how the Dimocrats and stupid Republicans will respond to the latest Obama Drama because it avoids substantive responses and because “she’s crazy” or “he’s crazy” is what Obama thugs usually say).
Massa voted against health care legislation in Nov., and he has not been a reliable vote for Dem leadership. That, he said, has put a target on his back.
“When I voted against the cap and trade bill, the phone rang and it was the chief of staff to the president of the United States of America, Rahm Emanuel, and he started swearing at me in terms and words that I hadn’t heard since that crossing the line ceremony on the USS New Jersey in 1983,” Massa said. “And I gave it right back to him, in terms and words that I know are physically impossible.”
“If Rahm Emanuel wants to come after me, maybe he ought to hold himself to the same standards I’m holding myself to and he should resign,” Massa said.
“Rahm Emanuel is son of the devil’s spawn, Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) said. “He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive.”
Rep. Massa describes a confrontation with Emanuel in a shower: “I am showering, naked as a jaybird, and here comes Rahm Emanuel, not even with a towel wrapped around his tush, poking his finger in my chest, yelling at me.”
“There is not a single member of the Democratic freshman class whi (sic) is going to vote against this health care bill now that they’ve got me,” he said. “Eric Massa’s probably not going to go back to Congress, because the only way I would go back there would be as an independent. A pox on both parties.”
We hope Eric Massa does not resign. Eric Massa today should think about what is best for the American people. Eric Massa should vote “NO” and then if necessary quit. Eric Massa should also leave the Dimocratic Party of Arrogance! Incompetence! Corruption!
Let’s talk, not in order: (1) Michelle Malkin, (2) Election 2006, (3) Election 2010, (4) Obama’s health scam.
First, let’s look at where the twig was bent. The Democratic myth of Election 2006 is that the election was about Iraq. We have always disagreed with that analysis. We believe Election 2006 was about arrogance (and incompetence and corruption). In 2006 Americans saw the same type of arrogance, incompetence, and corruption, from Republicans that Americans see in 2010 from Barack Obama and his corrupt Dimocrats.
In 2006 the Nutroots decided to run Joe Lieberman out of the U.S. Senate for his many outspoken deviations from Democratic orthodoxy. Rich self-funding Ned Lamont ran against Lieberman and won the primary. Lamont ran as an anti Iraq war candidate with the support of anti Iraq war Democrats and Nutroot websites eager to capitalize on Lamont’s self-funded campaign. Since the Lamont primary victory the Nutroots have twisted the narrative of Election 2006 to their benefit and declared Election 2006 was a referendum on the Iraq war and the need for Democrats to follow their line of thought or be defeated. But of course, Joe Lieberman won reelection though not on the Democratic Party line.
Without getting into the weeds (today) of whether or not Joe Lieberman should have been removed and the many Iraq war arguments – we do not believe that Election 2006 was specifically about the Iraq war. Frustration and anger with the floundering, incompetently run Iraq war was important, but that is not what was determinative. For example, there are little to no electoral results that year which are directly attributable to the Iraq war as the issue which swung any election. A few Iraq war veterans won election but even they did not focus their elections solely on Iraq (compare with Carolyn McCarthy when she won strictly on gun control). The exit polls confirm our view that Iraq was important but not determinative. What was determinative? We believe it was the arrogance and incompetence and corruption of the party in power.
The narrative pushed from the Democratic Left is that Election 2006 was about Iraq. This misguided analysis of Election 2006 has had deleterious effects on the Democratic Party and must be corrected. Americans will be patient with stupid wars and dumb policies but Americans will bristle and rear when hypocrisy and arrogance slap them in the face. That’s what happened in 2006 and that is what is happening now. What we are saying might be too subtle for many, but it is important. Again, Iraq was important to the results of 2006 but it was the Bush W. arrogance about Iraq which infuriated the electorate sufficiently to “throw the bums out.”
“We’ve got the basic strategy right,” Cheney told George Stephanopoulos in an interview to be broadcast Sunday on “This Week.”
October was one of the deadliest months in Iraq for U.S. troops. Cheney said that while the administration’s policy may not be popular, “This is the right thing for us to be doing.”
In the most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, 57 percent of Americans said that the war was not worth fighting. The poll also showed President Bush’s job approval rating dropped to 37 percent, the second-lowest mark of his presidency.
Cheney said that even with pollsters predicting that Democrats would likely make gains in both houses of Congress Tuesday, voter sentiment would not influence Bush’s Iraq policy.
“It may not be popular with the public — it doesn’t matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right. And that’s exactly what we’re doing,” Cheney said. “We’re not running for office. We’re doing what we think is right.”
“It doesn’t matter…what WE think is right… We’re doing what we think is right.” Faced with such arrogance, Americans said, ‘No, you must go because you are not listening to us.’ Americans will put up with a great deal, but don’t tell Americans you will ignore them.
In the same TV show interview, then Vice President Dick Cheney reacted to a Vanity Fair article which reported that “two of the Pentagon’s strongest supporters of the war, Richard Perle and Ken Adelman, now say they would not have supported the invasion if they had known how incompetently the administration would handle it.” This is how Cheny responded to the incompetence charge:
“Cheney said, “I haven’t seen the piece I’m not going to comment on it. I think there is no question that it is a tough war, but it is also the right thing to do,” he said. “And it is very important that we complete the mission.”
Dick Cheney did not offer any acknowledgment that things were “on the wrong track” in the country generally and in the Iraq war specifically. There was no explanation or engagement of the substantive disagreements, just an occasional publicity stunt. All Dick Cheney offered was ‘we are right and we will continue to do what we want to do and we will even ignore our own friends who criticize us.‘ Who does that sound like in 2010?
In 2006 Americans were frustrated that they were not being listened too. The Dick Cheney Republican arguments did not start four days before the election. This was an all year refusal to listen to American voters and simply keep on repeating the same arguments at publicity stunts. The secrecy and arrogance from Republicans in 2006, along with incompetence, was suffocating the American people. The American people on many policy issues (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, secret surveillance programs, secrecy, terrorism, oil, Darfur, budget cuts) were confused if not angry and frustrated and George W. Bush appeared not to be listening. The American people smacked George W. on the head and yelled ‘LISTEN to us.’
“Voters across the nation said they disapprove of the job President Bush is doing and many said their vote for Congress was to express opposition to him. A clear majority said they disapprove of the war in Iraq, and most said they do not believe it has improved the long-term security of the country.”
The Iraq policy issue was a point of contention but what voters voted on was opposition to George W. Bush. It was the arrogance of power.
“President Bush played a large role in today’s voting, as a majority of voters said he was a factor in their decision: One in five voters (22 percent) said their vote was to show support for Bush, while 36 percent said it was to express opposition. [snip]
In addition, the number of voters who said they are angry with the Bush administration has increased to 29 percent today – up from 23 percent in 2004. Another 30 percent said they were “dissatisfied but not angry,” while at the other end of the spectrum 27 percent felt “satisfied, but not enthusiastic,” and about one in 10 felt “enthusiastic.”
Over half of voters (55 percent) said the country is headed in the wrong direction and 41 percent said it is going in the right direction. Those saying the country is on the right track broke for the Republican candidates by over 50 points, while those saying the country is going in the wrong direction went solidly for the Democratic candidate in their district about 60 points.”
The exit poll numbers confirm our analysis (this one from CNN) that Iraq was not the main factor in Election 2006. It was arrogance. In 2006 voters were emotionally angry. The visceral reaction at the polls, we believe, was due to the arrogance of George W. Bush and Republicans who would not listen but thought they knew better and did not have to explain or change policy simply because the American public did not agree with them.
“When deciding which candidate to support, more voters today said political corruption (41 percent) was extremely important to their vote than said the economy (39 percent), the issue of terrorism (39 percent), the war in Iraq (36 percent), values issues (36 percent) or illegal immigration (30 percent) was extremely important.
Those saying corruption was extremely important to their vote backed the Democratic candidate in their House district by a 60 to 38 percent margin.
Economy voters favored the Democrats by 20 percentage points, and Iraq war voters backed the Democrats by over 20 points.
Republicans were favored by terrorism voters (+ 7 points) and immigration voters (+ 6 points). The largest margin comes from values voters, and this group backed the Republican candidate by 18 points.
The 2006 Election was about Arrogance!, Incompetence!, Corruption! The 2010 elections will be about Arrogance!, Incompetence!, Corruption!
Arrogance!, Incompetence!, Corruption! doomed the Republicans in Election 2006. Arrogance!, Incompetence!, Corruption! will doom the Obama Dimocrats in 2010.
Celebrity Barack Obama and his Obama Dimocrats have already outpaced George W. Bush Republicans in the arrogance race. The argument on health care is a Cheneyesque ‘Once we pass health care Americans will love it even though they hate it now, because we know better than stupid Americans and the Tea Party activists we once derided as ‘teabaggers’ but once they whupped us at the polls we have to pretend we don’t hate them and want to snub them, and anyway we are going to ignore everyone and do what we want to do and pass whatever we want to do because we have to transfer taxpayer dollars to Big Insurance and Big PhaRma just like we transferred trillions to our Wall Street friends.’
We borrowed the title “Arrogance, Incompetence, Corruption” from tomorrow’s thrill packed article here on Big Pink. You will be reading that phrase a lot during 2010 election season.
Today we will allow ourselves to be distracted by the dreary health scam distraction. Regular readers will recall we believe Obama Dimocrats are in a lose/lose situation on the health scam. If the health scam becomes law, the American people will revolt and throw Dimocrats into the trash heap for arrogance and corruption. If the health scam does not become law, the American people will throw Dimocrats into the trash heap for incompetence and arrogance and corruption. [More on all this tomorrow.]
“Barack Obama does not know what to do to strengthen the American economy. Barack Obama does not know what to do to help the private sector create jobs. That’s why Obama distracts with schemes which will reward his friends and donors with massive transfers of wealth from the American taxpayer pocket.”
The Dimocratic lose/lose is a Republican win/win. If the massive Dimocratic majorities in the House and Senate produce nothing but the “stimulus” flood of money to the guilty, rank and file true blue Democrats will realize the Obama Dimocrats are too incompetent to govern and will therefore stay home and not vote. Republicans will run on a repeal or de-fund the Obama health scam if something passes.
It’s an Obama disaster. Barack Obama is Poison.
* * * * * *
Barack Obama finally realizes that he has to do something other than publicity stunts. Obama wants to have something anything pass the congress that he can tout as an unprecedented historic transformative earthshaking celestial choirs singing Obamagasm. To that Obamagasm end, Obama is flim-flaming once again – this time it’s House Dimocrats as targets.
Obama pretends that if the House Dimocrats pass the Senate Obamination health scam, which transfers money and people to Big Insurance companies and protects the deal Obama worked with Big PhaRma to protect Big PhaRma, he will work for an additional bill passed via “reconciliation” to “fix” the Senate bill. As if! Obama doesn’t work for anything which does not benefit him personally. House Dimocrats if they are fools can pass the Senate bill and then Obama will have an Obamagasm publicity stunt and forget about the additional “reconciliation” bill. It will be a flim-flam-flip-flop-bamboozlepaloooza-Obamagasm.
“The plan, as it comes from the Senate, hangs out every Democrat who’s running for office to dry — including the president, in 2012, because it makes him defend a plan that isn’t in effect essentially yet,” Dean said during an appearance on the liberal Bill Press Radio Show.
Dean, who has clashed publicly with the White House over the healthcare proposals favored by the administration, said that by passing the bills under consideration, Democrats would essentially be conceding defeat to Republicans.
“It’s easy to campaign on repealing something if no one knows what the something is,” Dean said. “And fundamentally people don’t understand what the president’s healthcare plan is.”
“And if it passes next week and get’s signed into law the week after, we’re not going to be able to explain it to people over the din of Fox News and the Republicans,” the former Democratic party chairman added.
Oh, dear. We are in trouble when Howard Dean’s peepers are opening and he begins to agree with Big Pink. But Obama corruption and the Obamagasm goes on.
Tonight, Barack Obama will host ten House Democrats who voted against the health care bill in November at the White House; he’s obviously trying to persuade them to switch their votes to yes. One of the ten is Jim Matheson of Utah. The White House just sent out a press release announcing that today President Obama nominated Matheson’s brother Scott M. Matheson, Jr. to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
National Repubicans are planning to unleash a huge wave of robocalls tomorrow targeting dozens of House Dems and warning their constituents that Obama and Nancy Pelosi are plotting to “ram” their “dangerous” health reform plans through Congress.
The robocalls — the first paid media by the NRCC’s new “code red” program, which targets Dems on health care — comes after Obama told Congress to pass reform via reconciliation.
The calls are meant to spook House Dems right at the moment when the White House and Dem leaders are about to undertake a grueling effort to round up support for what’s expected to be a hair-raisingly close vote. It warns constituents that the targeted House Dem risks supporting this “dangerous” move.
“Even though a majority of the country wants them to scrap it, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Obama are planning to ram their dangerous, out-of-control health care spending bill through Congress anyway,” the call says, according to a script provided by a GOP official.
The version targeting Dem Rep Frank Kratovil of Maryland continues:
What’s worse, Congressman Frank Kratovil might vote for it. Frank Kratovil votes with Nancy Pelosi 84% of the time and may follow her orders on this bill too. Frank Kratovil might vote for a bill that will kill jobs, raise the costs of health care, and increase taxes. Frank Kratovil should be focusing on creating jobs, yet he might be the deciding vote that causes this massive new spending bill to pass.
The calls are targeting 25 House Dimocrats who voted for Obama’s health scam the first time, along with 11 who voted “no” and four others from open seats. There are already results:
Okay, a bit more bad news for the prospects of passing the Senate bill out of the House.
Rep Frank Kratovil of Maryland, a previous No vote who was now said to be undecided, will vote No on the Senate health reform proposal, his spokesman confirms.
“He would vote against it,” the spokesman, Kevin Lawlor, says. Crucially, Kratovil would vote against the Senate bill even if there’s some kind of verbal guarantee that it would be fixed via reconciliation later, Lawlor says.
The only way Kratovil — one of the targets of a barrage of NRCC robocalls hammering the reform proposals as “dangerous” — could support the Senate bill is if it’s fixed first via reconciliation, before the House votes on it. But no one expects this to happen.
Separately, Dem Rep Kurt Schrader, a freshman in Oregon who voted Yes last time, is now unwilling to commit to supporting the Senate bill, reports The Oregonian. Schrader, too, is getting bludgeoned by the NRCC robocalls.
So where does that leave us? The math is too in flux to make any pronouncements. Bottom line: Every Dem who flips from Yes to No (as Schrader may do) must be made up for by flipping a No to Yes (as Kratovil almost certainly won’t do). Long road ahead.
Given that the proposed use of reconciliation is an illegitimate use of the procedure, the Senate GOP ought to be preparing to counter the jam down with a flood of amendments, each one of which requires an up or down vote. The prospect of thousand, or tens of thousands, or perhaps even a million amendments and the resulting spectacle of a Senate paralyzed by endless roll call counts should worry Democrats much more than Republicans as the American public doesn’t want Obamacare, and a last ditch stand to stop it via a blizzard of amendments will put the spotlight on the bill and its many flaws. It will also show a Republican leadership willing to fight to stop this radical rewrite of the rules of American medicine,
But where to get thousands and thousands of draft amendments? This is the joy of the internet. If the NRSC is on its toes, it will already be setting up a site where visitors can draft and submit their own amendments for use in the process. (The NRSC website is already accepting input on the topic.) Some of the draft amendments will be inspired and informed as experts weigh in. Some will be absurd. Some no doubt will be vulgar or obscene as trolls invade.
But the vast bulk of them would come from ordinary Americans with ideas on how to reform health care.
We need to launch a massive, coast-to-coast effort to identify and pressure the Democrats’ LARGE DONORS to put a stop to this madness.
Large political donors are vulnerable because they are people the public doesn’t know. They are business men and women. Socialites. Wealthy people who fund political campaigns largely, in most cases, because it’s fun and something to do, and they like getting pictures with presidents and senators.
The Senate’s healthcare bill would lose 12 Democratic votes in the House, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) said Wednesday.
Stupak, the sponsor of an amendment to the House healthcare bill which barred federal subsidies for health plans covering abortion, said that 12 lawmakers who had previously supported healthcare reform legislation in the House.
“It’s accurate to say there are at least 12 of us who voted for healthcare that have indicated to the speaker and others that unless you change this language, we will vote against it,” Stupak said during an appearance on MSNBC.
In order to accommodate Stupak the Dimocrats would have to pass yet another bill:
“It would have to be a separate bill, you could sidebar it to the final bill,” he said. “One bill doesn’t pass without the other. They walk down the aisle together.”
Born into slavery as one of the youngest of thirteen children of James and Elizabeth in Ulster County, New York, in 1797, Sojourner Truth’s given name was Isabella Baumfree. As almost all of her brothers and sisters had been sold to other slave owners, some of her earliest memories were of her parents’ stories of the cruel loss of their other children. [snip]
In 1843, she changed her name to Sojourner Truth – her name for a traveling preacher, one who speaks the truth – and left New York. She traveled throughout New England, where she met and worked with abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, and Frederick Douglass. Her life story, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, written with the help of friend Olive Gilbert, was published in 1850.
While traveling and speaking in states across the country, Sojourner Truth met many women abolitionists and noticed that although women could be part of the leadership in the abolitionist movement, they could neither vote nor hold public office. It was this realization that led Sojourner to become an outspoken supporter of women’s rights.
In 1851, she addressed the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, delivering her famous speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” The applause she received that day has been described as “deafening.” From that time on, she became known as a leading advocate for the rights of women. She became one of the nineteenth century’s most eloquent voices for the cause of anti-slavery and women’s rights.
Because we want to share our ideas and experiences, our common goals, and nonpartisan solutions to the challenges that we face - and there are no limits to what we can achieve when we do.
And because we want to keep working for a better future for every child, from every family – a world in which no limits is not just our goal, but a reality!
NoLimits.org will "keep you up to date with news about issues on which Hillary took a lead and we know you care so much about," group President Ann Lewis said in an e-mail to as many as 2 million people culled from the Clinton campaign database.
Because No Limits is a registered nonprofit, "it cannot do anything political. It has to be nonpartisan," said Lewis, a longtime senior adviser to Clinton.
In Clinton's job as secretary of state for President Obama, her political dealings are highly restricted.
For example, she shut down her political action committee.
Some, like Democratic consultant and former Bill Clinton aide Chris Lehane, dismiss talk that the group could be a springboard for Clinton to try again for the White House in, say, 2016.
"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," Lehane said. "I think this is just [a] group of folks who developed relationships in an intense [electoral] environment and want to stay together."
But the University of Virginia's Larry Sabato countered: "Whenever a group like this says it's not a political organization, you just know it is."
"Maybe [this] is Hillary's answer to Obama's new 'change' group that controls his golden mailing list. Maybe it's a way for Secretary of State Clinton to mobilize backing for her objectives at the State Department," he said. "And maybe [it's] a standby committee of supporters in case Hillary decides to get back into elective politics."
Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf said NoLimits.org is "one way to make sure that she - and/or the former President - still have political leverage."
Hillary World-Wide January 26, 2009
Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton Meets Afghan Women Lawyers. Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton met today at the State Department with fourteen prominent Afghan women judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys. These jurists were in Washington to participate in a training program arranged by the Department’s Public-Private Partnership for Justice Reform in Afghanistan. Secretary Clinton told them: "Your American friends greatly admire your bravery and courage. It is your work in the tough environment of Afghanistan for women lawyers that will bring real reform and the rule of law to the Afghan people. As President Obama made clear yesterday in his first foreign policy announcement, we are committed to supporting your efforts to bring security and stability to your country."
Naked Politics - Rahm Emanuel Pokes Eric Massa Who Runs To Glenn Beck
The Mark Foley Sex Scandals of Election 2006 finished off Republican chances in that year’s election. We began to explain what happened in election 2006 in the article Arrogance! Incompetence! Corruption!: Election 2006 And Dimocrat Obama’s Culture Of Corruption Election 2010, Part I. It was arrogance at the heart of the Republican problems in 2006 and when the Mark Foley sex scandal hit the headlines, it focused the public onto the fact that something was very wrong.
The Eric Massa Naked Politics Scandals of Election 2010 will finish off Dimocrats this year. Eric Massa has told a vivid story about Rahm Emanuel naked in the congressional gym that rings with truth. The Eric Massa story is focusing the public attention in the same way that the Mark Foley scandal focused the public attention in 2006. Americans know that something is very very wrong.
At conservative Hot Air they quote Tom Bevan who echoes Big Pink:
Some conservatives are looking a gift horse (that tells the truth) in the mouth, with caveats that are mostly irrelevant at this point. Glenn Beck is not looking the gift horse in the mouth but instead is hosting Eric Massa for the full hour today. Larry King will also host Massa.
In a move to counter Massa’s appearance on the Glenn Beck show and the Larry King show the Dimocrats are leaking allegations against Massa. The stories about Eric Massa have been circulating for months, if not years, and Dimocrats like Rahm Emanuel knew all the “rumors” about Eric Massa – for years. Only now, because Eric Massa is not bending to their will, are Dimocrats out to destroy Massa. We are not defending Massa (nor David Paterson) but we know a drive by shooting by Obama thugs when we see one.
Today, it’s Eric Massa on Glenn Beck’s show. Lot’s of people watching today as will we here at Big Pink.
We’ll return Arrogance! Incompetence! Corruption!: Election 2006 And Dimocrat Obama’s Culture Of Corruption Election 2010, Part III tomorrow.