Couple inconvenient polls out that the Democrats will ignore and, in one case, the MSM ignores. First, on the retarded decision by Obama and company to give our deadliest enemy the same constitutional protections afforded American citizens:

Two-thirds of Americans disagree with the Obama administration’s decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a civilian court rather than a military court, according to a new national poll.

But six in 10 people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday say that the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks should be tried in the United States, as the administration plans to do, rather than at a U.S. facility in another country.

The poll indicates that 64 percent believe Mohammed should be tried in military court, with 34 percent suggesting that he face trial in civilian court. Six in 10 people questioned say Mohammed should be tried stateside, with 37 percent calling for the trial to take place at a U.S. facility in another country.

“The decision to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in front of a civilian court is universally unpopular – even a majority of Democrats and liberals say that he should be tried by military authorities,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. “Despite that, most Americans say that he will get a fair trial in the U.S.”

Not sure what Holland’s point is here. Of course he would get a fair trial, but the majority of respondents, in a CNN poll for gods sake, understand that giving this scumbag a civilian trial is ludicrous: Read the rest of this entry »

Irrational fear is one of our most dangerous enemies. H1N1 is an irrational fear, every year the seasonal flu kills 40,000 people with challenged immune systems and H1N1 is a more benign flu than the seasonal flu; yet because of the Obama administration’s irresponsible hype over this flu, an unrealistic fear has become a form of national hysteria.

I saw irrational fear years ago with a friend, his name was Johnny or Barb Wire Johnny. He was one of the best horsemen, I’ve ever known. Johnny lived in the bush country of Northern British Columbia, he was an outfitter, trapper, and horse trainer. A small man with long black flowing hair that the most beautiful women in the world can only dream about.

With a gentle heart and calm steady hands he could make the best ranch horses, mountain horses, pack horses, and driving horses I have ever seen. For all his abilities, Johnny had his personal demons; like many in the North he was part native and possessed a weakness for alcohol, a common affliction in the North. He also had a taste for high venison, most of us ate moose and moose hardly ever spoils, but Johnny liked to hang his venison until it started to spoil. It caused him to have a permanent case of dysentery and Johnny never quite made the connection. Like many of the old timers, Johnny wore moose hide moccasins and leggins, in the winter he also wore a union suit beneath his moose hide clothes. That’s a pair of woolen long johns with a flap in the back for life’s necessaries.

Unfortunately, Johnny might be overtaken by his dietary problems at any moment, so he liked to stuff straw or hay in the back door of his union suit, just in case. Moose hide stretches and Johnny was always stretching his leather leggins from riding horses and stuffing the hind end with straw. It was funny to watch a little man with an oversized and sagging butt walking away, but I never said anything.

I was Johnny’s connection to the outside world, I would bring the whiskey, horses for training, and cash paying hunters. I lived on a ranch with a phone, a real advantage for a business man. There was usually at least a dozen people listening to every conversation, but it was a phone none the less. I helped him with the hooves, shoes, and teeth and he taught me of the mystical world of man and horse or the science of turning two critters into one, many of these lessons I use in my business to this day. Read the rest of this entry »

The left got what they wanted….we’re like Europe now:

Unemployment is now higher in the U.S. than in Europe,  reports the Washington Post.  “The official U.S. unemployment rate, reported last Friday, now stands at 10.2 percent,” compared to “9.7 percent” in Europe.   This is the highest rate in more than 26 years, and marks a huge change from the recent past, in which unemployment was double the American rate in much of Europe.

Unemployment is at 10 percent in France, which refused to adopt a U.S.-style stimulus package, and only 7.6 percent in Germany, which adopted a stimulus package that was smaller relative to its economy than ours was.  (Countries that refused to adopt big stimulus packages have fared better than those that imitated President Obama. And the biggest-spending countries have suffered worst in the recession.)

A “broader measure of U.S. unemployment,” including discouraged workers, puts U.S. unemployment at 17.5 percent, reports the New York Times. Read the rest of this entry »

Tom Blumer from BizzyBlog has updated his map of the ObamaCare/PelosiCare behemoth and what it creates. Namely 111 agencies, regulators, committees, boards and offices: (click on picture to enlarge)

Meanwhile Senator Gregg reacts to the new CBO estimate:

Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee today commented on the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) more detailed cost estimate of the manager’s amendment to the House health reform bill.

Senator Gregg stated, “The CBO estimate released last night finally sheds light on the smoke and mirrors game the majority has been playing with the cost of their health care reform proposal. Over the first 10 years, this legislation builds in gross new spending of $1.7 trillion – and most of the new spending doesn’t even start until 2014. Once that spending is fully phased in, the House Democratic bill rings up at more than $3 trillion over ten years.

“Additionally, this bill cuts critical Medicare and Medicaid funding by $628 billion, accounts for nearly $1.2 trillion in tax and fee increases and will explode the scope of government by putting the nation’s health care system in the hands of Washington bureaucrats. The $3 trillion price tag defies common sense – we simply cannot add all this new spending to the government rolls and claim to control the deficit. Read the rest of this entry »

Think the bluedog’s will be feeling some heat?

This from a CNN poll of all places:

Of course CNN spins away with this headline:

CNN Poll: Public wants Congress to keep working on health care

Puhlease…. Read the rest of this entry »

Man, the lefties must really be hating Liebeman nowadays:

“We’re trying to do too much at once,” Lieberman said. “To put this government-created insurance company on top of everything else is just asking for trouble for the taxpayers, for the premium payers and for the national debt. I don’t think we need it now.”…

Lieberman did say he’s “strongly inclined” to vote to proceed to the debate, but that he’ll ultimately vote to block a floor vote on the bill if it isn’t changed first…

“I can’t see a way in which I could vote for cloture on any bill that contained a creation of a government-operated-run insurance company,” Lieberman added. “It’s just asking for trouble – in the end, the taxpayers are going to pay and probably all people will have health insurance are going to see their premiums go up because there’s going to be cost shifting as there has been for Medicare and Medicaid.”

Since that statement came out earlier today the Reid camp…or cheerleaders….have tried to spin it so it doesn’t sound as bad as it really is. I mean how can it be bad if Joe will vote to open floor debate on Reid’s bill? Of course they are leaving out the other vote…the one that closes debate and moves the bill to a vote. Joe says he will NOT vote for that if the public option is there.

Good for him.

RINO Snowe says she won’t vote for the public option either….at least today she is saying it: Read the rest of this entry »

What is it with Democrats always denying who they are and what they’re peddling? Liberalism has a negative stigma attached to it in conservative America; so Democrats now prefer you call them “progressives”. The word “socialist” is the new “N” word, but it describes President Obama’s instinctual gravitations and political inclinations. Why deny it? Why hide from the description? Democrats who revel in communist/Marxist/socialist doctrine should come out of the closet and bask in the transparency of who they are. Be proud! Don’t hide! Don’t obfuscate.

Yet the reason they have an aversion to such “labels”, no matter how descriptively accurate, is because in order to sell any of their bill of goods to the American public, they have to engage in deception. Can you say “stealth socialism”?

“Public option” is now politically damaged goods; so let’s give it a makeover, says Nancy Pelosi, even though poop by any other name still smells like poop:

Read the rest of this entry »

Shocking!….not:

The nation’s medical costs will keep spiraling upward even faster than they are now under Democratic legislation pending in the House, a report from government economic experts concluded Wednesday.

Republicans said the report is a warning sign that health care legislation is likely to fall short of President Barack Obama’s goal of “bending the cost curve” by slowing torrid rates of medical inflation.

~~~

Unlike previous estimates that have focused mainly on the legislation’s impact on the federal deficit, the actuaries’ report looked at total costs, public and private, over the next 10 years. It found that the nation’s health care tab would increase somewhat more rapidly with the legislation than if nothing is done. The main reason: Newly insured people will seek medical care.

The nation’s health care tab, now at about $2.5 trillion annually, is projected to approach $4.7 trillion in 2019 without the legislation. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember this?

Yeeeeeah:

Maneuvering to boost prospects for sweeping health care legislation, Senate Democrats hope first to win quick approval for a bill that grants doctors a $247 billion increase in Medicare fees over a decade but raises federal deficits in the process, officials said Wednesday.

By creating a two-bill approach, Democrats intend to claim the more comprehensive health care measure meets President Barack Obama’s conditions — that it will neither add to deficits nor exceed $900 billion in costs over 10 years.

If approved and signed into law, the legislation would avert a 21 percent reduction in Medicare fees paid to doctors that is scheduled to take effect in January as well as additional cuts in future years. Read the rest of this entry »

The former CBO director, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, warns today on the effect ObamaCare will have on our economy and health care. These facts should be painfully obvious to those with even one iota of common sense. This bill will lead to a huge middle class tax increase:

Remember when health-care reform was supposed to make life better for the middle class? That dream began to unravel this past summer when Congress proposed a bill that failed to include any competition-based reforms that would actually bend the curve of health-care costs. It fell apart completely when Democrats began papering over the gaping holes their plan would rip in the federal budget.

As it now stands, the plan proposed by Democrats and the Obama administration would not only fail to reduce the cost burden on middle-class families, it would make that burden significantly worse.

~~~

The bill creates a new health entitlement program that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates will grow over the longer term at a rate of 8% annually, which is much faster than the growth rate of the economy or tax revenues. This is the same growth rate as the House bill that Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) deep-sixed by asking the CBO to tell the truth about its impact on health-care costs.

To avoid the fate of the House bill and achieve a veneer of fiscal sensibility, the Senate did three things: It omitted inconvenient truths, it promised that future Congresses will make tough choices to slow entitlement spending, and it dropped the hammer on the middle class. Read the rest of this entry »

You know the Obama administration is living in the ozone when they claim the Baucus bill is “bipartisan” because of one….ONE….Republican vote:

“Today we reached a critical milestone in our efforts to reform our health care system, the president said this afternoon,” speaking from the White House Rose Garden.

Although the bill drew an “aye” vote from one Republican senator, President Obama touted the bill as a proposal having both “Democratic and Republican support.”

“After the consideration of hundreds of amendments, it includes ideas from both Democrats and Republicans, which is why it enjoys the support of people from both parties,” he said.

The president thanked in particular the senator who cast the lone Republican vote, Sen. Olympia Snowe from Maine.

Democrat….er, “Republican” Senator Snowe caving to the Democrats is not surprising. Just look at her scorecard at Club For Growth:

Year          Score        Rank
2008            12%            63
2007            12%            66
2006              9%             62
2005             18%          56

No…not surprising in the least and I suppose the ignorant claim that her defection is proof that the bill is bipartisan should not surprise us either coming from this administration. Read the rest of this entry »

America’s Health Insurance Plans commissioned a study from PriceWaterhouseCoopers recently on the Baucus health bill and it shows many things that we all expected and feared would happen. The cost of insurance will go waaaaay up….by about 18% on average ON TOP of the expected inflation.

Key Findings

• Health reform could have a significant impact on the cost of private health insurance coverage.
• There are four provisions included in the Senate Finance Committee proposal that could increase private health insurance premiums above the levels projected under current law:
  1. A new tax on high-cost health care plans,
  2. Insurance market reforms coupled with a weak coverage requirement,
  3. Cost-shifting as a result of cuts to Medicare
  4. and New taxes on several health care sectors.
• The overall impact of these provisions will be to increase the cost of private insurance coverage for individuals, families, and businesses above what these costs would be in the absence of reform.
• On average, the cost of private health insurance coverage will increase:
  1. 26 percent between 2009 and 2013 under the current system and by 40 percent during this same period if these four provisions are implemented.
  2. 50 percent between 2009 and 2016 under the current system and by 73 percent during this same period if these four provisions are implemented.
  3. 79 percent between 2009 and 2019 under the current system and by 111 percent during this same period if these four provisions are implemented.

America’s Health Insurance Plans asked PricewaterhouseCoopers to check out the impact of four components in the Baucus bill: Read the rest of this entry »

It was months ago that Obama vilified doctors and basically called them greedy:

“Right now, doctors, a lot of times, are forced to make decisions based on the fee payment schedule that’s out there. So if you come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat, or your child has a bad sore throat, or has repeated sore throats, the doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.’ Now, that may be the right thing to do, but I’d rather have that doctor making those decisions just based on whether you really need your kid’s tonsils out or whether it might make more sense just to change, maybe they have allergies, maybe they have something else that would make a difference.”

~~~

“All I’m saying is let’s take an example of something like diabetes, one of, a disease that’s skyrocketing, partly because of obesity, partly because it’s not treated as effectively as it could be. Right now, if we paid a family, if a family care physician works with his or her patients to help them lose weight, modify diet, monitors whether they’re taking their medications in a timely fashion, they might get reimbursed a pittance. But if that same diabetic ends up getting their foot amputated, that’s $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, immediately the surgeon is reimbursed. Well, why not make sure that we’re also reimbursing the care that prevents the amputation, right? That will save us money.”

But still the AMA and the insurance industry backed his disastrous socialism.

Are they starting to wake up?: Read the rest of this entry »