THE OVAL OFFICE WATCH AT FSM

Posted By on December 28th, 2009

December 28, 2009

Exclusive – Oval Office Watch – Monday, December 28

Oval Office Watch

‘Health care for all’ is not a right; it is slavery – HERE.
 
Socialism Creeps In As America Sleeps – GO HERE.
 
So You Say You Want a Health Care Revolution – SEE HERE.
 
Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Obamacare
Jeffrey H. Anderson, NRO.com
 
Remember back in June, in President Obama’s major address to the AMA, when he said the following? “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise. . . . If you like your health-care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.” In the six months since, there seems to have been a change.
 
Obamacare would require Americans to buy government-approved health insurance. It would make it illegal to offer choices in insurance plans beyond the handful of very similar ones that the government would allow. It would become illegal to offer new and innovative plans. Under any of the government-approved plans, it would become illegal to pay your doctor directly for more than a certain percentage of your care. Higher deductible, consumer-driven plans would be severely altered or eliminated. By law, a greater percentage of money would have to be paid in insurance premiums, rather than directly for care. Competition and choice would diminish tremendously. One-size-fits-all conformity would rule the day. 
 
At its core, what Obamacare really means is a loss of freedom. Read article.
 
Forever Gone?
Investors.com
 
American history shows that once an entitlement is enacted, it’s next to impossible to erase. Catastrophic health care for seniors, passed 20 years ago, is the only such program ever repealed; the 1996 welfare reform severely limited that socially destructive entitlement.
 
The statists may now finally have bitten off more than they will be able to chew politically. If Republicans act like Republicans and convince the populist Tea Party movement not to go the suicidal third-party route, the coming public backlash will see to it that the greatest health care system in the world is not gone for good.
 
Look for demonstrators to start burning copies of Page 1,020 the way ’60s radicals used to burn their draft cards. Read article.
 
Maximum Achievable Damage
Mona Charen, JWR.com
 
Does anyone remember the TV show “Supermarket Sweep”? Contestants would compete with one another by careening through a supermarket and grabbing as many products as they could toss into a basket. The winner was the shopper whose cart carried the biggest price tag when the bell sounded.
 
It’s a fitting image for the way Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have handled the most important domestic issue of the decade. They’ve raced down the health policy aisles, sweeping items off the shelves and into their legislative carts, heedless of nutritional value, taste, or cost. As items dropped out on the hairpin turns, others were shoved into the spaces. Harry Reid inserted the Medicare “buy-in” at the 11th hour and just as quickly withdrew it under pressure. No organizing principle has governed the contents of their baskets (Pelosi added and jettisoned abortion coverage), just an urgent imperative to pass something. And now, as the clock winds down, they are declaring, as a journalistic cheerleader at the Washington Post put it, “a legislative feat of epic proportions.”
 
Actually, it was the sloppiest and most slapdash legislative process ever to accompany a major bill. The 383-page manager’s amendment, making changes to the Senate bill, was released on the morning of the cloture vote. Secrecy marked Reid’s handling of the bill throughout. Not only Republicans, but Democrats, too, were kept from studying the legislation. Payoffs to wavering Sens. Lieberman, Landrieu, and Nelson, on the other hand, were blatant. Read article.
 
Obama’s failing grades
Editorial, Washington Times.com
 
President Obama told Oprah Winfrey that he deserves a “solid B-plus” for his accomplishments as president so far, and that if health care reform passes, that would raise his grade to an A-minus. This is bold talk from a man who has made history by achieving the lowest approval rating of any modern president at this point in his presidency. But if you like a government-run economy, astronomical deficits and a weakened America, you may well give Mr. Obama high marks.
 
Mr. Obama campaigned as a centrist who would bring bipartisanship and responsibility to Washington. Instead, we have seen him lead a year of irresponsible spending and wildly increasing government intrusion in the lives of Americans. Mr. Obama has pushed ahead with his Big Government agenda, heedless of the wishes of the American people, and people with dissenting viewpoints have been told to shut up and rudely shut out of the process. Mr. Obama does not have a bipartisan bone in his boney body.
 
We have witnessed government expanding by every means available. The government took control of two of the Big Three automakers, dictated which dealerships would have to close, and rushed through an expensive “cash for clunkers” handout that mainly benefited Japanese automakers. The Environmental Protection Agency has issued an endangerment finding on carbon dioxide that opens the way for government regulation of every aspect of manufacturing, distribution and travel outside of congressional oversight. Read article.
 
Obama, left behind – even progressives abandon him as he ends a lost year.
Matt Welch, NY Post.com
 
Boy, this “Obama Derangement Syndrome” really has gotten out of hand. Why, just this past week the decreasingly popular president has been called a “bald-faced liar,” “an executive who can’t bring himself to lead,” and even an “Uncle Tom.”
 
And that’s just by liberals.
 
The progressive crack-up, before Obama even reaches the end of his first year, has been an awesome and occasionally humorous sight to see. Undead ’60s warhorse Tom Hayden got the ball rolling in early December with his dramatic announcement in The Nation that, with the president’s decision to increase troop levels, “It’s time to strip the Obama sticker off my car.”
 
Liberal historian Garry Wills joined the anguished chorus. “My wife and I had maxed out in donations for him. Our children had been ardent for his cause,” Wills wrote. “And now he betrays us.”
 
Obama’s intention to double down in Central Asia was no secret in 2008 — it’s right there on his campaign Web site: “Barack Obama will refocus our efforts on Afghanistan. He has a comprehensive strategy to succeed in Afghanistan with at least two more US combat brigades.”
 
But the Democrat’s strongest supporters had their eyes glued on the twin prize of repudiating George W. Bush and electing the nation’s first black president. Intra-party policy disagreements just weren’t a part of the conversation. Read article.
 
Passing health reform could be a nightmare for Obama
Robert Samuelson, Washington Post.com
 
Barack Obama’s quest for historic health-care legislation has turned into a parody of leadership. We usually associate presidential leadership with the pursuit of goals that, though initially unpopular, serve America’s long-term interests. Obama has reversed this. He’s championing increasingly unpopular legislation that threatens the country’s long-term interests. “This isn’t about me,” he likes to say, “I have great health insurance.” But of course, it is about him: about the legacy he covets as the president who achieved “universal” health insurance. He’ll be disappointed.
 
Even if Congress passes legislation — a good bet — the finished product will fall far short of Obama’s extravagant promises. It will not cover everyone. It will not control costs. It will worsen the budget outlook. It will lead to higher taxes. It will disrupt how, or whether, companies provide insurance for their workers. As the real-life (as opposed to rhetorical) consequences unfold, they will rebut Obama’s claim that he has “solved” the health-care problem. His reputation will suffer.
 
It already has. Despite Obama’s eloquence and command of the airwaves, public suspicions are rising. In April, 57 percent of Americans approved of his “handling of health care” and 29 percent disapproved, reports the Post-ABC News poll; in the latest survey, 44 percent approved and 53 percent disapproved. About half worried that their care would deteriorate and that health costs would rise.
 
These fears are well grounded. Read article.
 
Re: Not an Easy Time for Obama Worshipers
Jennifer Rubin, Commentary Magazine.com
 
One feels discomfort watching liberal pundits twist and turn, straining to come up with explanations for the decline in their once beloved Obama’s fortunes. It is embarrassing at times. Jill Lawrence is a case in point. She goes so far as to argue that none of the bad polling is really the Obami’s fault:
 
So where did they go wrong? What could they have done to avoid what many analysts see as portents of doom for the 2010 House and Senate elections? Probably nothing. In fact, they’d be in even worse shape if they had made different choices.
 
Really? He’d be in worse shape than if he hadn’t made the choices he made? Frankly, that’s poppycock. Hard to imagine on foreign policy Obama would be in worse shape if he hadn’t played footsie with the mullahs for a year, engaged in a monumentally stupid settlement freeze gambit in the Middle East, done his best to offend the Brits, yanked missile-defense systems from allies, shoved human rights under the rug, and bowed and scraped before many a monarch. All of those choices have led to widespread criticism from across the political spectrum.
 
Then there are Obama’s choices on the war on terror. If he hadn’t decided to end enhanced interrogations, go after the CIA, shutter Guantanamo, move the detainees to Illinois, and give KSM a civilian trial, would he really be worse off? The public hates all of these moves, after all.
 
Then there is the spending binge, the debt accumulation, and the ultra-liberal domestic agenda. Had he not delegated the stimulus plan junk-a-thon drafting to Nancy Pelosi and backed a huge energy tax and regulatory bill just when the public was losing patience with global-warming hysteria, would Obama’s poll numbers be lower than they are now? Read article.
 
Life in a box
Paul Dreissen, Townhall.com
 
Life in a box is better than no life at all,” playwright Tom Stoppard famously opined, through the personage of Rosencrantz. (Or was it Guildenstern?) That’s lucky for us, because our energy, environmental and economic policies have certainly put us in a box – and there is no easy way out.
 
Congress passed a $787-billion “stimulus” bill, and a $3-billion cash-for-clunkers program that trashed perfectly good cars, and the energy and raw materials that created them. It’s halfway toward imposing nationalized healthcare that could cost taxpayers another $2.5 trillion over the next decade. Unemployment now stands at 10.2% officially, or 22% if you include people who have given up on finding a job. At this point, 25 states have borrowed $23 billion from the Federal Unemployment Trust Fund, to meet their obligations to employment-deprived workers.
 
Meanwhile, over in Copenhagen, the G-77 poor nations snubbed Europe’s offer of $10 billion over three years, for climate change reparation, mitigation and adaptation. “The world’s scientists and policy makers say this is the greatest risk humanity has ever faced,” G-77 chairman Lumumba Di-Aiping noted. Something closer to $1 trillion every few years would be more appropriate, he suggested.
 
That’s in addition to regular foreign aid – and on top of the $50 trillion in life support for corrupt dictators that the developed world has already provided to still-impoverished nations since 1950.
 
The proposed 83% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050 would send the United States back to levels last seen in 1908 – or 1868 when population, energy use and technology changes are considered.
 
The cap-tax-and-trade laws and Copenhagen treaty represent the greatest transfer of wealth, power and control in the history of mankind. Perhaps worst, the energy taxes and restrictions amount to economic suicide by PDCs – previously developed countries. Read article.
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