- MUST READS
- PRODUCTS
- RESOURCES
- MULTIMEDIA
- ENFACTLOPEDIA
- FSM AUTHORS
- ABOUT US
- CONTACT US
- FSM BLOG
- DONATE
- PRESS COVERAGE
SEARCH FSM
- IN THIS SECTION
October 20, 2009
Exclusive: Oval Office Watch – Tuesday, October 20
Do Dems Still Need 60 Senate Votes for Health Care? SEE HERE.
The Control tsunami is coming at warp speed. Read Laurie Roth HERE.
Department of Defense to End Preemptive Military Strike Doctrine. GO HERE to read full article.
Debacle in Moscow
Charles Krauthammer, RCP.com
About the only thing more comical than Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was the reaction of those who deemed the award "premature," as if the brilliance of Obama's foreign policy is so self-evident and its success so assured that if only the Norway Five had waited a few years, his Nobel worthiness would have been universally acknowledged.
To believe this, you have to be a dreamy adolescent (preferably Scandinavian and a member of the Socialist International) or an indiscriminate imbiber of White House talking points. After all, this was precisely the spin on the president's various apology tours through Europe and the Middle East: National self-denigration -- excuse me, outreach and understanding -- is not meant to yield immediate results; it simply plants the seeds of good feeling from which foreign policy successes shall come.
Chauncey Gardiner could not have said it better. Well, at nine months, let's review.
What's come from Obama holding his tongue while Iranian demonstrators were being shot and from his recognizing the legitimacy of a thug regime illegitimately returned to power in a fraudulent election? Iran cracks down even more mercilessly on the opposition and races ahead with its nuclear program. Read article.
Barack Obama's silly obsession with Fox News
Toby Harnden, Telegraph.co.uk
You'd expect the Leader of the Free Word to be, well, bigger than this. As New York magazine puts it: “Recognizing Fox as an enemy worth fighting is an admission of weakness for a president whose appeal has been partly predicated on the promise of unity. It’s hard to disagree with, from the Left, John Nichols of the Nation when he describes Obama as the “Whiner-in-Chief”.
Maybe Michael Wolff is right in surmising that Obama is simply “fulminating”. Perhaps Team Obama is trying to be cleverer than that and attempting to define Republicans: “If the White House is looking toward 2010’s midterms, or re-election in 2012, there would be worse things for it than to make an extremely polarizing channel, and hosts like Glenn Beck, the public face of the opposition.”
The thing is, though, many of Fox’s viewers are independents – and Obama will need at least some of them if he is to win re-election.
Bottom line: this is a big win for Fox and it diminishes Obama, one of whose great strengths in the campaign was being seen to occupy the high ground and remain above the fray.
As Gannett’s Chuck Raasch puts it: “Fox commentators, of course, ate the attack up as if they had gotten inside the proverbial henhouse. Fox News portrays itself as the network that dares ask what CNN won’t because it wants access or MSNBC can’t because it is so aligned with the Democrats. What is better for that story line than to get into a food fight with the White House?” Read article.
Obamacare Puts You on Welfare
The Foundry, Heritage.org
Lost in all of last week's headlines on how the Senate Finance Committee (SFC) finally delivered a health care product that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was willing to say would reduce the deficit, was how exactly they achieved it. At a price tag of $829 billion, the SFC ’framework’ will reduce the number of uninsured Americans by 29 million, moving the overall percentage of nonelderly Americans with health insurance from 83% in 2010 to 94% in 2019. But of those 29 million with new insurance coverage, almost half (14 million), will get their coverage through the welfare programs Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). That is equivalent to adding every resident of Ohio and Nevada to the welfare rolls.
In other words, for half of those Americans who are being promised health reform, they are going to be stunned to find themselves in a welfare office applying for Medicaid. Under the current baselines for Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), there will be 76 million individuals served by these programs for at least some part of the year in 2019. If the SFC proposal becomes law, the number on Medicaid/SCHIP will top 90 million. So why do Obamacare supporters want to put 90 million Americans on the welfare rolls? It is cheaper than providing them with real quality health care. Read article.
Obama's Eve of Destruction
Sher Zieve, RenewAmerica.com
This summer liberal Congress members were bombarded by the public with questions about ObamaCare that it appeared only the questioners had read. Due to the probing and sometimes unrelenting questions from their much more educated constituencies, with some exceptions (most notably liberal Senators Claire McCaskill D-MO and John McCain R-AZ) many liberal US Congressional Reps and Senators either canceled any scheduled remaining Town Hall meetings or decided not to hold them at all.
During the ObamaCare and Obama Cap & Tax debacles it also became even clearer to the American people that not only would Obama's promise of transparency in his administration not be upheld, just the opposites would be practiced. And it began only a few days after Obama took office. Obama had promised "We will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it." Then he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, allowing no public review whatsoever, one day after Congress had sent it to him.
Further disregarding the will of the American people, on 13 October the Senate Finance Committee passed their version of ObamaCare out of committee and have now gone behind closed doors (with no Republicans invited or involved) to make changes and additions to their proposal. The American people are, also, not invited even to know what they will add or delete. This is called "ObamaTransparency." However, to add insult to injury, Democrat and Uber-leftist Sen. Charles Schumer told Fox News'; Bill Hemmer Wednesday that those heads of healthcare companies who oppose government-run ObamaCare will now have the loaded gun barrels of the US government aimed directly at those heads. No one dare oppose Obama and the leftist ruling elite! Read article.
Beware CBO Healthcare Estimates
AJ DiCintio, NMJ.us
Given all the hullabaloo directed at Senator Max Baucus as he and his Democratic allies anticipated cost estimates of his healthcare bill with the nervous agitation exhibited by actors who fidget all night as they await reviews of a hopelessly bad play, Americans are now aware of the Congressional Budget Office.
In fact, there was so much hullabalooing that the public has also come to know that Washington’s politicians regard the CBO as the “gold standard” when it comes to letting everyone know how much the Federal Government will take in or how deeply one of its programs will dig into taxpayers’ pockets or add to the debt already breaking taxpayers’ backs.
Problem is, anyone who believes the gold standard stuff suffers from a severe disturbance of the mind that, for some crazy reason, still remains absent from the American Psychiatric Association’s Manual of Mental Disorders.
So, what is the truth about an agency Congress has not only saddled with the task of predicting the future but also with the requirement that it complete its tasks with numbers and assumptions provided by the “honorable members” who perform their dirty labors under the dome of the U.S. Capitol?
To answer that question, you first must know why, in 1974, Congress was all in a sweat to get out of the cost prediction business. The reason is this: By that year, its members realized they needed a fall guy to take the hit for their Medicare predictions.
You see, when the Medicare bill passed in ’65, the House Ways and Means Committee told the public that by 1990, the hospital insurance portion of Medicare (Part A) would cost about $9 billion annually.
Then, in ’67, when Medicare went into effect, Ways and Means announced that by 1990, the entire Medicare program would cost about $12 billion a year.
But Members of Congress were aware of the relevant data regarding Medicare. And therefore they huffed and puffed Fall Guy into life.
And sure enough, in 1990, it was the CBO that had the pleasure of announcing Part A of Medicare cost $67 billion for the year and the entire Medicare program $110 billion. (Data thanks to the Heritage Foundation.)
So, too, according to the Heritage Foundation, in 1992 it was the CBO that had to tell the public the amount states paid to hospitals that served large numbers of Medicaid and uninsured patients was $17 billion, instead of the $1 billion Congress had estimated just five years earlier.
Moreover, through the nineties, it was the CBO chief sweating in the limelight as he explained the lowball miscalculations (actually, “congressional lies”) involving changes to Medicare’s home care benefit, the addition of a catastrophic coverage benefit to Medicare, and the institution of the SCHIP program.
But has the gold standard agency done better in the new millennium? Read article.
Obama's Middle Class Betrayal
Howard Rich, Rasmussen Reports.com
As much as the Beltway chattering class refuses to admit it, Barack Obama's electoral victory last year had nothing to do with his oft-repeated, generic pledge to bring "hope and change" to Washington, D.C. Sure it sounded good at the time, but Americans have always voted based on their wallets and pocketbooks – not lofty-sounding campaign promises or rhetorical flourishes.
The real key to Obama's victory a year ago – indeed his "signature" issue – was his promise not to raise taxes on the middle class.
"You will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime," Obama promised tens of millions of Americans making $250,000 or less. In fact, candidate Obama promised the middle class billions of dollars in tax cuts, part of his whole "spread the wealth around" plan.
"If you're a family that's making $250,000 a year or less, you will see no increase in your taxes," Obama promised. "Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your personal gains tax, not any of your taxes."
Never mind the fact that Obama's plan would have hit income and payroll providers especially hard, rendering "middle class tax relief" irrelevant to the millions of workers heading toward already-crowded unemployment lines.
No matter how you look at it, though, what a difference a year makes. Read article.
Angry Hispanics mull boycotting 2010 census
Stephen Dinan, Online WSJ.com
Angered by President Obama's lack of success in legalizing illegal immigrants, some Hispanic activists are urging all Hispanics to boycott the 2010 census as a sign of displeasure.
Other groups have asked the federal government to suspend immigration raids while census takers are in the field, hoping that will make illegal immigrants more likely to respond to questions.
It's just the latest trouble in what's turning into a rocky run-up to the census next year.
During a congressional hearing last week, a Democratic senator told Census Bureau Director Robert M. Groves that the American Community Survey - a yearly survey the bureau mails to a small sampling of Americans - pries too deeply and is so confusing that it appeared at first to be a case of mail fraud.
Meanwhile, a group of Republican senators is trying to have the 2010 census form include a question about citizenship. They are trying to set a precedent that congressional seats be reapportioned based on a count of citizens, rather than all residents. The census issue is roiling Hispanic and immigrant rights groups.
The census issue is roiling Hispanic and immigrant rights groups. Read article.
Reader Comments: Submit Your Comment (0)
| Print This E-mail This |
|
