Exclusive – Oval Office Watch – Friday, April 30
by OVAL OFFICE WATCH
April 30, 2010
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE, April 28 (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama is concerned about Greece's debt problems and his administration is in touch with Europe about the issue, White House spokesman Bill Burton said on Wednesday. - Read article.
Consumer Confidence Reaches Highest Level in Over Two Years - HERE.
60% Say Capitalism Better Than Socialism - SEE HERE.
Nigerian lottery scams morph into new healthcare frauds - GO HERE.
Health reform gives old scam a new angle
David Goldstein, Kansas City.com
The man at the door said he was with “ObamaCare,” which he was sure the elderly Winfield, Kan., woman would need.
In suburban St. Louis, a fellow was going from house to house saying he was from the government and he was there to help people — to obtain “ObamaCare” policies.
There’s a “limited enrollment” period for the new health insurance program, so act quickly. If you don’t buy, it’s breaking the law, you know.
All of which is just more of the old, old snake oil in a new bottle.
For the record, no government health insurance program called ObamaCare exists. No federal employees are acting as salesmen, on either your doorstep or your telephone.
Read article.
Healthcare Law Impact on the Uninsured
Kathryn Nix, Heritage.org
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is reporting that the new health care law will decrease the number of uninsured in 2019 by 32 million. However, this does not mean that universal coverage will be achieved—23 million Americans will remain without coverage, including illegal immigrants.
Of those Americans that do become insured, 16 million will be added to Medicaid, and 24 million will obtain coverage in the newly created exchanges. Moreover, an estimated 3 million Americans will lose their current employer-based insurance, and another 5 million will lose their current non-group or other form of coverage.
The new law expands coverage by increasing the size of government. Rather than making health insurance markets more responsive to Americans’ personal wants and needs, lawmakers enacted a top-down approach that will impose their will on the rest of the country. This “reform” will result in less choice and competition for health care consumers and, although more Americans will be “covered,” the quality of this coverage will decrease.
Read article.
The Insurance Mandate in Peril
Randy E. Barnett, WSJ.com
A"tell" in poker is a subtle but detectable change in a player's behavior or demeanor that reveals clues about the player's assessment of his hand. Something similar has happened with regard to the insurance mandate at the core of last month's health reform legislation. Congress justified its authority to enact the mandate on the grounds that it is a regulation of commerce. But as this justification came under heavy constitutional fire, the mandate's defenders changed the argument—now claiming constitutional authority under Congress's power to tax.
This switch in constitutional theories is a tell: Defenders of the bill lack confidence in their commerce power theory. The switch also comes too late. When the mandate's constitutionality comes up for review as part of the state attorneys general lawsuit, the Supreme Court will not consider the penalty enforcing the mandate to be a tax because, in the provision that actually defines and imposes the mandate and penalty, Congress did not call it a tax and did not treat it as a tax.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) includes what it calls an "individual responsibility requirement" that all persons buy health insurance from a private company. Congress justified this mandate under its power to regulate commerce among the several states. It is true that the Supreme Court has interpreted the Commerce Clause broadly enough to reach wholly intrastate economic "activity" that substantially affects interstate commerce. But the Court has never upheld a requirement that individuals who are doing nothing must engage in economic activity by entering into a contractual relationship with a private company. Such a claim of power is literally unprecedented.
Read article.
Arizona's border can be secured
Robert Robb, JWR.com
The defeatist notion that the country cannot independently secure its border is without foundation and should be rejected.
For the federal government, however, hundreds of millions of dollars isn't a lot. There is also a national rationale for spending it. Human and drug smuggling is now largely in the hands of organized and violent Mexican criminal syndicates. Arizona is the main corridor for distribution of both throughout the country. This makes the failure of the federal government to act in a big enough way to make a difference both unwise and insanely frustrating for those living near the border.
Illegal immigration could be largely controlled by a combination of border security, cutting off access to the formal economy by requiring all employers to electronically verify work eligibility, and permitting Social Security to share with immigration enforcement instances of duplicate use of the same Social Security number.
Read article.
Iraq's Political Disarray Likely to Remain After U.S. Departure
Andrew Lee Butters, Time.com
Iraq's democratic system is in trouble. That much was acknowledged for the first time on Monday by U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill. The immediate cause for his concern was the decision by Iraq's Supreme Court to uphold the disqualification of 52 candidates who ran in the March 7 parliamentary elections — two of whom had won seats — on charges that they had ties to Saddam Hussein's banned Ba'ath party. Because most of those disqualified were Sunni Muslim members of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's Iraqiya party, the decision was widely viewed as an attempt by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to try and regain the lead before the election results are finally accepted. Maliki's Shi'ite-dominated State of Law coalition came in second in the poll, two seats behind Iraqiya, but the court's decision could put it back in front to form a new coalition government.
But the deeper worry for Ambassador Hill was that seven weeks after the election, Iraq's politicians have not yet accepted the poll results, much less begun negotiating in earnest to form a new government. "We are now approaching the two-month period [since the election], and we are concerned the process is lagging," Hill said at a briefing for foreign journalists.
Read article.
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