On Wednesday, Gibbs was asked again about the C-Span commitment. The story had gotten pretty big in the intervening time, and presumably Gibbs had had a chance to familiarize himself with it. So reporters tried for a second day to get him to comment on the president’s commitment to holding televised health-care talks. Gibbs’ answer? “We covered this yesterday.” Gibbs referred reporters to the transcript of Tuesday’s briefing and said, “The answer I would give today is similar.”
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And that was the end of that. If the public wants to know why President Obama didn’t keep his pledge to hold televised health-care negotations, they’ll have to look for answers elsewhere. The White House isn’t talking.
So much for holding the healthcare negotiations on C-span, too.
Embattled Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd (D) has scheduled a press conference at his home in Connecticut Wednesday at which he is expected to announce he will not seek re-election, according to sources familiar with his plans.
Dodd’s retirement comes after months of speculation about his political future, and amid faltering polling numbers and a growing sense among the Democratic establishment that he could not win a sixth term. It also comes less than 24 hours after Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) announced he would not seek re-election.
the chap with the “cottage” in Ireland, the sweetheart deals with various mortgage companies that you and I, with no patronage to dispense, could never wrangle, and a reputation for honesty that rivals that of Barney Frank
What is being overlooked is that these Democrat House Reps and Senators are free to vote for whatever crappy legislation they please without a worry about answering to their constituents. In essence they are like Dead Men Walking. They have nothing to lose by going against the will of the people for the next eleven months.
So as we all cheer about another Dem biting the dust before 2010, let us take time to realize the threat these retiring Dems pose.
They’re not out – legistatively speaking – until they have actually left.
With the final vote on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act slated to start after sundown Dec. 24, senators and hundreds of their health policy analysts, press secretaries and other aides — not to mention the universe of police officers, clerks and student pages who keep the place humming — wishing to be with their families will instead spend the holiday in Washington. And there’s a possibility the Senate could be called back next week, to take up debt-limit legislation.
The Senate Democrats declare a super-majority of senators will be needed to overrule any regulation imposed by the Death Panels
Upon examination of Senator Harry Reid’s amendment to the health care legislation, Senators discovered section 3403. That section changes the rules of the United States Senate.
To change the rules of the United States Senate, there must be sixty-seven votes.
Section 3403 of Senator Harry Reid’s amendment requires that “it shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.” The good news is that this only applies to one section of the Obamacare legislation. The bad news is that it applies to regulations imposed on doctors and patients by the Independent Medicare Advisory Boards a/k/a the Death Panels.
Section 3403 of Senator Reid’s legislation also states, “Notwithstanding rule XV of the Standing Rules of the Senate, a committee amendment described in subparagraph (A) may include matter not within the jurisdiction of the Committee on Finance if that matter is relevant to a proposal contained in the bill submitted under subsection (c)(3).” In short, it sets up a rule to ignore another Senate rule.
1. Sen. Ben Nelson’s “Cornhusker Kickback.”
2. New England’s Special Syrup.
3. Corruptocrat Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd’s Christmas wish: Hospital helper.
4. “Some insurers are more equal than others” tax exemption.
5. The Frontier Freebie.
6. More Democrat hospital bennies.
7. Bernie Sanders’ socialized medicine sop.
8. Fla.-Pa.-NY Protectionism.
If you review Michelle’s items, you’ll find that six of the items on her list directly involve Medicare and Medicaid, the existing government healthcare programs … that are broke.
This is how our system works and has worked since time immemorial. Discussions of logrolling and pork barrel politics have been part of introductory American politics courses since, oh, the advent of introductory American politics courses. The terms were coined in 1835 (by Davy Crockett, no less) and 1863 (by Edward Everett Hale). Let’s just say Harry Reid didn’t invent them.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t shine a light on these abuses. By all means, we should. But let’s not pretend that they’re a recent invention.
You’ll find mandates with financial penalties — the amounts picked out of a hat.
You’ll find insurance companies (who live and die by their actuarial skills) told exactly what weight to give risk factors, such as age. Currently, insurance premiums for 20-somethings are about one-sixth the premiums for 60-somethings. The House bill dictates the young shall now pay at minimum one-half; the Senate bill, one-third — numbers picked out of a hat.
You’ll find sliding scales for health-insurance subsidies — percentages picked out of a hat — that will radically raise marginal income tax rates for middle-class recipients, among other crazy unintended consequences.
Krauthammer proposes that real healthcare reform should include tort reform, abolish the prohibition against buying health insurance across state lines, and tax employer-provided health insurance.
Of course, of these three actions the only thing the politicians might go along with is taxing employer-provided benefits. Why not? After all, they’re taxing everything else.
Going forward, there is no relief in sight, as spending far outpaces revenues and the federal budget is projected to be in enormous deficit every year. Our national debt is projected to stand at $17.1 trillion 10 years from now, or over $50,000 per American. By 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analysis of the president’s budget, the budget deficit will still be roughly $1 trillion, even though the economic situation will have improved and revenues will be above historical norms.
The planned deficits will have destructive consequences for both fairness and economic growth. They will force upon our children and grandchildren the bill for our overconsumption. Federal deficits will crowd out domestic investment in physical capital, human capital, and technologies that increase potential GDP and the standard of living. Financing deficits could crowd out exports and harm our international competitiveness, as we can already see happening with the large borrowing we are doing from competitors like China.
Government healthcare coming up?
Perhaps the most vivid example of sending the wrong message to international capital markets are the health-care reform bills—one that passed the House earlier this month and another under consideration in the Senate. Whatever their good intentions, they have too many flaws to be defensible.
First and foremost, neither bends the health-cost curve downward. The CBO found that the House bill fails to reduce the pace of health-care spending growth. An audit of the bill by Richard Foster, chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, found that the pace of national health-care spending will increase by 2.1% over 10 years, or by about $750 billion. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s bill grows just as fast as the House version. In this way, the bills betray the basic promise of health-care reform: providing quality care at lower cost.
Second, each bill sets up a new entitlement program that grows at 8% annually as far as the eye can see—faster than the economy will grow, faster than tax revenues will grow, and just as fast as the already-broken Medicare and Medicaid programs. They also create a second new entitlement program, a federally run, long-term-care insurance plan.
Finally, the bills are fiscally dishonest, using every budget gimmick and trick in the book: Leave out inconvenient spending, back-load spending to disguise the true scale, front-load tax revenues, let inflation push up tax revenues, promise spending cuts to doctors and hospitals that have no record of materializing, and so on.
If there really are savings to be found in Medicare, those savings should be directed toward deficit reduction and preserving Medicare, not to financing huge new entitlement programs.
A House Democratic leader said Monday she’s “confident” controversial language on abortion will be stripped from a final healthcare bill.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the Democrats’ chief deputy whip in the House, said that she and other pro-abortion rights lawmakers would work to strip the amendment included in the House health bill that bars federal funding from going to subsidize abortions.
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Sixty-four Democrats voted for Stupak’s amendment, without which the House healthcare bill would not have won final passage in a 220-215 vote.
Stupak’s language not only prohibits abortion coverage in the public insurance option included in the House bill. It would also prevent private plans from offering coverage for abortion services if they accept people who are receiving government subsidies.
JOHNSON: Well, I was called into the room to assist during a procedure. And it was actually an ultrasound-guided abortion procedure, which is not that common in Planned Parenthood health centers because it’s a longer type of abortion procedure, and Planned Parenthood centers are trying to do as many procedures a day as they can, and so they’re not going to take a lot of time for each procedure. But for whatever reason, this physician did decide to do an ultrasound-guided procedure on this particular woman. And so, I was called in to help. And my job was to hold the ultrasound probe on this woman’s abdomen so that the physician could actually see the uterus on the ultrasound screen. And when I looked at the screen, I saw a baby on the screen. And she was about 13 weeks pregnant at the time. And I saw a full side profile. So I saw face to feet on the ultrasound machine. And I saw the probe going into the woman’s uterus. And at that moment, I saw the baby moving and trying to get away from the probe.
HUCKABEE: Moving away from it, oh, my God.
JOHNSON: Yes. And I thought, “It’s fighting for its life.” And I thought, “It’s life, I mean, it’s alive.”
HUCKABEE: Until that moment, Abby, had it appeared to you that you were able to use words like “fetus” and “tissue,” it’s very different than when you saw the form of a child, recognizable.
JOHNSON: That it was alive. Mm-hmm.
HUCKABEE: What did you do? Did you say anything at that moment to the doctor?
JOHNSON: No, I mean, my mind was racing, my heart was beating so fast. And I just was thinking, “Oh, my gosh, make it stop.” And then, all of a sudden, I mean, it was just over, just, in the blink of an eye. And I just saw the, I just saw the baby just literally, just crumble, and it was over. And I just, I dropped the ultrasound probe. And then I realized, “Oh, my gosh, I’m not holding the ultrasound probe,” so I scrambled and I put the ultrasound probe back in place. And I, so many things were going through my mind, and I was thinking about my daughter who’s three, and I was thinking about the ultrasound I had of her, and I was thinking of just how perfect that ultrasound was when she was 12 weeks in the womb. And I was just thinking, “What am I doing? What am I doing here?” And I could just, I had one hand on this woman’s, on this woman’s belly, and I was thinking, “There was life in here, and now there’s not,” and-
HUCKABEE: You literally were holding your hand on top of her, on top of her belly at that point-
JOHNSON: Mm-hmm.
HUCKABEE: -and realized that what was underneath that hand once a moment ago was life and it’s gone?
JOHNSON: Mm-hmm.
HUCKABEE My gosh. When you were faced with that – by the way, did the woman see any of this? Did she have access to see the screen at all?
JOHNSON: No, she was sedated.
HUCKABEE: People never see really what’s happening to them.
JOHNSON: No.
HUCKABEE: I can’t help but believe if they saw that they might be running out of those clinics.
JOHNSON: Yeah, absolutely. If clinic workers saw what was happening on that screen, they would be running out of those clinics. This is what the abortion industry does not want their workers to see. They don’t want their workers to see what’s actually happening during an abortion. That’s why Planned Parenthood doesn’t do, that’s why so many of these large abortion industries don’t do ultrasound-guided abortion procedures. They don’t want people to see what’s really happening in the woman’s womb.Jill Stanek posted the video of the interview of Abby Johnson, former director for Planned Parenthood:
The baby Johnson was talking about was thirteen weeks. Here’s a baby at sixteen weeks:
If you still do not believe abortion ends a human life, I urge you to watch The Silent Scream. It shows the murder of an 11-week old baby. The movie is narrated by the former director of the largest abortion clinic in the Western world.
So who is Kenneth Feinberg, and where did he get the power to set pay for executives at private firms?
As part of the hastily enacted and seldom-read legislation establishing the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Congress authorized the Secretary of the Treasury to “require each TARP recipient to meet appropriate standards for executive compensation.” To carry out this task, last June the Treasury promulgated an emergency “Interim Final Rule,” waiving ordinary requirements for a public comment period.
As part of this emergency rule, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner created the office of “Special Master” for compensation, delegated his TARP authority to set compensation standards to this officer, and appointed Mr. Feinberg (a lawyer and mediator) to this position, without obtaining Senate confirmation.
Therein lies the problem. The Appointments clause of the Constitution, Article II, section 2, provides that all “Officers of the United States” must be appointed by the president “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” This means subject to confirmation, except that “the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment” of “inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.”
There is no doubt that Mr. Feinberg is an “officer” of the United States. The Supreme Court has defined this term (Buckley v. Valeo, 1976) as “any appointee exercising significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States.” Mr. Feinberg signed last week’s orders setting pay levels for executives at Bank of America, AIG, Chrysler Financial, Citigroup, GMAC, General Motors and Chrysler. They have the force of law and are surely an exercise of “significant authority” pursuant to an Act of Congress. He is not a mere “employee,” acting at the direction of a superior. That means his office is subject to the requirements of the Appointments Clause.
While somewhat more disputable, Mr. Feinberg’s is probably an “inferior” officer, defined as one subject to supervision and removal by a member of the cabinet. Although he has substantial discretion and independence, Mr. Feinberg reports to the secretary of the Treasury, who can fire him any time for any reason. This means that Congress could, if it wished, vest the appointment of the pay czar in the secretary, without any need for Senate confirmation.
But Congress has not done so. On the contrary, it vested the authority to implement TARP’s compensation provision in the secretary of the Treasury. The secretary may sub-delegate that power to someone else—but that someone must be an “officer” properly appointed “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.”
Which, of course, he hasn’t. Otherwise he wouldn’t be a “czar”.
McConnell stresses,
Congress and Congress alone has power to dispense with the safeguard of the confirmation process.
The federal credit provides from $4,200 to $5,500 for the purchase of an electric vehicle, and when it is combined with similar incentive plans in many states the tax credits can pay for nearly the entire cost of a golf cart. Even in states that don’t have their own tax rebate plans, the federal credit is generous enough to pay for half or even two-thirds of the average sticker price of a cart, which is typically in the range of $8,000 to $10,000. “The purchase of some models could be absolutely free,” Roger Gaddis of Ada Electric Cars in Oklahoma said earlier this year. “Is that about the coolest thing you’ve ever heard?”
The IRS has also ruled that there’s no limit to how many electric cars an individual can buy, so some enterprising profiteers are stocking up on multiple carts while the federal credit lasts, in order to resell them at a profit later.
What it comes down to is this:
This golf-cart fiasco perfectly illustrates tax policy in the age of Obama, when politicians dole out credits and loopholes for everything from plug-in cars to fuel efficient appliances, home insulation and vitamins. Democrats then insist that to pay for these absurdities they have no choice but to raise tax rates on other things—like work and investment—that aren’t politically in vogue. If this keeps up, it’ll soon make more sense to retire and play golf than work for living.
Retire and tango!
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There will be no podcast today due to a business appointment.
You’ll find insurance companies (who live and die by their actuarial skills) told exactly what weight to give 
