Obama's Promises Unravel on Obama Care

President Obama sold the Affordable Care Act aka Obama Care to the American people based on four promises. To gain public support for his landmark new entitlement, lacking bi-partisan support and whose content was unknown, the President pledged:

1) If you like your current insurance you can keep it.
2) If you like your doctor you can keep him or her.
3) The ten-year cost of Obama Care will be less than $1 trillion.
4) Obama Care will not add one dime to the deficit.

All four of these promises have been broken according to the administration’s own experts (See: Health and Human Services, Estimated Financial Effects of the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” as Amended  and Congressional Budget Office-Joint Committee on Taxation, Estimates for the Insurance Coverage Provisions of the Affordable Care Act Updated for the Recent Supreme Court Decision).   His fifth promise – universal health care coverage – has long been forgotten. Government studies find there will be thirty million uninsured after a decade of Obama Care.

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Russian Television (RT): Partial Release of Hacked Hillary Clinton Emails

Confidential emails purportedly from former political advisor Sydney Blumenthal to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been hacked and widely distributed to politicians and news sources. Included in the hacker “Gucifer’s” distribution list are Russian news services such as Pravda, Moscow Times, and RT.
We have no information about the authenticity of the hacked e mails. They will be tested over the next few hours or days.

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Our By-Stander President Did Not Cancel the White House Tours (Or Maybe He Did)

President Barack Obama now claims to be a passive bystander in the decision to close down White House tours.

Asked by George Stephanopoulos whether it was necessary to cancel the tours, which the Secret Service says cost about $74,000 per week, the President answered:

“You know, I have to say this was not a decision that went up to the White House. But what the Secret Service explained to us was that they’re gonna have to furlough some folks. What furloughs mean is that people lose a day of work and a day of pay. And, you know, the question for them is how deeply do they have to furlough their staff and is it worth it to make sure that we’ve got White House tours that means that you got a whole bunch of families who are depending on a paycheck who suddenly are seeing a 5 or 10% reduction in their pay.”

(Sorry I did not understand about half of this).

Let me get this straight: President Obama had nothing to do with the politically-sensitive decision to shut down America’s House!  He had been stirring up hysteria for weeks that the sequester would cripple the economy and wreak untold disaster and inconvenience on the American people. Strange. If such a decision does not go up to the White House, what does?

The President now tells us that someone else – the Secret Service – did it. Moreover, we learn from him that – he was told – that we need the tour cuts to prevent families who depend on a paycheck from seeing their pay cut. By cutting the 34 secret service officers who guard the tour route, we are saving the paychecks of others! Strange.

Now that all hell has broken loose, I can imagine a “wink-and-nod” meeting between the President and Mark Sullivan, the director of the Secret Service:

Obama: Mark: You know that the Republicans are using the closing of White House tours to hurt me politically. How could you (wink) have cancelled them without telling me? (wink)
Sullivan: Mr. President, we in the Secret Service did not feel that closing America’s House, the very house in which you live, was worth bringing to your attention. (nod)
Obama: And I told the press that we had to do this to save on costs. I guess you are sure that we could not afford to keep the tours going.  (wink)
Sullivan: Mr. President, the tours were simply too expensive (wink). (The taping system picks up whispering: “Mr. President:  I would not tell anyone that the White House tours cost two tenths of one percent of the Secret Service budget. The 34 agents used in the tours are one half of one percent of our Secret Service work force.”)

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Why Doesn't The New York Times Expose Carlos Slim?

The New York Times, in its persistent fight for the poor and downtrodden, exposes rapacious lenders who foist unaffordable mortgages on naïve families, shines light on polluters, climate change deniers, and oil spillers, spins pitiful tales of hungry children and uninsured families denied medical care, documents the plight of illegal aliens separated from families and exploited by evil employers, exposes Big Oil and Big Pharma's unwillingness to pay their 'fair share,' and even discloses the misdeeds of non-unionized Walmart in Mexico. After all, the Times must protect Mexican consumers from low prices.

The Times is also an arbiter of what is in the public interest. From the Iran cyber attacks to WikiLeaks, the Times decides which national secrets to expose, even if it puts American allies at risk. No wonder, the "Grey Lady" is regarded as America's newspaper of record.

Although the Times declares itself beyond reproach in the era of Murdoch klatsch journalism, it exempts its second largest shareholder (and lender of last resort), Mexico's Carlos Slim, from its motto: "printing all the news that's fit to print."


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The Sequester Cut of White House Tours Equals 2 Hours of Air Force One

Most kids remember their first trip to Washington all their lives. Proud parents, their children in tow, visit the monuments, Arlington Cemetery, and other sights, but the highlight will always be the tour of the Capitol and the White House.

President Obama has opted to deprive American kids of this lifelong memory because the sequester cuts, which he describes as drastic, leave him without funds to offer tours of the White House. Sorry kids, the President says: “I tried hard to get the Republicans to adopt a balanced approach, but they wouldn’t budge. They had to protect Big Oil and corporate jets. You are left holding the bag. I can see you standing on Pennsylvania Avenue peeking through the locked gates. Sorry.”



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Hugo Chavez Leaves The Soft-Dictator's Oil Curse As His Legacy

Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, has died. He was 58 years old. Chavez had been treated in Cuba, a country with which he was closely allied. Since his return from Cuba, Chavez was isolated in a military hospital. Official communiqués reported that he was having breathing problems but was well enough to run the affairs of state. Chavez’s muzzled state press had condemned reports that Chavez had died or was at death’s door.

Chavez, who dominated Venezuelan politics for almost a decade and a half, combined policies of communal socialism, populism, patronage, nationalization, and virulent anti-Americanism. Chavez named his policies the Bolivar Revolution, but they entered the vernacular as “Chavismo.” In foreign policy, he created a bloc of leftist Latin American states united by virulent anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism. Chavez used the media and populist policies, subsidies, patronage, corruption, and direct distribution to the poor to defeat his middle class and business opposition in three elections. He was known to hold forth in marathon TV conversations with the Venezuelan people. Chavez’s people populated Venezuela’s poor barrios. They idolized the at times clownish figure Chavez cut in his red beret and red-white-blue jumpsuits. He likened George Bush to the devil in a bizarre speech to the United Nations General Assembly. His antics played well to his political base at home and to anti-American forces abroad.



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White House Admits (Third Time) President Obama Fibbed On Sequester

Is the press corps getting some balls (to put it crudely but graphically)? Are they finally prepared to challenge the President’s untruthful assertions on facts that are crucial to understanding policy?

None other than NBC’s David Gregory today pressed Obama’s chief economic advisor, Gene Sperling, whether his boss told the truth in the third presidential debate that “the sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.”  Sperling finally wilted under the pressure of tough questioning to  admit that “yes, in fact, the sequestration was President Obama’s plan.”



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'Sequester Costs 750,000 Jobs' From Those Who Gave Us the Four-Million-Job Stimulus

 The Director of the Congressional Budget Office, Douglas Elmendorf, testified on February 13 before Congress that 750,000 jobs would be lost in 2013  alone if Congress does not avoid the sequester cuts (source). To put that estimate in perspective: the economy gained 741,000 jobs between September and January 1. Per Elmendorf: The sequester cut, reported to be $85 billion in 2013, will set us back four months of job growth. I say, using the experience of the 2009 stimulus, that the 2013 sequester cuts will cost us zero jobs.

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