Tonight! Wearing out his prime-time welcome with hiiis sixth television appearance in eight months.
Mickey Kaus sums up the problem:
Obama doesn’t need to get “Republicans on board.” He doesn’t need to get Blue Dog Democrats on board. He needs to get voters on board. They aren’t on board now –39-37 against, according to Gallup. (When Congress passed Medicare in 1965, by way of contrast, Gallup found a 63-28 majority in favor.) … If the Dems’ health care bill were actually popular, all the vote-bargaining problems they now face would be easily solved. If the bill remains relatively unpopular, with those opposed much more likely to base their vote on the issue, it could easily fail to pass even if versions of it get past the House and Senate and into a conference committee.
You know whom we have to thank for this? Yes, you do! And she’s back for another round in today’s Wall Street Journal:
In his Times op-ed, the president argues that the Democrats’ proposals “will finally bring skyrocketing health-care costs under control” by “cutting . . . waste and inefficiency in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid and in unwarranted subsidies to insurance companies . . . .”
First, ask yourself whether the government that brought us such “waste and inefficiency” and “unwarranted subsidies” in the first place can be believed when it says that this time it will get things right. The nonpartistan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) doesn’t think so: Its director, Douglas Elmendorf, told the Senate Budget Committee in July that “in the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount.”
Now look at one way Mr. Obama wants to eliminate inefficiency and waste: He’s asked Congress to create an Independent Medicare Advisory Council—an unelected, largely unaccountable group of experts charged with containing Medicare costs. In an interview with the New York Times in April, the president suggested that such a group, working outside of “normal political channels,” should guide decisions regarding that “huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives . . . .”
Given such statements, is it any wonder that many of the sick and elderly are concerned that the Democrats’ proposals will ultimately lead to rationing of their health care by—dare I say it—death panels? Establishment voices dismissed that phrase, but it rang true for many Americans. Working through “normal political channels,” they made themselves heard, and as a result Congress will likely reject a wrong-headed proposal to authorize end-of-life counseling in this cost-cutting context. But the fact remains that the Democrats’ proposals would still empower unelected bureaucrats to make decisions affecting life or death health-care matters. Such government overreaching is what we’ve come to expect from this administration.
As D.K. Jamaal writes for Examiner.com:
It’s not even 2012, and Sarah Palin, the “lightweight” Caribou Barbie stupid dumb right-wing inexperienced unqualified unaccomplished religious wacko birther enabling nut that came from Wasilla, has already defeated President Obama.
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Oh, and she did it with Facebook notes.
Read that again: she did it with Facebook notes.
Gen. Custer, call your office.