Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Hispanic Republican Woman Elected to Wisconsin Legislature Special Elections Show Surprising GOP Strength

Hispanic Republican Woman Elected to Wisconsin Legislature Special Elections Show Surprising GOP Strength

By John Fund

Just after last month’s government shutdown ended, pundits were proclaiming the death of the Republican party. But the evidence so far for that demise is scant, and sometimes points to quite the opposite.

Indeed, four special elections for seats in state legislatures yesterday showed the GOP elephant stomping Democrats in most places. In Wisconsin, Republicans held a rural assembly seat in central Wisconsin with 67 percent of the vote as expected but also held a highly competitive seat in south Milwaukee County that Barack Obama carried in 2008 and only narrowly lost last year. Republican Jessie Rodriguez, who won 56 percent of the vote yesterday, will become the first female Hispanic Republican to serve in the assembly. She was born in El Salvador but moved to the U.S. in the 1980s to avoid that country’s civil war. She is currently an outreach coordinator for Hispanics for School Choice — a nonprofit organization that helps low-income parents find schools for their children.
In Iowa, Republican Julian Garrett kept a vacant state senate seat south of Des Moines in the GOP column by crushing Democrat by Mark Davitt by 60 percent to 40 percent. The district only narrowly voted for Mitt Romney last year.
But the biggest surprise yesterday may have been in California, a place where the Republican party has been on life support. But not last night. With provisional and absentee ballots still to be counted, former Democratic congressional staffer Matt Dababneh had only a 173-vote lead over Republican Susan Shelley in a special election for a San Fernando Valley assembly seat near Los Angeles. The district is overwhelmingly Democratic. Barack Obama won it in 2012 with 64 percent of the vote and Republicans make up only a quarter of the registered voters.
The result is so close and so many ballots are still out that the official winner may not be known for two weeks. “It’s so close that it’s certainly within the number of absentee and provisional ballots. I don’t know how many are uncounted, but there’s a substantial number,” Shelley, a writer and producer for the TV show Jeopardy, told reporters.
Win or lose, her showing is especially impressive given that she was out-spent ten to one and that almost every local elected official endorsed her opponent. “Many people have written off this area as completely un-winnable for Republican candidates, and I think I demonstrated tonight that is wrong,” she said.
As I indicated above, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of the Republican party appear to be greatly exaggerated.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/364410/hispanic-republican-woman-elected-wisconsin-legislature-special-elections-show#!

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Scott Walker may be Chris Christie's worst nightmare

By PHILIP KLEIN

Topics: Obamacare Republican Party 2014 Elections 2016 Elections Campaigns Chris Christie Scott Walker Government shutdown

He’s a problem-solving Republican governor who fought entrenched special interests in a traditionally Democratic state.
But he isn’t from New Jersey.
And if Scott Walker gets re-elected in Wisconsin next year and chooses to run for president, he threatens to steal New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s thunder.
Early speculation on the 2016 Republican presidential race essentially splits the primary electorate into two camps.
On one side, there are those who are fed up with unruly Tea Partiers and argue that conservative purity tests in recent Republican primaries have crippled GOP candidates in the general election.
On the other side, there are conservatives who are fed up at having lackluster nominees foisted upon them — such as Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — who were not ideologically conservative.
Though President George W. Bush won two terms in office, he drastically expanded the size and scope of government with the help of a Republican Congress.

Come this time next year, Walker could be in a much better position than Christie to thread the needle between these two groups.
Christie doesn’t have the implicit trust of the GOP’s conservative base, so his hopes rest on reassuring them and arguing he’s the most plausible candidate because of his successes in a blue state.
But that argument will be a lot more difficult to make if Walker enters the race.
Should he win re-election, Walker would be able to make a similar set of claims to Christie's. Though it’s been more closely divided than New Jersey in recent presidential elections, Wisconsin hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan’s 1984 rout of Walter Mondale.
As governor, Walker understood that, ultimately, persuadable voters would make up their minds not based on ideology, but on performance.
“Part of the reason I believed our reforms would work so well in the state was because I believe that results trump everything else,” he explained at a Nov. 15 lunch hosted by National Review.
“You can have all the scare tactics in the world and have all the attacks ... it doesn’t matter how much money you have, you can’t convince people of something they don’t know to be true,” Walker said.
This is why, he argued, the troubled rollout of President Obama’s health care law will continue to be a political headache for Democrats.
Walker disagreed with the Republicans’ failed effort to defund Obamacare because he said it diverted focus from the health care law to the shutdown.
“We’re all for principled fights and things, but we’re all for outcomes,” Walker said of governors. “We want to see an endgame.”
Not only can Walker cite executive experience under tremendous odds, he is still revered by a broad swath of conservatives for his bruising battle with the Wisconsin teachers’ unions over his education reforms in a way that Christie is not.
On a gut level, most conservatives would say of Walker that he is “one of us” — that he thinks and governs like a conservative rather than being a candidate who merely spouts conservative talking points when it suits his political ambitions.
At the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference, Romney — desperate to reassure his skeptics on the Right — gave a speech in which he used a variation of the word “conservative” 24 times.
In contrast, Walker spoke without uttering the word once. He didn’t need to, because he could speak about his tangible conservative reforms.
Walker, who is out with a new book this week, Unintimidated: A Governor's Story and a Nation's Challenge, about his battles in Wisconsin, has started to sound more like a presidential candidate.
When I asked him whether he would pledge to serve a full four-year term if re-elected governor in 2014, he said he’s never made such a commitment at any point in his political career. He wouldn’t rule out a run for president when pressed.
To have any chance of running for president, though, Walker will have to win re-election. In June 2012, Walker survived a recall attempt with 53 percent of the vote.
At the lunch, he noted that his margin was padded because a certain percentage of those who voted for him were simply against the protracted recall process — a rare acknowledgement for a politician.
And that marks another important contrast. Primary voters may find Walker’s Midwestern humility more appealing when placed against Christie’s in-your-face Jersey attitude.
It’s too far in advance to be anointing frontrunners in the 2016 presidential race. But if Walker runs, he could prove to be Christie’s worst nightmare.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/scott-walker-may-be-chris-christies-worst-nightmare/article/2539447

Lies, Damn Lies and ObamaCare

By Steve Tobak

FOXBusiness

Last week I was informed by the agent who handles my firm’s health-care insurance that, come 2014, our group plan will be cancelled and replaced with an ObamaCare plan.

Never mind that President Obama, his spokespeople, and Democratic Congressional leaders all stated over and over that Americans happy with their health-care plans would be able to keep them. Never mind that none of that was true.

Now those same leaders – not to mention all sorts of political talking heads – are saying that the only plans being cancelled are subpar plans that don’t meet the minimum requirements of ObamaCare. They’re saying the cancellations will only affect a small percentage of individual plans.

None of that is true, either.

Our plan is a small business (2-50 employees) group PPO plan with low deductibles, out-of-network coverage, the whole nine yards. Read my lips: it’s not a subpar plan. And you know what it’s being replaced by? An EPO plan – a new designation with no out-of-network coverage at far higher premiums with a fraction of the number of doctors.

Here’s the thing. I’ve had PPO health-care coverage for decades. I don’t want to get into personal details here, but suffice to say that, without out-of-network coverage, I probably would have lost a loved one many years ago.

As I understand it, under ObamaCare, Blue Shield of California will no longer be offering PPO plans in quite a few California counties such as Alameda, which includes Oakland and Berkeley. Let me tell you: that’s a very big deal that will impact a lot of people.

When it comes to ObamaCare, everyone’s mincing words these days. They’re afraid to say our leaders lied. And they’re afraid to say they’re still lying. That’s entirely understandable. They want to be accurate. They want to be truthful. They want to be honest. Well thank God somebody does. Nobody in Washington seems to.

Well, here’s how I see it. It sure looks to me as if the President of the United States, members of his administration, and Democratic Congressional leaders didn’t just lie. I think they intentionally perverted the truth. And I think they did it because, if they didn’t, they knew the bill wouldn’t pass through Congress.

And Congress passed a bill it knew would dramatically impact Americans' rights – you know, our inalienable constitutional right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – without even reading it. And they subverted the constitution by using the Commerce Clause to ram it through the Senate without a single Republican vote.

If that isn’t enough, the Supreme Court upheld ObamaCare’s individual mandate as a tax, even though President Obama and congressional leaders clearly stated it wasn’t a tax. Had they proposed it as a tax, they never would have gotten it through Congress.

I wish this was just about lying, dishonesty, and accountability. To me, it goes way beyond that. To me, and apparently the Merriam Webster dictionary, this is fraud:

fraud noun \ˈfrȯd\

a : deceit, trickery; specifically : intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right

If a CEO or CFO of a public corporation pulled something like this, it would be fraud. The only difference is this fraud was committed against the American people. Not a small percentage of the American people. Not just the ones with individual coverage. Not just the ones who had subpar plans, whatever that means.

We’ve recently seen reports that, way back in 2010, the Obama administration knew ObamaCare

would dramatically disrupt private health insurance plans. They knew that at least 93 million Americans would lose their health plan coverage. And, by some estimates, the actual number will be much higher.

According to the administration’s commentary in the Federal Register, in addition to individual plan disruption, “The Departments’ mid-range estimate is that 66% of small employer plans and 45% of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfather status by the end of 2013.”

Perhaps more importantly, under ObamaCare we will have fewer choices, higher premium costs, and far fewer doctors. Let me spell that out for you: fewer choices + higher costs + fewer doctors = poorer health care.

I’m no constitutional expert but it sure looks to me as if at least two branches of the Federal Government – branches that are supposed to provide checks and balances to keep each other from overstepping their bounds – committed fraud by perverting the truth and subverting the constitution to get Americans to give up some of their rights.

Let me tell you something, folks. We’ve seen this sort of leadership behavior before. We’ve seen it at companies like Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and Adelphia. If you’ve ever wondered what makes powerful executives commit fraud, the answer is simple. They think they’re above the truth and the law. They think they know better. And they think they can exert their will over others without being held to account.

When that happens, it’s called absolute power, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That’s what I think we’re seeing here. The organization of our federal government into three unique and autonomous branches was supposed to keep this sort of thing from happening. It didn’t. It failed.

How can we the people let this stand? And if we do, what’s next?

Steve Tobak is a Silicon Valley-based strategy consultant and former senior executive of the technology industry.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/2013/11/14/lies-damn-lies-and-obamacare/

Don's Tuesday column

THE WAY I SEE IT by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News 12/03/2013

Thank God for … mandated contraception?

It’s not far from Thanksgivings devoid of giving thanks to God, to Obamacare’s mandate that businesses provide employees with contraception, including abortifacients (a drug, agent or device used to cause abortion). The atheist-accommodating trend of removing God, the Supreme Deity, (or “Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence), from all but private or religious settings—that trend has sickeningly morphed into the force of federal law, via Obamacare, mandating that devout, abortion-opposed but otherwise free citizens and business owners fund and provide abortion services under the guise of women’s “health care.”

Read carefully these words and sentiments and consider whose vision is more righteous for America: Washington’s or Obama’s:

“Thanksgiving Proclamation, President George Washington, City of New York, October 3, 1789”

“Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits and to implore his protection and favor, and Whereas both Houses of congress have by their joint Committee requested me ‘to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.’

“Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26^th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be. That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks, for his kind care and protection of the People of this country … for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence … for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

“And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions, to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually, to render our national government a blessing to all the People, by constantly being a government of wise, just and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed … To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and Us, and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.”

President Obama omitted any reference to God in his 2011 Thanksgiving address, likewise omitted it from his reading of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and has used a past Thanksgiving speech to indirectly chide Republicans for obstructing his political agenda. He quoted from President Lincoln’s Thanksgiving address, the “Almighty hand” and “Divine purposes,” last Thursday, but dismissed the whole thing for having “roots in centuries-old colonial customs.” Obama said, “When we offer our thanks, we mirror those who set aside a day of prayer”, but what he meant was that he’s not asking anyone to pray, as past leaders have, because “we too” do that prayer thing, just not directly. Sheesh!

Obama included his favorite hobbyhorse, homosexuality: we’re Americans “no matter who we are or who (sic) we love.” Another stealth priority, immigration reform, got a boost with references to “people of all races and religions, who arrived hear from every country on Earth …” as if we should thank the ones who, if they have immigrated legally, should be grateful that America’s laws let them come, stay here and become citizens. Obama even added a simultaneous proclamation of “Minority Enterprise Development Week, 2013” to make us all warm and fuzzy over set-asides and affirmative action quotas.

Finally, I think the collective rubber hit the “government’s-the-only-thing-we-all-belong-to” road with his praise of “everyone who’s doing their part to make the United States a better, more compassionate nation” by volunteering, joining or sharing. There’s nothing wrong with that—let’s all pitch in. But when Mr. Big Government—top-down, wise-overlords-know-best, here’s-your-subsidy/benefit, here’s-your-tax-bill—proclaims that “we’re all part of one American family,” many people start hearing what Ronald Reagan said are the most terrifying nine words: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

To Obama and his ideological allies, “We are each other’s keeper” means “You are not competent to do it on your own, to your satisfaction and happiness—for your collective good, forget that messy freedom thing, we’ll mandate what’s best for your health care.” That especially applies to you business owners who seem to think that your deeply held, pro-life religious beliefs are more important than providing ‘health services,’ aka contraception and abortion-inducing drugs, to your employees.

Monday, December 2, 2013

Obamacare Repeal Watch

by Steven Hayward in Obamacare

A lot of “folks” (as President Obama likes to say) thought I was going way out on a limb to predict two weeks ago that Congress will vote to repeal Obamacare in advance of the election next year, but the momentum is building.
Politico notes that many Democratic strategists are saying the party is “in denial” about the disaster of Obamacare:

And that perceived gap between party spin and facts on the ground is fueling worries that the White House and Democratic higher-ups aren’t taking the possible electoral blowback seriously enough or doing enough to shield their candidates. Democratic contenders in the toughest races are distinctly less convinced that Obamacare will fade as an election-year issue — and they can’t afford to just cross their fingers that things get ironed out or that Republicans revert to political hara-kiri. . .
“We’re trying to deny what everyone knows is happening,” said one Democratic pollster who is a veteran of competitive congressional races. “Anybody who is halfway intelligent knows this is a big … problem for us. It’s impossible not to see. We can try to hide our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not a problem, but it is.”

A second Politico story warns that Democrats in Congress are running out of patience with the White House:

Some Capitol Hill Democrats are preparing to launch broadsides against President Barack Obama if the Affordable Care Act website isn’t fixed by the end of the month. . .
“The president and his team have repeatedly assured us that the system will be working by Dec. 1. That’s when I start looking at what we have to do in our oversight function to hold the administration accountable for making it work,” Rep. Bruce Braley, an Iowa Democrat who is running for an open Senate seat said Thursday, adding that he’s contemplating whether to ask the president to fire members of his staff. “I’m thinking about those options. But my biggest concern is fixing the system and making it work.”
Democratic lawmakers — particularly those on the House side — are preparing to try to put distance between themselves and the president because they’re not confident that the White House has a Plan B for getting the policy right or protecting them in the mid-term elections.
[One] big-city lawmaker predicted oversight hearings are “going to be ugly” come next month. “The more we find out about this implementation of the ACA, the worse it looks. The Congress did our job. We passed the ACA. It’s up to the administration to implement the law.”

In the Washington Post this morning, Reid Wilson thinks another Republican wave is building:

President Obama’s poll numbers are at record lows. The health care law that serves as the cornerstone of his domestic policy legacy is even more unpopular. And there are few chances to change the conversation among a skeptical public that isn’t happy with Washington.
Sound familiar? It should: The national political climate today is starting to resemble 2010, when Republicans won control of the House of Representatives by riding a wave of voter anger. . .
[T]here’s no sign that Obama will become more popular. Presidents who see their approval ratings dip so dramatically in the second term rarely see their numbers improve.

Tick, tock, tick, tock. . .

JOHN adds: I think a lot of Democrats are delusional, in this sense: they haven’t figured out that the problem with Obamacare isn’t the rollout, or the launch, or the implementation, or the web site. The problem is the law itself. It will be, I think, a rolling disaster for the next year, as millions of people lose their health insurance, rates increase, and millions more lose their doctors. I think we have barely scratched the surface of public anger at Obamacare, and, yes, I too think the law will be repealed, although perhaps not as soon as next year.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/11/obamacare-repeal-watch.php

EPA preparing to unleash a deluge of new regulations

by Michael Bastasch

Happy holidays

from the Obama administration. Federal agencies are currently working on rolling out hundreds of environmental regulations, including major regulations that would limit emissions from power plants and expand the agency’s authority to bodies of water on private property.
On Tuesday, the White House released its regulatory agenda for the fall of 2013. It lists hundreds of pending energy and environmental regulations being crafting by executive branch agencies, including 134 regulations from the Environmental Protection

Agency alone.
The EPA is currently crafting 134 major and minor regulations, according to the White House’s regulatory agenda. Seventy-six of the EPA’s pending regulations originate from the agency’s air and radiation office, including carbon-dioxide-emission limits on power

plants.

Carbon-dioxide limits are a key part of President Barack Obama’s climate agenda. The EPA is set to set emissions limits that would effectively ban the construction of new coal-fired power plants unless they use carbon capture and sequestration technology

. Next year, the agency will move to limit emissions from existing power plants — which could put more older coal plants out of commission.
“The proposed standards, if finalized, will establish achievable limits of carbon pollution per megawatt hour for all future units, moving the nation towards a cleaner and more efficient energy future,” the agency said in its agenda. “In 2014, EPA intends to propose standards of performance for greenhouse gas emissions from existing and modified power plant sources.”
Hundreds of coal plants that have been closed or slated for early retirement due to Environmental Protection Agency regulations, according to coal industry

estimates.
“Already, EPA regulations have contributed to the closure of more than 300 coal units in 33 states,” said Laura Sheehan, spokeswoman for the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity

.
However, the agency isn’t just working on limiting emissions from coal plants. The EPA is also working on a rule that would expand the definition of “waters of the U.S.” under the Clean Water Act to include water on private property

Republicans have hammered the EPA’s draft water rule as the largest expansion of agency power in history.
“The EPA’s draft water rule is a massive power grab of private property across the U.S. This could be the largest expansion of EPA regulatory authority ever,” Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith. “If the draft rule is approved, it would allow the EPA to regulate virtually every body of water in the United States, including private and public lakes, ponds and streams.”
The EPA’s rule is heavily supported by environmentalists who argue that it’s necessary to protecting water quality. Smaller water sources, they argue, eventually affect larger water sources that people use for recreation or their livelihood.
“It’s taking the way the Clean Water Act works back, so that it works the way water works in the real world,” Bob Wendelgass, president and CEO

of Clean Water Action, told Fox News.
The EPA says the rule is needed to clear up uncertainty left in the wake of U.S. Supreme Court decisions on the agency’s regulatory authority over bodies of water.
“The [Clean Water Act] does not distinguish among programs as to what constitutes ‘waters of the United States,’” the agency said. “As a result, these decisions affect the geographic scope of all [Clean Water Act] programs.”

Sunday, December 1, 2013

Obama hits new low with Dems

President Obama’s relationship with congressional Democrats has worsened to an unprecedented low, Democratic aides say.
They are letting it be known that House and Senate Democrats are increasingly frustrated, bitter and angry with the White House over ObamaCare’s botched rollout, and that the president’s mea culpa in a news conference last week failed to soothe any ill will.

Sources who attended a meeting of House chiefs of staff on Monday say the room was seething with anger over the immense damage being done to the Democratic Party and talk was of scrapping rollout events for the Affordable Care Act.

“Here we are, we’re supposed to be selling this to people, and it’s all screwed up,” one chief of staff ranted. “This either gets fixed or this could be the demise of the Democratic Party.
“It’s probably the worst I’ve ever seen it,” the aide said of the recent mood on Capitol Hill. “It’s bad. It’s really bad.”
Meanwhile, at a recent caucus meeting with Senate Democrats and White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, one senator stood up and asked for a political point of contact at the White House.
“There’s been an increase in frustration because people feel like they are continuing to be blindsided,” said one Democrat who attended the caucus meeting, adding that there’s a “check-the-box” mentality at the White House in dealing with lawmakers.
Democrats around Capitol Hill say there are lots of people to blame for the debacle that has engulfed them. But increasingly the anger is directed at one person only: Obama.
“Is he even more unpopular than George W. Bush? I think that’s already happened,” said one Democratic chief of staff.
Senior administration officials say they understand the frustration and anger on the opposite side of Pennsylvania Avenue and they realize Democrats are the ones who continue to take a hit.
But the senior officials say the most important thing the White House can do right now is to get the implementation of the healthcare law right. The feeling in the West Wing corridors lately is that once the rollout is fixed, the public will see all the positives behind ObamaCare.
“The policy will take care of the politics,” one senior administration official said.
But not everyone agrees with that sentiment — particularly those Democrats in both chambers who are up for reelection in 2014.
“They’re freaking out, as they should be,” said one senior Senate Democratic aide, adding that the rollout continues to be “a lasting mess.”
In the news conference last week, Obama accepted responsibility for the botched site and acknowledged that the failure of the rollout “has put a burden on Democrats, whether they’re running or not, because they stood up and supported this effort through thick and thin.
“And I feel deeply responsible for making it harder for them rather than easier for them to continue to promote the core values that I think led them to support this thing in the first place, which is, in this country, as wealthy as we are, everybody should be able to have the security of affordable healthcare,” Obama said. “And that’s why I feel so strongly about fixing it.”
The view among those in the Senate is that it would be helpful to have the ability to vote on a healthcare fix.
“People here want to be on the record showing support for fixing the problem,” the senior Senate aide said. “He should understand that. For someone who served in Congress, people are surprised how little he understands Congress.”
The White House hasn’t indicated just how much Obama will help campaign for those who are up for reelection next year. The president, who has been attending a string of fundraisers in recent days — including a West Coast check-collecting trip this weekend — is expected to help lawmakers and both campaign committees throughout 2014.
But as the healthcare problems continue to persist, lawmakers in swing districts aren’t sure that’s the best idea, especially because, according to one Democrat, “systemically you have what is a long-term problem.”
“It wouldn’t be helpful,” the Senate aide said. “Maybe he can help raise some money for Democrats, but that’s the extent of it.”
Democrats say the biggest favor Obama can do for them at the moment is to focus on untangling the web and trying to smooth out the glitches on healthcare.
“The only way he can really make it up to us is by fixing this s--t,” one Democratic House aide said.
Luckily, the aide surmised, Obama is going to want to fix the problem because his legacy is on the line.
“We have his own self interest working in our favor,” the aide said.

http://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatch/health-reform-implementation/190844-obama-hits-new-low-with-dems-at-capitol

‘Non-partisan’ group paid $1 million to produce positive Obamacare stories

President Obama with Families USA Executive Director Ron Pollack.

‘Non-partisan’ group paid $1 million to produce positive Obamacare stories

Joe Schoffstall

With the roll out of Obamacare being as disastrous as possible for the Obama administration, one group was given a $1 million grant to help lead a rebranding effort with hopes of salvaging the law in the eyes of the American people.
Families USA (FUSA) — an organization that describes itself as a “national nonprofit, non-partisan organization dedicated to the achievement of high-quality, affordable health care for all Americans” — was given a $1.1 million grant by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on October 4, 2013, to gather “success stories” of Americans dealing with Obamacare and distribute them to the media who often refer to them as an “independent” group. This is part of a greater upcoming effort to bolster the perception of the lowly health care law.
“The purpose is to bridge the information gap for people who can significantly benefit from the Affordable Care Act,” Ron Pollack, the Co-founder and Executive Director of Families USA, told TIME on October 25, 2013.
However, the organization is a far cry from “non-partisan” and is extremely close to the Obama Administration and Enroll America – the group leading the efforts to sign people up for Obamacare.
Philippe Villers, the president of Families USA, serves as the Secretary and Treasurer of Board of a little-known group called the Herndon Alliance. The Herndon Alliance originated in Herndon, VA in 2005 and produced research the left used to sell the overhaul of the United States health care system and counteract opposition as the president was making a push for Obamacare. As Lachlan Markay of the Washington Free Beacon noted, they are credited with crafting President Obama’s, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it” message, and are even backed with money from George Soros’ Open Society Institute.
In 2009 Politico wrote, “When President Barack Obama says Americans can maintain their ‘choice’ of doctors and insurance plans, he is using a Herndon strategy for wringing fear out of a system overhaul.” They were also described as, “the most influential group in the health arena that the public has never heard of.”
Ron Pollack, the above mentioned co-founder and Executive Director of Families USA, told the Washington Post in a 2010 interview after the passage of Obamacare that he was going to help found a group called Enroll America in order to raise millions of dollars to assist with enrollment.
“We’re actually helping to found a new organization to work on this. Its placeholder name is Enroll America, and it will involve all the different interest groups, from supporters of reform like consumers groups to community health centers and doctors and insurers,” Pollack told Ezra Klein during an interview. He continued, “And what we’ll do is raise tens of millions of dollars for state groups to work with the state to try to create the most effective systems to apply and enroll. You should be able to enroll with simple application forms at a doctor’s office or a pharmacy. You shouldn’t have to take the day off of work. That sort of thing.”
Pollack currently sits on the board of directors of Enroll America.
In fact, the grants given by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation show Families USA and Enroll America are in the exact same office building, in the exact same suite.
Here is a screen cap of the grant awarded to Families USA, located at 1201 New York Avenue, N.W., Suite 1100, Washington, D.C.
Rachel Klein, the person listed on the grant to Families USA, is a former employee of Enroll America.

Here is a screen cap of the grant awarded to Enroll America, located at 1201 New York Avenue, N.W., Suite 1100, Washington, D.C.
Anne Filipic, the person listed on the grant for Enroll America, formerly served as Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. Before this, she was the Deputy Director of Intergovernmental Affairs for Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

As for the foundation that awarded the grants to Families USA and Enroll America — The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation– they are the largest philanthropy group in the United States devoted to health and health care. They, too, have close ties to the Obama Administration.
Their current president and CEO, Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, sits on President Obama’s Council on Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition.
Nancy-Ann DeParle, who sits on the Board of Trustees of the foundation, served as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy in the Obama Administration from January 2011 until January 2013. Before this, she served as the president’s Health Care Czar and led the administrations effort to pass Obamacare. She is referred to as the administrations “point guard” for overhauling the American health care system.
This isn’t the first time the “non-partisan” Families USA will help the Obama administration rebuild the image of the law.
Every year, FUSA puts on the Health Care Action (HCA) conference. During the 15th HCA conference in January 2010 before the law passed, White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett told those in attendance that the fight for new legislation was not nearly over. “You have been out there in the trenches working with us every single day. On behalf of President Obama, I want to have the pleasure of thanking you. […] I want to reassure you he has not given up on this.”
Later that year, FUSA partnered with the Obama administration with the goal of rebuilding the image of the unpopular health care bill.
Anita Dunn, former communications director for the administration, and Andrew Grossman, a top Democratic strategist who coordinated grassroots efforts in 2009 for health care reform, came up with a plan that would last until 2014 consisting of “road shows” with the intent of being “media-centric.”
“Those events are intended to be media-centric,” Pollack said of the nationwide public relations plan. “We devote a lot of time before and after to meet with editorial boards, to do radio and TV interviews and sit down with local reporters.”
In 2011, after the annual HCA conference convened, FUSA put together a document titled, “Messaging Cheat Sheet: Mastering the 30-Second Sound Byte.” The document contained ways to answer difficult questions being asked from reporters or the public.

“At the Families USA Health Action 2011 Conference in January, we convened a plenary session that presented the findings of focus group and polling research about how to talk about the Affordable Care Act with the public. As part of this plenary, we asked the audience of state advocates from across the country to submit examples of questions that they have been asked by the public or reporters and that they struggle to answer; many more questions were submitted than our panelists had time to answer,” it states.
Within the 26-page document, there are questions dealing with addressing health care costs and premium increases, effects on the health insurance industry, business, and jobs. Also discussed are questions on provider concerns, repeal efforts, and coverage issues.
Here is a sample question from the document dealing with Republican opposition:

Question: One major concern raised by Republicans and other opponents of the law is that it busts the budget. Did Congress burden our children with the cost of health reform?
No. Prevention saves money. Controlling waste, fraud, and abuse in health care saves money. Controlling industry greed saves money. Patient-focused health care saves money. Efficient delivery of services saves money. Not depending on emergency rooms saves money. And all these improvements are part of the new law.

In truth, the Affordable Care Act reduces the deficit. Congress’s official scorekeeper—the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office—estimated that the Affordable Care Act would reduce the federal deficit over the next 10 years. And earlier this year, when Republicans in the House wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act—the official scorekeeper estimated that repealing the law would actually increase the deficit.

Fixing health care will strengthen the economy by keeping more Americans healthy and by making coverage more affordable for families and for businesses. Healthier workers are more productive. American businesses will be more competitive in global markets.

Throughout 2011, the group was cited numerous times by mainstream news outlets as an unbiased source in showing immediate “positive signs’ emerging from the law without reference to their liberal bend.
For example, a report from CBS News hyped Medicaid and Medicare sob stories, while calling them “an advocacy group for health care consumers.” They were used again by CBS to play up Obamacare’s “early success” while referring to Ron Pollack as a “patients rights advocate” with no mention of his liberal agenda.
Now, they will try once again to do damage control for the White House and Democrats.
The media recently used them to show signs of life from the law amid a sea of bad news – as displayed by The Huffington Post and The Washington Post just last week. Both outlets touted a “study” from the group that supposedly shows positive signs from the law. The Washington Post even gave it the headline, “Want to debate Obamacare’s cancellations? You need to see this study first.”
Enroll America is sending emails with “success stories” of people signing up for Obamacare through the faulty healthcare.gov website– the purpose of the grant given to Families USA and a tactic they have used previously.
While the group doesn’t hide the fact they’re in favor of the law, they are used as an “independent” group when referenced by the media. This is the case despite being tied to Enroll America and their close proximity to the Obama administration.

http://capitolcityproject.com/non-partisan-group-paid-1-million-produce-positive-obamacare-stories-close-obama-administration-tied-enroll-america/

Lies of Obamacare

by Scott Johnson in Obamacare

We have asserted from the outset that Obama’s Obamacare sales job was a variety of fraud. Every word of it was a calculated lie, including (as Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman’s oeuvre) the words “a” and “the.” In this case we might amend McCarthy’s observation to say that every word he said was a lie including the word “period.”
This applies especially to the foundational lies of Obamacare, Obama’s often repeated assurances that if you like your health plan you can keep your health plan (“period”), that if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor, that Obamacare will save the average family $2500 per year and that Obamacare will not add a penny to the deficit. As will become obvious in the fullness of time, all these assurances were bald-faced lies of the kind that would get a corporate executive sent to prison in the business context.
Mona Charen recently devoted her syndicated column to another lie of Obamacare that Obama retailed while he was running for president in 2008 and again while he was running for reelection in 2012. Charen’s column is titled “Remembering Stanley Ann Dunham Obama.” Charen’s column belongs in this series on the lies of Obamacare. Mona writes:

Remember President Barack Obama’s mother? Though the airwaves currently echo with his vow “If you like your plan . . .” I keep remembering Obama’s account of his mother being denied coverage by her insurance company as she lay dying of cancer.

The moving and infuriating story was a staple on the 2008 campaign trail. His mother had insurance, he explained, but when she came down with cancer, her insurance company claimed her disease was a “pre-existing condition” and refused to pay for her treatment. In a debate with Sen. John McCain, Obama said: “For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s something fundamentally wrong about that.”

There would be, if it had been true. But when New York Times reporter Janny Scott researched the issue for her biography of the president’s mother, she discovered letters proving beyond doubt that Cigna never denied Stanley Ann Dunham coverage for her disease. The dispute was over a disability plan that would have paid some of her other expenses.

The White House did not deny Scott’s account, but shrugged it off as something that had happened long ago. Not so long that it couldn’t be milked one last time though, for a 2012 campaign film. In “The Road We’ve Traveled,” the message remained unchanged — a greedy insurance company had cut off Obama’s mother at her moment of maximum vulnerability, and it cost Dunham her life.

If someone comes to you and asks for financial aid to cope with a family member who is gravely ill, and you comply, how are you going to feel when you learn there is no sick relative?

It’s different in politics, explained Michael Cohen in the New York Daily News. The American people want too many contradictory things. “Seemingly, the only path to change is telling voters what they want to hear.”

Doubtless that’s what Obama tells himself to justify his deceptions. It’s a form of “lying for justice.” If your goals are noble enough, truth is an acceptable casualty.

Obama’s propensity to lie is finally widely acknowledged, but it hasn’t gone far enough. It isn’t just that the pledge about keeping your plan was a noble lie — the whole law is based upon lies.

The Dunham tale was meant to personify the hundreds of thousands — or millions — of Americans who were “dumped” by insurance companies when they became sick. This is an invented tale, and might have been rebutted by the insurance industry if they hadn’t gotten into bed with Obama in 2010 in return for millions of coerced new customers. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, academic studies have estimated that policies were dropped in only four-tenths of one percent of cases in the individual market.

In a 2010 radio address, Obama said one carrier was “systematically dropping the coverage of women diagnosed with breast cancer.” The CEO of WellPoint, which had reason to believe the president was referring to her company, responded that they had provided coverage in the previous year to 200,000 breast cancer patients and had canceled just four policies for fraud or misrepresentation.

Whole thing here.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/11/lies-of-obamacare-7.php