“Pulling The Plug On Grandma”: Practical Steps To Stopping Obamacare

Here’s the president in Cincinnati, yesterday:

“I’ve got a question for all those folks who say we’re going to pull the plug on Grandma. What’s your answer? What’s your solution? And you know what? They don’t have one. Their answer is to do nothing.”

Actually, our answer is not to pull the plug on grandma.

Doing nothing is much much better than destroying American medicine via an ill-conceived attempt to increase political power by leveraging fears about health insurance.  Voters don’t trust the president to do any better with health care than he has with his plans for stimulating job creation or with GM.  Seniors know that the president is counting on money drained from medicare to pay for the extension of benefits to the uninsured.  Their answer is: Don’t cut Medicare.

Will a big speech to Congress alter the basic and deep disagreements between a majority of Americans and the president and his hard-left allies in the Congress? 

Only if the president can tempt his Democratic colleagues into forgetting everything they saw and heard during the August recess.  If the Democrats pass anything like the president’s plans with its dramatic cuts to Medicare, they will be punished at the polls in 14 months.  Seniors won’t forget and employers won’t forget, and doctors and health care workers most certainly won’t forget.

The president doesn’t care what happens to his Congressional allies.  Today’s lead Politico story by David Rogers calls House Democrats “Obama’s expendable shock troops.”  Expendable as in “Enjoy your retirement and the knowledge that you helped ruin American medicine.”

This is the sort of story that jars a House Democrat.  Everyone sees they are being set up to take the political fall for a disastrous, radical attempt to remake American health care when the vast majority of voters are satisfied with their own care and their own insurance.  It doesn’t matter how often the president speaks —and via Mike Allen comes Mark Knoller’s count of 121 speeches that includes some appeal on health care, including 28 events dedicated to pushing health care, or more than 3 a month— if the message is the same push to shrink Medicare, limit doctors’ authority and raise taxes to pay for Canada-style rationing.

To set the stage for tomorrow night’s speech, I suggest two things.

First, if you haven’t yet signed the petition against Obamacare that will be presented on the Hill tomorrow, please do so.  We are above 1,250,000 signatures with a day left to add your name.

Then send $25 or $50 to the National Republican Congressional Committee and the same amount to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.  If President Obama’s big push for his takeover of American medicine provokes an early and visible increase in funding and enthusiasm for the GOP’s effort to knock off House Democrats, the Blue Dogs and other vulnerable Members as well as a larger bank account for the NRSC’s effort to re-establish some balance in the upper chamber, the president’s speech might be his most eloquent yet, but not so eloquent as to drown out the sound of political footsteps lining up for a chance to retire the enemies of American medicine in November, 2010.

Why Did President Obama Fire Van Jones?

Which of Van Jones’ statements, if any, did President Obama find so unacceptable that Jones was obliged to leave such an important post?

And what standard concerning present and future Obama appointees are we supposed to deduce from Jones’ dismissal?

There are plenty of interesting questions to ask Robert Gibbs and all other Obama Administration officials including the president about Van Jones, but don’t expect the MSM to pose them.  

The Washington Post actually has a link to a Jones interview conducted by Lois Romano less than a month ago which includes these questions:

You–you personally appear to be a good communicator, and you’ve done a lot of public speaking, and I–and you are a community activist. Do you view that as part of your portfolio to sort of educate America?

and

Have you considered that your–your vision might be far ahead of–of reality and what’s really going on in the country?

and

One final question. You have spent most of your career as a community activist. You started a couple of organizations, and you could be autonomous and sort of see, you know, the impact of your visions. How has this transition been working in a bureaucracy?

The irony is that the Post is advertising today either just how uninterested its reporter was in Jones’ background or how unremarkable the reporter found that background to be.

The Administration, like the president who leads it, is the least examined, the least scrutinized of any of modern times.  MSM has simply refused to push either the president or his appointees on their backgrounds, their plans, their qualifications and their ideology.  Mr. Jones is almost certainly not the only Obama appointee who holds the views he does, but he may well be the only one we ever hear about.

Saturday Afternoon Post

Well, the Buckeyes made me sweat, or more accurately, Navy did.  Hats off to the Midshipmen who never let up even when they were down by 15.  The Irish are making me smile right now, so it is a good time to post.

Over at Duane’s World, Hughniverser Dave posted a request that we post the broadcast from 9/11.  I am not even sure we can do that since it predates the podcasting technology, but if it is possible, Duane will figure it out.

What I am thinking about are the weeks and months of broadcasts after 9/11 where caller after caller flatly stated that America would never forget and would never be the same.  Today’s news is full of voices suggesting it is time to bolt Afghanistan.  I guess “never” meant eight years.

Even as we continue to work to defeat Obamcare, we have to stay behind the president so long as he stays nehind victory in Afghanistan.

Democrats Losing Independents Over Obamacare, Massive Spending, GM, Etc

Don’t believe me.  Believe Charlie Cook.  (HT: HR)

Now there’s Van Jones and the folks who cleared him.  The impression is growing every day that the president is surrounded by the extreme, the inexperienced and the incompetent.  Who else among the czars and czarinas holds views like those of Jones, and how can the country’s economy recover and grow when a group of ideologues are in charge of important policy-making positions?

Democrats are teetering on a political cliff.  Voting for Obamacare –even a stripped down version with no public option, just massive cuts to Medicare–will take them over it.

“Without Tort Reform, It Isn’t Health Care Reform –It’s A Lawyers’ Protection Act.”

My new Townhall.com column is up.

Talk about it at The Hughniverse, and have a great Labor Day Weekend.

“His wax wings having melted, he is the man who fell to earth.”

Charles Krauthammer’s new column is on the president’s approval ratings tumble.

Too much can be made of President Obama’s many mistakes to date.  He’s a basketball player, and he and his team are down 10 in the middle of the first quarter, and he has a deep bench.

It wouldn’t be fair to compare the DC GOP to the Washington Generals, but all it will take is a jam down of a slimmed down “health insurance reform” bill for the president to declare he’s got his game back.

Still, the unemployment numbers today make it harder and harder for even the devout Democrats to pretend the stimulus worked or that the massive expense of Obamacare or the looming tax hikes make sense.  Distraction after distraction —Michelle Malkin writes today on the “Dear Leader” speech blowback and Van Jones will no doubt generate a few more stories over the long weekend (the White House has got to be wondering whether Mr. Jones will end up defining the president for another slice of the public)– keeps the president off of his agenda, and when he’s on his agenda, the public rejects it.

Still, the president will almost certainly turn the school kids’ speech into a bland “what was all the fuss about” lecture on doing homework, and he’ll almost certainly lookand sound good when he delivers his “eat your liver” speech to Congress next Wednesday.  Van Jones will either stop generating headlines or he’ll be looking for work.  The president can show up at the Ohio State-USC game or somewhere else and get a new deposit of points in the regular account.  Presidents bounce back.  Remember Time’s “Incredible Shrinking President” cover from June, 1993 as Bill Clinton struggled to figure out the presidency?

Clinton did pretty well with the comeback thing.  Perhaps President Obama should ring up David Gergen?

Or perhaps he should shelve Obamacare as a needlessly and deeply divisive and unpopular attempt to radically change what the vast majority of Americans like –their medical care.

And instead concentrate on winning in Afghanistan, which is the front line in a war that goes on and which continues to threaten Americans even if they are forgetting that threat.

There’s a genuine bipartisan cause behind which many if not most conservatives and independents will rally.

The President’s Speech To Congress: If He Doesn’t Demand Serious Tort Reform He Isn’t Serious About Health Care Reform

The lack of any serious tort reform in the many health care bills floating around Congress has undermined the credibility of the big push for less care at a greater cost from day one.  All of the versions of Obamacare are threatening seniors with rationing, private employers with higher taxes, and everyone with getting dumped into a bare bones public plan even as the CBO predicts enormous additions to the deficits as a result.  Defenders of the plan like the AARP cannot mount a coherent case because the repeated arguments by the president and Congressional Democrats about the need to cut billions from Medicare is understood by everyone to mean deep reductions in services to seniors.

What’s absurd about the effort is that every high-sounding call for the need to change and the crisis of health care is immediately understood to be hypocrisy because the speakers aren’t demanding the sort of damage caps in medical malpractice cases that will have immediate and dramatic impacts on the costly practices of preventative medicine.  The lack of tort reform brands each of these bills as protection rackets for one of the key funding sources of the Democrats –trial lawyers.  Everyone has to sacrifice, the president hectors evert audience (except my friends from the Bar with the million dollar contribution accounts.)

Now that seniors, doctors and employers are fully engaged on the debate and know the risks to their care, their practices and their businesses posed by the push for Obamacare, all three audiences and more will be listening very closely to the president on Wednesday night.  If the president doesn’t demand comprehensive tort reform as part of the payment package for his latest set of proposals, everyone will know it isn’t really a heath care reform or health insurance reform bill.  Without tort reform it will remain one lengthy talking point on behalf of the power of the Democratic Party.

And opposition will grow.  The president’s popularity will continue to fall, and Democrats will inch closer to a devastating loss next November.

Why?  Because, with no help from the MSM, the county has come to understand the Obama-Pelosi game on health care, and even if a majority of Americans was willing to watch them blow a trillion dollars on the stimulus and nationalize GM, that same majority will not applaud the destruction of American medicine complete with the protection of the plaintiffs’ bar.  The president has used up his credit with the electorate, and now he is threatening the way they live, the care they receive as seniors, and the insurance they get from work which they value.  And he’s doing so while protecting the extremely small but very wealthy core of Democratic Party funders that are plaintiffs’ lawyers.

Between now and Wednesday, every Republican elected official and every center-right commentator ought to be demanding that the president demand serious and thorough tort reform as the test of a real commitment to real health care reform.  There’s a week to focus the country on the incredible hypocrisy of purporting to care about health care while protecting the lawyers who drive so much of the cost that plagues the system.

Talk about it at The Hughniverse.

The President’s Hail Mary

Sigh. Yet another hectoring on why we should want to dismantle American medicine and pay more to do so from the POTUS on the TOTUS. Breathless reports from CNN about Olympia Snowe’s willingness to deal aside, the White House looks desperate at this point, and with public opinion turning as rapidly as it has against Obamacare, that desperation is understandable.

People warned the president about overexposure, and now he’s already in reruns eight months into his presidency. Obamafatigue has set in, and ham-handed stunts like addressing the nation’s school children only add to the woes of a White House stuck with a thinly-disguised push to single payer built on the rationing of medical services to seniors.

The only question of interest now is how many Democratic incumbents are willing to lose their seats in service to President Obama. Pushing through any “reform” at this point could cost Democrats massively in November, 2010. I suppose there are a few Alinskyites who don’t mind being retired in order to advance the president’s agenda. Enough to pass Obamacare though?

Talking to AARP About Health Care Reform

The big news of the morning is the president’s partial retreat on the so-called “government option/public plan” (which could be just another in a series of head fakes on this subject), but even if this a real abandonment of the worst feature of Obamacare, my long interview with AARP’s legislative director David Cetner on yesterday’s program should encourage everyone to stay in the battle to defeat even the (very large) rump of Obamacare.

The transcript of the interview is here. The podcast is here. If you post an analysis of Mr. Certner’s responses, send me a link. Your comments on the interview can be posted at Hughniverse if you have subscribed.

I hope one of the Beltway analysts of the details of the various proposals gives Mr. Certner’s responses a thorough going-over, especially for their implications for Medicare services. Medicare seems to me to be in for a frightening-to-seniors top-to-bottom overhaul from which money will squeezed at every step not for the purpose of making Medicare fiscally sustainable, but in order to subsidize other experiments with our health cares systems, leaving Medicare truncated and still broke.

Mr. Certner says things like “preauthorization of MRIs for seniors” isn’t rationing, but if the preauthorization is declined or delayed, of course it is rationing. There’s a lot of slipperiness in his responses.

And of course there isn’t a lick of tort reform in the bill, no matter what Mr. Certner says to me.

Here is the Politico.com article alleging huge funding of the former Axelrod firm by a broad coalition of Obamacare advocates. AARP is not named in the article but Mr. Certner’s ambiguous answer left me wondering whether AARP is in fact part of that coalition referenced by Kenneth Vogel.

I appreciate Mr. Certner’s willingness to appear and answer questions, but I reacted just as my audience did: There was very little candor here and a lot of evasion and defensiveness about AARP’s agenda and the impact on seniors.

Draw your own conclusions, but if I was covered by Medicare, not only would I have long ago signed the petition opposing Obamacare, I’d be forwarding the petition to friends and I’d be jamming my Congressman’s and senators’ phones with demands that this mess be shelved and a new bill begun –in the open, with robust tort reform, and with the objective of fixing Medicare first, not using it to prop up the path to single payer.

A final note: Mr. Certner refused to disclose for whom he had worked when he worked on the Hill. I found it very odd, but if anyone happens to know the answer to that, please send it along to hugh@hughhewitt.com.

The President’s Command Performance For America’s Children

Here’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s letter to principles announcing President Obama’s speech to America’s schoolchildren on September 8.

Here’s the list of suggested classroom activities for before, during, and after the speech for grades pre-K to 6, and for grades 7 to 12.

In the section for pre-K to 6th graders titled “Extension of the Speech: Teachers can extend learning by having students” is this suggestion:

• Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.

Liberals will say critics of this “first ever” presidential speech to students are politicizing a nice gesture by the president about the importance of learning.

But the widespread and growing objection to the idea is that the president has no business injecting himself into every classroom or suggesting to teachers that they help students figure out how they can help the president. If W has tried such a stunt he would have been rightfully roasted for doing so. It is a terrible idea, and ought to be abandoned, but won’t be. Parents who object to the exercise are going to find themselves mocked, but many will do so nonetheless. Whether they will be listened to remains to be seen.