The big pharmaceutical companies thought they had bought some form of peace with a “secret” White House deal that limited their exposure to the new health care “reform” by paying off the Obama administration (and that is exactly what it is, a payoff). Lo and behold, the White House is reneging on the deal – leaving the big drug companies twisting in the wind.
U.S. drugmakers may have trouble enforcing a bargain the industry struck with President Barack Obama to absorb no more than $80 billion in cost cuts as part of a health-care overhaul, congressional Democrats said.
Lawmakers, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, have said Congress isn’t bound by agreements the Obama administration negotiated with six groups that pledged to help cut $2 trillion from medical spending over 10 years.
“Their agreements don’t bind me whatsoever,” Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa said yesterday, just hours after Senate Democrats questioned top White House aides about the agreement with Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the Washington-based industry trade group known as PhRMA. “We can do what we want.”
Yesterday, it was congressional Democrats feeling screwed. Today it is the Pharma lobbyists who thought they had a deal.
You will need a scorecard to figure out who is currently being screwed by the administration. Or you can use the short form and figure out that it will be everyone that gets it from the bunch in the White House.
That’s easier and easier to see.
Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal:
We have entered uncharted territory in the fight over national health care. There’s a new tone in the debate, and it’s ugly. At the moment the Democrats are looking like something they haven’t looked like in years, and that is: desperate.
They must know at this point they should not have pushed a national health-care plan. A Democratic operative the other day called it “Hillary’s revenge.” When Mrs. Clinton started losing to Barack Obama in the primaries 18 months ago, she began to give new and sharper emphasis to her health-care plan. Mr. Obama responded by talking about his health-care vision. He won. Now he would push what he had been forced to highlight: Health care would be a priority initiative. The net result is falling support for his leadership on the issue, falling personal polls, and the angry town-hall meetings that have electrified YouTube.
In his first five months in office, Mr. Obama had racked up big wins-the stimulus, children’s health insurance, House approval of cap-and-trade. But he stayed too long at the hot table. All the Democrats in Washington did. They overinterpreted the meaning of the 2008 election, and didn’t fully take into account how the great recession changed the national mood and atmosphere.
Please read the entire piece. I think Noonan has captured more than one truth in her column this week. I do see outright panic in the eyes of Democrats as captured in the YouTube videos of their events. I do see massive flailing. I see thuggery egged on by those who are fearful of what they have unleashed.
This is not going according to the scripts the Democrats all built in their heads while wallowing in the echo chambers. They are, as a result, beginning to lash out, calling names and demonizing just plain people who dared to stand up and push back. Releasing hired goons to assault those people.
Noonan wrote this before the goons were unleashed. I wonder how she would revise her column in light of that fact.
Time to point this out. Past time, really. White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina on Thursday reportedly made this statement:
“If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard….”
And lo and behold, on Thursday evening hired SEIU goons did just that.
This is flat-out incitement to riot by a White House official. This is not flowery rhetoric, this is a call to violence.
Messina should be very publicly fired for this. The Democrats right now – especially the White House inhabitants – are beginning to feel the real heat of real opposition to their agenda. This is not the drummed up astroturf they are used to dealing with on their side of any issue. This is real opposition by average people.
They have no idea how to handle it other than to try to crush it by violent means.
Is this the change you hoped for, Obama voters? Calls to outright thuggery by the White House itself?
Fire Messina. Right now. Call off your goons. Right now. This is enough. Time to act presidential and not like a permanent candidate, Mr. Obama. Time to pull back before it is too much for you to contain.
Dial it back right now.
Congratulations, Democrats. You actually just succeeded in making things even worse for yourselves. By bringing in your hired union goons to assault peaceful, if loud, protesters against your health care “reform” you will only achieve a backlash.
SEIU is sending its goons into these town halls now and suddenly violence erupts. There has been no hint of violence prior to the unions showing up.
Stay classy, Democrats. It will be a very, very short time before you have to look for honest work.
You have to love the sign one of the women in this post filled with photos from the event is holding. It reads “Good move, Pelosi. Make us madder.”
Get those video cameras out, tape everything and press charges against the thugs. Remain peaceful, continue the pressure and do not yield to the goons. Make this stop now. And make sure the Democrats get the message that union thugs will not save their miserable hides at the next election.
Push back, people. Do not let these people rule you.
Obamantics | Gaius August 7, 2009 | 
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