“That Is Just An Extraordinary Lie”

Barack Obama today on a telephone lecture (it was not a teleconference):

Obama urged the listeners to reject misinformation about his plans, noting, “There are some folks out there who are, frankly, bearing false witness.”

He referred to some assertions as “ludicrous,” and cited as an example rumors that the government is planning to set up “death panels” to determine the fate of the nation’s elderly.

“That is just an extraordinary lie,” he said, adding that it was based on a provision in the House legislation that would allow Medicare to reimburse someone who voluntarily sought counseling on how to set up a living will for the end of life.

“It gives an option that people who can afford fancy lawyers already experience,” the Harvard-trained lawyer said.

Yes, that is an extraordinary lie:

It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.
—President Barack Obama in a New York Times interview on how costly medical decisions should be made.

And: 

President Obama suggested at a town hall event Wednesday night that one way to shave medical costs is to stop expensive and ultimately futile procedures performed on people who are about to die and don’t stand to gain from the extra care.

In a nationally televised event at the White House, Obama said families need better information so they don’t unthinkingly approve “additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care.”

He added: “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.”

Only it is not the ones pointing Obama’s own words out who are conflating unrelated things together – or lying. 

It’s extraordinary, alright. Nice that he admitted it.

O-Blame-a’s Greatest Hits

It pretty much reads as a recap of things I have posted about here at the Crabitat, so I won’t excerpt it at all. But if you’re bored (or have a really good memory), you can match up Caroline Baum’s list of Barack O-Blame-a’s greatest hits with Blue Crab Boulevard’s various and sundry postings. I think the only one she missed is the new (doubtlessly Axelrod-coordinated) effort to paint ObamaCare protesters as LaRouche supporters. (Even though he belongs to the Democrats, not the right.) But, of course, that’s a brand new slime of attack from the left.

And Bingo

The new highly coordinated smear job from the left will be that if you protest against ObamaCare, you are a LaRouche supporter. This is exactly what I suspected.

No sale, folks. He’s yours.

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, Jr. (born September 8, 1922) is an American self-styled economist,[1] political activist, and the founder of several political organizations, known collectively as the LaRouche movement. He has been a perennial candidate for President of the United States, having run in eight elections since 1976, once as a U.S. Labor Party candidate and seven times as a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination.

He’s all yours. The good people pushing back against ObamaCare are not part of this guy’s team – but a lot of the left’s members advocate for exactly what this guy stands for – socialist medicine.

Don’t try to give him to us, you keep him.

An Unattractive Look For Facebook

Facebook – whether they like it or not – is now the host for a group thuggishly trying to silence Whole Foods CEO John Mackey.

The Facebook group is urging a boycott of Whole Foods stores until Mackey issues a full apology. The group says Mackey’s op-ed is “suggesting that health care is a commodity that only the rich, like him, deserve.”

The group says its mission is to let Whole Foods know that customers’ money will “no longer go to support Whole Foods’ anti-union, anti-health insurance reform, right-wing activities.”

Brown isn’t a good color, at least in shirts. As the previous post noted, attempts at silencing of critics is now a regular activity on the left, both in Washington and outside of it. They can’t argue with Mackey’s points, they have to shut him up.

Mackey is about as far from right wing as can be found in corporate America, yet he is this group’s chosen target. Do you really want people such as these or the policies they back deciding what you may or may not have?

If I had a Whole Foods near me (I do not) I’d go over and buy some things I didn’t really need, just to make a statement.

The Thugs Of August

Talk about naked intimidation.

House Democrats are probing the nation’s largest insurance companies for lavish spending, demanding reams of compensation data and schedules of retreats and conferences.

Letters sent to 52 insurance companies by Democratic leaders demand extensive documents for an examination of ‘extensive compensation and other business practices in the health insurance industry.” The letters set a deadline of Sept. 14 for the documents.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, signed the three-page letter dated Monday.

I rather doubt that Waxman has the authority to demand such documentation or he would have issued subpoenas rather than letters. Just a guess. Regardless, his goal is rather obvious – he’s strong arming companies into rolling over and going silent if they oppose his schemes.

Do you really want people like these deciding on what health care you are going to be allowed to have? This kind of vindictiveness is not what I want in a health care plan.

Want A New iGrenade?

The latest thing in gadgets, the iGrenade:

Apple iPhone 3GS smartphones have reportedly been exploding around Europe, in what Apple is calling isolated incidents. According to some news outlets, in at least one case Apple has offered to reimburse an owner, with the agreement that the terms and existence of the settlement were to remain confidential.

Gee, and we thought Microsoft’s Autocrash feature was annoying. This could ruin your whole day if you had it in your pocket.

WaPo Plays It Sort Of Straight

The Washington Post:

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was greeted with shouts and boos at a town hall meeting on health care at a senior center in Dartmouth, Mass., Tuesday night, an event that was targeted by supporters of perennial independent political candidate Lyndon LaRouche. But the combative House Financial Services Committee chairman met fire with fire.

“On what planet do you spend most of your time?” Frank retorted when a woman in the crowd compared President Obama’s push for health-care reform to the policies of Nazi Germany while holding up a pamphlet depicting the president with a Hitler mustache, a LaRouche anti-Obama health reform campaign image.

Let’s say, almost straight. Because what LaRouche has done – over and over and over again – is to campaign for the Democratic nomination. Seven times, in fact.

What he is not is right wing and his supporters are, in fact, attacking from the left. They want socialized medicine.

At least the WaPo painted them as LaRouche supporters and not crazed Republicans.

However, they are  also now trying to paint these guys as the main organizers of the protests at town halls, so they lose all the good points they made.

Because it is not LaRouche supporters who have been showing up in large numbers. They are just very loud and appear to be very active in Frank’s district. (Can’t find the link right now, but I read something about that earlier today.)

Clunker Program In Need Of A Bailout

No, not more money. Just releasing the money already owed to dealers. About half of the dealers in metro New York City have abruptly withdrawn from the Cash for Clunkers program – because the government hasn’t paid them for the deals they have already made.

The Greater New York Automobile Dealers Association, which represents dealerships in the New York metro area, said about half its 425 members have left the program because they cannot afford to offer more rebates. They’re also worried about getting repaid…

…Schienberg said the group’s dealers have been repaid for only about 2 percent of the clunkers deals they’ve made so far.

I have already posted about the problems dealers have had getting paid. Those dealers, from Wisconsin, said that this was a nationwide problem. The news from New York confirms that.

Once again, this is a relatively paltry $3 billion program (sure, I’d love to have that kind of “paltry” money). Yet the Feds cannot even move that cash effectively – whereas the private dealers were nimble enough to start doing deals right away.

That should tell you all you need to know about government efficiency.

Obama issued an urgent call for more funding for the C4C program. The original authorization is not even yet spent.

That should tell you all you need to know about current Washington honesty.

Now do a little thought experiment and figure how slow the government would process your claims or authorize your needed procedure if they were in charge of health care. Think hard, the clock is ticking. Your appendix just burst and you need care now. The Department of ObamaCare is processing your request at full bureaucratic speed…..

Tick, tock……

Which is the real clunker here?

Proof Positive

Not of global warming. No, something completely different.

Clams fart.

The Flotsam In The Sewer

Jonah Goldberg:

Lashing out at the town hall protesters, playing the race card, whining about angry white men and whispering ominously about right-wing militias is almost always a sign of liberalism’s weakness — a failure of the imagination.

The left, broadly speaking, has been attacking conservative talk radio and all it allegedly represents for the better part of 20 years now. When Bill Clinton needed a convenient villain, he attacked Rush Limbaugh. When Bush emerged victorious from the Florida recount, liberals concluded that what they really needed was their own version of Limbaugh. Last March, at the first sign of resistance from congressional Republicans, Obama immediately complained that the GOP was Limbaugh’s lap dog, and both the White House and much of the press corps went into anti-Limbaugh campaign mode.

It’s funny how these supposed champions of the Enlightenment can’t grasp that people can disagree with them for honest reasons. Instead, we simply must be Limbaugh’s automatons, which is to say racist, fascist thugs.

In addition to the slander, such complaints are monumentally, incandescently lame coming from a party that controls Washington. Indeed, according to liberals themselves, these evil-mongers are a tiny minority, a bunch of “Astro Turf” frauds. So why not ignore them and get on with the work you were elected to do?

Well, because they can’t — or won’t.

One of the reasons the term “Obama-care” has become a journalistic convention is that there is no bill. You can’t talk about Obama’s actual healthcare plan because there isn’t one. There are a bunch of competing bills, proposals, ideas swirling around the halls of Congress like flotsam in a sewer. As even Robert Reich, Clinton’s Labor secretary, recently conceded, the failure to put forward a concrete proposal allows opponents to pick from a menu of scary ideas and possibilities, all of which can be labeled Obama-care.

Please read the whole thing. It is devastating. Support for ObamaCare is genuinely eroding among voters the Democrats need desperately to stay in power. The independents are turning away in droves with some 2/3 now opposing the schemes.

That is why (as I have pointed out again and again) the Democrats are pulling out all the stops to demonize, denigrate, dismiss or destroy anyone who speaks out against the plan(s). That is why the left and the media are deliberately conflating unrelated items in an effort to “prove” the critics are wrong.  

 Obama has stated he wants a panel to decide who gets the hip or who gets the pills. Obama himself has stated he wants to cut funds (or produce “savings”) from Medicare and Medicaid to fund the new ObamaCare edifice to be built in his image. Obama has himself stated in the past that his ultimate goal is single-payer (socialized) health care.

These are not inventions of Obama’s critics. The attacks and misdirection are being used to distract people from those ugly truths bobbing around down there beneath the surface in the sewer that is Washington.

The Ugly Truth About Rationing

John Stossel:

But even if some conservative Republican critics are wrong about Section 1233, there is good reason to worry about Obama’s nationalization scheme.

The reason can be found in Econ 101. Medical care doesn’t grow on trees. It must be produced by human and physical capital, and those resources are limited. Therefore, if demand for health care services increases — which is Obama’s point in extending health insurance — prices must go up. But somehow Obama also promises, “I won’t sign a bill that doesn’t reduce health care inflation”.

This is magical thinking. Obama, talented as he is, can’t repeal the laws of supply and demand. Costs are real. If they are incurred, someone has to pay them. But as economist Thomas Sowell points out, politicians can control costs — by refusing to pay for the services.

It’s called rationing.

Advocates of nationalization hate that word because it forces them to face an ugly truth. If government pays for more people’s health care and wants to control costs, it must limit what we buy.

So much for Obama’s promise not to interfere with our freedom of choice.

The media and the left (redundant) have focused the discussion of “death panels” on end of life counseling. That is not and nave has been the real problem. The real problem is the panels – already funded under the “stimulus” plan (they got that in before even starting the health care bills) that will decide what treatments will be allowed for certain people.

In other words, it is not getting unplugged one has to fear right now. It is getting plugged in in the first place.

The media and the left have conflated the end of life counseling with the criticism of this panel which will decide who gets the hip and who gets the pills. These are Obama’s own sentiments. He has expressed them repeatedly. He has called for rationing himself, while not calling it that.

As Stossel points out, there is no other way for them to control costs. The CBO has shot down every other scheme that was supposed to save gobs of money. Withholding services, imposing long waits on services (in hopes you’ll die first or heal by yourself - it makes no difference to them which) and bureaucratic red tape to slow demand are all they can do to control costs.

One other point Stossel makes that should chill you. Right now, the doctor works for you. Under ObamaCare, the doctor answers to the state.

Feeling hopeful?