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by jdsmith » 17 Mar 2012, 07:11
Tigerman wrote:US drilling under President Obama: Fact vs. Fiction
I've seen this debate before. I'm surprised that O is still peddling this line.
by jdsmith » 17 Mar 2012, 07:40
Remarks in Denver: "The Past Versus the Future"
January 30, 2008
If you choose change, you will have a nominee who doesn't take a dime from Washington lobbyists and PACs. We don't need a candidate who agrees with Republicans that lobbyists are part of the system in Washington. They're part of the problem. And when I'm President, their days of setting the agenda in Washington will be over.
Read more at the American Presidency Project: Barack Obama: Remarks in Denver: "The Past Versus the Future" http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index ... z1pKFq4VGn
Bill Maher on Thursday night while performing on a comedy special streamed on Yahoo apparently pledged $1 million to the super PAC supporting President Obama.
Priorities USA Action, a super PAC raising unlimited money to aid President Obama's campaign, collected $2 million in February, following Obama's reversal last month of his opposition to outside groups. Half of the money came from television host Bill Maher.
If you choose change, you will have a nominee who doesn't just tell people what they want to hear. Poll-tested positions and calculated answers might be how Washington confronts challenges, but it's not how you overcome them; it's not how you inspire our nation to come together behind a common purpose; and it's not what America needs right now.
Read more at the American Presidency Project: Barack Obama: Remarks in Denver: "The Past Versus the Future" http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index ... z1pKGug4Gk
by Winston Smith » 17 Mar 2012, 09:53
by jdsmith » 17 Mar 2012, 10:46
Winston Smith wrote:It's interesting -- and a bit scary -- seeing educated, intelligent liberal and conservative Americans being sucked into orbit around the reality distortion field of Washington DC and losing all apparent ability to tell the difference between fact and fiction. Once they get spit out of orbit by regime change in Washington DC and they're outsiders looking in they seem to regain their ability to distinguish reality from fantasy with no apparent ill effects, which is good, but they apparently have no memory whatsoever of their own stint inside the reality distortion field.
It's hard to label anyone a liar under those circumstances. Temporary insanity seems to be a more appropriate diagnosis.
by Winston Smith » 17 Mar 2012, 11:03
jdsmith wrote:Winston Smith wrote:It's interesting -- and a bit scary -- seeing educated, intelligent liberal and conservative Americans being sucked into orbit around the reality distortion field of Washington DC and losing all apparent ability to tell the difference between fact and fiction. Once they get spit out of orbit by regime change in Washington DC and they're outsiders looking in they seem to regain their ability to distinguish reality from fantasy with no apparent ill effects, which is good, but they apparently have no memory whatsoever of their own stint inside the reality distortion field.
It's hard to label anyone a liar under those circumstances. Temporary insanity seems to be a more appropriate diagnosis.
I think what you need to do is to focus on the small things, and keep bashing them, a la Cindy Sheehan. I'm fixing to get a t-shirt made up before I go back to NY that reads "Oblahblah" on the back, with that oil lie and refutation below it.
by Deuce Dropper » 17 Mar 2012, 11:06
by jdsmith » 18 Mar 2012, 22:06
LOBBYIST RULES
Pledge: "When you walk into my administration, you will not be able to work on regulations or contracts directly related to your former employer for two years." -- Obama, during a June 22, 2007, speech in Manchester, N.H.
Verdict: Promise Broken. This pledge was broken from the very beginning of Obama's presidency, with the nomination of William Lynn as deputy defense secretary. Lynn was registered until last July as a defense lobbyist for Raytheon Co., where he advocated for a range of military programs. Even though Obama did issue the ethics rules he promised on the campaign trail, he ended up issuing a waiver on Lynn's behalf after senators threatened to hold up the nomination. Lynn was confirmed, and the administration continued to grant waivers for subsequent former lobbyists.
SPENDING
Pledge: "When George Bush came into office, our debt -- national debt was around $5 trillion. It's now over $10 trillion. We've almost doubled it. ... But actually I'm cutting more than I'm spending so that it will be a net spending cut." -- Obama, during an Oct. 7, 2008, debate in Nashville
Verdict: Promise Broken. The federal budget deficit for fiscal 2009 tripled to a record $1.4 trillion, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate out in early October. That's nearly $1 trillion more than the $459 billion deficit recorded in President Bush's last full year. The recession-driven declines in revenue accounted for a large part of Obama's red ink, but so did increases in spending -- on everything from the economic stimulus to Wall Street bailouts (sealed before Obama took office). Though Obama still says he wants to bring the deficit down significantly before the end of his first term, projections show the fiscal 2010 deficit will also exceed $1 trillion. Even if Obama does make major changes to fiscal policy and cut the deficit in half, that's still hundreds of billions of dollars every year to the national debt.
TRANSPARENCY
Pledge: "That's what I will do in bringing all parties together, not negotiating behind closed doors, but bringing all parties together, and broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are." -- Obama, during a Jan. 31, 2008, debate in Los Angeles
Verdict: Promise Broken. While Obama and his congressional allies have given countless briefings and speeches on health care reform, much of the negotiations have taken place behind closed doors. These private meetings have grown more common since the Senate Finance Committee passed its version of the bill in mid-October, becoming the last of five congressional panels to clear the bill. Lawmakers are now trying to hammer out versions that can pass the full House and Senate.
HEALTH INSURANCE MANDATE
Pledge: "If you've got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it. All I'm going to do is help you to lower the premiums on it. You'll still have choice of doctor. There's no mandate involved." -- Obama, during an Oct. 7, 2008, debate in Nashville
Verdict: Promise Broken. All of the health care reform plans before Congress endorse some kind of requirement for people to get health insurance. And during his Sept. 9 address to a joint session of Congress, Obama endorsed the idea as well. "Improving our health care system only works if everybody does their part," the president said. Obama expressed a wholly different point of view during the Democratic primaries, when one of the few policy differences between him and Hillary Clinton was that she supported an individual mandate while he did not. He persistently defended the decision, arguing that the reason people don't have health insurance is because they can't afford it -- not because they don't want it.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/10 ... z1pTazcbEf
It's bad enough that the deficit this year will be $93 billion larger than estimated just two months ago, hitting $1.2 trillion for all of 2012.
What's worse, the nonpartisan CBO says, is if nothing changes, spending will hit 25% of GDP in 2022, a record, pushing federal debt to "unsupportable" levels.
Recall during his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama pledged a "net spending cut" during his first term. That has now become something of a joke.
The CBO estimates government spending will exceed 23% of GDP for the next decade, well above the long-term postwar average, pushing up U.S. debt and deficits for decades to come — the greatest spending surge ever.
As the Heritage Foundation observes, "deficits never fall below $883 billion and would reach $1.45 trillion in 2022. (Public debt) also continues rising, from 73.3% of GDP today to an alarming 93.2% in 2022."
That's just 10 years away, folks. Yet, Congress hasn't passed an actual budget in nearly three years now, and the president's own budget is openly treated by both parties as a joke.
You have probably heard by now the disastrous performance by new White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew on the Sunday morning talk shows last weekend. When it was noted on CNN's State of the Union that the Democrat-controlled Senate has not passed a budget for 1,019 days now, almost three years, in violation of federal law, Lew said, "You can't pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes, and you can't get 60 votes without bipartisan support. So unless Republicans are willing to work with Democrats in the Senate, [Majority Leader] Harry Reid is not going to be able to get a budget passed."
Later that day, on NBC's Meet the Press, Lew repeated in response to the same question, "One of the things about the United States Senate that I think the American people have realized is that it takes 60, not 50, votes to pass something."
The problem is not only that it takes no more than 51 votes to pass a budget resolution under Senate rules. Indeed, it only takes a simple majority of the Senators present. The problem is that Jack Lew has served twice before as Director of OMB, so there is no doubt that he knows this.
by jdsmith » 19 Mar 2012, 13:08
Hi, everybody. As I’m sure you’ve noticed over the past few weeks, the price at your local pump has been going up and up. And because it’s an election year, so has the temperature of our political rhetoric.
For years, traders at financial firms were able to game the energy markets, distort the price of oil, and make big profits for themselves at your expense. And they were able to do all that because of major gaps and loopholes in our regulations. When I took office, we did something about it.
The Wall Street reforms I signed into law are helping bring energy markets out of the shadows and under real oversight. They’re strengthening our ability to go after fraud and to prevent traders from manipulating the market.
What’s more, at a time when big oil companies are making more money than ever before, we’re still giving them $4 billion of your tax dollars in subsidies every year. Your member of Congress should be fighting for you. Not for big financial firms. Not for big oil companies.
In the next few weeks, I expect Congress to vote on ending these subsidies
And when they do
And tell them to be honest with you.
Not when we use more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but still only have 2 percent of the world’s known oil reserves.
Not "proven" reserves, but now it's KNOWN reserves. 
by jdsmith » 20 Mar 2012, 12:43
‘The Road We’ve Traveled:’ A misleading account of Obama’s mother and her insurance dispute
Narrator Tom Hanks: “He knew from experience the cost of waiting [on health care reform].”
President Obama : “When my mom got cancer, she wasn’t a wealthy woman and it pretty much drained all her resources”
Michelle Obama: “She developed ovarian cancer, never really had good, consistent insurance. That’s a tough thing to deal with, watching your mother die of something that could have been prevented. I don’t think he wants to see anyone go through that.”
Hanks: “And he remembered the millions of families like of his who feel the pressure of rising costs and the fear of being denied or dropped from coverage.”
--series of statements with images of Obama and his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, in the Obama campaign film “The Road We’ve Traveled”
The Facts
During the 2008 campaign, Obama frequently suggested his mother had to fight with her health-insurance company for treatment of her cancer because it considered her disease to be a pre-existing condition. In one of the presidential debates with GOP rival 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.”
But then earlier this year, journalist Janny Scott cast serious doubt on this version of events in her excellent biography, “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s mother.” Scott reviewed letters from Dunham to the CIGNA insurance company, and revealed the dispute was over disability coverage, not health insurance coverage (see pages 335-339).
Disability coverage will help replace wages lost to an illness. (Dunham received a base pay of $82,500, plus a housing allowance and a car, to work in Indonesia for Development Alternatives Inc. of Bethesda, according to Scott.) But that is different than health insurance coverage denied because of a pre-existing condition, which was a major part of the president’s health care law.
Scott writes that Dunham, who died in 1995 of uterine and ovarian cancer, had health insurance that “covered most of the costs of her medical treatment…The hospital billed her insurance company directly, leaving Ann to pay only the deductible and any uncovered expenses, which, she said, came to several hundred dollars a month.”
Dunham had filed the disability claim to help pay for those additional expenses. The company denied the claim because her doctor had suspected uterine cancer during an office visit 2 ½ months before Dunham had started the job with Development Alternatives, though Dunham said the doctor had not discussed the possibility with cancer with her. Dunham requested a review from CIGNA, saying she was turning the case over to “my son and attorney Barack Obama.”
When Scott’s book was published, the White House did not dispute her account. “The president has told this story based on his recollection of events that took place more than 15 years ago,” a spokesman said.
Now let’s look at what the movie does with this story. It does not directly repeat the claim that Obama’s mother was denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition, fighting for treatment in her hospital room. But look at what it does say:
1. Hanks says the president knew the cost of waiting on reform. (Though disability coverage was not an issue in the health care debate.)
2. The president says cancer “drained all her resources.” (Health insurance paid for most of her bills, so this is not the case of someone being bankrupted by tens of thousands of dollars in bills. Her salary of $82,500 in 1995 was the equivalent of $123,000 today, but Scott says she had little savings.)
3. Michelle Obama says Dunham “never really had good, consistent insurance.” (It is unclear what she means by this, except maybe that Dunham had different jobs, some of which did not provide insurance. But Dunham had good health coverage when the cancer was discovered.)
4. The first lady also suggests the death “could have been prevented.” (Again, it was not an insurance issue. Before going overseas, Dunham was too busy with work and had skipped an important test recommended by her U.S. doctor, dilation and curettage, that might have spotted the cancer earlier. Then an Indonesian doctor diagnosed her problem as appendicitis and removed her appendix. By the time the cancer was finally discovered, it was third-stage.)
5. Hanks says that Obama’s family felt “the pressure of rising costs and the fear of being denied or dropped from coverage.” (Maybe for disability, but not health insurance.)
In the end, the impression left by the film, especially if you watch it (go to the 8:45 mark), is very similar to Obama’s 2008 campaign rhetoric: His mother was denied health-insurance coverage, draining her resources, and with better coverage she might have lived longer. The film suggests this experience helped inspire the president to keep fighting for the health care law, even in the face of advice from aides that he accept a less-than-satisfactory compromise.
Note that none of the quotes in the film actually use the words “health insurance” or “health insurance coverage.” Instead, the first lady says “insurance” and Hanks says “coverage,” which could just as easily mean disability insurance. But that would not be as evocative—or as motivating.
Asked for a response, the Obama campaign referred us to the previous White House statement on Scott’s book.
by Rotalsnart » 20 Mar 2012, 14:00
jdsmith wrote:Tigerman wrote:US drilling under President Obama: Fact vs. Fiction
I've seen this debate before. I'm surprised that O is still peddling this line.
I wouldn't accept this kind of "misleading" and disingenuously worded, ie lying, from my own son. Why should have to accept it from an elected, sitting President?
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