What’s New Today
Story
# 1 is our signs of desperation Dissent in the Obama campaign. #2 opines that PolitiFact has crossed the
line with the Obama campaign. #3 looks
at the Mediscare tactic the Dems are trying to use on Romney/Ryan. It doesn’t work. #4 Romney’s ahead with registered voters with
Gallup. #5 400 hundred economists have
endorsed BHO including 5 Nobel Prize winners.
#6 explains how Romney has outflanked the Democrats on Medicare.
Today’s
Thoughts
President
Kardashian is what Rush Limbaugh calls Mr. Obama. With his recent snub of the National Media in
favor of People Magazine and Entertainment Tonight, it appears Rush was right.
Leading from Behind:
The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him will be
published on Tuesday. The book alleges
that Obama canceled the strike against
OBL three times before going ahead with the mission at the insistence of
Hillary Clinton.
Here’s a question for the VP debates.
Will the Democrats have the opportunity to rebut what Joe Biden
says?
“In 2006,
President George W. Bush
was wrong when he said we were addicted to oil. The real
truth is, oil, and other
carbon-based fuels, are merely the affordable means by which
we can satisfy our true
addictions – long life, good health, prosperity, technological progress,
adequate food supplies, internet services, freedom of movement, protection from
environmental threats, and so on. As I’ve
said numerous times after living in Africa, – without energy, life is brutal and short.” John
Christy
Lie of the Day
Barack Obama: “Well, first of
all, I am not sure that all of those characterizations that you laid out there
were accurate. For example, nobody
accused Mr. Romney of being a felon.” August 20, 2012
Or, he was "misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people.
If that’s the case, if he was lying to
the American people, that’s a real character and trust issue" July 12,
2012
It seems we have proof that President Obama is lying about this which is “a real character and trust issue.”
1. Signs of Desperation—Dissent
in Obama’s Campaign
President Barack Obama’s campaign team,
celebrated four years ago for its exceptional cohesion and eyes-on-the-prize
strategic focus, has been shadowed this
time by a succession of political disagreements and personal rivalries that
haunted the effort at the outset.
Second-guessing about personnel, strategy and
tactics has been a dominant theme of the reelection effort, according to
numerous current and former Obama advisers who were interviewed for “Obama’s Last Stand,” an e-book
out Monday published in a collaboration between POLITICO and Random House.
The discord, these sources said, has on occasion flowed from Obama himself, who at repeated turns has made vocal his dissatisfaction with decisions made by his campaign team, with its messaging, with Vice President Joe Biden and with what Obama feared was clumsy coordination between his West Wing and reelection headquarters in Chicago.
The effort
in Chicago, meanwhile, has been bedeviled by some of the drama Obama so deftly
dodged in 2008 — including, at a critical point earlier this year, a spat that
left senior operatives David Axelrod and Stephanie Cutter barely on speaking
terms — and growing doubts about the
effectiveness of Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz….
… Biden’s
misstep, also in May, in announcing his approval of gay marriage — which forced
Obama to do the same before he intended — caused greater disharmony in the White House than was reported at the
time….
… Obama
really doesn’t like, admire or even grudgingly respect Romney. It’s a level
of contempt, say aides, he doesn’t even feel for the conservative, combative
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the Hill Republican he disliked the most.
“There was a baseline of respect for John McCain. The president always thought
he was an honorable man and a war hero,” a longtime Obama adviser said. “That
doesn’t hold true for Romney. He was no goddamned war hero.”…
I think Obama’s disgust with
Romney is because Romney will probably take his job away from him. And Obama is convinced what he did is right
and Romney will get credit for improving the economy.
2. Has PolitiFact become part of the
Obama Campaign?
Recently, the fact-checking organizations
PolitiFact.com and FactCheck.org failed to properly analyze an ad by President
Obama claiming that Mitt Romney pays a lower tax rate than the average
American. Just Facts President Jim
Agresti and I subsequently hammered both organizations for what appears to be a
severe case of intellectual dishonesty.
Unfortunately, this is an increasingly common problem at PolitiFact. Conservatives
rightly point to a liberal bent at Fact Check, but the organization is pretty
solid at analyzing what’s going on with claims by members of both major
political parties. On the other hand, with the arrival of the general election
and the otherwise politically-quiet month of August, PolitiFact seems to have
gone from being a respectable, if liberal-leaning, organization to a campaign
slot for Obama.
This Obama bias was shown in a recent claim by
PolitiFact Wisconsin (PFW) that a Tweet by Obama national co-chair and actress
Eva Longoria about Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is “half-true.” From the Tweet:
“Today Mitt Romney picked Paul
Ryan, who wants to cut Pell Grant scholarships for nearly 10 million students!”
Again, PFW ranks this claim as “half-true.” Their primary evidence? An unsubstantiated
claim by President Obama in April 2012:
Fortunately, our colleagues at PolitiFact
National evaluated a similar statement made by Obama himself in April 2012, a
few days after the GOP-controlled House approved Ryan’s budget resolution. (The
plan didn’t pass in the Democratic-controlled Senate.)
Obama said that if spending reductions in the resolution
“were to be spread out evenly,” nearly 10 million college students would see
their financial aid cut by an average of more than $1,000 each. The White
House told our colleagues the president was referring to the Pell Grant
program.
So, Ryan’s
plan does not specify cuts to Pell Grants. Obama is simply applying the total
spending cuts in the plan evenly across the overall budget to derive a Pell
Grant number.
This alone should make PolitiFact’s claim
laughable. However, following a link from the PFW analysis to the Department of
Education’s website, one sees the Department has requested Pell Grants whose
cost will total $36.629 billion – meaning that in a budget proposal that spends
nearly one hundred times what the Department has requested, PolitiFact is
making big assumptions. And while the liberal Center for Budget & Policy
Priorities (CBPP) makes the claim that Pell Grants would take $166 billion in
“cuts” over ten years if the Ryan/House budget were to be made, those “cuts”
are assumed from the language of the budget proposal, not directly stated by
the budget proposal.
Democrats don’t do well with math. They keep telling us that the Republicans want
to cut the taxes of the rich. The Bush “tax
cuts” cut taxes for everyone as demonstrated by the fact that raising the taxes
on the rich would only “restore” 25% of the tax cuts revenue.
3. Mediscare: The $6400 lie
One of President Obama's regular attacks on Paul Ryan's
Medicare reform is that it would force seniors to pay $6,400 a year more for
health care. But merely because he keeps
repeating this doesn't mean it's in the same area code of accurate.
The claim is based on a now out-of-date Congressional Budget
Office estimate of the gap between the cost of
health care a decade from now, in 2022, and the size of the House budget's
premium-support subsidy for a typical 65-year-old in 2022.
In other words,
the $6,400 has no relevance for any senior today. None. But it also is unlikely to have any
relevance for any senior ever because CBO
concedes that its number is highly uncertain and "will depend on the
evolution of the health care and health insurance systems over time, which
is hard to predict." That's for sure.
The more fundamental problem is that the CBO analysis has
nothing to do with the current Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan plan. Nada.
Over the last year Mr. Ryan has made major adjustments to his original proposal
as he sought a compromise with Democrats. In its most up-to-date analysis, CBO
admits that it "does not have the capability at this time to estimate such
effects" in the new version. That is, it does not have the tools to make
its $6,400 exaggeration again.
The reason CBO can't model the 2013
House budget and the Romney-Ryan plan is that they harness markets with
competitive bidding. Congress's budget gnomes can't handle these dynamic
forces.
So how would Ryan 2.0 work in
practice? Traditional Medicare and all
private insurers in a region would make bids to cover seniors and compete for
their business by offering the best value and prices. Then the government would give everyone a
subsidy equal to the second-lowest bid.
If seniors chose that No. 2 option, whether it was Medicare
or another plan, they'd break even
and pay nothing extra out of pocket. If they picked the cheapest plan, they'd
keep whatever was left over after the government subsidy—that is, they'd get a cash refund. If they
instead picked the third-cheapest option, the fourth-cheapest, etc., they'd pay
the difference above the government subsidy.
That structure ensures that seniors
would have at least two choices
(and likely far more) that they are guaranteed to do better than they do now. The amount of the premium-support subsidy
would also be tied to underlying health-care costs, so it would not shift costs
to beneficiaries, as Democrats also falsely claim….
There are lies, damn lies, and the Democrat’s talking
points.
4. Gallup: Romney 47%
Obama 45%
These
are the results when registered
voters are asked: "Suppose the presidential election were held today. If Barack Obama were the Democratic Party's
candidate and Mitt Romney were the Republican Party's candidate, who would you
vote for Barack Obama, the Democrat or Mitt Romney, the Republican?"
Those who are undecided are further asked if they lean more toward Obama or
Romney and their leanings are incorporated into the results. Each seven-day
rolling average is based on telephone interviews with approximately 3,050
registered voters; Margin of error is ±2 percentage points. Results from April
15 through May 6 are based on five-day rolling averages with approximately
2,200 registered voters each; Margin of error is ±3 percentage points.
What’s important here is that this is among registered
voters, not likely voters. Likely voters
give Republicans a bigger share of the vote.
5. Economist endorse Romney’s
economic plan
Over 400 independent economists signed a statement at the
website Economists for Romney in support of what they call the Republican
presidential candidate's "bold economic plan for America."
Five Nobel laureates (Gary
Becker, Robert Lucas, Robert Mundell, Edward Prescott, and Myron Scholes)
signed the statement
which, in part, reads, “We
enthusiastically endorse Governor Mitt Romney’s economic plan to create
jobs and restore economic growth while returning America to its tradition of
economic freedom.”
The
economists also denounced Obama's economic ideas, claiming they led to an
"an anemic economic recovery and high unemployment." They further
assert, "his future plans are to double down on the failed policies, which
will only prolong slow growth and high unemployment."
The economists write that
Romney's plan is based on sound principles: "more contained and less
intrusive federal government, a greater reliance on the private sector, a broad
expansion of opportunity without government favors for special interests, and
respect for the rule of law including the decision-making authority of states
and localities."
These economists note that Romney would:
Reduce marginal tax rates on
business and wage incomes and broaden the tax base to increase investment,
jobs, and living standards.
End the exploding federal debt by controlling the growth of spending so federal spending does not exceed 20 percent of the economy.
Restructure regulation to end “too big to fail,” improve credit availability to entrepreneurs and small businesses, and increase regulatory accountability, and ensure that all regulations pass rigorous benefit-cost tests.
Improve our Social Security and Medicare programs by reducing their growth to sustainable levels, ensuring their viability over the long term, and protecting those in or near retirement.
Reform our healthcare system to harness market forces and thereby reduce costs and increase quality, empowering patients and doctors, rather than the federal bureaucracy.
Promote energy policies that increase domestic production, enlarge the use of all western hemisphere resources, encourage the use of new technologies, end wasteful subsidies, and rely more on market forces and less on government planners.
End the exploding federal debt by controlling the growth of spending so federal spending does not exceed 20 percent of the economy.
Restructure regulation to end “too big to fail,” improve credit availability to entrepreneurs and small businesses, and increase regulatory accountability, and ensure that all regulations pass rigorous benefit-cost tests.
Improve our Social Security and Medicare programs by reducing their growth to sustainable levels, ensuring their viability over the long term, and protecting those in or near retirement.
Reform our healthcare system to harness market forces and thereby reduce costs and increase quality, empowering patients and doctors, rather than the federal bureaucracy.
Promote energy policies that increase domestic production, enlarge the use of all western hemisphere resources, encourage the use of new technologies, end wasteful subsidies, and rely more on market forces and less on government planners.
In "stark contrast,"
Obama, according to the economists, "has failed to advance policies that
promote economic and job growth, focusing instead on increasing the size and
scope of the federal government, which increases the debt, requires large tax
increases, and
burdens business with many new financial and health care regulations."
I’m sure there are liberal economists (Paul Krugman comes to
mind) who would say the opposite. But if
you look at the results that Obama has achieved, you have to go with this
group.
6. Romney outflanks the Democrats
Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan was supposed to be a
problem for the Republicans. So said
a chorus of chortling Democrats. So said a gaggle of anonymous seasoned
Republican operatives. All of which was echoed gleefully by mainstream media.
The problem, these purveyors of the
conventional wisdom all said, was Medicare -- to be more specific, the future
changes in Medicare set out in the budget resolutions Ryan fashioned as House
Budget Committee chairman and persuaded almost all House and Senate Republicans
to vote for.
But while Democrats licked their chops at the prospect of scaring old
ladies that they'd be sent downhill in wheelchairs, the Medicare issue seems to
be working in the other direction.
Romney and Ryan have gone on the
offense, noting that while their plan calls for no changes for current Medicare
recipients and those over 55, Obamacare,
saved from demolition by Chief Justice John Roberts, cuts $716 billion from the
politically popular Medicare to pay for Obama's politically unpopular health
care law.
The Romney campaign is putting TV
advertising money behind this message, and it will have plenty more to spend --
quite possibly more than the Obama forces -- once the Romney-Ryan ticket is
officially nominated in Tampa, Fla., in 10 days. Team Obama is visibly
squirming.
It turns out that Ryan and Romney,
who in late 2011 and early 2012 moved quietly but deliberately toward embracing
the Ryan agenda, may have outthought their adversaries.
Those last-minute Mediscare-type mailings to seniors, which
enabled Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles to narrowly defeat Jeb Bush in the 1994
Florida governor race, don't work so well anymore when the issue is brought out
fully in the light of day.
But Medicare/Mediscare is not the
only thing on which the Democrats have underestimated Ryan and the putative
presidential nominee who selected him from the high-quality field of potential
VP nominees from which he made his pick…
I think taking this arrow out of the Democratic quiver,
leaves them with a huge problem. The
economy stinks, the deficit has doubled under Obama and the Democrats, the debt
is through the roof, and now they don’t even have Medicare to scare grandma
with. What’s a liberal to do?
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