Ryan and Medicare

What’s New Today

Story # 1 thru #3 are signs of desperation by the Democrats.  #4 is a link so you can read the Ryan Plan.  #5 asks if the Ryan plan cuts Medicare.  #6 explores how Obamacare cuts Medicare.  #7 explains why Obama and the Democrats are losing the Medicare battle.  #8 takes a look at the Biden factor and #9 asks if Obama can adapt to a new strategy. 

Today’s Thoughts

"the revelation that Biden’s “very good friend” and donor, John Hynansky, received a taxpayer loan to open a business selling foreign luxury cars in a foreign country using foreign labor stands in stark contrast to the Obama-Biden 2012 campaign charges that the Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan campaign stands for breaks for big business and shipping American jobs overseas.

It’s interesting that we have a left wing shooting at the FRC and the coverage by the MSM is mostly silence.  Of course the MSM isn’t biased and if you don’t believe that ask them or the Democratic Party. 

Since World War II, 10 U.S. recessions have been followed by a recovery that lasted at least three years. An Associated Press analysis shows that by just about any measure, the one that began in June 2009 is the weakest.

Lie of the Day

“I don't think you or anybody who's been watching the campaign would say that in any way we have tried to divide the country. We've always tried to bring the country together,” President Obama said in an interview with Entertainment Tonight.

1.  Signs of Desperation—Obama Negative Campaigning

While President Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 promising to rise above petty politics, he’s showing a more down-and-dirty side in his re-election campaign. 

Obama this week tested a joke on the stump alluding to Republican Mitt Romney’s treatment of a family pet, and he declined to back away from a controversial jab at Romney by Vice President Joe Biden. His campaign has refused to condemn an ad by independent pro-Obama super-political action committee that Republicans complained was a low blow. 

The rhetorical warfare has provoked anger from Romney. He accused Obama of running “a campaign of division and anger and hate” that disgraces the presidency. 

“It is a lot different than Obama ’08,” said Dan Schnur, chairman of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California and a former Republican strategist.

Obama’s willingness to wage a more negative campaign reflects “the difference between being a challenger, and an incumbent in a bad economy,” Schnur said. “You have to get some blood on the other guy.” 

The approach is unified. Obama campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt said Romney’s complaint “seemed unhinged.” Campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the president is facing an opponent who has been making assertions about Obama’s record that are “full of bold-faced lies.” …

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-08-17/obama-threads-digs-at-romney-into-campaign-rhetoric

It is my belief that Obama wouldn’t recognize the truth if it sat down next to him and gave him a high five. 

2.  Signs of Desperation—Why the Democrats should be worried

"Hey Paul!" yelled an elderly woman while Ryan was placing his order with the cashier. "Good luck! Kick ass!"

The well-wisher, Erma from Howland, Ohio, told me later that she's not worried that Ryan and Romney would end Medicare. "I don't believe it," she said. "Because Obama has a bigger plan to rob Medicare of $617 billion."

"We better worry about Obamacare before we worry about Ryan," added Erma, a self-described conservative. Erma wasn't the only conservative senior citizen at the Original Hot Dog Shoppe to demonstrate that the party faithful have absorbed the Medicare message being pushed by the Romney-Ryan campaign this week.

"Oh, don't believe none of that stuff," Eleanor Costantino, a senior citizen from Warren, told me when I asked her if she was worried about Romney-Ryan taking away Medicare. "It's all nothing but a bunch of lies!"

"He's going to save Medicare," chimed in Eleanor's friend Karen Combs from Cortland, Ohio. "There's $700 billion under Obamacare coming out of Medicare, and seniors should be more frightened over that."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/senior-citizens-greet-paul-ryan-good-luck-kick-ass_650089.html

If you are a Democrat that is exactly what you don’t want to hear and it’s even worse since these are seniors in Ohio.  The Democrats should be very afraid. 

3.  Signs of Desperation—Obama reaction to Ryan

…"Both campaigns see the Ryan pick as something that makes Wisconsin more competitive. When we visited this week, every Republican we spoke to suggested it would help keep a Republican base already energized by the recent recall election fired up and hungry for more in November." said CNN Chief National Correspondent John King.

"And we saw the impact on the Obama campaign firsthand. Within hours they rewrote their script for calls to voters to add some sharp criticism of Ryan and his Medicare plan. But the way they did it was telling: A couple of lines about how is a nice guy, sure, but then the segue to the attack and a script that included a line saying President Obama was more in tune with working class voters," added King.
According to the CNN/ORC International Survey, which was conducted entirely after Romney added Ryan to the GOP ticket, 49% of registered voters in Wisconsin say they back President Barack Obama, with 45% supporting Romney. The president's four point advantage over the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is within the survey's sampling error.

Two other polls conducted last week, before the Ryan announcement, indicated the president holding a single digit advantage in a state he won by 14 points in the 2008 presidential election…

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/16/cnn-electoral-map-wisconsin-moves-to-true-toss-up/

Watch over the next month and see more states fall into the toss up category.  The Democrats are starting to have to play defense much sooner than they anticipated. 

4.  The Ryan Plan

The Obama Campaign, having no accomplishments on which to run, has been attacking Paul Ryan’s plan for saving the sinking ship that is Medicare. Hoping to scare seniors by using false information, the Obama Campaign has been spreading lies about Ryan’s plan with the hope that if repeated often enough, it will become fact. While Obama has raided Medicare to fund Obamacare, his catastrophe of a healthcare overhaul, he still insists on spreading lies about Ryan’s plan that allows for more choices for seniors. Here, Paul Ryan discusses and explains his plan and why it’s effective. Take a look.

http://dustinstockton.com/2012/08/ryan-explains-his-medicare-plan/

You’re going to hear a lot about this so you might as well get it from the Ryan’s own mouth.  He’ll be a lot more truthful than the Democrats will be. 

5.  Does the Ryan Plan Cut Medicare?
 

Republican vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan moved to explain why the federal budget plan he proposed as House Budget Committee chairman included more than $700 billion in cuts to Medicare Thursday, arguing that he was using President Barack Obama's baseline that already included those cuts when crafting the budget.

Since the Medicare cuts were part of Obama's health care law, Republicans included that projected spending in their proposal, Ryan said. He justified it by pointing out that the House later voted to repeal the health care law, which would have stripped out those cuts, and said that Republicans never proposed them.

"First of all, those are in the baseline, he put those cuts in," Ryan said, referring to Obama. "Second of all, we voted to repeal Obamacare repeatedly, including those cuts. I voted that way before the budget, I voted that way after the budget. So when you repeal all of Obamacare what you end up doing is that repeals that as well."

"In our budget we've restored a lot of that," Ryan continued. "It gets a little wonky but it was already in the baseline. We would never have done it in the first place. We voted to repeal the whole bill. I just don't think the president's going to be able to get out of the fact that he took $716 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare."

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/ryan-explains-why-medicare-cuts-were-house-budget-172943914.html?_esi=1

If you cancel Obamacare the money taken from Medicare goes back to Medicare.  It’s pretty simple.  If Obama wants to cancel Obamacare he could claim the same thing. 

6.  How does Obamacare cut Medicare?

 Presumptive GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan should begin his campaign rallies by blasting Eric Clapton's "Before You Accuse Me (Take a Look at Yourself)." This blues tune perfectly reflects the neurosis of President Barack Obama and his troops. They constantly bellow that Mitt Romney and Ryan lust to cut Medicare. Yet, in fact, it is Team Obama that already has chopped deeply into it.

Obama and his comrades echo each other on this point. Republicans are "weakening the safety net," Obama said Monday. "Romney and Paul Ryan are dead set on slashing seniors' Medicare benefits to pay for more millionaire tax breaks," Democratic strategist Kelly Ward wrote donors on Tuesday. "It's a rigged deal," Obama political guru David Axelrod told MSNBC on Thursday. "The Ryan budget, endorsed by Mitt Romney, would end Medicare," screamed MoveOn.org.

Unfortunately for Democrats, who have sung this song since last year, the truth refuses to harmonize with their vocals. Indeed, PolitiFact.com crowned the left's "Republicans voted to end Medicare" mendacity as "the 2011 Lie of the Year."

The Washington Post caught Democrats with their hands, arms and shoulders in the Medicare cookie jar.

"Romney is right," read last Tuesday's WashingtonPost.com headline. "Obamacare cuts Medicare by $716 billion." Post reporter Sarah Kliff's extensive evidence explains "all the various Medicare cuts Democrats made to pay for the Affordable Care Act" -- aka Obamacare.

For starters, the Congressional Budget Office director, Douglas W. Elmendorf, wrote House Speaker John Boehner on July 24. Elmendorf determined that if Congress repealed Obamacare, "spending for Medicare would increase by an estimated $716 billion over that 2013-2022 period." Conversely, if Obamacare remains law, so will Obama's $716 billion in Medicare cuts.

The Washington Post conveniently itemizes Obama's 10-year decreases in Medicare:

-- The lion's share, some 34.8 percent or $249.2 billion, involves "reductions in how much Medicare reimburses hospitals and private health insurance companies," as Kliff observes. Team Obama lamely argues that these are not Medicare-benefit cuts. Nice try. This is like saying that Washington is not reducing student aid, just limiting tuition payments to colleges and university systems. 

-- Another 30.2 percent of Obama's Medicare reductions, or about $216.2 billion, is gouged out of Medicare Advantage. This highly popular program lets seniors choose among private insurers. But, since Obama knows best, this market-friendlier approach gets catapulted off a cliff.

"These cuts will force seniors to pay $3,700 more for their health care by 2017," according to the Ethics and Public Policy Center's James C. Capretta. "The Medicare trustees project that the cuts will drive some 4 million seniors out of Medicare Advantage plans between 2012 and 2018."…

http://www.scrippsnews.com/content/murdock-democrats-ignore-own-issues-medicare

The reductions in reimbursement to medical providers is cost controls that will result in fewer doctors, hospitals, etc. willing to take Medicare patients.  Right now this reimbursement is on the edge with some doctors and hospitals being unwilling to treat Medicare patients.  This will explode that number and is a very real threat to senior’s health.  Grandma doesn’t get a knee replacement so Suzie can get free birth control. 

7.  Why Obama is losing the Medicare battle

…Anyone who thought that the selection of Paul Ryan would force the president and his team to abandon purely negative campaigning had better think again. The presence of Ryan on the ticket has merely changed the target of Obama’s negative campaign from Mitt Romney’s performance at Bain Capital to Paul Ryan’s plans to make sense of our fiscal condition and preserve Medicare, unchanged for those 55 years old and over, reformed for other Americans. The Obama campaign remains stuck on negative, claiming that Ryan would destroy Medicare and Medicaid “as we know them.” How Obama would preserve these programs “as we know them” remains a deeper secret than his well-publicized cyberattacks on Iran. The simple fact is that existing entitlements, gobbling ever-larger portions of our GDP, cannot survive “as we know them.”

I am reminded of a wonderful scene in an Elaine May movie (A New Leaf) in which Walter Matthau’s attorney is trying to explain to him that he has squandered his entire huge inheritance. To which an uncomprehending Matthau, waving a check that has bounced, replies that his check must be honored, a position he maintains despite his lawyer’s repeated explanation that, having spent more than the income from his inheritance for many years, he has no more capital: “You don’t have any money.”

President Obama certainly cuts a more elegant figure than the late, rumpled Walter Matthau, but he, too, has no money to back his spending plans. Which is why the Democrats are sticking to their negative campaign rather than saying just how they propose to save these entitlements as we know them. Matthau solved his problem by marrying an extraordinarily wealthy heiress; Obama has solved his problem—our problem—by borrowing almost 40 cents to cover every dollar he spends. That can’t go on, and won’t be solved by soaking the rich: Squeeze them dry and he won’t affect the rounding error in his deficits...

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-bankruptcy_650106.html

Medicare has become a great issue for Romney/Ryan and a toxic one for Obama/Biden.  This isn’t the way the Democrats saw it going.  But after hearing for the last 20 years the programs were going broke, the Democrats negative ads seem out of touch with reality.  The seniors today are smarter than what the Democrats want to give them credit for. 

8.  The Biden Factor

You know it’s bad when Sarah Palin says you’re not fit to be vice president.

Palin’s gaffe-prone journey on the 2008 GOP ticket could be a walk in the park compared to what Vice President Joe Biden and the Obama campaign are facing this fall.

Biden’s blunders four years ago, such as imploring a man in a wheelchair to “stand up,” were embarrassing but never really hurt Obama.

But with one horrific reference to slavery, that has all changed now, and the president — not Mitt Romney — is the one with the running-mate problem.

Getting attention is never good for a vice presidential candidate. They’re supposed to be boring. In 1988, Michael Dukakis’ running mate, U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, ran what his aides called the “champagne campaign” because he was done by cocktail hour.

But the party is over for Joe. Barring a complete meltdown, Biden is not going to be replaced with Hillary Clinton. So let’s take a look at what could happen in the coming weeks, assuming the media will not just let “Joe be Joe” and ignore him.

Obama’s handlers will try to clamp down on Biden and make sure he sticks to the script, just like his boss. That would be a mistake. Obama needs a real guy on the ticket, not a teleprompter reader.

“Joe Biden’s appeal is based on his genuineness,” said Boston public relations guru Larry Rasky, a close friend of the vice president. “Any staff person who tries to tell Joe Biden what to do ought to re-examine how they do their job.”…

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view/20220817romney_just_biden_his_time_gaffe-prone_vp_an_obama_liability/srvc=home&position=2

Biden is not a major problem but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a problem.  His gaffes will make news and throughout the campaign he will be compared with Paul Ryan.  He was beaten pretty badly in the VP debate by Sarah Palin and he most likely will be eviscerated by Paul Ryan on October 11.  He will become part of a feeling, a feeling that Obama is not going to win.  

9.  Can Obama adapt to a new race?

Democrats say that President Obama's unconventional strategy for the 2012 election hasn't yet begun the crucial phase: the pivot to positivism.

Obama's theory of the 2012 election was to do what other incumbents have feared to attempt and open the campaign on a sustained negative note. The idea was to destroy Romney's public image and then, with the Republican nominee in tatters, set about the business of restoring some sheen to the president's somewhat tarnished brand.

This is sort of the same thing that Obama did in the White House. Obama came in swinging hard and spent most of his first two years pushing an unpopular new health-insurance entitlement. Then he undertook a "hard pivot" to focus on the economy.

The health law, though, consumed more time and more political capital than Democrats had expected. Even with supermajorities in both houses of Congress, the health law proved to be overwhelming.  

The result was a scorching defeat for Democrats in 2010. Even before the midterms were done, though, Team Obama was promising a renewed focus on economic and employment issues….

…Then began Obama's spring offensive in which he and his team went on a scorched-earth campaign against by-then presumptive Republican nominee Romney. They had been expecting to face Romney all along, but the speed and thoroughness with which Romney captured his party's nomination was surprising.

So Obama rolled out the next phase of his campaign strategy: character attacks on Romney. Even the gentlest political scribes were amazed at how mean Obama was and how early. But many believed that the attacks would work, and nothing succeeds with reporters like success.

And after four months of the negative barrage against Romney, it looked like it was finally paying off. Whatever damage the president had done to his own brand as a healer and uniter, was being more than offset by Romney's crumbling favorability ratings and Romney seemed to be exhausted.

And just at the moment, Romney pulled the Ryan ripcord and changed the trajectory of the race.

A look at the swing state polls starting to trickle in shows that Romney has at worst stopped his deterioration and at best started outpacing the president. Ryan's choice not only enthused the GOP base, but seemingly convinced some independent voters fed up with the status quo that the moderate former governor of Massachusetts was about some big ideas.

Romney has halved Obama's lead in Franklin & Marshall's Pennsylvania poll and is either leading or statistically tied in a slew of other battleground polls. Something good is happening for Romney and it seems directly attributable to Ryan.

But the immutable fact is that Obama did not ruin Romney before the current change took place. The hope with the sustained barrage by Obama was that by this point, the president would have enough of a cushion to switch to a positive closing argument. But here we are in a deadlocked contest and Romney is still kicking.

The three phases of the Obama strategy -- attack, pivot to positivism and then go like hell to get out the vote - are still enact, but the schedule is looking a little iffy…

…And there's this: Having been so negative for so long, Obama's campaign may have poisoned the political atmosphere to the point that the press gives Romney broad latitude in his attacks and voters close their ears to any subsequent entreaties from Obama to see him again as a man who can heal a broken political system.

An interesting parallel for the president: It was the success of Republicans in 2010 that stymied his "hard pivot" to jobs. And it is the apparent success of one House Republican, Ryan, as Romney's running mate that may jeopardize Obama's pivot to positivism.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/08/17/can-obama-adapt-to-new-race/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxnews%2Fpolitics+%28Internal+-+Politics+-+Text%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo#ixzz23odTmA65

This is an interesting look at the Obama campaign and what’s happened so far.  The Medicare issue seems to be not only a dud for the Democrats, but a winner for the Republicans.

Backfired: The Obama Campaign

What’s new Today 

Story #1 relates how in 2008 Obama prophetically described how an incumbent who has a bad record is forced to run for reelection.  #2 tells how Ted Kennedy’s son describes the pay for access set up at the Obama Whitehouse.  #3 is a story regarding the war on women.  #4 demonstrates the contradiction in global warming.  It can’t do what the latest claim is.

Today’s thoughts

It appears that the Obama Campaign strategy is to try to make Americans more concerned with what Romney does with his money, that what Obama does with ours.

Obamacare questions whether the government can order people to participate in commerce.  If the answer is yes, would it be able to order women out of the home into a job?

The Treyvon Martin case has some flaws in it to be a good progressive lesson.  George Zimmerman isn’t white, but Hispanic and he isn’t a Republican but is a registered Democrat. 

1.  Barack Obama: Prophet

"[I]f you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare the voters. If you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from." That is what Barack Obama said when he accepted his party's presidential nomination in 2008. Four years later, it reads like a prophetic description of his re-election campaign.

President Obama's two biggest legislative accomplishments were the passage of his $831 billion economic stimulus package and his $1.8 trillion health care law. How's that working out? Last month's Washington Post-ABC News poll found that a mere 31 percent of Americans believe his "economic program" made things better, compared with 67 percent who said it had "no real effect" or even made conditions worse.

As the Supreme Court weighs whether Obamacare is even constitutionally permissible, support for the law is down to 39 percent, which is even lower than it was at the time of passage, according to an average of surveys compiled by the Huffington Post's Pollster.com. Although Obama promised to cut the deficit in half in his first term, it's now projected to be $1.25 trillion in 2012 -- the fourth straight year it will exceed a trillion dollars. With gas prices rising, unemployment still at a stubbornly high 8.2 percent and economic growth sluggish, Obama cannot win if he runs on his record….

http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/2012/04/examiner-editorial-obama-goes-negative-side-step-his-sorry-record/483421?utm_source=Washington%20Examiner%20Opinion%20Digest%20-%2004/15/2012&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Washington%20Examiner:%20Opinion%20Digest

Running on his record is suicide, but running as a hit man isn’t working too well for him either.  People used to like him a lot more than they do today.

2.  Access for a Price

Access to the Obama White House is in direct correlation to the amount of money donated to the president's reelection effort and the Democratic party, the New York Times reports today.

The Times reports: "those who donated the most to Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party since he started running for president were far more likely to visit the White House than others. Among donors who gave $30,000 or less, about 20 percent visited the White House, according to a New York Times analysis that matched names in the visitor logs with donor records. But among those who donated $100,000 or more, the figure rises to about 75 percent. Approximately two-thirds of the president’s top fund-raisers in the 2008 campaign visited the White House at least once, some of them numerous times."

But the most explosive allegation in the news story comes from former Democratic congressman Patrick Kennedy, son of the late Ted Kenney, who calls what the Obama White House is doing "quid pro quo."

Patrick J. Kennedy, the former representative from Rhode Island, who donated $35,800 to an Obama re-election fund last fall while seeking administration support for a nonprofit venture, said contributions were simply a part of “how this business works.”

“If you want to call it ‘quid pro quo,’ fine,” he said. “At the end of the day, I want to make sure I do my part.”…

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/former-dem-congressman-kennedy-alleges-quid-pro-quo-access-white-house_637051.html

This shouldn’t come as a surprise unless you actually believed that Obama was different.

3.  War against Women

In all my years growing up in the good old Soviet Union, I never met a non-working woman. Let me put it another way: because all citizens were required to work and the government had officially abolished the differences between sexes in the workplace, one hundred percent of women were doing their part in creating paradise. The result was general misery, as usually is the case in going against human nature….

…The risible "War on Women" is not about free contraception. It is about taking away the ability to decide what to do with your life and forcing women into "one-size-fits-all" shackles. I have lived that reality, and it's not pretty.

So I'll take Ann Romney, who "never worked a day in her life," over the overpaid professional loudmouth who led the charge against her. I'll even vote for Mitt if Ann promises to keep him in line.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/war_on_women_count_me_for_the_defense.html#ixzz1sCHhwjp7

I think the “forcing women into “one-size-fits-all” is the important insight in this.  Banning contraception does that as does discounting women who chose to stay home with their children. 

4.  Global Warming and its Own Contradictions

The typical doomsday cult believes that an apocalyptic disaster is imminent. When the disaster fails to arrive, the cult faces a psychological disaster from which it may or may not recover by announcing a new and later date for doom to arrive…

…An iron triangle, in political usage, describes a strong lobbying interest with three mutually supporting components. The iron triangle of interests that promotes government support for global warming consists of big science, environmental organizations, and alternative energy industries.

The advocates of global warming are beginning to have the classic doomsday cult problem. The Earth hasn't been warming for 16 years, and that's starting to get very embarrassing. The first adjustment to the dogma was to stop talking about global warming and start talking about climate change. The latest version of the party line is that we are going to have more extreme weather. The reality is that the weather is not any more variable or extreme than in the past. But with suitable fishing in the data, it is easy to make a case that this or that weather phenomenon has become more extreme.

The scientist Richard Lindzen has pointed out that the extreme weather theme is inconsistent with the global warmers' own theories. The global warmers have long claimed that the poles will warm faster than the tropics. One of their key scary claims is that vast amounts of ice at the poles will melt and raise sea level. So, according to warmer theory, the temperature difference between the poles and the equator will lessen. But it is that very temperature difference that drives weather, particularly extreme weather, when cold fronts from the poles collide with warm fronts emerging from the tropics. So the warmers' claims are fundamentally contradictory. How can weather become more extreme when the driver of extreme weather, the pole-to-equator temperature difference, is supposed to weaken?...

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/04/global_warming_dogma_and_the_new_iron_triangle.html#ixzz1s7NlZeoO

Don’t bother telling this to the believers because they don’t really understand science.  They simply accept the consensus.  Evidently they don’t understand what consensus is either. 

Don't look behind the curtain

What’s new Today 

Story #1 tells of Obama’s campaign strategy.  #2 looks at the Democrats war on stay at home moms.  #3 looks at the question would Reagan have supported Obama’s Buffet Rule?  #4 is Obamacare “fair”?  #5 tells us of George Lucas vs the environmental fanatics.  #6 looks at how the rest of the world looks at oil and how we do. 

Today’s thoughts

Was the indictment of George Zimmerman for the Second Degree Murder of Treyvon Martin a careful judgment of the Special Prosecutor or was it a bone thrown to the angry mob?

It appears Obama is now going after Romney’s wife for staying at home to raise her family, deal with her MS and beat cancer.  So who is really got a war on women going?  And why are leftists so mean spirited? 

Mitt Romney was not my first choice for the Republican nomination, but he is miles ahead in the presidential race. 

The left’s hatred of Fox News isn’t due to bias in their reporting.  It due to them covering issues the left wing media wouldn’t if it weren’t for Fox.  Reporting bias shows up as sins of omission.

1.  Obama’s 2012 Campaign

In 2008, a mostly unknown Barack Obama ran for president on an inclusive agenda of "hope and change." That upbeat message was supposed to translate into millions of green jobs, fiscal sobriety, universal health care, a resetting of Bush foreign policy, and racial unity.

Four years later, none of those promises will be themes of his 2012 re-election campaign. Gas has more than doubled in price. Billions of dollars have been wasted in insider and subsidized wind and solar projects that have produced little green energy.

Unemployment rates above 8 percent appear the new norm, when 5 percent in the past was dubbed a "jobless recovery."

From the Middle East to the Korean peninsula, the world seems on the brink. Modern racial relations are at a new low.

If borrowing $4 trillion in eight years was "unpatriotic," as Obama once labeled George W. Bush, no one quite knows how to term the addition of $5 trillion in new debt in less than four years. ObamaCare is unpopular with the public. Its constitutionality now rests with the Supreme Court.

After four years, the claims of "Bush did it" and "It might have been worse" grow stale. So re-election will rest not on a new agenda, or an explanation of what happened, but on a divide-and-conquer strategy. Translated, that means Obama will find fissures in the voting public over fairness, expand them, and then cobble together various angry partisans in hopes of achieving a bare majority. Such an us/them strategy is not new in American history…

http://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2012/04/12/enemies_of_the_people

It will be nasty, but that only works for a limited time.  Obama is starting already and his charges will begin to seem trite by the conventions and will be recognized as nonsense by the election. 

2.  The Democrat’s woman misstep

…By last Friday, it was already apparent that the only thing stopping Mitt Romney from becoming the GOP presidential nominee were mere formalities, and talk had already begun among Obama's media allies that Ann Romney, the wife of our likely nominee, was going to be a huge asset for the Republican ticket. Attractive, charismatic, warm, well-spoken, intelligent, and likable on sight, she would do much to not only soften her husband's edges but also to help shore up the so-called gender gap.

As we've all seen since President Obama stabbed the Catholic Church in the back a couple of months ago, Obama is cynically plotting a path to re-election through a phony "war on women." Because he can't run on a failed record, the White House and the media are hoping this divisive tactic will scare enough women into voting against Romney.

When that's your sinister plot, a woman like Ann Romney is a serious problem.

So last night on CNN, Hilary Rosen attacked Ms. Romney. But almost immediately afterwards, the Obama campaign assured us Rosen doesn’t speak for them.

Baloney.

Obama might suck as a president but when it comes to campaigning and message discipline, this White House knows what it's doing (it doesn’t hurt to have the MSM carrying your water, either). Speaking of his wife Michelle just a few days prior to Rosen's attack, President Obama launched a little theme that should sound familiar after last night's fireworks:

"And once Michelle and I had our girls, she gave it her all to balance raising a family and pursuing a career--and something that could be very difficult on her, because I was gone a lot….

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/04/12/Obama-Started-Attack-On-Ann-Romney

I’m surprised it took as long as it did for Hilary Rosen to apologize.  It was a stupid mistake and when she doubled down it was even worse. 

3.   Would Reagan have support Obama’s “Buffet Rule?”

The world has gone topsy-turvy when a Democratic president approvingly cites Ronald Reagan on tax policy — and even suggests naming his legislative proposal after the Republican icon, since, as Obama put it, he “traveled across the country pushing for the same concept.”

Obama is talking about the so-called “Buffett Rule,” which seeks to raise the taxes of the super wealthy so they don’t pay less than middle-class Americans…

… YouTube clips of Reagan complaining about corporate executives paying less than secretaries or bus drivers have circulated on the Internet for a while. But are Reagan and Obama really talking about the same thing when they used similar anecdotes? As always, context is important…

… Why did Reagan give those speeches? Contrary to Obama’s suggestion that he was specifically arguing for a new tax provision aimed at the superwealthy, Reagan was barnstorming the country in an effort to reduce taxes for all Americans, mainly by cutting rates, simplifying the tax system and eliminating tax shelters that allowed some people to avoid paying any taxes at all.

In other words, Reagan was pushing for a tax cut for everyone, not just an increase on a few. (The highest tax bracket at the time was 50 percent.) He even wanted to cut the tax rate on capital gains from 20 percent to 17.5 percent…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/president-obama-quoting-reagan-out-of-context/2012/04/11/gIQAaOsZBT_blog.html

 Once again we see that truth and our current  President are strangers to one another. 

4.  Obamacare and Young Adults

…Among the flaws that I identified with this purportedly narrow defense of the mandate is that it is factually inaccurate: Obamacare does not simply make people buy catastrophic coverage that would cover their own unaffordable risks at a price that reflects their actuarial risk; instead, as several of the Justices recognized, it makes them buy comprehensive policies for a wide range of services they don’t need in order to subsidize the law’s other costly requirements, at a price in excess of the actuarial risk that they pose to the system. Rather than being a scheme to insure against the risk posed by younger persons, the Affordable Care Act creates a system of a government-mandated privately-administered redistribution of wealth from the young and healthy to older baby boomers.

An AP reporter, however, recently suggested otherwise, cobbling together several comments from “insurance experts” under the provocative headline “Supreme Court misunderstanding on health overhaul?”  According to the story, whereas the Justices “seemed to be under the impression that the law does not allow most consumers to buy low-cost, stripped-down insurance to satisfy its controversial coverage requirement[,]” “[i]n fact, the law provides for a cheaper ‘bronze’ plan that is broadly similar to today’s so-called catastrophic coverage policies for individuals.”

This story might be used by those desperately seeking a limiting principle for the mandate, but the story’s key factual contention is flatly false. As Chief Justice Roberts and Mike Carvin both correctly pointed out during oral argument, even a “bronze” plan must cover a wide array of costly “essential health benefits”—including contraceptives, maternity and newborn care, counseling, physical therapy, preventive services and pediatric oral and vision care—that drastically exceed the types of unpredictable and unaffordable costs covered by normal catastrophic plans (and which might potentially result in cost-shifting). As the article admits:

The health care law does impose a minimum set of “essential health benefits” for most insurance plans. Those benefits have yet to be specified, but are expected to reflect what a typical small-business plan now offers, with added preventive, mental health and other services.

That is precisely why premiums for bronze plans would cost between $4,500 and $5,000 per year under the Act (as estimated by the CBO), whereas true catastrophic plans are currently available for around $420 per year (as quoted online for a policy that covers a thirty-year-old nonsmoker, doesn’t cover preventative and other non-essential services, and carries a $10,000 deductible)….

http://volokh.com/2012/04/12/the-myth-that-the-individual-mandate-addresses-cost-shifting-by-the-uninsured-part-2-bronze-plans-are-not-the-same-as-catastrophic-coverage/

The reason the mandate is so important is because it is a shift of cost from older bigger users of healthcare to younger nonusers.  And the reason it will balloon costs is that these young people will use the services more because they have to pay for them whether they use them or not.   

5.  Dealing with Fanatics

George Lucas is the newest victim of the green religion to recognize that there is no reasoning with religious fanatics intent on saving the world (and you), no matter what you want. The film maker has been trying to build a new movie making facility in Marin County for 25 years, bending over backward to be a good neighbor, dedicating enormous amounts of money to satisfy every demand.

But the green fanatics would have none of it, and have endlessly stymied the development, which would be invisible from the highway, and would provide many high paying jobs and substantial tax revenue. Just last week, they convinced the Marin Country Board of Supervisors to delay the project once again for even more studies…

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/04/myth-spinning_greenies_alienate_the_greatest_myth-maker_of_our_time.html#ixzz1row1eNPS

The green Luddites strike again.

6.   Obama and energy suicide

Energy Policy: A Chinese oil company is now the world's top producer. While we sleep and watch pump prices rise, China, India and even Cuba seek supplies the world over, including drilling off the Florida coast.

Global demand for oil is rising, as is its global price, as energy-hungry economies such as China, India and Brazil scour the earth for oil they know will be the energy of the present for some time to come.

Even those lacking their own technology are asking others to help them get more. For them, there is no such thing as "peak oil."

The U.S., however, stands alone as the only major country not actively seeking new supplies…

http://news.investors.com/article/607461/201204111839/china-seeks-canadian-cuban-oil.htm

I’m not sure if it is ideology or stupidity that is driving the left in this country when it comes to energy.  Their green initiatives don’t seem to be working very well.