Here’s the set up for the latest spark in the prarie fire. Two weeks ago, all of Washington was in high dudgeon over a photoshopped fax depicting Obama as the Joker that was making the rounds. The picture was captioned by the word “SOCIALISM” and contained a letter threatening “Death to All Marxists! Foreign and Domestic!” Liberals demanded a manhunt for the cyber-artist responsible for the offensive parody (and then remained largely quiet when the perpetrator was revealed to be a diehard leftist).
Unless you’ve been living on a remote island off the coast of Cuba for the past six months, the health care debate has saturated one (or many) aspects of your daily life. Whether you’ve taken your pitchfork to an Arlen Specter & Friends tea time, had your Sunday night television inundated with over-dramatized pictures of ambulances, heard the radio DJ attempt to explain “public option,” or have simply been spammed by David Axelrod (doesn’t that paint a terrible visual), chances are you’ve been exposed to dialogue as fiery as that of an Eagles’ fan at a Michael Vick press conference.
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The crowds of town hall protesters shouting down congressmen and expressing fury at their government has dominated the media cycle this month. MSNBC even interrupted its hard hitting investigative coverage of Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon to discuss the grass roots phenomenon. Both political parties have tried to play the protests to their own advantage. Democrats ran an ad casting the crowds as right-wing mobs hell-bent on destroying Obama’s presidency while Republicans have been crowing about a rebirth of grass roots energy for their party. Many in the GOP have even started contemplating the uncontemplatable: victory in 2010.
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Our own Ryan J. Reilly, former Tower editor, contributed to this Bloomberg story which has been making a splash throughout the day. I think we can all agree that 3,300 lobbyists working on health care is far too many.
Six Lobbyists Per Lawmaker Work on Health Overhaul
By Jonathan D. Salant and Lizzie O’Leary
Aug. 14 (Bloomberg) — If there is any doubt that President Barack Obama’s plan to overhaul U.S. health care is the hottest topic in Congress, just ask the 3,300 lobbyists who have lined up to work on the issue.
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My eyes started to glaze over after the first two and a half hours of Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on health care last night. The last thing I remember hearing was, “When you think of getting $237,000 in campaign contributions from nursing homes, Senator Baucus, do you ever think about whether they subtract that amount of money evenly from all the patients suffering and dying in the lousy ones or just a few of the lousy ones?” I’m not entirely sure what that means, but apparently this generation’s Edward R. Murrow is finally letting those nursing home bastards have it. Give ‘em hell, Keith!
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The liberal intelligentsia used to sneer at George W. Bush because he didn’t read newspapers. I’m starting to wonder if the same criticism should be applied to Barack Obama.
As Obama revs up for a barnstorming national road trip to convince us that health insurance companies are comprised exclusively of blackhearted sociopaths, a constant refrain from the president has been that Congress needs to act now because ”the American people want this.” This may have been true shortly after the election. The public, blind with fury at Wall Street, collectively turned to the government and asked for serious economic help. Support for statist health care was, unfortunately, very high.
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Barack Obama may want to take note of the fact that his approval rating fell to 48 percent today according to a Zogby poll. If a Massachusetts union is blind with rage at a Democrat a mere eight months into his presidency, it may be time to yank him from the TV circuit for a little while. The uber-charismatic Kennedy-esque Messiah is his own worst enemy. Who’d have guessed it?
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The Grey Lady published the definitive article on the death of George Tiller and the controversy surrounding his work on Friday. I have yet to obtain an actual hard copy of the Times, but given the sheer length of the piece, one imagines it spilling into the sports section. The research done by journalist David Barstow is exhaustive and he deserves enormous credit for his legwork. Despite having been published in what credentialed reporters continue to insist is the Newspaper of Record, the article has a visceral pro-Tiller bias (it boggles the imagination, I know). But if you can get beyond Barstow’s mild disdain for pro-lifers and nagging urge to canonize the departed, the piece is an open window into the mysterious life of Dr. George Tiller, one of the most despised, controversial men in America until his life was ended by an assassin’s bullet.
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John Yoo is the Sherlock Holmes of government lawyers. While other U.S. attorneys were telling the Bush administration that the Constitution guarded against things like “illegal searches and seizures” and “cruel and unusual punishment”, Yoo was hard at work combing through the Constitution with a magnifying glass, perhaps from his den with a large pipe in his mouth, uncovering presidential powers that no other legal scholar in U.S. history had managed to find. Among Yoo’s flabbergasting deductions about the Constitution: the Fourth Amendment doesn’t prevent warrantless wiretaps and the Eighth Amendment doesn’t prevent torture. When the Cheney-Rumsfeld ideological wing of the Bush administration needed a legal justification for something egregious, Yoo was their go-to man at the White House Office of Legal Council. His constitutional theory revolves around the idea that the president must protect the nation during wartime and therefore may justify nearly anything, Constitution or no Constitution.
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Barack Obama’s toxic health care plan would place about 15 percent of the American economy under the control of the federal government. In response, conservatives have offered up a raft of valid criticisms, wondering how a medical bureaucratic behemoth can possibly be funded with a projected deficit of trillions, and querying how the federal government, which can’t deliver mail packages efficiently, could possibly run the entire health care system. But all that aside, there’s something even more remarkable about this entire charade: Barack Obama believes he can singlehandedly redesign the American health care industry.
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