Bloodthirsty Liberal

It’s the taxes, stupid:

Addressing the percentage of taxpayers who do not pay any income tax, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said these Americans have “skin in the game” since “they pay payroll taxes,” adding, “I wish they would earn more so they can pay more.”

“Well, you know, they do pay taxes. They pay payroll taxes. And this is a tactic that the other side uses to make it sound as if these people are not paying taxes. They are paying taxes. They do have skin in the game. And I think that that should be respected,” said Pelosi at the Capitol Thursday.

“I wish they would earn more so they can pay more.”

Doesn’t that say it all? Instead of wishing for people to do well so that they can take care of their families and leave the rest of us alone, Democrat policy is to wait for them to fatten up and harvest them.

And what does it say about our tax system that both sides can be right? Poor people don’t pay federal income tax (when almost everyone else does), yet they do pay other taxes (if they work). It’s a shell game. Simplify, simplify, simplify—and let us see where the money’s coming from and where it’s going.

Let her tell it:

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi today said she has “no idea” whether the Supreme Court will strike down a key provision of the health care law that she guided through Congress during her reign as speaker of the House two years ago.

“I have no idea. None of us does,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said. “We are all now talking about something of which we have no knowledge because we’re not members of the Supreme Court. We have knowledge of the legislation [and] we knowledge of the arguments, but we have no idea what the outcome will be.”

…

Pelosi said congressional Democrats “have long believed in judicial review” as part of the country’s constitutional process, but said that as Democrats wrote the Affordable Care Act, “We were careful to honor our Constitution.”

Like “deeming” it passed? Offering kickbacks and side deals to buy swing votes? Creating a bureaucratic monstrosity that compels supposedly free citizens to purchase a health insurance plan of the government’s liking? Maybe Pelosi was speaking of the South African constitution (Justice Ginsburg’s preferred charter), ’cause she sure as heck ain’t speaking about the US Constitution.

Deeming bills passed, leaking private testimony public (or threatening to), hers is the permanent rictus of liberal fascism:

“The ‘something’ Leader Pelosi knows is that Newt Gingrich will not be President of the United States. She made that clear last night,” Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said in a statement.

“Leader Pelosi previously made a reference to the extensive amount of information that is in the public record, including the comprehensive committee report with which the public may not be fully aware,” Hammill said.

Pelosi made headlines on Tuesday when she told CNN Gingrich would not be president, and that “there’s something I know.”

She’s made that insinuation before, and it’s beyond inexcusable. It’s actionable:

“One of these days we’ll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich,” Pelosi said. “I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him, four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff.”

…

[Gingrich:] First of all I’d like to thank Speaker Pelosi for what I regard as an early Christmas gift. If she’s suggesting she’s gonna use material she developed while she was on the ethics committee, that is a fundamental violation of the rules of the House and I would hope members would immediately file charges against her the second she does it.

What a reprehensible human being she is.

Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CAsh)

The former speaker and her husband have participated in at least eight IPOs, one of which was from Visa in 2008 – just as a troublesome piece of legislation that would have hurt credit card companies began making its way through the House. The Pelosis purchased 5,000 shares of Visa at the initial price of $44 dollars. Two days later it was trading at $64.

…this stock purchase was made as Visa was engaged in a full-court press to lobby Pelosi to stop legislation to curb credit-card swipe fees to vendors.

In 2007, Visa used an army of lobbyists to try to influence Pelosi, including one of her former advisers, Dean Aguillen… In addition to exploiting the revolving door between Congress and lobbying firms, Visa’s political action committee made a $1,000 donation to Pelosi’s re-election campaign… Two days after that donation was made, Pelosi met with Visa executives in her office. Aguillen also contributed $1,000 to Pelosi and another $1,000 to the campaign arm of the House Democratic caucusin the first half of 2008.

Crony capitalism: it’s everywhere you don’t want it to be, but always expected it was.

That would pass on a voice vote alone, although I’m not sure one’s tear ducts are still functional after so much Botox:

The U.S. House passed a bill Thursday that would amend the health care law to bar federal funding for health plans that provide abortion services.

The vote was 251 in favor and 170 against.

The bill, the Protect Life Act, was sponsored by Pennsylvania Republican Joe Pitts and gathered overwhelming Republican support. Only two Republicans voted against it, along with all but 15 Democrats.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi condemned the bill during earlier debate, arguing that if it passed, “women can die on the floor and health care providers do not have to intervene.”

Democrats opposed to the bill charged that the GOP majority was ignoring the nation’s top priority and instead spending time on a bitterly divisive issue.

“Instead of focusing on jobs, Republicans are continuing to wage their war on women,” California Democrat Barbara Lee said on the House floor.

Keep your knickers on, toots. Didn’t Congress just pass a couple of trade bills? I didn’t hear you whining when Harry Reid said he’d get to the America Jobbed Act after he sorted his sock drawer.

And what are you going to do with those 15 Democrats? Sounds like the support for the bill was a lot more bipartisan then the opposition.

Lastly, Nancy, women won’t have to die on the floor. They can have comfy chairs or throw pillows if they like, even a divan. Still, if ObamaCare comes to be associated with corpses of women strewn across the linoleum, I won’t complain.

IPAB

A small army of health policy wonks helped Democrats pack ObamaCare full of big ideas that they hoped would transform American health care, making it less expensive and more effective. Perhaps the biggest of those ideas is IPAB, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a 15-member panel of bureaucrats appointed by the president and tasked with holding total Medicare spending to predetermined spending targets. The panel’s name suggests it’s merely an advisor to Congress, which has traditionally been in charge of Medicare spending, but its “recommendations” have the force of law unless Congress holds down spending enough to meet the target or eliminates the board, which it can only do with a supermajority vote in the Senate.

Death Panel, right? Was Sarah Palin correct?

…IPAB is intended to take tough decisions about Medicare spending out of the purview of politically motivated legislators and turn those decisions over to a board of independent, unelected bureaucratic experts. Health wonks, in other words, convinced Congress to put a panel of health wonks in charge of the nation’s biggest health insurance program.

In a major speech on the federal debt earlier this year, President Barack Obama took this big idea and proposed to make it bigger by tightening IPAB’s official spending targets. Spending control and reduced political liability for Medicare cuts—what’s not to like?

We once had a conversation with a middle-aged British couple, who explained that although their community in England had overwhelmingly voted for such-and-such, the bureaucrats overrode it. The opposite to the vote was instituted.

How many times have your heard your friends on the Left bemoan the fact that the US isn’t more like Europe? We don’t have six weeks of vacation. We can’t retire at age fifty. We aren’t cultured enough.

The trade-off for all of this is Liberal Fascism, the State taking over the role of the voters:

But according to Cohen, IPAB’s mandate is so broad, and the checks on it so few, that it tests the limit of even the most deferential standard. “It’s like the perfect storm of bad elements,” she says. Among the problems? “Overly broad delegating authority language, no judicial review, no administrative review, no rule-making. There’s no meaningful congressional oversight and it’s not repealable except for under the most draconian and limited circumstance.”

That’s the other catch: ObamaCare doesn’t just create IPAB. It also sets in place a series of barriers designed to make it extremely difficult to repeal. So if Congress wants to get rid of IPAB, it will have to jump through a complex set of hoops first.

During the Bush years, liberals fretted that we were “losing our liberties”.

That means acting swiftly and with great unity. The health care overhaul contains a provision labeled Joint Resolution Requirements to Dissolve the Board that lays out exactly the steps that Congress must follow if it wants to take down IPAB. The provision lays out in great detail what a joint resolution to dissolve IPAB would have to look like, and then sets out a further requirement that it must be introduced between January 1 and February 1, 2017—meaning Congress would have to act in just a few working days.

Following the introduction of the legislation, Congress would have to pass the joint resolution with a supermajority of sworn members by August 15 of the same year. “If you don’t do that,” Cohen says, “Congress has no option, at all, to repeal the board.” Meanwhile, even if the board were successfully dissolved, IPAB would keep issuing its recommendations, which would still have the force of law, until 2020.

The protections erected around IPAB make it all but impossible to repeal. “We kind of joke about that,” says Cohen, “the idea that the whole bill comes down but the only thing that stays is IPAB, like the roach after the nuclear blast.”

IPAB supersedes any changes made to Medicare, and in fact, IPAB trumps Congressional authority. Congress will not be able to institute any other system, because the rules of IPAB take precedent and cannot be overturned.

So, to all those liberals who dreamed of a European system, welcome to Paradise.

- Aggie

The health care law is going to force a large group of the middle class into medicaid

Back in March 2010, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif,, uttered the now-famous words, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.” Pelosi was talking about the health care law, and it appears she was right about the fact that it was full of unknowns.

It turns out that, due to a glitch in the law, roughly three million middle-income Americans could wind up on Medicaid – which was designed to assist the country’s poorest citizens.

“It’s gonna cost about $450 billion over 10 years,” Senator John Barrasso. R-Wyo., who is also a surgeon, warns. Barrasso says it’s yet another burden for average Americans. “Who’s gonna pay for that – the taxpayers, people who are paying their bills every day,” he says.

Democrats acknowledge there is a problem within the health care law that could have an unintended impact on Medicaid.

“I do think that between now and 2014, sooner rather than later, we should go back and take another look at this,” Congressman Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said Wednesday. Van Hollen also admitted that the potential snafu was discussed while the health care law was being drafted. It stems from a problem about how the word “income” is defined under the law now – and how that definition is set to change.

Hahhahahahahahahah!

Richard S. Foster, Chief Actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, says it’s a worry that keeps him up at night. “We need to do something about this,” he said.

The Obama administration, via a blog, concedes there is trouble. Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Richard Sorian wrote, “We are concerned that … some middle-income Americans may be receiving coverage through Medicaid, which is meant to serve only the neediest Americans.” As for what HHS plans to do, Sorian says, “We are exploring options to address this issue.”

We don’t mind paying for it – not a bit! Elections have consequences.

Oh, and those thousands of waivers to unions and businesses? They aren’t for the little guy. You have to pay up, suckah!

- Aggie

ObAmerica: land of the free lunch, and home of the waive:

Amidst the news that 38 of the 204 Obamacare waivers approved in April went to posh entertainment venues in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s district, new questions about the Obama administration’s transparency pledge have arisen.

Although the administration has approved more than 1,300 Obamacare waivers and published the recipients’ application information online, it has not made public which companies and other entities have been denied waivers and why they were denied.

Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) won’t release that information, nor will they publicly release the identities of those still waiting for a decision. HHS won’t even say how many applications are in the queue.

…

The White House’s most recent waiver defender, HHS spokesman Richard Sorian, did not return TheDC’s multiple requests for answers to which companies have been denied waivers and which and how many are still waiting for a decision. Sorian defended the Obamacare waiver system on the White House’s blog after TheDC’s initial report on Pelosi’s district’s Obamacare waiver recipients, but when TheDC asked to talk to him about it on at least four occasions Wednesday, his secretary said, “he’s in meetings, he’ll call you back.”

Sorian never called back.

Of course he didn’t. He was too busy arranging waivers for Ghirardelli Chocolates and The Haight-Ashbury Head Shop.

But someone did have a comment:

“Unflippingbelievable! No, wait, it is believable,” Palin said in an email to TheDC. “Seriously, this is corrupt. And anyone who still supports the Pelosi-Reid-Obama agenda of centralized government takeovers of the free market and the corresponding crony capitalism is, in my book, complicit.”

But Pelosi demurs:

Pelosi’s office denies any connection to the waiver recipients in her district. Flex-Plan Services, a provider of insurance services to several small companies in Pelosi’s congressional district as well as elsewhere, is taking credit for helping the companies in Pelosi’s district apply for waivers. A co-owner of Flex-Plan, Hilarie Aitken, told the Huffington Post that the companies being granted Obamacare waivers in Pelosi’s district had “nothing to do with her [Pelosi] at all.”

Uh-huh.

Well, okay. We’ll just have to accept her word for it—as we did with the law itself.

As Horatio Alger once noted, anybody can make it in America, by dint of hard work, self-discipline, ingenuity, and large contributions in small, non-sequential notes to Organizing for America.

Or who:

Of the 204 new Obamacare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.

That’s in addition to the 27 new waivers for health care or drug companies and the 31 new union waivers Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services approved.

Pelosi’s district secured almost 20 percent of the latest issuance of waivers nationwide, and the companies that won them didn’t have much in common with companies throughout the rest of the country that have received Obamacare waivers.

Other common waiver recipients were labor union chapters, large corporations, financial firms and local governments. But Pelosi’s district’s waivers are the first major examples of luxurious, gourmet restaurants and hotels getting a year-long pass from Obamacare.

All ObamaCare waivers are suspect, but each Pelosi ObamaCare waiver is suspect in its own way.

And this from a law that has yet to take full effect. You want to see such a law in action?

No, you don’t. Trust me.

As long as everybody understands that this is a long and winding road to government run health care, single payer, socialized medicine, whatever, we don’t really have a problem. It’s only when they try to tell us how wonderful a job they did that a fire-breathing dragon named Reality rears its ugly head.

I mean, we know we’re being rogered; it’s not exactly a secret. At least have the decency to admit it.

Racism, obviously.

The compromise that Obama struck last week with House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to keep the federal government running contained steep cuts to some of the party’s most cherished programs—nutrition for poor women and children, long-stalled transportation projects, funding for community health centers—as well as language barring the District of Columbia from using its own tax dollars to finance abortions.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, warned that the $38 billion in promised cutbacks would hurt the most vulnerable Americans. “We don’t have enough time to talk about the ways it violates our values,” he told The Daily Beast.

There is no more visible symbol of Democratic disgruntlement than the woman who was perhaps the president’s closest ally when she wielded the speaker’s gavel. When Nancy Pelosi voted against the budget measure Thursday, she did little to hide her anger with the White House over the fact that Obama, for the first time, had left her out of the negotiations on a major deal. Instead, he chose to work directly with Boehner and Reid to hammer out the compromise that each could take back to their caucuses for approval.

“I have been very disappointed in the administration to the point where I’m embarrassed that I endorsed him,” one senior Democratic lawmaker said. “It’s so bad that some of us are thinking, is there some way we can replace him? How do you get rid of this guy?”

“I feel no ownership of that or responsibility to it, except to say we don’t want to shut down the government,” the minority leader said. “As was pretty evident, House Democrats were not a part of that agreement.”

It’s all nonsense, of course. Obama will be their nominee; they will campaign vigorously to see that he gets reelected, and he probably will succeed. But they are tantruming today.

- Aggie