Talking Points Memo on Democratic Talking Points

TPM is one of those groups who thinks that the only reason why Obamacare has a bad rap is because they aren't pushing the message right.
They say:

Last summer, members were caught unprepared and were faced with angry voters, loud protests and televised meetings that portrayed them in many cases as fumbling and unsure of how to talk about a bill that didn't actually exist yet.

Its kind of a blunt assessment from a blog that before blamed the chaos on Tea Party members yelling. Now they admit that congress critters didn't know what they were saying.

The Democrats actually put out a whole set of Talking Points for their lemmings... er.. congresspeople, to mimic. If you want to ask them a question, be prepared to hear a pre-recorded message.

A sample of what is on the web page:

CBO Score:

• Four Key Points You Need To Know About the CBO Score
• Full CBO Score

Never let it be said that I won't publish the same crap the Democrats are pushing.
Let's take one talking point, from 'four key points':

Is fully paid for – costs $940 billion over a decade. (Americans spend nearly $2.5 trillion each year on health care now and nearly two-thirds of the bill is paid for by reducing health care costs).

It is not fully paid for. The only way it could possibly be paid for is if they reduce medicare by $500 billion over ten years. Who believes that they would do that? They also pay for it by taxing anyone who doesn't get health care insurance.

Frank Rich: World Class Asshat

There are a lot of clueless journalists out there. A lot of columnists who never get out of their home offices enough to talk to real people and find out what real people think.

But when those particular asshats work for the New York Times, they seem to take on a whole new dimension of asshattedness.

Frank Rich believes that the opposition that the president and congress has run into over the past week has nothing to do with health care. Frank wrote:

How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.

Let's put aside the fact that Tea Party members do not liken Obama to Hitler. As most of us know, there were LaRouche protesters who showed up at Tea Party rallies with [insert current president here] being compared to Hitler. They used to do it with Bush. Now they do it with Obama. Let's also forget for a moment that it was the left who came up with the term BushHitler.

The question is: how fucking offensive can you get in comparing 4 broken windows across a country of 300 million with the destruction of 7500 Jewish businesses, during a period where 200 synagogues were damaged or destroyed? The only thing missing from Frank Rich's comparison, outside of it being approximately 7496 windows short, is the fact that the Jewish people were being attacked for being Jewish. Whereas the democrats were apparently targeted for voting for a bill that was unpopular with the majority of the country.

Rich moves on:

No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause

This just shows how clueless Rich is, that we 'shouldn't' be angry that our health care is being taken over by the government which should result in higher premiums and health care of a lower quality. Not to mention the loss of liberty: for the first time in the history of the US, the US government is requiring us to buy a private product.
If losing my liberty isn't a good reason to be upset... what is?

Now let me make this clear, in case anyone is a little fuzzy on this. I believe in non-violent protest. There is no place for vandalism. But freaking out over the 4 broken windows in the entire US and making it sound like all hell is breaking loose is obscene.
Frank didn't stop there:

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play.

Frank is old. I'm not saying that to make light of his age. I'm saying that to point out that he's old enough to remember Bill Clinton pushing his health care bill. Back then, people like Frank Rich blamed opposition to the bill on Hillary Clinton's involvement. Not much has changed since then. They are still blaming opposition on everything except the bill itself.

Its like he literally can't figure out why anyone would be opposed to it. His brain can't handle the idea of people taking care of their own health insurance. He doesn't know why anyone would be opposed to more government intervention in our lives.
That's how much of a democrat he is. Its what makes him almost dangerously dumb.
And for the record, when I say that he's dangerously dumb, it doesn't mean that I want to shoot him or slash his tires.
I do, however, hope that the New York Times continues its slow and eventual decline into bankruptcy.

The Tea Party in Searchlight, Nevada

Eric Odom took some video going down the road that leads to the event.
Watch it and tell me that the Tea Party does not still have momentum.

Catching up with some links.

Investor's .com came up with a list of 20 ways that the health care bill will take away our freedom. My 'favorite';

6. You must buy a policy that covers ambulatory patient services, emergency services, hospitalization, maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment; prescription drugs; rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices; laboratory services; preventive and wellness services; chronic disease management; and pediatric services, including oral and vision care.
You're a single guy without children? Tough, your policy must cover pediatric services. You're a woman who can't have children? Tough, your policy must cover maternity services. You're a teetotaler? Tough, your policy must cover substance abuse treatment. (Add your own violation of personal freedom here.) (Section 1302).

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former CBO director, explains the faulty math in the CBO's 'costs' of health care in the NY Times:

Gimmick No. 1 is the way the bill front-loads revenues and backloads spending. That is, the taxes and fees it calls for are set to begin immediately, but its new subsidies would be deferred so that the first 10 years of revenue would be used to pay for only 6 years of spending.

Even worse, some costs are left out entirely. To operate the new programs over the first 10 years, future Congresses would need to vote for $114 billion in additional annual spending. But this so-called discretionary spending is excluded from the Congressional Budget Office’s tabulation.

The worst part about it is that in Douglas' opinion, the CBO should have been more critical of the spending.

Speaking of spending, Social Security finally hit the point of no return... where outlays are more then revenue. We are now also running a Social Security deficit:

This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

But we need to spend more on social programs. Right.

Did you know that as part of the health care bill takeover, from now on, the federal government will be in charge of student loans? That should bring down the cost of tuition...

Ending one of the fiercest lobbying fights in Washington, Congress voted Thursday to force commercial banks out of the federal student loan market, cutting off billions of dollars in profits in a sweeping restructuring of financial-aid programs and redirecting most of the money to new education initiatives.

This is like taking the car keys away from the guy who is stumbling drunk and giving them to the guy who is passed out, and telling him, "Here... you look responsible!"

A week after the health care takeover was passed, Rasmussen did a poll. They found out the following:

One week after the House of Representatives passed the health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats, 54% of the nation's likely voters still favor repealing the new law. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 42% oppose repeal.

The only people who didn't see that coming were hard core democrats.