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S. 1796 – The Baucus Boondoggle
Congressman Rogers from Michigan explains. Palin analysis. Krauthammer examines CBO report. Doug Patton editorial.
Mr. Rogers was referencing HR 3200 which is not the same measure passed out of the Senate Finance Committee recently, but his remarks are nonetheless relevant conceptually and philosophically.
As to S. 1796, it was filed today, and it amounts to . . . 1,502 pages!
Full texts and summaries here.
Financial implications: Heritage analysis
Krauthammer’s remarks on 10.8.09 on Fox:
On the CBO scoring of the Baucus health-care bill:
Look, the CBO scoring, the numbers that came in, the blessing it gave — is because of smoke and mirrors in the bill. For the people of Wichita, somebody has to wade into the weeds. I did it at great health risk.
Two items here. One of them is the $120 billion assumed of income from what are called “fees” of the big players in health care — the health insurers, the drug companies, the guys who do diagnostics and who produce the medical equipment.
The fee is a tax, and the tax, $120 billion, is going to end up out of your pocket and mine, because every penny of it will be in higher insurance, higher costs for drugs, for stents — any kind of medical devices — and for diagnostics. Everybody will pay.
But it’s hidden. It is a cowardly way to do a tax. You do it on the industry and it is passed on.
Secondly, there are individual mandates. People are going to be shelling out a huge amount every year on insurance, and those who don’t are going to have to pay a fine, also a tax, but under another name.
There are huge costs in here, which are all hidden, and that’s why it looks OK.
And secondly, there is a $400 billion assumption of cuts in Medicare. That is not going to happen. It is an illusion. It is a fantasy. And that’s why the numbers end up OK.
So if you really look behind all of these numbers, [the Baucus bill ] is a disaster.
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Health Care Bill is About Control, Not Health Care
By Doug Patton
October 19, 2009
The entire Declaration of Independence, including all 56 signatures, is contained on a single hand-written sheet of paper.
The full and complete original Constitution of the United States of America is printed on six pages. The first four pages contain the basic text of the founding document. Page five is the letter of transmittal to the British government. And the sixth and final page contains all ten of the initial amendments, known as the Bill of Rights.
Karl Marx laid out The Communist Manifesto in a mere 23 pages.
The English translation of Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment is 718 pages, while Tolstoy’s War and Peace weighs in at 1,225 pages. And try as she might, even Ayn Rand could manage only 1,069 pages in her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged.
My personal, large-print New King James copy of the Bible contains 1,426 pages of text, a 64-page concordance and six pages of maps.
What do these momentous documents have in common with each other? They all contain fewer pages than the bloated senate health care bill, S. 1796, which totals a ridiculous 1,502 pages.
In other words, the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, the father of modern Communism, three of history’s most prolific Russian writers and even God Almighty Himself didn’t need as many words to get their entire message across as the self-important blowhards in Congress trying to express themselves on one single issue: health care.
But let’s be honest. What’s going on in Washington right now is not really about health care; it is about control. The senate leaders, in conjunction with the White House, are doing the same thing they did with the stimulus bill, the omnibus bill, the budget bill and the cap and trade bill. Thousands of pages of rules, regulations, restrictions and, most of all, astronomical spending. They believe that if they so overwhelm the American people with mind-numbing legalese, we will simply take their word for it that this poison pill isn’t going to hurt us.
On top of the already burdensome language of this monstrosity, they have made it a moving target. It started with House Resolution 3200. Now it has morphed into the senate version. But they are not even close to being finished with it. In fact, the current, so-called Baucus bill, with its “moderate” approach to health care reform, is merely the framework for the shell game Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is playing with our health care system. Even if S. 1796 were acceptable in a free society — which it isn’t — it in no way reflects how the final bill will read.
President Barack Obama and the domineering Democrat leadership in Congress never talk about freedom. They whine about “fairness” and “security,” but the word “liberty” is not in their vocabulary. The Founders would have considered the current “reform” going on in Congress as nothing short of criminal. They would rebel against this tyranny as surely as they revolted against the despotism of King George.
One thing on which we can depend: this process will not improve the bill. If this piece of statism passes, the federal government will eventually tell us what we can or cannot eat or drink, how much exercise we must do to stay fit, what we can and cannot smoke (pot yes, tobacco no), whether or not we can have guns in our homes (they’re dangerous, you know, and therefore affect our health care costs) and how many children we can have.
And they will do it all in the name of “health care reform.”
Posted by Allan Erickson 
GOODNESS WORLD LIFE BLOG 
Fox Fires Hill
October 19, 2009AIM’s Kincaid Questions Rupert Murdoch about Marc Lamont Hill
18 October 2009
Full story here.
At the News Corporation annual meeting on Friday morning in New York City, Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media will urge Chairman Rupert Murdoch to ask why Fox News has hired a left-wing cop-killer apologist, Marc Lamont Hill, as a well-paid on-air contributor on shows such as The O’Reilly Factor.
“The Obama Administration had a Van Jones problem,” Kincaid explained, “and News Corporation has a Marc Lamont Hill problem.”
Van Jones was ousted from a White House job after his controversial background was highlighted by Fox News and other news organization, while Hill, a hip-hop professor, was hired by Fox News despite supporting cop-killers such as Assata Shakaur and Mumia Abu-Jamal, black racists such as Khallid Muhammad, and a communist group known as the “Poor Righteous Communist Party.”
Kincaid commented that “Fox News is as bad as Obama on background checks.”
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Excerpt from statement by Cliff Kincaid:
In the final analysis, I think Marc Lamont Hill was hired by Fox News as a well-paid contributor in order to please left-wing critics of the channel and to appear “fair and balanced.” You can see that Fox is currently under strong attack by the Obama Administration for being too conservative. Frankly, I think Fox is not conservative enough.
A professor and expert on “hip-hop” culture, Hill never had any expertise to comment on most of the issues he was brought on the air to talk about. Now, the hiring has blown up in the faces of Fox News and News Corporation. But I give credit to Murdoch for taking decisive action. I was surprised that he made that announcement to me at the annual meeting.
Bill O’Reilly has the most to answer for, since he had Hill on his show many, many times. Hill says that he was also on Hannity, On the Record with Greta Van Susteren, and Huckabee. But to my knowledge Hill never appeared on the Glenn Beck show.
Bill O’Reilly, who also has a record of pandering to black race hustler Al Sharpton, should be asked to explain what role he had in recommending Hill for his Fox News job.
Stop the spin, Bill. Tell us the truth.
The firing was belated recognition that Hill never should have been hired in the first place. Indeed, it is still a mystery how he showed up so many times on The O’Reilly Factor, when his expertise on issues other than hip-hop was thin if not non-existent. Hill was in over his head. But he smiled a lot and talked fast. That made him good TV.
But on one such occasion, Hill defended a protest in Oakland, California, in support of a cop-killer named Lovelle Mixon, who had killed four Oakland police officers before he was fatally shot in a gun battle. The protesters were from a communist group upset about what Hill told O’Reilly was “police terrorism.” Hill said the protesters had a point.
O’Reilly should have immediately kicked Hill off the show, never to appear again. Support for cop-killers should not be tolerated in respectable media. But having Hill on the show gave O’Reilly the chance to look “fair and balanced.”
In addition to being a career criminal and a cop-killer, Mixon was also a suspected rapist, since his DNA had been linked to the rape of a 12-year-old girl. Who in their right mind could have sanctioned a protest in his defense? Marc Lamont Hill did.
Full Kincaid release here.
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Related:
KINCAID CRITICIZED MURDOCH & FOX FOR PUBLISHING A BOOK BY MARK RUDD OF THE WEATHERMEN—
“Kincaid will also press Murdoch and his board about the publication by Harper Collins of Mark Rudd’s terrorist memoir, Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen, about his days in the Weather Underground. Rudd has said he got a $50,000 advance and that while some went to his agent, “the rest went up my nose for coke…” One of the members of Murdoch’s board is Professor Viet Dinh, a former Bush counter-terrorism official who had fled Vietnam as a child when Rudd’s communist comrades took over South Vietnam in the wake of the U.S. military withdrawal.”
Source here.
Rudd, and pals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, we responsible for violence against police in the 60s and 70s resulting the killing and wounding of several police officers. One officer, James Pera, wrote Kincaid about the urban war he experienced during that period, thanks to people like Hill and associates, Rudd, Ayers, and Dohrn:
I am a retired San Francisco Police sergeant. I served thirty years on the streets.
During my long career, I witnessed the murders of scores of my fellow police officers. They died from gunshot wounds, bombings and other ways that most Americans, who have not been in uniform, during a time of war, can’t even imagine. Make no mistake about it, we were in a war. It was an urban war, especially back in the 60s and 70s.
I have also known scores of other officers, too many to even count, who have been maimed and injured, many to the point that they were forced to retire, with lifetime disabilities.
I find it difficult, therefore, to comprehend why Fox, the only source for balanced news and really the only one conservatives have, in a media that is otherwise overrun with left-wing propagandists, would want to hire a paid contributor the likes of Professor Marc Lamont Hill. In my opinion, he is a cop-hating, race-bating, revolutionary-oriented black racist, who hates white Americans. And his comments reflect that perception.