American Thinker: The President's Oil Reserves Lie

American Thinker: The President's Oil Reserves Lie

Really?

President Barack Obama makes a statement about Iran, Wednesday, June 9, 2010, in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House.
Associated Press photo

From National Center For Policy Analysis

ARE YOU READY FOR GLOBAL COOLING?

From The Congressional Budget Office

Under the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, which created CBO, the agency’s primary duty is to provide budget-related information to the Committees on the Budget of the House and Senate. CBO is also required to assist the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations, the House Committee on Ways and Means, the Senate Committee on Finance, other committees, and Members of Congress. The law further requires CBO to prepare several budget projections each year, produce cost estimates of legislation ordered reported by Congressional committees, and publish studies of budgetary issues.

Keep Your Health Plan Under Overhaul? Probably Not, Gov't Analysis Concludes

By DAVID HOGBERG AND SEAN HIGGINS, INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted 06/11/2010 07:32 PM ET

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Internal administration documents reveal that up to 51% of employers may have to relinquish their current health care coverage because of ObamaCare.

Small firms will be even likelier to lose existing plans.

The "midrange estimate is that 66% of small employer plans and 45% of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfathered status by the end of 2013," according to the document.

In the worst-case scenario, 69% of employers — 80% of smaller firms — would lose that status, exposing them to far more provisions under the new health law.

The 83-page document, a joint project of the departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and the IRS, examines the effects that ObamaCare's regulations would have on existing, or "grandfathered," employer-based health care plans.

Draft copies of the document were reportedly leaked to House Republicans during the week and began circulating Friday morning. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., posted it on his Web site Friday afternoon.

"It's been passed around the staffs here on Capitol Hill. Congressman Posey thought it was important enough to share," said spokesman George Cecala.

In a statement, Posey said the document showed that the arguments in favor of ObamaCare were a "bait and switch."

"The president promised repeatedly that people who like their current plans can keep them, but now the details of their plan actually confirm what many suspected all along, most Americans will lose their current health care plan," Posey said.

A White House official told IBD: "This is a draft document, and we will be releasing the final regulation when it is complete. The president made a promise to the American people that if they liked their health care plan, they can keep it. The regulation, when finalized, will uphold that promise."

However, the source conceded: "It is difficult to predict how plans and employers will behave in the coming years, but if plans make changes that negatively impact consumers, then they will lose their grandfather status."

It's unclear how the document leaked out. An HHS spokeswoman confirmed that the department was working on a draft paper about grandfathered plans but said it hasn't been made public yet.

A House Republican staffer said the rumor was that the document had been erroneously posted on the Office of Management and Budget Web site earlier in the week and somebody spotted it before it was taken down. IBD has not been able to confirm this report.

Under the new health law, current employer-based health plans will be grandfathered — that is, they will not have to follow many Obama-Care provisions that take effect on Jan. 1, 2014. These include benefit mandates, caps on out-of-pocket expenses and limits on age-based premiums.

But they forfeit that grandfathered status if they make changes to the plans by 2014. If so, firms may have to adopt new plans or drop coverage and pay the penalty.

No Longer A Grandfather

But the term "grandfathered" is loosely defined by the new law; specifics have been left up to the bureaucracies. One key question is, how much flexibility would employers have in changing their coverage before it is no longer considered grandfathered?

Under the regulations in the document, a plan is no longer considered to be grandfathered if:

• It eliminates benefits related to diagnosis or treatment of a particular condition.

• It increases the percentage of a cost-sharing requirement (such as co-insurance) above its level as of March 23, 2010.

• It increases the fixed amount of cost-sharing such as deductibles or out-of-pocket limits by a total percentage measured from March 23, 2010, that is more than the sum of medical inflation plus 15 percentage points.

• It increases co-payments from March 23, 2010, by an amount that is the greater of: medical inflation plus 15 percentage points or medical inflation plus $5.

• The employer's share of the premium decreases more than 5 percentage points below what the share was on March 23, 2010.

Analyzing data on employer-provided plans from 2008 and 2009, the report stated: "Many employers who made changes between 2008 and 2009 that would have caused them to relinquish grandfather status did so based on exceeding one of the cost-sharing limits."

In total, 66% of small businesses and 47% of large businesses made a change in their health care plans last year that would have forfeited their grandfathered status.

"These rules will ensure that up to 69% of employees — and 80% of workers in small business — will lose their current plan within three years," said Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., a physician. "The reality is this: 58% of Americans want ObamaCare repealed because they fear they will lose their health care — and even their jobs — once this law is fully implemented."

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Here's the link to the report

Glenn Beck Show - June 9, 2010

Obama's Message To The Marxists
Glenn Beck Show - June 9, 2010
Tonight: Have you ever heard the kind of language from a sitting president like what Obama said on The Today Show? This isn't exactly the kind of thing that resonates with Americans. Americans want the president to uphold and defend the Constitution. They don't want him looking for some ass to kick. But if the message wasn't meant for the average American, who was it meant for? Listen to the rhetoric...the masks are coming off. He was talking to Marxist revolutionaries, because that's a large part of who he's surrounded himself with: radical revolutionaries...and they are angry.
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Some Great Quotes On Tryanny

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." — C.S. Lewis

"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." — Daniel Webster

"Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." — Frederick Douglass, civil rights activist, Aug. 4, 1857

"So long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men." — Voltarine de Cleyre

Governor Chris Christie blasts corrupt school unions!

US Unemployment Back at 9.7%

Here is this month’s chart that shows the real unemployment rate versus the administration’s predicted rate with the passage of their $787 billion dollar stimulus package:

Employers added 431,000 nonfarm jobs nationwide in May, the biggest increase in a single month in a decade, the Labor Department said Friday. But the bulk of the growth was in government jobs, driven by hiring for the 2010 census, and private-sector job growth was weak.

Altogether, 411,000 of the jobs added were for census workers whose positions will disappear after the summer.

President Obama tried to put a positive spin on the jobs report, telling workers at a trucking company in Hyattsville, Md., that the addition of 431,000 new jobs in May demonstrated that the economy was "getting stronger by the day."

Glenn Beck Show - June 2, 2010

The History of Israel and America
Glenn Beck Show - June 2, 2010
Tonight: What were the real motivations behind the 'Freedom Flotilla'? This all fits an all too convenient storyline...the media are all up in arms, blaming Israel and portraying them as the terrorists- but we've come to expect that from them. But, why are we tied to Israel? Why is our relationship with them so important? To understand all of this, we must first learn the history of Israel and America. Tonight, a history lesson you won't hear from anyone else in the media. Plus, is there anybody from America involved with the 'Freedom Flotilla'? Find out tonight!
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Special After Show Video

From Investors Business Daily

Reversing A Mistake

Posted 06/01/2010 06:54 PM ET

Medical Care: Monday's headline from Reuters — "Soaring costs force Canada to reassess health model" — is a warning. In the not-too-distant future, the headline will be used again, except "U.S." will replace "Canada."

The Canadian health care model is irreparably broken. Rather than reassess, Canada would be better off rejecting in whole a system that is not delivering. The publicly funded, single-payer program provides universal care, but its rationing is also universal — and sometimes deadly — and its costs are simply out of the universe.

Western dabbling in socialism has shown that public health care systems funded by other people's money are unsustainable. The provision of "free" care is a losing game. Because it is perceived to be free, demand in such a system will outstrip supply. Costs can't help but rise.

No country is more well acquainted with this dilemma than Canada, which finds itself, Reuters reports, "taking tough measures to curb health care costs" which "could erode the principles of the popular state-funded system."

And it is popular. Last year a Harris/Decima poll found that 82% of Canadians preferred their government health care system over the mixed system found in the U.S.

Given the widespread, agonizing and sometimes fatal waiting lists that plague the Canadian system, this finding is baffling. Regarding their state-run health care as part of their Canadian identity might be a touching display of sentimentality, but it is also a stubbornness that has led to trouble.

The popularity of the system doesn't make it functional, though. In 2009, health care spending in Canada devoured 40% of the provincial governments' budgets and expenditures have been rising by 6% a year. At that rate, or even half that rate, it wouldn't be long before the provincial governments did nothing but fund health care. The Ontario government says health care spending could consume 70% of its budget within just 12 years.

"We are quickly hitting a point where either provinces can help educate our children, fix our roads and help our poor or they can maintain the status-quo in health care provision," Robert Silver, a Canadian lawyer who says he is "a big defender of aspects of our health system," wrote last year in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Some of the blame can be placed on an aging population. Reuters reports that one-fourth of Canada's population in 2036 will be senior citizens. But it's the nature of the system, its near monopoly and its ambition to serve every Canadian, that makes it unsustainable. It has grown from 7% of provincial governments' spending in the 1970s to the 40% it is today merely because it is a government giveaway that people cannot get enough of.

To cope with the declining conditions of its health care system, Canadians are moving into a realm where a slim majority of U.S. lawmakers — all Democrats — no longer want Americans to tread: private care. Clinics operating outside of the government system, which were once banned by the law, have been opening across the country. The pace is likely to pick up as policymakers continue to wrestle with the budget problems of the state system.

Two years ago, Claude Castonguay, known as the father of the Quebec public health care system that became the model for the rest of the country, made what had to be a painful admission. Canada's socialist health care program, he said, had reached "a crisis point."

How many generations of Americans will have to endure a costly system of rationed and substandard care before Washington realizes that it set the country on a crisis course? The possibility that we will continue to be governed by party hacks who have learned nothing doesn't exactly inspire confidence on this front. The mistake of 2010 will be reversed only when there's been an extensive roster upheaval in Congress.

Benjamin Netanyahu

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speech defending actions taken by Israeli Defense Forces aboard a Pro-Palestinian Ship that attempted to run Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

From The Heritage Foundation

Federal Spending by the Numbers 2010 | The Heritage Foundation

Flotillas and Falsehoods

By Mona Charen
June 1, 2010 12:00 A.M.

Don’t members of the press ever resent being so used?

The effort to destroy the Jewish state has many fronts. One front is in Iran, where the maniacal regime that has repeatedly promised to “wipe Israel off the map” marches inexorably toward a nuclear bomb. Another is in Gaza, from which Hamas has lobbed 10,000 missiles into Israeli cities. Yet another front, the most insidious, is comprised of the propaganda arm of the Palestinian movement. And this front thrives for only one reason — the complicity of the world press and the so-called “international community.”

It was the propaganda arm that staged the “Freedom Flotilla.” But there have been many previous productions: The propaganda arm was responsible for the photo-shopped images of damage to Lebanon during the 2006 war, the staged “death” of twelve-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah, the “massacre” at Jenin, and the “war crimes” in Gaza.

In each and every case, the “news” of Israeli atrocities was broadcast far and wide by organizations such as Reuters, AP, CNN, and AFP. The United Nations has offered its imprimatur to every libel. The truth seemed always to have a case of laryngitis.

Today, in the wake of the confrontation between Israeli soldiers and the provocateurs aboard the Gaza flotilla, the remarkably incurious world press is providing exactly the sort of headlines on which the organizers knew they could count. “Flotilla Attack Is Israel’s Kent State” screamed the Huffington Post. Agence France Presse carried a banner quoting the Turkish foreign minister to the effect that “Israel has lost all legitimacy.” Every news outlet I checked docilely described the flotilla as “humanitarian.”

Don’t members of the press ever resent being so used?

Fact: Israel imposed a blockade of Gaza to prevent weapons from reaching the radical Islamic regime there that continues to make war on Israeli civilians. Egypt too has blockaded the strip, hoping to choke off weapons to Hamas, which it views as a threat.

Fact: Humanitarian relief is delivered to Gaza from Israel on a daily basis. During the first three months of this year, 94,500 tons of supplies were transferred to Gaza from Israel, including 48,000 tons of food products; 40,000 tons of wheat; 2,760 tons of rice; 1,987 tons of clothes and footwear; and 553 tons of milk powder and baby food for the strip’s 1.5 million inhabitants. Representatives of international aid groups and the United Nations move freely to and from the Gaza Strip.

Fact: Upon learning of the intentions of the Gaza flotilla, the Israeli government asked the organizers to deliver their humanitarian aid first to an Israeli port where it would be inspected (for weapons) before being forwarded to Gaza. The organizers refused. “There are two possible happy endings,” a Muslim activist on board explained, “either we will reach Gaza or we will achieve martyrdom.”

Fact: The flotilla ignored multiple instructions from Israeli navy ships to change course and follow them to the Israeli port of Ashdod.

Fact: On board one of the ships, according to al-Jazeera, the “humanitarian” Palestinians sang “Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Muhammad will return” — a reference to the 628 massacre of Jews in Arabia at the hands of Muhammad.

Fact: The flotilla’s participants included the IHH, a “humanitarian relief fund” based in Turkey that has close ties to Hamas and to global jihadi groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya, and elsewhere, and which has also organized relief to anti-U.S. Islamic radicals in Fallujah, Iraq. A French intelligence report suggests that IHH has provided documents to terrorists, permitting them to pose as relief workers. Among the other cheerleaders — former British MP and Saddam Hussein pal George Galloway, all-purpose America and Israel hater Noam Chomsky, and John Ging, head of UNRWA, the U.N.’s agency for Palestinian support.

Fact: When the family of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was kidnapped during a cross-border raid by Hamas in 2006, offered to support the flotilla if, in exchange, they would agree to ask Hamas to permit international agencies to visit their son, they were rebuffed.

Fact: When Israeli commandos rappelled down ropes to the deck of the Mavi Marmara, they were assaulted and beaten with metal poles and baseball bats by the Palestinians on board. (It’s available on theisraelproject.org).

Some commentators sympathetic to Israel complain that the Israelis were late getting their explanation of events to the press. That’s probably true, but almost irrelevant. There is a jerking of knees around the world whenever and wherever Israel is forced to defend itself. This eagerness to repeat the Palestinian version of events, to assume the very worst about Israel, and to ignore the history of blatant and outrageous lies by Israel’s enemies — amounts to joining them.

— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.