Going Down The Drain,Rangel WantsYOU & Beer Gate!

Worth repeating. Turning winning options into losing ones - the Obama-Kennedy way. (See 1 below.)

Good old Charlie Rangel, like Uncle Sam, he wants you! - he wants you to pay for his skullduggery. Congress is just brimming with worms like Rangel but constituents just love their own and keep sending them back! (see 2 below.)

Obama believes doctors are greedy crooks so he wants a bureaucrat to look down your child's throat instead. The devil is in the details folks. (See 3 below.)

Once again Israel is put in a corner by being asked to cut its own throat and allow radical Fatah members opposed to negotuations to transgress Israeli territory to support Abbas's call for a Conference. (See 4 below.)

These opinion writers believe ObamaCare worse than previously thought once they read details.

Has anyone stopped to ask why Obama sees nothing admirable or redeeming about our current health care system yet Saudi Sheiks and a host of other Arab rulers flock here for first rate care when they have serious problems. (See 5 below.)

As 4th of July fireworks roared skyward Obama's 'Roman Candles' fizzled. Though he has the numerical advantage he loses in the intellectual department because his rhetoric is not supported by facts. So when the facts don't square engage in a rush job, obfuscate and bully. Typical actions associate with a doomed strategy.

Obama tried to pull out all the stoppers but, in the end, it was himself and his program(s) that are going down the drain. (See 6 below.)

Gates tapes are released and appear to reveal a calm officer doing his job being confronted by a Harvard elitist who sees himself above the law.

President cool hopes a cold beer get together will quench the public's thirst for its continuing interest in Obama's own over-reaction and stupidity. Tag this one 'Beer Gate.' (See 7 below.)

Our First Lady, who previous to becomeing same, was not happy with her country seems quite comfortable now according to this report whose veracity I will not attest.

Female equivalent of Red Skelton's: 'Freddie the Freeloader?'(See 8 below.)

Dick


1) 5 freedoms you'd lose in health care reform: If you read the fine print in the Congressional plans, you'll find that a lot of cherished aspects of the current system would disappear.
By Shawn Tully

In promoting his health-care agenda, President Obama has repeatedly reassured Americans that they can keep their existing health plans -- and that the benefits and access they prize will be enhanced through reform.

A close reading of the two main bills, one backed by Democrats in the House and the other issued by Sen. Edward Kennedy's Health committee, contradict the President's assurances. To be sure, it isn't easy to comb through their 2,000 pages of tortured legal language. But page by page, the bills reveal a web of restrictions, fines, and mandates that would radically change your health-care coverage.

If you prize choosing your own cardiologist or urologist under your company's Preferred Provider Organization plan (PPO), if your employer rewards your non-smoking, healthy lifestyle with reduced premiums, if you love the bargain Health Savings Account (HSA) that insures you just for the essentials, or if you simply take comfort in the freedom to spend your own money for a policy that covers the newest drugs and diagnostic tests -- you may be shocked to learn that you could lose all of those good things under the rules proposed in the two bills that herald a health-care revolution.

In short, the Obama platform would mandate extremely full, expensive, and highly subsidized coverage -- including a lot of benefits people would never pay for with their own money -- but deliver it through a highly restrictive, HMO-style plan that will determine what care and tests you can and can't have. It's a revolution, all right, but in the wrong direction.

Let's explore the five freedoms that Americans would lose under Obamacare:

1. Freedom to choose what's in your plan

The bills in both houses require that Americans purchase insurance through "qualified" plans offered by health-care "exchanges" that would be set up in each state. The rub is that the plans can't really compete based on what they offer. The reason: The federal government will impose a minimum list of benefits that each plan is required to offer.

Today, many states require these "standard benefits packages" -- and they're a major cause for the rise in health-care costs. Every group, from chiropractors to alcohol-abuse counselors, do lobbying to get included. Connecticut, for example, requires reimbursement for hair transplants, hearing aids, and in vitro fertilization.

The Senate bill would require coverage for prescription drugs, mental-health benefits, and substance-abuse services. It also requires policies to insure "children" until the age of 26. That's just the starting list. The bills would allow the Department of Health and Human Services to add to the list of required benefits, based on recommendations from a committee of experts. Americans, therefore, wouldn't even know what's in their plans and what they're required to pay for, directly or indirectly, until after the bills become law.

2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs

As with the previous example, the Obama plan enshrines into federal law one of the worst features of state legislation: community rating. Eleven states, ranging from New York to Oregon, have some form of community rating. In its purest form, community rating requires that all patients pay the same rates for their level of coverage regardless of their age or medical condition.

Americans with pre-existing conditions need subsidies under any plan, but community rating is a dubious way to bring fairness to health care. The reason is twofold: First, it forces young people, who typically have lower incomes than older workers, to pay far more than their actual cost, and gives older workers, who can afford to pay more, a big discount. The state laws gouging the young are a major reason so many of them have joined the ranks of uninsured.

Under the Senate plan, insurers would be barred from charging any more than twice as much for one patient vs. any other patient with the same coverage. So if a 20-year-old who costs just $800 a year to insure is forced to pay $2,500, a 62-year-old who costs $7,500 would pay no more than $5,000.

Second, the bills would ban insurers from charging differing premiums based on the health of their customers. Again, that's understandable for folks with diabetes or cancer. But the bills would bar rewarding people who pursue a healthy lifestyle of exercise or a cholesterol-conscious diet. That's hardly a formula for lower costs. It's as if car insurers had to charge the same rates to safe drivers as to chronic speeders with a history of accidents.

3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage

The bills threaten to eliminate the one part of the market truly driven by consumers spending their own money. That's what makes a market, and health care needs more of it, not less.

Hundreds of companies now offer Health Savings Accounts to about 5 million employees. Those workers deposit tax-free money in the accounts and get a matching contribution from their employer. They can use the funds to buy a high-deductible plan -- say for major medical costs over $12,000. Preventive care is reimbursed, but patients pay all other routine doctor visits and tests with their own money from the HSA account. As a result, HSA users are far more cost-conscious than customers who are reimbursed for the majority of their care.

The bills seriously endanger the trend toward consumer-driven care in general. By requiring minimum packages, they would prevent patients from choosing stripped-down plans that cover only major medical expenses. "The government could set extremely low deductibles that would eliminate HSAs," says John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a free-market research group. "And they could do it after the bills are passed."

4. Freedom to keep your existing plan

This is the freedom that the President keeps emphasizing. Yet the bills appear to say otherwise. It's worth diving into the weeds -- the territory where most pundits and politicians don't seem to have ventured.

The legislation divides the insured into two main groups, and those two groups are treated differently with respect to their current plans. The first are employees covered by the Employee Retirement Security Act of 1974. ERISA regulates companies that are self-insured, meaning they pay claims out of their cash flow, and don't have real insurance. Those are the GEs (GE, Fortune 500) and Time Warners (TWX, Fortune 500) and most other big companies.

The House bill states that employees covered by ERISA plans are "grandfathered." Under ERISA, the plans can do pretty much what they want -- they're exempt from standard packages and community rating and can reward employees for healthy lifestyles even in restrictive states.

But read on.

The bill gives ERISA employers a five-year grace period when they can keep offering plans free from the restrictions of the "qualified" policies offered on the exchanges. But after five years, they would have to offer only approved plans, with the myriad rules we've already discussed. So for Americans in large corporations, "keeping your own plan" has a strict deadline. In five years, like it or not, you'll get dumped into the exchange. As we'll see, it could happen a lot earlier.

The outlook is worse for the second group. It encompasses employees who aren't under ERISA but get actual insurance either on their own or through small businesses. After the legislation passes, all insurers that offer a wide range of plans to these employees will be forced to offer only "qualified" plans to new customers, via the exchanges.

The employees who got their coverage before the law goes into effect can keep their plans, but once again, there's a catch. If the plan changes in any way -- by altering co-pays, deductibles, or even switching coverage for this or that drug -- the employee must drop out and shop through the exchange. Since these plans generally change their policies every year, it's likely that millions of employees will lose their plans in 12 months.

5. Freedom to choose your doctors

The Senate bill requires that Americans buying through the exchanges -- and as we've seen, that will soon be most Americans -- must get their care through something called "medical home." Medical home is similar to an HMO. You're assigned a primary care doctor, and the doctor controls your access to specialists. The primary care physicians will decide which services, like MRIs and other diagnostic scans, are best for you, and will decide when you really need to see a cardiologists or orthopedists.

Under the proposals, the gatekeepers would theoretically guide patients to tests and treatments that have proved most cost-effective. The danger is that doctors will be financially rewarded for denying care, as were HMO physicians more than a decade ago. It was consumer outrage over despotic gatekeepers that made the HMOs so unpopular, and killed what was billed as the solution to America's health-care cost explosion.

The bills do not specifically rule out fee-for-service plans as options to be offered through the exchanges. But remember, those plans -- if they exist -- would be barred from charging sick or elderly patients more than young and healthy ones. So patients would be inclined to game the system, staying in the HMO while they're healthy and switching to fee-for-service when they become seriously ill. "That would kill fee-for-service in a hurry," says Goodman.

In reality, the flexible, employer-based plans that now dominate the landscape, and that Americans so cherish, could disappear far faster than the 5 year "grace period" that's barely being discussed.

Companies would have the option of paying an 8% payroll tax into a fund that pays for coverage for Americans who aren't covered by their employers. It won't happen right away -- large companies must wait a couple of years before they opt out. But it will happen, since it's likely that the tax will rise a lot more slowly than corporate health-care costs, especially since they'll be lobbying Washington to keep the tax under control in the righteous name of job creation.

The best solution is to move to a let-freedom-ring regime of high deductibles, no community rating, no standard benefits, and cross-state shopping for bargains (another market-based reform that's strictly taboo in the bills). I'll propose my own solution in another piece soon on Fortune.com. For now, we suffer with a flawed health-care system, but we still have our Five Freedoms. Call them the Five Endangered Freedoms.

2) Morality and Charlie Rangel’s Taxes: It’s much easier to raise taxes if you don’t pay them.


Ever notice that those who endorse high taxes and those who actually pay them aren’t the same people? Consider the curious case of Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel, who is leading the charge for a new 5.4-percentage point income tax surcharge and recently called it “the moral thing to do.” About his own tax liability he seems less, well, fervent.

Exhibit A concerns a rental property Mr. Rangel purchased in 1987 at the Punta Cana Yacht Club in the Dominican Republic. The rental income from that property ought to be substantial since it is a luxury beach-front villa and is more often than not rented out. But when the National Legal and Policy Center looked at Mr. Rangel’s House financial disclosure forms in August, it noted that his reported income looked suspiciously low. In 2004 and 2005, he reported no more than $5,000, and in 2006 and 2007 no income at all from the property.

The Congressman initially denied there was any unreported income. But reporters quickly showed that the villa is among the most desirable at Punta Cana and that it rents for $500 a night in the low season, and as much as $1,100 a night in peak season. Last year it was fully booked between December 15 and April 15.

Mr. Rangel soon admitted having failed to report rental income of $75,000 over the years. First he blamed his wife for the oversight because he said she was supposed to be managing the property. Then he blamed the language barrier. “Every time I thought I was getting somewhere, they’d start speaking Spanish,” Mr. Rangel explained.

Mr. Rangel promised last fall to amend his tax returns, pay what is due and correct the information on his annual financial disclosure form. But the deadline for the 2008 filing was May 15 and as of last week he still had not filed. His press spokesman declined to answer questions about anything related to his ethics problems.

Besides not paying those pesky taxes, Mr. Rangel had other reasons for wanting to hide income. As the tenant of four rent-stabilized apartments in Harlem, the Congressman needed to keep his annual reported income below $175,000, lest he be ineligible as a hardship case for rent control. (He also used one of the apartments as an office in violation of rent-control rules, but that’s another story.)

Mr. Rangel said last fall that “I never had any idea that I got any income’’ from the villa. Try using that one the next time the IRS comes after you. Equally interesting is his claim that he didn’t know that the developer of the Dominican Republic villa had converted his $52,000 mortgage to an interest-free loan in 1990. That would seem to violate House rules on gifts, which say Members may only accept loans on “terms that are generally available to the public.” Try getting an interest-free loan from your banker.

The National Legal and Policy Center also says it has confirmed that Mr. Rangel owned a home in Washington from 1971-2000 and during that time claimed a “homestead” exemption that allowed him to save on his District of Columbia property taxes. However, the homestead exemption only applies to a principal residence, and the Washington home could not have qualified as such since Mr. Rangel’s rent-stabilized apartments in New York have the same requirement.

The House Ethics Committee is investigating Mr. Rangel on no fewer than six separate issues, including his failure to report the no-interest loan on his Punta Cana villa and his use of rent-stabilized apartments. It is also investigating his fund raising for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York. New York labor attorney Theodore Kheel, one of the principal owners of the Punta Cana resort, is an important donor to the Rangel Center.

All of this has previously appeared in print in one place or another, and we salute the reporters who did the leg work. We thought we’d summarize it now for readers who are confronted with the prospect of much higher tax bills, and who might like to know how a leading Democrat defines “moral” behavior when the taxes hit close to his homes.

3)Dr. Obama’s Tonsillectomy:Do Americans want a federal board deciding if their kids need surgery?.

Those greedy doctors. “You come in and you’ve got a bad sore throat, or your child has a bad sore throat or has repeated sore throats,” President Obama explained at Wednesday’s press conference. “The doctor may look at the reimbursement system and say to himself, ‘You know what? I make a lot more money if I take this kid’s tonsils out.’”

If that’s what he really thinks is wrong with U.S. health care—and with the medical profession—then ObamaCare is going to be even worse than we thought. The point Mr. Obama oversimplified is that the way the U.S. pays for medical services can encourage some physicians to prescribe unnecessary tests or treatments, especially in Medicare. But his implication is that doctors aren’t acting in the best interests of their patients in order, basically, to rob them.

Incentives matter, yet maybe the truth is that medicine is a highly complex science in which the evidence changes rapidly and constantly. That’s one reason tonsillectomies are so much rarer now than they were in the 1970s and 1980s—but still better for some patients over others. As the American Academy of Otolaryngology put it in a press release responding to Mr. Obama’s commentary, clinical guidelines suggest that “In many cases, tonsillectomy may be a more effective treatment, and less costly, than prolonged or repeated treatments for an infected throat.”

Mr. Obama seems to think that such judgments are easy. “If there’s a blue pill and a red pill and the blue pill is half the price of the red pill and works just as well,” he asked, “why not pay half price for the thing that’s going to make you well?” But usually the red and blue treatments are available—as well as the green, yellow, etc.—because of the variability of disease, human biology and patient preference. And the really hard cases, especially when government is paying for health care, are those for which there’s only a red pill and it happens to be very expensive.

Under the system Democrats are trying to ram through Congress, these case-by-case choices, currently made between patients and care-givers, will gradually be replaced by rigid government schemes. “Part of what we want to do is to make sure that those decisions are being made by doctors and medical experts based on evidence, based on what works—because that’s not how it’s working right now,” Mr. Obama said. We await the President’s evidence that the nation’s pediatricians are striking it rich with unnecessary tonsillectomies.

4) Abbas wants to crown extremist Maher Ghneim successor at Fatah conference


A backstage drama took place Monday, July 27, around US Middle East envoy George Mitchell's shuttle between Jerusalem, Cairo and Ramallah - behind the overt discussions on the peace process and Israeli settlement construction. It centered on the Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas' desperate attempt to bring off the first general conference of his Fatah faction in 25 years next Tuesday, Aug. 4, in Bethlehem.

it is still up in the air, but if all the hurdles are overcome, he hopes to anoint the Tunis-based veteran advocate of armed resistance to Israel, long-time head of the PLO's armed groups' personnel, 71-year old Maher Abu Ghneim to be his No. 2 and successor as Fatah leader.

After boycotting Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister, the Palestinian leader now wants his permission to let Ghaneim attend the conference.

Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak weighed in by asking Mitchell to make an unscheduled side trip to Cairo Sunday, July 26, in the middle of his meetings with Israeli leaders. Mubarak told the US envoy that it was up to him to persuade Israel to help make the Fatah conference a success. Otherwise, he said, Abbas would be finished and forced to retire, taking with him the Obama administration's hopes for an Israel-Arab peace process taking off before the end of September.

Mitchell turned to the Israeli prime minister who found himself stuck with four quandaries:

1. Should Israel open the door to admit the Palestinian rejectionist Ghneim, who for decades fought tooth and nail against negotiations with Israel and tried to sabotage the Oslo framework accords?

2. Should he allow 400 Fatah delegates based in the Gaza Strip to cross through Israel on their way to the Bethlehem conference - that is if the rival Hamas, which rules the enclave, lets them out? Hamas' price is that the Fatah-ruled West Bank administration release all Hamas detainees and obtain Israel's consent for their passage.

3. Should Israel also admit Fatah delegations to the conference from Yemen, the Gulf emirates, Algeria, Lebanon and Syria, knowing they are the hard core of the Palestinian terror organizations operating in those countries?

4. The Netanyahu government is informed a priori that the majority of the approximate 1,500 delegates to the Fatah conference are radicals who will object to any move to drop the Palestinian movement's commitment to "armed struggle" against Israel.

Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian leader who is serving 5 life sentences in an Israeli jail for orchestrating lethal terrorist attacks, posted a circular letter Sunday to all delegates telling them they must not renounce violent resistance to Israel, including suicide attacks, even for the sake of aid from the West.

The Israeli government therefore finds itself in the hugely anomalous position of being squeezed by the United States, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority to help launch a Palestinian conference which is certain to be as radically anti-Israel as the Islamist Hamas to give the US-promoted "peace process" a necessary lifeline.

5)Obamacare: It's Even Worse Than You Think: The next few weeks will be crucial to the future of American health care and American prosperity.
By James C. Capretta & Yuval Levin




President Obama's strategy to pass sweeping health care legislation rested on stealth and speed. The idea was to fill the conversation for months on end with vague talk about expanding coverage, "bending the cost-curve," improving quality, and rooting out waste, without showing the public how the plan would actually work or what it would cost. Legislation, meanwhile, would be composed behind closed doors, and the bills would be introduced as close as possible to when they might come up for a vote to minimize the time in which they could actually be read and thought about by those who would vote on them and those who would live under them. By the time the details emerged, maybe momentum and being "closer than ever before" would be enough to overcome the torrent of objections that were sure to be raised when people got a real look at the nuts and bolts.

That moment has now come. House Democrats finally unveiled their plan on July 14, with the aim of passing it by July 31, the last day before the August congressional recess. The Senate's Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee has released its part of the plan, but the Finance Committee (which must figure out how to pay for it all) has yet to do so. There, too, the leadership hoped for a vote before the recess.

But things have not gone as the Democrats intended. As details have emerged, an extraordinary wave of public concern has washed over the debate and left the plan's champions reeling. It is all but certain that both the House and Senate will recess for August without voting on health care, despite the president's insistence on its urgency. And the emerging tone of the public debate casts serious doubt on the fate of Obamacare more broadly.

The reasons for the public revolt are easy to see. The Democrats want to spend $1.5 trillion over a decade, impose an $800 billion tax increase in the midst of the worst recession in a generation, increase federal borrowing by $239 billion (on top of the $11 trillion the Obama budget already requires us to borrow through 2019), impose costly mandates on employers that will discourage hiring as unemployment nears 10 percent, force individuals to buy one-size-fits-all government defined insurance, and insert the government in countless new ways between doctors and patients. All of that would occur whether or not the plan includes a "public option," which at this point it does include and which will exacerbate all of these problems.

As these facts have become clear, Obama's standing has fallen and public opinion has grown decidedly less enthusiastic for the administration's approach. The trend is likely to continue, because the details of the plan reveal that its two most serious drawbacks--its cost and the prospect of government rationing--are worse than even most of their critics have grasped.

First, there are massive hidden costs inherent in a little-understood provision of the plan. The centerpiece of Obamacare is a new premium subsidy program. In the House bill, families with incomes up to four times the poverty level would get a fixed cap on their insurance premiums, tied to their incomes. For instance, a family whose income is twice the poverty level would pay no more than 5 percent of its total income for insurance. But providing that guarantee to all such households in America would cost far more than even the Democrats are willing to propose. The plan therefore would make subsidies available only to households getting insurance through the new "exchanges," insurance pools set up in each state as a parallel system to job-based coverage. And full-time workers in all but the smallest firms would be barred from entering the exchanges, at least for a time, so they wouldn't have access to the new entitlement.

This means that two households, identical in all respects including income, would be treated very differently depending on whether they got their insurance through the exchange or through their employer. At twice the poverty level, a family of four today makes $44,000. Such a family insured through an exchange would pay no more than $2,200 for a policy that could cost $12,000, so it would receive a federal subsidy totaling nearly $10,000. The family next door, meanwhile, with the same income but with health insurance provided through the workplace, would receive an implicit tax break for the $12,000 in employer paid premiums worth only $3,600. That's a bonus of more than $6,000 for being in the exchange--or a penalty of $6,000 for having employer coverage. This disparate treatment would be widespread. The Census Bureau counts 102 million people under age 65 in households with incomes between 150 and 400 percent of the poverty level, but the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that only 20 million of them would receive insurance through the exchanges in 2014.

Such disparate treatment of lower income workers would create a powerful incentive to flee employer coverage for the exchanges. And there would at the same time be pressure to extend the subsidy to workers generally satisfied with the plans provided at work but displeased about paying so much more for them than other similarly situated people. This would vastly increase the cost of the plan, since Congress is not known for resisting constituent pressure. CBO's estimates of the cost of the bill assume the barriers to a vastly larger entitlement program would hold. But the Lewin Group, a health policy consulting firm, concluded otherwise: that about 130 million people would be moved from job-based coverage to the exchanges, with most ending up in the new "public option" very quickly. So, one way or another, the bill's promise of "capped" premiums would be all but certain to become a 100 million person entitlement, which would cost several times what the CBO has so far estimated.

Meanwhile, it is becoming increasingly clear that Obamacare would involve not just rationed care but centrally managed and controlled care. For months, the president said he knew how to "bend the cost-curve" with painless innovations like information technology and new effectiveness research, but CBO said these simply wouldn't work. So, now, at the eleventh hour, the president is hailing a new approach--vast new powers for a board of experts in Washington to set rules and calibrate fees--as the secret to cutting costs and bringing the system under control, first within Medicare and then beyond. But in a system as complex as ours, this is a recipe for one-size-fits-all inefficiency and the shortages, misallocations, and waiting lines that come with it. This is even worse than simple rationing; it is an attempt at technocratic central planning for a country of over 300 million people.

The idea of subtle adjustments of rules and incentives to drive doctor and patient behavior is nothing new, of course. It has been tried several times in America--most notably in 1989, when an expert commission was assigned to devise a new fee schedule for Medicare that would reward general practitioners and drive more medical students to become family physicians. The group sought carefully to manipulate prices and payments to drive practitioner decisions, but the results of their efforts were exactly the opposite of their intent. Specialists have triumphed with tests and procedures, general practitioners have vanished--not just for Medicare patients but for everyone--and doctors despise the complicated fee schedule.

There is no reason to think the new council of experts would be any better able to bring America's vast and complex health care system under centralized rational control. Doctors know better than anyone that efforts at such control constrain their ability to respond to the needs of the unique patient in front of their nose--and they are growing increasingly uneasy with this element of the Obama plan, just as the general public is growing uneasy about costs.

Paying more for a great health care system might perhaps be justifiable, and there might even be a case for accepting a system worse than the one we have now in order to save money. But paying more for a worse health care system simply makes no sense--yet this is the bargain the president and his allies are proposing.

None of this means Obamacare is dead. The Democrats have some serious political muscle to flex, and they may still be able to force their plans through. Conservatives should not grow confident or careless at the sight of public opposition to liberal health care reform. Instead, they must use the August recess to clarify the problems with Obamacare to voters, and to make the case that America must not be rushed into a terrible mistake. There is time to find the right way to reform American health care, and there are good ideas out there for doing so--ideas that use competition and consumer choice to put downward pressure on prices rather than rationing care, displacing the currently happily insured, and bankrupting the government.

The next few weeks will be crucial to the future of American health care and American prosperity. Opponents of the president's proposal have managed to slow it down enough to allow for a real debate. Now they must win the argument.

6) Analysis: July has been disaster for Obama, Hill Dems
By Sam Youngman


The Obama administration, which was flying high a month ago after pushing through a climate change bill in the House, has since been dealt a series of setbacks and is struggling to regain its footing.

After the climate bill passed 219-212 on the afternoon of June 26, there was a feeling that the White House could get much of its agenda through Congress in 2009.


A month later, there are doubts that President Obama will even achieve his No. 1 priority of healthcare reform, much less cap-and-trade, immigration reform and a regulatory revamp of the financial sector.

Since late June — when Democrats defied conventional wisdom and passed the climate bill by their self-imposed deadline — the stubborn realities of Washington have blunted and possibly even derailed the president's signature domestic efforts.

The White House is frantically working to get healthcare reform back on track after missed deadlines in August. Obama had initially said he wanted both chambers to pass legislation by the August recess and sign a bill by Oct. 15. He now says he wants to enact healthcare reform by the end of the year.

And while the president continues to put his critics "on notice," targeting GOP lawmakers, the Republicans are quick to note the obvious — Obama has comfortable majorities in both the House and Senate.

Obama enjoyed immediate successes in office, signing into law his $787 billion stimulus package in just 28 days. He also helped shepherd a pay equity measure and a children’s healthcare bill through Congress.

But in the past few months, as unemployment rates have spiked, Republicans have increasingly found traction in lambasting Obama’s agenda and fanning the flames of division within the Democratic Party. Obama did score a significant victory last week on eliminating Senate funding for F-22 fighter jets, but the triumph was overshadowed by Democratic infighting on healthcare.

Despite a number of former Democratic members and aides working in the Obama administration, Democrats on Capitol Hill have grown bolder in defying their party leader. Many centrist Democrats are worried that Republicans will have the upper hand in the 2010 elections.

Paul Light, an expert on the presidency and a professor at New York University, said the president's problems with Capitol Hill reflect "a miscalculation by the Obama administration on how political capital gets spent in Washington."

Light said that capital, even for a president who enjoys immense personal popular support like Obama, is spent a bit at a time on each initiative or piece of legislation.

"I think the Obama administration has been spending political capital at roughly the same rate the federal government spends money," Light said. "Eventually, it runs out."

Light quoted President Lyndon Johnson, who said that "if you don't get it done in six months, you're not going to get it done."

One of the reasons Obama has spent so much capital, aside from his ambitious agenda, has been his willingness to cede so much control to Congress, Light said.


While lawmakers like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are allies of the president, his political capital is not necessarily a priority of theirs.

To that end, Light says, Obama has made a mistake in making Pelosi his "broker," spending his political capital but not always to his benefit.

The other misstep that has bogged down the administration on healthcare specifically is Obama's inability to communicate effectively to the American people, Light said.

While it is shocking to consider that Obama is anything less than one of the best communicators in modern political history, when it comes to healthcare, he simply has not been able to make the sell to people who do have health insurance.

And Wednesday night's primetime press conference was a "disaster," Light said.

Light said that for the president to regain political momentum, he needs to reclaim his agenda from Congress and start connecting with the public.

"He needs to take this over and own it," Light said.

7) Cambridge releases Gates arrest 911 tapes
By Jessica Van Sack and Joe Dwinell

The long-awaited audio tapes of the controversial July 16 arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. illustrates how worried neighbors were about a possible break-in and how a veteran sergeant felt he needed help with an “uncooperative” man.

Gates can be heard on the tapes talking in the background, but his exact words are muffled. It is difficult to say if the professor is screaming or not, according to tapes made public for the first time today.

Arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, remains calm and clear as he tells a dispatcher “he’s off with a gentleman who says he resides here (but) is rather uncooperative.”

He then adds: “Keep the cars coming.”

The tapes were made public today at a noon press conference with police and Cambridge officials. City officials said they hope the release marks a “turning point” in the debate over race relations in a city famous for its liberal leanings.

In the initial 911 call, Harvard alumni magazine employee Lucia Whalen of Malden can be heard spelling out the name of the street and saying that another woman approached her about seeing two men trying to enter the 17 Ware Street home.

“She had noticed two gentlemen trying to get in at that number 17 Ware Street,” Whalen said. “They kind of had to barge in ... using their shoulder ... I’m not sure if these are two individuals who actually live there ... they were pushing the door in.”

When asked by the dispatcher if the men are “white, black or Hispanic,” Whalen said, “One looked kind of Hispanic,” also saying they were “larger men.

“I just saw them from a distance,” she said, adding she called when an older woman also walking on the street seemed concerned about the men busting into the house.

Her voice is also clear on the 911 audio. The conflict, however, begins to develop in the second audio of the 12:44 p.m. call of a “possible B&E in progress.”

One minute into the tape, Crowley is heard saying “can you have the caller come to the front door?” The dispatcher replies, “It’s not her house.”

Forty seconds later Crowley asks for Harvard Police to back him up. Finally, you hear police call for “the wagon.”

The tapes “speak for themselves,” said Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert Haas. Both sets of tapes last for about 4 minutes, 30 seconds. They clearly spell out the 911 call, but are choppy when it comes to recording all that went on that afternoon at the professor’s yellow, two-story home located just off bustling Harvard Square.

Hass joined city officials today to both release the tapes and name two top members of a panel being established to help improve community relations with police. Those members include Massachusetts-based police management expert Bob Wasserman and Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum in Washington, a nonprofit group focused on improving police tactics.

Wasserman is chairman of a consulting company Strategic Policy Partnership.

Cambridge Mayor Denise Simmons called today’s release of the tapes and naming of panel leaders a turning point for the city.

“I strongly support our commissioner Bob Haas, and I strongly endorse this committee,” she said.

City Manger Robert Healy added: “Today is the day to move forward.”

As for Gates and Crowley, both are invited to the White House for a beer with President Obama, possibly sometime this week, to mend fences in what has turned into a national examination of racial profiling.

The president admitted Friday he fanned the flames of the race debate when he accused Cambridge police of “acting stupidly” in the arrest of Gates, a friend who is a prominent African-American studies scholar.

Obama’s offer for a beer, he added at a press conference Friday, came at the end of a call to Crowley made to help repair any damage done. The president also called Gates the same day with the same invitation. The White House has revealed the president will have a Budweiser and Crowley a Blue Moon. Gates has not said what he’ll drink.

8)"In my own life, in my own small way, I have tried to give back to this
country that has given me so much," she said. "See, that's why I left a
job at a big law firm for a career in public service," Michelle Obama

No, Michele Obama does not get paid to serve as the First Lady and she
doesn't perform any official duties. But this hasn't deterred her from
hiring an unprecedented number of staffers to cater to her every whim
and to satisfy her every request in the midst of the Great Recession.
Just think Mary Lincoln was taken to task for purchasing china for the
White House during the Civil War. And Mamie Eisenhower had to shell out
the salary for her personal secretary.

How things have changed! If you're one of the tens of millions of
Americans facing certain destitution, earning less than subsistence
wages stocking the shelves at Wal-Mart or serving up McDonald
cheeseburgers, prepare to scream and then come to realize that the
benefit package for these servants of Miz Michelle are the same as
members of the national security and defense departments and the bill
for these assorted lackeys is paid by John Q. Public:

1. $172,2000 - Sher, Susan (Chief Of Staff)

2. $140,000 - Frye, Jocelyn C. (Deputy Assistant to the President and
Director of Policy And Projects For The First Lady)

3. $113,000 - Rogers, Desiree G. (Special Assistant to the President
and White House Social Secretary)

4. $102,000 - Johnston, Camille Y. (Special Assistant to the President
and Director of Communications for the First Lady)

5. Winter, Melissa E. (Special Assistant to the President and Deputy
Chief Of Staff to the First Lady)

6. $90,000 - Medina, David S. (Deputy Chief Of Staff to the First Lady)

7. $84,000 - Lelyveld, Catherine M. (Director and Press Secretary to
the First Lady)

8. $75,000 - Starkey, Frances M. (Director of Scheduling and Advance
for the First Lady)

9. $70,000 - Sanders, Trooper (Deputy Director of Policy and Projects
for the First Lady)

10. $65,000 - Burnough, Erinn J. (Deputy Director and Deputy Social
Secretary)

11. Reinstein, Joseph B. (Deputy Director and Deputy Social Secretary)

12. $62,000 - Goodman, Jennifer R. (Deputy Director of Scheduling and
Events Coordinator For The First Lady)

13. $60,000 - Fitts, Alan O. (Deputy Director of Advance and Trip
Director for the First Lady)

14. Lewis, Dana M. (Special Assistant and Personal Aide to the First
Lady)

15. $52,500 - Mustaphi, Semonti M. (Associate Director and Deputy Press
Secretary To The First Lady)

16. $50,000 - Jarvis, Kristen E. (Special Assistant for Scheduling and
Traveling Aide To The First Lady)

17. $45,000 - Lechtenberg, Tyler A. (Associate Director of
Correspondence For The First Lady)

18. Tubman, Samantha (Deputy Associate Director, Social Office)

19. $40,000 - Boswell, Joseph J. (Executive Assistant to the Chief Of
Staff to the First Lady)

20. $36,000 - Armbruster, Sally M. (Staff Assistant to the Social
Secretary)

21. Bookey, Natalie (Staff Assistant)

22. Jackson, Deilia A. (Deputy Associate Director of Correspondence for
the First Lady)

Copyright 2009 Canada Free Press.Com
canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/12652

There has never been anyone in the White House at any time that has
created such an army of staffers whose sole duties are the facilitation
of the First Lady's social life. One wonders why she needs so much help,
at taxpayer expense, when even Hillary, only had three; Jackie Kennedy
one; Laura Bush one; and prior to Mamie Eisenhower social help came from
the President's own pocket.

Note: This does not include makeup artist Ingrid Grimes-Miles, 49, and
"First Hairstylist" Johnny Wright, 31, both of whom traveled aboard Air
Force One to Europe