Pres. Obama sounded the alarm in his weekly radio address, seeking to correct disnformation and dispel rumors about the Democrats’ healthcare proposals. There is a lot on the web about ObamaCare that seems fishy, but rather than sending bits and pieces to flag@whitehouse.gov, I am compiling them here in several categories:

Misinformation from Pres. Obama about the cost of ObamaCare.

Let me repeat: Health insurance reform cannot add to our deficit over the next decade and I mean it.

***

The bill I sign will also include my commitment and the commitment of Congress to slow the growth of health care costs over the long run.

Making health care affordable for all Americans will cost somewhere on the order of $1 trillion over the next 10 years. That’s real money, even in Washington. But remember, that’s less than we are projected to have spent on the war in Iraq.

Misinformation from Pres. Obama on the doctor-patient relationship.

I know that there are millions of Americans who are content with their health care coverage — they like their plan and, most importantly, they value their relationship with their doctor. They trust you. And that means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.

These assurances reflect an aspiration, but may not be literally true or enforceable.

The legislation does not require insurers or employers to continue offering the health benefits they now provide. The House bill sets detailed standards for “acceptable health care coverage,” which would define “essential benefits” and permissible co-payments. Employers that already offer insurance would have five years to bring their plans into compliance with the new federal standards.

The Senate health committee bill goes somewhat further by offering an “option to retain current insurance coverage.”

The legislation could have significant implications for individuals who have bought coverage on their own. Their policies might be exempted from the new standards, but the coverage might not be viable for long because insurers could not add benefits or enroll additional people in noncompliant policies.

Dallas L. Salisbury, president of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a private nonpartisan group, said: “The president and Democrats in Congress are saying what they would like. Their promises may not be literally true because your health plan may change, and your doctor may no longer accept your insurance.”

Misinformation from Pres. Obama about a government takeover of health care.

If the government requires insurers to accept all customers and charge all the same price, regulates all aspects of their marketing to make sure they aren’t discriminating, and then redistributes the profits to make sure that no company gets penalized unfairly, in what sense is the industry still “private”?

Misinformation from Pres. Obama about government funding abortions.

Health care legislation before Congress would allow a new government-sponsored insurance plan to cover abortions, a decision that would affect millions of women and recast federal policy on the divisive issue.

***

A compromise approved by a House committee last week attempted to balance questions of federal funding, personal choice and the conscience rights of clinicians. It would allow the public plan to cover abortion but without using federal funds, only dollars from beneficiary premiums. Likewise, private plans in the new insurance exchange could opt to cover abortion, but no federal subsidies would be used to pay for the procedure.

“It’s a sham,” said Douglas Johnson, legislative director for National Right to Life. “It’s a bookkeeping scheme. The plan pays for abortion, and the government subsidizes the plan.”

Misinformation from Pres. Obama about government-run healthcare and illegal immigration.

Misinformation from Pres. Obama about cutting Medicaid.

My husband told me about this yesterday.



"NM Chrysler dealers enraged by closures

Annette DiLorenzo-Thayer has one word for the way Chrysler Corp. has treated her and the Albuquerque Chrysler dealership her family had run for 23 years.

“Despicable,” DiLorenzo-Thayer said of Chrysler’s decision to end Quality Jeep-Chrysler, Inc.’s franchise on June 9 as one of the company’s new car dealers.

What angered DiLorenzo-Thayer even more is that Chrysler took her dealership away and appears ready to renew its relationship with Ken Zangara, whose Albuquerque Dodge dealership closed in February amid allegations of poor business practices. DiLorenzo-Thayer was baffled by Chrysler’s decision.

Zangara and Zangara Dodge are on a list of assumed new car dealers and dealerships that Chrysler reportedly will do business with once it emerges from bankruptcy protection."


The "poor business practices" Zangera is accused of are failing to pay off loans for vehicles customers traded in toward new cars. They now got to strike a deal with the AG. ..
Other than providing their customers letters in which to give to the credit companys, there is no mention of a punishment. No jail time for Mr. Zangera. No fines.

So I ask you, dear readers, why is Chrysler closing one dealership, only to allow another, obviously shady, dealership to open back up?
At first I thought it was political, but after some googling, I've found only contributions to the Republican party. Hmm. I'll reseach Delorenzo and see what I can find on them as well.
In the mean time here are some examples of Zangera breaking the law: 1997, 1998, 2004
Another Zangera article and another and a blog.

Why would Obama be worried about graduating navel shipmen being armed with ceremonial swords?

Anyone?

Because he's a tyrant. Plain and simple. 

One of the commenters pointed out that the swords have been banned since 9/11. This is a Bush policy and they are encouraging Obama to repeal it.

Please read the comments on that person's blog. Peach brings up a good point when she says "All recent photos of graduation at Annapolis shows middies wearing white uniforms and no swords. At West Point’s 2009 graduation, cadets wore full dress uniforms and swords.Cadets and all military at West Point wear combat ready fatigues and boots every day to class and on the post, unless another uniform is designated, like parades. I asked why ? The answer, “We are at at war, the global war on terror.” That was in 2008, so maybe this has been changed." And she's right.

That strongly suggests that it is NOT a Bush policy, and even if it was, Obama has a chance to over ride it, or whatever. But he's not going to.

The economy stinks, and it’s going to get worse. Much worse.

What stinks about it? For starters, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has been fluctuating between eight and nine thousand, which is about five thousand points below its 2007 highs. The Dow is a calculated average of industrial stock prices, meant to measure the overall value of the American industrial sector. It includes major companies like Coca-Cola, Intel, Microsoft, Exxon-Mobil, and Wal-Mart. These companies lost a huge amount of value over the last two years, and they’re not growing in value now. They represent every major sector of the economy, so when the Dow is flat, it means none of the leading companies in any industry are gaining in value. That’s especially bad news, because as mediocre as it’s been, today’s market is probably as good as it’s going to get for a while. Huge amounts of “stimulus” money have generated nothing except waste and graft. The coming wave of tax increases, along with energy shortages from Obama’s insane energy policies, haven’t slammed into the industrial sector yet. The Dow also maintains indexes for transportation and utilities, and they don’t look so good, either. Cap-and-trade energy taxes will kill entire industries stone dead. Incidentally, one of the companies in the Dow industrial formula, since 1931, was General Motors.

What else is bad? Unemployment. Companies that are losing value don’t hire people. The current unemployment rate is 8.6%. For most of the Bush years, it was around four to five percent. Nobody expects this rate to go anywhere but up, or the media wouldn’t be parroting Obama’s ludicrous “create or save” language about jobs – a rhetorical dodge that only someone with great faith in the boundless stupidity of the public would attempt.

Another dangerous economic indicator is the trade deficit. It’s about six percent of our gross domestic product at the moment. The trade deficit means we’re importing far more than we’re exporting. To finance these imports, we have to borrow money from countries that are running trade surpluses. Running such a huge trade deficit means we’re not supplying our own domestic needs, and foreign customers aren’t buying our products. One of the major producers of a high-value product that both domestic and foreign customers used to be interested in was General Motors. Its transition from failing private-sector corporation to government-run disaster will not help that trade deficit any.

And of course, the fourth horseman of the economic apocalypse is our federal budget deficit, which has passed astonishing and become obscene. Endless billions plunged into pork-barrel spending, coupled with doomed attempts to keep the bloodless corporate host organisms of labor unions on life support, have threatened the bond market and the value of our currency. The current federal government debt is now over half a million dollars per American household, with plenty more reckless spending yet to come… including plans for a nationalized health care system that will suck another few trillion in imaginary money out of an utterly broke government that is mortgaged to the hilt. Among the genius ideas floated to pay for the nationalized health system is a brand-new value-added tax, a super sales tax of 10 to 25 percent, added onto the sales tax you already pay. The major immediate effect of such an idiotic scheme would be a massive reduction in spending by consumers, making an 8000 Dow look like a wistful memory of a bygone era. A significant result of nationalized health care will be a dramatic reduction of the average life expectancy, as a desperate government rations health care by declaring elderly people too expensive to treat. The elderly are generally wealthier than younger age cohorts, since they had a long lifetime to amass money and property… and since they won’t be able to spend money on staying alive, they’ll have more cash in the bank when they pass away, and those massive death taxes kick in. This will make one of the “unforeseen consequences” of socialized medicine an even greater wealth transfer from the private sector to the government.

These dire economic indicators are merely the prelude to the detonation of Social Security and Medicare, the Fat Man and Little Boy of financial catastrophe. These programs were going bankrupt anyway, but the doomsday clock has been greatly accelerated by a weakening economy and worse-than-broke government. Socialized medicine would relieve the pressure somewhat, by killing elderly people sooner and reducing the strain of paying their Social Security benefits, but it won’t be nearly enough to stop the avalanche of entitlement spending on the aging Baby Boomers. Retirees will fight to the bitter end to collect the benefits they paid for all of their lives, and it will be absolutely impossible to pay them.

We need dramatic action to remedy the collapsing economy now. A state-run economy does not have the flexibility to survive sudden expenses, such as major natural disasters or terrorist attacks. Everything that’s wrong with America is doubly wrong with California – what happens if they finally get that big earthquake they’ve always been worried is coming? Beyond the immediate physical destruction, the economic shock wave would bring the creaky American system crashing down, because we’re all plugged into California, whether we like it or not.

So, what can be done to fix these problems? It seems to me that we need the exact opposite of what we’re getting from the hapless Obama Administration. We need increased industrial activity, spurred by increased consumer demand, resulting in higher employment and more exports. None of this can come from tax-and-spend statist policies. The government does not create wealth, value, or hours of productivity when it spends money. It takes the money away from those who create those things, then skims a huge amount off the top due to bloated overhead costs, political graft, and the natural reduction of economic activity that comes from high tax rates. Major corporations and wealthy individuals have ways of avoiding high taxes, and most of them result in higher unemployment and reduced industrial output. The shriveled resources appropriated by the government are then spent inefficiently, with decisions made according to neurotic obsessions and political convenience. Digging our way out of the economic hole will require maximum productivity and efficiency. The path between employee, producer, and consumer must be as direct as possible.

We have to shut down the government. A great deal of it, anyway.

I wrote earlier about the enormous economic stimulus that would come from privatizing education. Many other such industries must be pried loose from the government’s talons, and fed to the private sector, where they can spur employment and commerce. Laws must be passed to prevent the sickening travesty of government officials controlling, or subsidizing, private industries. Laws that enable labor unions to bleed industries dry must be repealed, and the unions broken. Unions may have begun as collective bargaining entities protecting workers from exploitation, but they have devolved into quasi-governmental agencies that exploit everyone who doesn’t belong to the union – literally, in the case of the United Auto Workers, which has lifted about two hundred dollars out of your wallet over the last six months.

The only way to achieve these goals is with massive tax cuts. The leviathan can only be killed by starving it to death. Progressive taxation is a moral and practical atrocity that should be replaced with a flat tax or consumption-based tax (an argument for another day, but either would be better than the sheer tyranny of requiring half the country to pay 100% of the cost of bloated government.) We should flood the private sector with immediate, real money, broken loose from the government’s vaults. Since stock prices are predictive of anticipated trends, and companies figure upcoming quarterly tax assessments into their business plans, nothing could stimulate the economy faster than tax cuts. Tax and spend economies are simply a collectivist instrument for directing production as the political class sees fit, as wasteful as they are immoral. Return the freedom to create, hire, produce, and purchase to the private sector, and let the creative energy of millions of private citizens, making billions of transactions, produce results that can only astound the politically straitjacketed, manifestly incompetent minions of the Obama government. The spectacle of Treasury being run by a tax cheat, health care being administered by a lawyer with no medical training, and the fifty-billion-dollar GM boondoggle being captained by someone who appears to have been chosen randomly from a list of campaign operatives, is darkly amusing - but not at all surprising. This is the kind of garbage that happens every time politicians are given too much power. The private sector usually knows better than to hire a fraud like Turbo Tax Tim Geithner, and if it did make the mistake of hiring him, it would have fired him by now.

A revitalized, deregulated, lightly taxed private economy is the only chance we have of staving off the Social Security meltdown until private sector solutions can be applied to it. It is the only chance we have of preserving the value of the dollar, or stabilizing the bond market enough to make the Chinese stop laughing at us. Everything taken over by the government gets more expensive, but it never gets any better. We have to improve, to survive the coming storm. We need an army of screaming apparatchiks staggering out of Washington in shock, wondering what just hit them. We need the government to make sacrifices for a change. It is the largest employer, lender, borrower, and consumer in the country… or in the world. We’ve had enough of a blundering giant staring down at the little people and telling them to tighten their belts. It is time to declare the utter, absolute failure of socialism, made agonizingly obvious by the expensive fumbles of this President, and the coming crash his policies are only making worse. Socialism has failed comprehensively, in every particular. Every single problem it asserted the power to address has gotten worse. Its acolytes have brought a mighty engine of growth and commerce crashing into ruins. Its early New Deal triumph is about to collapse into a black hole that will obliterate the wealth of future generations. The current socialist government can only pretend it’s working by fudging numbers, making ridiculous excuses, and desperately trying to create distractions. We can’t afford this foolishness any more. The obsessions, hatreds, and superstitions of the Left have grown too expensive. We’ve arrived at our last opportunity to cancel their credit cards and make them get real jobs.

The national debt is currently 80% of our gross domestic product. In ten years, it will be 100%. No one can argue that’s efficient, moral, or sustainable. Bringing this bloated, spendthrift government down will not be an easy task, but we have no time to lose. We, the people, still have the power to control the destiny of the United States. We can do all the things the “smart set” tells us are impossible. We could do them in one single election. There’s no reason Obama should be anything but a helpless lame duck from 2010 to 2012. Bullies are also cowards. Instead of watching the Dow Jones Industrial Average drop another couple thousand points, let’s make the value of a Senate seat drop. Scare those people half to death in 2010, let them know you’re ready to finish the job in 2012, and a great many things can change very quickly. The second quarter of 2009 can either be the high-water mark of the post-Bush economy… or it can be remembered as the high-water mark of the total state. The choice is ours, as it always has been, but may not be for much longer.

****I invite comments. If you have another suggestion, or disagree with any of the above, please feel free to discuss. Personaly, I think the ole doc here has some great ideas and they run right in line with my thoughts that we need less government and more accountability for the officials we decide to keep. ~Anj****
Ps. I'll post my next Amendment blog later this afternoon. Stay tuned.

I am continuously astounded that this man gets away with saying the things he does. In an interview with the BBC, Obama said Iran's energy concerns are legit and he would support them in their right to develop nuclear energy, providing that they prove their aspirations are peaceful.

So, it's okay to cut coal and oil and deny any nuclear energy development here, but in a country that sits on a lifetime worth of natural gas and oil, its cool. Obama trusts that the Iranians will not develop nuclear bombs. In fact, he trusts them more than he trusts the very country he is supposed to be leading.

This quote was my favorite from that particular article: "Although I don't want to put artificial time tables on that process, we do want to make sure that, by the end of this year, we've actually seen a serious process move forward. And I think that we can measure whether or not the Iranians are serious," Obama said.

Does anyone REALLY listen to what he says? He does not want to put an artificial time table on the process, but gives them until the end of this year. Hm. Who's betting that by the end of this year, the big O will be saying we need to give them more time. What he fails to say what will happen if they do start making nuclear bombs, or what we will use to decide if the program is peaceful. He briefly mentions a willingness to "seek deeper international sanctions" if Iran does not respond positively to the US attempts at negotiations. Uh-huh. We'll seek them, but really, I'm not to concerned if it doesn't happen. Anyone else see it that way too? I mean, c'mon! This bad boy talk of sanctions is nothing more than that, talk. If, by chance, Iran does develop nuclear weapons, then it will already be too late for anyone to do anything about it. What good are sanctions when they are bombing our coasts?!

I seriously wonder if this man can make any statement and stand by it with out giving himself some wiggle room to back out if things go bad.

Has he no convictions? Has he no backbone?

Never mind. Forget I asked.