It’s Mandate-maggedon: Obama Prepares 3 Speeches

Today is the day we should learn the fate of Obamacare. Will the mandate be upheld or go down? If it goes down, will the Court rule that there is no severability and tank the entire law? Will they tank other parts of the law? We should find out about 10am. In the meantime, Obama has three speeches ready

(Wall Street Journal) But Mr. Obama has been doing more than sitting back and waiting. The president has three separate speeches prepared in anticipation of the ruling on his signature legislative achievement, a person familiar with them said.

One of the speeches addresses a complete overturn of the law, while another is crafted as if the court strikes down the law’s individual mandate but upholds other provisions. The third speech, for if the court upholds the entire law, is more celebratory, according to this person.

The first two will be unbelievable whiny, if we think about Obama’s history of speechifying, particularly after a loss. Nowhere will he consider that the Democrats went too far in passing legislation that is not only highly unpopular as a whole, but unconstitutional. The third will be a gloating speech which will still blame Republicans and insult the majority of Americans who will still be against the legislation.

No matter the ruling, the White House is expected to continue highlighting provisions of the legislation that are more popular than the overall law, such as the requirements that insurance companies cover people with pre-existing conditions or allow parents to keep their children on their plans until they are 26 years old.

Yes, those are popular, and would have to be kept in any replacement legislation, regardless of whether the Conservative base hates them. They aren’t actually bad ideas, though there would have to be a few tweaks with the pre-existing conditions, such as deeming that those with pre-existing conditions cannot simply purchase insurance right before needing medical care. Oh, and let’s not forget that under Obamacare those with pre-existing conditions are being charged an arm and a leg for insurance.

But, Champ should continue talking about Obamacare. The more he associates himself with the unpopular law the better for Romney’s chances and the chance for Republicans to take back the Senate.

Meanwhile, Liberals are freaking out on the Supreme Court, as they must all feel that the Court will at a minimum tank the Mandate. You have E. J. Dionne calling for Scalia to resign. The Washington Post editorial board whines about Scalia. Roger Simon says the court has lost its honor. You can cruise around the Progressive blogosphere and find all sorts of whiny posts about the court. The far left only likes our system when they win.

How will Obama and liberals act of any portion of Obamacare goes down? I’m think Barking Moonbat Level 10. What’s your guess?

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.

Read: It’s Mandate-maggedon: Obama Prepares 3 Speeches »

How A Carbon Tax Works

This comes from Jennifer Marohasy (via Tom Nelson)

Photobucket

(If you click the picture, you can see a slightly bigger version. Or click Ms. Marohasy’s link! Especially if you are Australian)

Read: How A Carbon Tax Works »

If All You See…

…are hills that would be perfect for wind turbines, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Wizbang.

Read: If All You See… »

Waxman Blames Climate Change For Colorado Wildfires, Debby Doing Florida

You just knew someone was going to do this

(The Hill) Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) seized on the portion of the decision that upheld EPA’s “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases are a threat to human health and welfare.

Waxman, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, called the decision a “resounding victory for science.” The court found that EPA “relied on a substantial record of empirical data and scientific evidence.”

The California Democrat used the ruling to criticize the GOP’s efforts to nullify EPA’s climate rules.

“Today’s ruling is a message to Congress that it’s time to stop denying science. Extreme events like the wildfires in Colorado and the floods in Florida are going to get worse unless the Republican-controlled Congress changes course soon,” Waxman said in a statement.

Because they’ve never happened before. While the Colorado fire is bad (prayers for Michelle Malkin and those who are affected) it isn’t even close to being the biggest, as Steven Goddard showed. But, you know, if Waxman is so concerned, perhaps he should stop taking inter-continental flights back and forth between California and Washington, D.C.

PS: I also really wanted to find some way to reference Debby doing something, since she was doing Dallas.

Read: Waxman Blames Climate Change For Colorado Wildfires, Debby Doing Florida »

As We Await Mandatemageddon, ObamaCare Still Pretty Darned Unpopular

But, says this poll, so is the current US health system. Must have really killed Obama cheerleader Chris Cillizza to write this

(Washington Post) A majority of Americans view both the United States’ current health care system and the changes enacted in President Obama’s health care bill in an unfavorable light — a one-two punch of disillusionment that epitomizes just how tough it is for politicians to talk about health care on the campaign trail.

Bold is the article writers. I guess they wanted to point out that this atrocity of a bill is his baby.

Fifty-six percent of Americans rate the nation’s current health care system unfavorably in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, while 52 percent regard the “federal law making changes in the health care system” in a negative light.

The numbers are even more stark when they are broken down into those who feel strongly favorably versus strongly unfavorably about each system. In each case, the number of people who feel strongly opposed is more than twice those who feel strongly in support — a testament to the fact that all of the energy on health care is on the side opposing both the old/new system.

And perhaps most interestingly, Americans who are not happy with their current health care also give Obama’s health care law negative ratings, by a 2-to-1 margin.

This is a group that health reform was theoretically supposed to help. Back in August 2009, a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that people who were less satisfied with their current health care were more likely to believe it would improve under health care reform. That clearly hasn’t happened.

No, it hasn’t happened. Why? Because most people aren’t idiots, and even those who are even marginally informed understood then and understand now that Obamacare will in no way make health insurance and health care better, but will make them worse. It’ll raise costs, mess with their HSAs, cause their employer to drop their insurance offerings, etc and so on. Switching over to the ABC News story on the poll

One key challenge is that while Americans are broadly dissatisfied with the system overall, vastly more – 75 percent – rate their own quality of care favorably. The difficulty thus remains where it’s been all along: Forging solutions to the current system’s problems that don’t leave people fearing they’ll lose what many see as their own good quality of care now.

Democrats thought they had a mandate to Do Something, but what they ended up doing was unpopular, despite throwing in a few popular ideas like keeping kids on their parents insurance till the age of 26. They thought that since people thought the overall system was broken, they’d be able to fix it. Alas, when people realized (even before the bill was passed) that the ACA would effect their own health insurance/health care, they came out against the bill. And the popularity of it has not gotten better.

Read: As We Await Mandatemageddon, ObamaCare Still Pretty Darned Unpopular »

Tax Cheats Received $1.4 Billion In Stimulus Tax Credits

Surprise!

(Washington Times) Tax cheats were given $1.4 billion in government-backed mortgage loans under President Obama’s economic stimulus, and the government doled out at least an additional $27 million in tax credits to delinquents who took the first-time-homebuyer tax break, according to a government audit released Tuesday.

Under government rules, delinquent taxpayers are supposed to be ineligible for the mortgage insurance program unless they have reached a repayment agreement with the Internal Revenue Service. But the Federal Housing Administration didn’t have the right controls to weed out bad applications, said the Government Accountability Office, Congress‘ chief investigative arm.

The Stimulus didn’t provide for the proper application controls? The hell you say!

That meant FHA insured $1.4 billion in mortgages for 6,327 borrowers who collectively owed $77.6 million in unpaid taxes, or an average of more than $12,000 each.

Liberals should be outraged that Obama’s poorly written Stimulus failed to collect that tax money. But, then, they haven’t been concerned with the billions upon billions wasted on “green” energy companies that were bound to fail. Nor that most of the Stimulus was wasted in full.

“In the name of ‘stimulus,’ the federal government gave mortgage insurance to thousands of people we knew were tax cheats and had a bad track record paying their debts,” said Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, who joined a bipartisan group of other lawmakers to request the investigation. “The federal government needlessly put taxpayers on the line to help tax cheats buy homes. Congress needs to ensure that tax cheats are no longer allowed to take advantage of FHA programs.”

That sounds similar to what the Stimulus did for “green” energy companies, giving money to companies with bad track records, shoddy products, and little chance of succeeding. Just another example of Obama’s government, and the government in general, wasting taxpayer money and failing miserably. And these are the people who want to be in charge of America’s health care? Oh, brother.

BTW, where was Sheriff Joe? Wasn’t he supposed to be in charge of rooting out waste and keeping an eye on the Stimulus?

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.

Read: Tax Cheats Received $1.4 Billion In Stimulus Tax Credits »

Claire McCaskill Latest Democrat To Skip Dem National Convention

Obviously, this can’t anything whatsoever to do with wanting to distance herself from Barack Obama? Right?

(ABC News) Sen. Claire McCaskill, vulnerable in her reelection bid, reportedly joined a growing faction of Democrats begging off this summer’s Democratic National Convention.

The Missouri senator made the decision Tuesday to skip the national convention, which takes place Sept. 3-6, Pema Levy first reported for Talking Points Memo. The convention is where President Barack Obama will formally receive his party’s nomination.

“In years when Claire is on the ballot, she has historically not gone to the convention,” an anonymous aide told the news outlet, “because she believes it’s important to stay in Missouri to talk to voters.” Her campaign highlighted McCaskill’s decision to skip the 2004 national convention.

Of course, of course, nothing to do with needing to distance herself from a far left and incompetent boob.

All in all, this makes 9 Democrats who have found “something better” to do than attend the DNC which happens just once every 4 years. And we’re only near the end of June. How many will suddenly find that they have “something better” to do or some other excuse between the dates of September 3-6?

Nice Deb on McCaskill bailing: It’s interesting that Juan would characterize McCaskill as a “conservative” Democrat when her voting record is anything but.

Sister Toldjah covers Clear Out Claire, as well as the DNC abandoning the use of Charlotte Motor Speedway: Sooo, they’d rather connect with their supporters in the mainstream media who will give them glowing press both state and nationwide rather than “the 99%” who live in the Concord area.  Surprised? You shouldn’t be.

Allahpundit explains that Claire isn’t just some Dem, but a person who jumped on the Obama bandwagon.

Ed Driscoll calls it a “convention clusterfark.”

Sadly, Democrats are working hard to make my home state look bad….perhaps they should simply go hold the convention in France.

Read: Claire McCaskill Latest Democrat To Skip Dem National Convention »

Warmists Still Pushing Racist Population Policies

When it comes right down to it, those who push “climate change” are racists. And nutjobs. And racists. Many of their solutions involve getting developing nations, particularly African nations, which are full of Blacks, to forgo any notion of prosperity. And one of the Warmists big bugaboos is the growing population of the world. Who better to ask than Paul Ehrich in a post entitled Crowd control: 7 billion people. One last chance to save the planet

Paul Ehrlich, author of the iconic 1968 book The Population Bomb, now refers to himself as a “mobster.”..

Yeah, let’s go to the guy who provided us with one of the most epic environmental fails of all time. Heck, scientific fails.

What’s to be done? Having written over 40 books, Ehrlich posits that “people don’t want to hear about solutions — those books don’t sell.” And he’s long since given up on any attempt to counter “genuine idiots” or “the mathematically challenged.” Ultimately, though, he’s a people person — he thinks that, with the right incentives, we can be retrained.

So, what exactly are the “solutions” for a growing world population? There’s really only two: stop having babies and reduce the current population. Hence, minorities around the world in 3rd world countries, particularly Blacks, are provided with contraception. Some Warmists/envirowackjobs have even suggest that humans kill themselves off en mass. Much of this goes back to the eugenics programs proposed by white Progressives, leading to forced sterilizations of minorities, Planned Parenthood, oh, and genocide as performed by Nazi Germany. You want to reduce the world’s population, Warmists? Stop having kids. Kill yourselves. Rid our planet of your insanity.

Read: Warmists Still Pushing Racist Population Policies »

If All You See…

…is hay that should be turned into ethanol, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Planck’s Constant (which I just re-added back to the blogroll after losing the site from my old Blogrolling account)

Read: If All You See… »

CSM Predicts Dooooom Over East Coast Sea Rise

Continuing on from that horrific, panic inducing doom and gloom, we’re boned report on sea level rise from the other day

(Christian dis-Science Monitor) From Cape Hatteras, N.C., to north of Boston, Mass., tide-gauge records reveal sea levels have increased on average about 0.08 inches (2 millimeters) per year from 1950 to 2009. Globally, meanwhile, sea levels have increased about 0.02 inches (0.6 millimeter) per year during that window.

Everybody paaaaanic…..wait, what? .02 inches worldwide? .08 inches from Hatteras to Boston?

Oh, and here’s another spit take worthy story

The summer may seem chilly, but Swedish researchers say climate change could significantly raise temperatures in Lapland. Average temperatures in Finland’s far north may rise by an average eight degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

It’s not, but it could!!!!!11!!! We have a saying in the South for that kind of writing: bless your heart.

(both via Tom Nelson)

Read: CSM Predicts Dooooom Over East Coast Sea Rise »

Pirate's Cove