There was never any real debate on health care issues - the only debate was over whether or not the government should compete with private health care. If Congress had put all that effort into coming up with ideas to reduce medical costs and premiums, to reduce fraud, waste or lawsuits, and to get more people insured,
Americans could have had a good bill. Democrats were determined to find a way that would eventually lead to a single payer system and end private health insurance. The people have been screwed by the democrats.

What's left in the bill pisses off seniors by taking away medicare advantage, pisses off those in their 20's or 30's who now will have to buy health insurance, pissing off those in their 20's or 30's who have health insurance but whose premiums will go up, and gives the insurers 30 million new clients of which the government who is running trillion dollar deficits will pay most of their premiums.

The dems are caught in a catch 22 situation.....gone is their beloved public option and their hastily substituted medicare expansion and now they are willing to pass anything in order to save face....Voters will make em pay in 2010.

Aloha Mr. Reid.....

I believe the alternative was worse....lesson were learned by the feds allowing Lehman Brothers to fail....that being if Bank of America and Citigroup and AIG had all gone under that real panic would have gripped the US for a long time. That would have lead to runs on the banks and unemployment off the charts. At best, Bernanke probably just delayed the immense forthcoming consequences of our continued deficit spending. Isn't that ironic. Didn't Congress approve the bailout money??? Isn't Conmgress spending the trillions of dollars??? Who is going to oversee the audit???Congress???

I wouldn't contact Harry Reid bout nothing.....he'll be gone in 2010. And deservingly so.

Obama Brings the Gitmolympics Home

President Obama's hometown cronies lost their bid to bring the 2016 Olympic Games to the Windy City. But this week they got a consolation prize: the Gitmolympics. On Tuesday, the White House went public with its official plans to purchase the Thomson Correctional Facility from financially strapped Illinois to house Guantanamo Bay detainees. The War on Terror meets the Chicago Way.

Political boosters of the Illinois budget bailout masquerading as a national security program can't wait to roll out the jihadi welcome mat. Unions representing federal prison workers also cheered the move. Leading the lobbying delegation for the new Gitmo-in-the-heartland located a few hours west of Chicago: Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, last seen on the international stage in 2005 likening American interrogators and military staff at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis, Soviet gulag operators and genocidal maniac Pol Pot.

And co-chairing the bid to bring suspected jihadis to American soil: beleaguered Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D), who is salivating at the prospect of an estimated $1 billion injection into the local economy over four years. (Never mind that the jobs predictions from the Council of Economic Advisers use the same fuzzy math methods that gave us bogus porkulus numbers.)

Sensibly, the people of Illinois who will have to live with this raw deal aren't waving their pompoms. A Rasmussen poll shows that 51 percent of voters in the state oppose the transfer of suspected terrorists from the Cuban detention facility to their backyard — including 70 percent of Republicans, 37 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of independents.

Left-wing advocates of closing Gitmo accuse these Americans of "NIMBYism" and groundless fear. But can you blame anyone who watched the Crashergate debacle at the White House or the Scare Force One debacle in New York City for choking on disbelief when Team Obama promises airtight safety, security and competence?

Moreover, Illinois is already suffering its own severe prison-overcrowding crisis — which Quinn has alleviated by secretly releasing more than 850 inmates, including violent offenders, since September, according to the Associated Press.

GOP gubernatorial candidate Dan Proft pointed out that "the state's 28 current prisons are 32 percent over capacity. Why not alleviate the overcrowding and bring the Thomson prison online" for existing criminals instead of importing them from abroad? Kirk Dillard, another Republican candidate, blasted Quinn's fiscal desperation: "I think al-Qaida needs to stay in Cuba. It shows how pathetic the state of Illinois' finances are, where we have to stand with our hat in hand and have the federal government give us money to open a penitentiary that the Democrats have let sit vacant for years."

Obama officials stress that the prison would house Gitmo detainees separately from federal inmates, and that the two would be "managed separately" with "no opportunity to interact" between them. Which entirely misses the point that Gitmo detainees' lawyers and translators have been the primary security concerns — not just other inmates:

— Last month, jihadist-enabling lawyer Lynne Stewart was finally ordered to jail after her conviction in 2005 for aiding and abetting imprisoned blind Egyptian sheik Omar Abdel Rahman by smuggling coded messages of violence to terrorist followers abroad — in violation of an explicit pledge to abide by her client's court-ordered isolation.

— Earlier this summer, the Justice Department launched an inquiry into photographs of undercover CIA officials and other intelligence personnel taken by ACLU-sponsored researchers assisting the defense team of Guantanamo Bay detainees. The pictures of covert American CIA officers — "in some cases surreptitiously taken outside their homes," according to the Washington Post — were shown to jihadi suspects tied to the 9/11 attacks in order to identify the interrogators.

— As investigative journalist Paul Sperry reported recently, a number of Arabic and Pashtu interpreters who served at Gitmo are "under active investigation for omitting valuable intelligence from their translations of detainee interrogations, among other security breaches."

The corruptocratic Attorney General Eric Holder is, of course, in no position to raise any principle objections to the Gitmo-in-the-heartland plans. Remember: He served as senior partner with Covington and Burling — the prestigious Washington, D.C., law firm that represents 17 Yemenis currently held at Gitmo. And top attorneys at his Justice Department have had to recuse themselves numerous times over their conflicts of interest in Gitmo-related cases. Holder has failed to provide a full recusal list of all the Gitmo detainee cases from which current Justice Department political appointees have had to recuse themselves.

Meanwhile, Team Obama is now championing the very same indefinite detention powers for detainees deemed untriable that it condemned the Bush administration for exercising — and for which it targeted Gitmo for closure in the first place. Give the White House a gold medal for costly incoherence and reckless redundance.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/uc/20091216/cm_uc_crmmax/op_1912313

Wall Street has NOT RECOVERED ....it's 3500 points down still. Small businesses will provide the jobs when the dems create an environment where entrepeneurs can KNOW what the h*ll the consequences of Obama and Congress's reforms will be. Until then, no Jobs.

I like this one better......

Over the last 15 months, we've traveled to every corner of the United States. I've now been in 57 states? I think one left to go.

The wisdom of our president....

You can start with "lobbyist" working in his administration....then go to bills with "earmarks", and on to "transparency and ethics". When u can accept those broken promises we'll get to the rest.

And you r not interested in accurately seeing what the Obama presidency has become.

You can't win elections while running up trillion dollar deficits either.
You can't win elections with a job stimulus that failed to do what was promised.
You can't win elections with a health care bill that MOST Americans don't want.

And that is what the 2010 elections will be about - issues.

It's the White house that doesn't know their arse from a hole in the ground:

"The surprise so far has been how long it has taken the job market to come around—surprising especially to a White House that predicted a jobless rate peak of 8% if the $787 billion spending stimulus passed."

Every serious person should welcome the president's proposals to lift the dormant economy and reduce unemployment. Not because every serious person would agree with them but because they are a clear test of how a left-wing government would run the American economy.

If this works, hats off to them and we become France. If not, Americans may finally dump left-wing economics into the ash heap of history, starting next November and then in the next presidential election, which can't come soon enough.

The first purpose of the jobs proposals Mr. Obama announced Tuesday—TARP money for Main Street, tax credits for new hires, more infrastructure spending and the weird weatherization program—is to bail out Democratic incumbents. The underlying strength and resilience of the American economy may yet produce enough headline growth the next 11 months to slow the panic over employment levels by next fall.

No Democratic president, though, can just say, "I'm doing this to save the Pelosi majority and to protect the state and local jobs of Andy Stern's dues payers and party regulars in the Service Employees International Union." Mr. Obama's saving grace is that no matter how political his initiatives, the reasons he offers for what he's doing generally do describe what is at stake.

And so he did at the jobs summit: "We've got the most entrepreneurial spirit in the world, and we've got some of the most productive workers in the world. And if we get serious, then the 21st century is going to be the American century, just like the 20th century."

Too true. This global competition is what lies beyond the politics of next November's employment rate. Still, one must ask: Can weatherization save us from a billion Chinese workers?

Apologies for the glibness, but I don't see how one can sort through the Obama economic policies and conclude that we have a strategy for sending America's best and brightest entrepreneurs onto the battlefields of Asia. It looks instead like we're going to spend a generation looking for jobs in Uncle Sam's hiring hall of targeted tax credits and industry-specific subsidies.

Everyone in politics genuflects in the direction of the job-creation powers of "entrepreneurs" and their ideas. But the generation of Democrats who rose to power with the Obama presidency and the current House majority don't really trust or much like real entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship, the kind that creates industries and jobs on the scale we'll need in the next century, is about two things: Ideas that spring randomly from some slightly crazed dreamer's head; and worse, they often get filthy rich if the dreams are real. The left likes neither.

In their country, government guides capital to ideas prewashed for goodness. As to letting guys get rich, we know about that problem. Hating it isn't just political. It's cultural.

But unless these Democrats can reverse habits of history dating to the Renaissance, entrepreneurship's new men not only will build businesses and create new jobs, they'll still tend to measure their self-worth with outsized yachts, mansions and other crimes against prevailing norms of taste. The new Democrats bear a visceral antipathy toward these people, whom they've reduced to the lumpen "Republicans."

Barack Obama campaigned for a year against "the top 1%" and "the wealthiest." It sounded like more than economics to me. But a nation can't have entrepreneurs and eat them, too. Asia is overflowing with rich entrepreneurs. Google "China's auto industry." They have more new auto manufacturers than you can count. If the U.S. has any hope of competing long term with this rising force, it will have to let some Americans get as rich as nouveau riche Asians. This presidency won't do that.

At the jobs summit, Mr. Obama said "I want to hear from CEOs what's holding back our business investment." Really?

How about the world's highest corporate tax rate? How about the 5.4% health-care surtax on top of the expiring Bush tax cuts, which will push the top marginal individual rate, paid at the outset by many entrepreneurs, well over 40%?

Set aside income taxes as the unransomed hostages of progressive dogma. Justify this: The Senate health-reform bill imposes a $4 billion annual excise tax on medical devices and diagnostic equipment. In a slow-innovation economy, which is what we have now, medical and diagnostic miracles sit at the intersection of American science, technology, education and IQ. That stuff defines American entrepreneurship and ingenuity. If the Obama Democrats will tax these people, they'll tax anything that produces income, no matter how innovative or job-creating.

The Obama bet is that the U.S. can be a Franco-German welfare state, with a mammoth public sector, and still compete with China, India, Brazil, Korea and the rest. This is a pipedream. We are going to spend four years treading water. If we tread quickly enough, we may get enough growth to save the Democrats, but not the nation.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704240504574586351637609092.html

The dems are just diverting attention from their failed job stimulus, their failed public option, and probable failed medicare expansion - and they hope no one mentions the deficits they are running or the military surge strategy.

The November jobs report was greeted yesterday with smiles and sighs of relief, which speaks volumes about how rotten the job market has been for a long time. Only 11,000 lost jobs! Praise heaven.

The report is hopeful if not yet happy news, in that it shows employment finally catching up with the economic recovery that has been building since the summer. Economic expansions always lead to some job creation, especially when the downturn and layoffs have been as steep as what the U.S. has endured in the last year.

The surprise so far has been how long it has taken the job market to come around—surprising especially to a White House that predicted a jobless rate peak of 8% if the $787 billion spending stimulus passed. President Obama called yesterday's report the best since 2007, which is true but is also like saying that this is the most tasteful season so far of "Keeping Up with the Kardashians."

The report's details suggest that job growth will finally arrive in future months. The average work week climbed to 33.2 hours from 33.0, which means more workers are being hired back to full-time status. The jobless rate—which is determined by the household survey, rather than the business establishment survey—fell to 10%, from 10.2%. And the household survey, which measures more small businesses and home entrepreneurs, showed a gain of 227,000 jobs. In the early stages of the 2003 recovery, this measure proved to be a better indicator of future job-market strength than did the lagging establishment report.

On the other hand, most of November's job gains were in services or government. If the stimulus spending has had any effect, it has been to preserve government jobs. Private hiring remains weak. Construction, manufacturing and business professionals are still shedding jobs. At more than 28 weeks, the average duration of unemployment is now longer than it has ever been, and overall employment is still down some 7.2 million from its 2007 peak.

The news of a better job market couldn't have come at a better time politically given that Congress seems ready to waste more money on more government job creation. The same folks who planned the last stimulus now want to spend a few hundred billion on public works jobs, more aid to states, and another round job of jobless benefits. In some states, workers can now get paid for 18 months for not working. This will give many of them an incentive to postpone a job search even as their hiring prospects improve.

Meanwhile, the White House is thinking about paying home owners to weatherize their homes. Cash for caulkers, we suppose. Now, that'll put millions back to work.

The real message of the November report is that the job market is healing on its own, if Washington will simply let it happen. If Democrats want faster job creation by next November, they'll do nothing at all. Stop imposing new taxes on estates, payrolls, insurance, device makers, drug makers, small business, you name it. Start over on health care. Adjourn for the year, spend December with the family, come back in 2011. And watch Congress's approval rating rise.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704342404574576203733082212.html

And the whold world will know the dems did this......what a concept.....borrowing money and spending our way to a recovery!!!

Don't be one of the liberal democrats, I mean masquerading independents, to be "Still in Denial" that Obama lied his way to the presidency. Lobbyist, earmarks, transparency, ethics, surge, Patriot Act, deficits, and dozens more.

That chart speaks more than any words about the next 3 years....compared to the past 8.

yeah, I know...that it is projected so we all know that in reality the numbers will be a lot worse.

speaks for itself!!!