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Jonathan Tobin catches White House minions, this time the documentary film makers, repeating one of Obama’s lies. Pickings of July 21 last year carried a story by Byron York on the first discovery the president had not told the truth about his mother’s health insurance.
Last summer, a brief stir was caused when a book published by New York Times Janny Scott uncovered an uncomfortable fact about President Obama: He had been lying about his mother’s health insurance problems. During the 2008 campaign and throughout the subsequent debate over his signature health care legislation, the president used his mother’s experience as a cancer patient fighting to get coverage to pay for treatment for what her insurer said was a pre-existing condition as an emotional argument to sway skeptics. But as Scott discovered during the course of writing her biography of Anne Dunham, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother, it turned out that her correspondence showed that “the 1995 dispute concerned a Cigna disability insurance policy and that her actual health insurer had apparently reimbursed most of her medical expenses without argument.”
At the time the White House chose not to dispute Ms. Scott’s findings. But apparently the Obama campaign thinks the public’s memory is mighty short. As Glenn Kessler writes today in the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column, the president’s much ballyhooed campaign biography film “The Road We’ve Traveled,” narrated by Tom Hanks repeats the same line that Scott debunked. Though the film’s script tries to avoid repeating the president’s false claims from 2008, as Kessler says, any reasonable person would infer from the movie that the president’s mother died because her insurance was denied.
As Kessler notes, the filmmakers were aware of the fact that the president had been caught in a lie about his mother’s insurance but were determined to get this story into the film without exactly repeating his mendacious statement. …
More on the film from Peter Wehner.
… The main emotion the producers of “The Road We’ve Traveled” are hoping to tap into is pity. We’re told Obama inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression (Ronald Reagan actually inherited a sicker economy than Obama did) and took steps that prevented the ship from hitting the rocks. In fact, though I realize this isn’t supposed to be said in polite company, it was George W. Bush who did the heaviest lifting when it came to taking emergency measures that kept the economy from collapsing and credit from freezing.
What’s most striking, though, is how little Obama has to show for his efforts. The documentary focuses almost exclusively on inputs, not outputs; on legislation passed, not successes attained; on narrative, not empirical progress.
In the film we don’t hear anything about the deficit or the debt, the unemployment rate, economic growth, our standard of living, the housing crisis, bending the health care cost curve down, poverty, America’s credit rating, et cetera. That is because on these crucial measures, Obama has no story to tell, no successes to cite, nothing to look back to with pride or forward to with hope.
Obama’s tenure has been, by any reasonable standard, a failure. Not even a Tom Hanks-narrated documentary can change that.
GE’s Jeff Immelt has figured out he was used by the administration says Charles Gasparino.
Back when he agreed to advise the Obama administration on economics, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt told friends that he thought it would be good for GE and good for the country. A life-long Republican, Immelt said he believed he could at the very least moderate the president’s distinctly anti-business instincts.
That was three years ago; these days Immelt is telling friends something quite different.
Sure, GE has managed to feast on federal subsidies, particularly the “green-energy” giveaways that are Obamanomics’ hallmark.
But Immelt doesn’t think he’s had anywhere near as much luck moderating the president’s fat-cat-bashing, left-leaning economic agenda of taxing businesses and entrepreneurs to pay for government bloat.
Friends describe Immelt as privately dismayed that, even after three years on the job, President Obama hasn’t moved to the center, but instead further left. The GE CEO, I’m told, is appalled by everything from the president’s class-warfare rhetoric to his continued belief that big government is the key to economic salvation. …
Andrew Malcolm’s story on the Dem fund-raising troubles suggests there are many like Immelt.
… Except for Warren Buffet, Obama has been bashing rich Americans like himself for months now. And guess what? A lot of them are not writing him the big checks they did back in 2007-08 when he raised $745 million and his unopened promise bag was full of hope and change.
Last summer after 17 months of hope and change, only 7% of Obama’s 2008 supporters were renewing their support for 2012. That’s about one-third the rate George W. Bush had in his 2004 reelection bid.
The Washington Post just reported that around 11,000 donors had contributed at least $2,000 to the Obama campaign or Democratic National Committee since last spring. That’s less than half as many as at this point in 2008 and less than a quarter of Bush’s 2004 turnout, jeopardizing their once assured goal of a billion dollar campaign this time. Obama’s large donor rate is also less than Mitt Romney is collecting from his big supporters.
The reasons, interviews of money bundlers determined, are several: the continuing poor economy, unhappiness with some of Obama’s actions (or inactions) and over-confidence about his success against the still-competing Republican field. And the impact of rising gas prices, now showing up in national polls.
As one result, the Obama camp has had to focus more on smaller donors. Their almost daily e-mail appeals now seek a $3 minimum contribution, instead of the previous $10-$50. And as an incentive, they promise a lottery chance to dine with the president. Three dollars is better than none now and any new donors can count on being tagged again and again.
To be sure, Obama is raising more than any of the four remaining Republican competitors. But the key is how fast he’s spending it.
Turns out, this Democrat president spends campaign cash like it was taxpayer dollars. In January, even with no big TV buys, the Obama campaign burned through 158% of what it raised (vs 60% for Bush eight years before). That left Obama and the DNC with $91.7 million in the bank (vs $122 million in 2008). …
Interesting article from American.com on the health care debate.
The epic debate over President Obama’s controversial individual health insurance mandate finally reaches the Supreme Court this month. Stripped of legal jargon, the administration’s defense of the mandate — and the broader Affordable Care Act — boils down to this: The U.S. healthcare system was badly broken, so we had to fix it.
Indeed, the fierce battle over reform was based on the perception that Americans did not get good value for their money. Many of the global comparisons that informed this view, however, were flawed, incomplete or misleading. It’s time to set the record straight.
“The U.S. health system is far superior to the statistical caricature critics have presented.” – Christopher J. Conover
The U.S. spends too much compared to other countries.
This is a pervasive misconception encouraged by reformers who sought to argue that other countries, especially those with single-payer systems such as Canada or Britain, outperform the United States. Thus it was feasible to imagine that the U.S. could dramatically expand access to care without spending more money.
But throughout the world, as income rises, so does willingness to pay for healthcare. In fact, differences in income per capita explain about 85% of the variation in health expenditures per capita across industrialized countries.
Conventional models purportedly show that the U.S. spends 60% more on healthcare than it should given its level of per capita income. These models treat all nations the same so that the United States and its 300 million people is compared with very small countries such as Iceland, population 500,000. But a more precise model that compares apples to apples shows that the U.S. spends only 1.5% more than it should. By contrast, France spends about one-fifth too much, while Canada and Britain spend about one-fifth too little. …
John Stossel argues for less rules.
“If you have 10,000 regulations,” Winston Churchill said, “you destroy all respect for law.”
He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That’s what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities have probably doubled that. We have so many rules that legal specialists can’t keep up. Criminal lawyers call the rules “incomprehensible.” They are. They are also “uncountable.” Congress has created so many criminal offenses that the American Bar Association says it would be futile to even attempt to estimate the total.
So what do the politicians and bureaucrats of the permanent government do? They pass more rules.
That’s not good. It paralyzes life.
Politicians sometimes say they understand the problem. They promise to “simplify.” But they rarely do. Mostly, they come up with new rules. It’s just natural. It’s how the public measures politicians. Schoolchildren on Washington tours ask, “What laws did you pass?” If they don’t pass new laws, the media whine about the “do-nothing Congress.”
This is also not good. …