CATO Responds to Obama’s State of the Union 2011

Cato experts Gene Healy, Ben Friedman, Michael F. Cannon, Dan Mitchell, Sallie James, John Samples, Justin Logan, Jagadeesh Gokhale, Neal McCluskey, and David Rittgers deconstruct the president’s speech and correct some of his errors—including the “American family” metaphor, calls for more federal education spending, zero-sum thinking in trade and globalization policy, ObamaCare fixes, TSA pat down jokes, soaking the rich, and much more. I’d like to encourage you to share these incisive analyses with your friends, colleagues, and readers.

For more, here is CATO’s blog coverage of the SOTU speech.


Jaw, Jaw and Bromides: Obama’s State of His Next Campaign for President Address

-By Warner Todd Huston

I sat through President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address last night. During the event I live Tweeted the whole thing (You can read that all at http://twitter.com/#!/warnerthuston) and ended up with an empty feeling and a headache. Obama’s address was long on calls for spending, filled with bromides, and weighted with jaw, jaw but pretty short on substance. In fact, it seemed like his 12 new spending ideas and his patriotic vagaries was simply his first step onto the 2012 campaign trail as opposed to a serious address to the nation.

Obama fittingly began his address citing John Boehner, the new Speaker of the House, and memorializing the wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. He then said that we had a “robust” debate in our politics and averred that it was one thing for the parties to sit together that night but it depended on what they all do “tomorrow” and he used that point to plead for moving forward with more bi-partisanship.

Tellingly, even as Obama has paid lip service to bipartisanship for three years, when he became president neither he nor his party made any moves to implement any bipartisanship. In fact, when Democrat Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House she never met with any Republicans on anything. This whole claim or bipartisanship is simply a farce on Obama’s part and Obama continued that farce in the SOTU speech.
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Jaw, Jaw and Bromides: Obama’s State of His Next Campaign for President Address”


Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) Delivers Weekly GOP Address On Repealing Obamacare

“Thanks To The Vote In The House Of Representatives, We Are Now One Step Closer To Victory In The Fight For A Health Care Policy That Puts Americans First – Not Washington. Our Job Won’t Be Done Until We Repeal And Replace This Bad Law.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Vice Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) released the following weekly Republican address. The address is available in both audio and video format and is embargoed until 6:00 a.m. ET, Saturday, January 22, 2011.


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Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) Delivers Weekly GOP Address On Repealing Obamacare”


New Website: Repeal Obamacare, No More Obamacare

-By Warner Todd Huston

American Solutions has started a new website to push the anti-Obamacare issue. Obviously the House will likely do a good job pushing repeal measures but the problem will be the Senate. This site will focus on those recalcitrant Senators that might try to hamper the movement to repeal.

Repeal Obamacare

On the site you’ll find a petition you can sign to let your voice be heard.

There is also a .pdf file that you can download to give you and your friends some info on what you can do to advance the case.

Repeal Obamacare
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New Website: Repeal Obamacare, No More Obamacare”


Obamacare: When Obama LIKES Imposing Higher Costs on ‘The Poor’

-By Warner Todd Huston

My friend George Scoville, who works for the CATO Institute, asked a question that really does go to show the left’s hypocrisy. This time the question reveals a “feature” of Obamacare that tends to expose hypocrisy so large that an ambulance could drive through it. (See how I said “ambulance” there to keep with the whole medical theme?)

Scoville was issued a letter from his insurance carrier that informed him that new government regulations was forcing them to eliminate a whole bunch of non-prescription items that used to be eligible to be paid for by his Health Savings Account (HSA). The new rules are forcing the insured to go to a doctor to get a prescription for things like acid reducers, baby rash ointment, eye drops, feminine anti-fungal products, lice treatments and a whole bunch of other stuff.

So now Scoville and his fellow insured patients will have to go to a doctor to get a prescription for lice treatments? For stool softeners? The insured patients will have to make a $50 or $75 doctor appointment to have their insurance cover a $3 bottle of nasal spray?

This outrageous cost hike is ridiculous, isn’t it?
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Obamacare: When Obama LIKES Imposing Higher Costs on ‘The Poor’”


President Gets Around Annoying Voters, Instills Death Panels By Regulation

-By Warner Todd Huston

Some of you may have missed this story since it was published on the day after Christmas (and a Sunday at that), but Obama’s death panels are back, this time via the president’s fiat regulatory powers. Since it was easy to have missed, I’ve decided to post the story today (Monday) so that more people might see it now that Christmas and the weekend both are over.

You might recall the end of life care policies that were once in Obamacare. You might also remember the political firestorm these death panels whipped up. The pressure was heavy enough that the Democrats removed the policy from the final Obamacare bill.

Well, now that Obamacare is passed, Obama is slipping these death panels right back into existence by ordering Medicare to just make the policy a new rule under updated Medicare regulations.
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President Gets Around Annoying Voters, Instills Death Panels By Regulation”


Unions ‘Christmas Carol’ Harassment, Media Ignores Hateful Unionistas

-By Warner Todd Huston

A bus load of 80 union thugs descended upon a sleepy — and private — suburb in Keokuk, Iowa disturbing the peace with loud singing, foul language and trespassing. And the media? Well, the Old Media thought this criminal behavior was just amusing “caroling.”

Locked out workers of Roquette America in Keokuk, Iowa (right across the river from Quincy, Ill.) invaded the property and homes of the company’s executives singing their foul songs and disrupting the peace in the quiet suburb.

Not only did the news media report this as but inoffensive “caroling” — which it decidedly was not — the media didn’t even report the illicit and immature behavior of these union thugs. The media whitewashed the whole incident.
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Unions ‘Christmas Carol’ Harassment, Media Ignores Hateful Unionistas”


FDA: Dec. 17, Countdown to a Death Panel for Breast Cancer Drug Avastin

-By Warner Todd Huston

In a few days the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to release its final decision on whether or not 17,000 women across the country will have the same access to the breast cancer drug Avastin that they now have. Several congressmen, thousands of doctors and patients, and many small government activists stand against this perceived example of Obamacare-like rationing.

As I reported last week, with this Avastin situation five Congressmen have become alerted to the threat that government is instituting cost-based rationing of healthcare and have become alarmed at the effects that will have on the sick. It seems that this FDA decision will set the table for the rationing war to come under Obamacare unless that legislation is repealed or inhibited.

Avastin is, admittedly, an expensive drug. But are we ready for government to decide if your lifesaving medicines are “too expensive” to be allowed for use? Is that the cost-based road down which we wish to travel? And how far down that road do we go? How much cost-cutting do we want government to indulge where it concerns our health? And should government even have that role in the first place?

These are questions that the Avastin decision evokes.
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FDA: Dec. 17, Countdown to a Death Panel for Breast Cancer Drug Avastin”


Obama Claims Power to Decide if Your Medicine is Too Expensive to be Allowed

-By Warner Todd Huston

It’s very easy for Obamacare supporters to scoff at the whole idea that there are “death panels” ensconced in Obama’s health care power grab. But the fact of the matter is that they exist in a defacto form. One of those defacto death panels is the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), an agency invented under Obamacare that has no congressional oversight and will be able to summarily cancel your drug prescriptions as paid for by Medicare.

The IPAB is not well known by Americans, but it is a 15-member board appointed by the president and while members are confirmed by the Senate, the board is not otherwise answerable to anyone but the president. As to its duties, this board was given the responsibility to put a spending cap on Medicare. One way that the IPAB intends to do that is to decide what drugs are cost effective enough for government to pay for.

In other words, the IPAB will decide whether or not Medicare patients will be allowed to have a drug and its decision to eliminate the drug will be based solely on cost, not effectiveness or medical necessity. These decisions will also not be made with your doctor. It will be a top down, bureaucratic decision, not a decision based on medical science.
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Obama Claims Power to Decide if Your Medicine is Too Expensive to be Allowed”


FDA Set To Cut Off 17,000 Women Annually From Lifesaving Drug

-By Warner Todd Huston

Obama’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is due to take up the case of Avastin, a cancer drug that successfully treats some 17,000 women annually. With a coming December 17 decision, the FDA seems poised to take this drug away from these patients quite despite the fact that their doctors find the drug effective.

The most dangerous period of time in Washington D.C. is that time we call the lame duck session (I call it the zombie congress; dead men walking). It is that time when those elected officials that are about to be ingloriously shipped off home for the last time due to losing election results make a mad scramble to grab for as much as they can get.

In the case of regulatory agencies like the FDA the lame duck session is not treated in exactly the same manner, but it is sure that when congress is about to have its majority party change over with the president’s party on the losing side of the switch, regulatory agencies often try to push through favored policies before the new congress is seated and before that new congress is in a position to put any pressure on those agencies to prevent them from pushing the president’s agenda.
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FDA Set To Cut Off 17,000 Women Annually From Lifesaving Drug”


Obamacare Forces Union to Drop Insurance for 6,000 Children

-By Warner Todd Huston

Remember how Obama said that if you liked your healthcare plan you could keep it? Apparently someone forgot to tell the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in New York because they’ve announced that Obamacare is forcing them to drop coverage for the children of its 30,000 low-wage members.

The union will be dropping coverage for 6,000 children starting in the new year because new state and federal rules will drive up its costs 60% causing it to face a “dramatic shortfall” between what employers contribute and the premiums charged by the insurance provider.

The union is blaming both state and federal rules but had this to say about the new rules Obamacare is forcing upon it.
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Obamacare Forces Union to Drop Insurance for 6,000 Children”


Obama’s Socialist-Admiring Medicaid/Medicare Chief Gets Hearing

-By Warner Todd Huston

Donald Berwick, Obama’s nominee to head up the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, made himself infamous earlier this year when video came to light showing him telling a British audience how much he admired their socialist healthcare system because it “redistributes” the Brit’s wealth.

Berwick went all warm and fuzzy over the socialist features of the British National Health Service saying,“Any health care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized, and humane must, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional.” The Heartland Institute had an extensive report on Berwick’s British address back when the video first surfaced.

Recently Senator Jim Bunning (R, KY) challenged Berwick, who accepted a recess appointment after his initial nomination never came to a vote in the Senate. Republicans are concerned that a man so taken by socialist policies would be in a position to attempt to implement similar left-wing policies here.

Berwick was brought before the Senate on Wednesday and The Heartland Institute covered the hearing in a live blog. It makes for interesting reading.
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Obama’s Socialist-Admiring Medicaid/Medicare Chief Gets Hearing”


Obamacare Waivers Prove Policy is a Jobs Killer, Unions Benefit Most

-By Warner Todd Huston

111 companies and organizations were granted waivers by Obama’s Dept. of Health and Human Services so that they could get out of having to comply with Obamacare and unions were particularly well rewarded by the HHS with these waivers.

Interestingly, there was no great announcement of these waivers issued to the press. The HHS buried the waiver announcement six layers deep on its webpage and posted them on Friday when they imagined no one would notice. It’s a typical Friday evening document dump so common when an administration wants to avoid the prying eyes of the people. So much for the “most transparent administration in history,” eh?

One thing is sure about these waivers. Obama rewarded his union pals quite well. Some 15 unions and union healthcare or financial fund and insurance providers fill the list of companies and groups that will not have to operate under Obamacare’s destructive rules.
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Obamacare Waivers Prove Policy is a Jobs Killer, Unions Benefit Most”


During Breast Cancer Month Obama’s FDA Ponders Delisting Cancer Drug

-By Warner Todd Huston

So you have Avastin, a drug used to treat breast cancer that has a record of extending the lives of sufferers for at least five and a half months, and it’s October, the month declared Breast Cancer Awareness Month. If you are the Obama Federal Drug Administration, what do you do? Apparently you look to delist the drug.

This October the FDA is trying to decide to delist Avastin because in keeping with its new Obamacare rationing impulses it has decided Avastin costs too much.

In September the FDA announced that it was going to delay its final decision perhaps until December on whether or not to take Avastin off the market for breast cancer patients. There was no clear indication of just when the decision would be made, but conveniently the decision certainly will be delayed until after the coming elections. As a result President Obama won’t have to worry about taking a drug away from breast cancer patients in the midst of an election cycle.

The calculation of skipping past the elections is hard to ignore.
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During Breast Cancer Month Obama’s FDA Ponders Delisting Cancer Drug”


Feds Deciding When Healthcare Science Costs Too Much To Save Lives

-By Warner Todd Huston

If anyone wants a current example of what is looming ahead for medical science at the hands of Obamacare, the Avastin controversy is a perfect one. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) wants to de-list the cancer drug Avastin one reason being that it is a drug too expensive for government to fund. It is scary to think that the federal government can summarily dismiss cancer drugs merely because of expense, but that is what happens when government starts counting the beans. It becomes an issue of cost instead of effectiveness.

There were other reasons that the FDA wants to dump Avastin, but cost was one of them. One of those that sat in judgment of Avastin admitted that cost was a factor in the decision to delegitimize the treatment. Natalie Compagni Portis, a member of one of the panels that the FDA convened to investigate the drug, said, “We aren’t supposed to talk about cost, but that’s another issue.”
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Feds Deciding When Healthcare Science Costs Too Much To Save Lives”


Obama’s Healthcare Rules Will Shut Down Catholic Hospitals Nationwide

-By Warner Todd Huston

Some of Obamacare’s most destructive forces are quickly becoming common knowledge. We have, for instance, become painfully aware that Obama’s claim that we all could keep our plans and doctors “if you like them” is an outright falsehood as some people are already losing their coverage. It is also becoming clear that companies will be dropping plans all over the place making a lie of the idea that plans will be cheaper and easier to get once Obamacre comes into force. Another aspect of the destructive nature of this top down-style of “healthcare” is that once government takes over the system Democrats will assume they have the power to force religious-based healthcare providers to perform abortions and this will cause thousands of facilities to close down. This will, of course, make care even harder to get in many cities across the nation as hospital beds are lost in great numbers.

In fact, we are already seeing this disastrous situation of closing hospitals playing out in Scranton, Pennsylvania where three Catholic-operated hospitals are likely going to be shut down and/or sold off because of the negative affects Obamacare will have on these facilities.

Kevin Cook, the CEO of Mercy Health Partners, the company that operates these three hospitals, told WNEP TV News that Obamacare “absolutely” playing a role in the decision to sell off the facilities.
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Obama’s Healthcare Rules Will Shut Down Catholic Hospitals Nationwide”


U of Chicago Prof Says His $400,000 Salary Is Taxed Too Much

-By Warner Todd Huston

University professors so often get the reputation of being ivory tower pinheads sheltered from real life and out of touch with reality. Professor Todd Henderson of the University of Chicago sure didn’t help change that perception when he posted a blog post detailing how Obama’s tax hikes will hurt and that his combined family income of $400,000 annually still doesn’t prevent them from struggling to keep up with his bills.

The professor posted some of his family finances in order to show that even though many feel he is “rich” he has bills like everyone else and Obama’s tax hikes coming next year will hurt him badly. Interestingly, Henderson a neighbor of Obama in Chicago’s prestigious Hyde Park neighborhood.

“A quick look at our family budget, which I will gladly share with the White House, will show him that, like many Americans, we are just getting by despite seeming to be rich. We aren’t,” Henderson wrote on the blog post.
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U of Chicago Prof Says His $400,000 Salary Is Taxed Too Much”


Video: Spending Just Got Personal

This is a pretty inventive way to relate polling figures, I have to say. This one was made by BankruptingAmerica.org.

Seven out of ten voters say government spending is too high and 68 percent say spending is affecting them personally, according to a bipartisan ten-state poll we sponsored. Our fans told us they love the infographics we made to visualize the poll’s key findings. So we made a video taking the graphics to the next level.

Hundreds from our online community have taken the poll themselves. See how their views match up with them and the rest of the country. Click here to weigh in now.


WOW, Democrat Jokes That Seniors Should Be Denied End-Of-Life Healthcare

-By Warner Todd Huston


Democrat Gary McDowell is running to replace Bart Stupak (D, MI) in Michigan’s First District and while he may be hoping he might get the votes of seniors coming to the end of their time here on this mortal coil, he sure seems reticent to give them the medical care they’ll need to be around much longer after the election!

At a campaign appearance, McDowell agreed with those Obamacare supporters that think giving lifesaving medical care to seniors at end of life is a “resource” that needs to be rationed.

McDowell even makes a joke of the issue by saying that those that say end-of-life care should be rationed must be “from a safe district” because the “inconvenient truth” as he sees it is a tough pill to swallow.

Death panels, anyone?

Like a true Democrat McDowell thinks that setting up death panels should be swathed in less alarming language but that they should still be set up. “I was more diplomatic in not mentioning the end of life,” he said to those gathered. Yet he still meant to talk about how we need to ration healthcare at the end of life because “as adults” we need to accept McDowell’s “truth” that it’s just too expensive to save grandma’s life.

Let’s hope that Michiganders vote for Doctor Dan Benishek instead of McDowell for Michigan’s First.

http://www.benishekforcongress.com/
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WOW, Democrat Jokes That Seniors Should Be Denied End-Of-Life Healthcare”


Mentally Retarded Now Have ‘Intellectual Disability’

-By Warner Todd Huston

Along with implementing a socialist takeover of healthcare making it more expensive and less attentive, aside from taking over America’s car industry and creating a new brand of auto — Government Motors — and right along side efforts to give Big Labor millions of our tax dollars in payoffs and bailouts, not to mention attempting to takeover the banking and investing sectors, the Obama administration and the Democrat Party have also decided that we can no longer say “mentally retarded,” or even mentally disabled.” Hence forth by order of Democrats we shall now call them “intellectually disabled.”

This is the really important work of Congress in these “interesting times” in which we live.

With this important work, Congress has changed the label in existing health, education and labor law so that the terminology will more closely ascribe to that of the United Nation’s health arm.

Me, I’d like to know when they will officially classify liberalism as a mental disease? Maybe instead of saying they suffer from liberalism, we should say they suffer from “Intellectual Disassociation Disorder.” Because they certainly can’t seriously imagine that their lies and schemes comport with reality in any way.

Still, I am glad that Congress has taken the time away from spending us into oblivion and indulging its plans to materially destroy the USA to make it a less powerful member of the European Union to alter our mental health definitions to fit the UN’s needs. God knows we can’t help the UN out enough.
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Mentally Retarded Now Have ‘Intellectual Disability’”


Remember That Business About Healthcare Being Cheaper and You Could Keep You Coverage…

-By Warner Todd Huston

… well, we are finding out now that millions of seniors will have to change their Medicare prescription plans because of “double-digit hikes” in costs.

Premiums will go up an average of 10 percent among the top 10 drug plans that have signed up about 70 percent of seniors, according to an analysis of Medicare data by Avalere Health, a private research firm.

Marketing for next year’s drug plans gets under way Oct. 1, and seniors will see some of the biggest changes since the Medicare prescription benefit became available in 2006. More than 17 million are enrolled in private drug plans offered through Medicare.

Oh, so costs are going to go up?

Well, then what about keeping your plan if you like it?
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Remember That Business About Healthcare Being Cheaper and You Could Keep You Coverage…”


Michigan Home Healthcare Workers Sue State Over Forced Unionization

-By Warner Todd Huston

So imagine that you are working out of your home or the home of a friend. Say you are helping care for your own developmentally disabled relative or that of another. You are working for a family, not a company, and you are not employed by the state. Then one day you get a letter in the mail that says you have been forced by the state to join a union and henceforth you will be paying dues by having some of your salary removed by the state and given to the union. Does this sound like you are living and working in America? It is if you are a home healthcare worker in the State of Michigan.

Because of a special deal made behind the scenes between Mich. Gov. Jennifer Granholm and two unions, the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Michigan’s 40,000 in-home healthcare workers were unionized by a shady “vote” of less than 20% of these workers in 2006 via a mail-in ballot that most workers had no idea even existed.

The forced unionization has been in and out of courts since 2006 and now it is about to go back in again as a group of in-home healthcare workers is suing the state for driving them into a union against their will.
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Michigan Home Healthcare Workers Sue State Over Forced Unionization”


Members of Oregon’s State Employee Unions Get 5% Pay Raises… as Taxpayers Lose Jobs!

-By Warner Todd Huston

Unbelievable. In Oregon the reg’lar folks are losing their jobs right and left. And the bad luck for those actually paying the bills, the taxpayers, gets even worse because Oregon’s politicians have made sure that the state’s public employees unions get an automatic 5% pay raise starting this Wednesday!

5 percent pay increase for state union employees begins Wednesday

SALEM (AP) — A step pay increase of nearly 5 percent for Oregon state workers represented by unions goes into effect Wednesday.
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Members of Oregon’s State Employee Unions Get 5% Pay Raises… as Taxpayers Lose Jobs!”


Weekly GOP Address: Florida’s Marco Rubio… ‘We Must Repeal Obamacare!’

Marco Rubio is running for Senate in Florida. He is a former speaker of the Florida House of Reps and is currently leading in the polls in the Sunshine State.

Some have been wondering if the national GOP was going to actually run on repealing Obamacare. Well, this is the official GOP address, Party approved, so I guess we have our answer. They certainly DO intend to run on repealing Obamacare.


Congress Secretly Behind Massive Egg Recall

-By Warner Todd Huston

The news is everywhere of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s recall of millions of eggs from several Midwestern farms allegedly due to fears of a salmonella outbreak but the real story is undergoing a massive coverup.

The truth is that Congressional Democrats are behind this recall. In a secret document discovered by famed blogger Dabney Schoosel, a joint order by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Democrat Senate Majority leader Harry Reid was issued to the USDA to initiate the recall for “political reasons.”

The order directs the USDA to begin a massive egg recall that will eventually recall all eggs in the country. The reason for this recall is to prevent eggs being thrown at Democrats who have returned home across the country to begin holding townhall meetings just ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.

However, in a late development, it has been discovered that this order has been rescinded after the USDA made its early recalls. The Democrat majority has since changed its political policy on returning Democrat’s townhall plans. Democrats have just canceled them all instead.

Check out this secret video of a Democratic Congressmen’s planning meeting…

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Congress Secretly Behind Massive Egg Recall”


Video: Where’s My Congressman?

-By Warner Todd Huston

Why are Democrat Congressmen avoiding Summer townhalls? Here is a little explanation of that…

Featuring Clint Howard, little brother of the very liberal Hollywood director Ron Howard, this film does a great job skewering the Democrats. Brought to you by Heritage Action for America.


Irregularities in Skilled Healthcare Trial

-By Warner Todd Huston

Last month I wrote about the California healthcare case involving Skilled Healthcare LLC. The Nursing Home company was accused by trial lawyers of violating California’s regulations governing how many staff members per resident that is required to operate a healthcare facility and lost its case.

What struck me is that this case seemed to have been brought to court by trial lawyers and without actual victims or injury and, worse, the $671 million award could bankrupt the company putting thousands of elderly patients out on the street and eliminating hundreds of jobs.

Now there is an update on this case that takes it to a whole new level of craziness. Aside from the absurdity of the case in the first place, now it seems that there were all sorts of irregularities with the jury and the judge during the case.
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Irregularities in Skilled Healthcare Trial”


Missouri Votes to Repeal Obamacare… Prop C Passes By Over 70%

-By Jim Hoft of GatewayPundit.com

MISSOURI VOTERS REJECT OBAMACARE!

Prop C passes in Missouri!
Over 70% of voters reject the democrat’s nationalized health care plan.

WOW! The Show Me State showed Obamacare the door tonight.
Over 70% of Missouri voters rejected Obamacare by passing Prop c.
It’s too bad local KMOV St. Louis Channel 4 could not find any one who voted for the proposition.
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Missouri Votes to Repeal Obamacare… Prop C Passes By Over 70%”