Free Republic

In making his case for a government takeover of the US health-care system, President Obama is going far beyond the usual Washington truth-stretching. Take a look at just a few of the most common claims: "If you like your current health-care plan, you can keep it." Even White House spokesmen have said that Obama's oft-repeated pledge that you can keep your current insurance isn't meant to be taken literally. The reality is that millions of Americans - perhaps most Americans - will be forced to change insurance plans.

In the span of two days, the administration has blown through two deadlines without producing a report. Yesterday, we marked ninety days since the President asked for his cabinet members to each produce a report that would lead to a reduction in administration spending of only $100 million. That report was due in 90 days. Yesterday, absolutely no report was produced. Meanwhile, a panel was supposed to produce an interim report on progress toward closing GITMO today. That report will also not be filed.

“The time for talking is through,” sayeth the man who apparently doesn’t realize that Congress exists to debate legislation and not to muzzle itself and rubber-stamp executive initiatives. Of course, Barack Obama might be able to make that argument a little better if this particular executive took any sort of responsibility for the executive initiative in question. Real Clear Politics has this quote from the President who wants Congress to pass the health-care reform bill by the end of the month without debate, but who

Trust in President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies to identify the right solutions to problems facing the country has dropped off significantly since March, according to a new Public Strategies Inc./POLITICO poll

In an Ideas piece, Bobby Jindal says Washington is trying to tax and spend our way back to prosperity. Photo: AP Digg/Buzz It UpDigg this Story! Buzz it up on Yahoo! Buzz POLITICO 44 Things in Louisiana are looking up. We are announcing major economic development wins and private capital investment and reducing government spending in order to live within our means. We just completed a grueling legislative session where we all had to work together, Democrats and Republicans, to find a way to do more with less.

In business, and in life, there is a concept that everyone should follow, manage expectations. If you promise someone that something will get done in two weeks and it's done in three you look like an incompetent. If, on the other hand, you promise it done in four weeks and it's done in three you're a hero.

Any successful salesperson worth their salt knows that to close the sale you need to create urgency. If there's no reason to buy NOW there's no reason to buy period. A car salesman will claim that said deal will go away, often referred to as a take away close. A stock broker will say that the price of said investment will go up. A mortgage broker will say that rates are about to go up. You get the idea.

I first wrote about the potential dangers of President Obama's penchant for naming czars back in January. Then, President Obama's desire to name czars, envoys, and special advisers was much greater than the actual number. Now, the administration has over thirty czars. They include such dubious functions as green jobs, California water, and pay czars. Most of these czars don't even have functions that any fair reading of the Constitution would give the president. For instance, he has a full assembly line, pardon the pun, of czars just to deal with the auto industry. Of course, the president technically has...

The president's plan for loan modifications has been an abysmal failure. The reasons for its failures should be examined especially in the context of the president's plan for universal health care. With a bit of fanfare, the president announced his plan to save up to seven million households from foreclosure. The eligible loans were any loans securitized by Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac. Any borrower living in the property they wanted to modify, with a hardship, no more than a loan to value of 105%, not already in foreclosure, a mortgage amount of less than $759,000, and a new housing debt to...

President Obama and the Democratic leadership are trying to ram a medical insurance bill through Congress in record speed, before anyone can get a good look at it. This 1,000-page monstrosity was released last Tuesday. The president wanted to see voting start by Thursday.

The president is finishing up a news conference that crystallizes in my mind the problem the Democrats have been facing regarding health care reform. He has a very sharp and clear message in this news conference. He has laid out what health care reform means: lower costs, universal coverage, a health care exchanges, and preventative care. Had this been the message for the last two to three months, it's very likely that the public would embrace health care reform in a much robust way than it currently is. That, however, is NOT what happened.

It was a day that every political junkie would love regarding health care reform. It was also a day that will likely have ramifications for the future of health care reform. The first event was another nuclear bomb handed down by the Congressional Budget Office. Instead of saving the federal government from fiscal catastrophe, the health reform measures being drafted by congressional Democrats would increase rather than reduce public spending on health care, potentially worsening an already bleak budget outlook, the director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said this morning.

The president, Republicans and Democrats in Congress and millions of Americans all agree -- our health care system is broken and must be fixed. We also agree that we must reform how we pay for this system, and, at the same time, reduce the number of people who lack coverage without disrupting the coverage that insured people already have.

That's a chart created by House Minority Leader John Boehner. It charts the complicated bureaucracy that will be created by the Democrat's plan for health care reform. Here's how John Boehner characterized it. If anybody thinks that all of this bureaucracy is needed to fix our health care system, I plainly disagree. What this is going to do is ration care, limit the choices that patients and doctors have and really decrease the quality of our health care system.

President Obama has again employed a straw man argument in trying to sell the newly minted health care reform package. But taking a stern tone, Obama accused his health care critics of "defending the status quo." He said he wants the House and Senate to pass out bills before the August recess, so that they can settle on one unified bill that he can sign shortly after lawmakers return from break. "This is a problem that we can no longer defer," Obama said, flanked by nurses. "Deferring reform is nothing more than defending the status quo -- and those who...

People who seek the services of auto mechanics want car repair, not "auto care." Similarly, most people who seek the services of medical doctors want body repair, not "health care." We own our cars, are responsible for the cost of maintaining them, and decide what needs fixing based partly on balancing the seriousness of the problem against the expense of repairing it. Our health-care system rests on the principle that, although we own our bodies, the community or state ought to be responsible for paying the cost of repairing them. This is for the ostensibly

Right after the mortgage crisis occurred, I bet most of the layman in the country got a quick lesson in the complicated nature that is our mortgage market. For instance, I'm sure that most folks thought that the banks that approved your loans also were the ones that kept them and made money on them. That's not so in the majority of cases because of a process known as mortgage securitization. In this process, a financial firm bundles hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of loans together turn them into bonds and sell them on trading markets. We've learned...

One of the worst things that can happen to an administration is for them to see things as rosey while the citizenry suffers. It's sometimes called the Pollyanna effect. Especially when they are talking about the economy, the administration is always in a difficult position. If they sound gloomy, they talk down an economy. Furthermore, economic health is the administration's responsibility. So, if the economy is suffering, who's responsibility is it? Remember how Jimmy Carter addressed the nation and presented a near doomsday scenario. That didn't help him or our nation. Yet, when you proclaim everything just fine while things...

The air is seeping out of the Great Liberal Hot Air Balloon. American liberals have been hoping, wishing, and praying--okay, maybe not praying--for over a quarter-century for an end to the ghastly interlude of conservative dominance ushered in by Ronald Reagan. Surely it was all a bad dream, a waking nightmare, a bizarre deviation from the preordained path of history. With the Democratic congressional victories in November 2006, the nightmare seemed to be ending. And in November 2008, with the election of Barack Obama and increased congressional majorities, it seemed to be over. A new era had dawned.

The government is now floating the idea of giving small businesses money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The Obama administration is working on a plan that would make available funds from the $700 billion banking-system bailout package to millions of small businesses struggling to survive the recession, FOX News has confirmed. Gene Sperling, a top adviser to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, developed the idea of using funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to help small businesses as part of a department-wide push to generate ideas to pump life into this ailing part of the economy. The concept...