- RealClearPolitics – Articles – Deception at Core of Obama Planstags: finance, obama, politics
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WASHINGTON — Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the “$2 trillion dollars in savings” that “we have already identified,” $1.6 trillion of which President Obama’s budget director later admits is the “savings” of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 — 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.
Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama’s tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that’s a matter of scale, not principle.
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The logic of Obama’s address to Congress went like this:
“Our economy did not fall into decline overnight,” he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education — importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.
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The “day of reckoning” has now arrived. And because “it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament,” Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.
Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.
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- 03/06/2009 – Could St. Louis lose its Catholic hospitals under new federal abortion legislation? – STLtoday.comtags: abortion, obama, are, you, sorry, yet?
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A proposed bill promising major changes in the U.S. abortion landscape has Roman Catholic bishops threatening to close Catholic hospitals if the Democratic Congress and White House make it law.
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The Freedom of Choice Act failed to get out of subcommittee in 2004, but its sponsor is poised to refile it now that former Senate co-sponsor Barack Obama occupies the Oval Office.
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The legislation has some Roman Catholic bishops threatening to shutter the country’s 624 Catholic hospitals — including 11 in the Archdiocese of St. Louis — rather than comply.
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But even within the Catholic community, there is disagreement about the effects FOCA might have on hospitals, with some health care professionals and bishops saying a strategy of ignoring the law, if it passes, would be more effective than closing hospitals.
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According to the CHA, Catholic hospitals make up 13 percent of the country’s nearly 5,000 hospitals, and employ more than 600,000 people. CHA says one of every six Americans hospitalized in the United States is cared for in a Catholic hospital.
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FOCA opponents have been discouraged by two moves made by Obama’s administration in recent weeks. In January, the administration repealed a Bush policy that restricted federal dollars for international groups that perform or promote abortion overseas.
And this week, Obama nominated Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Sebelius is a Roman Catholic who has been chastised by Kansas City, Kan., Archbishop Joseph Naumann for her positions supporting abortion rights. Naumann called Sebelius’ nomination this week “troubling.”
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.