Gotta protect their base, right BO

WASHINGTON, March 11 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) detailing federal investigations into the alleged corrupt activities of Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The documents reference serious allegations of corruption and voter registration fraud by ACORN as well as the Obama administration's decision to shut down a criminal investigation without filing criminal charges.

The documents include background information on two specific complaints filed in October 2008 by Lucy Corelli and Joseph Borges, Republican Registrars of Voters in Stamford and Bridgeport, Connecticut, respectively, during the 2008 election season.

According to Corelli, on August 1, 2008, her office received 1,200 ACORN voter registration cards from the Secretary of State's office. Over 300 of these cards were rejected because of "duplicates, underage, illegible and invalid addresses," which "put a tremendous strain on our office staff and caused endless work hours at taxpayers' expense." Corelli claimed the total cost of the extra work caused by ACORN corruption was $20,000. Likewise, Borges contended that: "The organization ACORN during the summer of 2008 conducted a registration drive which has produced over 100 rejections due to incomplete forms and individuals who are not citizens..." Among the examples cited by Borges was a seven-year old child who was registered to vote by ACORN through the use of a forged signature and a fake birth certificate claiming she was 27-years old.

The FBI and Department of Justice opened an investigation. However, the Obama Justice Department, while noting that ACORN had engaged in "questionable hiring and training practices," closed down the investigation in March 2009, claiming ACORN broke no laws.

By contrast, the documents also include records related to a federal investigation of ACORN corruption in St. Louis, Missouri, involving 1,492 allegedly fraudulent voter registration cards submitted by Project Vote, a liberal non-profit organization affiliated with ACORN on voter registration drives, during the 2006 election season. Assistant United States Attorney Hal Goldsmith initiated the investigation with "concurrence" from the Department of Justice and the participation of the FBI. According to a Justice Department memo, Goldsmith "advised he would prosecute any individual responsible for submitting fraudulent voter registration cards." Goldsmith identified the statute for prosecution: Title 42, USC 1973 (gg), which provides for criminal penalties for fraudulent voter registrations. In April 2008, eight former ACORN employees from the St. Louis office pled guilty to voter registration fraud.

Other documents show that the Bush Justice Department failed to prosecute ACORN voter registration fraud of non-citizens in Phoenix, Arizona in 2007 because the allegations that led to the opening of the investigation were "unverifiable." Notably, the FBI document detailing this questionable decision reveals that a "draft Intelligence Bulletin... concludes that ACORN's employment practices perpetuate fraudulent voter registration."

The ACORN documents uncovered by Judicial Watch include internal FBI memoranda, signed affidavits, subpoenas, fraudulent voter registration cards, and publications describing ACORN's policies and practices. The documents also include details regarding numerous allegations of corruption extending beyond voter registration fraud, to include attempts by ACORN employees to coerce workers to participate in campaign activities on behalf of Democratic candidates.

"These documents reflect systematic voter registration fraud by ACORN," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "It is a scandal that there has been no comprehensive criminal investigation and prosecution by the Justice Department into this evident criminal conduct. Given President Obama's close connections to ACORN, including his campaign's hiring of the ACORN's Project Vote organization, it seems rather obvious why Attorney General Holder has failed to seriously investigate these and other alleged ACORN criminal activities."

Visit www.JudicialWatch.org to read the ACORN documents obtained by Judicial Watch.

SOURCE Judicial Watch

Obama family health care fracas : A doctor savages his cousin Barack's reform plan

By Dr. Milton R. Wolf

"Primum nil nocere."First, do no harm. This guiding principle is a bedrock of medical care. Sadly, those politicians who would rewrite our health care laws do not live in the same universe as do the doctors and health care professionals who must practice it.

Imagine if, like physicians, politicians were personally held to the incredibly high level of scrutiny that includes civil and financial liability for any unintended consequence of their decisions. Imagine if they were forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars each year on malpractice insurance and still faced the threat of multimillion-dollar lawsuits with every single decision they made. If so, a government takeover of health care would be the furthest thing from their minds.

Obamacare proponents would have us believe that we will add 30 million patients to the system without adding providers, we will see no decline in the quality of care for the millions of Americans currently happy with the system, and -if you act now!- we will save money in the process. But why stop there? Why not promise it will no longer rain on weekends and every day will be a great hair day?

America has the finest health care delivery system in the world. Let's not forget that and put it at risk in the name of reform. Desperate souls across the globe flock to our shores and cross our borders every day to seek our care. Why? Our system provides cures while the government-run systems from which they flee do not. Compare Europe's common cancer mortality rates to America's: breast cancer - 52 percent higher in Germany and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom; prostate cancer - a staggering 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway; colon cancer - 40 percent higher in the United Kingdom.

Look closer at the United Kingdom. Britain's higher cancer mortality rate results in 25,000 more cancer deaths per year compared to a similar population size in the United States. But because the U.S. population is roughly five times larger than the United Kingdom's, that would translate into 125,000 unnecessary American cancer deaths every year. This is more than all the mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, cousins and children in Topeka, Kan. And keep in mind, these numbers are for cancer alone. America also has better survival rates for other major killers, such as heart attacks and strokes. Whatever we do, let us not surrender the great gains we have made. First, do no harm. Lives are at stake.

Obamacare: Fixing price at any cost

The justification for Obamacare has been to control costs, but the problem is there is little in Obamacare that will do that. Instead, there are provisions that will ration care and artificially set price. This is a confusion of costs and price.

As one example, consider the implications of Obamacare's financial penalty aimed at your doctor if he seeks the expert care he has determined you need. If your doctor is in the top 10 percent of primary care physicians who refer patients to specialists most frequently - no matter how valid the reasons - he will face a 5 percent penalty on all their Medicare reimbursements for the entire year. This scheme is specifically designed to deny you the chance to see a specialist. Each year, the insidious nature of that arbitrary 10 percent rule will make things even worse as 100 percent of doctors try to stay off that list. Many doctors will try to avoid the sickest patients, and others will simply refuse to accept Medicare. Already, 42 percent of doctors have chosen that route, and it will get worse. Your mother's shiny government-issued Medicare health card is meaningless without doctors who will accept it.

Obamacare will further diminish access to health care by lowering reimbursements for medical care without regard to the costs of that care. Price controls have failed spectacularly wherever they've been tried. They have turned neighborhoods into slums and have caused supply chains to dry up when producers can no longer profit from providing their goods. Remember the Carter-era gas lines? Medical care is not immune from this economic reality. We cannot hope that our best and brightest will pursue a career in medicine, setting aside years of their lives - for me, 13 years of school and training - to enter a field that might not even pay for the student loans it took to get there.

Giving power back to people

I believe there is a better way. The problems in the American health care system are not caused by a shortage of government intrusion. They will not be solved by more government intrusion. In fact, our current problems were precisely, though unintentionally, created by government.

World War II-era wage-control measures - a form of price controls - ushered in a perverted system in which we turn to our employers for insurance and the government penalizes us if we choose to purchase insurance for ourselves. You are not given the opportunity to be a wise consumer of health care and compare prices as well as quality in any meaningful way. Worse still, your insurance company is not answerable to you because you are not its customer. It is answerable to your employer, whose interests differ from your own.

Insurance companies have been vilified for following the perverse rules that government has created for them. But it gets worse. The government, always knowing best, deploys insurance commissioners across the land to dictate what the insurance companies must provide, whether you want it or not, and each time, your premiums increase. Obamacare will make all of this worse, not better.

One of America's founding principles is our trust in the people and their economic freedom to rule their own lives. We should decouple health insurance from employers and empower patients to be consumers once again. Allow them to determine the insurance plan that best meets their families' needs and which company will provide it. This will unleash a wave of competition that will drive costs down in a way that price controls never have. Eliminate the artificial state boundary rules that protect insurance companies from true competition and watch as voters demand that their state insurance commissioners get the heck out of the way. Innovative companies will drive down costs similar to how Geico and Progressive have worked for automobile insurance. And it won't cost taxpayers a trillion dollars in the process.

This free-market approach has worked for everything from high-definition TVs to breakfast cereals, but will it work for medicine? It already is. Take Lasik eye surgery, for example. Because patients are allowed to be informed consumers and can shop anywhere, doctors work hard for their business. Services, availability and expertise have all increased, and costs have decreased. Should consumers demand it, insurance companies - now answerable to you rather than your employer - would cover it.

Between Barack and a hard place

I have personally trained and practiced in both the government-run and free-market segments of American medicine. The difference is vast. Patients see this for themselves, and this may be why, according to a recent CNN poll, they oppose Obamacare nearly 3 to 1. I am with them. It is difficult for me to speak publicly against the president on his central issue, but too much is at stake.

I wish my cousin Barack the greatest of success in office. But I feel duty-bound to rise in opposition to Obamacare. I must take a stand for my patients, my profession and, ultimately, my country. The problems caused by government will not be solved by growing government. Now that this new era of big-government takeovers has spread to our health care system, it's not just our freedoms or our wallets that are at stake. It's our lives.

Dr. Milton R. Wolf is a radiologist in Kansas. He is Barack Obama's second cousin once removed. President Obama's great-great grandfather, Thomas Creekmore McCurry, is Dr. Wolf's great-grandfather. Dr. Wolf's mother, Anna Margaret McCurry, was five years older than Mr. Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. The two were childhood friends until the Dunhams moved from Kansas to Seattle in 1955.

Anyblody confused yet? If its going to pass it will be tomorrow or never

March 11, 2010
I'm Sorry, Madam Speaker -- the Republicans Won't Let Me Vote for It
By Carol Peracchio
When my daughter was a teenager, her friends would occasionally phone with an invitation to a party or outing which she was reluctant to attend. I'd hear her say, "Let me ask my mom." She'd cover the phone receiver and tell me about the invitation. I'd take one look at her face and ask, "Do you want to go?" She'd shake her head no. So I would give her some mom-cover. "Tell them I said no."

My daughter would then tell her friend, "Sorry, my mom says I can't go...yeah, you know how parents are."

I was reminded of this while watching two House Democrats last weekend on Fox News Sunday discussing the upcoming health care reform vote. The looks on the faces of Representatives Altmire and Adler mirrored the look on my daughter's face, as if they were being asked to go somewhere they really didn't want to go, but had no idea how to refuse the invitation. How does a congressman tell the Speaker of the House and the president of the United States that he just doesn't want to go to their party?

The Democrats in the House are in this pickle because the president and their leadership have decided to inflict comprehensive health care reform on an unwilling America through a process called reconciliation.

Democratic sources have said the general plan is for the House to pass the version the Senate passed last year with 60 votes. Meanwhile, negotiators in both chambers would agree to a separate package of changes to that legislation. That package would go before the Senate under reconciliation rules.


In other words, it's not comprehensive health care reform that is going to be voted on under reconciliation rules. It's the fix of the Senate health care bill that will be voted on and passed by a bare majority in the Senate. In a New York Post article, "Nancy's Nutty New Rules," Grace-Marie Turner explains the process that Speaker Pelosi has embarked on to pass comprehensive health care reform:

To use reconciliation, Pelosi must first get House members to vote for the exact bill the Senate passed in December. That is, the House would "keep the process moving" so both the House and Senate could pass a second bill to fix things members don't like in the Senate measure.


Ms. Pelosi is asking pro-life Democrats to vote for the pro-abortion Senate bill. She is asking the progressive caucus to vote for a bill without a public option. She is asking Blue Dogs to vote for the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase, because in order for the process to "keep moving," the House has to pass the exact same Senate bill first. Then those same House Democrats have to trust Harry Reid that the Senate will pass legislation that will address all their concerns. And they also must believe that the president will not merely sign the Senate bill into law, claim it as a major achievement, and move on to other things, like cap-and-trade. This is the party that a lot of House Democrats are leery of attending. How do they escape?

Unfortunately, congressmen don't bring their moms with them to Washington. However, I may have discovered the next-best thing. On March 9, Rush Limbaugh interviewed Karl Rove. They discussed the prospect of health care reform passing in the House of Representatives. Mr. Rove summarized the fix the House Democrats find themselves in as Ms. Pelosi is pressures them to come to her party:

... she's got a lot of things that she can tell people we'll take care of you. But, on the other hand, she has a heavy lift because, at the end of the day, her argument is, if you've got a problem with this bill, we can take care of it in reconciliation. Well, what happens if in the Senate they somehow pass it through the House, they get the pro-lifers to say, you know, I'll vote for a pro-abortion bill; they get the deficit hawks to vote for a bill that is broken and is going to cause huge deficits; they get the liberals who want more of a public option, and they say we'll fix it for you in the Senate reconciliation. And what happens if the Senate Republicans can keep them from fixing things in Senate reconciliation?


My suggestion is for Senate Republicans to rescue the House Democrats (and the American people) by promising to block the Senate fix. Senator McConnell, accompanied by Senator Kyl, new Senator Brown, and perhaps even Senator McCain, should hold a press conference during which they state unequivocally that no fix to the comprehensive health care reform bill will ever make it out of the Senate, reconciliation or not. Every delaying maneuver known to man will be applied to the legislation. Having this pledge signed by all 41 Republican Senators would be a nice touch.

Now the Democrat congressmen can tell Nancy Pelosi and President Obama, "I'm sorry, I can't vote for the bill. The Republicans won't let me." Then they can all get together with the mainstream media and the White House and gripe about how mean the Republicans are. Don't worry, House Democrats. We'll never let on how grateful you are for the cover.
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Carol Peracchio is a registered nurse.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/03/im_sorry_madam_speaker_the_rep.html at March 11, 2010 - 08:16:56 AM CST

Obamacare’s Procedural Fraud on the American People

Posted By Brian Darling On March 10, 2010

The Health Care Nuclear Option [2] is still the stated plan to get Obamacare to the President’s desk. The latest wrinkle is designed to allow pro-life Democrats to vote for the Senate’s taxpayer funded abortion language while still claiming they never voted for taxpayer funded abortions. Don’t be fooled.

First, let’s be clear that the Senate bill allows tax dollars to be used for abortions. According to Chuck Donovan [3] of The Heritage Foundation, the Senate passed Obamacare bill funds abortion in several ways, even creating an appropriation for Community Health Centers that contains no restriction on abortion subsidies. If the Senate version of Obamacare is passed by the House and sent to the President, then the House has consented to the federal funding of abortion.

House members have come up with a unique way to structure a vote that attempts to avoid the House voting on legislation before it goes to the president. First, the House Budget Committee will report out a reconciliation bill. It is unclear as to whether the Stupak Amendment will be added. This reconciliation measure would be reported for consideration by the House of Representatives as a whole.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) would then package the Senate passed Obamacare bill and the House reconciliation measure into one measure. The House rules committee will report out a rule that will allow the Senate passed Obamacare bill to pass the House without a vote. The rule will be self-executing in the sense that the House will have been deemed to pass the Senate Obamacare bill if the House can muster the votes to pass the reconciliation measure. The House has used this procedure in the past during a debate on funding the Global War on Terror and in passing debt limit increases under the “Gephardt Rule.”

There is a constitutional issue raised by this procedure. Article 1, Section 7, of the Constitution states in part “Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it becomes a law, be presented to the President of the United States.” If the House does not vote on a bill, is it considered to “have passed the House of Representatives?” Don’t expect the Supreme Court to take up this case, because this is in the realm of a political issue that the Courts tend to want resolved by the House and Senate through the democratic process. It is a Constitutional concern and should be discussed by all Americans. If any member of Congress claims to have not voted for the pro-abortion Senate passed bill, one can point to this provision in the Constitution to argue the opposite.

Procedurally, this would happen in the following order. The House Rules Committee would approve this self-executing rule. The House would vote on the rule that allows this scenario. Then the House will vote on the reconciliation measure. Upon passage of the reconciliation measure the Senate Obamacare bill will be deemed to have passed the House and the reconciliation measure will be sent to the Senate. This so called “Deeming Resolution” is a trick that allows the House to pass a bill they never voted upon. Therefore, the real vote on the pro-abortion Senate passed bill will be the vote on the rule to allow this scenario to roll out on the House floor.

One provision that may make the rule is a provision that does not allow the House to report the Senate passed Obamacare bill to the President until the Senate passes a reconciliation bill. Bills are enrolled before being sent to the President for his signature and the House can prevent the enrollment and delivery of Obamacare to the President until the Senate completes work on the reconciliation measure. Sound complicated? Yes and it is supposed to so the American people can’t understand that the House is on the verge of passing an unpopular Obamacare bill, yet they are reserving the right to claim that they did not vote for the Senate passed bill.

If the liberals in the House can pull off this trick, this would have allowed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to have secretly written the version of Obamacare going to the President’s desk. Do you remember Harry Reid and the Chamber of Secrets [4]? Reid merged, without any official proceedings, the Senate HELP and Senate Finance Committee versions of Obamacare, with his personal additions to the bill including a Public Option with an opt out for states, in closed door meetings with political elites. Basically, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, OMB Director Peter Orszag, Senators Harry Reid (D-NV), Max Baucus (D-MT), Chris Dodd (D-CT) and a few other liberal Senators have rewritten health care law in secret closed door meetings.

After those meeting the Senate moved to proceed to this bill, without any hearings or opportunity for public review. During debate in the Senate, Senator Harry Reid crafted a manager’s package of amendments and added the Cornhusker Kickback for Nebraska, a Louisiana Purchase and a Gator-Aid earmark. Now the House is preparing to pass this bill without a vote. The American people should demand that Congress start over. This secretive and non-transparent procedure is not way to force through Obamacare.

Article printed from The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.: http://blo

From Drudge Front Page, We can always HOPE!

'END' OF THE 'END GAME' OR 'THE END'?

TODAY: Obama pushing on health care end game (AP)

Last year:

July 28: Healthcare endgame on Capitol Hill (Reuters)

August 21: Analysis: Health care endgame near but uncertain (AP)

October 14: Senate, administration begin healthcare endgame as Dem leaders express unity (Hill)

October 25: Senators say health care bill endgame is in sight (Politico)

October 27: End Game: So When Will Health Care Really Happen? (TPM)

October 30: Health reform inches closer to endgame (WaPo)

November 23: The Health Care Endgame (NPR)