Watchdog Groups Release Database Detailing Earmarks and Campaign Contributions

From Open Secrets --

Two of Washington, D.C.'s most reliable and respected nonpartisan watchdogs joined forces today and released a comprehensive database linking campaign contributions with earmarked spending by lawmakers.

Taxpayers for Common Sense, a national budget watchdog, provided data documenting more than 20,000 earmarked spending provisions worth over $35 billion. The Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks money-in-politics on its website, OpenSecrets.org, provided data detailing $226.8 million in campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures.

"At a minimum, earmarks granted to lawmakers' friends and supporters merit scrutiny and indicate potential conflicts of interest," said Sheila Krumholz, Executive Director of the Center for Responsive Politics. "This information will help Americans decide for themselves whether their congressional representatives are beholden to the voters who elect them – or to elite interests bankrolling their campaigns."

Is this the future of our health care and what Americans have to look forward too?

In the UK, the story read, "Woman gives birth on pavement 'after being refused ambulance"


Here's the site:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1207151/Woman-gives-birth-pavement-refused-ambulance.html

Make sure to read the comments at the end of the article from other Brits!

Victory NH, A Citizen Activist Network

Another website to check out:

http://60secondupdates.com/test/

http://60secondupdates.com/test/about-us

Site being circulated at some colleges/universities.

As always, we report (on what we find that might be helpful in our crusade against big government) and you decide (if it's valuable info or not).

Thanks for your consideration--God Bless America!

Dem Congressman on Single Payer: I Will Vote Adamantly Against the Interests of My District

Public Option Is Not Dead Yet

The headlines are encouraging: The AP reports, “White House appears ready to drop ‘public option’.” Politico reads, “White House backs away from public health care option.” And the front page of USA Today says, “Obama may drop public option in health care.” These headers all stem from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ comment on CNN Sunday Morning that the public option “is not the essential element” of President Barack Obama’s health care plan. But by Sunday night the White House was already walking back Sebelius’ statement.

An anonymous administration official told The Atlantic that Sebelius “misspoke” and White House health reform communications director Linda Douglass released a statement explaining: “Nothing has changed. The president has always said that what is essential is that health-insurance reform must lower costs, ensure that there are affordable options for all Americans and it must increase choice and competition in the health-insurance market. He believes the public option is the best way to achieve those goals.”

Obama’s allies on the left are equally emphatic about the non-death of the public option. Democracy for America head Howard Dean told the Washington Post, “I don’t think this bill is worth passing without a public option.” And Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told CNN, “It would be very, very difficult [to pass Obama's plan] without the public option.” But Democrats in the Senate are singing a slightly different story. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) told Fox News Sunday that “there never have been” enough votes for a public option in the Senate, and that continuing to fight for it would be “just a wasted effort.”

But that does not mean that Americans fighting against government-run health care are out of the woods yet. Conrad insists that the Senate could pass health reform that includes health insurance co-operatives. Co-operatives do have a long and proud tradition in many sectors of the U.S. economy, but details matter. Conrad says these health co-ops will not be “government-run and government-controlled” but instead “membership-run and membership controlled.” But others in Conrad’s caucus have a starkly different co-op goal. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is pushing a vision of co-ops that are: 1) run by the government, preferably the federal government; 2) funded or subsidized by the government; or 3) includes plans chosen by the government.

If the language that comes out of the Senate looks anything like what Schumer is proposing, then there is no real difference between co-ops and the public plan. If, on the other hand, the Senate produces something that; 1) is not funded by the federal government 2) is not “government-run and government-controlled”; but instead 3) is “membership-run and membership controlled” then co-ops would be acceptable.

Of course, the public plan is just one of the more objectionable parts of Obama’s health care plan. The individual and employer mandates, the expansion and federalization of Medicaid, the creation of a new health czar, not to mention the trillion dollar cost of the new plan, are all still intact. If, as Sebelius insists, the White House wants health reform to increase “choice and competition” than there are a number of conservative alternatives in the House and Senate that do just that by pursuing health reform through a “patient-centered” approach. The White House’s rhetoric is rapidly moving away from an expert/government-centered approach to health care and towards a more market/consumer model. Let’s hope their actions start matching their words.

We’re Winning The Health Care Debate

When any White House knows they are a losing a public debate, they turn to sympathetic journalists to try and reframe the debate in a way that is more advantageous to their policy goals. So after consulting with his best White House sources, The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder wrote under the headline How Conservatives Are Blowing Their Chance, Sunday:

“Democrats are beginning to notice that opponents of health care reform have discredited themselves. … The media, being a collection of different megaphones, reported on the town hall meetings in one of two ways, both damaging to Republicans. Either they credulously reported the louder, angrier voices (inherently damaging to Republicans in this case) or they reported on the political architecture of the town hall meetings, which plays down the substance of the protests. … The White House’s goal was to prevent the Blue Dogs from panicking. The swing constituents in these congressional districts aren’t angry Republicans, and the Blue Dogs know this. They’re political independents for whom the sanctity of the process is important.”

So that is the official White House spin. But what is the reality? Two new polls came out yesterday from Gallup and Pew, and both of them show that in direct contradiction to Ambinder’s “analysis”, the townhall protests are, in fact, making political independents more sympathetic to opponents of Obamacare. Pew found that of those Americans following the townhalls, 61%, including 64% of independents, said they think the way people have been protesting is appropriate. And according to Gallup, 34% of independents say the townhalls have made them more sympathetic to opponents of Obamacare, compared to only 23% of independents who say the townhalls have made them less sympathetic. Equally important, Gallup found that more Americans believe the townhall protesters are motivated by their internal beliefs and not stirred up by “political activists” crating “organized opposition.”

In fact, it is the supporters of Obamacare who are resorting to multi-million dollar Astroturf campaigns. Earlier this week Billionaire speculator George Soros pledged $5 million for the cause and any perusal of online bulletin board Craigslist will find hundreds of ads promising $11-16 an hour for “grassroots” campaign jobs supporting Obamacare. And just yesterday Americans for Stable Quality Care (a group largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry but also including the AMA, Families USA, the Federation of American Hospitals, and the SEIU) launched a $12 million television ad campaign in support of the White House plan. This $12 million ad buy is just a small fraction of the $150 million that PhRMA has pledged for advertising and “grassroots activity” to help pass Obama’s plan.

Turning back to the White House spin, Ambinder wrote about the townhalls: “Lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats, were being asked to respond to non-sequiturs (would you support a health care reform plan that grows the deficit? Health care grows the deficit right now, so it’s a nonsense question, one that is easy for politicians to answer).” This just shows how out of touch the White House is with the American people. As Gallup’s Frank Newport reported last week: “The push for healthcare reform is occurring in an environment characterized by high levels of concern about fiscal responsibility, government spending, and the growing federal deficit. … The economy outweighs health care as the most pressing problem facing the country and in Americans’ personal lives.”

At his Portsmouth, New Hampshire pep rally yesterday, President Obama pleaded: “Where we do disagree, let’s disagree over things that are real, not these wild misrepresentations that bear no resemblance to anything that’s actually been proposed.” Well here is the reality of what has actually been passed by three separate House committees: Obamacare will be spending $245 billion a year by 2019, increases the budget deficit by $239 billion over that same time frame, and in the out years, according to CBO director Doug Elmendorf “the proposal would probably generate substantial increases in federal budget deficits during the decade beyond the current 10-year budget window.”

You may have seen yesterday’s video of Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) speaking on her cell phone while a cancer survivor spoke to her about health care reform. Well now comes news that the pro-Obamacare voices in the crowd were not entirely legitimate. A primary care physician identified as Dr. Roxana Meyer stood up and praised the President’s health care plan for overhauling a broken system. Meyer said: “I don’t know what there is in the bill that creates such panic.” The Congresswoman asked the crowd to give her a round of applause for being a doctor, hugged her and then asked “How long have you been practicing?” to which “Dr.” Meyer answered “Four years,” which was followed by more applause and a gushing grin on the face of “Dr.” Meyer. The problem? Roxana Meyer is not a doctor, but rather an Obama campaign delegate.

Townhall Downfall: Astroturf Doctors?

In fact, Roxana Meyer was sitting in the audience with a friend who also worked for the Obama campaign and was famously photographed hanging a Che Guevara revolutionary flag above her official Obama campaign office desk. The Houston Chronicle, which reported on the townhall and highlighted the exchange, knew that Ms. Meyer was an Obama delegate but was unaware she was not a doctor. The Chronicle did not report her campaign background, but has since updated their website to reflect she is not a physician. In responding to inquiries, Roxana Meyer says she possessed “spontaneity” in her deception and she thought it would “help her credibility.” Yes, she gave all Obamacare supporters loads of credibility today. We hope that the President’s chorus will denounce her actions as loudly as they have protested regular parents, citizens, students who have driven themselves to their representative’s townhalls to ask serious questions about the “reform” of one sixth of the U.S. economy.

Does Obama's OFA support his Hellth Care

Tom Blumer at Bizzy Blog offers this up on the supposed support of ObamaCare by his mindless minions...

I hope the establishment media is monitoring and interested in reporting the real results of the attempt by Organizing for Astroturfing, er, America, to lobby individual members of Congress to support ObamaCare. Sadly, I doubt they are.

If what I have learned this week holds elsewhere, it will turn out to have been a complete bust, and will demonstrate that, despite attempts to make it appear otherwise, there is no grass-roots groundswell for statist health care.

In Tom's escapade into Astroturfing, he learned some very interesting information. That while the administration attempts to incorrectly dismiss arguments of anyone against the hellth care proposals as lies -- it seems they have no problem putting out lies of there own....

As you’ll see, the Guide has a few amazing claims, with no sourcing, about “The Cost of Inaction in Ohio”:

• 1,500,000 are uninsured today in Ohio, and 1,180 Ohioans will lose their health coverage every week because of rising costs.

• The average family premium in Ohio costs $1,000 more because our system fails to cover everyone.

• Our broken health insurance system will cost the Ohio economy as much as $7.1 billion this year in productivity losses due to lack of coverage.

I did my own sourcing, and determined that the claims are are either flat-out wrong or squishy deceptions. More...

Click here to read Tom's whole post and see how he dismantles the above lies and about his trip to visit 1st District Rep. Steve Driehaus & 2nd District Rep. Jean Schmidt.