I had an entire set of stuff lined up for yesterday’s LinkSwarm, but in the rush of amnesty-related news I managed to forget to paste it into the right file. D’oh!
So enjoy your rare complimentary Weekend LinkSwarm!
Here in Austin, we’re enjoying a temporary respite from Winter in November, but I don’t expect it to last long.
Links!
The growing impression that politicians don’t play straight with their constituents is completely toxic, particularly to Democrats, who actually want to use government to improve people’s lives. It’s one thing to downplay unpalatable choices made in the law; it’s another to never disclose the consequences of legislation until it’s too late for anyone to react. Combine that with the moustache-twirling of a Jonathan Gruber, saying that the idiots should be happy for what they got, and you have basically every conservative stereotype about liberal elites confirmed.
Also: ObamaCare is designed for people buying insurance through it to get a nasty sticker shock in year two. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Since some members of the MSM still seem mystified as to who this “obscure” Jonathan Gruber is, here’s a handy two-minute video primer:
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with FireDogLake or not, the lefty blog run by Jane Hamsher. (Think of it as sort of Daily Kos, Jr., and you wouldn’t be far wrong.)
Well, you may not remember, but there was a time in 2010 when Firedoglake and other liberals were fighting against what would become ObamaCare on the grounds that it was a giant taxpayer subsidy for insurance companies (correct) and that it simply wasn’t liberal enough, falling short of their goal of fully socializing the entire American medical system (AKA “single player”).
So back then, Hamsher was deeply skeptical of how ObamaCare was constructed, and did an analysis of the role one Jonathan Gruber had in crafting and selling the law.
How deeply was Gruber involved? Up to his eyeballs:
Up until this point, most of the attention regarding the failure to disclose the connection between Jonathan Gruber and the White House has fallen on Gruber himself. Far more troubling, however, is the lack of disclosure on the part of the White House, the Senate, the DNC and other Democratic leaders who distributed Gruber’s work and cited it as independent validation of their proposals, orchestrating the appearance of broad consensus when in fact it was all part of the same effort.
The White House is placing a giant collective bet on Gruber’s “assumptions” to justify key portions of the Senate bill, which they allowed people to believe was independent verification. Now that we know that Gruber’s work was not that of an independent analyst but rather work performed as a contractor to the White House and paid for by taxpayers, it should be made publicly available so others can judge its merits.
Throughout the piece, Hamsher highlights the numerous times when the Democratic Party and their allies in the media purport to “analyze” the effects of ObamaCare on a wide variety of economic metrics, when in fact all the disparate “analyses” all points back to Gruber’s work.
And how’s this for a prophetic sentence?
Though Gruber’s analysis has been cited as support that insurance would be affordable, it appears that the individual mandate will impose a financial burden on middle class families that will leave them with no ability to make the co-pays necessary to use the insurance they are forced to buy.
While the Hamsher piece doesn’t uncover whether Gruber actual drafted specific language that made it’s way into ObamaCare, her piece does make clear that not only was Gruber used by the White House, congressional Democrats and the media to sell ObamaCare, he was the central figure in selling ObaamaCare’s “cost savings” to the public:
What was Gruber’s role in crafting the Senate bill? Nobody will say. Is he in effect grading his own work when he praises the bill? We don’t know. What we do know is that the White House engaged an expert who was quite likely to reach the conclusions he reached, because he’d been making similar claims for years. And they worked hard to promote his work as independent validation of their plan, when in fact he was an integral part of it.
In light of this, it’s rather amazing the degree of amnesia that’s swept Democrats and their MSM lackeys over Gruber’s central role in ObamaCare. Even more amazing is the fact they think the public will actually buy those denials. Then again, as Gruber himself noted, lack of transparency and deceiving those “stupid” voters was central part of Democrats’ ObamaCare plans from the beginning…
(Note: When I tried to pull up this piece yesterday, I got a persistent error, and wondered on Twitter why Firedoglake had memory holed the piece, and went and found an archive in the Wayback Machine. Well, either that was a transient error, or they thought better of memory holing it, as it is now back up. The Wayback Machine link is here just in case it disappears again…)
A few quick post-election links:
I’ve been covering ObamaCare since before it was even passed. Along the way I’ve documented numerous ObamaCare-related insurance cancellations and rate hikes. But now I have a special insurance rate hike to report on: my own.
Yes, my monthly rate will be going up by $100, a hefty 27.33% hike.
Background: As a contractor, I currently pay for my own health insurance. I have a Humana HMO Platinum Plan for myself only, with a fairly low deductible and solid prescription drug coverage (I’m not on any truly budget-busting medication, but I am on one slightly pricey one that essentially makes the pricier plan more cost effective than the cheaper ones.) I bought my plan through the private insurance market and not the ObamaCare website. (And the children’s dental is on there only because it was a buck more and I didn’t want to go through the bother of the paperwork hoops necessary to get it taken off.)
It’s not that I’ve never seen an insurance hike before, but before ObamaCare I never experienced one so breathtaking. Judging from results, ObamaCare seems designed to fatten both the bottom lines of insurance companies and to force people on affordable plans that Democrats disapprove of onto Medicaid.
I think I may have gotten my hike notice early only because I’m on a private, non-employer plan. If you’re on an employer-covered plan, there’s a good chance your rate hikes will be coming down the pike after the election…
Evidently I missed the new Kronies action figure when it dropped in September:
(I was trying to think of a more clever headline, but let’s just go with the obvious, shall we?)
One of the last, best hopes for Obama and Harry Reid to keep control of the senate is Louisiana incumbent Mary Landrieu hanging on to one of the last Democratic seats in the south.
Let’s discuss just the highlights of why Louisianans should vote for Rep. Bill Cassidy over Landrieu. The latest polls show Casserly up, but at under 50%. (And remember that the Democrat’s ground game surprised a lot of pollsters in 2012.)
Remember how Mary Landrieu was one of the deciding votes for ObamaCare in the senate?
Now she’s making all sorts of noises about protecting Louisiana citizens from the effects of the law she passed. Gee, maybe shouldn’t have bragged about how she didn’t need to read the bill:
Contrary to popular belief and what FOX News said, people here read the bills. For 40 years we read the bills. But we did not have to read the bills; all we had to do was look at the faces of kids dying of cancer who had no way to get cured… I don’t need to read a bill. I listen to my constituents. That is what this is about.
Somehow I doubt she’s going to listen to those whose policies were canceled, or whose prices doubled or tripled, thanks to ObamaCare. Maybe that’s why 59% of Louisianans oppose ObamaCare, and more than half disapprove of Landrieu’s performance.
And Landrieu says she would vote for ObamaCare again. Maybe that’s why the National Federation of Independent Business has endorsed Cassidy. (More on Landrieu’s ObamaCare support here.)
Landrieu got a D from the NRA-PVF on her gun rights voting record. Despite crowing about her Second Amendment support, she has voted for several gun control measures. While not as hostile to Second Amendment rights as Nancy Pelosi or Andrew Cuomo, she’s betrayed gun rights enough for Louisiana gun owners to be leery of her.
No less than Michelle Obama said that re-electing Landrieu was critical for gun control efforts. And remember: When push comes to shove, there’s no such thing as a pro-gun Democrat. I guarantee you that Mary Landrieu is no more “pro-gun” than Bart Stupak was pro-life.
Mary Landrieu doesn’t actually live in Louisiana:
In Washington, Sen. Mary Landrieu lives in a stately, $2.5 million brick manse she and her husband built on Capitol Hill.
Here in Louisiana, however, the Democrat does not have a home of her own. She is registered to vote at a large bungalow in New Orleans that her parents have lived in for many decades, according to a Washington Post review of Landrieu’s federal financial disclosures and local property and voting records.
On a statement of candidacy Landrieu filed with the Federal Election Commission in January, she listed her Capitol Hill home as her address.
It takes a special kind of stupid to put your D.C. mansion down as your home address.
Finally, for a hard-hitting look at how Mary Landrieu has ignored her constituents, take a look at this ad:
Reminder: Louisiana has system whereby the top two candidates will go to a runoff on December 6. Unless Bill Cassidy is able to win outright in November (which seems doubtful at this point), he’s going to need help in the runoff. And if the control of the senate hangs in the balance, you know Democrats will pull out all the stops to keep Harry Reid in power…