The Beginning of the End of Private Health Insurance

How Obama's public health insurance option will quickly evolve into the only option
Ronald Bailey | June 9, 2009
In his weekly radio address on Saturday, President Barack Obama declared that "it's time to deliver" on health care reform. In a letter to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), President Obama wrote, "I strongly believe that Americans should have the choice of a public health insurance option operating alongside private plans. This will give them a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep insurance companies honest." This week Sen. Kennedy released a draft of his proposed "American Health Choices Act" which includes one such optional public health insurance plan. The administration's goal is to report that bill out of the relevant Senate committees by the end of this month.

Earlier this week, Republican lawmakers sent a letter of their own, strongly warning the president that "Washington-run programs undermine market-based competition through their ability to impose price controls and shift costs to other purchasers. Forcing free market plans to compete with these government-run programs would create an unlevel playing field and inevitably doom true competition."
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Newsweek’s Evan Thomas: Obama Is ‘Sort of God’

By Kyle Drennen (Bio | Archive)
June 5, 2009 - 18:45 ET


Newsweek editor Evan Thomas brought adulation over President Obama’s Cairo speech to a whole new level on Friday, declaring on MSNBC: "I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God."

Thomas, appearing on Hardball with Chris Matthews, was reacting to a preceding monologue in which Matthews praised Obama’s speech: "I think the President's speech yesterday was the reason we Americans elected him. It was grand. It was positive. Hopeful...But what I liked about the President's speech in Cairo was that it showed a complete humility...The question now is whether the President we elected and spoke for us so grandly yesterday can carry out the great vision he gave us and to the world."

Matthews discussed Obama’s upcoming speech marking the 65th anniversary of D-Day and compared it to that of Ronald Reagan. He then turned to Thomas and asked: "Reagan and World War II and the sense of us as the good guys in the world, how are we doing?" Thomas replied: "Well, we were the good guys in 1984, it felt that way. It hasn't felt that way in recent years. So Obama’s had, really, a different task We're seen too often as the bad guys. And he – he has a very different job from – Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is ‘we are above that now.’ We're not just parochial, we're not just chauvinistic, we're not just provincial."
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Rupert Murdoch: Unemployment Will Reach 10 Or 11 Percent

Mark Steyn with Hugh Hewitt

more Hugh Hewitt podcasts here

saving or creating jobs the Obama way

MICROSOFT to move jobs overseas if Obama tax plan goes through
By Ryan J. Donmoyer | June 3, 2009 | Bloomberg
June 3 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”

Obama on May 4 proposed outlawing or restricting about $190 billion in tax breaks for offshore companies over the next decade. Such business groups as the National Foreign Trade Council, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable have denounced the proposed overhaul.

U.S. tax rules let companies defer paying corporate rates as high as 35 percent on most types of foreign profits as long as that money remains invested overseas. Obama says he wants to end such incentives to keep foreign profits tax-deferred so that companies would invest them in the U.S.
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Obama sees himself in Qar hieroglyph

June 4, 2009 1:56 PM | CBS News
While Obama was in Egypt touring the pyramids, he visited the Tomb of Qar, who his guide, Dr. Zahi Hawass, described as a well-known priest, scholar and judge in ancient Egypt. On the wall were hieroglyphs of Qar, primitive images engraved in the stone. He was a thin man man with big ears.

“That looks like me!” exclaimed President Obama. “Look at those ears.”

The president summoned to his top aides to take a look, and repeated his observation about the Qar hieroglyph.

“Look, that’s me,” he told them. None of his senior staff was willing to disagree with the boss. Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel smiled politely, if not knowingly.

link to CBS article

Obama greenlights nukes for Muslims (including Iran)

In this audio clip from America's Newsroom (June 4, 2009), Obama greenlights nuclear power for Muslims. Notice that in the CBS youtube clip below, they avoid the topic altogether.

Gay groups grow impatient with Barack Obama

By BEN SMITH & JONATHAN MARTIN | 6/4/09 4:32 AM EDT

President Barack Obama’s promises of change are falling short for one core Democratic constituency: gays and lesbians, whose leaders say Obama’s administration isn’t keeping up with the times.

Gay rights campaigners, most of them Democrats who supported Obama in November, have begun to voice their public frustration with Obama’s inaction, small jokes at their community’s expense and deafening silence on what they see as the signal civil rights issue of this era.

His most important campaign promises repealing the Defense of Marriage Act and the military ban on openly gay and lesbian service-members have not been fulfilled.

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Miller Time - June 3

The Obama Infatuation

Is the press giving the president a free pass? | By
Robert J. Samuelson | Jun 1, 2009 | Updated: 1:47 p.m. ET Jun 1, 2009

The Obama infatuation is a great unreported story of our time. Has any recent president basked in so much favorable media coverage? Well, maybe John Kennedy for a moment, but no president since. On the whole, this is not healthy for America.

Our political system works best when a president faces checks on his power. But the main checks on Obama are modest. They come from congressional Democrats, who largely share his goals if not always his means. The leaderless and confused Republicans don't provide effective opposition. And the press—on domestic, if not foreign, policy—has so far largely abdicated its role as skeptical observer.

Obama has inspired a collective fawning. What started in the campaign (the chief victim was Hillary Clinton, not John McCain) has continued, as a study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism shows. It concludes: "President Barack Obama has enjoyed substantially more positive media coverage than either Bill Clinton or George W. Bush during their first months in the White House."

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