Not so Fast with ObamaCare!!

Via(WSJ Opinion)

ObamaCare Isn’t Inevitable

By KARL ROVE

While still good, President Barack Obama’s political health is deteriorating, threatened by what he thought would be balm — his ambitious plan for a government takeover of health care.

Mr. Obama remains slightly more popular than most presidents have been in their opening months. But his job approval rating has drifted down to 60% in the RealClearPolitics.com average. His disapproval numbers have nearly doubled to 33%.

More troubling to Team Obama is the growing gap between the president’s approval rating and declining support for major items on his policy agenda. Independents are increasingly joining Republicans in opposition to administration initiatives that range from reviving the economy to closing the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo.

Things will likely get worse in the coming months as the congressional stage comes to be dominated by health care. A new poll by Resurgent Republic (a nonprofit, right-of-center education organization whose creation I helped spur), reveals some of the president’s challenges. By a 60%-to-31% margin, Americans prefer getting their health coverage through private insurance rather than the federal government.

Mr. Obama’s record-setting spending binge has also made Americans more sensitive to deficits and higher taxes. Thirty-nine percent said they supported “a health-care plan that raises taxes in order to provide health insurance to all Americans,” while 52% preferred “a plan that does not provide health insurance to all Americans but keeps taxes at current levels.” By a 58%-to-37% margin, American prefer reforming health care “without raising taxes or increasing the deficit” to government investing “new resources to make sure it is done right.”

This is why Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus blanched when committee staffers priced his — which is also the Obama administration’s — draft legislation at a cool $1.6 trillion over the next decade.

The federal government will release an update on the deficit in mid-July, which will likely increase the public’s fear of deficit spending. The current fiscal year’s $1.8 trillion deficit is likely to grow significantly.

There is some good news in the Resurgent Republic poll for Mr. Obama if he can sell his plan as shifting power from “insurance bureaucrats to consumers.” Resurgent’s poll found that Americans favor that by 57% to 38%.

But to argue, as Mr. Obama does, that a government-run health-care plan can control costs better than a market-based system is a mistake. This argument is belied by Medicare’s experience. A study published by the Pacific Research Institute finds that since 1970 Medicare’s costs have risen 34% a year faster than the rest of health care.

Mr. Obama’s trashing of American health care as “a broken system” that must be brought “into the 21st century” doesn’t resonate with most Americans. They are happy about their health care, doctor and hospital. Resurgent’s poll found that 83% of Americans are very or somewhat satisfied with the quality of care they and their families receive.

Nearly everyone agrees that some reforms are needed. But it is also vital to protect areas of excellence and innovation. Stanford University professor Scott Atlas points out that from 1998 to 2002 nearly twice as many new drugs were launched in the U.S. as in Europe. According the U.S. Pharmaceutical Industry Report, some 2,900 new drugs are now being researched here. America’s five top hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other developed country, according to Mr. Atlas. And a McKinsey Co. study reports that 40% of all medical travelers come to the United States for medical treatment.

Transforming health care into a government-run system would be difficult to do under any circumstances. Americans are still wary about big government. Health-care reform also always sounds better in the abstract. Public resistance rises once liberals are forced to release the details of their plans.

Meanwhile, the $787 billion stimulus package has not provided the economic kick Mr. Obama promised. The $410 billion Omnibus spending bill the president signed in March and his $3.5 trillion budget plan for next year are also adding to the river of red ink.

Health-care reform was said to be “inevitable” a few months ago. Today, its prospects are less certain, even to Democrats. The issue may even turn out to be a millstone for the party.

Americans are increasingly concerned about the cost — in money and personal freedom — of Mr. Obama’s nanny-state initiatives. To strengthen the emerging coalition of independents and Republicans, the GOP must fight Mr. Obama’s agenda with reasoned arguments and attractive alternatives. Health care may actually be an issue that helps resurrect the GOP.

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Follies by Obama Administration!! So Far….

Via(Jenn over @ ScrewLiberals.com)

Obama Administration Follies

Anyone else see a pattern since Barack Hussein Obama was elected?

U.S. Government posts sensitive list of US nuclear sites…

Barack Obama continues the worldwide apology tour in Saudi Arabia and Egypt this week…

Continental Express pilot reported a “missile or rocket” flying near his airplane….

Obama gives Iran the green light to continue it nuke weapons program….

Venezuela Chavez says “Comrade” Obama more left-wing…..

“….the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple….” True, but who said this? RUSSIA!!!!

General(Government) Motors will continue its multimillion-dollar lobbying operation in Washington……Nice.

More Targets Found on Arkansas Shooting Suspect’s Computer…..You know the Muslim guy who shot and killed an innocent soldier, not the creep who shot the baby murderer.

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

American Flag, Offensive??

Via(CBS 11 News Mansfield, TX)

This is NEVER OFFENSIVE!!

Supervisor Asks Woman To Take Down American Flag

Is it okay to show your patriotism at the office?

For one Arlington woman, the answer was “no” after she hung an American flag in her office just before the Memorial Day weekend.

Debbie McLucas is one of four hospital supervisors at Kindred Hospital in Mansfield. Last week, she hung a three-by-five foot American flag in the office she shares with the other supervisors.

When McLucas came to work Friday, her boss told her another supervisor had found her flag offensive. “I was just totally speechless. I was like, ‘You’re kidding me,'” McLucas said.

McLucas’ husband and sons are former military men. Her daughter is currently serving in Iraq as a combat medic.

Stifling a cry, McLucas said, “I just wonder if all those young men and women over there are really doing this for nothing.”

McLucas said the supervisor who complained has been in the United States for 14 years and is formerly from Africa. McLucas said that supervisor took down the flag herself.

“The flag and the pole had been placed on the floor,” McLucas said. But McLucas also said hospital higher-ups had told her some patients’ families and visitors had also complained.

“I was told it wouldn’t matter if it was only one person,” she said. “It would have to come down.”

McLucas said hospital bosses told her as far as patriotism was concerned, the flag flying outside the hospital building would have to suffice.

Rest of the story here:

Well looks like the hospital is treating to do major damage control.  The story doesn’t jive at all.

Read the Kindred Damage Control Press Release here:

You can also email them your thoughts here:

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

New TV Channel, Obama/WhiteHouse Channel!

Via(PoliticalPunch)

Do You Want Your OTV?

On April 27, President Obama welcomed the University of Connecticut Lady Huskies, who had just won the NCAA women’s basketball championship.

After the event, President Obama went to the White House basketball court to shoot hoop with the Lady Huskies.  The White House press corps was not allowed to attend.

Reads the print pool report from that day: “After shaking hands with the team’s parents and members of Congress who showed up, the president walked the team over to his basketball court and shot hoops. The pool was held back from the stroll down the drive and around the corner, and couldn’t see the court. Poolers could hear periodic cheering coming from the other side of the bushes.”

Read the TV pool report: “Your Pool was not allowed to go over and shoot POTUS with the team shooting hoops.  We protested loudly.” Now we know why: Obama White House officials decided to do their own media report on the visit, complete with cuts, interviews, and chyrons identifying who’s speaking.

Also, just like a network, they have their own little logo!

Cute!

It’s perfectly fine, of course, for the White House to put out its own version of events — but is it right to do so by preventing actual reporters from covering something? (Even something like a pickup basketball game).

Do Obama White House officials think their media coverage isn’t flattering enough?

Is the goal to ultimately replace the pesky photographers who film what they want to and not what they’re told to (not to mention the annoying reporters who ask uncomfortable questions about, say, detainee policy and bank bailouts)?

Do you want your OTV? (I’ll bet there are a few takers out there.)

– jpt

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Christianity- The New Black

Via(The Idiot’s Guide to Conservatism)

Recently, we have witnessed great victories by members of some traditionally discriminated groups. In our latest Presidential election, we had one side, a black candidate for President, and on the other side, a woman candidate for Vice-President. What a victory for both groups, but there still is one group suffering discrimination in this country, everyday, and you need not go any further then your neighborhood public school or your local big box home improvement warehouse to witness it. That group is Christians.

It was Christmas, 2007, when the group that I had founded, Americans for Putting America 1st, had embarked on a project that was designed to bring a little bit of joy to our wounded veterans, infirmed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. From September of that year, until the 2nd week of December, I had headed a nationwide gift drive, in which myself, and a small group of other patriots would personally deliver the gifts to the hospital, one room at a time. I had enlisted the help of one of the office administrators at my children’s elementary school, who was excited to collect gifts from the staff at the school, as well as at her church. We had decided that it would be awesome if the school children could participate, as well, and the Assistant Principal had given the go ahead for the children to create cards in Art class, on one condition; that there be no mention of Christmas in the artwork. Leave it to public education to take Christ out of Christmas.

Continue reading HERE!!

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Airport for Nobody and In the Middle of Nowhere!

Wow so we go from “Road to NoWhere”, to “Airport in the Middle of NoWhere”!

Well here is how the disgraceful Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman John Murtha is using our taxpayer dollars to fullfill his many earmarks.

Well here is the website of the John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport

Let’s them know what you think..

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Obama-Care: Killing Off Grandma and Grandpa & Cost-Savings?

Via(SteveMaloneyGOP)

Barack Obama’s Culture of Death

The biggest issue that lies before America is Barack Hussein Obama’s version of national health care. Obama claims that increasing demands on the health care system, which his plan surely will do, is somehow going to lower costs while increasing quality.

Based on the experiences of other countries, including Canada and European nations, Obama-care eventually may lower unit costs modestly (mainly through rationing). On the minus side, it will decimate the quality of care. It will make the world’s gold standard in health care — the U.S. — start to resemble your local Department of Motor Vehicles (“take a number please”).

I’ll be writing on this subject for the next week to 10 days, and I hope you’ll follow along.

One way Obama wants to control health costs is by increasing the number of abortions, both in the U.S. and worldwide. The basic concept is that dead embryos don’t incur any additional health costs. I’ll write more about that later.

For now, however, I want to focus on the severely infirm and/or “terminally ill” elderly. Here’s what Obama recently said about them. He admitted he wants the government to decide what health care Americans receive.

“There’s always going to be an asymmetry of information between patient and provider,” he said. “And part of what I think government can do effectively is to be an honest broker in assessing and evaluating treatment options.” In other words, the federal government would be a middle-man, basically usurping a doctor’s determination what treatment is appropriate.

Continue Reading here:

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Thank You Condoleezza Rice!!

As Bush Adviser, Rice Gave OK to Waterboard

As national security adviser in the Bush White House, Condoleezza Rice verbally OK’d the CIA’s request to subject top Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah to waterboarding in July 2002.

WASHINGTON — As national security adviser to former President George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice verbally approved the CIA’s request to subject high-ranking Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah to waterboarding in July 2002, the earliest known decision by a Bush administration official to OK use of the simulated drowning technique.

Rice’s role was detailed in a narrative released Wednesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee. It provides the most detailed timeline yet for how the CIA’s harsh interrogation program was conceived and approved at the highest levels in the Bush White House.

The new timeline shows that Rice played a greater role than she admitted last fall in written testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The narrative also shows that dissenting legal views about the severe interrogation methods were brushed aside repeatedly.

The Intelligence Committee’s timeline comes a day after the Senate Armed Services Committee released an exhaustive report detailing direct links between the CIA’s harsh interrogation program and abuses of prisoners at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Afghanistan and at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

Both revelations follow President Barack Obama’s release of internal Bush administration legal memos that justified the use of severe methods by the CIA, a move that kicked up a firestorm from opposing sides of the ideological spectrum.

According to the new narrative, which compiles legal advice provided by the Bush administration to the CIA, Rice personally conveyed the administration’s approval for waterboarding of Zubaydah, a so-called high-value detainee, to then-CIA Director George Tenet in July 2002.

Last fall, Rice acknowledged to the Senate Armed Services Committee only that she had attended meetings where the CIA interrogation request was discussed and asked for the attorney general to conduct a legal review. She said she did not recall details. Rice omitted her direct role in approving the program in her written statement to the committee.

A spokesman for Rice declined comment when reached Wednesday.

Days after Rice gave Tenet the nod, the Justice Department approved the use of waterboarding in a top secret Aug. 1 memo. Zubaydah underwent waterboarding at least 83 times in August 2002.

In the years that followed, according to the narrative issued Wednesday, there were numerous internal legal reviews of the program, suggesting government attorneys raised concerns that the harsh methods, particularly waterboarding, might violate federal laws against torture and the U.S. Constitution.

But Bush administration lawyers continued to validate the program. The CIA voluntarily dropped the use of waterboarding, which has a long history as a torture tactic, from its arsenal of techniques after 2005.

According to the two Senate reports, CIA lawyers first presented the plan to waterboard Zubaydah to White House lawyers in April 2002, a few weeks after he was taken into custody in 2002 in a Pakistani safe house.

Tenet wrote in his memoir that CIA officers themselves originated the idea.

In May 2002, Rice, along with then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales met at the White House with the CIA to discuss the use of waterboarding.

The Armed Services Committee report says that six months earlier, in December 2001, the Pentagon’s legal office already had made inquiries about the use of mock interrogation and detention tactics to a U.S. military training unit that schools armed forces personnel in how to endure harsh treatment. A former intelligence official said Wednesday the CIA officers also based their proposed harsh interrogations on the mock interrogation methods used by the unit.

He declined to be identified because the CIA had not authorized the disclosure of the information.
In July 2002, responding to a follow-up from the Pentagon general counsel’s office, officials at the training unit, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, detailed their methods for the Pentagon. The list included waterboarding.

But the training unit warned that harsh physical techniques could backfire by making prisoners more resistant. They also cautioned about the reliability of information gleaned from the severe methods and warned that the public and political backlash could be “intolerable.”

“A subject in extreme pain may provide an answer, any answer or many answers in order to get the pain to stop,” the training officials said in their memo.

Less than a week later, the Justice Department issued two legal opinions that sanctioned the CIA’s harsh interrogation program. The memos appeared to draw deeply on the survival school data provided to the Pentagon to show that the CIA’s methods would not cross the line into torture.

The opinion concluded that the harsh interrogation methods would be acceptable for use on terror detainees because the same techniques did not cause severe physical or mental pain to U.S. military students who were tested in the government’s carefully controlled training program.

Several people from the survival program objected to the use of their mock interrogations in battlefield settings. In an October 2002 e-mail, a senior Army psychologist told personnel at Guantanamo Bay that the methods were inherently dangerous and students were sometimes injured, even in a controlled setting.

“The risk with real detainees is increased exponentially,” he said.

Nevertheless, for the next two years, the CIA and military officials received interrogation training and direct interrogation support from JPRA trainers.

Last week, the Obama administration’s top intelligence official, Dennis Blair, privately told intelligence employees that “high value information” was obtained through the harsh interrogation techniques. However, on Tuesday, in a written statement, Blair said, “The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means.”

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

Hey Obama, America needs give NO APOLOGIES!!

The President’s Apology Tour

Great leaders aren’t defined by consensus.

By KARL ROVE

President Barack Obama has finished the second leg of his international confession tour. In less than 100 days, he has apologized on three continents for what he views as the sins of America and his predecessors.

Mr. Obama told the French (the French!) that America “has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive” toward Europe. In Prague, he said America has “a moral responsibility to act” on arms control because only the U.S. had “used a nuclear weapon.” In London, he said that decisions about the world financial system were no longer made by “just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy” — as if that were a bad thing. And in Latin America, he said the U.S. had not “pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors” because we “failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to progress throughout the Americas.”

By confessing our nation’s sins, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Mr. Obama has “changed the image of America around the world” and made the U.S. “safer and stronger.” As evidence, Mr. Gibbs pointed to the absence of protesters during the Summit of the Americas this past weekend.

That’s now the test of success? Anti-American protesters are a remarkably unreliable indicator of a president’s wisdom. Ronald Reagan drew hundreds of thousands of protesters by deploying Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe. Those missiles helped win the Cold War.

There is something ungracious in Mr. Obama criticizing his predecessors, including most recently John F. Kennedy. (“I’m grateful that President [Daniel] Ortega did not blame me for things that happened when I was three months old,” Mr. Obama said after the Nicaraguan delivered a 52-minute anti-American tirade that touched on the Bay of Pigs.) Mr. Obama acts as if no past president — except maybe Abraham Lincoln — possesses his wisdom.

Mr. Obama was asked in Europe if he believes in American exceptionalism. He said he did — in the same way that “the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks in Greek exceptionalism.” That’s another way of saying, “No.”

Mr. Obama makes it seem as though there is moral equivalence between America and its adversaries and assumes that if he confesses America’s sins, other nations will confess theirs and change. But he won no confessions (let alone change) from the leaders of Venezuela, Nicaragua or Russia. He apologized for America and our adversaries rejoiced. Fidel Castro isn’t easing up on Cuban repression, but he is preparing to take advantage of Mr. Obama’s policy shifts.

When a president desires personal popularity, he can lose focus on vital American interests. It’s early, but with little to show for the confessions, David Axelrod of Team Obama was compelled to say this week that the president planted, cultivated and will harvest “very, very valuable” returns later. Like what?

Meanwhile, the desire for popularity has led Mr. Obama to embrace bad policies. Blaming America for the world financial crisis led him to give into European demands for crackdowns on tax havens and hedge funds. Neither had much to do with the credit crisis. Saying that America’s relationship with Russia “has been allowed to drift” led the president to push for arms negotiations. But that draws attention away from America’s real problems with Russia: its invasion of Georgia last summer, its bullying of Ukraine, its refusal to join in pressuring Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions, and its threats of retaliation against the Poles, Balts and Czechs for standing with the U.S. on missile defense.

Mr. Obama is downplaying the threats we face. He takes comfort in thinking that Venezuela has a defense budget that “is probably 1/600th” of America’s — it’s actually 1/215th — but that hasn’t kept Mr. Chávez from supporting narcoterrorists waging war on Colombia (a key U.S. ally) or giving petrodollars to anti-American regimes. Venezuela isn’t likely to attack the U.S., but it is capable of harming American interests.

Henry Kissinger wrote in his memoir “Years of Renewal”: “The great statesmen of the past saw themselves as heroes who took on the burden of their societies’ painful journey from the familiar to the as yet unknown. The modern politician is less interested in being a hero than a superstar. Heroes walk alone; stars derive their status from approbation. Heroes are defined by inner values; stars by consensus. When a candidate’s views are forged in focus groups and ratified by television anchorpersons, insecurity and superficiality become congenital.”

A superstar, not a statesman, today leads our country. That may win short-term applause from foreign audiences, but do little for what should be the chief foreign policy preoccupation of any U.S. president: advancing America’s long-term interests.

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie

1st Domestic Terror Suspect!

Via(NationalTerrorAlert)

FBI’s Most Wanted Lists 1st Domestic Terror Suspect

The FBI on Tuesday will for the first time add the name of a domestic-terrorism suspect to its list of Most Wanted Terrorists, a post-Sept. 11 creation that until now has included only suspected Islamist terrorists, a law enforcement official told The Washington Times.

Daniel Andreas San Diego, a 31-year-old animal rights activist, is wanted in connection with the 2003 bombings of two companies in the San Francisco Bay Area linked to an animal-testing laboratory.

San Diego will take his place on a list that has included notorious international terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahri and Adam Gadahn, the American-born al Qaeda spokesman, said the law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to pre-empt the official announcement.

The announcement is being made nearly a week after The Times reported on a Homeland Security Department assessment warning that war veterans could be susceptible to recruitment into “right-wing extremism.” The report unleashed a firestorm of controversy and led to an apology to veterans from Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

Authorities say San Diego planted bombs at the corporate offices of two biotechnology companies, Chiron Life Sciences Center in Emeryville, Calif., and Shaklee Corp. in Pleasanton, Calif.

Read Full Article

God Bless,

The Truth Tracker

Jason R. Bootie