George W. Bush Found the Solution to America's Healthcare Crisis Seven Years Ago, Too Bad Nobody Listened

Politico.com:

The Congressional Budget Office’s warning that the Affordable Care Act will cause employment to fall by the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time workers is just the latest of Obamacare’s negative surprises. Unfortunately, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s statement that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it” is proving to be depressingly accurate. 

The law’s defenders legitimately argue that it is not sufficient merely to criticize the Affordable Care Act; responsible action requires proposing an alternative. Fortunately, Republicans have a good one, and it’s been hiding in plain sight for the past seven years. The plan was first described in President George W. Bush’s 2007 State of the Union Address, but it remains timely. This plan would remedy most of the major problems that exist in America’s health care system and cause less destruction with fewer adverse consequences than Obamacare. 

There are two main problems associated with health care in the United States today. First, it is expensive. Health economists, among them Daniel Kessler at Stanford, have shown convincingly that the United States spends a larger share of its gross domestic product on health care than other countries (for example, about one-and-a-half times what Switzerland spends per capita) because of inappropriate incentives to use care efficiently. Patients who have insurance or rely on state funds to cover their expenses bear little of the cost of any treatment received, which causes them to use health resources as if they were almost free. This means that health care is overused and the scarce resources do not always go to those who need them most. Part of this is a result of a Tax Code that subsidizes expensive plans, which have low co-payments and overly extensive coverage. The second problem is the large number of uninsured Americans who do not have reasonable access to health care and who obtain the health care that they do receive in inefficient ways, such as using emergency rooms for minor ailments. 

So what would the ideal alternative to Obamacare look like? It should provide cost-effective care and the quality treatment that Americans deserve. Effective reform should discourage over-insurance that results from the subsidy of so-called Cadillac plans that pay for basic, inexpensive and predictable proceduresand have patient co-payments that are too low. Reform should encourage consumers to use America’s scarce health resources efficiently by inducing them to get tests and treatments that are justified instead of those that are selected because they are almost free to the decision-makers. Finally, reform should make health insurance available to the vast majority of Americans, some of whom cannot afford insurance without help. 

The Bush 2007 plan achieves these goals. The basic structure is to offer all Americans a standard tax deduction, in 2007 set at $15,000 for families and $7,500 for individuals. The deduction would apply to payroll tax — both employee and employer contribution — as well as to income tax. Importantly, the size of the deduction would be independent of the amount spent on the plan. Any taxpayer who has a plan that includes catastrophic coverage gets the full deduction, irrespective of the plan’s cost. That is important because it creates the incentives to choose efficiently. A family that wanted to spend less on the plan than the value of the deduction would pocket the difference. A family that wanted to spend more on a plan than the value of the of the deduction would bear the additional cost out of pocket. As a consequence, consumers would reap the full benefit of keeping the cost of their plan low, which prompts them to shop and choose effectively. If the extra coverage offered by a $10,000 plan over an $8,000 one is not worth at least $2,000 to the consumer, he will not purchase it. 

Under the current system, part of the cost is borne by others because the tax system does not treat employer-provided health insurance as income. As a consequence, a dollar spent by the employer or worker costs less than a dollar to that worker. The Bush plan would eliminate that distortion, replacing the non-taxed status of employer-provided health insurance with the standard deduction. By eliminating the link to employers, health insurance becomes more like auto insurance, where the consumer has appropriate incentives to shop around. Other features of the Bush proposal include allowing the purchase of plans across state lines to enhance competition and reform of medical liability to reduce the amount of defensive medicine.

RELATED: HEALTH CARE: Latinos lag in Obamacare enrollments

Former NOLA Mayor Ray Nagin Found Guilty of Bribery, Fraud, Laundering in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

Funny how these things work out:

So it turns out that Ray Nagin, the Democratic ex-mayor of New Orleans best known for his furious denunciations of the Bush administration in their response to Hurricane Katrina, wasn’t exactly acting with the city’s best interests at heart himself. The guy left office in 2010 with bottom-of-the-barrel approval ratings and insisted that he wouldn’t be running for political office again — and I think this just about seals the deal on that. The sentencing is still to come, but each of the 20 charges of which he was convicted carries a sentence of at least several years, and he could be looking at a nice long prison term. Via CNN:

Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, whose desperate pleas for help during Hurricane Katrina drew national attention, walked silently out of a courthouse Wednesday after a jury convicted him of federal corruption charges.

Nagin was elected as a reformer in 2002. But after a two-week trial that began in late January, he was found guilty of 20 out of 21 counts of bribery, money laundering, fraud and filing false tax returns, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The sole acquittal was on one of the bribery counts. …

The charges detailed more than $200,000 in bribes to the mayor, and his family members allegedly received a vacation in Hawaii; first-class airfare to Jamaica; private jet travel and a limousine for New York City; and cellular phone service. In exchange, businesses that coughed up cash for Nagin and his family won more than $5 million in city contracts, according to the January 2013 indictment.

In a nutshell, he used the opportunity of the Katrina recovery effort to kick city contracts back to any vendors that offered to sweeten the deal, while simultaneously blustering about the incompetence and corruption of everybody else’s post-Katrina commitment. What a swell guy.

RELATED:  Many Louisiana Republicans blame President Obama for Hurricane Katrina response

Nancy Pelosi: "We Did Not Treat President Bush This Way"

Amazing how often this insane woman can lie straight to people's faces:

Democrats are looking to President Obama to really help kick the populist agenda they have been re-devising for the 2014 campaign season into high gear with his address this evening, and in previewing the SOTU on MSNBC this morning, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was really in her element, hitting all of the latest “obstructionist,” “income inequality opportunity gap,”  “executive action” talking points like so many carefully concocted whack-a-moles. That it always and necessarily takes two parties to tango is a piece of logic that never seems to enter into that kind of woe-is-us, nobody-else-has-ever-had-to-deal-with-a-divided-government brand of thinking:

The point is that, since that time, under President Obama’s administration, we have eight million jobs created… We have an opportunity gap that the president will be addressing, but let’s remember where we were and how far we have come from the Bush economic policies to where we are now. … The point is, what is happening here now, and let’s, since you’re trying to analyze it, is we have a large segment of the Republican party that is anti-government. We don’t want any more government than we need, but they’re anti-government, anti-science, and anti-Obama. They have a trifecta that is going. I say to the Republicans, take back your party. …To obstruct every initiative that the president has put forth on jobs and say, ‘Why don’t we have more jobs?’ Well, we do have more jobs, but no thanks to the Congress of the United States. … We did not treat President Bush this way. … This obstruction to President Obama is something quite stunning, and something quite different.

RELATED: Pelosi: Bush 'a total failure'

Stupid, Race-Baiting, MSNBC Host Melissa Harris-Perry Says “ObamaCare” Was a Word Coined by Wealthy White Men to Diminish Obama’s Accomplishments

Right. And "Bush Tax Cuts" and "RomneyCare" were terms coined by poor, black people to diminish George W. Bush and Mitt Romney's accomplishments. In other words, Melissa Harris-Perry is a total idiot:

Via RCP. By coincidence, Charles Cooke has a piece out today on the alternate universe you too can inhabit if only you Lean Forward far enough:

America II, as anyone who watches the channel will discover rather swiftly, hosts a supermajority of well-meaning multi-culti, progressive types whose foolproof plans for explosive economic growth, uniform social justice, and general human utopia are constantly being undone by a blossoming white-supremacist movement, split apart by neo-secessionists, and existentially threatened by traitors whose defining characteristic is a never-quite-explained hatred for progress. America II features no gray areas whatsoever: All local variation is apartheid, each and every identification requirement is the second coming of Jim Crow, all criticism of the government is sedition. It’s exhausting.

On a network where smirking references to “teabaggers” are treated as witty, Harris-Perry’s attempt to rehabilitate “ObamaCare” as some sort of slur practically qualifies as clever. How to square the fact that O himself now uses the term with the quasi-religious belief that any Republican messaging about him, no matter how innocuous and easily explained by basic partisanship, must be proof of racism in America II? Simple: Claim that “ObamaCare” was a slur, but now, by embracing the word himself, Obama’s taken the power back. If you find that unpersuasive, remember, decoding conservative criticism of O for alleged racial subtexts is a sort of parlor game on MSNBC. Previously identified dog-whistles include “IRS,” “Chicago,” and my favorite, “golf.” Usually the game ends with some variation of “and that’s why it’s racist,” but MHP’s argument has a whole second part to it. Consider this bar raised.

Legal Insurrection has a nice post tracking the origins of the word “ObamaCare,” including a claim from none other than Anthony Weiner that he coined the term himself. Which, if true, partially vindicates Harris-Perry: A wealthy white man really is responsible. By the way, as I write this, there are roughly 575,000 results for “RomneyCare” on Google. On this site alone, that word appears in more than 250 posts. 

RELATED:  No, Melissa Harris-Perry, “Obamacare” was not conceived by rich white men

Media Sees Obama's Wars As Good Because He's Not Bush

WashingtonExaminer.com:

If you've noticed that the active anti-war movement seems smaller these days, you're not alone – and just at the moment when the public seems to support their cause.

But those few who have remained consistent, along with a vast and ideologically diverse majority of Americans opposed to war with Syria, must now contend with a media that reflexively assumes purer motives of President Obama than it did of his predecessor.

This is how the media had been dragging us into a war that both Congress and the public view with great skepticism – right up to the moment the British Parliament's vote and extremely sour public opinion forced Obama to un-make his mind about invading without congressional approval.

Witness, for example, the coverage this year and last of Obama’s controversial drone-strike policy. Even while providing reasonably critical coverage, journalists did not hide their shock that Obama – “a good man ... an honorable man ... the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize ... an unimpeachably upstanding citizen,” as Esquire put it – had made mass assassination his singular contribution to the history of the U.S. presidency.

The New York Times, even in revealing Obama's personal role in approving strikes, merely presented this as evidence of his credentials as a deep thinker: “A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas,” the Times asserted, “he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions.”

That provides some insight into the sympathetic assumptions from which the media currently operate and how they have nearly got us into a war last week.

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan asked her paper’s managing editor, Dean Baquet, about whether Times coverage of Syria isn’t ignoring the lessons of Iraq.

His paraphrased reply: "Syria is not another Iraq, he said. One of the major differences, he said, is that the Obama administration has no enthusiasm for this conflict in the way that President George W. Bush’s administration did a decade ago.”

The drums of war beat to such assumptions, and to the tune of wishful thinking. Time’s Jay Newton-Small penned a post last Wednesday – “Six Ways Syria 2013 is not Iraq 2003.”

Two of her six “reasons” – the robust Arab and European support that Obama supposedly enjoys (Newton-Small sneered: “Remember ‘Freedom Fries?'”) – were falsified within 48 hours of publication.

Jordan refused U.S. access to its airspace and the British Parliament vetoed UK action against Syria. It was the first time Parliament has voted down a government-backed military action since Britain exited our own Revolutionary War. (“Freedom Muffins,” anyone?)

Newton-Small at least brought up one other important difference – the fact that Bush had placed his ill-fated invasion in Congress' hands, whereas Obama at that point had no plans to do so.

“Maybe Obama should allow the debate in Congress,” she conceded, adding that “it’d be a headache,” and referring to the constitutional process of authorizing a war as “posturing.” She was not alone in this characterization.

Yet under great pressure at home and abroad, Obama has now conceded (if not explicitly) that he can't just start foreign wars on his own – a possibility that few journalists ever took seriously, even if polls showed eight in 10 Americans were demanding it.

In 2003, the American public strongly supported the invasion of Iraq (72 percent), and its prospects seemed far more promising at the time than this new venture.

It had an actual goal (regime change), and months (not days) were spent debating the merits. One can only imagine how much more quickly that unwise war might have begun, had the contemporaneous media coverage taken the deferential tone of the Obama era.

RELATED: John Kerry Battles 2004 Version of Himself Over Why Obama is Ignoring Ineffectual U.N.

No, Al Gore Did Not Just Want to "Count All the Votes" in the 2000 Election

The idea that George W. Bush "stole" the 2000 election, while having died down over the years due to the total ineptitude of the Obama administration, is still pushed by some far-Left zealots who will go down to their dying breath hating and blaming Bush for everything wrong with the world. But as the far-Leftist News rag, the NYTimes, even admitted to (albeit reluctantly), Bush did get the most votes in Florida that year. Then too, the idea that somehow the Supreme Court's decision to stop Al Gore from finding enough votes to win in 2000 was biased and filled with errors, is again being debunked:

Last week I wrote that "count all the votes" emerged comparatively late in the game of the Bush v. Gore saga.  A number of people have pushed back, here and elsewhere, have pushed back.  Gore, they say, offered to do a hand recount of all 67 Florida counties on November 15th; if Bush would support it, and withdraw his lawsuits, Gore said he would withdraw his lawsuits too.  Bush turned him down.  This is supposed to prove that Democrats always had a committment to counting all the votes.

Well, not so fast.  For starters, when Bush turned him down, Gore didn't go and start asking for recounts in all 67 Florida counties.  His committment to "counting all the votes" was conditional on Bush withdrawing all of his lawsuits.  It was a second-best alternative to just counting some of the votes, one which he offered when it looked like he might be losing.  When it was turned down, he went on with his partial recount strategy.

And because of this, the voices raised in favor of counting all the votes were somewhat muted.  A Nexis search for the phrase "Count all the votes" in major newspapers turns up just 26 uses in the week after the Florida election--before Gore had made his offer.  In the first 17 days of the recount, it occurs just 57 times.

Then, on November 24th, the Supreme Court accepted cert for the Florida recount, with a hearing to be held on December 1st.

Observers knew that this meant the Florida Supreme Court ruling allowing partial recounts was likely going to be overturned (if they weren't likely to overturn, they would have just dodged the case on a technicality). 

Suddenly, folks get very interested in counting all the votes: there are almost 100 mentions between November 24th and November 30th, with most of those seeming to come in the few days before the hearing.  Then things quite down for the three days until the court decides: just 25 mentions.

Then on December 4th, the Supreme Court vacates the Florida Supreme Court's order allowing the partial recounts to be included in the total, and interest in counting all the votes explodes: 121 mentions in the 8 days that follow.  And almost all of that was clustered in the three days immediately surrounding the court's stay of the recounts, and its decision in Bush v. Gore.

Overall, there are 73 mentions of the phrase "count all the votes" in major newspapers between November 7th, 2000 and November 27th, 2000 . . . more than halfway through the recount process.  Over the next 20 days, it occurs more than 250 times.

In other words, people didn't get interested in counting all the votes when Al Gore offered a statewide manual recount as an alternative to lawsuits. They got interested in counting all the votes when the partial recounts suffered legal setbacks.  People are retroactively remembering something that emerged several weeks into the recounts as having been more central to the Democratic case than it actually was.  "Count all the Votes" became the central argument only after the Supreme Court had squelched the preferred "count some of the votes".

People remember having been outraged when the Supreme Court declined to "count all the votes". But partisan fervor was already running very, very high by late November.

 Odds are that anyone who is old enough to remember that election was very probably just as angry and passionate before "count all the votes" emerged as the unifying rallying cry for Democrats.  Indeed, most of those very people were probably in favor of counting some of the votes before they were against it.

They remember this particular issue as having been more salient than it was for two reasons: first, because all of us tend to remember the end of an experience better than the middle, and second, because "count all the votes" is a much easier grudge to nurse than "I wanted my guy to win, and he didn't".

I don't mean to suggest that Democrats are somehow specially hypocritical here; I am personally skeptical, for example, that Katherine Harris' maneuvers to cut off vote counts were motivated by her fervent committment to administrative efficiency and strict deadline discipline.  Both sides had reasonable points, and reasonable grievances.   But Al Gore was running for president, not Santa.  The procedure he chose--and stuck with, until a court told him to knock it off--was not fair.  And by the time the case hit the Supreme Court, his supporters (and the Florida Supreme Court) had already invested a huge amount of credibility in coming up with creative reasons that it should happen anyway.

Ironically, I suspect that if Gore had simply unilaterally requested a statewide manual recount, or the Florida Supreme Court had forced one upon him, the United States Supreme Court would have probably stayed out of it.  But they didn't, and as they say, the rest is history.

RELATED:  Gore Is Romney-Rich With $200 Million After Bush Defeat

Rush Limbaugh Rips Media ‘Groupies’ Fawning Over Obama: ‘Happiest They Have Been In Recorded History’

Mediaite.com:

Rush Limbaugh was all caught up on the weekend’s inaugural festivities on Tuesday — and the media’s “fawning” coverage of the event left a bad taste in his mouth. Taking aim at the media, Limbaugh said there’s no longer even a pretense of objectivity.

Even some conservatives, he said, were saying President Obama‘s not really such a bad guy — not a socialist or Marxist, but just “a Chicago thug.” Limbaugh wasn’t pleased: “It became clear, folks, that you and I, who are conservatives, we’re becoming more and more marginalized and isolated on a little island here, and it’s very small.”

People “are jumping off our own ship” left and right.

But he digressed, moving on to the media’s “fawning over Obama” during the inauguration, which, Limbaugh asserted, demonstrated that there’s “no pretense that these people are journalists anymore.” CNN, he cited specifically, taking a jab at, among others, Al Roker, who “practically messed in his pants again.”

“It is unlike anything I have ever seen,” Limbaugh said. One step farther is CBS political director/Slate correspondent John Dickerson, who recently penned a Slate piece arguing Obama should “declare war” on the GOP. I warned you, Limbaugh said, that the top priority on the agenda would be destroying the Republican Party.

Running through some clips, he was taken aback by how excited media “groupies” were to be in the president’s presence. “I think this is the happiest they have been in recorded history,” he asserted. “Certainly in the modern era. Certainly they are happier than the first time around in 2008.”

“I don’t feel that way about anybody,” he added. “There’s not a human being I could get close to that I would go ga-ga for. Other than me.”

About Obama, Limbaugh concluded, “We are dealing here with a cult figure.”

RELATED:  A Tale Of Two Inaugurals: In 2005, Media Sneers; In 2013, Media Cheers

Liberal Director Oliver Stone Rips President Obama: ‘Took A Bad Situation And … Made It Worse’

It's no secret that Hollywood is 90% liberal, a cesspool of actors, directors, agents, etc. that bow down to the lily-white, unGodly, far-Left agenda. So when a noted director, well-known for his liberal views and contempt for anything conservative, comes out swinging against a Democrat president...well you know you're in some trouble:

In his new book, outspoken liberal filmmaker Oliver Stone offers some harsh criticism for President Barack Obama.

The forthcoming book titled The Untold History of the United States airs Stone and historian Peter Kuznick‘s scorn for the president acting too much like his Republican predecessor George W. Bush.
Politico published several excerpts from the book which express disgust with the Republican Party and disappointment with the Democratic president and his party.

“The country Obama inherited was indeed in shambles, but Obama took a bad situation and, in certain ways, made it worse,” the authors continue, according to Politico. “Rather than repudiating the policies of Bush and his predecessors, Obama has perpetuated them.”

Stone and Kuznick lament that the president’s attempts at reforming and regulating Wall Street have largely failed in their progressive aims: “The biggest winner under Obama was Wall Street.”

According to Politico, the authors find little to celebrate in the president’s health care reforms: “Obama’s failure to articulate a progressive vision was also apparent in the fight over health reform, which was to have been his signature initiative…Obama’s health care reform effort, marked by the inability to even refute Republican charges of death panels, was so unpopular that it became an albatross around the necks of Democrats in the 2010 election.”

The authors also criticize the president’s handling of the war in Afghanistan: “When it finally came down to decision time, Obama didn’t have the courage or integrity of a post-Cuban Missile Crisis John F. Kennedy. He settled on a 30,000-troop increase, giving the military leaders almost everything they wanted and more than they expected.”

Stone also echoes something we’ve documented several times here and here — that President Obama and the Democrats have seemingly turned their backs on their promises to reverse Bush’s civil liberties encroachments: “Among the greatest disappointments to his followers was Obama’s refusal to roll back the expanding national security state that so egregiously encroached on American civil liberties.”

The authors quip: “Obama asserted presidential power in ways that must have made Dick Cheney jealous.”

RELATED:  Letterman: Disappointed Obama ‘Not Telling The Truth’ About Romney’s Position On Auto Bailout

Bill O’Reilly And Bernie Goldberg Take On Dan Rather: First Paragraph Of Obit Will Contain ‘Memo-Gate’

Mediaite.com:

Former CBS anchor Dan Rather was supposed to make an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor tomorrow, but it turns out he cancelled. On his show Monday, Bill O’Reilly chatted with Bernie Goldberg and pondered why that might be.


On Monday, Rather doubled down on his controversial report about President George W. Bush Texas Air National Guard service — the story that led to his leaving the network. “You lost in the court of law,” O’Reilly said. “Your assertion was not deemed credible.” How you do squared that? Rather would have to answer those questions, O’Reilly said, and that’s probably why he canceled.


Goldberg chimed in with his take. “I think Dan would rather be interviewed by an ideological soulmate — whether it’s George Stephanopoulos or Chris Matthews or somebody like that — rather than sit down and be grilled by you. [...] I don’t think he’d want to sit down and be grilled by you, so I don’t think it’s really that complicated.”


Rather made his reputation being confrontational, O’Reilly observed, so one would think he’d take the opportunity to go to come on the show. He added that, if he kicked O’Reilly’s butt, Rather would look like a hero, so “it’s a win-win.”


Goldberg agreed, and added:

You would think so. I mean, he took on in what turned out to be a disaster. He took on George Bush the elder on the CBS Evening News. He sat down face-to-face with Saddam Hussein who could have had him killed before he left the country. But, I know it doesn’t sound logical, but I think he is more comfortable with sitting down with a murderer, like Saddam Hussein, than he is — I know, you know what i’m going to say — than sitting down with you. I mean, look. The only reason people cancel, the only reason people cancel is because they have a conflict of scheduling and that wasn’t it.

O’Reilly said, “I think he is painfully aware of the fact that some day down the road when somebody writes the obit for Dan Rather, in the first paragraph it’s going to contain the words either Memo-Gate or Rather-Gate or something like that. I think that hurts him terribly.”


Goldberg added that Rather is “like Captain Ahab, who became obsessed with the whale, who did him in, he can’t let this go.”

 RELATED:  Dan Rather Outspoken: Still Battling CBS News

Politiks As Usual: In The News 3/26/12

U.S. Gives $860,000 To Afghan Families

Health Care Law Brawl Arrives At Supreme Court Steps

The Dark, Intolerant, And Abusive Nature Of The Gay Agenda

Santorum Beats Romney By 22 Points In Louisiana

Cheney Waited Longer Than Average For Heart Transplant

Black Panthers: $10,000 To 'Capture' Trayvon's Killer

John Heilemann: Bush v. Gore Ruling 'Pure Politics and Purely Corrupt'

CBS’s O’Donnell Hits Ryan With White House Talking Points, Then Cues Up Softballs to Schumer

Green Is Taking Us For A Ride

Beware Of The Mob, Hey, Remember When High Gas Prices Were All Bush’s Fault?

Obama Campaign Capitalizes On Foul-mouthed Biden With Profane T-shirts

Liberal Media Giving Obama A Pass On Continuing Bush-Era Policies

If you're a conservative you've been well familiar with liberal hypocrisy for eons, but golly-gee-whiz it seems that even some in the liberal media are catching on to the blatant hypocrisy of the Left's "anti-war" contingent esp. in regards to reaction from the liberal media to Barack Obama's uber-aggressive foreign policy deeds as POTUS in comparison to his predecessor's. Will wonders ever cease:

President Barack Obama has forged a surprising consensus on opposite ends of the political spectrum: They wonder how on earth he gets away with it.


A series of recent moves — from aggressively filling his reelection war chest to green-lighting shoot-to-kill orders against an American terror suspect overseas — would have triggered a massive backlash if George W. Bush had tried them, say former Bush administration officials and a few on the political left. Even Obama’s love for the links draws only gentle ribbing rather than the denunciations that helped drive Bush to give up the game for the balance of his presidency.


The muted public response has fueled frustration – and more than a little envy.


“A little bit of consistency from the media would be appreciated — and from the left-wing groups,” said Mark Corallo, director of public affairs at the Justice Department from 2002-05. “I don’t see anybody standing up. … Where is the outrage?”


Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald, an icon of what the Obama White House famously dubbed “the professional left,” also sees a strange lack of interest toward some of Obama’s policies. Among them: his administration’s claim that the Constitution allows executive use of armed drones to kill U.S. citizens abroad deemed to be terrorist operatives.


“Virtually all the Democrats who were apoplectic about Bush and were constantly complaining about him ‘trampling on our values’ over eavesdropping and detention have been silent about assassination, even though it’s so much more severe,” Greenwald said. “It isn’t that Obama is necessarily any worse on civil liberties than Bush. The point is he’s able to get away with so much more.”


A White House spokesman declined to comment for this story. But Obama aides have noted that he takes plenty of heat for other policies — such as expanding entitlements or phasing out traditional light bulbs — that were far less controversial when Bush did them. Obama’s recent decision on contraception and religious employers triggered a political firestorm, but a similar policy in place throughout the Bush administration barely registered on the political radar.


Some differences in coverage flow from a simple truth: Stories that feed an established media narrative about a political figure get more attention than those that cut against it. And the press tends to blow up stories when partisans attack one another. Some of Obama’s practices, particularly in the war on terror, are supported by Republicans — even as they cringe at the unanimity.


Here’s a look at five areas in which critics on the left and right say Obama’s gotten a relatively easy ride:


A green light to kill U.S. citizens abroad


Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder visited Chicago to lay out his rationale that the U.S. government has the legal right to kill U.S.-citizen terror suspects overseas — and that there’s no role for the courts in reviewing such use of lethal force.


The speech at Northwestern University Law School drew a smattering of news accounts and a handful of reporters, but few protesters, no candlelight vigil and no audience members clad in orange jumpsuits and chains. Some liberal groups issued press releases taking issue with Holder’s analysis, but the reaction to what could be termed warrantless killing was a far cry from the sky-is-falling, apocalyptic rhetoric unleashed at Bush and his appointees a few years back over efforts merely to listen in on the communications of suspected terrorists through the warrantless wiretapping program.


After Obama submitted to a rare news conference the next day, “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart noted that not a single question was asked about the provocative Holder speech. “How come no one at the press conference brought that up? Didn’t even say a f—ing word about it?” Stewart asked on his program Wednesday. “You didn’t say anything about a historically massive, executive branch power grab.”


Greenwald sounded equally amazed. “Here you have Obama asserting the power not to detain Americans or eavesdrop on them, but to target them for execution by the CIA without a shred or whit of due process,” he said. “I would think that most people would prefer to be eavesdropped upon, or detained, than killed with a drone.”


He argues that muted criticism of Obama on the war on terror actually makes his policies more extreme.


“There were Americans in Al Qaeda throughout the Bush administration, but it never asserted the power to target them for death. It was just a bridge too far for them,” Greenwald said. “Those Democrats who claimed to find these issues so important and are now being opportunistic and politically cynical are not just neglecting these abuses, they’re actually enabling them.”


Corallo said he supports the drone policy outlined this week, but if his former boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, gave a similar speech, he would have been excoriated.


“You would have gotten a firestorm of criticism from the left,” Corallo said. “We would have been pilloried as ‘a bunch of jackbooted thugs ignoring the Constitution. We ought to impeach this president.’ The cacophony would have been deafening. The New York Times editorial page would have pilloried Ashcroft and Bush, and reporters would have found every leftist constitutional law scholar to come out and scream and yell that we’re just trampling on constitutional rights.” (The Times did weigh in with an editorial Sunday, six days after Holder’s speech.)


Corallo noted that the Bush administration’s detention of Al Qaeda suspect and American citizen Jose Padilla without charge in a Navy brig in South Carolina became a cause célèbre for many on the left, while reaction to the drone strike that killed New Mexico-born Al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen last year has been relatively muted.


“We got pilloried [over Padilla], and they’re dropping missiles on some guy’s eyeball from 30,000 feet and it’s just business as usual,” said Corallo. “In fact, they’re actually crowing about it.”


Fundraising and swing state travel


Obama, who came into office bemoaning a broken electoral system, has proved surprisingly energetic at fundraising from wealthy donors and using his office to his political benefit in states that could decide his reelection.


He’s attended 103 reelection fundraisers — about double the 52 such events Bush had attended at this point in 2004, according to tallies kept by CBS’s Mark Knoller.

RELATED: Repulsive progressive hypocrisy

Obama Campaign To Borrow From George W. Bush ‘04 Playbook

Figures:

The last time an incumbent president faced re-election, George W. Bush exploited social and national security issues to offset his economic vulnerabilities.


Over the next year, President Obama will try the same thing.


Circumstances have changed drastically since 2004. America’s economic woes stand to dominate the 2012 dialogue no matter what — probably to Mr. Obama’s detriment.


Yet in important electoral battlegrounds, Mr. Obama’s strategists intend to use abortion, gay rights, the environment and successes in the fight against Al Qaeda to counter economic attacks and drive a wedge between Republicans and swing voters.


The Democratic shift from defense to offense on those issues stems from evolving public attitudes, intensifying Republican conservatism and the raid that killed
Osama bin Laden on Mr. Obama’s orders. The perilous state of the American economy undercuts the president’s assertions that he prevented something worse.


The result: over the weekend, Mr. Obama accused his Republican challengers of displaying a “kind of smallness” by not denouncing a debate audience that booed a gay soldier. He used the incident to question their readiness to become commander in chief.


Days earlier at a California fund-raiser, Mr. Obama cast his re-election bid as an appeal to “people of like mind, people who believe in a big and generous and a tolerant and ambitious and fact-based America.”

Rush Limbaugh: MSNBC's Response Different If Halperin Defamed George W. Bush

Of course Limbaugh's right. It's always a different standard for liberals on how to treat the President when a Republican is in there as opposed to a Democrat:

As NewsBusters reported Thursday, MSNBC has put Mark Halperin on indefinite suspension for making an intemperate remark about President Obama on "Morning Joe."


Just a few hours later, conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh told his audience the network's response would have been much different if Halperin had said this about George W. Bush when he was president

RUSH LIMBAUGH: Now, let me ask you a question: If Mark Halperin had said this about say George W. Bush, would they be falling all over themselves to apologize? Nope. He would be, my guess is, “New ground had been broken. Finally, finally,” they would say, “a reporter has had the courage and the guts to tell the nation just exactly the kind of President we have. A gutsy move. It might have been over the line. It might have been a little bit risky. And it might be something he would never do again, but by golly, by gosh, the courage.”


That’s how they would play it had Mark Halperin said it about George W. Bush.


Taking this a step further, since Halperin apparently believed what he said was going to be edited out - he specifically asked if MSNBC was on a seven second delay - it's quite likely the technician that failed to bleep his comment about Bush would have been the fall guy - assuming there was one at all.


But because MSNBC is the leading television propaganda outlet for this White House and the Democrat Party, that certainly wouldn't be enough in this instance.


Something else to consider is it's unlikely the minor vulgarity bothered the network.


As Breitbart reported a few hours ago, MSNBC allowed an audible f-bomb on "The Last Word" during prime time Wednesday evening. Nobody involved in that show has been suspended including the host.


As Limbaugh pointed out there likely wouldn't have been this response if Obama was Republican, one must conclude the network just didn't like such a thing being said about a president it so faithfully supports.

Osama bin Laden Is Dead

Justice is indeed done. Thoughts and prayers again to all those who lost their lives on 9/11, we will never forget.

No Lock-Out Coverage for Obama in NY Times, But Bush's Door Flub Was Front-Page News

Newsbusters.org:

President Obama arrived home to the White House on Wednesday from his five-day trip to Latin America and found himself locked out of the French doors to the Oval Office, as captured by several news organizations.


My Media Research Center colleague Tim Graham reminded me that back on Nov. 21, 2005, the New York Times published on its front page a photo of President George W. Bush making a face after trying to leave a press conference in Beijing through a locked door, accompanied by an article that mentioned the gaffe. Former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg wrote a letter to the editor at the time to complain:


The Times published a four-panel picture on Page 1 that extended over two columns and ran some 12 inches from the masthead more than halfway down the page showing President Bush trying to exit a meeting with reporters in Beijing -- through a locked door....Did it occur to anyone in charge -- and for that matter, does it occur to anyone at The Times even now -- that this is precisely what gives your critics ammunition?....on Page 1, whatever your editors' intentions, it sure looks like an editorial posing as news.


Yet not only has the Times not put an image of Obama’s flub on the front page, a nytimes.com search indicates that as of Friday afternoon Obama’s lock-out has neither been shown or even mentioned by the Times, either in print or online.

How George W. Bush Laid The Groundwork For Hosni Mubarak’s Resignation

You won't find this out from reading the lamestream media:

A small, controversial effort launched under President George W. Bush to fund and train election monitors in Egypt played a key role in the movement to topple President Hosni Mubarak’s regime.


The program, which provided millions in direct funding to prodemocracy groups, helped dispatch 13,000 volunteers to observe Egypt’s parliamentary elections in December. Thousands of those monitors, angered by what they said was blatant election rigging, joined the protests. Some became outspoken leaders; others used the networking and communication skills they learned to help coordinate 18 days of rallies.


“The very fact that they saw the fraud firsthand has contributed to them turning from monitors into activists,’’ said Saad Eddin Ibrahim, founder of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, which has used a share of the US funds to train volunteers. “They became very disillusioned with the regime.’’


The evolving role of the monitors provides a measure of vindication for Bush administration officials and allies, including Elizabeth Cheney, the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, who fought for permission to funnel money to the monitors, bucking a longstanding US policy of giving Egypt a veto over US funds.


“I certainly feel vindicated,’’ said Charles King Mallory IV, a former aide to Elizabeth Cheney, who could not be reached for comment.

RELATED: Egypt's Military Dissolves Parliament, Suspends Constitution

Democrats Conceding Bush Was Right on Middle East!

Newsmax.com:

Egypt’s perilous standoff over democratic reforms has put the Obama administration on the defensive, with no clear end in sight to a stalemate that has exposed the White House to fire from all sides of the political spectrum.


Some analysts have given President Barack Obama credit for managing a complicated, volatile crisis as well as anyone could reasonably expect.


But many other foreign-policy experts, worried about the historic wave of unrest now spreading across the Middle East, are reconsidering George W. Bush’s pro-democracy “freedom agenda,” which the Obama foreign policy team largely rejected as too simplistic.


The policy questions continued to emerge Sunday even as representatives of the Egyptian government met with opposition leaders and offered major concessions in an effort to quell the uprising.


The regime of Egyptian strongman and staunch U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak promised to release imprisoned protesters, end restrictions on reporters covering the crisis, and institute constitutional reforms.


The early reaction from the tens of thousands of demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, however, suggested Egypt’s masses may not be satisfied until Mubarak is out of power, and possibly out of the country.


The Obama administration is drawing increasing fire for its apparent reluctance at times to bid Mubarak adieu:


* Nathan Brown, director of Middle East studies at George Washington University, said on CSPAN’s American Journal on Sunday that administration officials “have been shifting positions and calibrating constantly, and it certainly looks as if it’s an administration that’s kind of reeling with the punches. But to be fair to them, what they’re trying to do is react to realities on the ground.”

* Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, who has just returned from a trip to Saudi Arabia, tells Newsmax that Obama’s soft-peddling of criticism toward Middle East despots has been “shameful.” “[George W.] Bush was absolutely right on his freedom agenda,” Land said. “He said the only way you’re going to fix this [terrorism] problem is to drain the swamp. … I think Obama’s whole human-rights agenda has been sadly missing. I mean, I know a lot of Democrats who are shocked by how Kissinger-esque it has been.”

* Longtime Bush antagonist Maureen Dowd credited Bush in part, saying he “meant well when he tried to start a domino effect of democracy in the Middle East and end the awful hypocrisy of America coddling autocratic rulers. But the way he went about it was naive and wrong.” By contrast Dowd said Obama was “calling around this week to leaders in the region to stanch the uncontrolled surge of democracy in the Arab world.”

* The New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier said Obama’s policy of engagement and multicultural globalism has had “the effect of aligning America with regimes and against peoples.” He added, “This was the case with our response to the Iranian rebellion in 2009, and it was the case with our response to the Egyptian opposition until a few hours ago. The striking thing about Barack Obama’s ‘extended hand’ is how utterly irrelevant it is to the epochal events in Egypt, and Tunisia, and Iran, and elsewhere.”

* Stephen Carter, a Yale professor and left-leaning author, told The Daily Beast readers that the protests in Egypt prove Obama’s predecessor was right to push for democracy in the Arab world. The foreign-policy establishment largely derided Bush’s democracy push as naïve, but now some observers say it could have given the United States more credibility in the Arab world.

* Elliott Abrams, a Bush-era deputy secretary of state, conceded that Bush’s actual policies didn’t always live up to his “freedom agenda” rhetoric. “But the revolt in Tunisia, the gigantic wave of demonstrations in Egypt and the more recent marches in Yemen all make clear that Bush had it right -- and that the Obama administration's abandonment of this mind-set is nothing short of a tragedy,” Abrams wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.

* Conservative columnist Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe wrote that human rights and reform has clearly not been a priority of the Obama administration, adding: “It is unworthy of a nation as great and free as ours not to promote the values it most esteems. It shouldn't take an upheaval in the Arab street to remind us that it is always in America's interest to promote liberal democracy.”

* In a story titled “Was George Bush right?” The Economist stated that “Mr. Bush was indeed a far more active champion of democracy than Mr. Obama has been,” but said Bush still bears responsibility for invading Iraq.


In a 2003 speech Bush stated: ‘Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe - because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export."

Social Security Now In Peril, In 2006 Democrats Cheered When George W. Bush Warned Us That This Would Happen

How stupid do they look now?

Sick and getting sicker, Social Security will run at a deficit this year and keep on running in the red until its trust funds are drained by about 2037, congressional budget experts said Wednesday in bleaker-than-previous estimates.


The massive retirement program has been suffering from the effects of the struggling economy for several years. It first went into deficit last year but had been projected to post surpluses for a few more years before permanently slipping into the red in 2016


This year alone, Social Security will pay out $45 billion more in retirement, disability and survivors' benefits than it collects in payroll taxes, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said. That figure nearly triples - to $130 billion - when the new one-year cut in payroll taxes is included.


Congress has promised to replenish any lost revenue from the tax cut, but that's hardly good news, either, adding to the federal budget deficit. In another sobering estimate, the congressional office said government red ink this year will increase to $1.5 trillion, the most in U.S. history.


More than 54 million Americans receive Social Security benefits, averaging $1,076 per month.

Nancy Pelosi Says Dems Lost House Because Of . . . George W. Bush

Bush Derangement Syndrome never ends. But let's hope the idiots are still blaming Bush come 2012 because clearly they still don't get it.

Obama Has Nearly Doubled George W. Bush's Golf Rounds

Progolftalk.com:

Just days after 9/11, President George W. Bush was filmed golfing. He spoke briefly with the press about Israeli security and ousting terrorists, then infamously said, “Now watch this drive.” Since then, progressive critics railed on President Bush for his golf habit until he gave up the game for the remainder of his presidency in 2003, saying:


“I don’t want to some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander-in-chief playing golf… And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”


With American forces still in Iraq and Afghanistan, a stalled economy, and a host of other issues, Barack Obama is playing even more golf than the last Commander in Chief.


On Thursday, President Obama played his 56th (or maybe 57th) round of golf since becoming President. In his two years of golf over two terms, President Bush played 32 times. That has not only drawn criticism from political reporters and enemies, but also from people in the golf world.


John Kim, coordinating producer for PGA.com and friend, spoke on Twitter about Obama’s statline.


“Obama golfs more than a PGA producer?!,” Kim asked.


He continued, saying, “[T]he old adage is: those who work in golf never get to play. Guess I need to run for President to hit the links!”