It has been a while since my last my post and quite a bit has occurred, the most visible being the continued pig-headedness of the Democratic leadership to shove government-run healthcare down Americans gullet and the GOPs sweep of the governor races in Virgina and Democratic-stronghold New Jersey.  It was the race in NY congressional district 23, however, that has me pondering the outcome in 2010 elections.

In case you are unfamiliar with that race, the Republican National Committee and other Republican leaders, most notably Newt Gingrich, threw their support behind a very liberal Republican candidate without even a primary despite a conservative candidate, Doug Hoffman, eagerly waiting to take on the Democratic opponent, Bill Owens.  The thinking of these political geniuses was that the Republican party needed to be more moderate and that showing their enlightenment by backing a candidate more liberal than the Democrat would surely draw voters into the “Big Republican Tent”.  Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the church…Hoffman was forced to run as an independent under the Conservative Party banner and began cleaning she-who-will-remain-nameless’ clock in the polls.  Five days before the election, the Republican withdrew from the race and endorses the Democrat making Gingrich and the RNC look like total buffoons.  Hoffman goes on to lose the race by a couple of percentage points while the non-existent Republican candidate still received 5% of the vote (who the hell votes for someone not even in the race!!??).  No question if the Republican leadership had supported Hoffman from the word go, that seat would be filled with an (R) rather than a (D).

So what does this mean?  To me, it says that the Republicans absolutely have the ability to screw up a 2010 election that is looking like a huge opportunity to stop the insanity that is Congress today.

I am especially disappointed in Newt.  His “Contract with America” in 1994 was pure genius and an exact game plan for appealing to the American voter – lower taxes, lower government spending and balanced budgets among other things.   More recently, Newt is looking more and more like his Democrat friends and espousing moderation over conservatism.  What is he smoking?  Perhaps he just wants more love from the media and his buddies in the Democratic Party.  Whatever the reason, Newt no longer speaks for me.

The tea-parties are not about creating a third party that American history shows has no shot at winning substantial political power.  They are about getting the GOP back to its conservative foundation.  When the GOP has a clear and conservative message, it wins.  Plain and simple.  Look no further back than 1994, when the Contract with America resonated with voters and allowed the GOP to take over the House after 30 years of Democrat rule.  Fast-forward to 2006 – 2008 and the GOP gets it butt kicked when they begin to look no different than big-spending, lobbyist-loving Democrats.  Given no clear message, the voters simply wanted the current bums out of office as they search for change.

The GOP leadership needs to take heed to this example.  If they produce a clear, united and conservative alternative to the likes of Obama, Pelosi and Reid, they will cruise to victories next year and I would not be the least bit surprised to see the House under GOP rule again (GOODBYE, NANCY!).  However, should they continue to dither around in an effort to display a more moderate (dare I say, progressive/liberal) face, they will provide voters with no reason to get excited and many Democratic incumbents will hang on to their seats.

Then we get at least two more years of this great hope and change…

If you have been asleep for the last week, you may not have heard about the ACORN corruption scandal.  Two kids in their early-twenties posing as a pimp and a ho and using a hidden camera exposed immoral and criminal behavior at the Obama administration’s leading community organizing outfit.  Check out all the undercover videos here.

This cracks me up. The Times, 60 Minutes, and all the other mainstream “investigative” reporters have for as long as I have watched TV or read the newspaper trumpeted their work as a great public service. Helping us little folks, the great unwashed. Hmmmm. Seems we have only been “saved” from the evil-doers that have an agenda in opposition to the newspapers and TV stations.

The fact that two kids in their early twenties can stroll into five different offices of an organization as highlighted as ACORN and expose this corruption is laughable.

What bothers me even more is the uneasy feeling that the editors-in-chief at the mainstream media outlets are spending less time chewing the butts of their so-called investigative reporters and instead are demanding their teams find dirt on the two kids in order to discredit them.

Nice work, folks.

Time to go back to work, good congresspeople.  I hope the earful you got from the American people during your August recess got your attention.  There are a great many topics that need addressing and the way you have been planning to “fix” them needs to be rethought if you give a damn about what your constituents told you.

First, let’s back the train waaaaay up on healthcare.  Any thoughts of ramming your silly government-run healthcare down the American people’s throats should be long gone.  You want competition, choice and reduced healthcare costs?  Let me get you started on a much more reasonable bill.  Feel free to use all of these ideas:

1. Allow Americans to buy health insurance across state lines.  This will provide you all the competition you want as there will immediately be over 1,300 insurance plans competing for the consumer’s business.
2. Make healthcare insurance premiums tax-deductible.  This would allow many more folks to purchase healthcare insurance creating more coverage.  You could even give the American people an advance on the deduction (ie. tax credit check in the mail) so they can get the insurance now.
3. Loosen the eligibility criteria for  Medicare and Medicaid.  We already have government programs to help the poor and the elderly with healthcare so broadening the eligibility criteria could allow many of the 10-15 million who TRULY can not get health insurance the ability to get in.
4. Ensure that health insurance is portable between jobs.  Moving forward this would close the pre-existing condition loophole that exist today when people who get a serious illness while under their current employer’s plan could be tagged as having a pre-existing condition if they switch jobs and try to get insurance under their new employer’s plan.
5. TORT REFORM!  Likely needs to be its own bill, but the surest way to reduce medical costs is to put some common sense into the medical malpractice industry.  Outrageous legal suits from patients and lawyers looking to get princely sums have driven the cost of carrying medical malpractice insurance sky-high for doctors and hospitals and guess who gets that cost passed on to them? The patients.

Those five should get you started and I promise you, the American people will cheer your name if you embrace these type of ideas as a way to improve the healthcare system in this country.

Next, Cap-and-Trade must die.  Hopefully, smarter heads will prevail in the Senate and you folks will not pass anything close to that monstrous load of tax crap that passed in the House.  Study after study shows that what the House passed will have no (none, nada, zippo) appreciable positive impact on the environment over the next 100 years, but it sure will have a huge negative impact on middle America by creating higher rates on every form of energy we use today – electricity and gas being the biggest.

Take steps to correct your course on the above two issues and America will likely get off your back.  Yes, I understand there are issues on the foreign policy front right now as well, but Americans are hoping mad about the domestic policies being proposed so you would do well to heed the message you got from them during recess.

Play time is over now. Get back to work for the American people.

President Obama and his henchpeople continue to flood the airwaves about “phony” claims being made about the proposed healthcare bills that so many Americans oppose.  Well, let’s look at some of these claims and why people fear that they are not “phony”.

1) The bill would create a government-run healthcare system.
The independent Lewin Group published a report (see pg. 18) estimating that 56% (88.1 million) of individuals covered by private insurance would be transitioned to the public plan by 2011 as employers opt to dump their provided coverage.  Why?  Because it will be financially better for them to simply pay the additional payroll tax of 2-8% in lieu of paying for a huge majority (over 70%) of their employee’s government-mandated coverage levels.  I would say that Americans are indeed smart to be worried that a program that shifts so many individuals from private coverage to public coverage is on the road to full government-run healthcare.  Oh, and let’s not forget that Obama, Barney Frank and several others on the Left are on record as saying they favor a single-payer system and that this is the best way to begin to transition us to it. Socialized healthcare?  Check!

2) Government funds will be used to fund abortions.
This one is easy.  Heard of the saying “actions speak louder than words”?  In every version of the healthcare bill, amendments were offered that would ensure that no federal funds would be used to pay for abortions.  The result?  Not a single one of them passed. But wait! The House Energy and Commerce Committee passed an amendment by Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) that requires at least one insurance plan to cover abortion in every geographical region and requires the newly-created public plan to cover all abortion services.  Hmmm, and why should we believe that this is a phony claim?  Oh, maybe it is because Obama himself promised Planned Parenthood that his plan would cover “reproductive services”.  Actually, that DOES support that federal funds would pay for abortions.  Whether you support abortion or not, you shouldn’t expect taxpayers to fund it.

3) ObamaCare provides healthcare for illegal immigrants.
This one is another easy one under the heading of “actions speak louder than words”.  Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV) introduced an amendment that would use two citizenship status verification systems, the Income and Eligibility Verification System (IEVS) and Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) programs, to establish an individual’s eligibility to obtain the bill’s proposed affordability credits or enroll in the public insurance option. Both programs are currently used to determine citizenship status and eligibility for other public assistance programs.  The amendment failed on a straight-party vote.  If the Dems want us to believe that illegal immigrants are not going to get healthcare coverage, why not pass an amendment that ensures it?

4) ObamaCare will ration healthcare.
Guess what?  Another easy one.  Both the House and Senate bills call for an increased role for Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) to determine which medical procedures are most effective at treating specific ailments.  Three Senators offered amendments that would have prohibited the use of CER to mandate coverage, deny care, or ration.  Three guesses as to what happened to those amendments?  All three shot down on straight-party votes.

Does the adminstration and the leadership in Congress truly think the American people are nothing but a bunch of dimwits??!!!  The arrogance and lies of this bunch is incredible.

If you happen to get a chance to speak to your congressperson and they start the “phony” claim mantra, simply ask them about the amendments that they voted against that would have put all of these concerns to rest.  Me thinks they will likely accuse you of being an angry mobster and call for security to escort you out.

Tonight I attend the townhall for Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX).  This townhall had received a great deal press and word was out that MoveOn.org, the left-leaning action group, was preparing to show up en masse and drown out the opponents of nationalized healthcare.  Apparently, many of the MoveOn.org crowd called in sick, got stuck in traffic or maybe had been given the wrong address because they were easily outnumbered 3-to-1 outside the townhall and inside the townhall, opponents of the bill outnumbered supporters at least 4-to-1 and maybe as much as 5-to-1.  I will try to post pictures of the crowd outside in a future post.  Interestingly, there was a very large police presence in and around the townhall.

The townhall itself was not as unproductive as it could have been nor was it as productive as it shouldhave been.  Sessions did a good job of keeping the crowd noise down so that supporters of the bill could ask their questions.  To his credit, Sessions realized how lopsided the crowd was against the bill and told attendees that he wanted the first eight questions to come only from people who disagreed with him.  Unfortunately, he received little in the way of questions and instead had a number of people who rushed to the microphone to simply espouse their support of the bill.  MoveOn.org or any of these other Obama-support groups need to train their people on how to speak in public.  Most of their time was spent preaching to Sessions and the crowd about how wonderful Utopia will be with free healthcare and they would never ask a thought-provoking question. Of the first 8 speech-makers, 6 left the townhall immediately after giving the microphone back which only made them look more like a plant instead of a genuinely concerned citizen.

Since he was not given many questions to answer, Sessions was left to respond to the monologues with what essentially amounted to the Republican talking points.  He did lay out the five key elements of the Republican proposal – healthcare savings/spending accounts and leveling the field with regard to tax implications being the two main ones.  The other key Session message on the night is that we should be focusing on the problem facing the 30 million or so uninsured instead of forcing the other 280 million happily insured to face a national healthcare system.

The whole townhall lasted about 90 minutes and stayed mostly civil throughout.  I never got near the mic, but associated with a number of like-minded folks.  All in all, it was a good experience and I look forward to attending Rep. Joe Barton’s (R-TX) townhall tomorrow night.

I did see a funny quote on the back of several t-shirts…”If you think healthcare is expensive now, wait until it is free!”