Obama To Avoid Celebrating Obamacare

By Susan Duclos

The Hill reports that as Obamacare hits the spotlight again with the Supreme Court hearing challenges to it's constitutionality this month and the anniversary of it's being signed into law just days away, Barack Obama will avoid talking about it even to defend it against a population who still believe by an overwhelming majority that portions of the healthcare law are unconstitutional.

Republicans are jumping on the news pointing out if Obama is so proud of his "signature accomplishment" he should own it.

Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be fanning the flames.

“If the president is so proud of his signature policy initiative he should own it and continue campaigning on it,” said Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. “Instead, the White House is attempting to distance themselves from the president’s namesake because it’s clear Americans believe ObamaCare is making healthcare worse instead of better.”

Meanwhile, in a separate The Hill article, they describe the frenzied "circus-like" atmosphere surrounding the upcoming healthcare battle in the Supreme Court and how it has already reached historic proportions.

The frenzy generated by the Supreme Court’s arguments on the healthcare reform law next week is likely to dwarf anything the court has ever seen.

Lawmakers and interest groups plan to stage protests and events outside the court nearly nonstop, creating a circus-like atmosphere for a case that could redefine the limits of federal power.

A throng of lawyers and reporters, meanwhile, are practically beating down the court’s doors to try and secure a seat inside the chamber to witness the historic arguments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Many legal experts say the ruling on the healthcare law could be one of the most consequential in the court’s history. The oral arguments in the case are the longest in 45 years, and the legal and political stakes are enormous. The court is expected to deliver its ruling in June, just months before the presidential election.

All of those factors are feeding a media frenzy that has already reached historic proportions, according to Drexel University law professor Lisa McElroy.

“This is just unprecedented. The only thing that even compares is maybe Bush v. Gore,” she said, referring to the 2000 case that helped settle the presidential election. “This is going to be on a scale we’ve never seen before.”

The Supreme Court will hear arguments of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare, cases on March 26, 27, and 28. Because of the extraordinary public interest in those cases, the Court will provide the audio recordings and transcripts of the oral arguments on an expedited basis through the Court's Website.

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Mitt Romney Encouraged Barack Obama To Implement Individual Mandate

By Susan Duclos

An individual mandate is a requirement by a government that certain individual citizens purchase or otherwise obtain a good or service. In the case of Obamacare aka Affordable Care Act, the individual mandate would force citizens to purchase health insurance and they would be penalized monetarily if they do not comply.

The Supreme Court has recently agreed to hear arguments against the constitutionality of the individual mandate, among other issues regarding Obamacare, in March 2012, with a ruling expected by June or early July.

It is also known that Jonathan Gruber, a healthcare economist and MIT professor helped Mitt Romney fashion Romneycare in Massachusetts and then went on to advise Barack Obama on creating Obamacare. Gruber has gone on to say recently that they are the same thing.

Howard Dean and Paul Krugman, among others have maintained that Obamacare and Romneycare are the same, or identical and PolitiFact has rated both those assertions as "mostly true."

The individual mandate portion of the mammoth Obamacare bill has been the least popular and two years after the Democrats which then controlled the House and controlled the Senate passed the bill with Barack Obama signing Obamacare into law, Americans according to Gallup, Democrats (56%), Republicans (94%) and Independents (70%) still believe the individual mandate is unconstitutional.

The headline today from BuzzFeed is "Mitt Romney's Advice For ObamaCare: Look At RomneyCare," which points to an op-ed article Mitt Romney wrote which appeared in appeared in USA Today on 07/30/2009, where Romney himself, encouraged Barack Obama to implement the most egregious portion of Obamacare... the individual mandate.

Specifically the portion quoted below of Romney's op-ed which was an open statement to Obama as evidenced by the headline of the piece itself which was "Mr. President, What’s the Rush?:

Our experience also demonstrates that getting every citizen insured doesn’t have to break the bank. First, we established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance. Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages “free riders” to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others.

Mitt Romney encouraged Barack Obama, via his own words in that op-ed, to force the highly unpopular, individual mandate down the throats of Americans that were opposed at the time of passage and are still convinced the mandate is unconstitutional.

With the Supreme Court hearing arguments this month and rendering a ruling just a few short months before the November presidential election, Obamacare is expected to be an issue focused on leading to election day.

One candidate holds absolutely no credibility when he claims he would repeal Obamacare and is opposed to the individual mandate..... Mitt Romney.

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Video- Challenge Accepted: Huntsman Nails Romney On 10K Bet

By Susan Duclos

In the GOP Iowa debate where Mitt Romney attempted to wager $10,000 with Rick Perry, who declined the bet, over statements made in Romney's book about the individual mandate portion of health care he instituted in Massachusetts.

GOP presidential hopeful, Jon Huntsman, who immediately bought up the domain www.10kbet.com, says "Challenge Accepted."

Video below:



While Romney cannot decide whether to double down on his gaffe or back away from it, GOP rivals are labeling Romney as out-of-touch with every day Americans who would never think of wagering 10K even jokingly are imagining what that type of money could do to ease their economic suffering.

Other pundits think that while the wager itself was bone-headed it wasn't the amount that matters, what matters is that he tried to make the bet at all.

Via Business Insider:

What we don't want is someone who doesn't have the presence of mind on stage to avoid making such a bone-headed comment. If he doesn't recognize the insult he's making to the American people with such a flippant response during a debate, how can we trust that he won't do something as casually catastrophic when talking to Putin, Netanyahu, or Ahmadinejad.

We can't.

The very fact that Romney is still being asked about the 10K bet moment, the media is still reporting on rivals using it in their ads, their speeches and their interviews, and the multiple videos of the 10K moment have garnered millions of viewers, shows that it was a moment Romney should be regretting right about now.

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It's a Dud

Masachusetts Universal Heathcare a Flop

When former Governor Mitt Romney presented his universal health plan to the people of Massachusetts about four years ago, there were many who predicted it would fail because it had many of the features of the much reviled plan put forward by former First Lady Hillary Clinton, as seen in this cartoon from those times:



Today the Massachusetts plan is often pointed to as the model for the national healthcare plan currently being pushed by President Obama and the Democrats in congress. But before we adopt it for the nation as a whole, shouldn't we consider how it is faring in Massachusetts first? Unfortunately, the early returns on the Massachusetts plan are far from encouraging, as reported by Michael Graham in the Boston Herald:



It’s exploding the budget: Our “universal” health insurance scheme is already $47 million over budget for 2010. Romneycare will cost taxpayers more than $900 million next year alone.

It’s killing us on costs: Average Massachusetts premiums are the highest in the nation and rising. We also spend 27 percent more on health care services, per capita, than the national average. Those costs, contrary to what we were promised, have been going up faster here than nearly everywhere else.

It’s creating bizarre marketplace mutations: In Massachusetts, ObamaCare 1.0 is such a mess our governor is talking about imposing draconian price controls. He’s even suggested going to “capitation,” a system where doctors get a fixed amount of money per patient - and then that’s it. Which means it would become in your doctor’s financial interest never to see you again.

All this damage to the taxpayers, the insured and the responsible business owners . . . and for what?

The percentage of uninsured Bay State residents has gone from around 6 percent to around 3 percent.

In other words, it’s a dud.

And now Obama is preparing to drop the Big One on bipartisanship and turn Congress into a political hot zone for the remainder of his presidency, in order to pass a similar plan.

After the election of Scott Brown, we sometimes heard critics complaining that while Massachusetts already has a universal care plan like Obama wants, through electing Brown we voted to deny it to the rest of the nation. Now we know that our plan is not only not universal, but that costs are going through the roof. Therefore the rest of country should thank Massachusetts for electing Brown and thereby stopping the imposition of our failing system on everybody else.

At least for the time being.

Valley Freedom Fighter

Northampton Attorney Richard Evans was among those testifying in Boston this week for the legalization of marijuana. Of course the bill won't pass, but that doesn't take anything away from the cogent arguments of this tireless advocate, who first spoke before the legislature on this issue in 1981. Here is a video of his appearance the other day.



The Contender



I'm pleased to hear that Tom McCarthy (above) of Pine Point's Gateway Hardware is gathering signatures to run against entrenched incumbent State Senator Gale Candaras. McCarthy ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature in 1996, and I'm happy to see him returning to the arena.

Bar Scene

Ace photographer Tony Mateus took a couple of shots recently of bars I once had more than a casual relationship with. (Actually there were quite a number of such places!) The Regal Beagle in Indian Orchard was one such hangout, which I never seemed capable of visiting without leaving shitfaced. I went there alot in the 1980's because Jay Libardi loved the joint.



Another place we used to visit was this dive down by the arch in downtown Springfield. Despite the bad neighborhood it was a surprisingly friendly place, and drew a wonderfully weird crowd of street eccentrics.



But my drinking days are behind me now, thank God, and I stick to the coffeeshops. Here's a picture I took at the Haymarket Cafe about seven this morning, an hour I could never wake up for in my alcoholic past.



The Music Section

Azwan of Amherst.



Drunk girls in Northampton last week.

Videos by Dann Vazquez

False Promise

Can the Government Save Money?



I'm shocked that I continue to hear people say on TV and in the papers that one of the main goals of the so-called health care reform efforts in Congress is to control spending. Huh? When the hell has that ever happened? On the contrary I strain in vain to think of any area in which the government getting involved in providing any service has resulted in cost savings.

If anything, government involvement is an invitation to waste and fraud, as the TV show 60 Minutes so eloquently showed on Sunday. I urge you to watch the video below of that 60 Minutes segment, and then I dare you to talk about government savings in the health care field with a straight face.




If Congress were really interested in controlling costs, they would not model their program, as they have, on what increasingly appears to be the failing model of universal health care here in Massachusetts. Columnist Jacob Sullivan explains:

Since 2006, Michael Cannon notes in a recent Cato Institute paper, health insurance premiums in Massachusetts have risen by 8 percent to 12 percent a year, almost double the national average. During the same period, total medical spending has increased by 28 percent. The cost of subsidizing coverage through the state’s Commonwealth Care program is expected to hit $880 million next year, 20 percent more than originally projected.

Second, despite stricter penalties, Massachusetts seems to be experiencing adverse selection. Cannon notes that, while the share of residents without insurance has shrunk from about 10 percent to about 5 percent, the proportion of uninsured people in the 18-to-25 age group has increased from 30 percent to 35 percent, indicating that “the young (and presumably more healthy) are less likely to comply with the mandate.”

Third, requiring people to buy insurance entails defining the minimum level of coverage, which necessarily makes insurance more expensive than it would otherwise be. In effect, the government prohibits the cheapest insurance plans, the ones with the highest deductibles and the least generous benefits.

The upshot is a phenomenon we have seen many times before: Instead of protecting us from big business, big government buys it off with our money.

Canadian High

With Grace Slick in poor health the Jefferson Starship is today primarily a Paul Kantner solo band. Currently touring Canada, a review from a Canadian paper yesterday describes the 68 year old Kantner as still overseeing a realm of stoned chaos.



Kantner sang and played mostly rhythm guitar. Here’s one dude who’s still living the dream. He spoke several times on the quality of Vancouver Island drugs, which apparently, pale to his usual toot.

“Some of the stuff I had from your local dispensary is pretty good,” declared Kantner sagely. “But it’s not as good as San Francisco.”

To read the whole concert review click here.

Hadley in the Rain

Today is another one of those gloomy, wet New England fall days. On the bus into Amherst this morning I took some pictures through the rain streaked windows of the farm fields of Hadley. Sometimes I captured a nice effect.



Other times I didn't. Those blurry light and dark blobs on the grass are white ducks and black hens.



This area is so rural you need a sign just to warn you of an approaching sign.



All the farmer's fields are dead, patiently waiting until next spring to be reborn.



Growth, harvest and rebirth, the unchanging cycle of hundreds of years.

Today's Video

Easthampton explores the bizarre.