George Rebane

Our President’s lies on the costs and benefits of Obamacare are shredding whatever government credibility remains about the nature of our new national healthcare program.  The chief community organizer (CCO) sold us his bill of goods with lavish promises of lower healthcare costs.  Only the hardcore and terminally left believed that fiction when it was poured over the country.  Americans overwhelmingly rejected that giant step toward socialized medicine.  Now it turns out, according to our CCO that “ – we knew that”.  Knew what?  Well, that healthcare costs for all taxpayers were going rise with Obamacare.  If he, like the rest of us, knew that, why did he tell a bald-faced lie?  (That’s a rhetorical question to which we all know the answer, not to be confused with some of the real toughies that occasionally get sprinkled in.)

Now his mouthpiece Kathleen Sebelius, Sec Health and Human Services, is caught zigging while the CCO zags.  She is threatening insurance companies with new pogroms if they inform their customers of premium increases required by healthcare costs that continue to skyrocket instead of coming down in the age of Obamacare – “there will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases.”  Misinformation, from where??!!  The upcoming election is driving the socialists to distraction attempting manage their conflicting messages.  The main purpose is to get eyes off Obamacare and onto insurance costs, which were never the real culprit in the nation’s high cost of healthcare.  All of this is laid out in the Cato Institute’s Bad Medicine – A Guide to the Real Costs and Consequences of the New Healthcare Law.  Our ignorance about this is and always has been a matter of choice.

Barry Pruett reports here that Supervisor Ted Owen has stated publicly his support for Proposition 23.  Ted told me a couple of weeks ago at the Republican BBQ that he was in favor of Prop23 to suspend the remainder of the job killer AB32 that is hanging over California’s crippled economy.  But at that time his position was not yet for publication.  Supervisor Owen joins Supervisor John Spencer in their public declarations for Prop23.

The local left has made Prop23 into a political divide, and correctly so since AB32 is a poster child piece of progressive legislation that promotes California’s bankruptcy, increases costs at all levels, and tightens the government’s command and control screws on our economy.  It’s good to see that the ‘relevance to Nevada County’ argument has now become laughable, and people know that there is no outstanding BoS resolution preventing Board action.  Now if only the remaining supervisors would declare their positions, then that may give courage to outfits like the NCCA and ERC to come out from under their desks.  And then who knows, more people will learn about Prop23 before November rolls around.

Another example of ‘never mind the message, get the messenger’ came rolling in with the recent news that the lapdog media of the ruling class is notching up its calls for Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin to be pulled from their pulpits.  Today’s American Thinker details here the new nasty heights this campaign to silence has achieved (h/t to Russ Steele).  This is of a piece with the recent RR post on the workings of the liberal mind.  It confirms that at all levels, the collectivist campaign follows Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – divert attention from the message by immediately attacking by name and denigrating the messenger.

It’s odd how all such contentious liberals are also expert psychoanalysts in that they claim deep and intimate knowledge of the ‘actual’ and ‘real’ thoughts that go through a particular person’s mind.  The fruits of this expertise they are happy to share with their public.  And given their revealed ‘truth’, they then proceed merrily to excoriate the messenger while hopefully leaving the message unnoticed in the dust.  Evidence for this phenomenon as practiced by the local left is liberally (pun intended) available in the comment streams on these pages.