Obama Spending $700,000 to Convince Seniors Health Care Bill is Good

In the wake of two polls showing seniors skeptical of health reform, the Obama administration has made a $700,000 national cable ad buy, featuring Andy Griffith talking about the Medicare benefits within the law, aimed at selling a key voting block on new provisions.

“With the new health care law, more good things are coming — free checkups, lower prescription costs and better ways to protect us and Medicare from fraud,” Griffith says in the 30-second spot, which went live today and is part of a Medicare open enrollment campaign that will continue through December.

The first run is on 4 national cable networks — CNN, Weather Channel, Lifetime and Hallmark — and will expand to further networks in coming months.

Recent polls have shown seniors to be the demographic most skeptical of the new health reform law. Just over one-third believe that the law allows for death panels or “allow a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare,” a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found Thursday.

Forty-six percent of seniors surveyed viewed the law unfavorably, compared with 38 percent who viewed it favorably. - Politico Story

Already Looking at Repealing Parts of Health Care Bill

House Democrats proposed repealing a piece of the health care overhaul Friday, a move designed to thwart Republican efforts to do the same thing and declare an early victory in their efforts to repeal the whole law.

Democrats proposed repealing new IRS reporting requirements that small business has warned would be overly burdensome. But they attached a new tax on Americans conducting business overseas— essentially a poison pill for Republicans who are unlikely to support a new tax.

The Democrats hold the majority in the house, but it was brought up on a procedural rule requiring two-thirds support. It failed, 241-154, largely on party lines with Republicans in opposition.

It is nevertheless the first time Democrats have gone on record in support of repealing a piece of the health care law, which was passed just four months ago.

Neither party really likes the provision of the health law at issue, which would require businesses to file 1099 tax forms for all transactions with vendors that cumulatively total over $600.

Due for implementation in 2012, the 1099 provision would raise $19 billion over 10 years to pay for the health care overhaul. - Politico Story

Obama Administrations Plan of Amnesty for Illegals?

Republicans are seizing on an internal memo they say is further evidence the Obama administration wants to bypass a gridlocked Congress and use its executive powers to grant “back-door amnesty” to thousands of illegal immigrants.

But administration officials tried to downplay the significance of the draft memo Friday, reiterating that they have no plans to grant permanent residency to the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S.

Written by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officials to the agency’s director, the memo discusses ways the administration – facing the reality that immigration reform is all but dead this year – could grant illegal immigrants permanent status, including indefinitely delaying deportation or issuing green cards.

“This memorandum offers administrative relief options to promote family unity, foster economic growth, achieve significant process improvements and reduce the threat of removal for certain individuals present in the United States without authorization,” states the memo, which was addressed to Director Alejandro N. Mayorkas. “In the absence of comprehensive immigration reform, USCIS can extend benefits and/or protections to many individuals and groups by issuing new guidance and regulations.” - Politico Story

Rep. Anthony Weiner Goes Ballistic on the House Floor

Economy Slows Even as Obama Touts Success

(CBS/AP) U.S. gross domestic product increased at an annual rate of 2.4 percent in the second quarter of this year. That lackluster performance was less than the 2.5 percent economists had forecast.

The report Friday is confirming investors' belief that the economic recovery is weakening as unemployment remains high and government stimulus programs end.

But also found in the latest government figures is that the recession was deeper than previously thought.

The Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis, in revisions issued Friday, estimates the economy shrank 2.6 percent last year - the steepest drop since 1946.

That's worse than the 2.4 percent decline originally estimated.

The economy's plunge underscores why the unemployment rate surged to 10.1 percent in October, a 26-year high.

The revisions in gross domestic product, or GDP, now show zero growth in 2008. That compares with a 0.4 percent gain previously estimated. The economy also grew less in 2007 (1.9 percent) than earlier thought (2.1 percent).

For all three years, consumers spent less and home builders cut more deeply than had been thought. Those factors help explain the downward revisions on the economy.

The revisions also show that struggling state and local governments cut spending more last year than previously thought, and they spent less in 2007 and 2008. - CBS News Story

Obama DOJ Working to Keep Military Votes Un-Counted?

The Department of Justice is ignoring a new law aimed at protecting the right of American soldiers to vote, according to two former DOJ attorneys who say states are being encouraged to use waivers to bypass the new federal Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act.

The MOVE Act, enacted last October, ensures that servicemen and women serving overseas have ample time to get in their absentee ballots. The result of the DOJ's alleged inaction in enforcing the act, say Eric Eversole and J. Christian Adams — both former litigation attorneys for the DOJ’s Voting Section — could be that thousands of soldiers' ballots will arrive too late to be counted.

"It is an absolute shame that the section appears to be spending more time finding ways to avoid the MOVE Act, rather than finding ways to ensure that military voters will have their votes counted," said Eversole, director of the Military Voter Protection Project, a new organization devoted to ensuring military voting rights. "The Voting Section seems to have forgotten that it has an obligation to enforce federal law, not to find and raise arguments for states to avoid these laws." - FOX News Story

Obama's New Law Cuts Down on Transparency

So much for transparency.

Under a little-noticed provision of the recently passed financial-reform legislation, the Securities and Exchange Commission

no longer has to comply with virtually all requests for information releases from the public, including those filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The law, signed last week by President Obama, exempts the SEC from disclosing records or information derived from "surveillance, risk assessments, or other regulatory and oversight activities." Given that the SEC is a regulatory body, the provision covers almost every action by the agency, lawyers say. Congress and federal agencies can request information, but the public cannot.

That argument comes despite the President saying that one of the cornerstones of the sweeping new legislation was more transparent financial markets. Indeed, in touting the new law, Obama specifically said it would “increase transparency in financial dealings."

The SEC cited the new law Tuesday in a FOIA action brought by FOX Business Network. Steven Mintz, founding partner of law firm Mintz & Gold LLC in New York, lamented what he described as “the backroom deal that was cut between Congress and the SEC to keep the SEC’s failures secret. The only losers here are the American public.” - FOX News Story

Howard Dean Calls Fox Racist

Main Content

Dean: Fox News “racist” - POLITICO Live: Dean: Fox News “racist”

July 25, 2010

Categories:

• Bad behavior

Dean: Fox News “racist”

Fox News’ handling of the Shirley Sherrod controversy “was absolutely racist,” former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean charged on Sunday.

Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Dean, who's also a former Democratic National Committee chairman and hero of liberals, asserted Fox News failed to vet video footage of a speech misleadingly excerpted to make it appear that Sherrod was boasting of using her post as an Agriculture Department official to discriminate against a white farmer.

“I don’t think Newt Gingrich is a racist, and I don’t think you’re a racist,” Dean told Fox News host Chris Wallace, “but Fox News did something that was absolutely racist. They took a — they had an obligation to find out what was really in the clip. They had been pushing a theme of black racism with this phony Black Panther crap and this business and this Sotomayor and all this other stuff.”

When Wallace interrupted Dean to point out that Fox News did not air the excerpted Sherrod footage until after the Obama administration had fired her based on it, Dean shot back: “It was about to go on Glenn Beck, which is what the administration was afraid of.” - Politico Story