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Unable to post text from a Gannett newspaper. To summarize, Moveon.org is trying to derail Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen's consideration for Health and Human Services Secretary. They claim Bredesen gutted TennCare, the state insurance program for the uninsured. Bredesen did cut services in TennCare to keep it solvent. He's a democrat who leans more towards fiscal conservatism than your typical beltway Dem. He has repeatedly refused to get on the "we need an income tax" bandwagon and simply said we need to live within our means. Link to Story

It's Worse Than We Thought By Doug Patton February 10, 2009 Perhaps it was all the hoopla about the historic nature of Barack Obama's presidency. Maybe the hype of election night and all that talk about wishing our first black president well actually made us all believe, for just a fleeting moment in time, that things would not be as bad as we feared they would be. It turns out they are worse. -snip- McCaughey reports that the bill calls for all medical treatments to be tracked electronically by a new federal bureaucracy known as the National Coordinator of Health...

Despite Daschle, Health Reform To Be a ‘Central Focus’ of Obama BudgetFebruary 9, 2009, 9:29 am Posted by Sarah Rubenstein Tom Daschle’s recent withdrawal from the HHS nomination has some people worried about the prospects for major health reform. Those folks may take some solace in something a senior administration official told the Treatment, the New Republic’s nifty health-care blog: Health care will be a “central focus” of Obama’s first budget proposal. The specifics are far from clear, but the comment is a signal that the administration isn’t giving up on health reform. In anonymous interviews with the New Republic,...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Kathleen Sebelius, the pro-abortion governor of Kansas who has been criticized for supporting late-term abortions, is now seen as the most likely pick for Health Secretary. Should President Barack Obama select her, it would add to his growing pro-abortion record as president. Obama must find a new Secretary of the Health and Human Services Department because his previous selection, pro-abortion former Sen. Tom Daschle, removed his name from consideration after a scandal over his not paying taxes properly. Pro-life groups complained about the Daschle nomination because the senator backed abortion and could craft a federal health...

What a start for Obama By Ralph R. ReilandMonday, February 9, 2009 "Well, That Certainly Didn't Take Long" was the headline on Maureen Dowd's column in The New York Times last Wednesday.Dowd, unswervingly a Bush-basher and pro-Obama over the past two years, was referring to Obama's success in knocking himself off his elevated pedestal within two weeks of his inauguration.Obama and his "arrogant attitude" went "SPLAT" (caps in Dowd's original) after a "cascade of appointments who 'forgot' to pay taxes" and the development of a "helter-skelter stimulus package." Rasmussen Reports survey on Feb. 2 found that only 37 percent of...

For 12 years I collected taxes for the federal government. I was a field officer, knocking on doors in every kind of neighborhood, from gated subdivision to dilapidated trailer park. I collected millions of dollars, some of it voluntarily repaid to the Treasury, some after a bit of friendly persuasion, and some only after I took something. A car. A boat. A house. There was no profile of your typical delinquent taxpayer in the thousands of cases I worked. White, black, rich, poor, young, old, sick, healthy . . . the only things they had in common were that they...

An IRS survey finds that nearly nine in 10 Americans think it is "not at all" acceptable to cheat on your taxes. Although the survey was conducted in late August, its release comes as Tom Daschle, President Barack Obama's nominee to be Health and Human Services secretary, has acknowledged failing to pay more than $120,000 in taxes. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had similar problems on a smaller scale.

My sources tell me President Obama had a heads-up on Tom Daschle's tax problems nine days before they came out in the press. I'm also told that Daschle offered to step aside as Obama's health and human services secretary nominee before the story got out, but that Obama, who thinks of Daschle as some kind of father figure, said "no." If that's how it happened, then the new president wins the Rookie of the Week award, hands down. He should have accepted Daschle's offer then and there. Obama was being loyal. But in this business, sooner or later you learn...

"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe." —President Obama, Feb. 4Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill. And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the...

Health Care Politics: The Obama White House had high hopes that Tom Daschle could push (or sneak) its reform scheme into law. Sounds a little like the Hillarycare syndrome to us.Looking back on the scope of Daschle's tax transgressions, you might wonder why the president stuck with him as long as he did. Here's a guess: Obama needed a legislative technician, and Daschle fit the bill. As one insider, John Podesta, told the Washington Post, Daschle "was the right guy for the job of leading the department (of Health and Human Services) and finally getting health care reform across the...

Writing in the National Journal Magazine, political analyst Charlie Cook opines that President Barack Obama had better start playing his own game, or his administration is going to get labeled incompetent. Cook, who edits the respected "Cook Political Report," writes that, with such stains on the record as Sen. Tom Daschle’s withdrawal as Health and Human Services secretary nominee, embarrassing disclosures about Treasury nominee Timothy Geithner’s taxes, and a stimulus package that has run up against a wall of criticism, President Obama may be setting himself up for the shortest honeymoon in presidential history.

Today the African-American lady who is the mother of one of the victims of the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole refused to meet with Obama in the wake of the throwing out of the case against the Jihadist bomb-master due to a recent Executive Order by Obama regarding Guantanamo. What else have we seen in just two weeks? What else can go wrong?

Picture the scene: a dignified Ted Kennedy stands beside President Barack Obama on a brisk, late winter day in the Rose Garden. Mr. Obama laments the events that caused him to withdraw the nomination of his anointed healthcare-reform czar, former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, as Health and Human Services Secretary. Reaching back to the lofty rhetoric of his campaign, he implores his audience to look past his own lapse in judgment and seize the opportunity to implement sweeping national reform that puts health insurance within reach for the millions already uninsured – and the millions more whose coverage is...

WASHINGTON -- Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill. And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall...

Tom Daschle hasn't always been driven around in corporate paid limos. Once upon a time, back in the days of political expediency, Tommy D could barely afford floormats and Penzoil. Before he began telling us how to treat our health lives, he was telling us how to live our financial lives. In this timely YouTube recovery, Tom railed on the ills of Washington's limousine-elite, a mere decade before he became one. link...Get your dirty farm hands off my paintjob!... Don't hate Tom Daschle because he changed. Hate Tom Daschle because he is didn't pay his taxes, tried to get his...

“Nobody is perfect” was the not-so-profound observation of White House press secretary Robert Gibbs over the past several days as he tried to fend off criticism of the tax troubles of three top appointees. One of the three -- Timothy Geithner -- survived congressional and public scrutiny and was confirmed as secretary of treasury. But former South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle -- who made a bundle in speaking fees and giving advice to health-care companies after he was defeated for re-election -- felt compelled to bow out from his nomination as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services...

President Obama, who swept to the White House on a message of hope and inspiration, is struggling to contend with a different emotion among Americans -- anger. Livid about their own vanished jobs and decimated retirement accounts, people across the country are being subjected to story after story about the excesses of the wealthy: the $18 billion paid out in Wall Street bonuses last year, the $35,000 chest of drawers for the Merrill Lynch chief executive's office, the planned Wells Fargo retreat in Las Vegas. This week, they got a new target: an Obama Cabinet nominee who had earned millions...

Reading this morning's dispatches from the scene of the Daschle crash -- everyone gingerly stepping through the wreckage, trying to comprehend the forces that generated such a highlight-reel wipeout -- it seems obvious that it had to end this way. It ended because the alternative was class warfare (enthusiastically stoked, no doubt, by partisans and media loudmouths). Yeah: A Shays Rebellion for our time. Peasants with pitchforks. Tom Daschle had to be jettisoned in an attempt to stave off a tax revolt that could potentially drain the Treasury faster than even the porkiest "recovery" bill. Officially, he withdrew without being...

Andrea Mitchell feels badly for tax-dodgin’ Tom Daschle. She really does. “I just got off the phone with Tom Daschle,” she said sympathetically on MSNBC. “And it was an emotional conversation…it sounded as though he were tearful, overwrought.” When Republican Senator Jim DeMint contended that Democrat support for Daschle’s nomination had wavered, Mitchell was clearly upset. “You can say that the Democrats were uncomfortable as well,” Mitchell lectured, “but they were all supporting him publicly.” “So this does read to the public as though the Republicans went after this man,” she wondered aloud, “someone that the President very much wanted,...

In the end, Tom Daschle had to go, not because of his tax problems, but because he had allowed a glimpse inside the Obama sausage factory. And what folks saw could have made even a certain peanut plant look pristine by comparison. It can be argued that Daschle's tax avoidance was less egregious than Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's, even though the amount was substantially more....