Posted on 07/22/2009 6:30:59 AM PDT by NMEwithin
A telling episode recounted by Senate Finance ranking member Charles Grassley reveals the Obama administration might be more worried than they are letting on that a Republican senator's comparison of the healthcare overhaul to Waterloo might be dangerously close to the truth.
Grassley said he spoke with a Democratic House member last week who shared Obama's bleak reaction during a private meeting to reports that some factions of House Democrats were lining up to stall or even take down the overhaul unless leaders made major changes.
"Let's just lay everything on the table," Grassley said. "A Democrat congressman last week told me after a conversation with the president that the president had trouble in the House of Representatives, and it wasn't going to pass if there weren't some changes made ... and the president says, 'You're going to destroy my presidency.' "
(Excerpt) Read more at nationaljournal.com ...
If he doesn't know what is in the bill, how can he know that NOT passing it will be his Waterloo?
If it does pass, it will be our waterloo as a nation.
"All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth....
could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?
I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad.
If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.
As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
Abraham Lincoln
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
“We rescued the economy,”
Conventional wisdom would make you think that the way this is negatively sweeping across the blogs, Oblahblah would back away from making a statement like that. However, his ego won’t let him and he’ll probably say it anyway. Our difficulty will be getting the State Run Media and Republicans to repeat it endlessly as the economy continues to nose dive. Like the Clintons (only to a greater extent), Oblahblah has been used to having complete and total media support and can say pretty much anything and not be called on it. Remember all of those Clinton speeches where he would sound so eloquent, but when it was parsed out, he said nothing?
It's the Democrat way. Look at their history. Why should we expect anything different?
I perhaps agree on the timing but the Waterloo metaphor is well-suited. This guy acts more like a Napolean than a U.S. President. Destroy his Presidency? Doubt it. Slow down his Marxist agenda? I most certainly hope and pray so.
Sometimes ZERO forgets his own jive talkin from the day before. It’s the nature of talking in lies.
Demint destroyed America’s future with his boasting.
It’s not about Blue Dog courage. I wouldn’t trust their courage as far as I can throw Obama’s 30-ton ego.
What it’s about is the constituents of the Blue Dog Democrats learning about what’s in these bills, indeed, learning the fact that Congress isn’t even writing bills anymore but that the lobbyists and the congressional staff are creating huge slush funds of unheard of amounts of money to be doled out by bureaucrats to control the intimate details of everyone’s life for decades to come.
It’s the constituents of the Blue Dog Democrats who hold the key. If the BDDs understand that their electoral success is tied to the defeat of these “bills,” they aren’t going to sacrifice their futures to save Zero’s butt (which is what “his presidency” is—his butt).
But if they think that crafting a “compromise” that gets 90% of Zero’s agenda through while giving the impression that the “evil” first draft was defeated will placate voters, get them reelected while also placating BamBam,
THEY’LL DO IT.
Information is the key here. People have to inform people, their friends, family, students, employers what’s really in these “bills.” And then people have to push back at their legislators.
But the “courage of the Blue Dog Democrats”—that’s not worth wasting any of your time on. Political forces have to win this battle, as they always have to win or lose political battles.
Courage and Democrats do not fit in the same breath.
The “blue dogs” will fold, they are Democrats after all. They have no moral compass.
“and the president says, ‘You’re going to destroy my presidency.’ “
I guess if threats don’t work, groveling and whining might. What a horrible excuse for a man!
The ONLY good thing that can come of this will be Republicans retaking both houses of Congress in the next election.
Kerry's idea is similar to a proposal pushed in 1994 by former Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., and approved by the Finance Committee that would tax the difference between the average health insurance premium in a region and insurers' higher-cost plans.
Unions have come out heavily against that proposal because of the potential for higher costs to be passed down to workers. Most big companies offer their own insurance plans to employees, meaning the pain could be spread beyond the insurance industry.
An industry source expressed concern that "self-insured" company plans would be victimized, noting a 2008 Kaiser Family Foundation survey that found 77 percent of firms with more than 200 employees fund their own workers' benefits, rather than contract with an outside insurer. That figure goes up for firms with 1,000 or more workers, where the vast majority are self-insured, said Marisa Milton, vice president for healthcare policy and government relations at the HR Policy Association.
Finance members are looking at the exclusion that protects employees from paying taxes on employer-based health benefits to try to reduce the growth of healthcare spending, but have run into pushback from Democratic leaders and Obama.
LOL
>and the president says, ‘You’re going to destroy my presidency.’
And that’s bad _HOW_?
I agree. We need to call those Senators.
How can they vote on a bill they haven’t read and the President doesn’t know what is in it but says you must vote for it.
It boogles my mind that such a sweeping overhaul is getting rushed through.
The government can’t do anything right that they oversee...they aren’t going to get health care right either. It will be one big nightmare.
Brilliant idea, and anyone running who wants to win will run on this.
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