Posted on 11/18/2014 8:30:53 AM PST by maggief
The ObamaCare consultant drawing fire for mocking the “stupidity of the American voter” visited the White House on nearly two dozen occasions and met with President Obama in the West Wing, according to a review of visitor logs.
MIT professor Jonathan Gruber held a series of high-level meetings with administration officials beginning in 2009 and extending through June of this year.
During the height of 2009’s ObamaCare debate, Gruber met repeatedly with former Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orzag, National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, and Jeanne Lambrew, the deputy director of the White House Office of Health Reform, among other officials. He also participated in a meeting of economists with President Obama.
In subsequent trips, Gruber received tours of the West Wing and residence and had breakfast at the White House mess, an exclusive West Wing cafeteria. He also met with Jason Furman, who now chairs the Council of Economic Advisers, and NancyAnn DeParle, the White House's point person on ObamaCare’s implementation.
The visitor logs, which are publicly available but were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, show Gruber has visited the White House 21 times during the Obama presidency. Some of the records are incomplete — missing details about when Gruber entered or exited the complex — so it’s possible that some of those visits did not occur. http://online.wsj.com/articles/health-adviser-gruber-logged-several-white-house-visits-1416270949
The visits are also likely to generate new questions for the administration, which has worked hard to distance themselves from Gruber since his comments first surfaced.
At a press conference in Australia over the weekend, Obama dismissed Gruber as “some adviser who never worked on our staff.” Press secretary Josh Earnest said he disagreed “vigorously” with Gruber's comments.
In a series of academic lectures, Gruber said the ObamaCare bill was a “tortured way to make sure the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes,” essentially acknowledging that Democrats spun the penalties associated with the individual mandate as a fine, rather than a tax, for political reasons.
“If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies,” Gruber said. “So it’s written to do that.”
Gruber went on to say the bill might also have lost political momentum if voters realized that in insurance plans, healthier individuals pay more to subsidize the sick, who cost more to insure.
“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber continued. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to get anything to pass.”
Gruber later apologized for the comments in an interview with MSNBC.
“The comments in the video were made at an academic conference,” Gruber said. “I was speaking off the cuff. I basically spoke inappropriately. I regret having made those comments.”
Allies of President Obama have acknowledged that the comments have done some harm.
A new Gallup poll released Monday showed approval of ObamaCare at an all-time low, with just 37 percent of respondents saying they approved of the law and 56 percent saying they disapproved.
“It’s not good,” former White House press secretary Jay Carney told CNN. “It doesn’t help when someone who helped write not only ObamaCare, the president’s Affordable Care Act, but the precursor to it, which was Gov. Romney’s health care reform initiative in Massachusetts, speaks from the ivory tower with remarkable hubris about the American voter and, by extension, the American Congress.”
Gruber is proof that the Dems/Progressives cannot survive without deceit and lies.
Was there between visits by the IRS director
Obama elected twice “stupidity of the American voter”.
Bookmark
Pretty much a blackout ...
ABC, NBC Ignore Gruber’s Numerous W.H. Visits, CBS Barely Covers
-PJ
Uh oh ...
6:10am ET
STEVE RATTNER: Jonathan Gruber was, back in the day, in 2009, the guru on health care, as you said. He designed the Massachusetts plan for Romney. I think if you go back and look at the Washington Post or the New York Times or anything from that period, you will find Jonathan Gruber’s name all over it, as both someone who’s the leading expert on health care quoted by everybody, and as someone who the White House was using — I don’t think we knew the dollar numbers he was paid at the time — but I remember that when I was in the White House, he was certainly viewed as an important figure in helping to put Obamacare together. And so, it’s exactly what you said. The problem is not that Gruber helped them put Obamacare together, because he was the man. The problem is what he said in the last two weeks and how the White House has handled it.
Jefferson was not always one to adhere to this principle. As Secretary of State, Jefferson leaked damaging information for publication about his rival Hamilton, effectively ruining Hamilton’s reputation and destroying him as Presidential material. Then President Washington asked Jefferson for any leads as to the source of the negative material on Hamilton and Jefferson sat silent.
Limbaugh unleashed: Obama is a 'sociopathic' liar
"Limbaugh paraphrased Paul Newman’s character in the 1973 film “The Sting,” who noted “the key to the con is that it’s never over. You never let the person you conned know he’s been conned. Never. The con goes on. Well, that’s what’s happening here. They have run a giant con game on the population of this country of Obamacare, and they are continuing to run the con. They are not giving it up.” “Obama is now fully exposed as nothing more, in common parlance, as a lying con man.”"
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How the WH Used Jonathan Gruber’s Work to Orchestrate the Appearance of Broad Consensus
Far more troubling, however, is the lack of disclosure on the part of the White House, the Senate, the DNC and other Democratic leaders who distributed Gruber’s work and cited it as independent validation of their proposals, orchestrating the appearance of broad consensus when in fact it was all part of the same effort.
The White House is placing a giant collective bet on Gruber’s “assumptions” to justify key portions of the Senate bill, which they allowed people to believe was independent verification. Now that we know that Gruber’s work was not that of an independent analyst but rather work performed as a contractor to the White House and paid for by taxpayers, it should be made publicly available so others can judge its merits.
Gruber began negotiating a sole-source contract with the Department of Health and Human Services in February of 2009, for which he was ultimately paid $392,600. The contract called for Gruber to use his statistical model for evaluating alternatives “derived from the President’s health reform proposal.” It was not a research grant, but rather a consulting contract to advise the White House Office of Health Reform, headed by Obama’s health care czar, Nancy-Ann DeParle, to “develop proposals” for health care reform.
How did the feedback loop work? Well, take Gruber’s appearance before the Senate HELP Committee on November 2, 2009, for which he used his microsimulation model to make calculations about small business insurance coverage for his testimony. On the same day, Gruber released an analysis of the House health care bill, which he sent to Ezra Klein of the Washington Post. Ezra published an excerpt.
White House blogger Jesse Lee then promoted both Gruber’s Senate testimony and Ezra Klein’s article on the White House blog. “We thought it would all be a little more open and transparent if we went ahead and published what our focus will be for the day” he said, pointing to Gruber’s “objective analysis.” The “transparent” part apparently stopped when everyone got to Gruber’s contractual relationship to the White House, which nobody in the three-hit triangle bothered to disclose.
see entire article for more...
FR thread:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3228278/posts
Steve Rattner: Jonathan Gruber was ‘the man’ on Obamacare
Politico ^ | November 18, 2014 | By KENDALL BREITMAN
Gruber: (10/17/13) “Politically, you just literally cannot do … transparent financing, transparent spending. I mean, this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If the CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. So it was written to do that.”
Obama: (11/16/14) “And I think it’s fair to say there was not a provision in the healthcare law that was not extensively debated and was fully transparent.”
Obama didn’t know him. Gruber was there for the buffet. /S
“Johnny, this is my brother, Fredo.”
“We never met.”
Thanks for the ping. Rattner was running a con on the auto bailout too. They took a 5 million dollar car dealership from a Repub and gave it to a Democrat.
See Limgaugh article
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3228157/posts
They have run a giant con game on the population of this country of Obamacare, and they are continuing to run the con. They are not giving it up.” “Obama is now fully exposed as nothing more, in common parlance, as a lying con man.”
I did not have health care relations with that man, Mr. Gruber.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24933.html
Why is Steve Rattner resigning from White House auto czar post?
By EAMON JAVERS | 7/15/09
EXCERPT
One possibility raised by insiders: He did it for the money.
Rattner, a former New York Times reporter who went on to found the multibillion-dollar Quadrangle Group private equity firm before joining the Obama administration, shepherded both Chrysler and General Motors through enormous and complicated bankruptcies. In a Wall Street culture of swaggering deal makers, Rattner is now the swaggering-ist.
“Can you imagine the amount of money he can make now?” gasped one industry insider. “These guys live for the deal, and this was the biggest deal ever. He’s at the peak of his marketability right now — he’s ‘Steve Rattner, the guy who turned around General Motors.’”
The General Motors bankruptcy is actually the fourth-largest bankruptcy ever, behind Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual and WorldCom. But it’s the biggest industrial company to go through Chapter 11, and there are few companies with the same name recognition. Insiders suspect Rattner’s turnaround skills could net him tens of millions of dollars on Wall Street in coming years.
The second possibility: He’s running for office.
Geithner’s statement hinted as much, saying, “I hope that he takes another opportunity to bring his unique skills to government service in the future.” Rattner has long been known to harbor political ambitions, but there’s no clear political path for him right now in New York. One insider speculated that Rattner is the first player on the bench to help fill out a second-term Obama Cabinet. But a lot can happen between now and then, which brings us to the third possibility.
He’s outrunning a scandal.
Rattner’s name surfaced as part of a joint Securities and Exchange Commission and New York state investigation into whether kickbacks were given as part of his firm’s participation in a $122 billion state pension fund. Rattner has not been accused of any wrongdoing. But The Wall Street Journal reported in April that Rattner held a 2004 meeting with a “politically connected consultant about a finder’s fee.” Later, the firm received an investment from the state pension fund and paid fees of $1.1 million. That’s the kind of thing that political opponents can use to great advantage.
And of course, you can never rule out one last possibility — that the timing was just as Geithner laid out in his statement: “With the emergence of both General Motors and Chrysler from bankruptcy, we enter a new phase of the government’s unprecedented and temporary involvement in the automotive industry.”
Rattner was outrunning the scandal is right. The owner of that 5 million dollar car dealership had a lawsuit and very nearly exposed Obama’s ineligibility, but lost the lawsuit (likely a bought off judge).
They are running the biggest scam in history - they go from on industry to the next to “transform” it. And then they invent some new scams to inflict damage to existing business.
The old - “it’s broken” and “it needs fixing” is the trail to follow on transformation.
Gruber wasn’t saying the Americans were stupid so much as he was saying “we are the con artists” and we are experts at it through experience.
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