If you receive this and you hate it and you don’t want to ever read it no matter what...that is fine; email me back and you will be deleted from my list (which is almost at the maximum anyway).

I attempt to post a new issue each Sunday by 2 or 3 pm central standard time (I sometimes fail at this attempt).

I try to include factual material only, along with my opinions (it should be clear which is which). I make an attempt to include as much of this week’s news as I possibly can. The first set of columns are intentionally designed for a quick read.

I do not accept any advertising nor do I charge for this publication. I write this principally to blow off steam in a nation where its people seemed have collectively lost their minds.

Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, makes it clear that a value added tax is on the table to fund the healthcare bill.

The CBO has scored the non-legalese version of the health care bill to actually reduce the deficit; this means, there will be more people provided healthcare insurance, and yet, somehow, it will cost less.

It appears as though the very man Obama picked for the job to make a recommendation for Afghanistan (General McChrystal) gave the President a report which has been essentially sitting on the president’s desk for 2 months , and that the president is still unable to make a decision about it. The overall strategy, supposedly set in stone by the President last march, is now being reevaluated.

Although most news services did not cover the small protest of doctors in Washington D.C. the previous week, they all covered the doctors who came to the White House this week, as guests of the President, ostensibly in support of Obama care.

House Republicans tried to pass a resolution to oust Rangel from his chairmanship of the powerful tax-writing Ways and Means Committee pending an Ethics Committee investigation into a long and stinging list of alleged wrongdoing. Democrats blocked this measure. Allegations are that he failed to report $1.3 million of income to the IRS. Rangel has given, from his election fund, money to 3 of the 5 ethics committee members.

Bill O’Reilly calls for Attorney General Eric Holder to launch a full-on investigation of ACORN, instead of the CIA.

"It's not April 1, is it?" Anonymous White House Aide when told that President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

“President Obama has come out for a longer school year; well, that’s one way to get kids to stop singing songs praising you.” Joni Miller.

Charles Krauthammer: “When you hear the speaker of the house say that we have saved or created many jobs, you notice she said "many," because she didn't have a clue what that number is. And the number is entirely unknown. It's angels on the head of a pin. We have lost jobs...But the reality is the one city in the country that is increasing employment is Washington, where they're hiring bureaucrats who are going to decide how other Americans are going to be running their lives.”

Charlie Rose to Nancy Pelosi, “Does a value added tax have any appeal to you?” She answered, “I would say, put everything on the table and subject it to the scrutiny that it deserves....in the scheme of things, I think it is fair to look at a value added tax.”

David Axelrod, top Obama advisor, about Obama receving the Nobel Peace Prize: “Yes, it's unusual, but there are a lot of unusual things that have happened over the past few years.”

Nobel Peace Prize committee statement concerning their choice of Barrack Obama as their choice for the prize: "His diplomacy is founded in the concept of those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitude that are shared by the majority of the world's population. For 108 years the Nobel Committee has sought precisely the international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman. The committee endorses Obama's appeal that now is the time for all of us to take a share of responsibility for a global response for global challenges."

Medea Benjamin, Code Pink co-founder, said: "We would leave with the same parameters of an exit strategy but we might perhaps be more flexible about a timeline... So many people are saying that, 'If the U.S. troops left - the country would collapse. We'd go into a civil war.' A palpable sense of fear, that is making us start to reconsider that." Although I would like to tie this to the left being in love with Obama; but Medea made this statement the day after she debated Afghanistan with Bill O’Reilly, and she took the opposite stance that night.

Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat Congressman of Missouri, when yielding the floor, “And now I yield 3 minutes to my friend, the chairman of the subcommittee of the strategic forces, Mr. Lungeman (?), so stick it up your a**.” The mic was apparently more sensitive than Skelton realized.

George Will on Obama, “All I am saying is, the world adores him and ignores him.”

It could be that the President may take the advice of Joe Biden over General McChrystal with regards to the approach to the war in Afghanistan, even though the very approach which Biden is suggesting (more drones and fewer men) is an area of McChrystal’s expertise.

In case you have not heard this, this is part of a news report by WJR in Detroit, interviewing people in line for Obama money:

Steve Crowder, funny and informative (this time, it is about Obama increasing the length of the school day and the school year):

In case you did not see Michelle Obama on Sesame Street, this is kind of funny (one of the comments is, “Big Bird is a racist.”):

Rush Limbaugh on the background for this Detroit situation (along with the people standing in line for Obama money) (a lot of good stuff is covered here, but the sound and video are out of synch):

Kimberly Kagan appeared on the Journal Editorial Report on FoxNews yesterday, and gave a full-on justification for troop increases in Afghanistan. It may take a moment before you take her seriously, as she looks like Minnie Driver doing a character; but she appears to know her stuff.

If you like facts and figures (like me), this is a good interview by Greta Van Susteren of Republican Representative Pete Hoekstra, wherein he compares the Congressional health care choices to what GM union makers get.

Great discussion on O’Reilly about ACORN with Tammy Bruce and Leslie Marshall (includes the talking points):

Glenn Beck on Who Is Robert McChesney? Our government is looking to go to war with the press (the press which opposes the government).

Kids from the Ron Clark academy singing about healthcare on CNN (it is not really as bad as it has been portrayed to be):

Gays have figured out that they way to get into the grammar schools is to conflate bullying with gay parents, so that the concept of gayness can be introduced under the banner of, prevent bullying. This is a political agenda. This is a very excellent discussion on Hannity, which mentions that (1) Oct. 8 is Harry Hay day and (2) October is Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered month. This is slowly and quietly finding its way into school curriculums. A lot of the discussion is about our safe school czar, Kevin Jennings.

“Kelly Osborne has turned down an offer to pose nude in Playboy; so, sorry Atheists, this proves that there really is a God.” (News busters).

This made me laugh out loud; it may not please liberals, however (it will open up in WMP):

1) The Democratic party always tries to sell itself as the party with heart, concerned for, among other things, collateral damage in war. However, Joe Biden supports more attacks by drones and a reduction of on-the-ground troops in Afghanistan, which is going to increase the number of innocents killed, as well as increase animosity toward the United States.

2) Many are suggesting that the Nobel Peace Prize award to President Obama was a means of keeping him on track in terms of looking at things globally as opposed to seeing them from the perspective of a nation’s president.

3) Do you recall that Congress used to have a government run cafeteria which they had to shut down and turn private? Now, if they cannot run a cafeteria...

4) If reducing healthcare insurance is important to you, the idea of making every insurance company accept people with preconditions is going to my healthcare costs skyrocket. Let’s say that anyone could buy auto insurance without a concern for the preconditions (e.g., just having been in an auto wreck) or house insurance without preconditions (buy it after your house burns to the ground). How would that affect your cost?

5) After a quick glance as the so-called factcheck.org, it appears as though this is a shill organization for the left. For instance, they said that Obama was telling the truth when he said that no illegal aliens would be covered by the new healthcare bill (which will be a conglomeration of several bills along with additional ideas added to the original bill). However, as a former constitutional professor, President Obama knows that you cannot have a service provided to American citizens only. Anything subsidized by government is available to all by previous court decisions. So, even if there is a clause, “Illegal aliens will not be able to qualify for any of the programs herein describe in this healthcare bill,” that provision will be ruled unconstitutional and be removed by the courts within a few years.

6) On FoxNews, over this past week, Cal Thomas quoted the Bible verse, “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God” and Bill O’Reilly spoke of man’s innate imperfection as well. Where is this found on any other news station?

7) We passed a Stimulus Bill which did not stimulate the economy. We passed an incredibly high 2009 budget which did nothing to stimulate the economy. What happens when we pass a massively expensive healthcare bill which does not solve any of the problems it purports to solve?

8) Deficit neutral has become a slogan, like choice and competition; it has nothing to do with reality.

9) Okay, if the recession is still in full swing, why does the stock market keep going up? Two reasons: (1) the stock market dropped a long, long ways, so many stocks are still bargains out there; and (2) when companies lay off employees, this improves their balance sheets.

10) Most of us have heard that, 40–49,000 Americans are dying in the streets due to lack of healthcare insurance. Here is how this figure was arrived at: from a small sample, it was determined that there was a 0.3% difference between those who died with healthcare insurance and those who died without it, well within the margin of error. Then that number was extrapolated to apply to the estimates of those who lack healthcare insurance. It is an extremely dishonest statistic.

In the past, deficits have typically been about 3% of GDP (even under President Bush, who was actually a little below average). The $1.4 trillion dollar deficit which Obama has is triple last years deficit and 9.9% of GDP.

According to the CBO estimations, 94% of the people in the U.S. will be covered with healthcare insurance by the year 2019. This means there will still be 20–25,000,000 without healthcare coverage. Recall that I have run the numbers for you before. There are somewhere between 5,000,000 and 15,000,000 American citizens who lack healthcare insurance and would ve a hard time getting if for whatever reason. Simply giving these people a tax credit to purchase catastrophic healthcare insurance would cost around a quarter of a trillion dollars over a period of 10 years. Short and simple bill and less than a third of the cost of the current bill; and it actually target those whom liberals claim to care most about. Throw in some real reforms like tort reform, selling over state lines, and reducing regulations as opposed to increasing regulations, would pretty much pay for this people.

#3 is FoxNews ratings compared to ALL cable channels. It has been the #1 news cable news channel for a long time.

If Cap and Trade becomes law, this will cost the average American family anywhere from $1500–3100/year.

An individual healthcare policy will be taxed if it is $600/month or higher; and a family healthcare plan will be taxed if it is $700/month or higher. You may think that this leaves you out. Dick Morris points out that, not too many years in the future, this will be a normal price for healthcare insurance (a year or so of double-digit inflation will get us there in no time at all).

The Congressional Budget Office says the cost of Baucus bill, $829 billion over ten years.

By the year 2019, CBO says 94 percent of the American people would be covered, leaving about 23 million still uninsured.

Medicare would face cuts of $404 billion including $133 billion for Medicare Advantage, and a tax on high-priced or Cadillac insurance plans would raise $201 billion to pay for other reforms.

63% of voters nationwide say guaranteeing that no one is forced to change their health insurance coverage is a higher priority than giving consumers the choice of a "public option" health insurance company

CNN fact checks a Saturday Night Live skit because it derided President Obama. It never occurred to them to do this for skits which desired George W. Bush, Sarah, Palin, the Republican Congress, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, John McCain, Newt Gingrich,...have I left anyone out?

It was imperative that SNL do something with Obama and the peace prize, but this skit fell flat. All Obama’s apologies and everything which he has done with respect to Geogia and Honduras could have been recalled without distortion, and the comedy effect would have been better...and it would have given the CNN some facts to check as well.

Instead of sending Obama and his talking heads out, it appears as if there was an uptick in favor of the Democratic healthcare plan. Now, how exactly did that happen?

Evan Bayh, regularly noted in this column, spoke clearly and forcefully about using the military option against Iran.

Obama’s speech concerning his winning of the Nobel Peace prize struck all of the right notes. My only problem here is, I have no idea whether to believe him anymore when it comes to anything.

Yay to Obama and the Democrats for reinstating the Patriot Act, almost unchanged. They may have used this act to beat down George Bush, but, at the end of the day, they like it.

Shared-responsibility = you will buy a government -approved healthcare plan, no matter what.

Would you be surprised to learn that medicare denies a higher percentage of benefit recipients than any private insurance company?

You think that any of the proposed healthcare bills will lower your healthcare costs.

If you think the result of passing any of the Democrat healthcare bills will be more choice and competition.

If any sort of a healthcare bill passes, the mainstream media will stop talking about those who do not have healthcare insurance (although there will still be a substantial number of them) and little or nothing will be said about the massive tax increases which we face, despite promises otherwise.

If you think this Democratic Congress is done spending, think again. They will pass a second stimulus bill, but they will not call it a Stimulus Bill. They will call it the Jobs Recovery Bill (or something like that). It will have some stimulative effect.

News services are going to continue to tell you that we are at the end of the recession, yet unemployment will continue to grow and the private sector will not create new jobs. This will continue into 2010 at least.

Huckabee predicts that, when Israel strikes Iran, terror cells all over the world, including the United States, will spring into action, committed many acts of terror.

The Federal Trade Commission will hold a workshop December 1–2 entitled "How will journalism survive the Internet age?" Here are 3 of the topics to be discussed:

Are new or changed government policies needed to support optimal amounts and types of journalism, including public affairs coverage?

Should the tax code be modified to provide special status or tax breaks to all or certain types of news organizations?

Should the federal government provide additional funding for news organizations?

My most paranoid thoughts align with Rush’s, when it comes to Obama’s destruction of our economy—what if this is intentional?

Although it is a good thing to have some branch of the government giving us some sort of estimate as to how much this or that bill will cost us, there are several things that we ought to keep in mind about the CBO’s numbers with regards to one of the Healthcare bill versions

(1) It does not make sense—how do you cover more people, reduce precondition limitations, and somehow cost less than the present system. This is how things work in Bizarre world.

(2) The CBO tends to underestimate any governmental program which is scores. This may not be the problem of the CBO, but the results of the actual implementation of the program itself.

(3) The bill they scored did not have any of the legalese language, which they say is required in order to get a more accurate score.

(4) We are assuming that Congress will be able to somehow take $500,000,000 from Medicare (or however much; I have heard several different figures) without there being a problem. When was the last time Congress was able to cut back on any federal program? Never?

(5) Money starts being collected for the healthcare bill immediately, but the actual healthcare provisions will not kick in until after the next presidential election. So, we have 10 years of funding to cover about 7 years of the program. That is a one-time occurrence.

I think the big story here is how little the Patriot Act has changed given the fact that we have a large majority of Democrats in the house and the Senate and how liberal the leadership is.

We're retaining the roving wiretaps. We're retaining the telecom immunity, the fact that the telecom industry is not going to be subject to prosecution for helping the Bush administration. We are retaining the lone wolf provision, which means you don't have to show that a guy is a member of a group, a terror group, in order to wiretap him.

All the major provisions are retained. And as you said, the Obama administration behind the scenes is supporting the minimal - it's supporting the idea of no changes.

And that's a tribute to the Bush administration. Remember, this was passed a month-and-a-half after 9/11 in the heat and the fury of that time. It totally restructured the way we go after terrorism domestically, and it got it right.

Eight years afterwards, in retrospect, with liberals in the House and Senate, it is remaining almost intact. We have not had a second attack in the eight years and we have not had any significant scandals of abuse of these powers in debating the liberties of Americans. It is really quite a remarkable achievement.

Clearly we have a split in this administration between the presidential advisor to the White House and the military. That's obvious.

A lot of leaks from the White House dissing the commanders. You had a public reprimand from the secretary of defense to McChrystal, our commander in Afghanistan, in which he said publicly that advice ought to be given privately and juxtaposing the administration's position. McChrystal and Petraeus, who is the area commander, have recommended all in, meaning you have to do this the way Iraq was done. You have got to is have a surge of troops. You have to occupy the territory, and you have to protect the population, or else we lose the war.

And the reason it's important is McChrystal is the expert, the world's expert on the opposite kind of strategy. He did in Iraq the special ops stuff, the remote control, under the radar operations. Four years. He killed a lot of the bad guys. He is the world's expert on it. He knows its potential and its liabilities. If he tells you that his expertise in that area is useless, what you have to do is go to the other strategy, it's persuasive.

The administration is refusing that add size, at least up until now, because it means a costly year, year and a half, two years, as we had in Iraq with the surge, that it thinks that politically it cannot afford.

If all of this happened at the beginning of the administration, it would have been thoughtful. A new administration is going to review everything.

But after the president announced six months ago, I have a new strategy, here he is, I have a new commander, introducing him. We're going to go all out, I have concluded a review. All of this he says in March.

And then six months later he says I can't decide on the troops because I don't have a strategy. Well, then, you've got to ask yourself, what happened to the original strategy?

All of this agonizing, this Hamlet in the White House of trying to decide which way to go, it is scaring to death our allies in Pakistan, those who support us and want to push the counterinsurgency in Pakistan, and the average Afghan who has got to decide he doesn't like the Americans or the other guys, but he has to decide...

[This is a fantastic article, about how some powerful Democrats have managed to get their own states exempted from some of the more costly portions of the Healthcare bill]

How good is Sen. Max Baucus's health reform bill? So good that Democrats have made sure some of the most costly provisions don't apply to their own states.

The Senate Finance Committee is gearing up for a final vote next week, and Chairman Baucus now appears to have the Democratic votes to pass his bill. Getting this far has of course meant cutting deals, and those deals, it turns out, are illuminating. The senators are all for imposing "reform" on the nation, so long as it doesn't disadvantage their constituents.

A central feature of the Baucus bill is the vast expansion of state Medicaid programs. This is necessary, we are told, to cover more of the nation's uninsured. The provision has angered governors, since the federal government will cover only part of the expansion and stick fiscally strapped states with an additional $37 billion in costs. The "states, with our financial challenges right now, are not in a position to accept additional Medicaid responsibilities," griped Democratic Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland.

Poor Mr. Strickland. If only he lived in . . . Nevada! Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is worried about losing his seat next year, worked out a deal by which the federal government will pay all of his home state's additional Medicaid expenses for the next five years. Under the majority leader's very special formula, only three other states-Oregon, Rhode Island and Michigan-qualify for this perk, on the grounds, as Mr. Reid put it recently on the Senate floor, that they "are suffering more than most."

Tell that to Mr. Strickland, who is still trying to figure out how to close an $850 million budget hole, in a state with near 11% unemployment. And tell it to Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, who quipped: "I wonder how citizens in Wyoming, in California and Florida and other states will feel if they pay more taxes so that Nevadans can pay less taxes."

To pay the bill for his version of ObamaCare, Mr. Baucus's legislation would tax high-value insurance plans-a 40% tax on plans that cost more than $21,000 a year. Democrats argue it is reform to make those who can afford "luxury" health care chip in for those who can't afford any at all.

That is, unless you live in a state such as New York. That state, along with some others, has many high-value plans-in part because it boasts a lot of union members with "Cadillac" plans, in part because the state has imposed so many insurance regulations that even skimpy plans are expensive. Sen. Chuck Schumer didn't want a lot of angry overtaxed New Yorkers on his hands, so he and other similarly situated Democrats carved out a deal by which the threshold for this tax will be higher in their states. If you live in Kentucky, you get taxed at $21,000. If you live in Massachusetts you don't get taxed until $25,000. This carve-out is at least more sweeping, applying to 17 (largely blue) states, though that's cold comfort if you live in Louisville.

Mr. Baucus will also pay for his bill by socking it to pharmaceutical companies, on the principle that drug companies are filthy rich and should have to contribute to health care. The view is a bit different in New Jersey. The state's Web site boasts it is the "global epicenter" of the drug industry, where "15 of the world's 20 largest pharmaceutical companies have major facilities." And Sen. Bob Menendez, of the Garden State, seems concerned that his home-state employers are going to struggle to both pay their federal liabilities and to continue to grow and innovate. Thus Mr. Menendez's quiet deal for a $1 billion tax credit for companies investing in drug R&D.

The Baucus bill, we are assured by many Dems, will successfully "bend down" the health-care cost curve. Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow isn't counting on it when it comes to her constituents. She and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry included $5 billion in the bill for a reinsurance program designed to defray the medical costs of union members.

"This will help our employers, whether it's the auto industry or whether it's other industries, be able to lower their costs for early retirees," said Ms. Stabenow. She is apparently unaware that this is what the broader bill is supposed to do, even without $5 billion in union slush money.

So, health-care "reform" is good, smart and necessary, so long as it isn't fully applied to the states of the senators who are pushing it. The Democrats' growing problem is that somebody is ultimately going to have to pay, and Mr. Reid's bad example has given every one the same idea. "If Colorado has a fair claim on being treated the same way Nevada has been, of course we're going to ask to have that kind of treatment," promised Sen. Mark Udall, upon news of the Reid deal.

Most senators are saving up their special state demands for when the bill hits the Senate floor. At that point, we'll get an even better idea of how much health-care change Democrats truly believe in.

The U.S. House of Representatives leadership recently unveiled a mammoth 852-page blueprint for overhauling Americans' health care: the draft "Tri-Committee Health Reform Bill." It is the product of three major House Committees with jurisdiction over health policy--Education and Labor, Energy and Commerce, and Ways and Means. If enacted, this comprehensive legislation would amount to federal control of the health care sector of the economy, with the implementation of far-reaching policies impacting doctors and patients in the public as well as the private sector.

Like the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee bill,[1] the House bill would create a new public plan to compete with private health insurance in a national health insurance exchange; impose mandates on individuals and businesses to buy health insurance coverage or be subject to tax penalties; and allow the federal government to control, standardize, and regulate health insurance, defining what is and is not "acceptable coverage" for American citizens.

The bill would require the secretary of health and human services (HHS) to establish a "public health insurance option" to compete against private health plans on a "level playing field" in a national health insurance exchange. It would also expand eligibility for the existing Medicaid program up the income scale to 133 percent of the federal poverty level.

The public plan's payment to providers would be based on Medicare payment rates plus 5 percent. The Lewin Group estimates that, by using the Medicare payment rates and opening up the plan to all employees, as the bill would provide, the House bill could result in up to 113.5 million people losing private coverage.[2] Lewin estimates that cost shifting to private plans from the public plan would amount to an additional $460 per person for those remaining in private insurance,[3] while physician and hospital revenues, under such a scenario, would decline significantly.

Contrary to the House sponsors' claims, it is hard to imagine a "level playing field" where Congress creates a special government plan to compete against private health plans while also creating the rules for its competitors.

While the House bill would set up an account within the Treasury for the deposit of startup funds and premiums, the bill would also require taxpayers to retain the risks and depend on congressional restraint in the appropriation of additional taxpayer funds for the public plan. In light of recent congressional bailouts of automakers and financial institutions, belief in such restraint would amount to a triumph of imagination over experience.

The bill would create a National Health Insurance Exchange in order to "facilitate access of individuals and employers, through a transparent process, to a variety of choices of affordable quality health insurance, including a public insurance option."

Champions of state-based health reform have proposed a health insurance exchange to serve as a state-based administrative body--not a regulatory body--to provide comparative information on prices, plans and benefits; facilitate enrollment of individuals and employees; collect and transmit premiums payments; and thus reduce the administrative costs for small businesses and the individuals and families employed by them.[4] It would facilitate a defined contribution on the part of employers for their employees, enabling them to choose their own plan while securing the existing tax advantages of group health insurance.

This would enable individuals to buy and own the health plan they determine is best for them and thus be able to take it with them from job to job. This added portability in health insurance would, in and of itself, result in a dramatic reduction in the number of the uninsured, most of whom lost coverage due to changes in their employment situation. For some states, a health insurance exchange may be an appropriate remedy for a dysfunctional health insurance market.

But in the House bill, the health insurance exchange, governed by a commissioner, would be a national institution and function as a powerful regulatory agency. Combined with federal benefit setting and a public plan, it would effectively limit personal choice and reduce competition, as the federal government would erode private coverage and limit the kind of plans that could enter and compete in the market. States could only set up a state-based exchange with federal permission.

Under the House bill, Congress would not forge a federal-state partnership; rather, it would enact federal domination of the states. It would also undermine, not advance, state innovation in the provision of new health insurance options.

The House bill would require every American to have health insurance coverage that Congress would define as "acceptable coverage." Under the terms of the bill, existing coverage at the time of enactment would be "grandfathered," but health plans would be legally required to conform to federal standards over time. Eventually, health insurance in the individual market would no longer be considered "acceptable coverage."

Because Congress would centralize decision-making over health insurance in Washington, taxpayers can expect a replay of the frenzied special-interest lobbying that characterizes benefit mandate decisions in state legislatures and agencies.

In addition, government health benefit decisions often include coverage of controversial items such as abortion. A number of House Democrats are concerned that the House bill would become a vehicle for taxpayer subsidization of abortion coverage.[5]

The bill contains both an individual and an employer mandate. Under the terms of the bill, an individual would be required to enroll in an "acceptable" health plan or face a tax penalty. The only exception would be "hardship" cases. For an individual, the tax would be equal to 2 percent of their income up to the "national average premium amount." Such a mandate would amount to an unprecedented restriction on personal liberty.

"Medium and large" employers would be required to offer an "acceptable" health plan, under the terms and conditions of the House bill, or pay an "assumed" 8 percent payroll tax.[6] As economists generally note, the costs of an employer mandate are invariably passed onto employees in the form of wage or compensation reduction or even job loss. There is yet to be an econometric analysis of the impact of these provisions of the House bill.

The President has said repeatedly that if Americans like their private health insurance coverage, they would be able to keep it. But in fact, the incentives built into the House bill--a combination of mandates and the provision of a public plan--would guarantee that millions of Americans would lose their private coverage, regardless of their personal preferences.

In the Senate, the leading bill would add $1 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, while pushing millions of Americans out of their employer-based coverage. While the President insists that health care reform should be "deficit neutral," the cost of the House bill--both quantifiable and not--is yet unknown.

Robert E. Moffit, Ph.D., is Director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

[1]For a description of the key elements of the Senate bill, see Stuart M. Butler and Robert E. Moffit, "Why the Kennedy Health Bill Would Wreck Bipartisan Reform," Heritage Foundation WebMemo No. 2481, June 12, 2009, at http://www.heritage.org/research/healthcare/wm2481.cfm.

[2]John Sheils, "The Impact of The House Health Reform on Coverage and Provider Incomes," testimony before the Energy and Commerce Committee, U.S. House of Representatives, June 25, 2009, p. 1.

[3]Ibid., p. 12. The assumption is that all employees would be eligible for enrollment in the public plan and that the plan would use Medicare payment rates.

[4]For a discussion of the purpose and function of the state-based health insurance exchange options, see Robert E. Moffit, "The Rationale for a Statewide Health Insurance Exchange," Heritage Foundation WebMemo No. 1230, October 5, 2006, at http://www.heritage.org/research/healthcare/

wm1230.cfm. Some analysts describe the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP) as a national exchange, but in sharp contrast to the House bill, there is a wide variety of private benefit options( ranging from traditional plans to health savings accounts) and there is no government plan competing with private health insurance.

[5]"Without an explicit exclusion, abortion could be included in a government subsidized health care plan under general health care." Representative Dan Boren (D-OK) et al., letter to the Honorable Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, June 25, 2009.

My column today skewers the Democrat doctors’ lab-coat stunt on Monday — just the latest example of Obamacare stagecraft that we’ve seen over the last nine months. You’ll remember well the illustrated guide to Obamacare stage props, the Kabuki town halls orchestrated with the MSM, and Obama’s wildly exaggerated health care anecdotes. Obama’s last-ditch appeal to authority (using Center for American Progress-backed partisans dressed up as experts acting in their patients’ best interests) demonstrates the depths of White House desperation. As the NYPost editorial board put it this morning: “Glitz, charm and oratory may have won Obama last year’s election, but they’re not enough to run America.”

Lights, camera, agitprop! The curtains opened on yet another artfully-staged performance of Obamacare Theater this week. One hundred and fifty doctors took their places on the plush lawn outside the West Wing – many acting like Twilight groupies with cameras instead of credible medical professionals. The president approved the scenery: “I am thrilled to have all of you here today, and you look very spiffy in your coats.”

White House wardrobe assistants guaranteed the “spiffy.” As the New York Post’s Charles Hurt reported, the physicians “were told to bring their white lab coats to make sure that TV cameras captured the image.” President Obama’s aides hastily handed out costumes to those who came in suits or dresses before the doc-and-pony show began.

But while Halloween came early to the Potomac, these partisan single-payer activists in White House-supplied clothing aren’t fooling anyone.

Obama’s spin doctors belong to a group called “Doctors for America” (DFA), which reportedly supplied the white lab coats. The White House event was organized in conjunction with DFA and Organizing for America, Obama’s campaign outfit. OFA and DFA are behind a massive new Obamacare ad campaign, letter-writing campaign, and doctor recruitment campaign. The supposedly “grass-roots,” non-profit DFA is a spin-off of Doctors for Obama, a 2008 campaign arm that aggressively pushed the Democrats’ government health care takeover. DFA claims to have thousands of members with a “variety of backgrounds.” But there’s little diversity in their views on socialized medicine (98 percent want a taxpayer-funded public insurance option) – or in their political contributions.

DFA president and co-founder Dr. Vivek Murthy, an internal medicine physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an Instructor at Harvard Medical School, served as a member of the Obama Health Policy Advisory Committee and the Obama New England Steering Committee during the 2008 presidential campaign.

DFA vice president Dr. Alice Chen of Los Angeles is an Obama donor and avowed supporter of Organizing for America, Obama’s campaign shop run by the Democratic National Committee. On Monday, she posted on the OFA website with an appeal to Democrat activists for letters to the editor in support of Obama’s “health care reform.”

DFA “senior adviser” Jacob Hacker is an Obamacare architect who laughed at criticism of the plan being a Trojan Horse for single payer coverage. “It’s not a Trojan Horse, right” he retorted at a far Left Tides Foundation conference on health care. “It’s just right there! I’m telling you. We’re going to get there.”

And here’s a brief political donation history of other top DFA docs compiled by Brian Faughnan at theconservatives.com:

Dr. Hershey Garner (who stood on stage with Obama at the White House event): more than $10,000 in donations to Democratic candidates since 2001.

Dr. Amanda McKinney (who also flanked Obama at the White House event): $2,750 in donations to Democratic candidates since 2001.

Who unveiled “Doctors for America” earlier this spring? No, not ordinary citizens outside the Beltway. The decidedly un-grass-roots sponsors of the Doctors for America launch were Democrat Sen. Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and the left-wing Center for American Progress (which is run by liberal operative John Podesta and underwritten by far Left billionaire George Soros).

As I’ve noted before, CAP is a lead organization in the Health Care Action Now coalition, the Astroturfed “grass-roots” lobbying group for Obama’s health care takeover legislation run out of 1825 K Street in Washington, D.C. with a $40 million budget. CAP is also the parent group of Think Progress, the far Left website leading the smear campaign against fiscal conservative activists who protested at congressional town halls this summer. And several CAP alumni are now leading the Obamacare push at the Department of Health and Human Services, including special HHS assistant Michael Halle and HHS director Jeanne Lambrew, a former senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who worked on health policy in the Clinton Administration. CAP/HCAN’s most recent initiative? Bussing protesters to the private homes of health care executives last week to bully them over the public option — even as many health care executives line the pockets of Obama administration officials and allies lobbying on their behalf.

It’s all in keeping with the elaborate Kabuki productions that have marked Team Obama’s efforts to manufacture support for government-run health care. They’ve been doctoring it up from Day One.

Step right up, taxpayer, because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have a new deal for you. And don't worry-it will make housing more affordable and won't cost a dime. (Pardon us if you've heard this one before.)

Fan and Fred's latest excellent adventure is intended to help independent mortgage lenders that have been hard hit in the wake of the financial panic. These smaller players have seen their costs of capital rise and access to capital shrink. They never benefited like the big boys from bailout cash from Uncle Sam or the implicit backing of a too-big-to-fail guarantee. As a result, the three biggest U.S. mortgage lenders-Wells Fargo, Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase-now make more than half of all new home loans in the country.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve and now government-run Fannie and Freddie have been pushing mortgage rates down in a bid to buoy the housing market. These artificially low rates in turn have lowered the rate at which it's economical for a lender to borrow money to make home loans; this has also increased the squeeze on independent mortgage shops.

Thus the latest Fannie brainstorm: Launch a program to guarantee the short-term debt of these small mortgage lenders, provided they use the money to make mortgages approved by Fan and Fred. Keep in mind that Fan and Fred already guarantee the mortgages themselves. So this new program would pile another taxpayer liability on top of that one by guaranteeing the short-term debt of independent mortgage companies, too.

Now, some might say that in a world in which more than 90% of all mortgages are already taxpayer guaranteed, this is no big deal. If you insure the mortgage product, why not insure the lenders who created it too? Yet by that logic, the taxpayers might as well cut out the middle men and simply nationalize the entire mortgage industry. (On second thought, forget we mentioned that.)

Our point is that piling mortgage guarantee upon guarantee is going in precisely the wrong policy direction. If we are ever going to return to a private mortgage market, the feds need to begin to roll back their guarantees and market share. Yet the more guarantees that are made, the harder it will be to withdraw. This may be precisely what Fannie and Freddie and their Congressional patrons want, since these new guarantees will make it that much harder to reform them and reduce their sway in the housing market.

This also shows how one policy mistake typically begets another. Fannie and Freddie's guarantees and subsidies helped to create the housing disaster, which has led the Fed directly to purchase mortgage-backed securities and mess up the market for small mortgage lenders, which in turn is leading Fan and Fred to guarantee the debt of those small lenders. Market distortion is piled on market distortion until we have a mortgage industry that can't function without taxpayers being on the hook for every transaction.

The Chinese must look at all this and wonder why the crazy Americans think they can give anyone advice about how to run a market economy.

Be warned: Even people with good insurance will risk fines if mandatory insurance becomes the national law

My husband retired from IBM about a decade ago, and as we aren't old enough for Medicare we still buy our health insurance through the company. But IBM, with its typical courtesy, informed us recently that we will be fined by the state.

Why? Because Massachusetts requires every resident to have health insurance, and this year, without informing us directly, the state had changed the rules in a way that made our bare-bones policy no longer acceptable. Unless we ponied up for a pricier policy we neither need nor want-or enrolled in a government-sponsored insurance plan-we would have to pay $1,000 each year to the state.

My husband's response was muted; I was shaking mad. We hadn't imposed our health-care costs on anyone else, yet we were being fined ("taxed" was the word the letter used).

We've spent much of our lives putting away what money we could for retirement. We always intended to be self-sufficient. We've paid off the mortgage on our home, don't carry credit-card debt, and have savings in case of an emergency. We also have a regular monthly income of about $3,000, which includes an IBM pension. My husband, 61, earns a little money on the side, sometimes working as an electronics consultant on renewable energy projects. I'm 58 and make some money writing science books. We are not wealthy, but we aren't a risk of becoming a burden on society either. How did we become outlaws?

The turning point was three years ago, when then-Republican Gov. Mitt Romney pushed through the state legislature a health-care plan that he promised would provide universal coverage while lifting from the middle-class the burden of having to pay for those who do not have insurance. His argument was that the uninsured drove up the cost of health care for everyone by seeking care at emergency rooms and then skipping out on their medical bills. Hospitals make up for those unpaid bills by charging everyone else more than they otherwise would.

The central plank of the Romney plan was a mandate that required everyone to buy health insurance or pay a fine for posing a risk to society by walking around without coverage. There would be subsidies for those who couldn't afford insurance, and residents would be required to buy a minimum amount of health insurance, on the grounds that they might buy a policy that doesn't cover the cost of their care and end up skipping out on their medical bills. "We insist that everybody who drives a car has insurance, and cars are a lot less expensive than people," Mr. Romney told the Boston Globe in 2006.

Mr. Romney and Sen. Ted Kennedy publicly promised that the middle class-that is, people like us-would not be taxed and that our health-care costs would actually decrease if the plan became law.

My husband and I weren't convinced. It all seemed inane, but we are neither politically or socially conservative and figured the plan wouldn't affect us much. Besides, who could be against a plan that covers more people for less money?

For the first two years of the mandate, our IBM health insurance was seen as acceptable in the eyes of the state. This year the rules changed. The state requires that health plans cap out-of-pocket expenses for individuals (not including monthly premiums) at $2,000 a year. Our plan's cap is $2,500.

Ten years ago, we had excellent coverage through a more gold-plated plan. But we found that it was no longer worth paying the premiums and scaled back to a more modest policy. Today, we pay about $300 a month for catastrophic care. If we went with the next step up in plans offered to us by IBM, our monthly premium would increase to $800. We simply don't need to pay that kind of money for the amount of health care we actually consume.

Nonetheless, we now owe the state an extra $1,000. Ironically, that's about the extra amount we would pay out-of-pocket under our current plan if both of us actually fell ill in the same year.

We could choose a state-sponsored plan. It would mean paying more than what we pay now, but less than what IBM's next step up would cost. But we don't want to.

IBM seems like a rock of stability compared to the state of Massachusetts. It's apparent that state health-care policies can change at the whim of politicians in Boston, and we might not be able to adjust to the new rules. The way we figure it, if we sign up for a state-subsidized plan we will be at the mercy of the state.

So we are sticking with our plan and paying the tax. But what bothers me most is that a similar health-care mandate is being proposed in Washington, and some of the same promises that were made here are being made again-such as that the mandate will never hit middle-class folks with a new tax. When asked about the mandate, Maine Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe said recently, according to the New York Times, "It surprises me that we would have these high-level penalties on average Americans."

Well, I don't find it surprising. The mandate in Massachusetts was sold as something that wouldn't penalize people like my husband and me. But those political promises were only good for as long as it took to get the mandate enacted into law.

Mrs. Williams is co-author of "Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics and the Battle for Our Energy Future" (PublicAffairs, 2007).

Can you imagine what will happen when it becomes almost impossible to sell a used house? Congress’s new Cap and Trade bill is going to make that happen:

More divisiveness over Obama being chosen for the Nobel Peace Prize (good video with this):

This is why the Wall Street Journal is not about to go under, as are the other news services:

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi lets it slip out that there very well could be a value added tax (video included):

RUSH: You want to hear a funny story? This is from the Communist Party USA's Daily Worker, People's World magazine, People's World newspaper. This is from October 2nd: "Hundreds Rally to Stop Chrysler Plant Closing." In other words, the United Auto Workers is rallying against the United Auto Worker-owned Chrysler. The UAW owns it, and UA workers are rallying and protesting against themselves. I wondered what was going to happen here when the UAW, as owners, have to act like owners and shut down plants. I wonder what the rank-and-file is going to do. "'Build 'em where they sell 'em,' was the battle cry from hundreds of autoworkers and their supporters at a rally in front of Chrysler's Sterling Heights assembly plant on September 25th. The plant is eight miles north of Detroit, scheduled to close on December 2010, but the union here is aggressively working to reverse that decision with itself." This is hilarious. Unions striking against itself, potentially. Certainly protesting itself.

RUSH: Obama's liberal buddies are blocking a surge. This is from the blog at TheHill.com, the Briefing Room. "Nearly two dozen House liberals have signed onto a bill introduced this past week that would prohibit an increase of troops in Afghanistan. A bill introduced by Representative Barbara Lee (D-CA) Thursday would bar funding to increase troop level in Afghanistan beyond its current level. Lee and 21 lawmakers, largely from the liberal Congressional Progressive Caucus..."

Do they really need a separate liberal caucus in the House? Aren't they all liberal socialist jerks? They need their own separate caucus? They introduced the bill, H.R. 3699 on Thursday. Who is this? Jones. "James Jones, the national security advisor vowed that the president's decision on troops wouldn't be swayed by politics." Wait 'til you hear the next story. James Jones said, "I don't play politics. I certainly don't play it with national security, neither does anyone I know. I can assure you that the president of the United States is not playing to any political base." Mmm-hmm. Right. And here's the next story from the UK Telegraph. You would not expect to see this here in the US State-Controlled Media.

"According to sources close to the administration, General Stanley McChrystal shocked and angered presidential advisors with the bluntness of a speech given in London last week." Ohhhhh! So that 25-minute meeting aboard Air Force One was a dressing down! Obama flew all the way across the world to yell at his general. That's another thing I predicted: Hey, he was really there to talk to McChrystal. The Olympic thing was an afterthought. "The next day McChrystal was summoned to an awkward 25-minute face-to-face meeting on board Air Force One on the tarmac in Copenhagen, where the president had arrived to tout Chicago's unsuccessful Olympic bid." HIS unsuccessful Olympic bid. "In London, General McChrystal, who heads the 68,000 US troops in Afghanistan, as well as the 100,000 NATO forces, flatly rejected proposals to switch to a strategy more reliant on drone missile strikes and Special Forces operations against Al-Qaeda.

"In a public speech, the general told the Institute of International and Strategic Studies that the formula which is favored by Vice President Joe Biden would lead to Chaos-istan. When asked whether he would support it he said, 'The short answer is no.'" So the general appointed by Obama went public and said Biden doesn't know what he's talking about, essentially. He called the place Chaos-istan if Biden wins this. So what we have here is a battle in the administration between General McChrystal who is a genuine general, and General Biden, who's a general buffoon. And we got these 21 members of the House liberal caucus voting against any money for a new surge in Afghanistan. (laughing) And then there's this from the LA Times. This is great. This is Gregory Rodriguez. It's an opinion piece.

The headline says it all: "What America Needs is a Good Enemy -- An external threat is almost always a cure for National Disunity." We don't have any? We don't have any good enemies? "Where is Osama Bin Laden when we need him?" is how this piece opens. I kid you not. "Where is Osama Bin Laden when we need him?" That's like saying when Bush was president, somebody said, "Where's Lee Harvey Oswald when we need him?" Remember that? And that's of course when there were no problems with civility. "Don't get me wrong; in no way do I wish death and destruction on our country. But as I listen to the increasingly vitriolic and even seditious rhetoric coming from the political right," that would be me, of course, "I can't help thinking that we need a threatening external enemy to help us cohere as a nation -- a more looming threat than the almost vanished Al-Qaeda leader or even his recently arrested alleged minion from Denver. ...

"It's not pretty, but it's true. Both individual and collective identities are forged as much by declaring what and who you're against as what and who you are for. Although we certainly don't wish for violence on the group we identify with, there are times when we can acknowledge the social value of circling the wagons." Mr. Rodriguez, dude: The enemy that's in focus now on the part of the left is the United States as we know it. The big enemy that you and your buddies see when you look out across the world is the United States and its Constitution! That's the "enemy" that you and Obama and everybody is fighting. And we are not "attacking" my man. We wake up every day and we watch our Constitution and our country under assault and we defend it, and then you get all crying and moaning and whining about "the lack of the civility."

"With 9/11 less than a decade past, we've returned to our corners to fight it out among ourselves with a vengeance. ... Despite the fact that we have dangerous global enemies, the members of the disgruntled right seem content to find their primary enemies domestically." (laughing) Projection again. It's just the exact opposite. It's the left who sees us as the biggest enemy they face. "Though angry political dissent is an American tradition, the vitriol is reaching new levels. Last week, a columnist for a conservative website fantasized happily about a coup d'etat toppling President Obama. In the meantime, we all but ignored Bin Laden's most recent tape, and attention to the arrest and indictment of Afghan Denverite Najibullah Zazi on WMD conspiracy charges has been surprisingly low-key. Such blase responses..." We? We ignored Al-Qaeda? These guys don't even want to talk about Afghanistan. You don't want to talk about it. While we've got an enemy, we are at war in Afghanistan, we've got a guy in the LA Times wishing for a new enemy so we can all coalesce. It's breathtakingly ignorant.

RUSH: Now, one thing that we have to assume here -- well, can't assume it, I mean we know General McChrystal is serious, he's a general. General Biden is a buffoon. What we ought to do maybe is let's divide Afghanistan up into three parts, like General Biden wanted to do in Iraq. I remember Biden said he was going to stuff Iraq down Bush's throat. You remember that quote? "We're going to stuff this bill down his throat." Now, we have the worst Afghanistan attack in a year on our troops in Afghanistan. What McChrystal wants to do, he wants to shift US troops away from these remote outposts which is where the killings are taking place. McChrystal wants to shift troops away from those remote outposts that are difficult to defend and move them into more heavily populated areas as part of a new strategy to focus on protecting Afghan civilians and this is what Obama's waiting on. McChrystal goes out and makes speeches, Obama gets mad, I don't know if he's being petulant, I don't know if he just doesn't know how to play the Hardball Washington game.

Washington Post: National security advisor James Jones suggested yesterday the public campaign has nothing to do with politics. McChrystal is being shortsighted, comments effectively rejected a policy option that senior White House officials, including General Biden, are considering nearly eight years after the US invasion. It's Biden that wants to pull back in Afghanistan. And McChrystal says I don't want to sit here and be part of defeat. And then there's Petraeus. Military memo, New York Times: "'Voice of Bush's Favored General Is Now Harder to Hear.' -- Gen. David H. Petraeus, the face of the Iraq troop surge and a favorite of former President George W. Bush, spoke up or was called upon by President Obama 'several times' during the big Afghanistan strategy session in the Situation Room last week, one participant says, and will be back for two more meetings this week. But the general's closest associates say that underneath the surface of good relations, the celebrity commander faces a new reality in Mr. Obama's White House: He is still at the table, but in a very different seat."

Petraeus, page two of this story, is a military superstar. He's got the White House worried. Obama supposedly isn't, but Democrat political aides fear the presidential qualifications of Petraeus. He hasn't taken a public stand behind McChrystal yet, but he's leaving that bit of politics to others. But clearly we've got a bunch of people in the White House in totally over their heads on this and they are in fact making political calculations based on Obama's health care bill.

RUSH: Chip Reid of CBS News grilled Robert Gibbs on Stanley McChrystal, the general in Afghanistan, today at the White House Q&A. Chip Reid says, "Have you heard anybody complain or voice any concerns that General McChrystal is out there pushing his position publicly?"

GIBBS: No. I think that the president believes strongly that we have a process that is working, that we ought to take the time to get this right. As you heard Secretary Gates say, it has been since sometime in the mid-eighties since we actually had a strategy to deal with Afghanistan.

REID: If General McChrystal continues to go out and give speeches very forcefully giving his opinion on that that's fine with the administration and the president?

GIBBS: The president is comfortable with where we're at in this process and how we're going about, uhh, getting that strategy right.

REID: In his meeting on Air Force One with General McChrystal he did not in any way suggest that he should stop doing that?

GIBBS: The president had a very constructive meeting about what's going in Afghanistan not what's, uhh -- going on in, uhh, on cable television.

RUSH: Well, then how do you know what the hell happened, Bob, if you "didn't get a full download from" the president? But now here's the White House dumping on its own allies in cable television! Uh, take it back. He probably means what's going on at Fox. Back to the phones. This is Gil in Philadelphia. Welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Mega dittos from the land of the Philadelphia Phillies. Listen, I have a question for you. I'd like to make an observation. Have you noticed a word I don't hear batted around the way it used to be, and that is "quagmire"? And you know, of course, the word "quagmire" is an allusion to the word "Vietnam," which was fought 45 years ago by a left-wing, liberal president who fought a war of containment in order advance a social agenda politically. And I can't help but think that there are amazing similarities between the situation we were in 1965 and those we're in today.

CALLER: No. I mean that just as LBJ fought a war of containment that he was not resolved in winning in order to advance his political agenda -- which, of course was, you know, the Great Society -- so Barack Obama is fighting a war that he's not convinced he's going to win.

CALLER: So o he's fighting this war that has no intentions, evidently, of winning. You know, he can't afford to exactly lose it because it would really hurt him politically and him politically being hurt would hurt the health care initiative and, his entire agenda.

RUSH: Or LBJ. So you think it's a purposeful strategy here to use Afghanistan as a distraction while we don't win, we don't lose, to advance the social agenda? Well, I don't think it's purposeful at all. The point is that LBJ in memoirs that were written subsequently it's been revealed supposedly or alleged that he knew all along, you know, that he couldn't win the war in Vietnam but he didn't want to pull out because he wanted to keep certain Democrats on board for his Great Society policies. And the only way he could do that was to not necessarily win the war in Vietnam but fight the war in Vietnam.

RUSH: Well, I'll tell you what. I'm going to say that even though I don't quite get the analogy, I hope you're right. Because LBJ did not run for a second term. Because Vietnam's quagmire ruined him. Remember, LBJ lost Walter "Klondike." When Walter Klondike said we couldn't win the Vietnam War, LBJ happened to be watching in the White House, "Oh, I've lost Klondike. I can't win the war." So I don't see anybody in the media saying we've lost Afghanistan -- and, quite frankly, if we do lose Afghanistan, I see enough people in the media applauding it that it won't hurt. This Afghanistan business is an interesting thing 'cause I don't think he knows what he's doing. He's in this public spat with this general now, and he's got the general pit against Biden. In Vietnam, we lost 50,000 kids there, 50,000 troops, and we had maximum number of 500,000 over there at one time, and we're not going to be anywhere near that in Afghanistan. The war in Afghanistan has not been sold like Vietnam was. "Well, this is to stop the domino March of communism. We've gotta go in there and stop it over there," blah, blah, blah. Don't forget JFK actually started it to distract people from his affairs with Marilyn Monroe. So we have some parallels here that are not quite the same. But I hope your analogy is right, because if he follows the path of LBJ, he will not seek a second term, something I doubt. Bostic, North Carolina, Frank, welcome to the EIB Network. Great to have you here, sir.

CALLER: Hey, it's an honor to talk to you, Rush. I wanted to speak with you about the double standard in this country. Take somebody like David Letterman and he can fondle or have sex with somebody. And anybody else that is involved in any kind of sexual harassment, you have the National Organization for Women and you have all these different women's groups that come up to bat, where are they all at now?

RUSH: They're in the same spot they were when they were with Clinton, asking themselves, "Oh, my God, why not me?"

CALLER: Well, you know, I finally got a chance to talk to you and I'm tongue-tied. I'm really excited about being able to speak with you. It's an honor, and I think you're a patriot and a real American, and the things that I hear you say on the radio are the things that I was brought up on. And it's just a real privilege and I hope that you'll keep fighting for us.

RUSH: Thank you very much sir. As I assured a bunch of people on the sideline last night pregame before the Steelers-Chargers: "I am not quitting until every American agrees with me," which means, my friends, that I plan on immortality. I read the story on that last week and I'm going to do what it takes.

RUSH: All right, Tom in Freeland, Michigan, great to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Hi.

CALLER: Glad to meet you. I noticed on Stephanopoulos yesterday, I couldn't believe it. They were talking about justifying a war in Afghanistan with the purge, so on and so forth, and just as the conversation was tapering off Cokie Roberts said that President Obama would be abandoning the women that were, as we know, so subject to the wrath of the Taliban. With the chickification of America, as you have so aptly coined the phrase --

RUSH: A chickification which, by the way, I have resisted. It has not happened to me. Let's be clear about that.

CALLER: Now it's happened to war. Cokie Roberts wants our boys to die in Afghanistan for chickification reasons.

RUSH: Wait, wait. I find this fascinating. We can't pull out of Afghanistan because of betraying the women there. Cokie Roberts, I understand this. But she's not far off here. If we pull out of there now, every ally we've got -- and we've got our own spies over there and we've got contract agents working for us. We've got US military personnel on the ground. If we pull out of there, everybody that's worked for us is dead. Everybody that has supported us, I'm talking about Afghanistan people, I'm talking about Afghanis, they are dead if we pull out of there. Not just the women in their burqas and so forth. A lot of people dead if we pull out. Even children are taught this. You don't start something you're not prepared to finish. Obama, this is his now. We were there before he got there but he ramped this up and I'm wondering how much of it was genuine or because he thought he had to just because during the campaign the Democrats say we should never have been in Iraq, we should have been in Afghanistan. That's where we needed to be. Bush distracted us from the real problem. That's where Osama is. We need to going after Osama. Now they couldn't care less about Osama.

Now we got stories from the State-Controlled Media, Osama, he's a has-been, he's yesterday's news. Letterman is the man of the hour. Osama's nothing. We don't need to catch Osama. In fact, we don't even need to stay in Afghanistan. Why, it's a lose-lose over there. We gotta get out of there. He went over there ramped it up, chose his own general, McChrystal. Because even the fringe left was saying, Afghanistan's where we gotta go if we're going to go anywhere, and we gotta get out of Iraq. We got to close Gitmo, get out of Iraq. Afghanistan, that's what Bush didn't do. So he's kind of caught there now. Biden wants to pull out of there. If he lets Biden run this, if he doesn't listen to the general whose job it is to win these things, if he's not going to listen to him, then it's not just the women in Afghanistan who are going to be losers. The whole country will be losers, but the people that worked with us are certainly dead, if we pull out of there.

RUSH: "A noted geologist who coauthored the New York Times bestseller Sugar Busters has turned his attention to convincing Congress that carbon dioxide emissions are good for the Earth and don't cause global warming." I first came across this on a blog, it's at the US Snooze & World Report, the Washington Whispers column by Paul Bedard.

"Leighton Steward is on Capitol Hill this week armed with studies and his book 'Fire, Ice and Paradise' in a bid to show --" and, by the way, our official climatologist, Dr. Roy Spencer, is there as well trying to persuade members of the Senate that there is no manmade global warming and the culprit is not carbon dioxide. And he's trying to get these senators "working on the energy bill that the carbon dioxide cap-and-trade scheme could actually hurt the environment by reducing CO2 levels." Leighton Steward says, "I'm trying to kill the whole thing. We are tilting at windmills." And when I saw this -- and we've got a sound bite here, by the way, this afternoon on the Fox Business Network live, Stuart Varney spoke with Leighton Steward about cap and trade and Stuart Varney said to him, "You're saying that we need more CO2 emissions, that it would in fact be good for the environment?"

STEWARD: There is real good news out there that the Earth needs more CO2 if we want to green the Earth. Now, if cap-and-trade comes in and we really get successful in trying to reduce CO2, we will actually take food out of the mouths of people, and we will move in a direction of browning the Earth. I know that sounds unbelievable, but it's true.

RUSH: Why does it sound unbelievable? Only because there is a culture that has developed resulting from the hoax that CO2, which we exhale, is a poison and that it will destroy the climate. When in fact he's right, green things need it. They need it. Green things cannot live without CO2. I got to thinking about this and I think that these senators all know this. Now, there are probably some idiots in the Senate who probably have bought the hoax. I mean not all those guy's elevators go all the way to the top floor. Many of them are an order of fries short of a Happy Meal. But still they're there and they got elected. But most of them know full well this is a hoax, just like Obama knows his stimulus plan is not about creating jobs. Obama is a about creating economic stagnation and prolonging it. Obama is shepherding our economic decline. It's time to bring the United States in line with other nations around the world and so cap and trade, the global warming hoax, it's just part of the mix. It's all part of the methodology to get us into a pared-down economy, to raise taxes, to punish achievement, to penalize economic activity with higher taxes.

He said we're just tilting at windmills out there, Leighton Steward did. This is a noted geologist. I mean profoundly high reputation among his peers. He does bring a lot of truth to power when he goes and tells these guys. But all this legislation -- health care, for example, is not about health care, it's not about improving your health care, it's not about insuring more people. It's not about anything that they say it's about. It's about straitjacketing the US private sector, it's about straitjacketing our economy, it's about raping one-sixth the economy and putting it under the control of Barack Obama, peace be upon him. That's what all this is about. These are just mechanisms to make that happen. So Leighton Steward can go up there and he can tell 'em right and he can probably even convince them, those that don't agree with him that he's right and it won't matter because it's not about climate change. It's not about saving. It's about destroying, mark my words.

RUSH: Kimberley Strassel today, the Wall Street Journal: "How good is Sen. Max Baucus's health reform bill? So good that Democrats have made sure some of the most costly provisions don't apply to their own states. The Senate Finance Committee is gearing up for a final vote next week --" probably on Tuesday. "-- and Chairman Baucus now appears to have the Democratic votes to pass his bill. Getting this far has of course meant cutting deals, and those deals, it turns out, are illuminating. The senators are all for imposing 'reform' on the nation, so long as it doesn't disadvantage their constituents. A central feature of the Baucus bill is the vast expansion of state Medicaid programs. This is necessary, we are told, to cover more of the nation's uninsured. The provision has angered governors, since the federal government will cover only part of the expansion and stick fiscally strapped states with an additional $37 billion in costs. The 'states, with our financial challenges right now, are not in a position to accept additional Medicaid responsibilities,' griped Democratic Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland."

So the Baucus bill is simply shifting federal responsibilities to the states, making them pay for it and the states are all bankrupt now, too. "Poor Mr. Strickland. If only he lived in . . . Nevada! Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is worried about losing his seat next year, worked out a deal by which the federal government will pay all of his home state's additional Medicaid expenses for the next five years. Under the majority leader's very special formula, only three other states -- Oregon, Rhode Island and Michigan -- qualify for this perk, on the grounds, as Mr. Reid put it recently on the Senate floor, that they 'are suffering more than most.'" Well, wait a minute, now. I thought health care reform was health care reform. I thought it was a must. I thought we had to ensure these people. I thought we had to make sure they got coverage and treatment.

"Tell that to Mr. Strickland, who is still trying to figure out how to close an $850 million budget hole, in a state with near 11% unemployment. And tell it to Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, who quipped: 'I wonder how citizens in Wyoming, in California and Florida and other states will feel if they pay more taxes so that Nevadans can pay less taxes.' To pay the bill for his version of ObamaCare, Mr. Baucus's legislation would tax high-value insurance plans -- a 40% tax on plans that cost more than $21,000 a year." The so-called Cadillac plans. "Democrats argue it is reform to make those who can afford 'luxury' health care chip in for those who can't afford any at all. That is, unless you live in a state such as New York. That state, along with some others, has many high-value plans -- in part because it boasts a lot of union members with 'Cadillac' plans, in part because the state has imposed so many insurance regulations that even skimpy plans are expensive.

"Sen. Chuck Schumer didn't want a lot of angry overtaxed New Yorkers on his hands, so he and other similarly situated Democrats carved out a deal by which the threshold for this tax will be higher in their states. If you live in Kentucky, you get taxed at $21,000. If you live in Massachusetts you don't get taxed until $25,000. This carve-out is at least more sweeping, applying to 17 (largely blue) states, though that's cold comfort if you live in Louisville. . The Baucus bill, we are assured by many Dems, will successfully 'bend down' the health-care cost curve. Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow isn't counting on it when it comes to her constituents. She and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry included $5 billion in the bill for a reinsurance program designed to defray the medical costs of union members." Do you want me to keep going with this or do you get the picture?

So health care reform is good, it's smart, and necessary, so long as it isn't fully applied to the states of the senators who are pushing it. They know you don't want it. They know you're gonna hate it. They know that they are going to face hell when this is implemented and they are carving out exceptions for their constituents who will not be taxed like everybody else will. And while Obama is out there preening around with his Nobel Peace Prize, this is what they're doing in the United States Senate, and I, ladies and gentlemen, thought you should know.

RUSH: These are dark days for our nation, ladies and gentlemen. What a stack today. Obama's America! It's getting difficult to chronicle it all. It's tough enough learning about it all during show prep, and then it's even more difficult talking to you about it, but talking about it I must and so here we go. Great to have you with us, the EIB Network and Rush Limbaugh be here behind the Golden EIB Microphone. Telephone number if you want to be on the program is 800-282-2882. The e-mail address is ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

Well, they're just going nuts out there over CBO score of the Senate health... It's not a "bill" yet. It's draft. It's bogus! The whole thing is bogus! It's nuts. So taxing private insurers even more, taxing certain health care policies, taxing medical devices, slashing Medicare, and still millions of people be uninsured, that's the Senate Democrat plan. Right on, baby! Right on, right on, right on. Now, the taxes... Get this. This is a Senate bill. The taxes and the cuts, the tax increases and the Medicare cuts kick in immediately but the plan itself doesn't kick in until 2013. They do this for two reasons. It makes the ten-year projection look better than it would be had the program kicked in when the tax increases and the Medicare cuts kick in, and the people (laughing) are not going to realizes how awful the program is until after Obama's hopefully reelected in his mind in 2012.

'Cause there going to be a revolt. There's going to be a revolt once this hits, and so they're going to delay the actual implementation of the health care plan 'til 2013, but the tax increases and Medicare cuts happen immediately. And this isn't even the worst of it. The liberals want more. They want a faster government takeover. They want higher taxes. They want coverage for illegal aliens. Folks, if this is not fascism, then what the hell is it? This sure as hell is not democracy. You know, I said this once before and they went nuts out there in the Drive-By Media, the State-Controlled Media and their websites. In many ways this is a bloodless coup. In many ways, this is a nonmilitary coup. That is, there is no constitutional authority for the exercise of this kind of power over personal health decisions and private property. You have a single Congress trying to ram through permanent changes to our country by hook and by crook before the public understands the magnitude. And, of course, not a word from the liberal media, the State-Controlled Media. Instead they cheer all of it. These are dark days for our nation. Now, we have here this... I think this is Politico: Baucus Scores Big with CBO." The Drive-Bys are orgasmic over the CBO report. Listen to this montage we put together.

MAGGIE RODRIGUEZ: Democratic leaders are cheering a report that shows that the Senate Finance Committee's health care bill actually saves money.

BRIAN WILLIAMS: The budget deficit would actually be reduced by $81 billion if the plan were enacted.

DANA BASH: This is not only paid for but it actually, according to the Congressional Budget Office, this proposal reduces the deficit.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: The Democrats got good news on health care. The Congressional Budget Office said, in effect, the Senate's Finance Committee bill is fully paid for.

STEPHANOPOULOS: This news from the Congressional Budget Office is the biggest boost the White House has had in weeks.

RUSH: Folks, I cannot emphasize enough how totally fraudulent this is. There is no legislative language. The CBO scored nothing! It is a mirage. It's a score of a draft of a bill. There is no legislation. They scored nothing, And it's not even an official score. They're even admitting that it's an estimate! It's an estimate of a draft. Somebody got to the CBO on this after the boondoggle that they reported on the House side. Don't forget the CBO guy was brought up to the White House not long ago where he got his mind right with President Obama. the Democrats, as usual, cannot be honest about a single thing. They are trying to pull a fast one. The score of this bill is a sham. There is no legislative language. they just pulled it out of thin air -- and, of course, the media went right along with them hook and sinker. They are trying to con us.

They're in the midst of running a giant con game. They're not going to reduce the deficit. It's not "paid for." It's going to cost more. What government program ever pays for itself? What government program ever has? What government program ever comes in less than the projected cost? What government program has actually worked? I mean, these guys ought to be laughed out of town simply by the knowledge that the American people over a collective number of years have. (interruption) What are they playing now? On what? They're playing video of me on PMSNBC refusing to get a flu shot. And notice... Notice... (interruption) Yes, I see. Yes. Notice that they're using video of 85 pounds ago. I don't know why. (interruption) Sure they're probably celebrating I'm not going to take a flu shot, that's right.

I think they are worried about my health but why in the world cover me? I thought I was irrelevant. I thought I had no influence with anybody anymore. I know 40% of the parents don't want it for their kids and so forth. At any rate, The Politico has like four pages here of orgasmic reporting on the CBO score of a nonexistent piece of legislation. My friends, the Finance Committee hasn't even voted this out yet. They're going to do that on Tuesday. They can't score it. There's nothing to score! It's a draft. And, by the way, last night Boehner was on Fox. He was on Greta's show and he was mad. He said that there are 75 phantom amendments added to the Baucus health care bill by Democrat leaders without the knowledge of the Republican members of the committee. This was after the draft was voted on and passed.

They added 75 amendments, didn't tell the Republicans. This certainly isn't democracy. I don't know what this is. It's gotta be fascism. This is Republicans left out of this. Boehner was fit to be tied last night. Seventy-five amendments after the draft was voted out of the committee. The Republicans were not even told about it. And, you know, Boehner trying to call attention to this. And to add to the mix (deep sigh) Bob Dole has joined with Puff Daschle here to say we gotta get this done and we are going to get this done. "Former Kansas Sen. Bob Dole says 'there will be a signing ceremony' for a health care reform bill either late this year or early next." I am convinced Dole has no clue what's going on. I don't think Dole has the slightest idea.

He's just from this bit, the generation, "We gotta get a bill! Somebody proposed a bill. We gotta get a bill! Gotta pass it."

"Doesn't matter. We're here to pass bills. We pass bills. We write bills. We sign bills. We don't read 'em, but we sign 'em and we vote on 'em. We gotta get a bill."

I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt, by the way, holding that view. "Dole, 86, spoke with reporters after an hour-long speech at a health care reform summit sponsored by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City. He told the group that he and former Sens. Tom Daschle, Howard Baker, and George Mitchell..." Now, let's see here. Daschle is a disgraced Democrat, tax cheat, voted out of office by his own people. Howard Baker, Republican, moderate, middle-of-the-roader. George Mitchell, the most partisan Democrat in Washington when he was the Senate majority leader. They're going to "issue a statement later today urging Congress to enact health care reform as soon as possible."

This is from the statement. "'...Congress could be close to passing comprehensive health reform. The American people have waited decades and if

this moment passes us by, it may be decades more before there is another opportunity. The current approaches suggested by the Congress are far from perfect, but they do provide some basis on which Congress can move forward and we urge the joint leadership to get together for America's sake.' And he repeatedly blamed 'partisanship' for the failure to produce a bill so far." The Dem... Senator Dole? Senator Dole? Partisanship? The Republicans can't stop it, Senator! This is what's so maddening. What are you doing, Senator Dole? The Republicans can't stop this. Partisanship? Over in the House side -- and I've got the story somewhere here in the stack --150 Democrats still have "jitters" about the House version of this thing. Republicans can't stop anything! Partisanship?

"Dole repeated his opposition to a public option for health insurance, which he said..." (laughing) He's out there urging passage of the public option while he repeats his opposition to it? "...he said would drive private companies out of business." (interruption) Do what? This is not possible to make sense of this without saying something that I really don't want to say here about Senator Dole. I leave it to Democrats to make fun of people for their issues, like Corzine is running ads in the governor race there in New Jersey making fun of his opponent's weight. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We've got the relevant audio from -- that ad. "Dole repeated his opposition to a public option for health insurance, which he said would drive private companies out of business. And he said he's also worried about paying for the cost of health care reform, which is estimated at $800 billion to $1 trillion over ten years." Then how can you say that and then join with these Democrats and urge that we "get a bill"? Folks, this is tough enough to read this. It is doubly tough to tell you about it and then restrain myself and then remain civil.

RUSH: Get this, from State-Controlled Associated Press: "Al Qaeda's role in Afghanistan has faded after eight years of war. Gone is the once-formidable network of camps and safe houses where Osama bin Laden and his mostly Arab operatives trained thousands of young Muslims to wage a global jihad. The group is left with fewer than 100 core fighters, according to the Obama administration." Wait a second, none

of this makes any sense. Why don't we just declare victory and get the hell out of there then? But more than that -- and there's a bunch of stories like this out there today, "Al-Qaeda barely exists anymore, down to a hundred and some odd core fighters, they don't even really know where they all are."

Well, wait a minute, what about Abu Ghraib? What about Guantanamo Bay? What about American values declining? What about all the terrorists that we created by going into Iraq? What about all the terrorists that we recruited and created by the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and at Club Gitmo? I thought all during the Iraq war, ladies and gentlemen, that terrorist recruitment was skyrocketing because George W. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were torturing prisoners, and I thought this meant that our values around the world had sunk to a new low and the rest of the world despised us and the terrorists were angry as hell at us, and, as such, they were recruiting new Al-Qaeda members left and right. It was the worst thing we could have done. Those two prisons and Iraq. And now, with Obama in charge, in the midst of a total mess in Afghanistan, State-Controlled AP runs a story saying that Al-Qaeda's basically nonexistent?

Have you ever seen so much bad news and evidence that Barack Obama has the inside track on becoming the worst president in the nation's history? America will once again succeed when Obama admits his policies and his arrogance have failed. And, of course, neither of those two will happen as long as he's in the White House. I don't have enough time here to list Obama's failures, much less comment on them, and it's not even a list. This is a catalog. The demise of the US dollar, a planet that is getting cooler, and the president says he has to impose a deeper recession on the country to stop nonexistent warming. The record-breaking cold weather stories alone would take three hours to report today. Ski places are opening earlier than ever. The first snow day in Idaho today because of overwhelming snow. Global sea ice is normal. There's not any more of it, there's not any less of it than there has been in the past 30 years. There may be a decrease in the North Pole ice and an increase in South Pole ice but overall, global polar ice, volume is the same.

The possibility of a double-dip recession is really a probability now. We have the likelihood that there's going to be a big dip in commercial real estate coming down the pike in the next three to six months. And we got Bill Ayers out there -- this is really funny -- Bill Ayers is fishing for credit for writing Obama's so-called autobiography. Yeah, I don't buy this for a minute. Some blogger runs into Ayers at Reagan National Airport in Washington, identifies him or herself as a conservative. And Ayers blurts, "I wrote it. Why are you telling me this? I wrote it." I think Ayers is very much aware that all these people -- I think he's just trying to yank the chains of some gullible conservatives. But still even with Ayers doing this it's out there now. It's out there, mainstream, Ayers has put it there whether it's a bogus story or not. So we have that out there. States like Illinois are billions of dollars in debt, it's worse than it has been; unemployment is ascending. It's not descending after Obama's nonstimulating stimulus plan. Late-night comics are pounding the man they said there was nothing funny about, either him or his administration. The stories about degenerate czars have got Democrats on the warpath.

The man who said he had all the answers for Afghanistan now admits he doesn't have a clue and has endless meetings about something he said he'd solved a year ago. We got the mess at Gitmo. They're not going to close it down. They're going to get rid of Greg Craig for supposedly botching it. We got the Iranian situation and the nuke situation. The UN speech still has people reeling as to how shallow and narcissistic it was. And, speaking of narcissism, we have the Olympics debacle and the speech he gave. This is a joke of an administration except it's very, very real. I could go on and on and on listing all these problems. All this bad news, all of this evidence, it's an endless stream of evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Obama has failed already his country. And the only way America is going to succeed is for Obama to admit his failures and embrace what's made the country great, and that ain't going to happen.

RUSH: I meant to play this audio sound bite yesterday. I didn't get it in time. It's nobody's fault. We were just busy. I have it now. This is 2000 in Iowa at the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. It's an event there. It's audio of Obama's "safe schools" czar, Kevin Jennings. This is the guy that a 15-year-old kid approached him, "I'm having a problem. An older man is forcing his way on me with sex and so forth," and Jennings said, "That's fine. Are you using a condom?" and urged the 15-year-old to further the relationship and then said, "Later I saw this kid come back to school and every day had a big smile on his face! I knew I'd done a good thing." That's Obama's "safe schools" czar. So nine years ago Kevin Jennings is at this Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. He is criticizing schools for promoting heterosexuality. This is from a speech Kevin Jennings gave at this event in Iowa.

JENNINGS: I find it amazing this is on the ballot for a couple reasons. First of all, we all know what's REALLY promoted in our schools. Heterosexuality is promoted in our schools. Every time in our schools. Every time kids read Romeo & Juliet or they're urged to go to the prom or whatever it is, kids are aggressively recruited to be heterosexual in this country, and you know what? It doesn't work. The reality is that if schools could affect your sexual orientation there would have been no gay people in the first place. But there's still people out there who believe that myth because, you know what? It's easy to panic people if you make them think that they're after your kids.

RUSH: So he's gay, obviously, and heterosexuality is being promoted through vehicles like Romeo & Juliet. We're recruiting. They're recruiting heterosexuals. They're recruiting and promoting heterosexuals in the school, and this guy is now Obama's "safe schools" czar.

RUSH: Nashville, Tennessee, this is Tim. I'm glad you waited, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: All right. My wife had a hard time trying to understand why Obama's plan to "spread the wealth" was unfair. She couldn't see (sigh), you know, what was wrong with taking from those who have and giving to those who don't have so what I did was I simplified it for her. She's a woman that prides herself on education. She's working on a PhD at Vanderbilt and she makes excellent grades.

RUSH: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You are depressing me. Your wife's a PhD, working on a PhD, she makes excellent grades.

RUSH: No, it makes total sense that she would think what she thinks because the culture she's immersed herself in, academia, is teaching her this stuff.

CALLER: That's okay. Let me just show you what I did to bring her around. I said, "You know, what if you made a hundred on a test and another guy in your class made a 60? This guy has a failing mark and you have a high passing mark. Would it be fair to say 20 of your points, bring you down to an 80, give the 20 to the guy that made the 60 and bring him up to 80 and everything is equal?" She said, "No." I said, "Why?" She said, "Because I earned that grade." I said, "Don't you think rich people earned the money that they get?" And so she was speechless. She couldn't say anything. She'd said, "No, I earned it." I said, "Think about it, Baby. "You're bringing a guy up from a failing grade to a passing grade, and we gonna bring you down to his level." I said, "Now you apply that type of example with everybody in the classroom, everybody being the dumper. Nobody would ever get out of your class because everybody would have a failing grade." So she then understood the point I was trying to make. Sometimes you have to use other examples to get other people to think, you know, to try to get the point across of what you're trying to say. That's all I wanted to say.

RUSH: Well, you did a great job out there. I don't know how much you made her "think" as you made her "realize."

RUSH: Has this conversion held? Does she still get it now that you've explained it to her.

RUSH: Well, I tell you, if she goes back to class where she's studying for her PhD and she runs this story either by a fellow student -- or even worse, a professor -- the professor will say, "Well, here's what you shoulda said when your husband posed this question: 'The people who have a lot of money didn't earn it. They have stolen it.'" This is Obama's belief. This is why they've stolen it. They have unfairly taken what's not theirs. They haven't earned it. That's the whole point, they cheated and steal and had lied to get it and that's why he's going to take it from them and give the money to like these poor people lining up at Cobo Hall in Detroit for it. That's what he believes. You gotta stay on this, my man, because a professor's going to tell her that if she dares tell this story, and the professor is going to say, "Well, you can't compare wealth to grades because there isn't anybody else... You can't take somebody else's grade but you could take somebody else's money from them while they weren't looking. You could cheat 'em, you could steal." They'll work on them like this. This is going to be an ongoing thing. You did a great thing here, a great thing. You've taken a big, giant step here.

CALLER: Oh, yeah. Well, I just appreciate that. She doesn't like to listen to you because every time I turn on the radio, especially in the car, she says, "Turn it off! Turn it off! Turn it off. He makes my heart start rushing." I'm like, "Oh, my God." I said, "It's just a voice, a person that's talking on this radio." She said, "I can't stand it. He talks too loud." I'm like, "Whatever." I think sometimes she just don't want to listen because people are realists.

RUSH: Well, look, she's like a lot of people. Her worldview is safely wrapped inside a cocoon in which she lives, and if anything penetrates it that upsets this security blanket she's living in, you're right, she doesn't want it.

RUSH: She does not want to be challenged with anything that would question her beliefs.

CALLER: Well, I'm teaching the four kids, bringing them up in the right way, teaching them.

RUSH: God less you. This is a great call. I appreciate the fact that you're doing this, and I appreciate the fact that you called to tell us.

RUSH: Thank you, Tim, very much. Well, sometimes it's just a simple little explanation like that is all it takes when you make it personal.

RUSH: Now Saturday Night Live is making fun of Obama. Here's an interesting thing. Johnny Carson was loved, as you well know, and he was loved by the whole country. When Johnny Carson dumped on you, you were done. When Johnny Carson started making fun of you, you were done. Now, the reason that that happened -- see, I am a highly trained broadcast specialist and I understand these things. I understand how the art of broadcasting works. Carson was not a polarizing figure. I mean, he was a comedian, but Johnny Carson had a knack of waiting until the people got it. And then he let fly. I am not Johnny Carson. I don't wait for the people to get it. I help the people get it. And since I'm ahead of the people, half of them hate me. But we've been making fun of Obama for nine months, for a year-and-a-half. Finally Saturday Night Live cannot avoid it anymore. The guy is a joke in many, many ways.

It's so funny, even CNN fact-checked a Saturday Night Live skit. We have the audio coming up. MSNBC got their underwear in a wad over the Saturday Night Live skit and they did a whole discussion about it, about Saturday Night Live being mean to the president, going after him, and still these Obama hacks are complaining that talk radio cheered Obama's failure to win the Olympics for Chicago. Now, it's really too bad that these fools aren't more animated about winning the war in Afghanistan and lamenting the failure of this president to act like a commander-in-chief with young men and women dying on the battlefield. What do we have to do here? We have to get Mayor Daley to call Obama and tell him to focus on Afghanistan and do what needs to be done to win it? Is that what it's going to take, maybe a phone call from Valerie Jarrett? Obama has spent more time talking to liberal Democrat doctors dressed in white coats handed out by the White House than he has been talking to his generals.

And that stuff at the White House yesterday, you know, we learned now that these 150 doctors are all Obama contributors or supporters, or the vast majority of them are. They showed up, many of them showed up, as you know if you're invited to the White House, you show up in a coat and tie, you have reverence for the place. These guys did not bring their lab coats, their doctor jackets, their white coats, so the White House passed them out. The White House passed out white coats to the doctors who didn't bring theirs because it's all image and when I read the story I'm beginning to think maybe these guys aren't doctors, maybe they're just all actors because I know full well that the vast majority of doctors want no part of Obamacare, they want no part of any kind of a public option, they want no part of this at all.

So for you Obama hacks who are complaining about talk radio cheering his failure to win the Olympics for Chicago you have to understand something. We conservatives are rooting for our country, especially in the middle of a war, and we don't need lectures from hacks. Now, it's interesting today, Richard Cohen, Washington Post, Roger Simon, Politico, Bob Herbert, New York Times, all cream Obama today for basically having no gonads. Are you gonna lead, Barack? Are you up to the job, Barack? I'm thinking, now, what's bringing this on? It was only yesterday that we shared the story with you from the American Spectator that Obama's a beta male, not an alpha male. And that can be seen now in many, many news stories and these three guys chime in and I'll tell you what it is. They don't care about Afghanistan; they don't care about Obama leading on the world stage. What they care about is his domestic agenda and they're afraid he's going to blow the domestic agenda by blowing international events and national security events.

Obama has no foreign policy. This is what you gotta understand. Biden's it. That's comforting, is it not? Biden is our foreign policy. This general, McChrystal, I'm convinced now that this guy, McChrystal, leaked to Bob Woodward at the Washington Post. I think that's how it got out, because I think McChrystal -- I mean this is deadly serious stuff what's happening over there. This is not just Afghanistan. We got rolled over there and it's over, and I think this guy, trained general takes it very seriously. I think he's scared to death of what he's dealing with, folks, I really do and I think that's why he leaked his report. I'm just guessing, wild guess, but I think this general is scared to death of what he's dealing with in a commander-in-chief who has no foreign policy.

All he does is make international trips, give campaign speeches aimed at promoting himself. When he makes decisions about foreign policy they're counterintuitive. By that I mean he embraces the killers and the thugs and the dictators. He lectures, and worse, he admonishes our allies, the small-D democrats that are our allies around the world. I wonder if it will be said, because Roger Simon, Richard Cohen, Bob Herbert, I wonder if they will be called racist hatemongers today since they have criticized Obama. Because all these other Obama hacks have called us conservative talk show hosts racist hatemongers. That's going to be fascinating. By the way, we do have a message from the White House on the new Afghanistan strategery.

RUSH: The State-Controlled Media is having a cow over this harmless little bit on Saturday Night Live this past weekend. It's the actor/performer Fred Armisen, who doesn't do a good Obama impersonation, but he does portray Obama in this bit.

ARMISEN (as Obama): When you look at my record, it's very clear what I've done so far. And that is...nothing.

ARMISEN (as Obama): You think I'm making it up? Take a look at this checklist. Now, on my first day in office...

ARMISEN (as Obama): On my first day in office I said I'd close Guantanamo Bay. Is it closed yet? No.

ARMISEN (as Obama): I said we'd be out of Iraq. Are we? Not the last time I checked.

ARMISEN (as Obama): I said I'd make improvements in the war in Afghanistan. Is it better? No. I think it's actually worse.

RUSH: State-Controlled Media has its underwear in a wad. As I said, you need to take the skirt off of this guy if you're the media. You gotta stop protecting him. He's the quarterback. He's supposed to be a man, an alpha male, and they can't even get away with teasing him now on Saturday Night Live. They're whining that Saturday Night Live made the slightest bit of fun of Obama which is what Saturday Night Live does. For crying out loud, Will Ferrell is still out there making a living off of making fun of George W. Bush. So yesterday and last night here's a montage of a bunch of State-Controlled Media people whining about the Saturday Night Live bit.

WOLF BLITZER: How should this White House deal with a Saturday Night Live skit like this? Do they just ignore it?

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: With friends like these, the president does not need enemies. Saturday Night Live just skewered the president.

RICK SANCHEZ: What's insult to injury? It's when Saturday Night Live starts to take notice.

LARRY KING: Saturday Night Live skewered the president. Is it a sign of tough times to come?

STEPHANIE MILLER: This sketch missed the mark, because great comedy is based in truth. I'm like, "Are you kidding me?"

RUSH: (laughing) "There's a role for humor, but come on"? And whoever said, "the sketch missed the mark, because great comedy is based in truth? Everything they said in the sketch is true." Now, here's Eugene Robinson, Real Clear Politics. He's a columnist for the Washington Post: "Generals Need to Shut Up and Salute." Sure the generals need to shut up and salute unless they oppose Bush and the Iraq war and then the generals are supposed to stand up and be disobedient so that they can be praised by the likes of Eugene Robinson. The Saturday Night Live skit was even "fact-checked" by CNN! They fact-checked a comedy show to see if they lied about Obama.

WOMAN: Bill Adair, editor of PolitiFact.com, a nonpartisan fact-checking website that rates the statements of elected officials, says SNL missed the mark on some of its claims.

ADAIR: I think SNL tended to kind of gloss over what is a fair amount of progress by this administration about sending two additional brigades to Afghanistan. We rated that a promise kept. On Iraq, Saturday Night Live said, not done. And of course that's true, they're not done.

WOMAN: As for health care, Adair says SNL also got it wrong since that legislation is still installed in Congress. But Adair says the sketch did get some things right, like Guantanamo Bay.

WOMAN: We reached out to the White House for their reaction on this. They wouldn't comment.

RUSH: This is just unbelievable, folks. There are two different media worlds out there. You know, it's typified by what happened over the weekend when this BBC reporterette did not know that when I was talking Friday afternoon about Obama's failed bid to get the Olympics, "Barack Hussein Obama! Mmm, mmm, mmm!" They played that all over MSNBC, and this infobabe from BBC America was just beside herself. "That's so insidious," did she say? It was "insidious" to mention his middle name? She was totally clueless of this episode at the New Jersey school where the teacher indoctrinated the little kids to sing that song with those words. She was clueless. Now, how is it that I, El Rushbo...? I know everything they're doing in their world.

I don't have to read a website to tell me what happened on MSNBC. I don't need to read a website to tell me what happened on CNN or it's in the New York Times because I expose myself to all this stuff to find out what they're doing, because in a sense they are the enemy. These people only know what is in their little cocoon world. If they don't know about it, they don't report it -- obviously -- and if they don't report it, they don't know about it and they don't care to know about it. All they do, ladies and gentlemen, is read websites that summarize what's said on this show and others and then report what is said. They never even call us to ask, "Well, did you really say this? What did you mean by this? Were you trying to be funny? What's the point here?"

Very few do. Some do, but very few do. I certainly never heard from this babe Katty Kay at the BBC America. But she was just clueless. Now, stop and think about this: Those of us on our side of the aisle know everything they do. We read them, we watch them. They have no clue. They do everything they do for each other. The Sunday morning shows are nothing more than shows for everybody else in the media. They are not even for the audience. They're not even for the American people anymore. It's a closed circle. It is an inside-the-Beltway -- well, I should say inside-the-New York-Washington axis or corridor. That's who they program to and that's what they do. This woman did not know.

And I'll bet you a whole bunch of the State-Controlled Media does not to this day know that schoolchildren all over the country are being made to recite poems and sing songs in dedication to dear leader, "Barack Hussein Obama. Mmm, mmm, mmm." This is quite stunning, actually, when you consider how puffed up they think they are, how important they think they are, how smart they think they are, how aware. These are the people that say, "We need filters out there. You can't trust what you hear in talk radio. You can't trust what you read in the sewer of the Internet. You only need to trust us," and they don't even know what's going on. They haven't the slightest idea what's going on. And now, fact-checking a Saturday Night Live skit! Seriously fact-checking a Saturday Night Live skit! Breathtaking. Unbelievable. Except that it happened.

RUSH: Yonkers, this is Matthew, and you're next on the program. Great to have you here.

CALLER: Oh, thank you for taking my call. I just wanted to make a quick point about the SNL skit thing and the media going after them. I just think it was more of a warning from these people saying, you know, we can make you, we can break you. We broke the Republican Party with Sarah Palin and the Tina Fey thing and they were actually really soft on him and it was a quick warning because nothing was ever brought up about the economy, about the unemployment rate not going past 8%, I mean nothing was even said about, you know, the talks with the nukes --

RUSH: This is a salient point you are making. I must congratulate you. You're very shrewd. You're pointing out something I did notice and fail to mention, and that is the things that they're criticizing about are things the far-left fringe wants done.

RUSH: They're not criticizing him over dumping on the economy, over failing to produce jobs, over failing to create circumstances where the private sector can recover. So it could be that you're right, it's a warning. I don't know. But they still made fun of him, and I still can't get over the fact, Matthew, that Saturday Night Live skit, a comedy bit got fact-checked by CNN!

RUSH: Well, it's comical. I'm going to repeat something I said in the first hour. People say, "Rush, what's the big deal, Saturday Night Live making fun of Obama." I'll tell you what's the big deal about it. I'll go back and I'll compare Saturday Night Live to Johnny Carson. I'm going to throw myself in the mix here, too. Johnny Carson was a comedian. Johnny Carson was not a polarizing figure and there's a very good reason why. Johnny Carson was the best at television broadcasting. When Johnny Carson dumped on you, i.e., made fun of you, you were a joke. When Johnny Carson dumped on you, you didn't say, "Oh, wow, all publicity is good publicity, I hope he pronounced my name right." You didn't say that. That's the standard cliche reaction to bad publicity. Johnny Carson hit you, it meant something. And the reason it meant something is that Johnny Carson was never ahead of the people. Johnny Carson waited until the whole country or a majority of the country, he had a sense for knowing what the country thought someone was a joke. And it was then that he piled on.

So Carson validated what a lot of people already thought and that sealed the deal. That was oftentimes the nail in the coffin. Saturday Night Live is not Johnny Carson, but it's close. Saturday Night Live waited and waited and waited, and they finally made fun of Obama. They are the first mainstream outfit to make fun of Obama. Now, Jon Stewart, he's done so, but this is bigger. They never fact-check Jon Stewart at CNN when he makes fun of Obama. And Chris Matthews and the boys never get upset at PMSNBC, but when Saturday Night Live did it, they did. Now, where do I fit into this? Well, I fit into it this way. I am ahead of the people, which is why a certain percentage of the country despises me. Unlike Johnny Carson, I don't wait 'til everybody figures it out, because I consider myself a factor in more and more people figuring it out.

I've been making fun of Obama for a year-and-a-half and of course I'm hated and despised by a few people for it. Now all of a sudden I'm joined. I'm always ahead of the game. Everybody's always playing catch-up. But as such, it's kind of interesting for me to sit around and watch everybody catch up. And now it's starting to happen with this Obama stuff. Everybody's starting to get it. The only troubling thing is there's nobody that can do anything about it, Republicans don't have the vote to stop any of this. So 2010 looms as the most important election we'd have in quite a while, and public opinion does matter. Not saying we're powerless here, but in terms of having legislative votes to stop it, it is, we don't.

RUSH: Now, look, here's a story. In all of my days I never, ever thought this would actually happen. I knew there were people who wanted to make it happen because they've been shouting and screaming about it my whole life but I never thought we would elect 'em. This is in the Wall Street Journal: "The Obama administration's pay czar is planning to clamp down on compensation at firms receiving large sums of government aid by cutting annual cash salaries --" we're not talking bonuses here "-- for many of the top employees under his authority, according to people familiar with the matter. Instead of awarding large cash salaries --" award salaries! "-- Kenneth Feinberg is planning to shift a chunk of an employee's annual salary into stock that cannot be accessed for several years, these people said. Such a move, the most intrusive yet into corporate compensation, would mark the government's first effort to curb the take-home pay of everyone from auto executives to financial traders."

It is no accident they wanted to own the auto companies. It's no accident they wanted to own and control the banks, the mortgage industry, and Wall Street. It is who they are. And if you're out there applauding that these fat cats need to have their salaries cut then you go ahead and applaud, and I'm going to be applauding when they cut yours. Actually I will not be applauding. I'm going to be defending you against their attacks on your salary. "Mr. Feinberg is expected to issue by mid-October his determination on compensation packages for 175 of the most highly compensated executives and employees at the seven firms he oversees. The companies are AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup, General Motors, GMAC Financial Services, Chrysler, and Chrysler Financial. The move will further reshape pay at those firms and could complicate efforts by some of those seven companies to attract top executives and employees." Hell, yes, and don't tell me they're bumbling idiots and don't know that. They know exactly what the outcome of this will be.

This is not constitutional, folks. Many of these companies did not want the government involved. They were given no choice. The government does not set people's pay, other than the people that work for the government. And see, that's the rub. The more people who work for the government or depend on it, the more people are controlled. This is all part of the giant redistribution scheme this administration has hatched and is well into implementing.

CALLER: How are you, Mr. Limbaugh? I've been listening to you since I was just big enough to walk. It's a pleasure to talk to you. I went to public school all my life and when I was a junior in high school, I had a teacher that had us read an article that compared our Founding Fathers to terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq. I just wanted to call to first of all thank you for helping me in my conservative view but to also thank him to strengthen my conservative views.

RUSH: Thank you very much. You're not the first person that I have heard -- I've heard parents say that they have kids going to school being taught that the Founding Fathers were terrorists. Look, it dovetails precisely with how the radical left views the country: unjust, immoral, Eurocentric, white supremacy, racist, sexist, bigot, homophobia, brought syphilis in, took the land away from the Indians who are at one with it. They got us the multicultural curriculum in schools. They hate the country as it was constituted. They've always been fringes; they've always been out there; they've been telling us who they are for years. The thing is now they got elected. They finally got elected.

CALLER: Exactly. But again, thank you very much. I appreciate everything you've done for me. I know you've opened up my eyes very widely to what's happening.

RUSH: Well, thank you, sir, very much. I have to tell you, though, you couldn't have done it without yourself. You hung in there.

CALLER: And my mother and my father, they're another one that really helped me in my belief.

CALLER: The Catholic view and the conservative view is all basically one, in my eyes.

RUSH: All right. We did one of our famous Google searches here. We searched the keywords "Founding Fathers were terrorists." We Google searched, "Founding Fathers were terrorists." It returned 11,200 pages for "Founding Fathers were terrorists." That's how mainstream it is, at least out there on the Internet

From the article: The dominant alpha male [dog] approaches directly, asserting his authority, while the beta male genuflects, crouches, tucks his tail, and may even end up on his back, exposing his neck in acquiescence, making sure the alpha male knows he has no intention of challenging him..

I find dishonesty all the time with section 8 recipients. Here is a story about food stamps being used to buy niagra, booze and porno:

Washington officials discuss Chicago violence while violence continues to erupt in Chicago’s streets (this may explain why they chose a meeting place far from where this violence typically takes place):

Kennedy claims that he slept with 1000 women, but this was left out of his autobiography:

Since there are some links you may want to go back to from time-to-time, I am going to begin a list of them here. This will be a list to which I will add links each week.

This website reveals a lot of information about politicians and their relationship to money. You can find out, among other things, how many earmarks that Harry Reid has been responsible for in any given year; or how much an individual Congressman’s wealth has increased or decreased since taking office.

This is an outstanding website which tells the truth about Obama-care and about what the mainstream media is hiding from you:

Politico.com is a fairly neutral site (or, at the very worst, just a little left of center). They have very good informative videos at:

On Obama (if you have not visited this site, you need to check it out). He is selling a DVD on this site as well called Media Malpractice; I have not viewed it yet, except pieces which I have seen played on tv and on the internet. It looks pretty good to me.

Conservative Review
Issue #96	Kukis Digests and Opines on this Week’s News and Views	October 11, 2009