With the Supreme Court hearing the Obamacare case this spring, it’s unlikely we’ll see the administration admitting that swaths of the law were not thought through very well. However, we will see attempts to make the public think the administration is willing to compromise on certain aspects of the law’s implementation. These give-and-takes are carefully calculated so they result in… the exact same law being implemented. But as far as concessions go, even the most merciful and caring administration in history has to draw the line somewhere.

From Fox News:

Despite renewed statements of concern by Catholic leaders, the Obama administration is done negotiating and will finalize its plan requiring insurance companies to provide free contraception to women working and studying at religious institutions, President Obama’s chief of staff said Sunday.

Jacob Lew told “Fox News Sunday” that the compromise offered last week to address objections by the Catholic Church is clear and consistent with the president’s “very deep belief that a woman has a right to all forms of preventive health care, including contraception.”

“We have set out our policy,” Lew said. “We are going to finalize it in the final rules, but I think what the president announced on Friday is a balanced approach that meets the concerns raised both in terms of access to health care and in terms of protecting religious liberties, and we think that’s the right approach.”

Lost in the mix here seems to be the point that the administration doesn’t have the authority to do any of this in the first place, which is why it’s important reject the entire premise and not validate the effort by accepting any “revised compromise.” Assume somebody says they’re going to take four of my cookies, and I say they have no right to do that. Then they say they’re willing to compromise and only take two cookies, and I reluctantly agree. Either way I’ve admitted that they have a right to reach into my cookie jar, so before I know it there won’t be any cookies left… at which point I’ll be told it was for my own good because I needed to lose a few pounds anyway.

Obama telegraphed where he’d be coming from on this (and related) issues in a 2008 speech making it clear which side must come out on top in a dispute between the State and the Church in order for society as a whole to be better off:

Background: Obama’s fraudulent abortion mandate accommodation

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Some of you might be familiar with Cassy Fiano, a writer/blogger I’ve gotten to know over the years. Cassy’s husband is in the US Marine Corps and is currently serving in Afghanistan. It’s through them that I became aware of, and have taken part in, the Project Valour-IT fundraisers (which Michelle has also been involved with).

Recently Cassy and her husband got some troubling news: Their unborn son has been diagnosed with Down syndrome. Cassy has written about it in her latest column, Choosing Life and Beating the Odds: Accepting Down Syndrome.

My wife and I have friends who have a similar story. Their son was born a couple of years ago and all I can say is they’ve never once regretted their decision (like Cassy, the alternative was never an option for them), and they can’t imagine their lives without him.

If a society is indeed judged by how it treats its most helpless, people like Cassy, her husband, friends of my family and countless others out there who choose life are reasons to remain optimistic about our future.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

With its unconstitutional, coercive, discriminatory Obamacare abortion mandate under fire, the White House announced…nothing today. A supposed “accommodation” to the policy will result in no compromise in the impact of the HHS edict forcing religiously affiliated health care providers and employers to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives, abortifacients, and related services that violate the religious principles and freedom of the mandate’s targets.

In fact, close observers say today’s announcement will make things worse.

The deets:

With the White House under fire for its new rule requiring employers including religious organizations to offer health insurance that fully covers birth control coverage, ABC News has learned that later today the White House — possibly President Obama himself — will likely announce an attempt to accommodate these religious groups. The move, based on state models, will almost certainly not satisfy bishops and other religious leaders since it will preserve the goal of women employees having their birth control fully covered by health insurance.

Sources say it will be respectful of religious beliefs but will not back off from that goal, which many religious leaders oppose since birth control is in violation of their religious beliefs.

White House officials are likening it to the so-called Hawaii compromise.

Phony baloney, say Catholic bishops:

It’s difficult to know what people may mean by the “Hawaii compromise.” But a central feature of the Hawaii law is that every religious organization that is eligible for the exemption has to instruct all employees in how they can access all methods of contraception and sterilization locally “in an expeditious manner.”

Just a few days ago the White House was saying that this is just about coverage, that no one has to be involved in getting people to the actual services they object to. It would be no improvement to say: “Sure, you don’t have to include the coverage, you just have to send all your lay employees and women religious to the local Planned Parenthood clinic.” The Administration’s press release of January 20 hinted at such a requirement.

That would not be a compromise. In some ways it would be worse.

As usual, this defiant administration keeps digging itself deeper.

***

The Hill calls Obama’s announcement a “retreat.”

The White House will announce a retreat from its controversial rule requiring religious organizations like charities and hospitals to include contraception in their healthcare plans.

President Obama has come under heavy criticism from the Catholic Church and other religious organizations, Republicans and even some Democrats over the issue, and Vice President Biden has suggested a compromise could be worked out.

A White House official on Friday confirmed an announcement on changing the rule would be made Friday. The White House is referring to the change as an accommodation.

It’s not a retreat. It’s a re-trick.

It’s not an accommodation. It’s an abomination.

***

Update 11am Weekly Standard reporter John McCormak is on a conference call with White House officials providing background on the policy head fake.

He tweets…

Sr. admin off.: “the insurance company, not the hospital, not the charity will be required to reach out” to women to provide contraception

To clarify, religious groups have to contract with INSURERS who do offer the pills, then the insurers offers free pills to women.

Update 12:26pm EST – From his brief press conference, Obama attacks “cynical” opponents of abortion mandate. He says “principle” of “access to free preventative care including contraceptive services” will stand.

“Religious liberty will be protected.” Translation: You’re still screwed.

***

Update: On Fox News, Kathleen The Shredder Sebelius attempts to defend the policy as a “no-cost strategy” by citing “actuaries” who claim that contraceptive coverage will actually “save money.”

You know who she’s citing? The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.

She repeatedly invokes “women’s health” to defend the edict.

Sanger’s grim reapers have the rhetoric down pat.

***

More from Steven Ertelt at Life News: Pro-Life Advocates Blast Revised Obama Pro-Abortion Mandate:

Jonathan Imbody, Vice President for Government Relations for the Christian Medical Association, called the revisions “offering a distinction without a difference to mute opposition.”

He said the revision fits a pattern of contempt for conscience that includes how Obama “has gutted the only federal regulation protecting the exercise of conscience in health care, denied of federal grant funds for aiding human trafficking victims because a faith-based organization refused to participate in abortion; lobbied the Supreme Court to restrict faith-based organizations’ hiring rights; and issued a coercive contraceptive mandate that imposes the government’s abortion ideology on every American.”

‘To Stop the Multiplication of the Unfit’
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2012

If you aren’t creeped out by the No Birth Control Left Behind rhetoric of the White House and Planned Parenthood, you aren’t listening closely enough. The anesthetic of progressive benevolence always dulls the senses. Wake up.

When a bunch of wealthy white women and elite Washington bureaucrats defend the trampling of religious liberties in the name of “increased access” to “reproductive services” for “poor” women, the ghost of Margaret Sanger is cackling.

As she wrote in her autobiography, Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in 1916 “to stop the multiplication of the unfit.” This, she boasted, would be “the most important and greatest step towards race betterment.” While she oversaw the mass murder of black babies, Sanger cynically recruited minority activists to front her death racket. She conspired with eugenics financier and businessman Clarence Gamble to “hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities” to sell their genocidal policies as community health and welfare services.

Outright murder wouldn’t sell. But wrapping it under the egalitarian cloak of “women’s health” — and adorning it with the moral authority of black churches — would. Sanger and Gamble called their deadly campaign “The Negro Project.”

In other writings, historian Mike Perry found, Sanger attacked programs that provided “medical and nursing facilities to slum mothers” because they “facilitate the function of maternity” when “the absolute necessity is to discourage it.” In an essay included in her writing collection held by the Library of Congress, Sanger urged her abortion clinic colleagues to “breed a race of thoroughbreds.” Nationwide “birth control bureaus” would propagate the proper “science of breeding” to stop impoverished, non-white women from “breeding like weeds.”

Speaking with CBS veteran journalist Mike Wallace in 1957, long after her racist views had supposedly mellowed, Sanger again revealed her true colors: “I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world — that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin — that people can — can commit.”

Sanger also elaborated on her anti-Catholic animus, telling one of Wallace’s reporters that New York Catholics had no right to protest the use of their tax dollars for birth city birth-control programs: “(I)t’s not only wrong, it should be made illegal for any religious group to prohibit dissemination of birth control — even among its own members.” When Wallace pressed her (“In other words, you would like to see the government legislate religious beliefs in a certain sense?”), Sanger laughed nervously and disavowed the remarks.

Fast forward: Five decades and 16 million aborted black babies later, Planned Parenthood’s insidious agenda has migrated from inner-city “birth control bureaus” to public school-based health clinics to the White House — forcibly funded with taxpayer dollars just as Sanger championed.

Several undercover stings by Live Action, pro-life documentarians, have exposed Planned Parenthood staff accepting donations over the years from callers posing as eugenics cheerleaders who wanted to earmark their contributions for the cause of aborting minority babies. “We can definitely designate it for an African-American,” a Tulsa, Okla., Planned Parenthood employee eagerly promised.

What has cheap, easy and unmonitored “choice” for poor women in inner cities wrought? Nightmares like the Philadelphia Horror, where serial baby-killer Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his abortion clinic death squad oversaw the systematic execution of hundreds of healthy, living, breathing, squirming, viable black and Hispanic babies over 4 decades — along with several minority mothers who may have lost their lives in his grimy birth control bureau.

City and state authorities looked the other way while jars of baby parts and reports of botched abortions and infanticides piled up. Beltway Democrats who now bray about their concern for “women’s health” were silent about the Gosnell massacre and countless others like it in America’s ghettos. Why?

The Obama administration is crawling with the modern-day heirs of the eugenics movement, from Planned Parenthood golden girl Kathleen Sebelius at the Department of Health and Human Services to the president’s prestigious science czar John Holdren — an outspoken proponent of forced abortions and mass sterilizations and a self-proclaimed protege of eugenics guru Harrison Brown, whom he credits with inspiring him to become a scientist.

Brown envisioned a government regime in which the “number of abortions and artificial inseminations permitted in a given year would be determined completely by the difference between the number of deaths and the number of births in the year previous.” He urged readers to “reconcile ourselves to the fact that artificial means must be applied to limit birth rates.” He likened the global population to a “pulsating mass of maggots.”

Listen carefully as this White House dresses its Obamacare abortion mandate in the white lab coat of “reproductive services” for all. The language of “access to birth control” is the duplicitous code of Sanger’s ideological grim reapers.

If she actually couldn’t see this coming, her family might want to make sure she never crosses the street unescorted:

Former Democratic congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper, a Catholic from Erie, Pennsylvania, cast a crucial vote in favor of Obamacare in 2010. She lost her seat that November in part because of her controversial support of Obamacare. But Dahlkemper said recently that she would have never voted for the health care bill had she known that the Department of Health and Human Services would require all private insurers, including Catholic charities and hospitals, to provide free coverage of contraception, sterilization procedures, and the “week-after” pill “ella” that can induce early abortions.

“I would have never voted for the final version of the bill if I expected the Obama Administration to force Catholic hospitals and Catholic Colleges and Universities to pay for contraception,” Dahlkemper said in a press release sent out by Democrats for Life in November.

What part of Nancy Pelosi’s health care law proclamation didn’t Dahlkemper understand?

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Before the payoff, here’s a brief set-up:

Florida’s poor can use food stamps to buy staples like milk, vegetables, fruits and meat. But they can also use them to buy sweets like cakes, cookies and Jell-O and snack foods like chips, something a state senator wants stopped.

Sen. Ronda Storms, R-Valrico, also wants to limit other welfare funds, known as Temporary Assistance For Needy Families, from being used at ATMs in casinos and strip clubs and anywhere out of state. The bill comes after reports that the debit cards welfare recipients now receive were used in those places, as well as locations in Las Vegas and the Virgin Islands in a small percentage of cases, but the state does not track what items were purchased.

The bill recently passed a committee. A companion bill in the state House companion is being considered by a subcommittee.

You’d think the food police would be thrilled. If there’s anything they should get behind, it’s an initiative designed to encourage lower income people to avoid unhealthy eats… right?

But instead, one Democrat gives us our chuckle of the day by denouncing (albeit selectively) the notion of food police — and maybe even things like health care mandates. Get a load of this:

But critics say the government shouldn’t dictate what people eat.

“What I choose to ingest even though I may be on food stamps, that’s at my discretion. I don’t need government telling me what I can and cannot purchase,” said Rep. Gwyndolen Clarke-Reed, a Pompano Beach Democrat who voted in committee against the bill (SB 1658). She said the bill is demeaning and invasive and she worries the education campaign would imply to “minorities and low-income folks that they’re not intelligent enough to make selections on the foods they want.”

How many calories are burned by doubling over in laughter for several minutes? Maybe this is part of the “Let’s Move” program and people are being tricked into exercising. It wouldn’t be the first time.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

If it’s Friday, it’s another White House dump day. Cue the dump truck horn: Doot! Doot! Doot!

While Obama sycophants are busy trumpeting deceptive jobs numbers, the administration is quietly moving forward with job-killing Obamacare regs and taxes. The IRS today released rules to impose the $20 billion Obamacare medical device tax scheduled to take effect next year.

At a time when the White House is touting its government initiatives to champion “innovation,” the Obamacare innovation tax on medical device/diagnostic manufacturers will kill an estimated 43,000 jobs.

The very job creators President Obama purports to support are balking at the tax regs and have called for repeal. The Advanced Medical Technology Association, America’s leading association for med tech manufacturers, blasts the new rules:

“[The proposed IRS regulations] highlights the need for prompt action by Congress and the Administration to repeal this anti-competitive, job-killing tax,” Stephen J. Ubl, AdvaMed president and CEO said in a statement.

“Failure to repeal the device tax flies in the face of the President’s comments during the State of the Union about the need to reform our tax system to make our nation more competitive in the world market, a view shared by members of Congress from both parties,” Ubl went on to explain, adding that “the tax will create a number of complex administrative and technical burdens that must be addressed.”

I’ve reported before on how the medical device tax has already resulted in operational and job cutbacks in Massachusetts, home to many medical innovators.

Fewer jobs. Fewer entrepreneurs. Fewer medical advances.

Winning the future…by killing it.

Back in November, I spotlighted Obama’s half-billion-dollar crony drug deal involving a no-bid contract with politically-connected SIGA.

Refresher course here.

In November, Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill — chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Contracting and Oversight and up for re-election in less than a year — asked HHS to review the contract.

Last week, the NYPost reported that SIGA execs dumped stock when they learned the contract would be far less than they anticipated last spring.

Today, GOP Rep. Renee Ellmers of North Carolina asked the HHS Inspector General to investigate:

“Yesterday afternoon I submitted my second letter to the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services regarding apparent gross impropriety on behalf of the Obama Administration.”

MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings, Inc. is a corporation wholly owned by Ronald Perelman, and TransTech Pharma, Inc. (a privately-held drug discovery company controlled by MacAndrews & Forbes). In November 2003, Perelman announced he would invest $10 million through MacAndrews and Forbes into SIGA Technologies – at the time a tiny biotech company that was developing oral drugs to prevent and treat diseases, including smallpox and anthrax.

Scandals? What scandals?

Jim Pethokoukis spotlights a new Health Affairs study on how Romneycare laid the foundation for Obamacare, and what it portends for the federal health insurance scene. In short: Expanded government coverage, higher taxpayer costs. Read here for details and analysis. His conclusion:

The authors conclude that based on the Romneycare experience, Obamacare will improve coverage and not kill employer-based insurance, but containing costs will be a “considerable challenge.” That is probably the avenue Romney should use to a) attack Obamacare and b) present his own national health reform. But this study will perpetuate the meme that Romneycare was the prototype for Obamacare. Santorum hammered Romney on this point at the last debate more effectively than any other candidate throughout this campaign season, probably because he understands the issue better than his rivals. We’ll see if he or Gingrich follows up tonight.

No surprises, of course. We already heard from Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber in October:

The Obama administration may have relied much more heavily on Romney’s Massachusetts healthcare legislation as a blueprint for Obamacare than was previously believed.

White House visitor logs obtained by NBC News revealed that three of Romney’s healthcare advisers had up to a dozen meetings with senior administration officials, including one in the Oval Office presided over by President Barack Obama.

“They really wanted to know how we can take that same approach we used in Massachusetts and turn that into a national model,” MIT economist and Romney healthcare adviser Jon Gruber told NBC.

And back in September, I noted the analysis by Suffolk University’s Beacon Hill Institute showing the depths of the economic damage that Romneycare did in the Bay State.

Flashback:

Romney’s baggage. It is so heavy:

The Bay State’s controversial 2006 universal health-care plan — also known as “Romneycare” — has cost Massachusetts more than 18,000 jobs, according to an exclusive blockbuster study that could provide ammo to GOP rivals of former Gov. Mitt Romney as he touts his job-creating chops on the campaign trail.

“Mandating health insurance coverage and expanding the demand for health services without increasing supply drove up costs. Economics 101 tells us that,” said Paul Bachman, research director at Suffolk University’s Beacon Hill Institute, the conservative think tank that conducted the study. The Herald obtained an exclusive copy of the findings.

“The ‘shared sacrifice’ needed to provide universal health care includes a net loss of jobs, which is attributable to the higher costs that the measure imposed,” said David Tuerck, the institute’s executive director.

…Despite Romney’s vaunted business acumen as a successful venture capitalist, Bachman said the former governor “was a little naive about what would become of the law.”

The Beacon Hill Institute study found that, on average, Romneycare:

•    cost the Bay State 18,313 jobs;

•    drove up total health insurance costs in Massachusetts by $4.311 billion;

•    slowed the growth of disposable income per person by $376; and

•    reduced investment in Massachusetts by $25.06 million.

And remember that RomneyCare relied on FedGovCare as a sturdy crutch: “He also noted the state’s health-care costs have been heavily subsidized by billions of dollars in federal aid through a Medicaid waiver program.”

The SEIU may be attacking Romney in Floridanow, but Big Labor radicals made out well under Romneycare.

I repeat: RomneyCare and ObamaCare share not only the same ideological architects, but similar waiver programs in part set up to benefit Big Labor – via Boston Globe in February:

Massachusetts regulators granted more exemptions last year to residents who said they could not afford the health insurance required by the state, waiving the tax penalty for more than half of those who appealed, according to state data.

State officials said they excused the majority of waiver applicants in large part because of the protracted sour economy, which made insurance unaffordable for more people. Under the 2006 state law that requires most residents to have coverage, regulators have significant latitude to authorize waivers by taking into account factors such as a home foreclosure.

The number of people seeking exemptions in 2010 was about the same as in 2009, and state figures show that roughly 98 percent of residents were insured last year.

Even as Republicans and many states wage a bitter battle in Congress and the courts to block the mandatory insurance requirement in the national health care law, the provision appears to retain broad acceptance in Massachusetts.

Regulators’ flexibility may be part of the reason.

“We aren’t going to make someone pay just to make them pay,’’ said Celia Wcislo, a director of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East and a member of the Connector Authority, which oversees Massachusetts’ health care law and grants the exemptions.

Refresher on the politicized “Connector Authority” via Cato:

When Romney signed his plan he claimed “a key objective is to lower the cost of health insurance for all our citizens and allow our citizens to buy the insurance plan that fits their needs.” In actuality, insurance premiums in the state are expected to rise 10–12 percent next year, double the national average.

…Although there are undoubtedly many factors behind the cost increase, one reason is that the new bureaucracy that the legislation created-the “Connector”-has not been allowing Massachusetts citizens to buy insurance that “fits their needs.”

Although it has received less media attention than other aspects of the bill, one of the most significant features of the legislation is the creation of the Massachusetts Health Care Connector to combine the current small-group and individual markets under a single unified set of regulations. Supporters such as Robert E. Moffit and Nina Owcharenko of the Heritage Foundation consider the Connector to be the single most important change made by the legislation, calling it “the cornerstone of the new plan” and “a major innovation and a model for other states.”

The Connector is not actually an insurer. Rather, it is designed to allow individuals and workers in small companies to take advantage of the economies of scale, both in terms of administration and risk pooling, which are currently enjoyed by large employers. Multiple employers are able to pay into the Connector on behalf of a single employee. And, most importantly, the Connector would allow workers to use pretax dollars to purchase individual insurance. That would make insurance personal and portable, rather than tied to an employer-all very desirable things.

However, many people were concerned that the Connector was being granted too much regulatory authority. It was given the power to decide what products it would offer and to designate which types of insurance offered “high quality and good value.” This phrase in particular worried many observers because it is the same language frequently included in legislation mandating insurance benefits.

At the time the legislation passed, Ed Haislmaier of the Heritage Foundation reassured critics that “the Connector will neither design the insurance products being offered nor regulate the insurers offering the plans.” In reality, however, the Connector’s board has seen itself as a combination of the state legislature and the insurance commissioner, adding a host of new regulations and mandates.

For example, the Connector’s governing board has decreed that by January 2009, no one in the state will be allowed to have insurance with more than a $2,000 deductible or total out-of-pocket costs of more than $5,000. In addition, every policy in the state will be required to phase in coverage of prescription drugs, a move that could add 5–15 percent to the cost of insurance plans. A move to require dental coverage barely failed to pass the board, and the dentists-along with several other provider groups-have not given up the effort to force their inclusion. This comes on top of the 40 mandated benefits that the state had previously required, ranging from in vitro fertilization to chiropractic services.

Thus, it appears that the Connector offers quite a bit of pain for relatively little gain. Although the ability to use pretax dollars to purchase personal and portable insurance should be appealing in theory, only about 7,500 nonsubsidized workers have purchased insurance through the Connector so far. On the other hand, rather than insurance that “fits their needs,” Massachusetts residents find themselves forced to buy expensive “Cadillac” policies that offer many benefits that they may not want.

Governor Romney now says that he cannot be held responsible for the actions of the Connector board, because it’s “an independent body separate from the governor’s office.” However, many critics of the Massachusetts plan warned him precisely against the dangers of giving regulatory authority to a bureaucracy that would last long beyond his administration.

Industrial-strength nose plugs can’t cover the stench.

The people of Nebraska whom he betrayed and embarrassed won’t be shedding any tears.

All together now: DLTDHYOTWO.

Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska will announce today that he is retiring after two terms, a serious blow to Democratic efforts to hold onto their majority in the chamber next November.

Nelson is scheduled to hold a press conference back home in Nebraska as early as today to make his decision official, said several Democratic insiders close to the leadership.

The 70-year-old Nelson was considered one of the most endangered Democratic incumbents this cycle. GOP-affiliated outside groups have already dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into TV ads bashing Nelson, while the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spent over $1 million on their own ad blitz to bolster his image.

The Cornhusker Kickback was not forgotten. Or forgiven.

Entrenched incumbents of ALL political stripes, you’re on notice.

Politifact has revealed the “Lie of the Year” for 2011.

First let’s review the last couple of winners, followed by some on the left who applauded Politifact for those choices.

In 2009, Politifact’s Lie of the Year was “Death Panels.” The left applauded the choice.

In 2010, Politifact’s Lie of the Year was “government takeover of health care.” Another liberal round of applause.

This year, Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” is…

What?

A “credibility-killing choice” says one unhappy former customer. “Politifact, RIP” writes MRC’s Quote of the Year winner Paul Krugman. The latter thinks Politifact is terrified of appearing partisan and made this choice to appease the right. Apparently the only way Politifact could avoid appearing partisan would be to give a claim from the right the “Lie of the Year” distinction every single year.

Krugman, et al, are claiming that the Republicans did vote to end Medicare and that Politifact got this one colossally wrong. On that, here’s Avik Roy writing at Forbes.com:

Their [lefty critics of Politifact's 2011 "lie of the year" choice] defense of the “ending Medicare” claim, such as it is, is that using private insurers to deliver health care to seniors, instead of a government agency, fundamentally “ends” the program. This is, plainly, ridiculous. When the British government privatized British Rail in 1993, the railway system did not cease to exist. When Germany privatized Lufthansa in 1994, the German airline wasn’t “ended.”

Similarly, if the government comes up with alternate modes of delivering the same health care to seniors, the program hasn’t been ended. As PolitiFact notes, a more accurate label would be to say that the Ryan plan “privatizes” Medicare. The problem for would-be liberal demagogues is that privatization isn’t the scare word for most Americans that it once was.

But just in case “privatization” is still the scare word it once was, let’s show the “Paul Ryan’s going to kill your grandma” ad one more time:

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Add two states to the Obamacare waiver denial list that already includes Delaware and N. Dakota. Hey, not everybody can with the Lucky Lottery.

From The Hill:

The decision could rekindle the controversy over the waiver process, as the two states that were turned down, Indiana and Louisiana, have Republican governors. GOP leaders at the state level have been extremely critical of the healthcare law and the requirements that it imposes on states.

The Department of Health and Human Services said Indiana and Louisiana do not need an adjustment from the health law’s medical loss ratio. That provision requires insurers to spend at least 80 percent of premiums on medical care or offer rebates to their customers starting next year.

Don’t assume too quickly that “GOP guvs = no state waiver,” because Nevada, Wisconsin, Maine and Iowa have gotten waivers, and they have GOP Governors. It’s possible the administration’s goal with these state waivers isn’t to punish or not punish political opponents as much as attempting to avoid making the economy even worse too soon — after all, there’s an election just around the corner. As a result, they’ll approve some waivers and deny just enough to avoid making it a de facto blanket admission that Obamacare is a horrible idea, especially with the Supreme Court readying to hear the case.

The real red flag isn’t who was denied or approved, but that states are clamoring for waivers at all from something that purportedly will improve the quality of everyone’s life. If it’s this painful on the front end, what’s it going to be like at the back end? Probably like most back ends.

The wording in some of the waiver discussions is even disturbing:

Consumer Watchdog wrote in public comments urging HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to reject the application. “As the MLR regulations make clear, there must be a credible threat to the stability of the individual marketplace in order to grant a waiver. Indiana has demonstrated no such threat.”

When it sounds like there’s a fine line between implementing an “affordable” health insurance law and deciphering chatter preceding an economic terrorist attack, something’s not going to end well.

In a related story, a remote corner of the Pacific just got to be a more attractive place to do business:

Guam had also applied for a waiver, but HHS determined the U.S. territory’s insurers were so small they don’t have to comply with the new rules.

Or so small there’s not enough power and money there to waste time trying to control… yet.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Nancy Pelosi is blissfully unaware or doesn’t care that the health care law is arguably the single biggest reason she’s no longer Speaker of the House, and as a result Pelosi is traveling the country promising to pay similar legislative attention to your kids if she regains the gavel.

From the Washington Post:

Last week, the California congresswoman hit five cities in five days, barnstorming for money to try to win the 25 more seats it would take to regain control. And if that happens — or when, according to her — at the top of her to-do list, she says, will be “doing for child care what we did for health-care reform” — pushing comprehensive change.

That statement should get so many children and their parents running in the other direction that Nancy’s government child care initiative might qualify for funding under the “Let’s Move” program.

My kids just submitted an early request for a waiver from “PelosiDaycare,” just in case.

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Tuesday, as Michelle noted, C-Span asked the Supreme Court to allow their cameras to televise oral arguments when the Court hears the Obamacare law case next spring.

Nancy Pelosi agrees:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Wednesday that Supreme Court arguments over President Obama’s healthcare law should be televised.

“When the Affordable Care Act is placed before the highest court in our country, all Americans will have a stake in the debate; therefore, all Americans should have access to it,” Pelosi said in a news release.

Back when all Americans should have had a stake in the debate — which was when it was being written — all they got was closed door meetings and “you have to pass it to find out what’s in it.” Now that it’s in the Supreme Court, where the opinion of anybody who isn’t wearing a SCOTUS robe or in the room arguing the case doesn’t really matter, transparency should be the order of the day.

Something’s making me suspicious enough to be against the idea now that Nancy Pelosi is for it. I can already picture her watching the Supreme Court proceedings with her stock broker on the line and adjusting investments based on how the debate is going: “Dump Cigna, exercise the call options on GE, and if Ruth Bader Ginsburg scratches her nose one more time go short on Medtronic.”

This seems like only yesterday…

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

So, yeah. All that White House demagoguery about prescription drug shortages I wrote about last week was simply smoke and mirrors to cover up rotten crony deals for his Big Pharma/Big Labor friends. I shed more light below on the chumminess between former SEIU thug-in-chief Andy Stern, fat cat Dem donor Ronald Perelman, and Obama health care bureaucrat Nicole Lurie.

Related non-shocker: SEIU announced its endorsement of Obama 2012. Pay to play.

Corrupt birds of a feather…

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Obama’s Half-Billion-Dollar Crony Drug Deal
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2011

What do you get when you mix Democratic fat-cat donations, Big Labor favors, pharmaceutical lobbying and Beltway business as usual? Answer: another toxic half-billion-dollar Barack Obama-approved crony deal. Move over, Solyndra. Here comes Siga-Gate.

This latest Chicago-style payoff on your dime involves a dubious smallpox drug backed by a liberal billionaire investor, along with a former union boss who was one of the White House’s most frequent visitors. They’re the “1 percent” with 100 percent immunity from the selectively outraged Occupier mobs that purport to oppose partisan government bailouts and handouts to privileged corporations.

Ronald Perelman is the New York City-based leveraged buyout wheeler-dealer who controls Siga Technologies. He has donated nearly $130,000 mostly to Democrats over the past two election cycles alone (history here), and he forked over $50,000 to pay for the president’s lavish inaugural parties. A Siga affiliate (MacAndrews and Forbes) pitched in nearly half a million more in contributions — 65 percent of which went to Democrats — and the firms have spent millions on lobbying.

Perelman’s pharma company makes an experimental antiviral pill used by smallpox patients who received diagnoses too late to be treated with the existing smallpox vaccine. Smallpox experts cast doubt on the need for the drug given ample vaccine stockpiles, the remoteness of a mass attack and questions about its efficacy. But over the objections of federal contract negotiators, competitors and scientists, the Obama administration approved a lucrative $433 million no-bid deal for Siga in May. No other manufacturers were able to compete for the “sole source” procurement, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The special arrangement was made after a competitor objected to the administration’s violating small-business rules during a first call for bids. That’s right: It’s yet another rigged giveaway from a Hope-and-Change champion who vowed on the 2008 campaign trail to “end the abuse of no-bid contracts once and for all.”

Intensifying the culture-of-corruption stench: the critical role of Andy Stern. He’s the profligate, corruption-coddling former head of the powerful Service Employees International Union — the 2.2 million-member public-employee union powerhouse that he left in April 2010 with a mountain of debt and eroding rank-and-file pensions (and looming FBI investigation).

After pouring some $60 million of workers’ dues into Democratic coffers, Stern was rewarded by Obama with a cozy spot on the White House deficit panel and dozens of visits to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — including at least seven with the president, one with Vice President Joe Biden, and meetings with Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain, OMB Director Peter Orszag, health czar aide Jennifer Cannistra and Valerie Jarrett’s former high-powered aide and Chicago fundraiser Tina Tchen.

In a classic access-buying maneuver, Siga placed Stern on its board of directors in June 2010. Four months later, Siga nabbed an estimated $3 billion contract. By January of this year, Siga’s stock had skyrocketed. The House GOP has been investigating the deal for months, which comes amid separate allegations of insider trading and political profiteering by investigative journalist Peter Schweizer.

Stern and Perelman have been scratching each other’s backs for years. In the fall of 2006, the SEIU backed off organizing protests against AlliedBarton, a security guard firm in Philadelphia owned by a Perelman interest — and then remained quiet when the firm was bought out by a longtime SEIU nemesis, the Blackstone Group.

According to the L.A. Times, which exposed the scandal over the weekend, Obama’s top biodefense bureaucrat Nicole Lurie railroaded a key dissenter at the Department of Health and Human Services who ridiculed Siga’s inflated projected profit margins. Lurie soothingly reassured a whiny Siga executive that the “most senior procurement official” would take over and mollified him in a letter: “I trust this will be satisfactory to you.”

Lurie falsely told the newspaper that she had never made contact with the official regarding the contract and deemed any such contact improper. When caught with documentation, her department spun the communication with Siga as a “national security” matter. Lurie, it should be noted, is a former Clintonite and Howard Dean health care consultant who was most recently in the headlines for pushing anthrax vaccine testing for children. According to the Labor Union Report, there have been market murmurs of a merger between Siga and the anthrax vaccine manufacturer, PharmAthene. Hard to trust Lurie’s public health moral authority with the taint of pay-for-play wafting over the Siga deal.

As always, venture socialism backed by Big Labor muscle and White House wealth redistribution is hazardous to taxpayers’ health.