In the wake of a new Siena poll showing her too far behind to catch up to either Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman or Democratic candidate Bill Owens, Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava today officially dropped out of the NY-23 special congressional election.

There are conflicting reports on whether she will throw her support to Hoffman, and no word yet on whether or not the National Republican Congressional Committe (NRCC), who had been backing Scozzafava, will now be supporting Hoffman in these final days before the election.

Regardless of how this plays out from here, the message from American conservatives to the political establishment has been delivered.

More more on this story as it becomes available.

Also see:

Hot Air: Breaking: Scozzafava quits after Siena poll; Update: Hoffman campaign asking for endorsement?

The Other McCain: NY23: SCOZZAFAVA QUITS! UPDATE: New poll shows Hoffman in dead heat with Democrat Owens

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-Cnation

Just found this over at Gateway Pundit:

From Sarah Palin’s Facebook page:

Mark my words - tomorrow is the game changer! Tune in to hear common sense solutions that bury the false accusations that conscientious members of Congress have no solutions to meet America’s health care challenges.

If you’re like me, shaking your head wondering why all the miscommunication between Washington and the American people who have been saying, “Please hear what we’re saying about our desire for health care reform,” then tomorrow will be a refreshing time of clarity for all.

All Americans, and especially colleagues of House Republican Leader John Boehner: please listen to tomorrow’s weekly GOP national address. Rep. Boehner will highlight a common sense alternative to Speaker Pelosi’s 1,990-page government takeover of health care. I urge you to watch for it. For a preview, go to: http://HealthCare.GOP.gov

You’ll hear solutions. You’ll hear of real choices based on America’s proven free-market principles. You’ll know once and for all what the GOP and Independents have been saying all along about alternatives to another big government take over. After tomorrow, you’ll know that accusations against the GOP and Independents for not providing solutions are false. Those claims are bogus. There are alternatives. Tune in to Rep. Boehner’s address tomorrow to hear them.

I look forward to the game changer!

- Sarah Palin

So I went to the link provided, http://HealthCare.GOP.gov , for a preview, and got three and a half minutes of John Boehner outlining some common-sense ideas such as:

• Number one: let families and businesses buy health insurance across state lines.
• Number two: allow individuals, small businesses, and trade associations to pool together and acquire health insurance at lower prices, the same way large corporations and labor unions do.
• Number three: give states the tools to create their own innovative reforms that lower health care costs.
• Number four: end junk lawsuits that contribute to higher health care costs by increasing the number of tests and procedures that physicians sometimes order not because they think it’s good medicine, but because they are afraid of being sued.

Well, OK, these are all good. Not necessarily new ideas,  but maybe tomorrow when the actual GOP address gets underway we’ll hear the details and action plan that will transform these ideas into the ‘Game Changer’ Palin is talking about.

So, I start looking around the GOP site for some indication of what time the Game Changer might air. Nothing. I looked back through Palin’s post to see if she posted the time for this Game Changer. Nothing. Checked Google, found about a million blogs that carried the Palin facebook post, many of which were commented with various breathless proclamations of undying loyalty and devotion, shouts of ‘Palin in 2012!” and “Go Sarah!”, but alas, no start time for the Game Changer.

So, back to the GOP site I go.

I’m scanning through the small print on the page beneath the Boehner video for a start time for the real thing, and I noticed this:

“In the national Republican address on Saturday, October 31, 2009, House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) discussed Republicans’ plan for common-sense health care reform our nation can afford.”

“House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) discussed…”. Past tense.  Sensing that I may have been had, I clicked here “For the full text of Leader Boehner’s address”, and sure enough, it was a transcript for the three minute video I had just watched.

That was the Game Changer? Three and a half minutes of Boehner rehashing the same points we’ve all been talking about for the past four freaking months? Are you kidding me?

Note to John Boehner: This is why people believe the GOP is lacking in vision, fortitude, and problem-solving ability. Truth be told, if you had any balls whatsoever you’d respond to calls for reform with “Congress does not have the constitutional authority to attempt to reform the healthcare industry; therefore, we defer to the states”. But since you don’t, you could at least expend a little effort to progress beyond the  general vagaries of “let families and businesses buy health insurance across state lines” and put together something solid to show up the Dems bills for the steaming piles of socialist crap that they are. The Democrats are dead serious about what they see as their mission to destroy the private sector; it’d be nice if you were at least half as serious about stopping them.

Note to Sarah Palin: We love you here at Conservative Nation, we really do, but things like this is why some people think you’re an idiot. Do you have any idea what the term ‘game changer’ means? A game changer is an event that noticibly alters the course of events. A well thought out and thoughtfully presented plan from the GOP might have been a game changer. Pelosi’s head on a stick next to Boehner as he was speaking would most certainly have been a game changer. Boehner using his commanding baritone to touch upon ideas that have been out there for months is not.

What a waste of time.

UPDATE: Allahpundit over at Hot Air seems to think Palin was simply trying to toss the GOP a bone with the Game Changer thing…

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-Cnation

Heritage Foundation Morning Bell for 10/30/2009

The new House health care bill (H.R. 3962) unveiled by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) yesterday clocks in at 1,990 pages and about 400,000 words. As written, the bill purports to cost only $1.05 trillion over the first ten years and is paid for by over $700 billion in tax increases and cuts to Medicare Advantage and Medicare prescription drug payments. But as troubling as those numbers are, the scariest thing about the bill is the solid foundation it lays for a complete government take over of the health care sector of our economy.

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The Washington Post describes the bill as “creating an expensive new entitlement program (subsidies to purchase health insurance) and dramatically expanding an existing one (Medicaid).” This is true by itself, but the Post later dismissively adds: “If you’ve noticed that we haven’t talked about the public option in the House bill, that’s not an oversight. For all the fury over the issue, it doesn’t matter that much; the CBO estimates that the government-run plan would actually have slightly higher premiums.” This is a breathtakingly naive statement by the Post and demonstrates that they have not yet fully grasped how all the different elements of the bill are designed to interact to produce President Barack Obama’s desired outcome.

The Medicaid Expansion: Under current law the CBO projects that only 35 million Americans would be on Medicaid by 2019. The House bill massively expands the Medicaid program by raising the upper income cutoff to 150 percent of the federal poverty line (FPL). As a result, the CBO now estimates some 50 million Americans will be enrolled in the program at a ten year cost to the federal government of $425 billion. This does not include the $34 billion in increased Medicaid costs that state governments will have to spend.

The Insurance Subsidies: The House bill also creates a Health Insurance Exchange through which individuals without employer based coverage could purchase insurance. The bill also provides “affordability credits” to people who are below 400% FPL. However, the bill also denies access to the credit for all people who are “eligible” for Medicaid. In essence, therefore, the House bill forces all Americans below 150% FPL to enroll in Medicaid or pay the individual mandate fine. The CBO explains why the Democrats chose this route: “The estimated costs of providing subsidies through the new insurance exchanges are now lower for several reasons: the larger expansion of Medicaid means that fewer people would be eligible for coverage through the exchanges.” In other words, it’s cheaper to force people into Medicaid then to give them subsidies high enough to buy private insurance. Furthermore, individuals are only allowed to enroll in the cheapest (”basic”) plans for the first two years. After that, they can only choose more expensive plans or the government run plan.

The Employer Mandate: The bill imposes a new 8% payroll tax on employers who don’t cover specified percentages of their employees’ health insurance. In the short term this will only result in job losses and lower wages. But further down the road, the health plans would have to meet new requirements to be specified later by Obama’s new Health Czar (“Health Choices Commissioner”). If your employer’s health plan doesn’t meet those requirements (which are all but guaranteed to drive up the cost of your health plan), you couldn’t keep it.

The Public Option: As health insurance premiums keep rising thanks to all the new requirements in the current bill and the Health Czar’s future regulations, more and more people will have no choice but to depend on the government plan or face a fine. At first, only individuals and employers with 25 employees or fewer would be eligible for the government run plan. But in year two (2014) individuals and employers with 50 employees or fewer become eligible, in year three (2015) employers with at least 100 employees become eligible but starting that year, the Health Czar permitted from this year forward to expand employer participation as appropriate, “with the goal of allowing all employers access to the Exchange.” In effect, the bill makes larger sized employers explicitly eligible and still turns over authority to the Health Czar to further open it up. The goal has been, and still clearly is, to open the exchange and the public plan to everyone. As the Post notes, the CBO now projects that the government run premiums will actually be higher than private plans. The Democrats will not allow this to continue. History shows that entitlement programs like this quickly devolve into price control central planning. A less “robust” public option today will almost certainly be a more robust public option tomorrow. Look no further than the history of Medicare. Medicare was initially designed to pay private rates, but now the program has a complex formula for administered pricing.

So that’s the plan: force all Americans to buy health insurance, regulate the private plans till they are too expensive, and then slowly expand the power and size of the public option as Americans are left with no choice but to turn to government run health care. That is how Pelosi aims to achieve Obama’s goal of “Everybody in, Nobody out” government run health care. The costs are going to be staggering. Not only will health care quality and choice suffer as more and more Americans are forced onto a government plan that reimburses providers at low government set rates, but the price tag is guaranteed to skyrocket. The only way the House managed to keep their price tag as low as $1.05 trillion is by pretending that Congress would cut Medicare reimbursement rates by 20% in 2010. The full ten-year cost of being honest about the Medicare reimbursement rates would be $250 billion. Less choice, lower quality health care, and trillion dollar deficits for years to come: that is the House’s prescription for health reform.

QUICK HITS

We all heard Nancy Pelosi a few weeks ago, while trying to coax her botox and plasticized face - which if you listen closely, can be heard crackling lke a new leather jacket - into an expression of concerned sadness, respond to a reporter’s question on her feelings about the tone of the healthcare debate

“I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw … I saw this myself in the late ’70s in San Francisco,” Pelosi said, choking up and with tears forming in her eyes. “This kind of rhetoric is just, is really frightening and it created a climate in which we, violence took place and … I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made.”

She went on to say:

“Our country is great because people can say what they think and they believe, but I also think that they have to take responsibility for any incitement that they may cause.”

Never mind that the Tea Party protests have been 100% non-violent, and that the only violence at the town hall meetings was perpetrated by either SEIU members or the occasional deranged leftist against the generally peaceful conservative protesters.

Never mind that the very violence she refers to from the 70s was the work of the liberal left and the ‘gay community’. You know, her hometown constituency.

Today, bottom feeder/intellectual powerhouse Joy Bahar and her guest Gore Vidal fantasize about murdering George W. Bush. Last week, Chris ‘Tingles’ Matthews says someone should put a pellet gun in Rush Limbaugh’s mouth and pull the trigger. And now, reports are that someone took a shot, as in fired a fucking gun, at Lou Dobbs’ home while his wife was standing outside a couple of weeks ago..

The violence and the violent rhetoric is from the left. It’s always from the left, and Nancy Pelosi, with all her talk about the TEA partiers carrying Racist/Nazi signs and spewing racist rhetoric is as responsible for it as anyone, probably even moreso, as most on the left don’t have a high-profile position like the house speakership from which to peddle their dishonest, hateful insanity from.

I’ve said it a million times and I’ll say it a million times more, violence is what they do. 1 2 3

Will Nancy Pelosi now come out, crocodile tears and all, and condemn Bahar, Vidal, and Matthews for inciting violence against conservatives? Will she apologize and take responsibility for her part in this incitement? Don’t hold your breath. To publicly denounce the incendiary words of those who, like Matthews and Vidal, bow at the altar of Obama would require at least a minimal degree of both integrity and character, neither of which she - or our president for that matter - possess.

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-Cnation

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Related:

Gateway Pundit: Rush Limbaugh: Pelosi Is a Liar and Thief & Should Go to Jail (Video)

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Heritage Foundation Morning Bell for 10/29/2009

In poll, after poll, after poll, the American people have clearly expressed their preference for prioritizing economic growth over global warming. This is a major problem for those on the left who want to reorganize our entire economy under the guise of cap and trade climate change legislation. Tacitly admitting they have lost this argument, the left has shifted gears and is trying a new tack: global warming is a threat to national security. So Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) recently blogged at the Center for American Progress:

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[C]limate change injects a major new source of chaos, tension, and human insecurity into an already volatile world. It threatens to bring more famine and drought, worse pandemics, more natural disasters, more resource scarcity, and human displacement on a staggering scale. We risk fanning the flames of failed-statism, and offering glaring opportunities to the worst actors in our international system. In an interconnected world, that endangers all of us.

Kerry is 100% wrong. Heritage fellow Lieutenant Colonel James Jay Carafano (Ret.) explained why in his testimony before the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee yesterday:

Climate Change is a Permanent Feature of Human Reality: While it might feel intuitively appropriate to directly connect the dots between the changing global environment and the human response to global warming, an appropriate complex system analysis would warn against such an approach. Indeed, there are many variables other the climate that affect how humans respond to climate change and, in turn, alter their behaviors to try to impact climate change and its consequences. For example, while the emission of greenhouse gases has been increasing across the globe for the last decade, political violence has been in decline. Furthermore, any changes in the climate, for better or for worse, will occur gradually over decades. Thus, there will be ample time to adjust national security and humanitarian assistance instruments to accommodate future demands. The global climate has always been changing. Adapting to these changes and human efforts to manage their surrounding environment is a permanent feature of human competition. The environment does not cause wars; it is how humans respond to their environment that causes conflicts.

Cap and Trade Would Do Nothing to Stop Climate Change: Even if you assume climate change is a threat to national security, proponents of cap and trade must first show that their solution would actually solve the problem. They can’t. According to climatologist Chip Knappenberger, similar legislation proposed in the House would moderate temperatures by only hundredths of a degree after being in effect for the next 40 years and no more than two-tenths of a degree at the end of the century. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson concurred, recently saying, “US action alone will not impact world CO2 levels.”

Cap and Trade Would Cripple the U.S. Economy: While there is no evidence that cap and trade legislation will halt climate change, there is strong evidence it will hurt the U.S. economy. A study by The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis on a similar companion bill proposed in the House finds that the law would make the United States about $9.4 trillion poorer by 2035. Much of this decline would be from reduced economic productivity and job loss. In particular, under the House legislation there would be 1.15 million fewer jobs on average than without a cap-and-trade bill. A collapse in U.S. economic growth would result in even more draconian cuts to the defense budget, leaving America with a military much less prepared to deal with future threats. Indeed, if America’s military power declines, there would probably be more wars, not fewer.

Inflicting cap and trade on the U.S. economy may well create the world we want to avoid. The law would ensure a steep decline in U.S. economic competitiveness and military preparedness. The consequences of a weak America would inevitably lead to a string of national security crises and an undermining of the nation’s capacity to deal with natural disasters here and abroad. At yesterday’s hearing, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) told Carafano she appreciated his testimony but that it was “misguided” since her cap and trade bill would create jobs, not cost them. Senator Boxer may want to read the testimony of Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorff who told Congress earlier this month that cap and trade would cause “significant” job loss and slow the U.S. economy. Our national security depends on it.

QUICK HITS

Tonight, on the eve of the release of the House healthcare bill to public scrutiny, Conservative Nation presents this simple video, courtesy of Verum Serum,  for your consideration:

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For those with a few extra minutes to spare, I am including a video of Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) addressing the Senate this past Monday 10/28/09 on the realities of the so-called ‘public option’. It runs approx. 15 minutes and is worth the time to watch.

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-Cnation

Heritage Foundation Morning Bell for 10/28/2009

Americans who like making their own health care choices received welcome news yesterday when Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) said he would be willing to block final passage of Obamacare if the government run health insurance program Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced Monday survives the amendment process during the Senate debate. Lieberman explained: “I think that a lot of people may think that the public option is free. It’s not. It’s going to cost the taxpayers and people that have health insurance now, and if it doesn’t, it’s going to add terribly to our national debt.”

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Lieberman is dead on. A government run insurance company will be massively more expensive than its proponents claim. Pressed by the leftist news organization Talking Points Memo to respond to “experts” who say the government run plan will actually save money, Lieberman responded: “Well all the history we have of health entitlement programs, including the two big ones that I dearly support, Medicare and Medicaid, is that they end up costing more than we’re prepared to pay, and they add to the debt, and then they add to the burden on taxpayers.” Again, the facts back Lieberman up here 100%.

In 1967, the experts predicted that the new Medicare program would cost about $12 billion in 1990. Actual Medicare spending in 1990 was $110 billion—off by nearly a factor of 100. The leftist TPM shot back noting that the government run health company is supposed to be “financed by premiums, and unable to draw on federal funds.” The statement would be comically naive if the stakes weren’t so high. Does the left really expect the American people to believe that the same government that bailed out General Motors, Chrysler, and scores of highly unpopular banks, would not bailout the already-government-run insurance company they fought so hard to create?

Addressing the “opt out” clause in Reid’s proposal, Lieberman commented: “I would vote against a public option plan even with an opt-out because it still creates a whole new government entitlement program for which taxpayers will be on the line.” This is also true. A government run health insurance program would create a new entitlement program designed to do nothing more than force every American into government run health care. This is not a bug of the plan, it is a feature. Just ask proponents of the plan like Michael Moore who told Rolling Stone this summer: “If a true public option is enacted — and Obama knows this — it will eventually bring about a single payer system, because the profit-making insurance companies won’t be able to compete with a government run plan and make the profits they want to make.” Candidate Barack Obama’s own campaign website back up Moore’s claim, quoting Obama at a 2008 speech in Ames, Iowa: “If I were designing a system from scratch I would probably set up a single-payer system. … So what I believe is we should set up a series of choices. … Over time it may be that we end up transitioning to such a system.”

But the scariest part of Obamacare is that it does not even need a “whole new government entitlement program” to push more and more Americans into government run health care. As Heritage scholar Dennis Smith has documented, even in the Senate Finance Committee version of Obamacare, which does not include a new government run insurance program, almost half of the newly insured Americans would get their new insurance through Medicaid. The House version of Obamacare, with the new government program, is no different.

The point is that no matter how the government run health insurance debate works out, Obamacare will move us closer towards government run health care. The only question is how fast it will do so. But there is still hope. Heritage Vice President for Government Relations Michael Franc explains:

But don’t lose heart. Conservatives will be in a position to prevail because, ultimately, America remains a right-of-center nation. And ultimately this debate will not just be one about our health system.

Rather, it will be a complex and layered debate about many other issues, issues where conservative values carry the day. Lawmakers will be hearing from their constituents on issues as varied and important as the individual’s relationship to government, the size and scope of that government, debt and deficits, our responsibilities to future generations, life (both at its beginning and its end), the level of taxation on individuals and work, job security, and privacy.

We’ll win because there is no other option.

QUICK HITS

From Rushlimbaugh.com:

In NY-23, Real Clear Politics: “Doug Hoffman, plus five.”  Doug Hoffman may in fact win this with nowhere near the amount of money the two Democrats have.  I know there’s a Democrat called a Republican, but we actually have two liberal Obama Democrats, one calling herself a Republican, and you’ve got the Reagan conservative Hoffman in there.  Tim Pawlenty threw in with him today, by the way, so you have Sarah Palin, Fred Thompson, Rick Santorum, who else?  (interruption)  Sue Collins endorsed — so?  Is that a surprise?  That’s going to sway a lot of votes.  Susan Collins from Maine — who?  Endorsed Scozzafava?  You know, the Republican Party, I really do not know what Newt Gingrich was thinking.  Maybe he hasn’t gotten over the budget battle of 1995.  I don’t know, but this is stunning.  I ruined two hours of my day when I saw that the Republican Party was running ads against Hoffman.  They have a death wish.  The Republican Party has a death wish.  Gallup: 40% of Americans now say they are conservative, 20% say they’re liberal, 36% say they’re moderates.  And of those three groups, which one is being ignored — not just ignored — which one is being attacked by the Republican Party?  The conservatives!

Read the whole thing here

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-Cnation

“Our goal should not be a Republican majority. It should be a conservative majority. If the Republican party will not be conservative, then we are going to run against them . . . and we’re going to win.”

- Doug Hoffman, NY-23 Conservative Party candidate

A great article by Doug Hoffman in the National Review Online today:

Yes, We Can [Doug Hoffman ]

How quickly things can change.

Two weeks ago, political observers noticed a poll from New York’s 23rd congressional district that showed the liberal candidate fading fast and the conservative candidate gaining faster. This is the resurgence Republicans have been hoping for!

Unfortunately, the Republican party had nominated the liberal candidate. The conservative candidate is running against both the Republican party and the Democratic party.

Isn’t that a good metaphor for the state in which conservatives find themselves?

I am that conservative candidate for Congress in New York’s 23rd District, and I believe conservatives can win our fight.

Read the whole thing here

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-Cnation

Heritage Foundation Morning Bell for 10/27/2009

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced that the health care legislation he is drafting will include a government-run health insurance plan, or as many on the left like to call it “the public option.” The new wrinkle that Reid has thrown into the proposal is an “opt out” clause which would require states to pass legislation by 2014 rejecting participation in the federal government run plan. None of the committees in the House or Senate ever even voted on this new opt out scheme. But that does not really matter. Whether it is first implemented through a co-op, or a trigger, or an opt out, the end goal is the same: government-run health care for all Americans.

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Hotel Harry Reid: Reid provided very few details for his “opt out” proposal, but here is what we do know: the government run plan would be available on the first day that major provisions of Obamacare would take effect in 2013, and states would have until 2014 to pass legislation declining participation in the program. This means that a one-vote majority of obstructionists in one chamber of a state legislature, by refusing to act, can consign a state’s residents to an eternity of government-run health care. In 17 states Democrats control both houses of the legislature and the state house. In another 24, Democrats control at least one legislative chamber or the governor’s mansion. That leaves a total of only 9 states where Republicans run the entire show — Texas, Utah, South Carolina, South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri, Idaho, Florida, and Georgia. That means Americans in 41 states are all but guaranteed to have no choice but to endure the government run health plan. What opt out really means is: You’re already checked in, and if you don’t do so by 2014, you can never leave.

The Co-op Co-opt: Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Kent Conrad (D-ND) have both pushed slightly different plans they both call co-ops. However, they both share the same fundamental flaws: advantageous federal funding and regulation designed to tilt the playing field in their direction. Heritage fellows Edmund Haislmaier, Dennis Smith, and Nina Owcharenko have explained why this model is guaranteed to fail: “Simply calling some form of a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) a “cooperative,” for instance, would be only another type of public plan in disguise. … One need look no further than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to see how GSEs can distort the market and leave taxpayers with huge liabilities. Decades of market distortions generated by their implicit government backing, compounded by the effects of repeated political meddling by Congress, put those GSEs at the very epicenter of the mortgage market collapse that triggered the current financial crisis and recession.”

The Trigger Trap: A trigger is a legislative tool that would put in place automatic benchmarks that if not met, would immediately unleash the government-run system into the market. For example, if 95% of Americans as defined by the bill, don’t have adequate health coverage by a certain date, the public option would be “triggered.” What a trigger does is hold off the tough decision until future, uncertain circumstances. The public option would essentially become law today, but not go into effect until an undetermined time when economic conditions could be even worse. Had Congress enacted a trigger to save Clintoncare, the trigger would have forced states to implement HMOs at exactly the time everyone was moving away from that overly rigid version of managed care. We don’t want to repeat that mistake. It is a travesty of democracy because it allows legislators to vote for a plan now, but passes the blame for the catastrophic consequences onto their successors.

Throughout the legislative process the White House has coyly denied that the establishment of a government run health plan was essential to their health care plan. But in 2003, President Barack Obama told the AFL-CIO: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care program. … And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single-payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.” Opt out, the trigger, and co ops will not get to government run health care immediately. They will all take time to develop. But no matter what road they try and bring Americans down, the destination is always the same: everybody in out, nobody out; that is, was, and always will be Obama’s ultimate goal.

QUICK HITS