Internet Scofflaw

Fox News reports:

Obama boasted Monday that Democrats’ health care proposals would cut deficits by $1 trillion “over the next decade,” a flub that inflated the actual estimate by $868 billion. . .

“Our cost-cutting measures mirror most of the proposals in the current Senate bill, which reduces most people’s premiums and brings down our deficit by up to $1 trillion dollars over the next decade because we’re spending our health care dollars more wisely,” Obama told an audience at Arcadia University in Glenside, Pa., a suburb north of Philadelphia. . .

“Those aren’t my numbers . . . they are the savings determined by the Congressional Budget Office, which is the nonpartisan, independent referee of Congress for what things cost.”

But the budget office did not say the Senate health care bill would save $1 trillion over the next decade — or even close to that figure.

It estimated the bill would save $132 billion from 2010 to 2019, leaving Obama’s “next decade” estimate $868 billion short.

When contacted about this disparity, a White House official said Obama meant to say the Senate bill would save $1 trillion in its second decade — a projection that would more closely match congressional analysts’ estimates.

Keep in mind that the CBO’s savings estimates are nonsense too, since they depend on counterfactuals like a reduction in Medicare reimbursements and rely on static models of economic behavior.

I wondered about this:

Rep. Eric Massa, D-N.Y., under investigation for alleged sexual harassment of a male staffer, accused House Democratic leaders of lying about the charges against him and using them to run him out of Congress because he voted against health care reform when it last came before the House.

Roll Call reports this morning that on the local radio show he hosts in his district, Massa said he had not been informed of the sexual harassment allegations before they became public. He claimed that Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., spoke falsely when he said he had brought the matter to him previously, Massa said. “Steny Hoyer has never said a single word to me, at all, ever, not once,” Massa said. “Not a word. This is a lie. It’s a blatant, false statement.” . . .

Massa, who voted against health care reform in November, accused Democratic leaders of driving him out of office in the cause of passing health care reform. “With the departure of Congressman Neil Abercrombie (D), who is running for the governorship of Hawaii, and with the tragic and very sad passing of my personal friend Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me and it will pass. You connect the dots.”

I can totally see the Democratic leadership doing this. They’re betting everything on passing this crap; they’re not going to hold back any tactic that might gain them a vote. On the other hand, if Massa feels this way, why did he step down?

(Via Instapundit.)

The Daily Mail reports:

A man of 22 died in agony of dehydration after three days in a leading teaching hospital.

Kane Gorny was so desperate for a drink that he rang police to beg for their help. They arrived on the ward only to be told by doctors that everything was under control. The next day his mother Rita Cronin found him delirious and he died within hours. . .

His 50-year-old mother says that he needed to take drugs three times a day to regulate his hormones. Doctors had told him that without the drugs he would die. Although he had stressed to staff how important his medication was, she said, no one gave him the drugs.

She said that two days after his hip operation, while Miss Cronin was at work, he became severely dehydrated but his requests for water were refused. He became aggressive and nurses called in security guards to restrain him. . .

The tragedy emerged a week after a report into hundreds of deaths at Stafford Hospital revealed the appalling quality of care given by many of the nurses.

It’s a horrifying story, but what’s more horrifying is how often we hear such stories out of the UK.

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: In fact, here’s another:

Ministers dismissed a warning in 2003 by the UK’s most senior heart surgeon that half of Britain’s units should be closed. As President of the Society for Cardiothoracic Surgeons (SCTS) of Great Britain and Ireland, Prof James Monro was commissioned by ministers to propose changes following the Bristol inquiry, yet “the Government did absolutely nothing” about his key demand, he told The Sunday Telegraph.

Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of the health service, told NHS bosses two years ago that he feared “another Bristol” tragedy because specialists were so thinly spread. . .

Britain’s leading children’s heart charity says Labour ministers “ran scared” from introducing an overhaul of the specialist system which could have saved lives, and prevented major disabilities.

(Via Power Line.)

I’m simply bewildered by President Obama’s strategy for passing health care reform. The House Democrats don’t like the Senate bill, so the White House is promising that the Senate will fix it by passing a second bill using reconciliation.

If the world made sense, the Senate would do the fix first, and then the House would vote on both bills at once. But that’s not what Obama is asking. No, he is asking that the House pass the Senate bill on spec, and trust that the Senate will make the fixes they want afterwards.

This is insane on so many levels:

1. Once the House loses all its leverage once it passes the Senate bill. The Senate can simply move on to other things. Is Obama going to veto the bill? Not likely.
2. Even if the Senate takes up a fix, will the Senate really fix every problem the House had with the bill? More likely, they would fix some issues and not others.
3. Even if the Senate actually tries to fix every single issue raised by the House, who’s to say that it will do so satisfactorily? Legislation is a tricky thing. That’s why you vote on actual language, not vague promises.
4. Even if the Senate takes up a fix that addresses every issue to the satisfaction of the House, the Senate Democrats do not necessarily have the power to pass it. The parliamentarian and the Republicans can and will interfere. At the end of the process, the bill will not be the same.

In short, the president is making a promise that is not in his power to keep. It’s not in the Senate Democrats’ power to keep either, even if they earnestly try, which seems unlikely. Why is anyone taking this scheme seriously? Are the House Democrats really this stupid? I guess we’ll see.

But it’s worse than that. It’s obvious that the sensible thing is for the Senate to act first. If they’re not doing it that way, there must be a reason. The most obvious reason would be that they know perfectly well that the Senate can’t do it. If the Senate goes first, its failure sinks the entire endeavor. But, if the House goes first, trusting the Senate to hold up its end, here’s what will happen: The Senate will make a show of trying to pass the fix, but will ultimately fail because of those awful interfering Republicans. Then Obama will sign the Senate bill without the fix.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal is thinking along similar lines.

UPDATE: It seems there is another reason for the House to go first that’s not at all obvious. Under the Senate’s reconciliation rules, it cannot consider a fix until the president signs the original bill. So it’s not only bad faith that has the president pushing the House to go first. Of course, this doesn’t at all change the fact that the House would be stupid to go along with it.

Roll Call reports:

Newly anointed House Ways and Means Chairman Sander Levin (D-Mich.) repaid a Maryland property-tax credit Friday that he should not have received, his office confirmed.

Levin, who owns a home in Chevy Chase, Md., received a $690 credit on his most recent property tax bill, the result of Montgomery County program that provided one-time credits to residential property owners in the 2009-10 tax year.

Levin . . . received the tax credit although it was intended for only “owner-occupied” properties, and he does not live in the home. The credit reduced his tax bill to just under $9,500. . .

Levin repaid the credit Friday, [Levin’s chief of staff] said, after being contacted by Roll Call.

(Emphasis mine.)

The House’s chief tax-writer

UPDATE (6/22/2011): Evidently a draft somehow got published in place of the full post. Unfortunately, I no longer remember where I was going with this, so I’ll leave it as is.

After Rod Blagojevich failed to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder, and after Senate Democrats scuttled an effort to fill the seat with a special election (a Republican might have won), Blagojevich appointed Democratic perjurer Roland Burris to the seat.

The long-delayed special election will finally be held this November, two years after Obama was elected president. Democrats nominated this guy:

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alexi Giannoulias sought to blunt a potentially damaging political issue today about questions regarding his involvement in his family’s struggling bank, which he said he expects will likely fail in the coming months.

But questions were still left unanswered following a more than 70-minute meeting with the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board. Among them were exactly what Giannoulias knew about convicted bookmaker Michael Giorango’s criminal past when he received loans from Broadway Bank, and how many of the bank’s troubled loans were made while Giannoulias was working there.

Giannoulias also sought to explain nearly $70 million the bank paid out in dividends to him and his family in recent years, saying $29 million of that was taken out of the bank to diversify the family’s investments.

Awesome! In this political climate, Democrats nominate a man tied to a failing family bank. The family made loans to criminals and took $70 million out of the bank after it started to fail.

Kirk and national Republicans have questioned why Giannoulias and his family accepted the nearly $70 million in dividend payouts in 2007 and 2008 – at the same time the economy was beginning to struggle. Giannoulias in November had said the payout was the result of helping settle his father’s estate. His father, Alexis Giannoulias, died in June 2006.

In his appearance today, Giannoulias added new details, saying that $40 million went to pay off income taxes for bank shareholders – which include him and his family members – and that $29 million was paid out so he and his family could better diversify their economic portfolios.

That’s no explanation at all. The income taxes needed to be paid one way or the other (or perhaps not), so $40 million might just as well have been spent on whatever corrupt Chicago Democrats ordinarily spend their money on. But the $29 million is even better. Of course they wanted to diversify their portfolios; their bank was failing!

Giannoulias says the questions about his failing family bank are unfair:

In light of the false, reckless attacks from Republicans and Mark Kirk against Alexi Giannoulias and his role at Broadway Bank, the Alexi for Illinois campaign announced that Alexi will be answering every question posed to him by the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune editorial boards today.

But he didn’t answer every question. Going back to the top:

But questions were still left unanswered following a more than 70-minute meeting with the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board. Among them were exactly what Giannoulias knew about convicted bookmaker Michael Giorango’s criminal past when he received loans from Broadway Bank, and how many of the bank’s troubled loans were made while Giannoulias was working there.

In fact, it looks like the questions Giannoulias didn’t/couldn’t answer are the most troubling ones.

(Via Big Government.)

Glenn Reynolds on the president’s virtual colonoscopy:

If Michael Kinsley’s definition of rationing holds — when the President can get a treatment that ordinary Americans can’t — then we’re already there.

To ration care, the government doesn’t have to cut off access to old treatments, it can withhold access to new treatments. (In this case “new” means 10 years old.) They’re already doing it for the health care they control. Of course they’ll ration everyone’s health care, once they can.

Except for the president’s, that is.