Beer summit better than Blair summit
For weeks, ever since Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate race, we’ve been wondering what the next move on health care reform legislation would be. Now we know.
President Obama has summoned Democratic and Republican leaders to Blair House on Feb. 25 for a half-day meeting to iron out their differences and produce a bipartisan health care reform bill. And he wants the whole exchange broadcast on C-SPAN.
Now, as a Democrat and big Obama supporter, I know I’m supposed to jump and down with glee at this historic attempt at bipartisanship. But, pardon my lack of excitement, I think the whole thing’s a waste of time and will do nothing but unnecessarily prolong the process and give Republicans one more platform to stab Obama in the back.
I’m willing to bet that this year’s Blair summit will accomplish even less than last year’s beer summit.
Maybe that kind of bipartisan meeting would have been helpful a year ago, but it’s too late now. There is no way Mitch McConnell and John Boehner will agree on anything. They’ve already said they want the president to scrap the whole bill and start over again. They want health care to fail. They want Obama to fail. They want nothing but the status quo.
After being rebuffed by Republicans for the last 14 months, why would President Obama still be reaching out to them?
Give him credit for trying, but it’s time President Obama forgot about trying to get bipartisan support for health care and focus on Democrats, instead: Bang out the differences between the Senate and House bills, then ram it through the Senate, using reconciliation, with all Democratic votes.
Americans love Social Security, even though no Republicans voted for it. Americans love Medicare, even though no Republicans voted for it. And Americans will love universal health care, even if no Republican votes for it. Bipartisanship is over-rated.
Bill Press is host of The Bill Press Show, a nationally syndicated radio talk show airing weekdays on Sirius XM Satellite Radio and on many local stations across the country.
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The Blair summit has nothing to do with Obama wanting to be bi-partisan Billy. It’s a political ploy and a set up. The American people have rejected Obama’s policies and encourage Republicans to say NO! NO! NO! So call them the party of no, we support them being the party of no. They should require conditions and dictate issues to be discussed. Obama must drop all current pending legislation on health care, energy, taxes…well his entire statist agenda and then we will show up and discuss the one and only issue that needs discussing. THE ECONOMY and JOBS. Obama needs to sit down, shut up, and listen to free market and tax proposals that have worked time and time again for economic recovery.
“After being rebuffed by Republicans for the last 14 months, why would President Obama still be reaching out to them?”
Why are Liberals congenitally predisposed to being unable to tell the truth? From day one the Republicans were told to shut up and get out of the way while the Democrats filled up the Health Care bill with all the little goodies they wanted (including things that the CBO says will cause EVERYONE’S insurance premiums to rise). The Republicans are refusing to cooperate, but then again every idea they’ve suggested has been dismissed out of hand. Here you have Press, a Liberal zealot suggesting that the Democrats push through this pile of crap bill that Americans hate at a 70 / 30 split with a legal maneuver that has never been used before for this type of bill passage.
So evidently when Liberals were whining hysterically about Bush taking away our freedoms they were really saying they didn’t want him to do it before they got the chance to do it first. Nice column, douchebag.
If they wanted people to have universal health coverage they would just buy insurance for them and that would be the end of it. That wouldn’t work because the funds confiscated from the private-sector economy would result in job losses and would create more people each year who needed the program, so it would be a perpetual nightmare. Setting that issue aside, “reform” is just a label it would seem for a larger purpose. That purpose would appear to be to allow government to exercise an unprecedented level of control over our lives by deciding who gets health care and who doesn’t. This is inconsistent with a free market economy, but entirely consistent with progressive policies and the philosophy of eugenics that dominates far-left political thinking as a result of the lessons learned from the National Socialists movement led by Adolph Hitler. This approach showed the fallacy of the eugenics theory of societal evolutionary controls, but (like socialism in general) never really dies; it just takes on a new form and a new label and progressives try to move it forward every few years or decades.
Today we are seeing the same policies cloaked in this “universal health care” program approach. This is a misnomer because universal health coverage is not possible for our society due to the way our economy is structured. If we want universal health care for all our people – and the price is to be affordable and controllable – then we must restructure our economy so that fiscal spending becomes and exogenous variable to the order of the private-sector economy. There is no substitute for this approach, but I doubt it will find adherents because it completely replaces the taxation method of funding government with the unlimited spending model based upon the investment income model. Progressives like punishing businesses and successful individuals far too much to walk away from the taxation “club” so we will have to endure the pronouncements of people like Mr. Press for the foreseeable future. Take a deep breath, grit your teeth and pray for mortality.
The American public just don’t trust the politicians they send to Congress and the White House. Why? The actions of the Obama Administration in this last year leads anyone with common sense to not trust them. Backroom deals, favors for friends, bribes to Senators, and faulty decisions by Obama’s appointees leads to mistrusting anything Obama now says. He just can’t be believed anymore. The foolish public may have believed him during the campaign but now, his actions have spoken louder than his slick words during the campaign. He has lied continuously even during the State of the Union speech. He cannot undo all the lies and so he lies some more. A lie is an eternal thing. It is forever. That is why Obama cannot get any cooperation from Republicans and even many in his own party. Now you know.
Of course Press is not going to say anything bad about Obama nor his health care bill. The bill is bad and even Democrats don’t like it. Scale it back, get rid of the mandatory stuff and make it constitutional. Get rid of the abortion language and keep the Stupak amendment. Don’t punish some folks who have a good health plan now while trying to get health coverage for those who don’t want it or can’t afford it. Take this one step at a time. I know Obama wants to brag about a massive bill but he should care about us rather than his reputation. Now you know what it takes to get something, and he can call it bipartisan then. Now you know.
Press is a progressive idealogue who has little to offer to the debate other than progressive talking points. He is not a journalist and he is a even worse speech writer.
“[GOP] want nothing but the status quo.”
WRONG!
GOP – and the American people – want incremental common sense reforms. NOT a government takeover of 1/6 of the economy cloaked inside 2700 pages of legislative jibberish. We’ll take the status quo over the jibberish. Democrat party owns the jibberish. There is still time to trash it, but Democrats seem too tone deaf to consider the obvious.
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/
Press is an Obama shill and does nothing but echo tired old liberal talking points. “Dems are good, Republicans are bad”. He’s not a journalist, he’s a speechwriter for the left. The only thing missing from this archival posting is blaming Bush.
Why can’t pundits offer opinions based on facts. liberal pundits especially deal in inaccuracies, misdirection, and downright lies to support an ideology that cannot be promoted openly and honestly because it lacks the support of the majority of the American people. The Republicans and the majority of Americans want Obama’s policies to fail not “the human being” to fail. Saying the minority party wants nothing more than the status quo is not an opinion of fact, it’s a liberal talking point and is simply not true. Republicans, like most of us, want reform we just don’t want reform that calls for expanding government control of our lives. It’s blatantly obvious the Senate and House bills have nothing to do with health care reform and are designed to advance the progressive statist agenda. Press knows all of this. I can’t understand why someone like Press would want more government control of his life. Is he not capable of living it fully himself? Does he, and those like him, believe they will somehow be among the elite and above the oppression that bigger government brings? They won’t have to wait in lines and be denied service? This idea that they are somehow special and will not suffer the consequences of their statist believes is the only logical conclusion I can come to as to why they support statism/socialism. If progressive’s are successful the Press’s of the world become part of the collective…nothing more. They might change their “opinions” if they woke up to that fact.