Tag Archives: Massachusetts

News

Massachusetts treasurer says Obamacare could wipe out the economy in 4 years

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Story here from Business Week. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The Massachusetts treasurer said Tuesday that Congress will “threaten to wipe out the American economy within four years” if it adopts a health care overhaul modeled after the Bay State’s.

Treasurer Timothy Cahill — a former Democrat running as an independent for governor — said the 2006 law has succeeded only because of huge subsidies and favorable regulatory changes from the federal government.

[…]Cahill said he’s called for the state to abandon its plan, and for the federal government not to match it.

He also gave reporters a copy of a state ledger sheet showing the state’s Medicaid program ballooning from $7.5 billion to a projected $9.2 billion since the health care law was adopted. Of the 407,000 newly insured, only 32 percent paid for insurance wholly on their own.

The remaining received partial or total taxpayer subsidies.

[…]Cahill [pointed] out the Obama administration is asking the House and Senate to approve a national plan that includes an “individual mandate,” similar to Massachusetts’, and an entity designed to match buyers with private health insurance plans.

Cahill said the Massachusetts equivalent, the Health Care Connector, had helped only 5 percent of those who bought private insurance without any type of government assistance.

While the Massachusetts program has increased access to health insurance, he said it hasn’t cut underlying cost increases, steering more people to a broken system.

“If President (Barack) Obama and the Democrats repeat the mistake of the health insurance reform adopted here in Massachusetts on a national level, they will threaten to wipe out the American economy within four years,” the treasurer said.

Let’s learn from the mistakes of others who tried to do what Obama is doing.

News

Coakley advisor blames Obama’s taxing and spending for loss

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Story from the center-left Politico.

Excerpt:

The Coakley adviser’s memo: National Dems Failed to Aid Coakley Until Too Late

[…]— From the beginning, Brown labeled President Obama’s health care and cap and trade plans as tax increases. Polling throughout the race showed this to be the most effective attack on Coakley.

There were other policies that hurt Coakley, but this was the most effective.

More here from Gateway Pundit.

Awesome. Just awesome.

Commentary

How the left-wing media lowers the level of civil discourse

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Here’s MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Republican Scott Brown. (H/T Newsbusters)

Excerpt:

Lost in the angst about Obama and Coakley is the little-recognized real headline of this vote. You have heard Scott Brown speculating, talking out of his bare bottom, about whether or not the President of the United States was born out of wedlock. You have heard Scott Brown respond to the shout from a supporter that they should stick a curling iron into Ms. Coakley’s rectum with the answer, “We can do this.”

You may not have heard Scott Brown support a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, or describing two women having a child as being quote, “Just not normal.” You may not have heard Scott Brown associating himself with the Tea Party movement, perhaps the saddest collection of people who don’t want to admit why they really hate since the racists of the South in the sixties insisted they were really just concerned about states’ rights. You may not of heard Scott Brown voting against paid leaves of absence for Massachusetts Red Cross workers who had gone to New York to help after 9/11.

In short, in Scott Brown we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, teabagging supporter of violence against woman and against politicians with whom he disagrees. In any other time in our history, this man would have been laughed off the stage as an unqualified and a disaster in the making by the most conservative of conservatives. Instead, the commonwealth of Massachusetts is close to sending this bad joke to the Senate of the United States.

News Busters has the video. This is what happens when you only listen to people who agree with you. It becomes impossible to focus on substantive policy debates and evidence, and you start to go after people personally. The way to stop it is to seek out the best people on the other side and to read their work, or better yet, see them in a debate. Leftists shouldn’t look at tea party protesters, they should look at Thomas Sowell.

In one way, this suits me well. Brown is going to get elected to the Senate today in Massachusetts, and I hope that the way that the left wing media portrays him will drive him further to the right, and make him more concerned about bypassing the media to talk to the people directly. The more they insult him, the less sympathy he will have for compromise, and the less he will be influenced by what the elite think of him.