“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech… or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Hellloooo??!  Watch, and get fired up.  If you have not contacted your Congress-persons for a while, NOW IS THE TIME for them TO HEAR YOUR VOICE in Washington, DC.  If this socialized medicine [excrement sandwich] is, in the end, crammed down the Peoples’ throat, have no regrets that you exercised your Constitutional Rights to stop this abomination!

Jefferson Paine’s Easy HealthCare “Reform” Package

1. Deregulate Private Insurance companies allowing them to market innovative products to deal with portability, pre-existing conditions, young, uninsured, etc.
2. Ban Government from offering “insurance” which is actually Welfare.
3. Cap ridiculous “pain and suffering” awards and require the proof in major malpractice be proven scientifically beyond a higher standard than 50/50, and institute some form of “loser pays,” in civil suits.
4. Clean up all waste, fraud and abuse in MediCare / MedicAid, and plan to phase out these colossally corrupt Ponzi schemes over a few years.
5. Repeal corporate tax breaks for employer-provided medical insurance.
6. Ban all Illegal Aliens from receiving free healthcare services, and arrest and deport them when they reveal themselves at medical facilities.
7. Allow Private Insurance products to be bought and sold across State lines.
8. Ban Government issuing mandates, fines, etc. in Private Healthcare services or insurance, and ban all Government “coercion” forcing one Citizen to pay for another’s medical costs involuntarily.
9. Require Government officials and bureaucrats to buy from the exact same choices of private medical services and insurance products as available to the common peon.
10. Grant all active and retired military personnel at least the same quality of medical services as those enjoyed by Congress critters.

Any questions?

Think Things, Not Words

Random thoughts on the passing scene.

By Thomas Sowell

Wise Man.

Upon learning that the Constitution requires a president to be a natural-born citizen, a college student asked: “What makes a natural-born citizen any more qualified than one born by C-section?”

Airlines that keep passengers trapped for hours in planes sitting on the runway should be prosecuted for unlawful imprisonment.

When politicians propose some hugely expensive new program and are asked how the government is going to pay for it, a standard ploy over the years has been to claim that they will pay for it by eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” At a recent town-hall meeting, a citizen raised the obvious question: If you can do that, why haven’t you done it already?

Marxism is an ism that has become a wasm.

What is called “universal health care” can turn out to be universal “don’t care” medical treatment, when Washington bureaucrats can overrule what you and your doctor want to do.

What ever happened to Samantha Brown on the Travel Channel? Could she have met with foul play? Where is the FBI when we need it?

The older I get, the more I learn to tolerate human shortcomings — and the less I tolerate bad attitudes.

After political crusades for “affordable housing” ended up ruining the housing market and much of the economy with it, many of the same politicians are now carrying on a crusade for “affordable health care.” But what you can afford has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of producing anything. Refusing to pay those costs means that you are just not going to continue getting the same quantity and quality — regardless of what any politician says or how well he says it.

Want to win an easy bet? Bet someone that Babe Ruth had a lower lifetime earned-run average than Cy Young, Whitey Ford, or Sandy Koufax. During his early years with the Red Sox, Ruth pitched nine shutouts in a season, which is still the American League record for a left-handed pitcher. He would have made the baseball Hall of Fame, even if he had never hit a home run.

Joe Wilson got into more trouble for telling the truth than Barack Obama got into by telling a demonstrable lie about adding millions of people to the insurance rolls without adding a dime to the deficit. As regards providing medical insurance for illegal immigrants, I doubt that the president will do that. More likely, he will legalize them first and then give them medical insurance.

The way Hollywood elites have sprung to the defense of Roman Polanski to keep him from being extradited to the United States, despite the heinous crime he is accused of, suggests that — like other egalitarians — they consider those who are “one of us” to be more equal than others.

When I contemplate the direction in which this government and this society are moving, my biggest consolation is that economists’ predictions are often wrong. I can only hope that my expectations are wrong by miles.

What is most frightening about the political Left is that they seem to have no sense of the tragedy of the human condition. All problems seem to them to be due to other people not being as wise or as noble as they are.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Think things, not words.” In words, many see a need for “social justice” to override “the dictates of the market.” In reality, what is called “the market” consists of human beings making their own choices at their own cost. What is called “social justice” is government imposition of the notions of third parties, who pay no price for being wrong.

Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Moammar Qaddafi, and Vladimir Putin have all praised Barack Obama. When enemies of freedom and democracy praise your president, what are you to think? When you add to this Barack Obama’s many previous years of associations and alliances with people who hate America — Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Father Pfleger, and so on — at what point do you stop denying the obvious and start to connect the dots?

By Robert Tracinski, RCP

Experience: ACORN. Any Questions?

We had our warning during the campaign, we really did.

Remember Barack Obama’s famous speech on race, back in March of 2008? Obama had spent 20 years listening to the sermons of Jeremiah Wright, full of venomous anti-Americanism and attacks on “white America.” Yet when the reverend’s rants were revealed to the public, Obama tried to convince us that he just happened to be missing from the pews on any well-documented Sunday, and that the Jeremiah Wright we saw and heard was not the Jeremiah Wright he knew.

It was a giant, implausible lie. Yet the speech was smoothly delivered and well-turned, perfectly balanced to seem to empathize both with the grievances of blacks and with the concerns of whites. So most people seemed to believe it.

This is what Obama’s supposed gift for rhetoric amounts to: the ability to tell a smoothly polished bald-faced lie.

And that was the whole essence of Obama’s big health-care speech. It was a pack of lies from beginning to end, and if we’re going to finally see through this flim-flam artist once and for all-as more and more people are beginning to do-then we had better identify them one at a time.

I’ll skip the lies by omission-his only mention of town hall meetings, for example, was of people who “shared their stories with us” because they are “counting on us to succeed” in passing a health-care bill. Yeah, that’s what happened at town hall meetings last month!

And I’ll skip the non-health-care lies, like Obama’s claim that he merely inherited giant deficits-when his first big legislative campaign was for three quarters of a trillion dollars in new deficit spending. Or his claim that the economic crisis was brought back from the brink “thanks to the bold and decisive action we have taken since January.” (Does anybody remember that day in February when the Dow dropped 300 points because Obama’s Treasury Secretary gave a speech in which he failed to outline any details of his latest plan? Bold and decisive indeed.) Or Obama’s claim that Ted Kennedy was not an advocate of big government.

For now, let’s just stick to the speech’s seven big lies.

1) Obama’s proposal is just minor, incremental tinkering.

The key to Obama’s speeches is that he counts on you not to be listening carefully and not to compare what he says from one moment to the next. So while he vows to be the “final” president to reform health-care-indicating that his approach is a sweeping, once-and-for-all overhaul, he then goes on to tell you that everyone else is a radical, but he’s just in favor of cautious, incremental tinkering.

There are those on the left who believe that the only way to fix the system is through a single-payer system like Canada’s, where we would severely restrict the private insurance market and have the government provide coverage for everyone. On the right, there are those who argue that we should end the employer-based system and leave individuals to buy health insurance on their own.

I have to say that there are arguments to be made for both approaches. But either one would represent a radical shift that would disrupt the health care most people currently have. Since health care represents one-sixth of our economy, I believe it makes more sense to build on what works and fix what doesn’t, rather than try to build an entirely new system from scratch. And that is precisely what those of you in Congress have tried to do over the past several months.

Does it take a thousand pages of legislation to not “disrupt one-sixth of our economy”? The reality is that the proposals he advocates would create a vast new bureaucracy from scratch, with sweeping powers to regulate private health-insurance plans-eventually including employer-provided plans-and forcing individual health-insurance plans to be offered on a government-controlled “exchange.” It is a plan for the comprehensive restructuring of the health-insurance industry-but Obama wants you to think that he’s not really doing anything. Which makes you realize that he doesn’t want to you notice or think too hard about what he is doing.

2) Obama’s plan is bipartisan.

This is another attempt to deflect scrutiny by claiming that everything he is proposing is safe, bland, anodyne. Thus, his plan “incorporates ideas from many of the people in this room tonight-Democrats and Republicans.” Which explains why Obama has so few Republican votes that his allies in Congress are now talking about ramming the bill through, in a dubious parliamentary maneuver, on Democratic votes alone.

Obama’s one token concession to Republicans gives you a flavor for his actual “bipartisanship.” Citing Republican arguments that curbing excessive medical malpractice awards would help reduce “defensive medicine,” i.e., extra tests ordered to avoid a lawsuit, the president offered to authorize “demonstration projects in individual states to test these issues”-an ineffectual, symbolic measure the Bush administration tinkered with because it couldn’t get Congress to pass real tort reform.

3) You can keep your existing insurance.

This is the central claim of Obama’s speech: “First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have.” Notice that this is already a minor change from his previous statements on this issue, in which he made the same assurance for all “private health insurance plans.” The change acknowledges the fact that individual plans would be swept into the government “exchange.”

But notice that, while claiming he won’t change your existing coverage, Obama goes on to detail a whole set of changes to that coverage that will be mandated by government:

What this plan will do is to make the insurance you have work better for you. Under this plan, it will be against the law for insurance companies to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition…. They will no longer be able to place some arbitrary cap on the amount of coverage you can receive in a given year or a lifetime. We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses…. And insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care.

And notice what each of these regulations would do: it would increase costs for private health-insurance companies. They would have to pay more to cover people with pre-existing conditions; more for people who go over their yearly or lifetime caps, more to make up for the limits on your out-of-pocket expenses, and more for routine checkups. Oh yes, and later on, Obama explains that his bill will be paid for by increased taxes on drug companies and insurance companies.

There is no way to increase all of these costs for the insurers without causing a corresponding increase in health-insurance premiums.

So you can keep your health-insurance-except that its cost will be driven up by all of the regulations imposed by Obama’s bill. This is a well-documented phenomenon. In fact, the states in which health-insurance is most expensive-places like New York-are those which have the greatest number of “mandates” dictating benefits that insurers have to provide.

That’s why most of us grasp that the “public option” is not really an option, in the long run. Obama’s bill is designed to drive up the costs of private insurance, making it even more unaffordable-and thereby herding all of us into a government-managed insurance plan as the only remaining alternative.

And that brings us to the next implausibility in the speech.

4) The “public option” will not be subsidized by government.

President Obama would have us believe that a government-run insurance company would be less expensive than private insurance because it avoids “some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits, excessive administrative costs, and executive salaries.” Does anyone actually believe this? Obama himself acknowledges that the “public option” leads to less efficiency when it comes to delivering mail. Why should we believe the government is suddenly going to become a model of efficiency in the health-insurance market?

It is obvious what is actually going to happen. Since the whole purpose of the “public option” is to provide a cheaper competitor against private insurance, the government will do whatever is required to ensure that this is the case-including subsidizing the public option.

After all, weren’t Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac supposed to be self-supporting enterprises, too? Why should “affordable health-care” end up any differently than “affordable housing”?

5) The health-care bill will pay for itself with cost savings.

Teleprompter: "I Demand More Wax from You"

The president continues to make a series of false claims about the “savings” that will supposedly come from all of the regulations he is imposing. Thus, for example, it is clear that requiring health-insurance companies to pay for “routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies” will increase spending-but Obama claims that this will “save money” because we’ll be “catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse.”

This is a demonstrated falsehood. Congressional Budget Director Doug Elmendorf makes this bluntly clear: “Researchers who have examined the effects of preventive care generally find that the added costs of widespread use of preventive services tend to exceed the savings from averted illness.”

A related lie: “we’ve estimated that most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system-a system that is currently full of waste and abuse,” another claim that’s been debunked by the CBO.

The far more plausible way to cut Medicare spending is to begin rationing or denying care. And that leads us to Obama’s next big lie.

6) There are no death panels.

Obama attacks the “bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost. The best example is the claim, made not just by radio and cable talk show hosts, but prominent politicians, that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. Such a charge would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple.”

But what is Obama’s most plausible recommendation for cutting Medicare spending? “[A]n independent commission of doctors and medical experts charged with identifying more waste in the years ahead.” How will they identify waste? By deciding which procedures are “cost effective” and should be covered by Medicare-and which procedures are “wasteful” and should not be covered.

Britain’s National Health Service already has such a commission, established on precisely the same rationale. They call it the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, known by the Orwellian acronym NICE. It is becoming notorious for rules that deny care to older patients because they don’t have enough “quality adjusted life years” left to justify the cost of their treatment.

If you read the British newspapers-and if you’re concerned about what greater government control of medicine might look like, you should-then you might have caught the latest development: a letter by a group of distinguished British doctors complaining that the Liverpool Care Pathway, a NICE-endorsed system for determining the care given to severely ill patients, is causing doctors to abandon care for patients who still have a chance of recovery.

If that’s not a “death panel,” I don’t know what is. Yet it is precisely the system Obama advocates to cut costs under his plan.

7) Obama doesn’t want a government takeover of medicine.

Here’s a tip: when Barack Obama says, “So let me set the record straight,” he is about to lie to you about his past. Thus, in rebutting the claim that he wants a “government takeover” of medicine, he assures us that “My guiding principle is, and always has been, that consumers do better when there is choice and competition.” So how is it that he was recorded only six years ago describing himself as an advocate of a Canadian style “single payer” system-the very opposite of “choice and competition”?

Hasn’t the overall theme of Obama’s administration-from the auto bailouts to cap-and-trade-been the relentless expansion of government power at the expense of individual freedom?

During the Jeremiah Wright affair, the American people gave Obama the benefit of the doubt because they couldn’t bring themselves to believe that such a respectable, well-spoken man could be such a brazen liar-and because they liked the inspirational, post-racial illusion he presented. They wanted to believe, and that’s the kind of audience a sharp operator like him needs.

But now the spell is broken, his audiences are beginning to ask the tough questions-and Obama’s credibility will continue to dissolve as his lies are exposed.

Obamacare will be one of many federal failures.

By Deroy Murdock, National Review Online

Don't Tread on US!

As the health-care reform debate roars on, Uncle Sam resembles a restless college senior who is flunking economics, finance, and management. Despite a report card full of Fs, he suddenly announces: “I want to go to medical school!”

Similarly, Pres. Barack Obama stood before a joint session of Congress Wednesday night and re-embraced a government option for health insurance. As he explained, “Sometimes government has to step in to help deliver” on the promise that “hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play.”

Alas, too often when Washington steps in, failing grades follow.

• Medicare, the Great Society’s shining jewel, is a battered gem. Its hospitals program already bleeds ruby-red ink. “Medicare Part A again will spend more in benefits than it receives in revenues” this fiscal year, observes Heritage Foundation analyst Bob Moffitt. Its Trust Fund is an accounting fiction, but even that fantasy disappears in eight years, with depletion in 2017. Even worse, Heritage’s Brian Riedl calculates that between 2009 and 2083 Medicare’s budget will zoom from 3.1 percent to 14.8 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Its unfunded liabilities (promises backed by campaign balloons instead of cash) equal $36.3 trillion.
• Social Security, the New Deal’s cornerstone, is as cutting edge as a 78 RPM record. In 2016, barely six years away, it will begin paying more in pension checks than it collects in payroll taxes. Congress then will be unable to use Social Security’s surplus like a ShamWow to absorb red ink. Social Security’s unfunded obligations equal $17.5 trillion — again not financed by anything but congressional speeches.
• Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: These two government options in the home-mortgage arena are widely considered the twin jet engines that flew the economy into a hillside. These were supposed to be money-making, quasi-private companies, with no federal involvement beyond an implicit guarantee that government would cover their losses. Emboldened by this cozy federal safety net, these enterprises embarked upon financial acrobatics they otherwise might have avoided. Rather than generate profits between 2009 and 2019, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, Fannie and Freddie will cost taxpayers $389 billion.
• The Hope for Homeowners program began last October 1. Congress gave it a hefty $300 billion to help some 400,000 homeowners avoid foreclosure. According to an August 10 Newsday editorial, “It has produced exactly one refinanced loan.” One down, 399,999 to go.
• “UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right?” Obama asked in August. “It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.” Yes, indeed. Its two-year fiscal deficit approaches $8 billion. It has pried some 60,000 mailboxes off of America’s streets, the Lexington Institute reports. It also is weighing the cancellation of Saturday services. Even as e-mail, digitally attached documents, and online banking decrease demand for first-class snail mail, the Post Office keeps hiking the cost of stamps. What sort of business actually raises prices while customers walk away?
• The Internal Revenue Code is like John Donne’s poetry: It means something different to everyone. Perhaps flummoxed by its 67,000 pages, even IRS advisers offer conflicting answers to identical questions. But today’s U.S. Tax Code will be a triumph of window-like clarity compared with the U.S. Health Code that Obamacare would trigger. Just wait until every medical lobby — from the American Stethoscope Council to the National Tongue Depressor League — hikes up Capitol Hill to demand exemptions, loopholes, and subsidies.
• Although Washington already owns 54 percent of the square mileage west of the Rockies, it obsessively purchases new acreage. More than on private property, land-use restrictions on federal soil often prevent thinning of foliage. Flames frequently follow.

“Most western wildfires burn federal land,” William Welch wrote in September 9’s USA Today. To date this year, 123,554 private acres burned in California, versus 271,000 federal acres.

Rather than inaugurate a frivolous, bottomless government option for health care, Washington should launch a “private option” for nearly every federal activity outside the Pentagon.

Obamacare Likely to Emulate Post Office

By Lowell Ponte

Undocumented Joker

“UPS and FedEx are doin’ just fine,” President Barack Obama told his carefully selected audience of supporters at Tuesday’s mock town hall meeting in New Hampshire.

“It’s the post office that’s always having problems.”

Obama intended his comparison to show that a government entity can compete with private companies without destroying them, just as he claims a government health insurance company could provide healthy competition to improve private insurers.

Republicans for months rightly said that the federal government would run our healthcare system “with the compassion of the IRS and . . . the efficiency of the post office. . . .”

Echoing this on Tuesday, Obama seemed to agree that his Democratic health scheme will indeed be like the post office.

Obama spoke only days after the United States Postal Service (USPS) acknowledged that it will end 2009 $7 billion in the red. USPS threatened to close 700 local post offices and curtail Saturday mail deliveries if Congress is slow to boost its taxpayer subsidy.

In the early days of our young republic, jobs as postmasters, clerks, and letter carriers were among the “spoils” political parties doled out to reward its partisan political operatives.

Today the U.S. Postal Service is America’s second- or third-largest employer, providing 786,000 high-paying jobs handed out preferentially to military veterans and especially to politically-favored minorities. Letter-carrier union members are a ready source of cash and campaign shock troops for the Democratic Party.

Liberal Oregon now holds its elections entirely by mail. This effectively gives members of the letter carrier union the power to choose which ballots arrive to be counted. (In most other states, mailed absentee ballots now comprise more than 25 percent of those cast in typical elections.)

Likewise, Obamacare will give politically appointed bureaucrats the power to decide who does or does not get costly life-saving medical treatments.

From its beginning, the deeper purpose of the Postal Service has always been to advance federal government power — controlling development by where it used eminent domain to build “post roads,” monitoring and reading citizen communications, and sending federal government eyes and ears daily to every town and home.

The Postal Service briefly grabbed control of the first public telegraph service in America and even schemed — until politically slapped down — to charge citizens a stamp-like fee for every e-mail they sent in competition with the mails.

E-mail has now replaced nearly a quarter of what used to be mail revenue for USPS. Days before Obama’s comparison, even New York Times business columnist Joe Nocera on Aug. 8 joined the late libertarian saint Lysander Spooner in arguing that government control of the mails should be abolished.

“[A]ll over Europe,” blogged Nocera on Aug. 7, “postal services are being either partially or wholly privatized.” But Obama continues to swim dogmatically against the anti-socialist tide of history.

So how does the Postal Service survive at all in the public market place, and what does it tell us about how a government health insurance entity would be?

In addition to having gigantic taxpayer subsidies to cover its losses, USPS has advantages FedEx and UPS could only dream of possessing.

Ever looked at your local postal vehicles? They used to wear U.S. government license plates. Now they have no license plates at all, unlike those of UPS and FedEx competitors that must pay states’ high rates for plates to drive on public roads.

Ever since the 1819 Supreme Court ruling McCulloch v. Maryland, federal property such as post offices has been legally exempt from state and local property and other taxes because — as Chief Justice John Marshall wrote — “the power to tax involves the power to destroy.” Duh.

FedEx and UPS are heavily taxed for the money that subsidizes the Postal Service. And the same will be true of Obamacare, whose vampirical tax bite will suck the life blood out of its private competitors.

Those with private insurance already subsidize Medicare with an average of $1,800 per year in overpayments to offset Medicare’s underpayments to doctors and hospitals.

USPS also survives because it has a government monopoly on first- and third-class mail. Its own police, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, have used its power to stage armed raids on FedEx, UPS and other competitor warehouses, tear into packages they are carrying, and impose huge fines if any ordinary private non-urgent letter is found therein in violation of USPS’ monopoly.

(And never doubt that USPS operatives might send such “mail” precisely for the purpose of imposing tens of thousands of dollars or more in fines on competitors, both to enrich USPS and destroy rival profits.)

This monopoly was granted because USPS is mandated to provide low-cost mail service everywhere, not so it can undercut the prices of private competitors.

The insanity of taxpayers subsidizing mail to the boondocks became clear a decade ago, when a builder on the Arctic Ocean north shore of Alaska put a stamp and address on each brick he needed in Point Barrow, saving himself hundreds of thousands of dollars in trucking costs by sticking USPS and taxpayers with the expense of delivering them.

Obamacare bureaucrats will dictate to their competitors what changed coverage they must provide, while at the same time requiring customers to drop their private coverage if its provisions or costs change and switch to Obamacare socialism. It’s a fatal Catch-22 giving the government the power at its whim to destroy Obamacare competitors.

Were Chief Justice Marshall here today, surely he would admit that the government power to regulate and mandate also “involve the power to destroy.”

The President was in one thing completely truthful: Obamacare WILL be like the post office, not FedEx or UPS.

Which brings us to a question by Rory Cooper of the Heritage Foundation: “[I]f you have an urgent piece of mail you need delivered, life or death, who are you going to call? Everyone saying the government . . . please raise your hands.”

TR:  Watch this video, and carefully note the horrors just below Steven Crowder’s humor.  It may seem like a parody – but it is a real look at the wonders of “free” health care in Canada.  This is what you can look forward to if we allow ObamaCare to be shoved down our throats.

ABC TURNS PROGRAMMING OVER TO OBAMA; NEWS TO BE ANCHORED FROM INSIDE WHITE HOUSE

By The DrudgeReport

All Barack Channel "News"

On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care — a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm!

Highlights on the agenda:

ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House.

The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.

The Director of Communications at the White House Office of Health Reform is Linda Douglass, who worked as a reporter for ABC News from 1998-2006.

Late Monday night, Republican National Committee Chief of Staff Ken McKay fired off a complaint to the head of ABCNEWS:

Dear Mr. Westin:

As the national debate on health care reform intensifies, I am deeply concerned and disappointed with ABC’s astonishing decision to exclude opposing voices on this critical issue on June 24, 2009. Next Wednesday, ABC News will air a primetime health care reform “town hall” at the White House with President Barack Obama. In addition, according to an ABC News report, GOOD MORNING AMERICA, WORLD NEWS, NIGHTLINE and ABC’s web news “will all feature special programming on the president’s health care agenda.” This does not include the promotion, over the next 9 days, the president’s health care agenda will receive on ABC News programming.

Today, the Republican National Committee requested an opportunity to add our Party’s views to those of the President’s to ensure that all sides of the health care reform debate are presented. Our request was rejected. I believe that the President should have the ability to speak directly to the America people. However, I find it outrageous that ABC would prohibit our Party’s opposing thoughts and ideas from this national debate, which affects millions of ABC viewers.

In the absence of opposition, I am concerned this event will become a glorified infomercial to promote the Democrat agenda. If that is the case, this primetime infomercial should be paid for out of the DNC coffers. President Obama does not hold a monopoly on health care reform ideas or on free airtime. The President has stated time and time again that he wants a bipartisan debate. Therefore, the Republican Party should be included in this primetime event, or the DNC should pay for your airtime.

Respectfully,
Ken McKay
Republican National Committee
Chief of Staff

MORE

ABCNEWS Senior Vice President Kerry Smith on Tuesday responded to the RNC complaint, saying it contained ‘false premises’:

“ABCNEWS prides itself on covering all sides of important issues and asking direct questions of all newsmakers — of all political persuasions — even when others have taken a more partisan approach and even in the face of criticism from extremes on both ends of the political spectrum. ABCNEWS is looking for the most thoughtful and diverse voices on this issue.

“ABCNEWS alone will select those who will be in the audience asking questions of the president. Like any programs we broadcast, ABC News will have complete editorial control. To suggest otherwise is quite unfair to both our journalists and our audience.”

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