ABC has fact checked whether the Senate bill pays for abortion. It does not. LISTEN.

The backlash is growing against Liz Cheney after she demonized Department of Justice attorneys as terrorist sympathizers for their past legal work defending Gitmo detainees — and now it’s coming from within deeply conservative legal circles.

On Friday, the conservative blog Power Line put up a post titled, "An Attack That Goes Too Far." Author Paul Mirengoff, called Cheney’s effort to brand DoJ officials the "Al Qaeda 7," "vicious" and "unfounded" even if it was right to criticize defense lawyers for voluntarily doing work on behalf of Gitmo detainees.

Reached on the phone, Mirengoff offered an even sharper rebuke, contrasting what Cheney is doing to the anti-communist crusades launched by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and, in some respects, finding it worse.

"It could be worse than some of the assertions made by McCarthy, depending on some of the validity of those assertions," Mirengoff said, explaining that at least McCarthy was correct in pinpointing individuals as communist sympathizers. "It is just baseless to suggest that [these DoJ officials] share al Qaeda values… they didn’t actually say it but I think it was a fair implication of what they were saying."

Mirengoff isn’t alone among conservative legal theorists who think the ad campaign by Cheney’s group, Keep America Safe, is distasteful. In a statement to the American Prospect, John Bellinger III, a former legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, called the effort "unfortunate."

"It reflects the politicization and the polarization of terrorism issues," Bellinger said. "Neither Republicans nor Democrats should be attacking officials in each other’s administrations based solely on the clients they have represented in the past."

CONTINUED

Conservatives Turn Against Liz Cheney – As Bad As McCarthy

When Big Insurance CEOs return to Washington next week on March 9th, we’re going to be ready for them.

We’ve gathered a massive posse to arrest these scallywags for crimes against the people – crimes like denying our care and letting people die because they don’t have insurance.¹ And we’re going after the insurance lobbyists to make sure Congress listens to us, not the insurance companies.

Our partner, TrueMajority, has a way for you to join in by making your own wanted poster: You can customize it by adding the CEO of your insurance company and adding to our list of indictments by sharing your story, or the story of someone you know.

Click here to make your own customized wanted poster.

We’ll deliver all the posters and indictments next week when we arrest the insurance companies, and you can print out your poster and hang it on a local bulletin board so others know it’s time to take action.

President Obama has just called for Congress to finish reform right and send him a health care bill by Easter² — and Congress is already gearing up to meet that deadline.³

But the insurance companies and their allies in Congress are gearing up too — word has just leaked to the press about a secret last-ditch attempt to defeat health care once and for all.⁴

We’ve come too far to let Big Insurance kill health care in the home stretch. So we’re taking the fight right to their doorstep by crashing their conference in D.C. next week and calling on Congress to finish reform right.

Help spread the word by making your own wanted poster, and tell your friends and family that it’s time to saddle up for reform. Click here to make a poster.

To your health,
Levana Layendecker
Health Care for America Now

1. Direct Action Time: Stop the insurance companies! – NOW! blog
2. Obama intensifies health-care efforts – Washington Post
3. Obama Calls for ‘Up or Down Vote’ on Health Care Bill – New York Times
4. Exclusive: GOP To Unleash Huge Wave Of Robocalls Warning Of Dem Plot To "Ram" Health Reform Through – Greg Sargent

Great analysis by KOS. The real intent of the GOP is to demoralize the left causing them to stay home. As I have always said, an informed electorate is an unbeatable one.

 

Election prognosticator Charlie Cook (who I like and respect) has been quick to trash Democratic chances this November. Just a few short weeks ago, he said:

[It's} very hard to come up with a scenario where Democrats don't lose the House.

It was actually pretty easy to come up with a scenario where the GOP didn’t pick up nearly 40 seats, but Cook –who in December 2007 was predicting Democratic gains of 2-7 House seats in 2008 when they won 21 –  was sticking to his guns.

It’s not a new phenomenon — the Beltway crowd is quick to pounce on perceived Democratic vulnerabilities, and slow to respond to Republican ones; just another facet of your liberal media at work. Still, it was a weird call for Cook to make, since Republicans would have to take out 33 incumbents to win back the House. As Chris Bowers notes, that is all but impossible:

In 2006 and 2008, Democrats won the national popular vote by 6.49% and 8.65% respectively.  Despite this, they still only defeated 37 Republican incumbents in those two years combined.   With Republicans nowhere close to that level of strength in the generic congressional ballot, it is still more likely than not that Democrats will retain control of the House.

The signs are certainly not there for a massive Republican wave. In fact, what early advantages Republicans have had appear to be receding: CONTINUED

Daily Kos: 2010: The tide is turning

RETWEET PLEASE: We have trusted consumer reports to be objective about the products and services it tests. It is hard to believe those trying to deny Americans from healthcare reform over this respected organization.

We’ve been telling you about the benefits you’ll get under health reform and asking you to tell others, because they probably don’t know. They add up to this – you and your family will always have access to health coverage, no matter if you’re sick, get older, lose your job, change your job, or hit a rough financial patch.

It’s about giving you peace-of-mind about your health care, and the freedom to live the life you want without fear you’ll be denied insurance or can’t afford it.

Reform proposals already have passed both chambers of Congress by majority vote. They’ll not add to our deficit, and actually will cut wasteful healthcare spending. And yesterday, the President added more changes after meeting with both parties, including greater efforts to reduce medical fraud and frivolous lawsuits – and then he called for an up-or-down vote on health reform.
But thanks to politics and the coming election season, some in Congress still want to turn their backs, delay and leave us at the mercy of the giant insurance companies.

Who can change their minds? YOU! Tell your members to finish the job they started

Opponents are more fired up than ever, because they know it’s always easier to be against something than have the courage to fix a tough, systemic problem like health insurance. But you ultimately have the power, because your members of Congress are responsible to you, their constituent!

You can hold your lawmakers accountable if they don’t deliver:

• Health insurance that can never be denied to you, even if you have a pre-existing condition.
• Your choice of the same coverage members of Congress get.
• Help to buy coverage should you lose your job or have less money coming in.
• Needed preventive care and screenings – mammograms, colonoscopies – covered 100 percent.
• Real insurance industry reforms, including a rebate if your insurance company uses too much of your premium on their profits and overhead.
• Tax credits to help local small businesses cover their workers.
• A Medicare program that doesn’t waste your tax dollars, and is there when you need it.

Email your Senators and Representative now to finish what they started! They work for you

The next few weeks will be critical if we are to get real change, which is why we need you and everyone you know to weigh in. Please forward this to all of those you’ve reached out to recently, and stay with us as we unleash a flood of emails, phone calls and visits on your members of Congress to finish what they started.

Thank you for your dogged perseverance – it will pay off!

Sincerely,

Liz Foley
PrescriptionForChange.org
A project of Consumers Union
101 Truman Avenue
Yonkers, NY 10703

Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 2:28 pm

No Gimmick

Peter R. Orszag, Director

The President has insisted since day one that health insurance reform should not add a dime to the deficit.  In keeping with this commitment, the President has put forward a health plan that would reduce deficits by roughly $100 billion over the next ten years and by roughly $1 trillion in the decade after that.

Recently, a lot of attention has been paid to a claim that this deficit reduction is achieved only through a business-as-usual Washington budget gimmick: paying for just a few years of costs with many more years of savings.
This charge is simply false—and let’s get the facts straight.

• First, it’s true that loading savings upfront and costs in later years is a time-honored budget gimmick.  It has a single purpose—to hide the ball and make programs look paid for in the near term that will in fact substantially add to the deficit over the long-term.

• Second, it’s also true that some of savings under the health plan start sooner than the major costs in the legislation.  We can move quickly to begin identifying waste and improving quality in the current health care system, as well as make certain reforms to rebalance the tax code.  But, the major coverage expansion does not occur until 2014, in part because we need to take time to establish a system of state-based exchanges through which private insurance companies will provide quality insurance to those not getting it through their employer. Still, it is important to note that the vast majority of the savings in the next ten years occur in 2014 and thereafter.

• Third, this is not a budget gimmick.  The purpose the tried-and-true gimmick described above is to make a proposal that adds to long-term deficits appear fiscally responsible. But if that were the course we were taking, we would expect to see a large fiscal hole at the end of the first decade and larger and larger deficits in the second decade. Instead, over the long-term, the savings under the President’s plan are expected to grow faster than the costs.  So, when the Congressional Budget Office is done with its scoring, we expect it will find that the President’s plan reduces deficits by roughly $100 billion in the first 10 years and roughly $1 trillion in the decade after that.  In other words, health reform should reduce the deficit by growing amounts over the long-term.

Put simply: Health reform will reduce the deficit in this decade, and it will reduce the deficit by even more thereafter.  There’s no gimmick in that.

OMB – Blog Post – No Gimmick