October 19th,
2009
Open Source
& Copyright Free
ALG
in the News: The restless grass roots
Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson's
latest op-ed is featured in the Washington Times.
Capitol
South
The Senator is thrilled Rush Limbaugh will not be allowed to
buy the Rams.
Buyer
Beware, PhRMA
The pharmaceutical industry agreed to back ObamaCare in
exchange for several favors, and in return it agreed to put $80 billion
on the table to "discount" prescription drugs and $150 million for a
favorable ad campaign.
Too
Hot Not To Note: LEAKED NETWORK MEMO REVEALS: Obama Controls Your
Television Set
Big Hollywood reports that Barack Obama is getting television
stations to make changes in scripts and storylines that would be
supportive of his agenda.
The restless grass roots
Bill Wilson
For decades, political observers have
watched with fascination the battle raging inside the Republican Party.
Whether the contest has been between Sen. Robert Taft and Gen. Dwight
D. Eisenhower, between Barry Goldwater and Nelson A. Rockefeller, or
Ronald Reagan and Gerald R. Ford, the battle has always been viewed as
a fight between "conservatives" and so-called "moderates."
However, as recent events reveal, such a
formulation misses the point. In fact, the real battle being waged is
between Washington insiders - as represented by the congressional wing
of the Republican Party - and grass-roots Americans from all walks of
life throughout the country.
The actual events that prompted this
observation were hardly anything of consequence. The gadfly, wannabe
"cool" chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele,
issued a policy statement titled a "Health Care Bill of Rights." Within
days, Senate Republicans led by Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander lashed
out at Mr. Steele, intoning, "We are elected to set the policy."
And that, in a nutshell, points up the real
fight being waged in Washington today. The congressional wing has grown
alienated from the very people who sent them to Washington.
You see expressions of this almost every
day. Just last weekend, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham held a
town-hall meeting where he ran headlong into opposition for his love of
compromise. When pressed by the crowd, Mr. Graham had advice for the
grass roots. He replied to a critic of his many liberal positions, "If
you don't like it, you can leave." That may be exactly what is
happening.
In a special election to fill a vacancy in
New York's 23rd Congressional District, insiders and lackeys of the
congressional wing selected a liberal assemblywoman who supports
President Obama more than the Democratic candidate, is radical on most
social issues and is tied by marriage to the AFL-CIO.
Local activists refused to accept such a
candidate, so the Conservative Party mounted a challenger. As of this
writing, the Conservative candidate, Doug Hoffman, is rising rapidly in
the polls as the Republican sinks toward single-digit support. The real
Republican Party finally is rising up against the self-appointed
mandarins of the congressional wing.
New York 23 is not an isolated case. In
Virginia's 5th Congressional District, a solid conservative, Bradley
Rees, has publicly announced he will run as an Independent next year if
the D.C. power brokers select a liberal challenger to freshman
Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello. Again, grass-roots activists are rising
up to tell the congressional wing to either get on board or get run
over.
The response coming back from the
congressional wing is invariably the same: They do what they want to
do, not what the people who sent them to Washington want them to do.
You and I are irrelevant.
Well, that is what has gotten us into this mess.
That attitude has allowed the culture of
corruption to flourish regardless of which party is in power. It is
this arrogant disrespect for citizens that has led us to the brink of
financial ruin.
So, with all due respect to Mr. Alexander:
Phooey! You and your cohorts were sent to Washington to represent the
views of the people back home. You were given the task of implementing
the ideas and policy positions embedded in the platform. And, you were
sent to Congress to serve, not dictate.
The millions of Americans who have from
time to time put their faith in one party or the other are starting to
awaken. They will no longer sit by silently and take whatever scrap is
thrown their way. They increasingly are taking Mr. Graham's advice -
they are leaving.
Bill Wilson is president of Americans
for Limited Government.
http://blog.getliberty.org/default.asp?Display=1666
Capitol
South
ALG Editor's Note: William
Warren's award-winning cartoons published at GetLiberty.org are a free
service of ALG News Bureau. They may be reused and redistributed free
of charge.
http://blog.getliberty.org/default.asp?Display=1665
Buyer
Beware, PhRMA
By Robert Romano
How did the White House get the
multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry to cave in as it was about
to enter the health care debate? Good ol' fashioned crony corporatism,
that's how.
As Beltway veterans are well aware,
Congress and the White House routinely cut all sorts of backroom deals
to keep various interest groups at bay. And ObamaCare's incarnation in
the Senate Finance Committee is no different.
The
original deal was announced by Senator Max Baucus in June, stating
that he, along with Barack Obama, had secured the "$80 billion
commitment from the pharmaceutical industry to reduce Medicare
prescription drug costs for seniors."Apparently, the industry also
agreed to do $150 million of advertising favorable to the plan.
According
to the New York Times, "Under that pact, the industry agreed to
various givebacks and discounts meant to reduce the nation's
pharmaceutical spending by $80 billion over 10 years. Shortly after
striking that agreement, the trade group — the Pharmaceutical Research
and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA — also set aside $150 million
for advertising to support health care legislation."
What did PhRMA get in return for buying
into Big Government? Apparently, the White House and Baucus agreed to
limit the Medicare prescription drug discount to just $80 billion.
Also, according
to PhRMA head Billy Tauzin, he "extracted a promise from the White
House to drop two important reforms: one, to allow the government to
negotiate bulk rates for drugs in Medicare, and the other to permit the
importation of cheap drugs from Canada (which was once an Obama
campaign saw)."
All of which was much to the chagrin of the
Hard Left. They thought Obama, Baucus & Co. should have shaken the
pharmaceutical industry down for more. Wrote
one blogger, "I believe that Baucus and Obama left a lot of money
on the table. It was probably as high as $200 billion. I also know that
Obama is smart and the deal does not sound like a smart guy's move. In
smart business, you play the game and bring the enemy (drug companies)
into the open. That is what they did with Tauzin."
As Mort Kondracke recently noted, PhRMA
definitely got the high end of the deal. "Just $80 billion over 10
years—out of total U.S. pharmaceutical outlays of $3.3 trillion,"
Kondracke criticized, apparently not satisfied with PhRMA's
contribution to reducing health costs.
Democrats in Congress were not pleased
either. All of which culminated in Senator
Bill Nelson offering an amendment that would have cancelled the deal
and taken another $86 billion more from the industry. Senators John
Kerry and Chuck Schumer expressed their support.
Fortunately for PhRMA, Senator Baucus
killed the push, and saved the deal with a little help from one of his
colleagues, Senator Tom Carper. Said Carper in committee when this came
up, confirming the existence of the $150 million advertising agreement:
"I'll tell you -- if someone negotiated a
deal with me and I agreed to put up say, 80 dollars or 80 million
dollars or 80 billion dollars and then you came back and said to me a
couple of weeks later -- no no, I know you agreed to do 80 billion and
I know you were willing to help support through an advertising campaign
this particular -- not even this particular bill, just the idea of
generic health care reform? No, we're going to double -- we're going to
double what you agreed in those negotiations to do. That's not the way
-- that's not what I consider treating people the way I'd want to be
treated. That just doesn't seem right to me."
Apparently, the deal won out with
government agreeing—at least for the time being—not to soak the
tremendously productive industry even more. But, buyer beware. In the
end, PhRMA may get more than it bargained for. Once ObamaCare is
enacted, and the pittance $150 million ad campaign over, Hard Left
lawmakers like Kerry, Schumer and Nelson will not be satiated.
After Congress is done destroying the
health insurance industry, it will have effectively played the "divide
and conquer" strategy to perfection. And PhRMA will learn the lesson
Churchill espoused decades ago: "An appeaser is one who feeds a
crocodile—hoping it will eat him last."
Robert Romano is the ALG Senior News
Editor.
http://blog.getliberty.org/default.asp?Display=1664
ALG Editor's Note: In
the following featured commentary from Big Hollywood's
Editor-in-Chief John Nolte, Barack Obama's plans to seize television in
a way that will further his agenda. As ALG has reported this is the
plans of Diversity Czar Mark Lloyd and it will not stop here. Lloyd
wants the fairness doctrine, which would force airwaves to put
individuals on the radio who are liberal, even though, for the most
part, these radio stations have failed.
LEAKED NETWORK MEMO
REVEALS: Obama Controls Your Television Set
by John Nolte
On September
10th of this year the Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF) posted a
press release informing the world that "from October 19-25, more than
60 network TV shows [will] spotlight the power and personal benefits of
service," and that this "unprecedented block of TV programming is the
first wave of a multi-year 'I Participate' campaign."
On its face this
all sounds rather benign in that silly, liberal do-gooder kind of way.
The networks have launched these kinds of campaigns before and other
than some clunky exposition awkwardly inserted into your favorite show
to meet the mandate — no harm, no foul.
But this year
there are a couple new strangers in town: "Volunteerism" and "Service."
You've heard of them. Their names have been bandied everywhere since
President Obama took office, and this internal memo from the EIF to
network showrunners obtained by Big Hollywood shows that the
entertainment industry is well acquainted and eager to introduce both
to as vast an audience as possible:
Link
to Document
Like
the NEA story, once again we see the same buzzwords pop up;
suggested topics pitched to an overwhelmingly left-of-center group:
Education, health, environment, the economy and lastly — almost as an
afterthought as some kind of "bi-partisan" cover – support for military
families.
We'll have to
wait until next week to see what effect this initiative will have on
the 60 television (and news) programs in question, but thanks to the
intrepid Patrick Courrielche and Stage Right, today we can answer the
simple question of…
"What's wrong
with this?"
Doing the work
the Kamikaze Media (many of whom are participating in this event rather
than digging for the story) refuses, and with the help of Big
Government's Dana Loesch, Patrick and Stage Right have discovered that
when it comes to this White House – whether it's the NEA conference
calls or EIF's iParticipate programming — all roads funnel into one
place: online volunteer portals, including Serve.gov, where if you plug
in "health care" all kinds of Planned Parenthood openings pop up along
with a video dispelling those ugly "myths" knocking ObamaCare.
There's scarier
stuff, but I don't want to spoil the surprise. *cough*Trutherism*cough*
We'll start with
Stage Right. Next week, tens, if not hundreds of millions of Americans,
will be urged through the (ab)use of public airwaves to log on to the
EIF iParticipate site and volunteer. Stage Right will give you a
preview of what the unsuspecting and well-intentioned, including your
children, will find.
If you're
thinking it's all about "Meals on Wheels," think again.
From there,
Patrick Courrielche will describe how this EIF initiative fits into a
broader White House plan, including the push to politicize the NEA, to
redefine "art" as "service" and engage an all too compliant news,
entertainment, and artistic community to start a volunteer army through
these online portals.
First the NEA,
now the EIF…
Starting to
notice a pattern?
PART II: Search
and Ye Shall Find…Left-Wing Advocacy
PART III: Serve.gov
or Serf.dom?
MORE: List
of 'Organically' Created iParticipate Television Programs
http://blog.getliberty.org/default.asp?Display=1663
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