Wow, I don't imagine ABC News will be broadcasting this story

 

Joe Biden just had a little Greek eruption

 

Biden to George Stephanopoulos: I'm the guy that put NATO together, I'm the guy that shut Putin down

 Joe was 6 when NATO was founded.

Putin is still in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, and we're still spending billion$ to stop him.

One term president tells George Stephanopoulos that his great unfinished business is healthcare reform

That lying bitch Hillary Clinton tells her biggest lie yet: I told the victims' families it was terrorism

George Stephanopoulos asked her Sunday if she’d told the victims it was about the film. Clinton gave a flat “no.”

She added: “I said very clearly there had been a terrorist group, uh, that had taken responsibility on Facebook, um . . .”

At least four family members disagree.

Read the rest here.

Time to organize the Benghazi Victims' Families For Truth.

Suddenly it's important news to ABC that Republican superfunder Koch Brother isn't a conservative

Here from George Stephanopoulos:

“I’m basically a libertarian, and I’m a conservative on economic matters, and I’m a social liberal,” [David] Koch told ABC News’ Barbara Walters during an interview for her special “The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2014″ that airs at 9 p.m. ET Sunday on ABC.

Koch, who supports abortion rights and gay marriage, said he isn’t concerned with candidates he supports who don’t share some of his views. He said his primary concern when choosing a candidate to support is their fiscal policies.

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Koch's political affiliation before 1984 was Libertarian Party, according to his Wikipedia entry, which means he's a hard-boiled libertarian. The man is 2014's ninth wealthiest in the world.

In this sudden attention to Koch's liberalism I smell a new political effort afoot by the liberal media to highlight the differences between libertarianism and conservatism to split the right in the interests of Democrat liberalism in 2016.

Remember, it was also George Stephanopoulos who brought us the war on women in 2012. George is getting ready early this time.

It's a sign of self-perceived weakness in the Democrat camp that they are already thinking they must begin to divide the right to win in 2016.

Words Mean Whatever They Say They Mean: It Wasn't A Tax, Now It Is

STEPHANOPOULOS:  That may be, but it’s still a tax increase.

OBAMA:  No.  That’s not true, George.  The — for us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. ... 

STEPHANOPOULOS:  I — I don’t think I’m making it up. Merriam Webster’s Dictionary: Tax — “a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.”

OBAMA:  George, the fact that you looked up Merriam’s Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you’re stretching a little bit right now.  Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition.

-- 9/20/09, here

More On Santorum's Weaselly 'My Wife Wrote It' Excuse: Isn't He Now An Admitted Plagiarist?

From Dan Amira at New York Magazine here:

George Stephanopoulos brought up a controversial passage from Santorum's 2005 book, It Takes a Family, in which Santorum contends, "The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness." Santorum insisted to Stephanopoulos that he isn't saying women shouldn't work, only that there's nothing wrong with being a stay-at-home mom, if that's what they choose. The explanation wasn't new; Santorum has been asked about that quote many times. What was new was that this time, Santorum added that, oh, by the way, "that section of the book was co-written, if you want to be honest about it, by my wife." ...

You also have to wonder why Santorum is only now bringing up his wife's co-authorship of that controversial passage. When the book initially came out, in 2005, Santorum was constantly on TV defending this very same "radical feminists" quote. But, curiously, he never mentioned that his wife helped to write it, according to a search of Nexis transcripts — not in a July 25 interview on Hannity and Colmes, or in a Today show interview that same morning, or a July 27 interview on Hardball, or a July 28 interview on CNN's American Morning, or a July 31 interview once with ABC's This Week (deja vu!), or an August 5 interview with Tucker Carlson on MSNBC.

More recently, Santorum was asked about this very same passage during a May 2011 Fox News presidential debate in South Carolina, and again, he neglected to credit his wife.

A failure to provide proper attribution for someone else's words in order to make them appear to be your own is called plagiarism.

Judge Objects to Obamacare Bait and Switch: The Mandate Became a Tax

From Peter Wehner at Commentary Magazine:

Judge Hudson writes, “Despite pre-enactment representations to the contrary by the Executive and Legislative branches, the Secretary now argues that the Minimum Essential Coverage Provision is, in essence, a ‘tax penalty.’”

That’s a polite way of saying that the Obama administration willfully misled the public during the health-care debate. In fact, President Obama repeatedly denied that the mandate was a tax — but now, in order to pass constitutional muster, his administration is insisting it is. I urge you to watch ... [w]hen ... Obama scolds Stephanopoulos. “That’s not true, George,” the president says. “[It] is absolutely not a tax increase.”

Now the president and his administration are arguing exactly the opposite.

This is a deeply cynical maneuver on the part of the man who promised to put an end to cynical political acts. Like so much of what Obama said, this promise was fraudulent.

The complete entry is here, with links.

You Can't Opt Out, You Can't Buy Cheap, And Healthcare Will Be Rationed

The following was posted here:

March 25, 2010

The Reality of Obamacare

By Jonah Goldberg

First: Congratulations to President Obama and the Democratic leadership. You won dirty against bipartisan opposition from both Congress and the majority of Americans. You've definitely polarized the country even more, and quite possibly bankrupted us, too. But hey, you won. Bubbly for everyone.

Simply, you have nationalized health care by proxy. Insurance companies are now heavily regulated government contractors. Way to get big business out of Washington and our lives! These giant corporations will clear a small, government-approved profit on top of their government-approved fees. Then, when health-care costs rise - and they will - Democrats will insist, yet again, that the profit motive is to blame, and out from this Obamacare Trojan horse will pour another army of liberals demanding a more honest version of single-payer.

The Obama administration has turned the insurance industry into the Blackwater of socialized medicine.

That's what Obama always had in mind. During the now-legendary health-care summit, Obama, who loves to talk about "risk pools," "competition," "consumer choice," and the like, let it slip that he actually doesn't believe in insurance as commonly understood. The notion that Americans should buy the health-care "equivalent of Acme Insurance that I had for my car" seemed preposterous to him. "I'm buying that to protect me from some catastrophic situation," he explained. "Otherwise, I'm just paying out of pocket. I don't go to the doctor. I don't get preventive care. There are a whole bunch of things I just do without. But if I get hit by a truck, maybe I don't go bankrupt." Apparently, people are just too stupid to go to the doctor - or maintain their homes - if they have to pay much of anything out of pocket.

The endgame was to get the young and healthy to buy more expensive insurance than they need or want. "Expanding the risk pool" and "spreading out the risk" by mandating - i.e., forcing - young people to buy insurance is just market-based spin for socialist ends. A risk pool is an actuarial device where a lot of people pay a small sum to cover themselves against a "rainy day" problem that will affect only a few people. Such "peace of mind" health insurance is gone. What we have now is health assurance. With health assurance, there are no "risk pools" really, only payment plans.

Under the new law, all the exits from the system are blocked. You can't opt out or buy cheap, high-deductible Acme car-type insurance, even if that's what you need. Ultimately, even that coercion won't be enough to make the whole thing work, because the "cost curve" will not be bending.

Profit-hungry insurance companies were never the problem. (According to American Enterprise Institute economist Andrew Biggs, industry profit margins are around 3 percent, and the entire industry recorded profits of just $13 billion last year, close to a rounding error in Medicare fraud estimates.) Rather, health-care costs have been skyrocketing because consumers treat health insurance like an expense account. Putting almost everyone into one "risk pool" doesn't change that dynamic; it universalizes it. And eventually, the only way to cut costs will be to ration care.

In September, Obama got into a semantic argument with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, who noted that requiring all Americans to pay premiums for a government-guaranteed service sounds an awful lot like a tax. "No. That's not true, George," Obama said. "For us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it's saying is . . . that we're not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you."

Stephanopoulos invoked a dictionary definition of a tax: "a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes." Obama laughed off the idea that a dictionary might outrank him as the final arbiter of a word's meaning: "George, the fact that you looked up . . . the definition of tax increase indicates to me that you're stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn't have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition."

Okay, put aside your dictionaries. The legislation allocates $10 billion to pay for 16,500 IRS agents who will collect and enforce mandatory "premiums." Does that sound like the private sector at work to you?