Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Some Adviser Gruber who Obama said "never worked on our staff" visited White House and Obama 21 times since 2009

The Hill, here, placing Gruber multiple times at the scene of the crime:

MIT professor Jonathan Gruber held a series of high-level meetings with administration officials beginning in 2009 and extending through June of this year.

During the height of 2009’s ObamaCare debate, Gruber met repeatedly with former Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, and Jeanne Lambrew, the deputy director of the White House Office of Health Reform, among other officials. He also participated in a meeting of economists with President Obama.

In subsequent trips, Gruber received tours of the West Wing and the residence, and had breakfast at the White House mess, an exclusive West Wing cafeteria. He also met with Jason Furman, who now chairs the Council of Economic Advisers, and Nancy-Ann DeParle, the White House's point person on ObamaCare’s implementation.

The visitor logs, which are publicly available but were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, show Gruber has visited the White House 21 times during the Obama presidency. Some of the records are incomplete — missing details about when Gruber entered or exited the complex — so it’s possible that some of those visits did not occur.

A precise tally of America's stupid: 65,918,507


Liberal contributor from The New Republic advocates for tyranny as all Lincoln lovers must


[T]here will be situations in which the common good demands and requires that the executive go beyond the letter and even the spirit of the law. In these extreme or emergency situations — situations in which an existential threat poses a grave danger, with the survival of the political community itself at stake — the executive's extralegal decisions effectively become the community's higher law.

Probably the clearest example from American history is Abraham Lincoln's 1861 suspension of habeas corpus, defiance of the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (who denounced Lincoln's actions as unconstitutional), and subsequent arrest (without charge) of pro-secessionist Maryland state legislators who appeared poised to condemn the suspension and vote to join the Confederacy.

Was Lincoln acting like a tyrant, as Maryland native John Wilkes Booth and many other critics of the time contended? You bet he was. And it's a good thing, too. Had Maryland seceded, Washington would have been surrounded by enemy armies and the South almost certainly would have won the Civil War quickly and decisively. Extralegal action was required to keep that from happening.