And I’m not talking about Dick Cheney…

…Well, okay I sorta am. But he’s not the one I deem to be spinning lies.

The Plames are once again outting themselves as a couple of partisan spinsters (or flatout liars) and they have the release of former VP Darth Cheney’s new autobiography to thank for bringing the two back into the spotlight of liberal celebritihood:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This interview was from the end of last month. Nothing quite like a Lawrence O’Donnell interview of a pair of anti-Bush heroes.

Anyone care to defend anything these three had to say?

Darth Cheney has been making the rounds. Here are a few more of his recent appearances:

Dateline:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

More NBC stuff, with Matt Lauer:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the Lauer interview, in response to his hypothetical regarding an American captive in Iran, one thing I wish Cheney had made note of is that KSM & Co. are non-uniformed combatants not eligible for POW status & protections under Geneva. Did KSM abide by the rules of civilized warfare as set out by the Geneva Conventions when he masterminded the killing of 3,000 innocent civilians on 9/11?

Did Pakistan ever lodge a protest regarding our treatment of KSM? Nope. The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence just handed him over to us. Would he have fared better under Pakistan’s humane interrogation practices? *Snicker*

KSM was not tortured. The lives lost and those affected by the loss on 9/11 are the true victims of torture.

The cackling hens at The View were surprising subdued and respectful.

Here’s one from Laura Ingraham:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I am still reading Cheney’s book. I am also in the middle of Ali Soufan’s book and Glenn Carle’s.

The Bourguiba Mausoleum of Tunisia

Tunisia’s former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali found a safe haven in Saudi Arabia on Friday, he was prevented from landing in Paris by President Sarkozy, while Tunisia has devolved into near chaos. Ben Ali, the 74 year old president, took power after a bloodless coup in ’87 as a Social Democrat. In an all too typical scenario of Marxist leaders, he established an authoritarian police state: while the country was mired in poverty, he and the Elites established a system of government based on nepotism and corruption, while living in opulent luxury.

Last month, a 26 year old college graduate, who could not find work and was selling fruits and vegetables without a permit had his produce impounded, in despair over his inability to support his family, he doused himself with gasoline and struck a match as a measure of protest. The social networks of twitter and Facebook were used to generate public anger and disgust over the events and causes of the self-immolation and the man’s feelings of hopelessness, thus they served as an impetus for revolution.

There were Wikileaks cables describing the corruption and graft of the Ben Ali Presidency and speculation that they contributed to the unrest that deposed the former government: the Obama Administration was quick to deny that their allegations of corruption concerning the Marxist government exposed in the Wikileaks cables precipitated the revolution in Tunisia, the administration was adamant in maintaining that the people of Tunisia were well aware of the corruption within the government.

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Sunday that Tunisians were well aware of the graft, nepotism and lavish lifestyles led by ex-President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his family long before the WikiLeaks website published the diplomatic cables.

The Obama regime has been quick to absolve itself of any blame for all unpleasant incidents; consequently, their claims of being innocent of any unpleasantries have become rhetorical and thus they have lost meaning in this age of state sponsored propaganda. That is a sad result of automatic absolution of guilt by leadership: the public no longer listens and routinely regards all such proclamations as suspect, even if they are truthful in nature. There remains the nagging question of why would it matter to the Obama Administration that the Wikileaks cables had a part in starting the revolution, why the vehement denial? To whom do they proclaim their innocence?

In Tunis, Tunisia, authorities are struggling to end the violence. Fire fights have broken out around the capital and around the former president’s palace on the shore of the Mediterranean and the headquarters of the primary opposition party. Looting, arson, and violence has been the result of a vacuum of leadership and control since Ben Ali left the country on Friday as factions struggle to gain control. The violence seems to be between Tunisians who are emboldened by the abdication of Ben Ali and by loyalists who aren’t anxious to give up their prestige and perks they enjoyed under the totalitarian police state of Ben Ali.

Neighboring countries are now feeling a loss of confidence in the markets as people sell their commercial paper, while wondering if the political turmoil of Tunisia will spread into other dictatorships in the Middle East.

Commercial International Bank Egypt SAE, the country’s biggest publicly traded lender, closed at the lowest level in more than a month. EFG-Hermes Holding SAE, Egypt’s biggest publicly traded investment bank, declined 2.4 percent. The EGX30 Index lost 1 percent, the biggest drop since Nov. 30, to 7,082.09 at the 2:30 p.m. close in Cairo. Tunisia’s benchmark Tunindex tumbled 13 percent last week as increasing violence lead to the toppling of the country’s leader on Jan. 14.

The Tunisian protests may embolden demonstrators who have recently taken to the streets in other North African and Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt, Morocco and Jordan, all of which have experienced demonstrations about economic conditions, said Marina Ottaway, director of the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

“People are selling because they think the same might happen here” given unemployment and inflationary pressure, Alia Khalil, senior equity trader at Cairo-based Pharos Holding for Financial Investments, said by telephone.

Egypt’s Unemployment Is Similar To America’s

Former European Commission President Romano Prodi said Egypt may be vulnerable to an uprising similar to Tunisia as “the fragility of the political situation makes it extremely vulnerable to youth unemployment and the increase in the price of bread,” according to an editorial in il Messaggero.

Unemployment in Egypt stands at 8.9 percent according to the Cairo-based Central Agency for Mobilization and Public Statistics. The government says it needs to maintain a growth rate of about 7 percent to create enough jobs for the 750,000 people who enter the workforce every year. Egypt’s central bank said last week core inflation, the benchmark it uses to make interest rate decisions, increased to 9.65 percent in December from 8.93 in the previous month.

No other Arab leaders have been forced out of power by public pressure since 1985, when public unrest led to a coup that unseated President Gaafar al-Nimeri.

Ben Ali’s 23 year reign has been noted for corruption and graft that has recently been characterized by even more of his wife’s and her family’sgreed:

The French government suspects that former Tunisian president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his family may have fled the country with 1.5 tons of gold, French daily Le Monde reported Monday.

According to the French secret service, Leila Trabelsi, the wife of the ex-president, went to the Central Bank of Tunisia to fetch the gold bars, the paper reported.

The governor of the bank is reported to have refused to give them to her, so Trabelsi rang her husband who first also refused to help, before giving in, according to Le Monde.

“It seems that the wife of Ben Ali left with some gold, 1.5 tons or 45 million euros worth,” a French politician told the paper.

In one of the iconic ironies of Marxist and totalitarian forms of Social Democratic governments, rulers must gauge how much corruption the public will endure for the Elites to live in opulent luxury at the expense of the workers in their Utopian dream state of eternal poverty. Now many of these Arab leaders are wondering if perhaps they have taken too much from the people in order to live as Elites.

Men who are willing to self-immolate are stepping forward to sacrifice themselves in protest of governments that offer few freedoms and little opportunity:

A Mauritanian man set himself on fire, the third self-immolation attempt apparently influenced by a man in Tunisia.

Local journalists say 43-year-old Yacoub Ould Dahoud said he was unhappy with the government. Witnesses say he drove to a government building in the capital and torched himself in his car.

Foreign ministry official Adbou Ould Sidi says police rushed him to the hospital.

The attempt follows similar incidents, including one in Algeria. Also Monday, an Egyptian man set himself on fire in an apparent protest.

The utter desperation of men who are willing to set themselves on fire will possibly be enough to set more than one government on fire in the Middle East. There is no doubt that many Arabs are dissatisfied with living in poverty, in order to enable their elites to live in splendor, there is a real possibility that more totalitarian governments may fall in the Middle East; unfortunately, the Islamic fundamentalists will be waiting in the shadows to offer their own form of Marxist dystopia to the unsuspecting innocent who has only known despotism.

Normally, revolution with the goal of a free society and government is to celebrated, but the Islamo Fascist is well funded and organized throughout the Middle East and with our own president increasing our dependence on foreign oil with the closing of vast oil fields, oil fields that could allow us to be independent of foreign oil, the possibility of Islamo Fascists gaining control of oil resources and causing havoc in our supplies and the world market in general is an ominous possibility.

The idea of forcing America to be a Green Society before the technology is available is a pipe dream of an idealist who is ignoring the fact that we are an oil based society and that relying on energy technologies that don’t yet exist, at the expense of cutting off our own oil supplies is a template for the destruction of this country. Technologies develop at their own rate, not because a bureaucrat determines that we need them at a specific time. Alternative energy will develop, it is inevitable, a natural result of free market enterprise.

Ben Ali was successful in keeping the Islamo Fascists under control with his totalitarian police state and that may be his only real accomplishment for 23 years in office. Now we and the rest of the world are wondering whether the emerging Democratic Revolution, a result of 23 years as a police state, will produce new fundamentalist dictators. The previous revolutions to establish democratic governments produced Islamo Fascists in Tehran and Algiers, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and Islamo Fascist-wannabes running Turkey.

And while the Islamic world is watching these events unfold with a degree of trepidation, we must have faith that our president has read of solutions on the teleprompter between golf games, so that we are ready to meet these new and important challenges that are like a fuse on the powder keg that is the Middle East.

During Thanksgiving weekend I went to see the movie REDS with Bruce Willis. Awesome movie and I highly recommend it. But during the trailers they showed the movie FAIR GAME with Sean Penn, supposedly based on the Plame/Wilson affair. I groaned when I saw it.

It appears my groan was warranted. Here is the WaPo: (h/t Dan Riehl)

In fact, “Fair Game,” based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions – not to mention outright inventions. To start with the most sensational: The movie portrays Ms. Plame as having cultivated a group of Iraqi scientists and arranged for them to leave the country, and it suggests that once her cover was blown, the operation was aborted and the scientists were abandoned. This is simply false. In reality, as The Post’s Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby reported, Ms. Plame did not work directly on the program, and it was not shut down because of her identification.

The movie portrays Mr. Wilson as a whistle-blower who debunked a Bush administration claim that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger. In fact, an investigation by the Senate intelligence committee found that Mr. Wilson’s reporting did not affect the intelligence community’s view on the matter, and an official British investigation found that President George W. Bush’s statement in a State of the Union address that Britain believed that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger was well-founded.

“Fair Game” also resells the couple’s story that Ms. Plame’s exposure was the result of a White House conspiracy. A lengthy and wasteful investigation by a special prosecutor found no such conspiracy – but it did confirm that the prime source of a newspaper column identifying Ms. Plame was a State Department official, not a White House political operative.

And as is usual with these liberal vanity pieces the numbers don’t look so hot. It cost 22 million to make and since opening one month ago it has taken in 7.3 million domestically and another 5 million worldwide. Receipts continue to fall, down 32% this weekend. This movie will be lucky to get its money back.

Hollywood has a very skewed idea of what the public wants to see when it comes to movies like this. They’ve sunk mega money into anti-war, anti-Bush movies because they believe the movie going public MUST think like they do in their insulated left leaning world. Rendition, Redacted, In the Valley of Elah, Green Zone….all money losers.

But they still insist on making these kind of POS movies.

Hollywood has a habit of making movies about historical events without regard for the truth; “Fair Game” is just one more example. But the film’s reception illustrates a more troubling trend of political debates in Washington in which established facts are willfully ignored.

Sean Penn paints the Bush administration as power-mad schemers and the Wilsons as some kind of courageous patriots. Yeah, would call that facts willfully ignored and a revision of history.

This one:

Not this one:

Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) appears to be a decent and honorable man. Part of his background includes military service (with four sons currently serving). The truth czar’s impassioned outburst during President Obama’s healthcare speech may seem out of step with his character and his military discipline, but he vented/channeled what many frustrated Americans were shouting into their tv sets, while provoking a million-mob strong march to turn out in D.C.: You LIE.

Not only is former ambassador Joe Wilson a liar; but the current president of the United States is one, too.

Congressman Wilson broke decorum and the rules of civility with his outburst (not like Democrats didn’t do this during Bush’s speech). But he manned up and offered his apology (accepted by President Obama) while not backing down from the facts of the matter. If Democrats wish to press for a forced apology (not happening) for nothing more than political humiliation, then lets bring to the floor Charlie Rangel and his ethical transgress. Where was the disapproval resolution for Democrats who booed President Bush? Did Harry Reid ever pay through the nose for his comment about President Bush as a “loser” and a “liar“? Did the Pelosi vs. CIA embarrassment ever get resolved? Apparently not, since she’s still House Speaker.

Joe Wilson’s charge may have been improper, but it achieved positive results. (He could use your support).

What is most remarkable about President Obama’s speech last Wednesday (and again, since), was just how divisive it was; and how un-evolved from previous speeches. What bizarro world is it that talking heads live in when they ooh and aah the partisan campaign speech that was anything but presidential?

Status quo? Who’s advocating for that?

Republicans haven’t been offering alternative bills and solutions? Lies, spin, strawman, and more lies and spin.

Last Friday, September 11th, Investors Business Daily put out a brilliant piece as part of their Government-Run Healthcare: A Prescription For Failure series. Here, they dismantle piece by piece, some of the misinformation and spin in President Obama’s healthcare speech:

Speaking Of Misinformation

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, September 11, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Reform: Millions of Americans finally got to hear the Democrats’ pitch on health care reform, made by their top salesman. But they heard nothing new — just a lot of discredited myths recycled as the truth.

For the record, we support improving our health care system. As is, it has too many rules, too much government spending and too few market forces to keep costs low and quality high.

We spend north of $2 trillion every year on health care — 17% of our GDP, the most of any wealthy nation. If that sounds like a lot, remember this: An estimated 47% of that already is spent by the government. And government’s share will grow even without “reform.”

Look closely at the plans so far to emerge from Congress. What the Democrats have proposed, in essence, is a government takeover of nearly one-fifth of our nation’s economy. When brought up in Congress, this idea has been rejected repeatedly. Yet, somehow, the idea never dies.

That’s why the president’s speech Wednesday night was a big disappointment.

Rather than a breakthrough that would remove government’s stranglehold on a once-healthy market and move us toward true reform, we heard a lot of old bromides and myths — things we just can’t let go uncorrected. Too much is at stake.

So following are 15 of the biggest misconceptions — and there are many more, we assure you — that we found in the speech:

• “The uninsured . . . live every day just one accident or illness away from bankruptcy. These are not primarily people on welfare.”

Actually, of the 46 million people the census estimates don’t have insurance, some 20 million have incomes above average and could afford to buy it, according to a study by former Congressional Budget Office Director June O’Neill.

Of the remaining 26 million uninsured, an estimated 13.7 million are poor. They are eligible for Medicaid — the state health care programs for the poor. But many, too, are illegals — about 8 million.

Though they’re eligible, research from the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association suggests as many as 14 million uninsured Americans qualify for public coverage, but don’t enroll. And as many as 6 million are enrolled, but don’t report it to the government, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis.

That leaves about 5 million people with no care.

By the way, according to the Census Bureau, America now has 37 million people in poverty. But Medicaid enrollment covers 55 million people — at a cost of $350 billion a year.

Based on this, no one should be without care. Which leads us to wonder: Is nationalizing our health care system really necessary to take care of people who already have care available to them?

• “Many other Americans . . . are still denied insurance due to previous illnesses or conditions that insurance companies decide are too risky or expensive to cover.”

This statement betrays a profound ignorance of what insurance is. If you can buy insurance after you’ve gotten sick, it’s not really insurance, is it? And why have insurance at all? It’s an incentive to simply wait until you get sick, then make someone else pay for it.

To see how absurd this is, let’s take the same concept to auto insurance. Why not let people buy insurance after they get in an accident? One reason, of course, is it leads to fiscal and personal recklessness.

• “There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage . . . every day, 14,000 Americans lose their coverage.”

As noted above, the bulk of the 30-plus million uninsured actually can get coverage — and in many cases, qualify for existing government programs. But how about 14,000 Americans losing their coverage each day? A little math shows this is just a scare statistic.

Multiply it out, and it comes to 5.1 million people losing coverage in a year. Sound scary? Consider that, according to the census, 46.3 million Americans don’t currently have insurance — 600,000 more than last year. That means that, along with 14,000 Americans losing their coverage each day, another 12,400 Americans are signing up for it — even in the middle of a brutal recession.

Those who lose insurance do so usually because they’ve lost a job. Most are without insurance for a couple of months or so. The best way to boost the number of insured — and one that “costs” nothing — is to cut taxes, ease regulations and slash government spending. Those policies are all proven job creators.

• “We spend one-and-a-half times more per person on health care than any other country, but we aren’t any healthier for it.”

This is a non sequitur. We spend one and a half times more per person, true. But because our health care here is better. That’s right — better. True, our life expectancy of 78.1 years — which is up sharply from just a decade ago — ranks us 30th in the world in longevity. But look a little closer at the data.

The U.S. homicide rate is two to three times higher than in other industrial nations. And we drive a lot more than others, so our auto fatality rate of 14.24 deaths per 100,000 people is higher than in Germany (6.19), France (7.4) or Canada (9.25). Add to this, we eat far more than other countries on average, contributing to higher levels of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer.

When all those factors are figured in, according to a recent study by Robert Ohsfeldt of Texas A&M and John Schneider of the University of Iowa, Americans actually live longer than people in other countries — thanks mainly to our excellent health care.

In case anyone missed it, Charles Krauthammer’s excellent piece regarding the myth of prevention as “cost effective”.

• Rising health care premiums are “why American businesses that compete internationally — like our automakers — are at a huge disadvantage.”

Well, right and wrong. Soaring health care premiums are a problem for some. But who’s to blame for this? Government health care programs, which make up 47% of all health care spending, are the biggest drivers of rising insurance premiums.

For example, Medicare forces doctors and hospitals to give patients 20% to 30% discounts on their care and drugs. Sounds great. But who pays for the “discount”? Private insurers, that’s who. And they pass it on to businesses. This is yet another case of government causing a problem, then blaming the victim.

Even so, in some industries health care premiums are an enormous problem and competitive liability. This is certainly true of the auto and steel industries. But they have no one to blame but themselves.

They gave gold-plated benefit packages to their unions during the fat times, and now that times are lean, want us — taxpayers — to make good on their extravagant promises.

This is why so many big businesses support nationalized health care. It bails them out of their own bad decisions — and by those imposed by government. Just last week a congressional oversight panel announced that taxpayers were unlikely to recoup much of the $81 billion they spent to bail out GM and Chrysler. That’s another indirect health care tax your children and grandchildren will have to pay.

• “Finally, our health care system is placing an unsustainable burden on taxpayers. . . . If we do nothing to slow these skyrocketing costs, we will eventually be spending more on Medicare and Medicaid than every other government program combined.”

Are we supposed to believe that adding more government will bring down government costs?

Medicare is already spending more than it is taking in through payroll taxes. Medicare trustees expect the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund part of the program to be insolvent by 2019. From now through 2017, it will need $342 billion of taxpayers’ money in order to keep paying hospital insurance benefits alone. Over the next 50 years or so, Medicare’s shortfall is expected to hit $37 trillion — an almost unbelievable deficit nearly three times our current GDP.

If Medicare has done one thing, it’s proved that government programs always cost more than their original projections. Citing the runaway costs of Medicare is an argument against, not for, further government intervention.

• “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 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.”

Discouraging employer-based coverage and encouraging individuals to buy their own insurance would help. But only if lawmakers make two real reforms, neither requiring a “new system from scratch.”

First, Washington must give tax credits for premiums paid on individual policies. That would make them more affordable for more people. Second, Washington has to make it easier for Americans to have health savings accounts. HSAs hold costs down because account holders self-ration treatment. They also give people more control over their health care.

• “Nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have.”

Shawn Tully, Fortune editor at large, dug into the legislation and found that for “Americans in large corporations, ‘keeping your own plan’ has a strict deadline. In five years, like it or not, you’ll get dumped into the exchange,” a government program in which heavily regulated private companies sell insurance policies.

Workers who buy their own insurance or begin coverage through small businesses will also be forced into the exchange if their plans change in any way, because it’s then considered a new plan. Since plans generally change policies every year, Tully says, “it’s likely that millions of employees will lose their plans in 12 months.”

According to a July study by the Lewin Group and the Heritage Foundation, health reform could cause as many as 88 million Americans to lose their private, employer-based coverage.

• “If you lose your job or change your job, you will be able to get coverage. If you strike out on your own and start a small business, you will be able to get coverage. We will do this by creating a new insurance exchange.”

The president says this is “a marketplace where individuals and small businesses will be able to shop for health insurance at competitive prices.” But it won’t be a real marketplace. Participating insurers will be saddled with a host of mandates. Those that don’t like the regulations will be left out. There’ll be little room for competition.

The Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner has said that “in practice, at least as demonstrated in Massachusetts,” an exchange “can quickly devolve into a regulatory body.”

• “Some of people’s concerns have grown out of bogus claims . . . The best example is . . . that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. . . . It is a lie, plain and simple.”

As far as we know, there is no provision for a death panel buried in the 1,018-page bill. But we do know how Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the administration’s health care czar, feels about treating those who need the most help.

“When the worse-off can benefit only slightly while better-off people could benefit greatly, allocating (treatment) to the better-off is often justifiable.”

So the federal government won’t be actively killing the old and the sick. It will just let them die by denying them the care that will supposedly be available to every American.

• “There are those who also claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false — the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.”

Tough words are one thing, enforcement is another. As IBD’s Sean Higgins reported last week: “Some independent analysis indicates — contrary to Obama’s claim — that the House health bill could result in coverage being extended to illegal immigrants.”

It starts with the mandate for everyone to buy insurance, including illegals. Their choices will be presumably through the “exchange,” and they won’t be eligible for subsidies to buy. But the non-partisan Congressional Research Service warns there’s no verification mechanism. An amendment by GOP Rep. Dean Heller of Nevada, to use electronic immigration records to verify eligibility for subsidies, was shot down by Democrats.

Enforcement woes are nothing new. The U.K.’s nationalized system treats as many as a million illegal immigrants a year because eligibility verification at the point of service is nearly impossible. It’s now giving up the ghost of trying because illegals have won the right to be treated at taxpayer expense as a “human right.” That’s brought new waves of “health tourism” as word spreads.

Cabinet officials, such as Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, support union demands to give amnesty to 12 million illegals. If so, they will get public health care. And hospitals that continue to treat illegals through emergency rooms, are reimbursed through Medicaid.

• “My health care proposal has also been attacked by some who oppose reform as a ‘government takeover’ of the entire health care system . . . Unfortunately, in 34 states, 75% of the insurance market is controlled by five or fewer companies. . . Without competition, the price of insurance goes up and the quality goes down.”

Obama is right about limited numbers of insurers in states. They’re the last ones able to survive the layers of bureaucratic mandates and regulations without going bankrupt.

The fastest way to create choice for consumers isn’t by adding a government option, but by breaking down trade barriers across state lines. By letting citizens buy insurance from any state, a truly competitive market can develop, with choices in coverage, service and price. It would be far better if each American could buy health insurance from any of the nation’s 1,300 insurers, not just a handful in their own states.

• “Despite all this, some . . . argue that these private (insurance) companies can’t fairly compete with the government. And they’d be right if taxpayers were subsidizing this public option. But they won’t be. . . . (The public option) would . . . keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies affordable and treat their customers better . . .”

When the government acts as both producer and regulator of its own and everyone else’s products, the playing field is tilted because there’s a basic conflict of interest. It’s also a recipe for cronyism and corruption. Witness Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

We looked at the after-tax margins of some big health insurers over the last 12 months. Here’s what we found: Among HMOs, Humana, 3.1%. Cigna, 4%. Wellpoint, 5%. United Health Group, 4.4%. Broader health insurers, like Unum (8.6% after-tax margin) and AFLAC (12.3%), do a bit better.

The point is, these are not outrageous profits. And the health care industry’s $13 billion in 2008 profits pale in comparison to the $65 billion in annual fraud in Medicare alone.

• “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future. Period. And to prove that I’m serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t materialize.”

From the folks who brought us a $10 trillion deficit over the next decade, that’s hard to swallow. The White House has assured us the public option would be funded by premiums. So, it’s hard to know what he means by savings or spending cuts.

Although Medicare and Medicaid, are slated for $313 billion in cuts, the government has yet to eliminate the $65 billion or so that goes to waste and fraud. They don’t need health reform to do that, they can do it now.

• “The only thing this plan would eliminate is the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud as well as unwarranted subsidies in Medicare that go to insurance companies — subsidies that do everything to pad their profits and nothing to improve your care.”

Speaking of waste and fraud, as we said, why can’t it be done today instead of waiting for some health care reform bill to pass? The president proposes $313 billion in Medicaid and Medicare cuts, saying $110 billion would come from reducing scheduled increases in Medicare payments.

“That would encourage health care providers to increase productivity,” White House budget director Peter Orszag told reporters. $110 billion would come from ending payments to hospitals to treat uninsured patients. But much of that comes from treating illegals, who aren’t supposed to be eligible for the public option.

Another $75 billion would come from “better pricing of Medicare drugs,” Orszag said.

What he doesn’t get is that some $10 billion of Medicare funding goes to dubious expenditures like hospitals padding bills because they are paid too little and must make up lost revenue in volume.

Cutting payments more means more padding, as the Mayo Clinic has warned. That means rationing. The Democrats’ plan may not be explicitly mean to ration, but not paying a fair and market-determined price for services will ensure less of it for patients.

President Obama began his speech by noting it’s “been nearly a century since Theodore Roosevelt first called for health reform” and that “nearly every president and Congress, whether Democrat or Republican, has attempted to meet this challenge in some way.”

“A bill for comprehensive care reform was first introduced by John Dingell Sr. in 1943,” he also pointed out. “Sixty-five years later, his son (Rep. John Dingell, Michigan Democrat now in his 28th term) continues to introduce that same bill at the beginning of each session.”

Could it be, we wonder, that the reason why health reform of the kind the Dingells and Democrats have been pushing for 100 years has gone nowhere is that Americans want nothing to do with it? What is it about “No!” that they don’t understand?

Does he see his own image reflected back at him from his telemprompter:

“But we’ve also seen in these last months is the same partisan spectacle that only hardens the disdain many Americans have towards their own government. Instead of honest debate, we’ve seen scare tactics. Some have dug into unyielding ideological camps that offer no hope of compromise. Too many have used this as an opportunity to score short-term political points, even if it robs the country of our opportunity to solve a long-term challenged. And out of this blizzard of charges and counter-charges, confusion has reigned.”

-President Barack Obama, “Remarks to a Joint Session of Congress on Health Care,” U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C., September 9, 2009

That seriously could have been written at the president.

Usually these are characterized as mostly civilians. This time it’s almost all Taliban (perhaps gathered to discuss peace in the SWAT territory?).

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Feb. 16 (UPI) — At least 31 people died Monday in a remote area of Pakistan in what seems to be a U.S. missile strike, a witness and a Pakistani government official said.

The attack by the pilotless aircraft occurred near Parachinar, a town near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in the semi-autonomous Kurram tribal region, The New York Times (NYSE:NYT) reported Monday. A government official said those killed were all thought to be Taliban militants.

The official and a resident both said U.S. drone aircraft were seen in the area before the strike near the village of Sur Pul. The target was a camp used by Taliban militants, the government official said.

The missile attacks by CIA-operated drones have been aimed at foreign al-Qaida and Taliban militants who hide in Pakistan. Pakistani authorities have criticized the strikes, sharing their complaints with Richard Holbrooke, U.S. President Barack Obama’s representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan, who is on a “listening tour” in the region.

The latest attack came a day after government officials and Taliban militants seemed close to reaching an agreement to end violence in Swat, also in northern Pakistan, the Times said. Militants there declared a 10-day cease-fire and the government indicated it was ready to accept the introduction of Islamic law.

related:
Democrat Senator outs an entire covert base and operation, but no outcry for indictment from the people who called for Karl Rove’s head after DepSecState Armitage outed a quasi-Beltway-spy

The entire article by Lance Fairchok at American Thinker is spot-on excellent, and exactly what I was looking for as an answer to this, which surprisingly seemed to get little media traction. However, I’d like to cite the following passage as a lead-in for a different, if not unrelated topic:

Webster defines propaganda as the “spreading of ideas or information to further or damage a cause,” it is also “ideas or allegations spread for such purpose.” The popular connotation of the word is false information, or information used to deceive or mislead. The left uses the word as a negative label for information that does not conform to their view, a tool to demean and discredit, regardless of truth. Their purpose is to dominate what the public sees with their messages and to eliminate contradictory information.

In information warfare, this is called shaping the battle space.

Throughout this war, the military has been inundated with negative press. Damaging leaks were rampant, coming from the Democrats in the Senate and the House, from the CIA and the State Department, even from inside the Pentagon. Every setback was exaggerated in an unrelenting information campaign to shape public perception.

Disinformation from our enemies was accepted without critical analysis by much of the media. Papers worldwide splashed every unsubstantiated negative story they could find. Enemy agents posing as stringers were feeding false stories about American atrocities. Terror attacks were timed for the 24-hour news-cycle. The broadcast media’s mantra for Iraq was “if it bleeds it leads” writ large.

The enemy knew it, and used it.

This relentless media assault frustrated and confounded the military, for whom the lessons of press malfeasance in Vietnam still rankle. How can you prosecute a war against a vicious enemy when your every action may be portrayed as criminal? How can you show success when failure is all Americans are allowed to see and hear? How do you get your message out when the press ignores or alters it? How can you tell the ground truth if no one is there to listen?

This brings us to today’s New York Times piece, written by Scott Shane, which details some of the little known interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. What is shocking (and yet, why shouldn’t we be surprised?) is the disclosure outing of the name of the 9/11 Mastermind’s interrogator:

Mr. Martinez declined to be interviewed; his role was described by colleagues. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the C.I.A., and a lawyer representing Mr. Martinez asked that he not be named in this article, saying that the former interrogator believed that the use of his name would invade his privacy and might jeopardize his safety. The New York Times, noting that Mr. Martinez had never worked undercover and that others involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda have been named in news articles and books, declined the request. (An editors’ note on this issue has been posted on The Times’s Web site at nytimes.com/world.)

What is it about today’s press that has impaired judgment, given aid and comfort to America’s enemies, endangered lives, prolonged the conflict, and sabotaged and undermined anti-terror programs by publishing leaks regarding such things as CIA secret prisons, NSA surveillance program, the SWIFT program? Were 32 frontpage stories on abu Ghraib published in the New York Times really warranted? Did the act itself inflame the Arab world and create more terrorists, or was it the media hype about the abuses, which did so? What about Haditha? Who has done more damage to the war effort? Soldiers on the frontlines to win hearts and minds, protesters out on the streets, politicians back in Washington, or perceptions created and driven by the media in its coverage of the war? The Bush Administration is held accountable for its failures in prosecuting the Iraq battle with zero percent casualties; but where is the media accountability?

There’s a reason for classified information and government secrets, aside from cynical conspiratorial beliefs that our government is up to no good, to remain secret from the public (and consequently, from our enemies). Is it not obvious?

From the editor’s note regarding the NYTimes defending its decision to publish KSM’s interrogator’s name:

The Central Intelligence Agency asked The New York Times not to publish the name of Deuce Martinez, an interrogator who questioned Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other high-level Al Qaeda prisoners, saying that to identify Mr. Martinez would invade his privacy and put him at risk of retaliation from terrorists or harassment from critics of the agency.

After discussion with agency officials and a lawyer for Mr. Martinez, the newspaper declined the request, noting that Mr. Martinez had never worked under cover and that others involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda have been named in news stories and books. The editors judged that the name was necessary for the credibility and completeness of the article.

The Times’s policy is to withhold the name of a news subject only very rarely, most often in the case of victims of sexual assault or intelligence officers operating under cover.

[sarcasm]
Yes, if only he were an “undercover” operative like Valerie Plame Wilson. Then the NY Times would have kept him anonymous. [/sarcasm]

Since I opened this post by citing a passage from Michael Yon’s book I found relevant, let me bookend the post by closing with this passage from Robert Kaplan’s Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts, pg 26-27:

Dekryger showed me the book he was reading, Tarawa: The Story of a Battle by Time-Life correspondent Robert Sherrod. He said that he found the book inspiring. Leafing through it, and reading it carefully at night in the hootch, I discovered that it was like other books popular among marines and soldiers, but which the contemporary media, aside from the military correspondents, were barely aware of. No potboiler, Tarawa was just an old-fashioned sort of book, very much in the tradition of great war reporting as defined by Richard Tregaskis in Guadalcanal Diary, Bing West in The Village, and Harold Moore and Joe Galloway in We Were Soldiers Once…and Young. These books celebrated the sacrifice and heroism of American troops in World War II and Vietnam not because it had been the authors’ intention, but because it was true and happened to be all around them.

~~~

Sherrod, like other correspondents of the era, keeps using the words “we and “our” when referring to the American side, for although a journalist, he was a fellow American living among the troops. Back in Honolulu a week after the battle, he found the naïveté of the home front toward Tarawa “amazing”. The public saw the killing of so many troops in so few days as scandalous. There were rumblings in Congress about an intelligence failure, and vows that such a thing must not happen again. But as Sherrod argues, there was no easy way to win many wars (in fact, eight months later, the first day of fighting on Guam would claim nearly seven hundred marines dead, wounded, or missing). Thus, “to deprecate the Tawara victory was almost to defame the memory of the gallant men who lost their lives achieving it.” He concludes that on Tarawa, in 1943, “there was a more realistic approach to war than there was in the United States.”

Hours after Senator Clinton dropped out of the race, and the news cycle was swamped with never-ending coverage of the inevitable doing the inevitable something was released under the radar.

link

Back in 2004 the Senate Intelligence Committee began an investigation into pre-war intelligence regarding Saddam’s regime, the threat it posed, and how the intelligence was handled.  Democrats on the committee did their best to politicize the investigation and give it the appearance of a precursor to impeachment of President Bush under some sort of Bush Lied conspiracy theory.  They did this for purely political purposes despite being contrary to national interests.  Again and again the committee came out with report after report.  Each report showed that the problems with pre-war intelligence regarding Saddam’s regime was not some grand conspiracy by a President who can barely read a teleprompter, but rather the result of bad intelligence from agencies that were as on the ball in 2002 and 2003 as they were on 9/11/2001; they were out of touch, undermanned, ill-equipped, budget constrained, and bureaucratically strangled.

In October of 2006, on the eve of the midterm elections, Senate minority leader Harry Reid pulled a big political PR stunt and ordered the doors of the Senate closed to discuss the classified elements of the investigation.  Publicly, he claimed it wasn’t a stunt, but rather that the Bush Administration was holding up the committee’s report to avoid embarassment and to skew the upcoming elections.  In those elections, Democrats took over the House, the Senate, and the Committee, then…instead of releasing it, they sat on it for almost two years.  Why?  Because they didn’t want the reality to make the news: that it was Democrats who were deliberately misleading the American people about the casus belli for the invasion of Iraq: the threat of an Iraqi/Al Queda WMD attack on the United States.

Now, when everyone else was watching Hillary’s 1/2 hour speech again and again and again, on 3 cable networks and every other news outlet, the Democratic-controlled committee released the final report on pre-war intelligence about Saddam’s regime.   In that report…they finally admit that YES

Saddam’s regime was in fact harboring Al Queda groups and leaders, meeting with Al Queda groups and leaders, and more.

Thomas Joseclyn fires the first shot at sinking the “no connections” lie that the Democratic Party has deliberately created and perpetuated for their political gains at national expense.  Naysayers will point to the source as partisan, but the article cited gives plenty of quotes in proper context for one to form an unbiased opinion, and to see with clarity that the real misleading regarding the war in Iraq, hasn’t come from the Bush Administration’s 6months of pre-war rhetoric, but from the Democratic Party’s leaders and flag bearers over the past 66 months.

Novak had a question and answer period with regular joe shmoes via IM yesterday at WaPo and there was some quite interesting exchanges:

Floris, Va.: Here’s what I’ve never understood about the Valerie
Plame Wilson issue. Most reporters don’t print information without
having at least two sources. Did you have more than one source
regarding Mrs. Wilson’s CIA status before you published the information
in your column?

Robert D. Novak: You must not have followed the case very
closely to ask that question. I have answered it in my columns, in my
memoir and in many TV and radio interviews. My three sources were
Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, presidential aide Karl Rove
and CIA spokesman Bill Harlow.

Chambersburg, Pa.: Do you think that Joseph Wilson’s information
about yellow cake from Niger was correct? Did he do the job that he was
asked to do?

Robert D. Novak: Pretty poor job, as the material released now
indicates. Based on his report, you could not definitely Iraq was not
seeking yellowcake uranium.

Kennett, Mo.: How do you rationalize the Bush administration’s
need for secrecy and the way the administration used you to out Ms.
Plame? The end justifies the needs.

Robert D. Novak: I was not used. The information was given me by
Deputy Secretary of State Armitage, who was out of phase with the White
and, like me, a critic of the Iraqi intervention.

San Francisco: Isn’t it true, though, that CIA spokesperson
Bryce Harlow asked you twice not to publish Valerie Plame’s name? How
can this request from a U.S. intelligence agency to a presumably
patriotic American be construed to make him a “source”?

Robert D. Novak: Bill Harlow, not Bryce Harlow.

He confirmed to me that she worked for the CIA in the Counter-Proliferation Division.

Denver: Have you rethought the admiration you expressed for
Ambassador Joseph Wilson in the column that he still claims ruined his
wife’s life?

Robert D. Novak: Yes, I was much too kind to him.

Minneapolis: I found your book very entertaining reading. Since
you finished writing it, it has been disclosed publicly by the
government both that Valerie Wilson was a covert employee by the CIA’s
own standards, and that investigators determined early on that she was
in fact a “covert agent” covered by the Intelligence Identities
Protection Act — in part because, contrary to what you say in your
book, she indeed had performed missions abroad undercover in the period
immediately preceding the public blowing of her cover in your column.
She was not, as you assert in your book, a desk-bound analyst at CIA
headquarters. (And by the way, it is investigators’ and prosecutors’
responsibility, not the CIA’s, to determine whether Wilson was covered
by the IIPA legislation.) How does that change your view of the case
and of your own role in it? Have you revised your view of whether what
you did was regrettable?

Robert D. Novak: Special Counsel had three years (and millions
of dollars) to determine whether anybody violated the IIPA. Of course,
nobody did.

Also, do you take seriously the claim that a person driving her car
every day from her home to CIA headquarters at Langley was a covert
agent?

I love that last one.  The left is constantly trying to bring up the fact that the CIA considered the desk-jockey “covert” and is covered by IIPC.  Only problem with that is then there would have been some criminal charges filed against the person who leaked the name right? 

Cough….Armitage…..cough….

Common sense right?

Alas, we all know who lacks common sense in this debate.

Tom Maguire with some thoughts:

If I had availed myself of the opportunity to brighten the Prince of
Darkness’s day, I would have asked him whether he had followed up on
the question of Ms. Plame’s covert status with Rep. Hoekstra.  When last we looked, the CIA Counsel was still unclear as to her status, but that was many months ago.

And if I had a follow-up, I would query him about Ms. Plame’s pension situation
- her pension gets increased based on service abroad and the CIA has a
formal record of what they consider (by their guidelines, which may not
fully overlap with the intent of the Intelligence Identities Protection
Act) to be the dates of her service abroad, so my question would be,
has Novak talked to Hoekstra or anyone else about just what the CIA
considers to be her official dates of service abroad?

And that, BTW, is my response to Jeff  – it may well be the case
that in the first wave of investigation the FBI took for granted that
Ms. Plame was “covert” as defined by the IIPA; however, the only time
that Fitzgerald actually asserted that was in the sentencing phase
after the case had gone to verdict and after the defense had forgone
their opportunity to challenge that point.  My view – Fitzgerald
clearly ducked the point about her pension dates of service, which he
would not have done had they gone in his favor.

In the end it doesn’t matter to the left in this country that this lady was not covert, that she was just a desk-jockey doing her best to bring down our President with lies.  The duo lied about who sent Joe to Niger, he lied when he wrote that the rumors about yellow-cake were not real when in fact he told the CIA he could not debunk the rumors.

So sure, there were plenty of lies to go around on this story.  The biggest being that these two were just some innocent Washington insiders wanting to do the “right thing.”  

Here is Robert Novak on Hannity & Colmes today getting a bit snippy with Colmes about the McClellan deal seeing as how the leak never came from The President, the Vice-President, Rove, or Libby:

Isn’t it curious how the left constantly wailed about Scott McClellan allegedly lying during his press conferences, but now that he is saying something that smells like trash talk about Bush, he is suddenly a truth teller.

Funny, funny stuff.

Whats the trash talk?  Well, he writes a tell-all book and wanting to ensure it will sell millions he releases a few sentences that he knew would get the left drooling in anticipation.

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan blames President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for efforts to mislead the public about the role of White House aides in leaking the identity of a CIA operative.

In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, McClellan recount the 2003 news conference in which he told reporters that aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby were “not involved” in the leak involving operative Valerie Plame.

“There was one problem. It was not true,” McClellan writes, according to a brief excerpt released Monday. “I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president’s chief of staff and the president himself.”

And do they ever drool.  Olbermann and Matthews almost orgasmed on camera. 

But I have a question for Scott.  Are you telling me that you lied last March?

KING: Scott, were you lied to?

MCCLELLAN: Well, Larry, I said what I believed to be true at the time. It was also what the president believed to be true at the time based on assurances that we were both given.

Or are you just trying to sell books?

I’m betting the latter.

UPDATE

Jeff Gannon with some interesting facts:

Later in the same interview, McClellan responded to the allegation that the White House sought to gain from ‘outing’ Valerie Plame:

Well, Larry, remember that the person was the one who was the original or primary source for Robert Novak, the column that started this whole investigation really was Dick Armitage, who was the deputy secretary of State, not really a proponent of the Iraq war. And it was certainly not a partisan gun-slinger as Robert Novak said in his article or said later in an interview. In terms of any other involvement beyond that, what came out in this trial is what I learned for the first time. So I don’t know of any effort beyond what we have seen in this trial come out in the media that was going on. I think one of the questions that this gets to is, was the administration trying to discredit or retaliate against a critic? I would say that the administration was trying to set the record straight. Whether or not people were involved in leaking someone’s name and that name was classified, that’s a different matter. I don’t know anything about that.

McClellan indicated that his entire knowledge of the ‘outing’ of Valerie Plame from both his personal knowledge and the public record was complete at this point, yet did not make any claim that high-ranking officials sent him out to “pass false information” about it. McClellan’s meaning in the book excerpt is murky at best and does not necessarily contradict the definitive statements he made to Larry King.

UPDATE II

Just as we figured, it was all a ploy to sell more books:

Former White House spokesman Scott McClellan does not believe President Bush lied to him about the role of White House aides I. Lewis Scooter Libby or Karl Rove in the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity, according to McClellan’s publisher.

Peter Osnos, the founder and editor-in-chief of Public Affairs Books, which is publishing McClellan’s book in April, tells NBC from his Connecticut home that McCLellan, “Did not intend to suggest Bush lied to him.”

Osnos says when McClellan went before the White House press corps in 2003 to publicly exonerate Libby and Rove, the problem was that his statement was not true. Osnos said the president told McClellan what “he thought to be the case.” But, he says, McClellan believes, “the president didn’t know it was not true.”
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Osnos says the quotes which appeared on the Public Affairs Books website were part of the roll out of the book catalogues for the spring printings. And he says McClellan had not finished the manuscript for the memoir yet and was working under deadline to have the book completed for the April publishing.

Olby and Chrissy are no doubt inconsolable now.