AMERICANS CAN handle the truth. But when it comes to terrorist acts on American soil, government officials are reluctant to give it to us straight from the start.

Instant analysis of the Times Square bomb scare kicked off with the usual official disclaimers: Don’t presume a Muslim extremist had anything to do with it.

It was likely a “lone wolf’’ operation, suggested Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, or, as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg speculated, “somebody with a political agenda who doesn’t like the health care bill or something.’’ Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, said it was being treated as a “potential terrorist attack’’ but it could be a “one-off’’ or isolated incident.

The arrest of Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American, quickly ended alternative theories. Shahzad is not a Tea-Partier-gone-wild or someone unable to take the pressure of home foreclosure, as some news reports intimated. He told authorities his efforts to blow up innocent people are connected to the Pakistani Taliban.

The SUV parked in Times Square and packed with crude explosives appears to represent that group’s first effort to attack the United States. It stands as yet another, thankfully failed, effort by terrorists with Islamic ties to attack in America.

Nine years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the corresponding war on terror that American troops have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the average citizen gets it. Some Muslim extremists want to kill Americans and will keep on trying to accomplish their mission.

It’s the first thought that registers when a bomb is placed in cars, shoes, or underwear by someone described as Muslim. What’s so terrible about acknowledging that link?

Politicians and law enforcement officials understandably do not want the narrative to get ahead of the facts. They do not want to panic the populace, especially in New York, where the hurt of the World Trade Center attacks is so personal.

There is also well-intentioned reluctance to stigmatize all Muslims, because of the extremist views of some Muslims.

But the “lone wolf’’ theory does not make a terrorist attack any less terrifying than one connected to an official pack of wolves — especially if the lone wolf is inspired by the same pack mentality.

Whether or not Shahzad was connected to a militant jihadist Pakistani network, “he is not a lone wolf,’’ argues M. Zuhdi Jasser, president and founder of American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a group that promotes the separation of religion and state. “The ideas that drove him to act did not hatch in his own mind. We ignore to our own detriment the common ideology, the common malignant virus of the slippery slope of political Islam that takes over these Muslims. When are we going to wake up as a nation?’’

Jasser, whose views are controversial to some Muslims, also believes that “many politicians are in denial or in avoidance behavior that there is a common ideology that threatens us. It is far more dismissive and expedient to say, ‘Well, just this last case must be isolated, forget the previous 100.’ ’’

Some of that political denial comes from troubling fact: Every terrorist plot launched by Muslim extremists cannot be foiled before it threatens human life. A combination of luck and vigilance has stopped a string of attempts, from Richard Reid’s attempted shoe-bombing in December 2001 to an attempted bombing of the New York subway system, from the bomb carried in the underwear of a passenger on a Northwest Airlines flight last December to the Times Square incident .

Denial also springs from the blood sport that is American politics. The fight against terrorism no longer unites the country. It divides it along partisan lines. It’s all about blame, not shared accountability.

Today, it’s a sign of political weakness to acknowledge an attempt by a Muslim extremist to attack in the United States.

Americans know the truth. It’s time for politicians — Republican and Democratic — to trust them to with the realities of the problem. It’s also time for politicians to stop using the reality as a reason to attack each other.

Joan Vennochi can be reached at vennochi@globe.com.

“[W]e have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., famously said that about President Obama’s health care reform package. She was right. We are just finding out what was contained within that Obamacare law that Obama signed weeks ago.

Here are five things we’ve learned so far:

One: No sooner had Obamacare passed than the White House discovered that someone goofed. Despite all of Obama’s promises and talking points, Obamacare as passed by Congress does not require insurers to cover children with expensive pre-existing medical conditions.

Immediately, the White House got an assurance from the insurers. After demonizing them for months as callous profiteers on others’ misery (in fact, the entire industry is barely profitable), Obama now tells Americans that they can trust health insurance companies to do the right thing out of the goodness of their hearts.

Two: State governments discovered that they are no longer just required to guarantee payment for indigent patients’ care under Medicaid. Obamacare changes Medicaid law so that now states must also guarantee treatment to the poor.

This is a thorny issue: Many doctors refuse to see Medicaid patients because the program doesn’t pay enough for them to break even. (In some states, payments to doctors have been delayed for months or years.)

Some cash-strapped states expect this new definition to spawn court challenges, which will ultimately force them to pay exorbitantly high prices to doctors and hospitals for their existing patients.

Three: Even as Medicaid’s costs increase because of the above, so will the number of Medicaid patients under Obamacare’s coverage provisions. Thanks to the “Cornhusker Kickback” — the special Nebraska provision that was extended to every state in the final version of the bill — the federal taxpayer is on the hook for 90 percent of the new patients’ expenses.

So remember those rosy budget projections about Obamacare reducing the deficit, or at least not costing too much? Forget it.

Four: Douglas Shulman, commissioner for the Internal Revenue Service, announced this week at the National Press Club that Obamacare means he can take your tax refund from you. Obamacare requires Americans to purchase insurance, but contains no serious enforcement mechanisms.

So, Shulman said, the IRS will collect penalties from those who fail to purchase “qualified” insurance by confiscating the interest-free loans that taxpayers make to the government throughout the year through employment withholding.

Five: The ski-tourism industry suddenly realizes that it is endangered by Obamacare. Ski resorts must now provide health care or else pay a fine for each employee who works more than 120 days out of the year — and many of their employees do.
The bill had applied only at the 150-day threshold, until House Democrats changed it in reconciliation. They also cranked up the fine from $750 to $2,000 per employee, in order to pad their budget numbers.

Those are just five things we’ve learned, out of more than 2,000 pages. You can bet we’ll learn a lot more in the seven months leading up to Election Day.
Speaking of which, on Monday evening, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., explained away public opposition to this new health care law, shaped in large part by the special deals he made with reluctant senators last December.

“The loud minority made a lot of noise,” Reid said. “Everybody acknowledges, with rare exception, that what we did with our immediate deliverables was terrific.”
Reid’s state defies the laws of math. Sixty-two percent of Nevadans somehow constitute a “rare exception.” And it looks as though the “loud minority” will send Reid looking for a new insurance plan later this year.

Even by President Obama’s loquacious standards, an answer he gave here on health care Friday was a doozy.

Toward the end of a question-and-answer session with workers at an advanced battery technology manufacturer, a woman named Doris stood to ask the president whether it was a “wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care” package.

“We are over-taxed as it is,” Doris said bluntly.

Obama started out feisty. “Well, let’s talk about that, because this is an area where there’s been just a whole lot of misinformation, and I’m going to have to work hard over the next several months to clean up a lot of the misapprehensions that people have,” the president said.

He then spent the next 17 minutes and 12 seconds lulling the crowd into a daze. His discursive answer – more than 2,500 words long — wandered from topic to topic, including commentary on the deficit, pay-as-you-go rules passed by Congress, Congressional Budget Office reports on Medicare waste, COBRA coverage, the Recovery Act and Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (he referred to this last item by its inside-the-Beltway name, “F-Map”). He talked about the notion of eliminating foreign aid (not worth it, he said). He invoked Warren Buffett, earmarks and the payroll tax that funds Medicare (referring to it, in fluent Washington lingo, as “FICA”).

Always fond of lists, Obama ticked off his approach to health care — twice. “Number one is that we are the only — we have been, up until last week, the only advanced country that allows 50 million of its citizens to not have any health insurance,” he said.

A few minutes later he got to the next point, which seemed awfully similar to the first. “Number two, you don’t know who might end up being in that situation,” he said, then carried on explaining further still.

“Point number three is that the way insurance companies have been operating, even if you’ve got health insurance you don’t always know what you got, because what has been increasingly the practice is that if you’re not lucky enough to work for a big company that is a big pool, that essentially is almost a self-insurer, then what’s happening is, is you’re going out on the marketplace, you may be buying insurance, you think you’re covered, but then when you get sick they decide to drop the insurance right when you need it,” Obama continued, winding on with the answer.

Halfway through, an audience member on the riser yawned.

But Obama wasn’t finished. He had a “final point,” before starting again with another list — of three points.

“What we said is, number one, we’ll have the basic principle that everybody gets coverage,” he said, before launching into the next two points, for a grand total of seven.

His wandering approach might not matter if Obama weren’t being billed as the chief salesman of the health-care overhaul. Public opinion on the bill remains divided, and Democratic officials are planning to send Obama into the country to persuade wary citizens that it will work for them in the long run.

It was not evident that he changed any minds at Friday’s event. The audience sat politely, but people in the back of the room began to wander off.

Even Obama seemed to recognize that he had gone on too long. He apologized — in keeping with the spirit of the moment, not once, but twice. “Boy, that was a long answer. I’m sorry,” he said, drawing nervous laughter that sounded somewhat like relief as he wrapped up.

But, he said: “I hope I answered your question.”

Look at these smiling fools. Remember this image. Let it melt in your memories of power at its most corrupt.

Obama Signs Health Care Overhaul Bill

Obamacare was just past. See all the mainstream media treat this as a great thing for the country while the majority opposed it and Democratic congress in-scrupulously pushed it thru. Its sad. Its sickening.

Signing off.

ON Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that, if enacted, the latest health care reform legislation would, over the next 10 years, cost about $950 billion, but because it would raise some revenues and lower some costs, it would also lower federal deficits by $138 billion. In other words, a bill that would set up two new entitlement spending programs — health insurance subsidies and long-term health care benefits — would actually improve the nation’s bottom line.

Could this really be true? How can the budget office give a green light to a bill that commits the federal government to spending nearly $1 trillion more over the next 10 years?

The answer, unfortunately, is that the budget office is required to take written legislation at face value and not second-guess the plausibility of what it is handed. So fantasy in, fantasy out.

In reality, if you strip out all the gimmicks and budgetary games and rework the calculus, a wholly different picture emerges: The health care reform legislation would raise, not lower, federal deficits, by $562 billion.

Gimmick No. 1 is the way the bill front-loads revenues and backloads spending. That is, the taxes and fees it calls for are set to begin immediately, but its new subsidies would be deferred so that the first 10 years of revenue would be used to pay for only 6 years of spending.

Even worse, some costs are left out entirely. To operate the new programs over the first 10 years, future Congresses would need to vote for $114 billion in additional annual spending. But this so-called discretionary spending is excluded from the Congressional Budget Office’s tabulation.

Consider, too, the fate of the $70 billion in premiums expected to be raised in the first 10 years for the legislation’s new long-term health care insurance program. This money is counted as deficit reduction, but the benefits it is intended to finance are assumed not to materialize in the first 10 years, so they appear nowhere in the cost of the legislation.

Another vivid example of how the legislation manipulates revenues is the provision to have corporations deposit $8 billion in higher estimated tax payments in 2014, thereby meeting fiscal targets for the first five years. But since the corporations’ actual taxes would be unchanged, the money would need to be refunded the next year. The net effect is simply to shift dollars from 2015 to 2014.

In addition to this accounting sleight of hand, the legislation would blithely rob Peter to pay Paul. For example, it would use $53 billion in anticipated higher Social Security taxes to offset health care spending. Social Security revenues are expected to rise as employers shift from paying for health insurance to paying higher wages. But if workers have higher wages, they will also qualify for increased Social Security benefits when they retire. So the extra money raised from payroll taxes is already spoken for. (Indeed, it is unlikely to be enough to keep Social Security solvent.) It cannot be used for lowering the deficit.

A government takeover of all federally financed student loans — which obviously has nothing to do with health care — is rolled into the bill because it is expected to generate $19 billion in deficit reduction.

Finally, in perhaps the most amazing bit of unrealistic accounting, the legislation proposes to trim $463 billion from Medicare spending and use it to finance insurance subsidies. But Medicare is already bleeding red ink, and the health care bill has no reforms that would enable the program to operate more cheaply in the future. Instead, Congress is likely to continue to regularly override scheduled cuts in payments to Medicare doctors and other providers.

Removing the unrealistic annual Medicare savings ($463 billion) and the stolen annual revenues from Social Security and long-term care insurance ($123 billion), and adding in the annual spending that so far is not accounted for ($114 billion) quickly generates additional deficits of $562 billion in the first 10 years. And the nation would be on the hook for two more entitlement programs rapidly expanding as far as the eye can see.

The bottom line is that Congress would spend a lot more; steal funds from education, Social Security and long-term care to cover the gap; and promise that future Congresses will make up for it by taxing more and spending less.

The stakes could not be higher. As documented in another recent budget office analysis, the federal deficit is already expected to exceed at least $700 billion every year over the next decade, doubling the national debt to more than $20 trillion. By 2020, the federal deficit — the amount the government must borrow to meet its expenses — is projected to be $1.2 trillion, $900 billion of which represents interest on previous debt.

The health care legislation would only increase this crushing debt. It is a clear indication that Congress does not realize the urgency of putting America’s fiscal house in order.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who was the director of the Congressional Budget Office from 2003 to 2005, is the president of the American Action Forum, a policy institute.

As per AP Fact Check Report:

Buyers, beware: President Barack Obama says his health care overhaul will lower premiums by double digits, but check the fine print.

Premiums are likely to keep going up even if the health care bill passes, experts say. If cost controls work as advertised, annual increases would level off with time. But don’t look for a rollback. Instead, the main reason premiums would be more affordable is that new government tax credits would help cover the cost for millions of people.

Listening to Obama pitch his plan, you might not realize that’s how it works.
Visiting a Cleveland suburb this week, the president described how individuals and small businesses will be able to buy coverage in a new kind of health insurance marketplace, gaining the same strength in numbers that federal employees have.

“You’ll be able to buy in, or a small business will be able to buy into this pool,” Obama said. “And that will lower rates, it’s estimated, by up to 14 to 20 percent over what you’re currently getting. That’s money out of pocket.”

Read rest of the article….

Yep, he said it. See for yourself.