(H/T Drudge)

On the eve of a primetime address to the Joint Session of Congress, President Obama met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi(D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Ried(D-NV). Acording to ABC’s Jake Tapper “sources tell ABC News that in his private meeting with Democratic congressional leaders this afternoon the key word was urgency.”

According to Tapper:

Both leaders told the president that despite the difficult rough and tumble of the legislative process in the last few weeks, they are optimistic that both the House and Senate can pass health care reform legislation.

What will be in the bill remains an open question, though after the meeting, Reid told reporters that “we’re going to do our very best to have a public option or something like a public option before we finish this work.”

President Obama had originally set an August deadline on healthcare legislation, but neither branch of Congress was able to pass any form of a bill. With his original deadline already in the past, Obama has scheduled a primetime address to lay out his plan for getting a bill passed. Of course, it makes PERFECT sense to schedule a plan to pass legislation in the month AFTER the deadline he previously laid out.

President Obama has spent a large amount of “political capital” to try to pass healthcare reform. The President knows he is losing the faith of the general public on the healthcare debate, and he knows the longer it goes on, the worse it will get. Rasmussen reports that 54% say that passing no bill at all is better than the bills currently going through congress. President Obama has decided his only option is to ram a bill down our throats.

HT (Ace and HotAir)

We have all seen plenty of video coverage of the health care Town Hall meetings occurring around the country. We have seen many good questions asked of members of congress, but this particular lady might take the prize for best confrontation of a congressman. I wish the video ran a little longer to see Rep. Dicks continue to squirm his way out of this mess.

Here is the “money shot”:

I haven’t seen any sources naming the questioner, but I can say it is good to have her on our side.

With his overall approval tanking, the White House is quietly working on drafting new healthcare legislation. According to CNN:

Multiple sources close to the process told CNN Friday that while the plan is uncertain, they are preparing for the possibility they could deliver their own legislation to Capitol Hill sometime after the President Barack Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress Wednesday, with one source calling the possibility of new legislation a “contingency” approach if efforts by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus to craft a deal fall through. The sources spoke to CNN shortly before Baucus said that he may lay out a health care plan as soon as Saturday.

(snip)

As previously reported, the so-called trigger option remains very much on the table.

Under a ‘trigger option’, a new government-run health care plan would only go into effect if insurance companies fail to meet certain affordability standards with their own plans.

President Obama has made it very clear that a healthcare plan is very important to him, and has said many times in the past that he strongly supports a “single payer system”.

Whatever legislation comes out of the White House, we can be sure of one thing. The President’s previously stated goals will be reflected in it. Whether there is a “trigger option” or a “public option”, we know President Obama wants a single payer Universal Health Care system. We need only to look to England’s NHS system to know how devastating that will be.

As President Barack Obama navigated the campaign trail last year, he relied heavily on being the candidate of change. Constantly touting “change you can believe in.” Being given the luxury of a complacent media and a majority of the electorate that bought into his notion of “change”, we are now in the eighth month of Obama’s presidency. Many events have occurred during the past 7+ months that have left the American people wondering “where is that change we can believe in?” Rasmussen is reporting that the president’s overall approval rating is 47% with 28% strongly approving and 39% strongly disapproving. Seems as if the “change we can believe in” is apparently absent.

Last night, I spent the evening at my neighbor’s house watching a dismal performance by the Boston Red Sox. I have lived next door to this guy for about 2 years now. We have become pretty good friends during that time. Our conversation is usually confined to sports, our families, and the events of our small community. We have never spoken of politics. As we sat in his living room last night, he looked at me and asked “what do you think of President Obama?” I told him that I hoped he would not view me any differently, but I am a Republican and I disapprove of virtualy everything that President Obama has done. He went on to tell me that he had never paid attention to politics and confessed that he had never voted. While I was not suprised that he paid no attention to politics, I was amazed that he had never voted. As the conversation progressed he told me that he was very scared of the direction of our country, and that he had attended a small tea party. He said that he had started talking with his other friends about politics and encouraging them to become active. This friend of mine that had never had interest in politics was waking up and becoming active.

It appears that President Obama IS giving us CHANGE. People across the country are starting to wake up and speak out. The Tea Parties and Town Halls have shown us that people are no longer willing to sit quietly and watch our country be run into the ground by progressives in Washington.

We have seen a whole new wave of people actively voicing their concerns about the state of our country. The above videos show the outrage over a government takeover of healthcare, and If I spent about another 30 seconds I could fill the page with videos of people angry about the stimulus package voicing their concerns at tax tay tea parties. People accross the nation who never wanted to be political activists are starting to grab the posterboard and a marker, make a sign, and go to protest this administration and their attempted destruction of the Greatest Country in the World.

Thank you President Obama. You have polarized a nation, and in doing so you have shown me “Change I Can Believe In!!!!”

(HT HotAir)

On Ron Reagan’s Air America Radio show, Rep. Slaughter said that she didn’t want to give her constituents a forum to express their opinions.  It appears to her that she believes that it doesn’t matter what the people she was elected to represent think.

This YouTube clip has the audio from the radio show.

I’m not doing town meetings;I’m not going to give those people a forum. I went through it with the Clinton health care bill, with the John Birch Society, where we had to have police around, and people hysterically crying…
And frankly, to tell you the truth Ron, my own dignity, and the dignity of the office I hold, is important to me; and I know what that is. It is not a spontaneous uprising of my constituents; I’ve got the best relationship with my constituents anybody can ever imagine.

I’m known as just “Louise”, from one end of it to the other, and they know I’m not going to do anything to hurt them, and I’m not going to give these other people, who, when you come down to it, a large number of them are anti-government, they don’t want Medicare or Social Security either; and the notion that they showing up with guns, I think, is totally dangerous.

Your father was shot, we’ve had too many presidents assassinated, I can’t believe President Obama said it was not a concern to him.

She at least made sure to get in her talking points.  Mentioning that people who are happy with their healthcare and don’t want the government to ruin it are showing up with loaded guns.  That is an excellent way to portray the “angry mob”, but Rep. Slaughter do you remember what it is you are supposed to do in Washington, D.C.?  Is it not your job to represent the people of your district?  I would say that by you not wanting to give them a forum, it would be akin to dereliction of duty.  May the 2010 primaries give you your just desserts!

Our Stimulus dollars are hard at work… That is if you work for the government

President Obama’s call last year for “shared sacrifice” doesn’t extend to federal employees, at least based on the details of his administration’s 2010 budget released this week.

At a time when the official unemployment rate is nearing double digits, and 6.35 million people are receiving unemployment benefits, the U.S. government is on a hiring binge.

Executive branch employment — 1.98 million in 2009, excluding the Postal Service and the Defense Department — is set to increase by 15.6 percent for the 2010 fiscal year. Most of that is thanks to the Census Bureau hiring 102,000 temporary workers, but not counting them still yields a net increase of 2 percent in one year.

There’s little belt-tightening in evidence in Washington, D.C.: Counting benefits, the average pay per federal worker will leap from $72,800 in 2008 to $75,419 next year.

Meanwhile, according to Forbes’ layoff tracker, there have been 558,087 layoffs since November 2008 at large public companies; even local school districts aren’t immune. That’s just a sliver of the total unemployed, which government data estimate to be 8.6 percent of the workforce, or an alternate method of reckoning that counts discouraged workers puts at 20 percent.

 
Yes, when Mr. Obama promised he would create or save 3.5 million jobs, he was certainly promising he would be expanding the amount of people relying on the government. Jobs, jobs, jobs…. well, if we look at the nationwide unemployment rate, I guess we could only conclude that the stimulus isn’t working. We all already knew that it would not work, and we were all sure of the vast expansion of government. While we were concerned with the phrase of “create or save”, the almighty administration was busy creating a plethora of bureaucracies to save the world. It is a sad situation when there are many skilled workers across the nation who are waiting on a decent paying job, while these elitist’s claim their part of the american dream.

Maybe we should all start looking for work at the DMV or the Post Office

God Help us all!!!