A good ad from Rick Scott’s gang:
Do bear in mind that Tom Daschle, who has returned to lobbying for a living, is still guiding “anti-lobbyist” President Barack Obama on health care “reform” even though his tax evasion lost him the spot of HHS chief and White House health care czar. Do also bear in mind that Daschle wrote in his book that Britain’s national health service is a system America should aspire to.
Then do the math.
National Journal has the story:
Just as the dust was settling last week from the exits of Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer, Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., whipped up the tumult again. By pulling out of consideration for Commerce secretary, a post previously abandoned by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D), Gregg became the Obama administration’s fourth high-level dropout so far.
But while this administration has set a turnover record for an incoming Cabinet, it’s hardly the first to run into problems with its nominees. Bill Clinton leads among recent presidents with a total of six major nominee dropouts over the course of his presidency, followed by George W. Bush and his Cabinet’s two withdrawals. Three previous presidents — George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter — each slipped once. All but Reagan had at least one kink in their first-term Cabinet selection process, with Clinton accepting three withdrawals.
I’m not sure this is a fair accounting of the process; it counts Tim Geithner as a successful nomination - which is rather generous. If Geithner were considered a failed nominee, Obama would be just one more Commerce Secretary Nominee away from Clinton’s record, and could still break it with a Daschle-like nomination at HHS.
Americans are up in arms, decrying wasteful spending in the so-called stimulus bill. They should be. But one of the bill’s worst provisions has gone almost unnoticed, dangerously lurking below the radar of those exposing the bill’s flaws.
“Comparative Effectiveness Research,” sounds innocuous, but big-government programs always do. The $1.1 billion of the stimulus package earmarked for this project is a significant step toward government-run healthcare. Comparative effectiveness research is a tool for bureaucrats to decide which medical treatments Americans should or should not have access to.
In countries with government-run healthcare systems, comparative effectiveness is often used as an excuse to deny patients life-saving medical care on the grounds of cost-effectiveness. The healthcare board of the United Kingdom has repeatedly denied breakthrough drugs to citizens suffering with breast cancer, Alzheimer’s, and even multiple sclerosis on the grounds of comparative effectiveness. The British government has stripped citizens of the freedom to choose their own healthcare. Congressman David Obey, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, has already admitted as much. Just read his own words from the committee report on the stimulus, talking about this provision: “Those items, procedures, and interventions… that are found to be less effective and in some cases, more expensive, will no longer be prescribed.” We must not allow it.
Comparative effectiveness “research” presents a danger to freedom of healthcare choice in America. And if the potential consequences of the study alone don’t scare you, recall President Obama’s failed nominee to oversee the Department of Health and Social Services. In his own book, Critical, Daschle talks about his desire to create a federal planning board to make Americans’ healthcare decisions. While Americans may have dodged a bullet with Daschle, the fight against government-run healthcare is only beginning.
He’ll show them all.
This is one time where excerpting isn’t going to cut it: let me summarize this article (”Ruin Your Health With the Obama Stimulus Plan: Betsy McCaughey*“) (H/T: AoSHQ) and then you can go read both it and the soon-to-be-federal law (here is the original, and here is the Nelson/Collins amendment). Essentially, McCaughey argues that the bill contains stealth provisions within it that will create a bureaucratic commission that will regulate acceptable medical treatments for patients. She then states that these provisions are “virtually identical” with those in Daschle’s book Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis
So, is it nonsense?
He was merely first in the queue:
Despite the fact that Geithner sailed through the confirmation process—while Daschle went up in flames—Geithner’s tax troubles were actually far more egregious. People tend to give Geithner a pass, because the overall amount he owed was smaller and it just involved Social Security and Medicare, rather than income tax. But Geithner actually acknowledged years ago that he owed the taxes—but didn’t pay them until he was nominated for the Treasury job. That hardly counts as a mistake.
Daschle, for his part, failed to count as income the value of a car and driver he received from a New York private-equity firm, InterMedia Advisors, during 2005-2007. He also overstated charitable contributions and understated income from InterMedia, which paid him $1 million a year. Daschle filed amended tax returns last month reporting $128,203 in additional taxes and $11,964 in interest. The revised tax returns were submitted after President Obama announced that he intended to nominate Daschle to be secretary of Health and Human Services.
Geithner’s situation was nonetheless a bigger ethical lapse. As an employee of the International Monetary Fund in 2001 and later years, Geithner was responsible for sending a check to the IRS to cover his own payroll taxes. He didn’t do so. What he did do was submit a request to the IMF for reimbursement of those taxes. And he collected.
This post is mostly for the bulimics out there who need some help throwing up tonight.
Toby Harnden has some of the quotes from David Gergen and Gloria Borger lamenting Tom Daschle’s withdrawal.
Gergen and Borger are typical Washington insiders who have lost all disconnect from the real world outside the beltway. Borger claims Daschle’s withdrawal was somehow partisan — not the criminal reality that it was.
Gergen thinks Daschle is just so smart it is just so upsetting. Never mind that Daschle was making huge money trading favors. Never mind that Daschle didn’t pay his taxes. Never mind that Daschle was potentially heading to a cabinet position that would oversee the very people who were paying Daschle lots of money.
That’s so typical of Gergen who probably does the same thing and probably ought to be audited himself.
The National Organization for Women has long had a low threshold for support of candidates for office and position. The criteria they use to judge worth generally consist of two requirements (1) Be Female (apparently 21st century androgeny and transgendered-rights haven’t yet caught on in this corner of Leftopia), and (2) Be Liberal.
Luckily enough for Democrat Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow, she meets both of these requirements (despite her fence-straddling support of the Iraq war and her profiting from criminal and Democrat bundler Norman Hsu to the tune of $27,000), meaning she’s a natural to receive the active endorsement of NOW for the “NOW”-empty position of Health and Human Services secretary.
The following release hit my inbox just after dinner last night:
I think I messed up. I screwed up in not recognizing the perception that even though this is an honest mistake, I believe, on Tom’s part, that, you know, ordinary people are out there paying taxes every day and whether it’s an intentional mistake or not, it was sending the wrong signal.
You can watch President Obama’s admission in the following video:
The full transcript of Katie Couric’s interview with President Obama is available here.
I appreciate it when a man can admit he made a mistake. Nevertheless, Obama is still sending the wrong signal about tax cheats. Even though Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer were thrown under the bus for their tax issues, tax cheat Timothy Geithner is still Treasury Secretary.
The Tom Daschle Affair has come to what should have been its expected end. My comments can be found in my latest New Ledger column, in which I invoke the Muse of Cosell. Excerpt:
Slowly but surely, the scales are falling from our eyes when it comes to taking the measure of the Obama Administration. We realize that its members are not ten feet tall. And along with that, we realize that its policies have not been handed down from Sinai. The Obama Administration’s missteps have reminded us that the President and his minions are human. Human beings make mistakes. Sometimes, those mistakes are found in the policies an Administration tries to implement. And that means that however charming the President, however tough and ruthless the staff and Cabinet around him, we ought to question those policies, argue against what we find to be wrong, and feel liberated to offer policy alternatives of our own.
When he got chosen to be the HHS Secretary and the White House’s health czar, Tom Daschle must have felt empowered to implement his vision of health care reform. By his withdrawal, and by what that withdrawal has signified about the Obama Administration, perhaps he has empowered us, after being on the political defensive for so long, to advance our views on what health care reform ought to look like.
Tom Daschle’s defenders argued that he was and is a great public servant. By his example, he may have accidentally proven them right.
See also this, in which I invoke the Muse of Stengel.
In a just world, this experience — having to withdraw his name from consideration for the White House position of de facto national health care czar due to a tax-related skeleton being disinterred from his closet — would serve as an impetus for Tom Daschle to transition the focus of his lobbying and consulting efforts from health care and legislator-sweet-talking to to helping build awareness about the need to simplify our ridiculously complex and illogical tax code, and to helping effect change in our labyrinthine withholding and reporting system.
Unfortunately, he is far more likely to continue his effort to Anglicize the U.S. health care system by giving government — that master of inefficiency — all but total control over Americans’ day to day health and wellness decisions, and by ensuring equality of poor health outcome among the population as a whole.
That’s a shame, really. He would have been an excellent novus homo to have on the tax reform bandwagon.
So Tom Daschle isn’t going to be Secretary of Health and Human Services for being a tax cheat. And Nancy Killefer removed herself from consideration for the same reason.
Now what about those people who want to be in Congress? Like Al Franken? Or Scott Murphy?
Just sayin …
On this day ninety-six years ago, February 3, 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. The Sixteenth Amendment gave the federal government to authority to collect income taxes. Today, in an affront to all Americans who have labored these past ninety-six years to pay their fair share – and then some – to the government, President Barack Obama has a tax cheat in charge of the Internal Revenue Service, and had another in line to take the reins at the Department of Health and Human Services.
The withdrawal of former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle from consideration for a Cabinet post is an anniversary present for the American taxpayer. Today of all days is a day to celebrate tax cheats getting their just desserts.
Mr. President, on this anniversary of the income tax, can you assure Americans who dutifully pay their taxes in full and on time that there will be no more tax cheats nominated for or discovered to be holding positions of power and influence in your Administration? It’s the least you can do on our anniversary.
Nancy Killefer, President Obama’s nominee to chief performance officer for the federal government has withdrawn her nomination:
When her selection was announced by President Barack Obama on Jan. 7, The Associated Press disclosed that in 2005 the District of Columbia government had filed a more than $900 tax lien on her home for failure to pay unemployment compensation tax on household help.
So after fighting hard for male tax cheat Geithner, and while continuing to battle hard for the male tax cheat Daschle, Obama throws the female tax cheat under the bus.
Those are the closing words in a Tom Daschle campaign ad, the highlight of which is that Tom Daschle is so cheap he kept driving his beat up old Pontiac in Washington, D.C. — despite its pollution causing oil leak.
Daschle used his home town image when he was in the Senate, but he was quick to ditch it once he left the Senate. Of course, he kept his Senate mindset, which puts him above the law.
Tom Daschle. That’s who.
The former Senate Majority Leader has done far more to earn the distrust of the Senate than have his erstwhile victims while Daschle was a Senate floor leader and had the power to order his fellow Democrats to sink the nominations of people he essentially targeted for political purposes. Why his nomination should not similarly sleep with the fishes is beyond me . . . unless we just want to throw consistency completely out the window, of course.
Meanwhile, Ezra Klein informs us that because “[t]he Senate knows Tom Daschle. He gets the benefit of the doubt,” because “watching his Senate colleagues rally around him actually underscores Daschle’s fitness for the job,” and because “[w]atching Daschle’s former colleagues leap to his defense and attest to his integrity and fairness”.
No. Really. He writes that. And he expects you to believe it.
The Daschle tax dodge cries out for more attention. Far be it from little old me not to give it. A brief flavor of the piece:
. . . While I have David Boaz to thank for a clever title for this article, I am sure that he joins me in wishing that it never had to be written. Alas, the Obama Administration and its allies seem to have a serious problem when it comes to paying taxes. Or, as House Republican Whip Eric Cantor puts it, “It’s easy for the other side to advocate for higher taxes because you know what? They don’t pay `em.”
Read it all (he said, immodestly). And along the same lines, there is this.
A tremendous amount of attention has been focused recently on Tom Daschle’s $140k tax blunder. It turns out that he didn’t even disclose any of his to Barack Obama after Obama nominated him. Note that this even included not paying the Medicare for his driver.
And people paid attention to now Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s “mistake”(?) of not paying taxes, while collecting the reimbursement for those taxes from his employer.
These aren’t the only Democrats on the national scene with tax troubles. Remember Al Franken, currently in limbo due a contested recount in Minnesota? Do you remember that he too didn’t pay his taxes? From the Politico in April:
But Franken’s admission Tuesday night that his corporation had owed $70,000 in back taxes and penalties in 17 states threatens to upend what has been until now a disciplined, on-message campaign against one of the GOP’s most vulnerable incumbents.
How many more are out there? Who is next?
“Make no mistake, tax cheaters cheat us all, and the IRS should enforce our laws to the letter.” — Senator Tom Daschle, Congressional Record, May 7, 1998, p. S4507
Tom Daschle, President Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, is singing a different tune today.
“I am deeply embarrassed and disappointed by the errors that required
me to amend my tax returns,” said Daschle, the former Senate Democratic
leader. “I apologize for the errors and profoundly regret that you have
had to devote time to them.”
For all the stories that have come out in the last month about how President Obama has executed the smoothest administrative transition in memory, and how Obama has chosen to enforce the “strictest ethics rules ever applied” to the administration vetting and recruitment process, the facts sure do seem to point to an altogether different conclusion — especially in terms of cabinet nominees and senior staff.
Let’s take a quick look at a few members of the crack team Obama has tried to surround himself with since being elected President three months ago.
The absurd attacks by leftists (and by “conservative” poseurs) on John McCain for his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate, and the supposed incompetence of his vetting staff that selection displayed, look very hollow indeed when measured up against the apparent lack of any vetting whatsoever President Obama’s nominees for half a dozen cabinet positions (and countless more senior staff jobs).
Between the lack of vetting, the memory-holing of vital documents posted on WhiteHouse.gov during the Bush years (like, for example, the Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. and Iraq, which is now only available via html cache), and Obama’s repeated violation of his own “ethics” rules for the purpose of filling his cabinet and senior staff rosters, the title “smoothest transition in history” appears to be almost exactly the opposite of what this incoming administration’s actions over the last few months deserve.
In fact, the only parts of this transition that have gone smoothly are the parts President Bush handled himself.
Now that should be a scary thought for all those liberals who proclaimed January 20, 2009 to be the day “competence” returned to the White House, shouldn’t it?
Why has Tom Daschle been paid over $4.5 million in the four years since losing his Senate seat (not to mention his wife’s lucrative career as a lobbyist)? Because it is believed - correctly - that Tom Daschle can get you government contracts; or spare you from government regulation; or get the government to regulate your competitors.
This influence peddling is going to get worse - much worse - under the Obama regime. You can’t double the Federal government’s discretionary spending in one “stimulus” bill, and propose to nationalize health care (as Mr. Daschle wants to do), nationalize the auto industry (as has just about been done), nationalize the banks (already nationalized in all but name, with the President yesterday announcing plans to dictate their lending policies), and think people aren’t going to flock to Washington and pay big bucks to the Tom Daschles of the world to help them get their share of the loot.
These are not unintended consequences of the policies of big government. They are the essence of big government. The cash floating around Washington and being lavished on the Tom Daschles of the world is exactly what Democrats have longed for - money follows power.
