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Clearing the Browser Tabs – The Obama Friday News Dump Saturday Edition

Posted: 15 Oct 2011 01:57 PM PDT

It’s become a tradition lately for President Obama to dump the worst possible news on a Friday, to avoid several good news days’ worth of coverage. The MSM has obliged him nicely by mostly ignoring those inconvenient stories on its weekend “talking head” pundit shows and early Monday headlines.

Yesterday, though, the administration truly outdid itself and dropped three big stories that, individually, would have dominated news coverage for a week. Instead, they’ll be largely forgotten and reported mostly by the blogosphere and news sources that don’t have huge television audiences and the Official Media Operation Stamp of Approval.

1) The CLASS program is no more. You probably hadn’t heard about CLASS, which stands for Community Living Assistance Services and Supports, but it was critical to the Democrats’ claims that Obamacare wouldn’t add roughly a bazillion dollars to the deficit. The program was designed to provide money directly to disabled and elderly people who signed up for and paid premiums to the voluntary program so they could buy their own home medical care. The idea behind the program was that long-term institutional care is more expensive than home care, so if we could shift people to that, we’d save Medicare funds. The problem is that the program relied on a huge accounting trick for its savings, which Democrats estimated at $70 billion dollars in the program’s first decade — well over half the total cost savings for Obamacare. Those who signed up for CLASS would have to pay premiums for five years before they’d get any benefit from it. In other words, the program would rake in money and spend very little for the first few years, then lose money hand over fist once it started to pay out benefits. Critics of Obamacare pointed out that the math couldn’t possibly work and now the administration had agreed. CLASS is done and, with it, the claim that Obamacare will “bend the cost curve”.

2) We’ve invaded Uganda. Well, okay, it’s not quite that dramatic, but we do now have combat troops in Central Africa with a mission to take down a man named Joseph Kony and the senior leaders of a group called the Lord’s Resistance Army. The LRA is a truly vile organization that has killed well into the tens of thousands, has burned out villages, rapes its way across the countryside, uses children as solders, and sells kids into slavery. We can and should do everything in our power to destroy the LRA utterly and so convincingly that the next would-be Kony decides to take up basket-weaving instead of wanton destruction. However, the President has an obligation to bring his case for intervention (even in a training and advisory status) to Congress and to us. He does not have the power to simply insert our soldiers wherever he sees fit and deliver a letter a couple days later. Those who groused about unchecked executive power during the eight years of the Bush Administration, including a large chunk of the MSM, should be apoplectic right now.

3) The President ignored a Congressional subpoena that directed him to turn over all SolyndraScam-related documents. Among the documents the administration refused to give to Congress were e-mails sent to and from the President’s Blackberry and internal White House communications on the Solyndra loan deals. The White House claimed privilege “consistent with precedent”, but that’s not going to fly very far. There is serious evidence of criminal activity, especially in how the Solyndra loan was revised to put the interests of private investors over ours, and I seriously doubt that Congress will accept any privilege argument now that there’s a significant quantity of blood in the water. Remember the old saying “It’s not the crime that kills you, but the cover-up”? Well, right now, the administration is neck deep in SolyndraScam cover-up and the longer it lasts, the more severe the comeuppance when it finally arrives. Oh, add to that this little tidbit that a major Solyndra investor and Obama fundraiser paid no taxes at all last year, and it’s clear to me that SolyndraScan isn’t going away any time soon.

4) We ran the second-highest budget deficit in America’s history in fiscal 2011 with a total shortfall of $1.3 trillion. That is about 9 percent of our total GDP, which is very bad for our long-term financial health. We ran our string of $1 trillion or higher deficits to three — which also equals the number of years that Barack Obama and the Democrats have been in charge of our spending together. But I’m sure that’s just a concidence.

I can’t wait to see how the administration plans to top this news dump next week!