Obama Appointees; Un-Presidential Speech; Presidential Speech with Telepromtors; Emanuel and BP; and US Jobs

The American Thinker opines:  The amorous Dr. Berwick [founder of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, has reportedly been named by President Obama to head Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the organization that administers programs including Medicare and Medicaid] wants American health care to mimic the NHS, which, according to Cato Institute's Michael Tanner, has three-quarters of a million patients waiting to enter hospitals. The U.K. had hoped to achieve a wait time of less than eighteen weeks by 2008. The deadline now passed, the NHS hopes to improve on an abysmal 30 to 50 percent of patients seeing specialists within eighteen weeks. Shockingly, each year, 50,000 queued-up NHS patients become too sick to undergo what might have been life-saving surgeries.

In early 2009, at one hospital alone, Britain's Healthcare Commission reported 1,200 deaths attributable to "appalling standards of care," "patients left for hours in soiled bedclothes," unattended injured people "covered in blood and without pain relief," and patients receiving wrong or no medication. Also in 2009, London's Daily Telegraph documented nearly 400 deaths a year at two hospitals that lacked "basic nursing skills" and made a habit of parking untreated patients in emergency areas for ten hours.

The doctor tells the NHS audience that there is "little evidence" that consumer choice and competition create a "healthcare system you want and need."  http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/06/leader_with_a_plan_invites_a_h.html

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Fox News reports: The Obama administration is asking the Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court decision that upheld Arizona's right to punish employers for hiring illegal immigrants. The Arizona law gives the state the right to suspend or terminate business licenses. "If you hire a person in this country illegally knowingly, you'll lose your license. First offense, 10 days. Second offense, revocation, never to do business in the state of Arizona again," said Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce, a Republican who helped draft the new controversial Arizona law that cracks down on illegal immigrants.  http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/06/03/justice-dept-challenges-arizona-immigration-law-targeting-employers/
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Powerline reports:  President Obama has announced the appointment of retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and current undersecretary of defense for intelligence, to be the next Director of National Intelligence. Eli Lake has some interesting background on Clapper. According to Lake, in 2004 Clapper supported the view that Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq sent weapons and documents to Syria in the weeks before the 2003 U.S. invasion.
I had never heard of Clapper's name before reading of Obama's nomination of him to replace Blair as the DNI. If Pete Hoekstra opposes him, however, there must be reasonable ground for believing Clapper may not be the man for the job. Hoekstra is the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee and a serious man. Politico reports that Hoekstra has related the existence of "bipartisan opposition" to Clapper's nomination, and complained that Clapper failed to brief Congress on "an extraordinarily sensitive program."
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/06/026470.php
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[The oh, so Presidential Obama, on the oil spill, on MSNBC]:  "I don't sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar [a venue in which he could excel], we talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick."  http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/06/07/obama_seeking_ass_to_kick_over_oil_spill.html   [As Lucianne at Lucianne.com says: Teachers, clergy, nice people everywhere try to get their heads around a president who uses street language.What are you telling your kids?]
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President Obama uses teleprompters while giving the commencement address at Kalamazoo Central High School in Michigan.  [And still, he is thought of as a great orator!  It boggles the mind...]
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The title of the article?  "The ties that bind.
Remember Rahm Emanuel's
rent-free D.C. apartment?
The owner: A BP adviser"
Los Angeles Times, by Andrew Malcolm  http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2010/06/rahm-emanuel-bp-gul-oil-spill.html
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Friday's US jobs report, according to the UK Guardian:  caught most economic analysts by surprise. After touting the strength of the recovery for months, they had to come to grips with the fact that the economy just is not creating very many jobs.
If the temporary jobs generated by the census are pulled out of the count, the economy created just 20,000 jobs in May. The average rate of growth of non-census jobs over the last three months has been just 130,000 a month, only slightly faster than the growth of the workforce. At this rate of job growth, it will take decades, not years, to get back to normal levels of unemployment. It's time that we stop the happy talk about recovery and get serious about the country's economic problems.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jun/07/deficit-cultists-jobs-report
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President Obama said Tuesday he would have fired British Petroleum's CEO Tony Hayward for comments downplaying the Gulf oil spill if Hayward had been working for him,
"He wouldn't be working for me after any of those statements," Obama said in an interview with Matt Lauer on NBC's TODAY show, reportsMSNBC. [This is outrageously hilarious.  He is surrounded by incompetence and/or unethical appointees (Napolitano, Holder and Emanuel come to mind), and he has yet to fire one who matters.  He is, after all, an organizer, not a leader.]
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From Politico:  A senior White House official just called me with a very pointed message for the administration's sometime allies in organized labor, who invested heavily in beating Blanche Lincoln, Obama's candidate, in Arkansas. "Organized labor just flushed $10 million of their members' money down the toilet on a pointless exercise," the official said. "If even half that total had been well-targeted and applied in key House races across this country, that could have made a real difference in November." [This is money shich could have been added to their pension funds, which Americans may have to guarantee and pay if government plans are successful.]
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith /0610/White_House_official_Organized_labor_just_flushed_10_million_of_their_members_money_down_the
_toilet_.html?showall#