Promises, Promises: Health Care Should `Never Be Purchased With Tax Increases On Middle Class Families`

From Gateway Pundit:

The American Spectatorreported:

Critics of the majority’s decision will say for the foreseeable future that Chief Justice Roberts rewrote Obamacare to save it. Michael Carvin, who argued against Obamacare before the Supreme Court, noted dryly, “I’m glad he rewrote the statute instead of the Constitution.”

Carvin’s summary of the Supreme Court’s ruling was on target: “What the Obama Administration… thought they were doing was completely unconstitutional; what they lied to the American people about was constitutional.… Unfortunately they got away with that bait-and-switch. A fraud has been perpetrated on the American citizenry.”

In oral arguments before the Supreme Court, the administration’s attorneys argued — as they knew they had to — that the mandate was constitutional as a tax. This despite the fact that Democrats passed Obamacare by stating specifically and repeatedly that the mandate was not a tax, including a testy response by President Obama himself to unusually challenging questioning by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in 2009.

As recently as a few months ago, President Obama’s budget director said in a Congressional hearing that the mandate is not a tax, with Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius saying “it operates as a tax, but it is not per se a tax.”

If the bill had been marketed to members of Congress and the public as a tax, it is unlikely that even the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase would have been enough to pass the law, despite the large Democrat congressional majorities at the time. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that “if it had been seen as a tax, they wouldn’t have gotten ten votes, much less sixty.”

As for those Democrats in Congress who have argued, and may continue to argue, that the Obamacare mandate is not a tax, Graham said “they either don’t know what they’re doing, or they lied to us. So this is a huge issue in the fall.” Graham called for every Congressional Republican who is up for election to ask their Democratic opponents whether they support this tax increase; given that Democrats have little choice but to support Obamacare, this is the political equivalent of asking someone if he has stopped beating his wife yet, and a solid political tactic.

Faux News Tonight! Newt Gets a Piece of Chris Wallace; and the Crowd Lets Byron York Know Their Dissatisfaction with Bachmann`s Question

NEWT

With auto pilot programs of unfunded liabilities and overspending that are bankrupting America… this fascination with faith and gay marriage (while important… however… we all pretty much know where the candidates fall on many of these issues) is sickening! I want to hear what these candidates will do to really try and lead the country into FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY. RESPONSIBILITY. Questions like the above and below are asinine! Newt answered it well with his Reagan reference, and the crowd let Byron York know he was a joke! (Mind you Michele answered well, but this is a question better asked of a theologian, not a politician.) Was I watching MSNBC with Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, and Keith Olbermann all over again?

BACHMANN

Jon Stewart Is the One Who Is Consistently Wrong

“I’m a comedian first. My comedy is informed by an ideological background, there’s no question about that. But the thing that you will never understand…is that Hollywood, yeah, they’re liberal, but that’s not their primary motivating force. I’m not an activist. I am a comedian.”

Newsbusters has this correction of Jon Stewart:

There are certainly going to be a lot of very disappointed Jon Stewart fans when they hear the fact-checking folks over at PolitiFact found their hero to have been false when he accused Fox News watchers of being “the most consistently misinformed media viewers.”

Before we get there, here’s what NewsBusters’ Rich Noyes wrote on this subject just hours ago:

In his June 19 appearance on Fox News Sunday, Comedy Central’s Daily Show host Jon Stewart fiercely denounced the Fox News Channel as uniquely biased, and slammed those who watch Fox News as “the most consistently misinformed media viewers….Consistently — every poll.”

Unfortunately for Stewart, he was relying on a methodologically-flawed survey from the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) that in December trumpeted how “those who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe….” and then listed a series of supposedly false statements.

PolitiFact strongly agreed with Noyes:

[W]e have three Pew studies that superficially rank Fox viewers low on the well-informed list, but in several of the surveys, Fox isn’t the lowest, and other general-interest media outlets — such as network news shows, network morning shows and even the other cable news networks — often score similarly low. Meanwhile, particular Fox shows — such as The O’Reilly Factor and Sean Hannity’s show — actually score consistently well, occasionally even outpacing Stewart’s own audience.

Meanwhile, the other set of knowledge surveys, from worldpublicopinion.org, offer mixed support for Stewart. The 2003 survey strikes us as pretty solid, but the 2010 survey has been critiqued for its methodology.

The way Stewart phrased the comment, it’s not enough to show a sliver of evidence that Fox News’ audience is ill-informed. The evidence needs to support the view that the data shows they are “consistently” misinformed — a term he used not once but three times. It’s simply not true that “every poll” shows that result. So we rate his claim False.

………

CORRECT~What a difference seven months

HotAir:

What a difference seven months — and an election — makes! Joe Manchin told Chris Wallace on yesterday’s Fox News Sunday that he would have voted against ObamaCare if he had taken the time to read the bill before casting a vote. A year ago, though, Manchin was cheerleading its passage, telling people that no bill is ever perfect but that the time had come to pass this particular government grab of authority. Did he bother to read the bill first before giving that advice, or was Manchin just acting as a rhetorical rubber stamp for Obama? The Daily Caller reports on the flip-flop:

In the final days before the midterm elections, Democratic Senate candidate and West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin doubled down on his opposition to parts of the health care law, legislation he supported when it was being debated in Congress last spring.

Manchin said on “Fox News Sunday” that he would not have supported the bill if he had been made aware of everything that was in it at the time. While he still fully supports “the concept” of the health care overhaul, he called the final product “overreaching,” citing the new tax mandate on businesses and the lack of protection against government-subsidized abortions.

“Knowing that, I would not have supported that or voted for that at that time,” he said.

Manchin added that he still supports parts of the bill that halt insurance companies from discriminating against customers with pre-existing conditions and the ability for young people to stay on their parents’ health care plan until they are 26-years-old.

“There’s a lot of good parts to it,” he added. “Why don’t we fix what’s wrong with it and make it better?”

Here’s Manchin a year ago, giving the argument that we needed to pass a bill that he apparently never bothered to read:

…(see and read more)…