Major news outlets in recent days have reported that U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is raising money from the private sector—including from health-care executives—for use by a private entity that is helping to implement ObamaCare. The entity, Enroll America, is run by a former White House aide.
The Washington Post quoted an HHS spokesman last week saying, “We requested additional money [from Congress] . . . but we didn’t receive any additional funding for the exchanges. So we had to come up with Plan B.”
My immediate thought was: Isn’t “Plan B” what got Oliver North in trouble during the 1980s?
Tag: lamar!
#rsrh OK, *this* can be a Quote of the Day.
Senator Lamar! Alexander (R-TN), on how a lack of planning on President Obama’s part does not constitute an emergency on Lamar’s! part:
“If you’re the president or a governor and you don’t have a good relationship with the other party, that’s your problem to solve,” he said.
Via @TheAnchoress.
Lamar! Czar! …and that joke will get old fast.
‘Rain of hellfire.’ If I had told people six months ago that this was going to be the level of the rhetoric coming from the Democrats I would have been soundly mocked for it.
Suffice it to say that Senator Alexander (R, TN) is amused at the DNC’s decision to play Teh GREAT Internetz Defenderz!!!11!1ONE!1!!!!11!:
(Via @nicklaus)
Hard not to be amused: it’s not every day that you see a major party organization threaten to unleash a “rain of hellfire” on health care rationing opponents. Or, as we here in Reality Non-Unicorn like to call them, “56% of the population.”
Moe Lane
PS: Yes, Lamar! was theoretically on to talk about the difference between positions that require Senate confirmation and postions that don’t (free hint: the Obama administration likes the latter. A lot). But why should I pretend that the DNC is anything except the White House’s sockpuppet? Nobody else is.
Crossposted to RedState.
Senator Alexander’s car industry conference call.
I participated in a conference call yesterday with Senator Alexander (R-TN) about his “Auto Stock for Every Taxpayer” bill; not to mention his “Car Czar” awards for government intervention in the car industry (his first one was to Barney Frank, for spreading intervention largess among his subjects). The general themse of the call was to discuss the problems inherent in making the government (in the abstract) an owner of a specific type of business; I don’t recall the word ‘nationalization’ being used in the call, but the word loomed there throughout. Not to mention its connotations.
The whole call is available here: my only – rather garbled, alas – question was on whether the general atmosphere of government intervention (and the specific one of Frank’s interference) gave credence to allegations of partisan Democratic interference in Chrysler dealership closings. Senator Alexander did not go so far as to endorse this theory, but he raised the important point that when you have an ‘incestuous relationship like this’ (his term) – which is to say, a direct relationship between the dealership and the government – allegations like these are credible. Even the appearance of impropriety is in fact a problem (I agree: it erodes trust in the government as being a reasonably impartial referee), and the only way to fix that is to get ownership out of the hands of the government.
And I really don’t have anything even semi-witty to say to end this, sorry. We just have to get the government out of the car industry. Simple as that.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.