Health Care Bill Hated by All...Passes

[Gordon Ray Kissinger]

Health Care Bill Hated by All...Passes

by John Stossel
December 24, 2009 02:14 PM EST

The Senate finally passed their 2,000+ page monstrosity this morning. The bill still needs to be reconciled with the House version, but it seems increasingly inevitable that we will get to see how Congress intends to help the uninsured by crippling what's left of the only market for insurance available to them.

The headline over at Reason.com sums it up nicely:

"Health Care Bill That Is Hated by Liberals, Conservatives, Libertarians, Socialists, Christians, Feminists, the Media and the American People Passes Senate."


Read entire article on Fox Business at http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2009/12/24/health-care-bill-ha...

[Gordon Ray Kissinger]

US voters give Barack Obama a big fat "F"

By Nile Gardiner World December 25th, 2009

Barack Obama gave himself a B+ on Oprah Winfrey’s White House Christmas Special on ABC this week, but he is far too optimistic and the American public is far less generous with their views on his first 11 months in office. The latest influential Rasmussen Daily Presidential Tracking Poll of likely US voters gives Obama a thumping 66 percent disapproval rating – an F grade by any measure. 56 percent strongly disapprove of the president’s job performance, while just 21 percent strongly approve. That’s a Presidential Approval Index rating of minus -21 percentage points, a staggering figure for a president just 11 months into his term of office.

These are historically low approval ratings for any US president, that concur with those released by several other pollsters, including NBC News/Wall Street Journal, who generously reported a 47 percent approval for Obama, and Quinnipiac and Marist, both at 37 percent.

The latest Gallup Survey gives Obama just 50 percent approval, lower than any other president in the first December of his first term in the post-war period, with the exception of Ronald Reagan in 1981, at 49 percent, who inherited a country literally brought to its knees by the Carter presidency before later restoring it to greatness. Reagan eventually left office with a 68 percent approval.

At the same stage of their presidencies, George W. Bush polled at 81 percent approval, John F. Kennedy at 77 percent, George H.W. Bush at 71 percent, Dwight Eisenhower at 69 percent, Richard Nixon at 59 percent, Jimmy Carter at 49 percent, and Bill Clinton at 53 percent. Significantly, it wasn’t until later on his second term that President George W. Bush’s approval ratings began to sink to the levels currently experienced by Obama.

Barack Obama’s health care reform legislation is playing a major part in driving the high negativity ratings. 64 percent of voters surveyed by Rasmussen “believe they will be worse off” if the health care Titanic is approved by Congress, with just 22 percent believing they will somehow be better off. 67 percent of voters now say that “it would be better to pass no health care reform bill this year instead of passing the plan currently being considered by Congress.” As the RealClearPolitics summary of polls demonstrates, the Obama health care plan is hugely unpopular.

The latest Rasmussen Presidential Tracking Poll reflects widespread disenchantment in the United States with the radical far leftward direction Barack Obama is trying to take the country. As recent Gallup surveys have shown, America remains a predominantly conservative nation, with less than a quarter of Americans identifying themselves as liberals. In fact, the United States is shifting even more to the right under Obama, with a significant revival in the strength of the conservative movement. This polls should be a wake-up call for the White House, if it still mistakenly believes that a radical left-wing agenda can be sold to the American people. The polls show quite the opposite.