Today, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) will formally introduce a new, bipartisan plan for Medicare reform. People 55 years of age or older would not be affected; everyone else, starting in 2022, will receive premium support that will allow them to choose between private insurance and traditional, fee-for-service public insurance.

As Yuval Levin notes in National Review, the Ryan-Wyden plan also plans to keep the cost of premium support low by using competitive bidding among private insurers to provide a defined minimum amount of coverage. That mechanism, Levin adds, is “an even more market-based reform than the original Ryan proposal” passed in the House budget earlier this year.

Sen. Wyden and Rep. Ryan (Photo source: TPM/CQ/Roll Call)

Rep. Ryan’s staff notes that he has always been willing to tinker with his Medicare proposals, and has done so in the past with Democrats such as former Clinton budget director Alice Rivlin. They stress that the key to the Ryan-Wyden plan is that Medicare would move from a defined benefit plan to a defined contribution plan–and they hail Sen. Wyden for his willingness to embrace that step, which is common in the business world but has traditionally been a conservative approach in the public policy arena.

The prospect of bipartisan entitlement reform is shaking the political world–not just because the Ryan-Wyden plan appears closer to Gov. Mitt Romney’s proposals than those of any other presidential contender, but also because it may thwart Democrats’ most cynical, and effective, campaign tactic: scaring seniors.

The left-wing Talking Points Memo predicts: “The move will infuriate other Democrats, all the way up to President Obama, who has been preparing a national campaign that emphasizes — not obscures — the contrast between the parties’ different visions of the social safety net.”

(Update: As expected, the White House has attacked the Ryan-Wyden plan almost immediately, claiming that it would “undermine, rather than strengthen, Medicare.” Even Sam Stein’s not buying the administration spin, noting that the Ryan-Wyden plan contains reforms Obama has previously supported.)

At the Huffington Post, Robert Creamer–the felon who apparently hatched Democrats’ political strategy for Obamacare from federal prison–is furious, claiming that the Ryan-Wyden plan will still “eliminate” Medicare and replace it with “vouchers,” and venting his frustration at Wyden: “What was he thinking?” (more…)

Sources have told the Chicago Tribune that Google’s Eric Schmidt was seen dining with Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign manager Jim Messina at Café Spiaggia in Chicago last week providing further evidence of Google incestuous relationship with the Administration.

Democratic sources told the Tribune that the dinner was “part of the Obama team wooing and coordinating with the tech world.”  In the case of Google, we are confident it was more about coordinating than wooing.

Google and the president are well beyond the wooing stage of a relationship. Schmidt has been named a potential nominee to fill the vacated Secretary of Commerce position.  Such a nomination would cement Google’s influence over the Administration – a relationship that has put the company in a position to steer policy and taxpayer funded contracts back into the pockets of Google executives who have funded the president since his initial foray into the presidential arena in 2007.

In 2008, Politico detailed the relationship between the newly elected president and the company.  “’ From the staff attorney all the way up the line, everybody now knows that Google is close to Obama,’” Politico reported. “And that could subtly affect the policy playing field in Google’s favor.”  Subtly was an understatement.

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I appeared on David Asman’s show on Fox Tuesday evening to discuss the hypocrisy of the Obama gang’s new fallacious attack on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, projecting Democrat crimes on unsuspecting decent organizations. The whole episode showed up the incredible hypocrisy of Obama and the Democrats, and their callous indifference to the will of the people.

Obama and the Democrats claim that the Chamber of Commerce has been funding Republican candidates using foreign money. But as I show in great detail in my book The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War On America (Simon & Schuster), in 2008 Obama’s FEC records were full of donations from people with obviously fake names, and other questionable material. (In contrast, McCain’s were squeaky clean.)

The Obama campaign website even featured a drop-down box enabling donors to specify from what country they were donating. All the donor had to do was check a box certifying that he was legally eligible to make a donation. There was no safeguard in place to make sure that foreign nationals did not donate from these countries, in flagrant defiance of the federal law forbidding candidates from receiving foreign donations.

Obama’s campaign received donations from the world over: the Virgin Islands, Vienna, The Hague, Madrid, London, Geneva, Tokyo, Bangkok, Turin, Paris, Munich, Madrid, Roma, Zurich, Moscow, Milan, Singapore, Beijing, Switzerland, Toronto, Vancouver, Dublin, Panama, Berlin, Geneva, Buenos Aires, Prague, Nagoya, Budapest, Barcelona, Sweden, Taipei, Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, Zurich, Ragusa, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Uganda, Mumbai, Tunis, Zacatecas, St. Croix, Mississauga, Lima, Copenhagen, Dubai, Jeddah, Kabul, Cairo, and many others.

Worst of all, Obama’s campaign received contributions from Hamas-controlled Gaza (documentation here) and lied about refunding those jihad donations.

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It took years, but there is something I finally agree with Barack Obama and Al Franken on. Obama and his propaganda machine in the mainstream media, not to mention his party of corruption, are calling for an investigation of “foreign money” in campaigns.

Finally.

I have been calling for a special prosecutor for years, ever since I exposed the millions Obama received from Muslim nations, Hamas-controlled Gaza and other foreign countries.

Obama warned Thursday that “groups that receive foreign money are spending huge sums to influence American elections, and they won’t tell you where the money for their ads come from.” He also said that “just this week, we learned that one of the largest groups paying for these ads regularly takes in money from foreign corporations.”

Franken then duly hurried to do Obama’s bidding, calling on the Federal Election Commission to investigate the Chamber of Commerce, the group to which Obama was referring.

We move to a theater of the absurd upon hearing Al Franken, who lost his election on election night and began pulling votes out of car trunks to steal that election, calling for an investigation of foreign money.

Nonetheless, the Democrats’ mainstream media shills then took up the cause. On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow confronted Oregon Republican Congressional candidate Art Robinson with accusations about foreign contributions: “If you get elected in part because of this spending and you find out that it’s from criminals, or foreign interests, or communists or something, wouldn’t that bother you?”

Whether or not it should bother Robinson, it should bother Obama. While he is calling for an investigation into the Chamber of Commerce, there should be a full investigation into the foreign millions Obama received for his campaign.

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Outside Right Nation 2010–

A leftist “religious” mob assembled outside the Sears Center at the Right Nation event featuring Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart. Protesters spit on Right Nation attendees and called them homophobic slurs. The “religious leaders” also lashed out at Glenn Beck.

It was quite a religious experience.

Dana Loesch caught video of the spitting.

Andrew Breitbart is harassed by the crowd- called a homo.

Obama’s Organizing for America (OFA) members were bussed into the parking lot before the Right Nation 2010 Conference in Chicago. The leftist protesters harassed Andrew Breitbart and called him a homo. This is while one of the members was leading the group in prayer.

After their religious service they turned in their flags and stacked up their signs.

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ACORN whistle-blower Anita Moncrief held a press conference Friday at the Right Online Convention in Las Vegas. She announced today that she will press FEC charges against the Obama Administration for the campaign’s illegal coordination with ACORN during the 2008 election.

Anita also rolled out her new website Emerging Corruption. The website will focus on fraud and corruption in ACORN and affiliated groups.

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During the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama’s website, Organizing for America – over which Obama has editorial control — played host to a series of vile anti-American, Jew-hating posts and pieces. It was overwhelming. There were numerous, heinous calls for Jewish genocide and incitement to hatred. And it is happening again, right now, on the official website of the man who is supposedly the leader of the free world.

The site was and is closely policed. The site moderators remove material that they consider to be “disrespectful to our other users” and to “detract from a welcoming community where all people can engage in positive discourse.” What they find disrespectful can be interesting: once during the campaign a conservative blogger, Bill Levinson, posted a blog on Obama’s website consisting entirely of a series of quotations from Obama’s own book, Dreams of my Father. Obama’s team did not approve of their standard-bearer’s words, and so Levinson’s blog and account were deleted from the Obama site in just under 36 hours. That’s right, Barack Obama’s website banned Obama’s own words. But the most disgusting anti-semitic ravings remained on the site, along with blogs advocating anarchy and the overthrow of the United States Congress.

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