Obama, Heath Care Continue to Fall in the Polls

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 30% of the nation's voters “Strongly Approve” of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-seven percent (37%) “Strongly Disapprove” giving Obama a “Presidential Approval Index” rating of -7 (see trends). Forty-five percent (45%) give the President good or excellent marks for leadership.

New Rasmussen Reports polling shows public support for the health care reform plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats has fallen to a new low. Data released yesterday shows that 51% fear the federal government more than private insurance companies. Thirty-two percent (32%) favor a single-payer health care system for the U.S., while 57% are opposed.

The “Presidential Approval Index” is calculated by subtracting the number who “Strongly Disapprove” from the number who “Strongly Approve”. It is updated daily at 9:30 a.m. Eastern.

Overall, 49% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President's performance. Fifty percent (50%) disapprove.

High School Teammates Carry On

I have been on business travel the past few days and have not had an opportunity to post anything on the RC Blog this week(sorry!). I was watching ESPN on Monday morning in the hotel and saw an inspirational story of friendship and love of neighbor that needs to be shared....

By Tom Rinaldi
ESPN

"Leroy, touch your toes."

Leroy reaches his arms out in front of him in mock effort, and says, "They're at home."

And then, the boys laugh.

He didn't know they were gone.

Staring down at the sheets of his bed, the morphine starting to fade, Leroy Sutton was still numb, but he had a feeling something was wrong.

"It was when I tried to sit up," Leroy said, remembering that day nearly eight years ago. "I pulled the covers up, and that's when I figured everything out."

It was Dec. 7, 2001, the day that shaped Leroy's body, and his life.

Leroy Sutton was a senior wrestler at Lincoln-West High School in Cleveland.

He was 11 years old at the time, walking to school with his brother along the Wheeling and Lake Erie railroad tracks near his home in East Akron, Ohio. A freight train approached, and Leroy got too close. His backpack got caught on one of the passing cars, and he was pulled beneath the wheels.

"I didn't even look down," said Leroy, now 19, recalling the first moments afterward. "I was just staring at the sun the whole time. I wasn't trying to look down because that's when I would have panicked."

The paramedics who arrived within minutes saved Leroy's life, but the doctors could not save his entire body. At Children's Hospital in Akron, his left leg was amputated below the knee, his right leg below the hip. He knew what had happened, but didn't understand what he'd lost until a day later, when he lifted the sheets, and looked down.

As the memory came back to him, his voice dropped and his head dipped.

"The whole time I was in the hospital, I just asked, 'Why? Why?'" he said. "Every night I could not go to sleep … because when I tried, I'd end up hearing the sound of a train."

Leroy left the hospital a month and a half later. He endured long, difficult hours of rehabilitation. He accepted that a wheelchair would be part of his life but was determined to make it a small part.

"I did not want to be in my chair," he said. "I had to build my arm muscles up so I could move around. … I move around on my arms a lot."

That ability to move -- to lift and flip and twist his body -- led him to a place few expected, and into a friendship few could have foreseen.

"Leroy, don't forget your shoes. …"

Others look down, duped. Leroy just smiles.

"You just can't see them. …"

In January 2008, midway through his junior year in high school, Leroy transferred to Lincoln-West High in Cleveland. By the time he was a senior, he was a familiar sight (his wheelchair flying down the hallways) with a familiar refrain (his laughter booming off the lockers). When he decided to join the wrestling team, just as he'd done at his previous school, the coaches welcomed him. They knew his story and were eager to tap his strength.

"I told him, 'You've been hit by a train. What else, what kid, what wrestler, what can stop you?'" said Lincoln-West coach Torrance Robinson.

Dartanyon Crockett was one of Lincoln-West's most powerful wrestlers, winning at several weight classes.

At Leroy's first practice, his first partner was the only other wrestler on the team powerful enough to handle him. Dartanyon Crockett was Lincoln's best and strongest talent. He was 5-foot-10 with muscles bunched like walnuts, and already a winner in multiple weight classes. But when Leroy hopped off his chair and onto the wrestling mat, the competition was more than Dartanyon expected.

"He was a complete powerhouse," Dartanyon said, recalling their first drills together. "I never wrestled anyone as strong as him. We pushed each other to our limits, and we didn't let each other give up."

Hour after hour, month after month, practices connected them in ways that went beyond the gym. They went everywhere together: between classes, on team bus rides, at each other's houses -- both dialed in to a wavelength few others could hear. They spontaneously broke into songs only they knew. They performed imaginary superhero moves they invented. They laughed at jokes and words only they understood.

Yet, their simplest connection was the one everyone saw and no one anticipated. Not even Leroy and Dartanyon know exactly when, or how, it first happened.

"One day I'm coming out of my office," said Kyro Taylor, the school's power lifting coach. "I look over to the corner of the gym where the mats were at, and right up the steps I see Dartanyon with something on his back, and the closer I get, I'm like, 'Is that Leroy?' And it was Leroy on his back. Dartanyon's carrying him."

It was not a onetime ride.

Dartanyon lifted Leroy onto his back and carried him to and from every match, on and off every bus, into and out of every gym, all season long. At more than 170 pounds, Leroy was not a light load. Dartanyon never cared, and the carrying never stopped.

"Most of the time we wouldn't get a wheelchair lift, so I would have to carry him on the bus, take his wheelchair apart, put it on the bus, then carry him off the bus," he said. "And then, into the building and up the stairs."

Dartanyon lifted Leroy onto his back for the playing of every national anthem, and carried him down the bleachers before each match. Yet as inseparable as they were, a team unto themselves in a way, they also shared something greater than their sport.

That's because the teammate who carried Leroy on his back all season long knows about challenges himself.

Dartanyon Crockett knows, because he's legally blind.

Dartanyon sings.

"I can see clearly now, the rain is gone."

Leroy listens, then corrects him: "But you can't see."

"So? I can still sing."

And they pick up the song together, twice as loud.

Born with Leber's disease, a condition that causes acute visual loss, Dartanyon, 18, has been severely nearsighted his entire life. He can barely make out the facial features of a person sitting 5 feet away.

"I'm basically blind compared to someone with 20/20 vision," he said.

It just started happening, they say. Dartanyon carried Leroy everywhere.

As a boy, his father watched him bump into the same table corners and fumble for the same objects over and over again, uncertain what was wrong. He received the diagnosis just after his son started elementary school.

"I wanted to grab him and help him, but I wasn't allowed to do that, because the world isn't like that," Arthur Harris said. "I never let him feel sorry for himself."

"I did feel like something was wrong with me because I was completely different from everyone," Dartanyon said. "Like I was … some type of freak."

Yet as he grew older, he not only accepted the condition but also adjusted so well to his inability to see that those around him often were unaware of anything until he told them.

"I asked him, 'Are you serious?'" said Lincoln-West teacher and assistant wrestling coach Justin Hons. "Nothing about him ever gives you the hint that he has a disability. The way he carries himself, he doesn't ask for anything."

Still, there are signs. At times, his eyes dart back and forth as if ricocheting between objects. Boarding the city bus for the ride to school, he asks the driver to tell him when his stop is near, unwilling to trust his glimpses of the passing landscape. In class, often he places text just inches from his face to read. On the wrestling mat, although his moves are quick and bold, he sees little more than rough shapes lunging toward him.

Yet his own view of his limits remains focused and clear.

"I'm just seeing it as a challenge God has given me and how I'm going to react to this challenge," he said. "Let it make me the person I am, or let it break me."

Other trials in his life could have broken him long ago.

After his mother died when he was 8, he moved in with his father, Harris, who struggled to take care of himself in the midst of an addiction to drugs and alcohol. There were times when Dartanyon scavenged the house for food, but found none. For most of his time in high school, he had no steady place to call home.

"I let him down," Harris said. "It was terrible for him."

Through it all -- being evicted from their apartment in Lakewood, the nights Dartanyon covered his father with a blanket after he'd passed out -- Dartanyon stayed in school, stayed on the mat and supported his dad's effort to stay clean. Harris now has been sober, while working two full-time jobs, for more than a year.

That Dartanyon would pick someone else up was no surprise. He learned to carry a father before he ever carried a friend.

"He made a lot of mistakes in the past, and he's learned from them," Dartanyon said. "It's made our bond stronger than I could fathom. He's a great father."

When the words were related to Harris, he dropped his head and began to cry.

"Above all, I'm glad the love never left," he said. "I'm glad that stayed."

Dartanyon and Leroy move down the hallway after class.
"I am Darth Cripple," Leroy says.

"I am Blind Vader," Dartanyon replies, and they turn a corner; their laughter is all that's left behind.

Friends joke. They jab. They can be the least flattering of critics and the loudest of supporters. So it is with Dartanyon and Leroy. They mock each other and themselves, every chance they get, in ways others never would dare.

They are as close as brothers, and Leroy and Dartanyon joke around with each other all the time.

There's a sure sign of a pending joke. The pace of speech slows, and the tone becomes a notch too earnest. Leroy, in particular, has mastered the pattern.

"People look up to me sometimes," he said from his wheelchair. He waits, then says, "Well, usually, they look down to me." His laughter comes first, and easiest.

"They constantly make fun of each other's situation, each other's disability," Hons said. "But they do it publicly, because they're not afraid of their disabilities."

The one place they don't laugh is in competition. Entering gyms all season, one atop the other, each cared as much about the other's match as his own, with as much invested in the other's outcome. Every time Dartanyon wrestled, Leroy sat on the edge of the mat, serving as unofficial coach and chief encourager.

"It's like having my brother there," Dartanyon said.

There was plenty to watch. Competing at 189 pounds in Ohio, one of the most wrestling-rich states in the country, Dartanyon relied more on strength than technique, preferring to overwhelm foes than to outpoint them. Nearly always the aggressor, he rarely waited for another's move, for a simple reason. He might never see it. So he struck first, and usually, firmest.

He went 26-3 in his senior season, securing the league championship in his weight class.

"It's amazing," Robinson said. "As phenomenal as he is, and he can't see. How does that happen?"

As for Leroy, who's unable to generate the leverage essential in wrestling, leverage gained by using the lower body that he doesn't possess, the matches were tougher, and the wins more difficult. He expected nothing less than 100 percent from his opponents, and if he sensed any pity, he reacted with anger.

"Pity?!" He spits the word. "It's more than likely that I'll punch you in the face than sit here and cry."
Leroy would bounce on his hands and often flip his way onto the mat before matches. Then he would scream out. Then he would slap his hands down as hard as he could, making a thunderous echo, his smile dead, his arms wired. If some stared when Leroy entered the gym atop Dartanyon, even more stared as he competed.

Wrestling in multiple weight classes this season, Leroy won nine matches, the majority by pinning his opponents. But in every match, regardless of the outcome, he left a message. He never said it, but his coaches understood.

"Watching him wrestle," Robinson said, "has taught me how to stand in areas of my life that I wouldn't have wanted to."

Dartanyon and Leroy walked across the stage and received diplomas at graduation. Dartanyon is enrolled at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland for the fall. Leroy plans to attend Collins College in Tempe, Ariz., to pursue a career in video game design.

"Did you guys do the homework?" the teacher asks.

"Dartanyon tried," says Leroy, "but he couldn't see it."

"So Leroy ran over," says Dartanyon, "and read it to me."

It was the final night of the school year, graduation night. The people inside the theater building of Cuyahoga Community College were there for a celebration more than a ceremony, to pay tribute to an accomplishment that meant more here than in most schools in America.

The majority of students at Lincoln-West High School never earn a diploma. This year, the school had a graduation rate of roughly 40 percent.

On that early June night, the graduates gathered on a stage, their gowns flowing and their tassels poised to swing, each ready to mark a point in a journey.

Leroy had dreamed of this night for a long time.

"My goal," he said in May, "is to actually walk across the stage."

No one on the stage that night understood that goal more than Dartanyon. That's why, when Leroy's name was called, Dartanyon stood, too, right beside him.

What would you do for a friend, one you carried on your back all year long?

You'd put him down, and walk beside him, which was exactly what Dartanyon did.

He helped Leroy stand -- upon new prosthetic legs he was fitted for just weeks earlier -- then moved alongside him as Leroy crossed the stage, step for step, eye to eye.

When Leroy stopped, put out his hand and grasped his diploma, the audience rose and delivered a standing ovation.

After the photos were taken, and the music stopped, and the tears dried, the two sat in the theater, side by side.

"As long as I can remember," Dartanyon said, "I've been carrying him from point A to B to C. Graduation was the first time I finally got to walk beside him." He paused. "It was a privilege. It was an honor."

Leroy's eyes moistened, and he looked up.

"It meant so much to me," he said, "to know I have a friend who was there to catch me if I stumbled."

There was no stumble.

There was no pun or punch line, no joke or jab. There were just two friends, sharing one moment, and there they lingered, smiling, in silence.

Ronald Reagan and the Jews

This was provided to us for reprinting on the Blog by JewishPress.com:

Ronald Reagan and the Jews
By: Jason Maoz, Senior Editor

Date: Wednesday, July 07, 2004

"Reagan I could trust." - Yitzhak Shamir

"He was unshakable; a staunch supporter." - Shimon Peres

For most of the 1980's, Ronald Wilson Reagan dominated the American political landscape as no man had since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The attitude of most Jews, however, was that Reagan's presence in the White House was a not altogether pleasant fact of life, something about which they could do nothing and for which they bore little responsibility.

Although Reagan's share of the Jewish vote in the 1980 election was 39 percent - the best showing among Jews for a Republican presidential candidate since Dwight Eisenhower's 40 percent in 1956 - the number that really stands out all these years later is that while Reagan was winning a 44-state blowout victory in the nation at large, fully 61 percent of Jewish voters preferred either the incumbent, Democrat Jimmy Carter, or third-party candidate John Anderson.

If Reagan's landslide victory over Carter was greeted by a less than enthusiastic response from American Jewry - then even more than now one of the Democratic party's most loyal constituencies - the reaction was entirely different in Israel, where there were real fears of what another four years of a Carter administration would bring.

For Israeli officials, the fact that a candidate with strong pro-Israel credentials defeated Carter was merely icing on the cake; more important was the relief in at last being rid of a president they had long ceased viewing with anything but distrust. And they were equally pleased to bid adieu to the Carter foreign policy team, particularly the national security adviser, Zbiegnew Brzezinski, and the UN ambassador, Donald McHenry, who along with former Carter officials Cyrus Vance (secretary of state until mid-1980) and Andrew Young (McHenry's predecessor at the UN until late 1979) had been a constant impediment to warmer U.S.-Israel relations.

The Roots of His Commitment

Ronald Reagan had an instinctive affinity for Israel that Jimmy Carter plainly lacked. As an actor who spent decades in the heavily Jewish environment of Hollywood, and who counted scores of Jews among his friends and colleagues, Reagan moved easily in pro-Israel circles. Both as a private citizen and as governor of California he was a familiar sight and a favored speaker at various functions for Israel.When asked about his immunity to anti-Semitism, Reagan would credit his parents, often relating the story of how his father, a traveling salesman, was about to check in at a hotel in some remote area late one night when the desk clerk casually remarked, "I'm sure you'll enjoy it here; we don't allow any Jews." Whereupon Jack Reagan brusquely informed the clerk that he most definitely would not enjoy it there, grabbed his bag and walked out the door. He spent the night sleeping in his car.

Few experiences touched Reagan as deeply as did his viewing of Nazi death-camp newsreels. "From then on," he said, "I was concerned for the Jewish people."

"The newsreels of the death camps he had seen in 1946," wrote Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, "were such a vivid part of his memory that he was able to imagine... that he was actually at the site of the concentration camps when they were liberated by the Allied armies."

Indeed, in separate conversations, Reagan told then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center that he had filmed the camps and their grisly evidence of Nazi atrocities and had even kept a copy of the film for himself in case anyone would voice doubt about what the Nazis had done.

Contrary to his recollection, Reagan, who spent the war years in Hollywood working on propaganda films for the U.S. military, could not have filmed the camps himself. Given the nature of his wartime responsibilities, though, he certainly would have been one of the first Americans with access to those films.

Reagan's emotional reaction to the Holocaust sealed what would become a lifelong commitment to the Jewish state. And for better than four decades he never wavered in his certitude, even when, as president, he had his share of disagreements with Israeli leaders.

"I've believed many things in my life," Reagan stated in his memoirs, "but no conviction I've ever had has been stronger than my belief that the United states must ensure the survival of Israel."

Scrapping Carter's Foreign Policy

"Few presidents," wrote Steven Spiegel in The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict, a study of U.S. policy toward Israel, "have come to office with as specific a vision of the world as Ronald Reagan. The basic tenets of his policy could not have been more divergent from the principles of the Carter era: staunch anti-Communism, antagonism to the Soviet leadership, de-emphasis on the Third World as an object of U.S. concern, and a commitment to a dramatically increased defense budget."

As his first secretary of the state Reagan chose General Alexander Haig, former chief of staff in the Nixon White House and more recently supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe. Haig was described as 'a 100 percent supporter of Israel on all issues' by Caspar Weinberger, the secretary of defense with whom he often clashed.

Reagan's UN ambassador during his first term, the solidly pro-Israel Jeane Kirkpatrick, had been a professor of political science at Georgetown University. Her writings on the struggle between democracies and dictatorships caught Reagan's eye as he campaigned for the White House, and the thought struck him that this was precisely the clear, pro-American voice he wanted for his administration.

For the Middle East, the Reagan team initially visualized an alliance of shared interest between Israel and anti-radical Arab states, a plan that for obvious reasons proved unworkable.

"The administration," explained Spiegel, "planned to provide incentives to both the Israelis and Arabs so they would join the effort to block Russian expansion in the area. Reagan, who had gone further than any previous major candidate in celebrating the Jewish state as an important strategic asset to the United States, would offer the Israelis unprecedented cooperation and increased military assistance. Meanwhile, the Arabs, especially the Saudis, would be fortified with arms so that they could contribute to the effort. Each side would acquiesce in U.S. support for the other because of the assistance they were to be provided."

The plan sounded sensible, but its implementation was stymied by the Saudis' reluctance to be grouped, however loosely, with Israel. The administration, rather quickly, was forced to shelve its grandiose plan for an anti-Soviet alliance and concentrate instead on bolstering friendly nations in the region on an individual basis.

The Inevitability of Disagreement

Reagan inaugurated what Israeli journalists Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman have termed the 'Solid Gold Era' in U.S.-Israel relations. Certainly the administration included individuals - most notably Weinberger - who were less than favorably disposed to Israel, but their influence was more than offset by the views of Haig, Kirkpatrick, a number of key non-cabinet level aides and, of course, Reagan himself.

Even so, Reagan - and this should underscore the inevitability of disagreement between Israel and even the friendliest of U.S. presidents - found himself engaged in a series of tiffs with the Israeli government, particularly during his first term.

The earliest friction concerned Israel's destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in June 1981. The U.S. voted with the rest of the UN Security Council to condemn the action, and briefly held up delivery of some F-16 aircraft to Israel, but the reaction was basically a slap on the wrist, with no permanent ramifications.

"Technically," Reagan wrote in his memoirs, "Israel had violated an agreement with us not to use U.S.-made weapons for offensive purposes, and some cabinet members wanted me to lean hard on Israel because it had broken this pledge.... I sympathized with [Prime Minister Menachem] Begin's motivations and privately believed we should give him the benefit of the doubt."

Later in 1981, a bitter fight was played out in Congress between the White House and supporters of Israel over the administration's decision to sell Airborne Warning and Control System aircraft (AWACS) to Saudi Arabia. The sale was finally approved by a narrow margin, but the confrontation left bruised feelings and egos on both sides.

The fears of those who opposed the AWACS sale would, over time, come to be seen as overblown. Ironically, Israeli military leaders were never in the forefront of the AWACS opposition; according to Raviv and Melman, "the commanders of the Israeli air force - the officers most directly concerned - were willing to live with AWACS flying over Saudi Arabia. They did not see them as a serious threat to Israel's security."

The AWACS battle highlighted what many in Washington - and Jerusalem - felt was the needlessly abrasive personality of Menachem Begin. Their concern was underscored in 1981 when, just weeks after the Reagan administration signed a memorandum of understanding with Israel for closer military and strategic ties, Begin rammed a bill through the Knesset that in effect annexed the Golan Heights. The U.S. responded by suspending the memorandum, whereupon Begin delivered a blistering - and highly undiplomatic - tongue-lashing to the American ambassador in Israel.

Reagan's frustration with Begin reached a crisis point in June 1982 with Israel's invasion of Lebanon, a promised 'quick strike' that became a Vietnam-like quagmire for the Israeli army and an unprecedented military and public-relations fiasco for the Israeli government.

To make matters worse, it was during this tense period that Alexander Haig resigned as U.S. secretary of state. Haig's tenure had been marked by squabbles with other administration officials and his departure was hardly a shock, but the timing could not have been worse for Israel. (Haig's replacement, George Shultz, initially viewed with some wariness by supporters of Israel, would develop a surprisingly warm rapport with Israeli and American Jewish leaders.)

The U.S.-Israel relationship had grown strong enough to survive a major disaster like Lebanon, just as it would survive what some viewed as the overbearing personality of Menachem Begin; the failure of the so-called Reagan Plan, which called for a freeze on Israeli settlements and the eventual creation of a quasi-independent Palestinian entity; the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Israel played a major role; the ill-advised visit by Reagan to a German cemetery where the remains of SS soldiers were buried; the arrest and conviction of an American citizen, Jonathan Pollard, on charges of spying for Israel; and the administration's controversial 1988 decision to talk to the PLO after Yasir Arafat read some American-scripted lines about recognizing Israel.

Through it all, Reagan provided more military and financial aid to Israel than any of his predecessors, and the increased cooperation between American and Israeli intelligence services proved beneficial to both countries. Washington also worked closer with Israel on the economic front, and in 1985 the administration signed a landmark Free Trade Area agreement, long sought by Israel, which resulted in a hefty boost in Israeli exports to the U.S.

Soviet Jewry

The plight of Jews in the Soviet Union was bound to strike a sympathetic chord with someone as unbendingly anti-Communist as Ronald Reagan. Concern over the Russians' decades-long repression of Jewish religious expression and their refusal to allow 'refuseniks' to emigrate to Israel was woven into U.S. policy during the Reagan years.

"Reagan's interest in Soviet Jewry was immense; it was close to the first issue on the American agenda and was part of the confrontation between the two superpowers," Yitzhak Shamir told authors Deborah and Gerald Strober.

"The Soviet leaders," Shamir added, "told me that every time they met with Shultz, he raised the issue of Soviet Jewry, and they would ask him, 'Why do you do this?' Shultz answered that this was very important."

Elliott Abrams, who served under Shultz as an assistant secretary of state, told the Strobers that "The Reagan administration kept beating the Soviet Union over the issue of the Soviet Jews and kept telling them, 'You have to deal with this question. You will not be able to establish the kind of relationship you want with us unless you have dealt with this question...' "

According to Richard Schifter, another assistant secretary of state, when Gorbachev came to Washington in December 1987 for a summit with Reagan, it was just a couple of days after a huge rally for Soviet Jews had been held in the nation's capital and the person who was the note-taker at the meeting told me that Reagan started out by saying to Gorbachev, "You know, there was this rally on the Mall the other day."

"And Gorbachev said, 'Yes, I heard about it. Why don't you go on and talk about arms control?" And for five minutes, Reagan kept on talking about the rally and the importance of the Jewish emigration issue to the United States, when Gorbachev wanted to talk about something else."

The Reagan administration was instrumental in gaining the release in 1986 of prominent Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky, imprisoned for nine years on trumped-up treason charges. Now a government minister in Israel, Sharansky recalled his reaction when, in 1983, confined to a tiny cell in a prison near the Siberian border, he saw on the front page of Pravda that Reagan had labeled the Soviet Union an 'evil empire.'

As Sharansky described it, "Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan's 'provocation' quickly spread throughout the prison. We dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth - a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us. I never imagined that three years later I would be in the White House telling this story to the president....Reagan was right and his critics were wrong."

* * * *

In 1984 Reagan was reelected in a landslide of historic proportions, but his share of the Jewish vote actually decreased by nearly eight points from 1980. When he left office in January 1989, it was with a higher approval rating than any president before him, but Jews - a majority of whom evidently consider a president?s fealty to liberalism more important than his support of Israel - gave him lower marks than any other voting bloc save African Americans.

It would take four years of the decidedly frosty relationship with Israel fostered by the first President Bush and his secretary of state, James Baker, for an appreciable number of Jews to begin looking back at the Reagan years with a new sense of appreciation.

"The Constitution and Regaining Principle in our Politics" -- August 24

Calling all Reagan Conservatives in the Washington, D.C. area!

Hillsdale College, The Federalist Society, and The Heritage Foundation are sponsoring a day-long course titled, "The Constitution and Regaining Principle in our Politics" on Monday, August 24 from 9:00 a.m. - 3:30 p.m near Capitol Hill.

All three of these fine institutions are dedicated to making America’s foundational principles the foremost consideration in the creation of our nation’s public policy. There are those who argue that we have lost the battle for limited, constitutional government, but we think nothing could be farther from the truth. The real challenge we face is returning to these enduring principles as the guide for America’s politics.

On August 24, the program will begin with a session to review and discuss primary principles and readings that point in the right direction.

The session will focus on topics such as:

• Why We Need Principles;
• America’s Foundational Principles;
• Understanding the Constitution of the United States;
• The Challenge of the Modern Administrative State; and
• What These Principles Mean for Politics.

Space may be limited based on the site of the facility. Registration will be $15 to include continental breakfst and lunch. Please contact Jennifer Powell ASAP at jpowell@hillsdale.edu or call at (202) 248-5084 to let her know of your interest in the attending the event and please let her know you heard about it on the R.C. Blog.

We hope to see you there!

CBO Deals Another Crushing Blow to Obamacare

From this morning's Heritage Foundation Morning Bell Report:

For the second time in less than two weeks, the independent and non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has dealt a crushing blow to President Barack Obama’s health care plans. First, on July 17th, CBO director Doug Elmendorf sent a letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY), explaining that, in direct contradiction to President Obama’s promise that his health plan would not add “even one dime to our deficit over the next decade,” the House health plan would actually increase the budget deficit by $239 billion over ten years.

Reeling from this setback, the White House then put all of its cost-containing reform eggs in one basket: a massive transfer of power from Congress to the Executive branch in the form of an “Independent Medicare Advisory Council” (IMAC) that would be “the equivalent of a federal health board determining how health care was rationed for all seniors.”

But as draconian as that solution would be, the CBO again refused to toe the White House line. In a letter to Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Elmendorf writes:

The proposed legislation states that IMAC’s recommendations cannot generate increased Medicare expenditures, but it does not explicitly direct the council to reduce such expenditures nor does it establish any target for such reductions. … As proposed, the composition of the council could be weighted toward medical providers who might not be inclined to recommend cuts in payments to providers or significant changes to the delivery system. … In CBO’s judgment, the probability is high that no savings would be realized … CBO estimates that enacting the proposal, as drafted, would yield savings of $2 billion over the 2010–2019 period.

Just $2 billion! That would leave the House bill still $237 billion short of meeting Obama’s promise to not add a dime to the deficit over the next ten years. Put another way, that $2 billion in savings is two tenths of one percent of what Obama wants to spend on health care over the next ten years. Now Democrats are pushing back against the CBO, claiming the official score keeper just doesn’t understand how wonderful their cost containment schemes really are. One senior House leadership aide told The Hill: “At CBO, they are accountants, but we still have to make our case. They are doing their thing and we are doing ours.”

Now Americans may ask just how accurate is the CBO when scoring the costs of health care reform? Does the CBO have a track record of underestimating how much new health care entitlements will cost? Or is the CBO too conservative and often over estimates new health care spending? Scholars at the CATO Institute went back and compared past CBO estimates on health care to actual spending numbers and found:

When Medicare was launched in 1965, Part A was projected to cost $9 billion by 1990, but ended up costing $67 billion. When Medicaid’s special hospitals subsidy was added in 1987, it was supposed to cost $100 million annually, but it already cost $11 billion by 1992. When Medicare’s home care benefit was added in 1988, it was projected to cost $4 billion in 1993, but ended up costing $10 billion.

History clearly shows that the costs of new heath care entitlements are routinely underestimated. And what would American be getting for their $2 billion in savings from IMAC? The Washington Post’s David Broder wrote yesterday:

But Congress will have to decide if it is willing to yield that degree of control to five unelected IMAC commissioners. And Americans will have to decide if they are comfortable having those commissioners determine how they will be treated when they are ill.

Huge cost estimates that are likely underestimated in exchange for a federal health board deciding the terms of your personal health care is not the reform people were expecting. But more importantly, if the Obama administration can’t trust a federal office to properly score their bill, how is it they trust a similar office to decide which medical treatments you receive?