There are plenty of losers as a result of enactment of Obamacare.  In today’s Examiner Sally Pipes outlines just how bad seniors will be hurt by the new law.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, Obamacare will cost at least $938 billion over the next decade. So here’s the big question: Who is going to pay for it? The answer is … drum roll please … senior citizens.

As it turns out, more than half this bill will be covered through cuts in Medicare spending.

Medicare affects an enormous portion of the population. In 2008, it covered more than 45 million Americans. Roughly 38 million of them were 65 or older. The other 7 million were disabled.

All told, the president’s health care bill will cut Medicare by $575 billion over 10 years, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Seniors and the disabled are going to see their costs rise and their quality of care suffer……

Most troubling, the legislation attacks Medicare Advantage, the one aspect of Medicare that’s working particularly well….

Under Medicare Advantage, private insurance companies offer an alternative to traditional Medicare. It’s not difficult to understand why the Democrats targeted this program.

Big-government types detest Medicare Advantage because it outsources to the private sector. Obamacare will cut it by $202 billion over 10 years, according to CMS.

“If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period,” Obama declared while campaigning for his legislation. “No one will take it away, no matter what.”

That’s certainly not true for the seniors on Medicare Advantage, who will see many of the benefits they’ve been enjoying vanish — along with their better health outcomes.

Today, over 12 percent of Americans are senior citizens — and that figure is growing rapidly as more and more baby boomers turn 65. Assuming we live long enough, all of us will end up with Medicare coverage eventually.

Medicare is a big, expensive program — and costs do need to be contained. But Obamacare takes the wrong approach. It guts the best parts, exacerbates cost shifting and sets the stage for future rationing.

This is hardly the right way to take care of our oldest citizens.

The November 2010 elections are less than 90 days away.  As we get closer to that day of reckoning, progressives are pulling out all of the stops to stay in power.  According to FoxNews they are even setting up phony Tea Party candidates as a way to siphon off the vote.

As the midterm election nears, allegations are surfacing across the country that Democrats are exploiting conservatives’ faith in the Tea Party name by putting up bogus candidates in November — the claim is that those “Tea Party” candidates will split the GOP vote and clear the way for Democratic victories……

Some of the allegations are coming directly from local Tea Party activists who are trying to flag the media and election officials as soon as they smell something fishy on the ballot. And they say they’ve got proof.

“It’s obvious it’s a Democratic play,” said Jason Gillman, a Tea Party activist from Traverse City, Mich.

Gillman, who also authors the blog “Michigan Taxes Too Much” and is running for county commissioner, caused a stir in Michigan politics in late July after he released documents he obtained from state elections officials about the so-called Michigan Tea Party. The documents, he said, showed that of the 23 candidates under the Tea Party name, at least nine of them had affidavits notarized by a local operative for the Oakland County Democratic Party. He said that was the “smoking gun” to prove Democratic involvement — on top of concerns he and other Tea Partiers had that the candidates on the ticket did not have Tea Party backgrounds……

In Nevada, a judge in April ruled that Senate candidate Scott Ashjian could run under the Tea Party name despite claims that he was an imposter. Earlier this year, Republican candidate Danny Tarkanian told FoxNews.com that “nobody” in the local Tea Party movement knew who he was and that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s supporters may have entered Ashjian into the race to help Reid. Reid’s campaign vehemently denied that charge.

Tarkanian is no longer in the race after Republican primary voters picked Sharron Angle, who enjoyed heavy Tea Party support, as their candidate in the fall. But Ashjian is still listed on the November ballot as a “Tea Party” candidate…….

In the New Jersey congressional race between incumbent Democratic Rep. John Adler and Republican challenger Jon Runyan, a third-party Tea Party candidate has some conservatives scratching their heads.

Peter DeStefano claims on his Facebook campaign page that he got in the race “because there is no true conservative in this election.”

But Runyan’s campaign says he’s an Adler plant. According to the campaign, an “operative” with ties to Adler signed DeStefano’s nominating petition.

Local Tea Party groups apparently hadn’t heard of him, either. “No one knows where Peter DeStefano came from or his affiliation or his qualifications,” William Haney, an activist with the Burlington County Tea Party, told FoxNews.com…….

Next door in Pennsylvania, the race to replace Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak — who is running for U.S. Senate — is the site of similar drama. The Philadelphia papers reported last week that third-party candidate Jim Schneller was being called an imposter within days of filing.

According to the Philadelphia Daily News, Schneller’s nominating papers were littered with the names of prominent local Democrats. Republican Pat Meehan’s campaign accused Democratic state Rep. Bryan Lentz’s supporters of setting the whole thing up.

Today’s Washington Times highlights the bleak news from the actuary’s annual  report on the state of the Social Security program which was released yesterday.

Social Security will pay out more this year than it gets in payroll taxes, marking the first time since the program will be in the red since it was overhauled in 1983, according to the annual authoritative report released Thursday by the program’s actuary…..

The deficit will last through 2011, then an improving economy will put it back into balance for three years, then it will dip back into the red in 2015, the actuary said……

In a speech in Washington yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported that  Turbo Tax Geithner spoke about the need to insure that the taxes for wealthy individuals go up — its his view that tax hikes on the rich are good for the American economy.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner made the Obama administration’s economic case for letting tax cuts for high earners expire at the end of this year, saying that failure to do so would harm rather than help economic growth…

The government needs the revenue it would get from allowing tax rates for the wealthy to rise, he said…

Mr. Geithner argued Wednesday that the wealthy tend to save more of their tax breaks than do other groups, so in letting their taxes rise there would be minimal impact on economic activity…..

Republicans, who have been pushing to extend all the tax cuts, say it is inevitable that consumer spending, the economy and job creation will be hurt if taxes on any group rise. Their position has been supported by some Democratic lawmakers as well as some mainstream economists, who favor extending all of the tax cuts at least while the economic recovery remains fragile…..

In recent days, some economists have said Mr. Geithner sounded too optimistic about the economy, perhaps to set the groundwork for taxes to rise.

A Treasury advisory committee also noted this week that “progress has slowed” in the recovery, and warned that “this loss of momentum heightens lingering concerns about the expansion’s resiliency in the face of a significant fiscal tightening planned for the quarters ahead.”

Yesterday Missouri voters spoke loudly on the individual mandate.  According to the AP, they don’t like the idea much.

Missouri voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a key provision of President Barack Obama’s health care law, sending a clear message of discontent to Washington and Democrats less than 100 days before the midterm elections.

About 71 percent of Missouri voters backed a ballot measure, Proposition C, that would prohibit the government from requiring people to have health insurance or from penalizing them for not having it…..

“To us, it symbolized everything,” said Annette Read, a tea party participant from suburban St. Louis who quit her online retail job to lead a yearlong campaign for the Missouri ballot measure. “The entire frustration in the country … how our government has misspent, how they haven’t listened to the people, this measure in general encompassed all of that.”

Missouri’s ballot also featured primaries for U.S. Senate, Congress and numerous state legislative seats. But at many polling places, voters said they were most passionate about the health insurance referendum….

“I believe that the general public has been duped about the benefits of the health care proposal,” said Mike Sampson of Jefferson City, an independent emergency management contractor, who voted for the proposition. “My guess is federal law will in fact supersede state law, but we need to send a message to the folks in Washington, D.C., that people in the hinterlands are not happy.”

The Missouri law conflicts with a federal requirement that most people have health insurance or face penalties starting in 2014…..

Thanks to  The Cable Game you can now see the latest evidence of what appears to be a curious collaboration between the Washington Post’s  Dana Milbank and George Soros’ Media Matters.    Both attempt to make some hay out of the fact that a crazed gunman showed up at the offices of the non-profit organization The Tides Foundation — the group that Glenn Beck has highlighted for its involvement in so much leftwing activity.

Does the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank lift his stuff from Media Matters–or does he simply take dictation from Media Matters?   Let’s take a look at the similarities between what Media Matters wrote on Friday, and what Milbank wrote for the WP.   As we can see, the two items show the same speculative sequencing of events to make the argument that Glenn Beck is a menace.   Milbank is either a plagiarist, or a co-conspirator.

Here’s the first part of an e-mail that Media Matters (MM)–the lefty group founded by David Brock, funded by George Soros–that was mass-blasted out yesterday, as part of MM’s usual tub-thumping and fund-raising schtick:

——Original Message——
From: Ari Rabin-Havt, Media Matters for America
To: _____
Subject: What Has Beck Unleashed?
Sent: Jul 30, 2010 12:25

Dear ___:

On Sunday, July 18, unhinged ex-convict Byron Williams loaded his truck with guns and headed up a California highway with the intention of starting a revolution. If he hadn’t been stopped by brave officers — two of whom were wounded in the confrontation — he could have carried out a plan to kill staff at progressive organizations, including the Tides Foundation.

What is the Tides Foundation? It’s the nonprofit that Glenn Beck brags about “turning the light of day” on by constantly attacking it as part of a socialist conspiracy to destroy our government. The Tides Foundation isn’t the shadowy political influence of Beck’s fantasies — it’s a transparent organization known in the philanthropic community for doing good public service. Make no mistake: Beck’s intention was to paint the Tides Foundation as a dangerous, increasingly powerful threat to freedom that must be stopped. And Williams set out to stop them.

OK, that was Friday–MM writes about a criminally insane man out to get the Tides Foundation, and blames the man’s actions on Beck.   Of course, we don’t even know where Byron Williams got his ideas from, and what his ideas were–we are just supposed to take MM’s word for it.

Next up, Milbank.  He’s more than happy to take MM’s word for everything.  Indeed, he is more than happy to take MM’s words, period.  Here are the first few paragraphs of his column, datelined Sunday; note that Milbank uses the same set-up–crazy man stalks Tides Foundation, inspired by Beck, says MM, oops, I mean, Milbank:

Late on a Saturday night two weeks ago, an unemployed carpenter packed his mother’s Toyota Tundra with guns and set off for San Francisco with a plan to kill progressives.

When California Highway Patrol officers stopped him on an interstate in Oakland for driving erratically, Byron Williams, wearing body armor, fired at police with a 9mm handgun, a shotgun and a .308-caliber rifle with armor-piercing bullets, Oakland police say. Shot and captured after injuring two officers, Williams, on parole for bank robbery, told investigators that he wanted “to start a revolution” by “killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU,” according to a police affidavit. His mother, Janice, told the San Francisco Chronicle that her son had been watching television news and was upset by “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.”

But what television news show could have directed the troubled man’s ire toward the obscure Tides Foundation, which sounds as if it’s dedicated to oceanography, or perhaps laundry detergent, but which is in fact a nonprofit that claims to support “sustainability, better education, solutions to the AIDS epidemic and human rights”?

A week after the incident, the mystery was solved. “Tides was one of the hardest things that we ever tried to explain, and everyone told us that we couldn’t,” Fox News host Glenn Beck told his radio listeners on Monday. “The reason why the blackboard” — the prop Beck uses on his TV show to trace conspiracies — “really became what the blackboard is, is because I was trying to explain Tides and how all of this worked.” Beck accuses Tides of seeking to seize power and destroy capitalism, and he suggests that a full range of his enemies on the left all have “ties to the Tides Center.” On Monday, he savored the fact that “no one knew what Tides was until the blackboard.”

According to the Associated Press, the recession we’ve experienced was more severe than we realized.  And ominously, it may not be over.

The Commerce Department, in revisions issued Friday, estimates the economy shrank 2.6 percent last year — the steepest drop since 1946. That’s worse than the 2.4 percent decline originally estimated.

The economy’s plunge underscores why the unemployment rate surged to 10.1 percent in October, a 26-year high.

The revisions in gross domestic product, or GDP, now show zero growth in 2008. That compares with a 0.4 percent gain previously estimated.The economy also grew less in 2007 (1.9 percent) than earlier thought (2.1 percent).

For all three years, consumers spent less and home builders cut more deeply than had been thought. Those factors help explain the downward revisions on the economy……

The economy slid into its worst recession since the Great Depression in late 2007. Many economists think the recession ended last summer, although a panel of academics that dates the start and end of recessions hasn’t declared when this one ended. The panel usually does so well after the fact.

From the start of the recession in December 2007 until the April-to-June quarter of 2009, the economy sank 4.1 percent. That was deeper than the 3.7 percent decline previously estimated for the recession.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a remarkably insightful op-ed by Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen about the divisive presidency of Barack Obama.

Rather than being a unifier, Mr. Obama has divided America on the basis of race, class and partisanship. Moreover, his cynical approach to governance has encouraged his allies to pursue a similar strategy of racially divisive politics on his behalf…..

he first hint that as president Mr. Obama would be willing to interject race into the political dialogue came last July, when he jumped to conclusions about the confrontation between Harvard Prof. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates and the Cambridge police.

During a press conference, the president said that the “Cambridge police acted stupidly,” and he went on to link the arrest with the “long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”

In truth, the Gates incident appears to have had nothing to do with race—a Cambridge review committee that investigated the incident ruled on June 30 that there was fault on both sides.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.) has said the president told him in a closed-door meeting that he would not move to secure the border with Mexico unless and until Congress reached a breakthrough on comprehensive immigration reform. That’s another indication Mr. Obama is willing to continue to play politics with hot-button issues.

Add in the lawsuit against the Arizona immigration law and it’s clear the Obama administration is willing to run the risk of dividing the American people along racial and ethnic lines to mobilize its supporters—particularly Hispanic voters, whose backing it needs in the fall midterm elections and beyond…….

On an issue that has gotten much less attention, but is potentially just as divisive, the Justice Department has pointedly refused to prosecute three members of the New Black Panther Party for voter intimidation at the polls on Election Day 2008.

It is the job of the Department of Justice to protect all American voters from voter discrimination and voter intimidation—whether committed by the far right, the far left, or the New Black Panthers. It is unacceptable for the Department of Justice to continue to stonewall on this issue……

Mr. Obama has also cynically divided the country on class lines. He has taken to playing the populist card time and time again. He bashes Wall Street and insurance companies whenever convenient to advance his programs, yet he has been eager to accept campaign contributions and negotiate with these very same banks and corporations behind closed doors in order to advance his political agenda.

Finally, President Obama also exacerbated partisan division, and he has made it clear that he intends to demonize the Republicans and former President George W. Bush in the fall campaign. In April, the Democratic National Committee released a video in which the president directly addressed his divide-and-conquer campaign strategy, with an appeal to: “young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women who powered our victory in 2008 [to] stand together once again.”

President Obama’s divisive approach to governance has weakened us as a people and paralyzed our political culture. Meanwhile, the Republican leadership has failed to put forth an agenda that is more positive, unifying or inclusive. We are stronger when we debate issues and purpose, and we are all weaker when we divide by race and class. We will pay a price for this type of politics.

Glenn mentioned this last week.  According to ABC News a provision included in the health care bill signed into law by President Obama this year will place new IRS reporting requirements on the buying and selling of gold.

Section 9006 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will amend the Internal Revenue Code to expand the scope of Form 1099. Currently, 1099 forms are used to track and report the miscellaneous income associated with services rendered by independent contractors or self-employed individuals…..

Starting Jan. 1, 2012, Form 1099s will become a means of reporting to the Internal Revenue Service the purchases of all goods and services by small businesses and self-employed people that exceed $600 during a calendar year. Precious metals such as coins and bullion fall into this category and coin dealers have been among those most rankled by the change.

This provision, intended to mine what the IRS deems a vast reservoir of uncollected income tax, was included in the health care legislation ostensibly as a way to pay for it. The tax code tweak is expected to raise $17 billion over the next 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation…..

Pat Heller, who owns Liberty Coin Service in Lansing, Mich., deals with around 1,000 customers every week. Many are individuals looking to protect wealth in an uncertain economy, he said, while others are dealers like him.

With spot market prices for gold at nearly $1,200 an ounce, Heller estimates that he’ll be filling out between 10,000 and 20,000 tax forms per year after the new law takes effect.

“I’ll have to hire two full-time people just to track all this stuff, which cuts into my profitability,” he said.