Obama is already over. In six short months the now-spattered bumper stickers with “Hope and Change” seem like pathetic remnants from the days of “23 Skidoo,” the echoes of “Yes, we can” more nauseating than ever in their cliché-ridden evasiveness.
Although they may pretend otherwise, even Obama’s choir in the mainstream media seems to know he’s finished, their defenses of his wildly over-priced medical and cap-and-trade schemes perfunctory at best. Everyone knows we can’t afford them. His stimulus plan - if you could call it his, maybe it’s Geithner’s, maybe it’s someone else’s, maybe it’s not a plan at all - has produced absolutely nothing. In fact, I have met not one person of any ideology who evinces genuine confidence in it.
On the foreign policy front, it’s more embarrassing. He switches positions every day, such as they are, while acting like a petit-bourgeois snob with our allies and then, when people with genuine passion for democracy emerge on the scene (the courageous Iranian protestors), behaves like a cringeworthy, equivocating creep. Enough of Obama. Only the Republicans are barely any better.
And, in another matter, while we’re talking about elements of the carefully crafted but artificial public persona of the President, Jack Cashill is back on the case of whether Bill Ayers wrote Barack Obama’s first book, which we’ve previously discussed:
Within days of my going public last September with the speculation that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers helped Barack Obama write his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, I learned that I was not alone in that intuition. Since then, I have received helpful contributions from serious people in at least five countries…
the first email I received from Mr. West had in the message box “759 striking similarities between Dreams and Ayers’ works.”…I was able to open them and was promptly blown away. Mr. West’s analysis was systematic, comprehensive, and utterly, totally, damning. Of the 759 matches, none were frivolous. All were C-level or above, and I had no doubt of their authenticity…
both authors evoke images of a “boy” riding on the backs of a “water buffalo” and prodding the beast not just with sticks, but with “bamboo sticks.” Ayers places his boy in Vietnam. Obama puts his in Indonesia…Obama and Ayers seem to have shared the same library…Both talk of reading the books of Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois and Frantz Fanon among others. In fact, each misspells “Frantz” as “Franz.”
The water buffalo stories and the parallel libraries and author misspellings are highly suggestive. We’d normally consider it nutty to think that Ayers wrote Obama’s book. However so much of the public Obama seems staged and phony — except his desire to centralize power in himself and his disturbing identification with the world’s nasty authoritarian rulers — that we now wouldn’t be surprised if the allegations are true. Things could become interesting again in America if the press decided to regularly stand up on their hind legs as Chip Reid and Helen Thomas did with Gibbs.
Paul Krugman comments on cap and trade and finds “treason” among the global warming “deniers”:
the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement. But 212 representatives voted no…as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.
To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research. The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course…
researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy. As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North Carolina today…
Gosh! Other government reports, suppressed by the government, draw very different conclusions. And it certainly seems that global cooling has been going on for some time, likely as a result of solar activity. For the record, we’re skeptical of AGM because an increase of 100ppm in CO2 causing such catastrophic problems just doesn’t pass the test of common sense, in our opinion. Indeed, it has been argued that increases in CO2 are an effect of rising temperatures, not the cause. We could be wrong of course, but Krugman’s rather hysterical tone doesn’t help the hypothesis he’s trying to sell.
Cap and trade: a solution that doesn’t work for a problem that doesn’t exist?
Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding “secret energy meetings” with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama’s “clean coal” policies. One reason: the disclosure of such records might impinge on privileged “presidential communications.”
The refusal, approved by White House counsel Greg Craig’s office, is the latest in a series of cases in which Obama officials have opted against public disclosure. Since Obama pledged on his first day in office to usher in a “new era” of openness, “nothing has changed,” says David -Sobel, a lawyer who litigates FOIA cases. “For a president who said he was going to bring unprecedented transparency to government, you would certainly expect more than the recycling of old Bush secrecy policies.”
The hard line appears to be no accident. After Obama’s much-publicized Jan. 21 “transparency” memo, administration lawyers crafted a key directive implementing the new policy that contained a major loophole, according to FOIA experts. The directive, signed by Attorney General Eric Holder, instructed federal agencies to adopt a “presumption” of disclosure for FOIA requests. This reversal of Bush policy was intended to restore a standard set by President Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno.
But in a little-noticed passage, the Holder memo also said the new standard applies “if practicable” for cases involving “pending litigation.” Dan Metcalfe, the former longtime chief of FOIA policy at Justice, says the passage and other “lawyerly hedges” means the Holder memo is now “astonishingly weaker” than the Reno policy. (The visitor-log request falls in this category because of a pending Bush-era lawsuit for such records.)
It would be a good thing to get rid of the inappropriate haigiography that these media fellows have been writing. Cracks appear here and there on matters both foreign and domestic. A disillusioned media seems unlikely, but possible, if Obama keeps mangling the big issues like the economy and Iran the way he has.
The NYT had some conflicting findings in its poll:
77 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with the quality of their own care…72 percent of those questioned supported a government-administered insurance plan — something like Medicare for those under 65…the survey results depict a nation desperate for change
77% of those polled are pretty satisfied with the quality of their own care. Why is that an indicator of “a nation desperate for change”? But that’s not the real problem with this poll of 895 adults. Here’s the problem, as it often is in NYT polls: the sample is skewed left:
What do you make of a poll of people who voted Obama 2 to 1 over McCain? The New York Times continues to embarrass itself daily, and shows no respect whatsoever to its readers when it prints rubbish like this.
The BBC reports that authorities in Iran have announced sweeping new restrictions on foreign media, effectively confining journalists to their offices:
The new restrictions on foreign media require journalists to obtain explicit permission before leaving the office to cover any story. Journalists have also been banned from attending or reporting on any “unauthorised” demonstration — and it is unclear which if any of the protests are formally authorised.
Press cards have been declared invalid. Our correspondent says they are the most sweeping restrictions he has ever encountered reporting anywhere. He says the clampdown comes amid surprise and fear among authorities at the show of defiance by opposition supporters who attended Monday’s huge illegal rally, insisting the vote was rigged.
The Guardian Council — Iran’s top legislative body — said votes would be recounted in areas contested by the losing candidates.
Should be a swell recount, since the regime has already announced that the results won’t change. (Reuters adds: “Reuters coverage is now subject to an Iranian ban on foreign media leaving the office to report, film or take pictures in Tehran.”) It remains to be seen what, if any, impact the micro-P-to-P media will have in coming days.
ABCNEWS anchor Charlie Gibson will deliver WORLD NEWS from the Blue Room of the White House. The network plans a primetime special — ‘Prescription for America’ — originating from the East Room, exclude opposing voices on the debate.
This can’t be the same ABC that allegedly blocked the potentially very profitable sale of the Path to 9-11 DVD because it was politically inconvenient, can it?
ABC reports the words of a plain-spoken man, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. He says that he can’t seem to get in contact with his friend of two decades, President Obama:
them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter that he’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck, or in eight years when he’s out of office….He’s gotta do what politicians do…Ethnic cleansing is going on in Gaza…Ethnic cleansing the Zionist is a sin and a crime against humanity, and they don’t want Barack talking like that because that’s anti-Israel…the Jewish vote, the A-I-P-A-C vote, that’s controlling him, that would not let him send representation to the Darfur Review Conference, that’s talking this craziness on this trip, cause they’re Zionists, they would not let him talk to someone who calls a spade what it is.
We don’t know about you, but we think it shows excellent judgement on the part of the President to spend as many as 1000 Sundays associating with this fine fellow Wright, a man who never vacillates and always speaks his mind. We live in an absurd time, not that the media would ever let Americans notice, as they engage in a special kind of worship of the own in this matter.
VDH reflects on the Cairo speech by President Obama and observes that the man really doesn’t understand human nature very well:
Most of you readers — in business, law, the professions — don’t continually praise your friends, competitors, and enemies (e.g., “Glad you got that job, Home Depot — we at Lowes didn’t really need it; what a wonderful bid you submitted, Hilton, much better than ours here at the Four Seasons; it was my fault here at Goldman Sachs that I didn’t match your better offer at Credit Suisse; I grew up working for the Royals, and can empathize why you Yankees don’t like us; it’s time we at Citibank apologized to Chase for our past cutthroat competition; we are just too arrogant over here at Delta and wanted to let you guys at United know that.”)
The world sadly does not work that way. If one were to do that, we know the outcome: a group of rival execs would say “Hmmm, time to steal market share from Citibank, or Hilton isn’t really up to the arena anymore, let’s move in on its Western region, etc.” Only someone who has not been in the real world, but only marketed rhetoric without consequences (e.g., if Obama had a bad day organizing, or legislating, was he fired?) could believe such things. In short, Obama reminds me a little of myself -– at 26…
Obama will come to his senses with his ‘Bush did it’, reset button, moral equivalency, soaring hope and change, with these apologies to Europeans, his Arab world Sermons on the Mount to Al Arabiya, in Turkey, in Cairo, etc., his touchy-feely videos to Iran, his “we are all victims of racism” sops to Ortega, Chavez, and Morales. It is only a matter of when, under what conditions, how high the price we must pay, and whether we lose the farm before he gains wisdom about the tragic universe in which we live.
In our view, it is not yet clear that Hanson’s last paragraph will happen before it is too late to matter. Yet another scary thing is that we now have an America wherein much of Congress and it seems all of the media think having a college professor president is a grand idea.
Back in November, Evan Thomas of Newsweek noticed a “slightly creepy cult of personality” in the worship of Obama. How times change:
in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above –- above the world, he’s sort of God…the President’s speech yesterday was the reason we Americans elected him. It was grand. It was positive. Hopeful…But what I liked about the President’s speech in Cairo was that it showed a complete humility…The question now is whether the President we elected and spoke for us so grandly yesterday can carry out the great vision he gave us and to the world…Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is ‘we are above that now.’ We’re not just parochial, we’re not just chauvinistic, we’re not just provincial…He’s going to bring all different sides together…Obama is trying to sort of tamper everything down. He doesn’t even use the word terror. He uses extremism. He’s all about let us reason together…He’s the teacher. He is going to say, ‘now, children, stop fighting and quarreling with each other.’ And he has a kind of a moral authority that he…can do that.
Evan Thomas once said that media coverage was worth “maybe 15 points” to the Democratic candidate in an election. Is that still true when the media elite sound sillier than teenage girls?
For a different take on the One’s speech in Cairo, we recommend this piece by Scott Johnson.
we are not prepared to forgo what all this soon-to-be-unavailable deficit spending can buy us (health care, bank bailouts, defense spending, food stamps, etc.). Nor can our governments (and the publics who elect them) stop the spending.
In Rome, eventually a contradiction arose between Romans’ concern for the tasks that needed to be performed and their concern for their form of government. The contradiction was resolved and the problems solved at the price of their republic: Came Gaius Julius Caesar.
Surely (presumably?), for the next decade, the United States will bungle onward with both our form of government and our deficit spending. But sometime soon after 2017, when Medicare’s trust fund will begin to be depleted (or earlier, if the world stops buying our bonds), the shocking reality of being forced to do without borrowing will shape — and probably misshape — both our way of life and our form of governance.
Right now America is in the midst of a fairy tale that we call “the Obama administration.” Over the course of the next several years, that fairy tale will have an ending, and in all likelihood it will not be a good ending.
The numbers are absolutely clear: the Obama administration’s spending and borrowing plans are ludicrous and unsustainable. Why large portions of the American electorate seem to buy into Obama’s economic fairy tale is a mystery to us.
Is Obama Zelig, shape-shifting to fit in with whatever his environment is? (Is that what his childhood was like?) Look at the rubbish that he spouts. NYT:
“one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world,” Mr. Obama said.
Everyone in the world knows this is nonsense, that the US’s tiny Muslim population would make it rank among the very smallest of Muslim countries (40 out of 48). So why does this man say such obviously false things, and why does no one seem to care? (Even if you accept Obama’s strangely high estimate of the number of Muslim Americans, America would be 27th on the list.)
Stephen Hayes writes in the that “President Obama has made it clear that he believes in transparency only when it serves his own interest. His administration has used the Freedom of Information Act as a shield, and in important ways his agencies are operating under a strong presumption in favor of secrecy.” Weekly Standard:
We were told on February 2 that the [Gitmo prisoner] report would likely be posted on the Pentagon website that afternoon. When we followed up, we were instructed to check back “in a couple days.” We made several additional attempts to obtain the report, and, on March 6, the Pentagon officially went into denial mode: “My understanding is that several requests have been received by our OSD FOIA office and it is being processed for a decision concerning release. If you would like to submit a FOIA request as well, below is a link for your convenience.”
Thanks to an unauthorized leak, the New York Times was able to write about the report last Thursday. According to the Times: Two administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the report was being held up by Defense Department employees fearful of upsetting the White House, at a time when even Congressional Democrats have begun to show misgivings over Mr. Obama’s plan to close Guantánamo. The report shows that 74 detainees released from Guantánamo have returned to jihad — some 14 percent…
Second, the CIA denied a request from former Vice President Dick Cheney to declassify two CIA reports on the results of “enhanced interrogation” techniques. In his speech on Thursday, Obama said: “I reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation.” Why should we believe him? What evidence did he cite to support this claim? Where are the facts? What do the professionals believe? What did contemporaneous reports tell us? What information did they produce? We are left to wonder.
The CIA, with the direct approval of the Obama White House, used a technicality to keep the documents secret and hidden from public view. “In researching the information in question, we have discovered that it is currently the subject of pending FOIA litigation (Bloche v. Department of Defense, Amnesty International v. Central Intelligence Agency). Therefore, the document is excluded from Mandatory Declassification Review.”
But on April 16, Obama released four Bush-era Justice Department memos that could have been withheld for the same spurious reason. The difference? Obama believes those memos help his continuing case against the Bush administration’s war on terror policies. But the Cheney memos, if we are to believe the former vice president and others familiar with their contents, undermine Obama’s case. So FOIA is being manipulated to keep documents secret. Hardly a “presumption in favor of disclosure.”
It is not surprising that a politician says one thing and does another. What is surprising is that Obama makes these promises in such a grand, sweeping fashion and then, almost immediately, pays them no heed. Obama evidently thinks he can get away with this, and to date he has.
What will happen if the adoring media figure out that the number one fan of the Obama cult of personality is not them, but Obama himself? Will they report twaddle as twaddle? Maybe not, but perhaps a healthy skepticism could re-emerge in the press. The Obama administration has become transparent, but not in the way it intended.
To date the media have almost uniformly adored their man Obama. Now it appears there occasionally are exceptions to the rule. EJ Dionne went to the White House and got annoyed by the Obama administration’s manipulation:
The disturbing aspect of Obama’s effort to create his new political alignment is that building it requires him to send rather different messages to its component parts. Playing to several audiences at once can lead to awkward moments.
Last Thursday afternoon, for example, the White House invited in journalists, mostly opinion writers, to sell them on the substance of the president’s big speech on Guantanamo and the treatment of detainees.
Unbeknownst to the writers until afterward, they had been divided into two groups, one more centrist with a sprinkling of moderate conservatives, the other more liberal. (I was in the liberal group.) The president made an unscheduled appearance at each briefing. As is his way, he charmed both groups.
The idea, as far as I can determine, was to sell the liberal group on those aspects of Obama’s plan that are a break from George W. Bush’s policies, and to sell the centrist group on the toughness of the president’s approach and the fact that it squares with Bush’s more moderate moves later in his second term…
establishments have a habit of becoming too confident in their ability to manipulate people and events, and too certain of their own moral righteousness. Obama’s political and substantive gifts are undeniable. What he needs to realize are the limits of his own mastery.
Obama may be a charlatan when it comes to a number of policy areas. He is, however, a deadly serious political person — his failing is that he has little subtlety. The interesting element in the Dionne piece is that liberals are beginning to see that they are being rather crassly manipulated by the administration. For example, it’s not just NRO but also the NYT that is noticing Obama’s overuse of the straw man rhetorical device to oversell his product.
We saw this coming within days of the election. It has now gotten ham-fisted and tiresome. Whether it will have any substantive impact on the media’s love affair with their man is unknown at this point.
we are out of money now. We are operating in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we’ve made on health care so far. This is a consequence of the crisis that we’ve seen and in fact our failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last several decades.
So we’ve got a short-term problem, which is we had to spend a lot of money to salvage our financial system, we had to deal with the auto companies, a huge recession which drains tax revenue at the same time it’s putting more pressure on governments to provide unemployment insurance or make sure that food stamps are available for people who have been laid off.
So we have a short-term problem and we also have a long-term problem. The short-term problem is dwarfed by the long-term problem. And the long-term problem is Medicaid and Medicare. If we don’t reduce long-term health care inflation substantially, we can’t get control of the deficit.
So, one option is just to do nothing. We say, well, it’s too expensive for us to make some short-term investments in health care. We can’t afford it. We’ve got this big deficit. Let’s just keep the health care system that we’ve got now.
Along that trajectory, we will see health care cost as an overall share of our federal spending grow and grow and grow and grow until essentially it consumes everything.
The polls seem to indicate that many Americans are getting wise to the con job being put over on them. Rasmussen: “Seventy-seven percent (77%) of voters say the bigger problem in the United States is the unwillingness of politicians to control government spending. Just 14% say the problem is that voters are unwilling to pay enough in taxes.” However, it’s a little hard to know just what’s going on through the miasma of much of the media’s relentlessly upbeat reporting of everything this fellow says and does.
Final point: when you read Obama’s comments on healthcare and the auto industry, among many other issues, he always seems to blame bad decision-making over a period of decades for today’s problems. What arrogance! Was everyone incompetent until this fellow suddenly came along? It’s really offensive.
The Economist summarizes the Obama administration’s cap and trade legislation as things currently stand in Congress:
Industries that emit carbon dioxide would have to buy permits to do so. A fixed number of permits would be auctioned each year. The permits would be tradable, so firms that found ways to emit less than they were entitled to could sell some of their permits to others. The system would motivate everyone to reduce emissions in the most cost-effective way. It would raise energy prices, which is the point, but it would also raise hundreds of billions of dollars, most of which Mr Obama planned to give back to voters. Alas, that plan looks doomed.
On May 15th Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, the Democratic point-men on climate change in the House of Representatives, unveiled a bill that would give away 85% of carbon permits for nothing, with only 15% being auctioned. The bill’s supporters say this colossal compromise was necessary to win the support of firms that generate dirty energy or use a lot of it, and to satisfy congressmen from states that mine coal or roll steel.
Giving away permits creates several problems. First, it generates no money, thereby royally messing up Mr Obama’s budget. Second, it means that the permits go not to those who value them most (as in an auction) but to those whom the government favours. Under Waxman-Markey, electricity-distributors would get the largest share, with the rest divided between energy-intensive manufacturers, carmakers, natural-gas distributors, states with renewable-energy programmes and so on. Oil firms, with only 2% of the permits, feel hard done by. But most polluters, having just been promised hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of permits for nothing, are elated.
As we previously noted, the FT had it right the other day: “On the drawing board is a vast and unfathomably complex new system, which fosters corruption, raises little revenue and tries to suppress the incentives that are its entire purpose. Otherwise, it all looks quite promising.” In this administration, reality apparently doesn’t count for much.
Watching the Obama administration is like watching a TV show. The writers make up whatever script they like. Reality is the thing that is on hiatus. We feel like we’re sitting around waiting for something important to begin, just listening to the crickets chirp. Meanwhile, there are rumblings off in the distance.
President Obama has effectively made himself CEO of this and that by firing the CEO’s he doesn’t like or by dictating corporate policies from the White House. Will California be next? George Will discusses the defeat of the tax increases in California, the upcoming bailout of the state and the legacy of Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor:
In a surreal attempt to terrify voters into supporting the propositions, Schwarzenegger (job approval: 33%) threatened to do something sensible: sell such state assets as San Quentin prison, which sits on prime ocean-view real estate. But Californians should now pay a real price, in realism about ways and means, for Schwarzenegger’s wasted years. His governance-by-attention-deficit-disorder has involved flitting from one trendy irrelevance (e.g., stem cell research) to another (e.g., cooling the planet) while the state has sagged. Fittingly, he was in Washington as his shambolic legacy was being defined by Tuesday’s defeat.
He was at the White House, applauding the Obama administration’s imposition of severe fuel efficiency standards on a dependent automobile industry that at least has a proven aptitude for its new task of building cars Americans will not like. Standing far from Tuesday’s repudiation, in the shadow of the president who may soon effectively be California’s governor, Schwarzenegger was the administration’s dependency agenda writ small.
It’s all such fun until the money runs out. Obama is spending like a drunken sailor, even as Schwarzenegger was doing. And it’s all fine until suddenly it isn’t, as the UK is apparently about to find out.
Meanwhile, Reuters, which last year was writing pieces about how the AAA rating of the US was in jeopardy, has changed its tune. Now Reuters reports: “U.S. AAA rating safe despite ugly fiscal picture…The United States issues bonds in its own currency and can always print more dollars — albeit at the cost of higher inflation — should it ever run into trouble making payments. That means unlike Japan, which lost its last remaining AAA rating when Moody’s downgraded it on Monday, a U.S. downgrade is an extremely remote possibility.” (Bill Gross disagrees, BTW.)
So the US could use hyperinflation to secure its AAA rating, is that so? Goodness how the media love this man and steadfastly refuse to notice that Obama’s numbers just don’t add up. Sooner or later it will become impossible even for them to deny.
By rejecting five budget measures, Californians also brought into stark relief the fact that they, too, share blame for the political dysfunction that has brought California to the brink of insolvency. Rightly or wrongly, voters in the special election refused either to extend new tax hikes or to cap state spending…
Clogged freeways, the decline of public schools, an outdated water system and a battered economy are just a few of the challenges demanding action by state leaders. Instead, they are consumed by yet another budget crisis, one that voters worsened Tuesday…
The public’s contradictory impulses were laid bare by a recent Field Poll. It found that voters oppose cutbacks in 10 of 12 major categories of state spending, including the biggest, education and healthcare. Yet most voters were unwilling to have their own taxes increased, and they overwhelmingly favored keeping the two-thirds requirement for tax hikes.
It seems pretty obvious that, when push comes to shove, the voters clearly prefer to cut services rather than raise taxes. The LA Times also reports: “Worst-case scenarios also call for the release from state prisons of up to 19,000 illegal immigrants, who would face deportation.” Why is that a worst case scenario?
Is any of this surprising? No, not really, since only 20% of the stimulus bill is to be spent in 2009. Question: will the same media that lavishly praised the passage of the stimulus pause to notice that it appears to have failed to deliver the results the administration touted? (HT: Ace)
Senator Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chair of the Senate Finance Committee…joined the Center for American Progress on Monday to announce the re-formation of Doctors for America, a grassroots organization of over 11,000 doctors in support of health care reform. Formerly known as Doctors for Obama, the group…advocated Barack Obama’s proposal for a government-managed option.
This group represents a bit over 1% of the doctors in America. Why do we have the feeling that they will appear much bigger in their upcoming media coverage.
