End of the Week Drop: Tort Reform, Clunkers and Selective Editing

It's Friday!

Politicians will usually use the end of the week, typically around 4:30 p.m. EST, to "drop" a particularly unpopular story to the press. The purpose is that hopefully the American public will be too busy getting ready for their weekend to take notice of the Government's screw-ups. Both parties are masters in this technique. The Sunday morning gab-fests already have their line-ups set, so the story usually gets lost before the Monday morning shows start their week.

Here at The Hippo's Ass, we hope to counter some of the "fog of information" and highlight some things you may have missed this past week.

Tort Reform

Sarah Palin continued to use the popular Facebook to spread her thoughts on current events. Citizen Palin's recent message had to do with Tort Reform:

First, we cannot have health care reform without tort reform. The two are intertwined. For example, one supposed justification for socialized medicine is the high cost of health care. As Dr. Scott Gottlieb recently noted, “If Mr. Obama is serious about lowering costs, he’ll need to reform the economic structures in medicine—especially programs like Medicare.” [1] Two examples of these “economic structures” are high malpractice insurance premiums foisted on physicians (and ultimately passed on to consumers as “high health care costs”) and the billions wasted on defensive medicine.

What does the Washington establishment think about Tort Reform? Let's hear from one of the co-authors of the "popular" Health Care Reform Bill, Congressman John Dingell:

Cash for Clunkers

Over at IHateTheMedia.com, they report on a survey from the National Automobile Dealers Association concerning the Cash for Clunkers Program, which ends on Monday:

NADA surveyed nearly 800 dealers and the results may be the Obama administration’s worst nightmare:

97% of dealers who responded, say the government is not reimbursing fast enough
13% of dealers have dropped out the program because the government is not reimbursing fast enough and overall concern payment problems
87% percent of dealers are concerned the money will be exhausted
3% of CARS program deals have been reimbursed
66% of dealers have not received one payment from the government
25% of dealers are experiencing servere cash flow problems that require short-term loans to fix
11% of submitted applications have been approved (though dealers still are waiting for the money)
16% of submitted applications have been rejected
55% of dealers are not confident they will get reimbursed for every deal

Here is a fun game to play:

Substitute the word Hospital/Doctors for the word Dealer/Dealers
Substitute AMA for NADA
Substitute Health Care Reform Program for CARS

Who Watches MSNBC Anyway?

Here is an item from Newsbusters.com:

On Tuesday, MSNBC’s Contessa Brewer fretted over health care reform protesters legally carrying guns: "A man at a pro-health care reform rally...wore a semiautomatic assault rifle on his shoulder and a pistol on his hip....there are questions about whether this has racial overtones....white people showing up with guns." Brewer failed to mention the man she described was African American.

Seriously, does anyone watch this news channel? Regardless, people are demanding that heads roll: Click Here for more to the story.

And finally, The Blue Hippo Fantasy Football League picked their draft date this year, Sept 9th. The League celebrates 11 years of Fantasy Football. The Editor of The Hippo's Ass finished 12th out of 12 teams last year and is hoping for a rebuilding season. In the spirit of Obamanomics, he will be asking to install a rule this year that will take one player from a "good" team and give it to a team that is playing poorly.

Its not that we want to punish them, its just that we want to spread their success around.

UPDATE! The dropped arrived right on schedule.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration will raise its 10-year budget deficit projection to approximately $9 trillion from $7.108 trillion in a report next week, a senior administration official told Reuters on Friday.