Reply #74: But, when Obama tries to reach across the aisles and uses GOP ideas, you're ok with that

[Nikki Stone1]

It's just little Nikki Stone, someone you don't even know over the internet, that you have a problem with. That's really odd, actually. You have remember, I really am not anyone. Not anyone at all. But Obama is, and sometimes the truth gets in the way of what we want to believe is. And sometimes the sources of information are not what we would have liked, but they are what they are.

My guess is that it's not Nikki in California that you're ultimately upset about. It is upsetting when a 2007 plan from the Heritage Foundation is the basis for the new law by a President that was supposed to be the next Roosevelt. But if it makes you feel better to lash out at me, go ahead. Just remember, I'm not running in 2012.

Edited to add: If you don't the Heritage Foundation website (where I double checked From's statement) maybe you'll appreciate Mother Jones, which amborin posted a while back:




http://motherjones.com/mojo/2009/08/obamas-insurance-plan-comes-right-wing-think-tank

Obama's Health Insurance Plan Channels...The Heritage Foundation?

During his New Hampshire town hall meeting on health care reform in mid-August, Obama explained that under his plan, people who lack health insurance would be able to purchase it in a new exchange that offered a similar “menu of options that I used to have as a member of Congress.” Obama said that by creating a big pool of potential customers, the exchange would allow the uninsured and even small businesses to shop around, easily compare various private health care plans and get a better deal than they could on their own.

Most of the health care reform bills circulating in Congress contain some form of this concept. The exchange, in fact, is now the centerpiece of proposed plans drafted mainly by Democrats. It’s a curious development, because the concept was largely popularized by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank best known in recent years for advocating Social Security privatization during the Bush administration. Its track record ought to make Americans more wary of Obama's proposals than any talk of "socialized medicine."


Heritage is the source of a number of radical free-market and socially conservative policy plans that have occasionally worked their way into law, with questionable results. Among the most prominent: welfare reform, which it advocated in the mid-1990s as a means of reducing out-of-wedlock births and restoring “personal responsibility.” The idea—also embraced by a Democratic president—was considered a resounding success during the boom years of the late Clinton era when millions of poor single mothers went to work. But now that the country has hit a major recession, it has become clear that welfare reform mostly succeeded in shredding the safety net for poor children. (Incidentally, out-of-wedlock births have never been higher).

More recently, Heritage has promoted the idea that what poor women really need to get themselves out of poverty is a good man. At its urging, the Bush administration gave more than $100 million in grants to “marriage entrepreneurs” charged with encouraging poor single mothers to get hitched rather than to get welfare. Needless to say, the poverty rate is still on the rise.....