Health Care Analysts: Obamacare Won't Meet Same Fate As Hillarycare

Leah Valencia, University of New Mexico-Talk Radio News Service

While the heated debate over health care reform is often compared to the struggle that former President Bill Clinton faced in the early nineties, there are several key differences, according to a number of health care analysts.

"[President Barack Obama's] effort was initiated when the economy was in free fall, unemployment still rising, we were on the brink of a world wide financial meltdown," Urban Institute President Robert Resichauer said during a panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute Friday. "In 1992 the economy wasn't chugging, but it was improving."

Resichauer said the current economic circumstances have forced the government to take extraordinary action, which makes the American public leery of the role government is playing in the economy's life.

Resichauer said that it is imperative to have a bipartisan effort on health care reform in order to win the support of the American public.

Health care attorney Dean Rosen said the political atmosphere surrounding the current debate also stands in contrast with Clinton's efforts.

"I think it will be very difficult to find more than a few Republicans in the Senate who are willing to do this," Rosen said. "It makes it a political necessity for this to be a Democrats-only enterprise. This was not the case in 1993 or 1994."

Ultimately, all panelists in attendance agreed that the current reform effort will meet a different fate than Clinton's.

"It is not whether we are going to have it, it is when and how," Resichauer said. "At least at a superficial level we have a lot more support on this than we ever have."

Cheney: Waterboarding Saved Thousands Of American Lives

By Jonathan Bronstein, Talk Radio News Service

Former VP Dick Cheney

Rushed to a secret White House bunker on September 11, 2001, former Vice President Dick Cheney watched coordinated terrorist attacks unfold before his eyes.

“I’ll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities,” said Cheney today at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

In the days following 9-11, Congress passed a Joint Resolution that gave the President and other high ranking officials the power to act with “all necessary and appropriate force” to protect America, according to Cheney.

This meant the Bush Administration would use all tactics at their disposal to ensure the country’s safety, including the allowance of waterboarding against suspected terrorists and an offensive war to disrupt terrorist activities.

Cheney bluntly stated that the use of waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques were “legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do.”

Cheney defended the 183 instances of waterboarding employed by the CIA on Kaled Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the attacks.

“American personnel were not there to commence an elaborate legal proceeding, but to extract information from him before al-Qaeda could strike again and kill more of our people,” said Cheney.

Waterboarding was not used against every enemy combatant, but “only those terrorists of the highest intelligence value,” said Cheney.

However, Cheney asserted that high-ranking members of Congress were briefed on the CIA’s use of these techniques, including the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D Calif.). He criticized those members of Congress who demanded to be briefed saying that “they support them in private, and then head for the hills at the first sign of controversy.”

In response to Pelosi’s assertion that the CIA lied to her, Cheney stated that “people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about ‘values.’”

Pelosi has been one of the harshest critics of the Bush Administration and a leading advocate for a ‘Truth Commission.’

“It’s hard to imagine a worse precedent, filled with more possibilities for trouble and abuse, than to have an incoming administration criminalize the policy decisions of its predecessors,” said Cheney in regards to such a commission.

Cheney wants the government to release all torture documents, and he mocked the Obama Administration’s choice to only partially release these documents when he said that “the public has a right to know the method of the questions, but not the content of the answers.”

“Every senior official who has been briefed on these classified matters knows of the specific attacks that were in the planning stages and were stopped by the programs we put in place,” said Cheney.

Additionally, Cheney asserted that no matter what actions the Obama Administration takes, like the closing Guantanamo Bay or disallowing the use of enhanced interrogation, the terrorists will continue to hate America.

“The terrorists hate this country precisely because of the values we profess and seek to live by,” said Cheney.

Experts: Sea Control Vital to American Supremacy

By Jonathan Bronstein, Talk Radio News Service

If America is to remain an international superpower, it must control the world’s oceans, according to U.S. military and policy experts.

“The United States quite simply is a maritime nation,” said Michael Auslin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “Our future is possibly more tied up in the Pacific than with Europe.”

“The more power diffuses to the international system and Asia, the harder it will be to protect the global commons and the more difficult it will be to protect maritime security,” said Ashley Tellis, senior associate at with the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. Tellis said that the interests between rising nations, like India and China, are not all shared by the U.S. and would be unreliable partners who would almost certainly take advantage of any global cooperation.

Tellis is skeptical of the concept that international maritime cooperation “is essentially an idea that is pivoted on the notion of cooperation, and it works best in a world where all nations have common interests.”

Historically, the domination of the seas has been vital to the continuing strength and viability of powerful countries. But America’s role as a global hegemony is in jeopardy as Asian nations, like China and India, are taking militaristic actions to control large bodies of oceans.

In 1994, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea was officially enforced, which defines the rights and responsibilities of nations in their use of the world’s oceans. But before China signed the treaty, they extended their territorial waters to the continental shelf, which was much farther than the 12 miles stated in the original treaty.

America did not sign the agreement, which creates a global system of signals to aid in communication in order to prevent any misunderstandings.

According to Bernard Cole, a professor at the National War College, the Chinese view the situation as: America must “stay 200 miles off our coastline at all times and we won’t have any conflict.”

Japan is another major player within the Asian-Pacific region because of the strength of their economy and relations with America. But Japan itself is at a “crossroads toward rising or falling as a nation,” said retired Vice Admiral Hideaki Kaneda of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force. “It is very critical in the long term to maintain this important maritime alliance for Japan and the United States.”

Analyst: North Korea, America’s most dangerous enemy

Even through failure progress can be achieved, as the North Koreans succeeded even though their missile, launched in April 2009, failed to break through Earth’s atmosphere. The missile transitioned to the second-stage of a three-stage rocket, which was a great improvement over the 2006 launch, which failed to get pass the first-stage. The rocket traveled some 3,000 km before it failed and landed harmlessly in the ocean.

“It was not as successful as it could have been,” said Dr. Bruce Bechtol, a professor of International Relations at US Marine Corps Command and Staff College, who continued to say that it was “certainly not as successful as the North Koreans wanted it to be, but it was far more successful than the 2006 launch.”

Many theories have been given as to why North Korea decided to launch their Taepodong-2 missile at this time. Some of the most popular explanations include,
include, the testing the Obama administration and its willingness to take a hardline stance against such brash actions or an attempt to legitimize the rule of the sickly Kim Jong-Il. Yet, according to Bechtol, all of these reasons are ancillary to the fact that the North Koreans launched the missile “because it was ready.”

However, North Korea poses a larger threat to an area far removed from Northeast Asia--the Middle East. North Korea has sold a reported $1.5 billion worth of ballistic missiles, according to the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis 2009 report, making them the largest seller of these weapons in the world.

Bechtol identified a troubling trend--the alliance between the Iranians and North Koreans. “There were Iranian engineers, technicians and dignitaries present at this launch, as there were at the launches in 2006, 1998 and 1993,” said Bechtol.  Thus, a link between the Iranians and North Koreans is not merely plausible, but probable.

Concluding his statement, Bechtol gave his personal prediction for the future of North Korean missile tests. Bechtol believes that “the North Koreans will conduct another long-range missile test in the future no matter what the geopolitical context is in Northeast Asia.”

Energy policy: Is there any right answer?

Speaking on the issue of offshore drilling, Fmr. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said, “You have to maximize oil production in the United States.”

In a discussion at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI), Gingrich advocated for clean coal technology calling the use of this technology “green conservatism.” Gingrich cautioned that if the United States tries other forms of technology too quickly, there is the possibility that the U.S. “doomed [itself] to no energy.” He called the costs of changing to other forms of energy such as wind, solar, and natural gas “a breathtaking investment.”

Gingrich was adamant that the U.S. does not have an energy crisis, but a “policy crisis.” He claimed that with its total range of resources, the U.S. “has the capacity to have ample energy at a reasonable price.”

Robert Hahn, Senior Fellow at AEI, said that offshore oil drilling would make little or no impact of domestic gas prices “anytime soon.” Hahn advised President -elect Obama to “limit his focus” on the issue of energy to potential investments and climate change. Hahn said that the potential jobs that would be opened by energy reform should not factor into Obama’s decisions. Hahn also cautioned that Obama not allow energy to turn “into complete political pork barrel” with potential wasted spending.

Irwin Stelzer, Senior Fellow and Director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Economic Policy, said the U.S. cannot run solely on domestic oil because it is “too few and too costly.” However, he said that renewable energy cannot replace fossil fuels because it is too difficult and expensive to attain. He put down the idea of nuclear energy because he believes Congress will not solve the issue of nuclear waste disposal. Stelzer was not in favor or natural gas because he doesn’t believe it can replace liquid energy. He said that the U.S. could practice conservation if U.S. citizens want to live “as the Japanese.” Stelzer said that the U.S. will probably remain “heavily dependent” on other countries for oil.