I had the pleasure of appearing on National Public Radio’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook to discuss “the conservative case for Mitt Romney” with Tom, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson and for the last half hour of the show, Ryan Hecker, formerly with the Houston Tea Party, now Chief Operating Officer of FreedomWorks of America.

It was a good conversation, not only because Ashbrook, Gerson and Hecker had some interesting observations about the current Republican presidential nomination process, but because the callers confirmed one of my major concerns about the potential nomination of Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate for President — namely, that many conservatives and Tea Partiers would be unlikely to vote for Romney in the general election.

Of the dozen or so callers who spoke on the show, only one said he was for Romney, and the rest, when asked, either equivocated or indicated they would not vote for Romney even against Barack Obama.

While this seemed to be something of a surprise to our host Tom Ashbrook — it was no surprise to me, or to Tea Partier Ryan Hecker, who predicted Romney would get “zero” Tea Party support in the primary, and here’s why.

Romney has been stuck in the mid-twenties for the entire five years he has been running for President. This is about the same number of Republicans who do not self-identify as conservatives.

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 Read More at Real Clear Politics By Richard Vigurie, Real Clear Politics

Barack Obama has nominated Henry J. Aaron to head the Social Security Advisory Board, a panel that advises the president and Congress about the old age system. The choice is most dangerous, since Aaron has a decades-long record as an advocate of denying American patients health care along the lines of the British national health system.

Aaron, a Brookings Institution scholar, has devoted his entire career to creating an intellectual and economic basis for health care rationing. In 2000, Aaron wrote, “The problem is that in the real world of limited medical resources, denial of beneficial care is inescapable.” Aaron wrote in a 2009 paper it is necessary for the government “to develop protocols that enable providers to identify in advance patients in whom expected benefits of treatment are lower than costs [and] to design incentives that encourage providers to act on those protocols.” That is, government must provide “incentives” to assure doctors deny treatment to those whom the ruling class deems unworthy of life.

Far from a passing interest, it would be fair to say advocacy for health care rationing has been the defining goal of Aaron’s career. In 1984 Aaron and William B. Schwartz wrote The Painful Prescription: Rationing Hospital Care. Six years later, the team wrote Rationing Health Care: The Choice Before Us. In 2005, Aaron teamed with Schwartz and Melissa Cox to write Can We Say No? The Challenge of Rationing Health Care for Brookings. A blurb for the book explains:

Can We Say No? argues that sensible health care rationing not only can save money, but can improve public health and general welfare as well…The choices the British have made point up the nature of the options Americans will face if they wish to prevent health care budgets from driving taxes higher and private spending from crowding out increases in other forms of worker compensation and consumption. The authors explain why serious consideration of health care rationing in the United States is advisable, even inescapable.

In the chapter he contributed to the book Setting Domestic Priorities: What Can Government Do?, Aaron wrote explicitly, “The simplest way to slow the growth of health care spending is to cap resources available to health care providers.” He noted hopefully, “Confronted with severe limits on equipment and staffing that necessitates denial of beneficial care to patients in Britain, one physician stated that there are always some reasons not to treat particular patients.” (Emphasis added.) The British physician admitted he “states the reason for not going forward in medical terms…but that formulation in many instances is in no small part conditioned by the fact that there really aren’t enough resources to treat everybody.”

Aaron then delineated his own plan, which:

would start with the establishment by the federal government of a ceiling on U.S. health care spending. A national budget would be parceled out among regions or states and then to substate units. The budgets would be allocated among hospitals and other providers by quasi-political entities. No one has described in detail how such expenditure caps would be calculated, what organization would determine allocations among and within the states, and how the limits wold be enforced.

 Read More at Floyd Reports By Ben Johnson, The White House Watch

The Secret Service searched Occupy D.C. on Monday for a man suspected of firing bullets at the White House on Friday, one of which was stopped by the building’s ballistic glass.

Protestor Ralph Wittenberg told TPM on Tuesday evening that authorities came through “searching for a so-called terrorist who shot at the White House, with no warrant, they went into everybody’s tents.”

A person handling media requests for Occupy DC confirmed the searches and said they were led by the Secret Service. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Police have been trying to locate 21-year-old Oscar Ortega Hernandez, a mentally ill man from Idaho who authorities say is connected to the incident, which apparently took place on Friday.

Agents began investigating after gunshots were heard on Friday night, but NBC Washington reports that agents didn’t discover the bullets until Tuesday morning.

 Read More at talkingpointsmemo.com By Ryan J. Reilly, talkingpointsmemo.com