Obama in 2006: I've "stolen ideas…liberally" from Gruber

We’ll start with the undercard, then move on to the latest Gruber video.  This is characteristically excellent work from Remy here, skewering Grubergate to the tune of Jeremih’s “Don’t Tell ‘Em:”

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If the Lena Dunham reference at the end went over your head, click over to Kevin Williamson’s devastating piece on Dunham’s autobiography…if you dare.  It’s actually quite disturbing. (Dunham is apparently “raging” at “right-wing bloggers” for noticing the contents of her book, while her sister has issued an incoherent word soup of a response on Twitter).  Back to the topic at hand.  We had Byron York’s piece on Gruber’s personal financial windfall from Obamacare as a headlines item yesterday, but it’s worth highlighting again:

Throughout 2009 and 2010, he energetically advocated a bill from which he stood to profit. And when it became law, the money rolled in. In 2009, as Obamacare was moving its way through Senate committees, Gruber, who had achieved a measure of fame as the architect of Romneycare in Massachusetts, was a paid consultant to the Department of Health and Human Services. In March of that year, he received a contract for $95,000 to work on the project, and in June he received a second contract to continue that work; it was worth $297,600. Together, they comprise the “nearly $400,000” that critics have said Gruber received to work on Obamacare.  But after the bill became law, Gruber made a good deal more from it. The Affordable Care Act provided for states to set up exchanges to sell taxpayer-subsidized insurance coverage. For those states that chose to do so, exchanges would have to be built from the ground up. Studies would have to be done. Contracts would be let. The bottom line is that Obamacare has been very, very good to Jonathan Gruber. Now that he is in the news for other reasons, the public is also learning how much he profited from the bill he did so much to promote.

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This contemporaneous report from 2010 underscores the degree to which Gruber was the go-to expert on Obamacare, cited widely by everyone from the White House to Congressional Democrats to Paul Krugman.  Now the Left is franticly pretending Gruber was practically an extra in the Obamacare feature length film, as opposed to one of its primary screenwriters.  Gruber’s “throwaway quips,” aren’t what’s important , sniffs David Axelrod.  In fact, Gruber is the opposite of a minor figure, and his major admissions are telling and damning.  A newly-unearthed video from American Commitment shows then-Senator Barack Obama praising the MIT economist in 2006. Obama said he’d “stolen ideas…liberally” from Gruber:

Obama was influenced by Gruber’s thinking years before the two men colluded to hide Obamacare’s less-than-convenient features from the public.  I’ll leave you with this:

Americans began heading anew this weekend to President Obama’s official Obamacare Facebook page to gather information on the new round of health care enrollment, share their experiences shopping for insurance on the federal exchange and voice their opinions on the president’s signature domestic achievement. However, what some would view as a robust marketplace of ideas is actually controlled by just a few, an analysis of the Web page shows….Sixty percent of the site’s 226,838 comments generated from September 2012 to early last month can be attributed to fewer than 100 unique profiles, according to an analysis completed by The Washington Times with assistance from an outside data analytics team. Many of those profiles belong to just one person who created multiple aliases or personas to widen her influence and multiply her voice. Cindi Huynh, an Obamacare supporter in California, posted on average 59 times a day on the site in 60 days, making her the No. 1 poster in that period. She posted only during work hours — as is the trend of the top 25 posters on the site — and never on weekends. Over the past two years, Ms. Huynh has been a prolific poster — ranking twice in the top 25 profiles contributing to the site — once under the name “Cindi Huynh” and again as “Cyndi Huynh Vellucci.” Ms. Huynh has had at least four Facebook profiles, she confirmed.

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Her employer must be thrilled.  “Grassroots” support!  Ms. Huynh is the 37 percent.

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