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Laura Ingraham fills in. |
| On The O'Reilly Factor...
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| All content taken from The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News Channel. Each weeknight by 6 PM EST a preview of that evening's show will be posted and then updated with additional information the following weekday by noon EST.
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| Laura began Friday's show with the news that Mitt Romney has raised about $5 million since the Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of President Obama's health care law. She welcomed Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky, who doubted whether Romney will be able to run against Obamacare. "Mitt Romney is not the guy to be carrying this message," Roginsky declared. "If you're going to call this a tax, it is exactly the same thing Romney did in Massachusetts. If this were Santorum or Gingrich or anybody else, maybe the Republicans would have a point, but Romney is not the right messenger." Steven Law, who runs a conservative SuperPAC, theorized that Republicans will benefit politically from Thursday's ruling. "A lot of people view this as a terrible decision for the country, but it is also an opportunity for Republicans to re-litigate this issue in the court of public opinion. And every time that's happened in the past, Obamacare has lost and Democrats have been collateral damage." |
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| President Obama has long maintained that imposing fines on people who don't purchase health care is a penalty, not a tax. Laura asked radio talk show hosts Leslie Marshall and Jeanine Turner to evaluate the Supreme Court's ruling that it is indeed a tax. "I don't see this as a broken promise," Marshall insisted. "We are now paying with our taxes for the abuse of our emergency rooms and for the reality that we have more sick people as society ages. In the long run, we'll be paying less because we're stopping the locomotive from hitting the brick wall." But Turner accused President Obama of being deceitful from the beginning. "I think Chief Justice John Roberts called Obama's bluff about what this has really been all along. It's always been a tax, Obama knew it was a tax, and he sent his Solicitor General to the Supreme Court to say it's a tax. Yet he told the American people and Congress that it's not a tax. This is going to garner a lot of votes from independents and Democrats who are on the fence." Laura reported that "Obamacare will result in about $4.2 billion in new taxes on middle class families." |
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| Laura was joined by two physicians who come down on opposite sides of Obamacare and how it will affect the quality of care. "A new survey says 90% of doctors think this is going to make health care worse," said Dr. Marc Siegel, "and 83% would consider quitting over this. They pay doctors less, they ask you to do more, they have more regulatory committees telling you what you can do, and it's more of a struggle to practice medicine. So of course doctors are unhappy. You can't practice the art of medicine if you're so restricted." But Dr. David Samadi predicted that Obamacare will benefit the majority of Americans. "One of the main advantages," he said, "is that you now have access to health care. There are about 30-million people out there who are really wandering around, not able to get insurance. And perhaps we will now be able to get people to clinics and get them to screenings." |
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| Chief Justice Roberts, who sided with the Court's four liberal justices to uphold Obamacare, is coming under withering criticism from the right. Laura analyzed Roberts' ruling with two conservative legal experts. "Obviously this was a very strange opinion," said constitutional scholar Michael Carvin. "The Chief Justice said that what Congress did was unconstitutional, so I'm going to pretend they did something different and therefore make it constitutional. Chief Justice Roberts said he was going to be an umpire who calls balls and strikes, but this time he saw a ball and called it a strike. This was a bad decision." Law professor John Eastman also accused Roberts of misinterpreting the Constitution. "The issue here is whether the Constitution limits the power of the federal government. If Congress does things that are not delegated to them, the role of the Court and the Chief Justice is to say to Congress, 'No!' If he thinks this was unconstitutional but found a way to uphold it to preserve the integrity of the court, then he really ought to resign." |
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| While the House of Representatives has voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt, the Justice Department has announced it will not bring criminal charges. "I don't know why anyone is surprised by that," said Geraldo Rivera. "I don't understand for the life of me how Darrell Issa and his committee could expect this to result in a criminal indictment of the Attorney General. That's why I was so opposed to this process รข?" they did this absolutely knowing that the criminal contempt charge will go no place! This is political hackery from the get-go, and the question is why Darrell Issa is so intent on creating a scandal?" Laura immediately answered Rivera's rhetorical question, saying, "It's a serious issue that thousands of guns went across the border and at least one Border Patrol agent was killed as a result of these guns walking across the border." |
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| Laura ended the week with actor Billy Baldwin, who explained why he is making a movie out of the book "A Time to Betray," which tells the story of a CIA agent in Iran. "My father was a political science teacher and I studied political science," Baldwin said. "In every dormitory and every lecture hall I was in, this is what we were talking about. This is about my friend who grew up in Tehran and attended university when the Shah of Iran was thrown out and the Ayatollah came in. He became a deep cover agent inside Iran, providing the most valuable intelligence to the CIA for about a ten-year period." |
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| Friday's Patriots or Pinheads: The Americans who told pollsters that Barack Obama would do a better job than Mitt Romney in the event of an invasion by space aliens. |
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