Is Obama’s Treasury Secretary playing chicken with our credit ratings agency? Today, at a House Appropriations Committee hearing, Tim Geithner was asked about Moody’s “warning shots” of America losing its triple A credit rating because of increasing deficits and debt, to which he responded:

                There's not a chance that's going to happen to our country.

We hope for the sake of our country that Geithner is right, because as CNBC’s Trish Regan explained today on MSNBC, a downgrade in our credit rating would mean Obama’s binge spending would cost us even more than it does now because it would be riskier for countries to lend to us.

But Obama’s binge spending has already left us with unprecedented deficits. The last thing we need is to pay higher interest rates on the money we are forced to borrow in order to pay for Obama’s binge spending agenda.

It’s “Sunshine Week” in Washington, which means that the White House is again talking the transparency talk without walking the transparency walk. The Washington Post writes that the departments of State, Transportation, Treasury, NASA  and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have fulfilled noticeably fewer FOIA requests and denied more of them since Obama took office. And The Associated Press reported that government use of legal exemptions to keep information secret has increased by a third since 2008. It looks like the most transparent thing about Obama is his doubletalk about transparency:

Major agencies cited that exemption to refuse records at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year… Departments used the exemption even though the Justice Department's Office of Information Policy, which advises them on FOIA, told them after Obama took office that they could exercise discretion and disclose such records. Doing so "will be fully consistent with the purpose of the ... more

Testifying before the House Appropriations Committee this morning, Christina Romer, Obama’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, claimed “one of the best ways to see what the Recovery Act is doing is in the projects that are actually started.” Obama’s budget director went one step further in his stimulus claims:

“[T]o date, there have not been the kinds of stories about substantial fraud and substantial abuse that one may have expected given an activity this large.”

Well, let’s take look at a stimulus project in Fresno, California, where the city used a portion of an $11 million award from President Obama’s Recovery Act to renovate this home.

The house was empty for about a year before it was bought at auction for $66,001 by the Redevelopment Agency in October, said Marlene Murphy, the agency's executive director. So far, the agency has sunk about $200,000 into buying and repairing the home. It's listed for sale at $160,000.

So money-losing deals don’t fall under the ... more

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today, liberal pundit Lawrence O’Donnell delivered brutal criticism of the Senate’s government-run health care plan.

But they never tell you what that tax is intended to do. It’s intended to cut your benefits. Sebelius said we're going to put the insurance companies on warning that they're going to have to change their plans. Change? What do you mean change? Reduce the benefits so that the plan never hits the tax threshold. And they actually do not raise any money from the tax from the insurance companies. They project, the CBO, that virtually all the money will be raised from income [tax.]

Couldn’t have said it better ourselves. President Obama constantly complains about how Americans are stuck with insurance that isn’t good enough and doesn’t cover enough. But insurance that covers everything is exactly the kind of insurance he’s planning to hit with his so-called “Cadillac tax.”

This weekend is judgment day for American freedom if Dems insist on ramming their government-run health care experiment through the House. Since the House will rubber stamp the $2.5 trillion bill passed by the Senate on Christmas Eve, all of the problems we noted earlier are still there.

But while the Senate’s bill is bad for Americans generally, it’s specifically bad for doctors and health care providers. It would restrict their freedom to practice medicine so much that a recent story in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine highlighted an analysis from a medical recruiting firm, which showed that about one-third of doctors would quit their practices because the increased regulation would be “the last straw.”

Find out all of the details in this morning’s research briefing “Judgment Day For Doctors.”