Meet the Mild-Mannered Investment Adviser Who's Humiliating the Administration Over Obamacare

NO...It wasn't FOX, LIMBAUGH...or Beck...
The man who 'exposed' GRUBER to the world was just another average "Stupid" American who lost the health insurance he liked...and was promised he could keep.
I wonder if he qualifies for a Pulitzer.
HERE is his story...It's very interesting:

Rich Weinstein is not a reporter. He does not have a blog. Until this week, the fortysomething's five-year old Twitter account had a follower count in the low double digits.

“I’m an investment adviser,” Weinstein tells me from his home near Philadelphia. “I’m a nobody. I’m the guy who lives in his mom’s basement wearing a tinfoil hat.” (He's joking about the mom and the tinfoil.)

He's also behind a series of scoops that could convince the Supreme Court to dismantle part of the Affordable Care Act. Weinstein has absorbed hours upon hours of interviews with Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor who advised the Massachusetts legislature when it created “Romneycare” and the Congress when it created “Obamacare.” Conservatives had been looking for ways to demonstrate that the wording of the ACA denied insurance subsidies to consumers in states that did not create their own health exchanges. Weinstein found a clip of Gruber suggesting that states that did not create health insurance exchanges risked giving up the ACA's subsidies; it went straight into the King v. Burwell brief, and into a case that's currently headed to the Supreme Court.

“It’s terrifying that the guy in his mom’s basement is finding his stuff, and nobody else is.”

Rich Weinstein
A few days ago, Weinstein pulled a short clip from Gruber's year-old appearance at a University of Pennsylvania health care conference. As a crowd murmured with laughter, Gruber explained that the process that created the ACA was, by necessity, obfuscated to pull one over on voters.

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure the CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” said Gruber. “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. Call it the stupidity of the America voter, or whatever.”

Weinstein's scoop went around the world in a hurry. American Commitment, a conservative 501(c)(4) founded by Americans for Prosperity veteran Phil Kerpen, published the clip on its YouTube channel. Kerpen promoted it through tweets, which quickly became live coverage of the media outlets discovering Gruber.

The story metastasized when Penn briefly pulled the original video. Jonathan Adler, one of the attorneys in the anti-subsidy cases, was among the people tweeting about the apparent censorship until Penn restored the video. Gruber himself crawled out of view, refusing to comment when reporters asked about his newly discovered argument that the ACA was “designed to dupe a gullible American public.” Even Snopes.com waded in, attempting to debunk the conservative theory that an Ivy League school was trying to hide a damaging gaffe that could hurt the legal case for the ACA.

Weinstein, back at home, was stunned at the reaction. Why did he keep finding Gruber gaffes? Why didn't the press glom onto this stuff first?

“It’s terrifying that the guy in his mom’s basement is finding his stuff, and nobody else is,” he says. “I really do find this disturbing.”

Weinstein dates his accidental citizen journalism back to the end of 2013 and the first run of insurance cancellations or policy changes. He was among the people who got a letter informing him that his old policy did not meet ACA standards.

“When Obama said 'If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period'—frankly, I believed him,” says Weinstein. “He very often speaks with qualifiers. When he said 'period,' there were no qualifiers. You can understand that when I lost my own plan, and the replacement cost twice as much, I wasn’t happy. So I’m watching the news, and at that time I was thinking: Hey, the administration was not telling people the truth, and the media was doing nothing!”

So Weinstein, new plan in hand, started watching the news. “These people were showing up on the shows, calling themselves architects of the law,” he recalls. “I saw David Cutler, Zeke Emanuel, Jonathan Gruber, people like that. I wondered if these guys had some type of paper trail. So I looked into what Dr. Cutler had said and written, and it was generally all about cost control. After I finished with Cutler, I went to Dr. Gruber. I assume I went through every video, every radio interview, every podcast. Every everything.”

Weinstein dug and dug and eventually discovered the first Gruber quote, known in conservative circles as the “speak-o.” Gruber had been on TV arguing that the case against subsidies in non-exchange states was ludicrous. Yet at a January 2012 symposium, Gruber seemed to be making the conservatives' argument. “What’s important to remember politically about this is if you're a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits—but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill,” said Gruber. “So you’re essentially saying [to] your citizens you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country.”

The investment advisor e-mailed this around. Nobody cared. Nobody noticed the clip until after the D.C. circuit ruled 2-1 in favor of plaintiffs who were suing to stop the subsidies. Weinstein clicked around for articles about the decision, and left a comment on The Washington Post's Volokh Conspiracy blog, pointing to the clip. In short order, Ryan Radia of the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute noticed the clip and promoted it. Within hours, Gruber's “speak-o” had greatly muddied the liberal argument.

“The next day, I woke up and turned on my iPad,” Weinstein recalls. “I did a quick search. You know, 'Gee, if I wonder if anything is out there about this Jonathan Gruber guy?' And the first result was about this video. 'Holy crap, what is going on?' Excuse my language. It just kept getting bigger and bigger. Later that day, a friend told me that Rush Limbaugh was talking about this video. I’m at WaWa, and I'm eating a sandwich in the car, and Limbaugh comes back from commercial and says 'There's more on this Gruber video. The White House is responding.' I’m like, 'What do you mean, the White House is responding?'”

There came a wave of reporters, senators, and wonks arguing that Gruber had mangled the description of congressional intent. They were matched with more clips of Gruber suggesting that, no, really, the subsidies were intended to nudge states into creating exchanges. Gruber, all of a sudden, was getting the sort of vetting previously reserved for high court nominees or Senate candidates. All because somebody actually paid attention to the words he was blabbing at sleepy-looking health care conferences. He wasn't even eavesdropping. He was just...listening.
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MORE:

www.bloomberg.com...

This guy should get the Pulitzer Prize for journalism.

It is certain that people who claim to be professional journalists

don't qualify as journalists but as regurgitators

of the state and liberal/progressive line.


I haven't seen real journalism like this in years. Almost not since Nixon and Watergate.

Kudos times a million.



This guys puts the mainstream media, all newspapers, and talk radio guys to shame who claim to be getting out the news.

One thousand rounds of applause for a real journalist and I give him my Pulitzer for the next 10 years!

new linkYour link is 404'd

a reply to: IAMTAT

This story will go done in American history books as important as The Bill of Rights, US Constitution mark my words!



P.S. Chief Justice Roberts USED to have the "cred" this man has has...

Don't give gruber to hard of a time.
80 million of those americans he was talking about voted for Obama twice.

originally posted by: Granite
a reply to: IAMTAT

This story will go done in American history books as important as The Bill of Rights, US Constitution mark my words!

Or prohibition???

a reply to: Hoosierdaddy71

Nope, it will go down in history as I said earlier.

It will be as important to US history as Watergate was!

It will be a defining piece of journalism that will go down in the history books.

Too bad not one "real" or "college trained" journalist even tried half hardheartedly to find out what this guy did "with a tin foil hat in his Mom's basement" (I know that is a phrase, not what really happened)

An epic fail for every single professional journalist in the entire USA.

Anyone, I don't care if they are Democrat, Republican, Independent or The Flying Spaghetti Monster,who had anything to do with pushing this on the American people, belong in jail, all the profit they made from it taken away and banished from public service for life. No retirement benefits, with a golden healthcare package. Let them struggle with it just the way we have to. But, all I see is a lot of talk and finger pointing, till the next big news comes along and this fades in to the back ground. Business as usual.

originally posted by: grandmakdw
a reply to: Hoosierdaddy71

Nope, it will go down in history as I said earlier.

It will be as important to US history as Watergate was!

It will be a defining piece of journalism that will go down in the history books.

Too bad not one "real" or "college trained" journalist even tried half hardheartedly to find out what this guy did "with a tin foil hat in his Mom's basement" (I know that is a phrase, not what really happened)

An epic fail for every single professional journalist in the entire USA.

Watergate was a crime exposed that resulted in a presidential resignation.
This is just a truth exposed but not a crime.
Don't get your hopes up that this will lead to a resignation.

originally posted by: Hoosierdaddy71

Watergate was a crime exposed that resulted in a presidential resignation.
This is just a truth exposed but not a crime.
Don't get your hopes up that this will lead to a resignation.

If bilking people out of billions of dollars based on lies isn't a crime, then I need to start an investment firm and we need to free Bernie Madoff.

But I guess Obama is a fan of the Nixon school of governance. If the President does it, it's not illegal.

a reply to: occrest

Thanks.

LINK UPDATED:

www.bloomberg.com...

More links:
VIDEO Interview of Rich Weinstein:
www.theblaze.com...

HUFF:
www.huffingtonpost.com...

originally posted by: VictorVonDoom

originally posted by: Hoosierdaddy71

Watergate was a crime exposed that resulted in a presidential resignation.
This is just a truth exposed but not a crime.
Don't get your hopes up that this will lead to a resignation.

If bilking people out of billions of dollars based on lies isn't a crime, then I need to start an investment firm and we need to free Bernie Madoff.

But I guess Obama is a fan of the Nixon school of governance. If the President does it, it's not illegal.

Madoff is in prison.
When do you suppose criminal charges are going to be brought up on Obama?
I don't see that happening do you?

a reply to: Hoosierdaddy71

Of course not. That would be racist.

It would be nice to see some enterprising lawyer come up with a class action lawsuit, though. Lies were told, money was lost, that should be easy enough to prove in court.

a reply to: VictorVonDoom

Well, it looks like some states have begun to cancel his contracts:

Gruber's contract with Vermont ends after missteps on ObamaCare pile up

www.foxnews.com...
www.breitbart.com...

New interview from today:

He found the Jonathan Gruber videos — and no media outlet would call him back

The man who changed the ObamaCare debate was at a gas station when I reached him, and he wasn’t dying to talk.

“I really want to stay out of the limelight,” said Rich Weinstein, a Philadelphia investment adviser. “This is not about me.”

But it is about him in the sense that if not for one slightly obsessed citizen, we wouldn’t have the videos of Jonathan Gruber saying the health care law was deceptively designed and its passage depended on the stupidity of the American public. And it is about his frustrating struggle to get that information out to the media.

Still, Weinstein would not be coaxed into an on-camera interview, or even provide a photograph. He doesn’t want his 15 minutes.

“I think people are going to look for a target. I don’t want to be Rich the Plumber,” he told me.

Weinstein is up front about the fact that his motives were personal. His insurance policy was canceled, he says, because of the Affordable Care Act, and his premiums wound up doubling.

He started out searching for another administration adviser and then switched to Gruber. He sat through hour after tedious hour of video taken at academic conferences and in other settings.

This helps explain why a self-described regular guy was able to unearth what the media could not. Few news organizations could afford to have a reporter spend a long period searching for a needle in an online haystack, especially without a tip that the needle existed at all. Maybe everything that Gruber had to say about the law he helped devise was boring. But Weinstein kept at it, although he did give up the search for awhile during his kids’ lacrosse season.

Last December, Weinstein found one video in which Gruber, an MIT professor, said that ObamaCare subscribers wouldn’t get tax benefits if their states didn’t set up health care exchanges, meaning they would be losing out to those in states that did create the websites.

That’s when Weinstein used every means he could think of, from Facebook to phone calls, to get the attention of journalists. He says he tried getting messages to Fox News, Forbes, National Review, Glenn Beck and a network affiliate in Philadelphia where a friend worked. Nobody bit. Nobody called back.

“It was so frustrating,” Weinstein said. “I tried really hard to give this to the media. I had this and couldn’t get it to anybody that knows what to do with it.” All he wanted, Weinstein says, was a train ride to D.C. for him and his lawyer, and “I was going to give them everything for nothing, no money, all I wanted was autographed pictures of the people I was working with to hang on my office wall.”

Crickets.

He finally posted a comment on the web page of the Volokh Conspiracy, a group of conservative lawyers whose blog is hosted by the Washington Post. A conservative activist picked it up, and Forbes wound up carrying a piece by contributor Michael Cannon, dubbed by the New Republic “Obamacare’s Single Most Relentless Antagonist.”

It wasn’t until shortly before the midterms that Weinstein found what came to be known as Gruber’s “stupidity” video. He plastered it on his Twitter feed days later, sometimes inserting the names of journalists to try to grab their attention. This time, the news was quickly picked up by Fox, the Daily Caller and other media outlets (but not the broadcast networks or major newspapers).

But even then, Weinstein was sounding cautionary notes on Twitter.

“Did first 2 interviews ever- both with orgs on the left. Hope I'm not turned into a crazy or sound ‘stupid.’ Videos speak-o for themselves”

And: “Just to be clear, I don't actually live in my mom's basement wearing a tin foil that!”

I can attest that he is actually quite lucid, and sounds nothing at all like a conspiracy theorist. Just a ticked-off guy who lost his insurance.

I pressed again on why he wouldn’t appear on camera or provide a photo. Weinstein said he didn’t want to be a political target, and recalled watching some pundits joke about whether Mitt Romney colored his hair.

“I thought, ‘Holy cow, if they’re gonna do that, what are they gonna do to me? I just want out.”

But he had a parting thought about the press and citizen journalists. There must be more Weinsteins out there, maybe one in each state, and they need a forum. The media have “got to open up a gateway,” he said, to receive such information.

www.foxnews.com...

originally posted by: VictorVonDoom
a reply to: Hoosierdaddy71

Of course not. That would be racist.

It would be nice to see some enterprising lawyer come up with a class action lawsuit, though. Lies were told, money was lost, that should be easy enough to prove in court.

That's plenty easy to prove in court. Now explain why it's illegal or even worthy of a civil judgment. Politicians are allowed to lie, there is no obligation on them at any time to tell the truth unless they are under oath, just like anyone else.

a reply to: Aazadan


Ummm...Methinks that's the problem...Perhaps there should be a clause that deals with just that.

Perhaps if there were legal ramifications against politicians lying to the public and causing "harm"...

I'm not talking censure...I'm talking expulsion...arrest...and jail...

C-ya...




YouSir