Reagan's Warnings Against Socialism & Socialized Medicine

His words ring ever more true today.



(H/T Irate Nation)

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Mirable Dictu, First Foreign Endorsement Of Obamacare Comes From . . .

. . . Fidel Castro. He of course understands what Obama and the progressive left has accomplished.

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Defusing Voter Outrage & Smearing A Movement

[T]he dark and personal tone of the final stages of the health fight could complicate Republican efforts to maintain their attacks on the legislation if they are seen as inciting an undue level of outrage and, conversely, could bolster Democrats if opponents of the measure are seen as breaching the boundaries of civility.

The reports of threats, coming after a tense weekend when protesters hurled racial and homophobic slurs at Democrats and spit on one congressman, left many Democrats shaken.

NYT, After Healthcare Vote, Threats On Lawmakers, 25 March 2010.

Dislike of our imperious progressive overlords and opposition to Obamacare is quite real. As to the latter, the latest poll from CBS shows a significant majority - 62% - want the Republicans to work to repeal Obamacare. The breakdown of that vote is telling: 89% of Republicans, 66% of Independents, and even 41% of Democrats.

So what is the left to do? The NYT article quoted above answers the question. They are now making a concerted effort, helped by an equally "progressive" MSM, to portray that there is some new level of violence, racism and homophobia in America, and further, that this violence, racism and homophobia is synonymous with the Tea Party movement who protested Obamacare at the capitol over the weekend. There is no doubt that this is a collateral attack on all of those who protest the passage of Obamacare and an attempt to delegitimize them. It is also just so incredibly hypocritical as to be jaw dropping.

As to politically motivated violence itself, John Hinderaker at Powerline states:

We condemn political violence in virtually all circumstances; certainly in all circumstances that could arise in our democracy

I certainly agree with that as the general rule, though as to what "could" foreseeably arise, I am much less sanguine. But that aside, the reality is, as John points out:

Threats of violence, sadly, are not uncommon in politics; let alone "harassment." Even insignificant conservatives like us have been threatened with violence on several occasions, and the linked article notes that Jim Bunning received threats after he temporarily held up the extension of unemployment benefits a few weeks ago.

Actually, the hypocrisy of this sudden expression of fear of violence on the left is pretty jaw dropping, given their virtual silence on the political violence of the past few years by the left directed against the right. John at Powerline points to:

The fact is that, unlike conservatives, modern liberals have had little quarrel with political violence. This is best demonstrated by their support for card check legislation, the entire point of which it to abolish the secret ballot so that union goons can use the threat of violence to extend union power and thereby enrich the Democratic Party. (If you doubt the truth of that proposition, try to think of another reason why the Democrats want to eliminate the secret ballot in union elections.) The beating of Kenneth Gladrey by union goons--more specifically, the lack of any interest in it by anyone in the Democratic Party, the media, or on the Left generally--shows how hypocritical the Democrats' current pacifism is. If the day ever comes when conservative groups start hiring goons, we can take the liberals' purported fears of violence more seriously.

To that, Instapundit adds:

REMEMBERING WHEN G.O.P. Offices Were Vandalized: “An apparent mob of vandals attacked the North Carolina Republican Party headquarters, causing minor smoke damage, breaking windows and leaving vulgar messages, police said.” I don’t remember a national panic over this, or over the bullet-riddled Bush/Cheney headquarters.

Then there was this episode. And, of course, this: “A group of protestors stormed and then ransacked a Bush-Cheney headquarters building in Orlando, Fla., Tuesday, according to Local 6 News.”

But those represented the righteous indignation of oppressed lefties, rather than the dangerous violence of nasty righties.

As I recall, the left gave critical acclaim to several works that advocated or showed the assassination of President Bush. And indeed, a blogger at Bin's Corner documents the many calls for the murder of Bush common at left-wing rallies. At any rate, I will not, for the purposes of this post, contest that current threats against Democratic law makers are real. But regardless, there is no question that this is being played up and blown out of proportion by the Dems in Congress and their MSM lapdogs in order to delegitimize the opposition to Obamacare. Moreover, the DNC is using these charges of racism and threats of political violence in their mailings to solicit donations.

And on a related matter of the Tea Party protests on Capitol Hill, all of the charges of racism, homophobia and spitting on Rep. Clyburn, made over the weekend, still lack a single scintilla of evidentiary support, despite the plethora of people using audio and visual recording devices at the event. And indeed, as to the charge of someone spitting on Rep. Clyburn, Instapundit goes to the videotape and runs that charge to ground - it appears that Rep. Clyburn was gilding the lilly (shades of Seinfeld). Yet how is the MSM playing this - I refer you to how the NYT, in their article quoted at the top of this post, so blithely describes the crowd of 40,000 people protesting Obamacare on Capitol Hill over the weekend: "The reports of threats, coming after a tense weekend when protesters hurled racial and homophobic slurs at Democrats and spit on one congressman, . . ."

These people are scurillous. As I posted below, we are in an ideological war in the U.S. today, and if conservatives are to win, we must find a way to effectively respond in such a way that everyone who reads or hears the left wing meme also hears the conservative response. With the MSM virtually in the pocket of the progressive left, it is a challenge.

Update: Eric Cantor hits the nail on the head in a statement today:



Update: One of the charges lodged by Politico this morning on the threats against Democrats came from a spokesman for Dem. Rep. Russ Carnahan who told Politico that "a coffin was placed in front of a [Carnahan's] house , another in a string of incidents against lawmakers after their vote Sunday on a health care overhaul." That certainly sounds threatening - until you hear the whole story.

Update: Andrew Breitbart at Big Government has an exceptional essay, 2010 A Race Odyssey, on the efforts by Clyburn and others to create a racist incident over the weekend, as well as a summary of the evidence that the charges lodged by the left are lies. As he opines, "If we let them get away with Saturday’s stunt — using the imagery of the Civil Rights era and hurtful lies to cast aspersions upon the tea party whole — then they really will have won the day." A similar sentiment is expressed at The Right Coast: "This latest Dem hysteria over the scariness of tea partiers is just beneath contempt."

Powerline also has a short post on the central figure in this latest Kabuki racial theatre, Rep. James Clyburn, who has doubled down on the his racism charges and now accuses the Republicans of aiding and abetting "terrorism."

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The Truth Slips Through

If you listen to the left long enough, you will hear members of the left slip-up and admit that their policies are ultimately aimed at garnering seemingly limitless power over people's lives.

Pelosi did it in China when she said that any "response" to "global warming" would require that government subject "every aspect of our lives" to an "inventory."

Just the other day, Dem. Rep. Tom Perriello made a plea for help, saying that Congress needed to be stopped or its members would "steal" ever more.

And today we have John Dingell making admissions about the heath care bill:



And on a related note, here is the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. When asked what part of the Constitution authorizes the government to require people to purchase health insurance as part of Obamacare, this Constitutional scholar cites to the "Good and Welfare" clause.



This is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee? To think this man holds a position of great power overseeing our Courts is simply jaw-dropping. There is no "good and welfare" clause in the Constitution.

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Obama Leads The Progressive Left Across The Rubicon (Updated)

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Sir Winston Churchill, Speech in November 1942

President Obama has crossed the Rubicon with the health care vote. The bill was not really about medicine; after all, a moderately priced, relatively small federal program could offer the poorer not now insured, presently not on Medicare or state programs like Medicaid or Medical, a basic medical plan.

We have no interest in stopping trial lawyers from milking the system for billions. And we don’t want to address in any meaningful way the individual’s responsibility in some cases (drink, drugs, violence, dangerous sex, bad diet, sloth, etc.) for costly and chronic health procedures.

No, instead, the bill was about assuming a massive portion of the private sector, hiring tens of thousands of loyal, compliant new employees, staffing new departments with new technocrats, and feeling wonderful that we “are leveling the playing field” and have achieved another Civil Rights landmark law . . .

Victor Davis Hanson, We've Crossed The Rubicon, PJM, 21 March, 2010

On Saturday night, we were a nation in deep trouble. We had a national debt of $12,676,374,186,522.00 - and were hemorrhaging billions in red ink daily. Unemployment/underemployment was well over 16% and was not forecast to get better during the coming year. We were still in the midst of the worst recession in our nation since the Great Depression - a recession itself brought on by Democrat social engineering of lending standards and a massive market distortion caused by Fannie and Freddie. (Update: The WSJ reports today that personal incomes contracted in the past year) Social Security, run as a ponzi scheme by a rapacious Congress for years and protected at all costs by Democrats, faced a huge problem of solvency (Update: with the insolvency starting this year) - dwarfed only by the massive unfunded liabilities looming in Medicare/Medicaid. And our ability to borrow to finance Obama's world record spending spree was rapidly deteriorating. Not only was our AAA rating for government securities in danger, but the market had already weighed in. "Two-year notes sold by the . . . Berkshire Hathaway Inc. in February yield 3.5 basis points less than Treasuries of similar maturity." Indeed, so serious are our economic woes that the "latest Fox News poll finds that 79 percent of voters think it’s possible the economy could collapse, including large majorities of Democrats (72 percent), Republicans (84 percent) and independents (80 percent)." Moreover, the same poll finds that three times as many individuals, some 64%, see our national debt as a greater threat to our nation than terrorism. In short, we were, on Saturday night, in a very bad situation. And then, Sunday night, Obama and the progressive left managed to make a bad situation exponentially worse.

On Sunday night, the progressive pulled out all of the stops to pass Obamacare, taking over, directly and indirectly, one sixth of our economy (voting roll here). Instead of addressing the looming disaster of Social Security and Medicare - indeed, instead of addressing unemployment and an economy in deep distress - Obama added on top of our failing entitlement programs the biggest entitlement program of them all. And Obamacare comes replete with massive new taxes, including taxes on investment income, unfunded state mandates that will mean higher state taxes, and the assurance of skyrocketing insurance premiums. As to our national debt, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former head of the CBO, explained the massive additions to our debt that we can expect as a result of this bill's passage.

The IRS will now expand massively as the designated arm of the state to enforce Obamacare. They will shortly begin hiring the 16,000 new agents needed to enforce the mandatory purchase of health insurance by all Americans. Over one hundred new bureaucratic offices are about to be created, all to oversee our Obamacare. As summed up by NRO, the vote last night “will increase taxes, increase premiums, and increase debt, while decreasing economic growth, job growth, and the quality of health care.” And the people are not fooled. When polled by CBS as to whether the health care plan pushed by Obama and the left was motivated by political concerns or actual concerns with health care - the majority, and even a majority of Democrats, 57%, answered that it was motivated by politics.

It is not enough to now simply say that our government runs our health care system. To give full credit where it is due, the Democrats now own it. Let's never let anyone forget that salient fact.

It looked for awhile like Bart Stupak and a handful of pro-life Democrats might hold out against language in the Senate bill that was so crafted as to allow for federal financing of abortions. Ultimately, Stupak caved in under intense pressure and with the promise that Obama would sign an executive order directing that no financing would go for abortions. An executive order does not trump the plain language of Congressional legislation. Indeed, a Court interpreting the law would likely only acknowledge the executive order in a footnote to its decision, if at all. You can bet your bottom dollar that, when the mandates become operative in a few years, there will be a law suit forcing the issue - and a court with any intellectual integrity will require that the government provide federal funding of abortion. The reality is that federal funding of abortion through Obamacare is now virtually inevitable.

Obama stated in remarks after the vote:

This is what change looks like. . . . We proved that this government — a government of the people and by the people — still works for the people.

Is Orwell now Obama's speechwriter? Health care played no role in causing our economic downturn - yet Obama pretended that it was at the heart of the problem. The plan designed by the progressive left does nothing to bend down the inflation of health care costs - yet it was sold on the basis of sound fiscal policy (Update: James Pethokoukis of Reuters no less calls it Faith Based Deficit Reduction; see also the post above, wherein Krauthammer forecasts an Obama attempt to impose a regressive VAT tax in order to fund Obamacare). Not a single poll showed that a majority of the people wanted this monstrosity - yet Obama claims a popular mandate. This was not a bill passed on its merits - it was progressive sausage made with toxic, backroom deals. All that last night proved was that the progressive left are power hungry statists willing to say and do anything in order to amass power. This is not a government that works for the people - it's a political elite that wants to control the people and punish wealth creation.

Megan McArdle, herself a throwback to old times - an intellectually honest, if a bit misguided, Democrat - summed up her thoughts at the Atlantic:

What I hope is that the Democrats take a beating at the ballot box and rethink their contempt for those mouth-breathing illiterates in the electorate. I hope Obama gets his wish to be a one-term president who passed health care. Not because I think I will like his opponent--I very much doubt that I will support much of anything Obama's opponent says. But because politicians shouldn't feel that the best route to electoral success is to lie to the voters, and then ignore them.

As Bill Kristol points out, this is by no means over, even now. Republicans are planning a series of parliamentary procedural moves that may yet impact final passage of proposed changes to the bill. But the real challenge lays in the upcoming elections. "[W]hat Republicans have to do is to make the 2010 and the 2012 elections referenda on Obamacare, win those elections, and then repeal Obamacare." Truer words were never spoken.

James Fallows, on the other hand, writing at the Atlantic thinks that "this will not seem anywhere near as poisonous seven months from now as it does today." He is living in a dream world if he thinks, after the election of Brown to Kennedy's seat in blue Mass., after the birth of the Tea Party movement so maligned out of fear by the left, this will all blow over. At the Politico, they speculate as to which Democrat seats are now in danger as a result of their vote last night on health care. No need to speculate. The answer is every damn one of them.

Even John McCain has put the left on notice that they should not expect any cooperation in Congress from the right after their actions of the past year:

"There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year," McCain said during an interview Monday on an Arizona radio affiliate. "They have poisoned the well in what they've done and how they've done it."

No, they didn't just poison the well, they urinated in it. And we really should go one further than McCain. If you hear anyone mention the word "bipartisan" again, in any suggesting that the Republicans should cooperate with the Obama administration, the only appropriate response is a swift and powerful kick to the groin. Repeat as necessary until the person expressing this obscenity has undergone a complete and permanent attitude adjustment.

While it will be several years before the full weight of Obamacare will be felt, some of the provisions, including ones directly attacking the health insurance industry, kick in immediately. One is a change to the acceptable ratio of payments to benefits that has long been the health insurance industry standard. The health care plan signed into law changes the acceptable ratio from 65/35 to to 85/15. In a stroke, Obama has destroyed the ability of health insurance companies to pay overhead, salaries and make a modicum of profit. In addition, the new health care bill includes a 40% rise in taxes on health insurance companies - which also must be paid from the 15. The net effect of this war on our health insurance industry will be a massive increase in premiums next January, when most plans renew, and a massive contraction of the health insurance industry as many, if not all, medium and small insurers, are forced from the market. This from a transcript of Rush Limbaugh's show on Tuesday, wherein a health insurance employee highlighted the impact of the newly passed bill:

. . .

CALLER: Okay. For time immemorial, both state and federal regulation -- and also just the industry standard -- has been a 65-45 percentage arrangement: 65 in claims payment and 45 for administration and claims expense. Withholding that you store for, you know, a major catastrophe or something.

RUSH: This is to pay your claims?

CALLER: No, 65% is to pay the claims. Thirty-five percent is for everything else.

RUSH: That means 35% is salaries, administration costs, and the offices, all the paperwork, that kind of thing?

CALLER: It's that as well as, you know, we are required to keep a certain amount of cash on hand as a percentage of our claims exposure to pay claims. . . .

RUSH: Now, I just want to make sure I understand here. State and federal regulations set those percentages?

CALLER: State and federal regulations, yes.

RUSH: So if you wanted to have 85% set aside for claims, you couldn't. You had to go at 65%?

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: If you wanted 30% set aside for claims and the rest were administration, you couldn't do it. It had to be 65%.

CALLER: That's illegal, yes. It has to be 65-35, and there's a couple of percentage either way, but generally when an insurance company falls outside of those guidelines, they are considered financially unstable.

RUSH: Well, who audits you all to make sure you are within the ratio?

CALLER: We're audited by the state insurance departments, primarily. There are some plans that are audited both state and federally, and then you have your private auditors who will come in as part of the stock market and that kind of thing. So we're audited often.
. . .
CALLER: . . . So what Obama just did an hour and a half ago is make every insurance company in the country financially unstable. Remember, the 15% that we are left has not only to pay salaries, maintenance, upkeep of buildings; it also has to pay the 40% increased taxes that we've got. I mean, there's just no way. You can't do it.

RUSH: Well, you're getting a little bit ahead of me here. What did Obama sign that changes this 65-45 split? In what way did Obama now sign you into permanent instability?

CALLER: The provision in the Senate bill requires that all insurance companies pay 85% of premiums collected every year in claims.

RUSH: So the 65 is now 85?

CALLER: Exactly. It doesn't matter how much we increase the premium, it won't matter.

. . .

Rush: . . . You originally thought that your industry would survive. You're speaking industry or just your particular company?

CALLER: I would say 99% of all insurance companies, health insurance companies in the country.

RUSH: Okay. So you originally thought you might have three to five years to stay in business under Obama. Now you said it's two to three. Why?

CALLER: Because of the 85-15. Plus the additional expenses were going to incur. Additionally, the mandates, what people don't understand when CMS (which is the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare) push a mandate down on insurance companies, we have to pay to complement those mandates. We don't know how many of those are in this monstrosity. So we can have our mandate budget doubled, our taxes already up 40% or whatever it is, and our cash flow immediately cut.

RUSH: Well, how can you know in advance of paying any claims? Because they've now shifted to 65% that you have to set aside for claims to 85%. How in the world can anybody know in advance of paying claims that it's going to amount to 85%?

CALLER: Well --

RUSH: Of course 65%? It seems to be like this is a ridiculous dictate made by people that have no clue how your business works.

CALLER: Well, they don't have a clue. But the way that that amount of money is calculated is you look at the past year, past five years, past ten years, and you see what your claims expense have been those years. Then based on your enrollment and your demographics you project forward into what you expect to be paying in the future, in the next year and the next five years. So you can do that. It's not precise to a dollar, but you usually get pretty close. What he's done is by saying, for example, the preventative services now --

RUSH: Those are free. Those are, quote, unquote, "free."

CALLER: Yeah, exactly.

RUSH: What the hell is a preventative service covered by an insurance company anyway?

CALLER: Well, that would be your colonoscopies, your mammograms, your yearly physicals, your lab work.

RUSH: Oh, so those are free now! So if I want to go get a colonoscopy today and I have an insurance policy, I'm not going to pay for it?

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: But you will.

CALLER: Well, we will. We'll pay out the nose for it.

RUSH: (laughing) Well...

CALLER: I know, bad analogy. I'm sorry.

RUSH: It is Christmas!

CALLER: But, Rush --

RUSH: Well, no, I don't look at a colonoscopy as Christmas. Don't misunderstand. . . . But it is Christmas in the sense that I'm not paying for it. I don't know how you can stay in business even two to three years with this kind of thing happening to you this year alone.

CALLER: I don't think we will and that's why I am seriously considering leaving this industry. I'm updating my resume. You know, people who I work with -- even people who voted for Obama and thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread -- are shell-shocked.

RUSH: That just frustrates the hell out of me. Anybody with a brain has no reason to be shell-shocked about who this guy is, but it is what it is.
. . .
CALLER: And you know how many people are going to die in the interim, Rush? I say that in all sincerity, because come January 1st you're going to see 200, 300% increases in premiums and people are going to drop their coverage. So you've got the woman who isn't going to go get the mammogram or the man who's not going to get the prostate exam.

RUSH: Wait a minute!

CALLER: People are going to die.

RUSH: I thought the mammogram was free.

CALLER: Not when you drop the coverage because you can't afford three times the premium. Remember, the premiums are going up because of the government, and jobs are being lost because of the government. If you can't pay it, you can't pay it. So people are going to drop it. They're going to drop their insurance before they drop their mortgage.

RUSH: They're going to be clamoring to the government to fix the mean-spirited insurance companies for raising the prices so high and that's where Obama's going to step in and say, "You know what? We have no choice here but than to do it ourselves," and then you get dumped on again first and foremost with Obama portraying the government as the savior. . . .

Read the entire transcript.

When Julius Caseser crossed the Rubicon river in 49 B.C., entering into Roman territory, it marked both a crossing of the point of no return and a declaration of war on the Republic. The end result was ultimately the destruction of Rome's Republican form of government. I think the analogy here is apt. Obama has so polarized politics in our government, it is questionable when or if we will see a return to rational, measured politics until either conservatism or progressivism wins out and the other is pushed into the dustbin of history. We are, as I blogged here, in a zero sum ideological war today. Never in history has the political system been so manipulated and in such a highly partisan fashion. Its provisions, mandating each person purchase health insurance, if upheld, will represent a vast expansion of the government's power to control and direct our lives. But even beyond all of that, this bill threatens not merely our health care system, but it also poses a clear and present danger to the fiscal viability of our nation.

In the end, the right must not merely repeal Obamacare, but it must present a better alternative. In that respect, Paul Ryan may in fact have the answer to Obamacare, as well as the problems of Medicare and Social Security. His "Roadmap" is a very serious attempt to address the actual problems we face. Here is hoping that Congressman Ryan is a player in 2012.

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Pelosi: Are You So "Arrogant . . . Ignorant . . . Incompetent?"

Republican doctors in the House are unleashed:

Eleven members of the Republican doctors railed against Democrats health reform plan this afternoon, demonstrating the increasingly heated and personal rhetoric surrounding the health reform bill.

Here’s the most vitriolic:

“I have three simple questions Ms Pelosi,” said Rep. [and family practice Dr.] Paul Broun, R-Ga. “Are you so arrogant that you think you know what’s best for the American people? Are you so ignorant that you are oblivious to the wishes of the American people? And are you so incompetent that you are going to ignore the Constitution of the United States, use tricks, deceptions, bald faced lies to try to ram down the throat of the American people something that they do not want and is going to be absolutely worse for their healthcare?”

My question - why haven't the right been taking this tack - and speaking with this level of passion - from the beginning. Give me one Paul Broun speech for every fifty monotone sound bites from Mitch McConnell (about whom I feel almost as much antipathy as I did for the odious Trent Lott.)

Indeed, I have long maintained that the right has suffered from not repeating its message with anywhere near enough repetition and not repeating it with utter, heartfelt passion. We finally see it from Broun, whilst the bell begins to toll 12. Now where are the rest?

And more on the canard of the "savings" reported in the CBO report from Hot Air:

This is why they’re delaying the start of the program, of course. If it kicked in right away, the decade-long estimate would obviously be well into the trillions. So they simply stalled it for four years, incurring just $17 billion in costs — or 1.8 percent of the total 10-year estimate — through 2013 so that wavering Democrats could go back to their districts and tell baldfaced lies to their constituents about the pricetag. A perfect ending to this travesty.

If Republicans where smart, they would take all the smoke and mirrors out of the health care bill - add in the Doc fix, then ask CBO to score that bill.

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The First Real Obama Interview Since . . . Well, Ever

My hats off to Bret Baier of Fox News for conducting the first real interview of Obama since he entered the national stage as a Senator. Baier asked relevant questions and tough follow-ups, making it difficult for Obama to dodge the questions. Obama was on the defensive throughout, he was bobbing and weaving like a champion boxer on issues of process and his double accounting for savings in Medicare. Further, Obama tried to mount a new - and somewhat bizarre - defense of the indefensible Louisiana Purchase. All in all, Baer conducted a very professional interview. Obama did not come off well.

What I found most stunning about this interview - Obama's admission that his trillion (or more likely, multi-trillion) health care plan will do nothing to solve massive multi-trillion dollar Medicare insolvency. You can find the transcript of the interview here.





And then the Fox Panel analyzed the interview:



Responses to the Baier interview are all over the net:

NRO - Two thumbs up for a superb interview

Doug Ross - The President ducked, dodged, stammered and "did some his best fibbing ever."

Another Black Conservative - "Normally Obama is pretty good at giving non-answers, but under Baier's pressure, his non-answers were quite apparent."

Weekly Standard - "What tripped Obama up was the spinach. He found it hard to defend special deals like the Cornhusker Kickback, Gator Aid, and Louisiana Purchase. He gave a rambling and evasive answer when Baier asked why the bill double-counts Medicare "savings." He said health care reform would pass because "it's the right thing to do." Guess that settles it, then."

Hot Air - "This moment, from Bret Baier’s interview on Fox News with Obama, might just be one of the biggest “WTF?!” moments from Obama’s presidency yet. Obama is either completely making things up, living in an alternate reality, or really, really confused."

Sister Toldjah - "I don’t think I’ve ever seen the President so defensive. And, of course, he did not answer a single question. Very revealing – or, rather, 'transparent.'"

Jammie Wearing Fool - "I can't imagine even the most diehard Obama sycophant thought he came off looking good here. Petulant, whiny, unpresidential, not worthy of even being a community organizer."

Neo-Neocon - "Obama seemed clueless and meandering in the interview, repeating the same points over and over and unable to counter Baier in any effective way, resorting to what Holden Caulfield used to call “slinging the old bull” and bringing up strangely irrelevant stuff like the Hawaii earthquake."

Huffington Post, Newsweek, AP - How Dare Baier

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Even Pelosi Agrees The Slaughter The Constitution Plan Is Unconstitutional

First up, Jack Cafferty doesn't hold back in his recent comments on Pelosi's "sleezy" plan for passing Obamacare.



(H/T Newsbusters)

As I blogged here, the Slaughter the Constitution plan is unconstitutional becasue it violates the express terms of Art. I Sec. 7. That section that require that a bill "pass" both houses and the vote on the bill be "entered" into a journal. Neo-Neocon has much more.

Then there is this from Mark Tapscott at the Washington Examiner, discussing a Court action brought against Republicans in 2005 when they used a mirror of the Slaughter plan to approve an increase in the national debt. Public Citzen filed the Court case:

Here's the argument they made:

"Article I of the United States Constitution requires that before proposed legislation may "become[] a Law," U.S. CONST. art. I, § 7, cl. 2, "(1) a bill containing its exact text [must be] approved by a majority of the Members of the House of Representatives; (2) the Senate [must] approve[] precisely the same text; and (3) that text [must be] signed into law by the President," Clinton v. City of New York, 524 U.S. 417, 448, 118 S.Ct. 2091, 141 L.Ed.2d 393 (1998).

"Public Citizen, a not-for-profit consumer advocacy organization, filed suit in District Court claiming that the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, Pub.L. No. 109-171, 120 Stat. 4 (2006) ("DRA" or "Act"), is invalid because the bill that was presented to the President did not first pass both chambers of Congress in the exact same form. In particular, Public Citizen contends that the statute's enactment did not comport with the bicameral passage requirement of Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution, because the version of the legislation that was presented to the House contained a clerk's error with respect to one term, so the House and Senate voted on slightly different versions of the bill and the President signed the version passed by the Senate.

"Public Citizen asserts that it is irrelevant that the Speaker of the House and the President pro tempore of the Senate both signed a version of the proposed legislation identical to the version signed by the President. Nor does it matter, Public Citizen argues, that the congressional leaders' signatures attest that indistinguishable legislative text passed both houses." (Emphasis added)

It's important to be clear that the issue before the court was whether a minor text correction was sufficient to satisfy the constitutional requirement that both chambers of Congress must pass the exact same bill. In this 2005 case, the court ruled the minor correction was acceptable.

The deeming of an entire bill to have been passed without a prior recorded vote goes far beyond a minor text correction, so the constitutional principle clearly would be violated by the Slaughter Solution.

And now for the kicker, guess who joined Public Citizen in that suit with amicus briefs:

Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman and Louise Slaughter

Heh. And hey, they got it right. My question, why isn't John Boehner passing out copies of this brief to every reporter in the WH Press Room?

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Progressively Surreal: The Gulf Between Words & Deeds

We learn today that the Obama administration - which came into office promising to bring us the most transpartent administration ever - has in fact been far more restrictive in answering Freedom of Information requests than the Bush administration ever thought of being. This from Raw Story:

. . . [A] provision in the Freedom of Information Act law that allows the government to hide records that detail its internal decision-making has been invoked by Obama agencies more often in the past year than during the final year of President George W. Bush.

Major agencies cited that exemption to refuse records at least 70,779 times during the 2009 budget year, compared with 47,395 times during President George W. Bush's final full budget year, according to annual FOIA reports filed by federal agencies.

An Associated Press review of Freedom of Information Act reports filed by 17 major agencies found that the use of nearly every one of the law's nine exemptions to withhold information from the public rose in fiscal year 2009, which ended last October.

The AP review comes on the heels of another bit of government transparency news: that the Obama Administration has threatened to veto a congressional intelligence bill because it objects to efforts to increase intelligence oversight.

Among other things, the proposed legislation would subject intelligence agencies to General Accountability Office review. US intelligence agencies are currently immune from review by the Congressional auditing office.

. . . In all, major agencies cited that or other FOIA exemptions to refuse information at least 466,872 times in budget year 2009, compared with 312,683 times the previous year, the review found. Agencies often cite more than one exemption when withholding part or all of the material sought in an open-records request.

All told, the 17 agencies reviewed by AP reported getting 444,924 FOIA requests in fiscal 2009, compared with 493,610 in fiscal 2008." . . .

Let us not forget, Obama promised that his would heal the divides and even slow the rise of the oceans. He was to lead us into the promised land of post-partisanship. Instead, he seems to be leading us to a period of bitter partisanship not seen since prior to the Civil War.

The left is hypocrisy unbound. Under the Bush Presidency, the left screamed from the rooftops that the Bush administration was warring on the Constitution - essentially because Bush and the right would not grant new Constitutional rights to enemy combatants and because he passed the Patriot Act as a responsible means of balancing the needs for protecting America against terrorist attack. Yet now all of that is turned on its head.

Now the left conducts a real war on our Constitution - from Obama's war on private property to Pelosi's plan to Slaughter the Constitution. That does not even begin to consider Obama and the left's larger war on our form of deliberative democracy. Nor the fact that, now that Obama is President, a Democrat controlled Congress, at the request of President Obama, has yet again extended the Patriot Act.

Now Obama, who promised us the most transparent government in office, has pulled down all the blinds on the windows into our government. There was of course his utterly opaque handling of the drafting of Obamacare. But that is one instance. The reality is that, in his first year in office, he has not merely held less press conferences than Bush, he has engaged in an effort to manipulate the press that even radical leftie Helen Thomas, sharply criticized several months ago:

White House correspondent Helen Thomas told CNSNews.com that not even Richard Nixon tried to control the press the way President Obama is trying to control the press.

“Nixon didn’t try to do that,” Thomas said. . . .

“What the hell do they think we are, puppets?” Thomas said. “They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.

True, Helen, true. November cannont come soon enough.

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Pelosi's Slaughter The Constitution Plan Part II

. . . We have entered a political wonderland, where the rules are whatever Democrats say they are. Mrs. Pelosi and the White House are resorting to these abuses because their bill is so unpopular that a majority even of their own party doesn't want to vote for it. Fence-sitting Members are being threatened with primary challengers, a withdrawal of union support and of course ostracism. Michigan's Bart Stupak is being pounded nightly by MSNBC for the high crime of refusing to vote for a bill that he believes will subsidize insurance for abortions.

Democrats are, literally, consuming their own majority for the sake of imposing new taxes, regulations and entitlements that the public has roundly rejected but that they believe will be the crowning achievement of the welfare state. . . .

Wall St. Journal, Slaughter House Rules, 16 March 2010

Pelosi does not yet have the votes to pass the Senate's Obamacare bill and it is a real question whether she will ever them. As an alternative, Rep. Louise Slaughter, head of the House Rules Committee, came up with a plan to have the House pass a bill with changes to the Senate bill to make it acceptable to Democrats in the House, while at the same time "deeming" the Senate bill to have passed without ever having to vote on it. According to the Washington Post, it is an option Crazy Nancy seems ever closer to choosing.

As I pointed out here, that violates the expression provisions of Article I, Sec. 7 of the Constitution. As WSJ explains today, that provision provides that "no bill can become law unless it is put up for public vote by both houses of Congress, and under Section 5 'the Yeas and Nays of the Members of either House on any question . . . shall be entered on the Journal.'" The Slaughter the Constitution plan of "deeming" the Senate bill passed obviously would run afoul of those requirements.

When I wrote my post, I pointed out that I was unaware of any particular precedent that would weigh on this issue beyond the plain language of Art. I, Sec. 7. Since then, Andy McCarthy at NRO pointed out a Supreme Court case very close to being dead on point:

[I]n Clinton v. City of New York (1998), . . . the Supreme Court held the line-item veto unconstitutional, Justice Stevens's ruling explained that for a bill to become law, both Houses of Congress must vote on precisely the same text, and it must then be signed into law by the president. As they quote the decision:

If one paragraph of that text had been omitted at any one of those three stages, Public Law 105—33 would not have been validly enacted. [Emphasis added] If the Line Item Veto Act were valid, it would authorize the President to create a different law - one whose text was not voted on by either House of Congress or presented to the President for signature.

Something that might be known as 'Public Law 105—33 as modified by the President' may or may not be desirable, but it is surely not a document that may 'become a law' pursuant to the procedures designed by the Framers of Article I, Section 7, of the Constitution.

Of course, that was twelve years ago and we now have a Court with more empathy. But if the Dems proceed according to their outrageous plan, the House will not have voted on the same 2,000 pages of paragraphs that the Senate voted on.

In light of the Constitution's plain language, and in light of the previous Supreme Court holding in the above referenced case, this doesn't appear to be a difficult legal question. If the Slaughter the Constitution plan is used, it should be struck down as unconstitutional by our Courts.

That said, it may well be "that however clear a constitutional violation may be presented by the Slaughter rule . . . there is a significant impediment to challenging that violation in federal court." That impediment comes from something called the political question doctrine under which the Courts may demur and refuse to reach the core issues. The political question doctrine arose out of the Court's "desire to avoid inserting itself into conflicts between branches of the federal government. It is justified by the notion that there exist some questions best resolved through the political process . . ." As Shannen Coffin explains at the NRO:

For fence-sitting Dems, the rule permitting the health-care bill to be "deemed" passed by a vote on reconciliation seems aptly named. Nancy Pelosi seems hell-bent on leading her little lambs to the slaughter. Regarding Andy's point that the rule would likely withstand a constitutional challenge in court despite its apparent conflict with the textual requirement of bicameralism and presentment, Andy is correct. The Supreme Court, since an 1892 decision in Marshall Field & Co. v. Clark, has refused to look behind the signature of the speaker of the house and president of the Senate (or president pro tempore) on an enrolled bill to challenge the process by which that bill was enrolled and a claim that the bill was not properly enacted. . . .

Our Courts seemingly have little problem ignoring the polical question doctrine on all those many occasions when they apply judicial activism to usurp the power of the legislature and alter the social policy of our nation per their whim. Abortion, gay marriage, the "seperation of Church and State" are just a few of the issues where Courts have usurped the power of the legislature to write their own policy preferences into law. Thus it would be true irony were the Courts to rely on the doctrine in this case. They would be allowing an act to stand that goes far beyond mere social policy and strikes at the very core of our version a Constitutional Republic, It is the type of situation in which the Court's duty to stand as guardians of our Constitution are at their zenith. Yet there is every reason to be pessimistic on this one, unfortunately.

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Crazy Nancy Adds To Her Greatest Hits

Speaking on the Healthcare bill . . .



Pelosi-style governance seems to resemble a national game of "pin the tail on the donkey" moreso than deliberative democracy.

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Ethics In A Democrat Majority Congress and Massa Unleashed

Democrat Rep. Eric Masa has gone nuclear on Congress and the Obama administration. Already having announced his resignation from Congress effective at 5 p.m. today, Massa claims, with some apparent justification, that he is being railroaded out of Congress by the House leadership and Rahm Emanuel because of his refusal to vote "yes" on Obamacare. This from Massa's radio interview on Sunday:

- On the incident that is the subject of the ethics complaint against him:

“On New Year’s Eve, I went to a staff party. It was actually a wedding for a staff member of mine; there were over 250 people there. I was with my wife. And in fact we had a great time. She got the stomach flu,” he said.

Massa explained that he then danced first with the bride, who was not identified, and then with a bridesmaid. He said multiple cameras recorded the incident.

“I said goodnight to the bridesmaid,” Massa continued. “I sat down at the table where my whole staff was, all of them by the way bachelors.”

“One of them looked at me and as they would do after, I don’t know, 15 gin and tonics, and goodness only knows how many bottles of champagne, a staff member made an intonation to me that maybe I should be chasing after the bridesmaid and his points were clear and his words were far more colorful than that,” Massa said. “And I grabbed the staff member sitting next to me and said, ‘Well, what I really ought to be doing is fracking you.’ And then [I] tossled the guy’s hair and left, went to my room, because I knew the party was getting to a point where it wasn’t right for me to be there. Now was that inappropriate of me? Absolutely. Am I guilty? Yes.”

- Massa, as to why he was being "railroaded:"

[Massa] accused Dems of a setup. Massa voted against health care legislation in Nov., and he has not been a reliable vote for Dem leadership. That, he said, has put a target on his back.

"When I voted against the cap and trade bill, the phone rang and it was the chief of staff to the president of the United States of America, Rahm Emanuel, and he started swearing at me in terms and words that I hadn't heard since that crossing the line ceremony on the USS New Jersey in 1983," Massa said. "And I gave it right back to him, in terms and words that I know are physically impossible."

"If Rahm Emanuel wants to come after me, maybe he ought to hold himself to the same standards I'm holding myself to and he should resign," Massa said.

Massa slammed House Maj. Leader Steny Hoyer for discussing a House ethics committee inquiry, accusing Hoyer of lying in an effort to eliminate an opponent of health care. Hoyer said last week he heard in early Feb. about allegations against Massa, and that he told Massa's office to report the allegations to the ethics committee.

"Steny Hoyer has never said a single word to me at all, never, not once," Massa said. "Never before in the history of the House of Representatives has a sitting leader of the Democratic Party discussed allegations of House investigations publicly, before findings of fact. Ever."

"I was set up for this from the very, very beginning," he added. "The leadership of the Democratic Party have become exactly what they said they were running against."

Massa bemoaned the state of the nation's politics, which he said is perpetuated by the constant need for money to run for re-election. And, he said, he has been made an example by Dem leadership.

"There is not a single member of the Democratic freshman class [that] is going to vote against this health care bill now that they've got me," he said. "Eric Massa's probably not going to go back to Congress, because the only way I would go back there would be as an independent. A pox on both parties."

- And Massa had some particularly harsh words for Rahm Emanuel, whom he described as "the son of the devil's spawn." You can hear his riff on Emanuel here.

It is not possible, based on what we know today, to dismiss Massa's complaint that he is being railroaded. Ethics in this Democratic congress is an absolute joke. The House Ethics Committee credits the defense of the various Congressman despite all evidence to the contrary. To wit - within the past two weeks, we have been treated to Charlie Rangel being given a slap on the wrists for taking a Carribean vacation paid for by lobbyists when the rules were clear that such is an ethics violation. Rangel's defense, accepted by the Ethics Committee, was that he never received the multiple communications from his staff, by e-mail and letter, informing him of the rule. If only we applied that same degree of deference to incredulous defenses in our criminal courts, we could solve the problem of prison overcrowding immediately.

But it gets better. The same ethics committee cleared seven Congressmen, including Jim Moran and Jack Murtha, of trading pork for campaign contributions despite a series of e-mails and letters that directly spell out what was going on. Indeed, there seems little difference between the evidence used to convict Duke Cunningham and the evidence that most of the seven Congressman were trading pork for campaign contributions. The only substantive difference appears to be that the House Ethics Committee gave preference to the flat denials from the Congressman.

And since when did the Democrat Party become incensed with inappropriate conduct relating solely to sex - whether homosexual or heterosexual (and in the case of Ted Kennedy, throw in homicide). As to the heterosexual scandal, the poster boy is Bill Clinton, though JFK doing Marilyn Monroe in the oval office comes a close second. As to homosexual scandal, in 1990 Barney Frank had one of his gay pick ups running a gay prostitution ring out of Frank's apartment. Barney is still in office. In 1983, Democrat Rep. Gerry Studds received only a censure for bending over a few of the young male paiges. He too continued in office. Even if Massa's comment was more than a mere joke, the history of Democrats is that they don't care. So, it would seem Massa may have some legitimate complaint that he is being railroaded.

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Portrait Of A Fiscal Hawk

Fortune Magazine has a good article on Rep. Paul Ryan - a Congressman who recently arrived on the national stage with his articulate criticism of Obama's health care plans. The article discusses Ryan's economic plans to put America back on a sound - and sane - fiscal footing.:

What is the Ryan plan , and why is the Obama administration seemingly obsessed with it? Ryan calls his proposal, published in January, the Roadmap for America's Future. It's a remarkably comprehensive, daring manifesto that tackles every part of the budget on a presidential scale, from Social Security to tax policy to health-care reform.

The goal is to eliminate the deficit, and eventually all federal debt, without any crippling tax increases. Under Ryan's plan, for example, federal spending would reach just 24% of GDP in 2035 and then fall, vs. the CBO's projection of 34% and rising from there. Ryan would make the deficit disappear by mid-century. . . .

Do read the whole article. Ryan, like Chris Christie, are people to watch as the Dems promise to lead us down an insane fiscal path - until 2012.

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A Cautionary Tale On Medical Expenses

This from from Oswald Bastable:

A man runs into the vet's office carrying his dog, screaming for help. The vet rushes him back to an examination room and has him put his dog down on the examination table. The vet examines the still, limp body and after a few moments tells the man that his dog, regrettably, is dead.

The man, clearly agitated and not willing to accept this, demands a second opinion. The vet goes into the back room and comes out with a cat and puts the cat down next to the dog's body. The cat sniffs the body, walks from head to tail poking and sniffing the dog's body and finally looks at the vet and meows. The vet looks at the man and says, "I'm sorry, but the cat thinks that your dog is dead too."

The man is still unwilling to accept that his dog is dead. The vet brings in a black Labrador. The lab sniffs the body, walks from head to tail, and finally looks at the vet and barks. The vet looks at the man and says, "I'm sorry, but the lab thinks your dog is dead too."

The man, finally resigned to the diagnosis, thanks the vet and asks how much he owes. The vet answers, "$650." "$650 to tell me my dog is dead?" exclaimed the man.... "Well," the vet replies, "I would only have charged you $50 for my initial diagnosis. The additional $600 was for the cat scan and lab tests."

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Jobs, Deficits and Health Care - Spinning On A Bridge Over Very Troubled Waters

The unemployment figures stayed at 9.7% for February. As the LA Times put it, "Obama administration encouraged by steady unemployment rate." And Obama himself hailed the news as clear signs of progress. Talk about your lowered expectations.

But the "steady" figure of 9.7% unemployment itself hid more problems. The work force actually contracted yet again in February, losing a net of 36,000 more jobs. Perhaps more importantly, the Labor Dept.'s "broader measure of unemployment and underemployment rose to 16.8% last month, from 16.5% in January." Tom Blumer of Bizzyblog digs deeper into the numbers and finds even more to be pessimistic about.

Were this a typical recession, we would have begun pulling out of it some time ago. We should already be seeing a return to normal employment levels. We are not because Obama is not working to restore America, he is working to remake it. Between health care, regulation of carbon, and a reworking of our financial regulations, Obama portends to work a sea change to America, with the federal government expanding its power over every aspect of society. And as Blumer points out, quoting a Heritage Foundation article, all of this has businesses hanging back:

The reason our unemployment rate is so much higher now is low job creation, not high job loss. So why aren’t businesses creating jobs?

■ At one of President Obama’s many jobs summits, Fred Lampropoulos told The New York Times that businesses were uncertain about investment because “there’s such an aggressive legislative agenda that businesspeople don’t really know what they ought to do.” That uncertainty, he added, “is really what’s holding back the jobs.”

■ Dan DiMicco, CEO of steelmaker Nucor Corp, told the Wall Street Journal: “Companies large and small are saying, ‘I am not going to do anything until these things — health care, climate legislation — go away or are resolved.’”

■ Porta-King CEO Steve Schulte told USA Today his company is not investing because “proposals in Congress to tackle climate change and overhaul health care would raise costs.”

■ The New York Post’s Charles Gasparino reported on the 600 companies stock analyst Peter Sidoti covers: “‘There hasn’t been one bankruptcy,’ he tells me. How did they survive the recession? By cutting costs and hoarding cash, not expanding their business and hiring more people, even as the economy now is starting to recover. During other recoveries, Sidoti says, firms like these would be hiring workers in droves as demand picks up for goods and services. This time around, they’re not — because ‘they don’t know what their costs are going to be.’” . . .

Unfortunately for America, Obama's efforts to rework our health care system ostensibly for economic reasons portends to be counterproductive on an insane scale. As Paul Ryan points out here, Obama's plan does nothing to bend down the curve of health care costs, and it understates by more than half what this monster will cost our country. As Krauthammer writes today, if Obama was truly concerned with the economic aspects of health care, then the single most important step he could undertake to bend down the cost curve of health care expenses would be to engage in tort reform. But Obama's health care plan is not about economics, it is about the accretion of power:

. . . Among the few Republican suggestions President Obama pretended to incorporate was tort reform. What did he suggest to address the plague of defensive medicine that a Massachusetts Medical Society study showed leads to about 25 percent of doctor referrals, tests and procedures being done for no medical reason? A few ridiculously insignificant demonstration projects amounting to one-half of one-hundredth of 1 percent of the cost of his health-care bill. . . .

It should also be noted that the CBO came out today with revised projections showing that, with Obama's massive spending, we can expect add a trillion dollars annually to our budget deficit over the next decade. This exceeds Obama's own ten year estimate by $1.2 trillion over ten years. It will mean a deficit in a decade that is near ten times the deficit left by the Bush administration and will top 20% or our GDP. Those are numbers that would make Robert Mugabe sit up nights worrying.

Lastly, there is Obama's latest plan to tax our financial institutions as a sort of punishment. Obama is selling this risible idea on a class warfare platform. As any student of Econ 101 could tell you, taxes on businesses get passed through to consumers to the maximum extent possible and, to the extent that they don't get passed on, then they manifest in other negative consequences for our economy. Today, the CBO actually has come out to explain it for those who are economically illiterate. This from Hot Air:

This only comes as news to people who haven’t worked in the private sector, of course — which means the entirety of the Obama administration and most of the Democratic leadership in Congress. It takes a CBO analysis for them to understand that increasing costs on businesses means increasing costs on their customers — or forcing them out of business altogether. This time, the CBO explains the impact of raising fees on financial institutions to the clueless:

President Obama’s proposed fee on the country’s biggest banks receiving taxpayer bailout money would ultimately result in costs to the firms’ customers, employees, and investors, a non-partisan Congressional watchdog said today.
…
But the Congressional Budget Office today warned that “the ultimate cost of a tax or fee is not necessarily borne by the entity that writes the check to the government.”

“The cost of the proposed fee would ultimately be borne to varying degrees by an institution’s customers, employees, and investors,” the CBO said today in a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley.

“Customers would probably absorb some of the cost in the form of higher borrowing rates and other charges, although competition from financial institutions not subject to the fee would limit the extent to which the cost could be passed to borrowers. Employees might bear some of the cost by accepting some reduction in their compensation, including income from bonuses, if they did not have better employment opportunities available to them. Investors could bear some of the cost in the form of lower prices of their stock if the fee reduced the institution’s future profits.”

The availability of credit – already a problem for some consumers and businesses – could also be limited by the proposed fee, the CBO said. . . .

Obama is leading us into economic oblivion at a sprint. The question in 2012 will be whether it is even possible to reverse the damage. Conservatives used to say tongue in cheek that Obama's inauguration would begin Carter's second term. If only . . .

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Obamacare, The President's Edition - Bigger, Longer, Taxier, More Expensive

Obamacare rises from the grave yet again. This is like a B-movie horror flick where the beast cannot be killed - at least until November. Obama seems utterly determined to destroy his party - fine by me, as long as he doesn't destroy health care and our economy along the way. Unfortunately, those are two real possiblities. Here are the short facts on the new Obamacare.

- It retains the Senate Bill with some important additions:

- Obama would add more taxes including a 2.9% capital gains tax increase and a doubling of the Medicare Payroll tax for high income earners.

- The Union fix is still there, but now it has been extended to everyone so that the hefty tax on cadillac health plans will kick in about 2018.

- After all Obama's talk that the laws regarding federal funding for abortion should remain the same, we now get to pay for abortions with our tax dollars.

- Taking a page from Hugo Chavez, we get a new bureacratic office, a federal Health Insurance Rate Authority, to effect national price controls on the cost of health care insurance. Price controls lead inevitably to either higher rates as they stifle competition or they end in scarcity. The justification for this are that the evil insurance companies are scamming us - with the most recent example being the 39% increase in premiums by Anthem in California. The problems - there is "virtually no competition in California when it comes to individual health insurance policies. Anthem pretty much has the market sewn up." Further, healthy people are dropping from the insurance rolls because of the horrid California economy, leaving only those with significant problems in the insurance pools. Take a look at Hugo's economy and you can get a good feel for the effect of price controls.

- Obama has tinkered enough with the Senate bill - and done so with sufficient inattention to detail - that the CBO now says that cannot score Obama's bill.

- AP adds the following:

The plan [includes additional] fees on drug companies and other health industry firms. . . .

Like the House and Senate bills, the plan would require most Americans to carry health insurance coverage, with federal subsidies to help many afford the premiums. Insurance companies would be barred from denying coverage to people with medical problems or charging them more.

Bottom line, I didn't think it possible, but Obama has taken the a nightmare of a bill and actually succeeded in making it worse. Again I ask, why in God's name are Republican's going to meet with Obama on this issue on Thursday. Not since Custer decided to meet for a pow wow at Little Big Horn has there been a decision this idiotic. (Note: Custer did not accept an invitation, I just said that for dramatic effect.)

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Will On A Roll

What superb responses - and here he is at the CPAC Conference







(H/T Hot Air here and here)

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Rope A Republican

It was during the Ali-Foreman fight that Ali made famous the rope-a-dope strategy. He was on the ropes most of the fight, way back on points - until Foreman got tired in the later rounds and Ali knocked him out. Foreman had strength and power on Ali. Ali played him like a cheap violin.

Now we have Obama, on the ropes, his poll numbers sinking quicker than a lead weight dropped over the a deep sea trench, and he has invited the Republicans to a televised meeting on health care. For the Congressional Republicans to take this bait is the height of stupidity. Yet according to WaPo, that is precisely what they intend to do.

The Senate's top Republican promised Sunday morning that he and his members will attend President Obama's health care summit on Thursday "ready to participate" but said the Democrats are being "arrogant" by refusing to scrap their legislation and start over.

"You know, they are saying, "Ignore the wishes of the American people. We know more about this than you do. And we're going to jam it down your throats no matter what," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on Fox News Sunday.

Republicans have accused the president of using Thursday's summit as political theater, and had raised the prospect of not attending. McConnell dismissed the idea of a GOP boycott, saying that "we're discussing the -- sort of the makeup of the room and that sort of thing, but yeah, I intend to be there and my members will be there and ready to participate."

McConnell said, however, that his party will continue to oppose Democrats if they try to use the parliamentary tactic called "reconciliation" to pass parts of their health care agenda without 60 votes in the Senate. He acknowledged that there are "a variety of different options" that Republicans could use to try and slow that process.

"The only thing bipartisan about it would be the opposition to it, because a number of Democrats have said, "Don't do this. This is not the way to go," McConnell said.

"We believe that we think a better way to go is to, step by step, move in the direction of dealing with the cost issue, targeting things like junk lawsuits against doctors and hospitals, interstate insurance competition, small association health plans," he added. "There are a number of things you can do without having the government try to take over one-sixth of the economy." . . .

This is sheer idiocy from a Senator who has obviously spent far too much time in Washington. McConnell also played a pivotal role in the big spending ways of the previous Republican Congress and in refusing to forgo earmarks since. This horse's ass is now going to play right into Obama's hands. I hope that there are ten Tea Party candidates that take part in the Republican primary for this joker's seat.

McConnell is clearly concerned about not appearing "bipartisan." But Obama, Reid and Pelosi have made this the most partisan Congress in over a century. McConnell is spineless indeed if he is afraid to explain that to the American people in no uncertain terms.

The left's health care monstrosity is an economy buster that most Americans do not want passed. It was written by the left with little to no Republican input. Republicans have every right in the world to refuse Obama's dog and pony show on 25 February. They should offer instead to talk about jobs. Barring that, there is not a single thing good that can come out of this for Republicans.

What I expect to happen on Feb. 25 is Obama will attempt to portray his plan as moderate and the Republicans as pure obstructionists. Repulicans will respond in respectful and measured tones wholly inappropriate to the level of malfeasence by Obama and the Democrats in the crafting of this bill, and wholly inappropriate to the level of danger this bill poses to our nation. Regardless, Obama will use that as cover and justification to jam healthcare down the throats of all Americans using the budget reconciliation process. McConnell is assisting. Rope a Republican indeed. God help us, in 2010 we need to throw all the bums out.

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