I had been kicking around a number of posts about the latest health care endgame which, if the House Deem-and-Pass of the Senate bill plus amendments go through will not really be the endgame, but the end of the beginning of the first round of the endgame.  Because from there, it’ll go back to the Senate and then may end up bouncing between the Houses for a while until they come up with some kind of resolution, that is, if Harry Reid comes up with the 51 votes he needs to proceed in the Senate.  And so far he hasn’t.

And should any version of Obamacare pass, we’ll move into a new era, an era inaugurated by Obama, Pelosi and Reid on January 20, 2010 (or thereabouts) when they decided to proceed with this mess even though, by then, it was abundantly clear that the American people didn’t want to proceed with this mess.

Future Congresses will have to address the cost increases associated with this, perhaps even moving to repeal it.  Should that happen, animosity between a Republican Congress and Democratic President could keep the issue at the forefront of the national conversation for years to come.   And this is not the issue that the American people want at the forefront of our public debate at this moment.

Should, however, Obamacare pass, repeal may well soon join jobs and the deficit as a top national priority.

The divisions in the American body politic that have come out in the last few months of debate will only be increased and animosities intensified.   Obama may have been elected to heal a divided nation, but he has instead accomplished the opposite–rubbing salt into the wounds and ripping open new ones.

Peggy Noonan puts it better than I ever could:

And so it ends, with a health-care vote expected this weekend. I wonder at what point the administration will realize it wasn’t worth it—worth the discord, worth the diminution in popularity and prestige, worth the deepening of the great divide. What has been lost is so vivid, what has been gained so amorphous, blurry and likely illusory. Memo to future presidents: Never stake your entire survival on the painful passing of a bad bill. Never take the country down the road to Demon Pass.

And with anything by Peggy, read the whole thing, but I will say that this time (and not for the first time), I don’t agree with every word of the Athena of punditry.  Her first sentence is wrong.  It doesn’t end with the vote this weekend.  It only continues.

Over at FDL (hey, you’ve got to know what your enemies are up to), word is that all that activity around the office of that lady with all the Botox all day might have been a precursor to a deal on Bart Stupak’s anti-baby-killing wishes.

Seems Nancy may let him substitute his language disallowing federal funds (read: Your and My Tax Dollars) for abortions. Not sure why this would make a difference, there’s no way it’d pass in the Senate, but perhaps all the machinations are beyond me. Thought I was following it up till now.

Funny thing, though, is that it sure as hell has the pro-baby-killing Left in a tizzy. It’s even got my Congresswoman, Diana DeGette (D-Would be the best place in the world, but for her) threatening to scuttle the whole thing. Wow, what irony it’d be if she and her Infanticide Cabal were actually responsible for killing this thing after all this. I might even send her a fruit basket.

Either way, though…sure is interesting that Pelosi would even be bothering with Stupak. Seems to me that word was she’d written him off long ago. That she’s engaging with him suggests she’s not as close to 216 as we’d all thought?

This shit still ain’t over… Stay tuned.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)

Proud to see no fewer than nine Economics professors, representing four of the Centennial State’s fine universities were among the 130 economists who signed on to this letter to Congress and President Obama arguing how the Stalinization of Health Care Act of 2010 will destroy the economy. A snipit:

In our view, the health care bill contains a number of provisions that will eliminate jobs, reduce hours and wages, and limit future job creation.
…
In addition to constricting economic growth and reducing employment, the health care bill will increase spending on health care and will increase the cost of health coverage. The new and higher taxes on America’s small businesses and workers included in the bill are detrimental to job creation and economic growth, especially now given the fragile state of the economy.

Given the lack of attention they’ve paid to us simple stupid constituents of theirs, what’s the chance they’ll take the word of experts?

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)

Wonder why that is.

In an article on the GOP’s successful efforts at recruiting congressional candidates, soon to be Members of Congress, Byron York notes the superabundance of doctors in the mix:

Talk to the new candidates, and they’re worried about the entire scope of Obama policy. But an indicator of the specific effect of Obamacare is the unusually large number of new recruits — 31 — who come from the medical profession. Twenty-four are doctors. The GOP already has a significant advantage in the number of physicians-turned-lawmakers — at the Obama health care summit, the Republicans brought three doctors to the table, while the Democrats brought none — and that advantage will probably be larger in 2011.

That gives them a special authority on what will surely be a continuing debate over Obamacare. “I think it will basically decimate the health care system in America,” says [Dr. Larry] Bucshon [heart surgeon in Evansville, Ind]. “The number of doctors who are going to retire, and the number of young people who are no longer going to go into medicine, will be massive.”

No wonder the Obama Administration is so fascinated with white coats.  The president hopes his little bit of political theater will obscure the overwhelming opposition to Obamacare among physicians.

Glenn Reynolds alerts us to the latest “Rasmussen [poll]: 43% now strongly disapprove of Obama, same as Bush when he left office: “Imagine how unpopular Obama would be if the press and the late night comedians (who are at least as important as the press) treated Obama as they treated Bush.”

And imagine how unpopular Obama will be should Obamacare pass the House and as we keeping learning about the bill’s myriad moving parts and its plethora of payoffs –not to mention the various inducements to get wavering Democrats to vote in favor of this legislation to limit our liberty.

His poll numbers will continue to decline in the coming days go down as the Senate is going to have to devote an inordinate amount of time to debating all those House fixes.  So, if the House package passes, we’re going to be at this for a while, a long while and the more wer’re at this, the lower Obama’s polls go.

The health care nightmare debate may well continue as will Obama’s polling agony.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, frm TML)

An unfair narrative has taken hold over the past year or so as the battle has raged on over health care reform. That insidious lie has been perpetrated by President Obama and his minions, pressed by Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reid, and repeated endlessly by the Leftists of Obama’s Christian de Neuvillette media. Naturally, that narrative is that Republicans aren’t interested in health care reform and would be (all together now), “satisfied with the status quo”. (Of course, lost in that lie is that apparently, but for the buy-offs, the Democrats are similarly “satisfied” were it not for the quid pro quo. But I digress…)

But the fact is Republicans do have a plan (have for over a year), and have touted it. That the media and the rest of the Left purposely ignores it and continues to lie about our satisfaction with the current health care situation is just par for the course…it’s to be expected.

Procedurally speaking, hearing future Speaker Boehner yesterday threaten promise to repeal the Stalinization of Health Care Act of 2010 if it passes and Republicans as a result regain the House is heartening to the base for sure. (Its impracticality before 2013 notwithstanding.) On the other hand, that doesn’t address the overwhelming number of Americans who genuinely want health care legislation passed. To be sure, they don’t want this mess, and they would likely be much more amenable to the Republicans’ plan.

So consider how much more effective we’d have been in defeating this disaster for our Nation if, instead of promising things like repeal if it goes through, sounding a narrative like: Hey, how about instead of these socialists ramming through this plan that you clearly don’t like, you give us the reigns, and we’ll make OUR health care reform Agenda Item Number One starting in January 2011!

Americans want health care reform. With Obama’s plan, they don’t get it till 2014 anyway. Why haven’t Republicans made real reform of health care their number one issue? Touting it as a neo-Contract with America? If that’s what Americans want, why haven’t Republicans made it a bigger issue for their own campaigns? By chasing after the Democrats’ disastrous plan, we’re not even taking our own advice: To look to the polls and address Americans’ concerns.

Representative Boehner would do better to promise not (just) repeal, but an actual health care reform bill from the 112th Congress if he is “lucky enough” to become speaker.

Tell you what…promising another shot at actual reform that Americans want would probably win more undecided Democratic fence-sitters to the “no” camp on the current legislation than just threatening to boot them if they go the other way.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)

In what has become a reliable pattern, the Vice President has tipped the hand of the Obama Administration (to those who didn’t already know) and inadvertently, in a moment of candor, told America (if they’ll hear it) what Teh One’s plan is.

In an interview for ABC News with Jake Tapper, the VP is asked how he’s working to gain votes of wavering Democrats in the House. As part of his answer, he reassures them:

And my response is, hey, man, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I’m telling you, you know, pre-existing, they’re going to be covered. You know we’re going to control the insurance companies.

Wow…with the master plot so laid out for the American people, shouldn’t it be obvious to us all what they’re after? Oh that’s right, it is obvious. That explains our continual and consistant disdain for it. Too bad nobody in Washington is listening.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)

Amidst all the hullabaloo over health care, we can’t lose sight of the other outrages of this Administration.  Remember how Democrats and their allies in the MSM just couldn’t stop telling us how horrible, no good and very bad it was that Karl Rove and the Bush White House “outed” a cover CIA operative, only to find out that Rove hadn’t done the “outing” and that the operative wasn’t covert?

Well, now, “Attorney General Eric Holder is dragging his feet in investigating how CIA officials were recently outed by the defense attorneys of terrorists“:

In August 2009, senior Al Qaeda enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay were shown photographs taken of CIA officials leaving their homes, by their defense attorneys.  In addition, Bill Gertz recently reported in theWashington Times that more photographs were shown to the detainees.

So, where’s the outrage?

Elise Cooper, who alerted me to the story writes, “Former CIA agents and intelligence specialists cannot understand why there are no outcries from Congress.”  Well, why would there be an outcry?   This can’t be used to embarrass a Republican Administration.

As the 2008 campaign got underway and we started learning about Barack Obama’s real record, not many people on the right believed the Democrat’s bromides that he was, as he claimed, some new kind of politician.  We saw his record; he was just a regular ol’ Chicago pol who cut a far more impressive figure in public than most.  He spoke well.  He looked good. But, he always toed the party line.

Despite his claims about changing the way things were done in Washington, he had no record of changing the way things were done in Chicago or Springfield, his state’s capital.

And remember, the transparency he promised on health care?   You know, deals negotiated in front of C-SPAN cameras.  Some thought maybe he had turned a new leaf when he convened his summit last month in front of such cameras, but well, House Democrats just released a passel of fixes to the Senate bill–and none of them were crafted in front of C-SPAN cameras.

It seems that with each passing day, each hour really, we learn some new nugget about the arm-twisting, job-offering and deal-making still going on to squeeze out those last few votes in the House.  Not just that, we keep hearing about the strategies that Obama campaign, er, team has been using to shift public opinion, strategies torn out of the playbook of old school Chicago politics, updated for the Internet era.

In a piece over at Big Journalism, Morgen Richmond and John Sexton detail how the president’s Organizing for America (OFA) is promoting an Astroturf letters-to-the-editor campaign, duping 72 local papers around the country “into publishing OFA talking points (some more than once).” They’ve even plagiarized their talking points.

Wondering at the lengths to which the Obami are going to deceive the American people, Richmond and Sexont ask “Is there any level to which the President and his supporters won’t stoop for a win?”

Indeed.

In an odd bit of political analysis featured on AOL, Russell Berman says Senate Republicans are taking political risks in preparing to fight the legislative fixes that House Democrats have demanded:

As the House moves toward passing sweeping health care reform, the threats from Senate Republicans keep coming. The latest is a promise to force a battle royal in the Senate over legislative fixes that House Democrats have demanded in exchange for their vote.

But what will be left for the GOP to fight? The brewing showdown could turn the political tables upside down, forcing Republicans to defend backroom deals and tax hikes they have spent weeks criticizing.

Um, Russell, hate to break it to you, the Republicans won’t be defending backroom deals and tax hikes, they’ll be fighting the backroom details and tax hikes contained in the House “fixes”   Borrowing a Democratic National Committee talking point (I call it that because he’s just rephrasing what he quotes a DNC spokeswoman as saying (though without her language accusing the Republicans of doing exactly what her fellow partisans have been doing to get this passed), Berman says that “by preventing Democrats from changing the new law, Republicans could find themselves in the position of ensuring that the most disputed elements of health care reform remain intact.”

So, by Berman’s logic, Senate Republicans should support fixes cooked up in back rooms on the other side of the Hill? (more…)

Featured on Yahoo! last night was a piece by Yahoo! News national affairs writer Brett Michael Dykes:

As the House gears up for this weekend’s dramatic vote on health reform legislation, Democrats are taking flak from all sides. In southern Ohio, opponents of the bill have created a blowback effect by airing an ad targeting Rep. Steve Driehaus to stand firm as a “no” vote on the legislation. The ad prominently featured the congressman’s young daughters, in violation of the unwritten law that forbids dragging lawmakers’ family members – most especially their underage children – into the fray.

Emphasis added.

Wonder if Dykes showed any outrage about John Kerry and John Edwards’ injection of then-Vice President Cheney’s daughter into the 2004 campaign and David Letterman’s sexual commentary Sarah Palin’s underage daughter.   Did Yahoo! then discuss this unwritten rule?

Not to mention the media going overboard on Mrs. Palin’s children.   A Brett Michael Dykes did, however, wade into Andrew Sullivan’s favorite topic, you know, allegations about the former Alaska Governor’s youngest child.

I agree that that an ad featuring a Congressman’s children, Democrat or Republican, is outrageous, but the group which attacked Driehaus has already apologized to the Congressman.  Why, then, did Yahoo! feature it on its main page?  (And, as I post this, continues to feature it.)

Would it have done the same if a left-wing group supporting Obamacare had used the children of an Obamacre opponent in an ad attacking him?

According to Gallup:

Americans hold Congress in far less esteem than they do the president — 16% approve and 80% disapprove of the job Congress is doing, according to the latest update from a March 4-7 Gallup poll. That is just two points off the record-low 14% Gallup measured in July 2008. Gallup has been measuring congressional approval since 1974.

Lowest since July 2008? Now, let’s see, who had the congressional majority back in 2008? Oh yes, the same folks who have it now. So, that means, that under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Congress has twice reached the nadir of its approval, lower than it was in 1974 when the American people threw out record numbers of Republicans, lower than in 1994, when the American people threw out the Democrats.

Now, we know that given the then-Republican president’s low ratings in 2008, many people, like 57% of Obama voters, weren’t then aware that Democrats controlled Congress. Now, they are.

You know, I don’t think Mrs. Pelosi will find herself any more popular (except among her far-left base) if she manages to ram health care through the house.

——

*Since Nancy Pelosi’s first term as Speaker.

RealClearPolitics still lists the California Senate race as Leans Democratic, but when a three-term incumbent Democratic Senator in a state that delivered 60% of its votes to Obama and where the president still enjoys high approval writing herself has a disapproval rating of 51%, it’s time to move this race to the Toss-up category.

According to the latest Field poll,

A majority, 51%, of likely voters now view [Barbara Boxer] unfavorably, with only 38% having a favorable impression of the incumbent. In the previous poll, taken in Jan., 48% viewed Boxer favorably, with 39% having an unfavorable image of her.

In matchups with the Republicans competing for the chance to succeed her, she never tops 45% and is running either one point behind or one point ahead of her Tom Campbell and Carly Fiorina respectively.  And what is it they say about undecideds breaking against the incumbent?

And my gal Carly’s been surging, up 9 points since the last poll.  If  she continues this trajectory, she’ll be polling above 50% next month.

(H/t:  Instapundit.)

So I’m currently reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (I know, I know… But anyway…).

I won’t go into how it’s killing my mother, the effect it’s having on my prospects for finding a boyfriend, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

Point is, I just went through Chapter 11 of Part 2 (“Ellsworth M. Toohey”). Howard Roark had just selected Steven Mallory to craft a sculpture for the Stoddard Temple. After what can only be called an epiphany of spirit, Mallory explains what the commission (and by its nature, Roark’s great understanding of his own demons) helped him discover. Tell me if it reminds you of anything:

“I know that the terror exists. I know the kind of terror it is. You can’t conceive of that kind. Listen, what’s the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me—it’s being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drolling beast of prey or a maniac who’s had some disease that’s eaten his brain out. You’d have nothing then but your voice—your voice and your thought. You’d scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you’d have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you’d become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you’d see living eyes watching you and you’d know that the thing can’t hear you, that it can’t be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it’s breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That’s horror. Well, that’s what’s hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wonton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own. I don’t think I’m a coward, but I’m afraid of it.”

Who knew Ayn Rand could so perfectly describe the Speaker and the “drooling beast” that the Stalinization of Health Care Act of 2010 has become, way back in 1943?

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)

Megan McArdle, who backed Obama in 2008, took a gander at the CBO numbers and called the House bill a “fiscal disaster waiting to happen.”  Among her six points is this, the most telling:

Ultimately, this rests on the question: are we really going to cut Medicare?  If we’re not, this gargantuan new entitlement is going to end up costing us about $200 billion a year next decade, which even in government terms is an awful lot of money.  There are offsetting taxes, but they’re either trivial or likely to be unpopular–look forward to a 4% rent increase when your landlord has to stump over the same amount for the new tax on rents.

Just read the whole thing.

She’s not the only one to be concerned about the fiscal impact of this hastily assembled reconciliation package.  Others have been poring over the numbers and have voice similar concerns.  Keith Hennessey found it:

Spends money on doctors in 2013 and 2014, but leaves out the permanent fix, as expected.  This means there’s another $300-ish B of Medicare spending that is not counted in this bill.  So much for true deficit neutrality.

H/t:  Instapundit.  (Read that whole thing too.)

Delineating five reasons the CBO figures are phony, Ed Carson observed:

The Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary “score” says the health care overhaul will cost $940 billion over the first 10 years, saving $138 billion over that time. But the CBO must assess legislation as written, rather than whether it will actually be carried out. Or, as the Economist put it, “The CBO is required to pretend to believe many impossible things before breakfast.”

(Another whole thing worth reading.)  And we still don’t know what the Senate is going to do with the amendments the House has passed.  As this bickering carries on and on, people will discover more and more unpleasant taxes and other limitations on our freedom in this behemoth.

So, the best thing to do is not to pass it so we can find out what’s in it, but defeat it to prevent this fiscal disaster from coming to pass.

In an exclusive for NRO (Does that mean I’m not allowed to quote from it?), Rep. John Boehner (R, OH, I hope he can pull this out!) promises that if he’s “lucky enough” to get the Speakership after an anticipated Republican take-over as a result of the passage of the Stalinization of Health Care Act of 2010, he’ll work to repeal this monstrosity.

That is nice to hear, Congressman Boehner. And anticipating what you’d do if you get “lucky” with your future position is bold. How about you apply more of those chops to ensuring the bill doesn’t pass in the first place?

- Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from TML)

With Democratic leaders are engaged in intense arm-twisting sessions with recalcitrant members of their caucus, the Administration apparently offering federal jobs to retiring lawmakers as the presidents’ polls plummet, it sure doesn’t seem like the latest push to nationalize our nation’s health care system is winning plaudits from the American people or winning votes on the bill’s merits.  If Nancy Pelosi wins this one, she wins it ugly.

And she’s working hard to pass a bill, voluminous though it is, that leaves much to be filled out by federal bureaucrats.  According to Charles Kesler, senior fellow at the Claremont Institute:

This phonebook-sized law that would control a sixth of the U.S. economy cannot be a law by that definition. If you rummage through the text of, say, the House of Representatives’ version of the bill, you find scores of places where power is delegated to administrative agencies and special boards, which are charged to fill the gaps in the written legislation by promulgating thousands, if not tens of thousands, of new pages of regulations that will then be applied to individual cases. Voters sometimes complain that legislators don’t read the laws they enact. Why would they, in this case? You could read this leviathan until your eyeballs popped out and still not find any “settled, standing rules” or a meaning that is “indifferent, and the same to all parties.”

In fact, that’s the point of such promiscuous laws. They operate not by setting up fences to protect each man’s liberty. They start not from equal rights but from equal (and often unequal) privileges, the favors or benefits that government may bestow on or withhold from its clients. The whole point is to empower government officials, usually unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, to bless or curse your petitions as they see fit, guided, of course, by their expertness in a law so vast, so intricate, and so capricious that it could justify a hundred different outcomes in the same case. Faster than one might think, a government of equal laws turns into a regime of arbitrary privileges.

Please note that he wrote this last week so he’s not referring to the House reconciliation package, so maybe they new bill doesn’t so delegate.  Perhaps, we should just call this the Federal Bureaucrat Empowerment Act.

Oh, yeah, let’s not forget the 16,500 additional IRS agents needed to enforce it.  Wonder if the CBO factored in the cost of their employment in its estimate of the bill’s cost.

So, this is why Mrs. Pelosi calls this a jobs’ bill:  it creates jobs for federal bureaucrats.

While Democrats and their lock-step lickspittles are just plum “giddy” about the CBO numbers saying that the Pelosi reconciliation bill will cut the deficit, more sober analysts are pointing out some uncomfortable facts to the Democrats, you know, like, well, these numbers are based on a lot of estimates.

Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, remarked:

The Congressional Budget Office has confirmed that there is currently no official cost estimate. Yet House Democrats are touting to the press – and spinning for partisan gain – numbers that have not been released and are impossible to confirm.

(H/t:  Ed Morrissey.)  And Ryan’s not the only one to wonder how a new federal government entitlement could save money which would mean it would do something a federal social program has never done before.

Our reader Sonicfrog, his head not buried in Iliad scholarship, has had the time to look more closely than I at the bill and the CBO analysis and shows just how it burdens small business.  He also points out something about the CBO analysis that those giddy Democrats just don’t want you to notice:

In the MSNBC article that came out today, concerning the CBO assessment, I noticed this paragraph:

Hospitals and doctors, drug companies and insurers would gain millions of new paying customers, but they would also have to adjust to major changes. Medicare cuts would force hospitals to operate more efficiently or risk going out of business.

Uh Hu. There is already a shortage of hospitals and emergency rooms across the country, and many are currently surviving by the skin of their teeth, operating on a bare bones budget. An increase in medical coverage will increase the demand for these facilities. So the government will allow struggling hospitals to go out of business, especially if the reason they go out of business can be tied to this government regulation?

Read the whole thing.  In other words, to get to the budget savings, Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues plan on cutting Medicare which will burden hospitals now dependent on such government largesse.  So, some will out of business and we have fewer hospitals (thus less health care).

The more people know about this legislation, the less they’ll like this.  No wonder Democrats are rushing to vote on it, trying to get this done on a weekend when most people spend their time spending time with their families and enjoying their favorite past times.

Like many young Americans, for the better part of my 20s and early 30s, I didn’t bother with health insurance.  When I finally got it (as my father’s insistence), I wasn’t aware I could get catastrophic coverage, figuring I had to buy the HMO that Anthem (then-Blue Cross) told me was the best deal for me.  Actually, it was the best deal for them, but unaware of all the choices out there, I went with that.

Of the many, many, many troubling things about Obamacare, the individual mandate (which Obama opposed during his campaign) may well be the most troubling.  It tells individuals what kind of coverage they must have.  A young person must be roped into a plan that may offer more coverage than he is willing to pay for, covering things, like my HMO did, that they don’t really need nor want–but the government says they need.

If, in 2001 when I got my health insurance, I was aware of all the choices out there, rather than dependent on the corporate representative to whom I was directed, I would have opted for something less expensive that covered only serious illness.  I had the choice, but didn’t make myself aware of what was out there.  Now, the Democrats are on the verge of denying young people that choice.