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.

I guess Obama, Pelosi and Reid will rule the United States like a banana republic from this week on.  We are no longer a “nation of laws.”

What a tool.

In an “extended, exclusive” interview tomorrow [Obama] will sit down with Special Report anchor Bret Baier to make his health care reform pitch to the FNC audience. What a long, strange trip it’s been.

The interview will air in full at 6pmET tomorrow and will take place earlier in the afternoon. “We welcome the opportunity to sit down with the President and try to get some specifics on the health care legislation,” said Baier in making the announcement right after NoonET today on Fox News.

The history between the White House and Fox News has been a shaky one. In September he went to every major news outlet except Fox for an interview. That started things, and with FNC essentially winning the war it came to a head in late October with a meeting between Robert Gibbs and Michael Clemente.

So Fox is a just a bunch of right-wing extremists watched by right-wing extremist teabaggers… until Obama is on the ropes.

What. A. Tool.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

Via Michelle Malkin:

. . .  our Texas blogger friend Kathleen McKinley said it first last week: “We’ve Moved From Passing Bills Without Reading Them to Passing Bills Without Voting On Them.”

Emphasis added.

Sometimes I think President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats are so hell-bent on passing health care is that they just want to prevent the GOP and Republicans from being able to gloat.

They’re so focused on being able to pass this “historic” bill.  But, just because the left has wanted a major health care overhaul for sixty some odd years doesn’t mean the American people want it.  And it’s too bad the Democrats confuse their own wishes–and their party’s long dreams with popular will.

I know there’s more to it than this, but when you look at how they’ve gamed the numbers, how they’ve bought off wavering Senators, how they’re using procedural gimmicks to pass this, it just seems that the goal of passing this has superseded all else.

Like the junkie selling all his possessions for a fix.

Delivering the GOP response to the president’s radio address, the man who succeeded John Kerry as the junior Senator from Massachusetts–after that latter had served a record 25 years in the position, Scott Brown, called Obama out for not keeping his promises, you know to focus on what he was elected to do and not keeping pushing health care.

The delivery may note be great, but the message is clear: President Obama is not keeping his campaign promises by pushing a massive health care overhaul crafted behind closed doors when people are still losing their jobs:

Maybe you remember what President Obama promised in his State of the Union address. He said he was going to finally focus on jobs and the economy for the remainder of this year. I applauded him for that. Well, here it is, it’s almost spring. And what is he out there talking about again? That same 2,700-page, multi-trillion dollar health care legislation.

So, an entire year has gone to waste. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, and many more jobs are in danger. Even now, the President still hasn’t gotten the message.

Somehow, the greater the public opposition to the health care bill, the more determined they seem to force it on us anyway. Their attitude shows Washington at its very worst – the presumption that they know best, and they’re going to get their way whether the American people like it or not.

And, when politicians start thinking like that, they don’t let anything get in their way – not public opinion, not the rules of fair play, not even their own promises.

They pledged transparency. Instead, we have a health care bill tainted by secrecy, concealed cost, and full of backroom deals– and that’’s just not right. They should do better. The American people expect more.

Ed Morrissey calls this a “scathing assessment of the Democratic machinations to pass ObamaCare.” I agree.

(H/t for video: Gateway Pundit)

So much for Obama’s Apology Tour and bowing before world leaders.  Americans aren’t buying it.  He has become Jimmy Carter II.  (PS – This is JAMES CARVILLE’s polling firm.)

A new Democracy Corps-Third Way survey provides a wake-up call for President Obama, his party, and progressives on national security.

The national mood continues to sour, with the share who see the country headed in the wrong direction moving up 4 points since mid-January, up to 62 percent, the highest mark in a year. The survey also shows concerns about the economy continuing to grow. And even though the Republican brand remains badly damaged, with no improvement in favorable ratings for their party, the GOP continues to gain ground in a named congressional ballot, with the Democratic House candidate now narrowly lagging by 47 to 44 percent. The movement away from Democrats is especially strong among independents, and independent women in particular.

Whereas a majority of the public approves of the job President Obama is doing in most aspects of national security, a 51 to 44 percent majority of likely voters disapproves of his efforts on the “prosecution and interrogation of terrorism suspects.”

[W]e see that the public once again has real and rising doubts about the Democrats’ handling of national security issues, as compared to their faith in Republicans. This security gap, which has roots stretching back to Vietnam, was as wide as 29 points earlier in the decade. The deficit began to close in 2006, with the Bush administration’s catastrophic mismanagement of Iraq and other national security challenges. As public hopes about the Obama presidency rose and peaked, the gap all but vanished. Last May, Democracy Corps found Democrats essentially tied with Republicans (41 to 43 percent) on the question of which party would do a better job on national security.

But now the gap shows signs of re-opening, with Democrats trailing by 17 points, 33 to 50 percent on which party likely voters think would do the better job on national security. The erosion since May is especially strong among women, and among independents, who now favor Republicans on this question by a 56 to 20 percent margin.

Hey, I hate to say this.  But we told you so.  Welcome back to reality, America.  Let’s hope our majority perception of Obama Democrats’ security weakness doesn’t translate into a real threat being ignored by Holder & Gestapo Janet.  The nation is truly run by September 10th’ers.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

As details emerge about former Rep Eric Massa’s (D-NY) misdeeds, he becomes the latest embarrassment for the Democrats.  His stories about Rahm Emanuel may tend toward exaggeration, but now that he is getting attention throughout the media, more and more people are learning about the Rahm with whom we on the right have long been familiar, the ruthless political operative who swears in public meetings and sends dead fish to pollsters who displeased him.

And people are learning about the White House Chief of Staff’s novel way of doing things (that new kind of Chicago politics) the week after scandals involving prominent New York Democrats broke.  The mainstream media may try to bury the news about former House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel and outgoing New York Governor David Paterson (which would still dominate the headlines if either man had an (R) after his name), but the stories remain fresh on people’s minds.

And this just days after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid boasted that we lost only 36,000 jobs last month.  Now, we have his counterpart in the House saying, “But we have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.“

How’s that for a definition of transparency?  Vote for a bill so you can find out what’s in it.  Can you imagine a car salesman telling you to agree on a purchase price for a car so you can figure out what you’ll be driving for the next seven years?

While Nancy asks Democrats to vote on faith, Politco reports that her grip on the House is slipping.  Not the kind of headline you want when you’re trying to corral votes for unpopular legislation.

It just keeps getting worse for the Democrats.  People may not believe Massa, but he sure has helped keep his party’s dirty laundry in the news.

Please, please, please, don’t let me latest post on Rahm Emanuel obscure my criticism of this highly partisan Chicago political operative.  With all the attention focused on the White House Chief of Staff and criticism of his tactics reaching a fever pitch and going to rhetorical extremes, Jim Geraghty observes that “no one in Washington jumped up to deny” certain accusations against Rahm, notably the one about him selling his mother to get a vote.

My point is not that Rahm is a good guy nor that he’s worth defending (though I grant that some of the recent criticism has been over the top and unwarranted–and yes, you can go too far in criticizing even a man who merits criticism), but that the problem isn’t so much Rahm as it is Obama’s agenda.  He’s trying to sell policies the American people don’t want and is focusing on issues which are, at best, peripheral to the American people.

While I don’t agree with New York Times columnist Bob Herbert’s characterization of Republicans nor do I support the solutions he would offer, I do agree with his analysis of the causes for the Administration’s troubles:

The Obama administration and Democrats in general are in trouble because they are not urgently and effectively addressing the issue that most Americans want them to: the frightening economic insecurity that has put a chokehold on millions of American families. . . .

Instead of focusing with unwavering intensity on this increasingly tragic situation, making it their top domestic priority, President Obama and the Democrats on Capitol Hill have spent astonishing amounts of time and energy, and most of their political capital, on an obsessive quest to pass a health care bill. . . .

But while the nation is desperate for jobs, jobs, jobs, the Democrats have spent most of the Obama era chanting health care, health care, health care.

The president should remember that, during the 2008 campaign, the electoral tide (at least as measured in polls) began to turn in his favor when the scope of the financial meltdown became manifest.  People trusted him more than they did John McCain to focus on fixing the economy.  Save for his insistence at the outset of his Administration on swift passage of the legislation (AKA the “stimulus”) he claimed would do just that, the incumbent has spent the better part of his time in office addressing other matters.

Rahm’s only part of the problem.  The real problem is the president’s failure to focus on the real concerns of the American people.

With the president on the road again pushing legislation that the American people have long since decided they don’t want, we have yet another piece of evidence that the man who billed himself as a pragmatic politician on the campaign trail is anything but.  Does he really believe that endless stumping for an overhaul of our nation’s health care system will cause Americans to change their minds and suddenly see the light, realizing they had been wrong to oppose it?

What we have seen in the year since Democrats began talking about this proposal is a near-steady increase in opposition, with only an occasional uptick in support.  And we’ve seen candidates supporting the plan — or associated with the party backing their plan– lose their bids for office.

The debate is helping energize the opposition while demoralizing Democrats–and pushing independents toward the GOP.

And yet the president presses on.  His determination should silence his left-wing critics beholden to more government-involvement in health care.  He’s fighting their battle, even if hurts his party.

He may even succeed in this, but right now he seems like the singer who won’t leave the stage even after the public has tired of his music.  He keeps on singing and singing, hoping he’ll receive once again the thunderous applause that greeted his opening number.

A couple weeks ago, you know about the time the citizens of Massachusetts elected a Republican to fill a Senate seat Democrats had held since the twilight of the Truman Administration, I thought I had read somewhere that President Obama planned to pivot away from health care and focus on jobs and the economy.  And while he may have given a speech hither, thither and yon on the economy, his focus at least since last June has been on overhauling the nation’s health care system.

Of course, he’s taken the occasional break to focus on other (more) pressing issues, like the war in Afghanistan, but he really seems bound and determined not just to effect some reform in health care, but to enact some major changes to the system.  While it might be smart politcally, as David Freddoso put it in the Washington Examiner yesterday, for Obama to retreat from his ambitious overhaul and seek instead “a cosmetic victory, after which he should privately acknowledge defeat and run like hell from this issue as quickly as possible,” the Democrat ”has already shut himself off from this path by committing to the position that incremental health reforms would be ineffectual.”

As another pundit put it, he “has put all of his eggs in the healthcare basket.“

Remember, the president, like all of us, only has a limited number of hours in the day, so he can’t devote his attention to every issue.  But, in recent days, it seems it’s been all health care all the time.  He held all all-day health care “summit” with a bipartisan group of congressional leaders.  It not only took time to convene and conduct the summit, but it also took time to prepare for it.  Meanwhile he’s been having meetings in the White House, trying to strong arm wavering Democrats to support his overhaul.

Soon, he’ll be traveling to Philadelphia and St. Louis to stump for reform. (more…)

It’s for the children regulation.

“Fisking” the warmist alarmist’s op-ed in the New York Times, blogress diva Ann Althouse figures out what Gore is all about:

He wants the policies that are sold under the name “global warming” whether the prediction of global warming is right or wrong.

Read the whole thing.  (H/t:  Instapundit.)

Yeah, she’s one to talk.  Representing a district where Obama beat McCain by 73 points (just up from John Kerry’s 71-point margin over W), Nancy Pelosi is now telling Democrats from districts where the margin was in the single digits–or favored the Republican–that they should “back a major overhaul of U.S. health care even if it threatens their political careers“

Lawmakers sometimes must enact policies that, even if unpopular at the moment, will help the public, Pelosi said in an interview being broadcast Sunday the ABC News program “This Week.”

“We’re not here just to self-perpetuate our service in Congress,” she said. “We’re here to do the job for the American people.”

It took courage for Congress to pass Social Security and Medicare, which eventually became highly popular, she said, “and many of the same forces that were at work decades ago are at work again against this bill.”

Nancy knows her history about as well as she knows economics.  It hardly took courage to pass those bills which were popular even before they passed.  And today, there are concerns about the fiscal solvency of both programs.

Is Mrs. Pelosi thus suggesting that the Democrats’ proposed health care overhaul will soon also face financial problems?

Her arrogance–and that of the Democrats who continue to push this–is simply amazing.  They claim they know better than the American people what’s good for them.  They keep pressing forward on this–as if one more push will break the pattern of public opinion consistently moving against them since the debate began.  And the tide will finally turn.  Well, now she seems to have given up hope of catching a wave and is now saying that, well, public opinion doesn’t matter because we know what’s best.

Even if their knowledge comes from policies which have never worked in the real world and are similar to those which have not brought the desired results in jurisdictions which have tried them.

Of all the analysis and criticism conservative pundits and bloggers have made about the president’s decision to press ahead with his statist healthcare overhaul, perhaps the most instructive exchange has been between Andrew McCarthy and Ed Morrissey.

McCarthy believes the Democrats will press forward at all costs, including the loss of Congress, in order to fulfill their their age-hold dream of government health care, increasing federal control over one-sixth of our economy. He thinks Republicans lack the will to repeal the monstrosity should Democrats pass it. Morrissey, by contrast, doesn’t think Democrats will get away with it because not all their fellow partisans share the vision of their far-left leaders from deep “blue” enclaves of our richly diverse country.

Being an optimist, I side with Morrissey, but aware of the liberal impulse for control, I get where McCarthy’s coming from and understand why the Democrats press on even as opposition has solidified against the overhaul, with strong opposition increasing and intensifying as the president’s poll numbers take a tumble every time health care tops the news.

First, given that right now, “there is no health care bill currently under consideration“, it’s not certain Democrats can come up with something which can pass both congressional chambers and pass muster under the Senate rules of reconciliation.  Second, even if Democrats do find a way to pass it, Republicans might finally find the stomach to repeal it, given that they’ll owe their majorities to popular opposition to the legislation and outrage at the way it has been (and likely will be) rammed through Congress.

In making a point similar to my second point (and so helping me frame my argument), Moe Lane offers this telling observation:

People like to talk about how government programs and agencies never die, once instituted, with the Great Society and the New Deal being the most used examples.  What’s not mentioned is that both of those programs were popular.  People wanted a Social Security program.  They wantedMedicare.  They do not notably want this monstrosity of a health care bill*.

And that’s why it may not only be the straw which breaks the statist camel’s back, but which finally turns the tides on big government, giving small government conservatives the will not just to repeal this boondoggle, but to start taking a crack at other outdated pieces of the federal leviathan.

There he goes again, bound and determined to force the American people to buy something we clearly don’t want.  The President took the airwaves to tell us that that a health care “overhaul must go forward.”  Gosh, these guys don’t give up.

Who says it must go forward?

Not the American people.  Support for the Democrats’ proposed health care overhaul polls worse that did John McCain in October 2008 and no better than Bob Dole did twelve years earlier, and behind Michael Dukakis in 1988, but about even with Walter Mondale in 1984.

More than just being unenthusiastic about the Democrats’ statist approach to health care, we’d also rather they turn their focus to other issues: “Americans overwhelmingly say that their main concern is jobs, and that they are satisfied with their current health care arrangements.”  Yet, the Democrats have devoted more legislative hours and the President has devoted more of his time to pushing health care.

Maybe that’s not entirely a bad thing.  Democrats think that they only way to create jobs is to spend more government money–and not to remove regulations which would spark private sector activity.

It’s too bad the president learned nothing from the health care summit on Thursday.  Had he paid any attention, he would have put forward a compromise approach and abandoned the statist overhaul crafted in Congress, starting afresh by building on the ideas expressed on both sides of the debate.

What is it with Howard Dean and “hate.”  When Republicans are in power, it’s right and good to hate them.  When Democrats are in power, the party that we were once supposed to hate becomes the party of hate.

He claims he was taken out of context when he said he hated Republicans and everything they stood for and called the partisan differences in America “a struggle between good and evil and we’re the good.” Only when he didn’t say jsut how his remarks had been taken out of context nor did he apologize.  He did say, “I don’t hate Republicans as individuals“, then added:

But I hate what the Republicans are doing to this country.  I really do.  I hate deficits, as you know.  When I was governor, I really was very tough on fiscal responsibility.  Deficits in the long run aren’t good for the country, and they do lower our standard of living.  Every American family knows that you have to pay your bills.  I hate the dishonesty, you know, the idea that you’d put a program through Congress without telling people what it costs, I think that’s wrong.  

Guess he must really hate this Administration, but then, he can’t because, well, he’s a Democrat and right now, only Republicans do the hating.  Yet, given what Howard Dean said back in ‘05, you’d kind of understand it, you know by his standards, if Republicans did start pushing the hate button, I mean, with those big deficits we’re getting from team Obama.  

He is, however, not praising them when he alleges they have the same attitudes toward a spendthrift Administration that he once did:

He also said that the Republican Party holds “untenable positions based on emotion and anger,” and that the GOP won’t be effective until they “stop pushing the hate button.”

To show just how out of touch is this former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he spouts some nonsense about the Tea Party’s views on social issues.  Guess he has a one-size-fits-all approach to conservatives.  If they oppose a Democratic Administration, then they must be like the imaginary conservative inside his head, harboring hateful views of homosexuals.

Hate to break it to you, Howard, but those Tea Party folks are pretty concerned about the things that got you hating the Republicans lo these five years ago.  Guess you just hate anyone who doesn’t have a (D) after his name and support your wayward left-wing ways.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.  This is the crusty old pot which once boasted about its thick coat of soot calling black the kettle just back on the stove after a long scrubbing with multiple Brillo Pads.

At the Washington Examiner, Susan Ferrechio sums up yesterday’s health care summit:

Nothing at the summit convinced Republicans to put aside their demand that Democrats scrap the current $1 trillion bill and start over. And Democrats appeared unmoved by a GOP plea to scale back the bill and incorporate ideas like tort reform favored by Republicans.

Democrats remain poised to move ahead on the Senate health care reform bill, which would mandate insurance coverage, expand Medicaid significantly, and use tax increases and Medicare cuts to pay for it.

On the same web-site, Ferrechio’s colleague David Freddoso links a Gallup poll showing significantly more people oppose the Democrats’ proposed health care overhaul than support it, with a solid majority oppose Democrats using reconciliation to advance their bill.  Indeed, said Gallup poll registers higher public support for the plan (42%) than do most surveys which show it polling in the 30s, with most registering opposition at or above 50%.

And Democrats press forward with the same ol’ plan when as I noted earlier this week, “more than two-thirds of Americans believe Congress should either start all over on health care reform or do nothing.”

It’s all about appeasing the party’s base.  And showing that the president can get something done, even if it’s not what the American people want.

Yesterday, in a conversation with my youngest brother, we puzzled over the president’s decision to double down on his health care overhaul despite polls showing strong opposition to the plan.  My brother thought Obama had no choice but to press on, lest he lose his left-wing base.  If he gives in, he risks dampening their enthusiasm in this year’s congressional elections, possibly pushing them to back a more politically correct candidate in the 2012 primaries.

But, as the president attempts to hold onto his base, he risks alienating the rest of the country.

Calling “the strategy of President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders is psychologically understandable — as well as delusional,” Michael Gerson offers five reasons why his reconciliation strategy would hurt the president and his party, leading off with this one:

First, the imposition of a House-Senate health-reform hybrid would confirm the worst modern image of the Democratic Party, that of intellectual arrogance. Parties hurt themselves most when they confirm a destructive public judgment. In this case, Americans would see Democrats pushing a high-handed statism. It is amazing how both parties, when given power, seem compelled to inhabit their own caricatures.

The president’s decision to press on with health care reform reinforces the image that he–and hi party’s leadership–are out of touch.

Even liberal pundits think the president’s “audaciousness on health care could backfire,” with Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus expressing the worry that

. . . going for broke and failing will leave no time or appetite for a fallback, scaled-down plan. And the moment to do something on health care — not everything, but something significant — will have evaporated, once again.

Well, good.  We don’t need “something significant,” at least in terms of the significant reforms put forward by left-of-center politicians and pundits.  Right now, all we’ve got is a president desperate to impose such “significant reform” and his latest plan, an amorphous amalgam of bills passed by the House and Senate has, in Jennifer Rubin’s words, “no CBO score, no popular mandate, and no congressional majority.“

And still he presses on.  Well, it’s for the children his liberal base.

Your Senate Majority Leader has wisdom beyond words that has no bounds.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) suggested Monday that domestic violence by men has increased due to U.S. joblessness.

Reid, speaking in the midst of a Senate debate over whether to pass a $15 billion package meant to spur job creation, appeared to argue that joblessness would lead to more domestic violence.

“I met with some people while I was home dealing with domestic abuse. It has gotten out of hand,” Reid said on the Senate floor. “Why? Men don’t have jobs.”

Reid said that the effects of joblessness on domestic violence were especially pronounced among men, because, Reid said, women tend to be less abusive.

“Women don’t have jobs either, but women aren’t abusive, most of the time,” he said.

Photo courtesy of GP Reader StrayMRG:

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

It seems that a week doesn’t pass without some new revelation of fraud, shoddy scholarship or doctored data at the the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).   They got things wrong about the Himalayan glaciers, the Amazonian rain forest, hurricanes and rising sea levels.

And yet politicians wanted to rely on the panel’s findings to create vast new bureaucracies, controlling our energy consumption and regulating our lives.  No wonder one politician (one of those once-derided skeptics) thinks an investigation is warranted:

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) today asked the Obama administration to investigate what he called “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation” — the actions of climate scientists revealed by the Climategate Files, and the subsequent admissions by the editors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

Senator Inhofe also called for former Vice President Al Gore to be called back to the Senate to testify.

“In [Gore's] science fiction movie, every assertion has been rebutted,” Inhofe said. He believes Vice President Gore should defend himself and his movie before Congress.

That movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary, might better be called An Overhyped Fraud.

Inhofe wants “the Department of Justice to investigate whether there has been research misconduct or criminal actions by the scientists involved”.  Those scientists do seem to have done everything in the power to forge a consensus for their conclusions.  But, they inconveniently hid their date and conveniently suppressed peer-reviewed work that conflicted with their conclusions.  As one blogger put it, “When you so obviously stack the deck in your favor, it is no wonder you get a consensus.“

To learn more about Senator Inhofe’s call for an investigation, check out this post and this report on the climate controversy.