You really, really have to go over and read the entire column by Shikha Dalmia over at Forbes. No, really, you do.
A very, very brief excerpt from a must-read:
In fact, the real reason why ObamaCare is so unpopular is that it is proposing a giant expansion of the entitlement state precisely when this state everywhere is coming apart: here and abroad; at the federal level and the state; in the public sector and the private. Suggesting a giant government takeover of a sixth of the economy can’t be a popular selling point in a country whose DNA has a programmed hostility to Big Government.
Please go read it.
Here’s the thing that I am seeing right now. The media continues to perform CPR on the Democrat’s plots to pass this monstrosity. Every day there are stories of how close they are to a deal, how great everything is going. How confident they are.
But the House has still not voted.
If Pelosi had the votes, this would already be passed.
If the House Democrats – the non-suicidal ones – had any trust in the Senate Democrats ability to pass a reconciliation, this would be done.
And a lot – a real lot – of Democrats would be gainfully unemployed come November. And the Democrat brand will be crippled if not utterly destroyed.
And Obama would be a lame duck with no other role left than to be the one who sets his successor up for untangling Obama’s wreckage and becoming a truly great president. This is more than Obama’s Waterloo. This is Obama’s political Little Bighorn.
Garryowen, Democrats. You can commit political suicide by following this narcissist over the cliff and into the valley, thereby wrecking your party and your personal political futures or you can recognize that this bill is a disaster and save yourselves – and your nation – from utter ruin.
He is not the one and this is not the bill.
Dick Morris:
And now the House Democrats line up at the instruction of their blind commanders for a final charge into glory as they battle to foist a health care system on a country that neither wants it nor can afford it. The charge may or may not reach its objective. But one thing is certain: The carnage among those who vote for health care will remind Civil War buffs of Pickett’s Charge on the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg.
As a French general who witnessed the spectacle said, “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.” (It is magnificent, but it’s not war.) The sight of so many Democrats throwing away their political careers may be arresting, but it is not politics.
Frankly, I don’t believe the Senate Democrats will pass a “fix” under reconciliation. Any House Deocrat who trusts the Senate – or the Wizard of 0 – to even try, much less succeed in doing so – is not playing with a full deck. And there will be a lot of House Democrats looking for work after November if they do pass this horror. Many, many more than if they do not pass it. There will be no safe seats.
Americans don’t want this and America can damn sure not afford the monstrosity that is ObamaCare.
If they do, it won’t be Pickett’s Charge, though. It’ll be Little Bighorn. Better be calling your Representative, folks. Make sure they understand what will happen if they vote yes. Say it with a smile and mean it.
Matt Welch:
Obama’s dishonesty, by contrast, seems to spring from a different place. As a man who has spent most of his career wowing people with his words and very little of it converting those words into deeds, he has an activist’s gap between rhetoric and reality and a radio broadcaster’s promiscuous carelessness with cutting rhetorical corners. Sure, it’s not technically true that the administration’s day-one lobbying reforms served “to get rid of the influence of…special interests,” as he claimed in a January radio address (to the contrary: federal lobbying in 2009 set an all-time record), but it’s easy to imagine that the president feels his combination of tighter employment restrictions for ex-lobbyists and stricter disclosure requirements for current ones is, in the context of the Manichean fight between “the people” and “special interests,” good enough for government work. The perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good, and the critics who complain are just opportunistic literalists grasping for any club to beat back the march of progress. No need to give them an inch.
But there’s a less charitable explanation too. During the president’s nonstop gabfests before, during, and after the State of the Union speech, he kept repeating the fiction that the medical industry’s “special interests” were significantly to blame for scotching his health care legislation. In fact, the administration and Congress negotiated with those interests every step of the way, receiving crucial buy-in and millions in campaign contributions. Pro-reform lobbyists outspent anti-reform lobbyists on advertising by a factor of 5 to 1. There’s a three-letter word for blaming the defeat of his bill on health care lobbyists, and it rhymes with pie.
Welch is pointing out something here that bears repeating. The Wizard of0 does not tell the truth rather often. He is quite blatant about it. And it is why I predict that if the House Democrats pass the Senate bill, they will be surprised that reconciliation does not occur at all or does not even come close to the fixes they were promised to entice them to take the bait.
This man will not hesitate to double cross his allies.
Well, yeah.
“There’s a reason that this has all happened, frankly one that I had not realized,” Massa said on WKPQ radio on Sunday. “Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill, and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me and it’ll pass.”
This could, of course, backfire on the Democrats. Massa is set to be on Glenn Beck tomorrow. He is not going quietly.
I’m thinking that the Congressional swamp Pelosi famously promised to drain is now resembling a cesspool since the Democrats have taken charge.
Glenn Reynolds:
“Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This is boilerplate American history, and something that Americans — and, in particular, America’s political class — have long taken for granted.
But now things are looking a bit dicey. According to a recent Rasmussen Poll , only 21 percent of American voters believe that the federal government enjoys the consent of the governed. On the other hand, Rasmussen notes, a full 63 percent of the “political class” believe that the government enjoys the consent of the governed.
It’s tempting to stress the disconnect here, and that disconnect is certainly huge. Unsurprisingly, the political class — which talks mostly to itself — thinks that it is far more popular, and legitimate, in the eyes of the country than is in fact the case. In this, as in so many things, America’s political class is out of touch with reality.
But forget the views of America — where, it seems likely, more people believe in alien abductions than in the legitimacy of our rulers — and look just at the more cheerful view of the political class.
Even among the rulers, only 63 percent — triple the fraction of the general populace but still less than two-thirds of the political class — regard the federal government as legitimate by the standards of America’s founding document. The remainder, presumably, are comfortable being tyrants.
I’m guessing that they are not only comfortable with it, they are in favor of it. How many times have you been told that the government is doing this or that for your own good?
Those words should provoke rage. It is not government’s place to dictate what is good for you.
Go read the whole piece. It’s worth your time.
We’re in a rather bad place right now as a nation. We have an utterly out of control government trying to become the dictators of your most personal decisions. We have maniacal spenders throwing money we do not have at problems we would rather they did not try to solve.
It promises to be a rough year, folks.
The CBO looks at Obama’s budgets:
If President Obama’s 2011 budget were put into effect as proposed, the U.S. federal government would add an estimated $9.8 trillion to the country’s accrued debt over the next decade, according to a preliminary analysis from the Congressional Budget Office.
Of that amount, an estimated $5.6 trillion will be in interest alone.
By 2020, the agency estimates debt held by the public would reach $20.3 trillion, or 90% of GDP. That’s up from 53% of GDP in 2009.
Frankly, it will be a lot worse. The rosy projections of revenue will not work out. Nor will the planned spending. The latter will be ever so much higher than predicted and the former will be much, much lower. Bank on it.
A trillion here, a trillion there. Pretty soon you’re looking at real economic collapse.
Look at the interest alone, folks. Not only is this spending unsustainable, this spending is deranged. This is a recipe for a ruined economy.
And it is one man doing this with the assistance of the mad Democrats in control of Congress. How are they planning on fixing this mess?
Why they are spending even more.
Time to clean house. Come November, we have to fix this. Get these maniacs out, get some fiscal discipline. Or we are dooming ourselves and our offspring. For many generations.
Time to take it back, folks. Or we will all fall.
Gee, only 36,000 jobs disappeared in America last month! Everything is coming up roses! We’re in the money! You’re out of the woods, America!
That’s the spin today.
Unfortunately, the U-6 tells a completely different story.
What’s the U-6, U ask? This:
U-6 Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force
What is that number, U wonder? 16.8. Close to one out of five Americans is out of work or woefully underemployed – not by choice.
That number is up year over year since 2009 by 0.8. It is not as high as it has been recently, but it is still a very, very bad sign that things are not good – at all. It is also a clear indication that the spin is nonsense. Things are not getting better.
Hell, 36,000 jobs disappeared in the last month, folks. It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure out that this is not – in any way – good news. Saying we’re bleeding less jobs is not saying that we are adding jobs.
The U-6 says that the tourniquet is slipping. We are bleeding out, economically-speaking.
Well, unless you are a Federal employee, that is. Then you have lordly wages and lavish benefits.
USA Today brings out yet another shocker: Federal pay exceeds that of private sector jobs of the same type. And the Federal benefits for those lavishly paid positions are absolutely obscene:
Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.
These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
So the pay is about 11% higher and the benefits are more than 4 times as large.
What’s wrong with this picture?
This is where your health care dollars will be spent under ObamaCare. Not on keeping you actually healthy, but on keeping the new rich wealthy at your expense. Think of the vast numbers of bureaucrats who will get massively overpaid jobs and lavish benefit packages while you struggle to keep paying the insurance company you have been indentured to by Obama’s law.
Better start making calls to your congressman. Make it abundantly clear that the price of a yes vote on ObamaCare will be very, very high indeed.
Or what?
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs is ratcheting up the pressure on Congress to complete health-care legislation, setting March 18 as the deadline by which a final bill should be passed.
Noting that President Obama leaves that day on a trip to Indonesia, Guam and Australia, Gibbs said on MSNBC’s “Daily Rundown” with Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie that “we believe that we’re on schedule, based on our conversations with the speaker and the majority leader, to get something done by then.”
The White House deadline means Congress would have exactly two weeks to pass a version of the existing Senate-approved bill in the House of Representatives and then pass a second bill filled with “fixes” in both chambers.
Gibbs modified his statement hours later, in his daily briefing for reporters, saying that the bill was “on schedule to get this through the House by then.” He did not address the bill’s fate in the Senate.
Back a few years, the one term county manager in the county I lived in issued a glaring threat in the local paper. The region had been hit by a massive ice storm and a full 50% of my utility company’s lines were down on the ground. Good old Ralphie got a headline demanding that the power be restored immediately “or else”.
What the “or else” was didn’t exactly get stipulated.
We got the power back on as soon as we were able given the immense damage.
He lost the next election in a landslide.
I really, really doubt the Emerald House staff munchkins will get this, but there is a lesson in that story.
Ships and passengers frozen in ice near Sweden:
Thirty to 40 ships — including several passenger ships — were stuck Thursday in ice off the coast of Sweden, said a spokesman for the Maritime Search and Rescue Center in Gothenburg, Sweden.
The area of the Baltic Sea worst hit by the ice were the waters bounded by mainland Sweden, the Stockholm archipelago and the Finnish island of Aland, said Tommy Gardebring, press officer with the Swedish Maritime Administration.
The center identified one of the passenger ships as the Amorella, with 753 passengers and 190 crew members.
Several passenger vessels from Viking Line were stuck, he said. One of them had been freed.
Of course, according to global warmening theory, such an event is unpossible. An event like this would put the North Dakota Banana Growers Association into receivership. But never fear, true believers! We here at the Blue Crab Boulevard Academy of Scientifical Studies have applied the Jones-Mann-Hansen “Hide the Decline” formula to the temperature data from the Baltic and have great news! The ships, their crews and the passengers are not actually frozen in the ice.
They actually flashed to incandescent gas when the scientifically corrected temperature hit 25,000° C.
The reality is that the White House wants to force House Democrats to pass the Senate bill. The supposed “fixes” that will be applied to that bill via reconciliation are being touted as the reason that House Democrats should simply follow the Wizard down into the valley of the Little Bighorn. Trust us, the Wizard shouts.
Unfortunately, there’s another reality in play.
There will be no reconciliation. There will, however, be a massacre in November.
The Senate will not be able to make any real changes to the Senate bill, if they even try. The little bit of tinkering they can do via budget reconciliation will leave all of the most objectionable parts of the Senate bill firmly intact and already signed into law.
House Democrats will have committed suicide on command for Obama. Because even “safe” Democratic seats will be in play after this horrible bill passes.
Americans do not want this bill by a very, very large margin. They will be in full payback mode in November. Repeal will be a massive weapon for the Republicans to wield and they will do so with glee.
I’m personally convinced that the health care “reform” will utterly cripple our already wounded economy.
And I have no illusions that the Wizard doesn’t know it will politically kill a lot of Democrats in Congress. I don’t think for a moment that he cares one whit about those future former members of Congress.
They should not be so stupid as to think he does, either.
The reality is simple. If the House passes the Senate bill, there will not be any reconciliation. It won’t happen. And Democrats in the House will be all alone to face the voters in November.
The Weekly Standard:
So, Scott Matheson appears to have the credentials to be a judge, but was his nomination used to buy off his brother’s vote?
Consider Congressman Matheson’s record on the health care bill. He voted against the bill in the Energy and Commerce Committee back in July and again when it passed the House in November. But now he’s “undecided” on ramming the bill through Congress. “The Congressman is looking for development of bipartisan consensus,” Matheson’s press secretary Alyson Heyrend wrote to THE WEEKLY STANDARD on February 22. “It’s too early to know if that will occur.” Asked if one could infer that if no Republican votes in favor of the bill (i.e. if a bipartisan consensus is not reached) then Rep. Matheson would vote no, Heyrend replied: “I would not infer anything. I’d wait to see what develops, starting with the health care summit on Thursday.”
The new version of PayGo. Obama pays off people to go vote for his schemes? The timing is more than a little suspicious, as the Standard points out. We have seen more than a little sleaze in the early stages of the ObamaCare odyssey. The Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker kickback. Did you really think the end game would be squeaky clean?
But how really, really ugly is the bill that is passed by such nefarious methods? The reality is that this monstrosity, if passed into law, will be even uglier than its passage.
Deaf to America:
That was nothing, though, compared to the multi-pronged Democratic disconnect on health care. It was clear early on that the public wanted the president and Congress to focus on the economy, especially after the evidence mounted that the stimulus, whatever its disaster-preventing benefits, was not going to spur job growth any time soon. Yet the Democrats went ahead and devoted most of the last year to health care reform, which only reinforced the growing perception that Washington was still as arrogant and unresponsive as ever and that the Democrats, like their predecessors, were still out for themselves and their political aims.
Once that die was cast, it was obvious that the public’s top priority was reducing costs, and they had a right to expect that’s what Washington would try to do since that’s how Obama sold his agenda. Yet the Democrats on the Hill crafted a contradictory trillion-dollar bill–it called for cutting costs by increasing spending–that was largely seen as being about expanding coverage. And after all the recent federal intrusions into the economy, the frustrated middle was plainly skeptical about the federal government’s ability to re-engineer one-sixth of the American economy. Yet the Democrats came forward with an incredibly intricate scheme that even they could not explain.
And so they follow their Wizard over the edge and into the valley of the Little Bighorn. If you are serious about trying to stop this madness, you had better start calling. Make it exceedingly clear that the political price Democrats will pay for ramming their agenda down America’s throat will be too high to bear. Say it with a smile – and mean it.
Begin gearing up now for the repeal battle, because this monstrous bill will cripple America, cause health insurance to skyrocket in cost and greatly diminish the quality of your health care. Sure, they promise otherwise, but when have you seen them be right?
They promise they can spend money to save money all the time. When does that work for you, personally? If you are a union member, Obama is coming for your gold-plated health benefits. If you are a small business owner, Obama is coming at you with punitive taxation. If you like your current health care plan, you will lose it. You will be forced to buy government-approved health care whether you want it or not. You will be a thrall to an insurance company. You will see your taxes go to fund abortions whether you want them to or not.
There is literally nothing worth the price you will pay in this horrible bill.
Start calling, folks. Hold the center.
And Democrat Charlie Rangel is gone – sort of.
Sources say Harlem Democrat Charles Rangel will step down as chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee soon, NBC News has learned.
He may make the move as early as tonight as pressure mounts and sources told NBC that either Michigan Democratic Rep Sander Levin or California Democrat Pete Stark will temporarily take over the committee.
Some details still need to be ironed out, but the sources said Rangel has been pushed to step down before the House voted on a bill to forcefully strip him of the coveted chairmanship.
He’s not giving up his seat, of course. Just the chairmanship of the committee. But making a few guesses about this, I’d about bet that he – and a lot of others – know that there are a lot more – even more damaging – revelations in the pipeline. If it was just the slap on the wrist he got over a couple of trips and nothing more, he would have fought.
There is likely a lot more dirt about to come out about Charlie and his finances.
Also, if true, his reported leave of absence may be a parting shot back at Nancy Pelosi for not protecting him. She needs his vote. If he is on leave, he can’t cast it for her. Interesting, isn’t it?
Look to Indiana:
If you want a textbook example of how to “bend the cost curve down,” I recommend taking a look at the state of Indiana and how it funds health care for its employees. The governor, Mitch Daniels, explained it yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. The state of Indiana puts $2,750 into a medical savings account for every state employee who signs up for this sort of coverage. (When it started five years ago, 4 percent signed up; this year 70 percent signed up.) The employee then pays all medical expenses out of that account. If there is money left over at the end of the year, it’s the employee’s to keep. If expenses exceed that sum, the state shares expenses up to an out-of-pocket maximum of $8,000 and covers all expenses above that sum.
The program has been a huge success, saving millions for both employees and the state. Why? As Governor Daniels explains,
It turns out that, when someone is spending his own money alone for routine expenses, he is far more likely to ask the questions he would ask if purchasing any other good or service: “Is there a generic version of that drug?” “Didn’t I take that same test just recently?” “Where can I get the colonoscopy at the best price?”
My wife and I have a Health Savings Account plan. It works. We watch exactly what the doctors recommend and keep an eye out for less expensive options on every visit. The plans in Washington don’t like those accounts, don’t like Medicare Advantage, don’t like anything that empowers citizens to choose for themselves.
They want you enfeebled and dependent on bureaucrats for your health care.
Reform should be about empowering citizens, not engorging the bureaucracy at public expense.
Democrats, Obamantics | Gaius March 11, 2010 | 
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