On Three! One, Two,….

It seems that there is bipartisan resentment and opposition to Obama’s health care “reform” among the nation’s governors.

The nation’s governors, Democrats as well as Republicans, voiced deep concern Sunday about the shape of the health care bill emerging from Congress, fearing that the federal government is about to hand them expensive new Medicaid obligations without providing the money to pay for them.

The role of the states in a restructured health care system dominated the National Governors Association’s summer meeting here this weekend – with bipartisan animosity voiced against the Obama administration’s plan during a closed-door luncheon on Saturday and in a private meeting on Sunday afternoon with the secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius.”I think the governors would all agree that what we don’t want from the federal government is unfunded mandates,” said Gov. Jim Douglas of Vermont, a Republican who is the group’s incoming chairman. “We can’t have the Congress impose requirements that we are forced to absorb beyond our capacity to do so.”

The governors’ backlash creates yet another health care headache for the Obama administration, which has tried to recruit state leaders to pressure members of Congress to wrap up their fitful negotiations. In its effort to win support for the health plan, the Obama administration dispatched Ms. Sebelius – who was governor of Kansas before she joined the cabinet in April – and the federal Medicaid chief, Cindy Mann, to meet here with the governors. Meanwhle, other administration officials spent Sunday pushing the proposal on television talk shows.

One is reminded of the old Cheech and Chong routine about the kamikaze commander briefing his pilots before the big day:

“Today,” he exhorts, “you will take your kamikaze airplane high into the sky, over the Yankee aircraft carrier, then take the kamikaze plane down, crashing on the deck, killing yourself and all aboard. Before we have the ceremonial sake toast, are there any questions?”

A hand rises tentatively in the back of the crowd: “Honorable general-san: Are you out of your flipping mind?”

As I recall it, the recruit did not use the word “flipping”.

On three, commit political suicide by voting for Obama’s plan!

I suspect that this means that Obama has seriously tried to overreach on this plan. I also suspect that any member of Congress, from either house, that votes for this plan will be in severe trouble back home at the next election. I think the governors (from both parties) just sent a very, very clear message. 

So, step up the pressure and start calling your Senators and Congressman. Just ask the Cheech and Chong question.

Random Obama

Matt Bai at The New York Times calls Obama the “shuffle President” – as in iPod shuffle, the name is not meant to be offensive.

Barack Obama is a born storyteller, which makes it all the more confounding that as president he refuses to inhabit a neat political narrative. Obama’s themes are clear enough (salvaging the American economy, reversing the Bush years), but his legislative priorities seem to rotate in and out like so many suitcases on a conveyor belt. One day his presidency hinges on health care, then he’s lobbying for a cap-and-trade plan to reduce carbon emissions and then he’s out there trying to re-regulate the financial world or sell a new treaty with the Russians. “An administration about everything is an administration about nothing” is the way the conservative columnist Peggy Noonan put it in The Wall Street Journal. Colin Powell made a similar point, telling John King of CNN, “I think one of the cautions that has to be given to the president – and I’ve talked to some of his people about this – is that you can’t have so many things on the table that you can’t absorb it all.”

Some of this itinerancy must be attributed to the sheer scope of the wreckage Obama inherited. When you’ve got failing banks and corporate giants, two ongoing wars, melting icecaps and mountainous health care costs, it’s hard to see what gets pushed to the margins. It’s also true, though, that Obama’s style reflects, whether he means it to or not, a cultural shift on the importance of narrative. Americans acclimated to clicking around hundreds of cable channels or Web pages experience the world less chronologically than their parents did. The most popular books now – business guides like “Good to Great” or social explorations like “The Tipping Point” – allow the casual reader to absorb their insights in random order or while skimming whole chapters.

Bull. Much of the “wreckage” is a direct result of Obama’s policies. Unemployment is soaring after Obama assured us that a breakneck passage of his ”stimulus” would keep unemployment at 8%. It is at 9.5% today. Obama assured us he had a plan to save people from foreclosure. Ask the 1.5 million people in foreclosure this year how that worked out.

For heaven’s sake, India just told Obama to stuff it when the administration tried to ram global warming nonsense down that nation’s throat. 

Obama is not in iPod shuffle mode – he is in completely random mode. As in he has not got a clue how to deal with any of this. So he bounces, clueless, from one crisis to another, mouthing the same hope-changey campaign rhetoric. But solving nothing whatsoever.

What “Improving” Our Relations With The World Looks Like

It look s a lot like foreign government spitting on the shoes of the US. India has publicly – and very unexpectedly – told Obama and the US to stuff it when it comes to climate “demands” from Obama.

India won’t bend to demands from the Obama administration or threats from the U.S. Congress to adopt legally binding caps on its carbon emissions, the country’s environment minister told visiting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday.

“There is simply no case for the pressure” the U.S. is exerting, considering India produces among the lowest per capita emissions in the world, Minister Jairam Ramesh told Clinton during an unexpected discussion of climate negotiations during an event intended to showcase U.S.-Indian cooperation on clean energy at a “green” office building outside New Delhi.

“As if this pressure was not enough, we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours,” Ramesh said, referring to a climate-change bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on June 26 that imposes tariffs on exports from countries that refuse to adopt greenhouse gas controls by 2020.

This was a very clear slap at Obama and at the US House of Representatives and their crap and tax bill. It is also a very clear signal about how the rest of the world sees Obama.

He is not “resetting” anything. He is perceived as a weakling. Otherwise, India would never have blindsided the US secretary of state this way.

Bad Mistake?

Jack Kelly on the Obama “stimulus” plan:

Shortly after a Quinnipiac University poll reported July 7 that President Barack Obama’s job approval rating in Ohio had fallen 13 percentage points in two months to 49 percent, the White House dispatched Vice President Joe Biden to that crucial swing state to defend the administration’s efforts to deal with the economic crisis.

This was a mistake, for two reasons.

The first is that almost every journalist reporting on the vice president’s speech would feel compelled to reference the Quinnipiac poll. This, noted Jim Geraghty of National Review Online, was like “hanging a lantern” on the problem.

The second is that Joe Biden is a motormouth, liable to say anything. The White House slapped him down after Mr. Biden said on ABC’s “This Week” program July 5 that the administration had “misread how bad the economy was.” (When asked about the remark, Mr. Obama said there wasn’t a misreading, just a lack of information in the early days of his presidency.)

Speaking in Cincinnati to a crowd of “about 200,” some of them protesters, Mr. Biden asked for patience. “Remember we’re only 140 days into this deal,” he said. “It’s supposed to take 18 months.”

This isn’t what Mr. Obama and his aides were saying in February. Back then we were told the $787 billion stimulus bill had to be rushed through Congress to keep unemployment from rising to 8 percent.

We are already at a 9.5% “official” unemployment rate and are actually already much higher in the real world. Read all of Kelly’s column, especially the part that describes exactly how many jobs the “stimulus” has generated in New Hampshire.

All temporary. All for one year. ALL in government. And very, very few.

My theory of why the health care “reform” suddenly stalled, despite the screeching from the left and the fawning from the media (yeah, that’s redundant, I know) is that the Democrats in Congress are staring at some really, really, really bad internal poll numbers right now. Not the overly-massaged national public polls but the internal ones that tell them how to vote.

And they are seriously questioning whether they want to be tethered to this Obama mess any more than they already are.

That is why the White House is coordinating attacks on wavering Dmocrats. A strategy that will, I sincerely hope, backfire in a spectacular manner.

The Wrong Stuff

Tom Wolfe on America’s great leap backward after the moon landings:

The American space program, the greatest, grandest, most Promethean – O.K. if I add “godlike”? – quest in the history of the world, died in infancy at 10:56 p.m. New York time on July 20, 1969, the moment the foot of Apollo 11’s Commander Armstrong touched the surface of the Moon.

It was no ordinary dead-and-be-done-with-it death. It was full-blown purgatory, purgatory being the holding pen for recently deceased but still restless souls awaiting judgment by a Higher Authority.

Like many another youngster at that time, or maybe retro-youngster in my case, I was fascinated by the astronauts after Apollo 11. I even dared to dream of writing a book about them someday. If anyone had told me in July 1969 that the sound of Neil Armstrong’s small step plus mankind’s big one was the shuffle of pallbearers at graveside, I would have averted my eyes and shaken my head in pity. Poor guy’s bucket’s got a hole in it.

Why, putting a man on the Moon was just the beginning, the prelude, the prologue! The Moon was nothing but a little satellite of Earth. The great adventure was going to be the exploration of the planets … Mars first, then Venus, then Pluto. Jupiter, Mercury, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus? NASA would figure out their slots in the schedule in due course. In any case, we Americans wouldn’t stop until we had explored the entire solar system. And after that … the galaxies beyond.

NASA had long since been all set to send men to Mars, starting with manned fly-bys of the planet in 1975. Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who had come over to our side in 1945, had been designing a manned Mars project from the moment he arrived. In 1952 he published his Mars Project as a series of graphic articles called “Man Will Conquer Space Soon” in Collier’s magazine. It created a sensation. He was front and center in 1961 when NASA undertook Project Empire, which resulted in working plans for a manned Mars mission. Given the epic, the saga, the triumph of Project Apollo, Mars would naturally come next. All NASA and von Braun needed was the president’s and Congress’s blessings and the great adventure was a Go. Why would they so much as blink before saying the word?

Please read the whole thing. You already know the answer as to why Washington cut back so hard even after we had made this giant leap for mankind: They wanted the money for greater pork-kind.

If you have not read Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, you really should.  It captures the time, the country’s mood and the great sense of wonder most Americans felt when we sent men into space – not just low earth orbit. I remember watching Apollo 11 and I remember wondering why television coverage of the later landings was so spotty (aside from Apollo 13, of course). 

We, as a nation, should be ashamed at our lack of will in this. Wolfe paraphrase something he once heard Wernher von Braun say shortly before von Braun died:

Here on Earth we live on a planet that is in orbit around the Sun. The Sun itself is a star that is on fire and will someday burn up, leaving our solar system uninhabitable. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of.

The entire NASA budget of around $18 billion is just over 1/2 of 1% of the 2010 budget.

We walked on the moon once.

We should be ashamed.