Oregon democrat Earl Blumenauer made liberals happy with a New York Times editorial calling conservative critics of democrat Health Care Reform “liars” and ridiculing the very idea that what Sarah Palin referred to on Facebook as “death panels” could possibly be found in the bill passed by the House of Representatives.

The most bizarre moment came on Aug. 7 when Sarah Palin used the term “death panels” on her Facebook page. She wrote: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

There is, of course, nothing even remotely like this in the bill.

The Wall Street Journal, in its lead editorial today, demonstrates rather effectively the falsity of Congressman Blumenauer’s self-proclaimed injured innocence. The editorial is specifically about those “death panels,” and explains exactly what they are, what they would do, and why they are a terrible idea.

Like most of Europe, the various health bills stipulate that Congress will arbitrarily decide how much to spend on health care for seniors every year—and then invest an unelected board with extraordinary powers to dictate what is covered and how it will be paid for. White House budget director Peter Orszag calls this Medicare commission “critical to our fiscal future” and “one of the most potent reforms.”

On that last score, he’s right. Prominent health economist Alain Enthoven has likened a global budget to “bombing from 35,000 feet, where you don’t see the faces of the people you kill.”

As envisioned by the Senate Finance Committee, the commission—all 15 members appointed by the President—would have to meet certain budget targets each year. Starting in 2015, Medicare could not grow more rapidly on a per capita basis than by a measure of inflation. After 2019, it could only grow at the same rate as GDP, plus one percentage point.

The theory is to let technocrats set Medicare payments free from political pressure, as with the military base closing commissions. But that process presented recommendations to Congress for an up-or-down vote. Here, the commission’s decisions would go into effect automatically if Congress couldn’t agree within six months on different cuts that met the same target. The board’s decisions would not be subject to ordinary notice-and-comment rule-making, or even judicial review.

Yet if the goal really is political insulation, then the Medicare Commission is off to a bad start. To avoid a senior revolt, Finance Chairman Max Baucus decided to bar his creation from reducing benefits or raising the eligibility age, which meant that it could only cut costs by tightening Medicare price controls on doctors and hospitals. Doctors and hospitals, naturally, were furious.

So the Montana Democrat bowed and carved out exemptions for such providers, along with hospices and suppliers of medical equipment. Until 2019 the commission will thus only be allowed to attack Medicare Advantage, the program that gives 10 million seniors private insurance choices, and to raise premiums for Medicare prescription drug coverage, which is run by private contractors. Notice a political pattern?

But a decade from now, such limits are off—which also happens to be roughly the time when ObamaCare’s spending explodes. The hard budget cap means there is only so much money to be divvied up for care, with no account for demographic changes, such as longer life spans, or for the increasing incidence of diabetes, heart disease and other chronic conditions.

Worse, it makes little room for medical innovations. The commission is mandated to go after “sources of excess cost growth,” meaning treatments that are too expensive or whose coverage will boost spending. If researchers find a pricey treatment for Alzheimer’s in 2020, that might be banned because it would add new costs and bust the global budget. Or it might decide that “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller,” as President Obama put it in June.

In other words, the Medicare commission would come to function much like the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, which rations care in England. Or a similar Washington state board created in 2003 to control costs. Its handiwork isn’t pretty.

Read the whole thing.
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We already addressed the “no death panels in our bill” claim long ago, when the first wave of liberal denial crested, in this August 16th posting, which quotes this perfectly accurate analysis by Cornell Law Professor William Jacobsen.

Democrats don’t like it being called a “death panel,” but the idea all along has been that their version of health care reform would avoid public debate by passing the responsibility of meeting budgetary limitations to an unelected commission which would be empowered to ration services. Many of its decisions will inevitably deny medicines, treatments, and procedures whose absence will be the equivalent of a death sentence. Americans will die because government has foreclosed their medical options. The body making such decisions and condemning Americans to deaths which might have been prevented on monetary grounds will not be a “death panel?”

Only if you are a democrat, won’t it be.

This photo is making the rounds via viral email.

Hat tip to Rich Duff.

These Japanese tried charging into the teeth of determined American resistance.

Even Time magazine recognizes that democrat efforts to impose socialized health care on an unwilling nation are looking more anjd more like the hopeless and futile Banzai attacks made by suicidal Japanese units on well-prepared Marine positions on South Pacific islands during WWII.

Getting hopped up on left wing ideology instead of rice wine, waving 2000 page pieces of legislation instead of samurai swords, and shouting slogans of Envy instead of Banzai! is not going to make the outcome different.

Smart Democrats are thinking we’ve seen this movie before: Suicide by health care. Last week was the trifecta that may have sealed health care’s fate: 1) GOP wins Virginia and New Jersey (!) governor’s races. 2) Business comes out swinging. 3) Unemployment over 10.

“To make matters worse, they force Blue Dogs and front-liners to walk the plank on the Pelosi Plan that exceeds the symbolically important $1 trillion mark, includes the public plan and a big tax increase on small business—all of which are dead-on-arrival in the Senate. BTU2. The attack ads make themselves.

“Now Gallup finds a sudden and massive shift among Indies. And let’s be honest, it’s not that Indies have fallen in love with the GOP agenda, whatever that is. Far from it. They want to put a hard brake on the spending and the borrowing, and they don’t want Washington messing with their health care at a time of intense economic anxiety.

“Meanwhile, the abortion sideshow is the last thing that the White House needed. Gets activists on both sides to man the battle stations and makes the vote a no-win proposition for any Dem in Reddish territory. Worst of all, your typical middle-of-the-road swing voter watches politicians in Washington fighting over abortion and says: ‘I thought we were having a health care debate. I don’t want any part of this. I think I’ll change the channel.’ Oh, and next up: immigration. Which is sure to be a unifying discussion.

“And, at long last, the debate is now squarely focused on health care costs, the soft underbelly of this whole enterprise, the place they never wanted this to go because it’s the issue on which they have no answer. Most voters now believe the bill will raise their personal costs—not a good thing for a politician to be doing in the midst of a deep recession. And when the establishment (CBO, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Mark Warner, Susan Collins) all agree that the bills don’t contain costs, it’s hard to dismiss as a baseless attack.

Rep. Paul Ryan ( R—1 WI), in his 2 minute House speech captured in this 1:53 video, correctly observes that the democrat’s health care bill is not about reforming the system or lowering costs. It’s about ideology.

What side of history do democrats want to be on? Not the side of Washington and Jefferson.

John Cassidy, in the New Yorker, identifies whose side they are on.

In extending our health-care system, all we are doing is catching up with Otto Von Bismarck’s Germany, which recognized a hundred and twenty-five years ago that universal health and disability coverage, along with old age pensions and a system of public education, were essential elements of a modern society.

Otto von Bismarck

Der Staatssozialismus paukt sich durch. (State Socialism will forcibly move forward.)—Otto von Bismark.

Democrats want to replace the Liberal American ideals of limited government, personal freedom, and individual responsibility with Mitteleuropean statism, socialism, and collectivism. Their “modern society” is, just like Bismark’s, centralized, bureaucratized, and dirigiste.

Socialism, statism, collectivism are all actually terribly old-fashioned ideas, representing nothing other than a variety of negative responses to the Liberal Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty and the restraint of state power in favor of voluntary and organic order. The would-be rulers of mankind simply ceased appealing to claims of Divine Right and hereditary superiority and began attempting to gain power by flattering and bribing the masses, while arousing their passions with fraudulent claims of injury and entitlement.

Human appetite for power is unlimited and the possession of power is always addictive. The Central European monarchies, Germany, Austria, Russia, which pioneered centralizing statism with unprecedentedly expansive regimes of taxation, regulation, and conscription, inevitably turned their power against one another, and destroyed themselves with the war they launched in 1914.

From its grand dynastic monarchies, the tradition of Continental European collectivism passed in 1917 to populist rule by cafe intellectuals, bringing within a generation an even greater war and murderous barbarism producing atrocities and deaths on a scale unprecedented in European civilization.

European exhaustion and the demoralization of the traditional leadership classes, after WWII, produced generally more benign socialist rule, but the European welfare state politics American liberals yearn to share produced nothing but European stagnation and decline. Britain was still rationing food as it had in wartime in 1954.

America surged dramatically ahead of Europe, economically and culturally, and (until the late 1960s) enjoyed decidedly less divisive and destructive politics.

Europe only began catching up to the United States in material prosperity, after many long years, when deference to market considerations on the basis of the American example significantly began to influence European economic policies.

Yet, despite the manifest superiority of the American political tradition and the American ideals of Liberty and Individualism, our domestic community of fashion continues to yearn to replace those with European-style statism. They seem to feel instinctively that, because French cheese, German cars, and Scandinavian design are such effective markers of class superiority that Europeans must also possess a more chic and desirable kind of politics. They are dead wrong.

Our liberals are like the Bourbons, and the Fall of Communism (whose anniversary, with respect to the opening of the Berlin Wall, we begin to celebrate tomorrow) is like the French Revolution, a historical watershed producing some definitive judgments on the Past. Like the Bourbons, American liberals have learned nothing about economics. And like the Bourbons, they refuse to relinquish their illusions and their ancient animosities.

Like housebreakers waiting until Saturday night when American adults would be out for the evening, Nancy Pelosi and the House democrats, joined among Republicans only by former Representative William (“office cooler full of cash”) Jefferson’s replacement Joseph Cao (“R”—2 LA), narrowly passed the labrynthine multi-trillion dollar bill proposing to nationalize health care in America 220-215.

The New York Times called it “their defining social policy achievement.”

I think it defines them alright, as socialists, collectivists, liars, frauds, and thieves.

Stephen Green speaks bitterly for the rest of us:

How do you cure high unemployment and sluggish growth?

Proven methods include reducing regulation and lowering taxes.

So it comes as no surprise that the House has just approved one of (if not the) biggest increases in taxes and regulation after virtually zero debate and in the middle of a weekend night when almost no one is paying attention.

They’re cowards. Shrewd cowards, but cowards still. ...

Which is the greater number: Pages in the bill the House just passed, or the minutes spent debating it?

Rich Lowry makes the same point, observing that the democrats are operating on the basis of a mandate for radical change that they never had.

On November 3, the fairy tale died. The election results in Virginia and New Jersey dismantled the self-satisfied, just-so story that Democrats have been telling themselves about last year’s election.

The story goes like this: In 2008, Americans voted for change not just in the nation’s leadership, but in its fundamental political orientation. They wanted a shift to the left not seen since 1932. The nation’s political map had been utterly transformed. Barack Obama owned the suburbs and independents, and laid claim to formerly secure Republican states. An outdated GOP had been reduced to a rejectionist husk clinging to rural areas and the South.

A more modest rival interpretation explained it differently: A charming young man running against a Republican party debilitated by its association with an unpopular war and a politically toxic incumbent won a solid 7-point victory nationally. He sounded reasonable and moderate, and won for his party something important, if not necessarily epoch-making: a chance to govern after the other side had blown it.

The Republican sweep of the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey is flatly incompatible with the first, heroic interpretation of 2008. If things changed so fundamentally, they wouldn’t have snapped back so quickly.

Read the whole thing.

David Brooks, too, observes that the willingness of democrats to try for radical change at the risk of the economy is costing them the support of the non-ideological center.

Independents turned on the Republican Party because the MSM persuaded them that it was George W. Bush’s intransigent extremism which had poisoned American political life and produced bitter factionalism, and that it was Bush’s war spending and Republican banking deregulation that produced the economic crisis. They put democrats in charge, and our politics has not become bipartisan, the Middle East is not at peace, and the economy has not recovered. On the other hand, the deficit has quadrupled, the government owns General Motors, and Congress is trying to nationalize another one sixth of the economy while adding another trillion dollar entitlement, just before it proceeds to start working on carbon taxes.

Right now, independent voters are astonishingly volatile. Democrats did poorly in elections on Tuesday partly because of disappointed liberals who think that President Obama is moving too slowly, but mostly because of anxious suburban independents who think he is moving too fast. In Pennsylvania, there was an eight-point swing away from the Democrats among independents from a year ago. In New Jersey, there was a 12-point swing. In Virginia, there was a 13-point swing.

The most telling races this year were the suburban rebellions across the country. For example, in Westchester and Nassau counties in New York, Republican candidates came from nowhere to defeat entrenched Democratic county officials. In blue Pennsylvania, the G.O.P. won six out of seven statewide offices.

Middle-class suburban voters who have been trending Democratic for a decade suddenly lurched out of the Democratic camp — and are now in play.

Why? What do these voters want?

The first thing to say is that this recession has hit the new suburbs hardest, exactly where independents are likely to live. According to a survey by the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, 76 percent of suburbanites say they or someone they know have lost a job in the past year.

The second thing to say is that in this time of need, these voters are not turning to government for support. Trust in government is at its lowest level in recent memory. Over the past year, there has been a shift to the right on issue after issue. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who believe that there is too much government regulation rose from 38 percent in 2008 to 45 percent in 2009. The percentage of Americans who want unions to have less influence rose from 32 percent to a record 42 percent.

Americans have moved to the right on abortion, immigration and global warming. Over the past seven months, the number of people who say government is doing too many things better left to business has jumped from 40 percent to 48 percent, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

According to that same survey, only 31 percent of Americans believe that the president and Congress “should worry more about boosting the economy even though it may mean larger budget deficits.” Sixty-two percent, twice as many, believe the president and Congress “should worry more about keeping the deficit down, even though it may mean it will take longer for the economy to recover.”

These shifts have not occurred because conservatives and liberals have changed their minds. They haven’t. The shift is among independents.

According to Gallup, the share of independents who describe their views as conservative has moved from 29 percent last year to 35 percent today. The share of independents who believe there is too much government regulation of business has jumped from 38 percent to 50 percent. Independents are in the position of a person who is feeling gravely ill at the same time he has lost faith in his doctor. ...

Independents support the party that seems most likely to establish a frame of stability and order, within which they can lead their lives. They can’t always articulate what they want, but they withdraw from any party that threatens turmoil and risk. As always, they’re looking for a safe pair of hands.

Daniel Henniger explains that economic fears drove independent voters to flee the Republican ticket and vote for Barack Obama, whose calm tones and competently-run campaign promised he could handle the crisis. The economic crisis was not resolved quickly. Democrats chose not to adopt the conventional policy of cutting taxes, preferring to regulate and spend. The public’s unease has been increased rather than assuaged by the Administration’s determination to advance an extreme partisan agenda, even in the face of declining public support.

Independent voters across the U.S. have become like the massive cattle herd John Wayne drove from Texas to Kansas in “Red River.” These voters are spooked and on the run, a political stampede that veered left in November 2008 and now right a mere year later. They will keep running—crushing incumbents, candidates and political models of the left and right—through November 2010 and onto 2012 until they find a person or party capable of leadership appropriate to our unsettled times. And yes, Virginia, the possibility of a man on a white horse in 2012 is not out of the question.

Exit polls in New Jersey and Virginia said the economy was on voters’ minds. Unemployment is near 10% and may stay there for a year. But it’s deeper than that.

This isn’t just another turn in the business cycle. On Sept. 15, 2008, the economic structure of the U.S. imploded. Lehman Brothers, a synonym for the American financial bedrock, filed for bankruptcy. On June 1, 2009, General Motors, once a synonym for American economic primacy, filed for bankruptcy and was effectively nationalized. In the nine months between these two iconic events, the American people were riveted to news of economic distress.

The signal event of the 2008 presidential election was the day in September when Sen. John McCain “suspended” his campaign to deal with the financial crisis. Within 48 hours, his candidacy stood naked. Mr. McCain’s instincts were right; The American people wanted leadership. But he didn’t have a clue how to provide it. The restless herd ran toward Barack Obama.

Now they’re ready to run toward someone else. They just did in New Jersey and Virginia.

This is not normal. A new American presidency, especially this one, should not be in this much trouble 10 months into a four-year term. Nor would it be if not for the economic events that fell out of September 2008.

Absent the immediate need to steady the credit markets and deal with a deepening recession, the Obama White House would have introduced—and passed—its restructuring of the U.S. health-care system in early spring. Instead, voters watched Congress create and pass a nearly trillion-dollar “stimulus” bill, and then erect the world’s tallest national budget—a towering $3.5 trillion. They watched the Obama Treasury, now hard-wired to the Federal Reserve, intervene massively in the structure of the private economy. There was an attempted federal climate-control bill, an attempted expansion of union organizing rights (card check) and second thoughts on free-trade agreements.

Only then, in June, was this hyperactive government able to introduce its health-care proposal—the public option, the remaking of the insurance industry, a 5.4% tax surcharge, the expansion of Medicaid.

After his election, Mr. Obama’s strongest attribute was limitless self-confidence. He was a man aglow with knowledge, control and . . . leadership. Now, with the scale and cost of Mr. Obama’s ambitions so clear, the question many voters are asking is whether the Obama government’s reach exceeds its grasp or abilities—or any government’s.

The most acute voters know these are not normal times. The Obama vision so far looks a lot like the social-market economic model of Europe, where leaders such as Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel give homilies about the “crisis” of capitalism. If American voters then look toward Asia, they see rising economies using capitalism to supplant Europe.

American voters know they’ve reached a long-term economic tipping point. Which way to go, old West or new East? They understand the challenges are growing while the politicians seem to be shrinking.

So the Republicans “won” Tuesday. Now what?

Just as the Democrats in 2008 ran mainly against “Bush,” the Republican political model seems to be to let Democratic failure dump states like New Jersey and Virginia into their control. But I think most voters, no matter their party registration, know that in the past 12 months the stakes for them have suddenly become larger than political “control.”

Unless leadership emerges equal to the new world voters see they have fallen into, volatility in America’s election returns is going to be the norm for a long time.

The moral is that personal charm and a reassuring manner are powerful tools in gaining middle-of-the-road support in American politics, but keeping the support of a coalition including the ideologically uncommitted requires a kind of leadership which Ronald Reagan had and which Barack Obama lacks.

Obama already seems already far more likely to go down in history as a surly extremist who achieved election by temporarily feigning a false bonhommie, à la Jimmy Carter, than a genuinely transformative president like Reagan.

Going for a New Deal-style massive entitlement program in the midst of recession, after quadrupling the deficit, will never persuade independents that this administration is responsible and pragmatic.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R- UT) yesterday. in an interview with CNS, questioned the constitutionality of the democrat health care reform bill, and explained why Nancy Pelosi and the democrat party’s congressional leadership are willing to defy opinion polls and risk losing control of Congress by ramming through ObamaCare.

The Hill:

HATCH: That’s their goal. Move people into government that way. Do it in increments. They’ve actually said it. They’ve said it out loud.

Q: This is a step-by-step approach —

HATCH: A step-by-step approach to socialized medicine. And if they get there, of course, you’re going to have a very rough time having a two-party system in this country, because almost everybody’s going to say, “All we ever were, all we ever are, all we ever hope to be depends on the Democratic Party.”

Q: They’ll have reduced the American people to dependency on the federal government.

HATCH: Yeah, you got that right. That’s their goal. That’s what keeps Democrats in power.

Around 19:50 in the 33:57 video.
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Duncan Black speaks for the left blogosphere generally by parsing Hatch’s warning into a more flattering form.

Orrin Hatch says we can’t have health care reform because it will be awesome and everyone will love it and they’ll be so grateful that they will vote for Democrats for all eternity.

Health care delivered by government will actually, judging by the experience of other countries, be crappy, severely rationed, and lacking innovation. The rich and powerful will simply go outside US borders to obtain first class health care at luxury clinics located in convenient resort destinations. The ordinary middle class citizen will find himself standing in long queues behind welfare moms, junkies, gangbangers, and illegal aliens.

The quality will be low, the service will be slow, but lunch will come without a check.

Democrats are counting on human nature being on their side. Free goods and services at somebody else’s expense have a powerful appeal. Also, they are addictive.

Once anyone has contributed revenue into the system, he is going to feel he has a claim to get those promised benefits. Once one sixth of the American economy goes down the federal anaconda’s throat, it won’t be coming back up.

Duncan Black’s boast can be more accurately paraphrased that the heroin will be so awesome, and will be so effective that the suckers’ will love it and will be unable afterward to do without it, and they’ll be so dependent on their dealer that they will happily surrender to him all the money and power he ever asks for.

Free government services, like addictive drugs, are morally corrosive, enervating to the human character and will, and a sure path to dependency and slavery.

Queue in Baltimore (Baltimore Sun photo)

Bill Kristol suggests, if you want to see ObamaCare in action, just look at how well the federal government is doing passing out Flu vaccine right now.

With Barack Obama as her front man, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—the real power in the Democratic party—has gone Clinton and Gingrich one better. Clinton tried to hike taxes. Gingrich sought to cut Medicare. Pelosi wants to do both at once. This is quite a feat: She’s combined the most unpopular Democratic and Republican proposals of the last generation in one piece of legislation.

And her timing is impeccable. Pelosi has decided to raise taxes and discourage employment just as joblessness approaches 10 percent. She’s decided to cut Medicare reimbursements just as seniors’ retirement accounts have shrunk. She’s decided to advance a huge spending bill just as the deficit is at historic highs. She’s decided to insist on federal funding of abortion just as the issue seems to have reached some sustainable middle ground. And she’s decided to put forward a 2,000-page piece of legislation with a mind-boggling array of scary instances of bureaucratic coercion and farcical examples of nanny-state liberalism—all nuggets of political gold for Republicans—at a time when the public is sick of statist overreaching and big-government meddling.

This is the Pelosi Plan to wreck our health care system and—the bright side!—the Democratic majority along with it. This week we’ll see whether enough of her fellow House Democrats intervene to prevent her from devastating their party. There will be no Republican votes for the Pelosi Plan of tax hikes and Medicare cuts. Will there be enough Democratic resistors so the bill is either withdrawn or defeated?

It’s hard to say at this point. The arm-twisting and palm-greasing haven’t yet produced enough Democrats to put the Pelosi Plan over the top. The substantive case against various versions of the legislation made for months by an army of nonpartisan experts and wonks has had an effect. The state of the American economy and the federal budget gives sane Democrats pause as they consider enacting a sprawling new entitlement. And as Americans read the legislation over the next week, they’ll find so much that is ill-considered, cumbersome, deceptive, and house-of-cards-like that it all just may collapse of its own weight.

Or it may collapse because of swine flu.

After all, we’re seeing a big government health care program in operation right now—the Obama administration’s effort to deal with the swine flu problem. No, come to think of it, it’s now the swine flu emergency. Last week, President Obama so legally designated it. How’s that test case in government-run emergency care going?

Turn on your local news to find out. You’ll see false reassurances, broken promises, rationing which doesn’t provide the promised rations, queues lengthening while supplies run out, and lots of bureaucrats explaining just why things aren’t working quite as their centrally planned plans had planned.

The swine flu emergency is a foretaste of life under the Pelosi Plan.

David Harsanyi thinks Americans need a good stiff drink as we survey the sheer size of Nancy Pelosi’s Pharonic pyramid of paper.

The King James version of the Bible runs more than 600 pages and is crammed with celestial regulations. Newton’s Principia Mathematica distilled many of the rules of physics in a mere 974 pages.

Neither have anything on Nancy Pelosi’s new fiendishly entertaining health-care opus, which tops 1,900 pages.

So curl up by a fire with a fifth of whiskey and just dive in.

But drink quickly. In the new world, your insurance choices will be tethered to decisions made by people with Orwellian titles (“1984” was only 268 pages!) like the “Health Choices Commissioner” or “Inspector General for the Health Choices Administration.”

You will, of course, need to be plastered to buy Pelosi’s fantastical proposition that 450,000 words of new regulations, rules, mandates, penalties, price controls, taxes and bureaucracy will have the transformative power to “provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending . . . .”

It’s going to take some time to deconstruct this lengthy masterpiece, but as you flip through the pages of the House bill, you will notice the word “regulation” appears 181 times. “Tax” is there 214 times. “Fees,” 103 times. As we all know, nothing says “affordability” like higher taxes and fees.

The word “shall” – as in “must” or “required to” – appears over 3,000 times. The word, alas, is never preceded by the patriotic phrase “mind our own freaking business.” Not once.

To vote for the bill, a legislator must believe a $1 trillion price tag is “revenue neutral,” or that it alleviates any of the pain higher costs bring to the average American. This would require alcohol.

Peggy Noonan is feeling a bit depressed today contemplating 1990 unreadable pages costing $2.24 million dollars a word.

While Americans feel increasingly disheartened, their leaders evince a mindless . . . one almost calls it optimism, but it is not that.

It is a curious thing that those who feel most mistily affectionate toward America, and most protective toward it, are the most aware of its vulnerabilities, the most aware that it can be harmed. They don’t see it as all-powerful, impregnable, unharmable. The loving have a sense of its limits.

When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren’t they worried about the impact of what they’re doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?

I think I know part of the answer. It is that they’ve never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don’t have the habit of worry. They talk about their “concerns”—they’re big on that word. But they’re not really concerned. They think America is the goose that lays the golden egg. Why not? She laid it in their laps. She laid it in grandpa’s lap.

They don’t feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—”strongest nation in the world,” “indispensable nation,” “unipolar power,” “highest standard of living”—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.

We are governed at all levels by America’s luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they’re not optimists—they’re unimaginative. They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.

A musical tribute from Creedence (with malice) to our democrat rulers via Moe Lane.

2:16 video

Capitol Weekly reports on an interesting recent political dialogue in California.

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, famously told the governor to “kiss my gay ass” at a Democratic fundraiser last month. Two days later, the governor responded in the veto message of one of Ammiano’s bills.

Earlier in the month, the San Francisco Democrat was at a boisterous Democratic fund-raiser when Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger stopped by to say hello. The governor, a guest of former Mayor Willie Brown, said a few words of greeting and extolled the virtues of bipartisanship. But Democrats, unhappy with the governor in their midst, booed loudly.

“Kiss my gay ass!” Ammiano shouted out.

Schwarzenegger smiled and left. But he was plotting his move.

On Oct. 11, the governor vetoed Ammiano’s AB 1176, with a seemingly innocuous and vague veto message.

Innocent enough. But when read on the governor’s Web site, the first letter of the last two paragraphs line up to spell out a clear, if crude message.

Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear said the hidden message was a “strange coincidence.”

“When you veto so many bills, something like this is bound to happen,” he said with a straight face.

Peggy Noonan contends that the Progressive Frontier of government expansion closed some time ago. Americans already have all the government, all the services, taxes, and regulations they can stand. Barack Obama and the democrats in Congress are yearning to go back to a Depression era past in which paternalistic leaders in Washington taxed and spent, and delivered de haute en bas charitable goodies to grateful voters. Americans today know that they will have to pay for any gifts sent to them from Washington themselves.

I’m not sure the White House can tell the difference between campaign mode and governing mode, but it is the difference between “us versus them” and “us.” People sense the president does too much of the former, and this is reflected not only in words but decisions, such as the pursuit of a health-care agenda that was inevitably divisive. It has lost the public’s enthusiastic backing, if it ever had it, but is gaining on Capitol Hill. People don’t want whatever it is they’re about to get, and they’re about to get it. In that atmosphere everything grates, but most especially us-versus-them-ism.

The biggest thing supporters of a health care overhaul do not understand about those who oppose their efforts, and who oppose the Baucus bill, which has triumphantly passed the Senate Finance Committee even though no one knows exactly what is or will end up in it, is the issue of context.

The Democratic Party and the White House repeatedly suggest that if you are not for the bill or an overhaul, you don’t care about your fellow human beings and you love and support the insurance companies. Actually, no one loves the insurance companies, including the insurance companies. ... But the Obama administration’s strategy of making (the insurance industry) “the villain” in “the narrative” will probably not have that much punch because . . . well, again, who likes the insurance companies? Who ever did?

People who oppose a health-care overhaul are not in love with insurance companies. They’re not even in love with the status quo. Everyone knows the jerry-built system of the past half-century has weak points. They just don’t think the current plan will shore them up. They think the plan would create new weak points and widen old ones. They think this because they have brains.

But even that doesn’t get to the real subtext of the opposition. Yes, the timing is wrong—we have other, more urgent crises to face, and an exploding deficit. And yes, a big change in a huge economic sector during economic crisis is looking for trouble.

But a big part of opposition to the health-care plan is a sense of historical context. People actually have a sense of the history they’re living in and the history their country has recently lived through. They understand the moment we’re in.

In the days of the New Deal, in the 1930s, government growth was virgin territory. It was like pushing west through a continent that seemed new and empty. There was plenty of room to move. The federal government was still small and relatively lean, the income tax was still new. America pushed on, creating what it created: federal programs, departments and initiatives, Social Security. In the mid-1960s, with the Great Society, more or less the same thing. Government hadn’t claimed new territory in a generation, and it pushed on—creating Medicare, Medicaid, new domestic programs of all kinds, the expansion of welfare and the safety net.

Now the national terrain is thick with federal programs, and with state, county, city and town entities and programs, from coast to coast. It’s not virgin territory anymore, it’s crowded. We are a nation fully settled by government. We are well into the age of the welfare state, the age of government. We know its weight, heft and demands, know its costs both in terms of money and autonomy, even as we know it has made many of our lives more secure, and helped many to feel encouragement.

But we know the price now. This is the historical context. The White House often seems disappointed that the big center, the voters in the middle of the spectrum, aren’t all that excited about following them on their bold new journey. But it’s a world America has been to. It isn’t new to us. And we don’t have too many illusions about it.

Hotline OnCall admires a very nice thank you gift recently delivered for services rendered during last year’s primary campaign for the democrat party presidential nomination.

It’s not often that a plum ambassadorship goes to someone who isn’t a career foreign service officer or a big bucks campaign contributor, but Pres. Obama has nominated Anne Slaughter Andrew to be the ambassador to the Republic of Costa Rica.

Hmmm.

The prospective diplomat is an Indiana Univ. trained atty who currently is Principal of New Energy Nexus, LLC, and, according to the WH release on her nomination, “advises companies and entrepreneurs on investments and strategies to capitalize on the New Energy Economy.”

But Andrew is also wife of ex-IN Dem chair Joe Andrew, who was tapped by Bill Clinton to be DNC from ‘99 to ‘01 who also was a big backer of then-Sen. Hillary Clinton in her ‘08 bid—until five days before the must-win IN Dem primary last year, when Andrew with great fan-fare threw Clinton under the bus, endorsed Obama, urged all his fellow Hoosiers to vote for Obama and called up party leaders and fellow superdelegates (Andrew had that status to the Dem convo because he was an ex-DNC chair) to basically shut the nominating contest down after the IN primary and get behind Obama.

In a public letter that at times was melodramatic and angst-ridden, Andrew wrote: “Why call for superdelegates to come together now to constructively pick a president? The simple answer is that while the timing is hard for me personally, it is best for America. We simply cannot wait any longer, nor can we let this race fall any lower and still hope to win in November. June or July may be too late.”

Well, the contest did run until June and Obama still somehow made it to the WH. But for Joe, this was a selfless act: “My endorsement of Senator Obama will not be welcome news to my friends and family at the Clinton campaign… If the campaign’s surrogates called Governor Bill Richardson, a respected former member of President Clinton’s cabinet, a ‘Judas’ for endorsing Senator Obama, we can all imagine how they will treat somebody like me.”

Geee, somehow he managed to survive and somehow the current Sec/State must have an amazing amount of equanimity and grace not to have choked on this administration nomination.

Charles Krauthammer notes that Barack Obama and the democrats painted themselves into the corner they presently occupy. Watching how they deal with the situation will be interesting. Krauthammer compares Obama to Hamlet. I think Obama is more like Aethelred the Unready.

The genius of democracy is the rotation of power, which forces the opposition to be serious—particularly about things like war, about which until Jan. 20 of this year Democrats were decidedly unserious.

When the Iraq war (which a majority of Senate Democrats voted for) ran into trouble and casualties began to mount, Democrats followed the shifting winds of public opinion and turned decidedly antiwar. But needing political cover because of their post-Vietnam reputation for weakness on national defense, they adopted Afghanistan as their pet war.

“I was part of the 2004 Kerry campaign, which elevated the idea of Afghanistan as ‘the right war’ to conventional Democratic wisdom,” wrote Democratic consultant Bob Shrum shortly after President Obama was elected. “This was accurate as criticism of the Bush administration, but it was also reflexive and perhaps by now even misleading as policy.”

Which is a clever way to say that championing victory in Afghanistan was a contrived and disingenuous policy in which Democrats never seriously believed, a convenient two-by-four with which to bash George Bush over Iraq—while still appearing warlike enough to fend off the soft-on-defense stereotype.

Brilliantly crafted and perfectly cynical, the “Iraq war bad, Afghan war good” posture worked. Democrats first won Congress, then the White House. But now, unfortunately, they must govern. No more games. No more pretense.

So what does their commander in chief do now with the war he once declared had to be won but had been almost criminally under-resourced by Bush?

Perhaps provide the resources to win it?

You would think so. And that’s exactly what Obama’s handpicked commander requested on Aug. 30—a surge of 30,000 to 40,000 troops to stabilize a downward spiral and save Afghanistan the way a similar surge saved Iraq.

That was more than five weeks ago. Still no response. Obama agonizes publicly as the world watches. ...

Less than two months ago—Aug. 17 in front of an audience of veterans—the president declared Afghanistan to be “a war of necessity.” Does anything he says remain operative beyond the fading of the audience applause.

John Hinderaker listens to another democrat apologizing for America.

Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright spoke at a forum in Omsk, Siberia. Pravda reported that her speech “surprised the audience.” No wonder. The Russians in attendance must have wondered how they managed to lose the cold war:

Madeleine Albright said during the meeting that America no longer had the intention of being the first nation of the world. ... The former US Secretary of State surprised the audience with her speech. She particularly said that democracy was not the perfect system. “It can be contradictory, corrupt and may have security problems,” Albright said. America has been having hard times recently, Albright said. “We have been talking about our exceptionalism during the recent eight years. Now, an average American wants to stay at home – they do not need any overseas adventures. We do not need new enemies,” Albright said adding that Beijing, London and Delhi became a serious competition for Washington and New York. “My generation has made many mistakes. We give the future into the hands of the young. Your prime goal is to overcome the gap between the poor and the rich,’ the former head of the US foreign political department said.

There you have it. And Albright was Secretary of State during the relatively moderate Clinton administration. I’m afraid she speaks for most Democratic foreign policy “experts.” Promoting American weakness: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Camille Paglia (who is a rebel, and will never ever be any good) finds life within the holier-than-thou democrat party left increasingly uncongenial. They are so conformist, so complacent… and so statist.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism. ...

(A)ffluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (“racism, sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it’s positively pickled.

Throughout this fractious summer, I was dismayed not just at the self-defeating silence of Democrats at the gaping holes or evasions in the healthcare bills but also at the fogginess or insipidity of articles and Op-Eds about the controversy emanating from liberal mainstream media and Web sources. By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers. There was a glaring inability in most Democratic commentary to think ahead and forecast what would or could be the actual snarled consequences—in terms of delays, denial of services, errors, miscommunications and gross invasions of privacy—of a massive single-payer overhaul of the healthcare system in a nation as large and populous as ours. It was as if Democrats live in a utopian dream world, divorced from the daily demands and realities of organization and management.

But dreaming in the 1960s and ‘70s had a spiritual dimension that is long gone in our crassly materialistic and status-driven time.

And, of course, they do. The supposed generosity of the bien pensants is really the purest selfishness. America’s pezzonovantes live limitlessly appetitive lives of aesthetic appreciation, worldly and even spiritual aspiration, of constant striving for success, power, personal advancement, and self affirmation. The sight of the poor, the uncomely, the disorderly, the untidied away aspects of cruel reality is disagreeable to them. Someone needs to do something about it. It is A PROBLEM. And all problems, from the viewpoint of the pseudogentsia, can be cleared away by simple transfer to the responsibility of the state with a generous allocation of other people’s tax dollars. Big Government is for the American left essentially just a larger-scale version of the building management they’re accustomed to calling upon to clean the elevator anytime someone has made a mess.

Ted Kennedy has been sober for 5 days, and is now eligible to vote in Chicago!

(Internet Viral Humor)

Hat tip to John C. Meyer.

Get out the shovels and start burying it, folks, before it starts to smell. It’s dead. The Obama Revolution is over. The high tide of American leftism has crested. The Retreat from Moscow is on.

In 2008, a glib and fortunate beneficiary of a massive legacy of liberal guilt was able to smooth talk his way into an electoral victory based on a sudden market crash created by the combination of long-standing democrat housing market interventions combined with well-founded fears of the possibility of his election.

Ironically, it was Mr. Market’s bipolar panic attack which actually assured that the nightmare of his own imaginings could and would become reality. The GOP turned chicken, too, and chose what the bosses thought must be the safest play, nominating the geriatric and politically incoherent John McCain, who ran an uninspired campaign, trying to oppose age to youth and promises of less to promises of everything paid for by somebody else. Everything fell apart at once. So the least qualified, most radical candidate ever, a community organizer and Alinskyite radical, whose best friends have been black Communist poets, Weathermen cop killers, and racist clergymen, waltzed into the White House, accompanied by a Star Wars bar’s assemblage of exotic representatives of the radical fringe, all bent of bringing Socialism to America.

He spent a few trillions in a matter of weeks, assuring a dimmer future to a generation of Americans, then gleefully nationalized General Motors delivering control of America’s largest auto maker to the UAW’s commissars. Barack Obama took to heart Rahm Emanuel’s dictum about using an economic crisis as an empowering opportunity. But that power was only on loan. The American people were frightened and willing to put their faith in the two party system, roll the dice, and give the party which had been out of power a chance. Their decision had only been based on the “we’re tired of A and unhappy, let’s try B for a while” approach. The assertion by democrats and by Barack Hussein Obama that the 2008 election gave them a mandate for Socialism has been proven wrong.

Obama in 2009 has wound up just like Napoleon in 1812. Flushed with a string of victories, armed with an unfilibusterable Congressional majority, backed by an enormous army of labor unions, interest groups, and activist organizations, funded by George Soros, allied to the mainstream media, and well-supported by the mass artillery of the leftwing blogosphere, the Obama Administration even succeeded in negotiating free passage for the invasion from large corporations like Walmart and the pharmaceuticals companies (no doughty Belgium in 1914, they). As always, capitalists will willingly sell the rope used to hang free enterprise to the bolsheviks for short term profit as long as the sellers get assurances that they themselves will be hanged last.

But the denoument is worthy of Tolstoy. The Grand Armee of Socialist Ideology, despite all its votes in Congress; its media support; its grand alliance of corrupt businesses, unions; the AMA and the AARP; ACORN and George Soros has been brought to a crashing halt. Its morale is crumbling. It is in complete disorder, and it will soon be in full retreat. Barack Obama has been dealt a devastating defeat, one which will permanently shatter his image of invincibility, and placing Barack Obama, the democrat party, and the American left on the defensive, struggling to avoid complete and total ruin.

The left is crying out that it was the weak and inferior forces of the Republican Party and the American Right that brought them low. I’m a Movement Conservative and a rock-ribbed Republican myself. I wish that it were so. But the truth is the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement have no such capabilities. What defeated Obamacare was the American People.

Barack Obama believed the American People are so stupid, so selfish, and so greedy that they would fall for democrat promises of health care free lunch, all the health care everybody needs or wants, paid for by the upper tiny few percent of staggeringly rich taxpayers (who won’t even miss it anyway). Uncle Sam will just nudge the taxes on Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and the guys at Goldman getting those multi-million dollar bonuses up just a notch, essentially sneaking into their bedrooms and removing some extra spare change from the tops of their bureaus, and granny gets her hip replacement gratis, and Tiny Tim will walk again, even if Bob Crachit has no insurance.

None of these promises were true, of course. The democrat “health care reform” was never going to bring ordinary Americans the kind of care US Senators get, “just like me,” as Obama promised so persistently during the campaign. What it was going to do, obviously, was to create a new and enormous federal entitlement program necessitating a massive increase of government’s share of the US economy. Socialism would have made a scarce and desirable service, medical care, cost free, obviously dramatically increasing demand. Most Americans would inevitably pay more and get less, as the health care butter got spread by the federal knife onto ever more slices of bread.

America today is a rapidly aging nation. The time to offer the Woodstock Generation a nice socialist health care system was 40 years ago when we were young and perfectly healthy, and could not imagine ourselves ever really needing it. Today, there are lots of Boomer generation geezers out there who have a real personal interest in just how health care reform will affect them now and who are old enough to know better. A lot of people tried sharing the granola and peanut butter supply back on the commune in 1969. They know just how “sharing” works out.

It was not Dick Armey and Rush Limbaugh who showed up with greater strength and larger funding or who beat back the democrat advance with superior cunning. It was the American People, who are experiencing this country’s economy right now, who saw Obama’s stimulus package and his bailouts, who paid their income taxes, and who are beginning to become afraid, very afraid of where Barack Obama’s economic policies are leading us. It was the American People that said, No, we do not believe there is really such a thing as a free lunch. It is the American People who are turning out at those Town Halls, and whose negative opinions are showing up in all the polls. It is the American People, not the Republican Party, that has defeated Obamacare.

Democrat brooding over America

The late Susan Sontag, in her personal journals (undated 1957 lecture note, p.151), observed that modern leftism does not only, like Milton, make Satan into a hero, it actively embraces his cause.

One of the main strands in modern literature is diabolism—that is, self conscious inversion of moral values. This is not nihilism, the denial of moral values, but their inversion: still rule-bound, only now a ‘morality of evil’ instead of a ‘morality of good.’”

Gerard van der Ginsburg, at American Digest, pays tribute to the American party of diabolism with a new version of a familar beat poem, titled Growl.

What Socialist Party of cement and aluminum bashed open American skulls and sucked out their freedom, brains and imagination?

Democrat! Darwinist Solitude! NEA Filth! Pelosi Ugliness! Recycling Cans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming silent under the D&C! Boys sobbing for Big Daddies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Democrat! Democrat! Nightmare of Democrat! Democrat the loveless! Gone mental Democrat! Democrat the heavy aggregator of girly-men!

Democrat the incomprehensible African-American plantation! Democrat the skull & crossbones soulless Senate and Congress of sorrows!

Democrat whose buildings are Fascist overbuilding with gun slits! Democrat the vast bloating stone of Deficit! Democrat the broke government of the pauper nation!

Democrat whose mind is pure machinery! Democrat whose blood is running tax money! Democrat whose fingers are in your wallet!

Democrat whose breast is a transexual dynamo! Democrat whose mouth is a smoking tomb! Democrat of the atheist thumb pulling out a plum and saying what a free to be bad boy am I! Democrat whose only god is Dracula!

Democrat whose eyes are a thousand broken windows! Democrat whose empty skyscrapers smolder in the long Detroit streets like endless Molochs! Democrat whose brains dream Utopia and choke in the fog of their flatulent dementia! Democrat whose smoking bongs and facial piercings crown the crapulous cities!

Democrat whose love is endless lube and lust! Democrat whose soul is welfare and affirmative racism! Democrat whose poverty is perpetual servitude to the government salad bar, no seconds!

Democrat whose only true Doctor and Cure is Kevorkian! Democrat whose foreign policy is a cloud of glowing Iranian hydrogen! Democrat whose whore is BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH!

Democrat in whom I once sat lonely! Democrat in whom I once dreamt the New Jerusalem! Crazy in Democrat! Sucker of crock in Democrat! Lacklove and deballed in Democrat!

The people had forfeited the confidence of the government and could win it back only by redoubled efforts. Wouldn’t it be easier to dissolve the people and elect another in their place?—Berthold Brecht.

Nancy Morgan, at American Thinker, comments on the anger of the democrat elite at the common people daring to talk back.

The face-off between the ruling party and the people continues to unfold, as Democrat politicians hold town hall meetings across the country to build support for the Obama administration’s latest power grab, misleadingly labeled ‘health care reform.’

The faux outrage politicians manufacture on demand has been replaced by real outrage. Outrage at the American people for failing to understand the nuances, the broad outline of a 1,000 page plus bill that most politicians haven’t even read. Hey, that’s what staff is for, explained new Democrat, Arlen Spector.

Peons from fly-over country are daring to challenge the carefully scripted and (deliberately?) misleading talking points. Talking points which, by the way, have been endorsed by the media. Don’t these guys read the New York Times?

Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are using the standard liberal tactic of diverting attention from the issue by demonizing the dissenter, in this case, the American people. According to Pelosi and Reid, voicing objections to the federal government’s take over of 17% of the formerly free market economy is ‘un-American.’ Harry Reid has gone a step further, tarring dissenter’s as ‘evil mongers.’

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has blithely dismissed the burgeoning dissent by informing one and all that these ‘townhalls are not representative of America.’ Obama, meanwhile, is trying to divert the issue by blaming the ‘headline hungry television networks’, accusing them of ‘enflaming an ugly backlash.’

Unused to any opposition that can’t be spun to their advantage or ignored, Democrats are desperately trying to convince Americans that the tidal wave of opposition is not genuine. Used to viewing every issue in political terms, our elected officials are actually convinced that the disruptive townhalls are merely the product of an evil conservative cabal. After all, every person these lawmakers know agree with them on this issue. Its called the ‘inside the beltway syndrome.’

Despite a new $12 million ad campaign designed to soothe Americans into relying on misplaced compassion instead of common sense, pesky Joe Six-Pack and Susy Homemaker still don’t get it. And adding insult to injury, American citizens are starting to question where all the money is coming from to run these ads. And by the way, who’s signing the paychecks for the new army of health care advocates who are being paid $12 to $13 an hour for their support? Inquiring minds want to know.

Answers to these questions are not forthcoming. Like the classic case of a wife catching her husband in bed with another woman, the question has become, “Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes?”

Just how much trouble Obamacare and the democrat party are in can be seen by the fact that they have actually managed to lose the confidence, and the support for their health care reform bill, of not only a majority of the public, but of even such an icon of the intellectual left as Camille Paglia.

In Salon, right now, today, (in addition to praising a topless photo of the 50-year-old Sharon Stone) avante-garde cultural commentator Paglia is agreeing with Sarah Palin and calling for Nancy Pelosi’s head. I love it.

(W)ho would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises—or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama’s aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities.

You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you’re happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing.

I just don’t get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama administration to present the issues to the public in a rational, detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford with a faltering economy.

As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead, have won wide public support. How is it possible that Democrats, through their own clumsiness and arrogance, have sabotaged healthcare reform yet again? Blaming obstructionist Republicans is nonsensical because Democrats control all three branches of government. It isn’t conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it’s the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan—it’s the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves. ...

...(W)hat do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the “mob”—a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration’s outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable “casual conversations” to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.

As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit on in her shocking image of a “death panel” under Obamacare that would make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized that Palin’s shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the electorate’s unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and punished.

Obama on the run

Peggy Noonan went scurrying back toward what she perceived as the center in the last election, and she is finding, only months later, that Barack Obama and the democrat Congressional leadership are anything but centrist.

Peggy Noonan is not buying the left’s talking points about “astroturf” and hired senior operatives sent by the Insurance Industry and Rush Limbaugh. She thinks the American people are really becoming scared, scared of deficits, scared of irresponsible policies hastily enacted, and scared of the impact upon themselves of vast expansions of remote federal power.

To her, Obama and the democrats appear to be in serious trouble.

We have entered uncharted territory in the fight over national health care. There’s a new tone in the debate, and it’s ugly. At the moment the Democrats are looking like something they haven’t looked like in years, and that is: desperate.

They must know at this point they should not have pushed a national health-care plan. A Democratic operative the other day called it “Hillary’s revenge.” When Mrs. Clinton started losing to Barack Obama in the primaries 18 months ago, she began to give new and sharper emphasis to her health-care plan. Mr. Obama responded by talking about his health-care vision. He won. Now he would push what he had been forced to highlight: Health care would be a priority initiative. The net result is falling support for his leadership on the issue, falling personal polls, and the angry town-hall meetings that have electrified YouTube.

In his first five months in office, Mr. Obama had racked up big wins—the stimulus, children’s health insurance, House approval of cap-and-trade. But he stayed too long at the hot table. All the Democrats in Washington did. They overinterpreted the meaning of the 2008 election, and didn’t fully take into account how the great recession changed the national mood and atmosphere.

And so the shock on the faces of Congressmen who’ve faced the grillings back home. And really, their shock is the first thing you see in the videos. They had no idea how people were feeling. Their 2008 win left them thinking an election that had been shaped by anti-Bush, anti-Republican, and pro-change feeling was really a mandate without context; they thought that in the middle of a historic recession featuring horrific deficits, they could assume support for the invention of a huge new entitlement carrying huge new costs.

The passions of the protesters, on the other hand, are not a surprise. They hired a man to represent them in Washington. They give him a big office, a huge staff and the power to tell people what to do. They give him a car and a driver, sometimes a security detail, and a special pin showing he’s a congressman. And all they ask in return is that he see to their interests and not terrify them too much. Really, that’s all people ask. Expectations are very low. What the protesters are saying is, “You are terrifying us.”

Read the whole thing.

Roger Kimball responds to the fresh hell that is reading Paul Krugman while living in a country with the current White House administration.

The White House, in addition to compiling its enemies list of people who say or write something “fishy” about its policies, has been urging its supporters to get out and “punch back twice as hard.” Obama flack Paul Krugman endeavored to do just that today, claiming that critics of the President’s plans for a government take over were — wait for it — motivated by “racial fear.”

Right. It’s another Dorthy Parker moment for the celebrated New York Times columnist. Let’s see if you have worked this out correctly. Presented with the bloated everything-but-the-kitchen-sink thousand-page obscenity that Rahm Emanuel is endeavored to shove down the collective gullet of America, why would you be critical? You might fear the government taking over another big chunk of the economy, since that way, you have learned “par expériences nombreuses et funestes,” is a prescription for waste, corruption, and inefficiency. You might be critical because you know that where similar systems have been tried, they have led to health care rationing and a denial of services to many vulnerable parts of the population, especially seniors> You might also be critical because you suspect that the plan will put a damper on medical innovation — one of the key ingredients that has made American health care the best in the world. You might further be critical because you have guessed the the price tag for this government sponsored boondoggle will be enormous and you do not relish paying yet higher taxes to fund it. I think you might be even more critical about the issue of freedom: the fact that, were anything like the Democrats’ plan to be passed, it would limit your freedom of choice in what doctors who see, what treatments you can get, and what sorts of insurance you choose to have (or, come to that, to forego). There are a dozen things you might not like about the Democratic plans. But what does Paul Krugman seize upon? “Racial fear.” Right. And I, as Miss Parker said, am Marie of Roumania.

This Lady GaGa parody skewers BO and the democrats.

4:17 video

Now we know, at least vaguely, what was behind the accusations against the CIA made in that June 26th letter from seven democrat House members.

After some months on the job, Leon Panetta learned of an inactive, never really implemented but potentially controversial, CIA program, initiated in the direct aftermath of 9/11, which proposed assassinating some important al Qaeda leaders. It would appear that such shenanigans were too Jack Bauer for the Bush Administration, so despite ink being spilled, findings being drafted, and probably warrior spooks training with silenced pistols off somewhere in the Virginia woods, nothing real ever came of any of this.

But good little Leon felt obliged to tattle anyway, and seven democrats thought the opportunity to play Gotcha! with the Agency was too good to miss. Ergo, the famous letter of June 26th. The Sunday Times dutifully clocked in yesterday with a deeply-troubled, chin-stroking article about the perfidy of Dick Cheney in concealing such dastardly doings.

The Wall Street Journal today actually supplies a lot more of the substance.

A secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative terminated by Director Leon Panetta was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives, according to former intelligence officials familiar with the matter.

The precise nature of the highly classified effort isn’t clear, and the CIA won’t comment on its substance.

According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn’t become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it.

In 2001, the CIA also examined the subject of targeted assassinations of al Qaeda leaders, according to three former intelligence officials. It appears that those discussions tapered off within six months. ...

One former senior intelligence official said the program was an attempt “to achieve a capacity to carry out something that was directed in the finding,” meaning it was looking for ways to capture or kill al Qaeda chieftains.

The official noted that Congress had long been briefed on the finding, and that the CIA effort wasn’t so much a program as “many ideas suggested over the course of years.” It hadn’t come close to fruition, he added. ...

(A) small CIA unit examined the potential for targeted assassinations of al Qaeda operatives, according to the three former officials. The Ford administration had banned assassinations in the response to investigations into intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Some officials who advocated the approach were seeking to build teams of CIA and military Special Forces commandos to emulate what the Israelis did after the Munich Olympics terrorist attacks, said another former intelligence official.

“It was straight out of the movies,” one of the former intelligence officials said. “It was like: Let’s kill them all.”

The former official said he had been told that President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney didn’t support such an operation. The effort appeared to die out after about six months, he said. ...

(I)n September 2001, as CIA operatives were preparing for an offensive in Afghanistan, officials drafted cables that would have authorized assassinations of specified targets on the spot.

One draft cable, later scrapped, authorized officers on the ground to “kill on sight” certain al Qaeda targets, according to one person who saw it. The context of the memo suggested it was designed for the most senior leaders in al Qaeda, this person said.

Eventually Mr. Bush issued the finding that authorized the capturing of several top al Qaeda leaders, and allowed officers to kill the targets if capturing proved too dangerous or risky.

Lawmakers first learned specifics of the CIA initiative the day after Mr. Panetta did, when he briefed them on it for 45 minutes.

What is really going on here is an attempt to gratify the democrat party’s bolshevik base with a little more witch hunting for Bush-Cheney war crimes, combined with the same party’s Congressional efforts to grab micromanagement control of US Intelligence operations.

Sensible people, and even Christopher Hitchens, have argued for some time that the battle with Congress over the CIA was lost long ago. It is past time to abolish the current agency, sell that campus at Langley for a football stadium, and establish a brand new unfettered agency operating covertly and free of Congressional oversight out of anonymous offices.

Mickey Kaus:

‘We’ll raise your taxes and in exchange we’re going to cut your treatments.’ I mean, how could that not have widespread appeal?

Jim Lindgren, at Volokh Conspiracy, warns that today is the day. The key basis for Barack Obama and the democrat party’s new Even Greater Depression will be voted on in the House of Representatives today. If Nancy Pelosi can bribe enough farm state democrats with ethanol subsidies into getting in line, you may very well need to kiss the American Economy as you’ve know it good-bye.

Before the last few years, scholars used to say that we couldn’t get a depression today because policymakers wouldn’t make mistakes as bad as the ones they made in the 1930s. Though we’ve made some great moves in the last year — increasing the money supply and guaranteeing money markets funds — we’re also repeating many of the same mistakes as Hoover and FDR (propping up failing industries; raising taxes; wasting money on unneeded public works projects; corruption; expensive new anti-business government programs).

Certainly, the Smoot-Hawley bill of 1930 was dumb; it imposed huge tariffs on foreign goods imported into this country, which backfired when those countries raised their tariffs too. In a sense, cap-and-trade looked like it would be even dumber; it seemed that it might impose a tariff on our own US manufactured goods, but not on foreign goods. But the House realized this and decided to require the administration to impose tariffs on goods imported from countries that don’t restrict their own emissions to the same extent as the US (tip to Maguire and OandO. This 21st century version of Smoot-Hawley will probably take years before the tariffs will be imposed.

The cap-and-trade bill, if passed by the Senate and actually implemented over the next few decades, would do more damage to the country than any economic legislation passed in at least 100 years. It would eventually send most American manufacturing jobs overseas, reduce American competitiveness, and make Americans much poorer than they would have been without it.

The cap-and-trade bill will have little, if any, positive effect on the environment — in part because the countries that would take jobs from US industries tend to be bigger polluters. By making the US — and the world — poorer, it would probably reduce the world’s ability to develop technologies that might solve its environmental problems in the future.

If this bill were very likely to pass the Senate and if the restrictions were to be phased in quicker in the early years of the program than the bill provides, then a double-dip recession would be a near certainty.

Waxman-Markey would cost the economy $161 billion in 2020, which is $1,870 for a family of four. As the bill’s restrictions kick in, that number rises to $6,800 for a family of four by 2035.

Note also that the CBO analysis is an average for the country as a whole. It doesn’t take into account the fact that certain regions and populations will be more severely hit than others—manufacturing states more than service states; coal producing states more than states that rely on hydro or natural gas. Low-income Americans, who devote more of their disposable income to energy, have more to lose than high-income families.

Even as Democrats have promised that this cap-and-trade legislation won’t pinch wallets, behind the scenes they’ve acknowledged the energy price tsunami that is coming. During the brief few days in which the bill was debated in the House Energy Committee, Republicans offered three amendments: one to suspend the program if gas hit $5 a gallon; one to suspend the program if electricity prices rose 10% over 2009; and one to suspend the program if unemployment rates hit 15%. Democrats defeated all of them.

The reality is that cost estimates for climate legislation are as unreliable as the models predicting climate change. What comes out of the computer is a function of what politicians type in. A better indicator might be what other countries are already experiencing. Britain’s Taxpayer Alliance estimates the average family there is paying nearly $1,300 a year in green taxes for carbon-cutting programs in effect only a few years.

Americans should know that those Members who vote for this climate bill are voting for what is likely to be the biggest tax in American history. Even Democrats can’t repeal that reality.

George W. Bush may have been a bit of an idiot to allow liberal elements of the Intelligence Community to damage his administration with leaks of high-level national security information and the Plamegame disinformation operation, but one does have to admire the fact that Bush scrupulously followed what he (I think erroneously) believed to be the rules and never whined about what his opponents were doing to him.

The CIA had a lot better reason to do some leaking this time: to correct the historical record after Barack Obama and congressional democrats chose to use counter-terrorism interrogations as an alleged atrocity useful for indicting their Republican predecessors.

But the spooks are not playing with gentlemanly George W. Bush this time. Demonstrate that Nancy Pelosi was lying her head off, and out come the democrat senatorial thugs to cry foul.

The Politico has the story.

Democrats charged Tuesday that the CIA has released documents about congressional briefings on harsh interrogation techniques in order to deflect attention and blame away from itself.

“I think there is so much embarrassment in some quarters [of the CIA] that people are going to try to shift some of the responsibility to others — that’s what I think,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), who sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and was briefed on interrogation techniques five times between 2006 and 2007.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, said he finds it “interesting” that a document detailing congressional briefings was released just as “some of the groups that have been responsible for these interrogation techniques were taking the most criticism.”

Asked whether the CIA was seeking political cover by releasing the documents, Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said: “Sure it is.”

Jonah Goldberg reminds readers that the voters threw out the GOP majority in Congress in 2006 because of corruption scandals. But replacing them with democrats has not proven to be a very effective cure, has it?

Democrats took back Congress in 2006 and the presidency in 2008 in no small part because of their ability to bang their spoons on their high chairs about what they called the Republican “culture of corruption.” Their choreographed outrage was coordinated with the precision of a North Korean missile launch pageant. And, to be fair, they had a point. The GOP did have its legitimate embarrassments. California Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham and lobbyist Jack Abramoff were fair game, and so was Rep. Mark Foley, the twisted Florida congressman who allegedly wanted male congressional pages cleaned and perfumed and brought to his tent, as it were.

Of course, it wasn’t as if Democrats were without sin. Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson was indicted on fraud, bribery and corruption charges in 2007, after an investigation unearthed, among other things, $90,000 in his freezer. Then-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was busted in a prostitution scandal.

But that’s all yesterday’s news. Let’s look at the here and now.

Read the whole thing.

These charts from Policy Watch demonstrate “the change” in action.

Arlen Specter’s party switch is worth celebrating.

An abrasive and arrogant liberal who opportunistically trimmed his political sails in stingy microscopic increments carefully calculated to make himself electable finally has found his natural home in the party made for crooks and liars and statists.

Now Arlen Specter can go and extort special personal concessions from the democrat leadership and betray them on key votes.

Doyle McManus, at the LA Times, thinks the democrats aren’t getting anything terribly worthwhile.

Conservatives dubbed him a RINO: Republican In Name Only. Now he has crossed the aisle to join the Democratic majority, but Specter acknowledged Tuesday that he’ll be something of a DINO. Asked whether he plans to attend meetings of the Democratic caucus, he looked momentarily stricken. “Give me a week to think about it,” he said.

Obama and the Democrats, to win Specter over, offered him an amazingly good deal. The president promised to support him in Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate primary next year. (Presidents don’t normally intervene in primary contests—at least, not so openly.) Gov. Ed Rendell, the most popular Democrat in Pennsylvania, promised to help too. And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada allowed Specter to keep the 28 years of seniority he has amassed as a Republican—meaning he’ll replace some unlucky Democrat of longer standing as chairman of a major committee.

What do the Democrats get in return? A 60th vote—they hope. ...

Specter has always been hard to please. He’ll still be the 60th vote on every issue, just as he was on the stimulus bill—the one who always has a special request before he can say yes. Reid will sometimes wonder whether this was such a good deal. ...

That approach, after all, is how the Democrats won so many seats in 2006. Under Rahm Emanuel, now Obama’s chief of staff, they welcomed anyone who looked capable of winning an election, beliefs be hanged.

That’s the party Arlen Specter just joined: the Let’s Make a Deal Party. What it loses in coherence, it makes up in voting power.

And Specter was cheerfully open about the cynicism of his move. He changed parties, the senator said, after looking at the polls and realizing that he couldn’t win the Republican primary. (When was the last time you heard a politician admit that he let polls guide his decisions?) He made a brief reference to the increasing conservatism of the GOP. “As the Republican Party has moved farther and farther to the right, I have found myself increasingly at odds with the Republican philosophy,” he said. But he also made clear this wasn’t just about philosophy; he would gladly have remained a Republican if he could keep his job that way.

But that’s how American politics, in all its non-ideological, market-driven glory, often works. As another great Republican, the late Sen. Everett Dirksen, said: “Sometimes a man just has to rise above principle.”

As democrats crafted their political comeback in recent years, a key ingredient in their master plan was the use of carefully selected conservative democrats to broaden their party’s base and to provide competitive candidates in rural, Southern, conservative, and GOP-dominated districts. Conservative democrats were then pampered, cultivated, and coddled by the national party organization and, when electorally successful, given red carpet welcomes to Congress.

This uncharacteristic warmth toward people deviating from the left’s ideological party line was understandable. Only by the creation of just this kind of diverse coalition could the democrat party hope to recapture majorities in both houses in an essentially center-right country.

Now, however, the time has come to reap the spoils and to enact the legislative agenda of the left, and as Karl Rove describes, the time of happy ideological diversity, the time of coddling Blue Dog democrats, is over and the gloves are coming off.

“Don’t think we’re not keeping score, brother.” That’s what President Barack Obama said to Rep. Peter DeFazio in a closed-door meeting of the House Democratic Caucus last week, according to the Associated Press.

A few weeks ago, Mr. DeFazio voted against the administration’s stimulus bill. The comment from Mr. Obama was a presidential rebuke and part of a new, hard-nosed push by the White House to pressure Congress to adopt the president’s budget. He has mobilized outside groups and enlisted forces still in place from the Obama campaign.

Senior presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett and her chief of staff, Michael Strautmanis, are in regular contact with MoveOn.Org, Americans United for Change and other liberal interest groups. Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina has collaborated with Americans United for Change on strategy and even ad copy. Ms. Jarrett invited leaders of the liberal interest groups to a White House social event with the president and first lady to kick off the lobbying campaign.

Its targets were initially Republicans, as team Obama ran ads depicting the GOP as the “party of no.” But now the fire is being trained on Democrats worried about runaway spending.

Americans United is going after Democrats who are skeptical of Mr. Obama’s plans to double the national debt in five years and nearly triple it in 10. The White House is taking aim at lawmakers in 12 states, including Democratic Sens. Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor. MoveOn.Org is running ads aimed at 10 moderate Senate and House Democrats. And robocalls are urging voters in key districts to pressure their congressman to get in line.

A security guard at the Fairfield home of AIG Financial Products executive Douglas Poling reasoning with demonstrators, who are being egged on by the press

Elections have consequences. One conspicuous consequence of the last election is angry mobs at the front doors of suburban Connecticut homes. As if they were living in some Third World country, American executives in Fairfield County now need to protect their families with bodyguards.

AIG employees and their families became victims of mass hatred and were placed in real physical danger by deliberate policy crafted at the highest levels of the Government of the United States.

The Obama Administration and the corrupt democrat congress have cynically chosen to advance their socialist agenda by the left’s traditional tactic of divisive agitation.

Paul Kengor, at American Thinker, puts the AIG show trial into perspective.

“We must teach our children to hate,” Vladimir Lenin instructed his education commissars. The Bolshevik godfather declared that hatred was not only “the basis of communism” but “the basis of every socialist and Communist movement.”

Class envy has been a defining staple of the left for centuries, from the frenzied mobs leaping around the French guillotines to the Soviets to, well, the new masses circling AIG executives today. ...

Historically, this behavior is both foreign and antithetical to the American experience. Unfortunately, modern Americans don’t understand their founding and the nation’s core principles—our educational system doesn’t teach those things. Thus, they are now voting, and behaving, in kind. And we are now witnessing our own homegrown socialist movement in action, inspired by hate.

Some Americans, whipped into poisonous hatred by their elected representatives, have literally called for death for AIG executives, and one U.S. senator openly requested that these businesspeople commit suicide.

Liberals in Congress, from Senator Chuck Schumer to Senator Chris Dodd, plus a wild gaggle of unleashed central planners in the House, have conducted a show trial of AIG executives, with the larger purpose of placing American free enterprise in the dock. ...

As members of Congress target the likes of AIG chief executive Edward Liddy, mobs target the homes of AIG employees in Connecticut. ...

AIG workers are being demonized, noted the Times; they are hiring bodyguards. And it isn’t only AIG. Merrill Lynch is dealing with similar assaults.

And that’s just the start. It’s only a matter of public exposure until another group of private-sector “reptiles”—Lenin’s word—is identified for the proletariat. Congress and the White House will be happy to call out the next group of kulaks. ...

[T]he mob wants someone’s head on a platter—now. Time to eat the rich. Perhaps our dear leader, President Obama, can go to Connecticut to play the role of healer, addressing the faithful, calming their fears, a political sermon on the mount. Blessed would be the peacemaker.

But not yet—for now, this hate is just too excellent, too perfect for advancing the agenda of the leftist ideologues and envy-mongers running the republic.

Who’s to blame? The American people are to blame. I’m tired of the populist nonsense from talk-radio on how Americans “deserve better than this.” They do? Why? They voted for this. Obama is being Obama. Pelosi is being Pelosi. Schumer is being Schumer. The American people cast the ballots.

You reap what you sow. Enjoy the hate, America. You elected it.

Read the whole thing.

Local papers like the Waynesville (Missouri) Daily Guide cover matters of interest often overlooked by the New York Times and Washington Post and report them very differently.

Last November’s election and the radical policies of the Obama administration have resulted in widespread ongoing gun and ammunition stockpiling and hoarding prompted by direct fears of new regulations and even federal gun confiscation.

The week Barack Obama was elected president, the amount of criminal background checks related to the purchase of firearms jumped 49 percent over the previous year, FBI statistics show.

It’s a trend that hasn’t ceased to stop, as background checks for firearm purchases have continued to increase in the months following the November election, when compared to the same time a year ago.

February alone witnessed a 23.3 percent jump, and January and December weren’t too far ahead, with 29 and 24 percent increases, respectively.

Fears of possible anti-gun legislation that’s being considered by the Obama administration might be contributing to the rise in sales, as well as the teeter-tottering economy.

The angst seems to be somewhat legitimate, although at this time it’s unclear whether a push to reinstate the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, commonly referred to as the “assault weapons ban” will be successful.

“Well, as President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes we would like to make, and among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons,” Attorney General Eric Holder said during a press conference last month that focused on growing violence in Mexico.

According to the State Department, drug cartels are using “automatic weapons and grenades” in confrontations against Mexican army and police units. The idea is by putting the ban back in place, the flow of guns into Mexico would be reduced.

Enacted in 1994 under then-president Bill Clinton, the assault weapons ban prohibited 19 specific firearms in addition to the possession, manufacturing and importation of the semiautomatic assault weapons and ammunition clips with more than 10 rounds for civilian use.

Though a bill to reinstate the act hasn’t been introduced in Congress yet, and Holder hasn’t given a timeline for when that might happen, numerous other pieces of legislation have been. Six U.S. House of Representative bills are currently being considered, the most troubling of which, gun-rights advocates say, is H.R. 45, known as the Blair Holt’s Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009.

If the legislation is successful, it would require a license for handguns and semiautomatic firearms, including those people already own. License applicants would have to under go a background check and take a written firearms examination, meant to test the applicant’s knowledge of safe storage and handling of guns, as well as the risks associated with the use of firearms in a home, legal responsibilities of owners of such weapons and “any other subject, as the Attorney General determines to be appropriate.”

Furthermore, “the bill would make it unlawful in nearly all cases to keep any loaded firearm for self-defense. A variety of ‘crimes by omission’... would be created. Criminal penalties of up to ten years and almost unlimited regulatory and inspection authority would be established,” according to Gun Owners of America, a non-profit lobbying organization led by former senator Bill Richardson.

The bill would also make it unlawful to sell or transfer a “qualifying firearm” to any person who is not licensed.
Other legislation includes H.R. 17 which would reaffirm the right to use firearms for self-defense and the defense of a person’s home and family; H.R. 1074 would permit the interstate sale of firearms as long as the laws of the states are complied with and adhere to federal law.

Bill Morris, Military Pro owner, said sales at his shop have increased as rumors about possible legislation circulate.

“A lot of customers are afraid that the guns they enjoy shooting so much for sports are going to be restricted,” Morris said. “A lot of the firearms people use for hunting and have used for a long time are being threatened.”

Rahm Emanuel, so fierce a political operator that democrats nicknamed him “Rahmbo,” previously had a softer side. Rush mockingly posted the above photo (and I enlarged it).

Recently targeted by the White House in a series of political attacks, Rush Limbaugh retaliated by challenging the renownedly eloquent Barack Obama to a live political debate on the issues on which they so conspicuously differ.

The current administration has specifically identified Rush Limbaugh as the principal spokesman of the opposition. No one would be a more fitting debate opponent.

Personally, I’ll bet that Obama chickens out and refuses to debate, but the compensation is that Rush will have plenty of fun mocking him for it.

I have an idea. If these guys are so impressed with themselves, and if they are so sure of their correctness, why doesn’t President Obama come on my show? We will do a one-on-one debate of ideas and policies. ...

Let’s talk about all of these things, Mr. President. Let’s go ahead and have a debate on this show. No limits. Now that your handlers are praising themselves for promoting me as the head of a political party—they think that’s a great thing—then it should be a no-brainer for you to further advance this strategy by debating me on the issues and on the merits, and wipe me out once and for all!

Just come on this program. Let’s have a little debate. You tell me how wrong I am and you can convince the rest of the Americans that don’t agree with you how wrong we all are. You’re a smart guy, Mr. President. You don’t need these hacks to front for you. You’ve debated the best! You’ve debated Hillary Clinton. You’ve debated John Edwards. You’ve debated Joe Biden. You’ve debated Dennis Kucinich. You’ve debated the best out there. You are one of the most gifted public speakers of our age. I would think, Mr. President, you would jump at this opportunity. Don’t send lightweights like Begala and Carville to do your bidding—and forget about the ballerina, Emanuel. He’s got things to do in his office. These people, compared to you, Mr. President, are rhetorical chum.

I would rather have an intelligent, open discussion with you where you lay out your philosophy and policies and I lay out mine—and we can question each other, in a real debate. Any time here at the EIB Network studios.

Hat tip to the Barrister.

And the spending just keeps going. Having just passed the $787 billion so-called Stimulus Package, democrat commissars on Capitol Hill are next turning their attention to an Omnibus Spending Bill, which as Newsmax reports, will contain more earmarks than ever before. The Saturnalia of Spending continues.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidates Barack Obama and John McCain fought vigorously over who would be toughest on congressional earmarks.

“We need earmark reform,” Obama said in September during a presidential debate in Oxford, Miss. “And when I’m president, I will go line by line to make sure that we are not spending money unwisely.”

President Barack Obama should prepare to carve out a lot of free time and keep the coffee hot this week as Congress prepares to unveil a $410 billion omnibus spending bill that’s riddled with thousands of earmarks, despite his calls for restraint and efforts on Capitol Hill to curtail the practice.

The bill will contain about 9,000 earmarks totaling $5 billion, congressional officials say. Many of the earmarks — loosely defined as local projects inserted by members of Congress — were inserted last year as the spending bills worked their way through various committees.

Byron York reminds readers of Congressional democrats posing as deficit hawks back when George W. Bush was in the White House. Now that they have control of Congress and the White House they are using the recession as a pretext for a budgetary blowout calculated to make the Great Society look like a Presbyterian picnic. Americans will be paying for Obama’s first month in office for a generation.

Back in 2006, when Democrats were hoping to win control of the House and Senate, party leaders worked themselves into a righteous outrage over the issue of out-of-control federal spending. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called the Republican budget “irresponsible” and “unpatriotic” because it increased the amount of U.S. debt held by foreign countries. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., accused Republicans of going on “an unprecedented and dangerous borrowing spree” and declared GOP leadership “the most fiscally irresponsible in the history of our country … no other president or Congress even comes close.”

You won’t find too many defenders of George W. Bush’s record on spending these days, even among Republicans. But a check of historical tables compiled by the Office of Management and Budget shows that the spending that so distressed Pelosi and Reid seems downright modest today. After beginning with a Clinton-era surplus of $128 billion in fiscal year 2001, the Bush administration racked up deficits of $158 billion in 2002, $378 billion in 2003, $413 billion in 2004, $318 billion in 2005, $248 billion in 2006, $162 billion in 2007, and $410 billion in 2008.

The current administration would kill to have such small numbers. President Barack Obama is unveiling his budget this week, and, in addition to the inherited Bush deficit, he’s adding his own spending at an astonishing pace, projecting annual deficits well beyond $1 trillion in the near future, and, in the rosiest possible scenario, a $533 billion deficit in 2013, the last year of Obama’s first term.

And what about the national debt? It increased from $5 trillion to $10 trillion in the Bush years, leading to dramatically higher interest costs. “We pay in interest four times more than we spend on education and four times what it will cost to cover 10 million children with health insurance for five years,” Pelosi said in 2007. “That’s fiscal irresponsibility.”

Now, under Obama, the national debt — and the interest payments — will increase at a far faster rate than during the Bush years.

“We thought the Bush deficits were big at the time,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, told me this week as he prepared to attend Obama’s Fiscal Responsibility Summit. “But this is going to make the previous administration look like rank amateurs. We could be adding multiple trillions to the national debt in the first year.”

At some point last week, the sheer velocity of Obama’s spending proposals began to overwhelm even experienced Washington hands. In the span of four days, we saw the signing of the $787 billion stimulus bill, the rollout of a $275 billion housing proposal, discussion of Congress’s remaining appropriations bills (about $400 billion) and word of a vaguely-defined financial stabilization plan that could ultimately cost $2 trillion. When representatives of GM and Chrysler said they might need $21 billion more to survive, it seemed like small beer.

Look who’s to the right of Congress and the White House!

Gateway Pundit relishes the irony.

Excessive intervention in economic activity and blind faith in the state’s omnipotence is another possible mistake. True, the state’s increased role in times of crisis is a natural reaction to market setbacks. Instead of streamlining market mechanisms, some are tempted to expand state economic intervention to the greatest possible extent… In the 20th century, the Soviet Union made the state’s role absolute. In the long run, this made the Soviet economy totally uncompetitive. This lesson cost us dearly. I am sure nobody wants to see it repeated.”

Tony Blankley looks at Barack Obama’s approach to governing, and finds it astonishingly passive and uninvolved. So far, Obama has seemed happy to preside as a sort of non-participant host to the orgy of looting and misrule by his party.

President Obama’s performance at the Gitmo executive order, provided brief but revealing insight into the president’s personal involvement in vital decision making. He had campaigned hard on closing Gitmo. His first public signing as president was that executive order to close it down. The central issue of Gitmo’s closing was and is: What do we do with the dangerous inmates? President Bush kept it open primarily because his administration couldn’t figure out an answer to that question.

Thus, it was breathtaking that at the signing ceremony, President Obama didn’t know how—or even whether—his executive order was dealing with this central quandary.

President Obama: “And we then provide, uh, the process whereby Guantanamo will be closed, uh, no later than one year from now. We will be, uh. ... Is there a separate, uh, executive order, Greg, with respect to how we’re going to dispose of the detainees? Is that, uh, written?”

White House counsel Greg Craig: “We’ll set up a process.”

To be at the signing ceremony and not know what he was ordering done with the terrorist inmates is a level of ignorance about equivalent to being a groom at the altar in a wedding ceremony and asking who it is you are marrying.

It’s a mess, but C. Edmund Wright offers the consolatory reflection that it’s only a matter of time before the consequences of left-liberal policies come home to roost.

There’s a law that liberals always shatter. (And no, I’m not talking about tax law.) It’s the law of unintended consequences. Actually it’s not so much liberals per se that break it so much as it seems liberal thinking by definition always runs afoul of this law. Leftist policy always hangs itself if given enough rope.

The liberals now have the entire stage with a very liberal President, extreme leftists in control of Congress, and the main stream media. Liberal failure has nowhere to hide and no one to hide behind. So as the Obama administration attempts to attack the country’s economic woes, they find themselves stepping in one pile of liberal policy do-do after another. You might say that the left hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. The world will have to watch as liberal policy for problem A destroys Obama goals for problem B and so on.

Read the whole thing.

The democrat Porkulus is bad enough viewed simply as a colossal waste of money and burden on the productive portion of the economy, but additionally the many-hundred-page package (passed unread by the nation’s Solons) contains some deviously crafted provisions constituting a very large step toward federal takeover of American health care, as William Winkenwerder, Jr. and Grace-Marie Turner at National Review’s the Corner explain.

The health-related provisions take a sharp turn toward greater government control over our health sector, without any hearings or serious debate in Congress and without telling the American people what the changes would mean for their personal health care. This is the biggest land grab in the health sector ever attempted by the federal government, and it would be a major step toward thrusting full responsibility for health-care financing onto the American taxpayer—today and for decades to come.

For starters, the bill would create a 15-member federal health board, composed entirely of federal employees appointed by the president, charged with running “comparative effectiveness” research to assess which drugs and other medical treatments are most effective. The board’s decisions would determine what medical treatments the federal government would or would not pay for. The treatments some patients desperately need might not be on the list. House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D., Wis.) explained that drugs and treatments “that are found to be less effective and in some cases, more expensive, will no longer be prescribed.”

The bill would also establish a $400 million slush fund, which the secretary of health and human services would use to give government, not doctors and patients, more control over health-care decisions.

There will be a substantial burden on employers: The bill would impose a back-door mandate for them to continue providing health insurance to workers long after those workers have left. PricewaterhouseCoopers says the ten-year cost of this provision would be up to $65 billion just for those workers currently eligible for COBRA (the current program through which people can participate in ex-employers’ health plans). The estimated costs would be even higher if many more workers retire early, as they likely will if they know they can continue their employment-based coverage indefinitely.

The Washington Times notices an Obama administration appointment indicating that sharp poniards and poison rings will be just as much a part of daily life in the West Wing as puppies and unicorns.

Shauna Daly, a 29-year-old Democratic operative, was named last month to the new job of White House counsel research director. Though she is inside one of the most powerful legal offices in the land, Miss Daly holds no law degree and doesn’t list any legal training on her resume.

Her sole experience has been as an opposition researcher for Democratic political campaigns: She helped dig up dirt on rivals, or on her own nominee to prepare for attacks.

The addition to White House counsel Greg Craig’s staff has alarmed some Republicans, who consider it a politicization of the office, and has irritated others who say that Democratic lawmakers who railed against Republican opposition researchers in legal positions in the past are now silent.

“Daly does not have the qualifications to be holding a significant position in the White House counsel’s office,” said Mark Levin, a conservative lawyer and radio-show host who worked in the Reagan White House and as chief of staff for Attorney General Edwin Meese.

“Her only qualification is that she knows how to dig up dirt on other people,” he said.

Barack Obama’s political career began with the winning of an Illinois State Senate seat by taking control of the process and getting all his democrat party opponents (in a one party race) kicked off the ballot. Barack Obama’s career reached its present zenith, at least in part, through other process short cuts like the democrat party’s rules committee awarding him primary delegates from Michigan where he did not run and duplicate registrations and votes courtesy of ACORN.

Newsmax:

The Obama administration is ending the Census Bureau’s traditional autonomy – a move that has Republicans outraged over the White House’s politicization of counting Americans.

Last week, an administration official revealed that the yet-to-be-named director of the Census Bureau will report to the White House rather than Commerce Secretary nominee Judd Gregg, a Republican.

What this move undoubtedly signifies is the Obama Administration’s intention to make an end run around the Constitution’s specification of an “actual enumeration” every decade to permit statistical estimates of non-actually-enumerated democrat constituencies in order to enlarge the congressional representation and budgetary apportionment for inner-city, one-party democrat-controlled districts. The estimating would be done by hardcore democrat party partisans, of course, who can estimate with the best.

Mr. Gregg should never have agreed to accept the Secretary of Commerce appointment in the context of such a cynical and opportunistic partisan manuever.
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UPDATE 2/13:

Senator Judd Gregg announced, very politely, that he was declining the appointment due to “irresolvable conflicts.” Good for him.

Yuval Levin, in Commentary, reflects on Sarah Palin’s candidacy and what it revealed about class and politics in contemporary America.

In American politics, the distinction between populism and elitism is… subdivided into cultural and economic populism and elitism. And for at least the last forty years, the two parties have broken down distinctly along this double axis. The Republican party has been the party of cultural populism and economic elitism, and the Democrats have been the party of cultural elitism and economic populism. Republicans tend to identify with the traditional values, unabashedly patriotic, anti-cosmopolitan, non-nuanced Joe Sixpack, even as they pursue an economic policy that aims at elite investor-driven growth. Democrats identify with the mistreated, underpaid, overworked, crushed-by-the-corporation “people against the powerful,” but tend to look down on those people’s religion, education, and way of life. Republicans tend to believe the dynamism of the market is for the best but that cultural change can be dangerously disruptive; Democrats tend to believe dynamic social change stretches the boundaries of inclusion for the better but that economic dynamism is often ruinous and unjust.

Both economic and cultural populism are politically potent, but in America, unlike in Europe, cultural populism has always been much more powerful. Americans do not resent the success of others, but they do resent arrogance, and especially intellectual arrogance. Even the poor in our country tend to be moved more by cultural than by economic appeals. It was this sense, this feeling, that Sarah Palin channeled so effectively. Her appearance on the scene unleashed populist energies that McCain had not tapped, and she both fed them and fed off them. She spent the bulk of her time at Republican rallies assailing the cultural radicalism of Barack Obama and his latte-sipping followers, who, she occasionally suggested, were not part of the “the real America” she saw in the adoring throngs standing before her. Palin channeled these cultural energies more by what she was than by what she said or did, which contributed mightily to the odd disjunction between her professional resume and her campaign presence and impact. ...

Palin never actually boasted of ignorance or explicitly scorned learning or ideas. Rather, the implicit charge was that Palin’s failure to speak the language and to share the common points of reference of the educated upper tier of American society essentially rendered her unfit for high office.

This form of intellectual elitism is actually fairly new in America, though it has been a dominant feature of European society since World War II. It is not as exclusive or as anti-democratic as cultural elitism is in other countries, because entry to the American intellectual elite is, in principle, open to all who pursue it. And pursuing it is not as difficult as it once was, at least for the middle class. Indeed, most of this elite’s prominent members hail from middle-class origins and not from traditional bastions of American privilege and wealth. They can speak of growing up in Scranton, even as they raise their noses at dirty coal and hunting season.

Nor is membership in the intellectual upper class determined by diplomas hanging on the wall. Palin could have gained entrance easily, despite the fact that she holds a mere degree in journalism from the University of Idaho. Although the intellectual elite is deeply shaped by our leading institutions of higher learning, belonging to it is more the result of shared assumptions and attitudes. It is more cultural than academic, more NPR than PhD. In Washington, many politicians who have not risen through the best of universities work hard for years to master the language and the suppositions of this upper tier, and to live carefully within the bounds prescribed by its view of the world.

Applied to politics, the worldview of the intellectual elite begins from an unstated assumption that governing is fundamentally an exercise of the mind: an application of the proper mix of theory, expertise, and intellectual distance that calls for knowledge and verbal fluency more than for prudence born of life’s hard lessons.

Sarah Palin embodied a very different notion of politics, in which sound instincts and valuable life experiences are considered sources of knowledge at least the equal of book learning. She is the product of an America in which explicit displays of pride in intellect are considered unseemly, and where physical prowess and moral constancy are given a higher place than intellectual achievement. She was in the habit of stressing these faculties instead—a habit that struck many in Washington as brutishness.

This is why Palin was seen as anti-intellectual when, properly speaking, she was simply non-intellectual. What she lacked was not intelligence—she is, clearly, highly intelligent—but rather the particular set of assumptions, references, and attitudes inculcated by America’s top twenty universities and transmitted by the nation’s elite cultural organs.

Many of those (including especially those on the Right) who reacted badly to Palin on intellectual grounds understand themselves to be advancing the interests of lower-middle-class families similar to Palin’s own family and to many of those in attendance at her rallies who greeted her arrival on the scene as a kind of deliverance. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that while these members of the intellectual elite want the government to serve the interests of such people first and foremost, they do not want those people to hold the levers of power.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog’s Best Essays of the Year.

Varifrank, on Twitter:

Pass it now or we may never recover’ – is he talking about the Dems or the American people?

Jonah Goldberg admires the gaping chasm between democrats’ expressed enthusiam for paying taxes and their actual personal behavior in some recent examples in the news.

During the presidential campaign, Joe Biden insisted that paying your taxes is a patriotic duty. No, scratch that. He said that supporting a tax hike was the American thing to do. “It’s time to be patriotic,” he told America’s putative tax slackers. When asked whether he might be questioning the patriotism of people who don’t want higher taxes, Biden, as is his wont, took things to the next rhetorical level. Forget patriotism, insisted Joe, paying higher taxes is a religious obligation.

The man who gave an average of $369 a year to charity over the previous decade fulfills his religious obligations by cutting a tax check—a check he’s required to cut by law.

Now it’s always perilous to take Biden’s statements too seriously, but it does seem eminently fair to say that his comments reflect a common, if not universal, attitude among Democrats. Taxes aren’t a “necessary evil” so much as a joyous affirmation of the possibilities of government and the lifeblood of a more hopeful society. “Taxes are what you pay to be an American”—like “membership fees,” says Democratic language guru George Lakoff.

Velociman has harsh, but fair, comments on the American left.

I have no gripe with those who believe there are different paths to an ideal, healthy America. I’m fairly convinced that America is no Leftist’s dream, however, hence the charge of dishonesty. The smallest of children can smoke out a platitude, and I take no solace in the Left’s charade that they want as I do for the nation, and western civilization as a whole. It is a bald-faced lie, built upon a shifting, unstable Sargasso Sea of prevarication. ...

The sad truth is the Leftist cohort, proudly represented by the Democratic Party, has engaged in a decades-long lie of being for the “little guy”, the “forgotten man”, when in fact they are power-mad usurpers of freedom, whose only interest in the little guy is how much of his hard-earned money they can abscond with, and to what nefarious disproven social experiment they can apply it.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to the Gerard van der Leun via the News Junkie