Vulnerable democrats seeking distance from Obama. Surprise, surprise.

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Leftwing commentariat still trying to pass defunct health care bill. Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait provoke stinging rejoinder from Ann Althouse.

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Carly Fiorina has an amusing Monty Pythonesque attack ad directed at a Republican primary opponent, labeling him a FCINO (Fiscal Conservative in Name Only). Needs re-editing, but worth a look. 3:21 video

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Eric Holder waives the 5th and admits to Mirandizing Abdulmutullab. We’ll see how he feels about all this after the next attack.

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Poof: Another 800,000 jobs disappear.

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Don Surber:

Tom Jensen at the liberal Public Policy Polling: “If you want a prism into why Democrats are struggling so much right now, this may sum it up: only 11% of voters across the country say that their economic situation has improved over the last year compared to 42% who think it has become worse. 47% say it’s about the same as it was.”

Megan McArdle responds to Jonathan Chait’s reiteration of the democrats-all-in perspective on the health care bill.

Last week, Jonathan Chait responded to me, arguing that Democrats have already taken all the political hit they’re going to from passing health care, since each house voted for a bill. Of course, if Chait is right, then Democrats should probably do it–at least, if you think that democracy should put zero weight on the actual opinions of those slack-jawed rubes in the electorate. But this logic seems highly questionable to me.

Who are you more likely to leave: the spouse who makes a pass at another woman, and then thinks the better of it, or the spouse who goes through with it? Maybe you’ll leave them either way. But it does not follow that they are better off going through with it. I don’t think it is actually true that trying to pass a bill people hate, and then thinking the better of it because it turns out the electorate hates it, is no different from trying to pass a bill people hate, finding out that they really, really hate it, and then ignoring them and pushing it through anyway.

Osama is a warmist. I guess that figures.

Bad news for literature. Patrician Louis Auchincloss dies at 92 (WaPo obit), and Zen recluse J.D. Salinger passed away at 91 (London Times obit).

Bad news for scholarship. King’s College London is planning to eliminate Britain’s only chair in paleography. No money in that, you see.

Why so few conservative or libertarian academics? Two researchers propose “path dependence” as the explanation.

Five stages of democrat grief over the health care reform bill.

Barack Obama told ABC News that he is determined to continue to try to pass the health care bill, even if it hurts him politically. “The one thing I’m clear about is that I’d rather be a really good one term president than a mediocre two term president.”

Charles Krauthammer responds that “Well, there is a third option he didn’t consider. He could be a mediocre one term president, and that’s what he been thus so far in his first year. And because mediocrity does not usually encourage the electorate to re-elect you that might account for being a one termer.”

Krauthammer describes the democrat response to their defeat in Massachusetts as “a marvel of obliviousness, of obtuseness, and of unbelievably condescending arrogance.”

3:04 video

Noemie Emery, in the Weekly Standard, relishes the cruel dilemma faced by congressional democrats, trapped between their party’s base demanding do-or-die passage of the health care bill and a massive public backlash.

In the wake of the stunning debacle (in their view) in the Bay State last Tuesday, Democrats find themselves with two thrilling alternatives: They can drop their unread and unreadable 2,200-page monstrosity of a health care reform bill and be labeled as wimps, jerks, and hapless losers who wasted a year and couldn’t deliver. Or, they can try to ram the Senate bill through the House (which hates most of it) in order to pass a bill that two-thirds of the country now loathes with a passion. They can either jump off the ship or stay on and sink with it. Either way, they end up in the drink.

There’s an interesting split among Democrats as to which courses to take. Those edging their way toward the lifeboats are those members of the House and Senate who sooner or later have to be in touch with the voters. Those who want the bill passed (i.e., pushed down the throats of the howling public) are White House officials and pundits, bloggers, academicians, talk show hosts, and others who don’t face reelection in this year or any, and will even find their business improving if the bill passes and all hell breaks loose. The pundits, who have no skin in this game since they will not get fired, have transferred their soaring contempt for the American people to their beleaguered House members. “Jump! Jump!” they cry to the quivering congressfolk. No sacrifice is too great for others to make for their dreams. …

Administrations have screwed up before, but this, in one of Obama’s pet words, is truly “historic” in terms of unforced self-destruction: No party before has wreaked such havoc upon its own members, created such division among its supporters, or sowed so much widespread despair. The fact that one year ago it stood on the pinnacle makes it still more amazing. As Jay Leno put it, “It’s hard to believe President Obama’s now been in office for a year. And you know, it’s incredible. He took something that was in terrible, terrible shape and he brought it back from the brink of disaster: The Republican party.”

Willem-Adolphe Bouguereau, Liberal Democrat Pursued By the Furies, 1862, Chrysler Museum of Art

Jay Ambrose takes on the role of Greek chorus, chanting about the lessons “Progressives” should have learned when they were turned out of office last time and didn’t.

Go back some decades, and it looked as if liberals were going to be the death of America. They wanted to take it really easy on criminals. They favored welfare programs that destroyed families. They backed foreign aid that buttressed tyrannies. Their way of dealing with enemies was unilateral disarmament. Still other proposals could have spent, taxed and regulated us into oblivion.

The voters didn’t like all of this, the L-word became a curse, and so liberals went into something akin to a witness protection program. They changed their name to “progressives” and if they did not quite hide out, they became less obtrusive with some of their views. Yes, they griped, fumed, engaged in numerous sneak attacks and thumbed their noses at the opposition, but they did turn the lights dimmer than before on their grand vision of free-enterprise destruction and runaway statism.

Ah, but then after their surprising 1990s ascension came the self-destruction of earmark-happy, spendthrift congressional Republicans who seemed to assume power was theirs forever, even if many of their principles were proving strangely evaporative.

So first off, the Democrats took back Congress. Then Barack Obama used unexcelled rhetorical skills, a recession, an unpopular war in Iraq and George W. Bush’s deep decline in public estimation to capture the White House. Conservative values had supposedly been rejected, and behold, it was the liberal hour, a time for the enlightened few to strike back, to fix things – glory, glory hallelujah!

The arrogance was suffocating. Resurrected liberals were practically smirking as they instructed us to sweet-talk our way out of terrorist threats, advised we should quickly duplicate Europe’s semi-socialist mistakes and condescendingly dished up all manner of other liberty-smothering ideological inanities that would transform America into a poor imitation of what it once was. …

Ordinary Americans have caught onto all of this, and so, I am sorry, liberals, but the word of the day for you is “lose.” Your side has lost elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and now your side has lost the Senate seat previously held by the very liberal Ted Kennedy in very liberal Massachusetts to Scott Brown, a Republican.

The message to the Democrats is simple. Either give up your liberal ways and veer toward the center or face political catastrophe in November’s general election. The message to liberals generally is also simple: Get back into your witness protection program.

No, Senators and Congressmen, the message of 2008 was not, “Go ahead and repeat the New Deal.” What 2008 really proved is that Americans are, for the most part, pragmatic and apolitical. When politics gets too noisy or too scary, when things start going to pot economically, they throw out the incumbents and send in the other team.

The Clintons alarmed America with Hillarycare, and the voters took away their Congressional majority. So Bill Clinton pulled in his horns and tried to govern competently, making noises like a Centrist. The economy caught fire as the Republican Congress favorably impacted economic policies, and Bill Clinton ironically even escaped removal from office, despite the Monica Lewinsky scandal and his perjury, because the public was decidedly content with a divided government featuring a competent democrat administration (however corrupt) as long as the economy was good.

Barack Obama has a very undeserved reputation for high intelligence. He is so stupid that he never even understood that there has come to exist, post the unhappy 1970s, a fundamental and unspoken contract between voters and leaders in American national politics: Don’t screw up the economy and you can be in office.

Minuteman memorial near the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts.

Michael Goodwin thanks the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for change we can believe in.

We the people of the United States owe Scott Brown’s supporters a huge debt of gratitude. They didn’t merely elect a senator. They ripped the façade off the Obama presidency.

Just as Dorothy and Toto exposed the ordinary man behind the curtain in “The Wizard of Oz,” the voters in Massachusetts revealed that, in this White House, there is no there there.

It’s all smoke and mirrors, bells and whistles, held together with glib talk, Chicago politics and an audacious sense of entitlement.

At the center is a young and talented celebrity whose worldview, we now know, is an incoherent jumble of poses and big-government instincts. His self-aggrandizing ambition exceeds his ability by so much that he is making a mess of everything he touches.

He never advances a practical idea. Every proposal overreaches and comes wrapped in ideology and a claim of moral superiority. He doesn’t listen to anybody who doesn’t agree with him.

After his first year on the job, America is sliding backwards, into grave danger at home and around the world. So much so that I now believe either of his rivals, Hillary Clinton or John McCain, would have made a better, more reliable and more trustworthy president.

They warned us he wasn’t ready.

Yes, we’re stuck with him, but we’re no longer stuck with his suffocating conformity. The second Boston Tea Party opened the door to new ideas and new people of both parties.

Obama’s reactions were predictable. More self-pity, blaming George W. Bush, and claiming that the voter revolt is due to ignorance about the health-care plan they hate.

Blah blah blah. Hasn’t he heard? The magic is gone.

Massachusetts changed everything. America’s spirit of independence has been emancipated and the cult of Obama-ism is finished.

With the Brown victory over Coakley and the mighty Massachusetts democrat party machine, Massachusetts voters proved that no democrat seat is safe, and the radical Congressional democrat majority is cowering like a beaten dog.

The public had decisively rejected socialized health care and the completion of the transformation of America into a European-style welfare state for the second time. Nationalized health care has become the kind of third rail for democrats that Social Security Reform is commonly asserted to be for Republicans. Every time they try touching it, they get killed.

The 2000 election, in which Al Gore was so narrowly defeated losing West Virginia and his home state of Tennessee clearly because of his support for Gun Control, seems to have finally persuaded the democrat party leadership that Gun Control is simply too costly to be actively pursued in contests outside the most urban blue states. Perhaps the likely impending loss of control of Congress for the second time following a second power grab at health care will persuade them to put aside that long-cherished democrat platform plank, too.

When you come right down to it, it seems to me that it is possible to argue that, on the national level, when push comes to shove, the fundamental goals that democrat party politics have long been directed toward, socialism, central economic planning, the welfare state, bureaucracy, disenfranchisement of the individual in favor of officially recognized interest groups and estates, complete domestic disarmament, are all fatally unpopular with a decisive majority of Americans. When it reaches the point that voters really take a personal interest, pretty much all of the democrat party’s fundamental goals are third rails.

A democrat senate staffer sent Josh Marshall an email describing the impact on the majority party in Congress of the Massachusetts special election result.

The worst is that I can’t help but feel like the main emotion people in the caucus are feeling is relief at this turn of events. Now they have a ready excuse for not getting anything done. While I always thought we had the better ideas but the weaker messaging, it feels like somewhere along the line Members internalized a belief that we actually have weaker ideas. They’re afraid to actually implement them and face the judgement of the voters. That’s the scariest dynamic and what makes me think this will all come crashing down around us in November.

Of course, theirs are the weaker ideas.

The health care bill was always unaffordable, and always represented an entitlement giveaway certain to increase demand for services dramatically, resulting inevitably in rationed services making health care less available to most Americans in the future.

How mysterious that Americans are not absolutely delighted by the opportunity to bankrupt the country by a process allowing most of us to pay more and get less.

J. Robert Smith, at American Thinker, is feeling very optimistic. He quips that the health care reform bill is as dead as the Articles of Confederation and predicts that internal democrat party conflicts will move to the forefront of Washington’s agenda as moderate democrats begin making defensive moves attempting to survive politically and the democrat party’s leftist base proceeds to twist arms and punish defectors.

In the coming weeks and months, the best political spectator sport around might not be Democrats versus Republicans or conservatives versus liberals, but Democrats of all stripes turning on one another.

Other than demagoguery, what Democrats are most accomplished at is fratricide (think back to the ’60s and ’70s). In the wake of Scott Brown’s hosing of Martha Coakley, the Democrats are about to have a good old-fashioned civil war. Pity for them; bully for America.

The Democrats are dividing roughly along these lines: left ideologues against pols, the latter being those congressional Democrats who like their jobs and don’t intend to wrap themselves in the European Union flag and jump off a craggy cliff into the Potomac.

It’s Pelosi and Frank and their ilk versus Heath Shuler and his ilk. But given Tuesday night’s win for Scott Brown in deep blue Massachusetts, it may be more than self-styled Democratic moderates who choose to defect. A few liberals may join in, too.

President Obama is showing every sign of being a cliff-jumper. Word out of the White House is that he plans to go on a populist offensive. In other words, he aims to demagogue anyone and anything in an attempt to divert voters’ attention from his utterly woeful, ideologically blind performance to date. And did I mention that under the cover of a hate, resentment, and envy campaign, Mr. Obama and his chief congressional lieutenants, the envenomed Nancy Pelosi and the passive-aggressive Harry Reid, will still scheme to foist statism on America?

While the President’s bravado may warm the hearts of Huffington Post and Daily Kos denizens, and while he may win plaudits from the Davids (Broder, Gergen, and Brooks) and the New York Times (among other liberal mouthpieces) for his supposed shrewdness, plenty of work-a-day congressional Democrats aren’t going to enlist in a lemmings’ march into the sea.

Self-preservation is a powerful instinct. The Coakley upending is the fork in the road for Democrats who are more enamored of themselves than stinky left-wing orthodoxy. The marker at the road’s fork points right, toward the middle ground. It’s where these Democrats know they must go if they are to stand a prayer of retaining their seats in November.

With every passing day, expect a few, and then lots of sobered Democrats to take the road right, regardless of the sharp disapproval of Pelosi and Reid or the threats of the White House Capone crew.

Congressional members peeling away from their party’s failing president is nothing new in Washington annals. LBJ and Richard Nixon could have given you earfuls.

But left-wing activists and fundraisers and money-givers aren’t going to take defections lightly. While keeping guns trained on Mr. Obama to ensure his fealty, expect left-wingers to turn other guns on congressional Democrats cheeky enough to scuttle ideology in favor of survival.

Nowadays, the left isn’t so much a movement as it is a death pact. If you’ve taken its money or accepted its campaign ground troops or benefited from its uncoordinated expenditures — and most Democrats have — then you’re on the hook. It’s like the mafia: Once you’re made, you can’t be unmade. Woe to the good fella or gal who wishes to part company. …

If the Democrats’ civil war plays out as expected, the result will be legislative torpor, magnificent wheels-squealing, and grinding-to-a-halt gridlock for 2010. Much to the relief of taxpayers and Main Street Americans, the 111th Congress will do no more damage…because it can’t.

The LA Times observes that the Massachusetts special election represented a shot by the voters fired directly across the democrat party’s bows. If they do not change direction rapidly, they are going to pay.

[E]ven as Massachusetts voters streamed to the polls to anoint Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s successor, Democratic leaders showed no signs of standing down.

“We’re right on course,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said after meeting with her leadership team. “We will have a healthcare reform bill, and it will be soon.”

For Democrats facing tough reelection fights in swing districts this November, however, the spectacle of their party losing in a liberal bastion has been chilling.

Even before Tuesday, party leaders had been under pressure to pivot toward other issues high on the agenda of an angry and impatient electorate: job creation and fiscal responsibility.

“It is really time now,” said Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), “for Democrats to shift their attention to issues that will enjoy broad public support.”

Most worrisome for the party is polling data that indicates Obama’s healthcare bill has helped turn independent voters — who fueled his presidential campaign to victory — into antagonists.

“If the Democrats can’t win in a state they carried by 26 points in 2008, then they have to ask themselves: Where in the world is it safe to be a Democrat running for federal office in 2010?” said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster whose firm worked with the Brown campaign. “The answer is nowhere.”

David Harsanyi explains that nobody has deceived the American people. Voters simply recognize that the health care bill is not in their interest. It would cause most Americans to pay more for health care and get less. It would result in fewer innovations and rationed services, and the US cannot afford it.

Generally speaking, would you favor smaller government with fewer services, or larger government with more services?

Fifty-eight percent of those polled by The Washington Post recently claimed they preferred smaller government with fewer services, with only 38 percent favoring a larger government with more services (and, yes, it is a terrific struggle not to place ironic quotations marks around the word services).

This is the highest number for the “smaller government” category since 2002. And a full year into President Barack Obama’s term, most polls, and state elections, tell us that the electorate is walking — maybe sprinting? — back from the progressive economic policies that now dominate Washington. …

Democrats continue to persuade themselves that the party’s problem is flawed candidates or poorly communicated messages, as White House spokesman Robert Gibbs conceded this week — because, presumably, the idea of socializing medicine is too nuanced and intellectually rigorous for the average voter to digest.

Hardly. The predicament Democrats face is the opposite. Too many voters appreciate exactly what health care legislation entails.

This is why Congress conducts clandestine negotiations on legislation and trashes promises of transparency. This is why leading Democrats have embraced procedural tricks and senatorial bribery — and now the possibility of “reconciliation,” so they can adjust health care reform and pass it with a 51-vote majority. You’re gonna get it whether you want it or not.

That’s what happens when these Democrats lose a debate. According to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, only 33 percent believe the health reform effort is a “good” idea, while 46 percent consider it a “bad” idea — with 55 percent disapproving of Obama on health care.

What’s most striking about this poll is that opposition to Obama’s plan has increased 20 percentage points since April — coinciding, not surprisingly, with the president’s big push to convince us that it’s needed. The more people learn, apparently, the less they like. …

[W]e have one party controlling both houses of Congress — with historically impressive margins. We have an opposition political party Americans have lost confidence in. We have endured a frightening downturn that allowed the far left to advance a menu of stunning regulatory intrusions that would normally be non-starters.

Finally, we have a charismatic and articulate president who, armed with near-national landslide, was given the stage to make his pitch on health care reform.

If, with all that, the progressives could not convince voters that the central cause of their movement was necessary, then it is not a messaging problem, it is not a leadership problem, it is not a Republican problem, it is an idea problem — a terrible idea problem.

“Chemical Ali” sentenced to death again. They’re going to have to hang that guy several times.

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James Cameron endorses ecoterrorism.

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Martha Coakley losing in Massachusetts Senate race. Democrats blame George W. Bush.

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Aurochs images from Chauvet cave.

Italians scientists propose breeding living cattle backwards to a genetic match with the extinct aurochs. Heck cattle descended from Herman Goering’s similar program are available, but they are intending to use Highland cattle and the Italian Maremma.

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Frank Fleming, at PJM, reveals more Game Changing moments from 2008:

Barack Obama’s rumored drug use was a lot more recent than most people think, but he vowed to never do it again after he woke up one morning with Joe Biden as a running mate.

Read the whole thing.