Back in 2005, when democrats held up George W. Bush’s judicial appointments in an unprecedented display of partisanship, the Republican majority in the Senate threatened to use the so-called “nuclear option,” i.e., to use reconciliation to overcome the filibuster to achieve judicial confirmations.

Diane Feinstein warns: “It begins with judicial nominations, next will be executive appointments, and then legislation.”

5:00 video

Biden: “I pray God when the Democrats take back control we don’t make the kind of naked power grab you are doing.”

In 2005, John McCain split from the Republican Party and derailed the proposed nuclear option, imposing his own compromise.

After the monster is finally dispatched in the dramatic climax of the conventional exemplar of Hollywood’s scary movie genre, when the nerves of the mass audience begin to relax, pulse rates slowdown, and theater-goers are expecting the final credits to arrive any moment on the screen, it has become traditional for directors to have a little fun by confounding expectations, setting aside all considerations of plausibility, and having the recently slain monster come right back to life and attack (and be dispatched) all over again.

One of the most impressive riffs on this by-now only too familiar trope is performed by Jon Voight, playing a murderous hunter in Anaconda (1997). Voight’s Paul Sarone comes a cropper, winding up in the coils of the giant anaconda. He is squeezed until his bones audibly break, and then ingested while the audience gets a view right down the alimentary passage of the giant reptile. We think we’ve seen the last of the heartless and relentless Sarone, but no, moments later, the snake regurgitates the villain, all covered with digestive juices, who –in one of trash cinema’s moments of genius, proceeds to wink at a truly horrified Jennifer Lopez.

2:14 (Spanish-subtitled) video

It appears that, in the same unappetizing style of curtain call made well known by Jon Voight, the health care bill may be coming back.

New York Times:

President Obama will put forward comprehensive health care legislation intended to bridge differences between Senate and House Democrats ahead of a summit meeting with Republicans next week, senior administration officials and Congressional aides said Thursday.

Democratic officials said the president’s proposal was being written so that it could be attached to a budget bill as a way of averting a Republican filibuster in the Senate. The procedure, known as budget reconciliation, would let Democrats advance the bill with a simple majority rather than a 60-vote supermajority.

Congressional Democrats, however, have not yet seen the proposal or signed on.

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I don’t agree one bit with Ezra Klein‘s claim of the public option being popular in the country, but here you see what the democrat party left is telling itself as it winks (from its current moribund position) at a horrified American voting public.

What you’re seeing here are the weird politics of the public option at play. It’s popular in the country. It’s wildly popular among the base. It’s the subject of obsessive interest in the media. There is little downside to supporting it publicly, huge downside to opposing it, and no one is allowed to ignore the issue, or even take a few days to see where the votes are.

But it’s divisive on the Hill. Bringing it back energizes all the narratives that Democrats fear most: That they’re cutting secret deals without Republicans in the room, that they’re building an extremist bill, that health-care reform is a government takeover. And this is all happening without 60 votes in the Senate or even certainty of simple majorities in the Congress. Democrats have spent the last month in a state of agonized confusion, and just as matters were clarifying, now this battle threatens to start up again.

No one I’ve spoken to — even when they support the public option — thinks that its reemergence is good news for health-care reform. It won’t be present in the package that the White House will unveil Monday. Everyone seems to be hoping this bubble will be short-lived.

But it might not be. The media is talking about it, liberals are organizing around it, none of the major actors feels politically capable of playing executioner, and Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson don’t have the power to do the job on their own. As of now, the strategy only has 20 or so supporters, and it’ll need at least another 20 or 25 to really be viable. But if it gets there, White House and Senate leadership are going to have some hard calls to make.

So, there you are. The democrat party base sees no downside, in ramming through a health care bill opposed by 58% of the American public via an unprecedented ultra-partisan maneuver around the conventional rules and procedures of the United States Senate.

It remains to be seen whether the parliamentarian of the Senate will permit the de facto elimination of the filibuster, and it is probably not altogether certain that Reid can muster even the 51 votes he would need to take that ultra-radical step.

If the democrats have the hubris to do all this, well, we will see just how well they like being in the minority in a Republican-controlled Senate with no filibuster. The first thing we should do is to repeal Obamacare, and kill the monster of socialism permanently and for the last time.

All sorts of people, several I’d never have suspected of being quite so racially sensitive, gleefully piled onto Harry Reid yesterday taking advantage of the scandalous revelation in Game Change, a new book about the 2008 presidential election contest, that Reid had expressed the opinion that Obama was electable because he was “light-skinned” with “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

“Negro” was suddenly discovered to be a vulgar and nasty pejorative, off limits in respectable society. And GOP Chairman (and opportunistic African-American) Michael Steele promptly called for Reid’s resignation from his Senate leadership post on grounds of PC taboo violation.

David Horowitz had the decency to express disgust.

[It’s] hard not to bathe in schadenfreude at the hammering [Harry Reid] is now getting over an interview he gave to John Heilemann and Mark Haperin during 2008 for their new book… But it is also hard not to be disgusted by the politically correct sanctimony of Republicans like the RNC’s Michael Steele who are acting as if they just caught the Nevada senator in a Klan costume.

“Negro” is the new n-word now? And is it not true that Obama’s light skin color and the half-white background that produced it was indeed an electoral asset? And didn’t the ability to talk like a brother as well as a Harvard grad sharpen the President’s ineffable hipness and post-racial appeal? Can the lexicon of the politically taboo have become such a fat book as this?

Instead of standing back with folded arms and watch the Democrats wallow in the squalor they created by forcing Reid to grovel for redemption from Al Sharpton, Julian Bond, the execrable Cong. Barbara Lee, and other race hustlers, Steele has demanded a leading role in this nasty spectacle. He says that the situation Reid created is similar to the one in 2002 when Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott was forced out of his leadership position for praising Strom Thurmond. Right. No doubt about it. But it was also the Republicans, cowering under the Democrats ludicrous charges of “racism,” who caved and forced Lott out. And while there is obviously a gleeful temptation to require Reid and the Democrats to endure the same standards now that took Lott down back then, Steele and the Republicans are taking the shabby way out again. If they don’t know that getting leverage by calling an opponent a racist (a term like “McCarthyite,” which no longer describes a pathology but is no more than a way of stigmatizing someone on the cheap) debases our political culture, who does? How many times have they been hit over the head with this charge? How can they not know that this is a game in which Republicans might score a run now and then but can never win. Nobody beats the Democrats at race-baiting!

By pointedly not doing to Reid what was done to Lott and making it into one of those “teachable moments” our President likes to talk about, Steele could have done the country a service. Instead, he supported a status quo in our politics in which the race card is always the first one dealt and always from the bottom of the deck.

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Patterico favors proceeding with the un-PC hunt, pointing out how often Harry Reid has played this game himself.

My own favorite example of Reid playing the race card occurred this fall, when Reid compared congressional Republican opposition to healthcare to the 19th-century debate over slavery.

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You can’t resign from being a former president, so William Jefferson Clinton will have to be allowed to get away with revealing his true racial perspective to the late Senator Edward Kennedy, remarking upon the incongruity of the upstart Obama challenging Mrs. Clinton for the democrat party nomination by noting: “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

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Disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich (who resigned after trying to sell Obama’s senate seat) chimed in, too, with the following comparison.

I’m blacker than Barack Obama. I shined shoes. I grew up in a five-room apartment. My father had a little laundromat in a black community not far from where we lived. I saw it all growing up.”

Surprise! Harry Reid’s amendment contains some tricky little provisions performing an end-run around the requirement of a two-thirds majority being needed to modify the Rules of the Senate.

Erik Erikson, at Red State, breaks the news that we don’t get to repeal Socialism.

Upon examination of Senator Harry Reid’s amendment to the health care legislation, Senators discovered section 3403. That section changes the rules of the United States Senate.

To change the rules of the United States Senate, there must be sixty-seven votes.

Section 3403 of Senator Harry Reid’s amendment requires that “it shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.” The good news is that this only applies to one section of the Obamacare legislation. The bad news is that it applies to regulations imposed on doctors and patients by the Independent Medicare Advisory Boards a/k/a the Death Panels.

Section 3403 of Senator Reid’s legislation also states, “Notwithstanding rule XV of the Standing Rules of the Senate, a committee amendment described in subparagraph (A) may include matter not within the jurisdiction of the Committee on Finance if that matter is relevant to a proposal contained in the bill submitted under subsection (c)(3).” In short, it sets up a rule to ignore another Senate rule.

Frozen Hell: Senator Ugolino gnawing on the skull of Senator Ruggieri

The late Dorothy Parker reputedly answered her telephone with the phrase, “What fresh hell is this?”

In the Age of Obama, Americans in general can greet any news from Washington with the same alarmed interrogative.

Michael Goodwin celebrates Harry Reid’s purchase of his 60th vote (using our tax dollars) by repenting for his vote last year.

President Obama, for whom I voted because I believed he was the best choice available, is a profound disappointment. I now regard his campaign as a sly bait-and-switch operation, promising one thing and delivering another. Shame on me.

Equally surprising, he has become an insufferable bore. The grace notes and charm have vanished, with peevishness and petty spite his default emotions. His rhetorical gifts now serve his loathsome habit of fear-mongering.

“Time is running out,” he says, over and again. He said it on health care, on the stimulus, in Copenhagen, on Iran.

Instead of provoking thought and inspiring ideas, the man hailed for his Ivy League nuance insists we stop thinking and do what he says. Now.

His assertion we will go bankrupt unless Congress immediately adopts the health monstrosity marks a new low. …

It is a myth the fight is over health care at all. It is a vulgar power dispute between liberals and extreme liberals, with health care a convenient portal for command-and-control of 17 percent of the economy.

It’s definitely not reform.

Notice how little Obama talks about sick people or medicine or suffering or any of the realities of illness and death. There is almost no mention of the moral dimension that supposedly animates the demand for universal coverage.

The public intuitively understands the con, which is why it prefers the flawed status quo. Voters tell pollsters by as much as 3-to-1 they think a federal takeover will cost them and the country more money and will produce more red tape instead of better care.

Yet, because power corrupts, and one-party rule corrupts absolutely, dissenters are considered heretics. Until the next election.

Meanwhile, Mother Nature delivered her verdict with yesterday’s blizzard in Washington. I am cheered by the thought that finally, hell has frozen over.

Read the whole thing.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made the mistake of trying to intimidate the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Instead of being frightened, Review-Journal Publisher Sherman Frederick reported what Reid did and openly defied him. I wish I lived near enough to Las Vegas to subscribe.

On Wednesday, before he addressed a Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce luncheon, Reid joined the chamber’s board members for a meet-‘n’-greet and a photo. One of the last in line was the Review-Journal’s director of advertising, Bob Brown, a hard-working Nevadan who toils every day on behalf of advertisers. He has nothing to do with news coverage or the opinion pages of the Review-Journal.

Yet, as Bob shook hands with our senior U.S. senator in what should have been nothing but a gracious business setting, Reid said: “I hope you go out of business.”

Later, in his public speech, Reid said he wanted to let everyone know that he wants the Review-Journal to continue selling advertising because the Las Vegas Sun is delivered inside the Review-Journal.

Such behavior cannot go unchallenged.

You could call Reid’s remark ugly and be right. It certainly was boorish. Asinine? That goes without saying.

But to fully capture the magnitude of Reid’s remark (and to stop him from doing the same thing to others) it must be called what it was — a full-on threat perpetrated by a bully who has forgotten that he was elected to office to protect Nevadans, not sound like he’s shaking them down.

No citizen should expect this kind of behavior from a U.S. senator. It is certainly not becoming of a man who is the majority leader in the U.S. Senate. And it absolutely is not what anyone would expect from a man who now asks Nevadans to send him back to the Senate for a fifth term.

If he thinks he can push the state’s largest newspaper around by exacting some kind of economic punishment in retaliation for not seeing eye to eye with him on matters of politics, I can only imagine how he pressures businesses and individuals who don’t have the wherewithal of the Review-Journal.

For the sake of all who live and work in Nevada, we can’t let this bully behavior pass without calling out Sen. Reid. If he’ll try it with the Review-Journal, you can bet that he’s tried it with others. So today, we serve notice on Sen. Reid that this creepy tactic will not be tolerated.

We won’t allow you to bully us. And if you try it with anyone else, count on going through us first.

Read the whole thing.

I look forward to 2010.

Needing to keep his job with CBS, golf analyst David Feherty apologized for saying what he really thinks in a quip published in recent Dallas-area magazine.

Fox News quotes the “unacceptable” joke:

David Feherty apologized Sunday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for a morbid joke that went bad in a Dallas magazine.

Feherty, one of the most popular golf analysts for his sharp wit and self-deprecating humor, was among five Dallas residents who wrote for “D Magazine” on former President George W. Bush moving to Dallas.

“From my own experience visiting the troops in the Middle East, I can tell you this though,” Feherty wrote toward the end of his column.

“Despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it, and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden, there’s a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death.”

Feherty, a former Ryder Cup player who grew up in Northern Ireland, has gone to Iraq over Thanksgiving the past two years to visit with U.S. troops, and he created a foundation to help wounded soldiers.

“This passage was a metaphor meant to describe how American troops felt about our 43rd president,” Feherty said in a statement. “In retrospect, it was inappropriate and unacceptable, and has clearly insulted Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid, and for that, I apologize. As for our troops, they know I will continue to do as much as I can for them both at home and abroad.

Feherty has to apologize for this “inappropriate and unacceptable” “morbid joke,” but one does not find Wanda Sykes apologizing for jokingly referring to Rush Limbaugh as “the 20th (9/11) hijacker” or anyone calling her expressing hope that “his kidneys fail” morbid or inappropriate. Instead, there is Barack Obama right next to her, grinning his head off.

Personally, I think we are all adults here and people in public life who are prominent leaders of sharply divided political factions should expect to be the subjects of uncomplimentary jokes. We can do without the prim and prissy faux outrage, particularly when it only is applied hypocritically in one direction.

Harry Reid, despite originating from and representing Nevada in the Senate (a state whose history is based upon minerals and mining), has gone all moonbat, and won himself a place in YouTube’s list of “Most Watched” videos, bleating absurdities about coal and oil “making us sick” and “ruining the earth.”

0:35 video

Well, mining coal in deep mines and breathing in coal dust can make you sick. It killed my grandfather back in the 1930s. But claims that coal is making anybody other than deep miners sick is a claim based on what we call statistics. Statistics are produced by sophisters, calculators, and economists, and liberals always have statistics by the boxcar load ready and waiting to prove whatever they happen to want to prove. As the old saying goes, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Coal has been used in domestic heating and in industrial production since Elizabethan times. Burning coal undoubtedly produced cleaner air in places like London than the wood fires used previously.

They discovered anthracite coal in Pennsylvania early in the 19th century, and Benjamin Franklin’s stove adapted with grates was found perfect for its use. By mid-century, railroads and canal boats were carrying coal to all major American cities. They found oil, also in Pennsylvania, in the mid-19th century, and we’ve been using that ever since, too.

Generations of Americans and Europeans have lived and died using coal and oil, and the Earth remains, far from ruined.

I don’t feel particularly sick. How about you?

The truth is that no economically practical alternatives exist, and politicians cannot magic new forms of energy into existence. What they can do is jump on to the bandwagons of fashionable do-gooder causes and disseminate misinformation and sow unnecessary fear as a means of bamboozling the gullible public into surrendering more powers and more tax monies to them.

It’s this kind of politics that ought to make you sick.

The Senate Majority Leader ducks a hard question.

0:36 video

And Dennis Miller has some advice for Harry Reid:

2:22 video

Hat tip to MacRanger.

Senator Joseph Lieberman agrees with Never Yet Melted on the proposition that there is no possibility that US forces can be defeated by our adversaries on the ground in Iraq, and that if the war is lost, it will be lost in the domestic war for public opinion.

He said so on Bill Bennet’s radio program. And one of the Talking Points Memo crowd captured Senator Lieberman’s radio comment and packaged it as a YouTube 0:48 video for the left blogosphere to spit and hiss over today.

mcjoan at Daily Kos typically treats Lieberman’s observation as a gratuitous attack on Harry Reid, and (naturally) proceeds to play the left’s sad old tune about the sufferings of the American soldiers they are busily stabbing in the back.

Jules Crittenden takes the occasion of the failure of the Gonzalez No Confidence vote, Harry Reid’s 19% Favorable Rating, and the democrat Congress’s 27% Approval Rating (a 10 Year Low) to remind Americans that it is actually possible to be doing worse than George W. Bush.

Mark Tapscott says the unpopularity of both Republicans and democrats proves it’s time for a new Party.

Corporal Tyler Rock USMC to Senator Harry Reid courtesy of Pat Dollard.

yeah and i got a quote for that douche harry reid. these families need us here. obviously he has never been in iraq. or at least the area worth seeing. the parts where insurgency is rampant and the buildings are blown to pieces. we need to stay here and help rebuild. if iraq didnt want us here then why do we have IP’s voluntering everyday to rebuild their cities. and working directly with us too. same with the IA’s. it sucks that iraqi’s have more patriotism for a country that has turned to complete shit more than the people in america who drink starbucks everyday. we could leave this place and say we are sorry to the terrorists. and then we could wait for 3,000 more american civilians to die before we say “hey thats not nice” again. and the sad thing is after we WIN this war. people like him will say he was there for us the whole time.