CBS: Obama’s approval rating on health care hits all-time low. 36 percent of Americans approve; 54 percent disapprove.

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WSJ: “The House version of ObamaCare is more destructive than the Senate version, though that’s like comparing Krakatoa and Mount Vesuvius.”

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Eliot A. Cohen, in the Wall Street Journal: “J. K. Rowling has given her readers a more thorough understanding of Lord Voldemort than the West’s leaders have given their populations of whom we fight, what really animates them, and what the challenges that lie ahead will be.”

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TSA is lying to the public. 2008 Federal specs require full body imaging machines to be able to record, store, and transmit digital strip search images. (EPIC.org) They’d obviously be a lot less fun for those airline security rent-a-cops if they couldn’t.

Your tax dollars at work. NPR uploaded a 1:24 propaganda cartoon last November which has recently been noticed and is attracting criticism.

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Peggy Noonan says passage of the Health Care Bill is going to be a catastrophic victory for democrats. Republicans are currently simply waiting for democrats to finish destroying themselves, and she warns them that, with respect to their own coming political accendancy, they should take a cue from the film Saving Private Ryan (1998) and: “Earn this”

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How’s that Global Warming working out for you? Snow covers the United Kingdom from Land’s End to John o’ Groats.

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WordPress is retiring the much-admired Kubrick as its default format theme. Never Yet Melted started out briefly using Kubrick, like just about everybody else.

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Michael Scheuer says Obama Counter Terrorism Czar John O. Brennan in 1998 blocked a CIA operation that could have klilled or captured Bin Ladin.

Japanese sink $1.5 million Sea Shepherd boat engaged in harassing a Japanese whaling ship in Antarctic waters. That’s really too bad.

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Ta- Nehisi Coates, in A Bad Time For the Empire, is philosophical about impending democrat party congressional losses resulting from ramming socialism down America’s throat.

If you work for the DNC or RNC, or if you cover politics for the media, elections are the end. The conversation of policy isn’t even really about policy, so much as it’s about how policy will effect the next election. But for others of us, policy is the end. Winning elections is nice, but you don’t elect candidates so that they can stand in front the capitol and look pretty, anymore than you send soldiers to the field for a photo-op. They’re there to do a job. And sometimes the job costs.

At least he identifies just which side he’s on. The Health Care Bill’s resemblance to other famous legislation has been remarked upon before.

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New Codes from Obama’s TSA:

From Vanderleun.

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Obama promises open Health Care Bill negotiations televised on C-Span 8 times.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs declined to discuss the president’s promises.

Michelle Malkin: Obama and the Vampire Congress

10 Things Liberals Like About Rush Limbaugh

Swedish cartoonist Lars Viks targeted, too. (Hat tip to Walter Olson.)

Newt Gingrich made the following prediction on Meet the Press last Sunday:

[Y]ou’ve got $513 billion in tax increases, $470 billion in Medicare cuts. You have a scale of, I think, bribery in the Senate we have not seen in our lifetime, with various senators getting all sorts of special deals in a way that I think the public is just appalled by. I suspect every Republican running in ‘10 and again in ‘12 will run on an absolute pledge to repeal this bill.

The bill — most of the bill does not go into effect until ‘13 or ‘14, except on the tax increase side; and therefore, I think there won’t be any great constituency for it. And I think it’ll be a major campaign theme. This is a bad bill, written in a horrible way, and the most — the most corrupt legislation I’ve seen in my lifetime.

0:49 video

Gingrich’s repeal pledge went largely unnoticed on the right, but it certainly got the left’s attention.

Leftie bloggers are busily spinning today about how impossible it would be to repeal the health care bill (Steve Benen), and Matt Yglesias has even devised an epithet to apply to people like me: we’re Repealers.

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I think those leftwing bloggers are whistling past the political graveyard.

Look at Rasmussen’s latest poll on Ben Nelson’s standing after the health care vote.

The good news for Senator Ben Nelson is that he doesn’t have to face Nebraska voters until 2012.

If Governor Dave Heineman challenges Nelson for the Senate job, a new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows the Republican would get 61% of the vote while Nelson would get just 30%. Nelson was reelected to a second Senate term in 2006 with 64% of the vote.

Nelson’s health care vote is clearly dragging his numbers down. Just 17% of Nebraska voters approve of the deal their senator made on Medicaid in exchange for his vote in support of the plan. Overall, 64% oppose the health care legislation, including 53% who are Strongly Opposed.

Zennie62 says Max Baucus wasn’t drunk. Zennie also thinks the health care bill is a good idea.

What do you think? Let’s have a real bipartishan approach to the question.

5:38 video

Obama skipped church on Christmas (I guess Reverend Wright was not GD’ing America anywhere nearby), but President Obama took up the slack personally, criticizing the Senate’s rules and procedures allowing minorities to resist passage of controversial measures.

Charles Hurt:

Increasingly unloved and ridiculed from both sides, a new and embittered President Obama is emerging this Christmas season as he begins a badly needed vacation in Hawaii.

In an interview on the eve of yesterday’s health-care ram-through, Obama expressed his deep frustration over the legislative process.

The president accused Republicans of abuse for employing the very rules that make the Senate the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”

“If this pattern continues, you’re going to see an inability on the part of America to deal with big problems in a very competitive world, and other countries are going to start running circles around us,” Obama warned.

What he is saying is that other governments around the world — those tyrannical states that do not share our respect for the minority — are better forms of government, better equipped to compete in this modern world.

This is a frightening new side of Barack Obama.

Senator Jim DeMint

The liberal media and left blogosphere are typically congratulating themselves on “winning ugly, but winning,” as Ezra Klein puts it.

The American voting public is experiencing profound revulsion at the sordid spectacle of ultra-partisan legislation they’ve witnessed recently, featuring open purchases of votes, behind-the-scenes horse-trades, and a host of favors for certain regions and constituencies. We’re reforming health care in very special ways for Libby, Montana, the entire state of Nebraska, longshoremen, and trial lawyers. The Congressional democrat leadership has greased the path to socialism with the purest of sleaze.

There will surely be a reckoning in 2010 and 2012 for all this, but in the meantime (sorry, Ezra!) it is not clear that they have actually won.

Dan Perrin, at Red State, points out that, because of the procedural objection by Senator DeMint, more of the same kind of votes recently won by razor-thin margins will need to occur in both houses.

When Senator DeMint engineered, and Republican Leader McConnell actually objected to the appointment of the conferees, he was really handing the ball off to the left wingers — progressives if you will — and now they have their shot to either hold their own clan members who are against the Senate compromises and force them to vote No, or have their policy demands be ignored and take the crumbs from Senator Nelson’s and Senator Lieberman’s table.

Now, because of the Senator DeMint’s objection, unless the House votes for the Senate bill unchanged — which is highly unlikely… — then the Senate ObamaCare bill must be amended on the House floor to gain the votes they need to pass it on the House floor. And because of Senator DeMint’s objection to the appointment of the conferees, there will be no conference, or conference report.

If the House amends the Senate bill, they then have to send the amended bill back to the Senate — where all the 60 vote margin cloture votes still apply — cloture on the motion to proceed, and cloture to end the filibuster and cloture on any amendment.

Do I believe that this objection to the appointment of the conferees will kill ObamaCare? Yes, if the progressives or those 64 House Democrats who voted for the Stupak amendment do not roll over and play dead.

Hat tip to Rand Simberg via Glenn Reynolds.

Jeffrey H. Anderson points out just how narrowly the democrats succeeded in getting this far. That effort required compromises in the Senate contradicting the deals that made passage in he House possible. Now they have to go back to the House members whose concessions were eliminated by the Senate and try to get them to stay on board.

If public opinion continues in an increasingly negative direction, it will be harder and harder for them. It is not over yet.

The Democrats passed a highly unpopular bill with two votes to spare in the House and none to spare in the Senate. Now they have to blend the bills (mostly reflecting the Senate one) and get them back through both chambers — after hearing from their constituents over the holidays.

Furthermore, the House bill passed only because of relatively strong anti-abortion language demanded by pro-life Democrats in particularly precarious seats. The Senate bill doesn’t contain that language. So either the anti-abortion Democrats in the House or the pro-abortion Democrats in the Senate are going to have to cave. Combine this with other issues, and the Democrats’ almost-nonexistent margin for error, and final passage is anything but certain.

Additionally, the Democrats’ bills would not go into effect in any meaningful way until at least 2013. They could have been written to go into effect immediately, but the Democrats made the calculation that it was better to delay implementation by several years so that they could mislead the American people by citing “10-year costs” for six years’ worth of of Obamacare. That enabled them to pitch an approximately $2.5 trillion bill (its real first-10-year costs, according to the Congressional Budget Office) as an $871 billion bill. But that decision has left us with this reality: The Democrats can only implement their overhaul, and avoid is repeal, if the American people choose to send them back to Capitol Hill and to the White House in 2010 and 2012. The American people, and not the Democratic party, will ultimately decide Obamacare’s fate.

But the American people will also decide the fate of Obamacare in a much more immediate sense. Across recent weeks, Democratic representatives in both congressional chambers have taken tremendous heat from the Obama administration. Now, over the holidays, they’ll get to interact with their constituents face-to-face. They’ve felt the immediate pressures of Washington; now they’ll get to feel the pressure from those who sent them there — the vast majority of whom oppose Obamacare. …

Now is the time to fight.

Iowahawk turns his inimitable talents to a new version of the classic holiday movie updating it a bit.

George and Clarence walk by empty welfare centers and boarded-up ACORN offices

MRS. FOSTER
Well I guess I always can skip my AARP dues.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

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.

Quinnipiac Poll:

As the Senate prepares to vote on health care reform, American voters “mostly disapprove” of the plan 53 – 36 percent and disapprove 56 – 38 percent of President Barack Obama’s handling of the health care issue, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

Voters also oppose 72 – 23 percent using any public money in the health care overhaul to pay for abortions, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds.

American voters also disapprove 51 – 44 percent of President Obama’s handling of the economy and disapprove 56 – 37 percent of the way he is creating jobs. …

Only 31 percent of voters say Obama’s policies will help their personal financial situation, while 37 percent say his policies will hurt and 30 percent say his policies will make no difference. Among voters in households where someone has lost a job in the last year, 37 percent say Obama policies will help them personally, while 37 percent say they will hurt.

Looking at the health care plan, independent voters “mostly disapprove” 58 – 30 percent, as do Republicans 83 – 10 percent. Democrats “mostly approve” 64 – 22 percent.

“As President Barack Obama’s numbers on health care have declined so has his margin over Republicans on whom American voters trust most on the issue,” said Peter Brown, Assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “In July he enjoyed a 20-point edge on the trust question, and that margin has been narrowing, to 45 – 40 percent today.