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.”

Newsmax cheerfully interprets away Obama’s 1.9% winning edge, but, hey! Brown hasn’t even started campaigning yet.

A stunning new poll conducted by Newsmax/Zogby reveals that Massachusett’s new Republican Sen.-elect Scott Brown could defeat President Barack Obama in a presidential election.

The Newsmax/Zogby poll released Tuesday found that the pair would be statistically deadlocked if the presidential election took place today.

The poll indicates surprisingly weak support for the president among independent voters, who favor the tyro Brown by 48.6 percent to 36 percent in a hypothetical matchup against Obama. …

“The real problem for Obama is that he has lost the middle, and losing the middle means losing independents,” McKinnon said. “And it is independents that are responsible for swinging elections one way or the other in this country. So if you lose independents, you’re going to lose the presidency.”

The poll asked likely voters: “If the election for president of the United States were held today and the only candidates were Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Scott Brown, for whom would you vote?”

Based on the 4,163 responses, Obama leads Brown by 46.5 percent to 44.6 percent. That amounts to a statistical tie because the Zogby survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.5 percent.

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Even hard-core liberal snark queen Maureen Dowd evidently recognizes the rising star eclipsing the setting one.

He’s The One, all right.

The handsome, athletic pol with the comely wife and two lovely daughters who precipitously rose from the State Legislature to pull us all together.

The fresh face and disarming underdog America’s been waiting for, someone who suffered through his parents’ divorce, watched his mom go on welfare and survived some wayward youthful behavior to become disciplined and successful — a lawyer, a lawmaker and a devoted family guy who does dog duty.

Someone who’s always game for a game of pickup basketball, loves talking sports and even boasts beefcake photos. A pro-choice phenom propelled into higher office by conservatives, independents and Democrats, a surprise winner with a magical aura.

The New One is the shimmering vessel that we are pouring all our hopes and dreams into after the grave disappointment of the Last One, Barack Obama.

The only question left is: Why isn’t Scott Brown delivering the State of the Union?

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.

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.

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.

2010 Washington may resemble San Francisco in 1906

Rick Richman stands in awe of what Barack Obama has accomplished in only 11 months.

In today’s Rasmussen presidential poll, only 26 percent of the nation’s voters strongly approve of Barack Obama’s performance as president, while 43 percent strongly disapprove — giving him a Presidential Approval Index rating, a sum calculated by subtracting the number of strong disapprovals from the number of strong approvals, of negative 17. His overall disapproval rating is 53 percent (it has been 50 percent or more for over a month). But it is the extraordinarily high proportion of those who strongly disapprove that bears noting.

In January, George W. Bush left office with a “Strongly Disapprove” rating of … 43 percent. It took Bush eight years to achieve that level of strong disapproval, despite how the mainstream media pummeled him for years. Obama has reached that level in 11 months, despite a media that for months could not use his name in a sentence without also adding “Lincoln” and “FDR.”

To appreciate the magnitude of Obama’s ratings fall, consider that after his first full day in office, his presidential index was positive 30. Today’s index of negative 17 reflects a swing of 47 points in less than a year.

A commenter at the Huffington Post today observes that Obama has “accomplished the remarkable feat of both demoralizing the base and completely turning off voters in the center.” The president has also unified the Republican party and created a tea-party movement that in some polls is more popular than both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Rasmussen‘s Presidential Approval Poll indicates that, if the numbers get any worse, the White House can start expecting visits from mobs of angry peasants brandishing torches and pitchforks.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 24% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -18. …

Overall, 44% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President’s performance. That’s the lowest level yet measured for this president.Previously, his overall approval rating had fallen to 45% twice, once in early September and once in late November.

Fifty-five percent (55%) now disapprove.

Seventy-two percent (72%) of Democrats now offer their approval while 80% of Republicans disapprove. Among voters not affiliated with either major party, just 36% approve.

Seventy-seven percent (77%) of liberals approve while 76% of conservatives disapprove. The bad news for the President is that there are a lot more conservatives in the country than liberals. However, he gets a bit of a boost because 57% of moderate voters still offer their approval.

The President earns approval from 37% of White voters and 98% of African-American voters.

Do Americans want Health Care Reform? Not the way democrats are “reforming” it.

Hat tip to Megan McArdle.

“Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad.”

Rich Lowry looks on with astonishment as the democrats march on determinedly toward assured destruction.

This will long be a case study in the annals of abnormal political psychology. Tax hikes undid George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton (Bush lost his presidency, Clinton his congressional majority), and Medicare cuts undid Newt Gingrich (taking the air out of his “Republican revolution”). Obama’s Democrats are prescribing themselves a strong dose of both, in an exercise in self-destructive quackery.

They believe that Obama can’t afford failure, that’s it’s the defeat of ClintonCare that killed the Democrats in 1994. But such are the grave political and substantive flaws of ObamaCare that Democrats can’t afford success or failure.

If they pass it, they have tax hikes and Medicare cuts around their necks, as well as the increased insurance premiums the bill is sure to cause. If they fail, they’ve demonstrated their own ineffectual ideological fervor, while still putting themselves on record in favor of tax increases and Medicare cuts.

The Democrats got themselves into this hellish dilemma by not taking the obvious step of scaling back the bill once it became clear it engendered fierce public resistance. Take half a loaf, disarm your critics, call it victory, hail yourselves at the signing ceremony — and come back for more later. It’s not complicated.

Instead, they’ve stayed on a maximalist course. They’ve pushed to the point where the effort could collapse — and, even if they succeed, they’ll have done themselves and the nation’s fiscal future grave harm.

This is the other element of the drama that inheres in the health-care debate: If it passes, people years and even decades from now will look back and ask, “What were they thinking?” It’s a rare opportunity to see a train wreck at its inception, as the conductors make the decisions with malice afterthought that will ramify disastrously.

Everyone agrees that the nation is on an unsustainable fiscal path. So Democrats will add a $2.5 trillion entitlement to hurry us further along the path. Tax hikes that could go to reducing the deficit they’ll plow into the new entitlement. Medicare cuts that could shore up Medicare’s own shaky finances, they’ll plow into the entitlement too (if the cuts happen at all). The new entitlement will grow at a projected 8 percent a year, and it’s only through gimmickry it’s made to look deficit neutral in the first decade. The cost curve of health care will be bent up, and insurance premiums, too, will rise. For all of this, ObamaCare will still leave 24 million people without health insurance.

If nothing else, watching the Democrats sacrifice so much on behalf of this monstrosity is fascinating, appalling — and dramatic. Common sense suggests that they shouldn’t do it. The basic laws of political physics say they can’t do it. And yet on they march.

What do Americans think? They’re against the Health Care Bill: 56% to 38%. Rasmussen.

Clarice Feldman has never seen anything like it.

Gallup finds that conservatives continue to outnumber liberals and moderates, and that growing numbers of Americans agree with conservative positions on many specific issues.

Get ready for 2010. We will be taking the country back.

Conservatives continue to outnumber moderates and liberals in the American populace in 2009, confirming a finding that Gallup first noted in June. Forty percent of Americans describe their political views as conservative, 36% as moderate, and 20% as liberal. This marks a shift from 2005 through 2008, when moderates were tied with conservatives as the most prevalent group.
The 2009 data are based on 16 separate Gallup surveys conducted from January through September, encompassing more than 5,000 national adults per quarter.
Conservatives have been the dominant ideological group each quarter, with between 39% and 41% of Americans identifying themselves as either “very conservative” or “conservative.” Between 35% and 37% of Americans call themselves “moderate,” while the percentage calling themselves “very liberal” or “liberal” has consistently registered between 20% and 21% — making liberals the smallest of the three groups.

Even from across the Atlantic, the Telegraph has not failed to notice the terrible things happening to Barack Obama’s approval rating in the polls.

The decline in Barack Obama’s popularity since July has been the steepest of any president at the same stage of his first term for more than 50 years.

Gallup recorded an average daily approval rating of 53 per cent for Mr Obama for the third quarter of the year, a sharp drop from the 62 per cent he recorded from April.

His current approval rating – hovering just above the level that would make re-election an uphill struggle – is close to the bottom for newly-elected president. Mr Obama entered the White House with a soaring 78 per cent approval rating. …

Jeffrey Jones of Gallup explained: “The dominant political focus for Obama in the third quarter was the push for health care reform, including his nationally televised address to Congress in early September.

“Obama hoped that Congress would vote on health care legislation before its August recess, but that goal was missed, and some members of Congress faced angry constituents at town hall meetings to discuss health care reform. Meanwhile, unemployment continued to climb near 10 per cent.” …

Mr Obama is also facing widespread criticism for his drawn-out decision-making process over what to do next in Afghanistan.

Trying to nationalize health care during Clinton’s first term cost the democrat party a 40 year old Congressional majority in both houses. At times like these, one is obliged to quote Santayana, who observed that those who cannot learn from history are inevitably obliged to repeat it.