Obama on healthcare: SOS

Realizing that his plans to "reform" the nation's healthcare system are, to put it mildly, in distress, Obama spoke to a joint session of Congress last night in a last ditch effort to pursuade the American people of the particular wisdom of his vision on health care.

How'd he do? He screwed the pooch. Basically, it was the Same Old Shit.

He simply repeated, albeit more forcefully, the same arguments that a majority of voters have already rejected as phony. Obama said, "nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have." As Pajamas Media's Vodkapundit Stephen Green correctly pointed out, "require" is one of those "weasel words." Yes, not "required" in the strict sense of the word, but once a public option plan is made available, that is cheaper than an employer's current offering, one can easily expect that the employer will pay the premiums (or penalties) and simply dump his employees into the public option. You can't keep your employer-sponsored health insurance if your employer no longer offers it.

As to how he was going to pay for the expanded coverage in his plan, Obama again offered nothing new:

[W]e've estimated that most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system - a system that is currently full of waste and abuse. . . . In fact, I want to speak directly to America's seniors for a moment, because Medicare is another issue that's been subjected to demagoguery and distortion during the course of this debate. . . . The only thing this plan would eliminate is the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud, as well as unwarranted subsidies in Medicare that go to insurance companies - subsidies that do everything to pad their profits and nothing to improve your care. . . . These steps will ensure that you - America's seniors - get the benefits you've been promised. They will ensure that Medicare is there for future generations. And we can use some of the savings to fill the gap in coverage that forces too many seniors to pay thousands of dollars a year out of their own pocket for prescription drugs. That's what this plan will do for you.

I see, Obama's going to waive his magic want, and convert fraud and abuse into untold riches which are going to pay for the expanded coverage in the plan. Vintage Obama, grand promises without any specifics that would make them meaningful. By the way, why do we need further legislation to trim fraud and abuse?

With respect to the public option, Obama said:

But an additional step we can take to keep insurance companies honest is by making a not-for-profit public option available in the insurance exchange. Let me be clear - it would only be an option for those who don't have insurance. No one would be forced to choose it, and it would not impact those of you who already have insurance. In fact, based on Congressional Budget Office estimates, we believe that less than 5% of Americans would sign up.

Again, only until their employers stopped offering their own plans, that is. Obama is right that a "broad concensus exists" on things like prohibiting insurers from dropping sick people, or denials for preexisting conditions, or allowing an insurance market exchange, or for tax credits for those who can't afford insurance. If it were true that only 5% of American would sign up for the public option, which is the most controversial part of Obama's plan, why risk this broad concensus for this 5%? Unless this is, of course, a trojan horse by which the government will ultimately assert control over the entire health care industry (as Obama, Barney Frank, and other liberals have so franly admitted).

In the end, I don't think anybody was fooled. Obama promised greater coverage at no extra cost. He refused to walk away from the public option and only offered, incredibly, that it would have no effect on anyone else's quality or choice of care.

I don't see how he changed anyone's mind. The only question now, is whether Obama, Pelosi and Reid can muster enough votes to ram this down our throats through a reconcilliation process. We'll see.

New Axis of Evil

The new "Axis of Evil": Iran, Venezuela, and their ally, the Obama Administration.

Obama's make or break speech on health care reform

In case you live under a rock and haven't heard yet, President Obama will deliver a prime-time address Wednesday to a joint session of Congress aimed at regaining momentum in his push for universal health care coverage.

I think this speech will make or break him. If Obama says something new, breaks new policy ground, or charts a new path on achieving health care reform, his legislative efforts will be revived. But if he simply trots out the same old tropes (e.g., if you like your health care, you can keep it, even with a public option; were going to cover 50 million new people and reduce costs without rationing, etc.) he's finished.

The crux of the problem over at the White House appears to be that they think that the problems with health care reform thus far have been its packaging, not its substance. But as Charles Krauthamer said on Fox News, the problems is that "the dog won't eat the dog food."

In Sunday's New York Times, Jackie Calms writes:

In 1994, Democrats’ dysfunction over fulfilling a new president’s campaign promise contributed to the party’s loss of its 40-year dominance of Congress. Now that memory is being revived, and it is the message the White House and Congressional leaders will press when lawmakers return this week, still divided and now spooked after the turbulent town-hall-style meetings, downbeat polls and distortions of August.Republicans early on united behind the lesson they took from the past struggle, that they stand to gain politically in next year’s elections if Democrats do nothing. But the Democrats’ version similarly resonates with all party factions, giving Mr. Obama perhaps his best leverage to unify them to do something. In now-familiar financial parlance, this one is “too big to fail.”

Adding to this chorus is Joe Klein where he writes in the August 31, 2009 issue of Time that:

[H]onorable conservatives . . . have been overwhelmed by nihists and hypocrites more interested in destroying the opposition and gaining power than in the public weal. . . . The party's putative intellectuals [ouch!] are prosaic tactitians who make precious few substantive arguments but oppose health care reform mostly because passage would help Barrack Obama's political prospects.

(To digress for a moment, this statement ignores that the public option, which conservatives has been resisting for over 50 years, violates deeply held conservative principles. This statement also ignores the fact that in an August 31, 2009 poll, 51 percent of voters say that they oppose Obama's health care reforms. To paraphrase the February 7, 2009 cover of Newsweek, "We are all nihlists now.")

But in the Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti writes:

For a while now, the message from Washington has been that we know what's good for the public, whether the public likes it or not. One after another, both parties have attempted to foist a series of grand reforms on a skeptical populace--in areas ranging from Social Security and immigration to energy and health care. Politicians have made decisions affecting millions of lives without accountability and oversight. The upshot has been more government, more debt, and--coming soon to a 1040 form near you--more taxes. No wonder the public is anxious.

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As for the elites, especially the liberal elite: They remain deaf, dumb, and blind.

The White House is learning all the wrong lessons from Clinton's effort to reform health care 15 years ago. Those at the White House think that they will be punished by the voters for failing to reform health care.

But one of the reason voters revolted against the Democrats in 1994 was not that they failed to deliver on a campaign promise, but that their proposals scared the hell out of the American people. It's not that they failed, but they overstepped their mandate by trying to do far too much.The White House appears to think that the public generally wants its version of health care reform, it's just that the voters don't really know it yet. If Obama could just somehow find the magic words to turn things around.

In June, ABC News aired a one-hour special from the White House on health care reform. In July, Obama held a press conference on health care reform (where he made an unforced error by stepping into the Heny Louis Gates affair). Obama has also had numerous town halls, other speeches and conference calls on the subject. And now he's going to salvage the debate with yet another speech before a joint session of Congress?

The best advice for Obama (which I offer fully confident that he won't take it), is to seek passage for a plan that the American people can accept (no cancellation of policies for sick people, no denials due to preexisting conditions, vouchers for the poor, etc.) and ditching those they can't (public option, rationing, transfer of monies from Medicare), and declare at least a partial victory.

But because the White House thinks Obama can sell ice to eskimos and their refusal to see that their problems lie in the substance of health care reform, such moderation of the Left's health care agenda is not likely.

In the end, Obama will reiterate the same tired arguments he's been making for the past 3 months, soften or rename (but not eliminate) the need for a public option, make nice noises towards Republicans (although they already know that Obama thinks talk is cheap), and try to unify the Democrats saying that they'll pay at the next election if they don't do something now.

So get some beer, popcorn, nachos or other snacks to watch the President's address on Wednesday. This is going to be classic. He'll either save his bacon, or self-destruct. I'm betting on the latter.

Return here after the speech for my comments to see how I think Obama did.

Where was the New York Times on Van Jones?

Well, Van Jones has resigned last night and those who don't get their news from the Internet or Fox News probably don't even know who he is. Largely because covering the strident, black nationalist, communist, truther, green jobs Czar is not within the narrative the MSM wishes to write on the Obama administration.

As Mickey Kaus asks, "Where's the New York Times?"

As for me, I've had it with the Times. I'd get more use from a tampon.

Democrats can't amend their cheatin' ways

There's an old joke about the football/basketball team that didn't lose the game, they just ran out of time before they could score enough points to win.

When the Democrats sense they are going to lose, they appear to have no problems in changing the rules of the game while it's still in progress. And I'm not talking about ancient history like Franklin Roosevelt's attempted court packing plan or the 2000 Florida recount where Democrat controlled election boards tried to discern the intent of the voters by looking at dimpled chads, tea leaves, what have you.

No, the most recent exhibit for cheating is Deval Patrick's announcement today that the Massachussets legislature is taking up a bill to allow him to appoint a successor to Edward Kennedy who died last week.

Current law provides that the Governor must call for a special election between 145 and 160 days of the vacancy. For those who don't already know, the current law was the result of a change urged by Kennedy and others who didn't want Republican Governor Mitt Romney to appoint John Kerry's successor should a vacancy have been created were he to win the 2004 presidential election. Clearly the ruling class in Massachussets are completely without shame.

In Washington, Democratic Senators, egged on by the New York Times, are threatening the "nuclear option," that is, they are threatening to pass health care reform by a reconcilliation procedure which would require only 51 instead of the 60 votes it would take to defeat a filibuster.

But the Times concedes that:

Reconciliation bills are primarily intended to deal with budget items that affect the deficit, not with substantive legislation like health care reform. Senators could challenge as “extraneous” any provisions that do not change spending or revenues over the next five years, or would have a budget impact that is “merely incidental” to some broader policy purpose, or would increase the deficit in Year 6 and beyond.

* * *

Another hurdle is that the reconciliation legislation covers only the next five years, while the Democratic plans are devised to be deficit-neutral over 10 years. The practical effect is that the Democrats will almost surely need to find added revenues or budget cuts within the first five years. Another Senate rule, which applies whether reconciliation is used or not, requires that the reforms enacted now not cause an increase in the deficit for decades to come, a difficult but probably not impossible hurdle to surmount.

The Times further adds:

Even the public plan so reviled by Republicans could probably qualify, especially if it is given greater power than currently planned to dictate the prices it will pay to hospitals, doctors, drug companies and other providers, thus saving the government lots of money in subsidies.

Given the above, could it be any more clear that reconcilliation is not appropriate for the sweeping, "transformative" changes in the proposed health care reform bills? Aside from changing the rules during the middle of the game, this would effectively kill the filibuster. But like the Kennedy succession farce, how long would it take Democrats to insist on the vitality of the fillubuster once they again found themselves in the minority?

With their willingness to cheat on such naked display, how will they adjust themselves to losing an election? Can we expect Obama to try to amend the Constitution to permit him to serve more than 2 terms? Or worse, will he follow the examples of his simpaticos Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Manuel Zelaya in Honduras and seek (or in Zelaya's case, attempt) to make himself President for life?

Thus reducing our electoral system from "one man, one vote" to "one man, one vote, one time."

And of course they'll remind us that their noble ends justify their disreputable means.

Liberals cannot comprehend the conservative mind

It has been somewhat amusing lately to watch the Democrats struggle with the American people's rejection not only of Obamacare, but also the growing unease with the advance of socialism in America.

According to the Democrats' narrative, angry citizens who showed up at town hall meetings were "Astrotruf" (e.g., fake grass roots) manilupated by insurance industry lobbyists. The sole reason behind opposing the president's health care (ahem, health insurance) proposals (depending on who was talking) was either latent racism, or wanting to hand the President a defeat in order to weaken him. Or that Sarah Palin and the Republicans were spreading misinformation about the President's proposals and the American people were too stupid to see the truth being spoken by the President.

In last week's Weekly Standard, Mathew Continetti wrote:

The Angry White Liberal finds it simply incomprehensible that somebody might honestly and in good faith disagree with the Democrats' efforts. On August 14, blogger Steve Benen wrote on the Huffington Post that the "far-right apoplexy is counter-intuitive." After all, "Why would people who stand to benefit from health care reform literally take to the streets and threaten violence in opposition to legislation that would help them and their families?"

Forget Benen's exaggerated claim of threatened violence. Note, instead, that Benen cannot conceive that someone might actually think the costs to the Democrats' program outweigh the unrealized and perhaps unachievable benefits. Hence he divides Obama's critics into five camps: the "partisans," the "tin-foil hats," the "greedy," the "dupes," and the "wonks." The "wonks," we are told, compose the "smallest of the groups." In Benen's view, then, millions of opponents of health care reform have no reasonable grounds for their opinion. That may satisfy the liberal's attitude of intellectual superiority. But it's also awfully condescending.

There really is something to the notion that liberals cannot comprehend the conservative mind. I think the primary (but not sole) culprit is projection.

Liberals tend to project what they know about themselves on conservatives (who probably do the same thing, which is why conservatives give them far too much credit for being sincere). So when Nancy Pelosi dismisses town hall protests of "Astroturfing" she is revealing what she knows to be true of her own movement. How else do "angry mobs" show up at town hall meetings in the middle of the day unless they are otherwise bussed in? That's how ACORN and SEIU do it. This fails to understand that conservatives aren't natural born protesters (most have day jobs in the private sector), and really have to be animated about something before they'll bother to make their voices heard. Besides, who would do the bussing? Not that it really matters, but I'm unaware of any such efforts by FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, the RNC, or anyone else.

To liberals, political positions are largely a matter of gamemanship to be used to obtain political power, and usually not deeply held principles in and of themselves. This is why they can't fathom that anybody could in good faith, oppose, among other things, the public option. Opposition must be because of narrow-self interest, or hatred of the President.

This is reminicent of the Clinton impeachment battle. In October 1998, House Republican started impeachment proceedings against Clinton, but were rudely rebuffed by voters in November who gave the Democrats a gain of 5 seats in the House. This marked only the second time since the Civil War that the party of the president had gained seats in a midterm election.

Democrats were certain this result would discourage Republicans in the House from moving forward with impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. Surely the Republicans would not want to further anger voters, and so the Democrats went to sleep, only to rewaken in December when they learned that Republicans would not be dissuaded. Democrats still can't believe that Republican's thirst for justice had overrode the obvious electoral risks in going forward with impeachment.

On the other hand, consider Code Pink and other groups protesting the war in Iraq while Bush was President. But under Obama, when we still have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention Clinton's war in Kosovo), their silence has been deafening. It's clear that anti-war protests were much less than about aversion to war than a cynical attempt to use the issue to obtain political power.

Steve Benen classifies conservatives into 5 camps: the "partisans", the "tin-foil hats" the "greedy", the "dupes" and the "wonks." This is because he and other liberals cannot comprend that people (aside from the greedy), would actually vote against their own narrow self-interest. That is, if you're going to get free stuff from the government, you are otherwise irrational if you don't simply shut your mouth.

But many of us enraged by Obama and the Democrats' actions since January take a larger view of self-interest. To us, the principles upon which this country was founded (free markets, limited government, rule of law, etc.) are far more important than any free goodies that the Democrats will try to bribe us with.

Likewise, I always thought that Democrats can be divided into three (not necessarily exclusive) groups: A) the arrogant,those who think they know better than us how to run our lives (e.g., Ted Kennedy); B) the stupid, those who actually believe liberal dogma (e.g., Jimmy Carter and maybe Barrack Obama); and C) the cynics, those who don't believe any of that crap but say it because they know that such appeals to the intellectually lazy will get them elected (e.g., Bill Clinton).

Finally, liberals and conservatives fail to understand each other because most liberals think with their left brain, and to them, an argument's greatest appeal is in its emotion. Most conservatives are less suceptible to appeals to emotion and are more interested in facts or logic. As English writer Horace Walpole famously said: "The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy too those who think."

On the death of Edward Kennedy

I won't disparage someone who just became a good democrat.