Please, Andy, Can You Talk Some Sense Into Red?

You know, when he slammed the Tea Party as racist, I chose to ignore it, because Morgan Freeman is still Morgan Freeman.  But marrying your own step-granddaughter?  That might land in the top ten creepiest things I've heard of a celebrity doing.  How am I supposed to watch The Shawshank Redemption again? 

There's An App For That

Just remember, when a Tea Party member comes up with an app that displays public employee unions as hordes of  vampires sucking blood from taxpayers, it was in response to this.  The best part will be that the Tea Party's app will not require any changes to a picture of Nancy Pelosi to make her look undead.

Truth be told, this doesn't offend me.  Anyone who actually thinks Obamacare will work to reduce the deficit deserves credit for overcoming their obvious intellectual deficit to make something of themselves.

Won't Somebody Please Think of The Children?

I've never seen this quote in the signs at a Tea Party in the news coverage, but it just became my new favorite slogan:  "My kid isn't your ATM."

Love it.  Yes, the headline is a jokey takeoff from the Simpsons, but the sign has it dead right why so many people are involved in the Tea Party movement -- they think our out-of-control spending is a moral issue, in that we're leaving the burden to our kids.

Ich Bin Ein Tea Party

David Harsanyi's column on why people like him (and me) like Tea Party candidates is spot on.  More to the point, the desire to vote for someone like us is pretty powerful; it's why elitist Beltway snobs love the idea of voting for Barack Obama.

When Kinda Sucking Is A Good Thing

I can't deny the logic of this column -- the GOP will win back control of Congress because they suck... less than the Democrats do.  Spectacular closing note...

People do remember how much the Republicans suck, and they know where it tops out … and that is nowhere near as bad as the Democrats are today. Like with the barking dog, it’s annoying, but you know it’s not going to cause the collapse of civilization as we know it. Not so with the zombie apocalypse; who knows how bad that could get if left to continue? Same with the Democrats and Obama; people have never dealt with anything this horrible their entire lives, and they aren’t that curious to see how much worse it can be.


So the Republicans kinda suck, and that’s why they’re going to win huge this November. Because in the land of epic, mega, ultra, apocalyptic levels of sucking, those who kinda suck are king. Or at least are going to win in a landslide.


Because once the zombie apocalypse is over, the annoying neighbor dog is going to be music to your ears.


For a little while, at least.

(hat tip: Instapundit) Tip to the GOP: Try not to suck as much this time, or there will be a third party before you know it.

Pretty Revealing

There's so much in the President's recent interview with Peter Baker, I don't know where to start.  But here's an excerpt which has several points that blow my mind...

While proud of his record, Obama has already begun thinking about what went wrong — and what he needs to do to change course for the next two years. He has spent what one aide called “a lot of time talking about Obama 2.0” with his new interim chief of staff, Pete Rouse, and his deputy chief of staff, Jim Messina. During our hour together, Obama told me he had no regrets about the broad direction of his presidency. But he did identify what he called “tactical lessons.” He let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat.” He realized too late that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” when it comes to public works. Perhaps he should not have proposed tax breaks as part of his stimulus and instead “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” so it could be seen as a bipartisan compromise.


Most of all, he has learned that, for all his anti-Washington rhetoric, he has to play by Washington rules if he wants to win in Washington. It is not enough to be supremely sure that he is right if no one else agrees with him. “Given how much stuff was coming at us,” Obama told me, “we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.”


That presumes that what he did was the right thing, a matter of considerable debate. The left thinks he did too little; the right too much. But what is striking about Obama’s self-diagnosis is that by his own rendering, the figure of inspiration from 2008 neglected the inspiration after his election. He didn’t stay connected to the people who put him in office in the first place. Instead, he simultaneously disappointed those who considered him the embodiment of a new progressive movement and those who expected him to reach across the aisle to usher in a postpartisan age. On the campaign trail lately, Obama has been confronted by disillusionment — the woman who was “exhausted” defending him, the mother whose son campaigned for him but was now looking for work. Even Shepard Fairey, the artist who made the iconic multihued “Hope” poster, says he’s losing hope.


Perhaps that should have come as no surprise. When Obama secured the Democratic nomination in June 2008, he told an admiring crowd that someday “we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”


I read that line to Obama and asked how his high-flying rhetoric sounded in these days of low-flying governance. “It sounds ambitious,” he agreed. “But you know what? We’ve made progress on each of those fronts.” He quoted Mario Cuomo’s line about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose. “But the prose and the poetry match up,” he said. “It would be very hard for people to look back and say, You know what, Obama didn’t do what he’s promised. I think they could say, On a bunch of fronts he still has an incomplete. But I keep a checklist of what we committed to doing, and we’ve probably accomplished 70 percent of the things that we talked about during the campaign. And I hope as long as I’m president, I’ve got a chance to work on the other 30 percent.”

I feel like I need to bullet point a rebuttal to just this small portion of the article.

1.  In the same paragraph, the guy talks about not wanting to be seen as just another tax and spend liberal, then says he should have tactically let the GOP push for tax cuts as part of the stimulus so he could compromise on it.  Huh?  If you don't want to be seen as a traditional tax and spend liberal, perhaps it would help if you, I don't know, cut spending and taxes.

2.  Again, the failure of the stimulus is seen as a failure in messaging.  Elsewhere in the article, Ed Rendell calls the stimulus successful but attacks the White House's messaging on it.  Gibbs says they haven't had a meeting where policy is considered a problem in 20 months.  But this is the point: they are either so insulated from reality that they don't get it, or they think that they can get away with a blatantly false argument.

The stimulus has not worked to accomplish the goals the President and his team originally set out.  When it was passed, the stimulus was supposed to keep unemployment from rising over 8 percent; instead, unemployment's been stuck between 9 and 10 percent for several months.  It's stunning to have the White House talk about a failure in messaging while the President admits that he didn't know that there's no such thing as a government shovel-ready project.  The failure here was the policy, not the messaging.  A restaurant can put a turd on a plate and call it gourmet food, but if a customer doesn't like the taste, you shouldn't blame the waiter for not presenting it correctly.

3.  Again, the reference to messaging annoys the crap out of me.  The President thinks he's been neglectful of PR, but we see him on every media outlet known to man.  Hell, it's probably easier to list news media where he hasn't popped up for an interview -- perhaps Cat Fancy hasn't done an Obama piece, but maybe that's coming for the holidays.  I get that this President believes in his powers of persuasion, but perhaps he needs to realize something -- if his power of persuasion is so great, then why can't he persuade people on the other side of the issue?  They're not all unreasonable -- hell, some of them voted for him.  The reason might be because they don't want to buy what he's selling, no matter what arguments he makes.

4.  The last two paragraphs make me worry for the long-term prospects for this administration.  Obama calls his high-flying rhetoric "ambitious", but than argues that he's making progress.  Dude, you talked about healing the Earth and stopping hte oceans from rising.  That's not ambitious, that's a friggin' fairy tale.  And if you truly believe you're making progress on such grandiose goals...

There was a great point made by someone the other day about how one of the major problems with government today is that it doesn't have concrete goals (wish I could find the post, but I'll paraphrase for now).  When you keep goals simple, people know what they're trying to accomplish: Build a highway system.  Win a war.  Put a man on the moon.

Bush was guilty of this as well.  But Obama's taken that problem and magnified it.  Look at the goals Obama's setting up there.  "Care for the sick"?  Does this mean that everyone who's ill gets every bit of treatment possible?  "Good jobs for the jobless"?  How do we know what a "good" job is?

Bottom line, I'm worried about an administration that doesn't get why it's losing ground.  I'm even more worried when they appear to think the only problem is that everyone else doesn't get their brilliance.

5.  There is a passage in the article where Obama meets with some historians who try to help him understand the Tea Party movement by analogy, and provide references to Know-Nothings in the 1850's, the Populists of the 1890's, and Charles Coughlin's backers in the 1930's.  Perhaps they called the wrong historians.

Take out Coughlin's anti-Semitism, and the latter two were essentially left-wing populist movements whose goals might have more in common with Obama than the Tea Party.  All three called for greater government involvement in American life, rather than less -- again, something shared with Obama.

More important -- look at each of those three examples, and realize that those three groups all more or less failed. There are such movements that experienced much greater success -- the most prominent being the original Republican Party in the 1850's, the Progressives during the first decade of the 20th century, and the civil rights movement of the 1960's.

The historians are offering Obama comfort food.  If Obama thinks the Tea Party is destined to fail like the first three examples, he probably won't take it seriously.  Maybe he will be right -- but it makes more sense to treat your opponents as serious critics than as likely failures.  And the failure to understand the Tea Party movement makes me think that the President's extraordinary 2008 connection with the electorate may never be recaptured.

No Tea For You

The Tea Party just kicked an incumbent out of office for the first time...

Once-popular Sen. Bob Bennett fell victim to a growing national conservative movement with his stunning defeat at Utah's GOP convention.


Delegates voted Saturday to bar the 76-year-old senator from seeking a fourth term, making him the first congressional incumbent to be ousted this year and demonstrates the challenges candidates face from the right in 2010.


Bennett was under fire for voting to bail out Wall Street, co-sponsoring a bipartisan bill mandating health insurance coverage and for aggressively pursuing earmarks.


"The political atmosphere obviously has been toxic, and it's very clear that some of the votes that I have cast have added to the toxic environment," Bennett told reporters Saturday, choking back tears.


"Looking back on them, with one or two very minor exceptions, I wouldn't have cast any of them any differently, even if I had known at the time they were going to cost me my career."


Bennett told The Associated Press he wouldn't rule out a write-in candidacy. State law prohibits him from running as an independent.


"I do think I still have a lot of juice left in me," Bennett said following his loss. "We'll see what the future may bring."

That would be a mistake, but it's his mistake to make. It's clear that the Washington establishment, including the Democrats, the GOP, the media, and every elite member of the inside-the-Beltway crowd, underestimated the movement. At its core, this is a true grassroots uprising. What should truly frighten the establishment is that it's founded on core principles that both parties seem willing to flout and is based around an idea (limiting the size of the federal government) that basically threatens everything that drives Washington.

The left will spin this as the GOP growing more extreme, by kicking out someone who was willing to work with the other side to try and craft bi-partisan solutions. Yet those who criticize it are basically criticizing democracy at its finest -- Sen. Bennett's most active constituents did not want the stimulus package, nor did they desire his work on a healthcare compromise that eventually mattered little. So they voted him out. Is there something truly wrong about that?

The President Fears Teabagging

Stay classy, Mr. President...

Three days after he decried the lack of civility in American politics, President Obama is quoted in a new book about his presidency referring to the Tea Party movement using a derogatory term with sexual connotations.


In Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” President Obama is quoted in an interview saying that the unanimous vote of House Republicans vote against the stimulus bills “set the tenor for the whole year … That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”


Tea Party activists loath the term “tea baggers,” which has emerged in liberal media outlets and elsewhere as a method of mocking the activists and their concerns.

I wonder if President would approve if the right regularly started referring to left-wing groups by using the term "douchebags." Allahpundit has a pretty good point about this...

How many prominent Democrats, I wonder, have yet to use “teabagger” in one form or another? Kerry and Schumer both used it in fundraising e-mails to appeal to the lefty base before the Massachusetts special election, and we’re bound to hear it again as the rhetoric ratchets way down before the midterms. Can it be that … Joe Biden is the tactful elder statesman on the left these days?

It's more likely Biden's advisors are trying to keep him from saying something about it, because he'd be just as likely to say something like, "C'mon, you teabaggers! I'm begging you -- teabag me!"

And in yet another shock, Robert Gibbs doesn't want to discuss the use of the term with the President. No balls, I guess.

The Left's Dumbest Idea Of The Week

So that we're clear, the left is convinced that the Tea Parties are filled with racists who think President Obama was born in Kenya.  So how do they go about proving it?  By trying to infilitrate Tea Party rallies as imposter racists and birthers.  No, really...

Jason Levin, creator of http://www.crashtheteaparty.org, said Monday the group has 65 leaders in major cities across the country who are trying to recruit members to infiltrate tea party events for April 15 — tax filing day, when tea party groups across the country are planning to gather and protest high taxes.


"Every time we have someone on camera saying that Barack Obama isn't an American citizen, we want someone sitting next to him saying, 'That's right, he's an alien from outer space!'" Levin said.


...Levin says they want to exaggerate the group's least appealing qualities, further distance the tea party from mainstream America and damage the public's opinion of them.


"Do I think every member of the tea party is a homophobe, racist or a moron? No, absolutely not," Levin said. "Do I think most of them are homophobes, racists or morons? Absolutely."


..."We've been ignored, we've been ridiculed. Well, now they're coming after us," said Judy Pepenella, a co-coordinator for the New York State Tea Party. "Gandhi's quote is one we understand: 'First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.'"

Love that last quote. For years, I've had to hear the left parroting it to annoy me; it's kind of nice to see if coming from my side.

I'm not sure which is more stupid -- opting to "infiltrate" the rallies, or advertising your intent to do so. As Allahpundit notes, this pretty much gives the right the opportunity to claim that any kook sign found at a Tea Party comes from a leftie infiltrator. But it's also incredibly telling that the best argument the left can make against a Tea Party gathering is not a counter-protest, but an attempt to make them look bad through trickery.  If the Tea Party groups were as bad as the left thought they were, they wouldn't need to send infiltrators to portray them as racists or kooks.  But maybe the problem is, the Tea Party folks aren't racists or kooks -- they're just ordinary Americans who are engaged in political protest against a rapidly growing government and the political elite that want tax dollars from our citizens while ignoring their input.

Nah.  The Left would never lie.  I'm sure Michael Moore will be doing a documentary exposing the Tea Partiers next.

The Health Care Follies Continue

I don't expect Congressmen to be top-flight Constitutional scholars, but Congressman Phil Hare's breezy brush-off of Constitutional concerns related to the health care reform legislation is more damaging than Hank Johnson's stupidity...

He doesn’t mean “I don’t worry about it because I’ve studied the Commerce Clause and I’m confident we’ll win in court.” When pressed, he flatly says he doesn’t know which part of the Constitution justifies the law, which is his way of saying he doesn’t care and hasn’t thought about it. In fact, the best he can do by way of legal authority is to cite life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — which of course comes from the Declaration of Independence. His response, when corrected? “Doesn’t matter to me. Either one.”

Imagine the outrage on the left if a GOP-controlled Congress passed, and then the President signed into law, a bill outlawing abortion. I will grant that such a bill would fly in the face of existing precedent, but there is plenty of good faith debate among top-flight Constitutional scholars as to whether different parts of Obamacare (particularly the individual mandate) are constitutional. I don't need a Congressman to weigh in with an expert opinion, but I would like to know that he's considered the issues and understands them well enough to articulate a coherent rationale for why he believes it's not an issue. I'd like to think that's part of the job. At least John Conyers made up a "Good and Welfare Clause" to justify Obamacare. On the whole, it's rather disturbing that the constitutionality of such far-reaching legislation is of little importance to those who passed it. If you want to know why the Tea Party activists are offended by our current governmental elite, there's a basic summary of it.

I doubt the Supreme Court would overturn Obamacare, based on existing precedent. But I think I'd enjoy watching Democrats try and debate the finer points of constitutional law with the Supreme Court.

Latest Dumb Statement By A New York Times Communist... Oops, I Meant Columnist

New York Times editorial columnist Frank Rich makes a bid for dumbest column of the year by comparing the Tea Party activists to Nazis...

How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.

I'd call Rich a douchebag, but that would insult feminine hygeine products. And that's before we get to Rich's decision to compare anti-government Tea Party activists to the fascist big government of Hitler. Professor Bainbridge wipes the mat with Rich's stupidity and that of Dem. Rep. Alan Grayson...

What we're seeing here are continuing efforts on the part of some left-liberals to use the ravings of a small fringe to delegitimize any dissent...


Indeed, at this point, an observer with a predilection for conspiracy theories would be wondering whether these efforts are being coordinated by dark forces. My money's on the Free Masons and the Trilateral Commission as being at the center of the vast left-wing conspiracy.

I'd also blame the reverse vampires.

The Healthcare Follies Continue

Looks like passing Obamacare is really helping those poll numbers.

My predicitions for the next few months:

1.  President Obama will make speeches designed to sway the public to favor his policies.
2.  The speeches will fail to move the poll numbers.
3.  White House spin machine and mainstream media (sorry if that's repetitive) will proceed to say that the poll numbers are irrelevant, because the public is being misinformed by opponents of Obamacare.  Leftwing blogosphere will creatively analyze pollig data and claim the problem is that legislation is not progressive enough, which is why the poll numbers are underwater.
4.  White House, random Democrats, and left-wingers will accuse opponents of Obamacare of being racist.
5.  The President will insist that he doesn't care about the poll numbers, that he's just did the right thing.  He will continue to fail to articulate a rationale that convinces anyone that his point of view is correct.
6.  The President will claim the opposition is guilty of obstruction and not having any ideas of their own.
7.  The opposition will point out that they presented their ideas to the President, who will respond with some variation of "I won/the time for debate was over/we needd to act now".
8.  Repeat steps #1-7 as necessary.
9.  When they lose control of the House in November, the Democrats will claim the loss had nothing to do with Obamacare and will creatively analyze poll numbers to prove it.
10.  When no one believes the poll number analysis noted in #9, the Democrats will blame racism.

Tea For All

I'm not sure what the point was in Ben Smith's article in Politico today, where he seemed to indicate that there's a rift between social conservatives/evengelicals and the Tea Party movement.  Gateway Pundit notes that one of the evengelicals quoted in the piece is actually pro-Obama, which leads me to question his credibility in thinking there's a rift.   But I think Smith is reaching here regardless.  Even this portion struck me as a reach...

It’s easy to overstate the depth of concern on the part of social conservatives. Fischer, Perkins, and other figures were quick to add that they feel an affinity for the tea party movement.

“The reason for it is fundamentally secular, but a lot of people involved in it are not secular,” said Richard Land, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. “I don’t see the tea party movement as a threat at all — I see it as additional allies and fellow travelers.”

But while Land and other Christians sympathize with the movement’s limited-government focus, they have been repelled by another aspect of the contemporary right: The vitriolic attacks on Obama.

A prominent Atlanta evangelical public relations man, Mark DeMoss, recently wrote Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele to denounce as “shameful” a fundraising presentation obtained by POLITICO that advised appealing to “fear” and portrayed Obama as the sinister Joker from Batman, over the word “Socialism” — an image drawn from a poster popular at tea party events.

Land said liberals can be equally faulted for demonizing Sarah Palin, but said that if he were an RNC donor, he’d stop giving.

“What [liberal blogs] do with Sarah is just really unacceptable and dastardly, but that doesn’t mean we should respond in kind,” he said. Obama, he said “provides a tremendously positive role model for tens of millions of African-American men” and “seems demonstrably fond of his wife and children, which is a positive role model for people of all ethnicities.”

Land is free to quit giving to the RNC, but Smith seems guilty of trying to connect the RNC fundraising piece to the Tea Party. Saying that it uses the same iconography of Obama that is popular among some Tea Partiers (pictured here at left) doesn't mean that the attack is mean-spirited, let alone an assault on Obama's character. The RNC may use it in a mean-spirited way (which is part and parcel of politics), but the RNC ain't the Tea Party. Smith himself publishes a quote on his blog from an unnamed conservative strategist who disagrees with the premise of his piece.

I think what Smith is missing (and what the mainstream media misses) is that the Tea Party movement is seperate and apart from the GOP.  It may well be more libertarian than traditionally conservative base of the GOP, but that doesn't mean it is at odds with the socially conservative right.  The large majority of those out there marcghing under the Tea Party banner are passionately opposed to bigger, more intrusive government on economic issues moreso than on social issues -- my impression overall is that they're slightly more conservative on social issues than most Americans, but they don't passionately advocate for those positions the same way that the most social conservatives do.  Just because the two groups may emphasize different issues doesn't mean they're on opposing sides of the issues.  I think the Left would love this to be the case, but right now it's pretty easy for folks in both the socially conservative camp and the Tea Party camp to find common ground -- they don't like the folks in power at present.  They can start worrying about a rift after they've got the power to actually do things in office.

The Health Care Follies Continue

Clive Crook details the Presidential strategery behind the health-care summit while discussing President Obama's new proposal...

It's true that the proposal entrenches Democratic preferences rather than saying, "we are open to new ideas." But Republicans can hardly complain. Who believes they would have brought open minds to the summit in any event? But if Obama has decided on a Democrats-only strategy, one interesting question is what purpose Thursday's "bipartisan summit" is intended to serve.

The idea must be to put pressure on Democrats to fall into line--sweetening the pill of a measure many don't like (for any number of reasons) by making Republicans look ill-prepared and obstructionist for the cameras. Democrats might decide this works for them, but the Republicans will have to screw up quite badly on Thursday for voters at large to buy it. Going in, the whole event now looks too much like an ambush. Obama needed a bipartisan gesture or two for camouflage--some sign of good faith, sure to be rebuffed. The thinking must be that any such gestures would have made Democratic unity impossible. In other words, get the reform passed first; worry about public opinion later.

The proposal itself doesn't add much to the debate. The biggest new idea in the plan isn't tort reform or some other attempt to reach across the aisle -- it's a plan to stop excessive rate increases by health insurers without government approval. Peter Suderman does a nice job of summarizing the problem with price caps...

And given the widespread public frustration with insurers, it's probably politically savvy, too. It's also hard to oppose: Who could be against blocking excessive rate increases? After all, they are, by definition, excessive (or, depending on who's talking, unreasonable).

But the problem, of course, is that what constitutes excessive or unreasonable isn't easy to define. I was at a conference with a number of lawyers this weekend, and one of them joked about how great words like "reasonable" were for the profession. (How many lawyers does it take to define what "unreasonable" means? Well, how many do you have?) The idea is to create some legal wiggle room, but you tend to end up with absurdly circular definitions like Arizona's, which defined excessive insurance rate hikes as those that "are likely to produce an underwriting profit that is unreasonably high." It's excessive if it's unreasonable! Unreasonable if it's excessive! Feel free to ride this definitional merry-go-round until you puke.

Fun as that sounds, let's go ahead and answer some key cable-news questions in advance: Is Obama's proposed rate-review commission a death panel? Nope! But it could result in insurance companies denying coverage more than they would otherwise in order to meet premium requirements. Is it a government takeover of the country's health care system? Not exactly. But it gives the federal government a lot more authority over health insurers. So what is it then? If you guessed "a form of price controls," you're today's lucky winner. And, just like when Bill Clinton proposed them, medical price controls are a deeply problematic idea.

Cato's Michael Cannon points to a great line from the President's own economic advisor, Larry Summers...

Price and exchange controls inevitably create harmful economic distortions. Both the distortions and the economic damage get worse with time.

But I'm sure price controls will solve the problem of rising health care costs! In the believing in the tooth fairy department, Jon Chait is convinced there's a coming health-care "freakout" (annoying song possibility!) among conservatives...

Brian Darling at Red State speculates that the Democrats will fire or overrule the parliamentarian in order to pass their plan through reconciliation. Republicans actually did fire the parliamentarian in 2001, after he complicated their plans to push tax cuts through reconciliation, but this caused virtually no outcry. But Democrats aren't going to need to do so. The paranoia stems in part from a failure to understand the technicalities of what's going on here -- liberal policy wonks have been following this closely for the last month, but hardly anybody else has. There was some discussion last year of using reconciliation to pass the entire health care bill and avoid the filibuster. This ran into technical difficulties -- reconciliation can only be used for measures that principally effect revenues or outlays. So instead the Democrats passed a health care bill through the Senate using regular order.

Now, of course, the problem is that they can't mesh the Senate bill with the House bill using regular order, because Republicans will filibuster it. But most of the points of negotiation between House and Senate concern taxes and spending -- exactly the kinds of things that reconciliation is designed for. So it's fairly easy to just have the House pass the Senate bill, then use reconciliation to eliminate the Nebraska Medicaid subsidy and change the mix of taxes that pay for new coverage. Indeed, this process is probably easier than getting another 60 votes in the Senate would have been even if Martha Coakley had won.

You can imagine how this feels to conservatives. They've already run off the field, sprayed themselves with champagne and taunted the losing team's fans. And now the other team is saying the game is still on and they have a good chance to win. There may be nothing wrong at all with the process, but it's certainly going to feel like some kind of crime to the right-wing. The Democrats may not win, but I'm pretty sure they're going to try. The conservative freakout is going to be something to behold.

I'm starting to believe that the only people who really want the bill to pass are liberal bloggers and the President's team, if only so they have something they can point to as a success on this front. Trust me when I say this -- the freakout won't come from conservatives or even Republicans if this bill somehow passes. It'll come from independants. The conservatives, particularly the Tea Partiers, will see this as irredeemable proof that government is broken beyond belief, and will happily assist the GOP in sweeping away the Democratic House majority and getting close to evening (or even killing) the Democratic Senate majority (watching Joe Lieberamn become more powerful would be vastly entertaining). But independants who turned against health care reform and thought it was dead after Scott Brown's election will see this as evidence of dirty tricks. And conservatives who feel that way (and even others who acknowledge that politics ain't beanbag) will fan those same flames (and I'm starting to picture something akin to the Cow Days episode of South Park, when Kyle reinstates his original declaration of "Shenanigans!").

Mickey Kaus, who's in favor of reform, does a nice job mocking the idea that we're heading for a bill. I hope he's right, although I think Megan McArdle does a good job of explaining why he probably is...

Despite having declared the death of the health care bill before almost anything else, I don't want to say that the thing's impossible. But the House has lost three of the votes it used to pass their bill 220-215 . . . which means that you have to persuade someone (probably a Blue Dog) to vote for it, who already voted against it. Progressives have been making the almost-plausible argument that the public is going to treat a vote for the House or Senate bill as a vote for final passage, so Democrats might as well go ahead and pass the thing. But their best argument totally falls apart for those who originally voted no.

And that's the best case scenario. It assumes that you can keep Bart Stupak's pro-life caucus, even though it's unlikely that they'll be able to "fix" the Senate's more liberal abortion language in reconciliation. This is a pretty heroic assumption. If you lose many of the Stupak folks, then the bill's done; there is not a snowball's chance in hell that you are going to persuade any significant number of the prior "no" votes in the Democratic caucus to throw their careers on the pyre of Democratic health care ambitions.

...Reid says they'll be ready to do reconciliation within 60 days. Really? Democrats are going to pass a mongo, costly new entitlement right around tax day? The caucus might as well pass the hat for the GOP election fund. But if you delay it, you're leaving an unpopular bill very fresh in peoples' minds as they go into the 2010 elections.

I'm not quite ready to say this thing is dead, because some Democrats seem absolutely willing to drink Kool-Aid and enter the political afterlife. But it is telling that fewer and fewer of them seem willing to take big public stands on it. I assume the White House's goal for Thursday's health care summit would be to turn public opinion around enough that it rallies enough Democrats to the cause. But when the Washington Post isn't impressed with the President's proposal, it's hard to see the Democratic center (let alone the GOP) rallying behind it. The AP's reporting is probably prophetic on this one...

Starting over on health care, President Barack Obama knows his chances aren't looking much more promising. A year after he called for a far-reaching overhaul, Obama unveiled his most detailed plan yet on Monday. Realistically, he's just hoping to win a big enough slice to silence the talk of a failing presidency.

The 10-year, $1 trillion plan, like the current Democratic version in the Senate, would bring health insurance to more than 31 million Americans who now lack it. Government insurance wouldn't be included, a problem for Democratic progressives. Republicans are skeptical about where the money would come from — and about Obama's claim that the plan wouldn't raise the federal deficit.

Striking out in one fresh direction that should have wide appeal, Obama would give federal regulators new powers over the insurance industry, a reaction to a rash of double-digit premium hikes that have infuriated policy holders in California and other states.

The plan is supposed to be the starting point for Obama's televised, bipartisan health care summit Thursday — a new beginning after a year of wrangling and letting Congress take the lead. Yet Republicans were quick to dismiss it as a meld of two Democratic bills the public doesn't want. Democrats, while reaffirming their commitment to major changes, reacted cautiously, mindful that Obama is asking them to stake their political fortunes in the fall elections.

In the end, Americans who have listened to a year of talk about big changes in their health care, may see much smaller changes, if any. The president is likely to have to settle for much less than he wants — small-bore legislation that would smooth the rough edges of today's system but stop well short of coverage for nearly everyone.

Jennifer Rubin does a nice job of summarizing the possible (and hopefully likely) endgame. Personally, we thought this comment from James Taranto was particularly apt...

Obama is asking voters to believe that ObamaCare is a good idea and that the reason they think it is a bad idea is that he isn't good at persuasion. But if he can convince them of that, he can convince them of anything--which means that the claim that he is bad at persuasion is wildly false.

Maybe health care reform will be revived this week. I hope not. But you have to give the Left and the President credit for persistence, even if the persistence is politically ill-advised. Then again, that might describe a lot of things from this band of characters.

Wow -- Now That's An Entertainer

I have to agree with AllahPundit -- I watched Glenn Beck's speech at CPAC the other night, and it was friggin riveting. I've posted part of the speech -- the part that was really, really salient to the GOP -- but I'd recommend watching the whole thing.



About 1:30 into that clip, Beck starts tearing the GOP apart. I'm not sure he's completely correct -- as some have pointed out, some members of the GOP have said this -- but he's making the case for what conservatives need to stand for, and also making the case for explaining hard choices to the populace. It's what President Obama claimed he would do, making Americans aware of the difficult choices we need to make. Instead, he has opted to grow the government and fail to confront those choices.

Beck is right that the GOP did not distinguish itself on some key issues while in power, and only looks good when compared to the current mess in office. But the real question is whether any politician will actually say this stuff on the stump -- they probably won't, and one of the reasons Beck can say this stuff is because he is an entertainer rather than a politician. Actually, here's the next part of the speech.



Here's what's great -- McCain ran on a "Straight Talk Express." Obama ran on the principle of being honest and open. Have we seen anything as direct and honest as this address from either party recently?

Of Tea and Race

A blogger at True Slant somehow tries to link the exceedingly weird Amy Bishop shooting incident to racism and the Tea Party movement. Bill Jacobson responds...

There is no actual link between Alabama-Hunstville shooter Amy Bishop and the Tea Party movement.

By all accounts, Bishop was extremely liberal and a huge Obama fan (to the point of being described by someone who knew her as being obsessed with Obama).

...It would be easy to dismiss the attempt to link Bishop and the Tea Party movement given the absurdity of the connection. After all, Bishop loves Obama, so how could the "anti-Obama" nature of the Tea Party movement have caused Bishop to do anything?

It's just that these things have a way of working their way into the mainstream media, regardless of how outlandish the supposed connection.

The link between Bishop and Tea Parties is absurd on its face -- it's a lot more easy to link her to Democrats than Tea Partiers (and in reality, linking her to either is stupid and insensitive to the victims of her awful crime). But the link to racism with the Tea Parties is almost equally absurd. The author at True Slant stated this regarding a NY Times article about the Tea Parties...

The New York Times didn’t address the issue of the Tea Party’s white makeup, but the article did describe the movement’s geographical connection, in Idaho, to the white supremacists Richard Girnt Butler and Randy Weaver.

That's actually not the extent of the connection in the article -- a civil rights activist quoted in the article saw questions about Obama's birth certificate as a proxy for racism and intolerance and "painfully familiar cultural and rhetorical overtones." And there is at least one reference to how most of the people at Tea Party meetings are white, contrary to what True Slant says.

But that's it -- they can't establish that any actual racism from Tea Party adherents, but the biggest link is geographical. By that linkage, I must be a huge supporter of President Obama, since I live within 15 miles of D.C.

Worse yet, the proxy for racism now seems to be whether there are enough minorities that are part of a movement. I know folks who are attending Tea Parties, and they're not racists. But it's absurd to claim that they need a minority like me ( or several such people) to show up to prove they're not racists. I guess I should expect this from Keith Olbermann, but I think it reflects a reality that is obsessed with race. Here's an excerpt from Olbermann's recent statement to the Tea Party folks...

And I know phrases like "Tea Klux Klan" are incendiary, and I know I use them in part because I am angry that at so late a date, we still have to back back that racial uneasiness which has to envelop us all. And I know if I could only listen to Lincoln on this of all days about the better angels of our nature, I’d know that what we’re seeing at the Tea Parties is, at its base, people who are afraid – terribly, painfully, cripplingly, blindingly afraid.

But let me ask all of you who attend these things: How many black faces do you see at these events? How many Hispanics, Asians, gays? Where are these people? Surely, there must be blacks who think they’re being bled by taxation. Surely there must be Hispanics who think the government should have let the auto industry fail. Surely there must be people of all colors and creeds who believe in cultural literacy tests and speaking English. Where are they? Where are they?

Do you suppose they agree with you that they’ve just chosen to attend their own separate meetings, that they’re not at your Tea Party because they have a Tea Party of their own to go to?

...Fear is a terrible thing – so is prejudice, so is racism. And progress towards the removal of any evil produces an inevitable backlash. The Civil War was not followed by desegregation, but by Jim Crow and the Klan. The Civil Rights legislation of the 60s was not followed by peace, but by George Wallace and anti-busing overt racism. Why should the election of a black President be without a backlash?

But recognize what this backlash is and maybe you can free yourself of this movement built of inherited fears and of echoes of 1963 or 1873. Look at who is leading you and why. And look past the blustery self-justifications and see the fear – this unspoken, inchoate, unnecessary fear of those who are different.

If you believe there is merit to your political argument, fine. But ask yourself, when you next go to a Tea Party rally, or watch one on television or listen to a politician or a commentator praise these things or merely treat them as if it was just a coincidence that they are virtually segregated. Ask yourself: Where are the black faces? Who am I marching with? What are we afraid of? And if it really is only a President’s policy and not his skin, ask yourself one final question: Why are you surrounded by the largest crowd you will ever again see in your life that consists of nothing but people who look exactly like you? Good night and good luck.

Now, I know that I'm looking at this from a different perspective than a liberal. They tend to look at the issue and believe, that when the vast majority of faces at a Tea Party gathering are white, that there is an underlying current of racism there, one that perhaps the Tea Party folks don't recognize but that exists. But Olbermann's expectation that there will be backlash to the election of a black president is like a self-fulfilling prophecy, one that basically makes it certain that we need to examine all criticism of this President from people of other races with a detailed analysis of whether the criticism is tinged with racist sentiment. That's insane on its face.

Leaving aside the fact that telling people they're closet racists probably isn't the best way to get them to change their opinion or consider your point of view, I don't understand why the lack of minority faces at a political meeting establishes some kind of racist thought. Olbermann analogizes the situtation to baseball prior to Jackie Robinson, when the game was segregated, and people like Olbermann's pre-teen father assumed that Satchel Paige just didn't want to play for the New York Yankees.

But Olbermann misses the point entirely -- baseball was rigidly segregated by the owners of the teams under an unwritten "Gentleman's Agreement". Yes, the rule was unwritten, but it was understood by everyone in the game, and rigidly enforced by Commissioner Landis during his tenure. This is one reason why Branch Rickey's decision to sign Jackie Robinson was such a big deal.

Last I checked, there's nothing stopping anyone of any color from attending a Tea Party meeting or rally. Considering the rather decentralized structure of the Tea Party movement, there's probably no way to have such an agreement, even if there was a desire to do so. And there's no proof of either.

Bottom line, it's silly to allege such stuff, because it can come back and bite you. More importantly, it demeans what racism really is, and eventually leaves people unable to discuss legitimate political disagreements with one another.

One Small Step for Democrats

For Democrats, the first step is admitting you have a problem. E. J. Dionne pulls that off, but fails to identify what the real problem is...

If you want to be honest, face these facts: At this moment, President Obama is losing, Democrats are losing and liberals are losing.

Who's winning? Republicans, conservatives, the practitioners of obstruction and the Tea Party.

The two immediate causes for this state of affairs are a single election result in Massachusetts and the way the United States Senate operates. What's not responsible is the supposed failure of Obama and the Democrats to govern as "moderates." Pause to consider where we would be if a Democrat had won the Massachusetts Senate race last month. In all likelihood, health reform would be law, Democrats could have moved on to economic matters, and Obama would be seen as shrewd and successful.

But that's not what happened, and Republican Scott Brown's victory revealed real weaknesses on the progressive side: an Obama political apparatus asleep at the switch, huge Republican enthusiasm unmatched by Democratic determination, and a focused conservative campaign to discredit Obama's ideas, notably his economic stimulus plan and the health-care bill.

The Obama administration argues that both the stimulus and the health bill are better than people think. That's entirely true, and this is actually an indictment -- it means that on the two big issues of the moment, Republicans and conservatives are winning an argument they should be losing.

Dionne goes on to claim that the stimulus is working, a claim that is questionable at best, as illustrated by Reihan Salam. I also tend to believe that when a large enough majority thinks something is true, it's probably illustrative of an underlying fact -- so when only 6% of the public thinks the stimulus is working to create jobs, that's not just a messaging problem. I think this reflects the underlying reality -- the stimulus may have created jobs, but no one thinks it was a good return on our investment of $787 billion. And the President's claims that the stimulus staved off a depression are ridiculed even by stimulus supporters like Megan McArdle.

But hey, maybe it is a messaging problem. I'm fully in favor of the Democrats pursuing this line of stupidity, because it probably won't lead to any more bad legislation and will boot them out of the House majority come November. So I'm not going to spend any more time identifying the real problems for them - it's not like they're listening.

You Stay Classy, Chuck Schumer

A sitting United States Senator just called a potential future colleague a "Teabagger", in an effort to raise money for Martha Coakley. When politicians start calling other politicians be derogatory names, it gives off a whiff of desperation.

And while I know that liberal pundits and some politicians have trotted out the term during the last year or so, they're really testing the limits of whether they can get away with saying just about anything, even if it's vaguely offensive to another group, just because they're Democrats. In other words, I guess Harry Reid really is a leader.

Extreme Takeover

Just remember, those Tea Party folks are extremists...

Just how angry is the public with the country's two leading political parties? Angry enough that the conservative, libertarian-leaning Tea Party movement is more popular than either the Democratic or the Republican parties, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

The Republican Party maintains its net-negative favorable/unfavorable rating in the poll, with 28 percent viewing it positively and 43 percent seeing it in a negative light.

For the first time in more than two years, the Democratic Party also now holds a net-negative fav/unfav, at 35-45 percent.

By comparison, the NBC/WSJ poll shows the Tea Party movement with a net-positive 41-23 percent score.

(hat tip: Instapundit) To be fair, it's easy to be popular when you don't have responsibility for anything. But other protest movements haven't been this popular, so far as I can tell. The GOP and the Democrats have a serious problem on their hands.

I'm joking about the extremist tag -- except that the Law and Order franchise shows applied the tag to tea party activists this summer and again last week. Of course, someone would actually need to watch Law and Order to realize this, and we thank the folks who suffered through it to let us know.

If Law and Order is right, extremists seem to be taking over our politics. Why do I think this wasn't exactly the hope and change the President promised?