Sen. Lieberman is setting steel rebar and hardened concrete around his threat to filibuster the public option.

From Politico:

“It’s classic politics of our time that if you look at the campaign last year, presidential, you can’t find a mention of public option,” Lieberman said. “It was added after the election as a part of what we normally consider health insurance reform — insurance market reforms, cover people, cover people who are not covered.”

“It suddenly becomes a litmus test. I thought Democrats were against litmus tests.”

The Lieberman filibuster bunker has hardened, and Senator Reid can’t breech it.

And you know what that means, right? Lets all say it together, Senator Reid has to throw the public option left wingers like Senators Franken, Brown, Burris and Rockefeller over the side, who are pounding their chest and the table about the absolute need for the public option.

These public-option-in-the-sky Senators will not like being tossed over the side.

The question is, as Senator Reid throws them overboard, will they plead for a fig-leaf public option deal? Essentially, will they ask to only be thrown mostly overboard (for those Monty Python er, Princess Bride fans, it’s like being mostly dead) or will they grab Senator Reid and take him with him as they go, just over the principle of the public option, and because they don’t like being thrown overboard?

There is going to be pushing and shoving on the deck of the USS Public Option, and I’ll be reporting the splashes, as they happen. (Grab the popcorn.)

Dem Senators are peeling off of President Obama’s government takeover of health care and its liberal fantasy land that spends more than a trillion and contains hundreds of billions in new taxes.

As James Carville told CNN, President Obama only has 57 votes.

Reuters James Pethokoukis is reporting that Senators Liberman, Landrieu and Nelson are at NO, and Bayh maybe too. Pethokoukis is reporting the same thing Hammond said in his memo, that reconciliation is a no-go. (Politico is reporting, correctly, that reconciliation rules would strip the Stupak amendment.)

As we all know, no 60 votes, no laundry. (Senator Reid needs 60 votes to break the filibuster on the motion to proceed to consider the bill. If he does not get 60 votes, ObamaCare never comes up on the Senate floor.)

There are whispers in Washington watering holes that some Dem Senators are quietly hoping Senator Nelson will vote against cloture on the motion to proceed. This will let the Senators who are up in 2010 off the hook from the nightmare of proceeding to this politically toxic bill.

Read More →

Like wolves on a fresh killed deer, the liberals keep tearing up Democrats over Representative Stupak’s amendment, which forces pro-abortion Dems to vote for pro-life protections for the innocents.

This has sites like FireDogLake completely bent:

“Is there anyone who did not see this coming, besides the over hundred Democrats in the House who call themselves pro-choice? Ben Nelson (D-NE) is now demanding the Senate also include the Stupak amendment language. Did anyone really think the Senate’s conservative Democrats would let any part of the House bill be to the right of the Senate? If Nelson gets his way (and when hasn’t Nelson gotten his way this year?), so much for “don’t worry, Obama will fix it in conference.”

From Politico,

“Senator Nelson is strongly pro-life and was pleased the Stupak amendment passed with such strong support,” Thompson said in a statement. “He believes that no federal money—including subsidies or tax credits–should be used to buy insurance coverage for abortion. This is a very important issue to Senator Nelson and it is highly unlikely he would support a bill that doesn’t clearly prohibit federal dollars from going to abortion.”

“It is a good thing NARAL and Planned Parenthood did not put up a fight before the Stupak amendment was added to the House bill. It is always so much easier to push things to the left in the Senate. . . .

But NARAL and Planned Parenthood got rolled by Speaker Pelosi, and now pro-abortion Senators will be forced to make the same choice pro-abortion House Dems did, but this time, the NARALs and Planned Parenthoods of the world can’t just roll over and play dead, like they did for their pal the Speaker.

Read More →

The news keeps getting tougher for the House Leadership in their irrational quest to pass their ObamaCare bill.

First, the Associated Press is reporting the bill will cost $1.2 Trillion without the doctor fix of $250 billion.

The new total will be $1.45 trillion — because the House Leadership intends to create a “self-executing rule” that would pull the doctor fix apart from the House ObamaCare bill — in order to keep the cost at $1.2 Trillion, then fuse the doc fix back into the ObamaCare bill after it passes the House.

It is like a magic trick, presto — $250 billion in new spending just appears in the bill after it passes.

Meanwhile, the new $1.45 billion ought to send the Blue Dogs scampering from the bill.

Then, of course, the House is finally grappling with two thermonuclear issues: abortion and immigration.

But, as numerous news reports state, the Democratic Leaders still do not have the votes for the bill — rumors abound, the most credible put the House vote count at less than 200 for the bill.

The more fundamental question is, why is the U.S. House voting before the U.S. Senate? House leadership has already moved the vote from Thursday to Friday, and are now talking about the vote being moved to Saturday or Monday of Tuesday of next week. House leaders should just punt the vote until after the Senate, and save their members — and themselves — the pain of voting.

Especially when the Senate is now talking post-Thanksgiving for its floor vote?

Why is the Speaker forcing its members to walk the plank again, prior to the Senate vote, especially when it is likely that the bill will never get off the Senate floor?

Read More →

By the time you read this, a lot of ink and air time will have been spent on this Politico article suggesting that the Republicans tremble when conservatives like Rush, Hannity, Beck, or even me says something.

Eric Cantor went on the record saying, “We need more voices.” I and everyone else I’ve talked to read that as being critical of the present voices, but his office tells me that “The question was does Rush, Beck, and others hurt, and Eric’s point was we need their voice and others. And he furthered that in the same quote by saying the party in power is trying to demonize voices, yours, ours, Rush’s, And no matter whom, we shouldn’t let them.” Good to hear, but it really didn’t read as a defense the way it was presented by the Politico.

In fact, what the GOP needs right now is leadership. Talk radio and places like RedState are filling a void because the GOP is behaving spectacularly crapulently. Lindsey Graham is collaborating with cap and traders. Pete Sessions and the NRCC are throwing their money down the rat hole that is the Scozzafava campaign. John Cornyn tries to shut out conservative hispanics in favor of squishy, but well tanned governors. The strategy is to be more like the Democrats. It is disappointing.

A question for those who want more voices — what should they be saying?

It is true the Republican brand still sucks. But “conservative” is becoming quite popular. The message of freedom and liberty still resonates. What the Republicans really fear is loss of control. They do not like that conservatives from outside the Beltway are more and more in the drivers’ seat.

But there is more to this story. This is something ignored by most people today. This story is, whether intended or not, a coordinated hit out of the White House. We know the Politico does this. It runs as full stories the hit jobs of the various parties.

And not only do we see the Politico running this as a hit job for the Democrats, but we see a few Republicans willing to go on record as useful idiots.

Read More →

CongressDaily is reporting that the House Leadership thinks they have 218 votes for ObamaCare. Speaker Pelosi herself said she “definitely” has 218 votes.

Call the vote on ObamaCare NOW Mrs. Speaker, if you have the votes, call the vote.

But you will not call the vote, because you don’t have the votes. And you will not call the vote anytime soon.

Here is one report from one source, who is as credible and well informed as they get, who wrote this after meeting with a Dem Chief of Staff (CoS):

Rep. Bart Stupak, leader of the pro-life Dems, has at least 50 votes in opposition to the bill. The CoS [Chief of Staff] also said there are lots of pro-choice Dems who don’t believe federal funding should be used for abortion. Ratchet the number up some more.

Then there are the Blue Dogs who don’t like it. And the CoS does not think they will roll. The BDs [Blue Dogs] took a licking at home after the Cap-and-Trade vote and then again during the August recess. They do not desire to repeat that.

Then you have Dems with Dem Governors back home telling them they can’t afford what the feds are about to throw at them via Medicaid.

Then you have the Dems in districts with large senior populations who are not happy with the Medicare cutbacks being proposed.

And Pelosi thinks she can get 218 out of this? “Ha!” laughed the CoS.

Apparently the secret to passing ObamaCare is for the President to acknowledge that all Members of Congress have something they don’t like about the bill, but to vote for it regardless:

AP reports the President said in New York yesterday:

“The bill you least like” improves coverage for millions, he said in New York. “Let’s make sure that we keep our eye on the prize.”

Seems a little strange to announce this in New York, a blue state, that members need to hold their nose and vote for health care reform. Is this the winning formula? Is holding New York members of Congress becoming tough? And if the President needed to say this in New York, what does this mean for the rest of the country?

The roll call vote on the motion to proceed to S. 1776 is instructive of what happens to a bill that cannot stop the filibuster on the motion to proceed. President Obama and the White House asked Senator Reid to put $247 billion in new spending off budget to buy off the American Medical Association. Majority Leader Reid was embarrassed. The White House, Senator Reid said, wanted him to bring the bill up. He needed 60 votes to stop the filibuster. He got 47 votes. Missed the mark by 13 votes. Here is the simple filibuster math (60 minus 13 = 47.)

Perhaps this is why President Obama did not go public on the vote, he did not want to risk a Chicago is knocked out in the first round of voting despite his personal lobbying for the Olympics type experience.

This is a lesson for everyone: no cloture, no laundry. And 60 votes in the Senate is a tough number to hit, even with 60 Democratic voting Senators (58 Dems and two independents). S. 1776 is dead. The bill did not even make it past the motion to proceed.

Today, AP ran a story questioning whether President Obama has the 60 votes to overcome a filibuster on ObamaCare. Really? Really, really. Here is some of Charles Babington’s piece:

Read More →

While Senator Snowe’s yes vote in the Senate Finance Committee was a shock to liberals and conservatives, it is neither a defeat for conservatives nor a victory for liberals. The bill would have passed Committee regardless of how Sen. Snowe voted.

Senator Snowe, in her own words, said her vote was a maybe on the Senate floor. Smart political observers like Carrie Budoff Brown at Politico understand that Snowe’s vote radically increases the likelihood of Dem-on-Dem political violence over any single significant move to the left that the Democratic Leadership contemplates when they attempt to merge the bill.

Think of the Snowe vote as tent pegs holding the bill in place, while liberal generated wind storms attempt to move the tent to the left. The chances of the pegs coming out and the tent being blown like a tumbleweed are real and will be devastating to the bill.

Plus, Senator Snowe’s voice now carries a high-wattage amplifier with it inside the Democratic leadership. The liberals want a public option? Lose Snowe. Want to bring up a Vapor bill? Snowe is at no. Want to spring legislative language on the Senate without a CBO score of the language? Snowe is at no and so are eight other Democratic Senators who sent a letter to Majority Leader Reid last week requesting a CBO score on actual legislative language and a 72 hour review period by the public of the bill prior to its consideration on the Senate floor. The letter was backed up with threats by the Democratic Senators to employ procedural hurdles if there request is not met, as Congressional Quarterly reported on October 6:

Read More →

Politico (again) breaks a major story this morning with its outing of the Dem secret plan that Brian Darling of the Heritage Foundation has been warning of for more than ten days:

a former House and Senate leadership aide sent an email sketching out another route to passage. Instead of introducing a Senate bill, Majority Leader Reid could insert the merged health care reform language into a revenue raising House bill already languishing in conference committee. The Senate would pass it and send it to the House whereupon passage, it would go straight to the president’s desk – completely bypassing conference. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

By cutting out conference, this single-bullet scenario eliminates weeks of expected wrangling and would make it possible to pass a bill by the Thanksgiving target so many Democrats are aiming for. Many insiders agree that a conference committee would make that goal next to impossible.

The Democrats are raping the Congressional process to pass ObamaCare:

Read More →

While the cognoscenti of the Western financial world is attempting to spin the recent fall in the dollar as a stylish financial mystery play with a journalist based in the Middle East as its star, the Whodunit spin is a red herring: the facts are that the dollar is weak, and getting weaker.

The world is awash in dollars. There is a massive oversupply. We are electronically creating (printing in another era) hundreds of billions of dollars to buy our own T-Bills. Our deficit and spending has soared.

Kudlow, in his column, “Save the Greenback, Mr. President” explains that solution is to remove the excess dollars from the market and to stop “printing so much debt:”

for therapy, the Fed should begin moving excess cash from the economy….And they need to stop printing so much debt from Congress. All this massive spending and borrowing is killing us.

Instead, the Democrats in Congress and the White House are planning more spending: a second spending bill is on the table — ironically tagged as the second stimulus bill, which ought to stimulate the dollar tanking — and of course, President Obama’s $1 trillion health care spending boondoggle.

When town hall meetings are interrupted with shouts of “stop printing money” the jig is up. Note to the White House: in the age of the internet, you cannot hide printing $600 Billion a year from the world.

Until the Federal Reserve stops printing money to buy our own T-Bills, and the Democrats in Congress stop spending on new programs and we lower our deficit the dollar will continue to drop. End of story, no other outcome is possible.

Simply put, the Dems are killing the dollar.

The MSM would like the American public to believe that the Senate Finance Committee bill was scored by the Congressional Budget Office. After all, WaPo, the NYT and the WSJ reported:

WaPo: “The bill would cost $829 billion over the next decade.”

NYT: “The budget office analyzed the bill … its newly projected cost — $829 billion over 10 years.”

WSJ: “The latest Senate health bill will cost $829 billion over a decade.”

But it is a score of a vapor bill — a bill that has no legislative language — and so with much fanfare and pomp the CBO has delivered a Vapor Score of a Vapor Bill. CBO has stated publicly and repeatedly that it cannot accurately score any bill without the legislative language — which does not exist so CBO cannot have it.

Heritage tagged this correctly its Bait and Switch blog:

As the Politico reported yesterday: “While the media and lawmakers often shorthand a CBO letter as a “score” or “cost estimate,” today’s CBO letter is neither. Because the bill is still in “conceptual,” or layman’s terms, CBO’s letter today was a “preliminary analysis.” For it to be an official cost estimate, the bill has to be translated into legislative language.”

And here is a thought from Ryan Ellis at ATR, the reason the latest ObamaCare bill scores so low is because of all the taxes. Here is the list.

For a more wonky analysis of the Vapor Score, see the blog by Donald Marron, a former CBO economist here, and from which the quotes from the MSM above were taken.

Politico is reporting that the President will back a public option in his speech before the Joint Session of Congress tonight.

This means that the President will not get his public option through the Senate, nor will he likely have the votes in the House, since by including the public option, the political price for a yes vote became very high for moderate Democrats. Add into the mix the other issues like new taxes, new spending, increasing deficits, coverage for abortion (a WaPo op-ed states abortion could derail ObamaCare), cuts to Medicare and senior’s opposition, and you have a very expensive vote for the moderates.

TIME is reporting the following:

“House leaders have pulled back from their once-aggressive schedule. “I have no timetable” for passage of a bill, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters yesterday. While eschewing the idea that they would wait for the Senate to act, they are stuck waiting at least until Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus shows his hand.”

Given the House Leadership’s and the President’s refusal to budge on the public option, it makes the cost of a yes vote too high. There are not the votes in the U.S. House to pass ObamaCare, and if this is the big, re-activated, re-energized approach that President Obama will take on health care, good luck with that.

According to Politico:

Read More →

The President’s most trusted advisor, David Axelrod told Politico:

“I think it’s fairly obvious that we’re not in the second inning. We’re not in the fourth inning. We’re in the eighth or ninth inning here, and so there’s not a lot of time to waste.”

That is about as good as it gets in terms of any admission from the White House that their signature initiative is in trouble (to continue the baseball analogy, the White House is behind) and the game is winding down.

A mid-August poll by Rasmussen of likely voters put President Obama’s support for a health reform bill at 34% without the public option:

“Just 34% of voters nationwide support the health care reform plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats if the so-called “public option” is removed. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 57% oppose the plan if it doesn’t include a government-run health insurance plan to compete with private insurers.”

CBS News today had more bad health care polling news for the President:

Read More →

Mike Allen of Politico is reporting on the internal Democratic Party secondary explosions from the White Flag hoisted (a la Drudge) on the public plan option.

Where, oh where is MoveOn.org now? Have they spent all their health care money and the plan is still sinking? (Note the nearly straight line down in the graph.) Intrade now shows there is a 14% chance that a public plan option will be law by Dec. 31, 2009.

Dean said on the CBS Early Show that punting to another time and space may be the best option:

“You can’t really have reform without a public option,” Dean said on CBS News’s “The Early Show. “If you don’t want to have the public option, … just do a little insurance reform … and then we’ll tackle health reform another time. But let’s not pretend we’re doing reform without a public option.”

Then there is Jim Carville, always political, also cited by Allen in Politico:

On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Democratic strategist James Carville became the first leading Democrat to suggest publicly that there might be political advantage in letting Republicans “kill” health care.

“Put a bill out there, make them filibuster it, make them be what they are, the party of no,” Carville said. “Let them kill it. Let them kill it with the interest group money, then run against them. That’s what we ought to do.”

Carville was there for the HillaryCare flame out. And, when you are already planning to blame the Republicans for the coming health care failure, you have to be pretty clear about where the politics of continuing down this road will lead — so, it is natural for Carville to blame the Republicans.

In other words, let’s keep health care alive as a political issue that can win elections, even if we let, er, uh, I mean, blame the GOP for killing it dead.

These two leading Democrats, Carville and Dean, are really telegraphing warnings and caution to their elected Democratic friends: let’s wait, let’s not pass anything, we can blame the Republicans.

And one other thing let’s not have any more town hall meetings!

Barbara Boxer might have a reason to feel touchy about her title of Senator, it seems. Not only is she facing a determined, conservative challenger in Chuck DeVore, but even her own caucusmates don’t think she’s equipped for the job.

In short, they think she’ll botch any job she’s given the responsibility for, so they’re taking responsibilities away from her.

Read More →

That’s one of the questions being debated over at Politico’s “Arena” blog. Here’s my take, in a nutshell, on Sotormayor’s statement at Berkley in 2001 that the “richness of experience” of a “wise Latina woman” makes her more fit to judge (or more likely to “reach a better conclusion”) “than a white male”:

This is a whole bunch of nothing to most liberals, who accept as the natural order of things that empathy and common ethnic experience are more important in Constitutional law than dispassionate review and application of an objective standard. To conservatives, on the other hand, Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” statement is a something — if not necessarily a “big deal” — because it injects subjectivity into an objective process, and because it reflects an adoption of the race-and-gender-obsessed liberal worldview that denies any objective good outside of “diversity” for its own sake.

Given that Sotomayor’s speech from which the “wise Latina” quote was pulled was part of a symposium entitled “Raising the Bar: Latino and Latina Presence in the Judiciary and the Struggle for Representation,” it’s not surprising or offensive in the least that she discussed race as a topic. However, rather than using that pulpit to acknowledge that neither minority status nor an impoverished upbringing was the sine qua non of effectively interpreting legal texts and applying them to cases (her job as an appellate judge), Sotomayor chose to declare that, in her estimation, a white male simply isn’t as fit to render legal judgment as a “wise Latina woman.”

There’s a very clear reason why this statement has half of the nation up in arms. Ironically, the other half, which is brushing this aside and saying it’s no big deal, would be calling for the head of any white male who said his race and gender made him more qualified to judge than any “Latina woman.” The difference in that situation is that, had a white male said such a thing, conservatives would be condemning it as well — something race-and-gender-obsessed liberals simply can’t bring themselves to do with regard to Sotomayor’s statement, despite the obviousness of the double standard.

Just when you thought the unprecedented adoration of President Obama and the current Democrats in Congress by the “fiercely independent,” and self-promoted “fourth branch” of government known as the media could not get any worse… along comes Politico.

In what can only be described as a hit piece on a good man - Politico trots out in the opening paragraph of its “introduction piece” on Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions… GUESS what? Go ahead… GUESS… Yep, that he’s racist. Hard to believe, huh?

Let me tell you something. I know Jeff Sessions. I know his staff. I know his family. I have seen him working up close and personally. And he is a decent, honorable, good man - a man of integrity who has raised a wonderful family and devoted his life to public service. And he deserves far better than this kind of cheap shot from an irresponsible, dim-witted and second-rate news publication.

Read More →

Many years ago, when I was but a teenaged college student, my political science professor taught me a valuable lesson. He returned a paper I had written with a grade of 37 on it and the following scribbled in the margin in angry red ink:

“Your paper is all supposition. Where is your supporting evidence?“

I learned from the experience. You can’t just phone it in and expect to be taken seriously.

Read More →

…as mentioned by Brother Erick Erickson here, about this article here, is that nowhere does the Politico state that they got their information about this particular echo chamber from their own J-List members. The only on-the-record quote from a named Politico J-Lister is, in fact, rather innocuous. Which suggests that either: Politico doesn’t want its own members being accused of dishing out some of the more salacious details; or that they have independent sources willing to forward juicy details to the Politico.

Either way, sounds like they’re breaking Rules #1 & #2 of Fight Club. Always the way, when you get too close to DC…

Moe Lane

PS: Thanks for letting us know that Toobin’s on that list, by the way. Alterman we would have guessed, anyway, but there are people who actually still believe that Toobin’s somewhere close to objective.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Armed robbers are not the sharpest knives in the gene-pool drawer. However, most of them have figured out the basics: don’t try to rob gun stores or karate studios. Stick to convenience stores, gas stations, and other targets unlikely to shoot you or punch your lights out.

Read More →