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 →

From the Hill:

“More than 40 lawmakers vowed to oppose the final healthcare bill if the House language on abortion is not removed.

Reps. Diana DeGette (Colo.) and Louise Slaughter (N.Y.) led the group of Democrats in writing to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) threatening to withhold support for a final conference report if it strictly prohibits federal funding for abortion services.

“We will not vote for a conference report that contains language that restricts women’s right to choose any further than current law,” reads a draft of the letter. DeGette and Slaughter, who is the chairwoman of the powerful Rules Committee, also wrote President Barack Obama requesting a meeting on the issue next week.”

The pro-abortion Democrats may have two options: a) accept pro-life language prohibiting federal funding of abortions, or b) kill their own health bill.

While the nation is going through the worst recession in modern history, our dollar is deflating because of government debt and we are electronically printing a trillion dollars; unemployment is at 10.2%, let’s tax the American people $752 billion (three quarters of a trillion dollars) and create a new entitlement and spend $1.8 trillion on something less than one in five Americans think is their top concern: health care. Three-quarters of likely voters believe the plan will force employers to give up providing insurance, shredding the “if you like it you can keep it promise.”

All while the American public overwhelmingly oppose the plan, and for triple political pain points, we can have the biggest votes on abortion, immigration, taxes, guns, the public option, Medicare cuts, massive spending and government control all rolled up in one vote, days after special elections that saw Independent voters run like scaled cats, screaming from the Democrats.

And at the same time as the President’s approval rating among likely voters glides ever downward..

Genius, isn’t it? And rational too.

I confess, it makes zero sense to me.

I’ve done the math and the political calculus keeps coming back a broken equation.

In general, if the strategic political forces are aligned properly, then the tactical level concerns resolve themselves. This mathematical rule in politics (it is very close to applied chaos theory) regularly produces victory for those applying the rule.

There are oh so very many outright political violations that irrationalism – an identifiable and documented strain of ideologies, among them, fascism — can only explain the behavior of the White House and the House and Senate leadership.

The following political actions are simply not rational:

Read More →

Organizing for America, the increasingly combative political operation of the White House, today unveiled a new web video targeting Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Michael Steele, charging the Republican Party chief with “siding with Washington elites and insurance companies and playing political games to kill reform.”

The latest installment in OfA’s “call ‘em out” campaign—a call to arms of sorts for complacent allies of President Barack Obama to debunk Republican myths about heath care reform—accuses Steele of scare-mongering and orchestrating a misinformation campaign against the President’s efforts on health care.

“Michael Steele is willing to lie and play political games in order to kill reform that would help Americans of every political party — so we’re calling him out,” reads an email from OfA Executive Director Jen O’Malley announcing the video.

The Democrats’ new web campaign, however, is as blatantly wrong as it is overtly hostile.

Opening with a recent segment from White House-scorned FOX News on health care reform’s “obligation to older Americans,” Steele said, “Just look at the situation with our veterans when you have a manual out there telling our veterans, you know, stuff like are you really a value to your community. You know, encouraging them to commit suicide.” Promptly followed by a blaring, rubber-stamped chyron reading “FALSE,” OfA cites as Politifact.com as cover for their claim.

At issue is a Department of Veteran Affairs-funded pamphlet—dubbed the “death book” by the Wall Street Journal—which presented various advanced care scenarios to aging veterans, callously prompting readers to then decide if their life would be “not worth living.” Democratic strategists correctly note the “Your Life, Your Choices” document was first published in 1997 and promoted by the VA throughout President George W. Bush’s two terms in office. What they fail to mention, conveniently, is that the “manual” was suspended after a review by Bush administration officials – and only later revived in 2009 by the new Democratic administration.

Read More →

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 →

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post is funny, in his rendition of Majority Leader Reid and his quest to put $250 billion in ObamaCare off-budget, adding it to the deficit. It really is worth the read, here are his first paragraphs:

“I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits, either now or in the future — period,” President Obama told Congress in a health-care address last month.

Well, that depends on what the meaning of “plan” is….So Democrats hatched a novel scheme: They would pass the legislation separately, so the $250 billion cost wouldn’t be part of the main reform “plan,” thereby allowing the president to claim that that bill wouldn’t increase the deficit.

Or this: “Finally we’re coming to the first vote on health-care reform, and what do the Democrats propose to do?” Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) asked at the microphones. “They propose to raise the national debt by . . . a quarter of a trillion dollars, plus $50 billion interest.”

There is plenty of good stuff in the piece, especially the quote by Senator Reid who essentially said — I did it because the White House told me to do it (he lost the cloture vote on the motion to proceed 47 to 53, Reid needs 60 votes to shut down a filibuster.)

OK, I cannot resist to quote Milbank’s Senator Stabenow stuff:

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.

When Putin announced that Russia would no longer sell its oil and natural gas in dollars, there were the normal — its OK type statements from the financial world, and it was viewed by the Western financial cognoscenti as an anomaly.

However, since the Federal Reserve is printing an estimated $600 billion a year to give to bankers and brokers, who then buy U.S. Treasury bills to finance for our over-spending Federal Government with printed dollars — the value of the dollar drops due to the massive over supply.

Then, those countries holding the U.S. dollar as reserve currency start to speak up. They plead with the President and Congress to start balancing the budget and lowering the deficit.

Instead, President Obama and Congress has not decreased the deficit, it has grown four times it was under Bush, to record numbers — $9 Trillion — under President Obama and the Democratic Congress.

And President Obama, by pushing his trillion dollar health care plan is rubbing the world’s face in their concerns about U.S. spending. He simply does not care that the dollar is dropping and that the value of these country’s dollar holdings is also dropping.

Read More →

From the Obama Experiment.

Taxes on your health plan, penalties for not buying one, and taxes on all sorts of health care services — all passed on to you, the patient.

The hero of the innocents, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), issued a clear and credible threat to the Speaker earlier this week, which resulted in the White House telling HHS Secretary Sibelius to say the President wants an explicit ban on abortion in ObamaCare.

From The Hill:

A leading pro-life Democrat in the House is threatening to block healthcare reform if Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) doesn’t allow a vote that would prevent the bill from funding abortions.

Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), co-chairman of the House Pro-Life Caucus, says the Democratic leadership must allow a vote adding the “Hyde Amendment” to the bill. That amendment prevents federal dollars from going to abortion funding.

“First of all, you have to give us our vote,” Stupak told CBN News, repeating the message he’s relaying to the Democratic leadership. “If you don’t give us our vote, everything’s off the table.”

Pro-life Democrats have the votes, all by themselves, to kill health care reform in the U.S. House.

Representative Stupak opposes the Capps amendment, which was an attempt in the Energy and Commerce Committee version of HR 3200 to have-abortion-in-the-bill-but-say-its-not.

Rep. Stupak wants his own vote on his own amendment, or he will kill health care reform in the House.

He can do it.

He will do it.

Therefore, the White House, via Sibelius, came out Sunday professing to want an explicit ban on abortion funding — which violates the promise President Obama made to planned parenthood about abortion being a key benefit in health care reform.

The question is whether any liberal Democrats will deny their vote for final passage of ObamaCare, should Rep. Stupak get a vote or if he does get a vote, his amendment passes?

How many of the liberal ideological favorites can Obama walk away from and still have their support? So far, its abortion, benefits for illegal immigrants and the public option.

The Democratic party has massive pent-up demand for good news on health care — i.e., they haven’t had any and Obama’s brightly colored abstract art painting of a health care speech has temporarily put the Democrats in a trance like state.

They will snap out of it, because the experienced veterans of health care warfare will help them.

One very experienced Democrat, a former Senate staffer who appears ofter on cable talk shows was very, very angry this morning. He believes Obama has completely destroyed the chance the nation had to get health care reform accomplished.

He simply stated that President Obama was not telling the truth on many key points in his speech yesterday.

Obama’s first point:

First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA, nothing in this plan will require you or your employer to change the coverage or the doctor you have. Let me repeat this: nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.

Obama wants to mandate all these new benefits — which he says he will do for free — for everyone’s health plan, and then he says your plan will not change. As soon as your plan changes — you are forced into the government-run, government-controlled health information exchange that dictates all plan designs of every insurance plan. But Obama keeps repeating what cannot be true.

Secondly, this Democrat was incensed that President Obama again said this plan will not increase the deficit:

I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits - either now or in the future. Period. And to prove that I’m serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t materialize.

Obama is living in fiscal fantasy land.

Read More →

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 politics of passing health care reform are exactly opposite in the Democratic controlled U.S. House and U.S. Senate.

1) In the House, Speaker Pelosi, staying true to her San Francisco Democratic roots will not pass health reform without a public option — and she has a recent letter signed by 83 of her Dem House colleagues from the Progressive Caucus, telling the President that a health bill “without a robust public option will not achieve the health reform this country so desperately needs. We cannot vote for anything less.”

2) In the Senate under normal Senate rules, a bill with a public option will not pass.

As it stands now it appears the White House is betting they can roll the Speaker, and the 83 Members of Congress who signed the letter cited above. When I say as it stands now, the repeated flips and flops by the White House and President Obama on this issue have kept both sides hoping they can cause another flip. And MoveOn has now targeted the White House with phone calls.

President Obama’s weapon of choice to convince the Members of Congress that it is OK to be rolled, and convince them they should act against their own political interest — is his own speech, his words — yet another health care speech, by him.

But the constant speechifying by the President on health care reform has not improved his approval rating slide, it keeps sliding. Zogby, in a poll of more than 4,500 likely voters, found President Obama’s approval rating at a record low of 42%.

Read More →

The Chief of Staff of a Member of Congress called this afternoon to suggest I look at the comments on Daily Kos about the President dropping the public option. (Now, how many times has he dropped it?)

Wow. The left is pissed-off, in deep emotional pain and feel betrayed.

Here is one comment such comment:

It’s hard to maintain a sense of equilibrium when you see all those around you, who have fought so hard for this issue, in emotional pain.

and another:

Obama is/was nothing more than another con-man politician . . . who knew how to speak the words that people outraged and despairing by eight years of Bush policies wanted to hear. But that’s all they were.

or this one:

We’re there to donate $, man phone banks, generate enthusiasm, and then let the “grown ups” make policy decisions the way they always did. We’re getting Clintonism w/o Clinton. Soon, we’ll get V-chips and school uniforms, or their contemporary equivalents.

and another:

if you take away the showmanship, it’s looking like Obama was never on the right side of that war - not even from the start.

and one more:

What’s really sad and maddening is that manypeople have worked through sickness and little money and others after a full week’s work, to get this. I’m not quite ready to believe it is dead, yet, but if they’ve known this for a long time, they have twisted the knife, by allowing us to spend our blood, sweat and tears, to no avail.

Read More →

There’s been a lot of controversy about President Barack Obama’s plan to give a speech to the nation’s public (only public) schoolchildren on September 8 (the Tuesday after Labor Day), a controversy Caleb Howe comprehensively summarizes here. The problem isn’t the President giving a pro-education message to the nation’s kids, something that’s part of any president’s job; the problem is the specter of enlisting of public school teachers, already a core interest group supporting Obama, in indoctrinating kids in his agenda. The conservative uproar over the Department of Education’s proposed materials for the speech seems to have already scored a victory in forcing the Administration to scale back its plans.

But I’m from New York. When I mentioned this speech to my wife, her immediate reaction was that Obama wasn’t looking at the calendar: the New York City schools, public and private, aren’t even in session yet the day after Labor Day. Obama’s effort to roll this into a massive PR blitz with the following day’s health care speech to a joint session of Congress will fail in my neck of the woods because nobody paid attention to the school calendar.

I suspect Obama rushed to coincide the speech with a Bill Gates-produced back to school education documentary that Obama will be appearing on the same evening on a battery of cable channels (because really, what Obama needs is more press). But either way, I’ll be keeping my kids home September 8 from their (Catholic) school - because they don’t have school anyway.

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 →

The number of likely voters who approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President is at 45 percent. (Note: other pollsters poll “Adults” instead of likely voters. Polling adults inflates President Obama’s approval rating.)

The President’s continued pushing of a politically lethal health care plan is to blame. But the three horsemen of the Democratic Party’s Apocalypse: Speaker Pelosi, Chairman Waxman and President Obama keep on riding the Death Horse.

As the Wall Street Journal put it today: “‘What we’re seeing now, both in terms of numbers and the feel out there, this is how big waves feel early on,” said Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report.”

Read More →

Richard Cohen, the liberal columnist of the Washington Post was the first to point out that the best U.S. President to compare President Obama to, is President Carter.

Cohen wrote:

More and more Obama is being likened to Lyndon Johnson, with Afghanistan becoming his Vietnam. Maybe. But the better analogy is to Jimmy Carter, particularly the president analyzed by James Fallows in a 1979 Atlantic magazine article, “The Passionless Presidency.” “The central idea of the Carter administration is Jimmy Carter himself,” Fallows wrote. And what is the central idea of the Obama presidency? It is change. And what is that? It is Obama himself.

Unlike Carter, Obama brims with energy and charm. His brilliance is not brittle but supple. Yet, another teachable moment is upon him and he seems lost. The country needs health care reform and a success in Afghanistan, and both efforts are going in the wrong direction. The message needs to be fixed and so, with some tough introspection, does the man.

Now, from the right, R. Emmett Tyrrell also compares Obama to Carter:

According to sources with whom I confer, the Obama White House is the most tightly controlled White House in years, with the president, Mr. Emanuel and White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod micromanaging practically everything. They make up what is called “the Politburo,” and the news story waiting to be written is that their control is as stultifying as was Jimmy Carter’s control of his White House. Stupendous failure is in the cards.

The Politburo follows no organizational flow charts. A source deeply rooted in official Washington tells me that when the president and his fellows want information from the National Security Council, they may go to its head, Gen. James L. Jones, or they may not. They may just call in one or two of his subordinates.

As President Carter found out, micromanagement and the Presidency do not mix well. And, micromanagment is directly at odds with the Presidential management style the electorate thought they were voting for.

The degree of the political problem that President Obama’s “damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead,” approach to health care reform has caused the ruling party in Washington, D.C. is beginning to become clear from some comments made by cognoscenti of the Democratic Party.

A gray-beard of the liberal establishment, Richard Cohen, wrote today in the Washington Post that the most apt comparison to President Obama is President Jimmy Carter. Ouch!

With regard to the health care debate, Cohen writes:

In the end, the success of the health care reform effort comes down to trust. A lesson of the raucous town-hall meetings is the sense of panic, the fear that this man in the White House does not appreciate the anxiety that middle-class Americans fear about health care — whether they will keep what they have, whether they will have enough or whether their last years will be spent in painful, degrading poverty….

More and more Obama is being likened to Lyndon Johnson, with Afghanistan becoming his Vietnam. Maybe. But the better analogy is to Jimmy Carter, particularly the president analyzed by James Fallows in a 1979 Atlantic magazine article, “The Passionless Presidency.” “The central idea of the Carter administration is Jimmy Carter himself,” Fallows wrote. And what is the central idea of the Obama presidency? It is change. And what is that? It is Obama himself.

Unlike Carter, Obama brims with energy and charm. His brilliance is not brittle but supple. Yet, another teachable moment is upon him and he seems lost. The country needs health care reform and a success in Afghanistan, and both efforts are going in the wrong direction. The message needs to be fixed and so, with some tough introspection, does the man.

Just how badly has the Democratic health reform effort failed? Democratic Senator Feingold (WI) is predicting no health care bill before Christmas, and when he said the most likely outcome is nothing being done at all, he was met with cheers from the voters at his town hall meeting.

As the Lakeland Times reports:

Read More →