As the Wall Street Journal reports, Congressional Democrats are now looking to the idea of splitting the bill into two parts, and passing one of them through via the reconciliation process so as to only need the support of 51 Senators on the reconciliation part.

The first of the two bills (the one that will be rammed through on more or less a party line vote, with some Democrat defectors) is, as the rules of reconciliation allow, a package of strictly budgetary matters, primarily involving federal insurance subsidies (say hi to Fannie Med!), expanding Medicaid (see SCHIP expansion, odds are you won’t recognize it as its intended purpose once it’s done), and (oh joy) devising the tax increases necessary to pay for it all.  The second one will be everything that isn’t strictly budget-related, namely their Byzantine series of regulations for the insurance industry that seek to make getting health care coverage every bit as pleasant as your typical TSA cavity search, and, of course, the actual creation of a government “public option”, “co-op”, “single-payer system” or what have you to actually dole out their goodies to their pet special interests those who are most in need.

Overall, the goal as it appears is to try to cause a head-fake among those following the bill and hopefully stuff down the throats of the public as much as they can without getting any input or support from the other party (which will likely include a new massive tax hike) while opponents are still trying to figure out what exactly they are looking at.

Drudge’s headline calling this a “shell game” couldn’t be more accurate.  That being said, I’m not really aware of the last shell game that I’ve ever seen that had the power to determine whether people lived or died.

The government, in this increasingly bizarre turn under Obama, has completed its grotesque morph from Jimmy Stewart’s character in “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” to Javier Bardem’s character in “No Country For Old Men”.

After the National Council for a New America (NCNA), led by Eric Cantor and other prominent conservatives, has undertaken an effort to listen and respond to the concerns of Americans disaffected with the GOP, they proceeded to get nearly every major player in the Republican Party to get on board with the undertaking.

Cantor’s in.  McCain’s in.  Palin’s in.  Romney’s in.  Barbour’s in.  Jindal’s in.

Conspicuously absent, however, is one former Arkansas governor.

Former Governor Mike Huckabee, writing in a column of Foxnews.com, has not only turned down an invitation from the group to join in the discussion, but now seems openly hostile to the group.

“A new group was recently formed that is calling itself a group of experts for the purpose of making the Republican Party attractive to voters again,” the former Republican presidential candidate wrote in a column posted Monday on the Fox News website. “The strategy is supposedly to go on a listening tour so they can talk to the American people and hear what people are concerned about.”

“It’s hard to keep from laughing out loud when people living in the bubble of the Beltway suddenly wake up one day and think they ought to have a listening tour; even funnier when their first earful expedition takes them all the way to the suburbs of Washington, D.C.”

So, what is it about the NCNA that has led Huckabee to deem its creation “a sad day in Republican politics”?  Partly the fact that, of the five major policy areas being discussed, none of them are the primary hot-button issues of social politics – gay marriage, abortion, or immigration.  Huckabee continued, saying “If the party elite want to abandon principled leadership to protect life, support traditional marriage while going along with deficit exploding spending, interference and micro-managing of private business and failing to police corruption and govern competently, then hearing aids or a panel of experts won’t help.”

While a principled argument, people like Palin, Cantor, and Jindal are hardly “party elite”.  If anything, they are anathema to much of the party elite, people like the Rockefeller Republicans in the beltway who are more concerned about getting along with others in hopes of cutting a deal than to either lead with principle or to represent the concerns of their constituents.  While a listening tour may not be the solution to all of the GOP’s ills, the open hostility to it seems to indicate that Gov. Huckabee’s priorities lie elsewhere.

My personal take is that, while social issues are important to a large amount of the Republican Party base, they also aren’t necessarily the issues that will allow the party to attract new voters in the coming years, for the main reason that people tend to be quite recalcitrant about their positions on those issues; either they’re with you or they’re not.

But giving up the ghost on them isn’t what is needed, either; what appears to be called for in this difficult electoral climate is to get out on point and say “We are Republicans.  We aren’t supporters of the profligate spending of the past or present, be it the Bush administration’s or the Obama administration’s.  We are in favor of government easing its iron grip on your pocketbook as well as over your daily life.  We don’t want to see the government picking winners and losers in business based on who the leadership’s friends are.  We support your ability to live without interference from forces domestic or abroad.  And, in addition, we support traditional American values on the grounds that our Christian upbringing and respect for tradition and the rule of law will bring the same degree of discipline and principle to our leadership.”

Hopefully what we see going forward will allow us to come together based on what unites us, rather than letting us divide ourselves based on what we’d like to see in addition.

…supplicating Leviathan through the offering of the product of one’s labors?

I mean, sure, I could sound a call about the insanity of our tax system, but then I would more than likely be lumped in with all those people that the Department of Homeland Security is referring to anymore under the scary umbrella term of “right-wing extremists“.

…Wait, I’m a libertarian.  Government tends not to like my ilk regardless of what party is in power.  Disregard the above paragraph, then.

As a college graduate student, I hear the arguments all the time — “Couldn’t government do something about <Situation X>?  We could address <Situation X> if only we spent this sum [untold billions] on dealing with it.  It’s only something like Y dollars per taxpayer!”  First off, this makes the pitch sound less like actual serious discussion of government policy and more like a Christian Children’s Fund infomercial; you know, those “for the cost of a cup of coffee a day” things.

At least with helping the poor children of sub-Saharan Africa one ends up with a picture of the child they’re sponsoring and some information about what’s going on in the area.  If the federal government got into the child-sponsoring business, they’d proceed to hold hearings, meetings, discussion panels, “awareness summits”, and fund research studies, while entire villages starve in the process.  Which is pretty much, sadly, what they do at the present time.

We hear all this stuff about private sector this and public sector that, and the similar terms are thrown around with enough frequency to make the uninformed believe that there is little distinction between the two.  The difference, of course, is obvious; if the public sector operated like the private sector does, China would be seeking Chapter 7 liquidation on Washington.  If the private sector acted like the public sector does, the economy as we know it would cease to exist, productivity would fall off the face of the earth, and companies would just send roving goon squads, “Mad Max”-style, to make sure they could “extract” the money they need to stay around and in charge.

Why is it people tolerate kleptocracy from one but not the other, and why do people only expect efficiency from the group that’s not organized theft?  (I would assume the obvious answer to the second is “because they’re organized theft”, but it does nothing to solve the first question.)

The answer to the first of the two questions, however, comes down to results.  Every day we hear of things that government is doing, or trying to do, and it instills a sense of confidence in the whole contraption, even more so when most people look at what’s going on in government, see what they’re paying in taxes, and deem that it is a fantastic deal, all things considered.  Obviously, these calculations don’t actually work out as well as they do in theory due to how progressive the US’ tax structure is, but it’s easy to not realize this when you look at your own tax bill (after all, one’s perception is that their experience, barring some unusual event, is relatively average, even when, in the case of taxes, it’s anything but).

And it doesn’t stop with income taxes, either.  Use taxes, sales taxes, payroll taxes, fees, excise taxes… the list goes on and on, most of which we never really see, just have them passed on to us.  (For those of you needing something to really get worked up over today, just go as far as your local bar; the average tax bite from a six-pack of beer stands at 56.2%, and distilled spirits hit a rate of 79.6%.  Cheers?)

In time, I would love to see a government that is responsive, principled, disciplined, and takes the concepts of fiscal stability and respect for basic economic principles seriously.  Then again, I also would love to see the Cleveland Browns win a Super Bowl, which, in all fairness, seems far more likely.  As Lord Acton said, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

In the meantime, hold onto that wallet; not from the thug down the street in the tattered Fubu shirt, but from the thug in the Capitol rotunda with the $5,000 suit.

After the California State Supreme Court ruled gay marriage legal under the state’s Constitution, opponents of gay marriage have put forth a petition to put Proposition 8 on the ballot, which would amend the state Constitution to ban gay marriage. So far, so straightforward.

Enter Jerry Brown.

The Attorney General is responsible, in most states, for approving the language used on the ballot to describe various proposals that have been placed up for vote by petition. Jerry Brown, however, may have crossed boundaries (as well as wires) in coming up with his most recent plan.

If at first you don’t like the proposal, apparently, change the ballot language.

The language for Proposition 8, as was suggested by petition circulators: “Amends the California Constitution to provide that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

As changed by Brown, it takes a bit more (er, a lot more) pointed of a turn: “Changes California Constitution to eliminate right of same-sex couples to marry. Provides that only a marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California. Fiscal Impact: Over the next few years, potential revenue loss, mainly sales taxes, totaling in the several tens of millions of dollars, to state and local governments. In the long run, likely little fiscal impact to state and local governments.”

Of course, the “eliminate right” part rankles some, although still is relatively accurate, even if the “right” was only created out of whole cloth recently on the part of the judiciary.

What bugs me, obviously, is the “Fiscal Impact” statement.

Last I checked, Jerry Brown was an absolute failure as a former Governor as well as a former Mayor of Oakland, yet he somehow ended up as the state AG (more than likely because he got the Democratic nomination; few Republicans win statewide office in CA). He is not an economist, or particularly well-versed in fiscal matters (as if the “former California Governor” thing wasn’t a dead giveaway enough). Yet why would he sign off on a statement with ultimately no clear impact, just a handful of weasel words?

I have no problems with a state AG modifying ballot proposal language to more clearly illuminate the issues being addressed, but to inject personal opinion to it one way or another is unconscionable.

What I would like to see is, no more and no less, a word-for-word layout of the wording intended to be put in the state Constitution, and let the voters decide. I don’t care about the logistics of it, or the amount of reading this may require; an informed voter is an informed voter. Obviously, I also do not have much faith in the state’s Department of Finance, who draw up the impact statements. (This “unknown millions in costs” statement also appears in Proposal 2, an animal-rights-led farm reform proposal, Proposal 4, a bill to require parental notification for a minor’s abortion, and Proposal 9, a victim’s rights proposal requiring victim notification and opportunity for input in sentencing, probation, and/or parole hearings.)

Having one miserable wretch of a career politician substitute his own preferences for the task of accurately presenting a ballot initiative to the voters is not only unconscionable, but a dereliction of his duties as California Attorney General.

For those of you wondering, yes, I am well aware that bottled water has quickly become the bête noire of the environmental movement, and that can be understood. If there are local concerns about what a water diversion plan of this scale would mean to the surrounding ecosystem, then those are things that should be heard before operations move forward. If the citizenry have decided that environmental impact is valuable enough to offset the economic benefit from such a facility’s operations, then so be it; it’s their priorities, after all.

But what in the blazes does it have to do with global warming? It’s not like they’re, say, manufacturing the bottles on site. The only greenhouse gas emissions related to the operations that are above and beyond a typical office building would be related to commuters going to work there, not from anything the facility would be doing.

Could it be a knee-jerk reaction to bottled water? Possible. Could there be some nativist resentment over the plant (it will be operated by Swiss-owned Nestlé S.A.)? Possible. Could there be some bureaucratic conflict of interest (i.e. somebody is angling for the site to be used by some other business or social interest)? Also possible; after all, progressivism and heavy-handed conflicts of political interest go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Is global warming being used as a whitewash for whatever reasons somebody has for scotching the development? You better believe it.

Cross-posted at The Corner Keyboard.

1. Mitt Romney is not particularly strong on social issues like gay marriage and abortion. Romney admits to developing a pro-life position only within the last decade and was governor when the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, both things that make some in the Evangelical community skittish. Never mind that Romney’s position on abortion as governor was to the right of McCain’s, or that Romney led an unsuccessful effort to overturn the gay marriage legalization in Massachusetts – it’s a “what have you done for me lately?” sort of a proposition. Needless to say, by that metric, Romney is especially weak.

2. Evangelical leaders have other people in mind. Namely, in the case of some leading megachurch pastors, there is a push for former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist minister running on a populist platform, to be McCain’s VP candidate. Although eventually picking up a handful more delegates than Romney, Huckabee’s appeal was largely limited to the Deep South, and stayed in the race for about two months longer than Romney did, largely relying on a rather impressive grassroots network. As much as I think that Huckabee would be a terrible candidate (he seems less Ronald Reagan and more Jimmy Carter), I can’t begrudge people their own personal preferences. I’d just prefer they be more open about it.

3. Mitt Romney is a Mormon. Some religious leaders are suspicious of Romney’s Mormon faith, considering him to not be a Christian, and therefore diminished in standing in their eyes. Personally, I find this to be, in some ways, analogous to anti-Catholic sentiment prior to JFK’s electoral victory in 1960, and just as baseless. I am less interested in what a politician might do with respect to a particular religion than I am concerned about how that politician will impact America as a whole for better or for worse. I am a Christian of an Evangelical stripe, but I cannot begrudge somebody who is sincere in their religious faith.

The main weight behind these threats is that Evangelical leaders will encourage their followers to stay home on Election Day if a VP candidate not to their liking is selected. And then what? Have Barack Obama elected? As dicey as some may think Romney is on sanctity of life issues, even the most strident pro-lifer would have to agree that most any Republican is better on the issue than Obama, who carries a 100% rating from the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). Also, the power on most social issues rests from judicial appointments, which are the domain of the President, not the Vice President. Considering John McCain is a potential mixed bag on judges, it’s possible that those lines of thinking should have been considered long before making McCain the presumptive nominee. In fact, adding Huckabee to the ticket could possibly have the disastrous effect of having economic conservatives either stay home or vote Libertarian, with the only options on the Republican ticket being somebody with an inconsistent record and one with almost no record, but a wide streak of populist, protectionist rhetoric.

Of course, this may all be for naught – McCain has made a career out of not making friends with the Evangelical community, and whatever direction they try to prod him into may end up causing the exact opposite to take place.