Dan Perrin at RedState laments the very real possibility that Harry Reid has his 60 votes for health care "reform".

Word is rampant among the Senate leadership, as well as is being reported by the Wall Street Journal, that Senator Reid has got to 60 votes on cloture on the Senate ObamaCare bill.

The question of whether we live in a country ruled by leaders who refuse to listen, but do what they believe is in their own interest, has been answered.

Conservatives hate this bill. Progressives and liberals hate it too. The public is solidly against it.

But it does not matter, apparently. The implications of a country in open revolt against this bill and the elite in the Democratic party giving the public the finger are profound.

The Daily Kos and FireDogLakes of the net could not produce a single Democratic Senator or Independent to vote no. Conservatives could not produce a single Democratic Senate vote against cloture. Neither could the general public. Perhaps the left can still get one of their own to kill this nightmare. Is there not a single Dem Senator who will stand with the public, or is this merely a quaint notion we used to have about our country — that the system responds to the public?

And they have 60 votes for a bill that hasn’t even been CBO-scored yet.  The vote hasn’t come yet, so there’s still time for some reasonable Democrats to become unable to stomach the massive price tag for this.  In the meantime…

The world will understand America has changed. Our country is now run by elites who are printing money, debasing our currency to throw at massive new spending and deficit creating programs — and actually believe they are both moral and politically smart. Just 19% of the public believes this plan will not increase the deficit.

What comes next is very discomforting to think about. But we have now crossed that line from what our country was into something else, and that something else has nothing whatsoever with the country being a Republic. There will be a reckoning for this, and it will not be pleasant — not for anyone.

(Emphasis in original.)  We’ve lost a lot of ground in the slippery slope of elitist rule.

People generally quote the non-partisan CBO score when trying to figure out how much a bill will cost us.  But Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute notes that, since the CBO is quite transparent, showing how it calculates its scores, Congressional Democrats are gaming the system to make the Senate bill look far cheaper than it really would be.

For some time, I’ve suspected the answer is that congressional Democrats have very carefully tailored their individual and employer mandates to avoid CBO’s definition of what shall be counted in the federal budget. Democrats are still smarting over the CBO’s decision in 1994.  By revealing the full cost of the Clinton plan, the CBO helped to kill the bill.

Since then, keeping the cost of their private-sector mandates out of the federal budget has been Job One for Democratic health wonks.  While head of the CBO, Obama’s budget director Peter Orszag altered the CBO’s orientation to make it more open and collaborative.  One of the things about which the CBO has been more open is the criteria it uses to determine whether to include mandated private-sector spending in the federal budget.  The CBO even published a paper on the topic.  Read this profile of Orszag by Ezra Klein, and you’ll see that those criteria were also a likely area of collaboration with lawmakers.

The Medical Loss Ratios memo is the smoking gun.  It shows that indeed, Democrats have been submitting proposals to the CBO behind closed doors and tailoring their private-sector mandates to avoid having those costs appear in the federal budget.  Proposals that would result in a complete cost estimate — such as the proposal by Sen. Rockefeller discussed in the Medical Loss Ratios memo — are dropped.  Because we can’t let the public see how much this thing really costs.

Crafting the private-sector mandates such that they fall just a hair short of CBO’s criteria for inclusion in the federal budget does not reduce their cost, nor does it make those mandates any less binding.  But it dramatically reduces the apparent cost of the legislation.  It is the reason we’re all talking about an $848 billion Reid bill, rather than a $2.1 trillion Reid bill.

All the promises of reducing the total deficit or paying for the bill with Medicare cuts are as much smoke and mirrors (and outright lies) if the base cost of the bill is fudged.  You’re being led down the primrose path by folks who know full well you wouldn’t support it if you knew how much it was really going to cost.

While one could easily dismiss the Obama Party Crashers incident as administration ineptness, let’s hope that officials within the administration treat it with the seriousness it deserves.

An inept guard was responsible for Lincoln getting shot as he allowed Booth to approach the unsuspecting president. Is it so unreasonable to think that either or both of these two individuals could have harmed President Obama had that been their intent?

Despite who might happen to occupy the White House, the office of the Presidency of the United States should not be treated with flippancy. State events should not be viewed as challenges to crash as if it were some “reality TV” contest.

Our culture may view the incident as mildly humorous. Our enemies, I fear, may see it in a completely different light.

That’s what the German’s pay, and yet their system has long ago run out of money.

Germany’s system relies on a handful of state-supported health insurers. This week they informed the government that the system was on the brink of a financial shortfall equal to nearly $11 billion.

Pointedly, the insurers made clear that cutbacks alone won’t solve the problem. They said the government would have to consider raising premiums on the insured or, you guessed it, raise taxes. Currently, German workers pay a fixed-rate premium into the insurance scheme; that rate is now set at 14.9% of gross pay.

Chancellor Merkel, something of a political acrobat, was previously allied in coalition with leftist Social Democrats. She’s now resisting calls from the Free Democrats to get off the state-pulled health-care train. The FDP’s spokesman on health, Daniel Bahr, wants a "shift in direction away from state-run medicine." Why? Because "the current financial figures have showed us that the health-care fund doesn’t work."

"Doesn’t work."  Please someone inform the Senate Democrats of this.

Now we know where that annoying campaign slogan was really coming from:

Source: GraphJam

I’ve heard some folks say that they’d happily pay their part to get health insurance for everyone.  The only problem is, they think that it’s just a matter of money; a few (or a whole bunch of) extra bucks out of their paychecks.  But there’s more to it than that.  Republicans have come out with some numbers that show this is a bit more costly than that.  A sampling:

5.5 million — Number of jobs that could be lost as a result of taxes on businesses that cannot afford to provide health insurance coverage, according to a model developed by Council of Economic Advisors Chair Christina Romer

$1.055 trillion — New federal spending on expanded health insurance coverage over the next ten years, according to a Congressional Budget Office preliminary score of the bill

0.7% — Percentage of all that new spending occurring in the bill’s first three years-representing a debt and tax “time bomb” in the program’s later years set to explode on future generations

$88,200 — Definition of “low-income” family of four for purposes of health insurance subsidies

114 million — Number of individuals who could lose their current coverage under the bill’s government-run health plan, according to non-partisan actuaries at the Lewin Group

And what about paying for all of this with Medicare fraud reduction?

$60 billion — Loss sustained by taxpayers every year due to Medicare fraud, according to a recent 60 Minutes expose; the government-run health plan does not reform the ineffective anti-fraud statutes and procedures that have kept Medicare on the Government Accountability Office’s list of high-risk programs for two decades

Zero — Prohibitions on government programs like Medicare and Medicaid from using cost-effectiveness research to impose delays to or denials for access to life-saving treatments.

That silly talk about "death panels"?

$634 Billion — Amount that could be saved by denying individuals access to treatments that are not “cost-effective,” according to a report by the liberal Commonwealth Fund; Section 1160 of the bill gives bureaucrats in the Obama Administration virtual free rein to develop a new “high-value” reimbursement system for Medicare by May 2012

Your money would be buying more government intrusion, less freedom, subsidies for those "poor" making $80,000 a year, expansion of unemployment, and a price tag that, while it may feel good at the beginning, will hit up-and-coming wage earners the hardest. 

Happily pay for this?  Really?

This has to be one of the most clever anti-Obamacare ads I have seen yet:

Source

If government healthcare reform passes, then we can kiss our freedoms goodbye according to Judge Andrew Napolitano:

Congress recognizes no limits on its power. It doesn’t care about the Constitution, it doesn’t care about your inalienable rights. If this health care bill becomes law, America, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it, and privacy as you have enjoyed it will cease to be.

Last week the House of Representatives voted on a 2,000 page bill to give the federal government the power to micromanage the health care of every single American. The bill will raise your taxes, steal your freedom, invade your privacy, and ration your health care. Even the Republicans have introduced their version of Obamacare Lite. It, too, if passed, will compel employers to provide coverage, bribe the states to change their court rules, and tell insurance companies whom to insure.

We do not have two political parties in this country, America. We have one party; called the Big Government Party. The Republican wing likes deficits, war, and assaults on civil liberties. The Democratic wing likes wealth transfer, taxes, and assaults on commercial liberties. Both parties like power; and neither is interested in your freedoms.

Think about it. Government is the negation of freedom. Freedom is your power and ability to follow your own free will and your own conscience. The government wants you to follow the will of some faceless bureaucrat.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

We’re spending trillions on both a stimulus that isn’t stimulating and a (so far, potential) co-opting of the health insurance industry.  And President Obama has the gall to say this:

President Barack Obama gave his sternest warning yet about the need to contain rising U.S. deficits, saying on Wednesday that if government debt were to pile up too much, it could lead to a double-dip recession.

To whom was he giving this "sternest warning"?  His own party, with his own approval, has been doing this! 

"It is important though to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession," he said.

"If I don’t stop doing this, I’m grounded!  I’m serious!"

So spending hasn’t fixed anything, and it looks like maybe, just maybe, the fella’ may yet have some sense in him.

His administration was considering ways to accelerate economic growth, with tax measures among the options to give companies incentives to hire, Obama said in the interview with Fox conducted in Beijing during his nine-day trip to Asia.

Tax cuts spurring employment?  Who would have thought?  Well, conservatives have always thought that, but besides them?

Remember "Paul Harvey News and Comment" on the radio?  (Or am I showing my age?)  At least that guy had the guts to let you know that he had commentary in his show, unlike some journalists these days that sneak it in.  Well, no hiding it here.  This is "Doug Payton Links and Comment".

Becky Garrison, writing at the liberal "God’s Politics Blog", on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, says that "more walls need to fall".  Fair enough, and I’d tend to agree with that.  But sometimes walls are necessary, and are the least intrusive method of dealing with an actual problem.  They can protect more so than divide.  One of the walls that Ms. Garrison says needs to come down is the Israeli wall on the West Bank.  Meryl Yourish, however, compares these two types of walls — Berlin vs. Israeli — and notes major differences in the motivation and the result of each.  The Christian Left perhaps needs to understand a little nuance here.

Dale Franks, writing at Q&O, notes that the supposed upside of the government takeover of Chrysler, and subsequent sale of a large portion to Fiat, hasn’t, and looks like it won’t, materialize.  Your government, and your money, at work flushed away.

An insufficiently colorful color guard.  Scott Johnson at Power Line point out political correctness in the smallest aspect of our lives.  (And he needs to because the media doesn’t seem to want to notice it.  Or it looks on with admiration and doesn’t consider it news.)

For all the accusations of hate directed at the Right, and the religious Right in particular, Jeff Jacoby points out that they don’t hold a candle to the irreligious Left.

President Obama doesn’t think that the prospect of jail time over choosing not buying government-mandated health insurance (and likely choosing not paying the fine) is not the "biggest question" Congress is facing now.  Yeah, no big deal.  (Riiight.)  And in an Irony Alert, candidate Obama criticized Hillary Clinton for proposing a health care system with a mandatory purchase requirement. 

The New York Times has no problem calling Jim DeMint a "conservative Republican", but decides that Bernie Sanders, a self-described "socialist", is only a "left-leaning independent".  Courage and truth from that liberal media.

A new ad will begin to run nationally today that makes the case that the government has no business getting any further into running healthcare given how they’ve handled the H1N1 flu vaccine shortage (as well as sending vaccine to Gitmo detainees before American citizens) (hat tip: Michael Goldfarb):

It’s a great ad and makes a very salient point. For all the talk about how widespread the H1N1 pandemic was supposed to be, the government sure seems to have been caught woefully unprepared in developing sufficient supplies of the vaccine. The ad reinforces what we already know: everything government does is going to be far less efficient and far more costly than they say it will be.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi insists that she is going to get a vote on healthcare reform over the weekend but one has to wonder what she thinks she is going to accomplish. According to the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, there are some Democrats who are questioning the wisdom in pushing ahead especially in light of Tuesday’s election results:

It’s one thing to be serene under fire, it’s another to be delusional.

More than a few Democrats in Congress are perplexed and worried that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is insisting on ramming through a 1,900-page health care bill on Saturday, just days after her party took heavy losses in Tuesday’s elections. “It reminds me of Major Nicholson, the obsessed British major in the film ‘Bridge on the River Kwai,'” one Democrat told me. “She is fixated on finishing her health care bridge even as she’s lost sight of where it’s going and what damage it could cause to her own troops.”

Indeed, the Speaker’s take on Tuesday’s off-year elections struck some of her own members as delusive “happy talk.” “From our perspective, we won last night,” a cheerful Ms. Pelosi told reporters, citing her party’s pick-up of a single House seat in a New York special election and retention of another strongly Democratic seat in California.

That’s not how many of her own troops see it. Democratic Rep. Parker Griffith of Alabama told Politico.com that members are “very, very sensitive” to the fact that the agenda being pushed by party leaders has “the potential to cost some of our front-line members their seats”

On health care, added New Jersey Democrat Bill Pascrell: “People who had weak knees before are going to have weaker knees now.”

Meanwhile, Republicans have outlined their own common sense and no-cost reform proposals that actually reform the health insurance system rather than turning the whole thing into another gigantic government bureaucracy.

Speaker Pelosi might just get her wish and see her bill pass the House. Chances are that even if she succeeds to keep enough Democrats together to pass it the bill will undergo vast changes in the Senate. More importantly, passage of a massively complex healthcare bill may fufill Democrats’ dreams of government healthcare but it will likely cause so many of their members to lose seats that they could be in the minority for many years to come. The key question will be how many Democrats are willing to risk political suicide for the sake of passing this bill. My guess is not many.

(With apologies to George Lucas and Star Wars episode 4.)

The President’s numerous, and recent, trips to Virginia and New Jersey notwithstanding, Republicans were elected governors of those states.  The thrill (up the leg) is gone one year on, and when policies instead of history-making is more of a draw, two conservatives are elected.  (Christie is very pro-life, and is the first Republican governor in 16 years.  McDonnell is the first Republican for Virginia in 8 years.)  While Democrats are saying that the reasons are mostly due to local issues, the fact that they brought in the President so much for these races tends to discount their own analysis.  Bringing in a President that both these states voted for in 2008 was not enough to get the job done. 

Hope and change indeed.  Just not the kind the President represents.

In the small but closely-watched race in New York’s 23rd district, where the Republican dropped out, only to endorse the Democrat, the fact that Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman managed to garner 45% of the vote is astounding.  Coming in only 4.5 points behind Democrat Bill Owens is amazing for a 3rd party candidate.  While it’s likely that some of the absentee ballots cast early, before Dede Scozzafava essentially dropped out, may have gone to Hoffman, it probably wouldn’t have been enough to win it.  The main issue here is that, as Brit Hume on Fox News Channel put it, this is why you have primaries.  Scozzafava was chosen by the party machine.  Clearly, the base, even in New York, is farther to the right than the party realizes.  When you run a good, conservative campaign, you can both energize the base and bring in independents (ask Ronald Reagan … or John McCain).  This is a tough, if small, loss in a district that has been reliably Republican, but the party dropped the ball and misread its constituents.

Still, giving up NY-23 for New Jersey and Virginia is a trade I’d take.

Closer to (my) home, the city of Atlanta is poised to elect it’s first white mayor in 35 years.  Mary Norwood got 46% of the vote last night, which kicks in a runoff in a few weeks with 2nd place challenger Kasim Reed.  For a long time, it has been my opinion that Atlanta needed an African-American mayor to avoid spurious charges of racism.  Freaknik, an annual party generally attended by college students from historically black colleges, was heavily curtailed by 1998 and ultimately relocated to Daytona Beach under Mayor Bill Campbell.  If he had been white, he would have been labeled "racist" and that would have been an unfair distraction from the actual debate.  As it was, he was labeled an "Uncle Tom" for doing so, even though residents of all colors agreed that it was getting out of hand.  He did what had to be done, all for good reasons, but I think the racial overtones would have not allowed a mayor to do the job properly.  That Atlanta seems ready to elect a white mayor is a good sign that the race issue is diminishing, but time will tell if Norwood is elected.

One issue-related referendum I’d like to point out is that in Maine (as liberal as they come in New England) they overturned a law (that had not taken effect  yet) that would legalize same-sex marriage.  By a 53-47 margin, the people rejected what the legislature had passed.  Yes, the people elected those legislators, but apparently the peoples’ representatives stopped representing them at some point.  As I understand it, when it comes to referendums, same-sex marriage is 0 for 31.  I’m detecting a trend.

And finally, in a much smaller race, blogger Scott Ott, evangelical Christian and author of the wonderful, satirical blog ScrappleFace, lost to the incumbent for County Executive of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania by the small margin of 49-51.  The election was decided by 1,000 votes among the 40,000 case.  Scott put up a great campaign, and for a first-time political-office-seeker, this is fantastic, and shows that his conservative principles, especially with regards to fiscal policy, hit a nerve.  I hope this is not the end of Scott’s political aspirations.

The latest war between the White House and Fox News has come to a truce, with the Press Secretary of the Nobel laureate for Peace and a senior VP for the news organization (I think I can still call it that) meeting together to call a cease-fire.  The website The Wrap notes, "No word whether the White House will backpedal on its pledge to keep Barack Obama from appearing on the News Corp. network until 2010."

Can’t face Fox, but claims to be able to face off against terrorists.  Indeed.