Nancy Pelosi:

You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other.  But I don’t know if you have heard that it is legislation for the future, not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America, where preventive care is not something that you have to pay a deductible for or out of pocket.  Prevention, prevention, prevention—it’s about diet, not diabetes. It’s going to be very, very exciting.

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.

Emphasis added (by Reason magazine), and it speaks for itself.  No matter what they tell you about the bill, they’re not telling you everything.  No matter what they say it’ll cost, they won’t say all of it.  "Trust us to overhaul the health care insurance industry, with a bill made with back-room deals with unions, and bribes for votes."

Yeah, right.  It’s huge and it’s shrouded, and it’s a classic carnival huckster method.  How can people actually fall for this?

Should something as huge as the remaking of the healthcare system in America be done in such a "unipartisan" manner?  Ask Barack Obama.  That was then:

And this is now:

White House officials tell ABC News that in his remarks tomorrow President Obama will indicate a willingness to work with Republicans on some issue to get a health care reform bill passed but will suggest that if it is necessary, Democrats will use the controversial "reconciliation" rules requiring only 51 Senate votes to pass the "fix" to the Senate bill, as opposed to the 60 votes to stop a filibuster and proceed to a vote on a bill.

So then, it requires a "sizeable majority" so long as it doesn’t take too long.  Then all bets are off.  Gotcha.

There are those who say that our government is "us", so to speak, and thus if health care reform passes, it’s because we wanted it.  Well, except that a majority of us don’t.  This isn’t representative government.  Yes, the general idea did enamor more folks when it first hit Congress, but the more people know about it, the less they have wanted it.  With one exception, opposition to it has been over 50% since the middle of September, and peaked over 50% often before that. 

Most of us don’t want this monstrosity.  But Obama is more than willing to shove aside his principles of good governance, and do precisely what he accused Bush and Rove of, in order to get his way.  Representative government indeed.

Otherwise known as the Health Care Summit.

Bruce McQuain at Q&O has a good round-up of the day’s talkfest. 

I’ve been watching and/or listening to the health care summit today and it became fairly obvious from the opening bell that there wasn’t going to be much of anything worthwhile or substantive accomplished – not that I’m surprised.   5 hours into it, it has been mostly the exchange of talking points.

Did anybody really think this was anything more than a very long press conference?  Or perhaps a fig leaf of "transparency" for a bill that has been worked out almost entirely in back rooms.

One thing I thought was interesting was that tort reform, often handwaved away as not really saving much, was shown to be something that, if Democrats are serious about controlling costs and not beholden to the trial lawyers, should be in any reform bill.

Republicans have argued for tort reform for medical malpractice. Democrats (Dick Durbin in particular) have argued against it. McCain used the Texas model to make the point for tort reform. Texas, which has instituted tort reform has seen malpractice premiums reduced by 27% and has had a net gain of 18,000 doctors – extrapolated nationally using direct savings (malpractice insurance premium cost) and indirect savings (reduction of the “defensive medicine” practiced by doctors) the amount saved could be in the $150 billion range.

Certainly worth putting in if the Democrats are serious.  We’ll see.

In going through anecdote after anecdote trying to prove their points, it seems one Democrat got the wrong moral of the story.

Chris Dodd is now telling a story about a guy who privately put together a small business health care association in CT. Of course the point lost on him as he argues for the government to act is it was done privately and perhaps the government’s role ought to be enabling that. Rep. Joe Barton is now making that point.

Local solutions to local problems, not one-size-fits-all square pegs in round holes.  Give the people the freedom to get done what they need to, and whadaya’ know; they will!

Bottom line – no bi-partisan attempt on either side to reach a compromise. And again, that’s fine.

Amen to that.

When Democrats in Congress refused to vote for Republican bills during the Bush administration, they’d often cite the President’s poor approval rating numbers as demonstrating that the country didn’t want what Republicans were selling.  Never mind that their own approval ratings were often lower, that reason was used as a bludgeon over and over.

While Obama’s number have been tanking faster than any President in half a century, he’s not at Dubya-depths yet.  (Though, stay tuned.) Congress, however, can only pine for those heady days of 20-something approval.

Voter unhappiness with Congress has reached the highest level ever recorded by Rasmussen Reports as 71% now say the legislature is doing a poor job.

That’s up ten points from the previous high of 61% reached a month ago.

Only 10% of voters say Congress is doing a good or excellent job.

I don’t think legislation passage should necessarily be tied to approval ratings, but if you live by the polls, you’ll die by the polls. Will this Democratic Congress judge itself by the same standard it holds others to?

(Hint: No.)

Hey, what’s a few more cases of breast cancer when something so important as the "right" to an abortion is on the line?  For some, that’s just a necessary tradeoff.

A women’s group is asking Congress and the Obama administration to investigate the expose’ showing how a top National Cancer Institute researcher recently admitted that abortion causes a 40% breast cancer increase risk but organizing a meeting to get the NCI to deny it.

As LifeNews.com reported earlier this month [January], the main NCI activist who got the agency to deny the abortion-breast cancer link has co-authored a study admitting the abortion-breast cancer link is true, calling it a "known risk factor."

The study, conducted by Jessica Dolle and NCI official Louise Brinton, appears in the April 2009 issue of the prestigious cancer epidemiology journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.

The Dolle study, conducted with Janet Daling of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, cited as accurate Daling’s studies from 1994 and 1996 that showed between a 20 and 50 percent increased breast cancer risk for women having abortions compare to those who carried their pregnancies to term.

Now, the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer informed LifeNews.com today it is sending a letter, signed by doctors and pro-life organizations to President Obama and the leaders of Congress calling for an investigation of the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

Karen Malec, the head of the group, told LifeNews.com the letter "puts political leaders on notice of a discrepancy between what the National Cancer Institute says about the breast cancer risks of abortion … and what Louise Brinton, the NCI’s Chief of the Hormonal and Reproductive Epidemiology Branch, has reported in her research."

"The letter asks Congress to investigate the NCI’s failure to issue timely warnings about breast cancer risks and asks political leaders to remove public funding for abortion from all legislation being considered by this Congress," she said.

The truth doesn’t matter to these people.  What’s more important is the freedom to kill their inconvenient children.  Are those the kind of politics your vote supports?

From James Taranto’s “Best of the Web Today” column, a must-read column:

How did Barack Obama manage to kick off his presidency by making exactly the same disastrous mistake Bill Clinton made 16 years earlier? One answer is that Obama thought Clinton’s health-care errors were tactical rather than strategic, and that correcting these–by letting Congress write the bill, or by cutting deals with industry groups in exchange for their support–would be sufficient to ensure success.

But if Rep. Marion Berry is right, the answer may be as simple as sheer hubris. Berry, an Arkansas Democrat first elected in 1996, announced over the weekend that he won’t seek re-election. In an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, reprinted by Politico, Berry, who was an “aye” in the House’s 220-215 vote for ObamaCare Nov. 7, recounts his unsuccessful efforts to persuade the White House to pursue more moderate policies:

Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs “off into that swamp” of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home.

“I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.”

“You’ve got me.” In fairness, one can see why Obama might have been overly impressed with himself. Here’s a guy who became president of the United States just four years out of the Illinois Senate, and along the way developed a cultlike following. It sounds as though Obama became a follower as well as figurehead of his own cult of personality. He overestimated the degree to which he was special as opposed to lucky–a very human failing.

Indeed, he’s only human.  His followers, however, bought into the image hook, line, sinker and fishing pole.  It was willful blindness, as they couched their ignorance in the heady thought of electing the first African-American President.  It was all about feeling good about what you were doing, rather than about policies and programs and party planks.  And now the Democrats are paying the price for promoting it.

As it turns out, Berry understated the peril in which Obama was placing Democrats–not just in a conservative area like the First District of Arkansas (where John McCain topped Obama, 59% to 38%), but even in Massachusetts (Obama 62%, McCain 36%), where last week the Democrats could not hold Ted Kennedy’s former Senate seat. Even observers who have thought for some time that ObamaCare was bad news for Democrats were surprised that it was this bad.

Welcome to the real world, where even liberals are getting the idea that government is doing too much to try to “fix” things, many of which aren’t broken, and many of which the private sector can handle.  (Yes, those are poll results from last September, and they can certainly change, but the trend lines are really veering away from the “big government” mindset.)

Believing your own press is the worst thing that can afflict a politician, and Obama seems to have soaked it up.  This is why a liberal media can, indeed, sometimes hurt a Democrat; they butter him up with good press, and don’t reflect what the people think.  (It another proof that indeed the media lean liberal, causing this to happen.)  Then a Republican replaces Ted Kennedy and they’re shocked.

Good morning Democrats.  This your wake-up call.

Unless you’ve been living in a closet for 2 week, or are a die-hard Obama supporter trying to avoid the news, Scott Brown, the Republican, won the special election to fill the Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy.

Yes, that Ted Kennedy.

Was this simply a local election, judged solely on local issues?  I don’t think so, especially since Brown himself injected national issues into it when he said he would vote against health care "reform".  Yes, local issues played a part, but I think the national ones overshadowed them. 

This is Massachusetts, after all, one of the bluest of blue states, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 3.5 to 1, and where they were replacing a Democrat who’d held that seat for a generation. 

Polls a month ago put Coakley ahead by 20 points.  Brown then made it national, and all of a sudden the momentum shifted in a big way.  The payoffs, most notably to Senator Ben Nelson, didn’t help matters.

There are those that say conservatives shouldn’t get credit for Coakley’s defeat, and explain why the loss was mostly, if not wholly, due to disappointment by Democrats in Obama; what he promised vs. what he’s delivered.  The problem with that analysis is that not much on that front has changed in 3-4 weeks, when Coakley’s numbers tanked.  The issues noted in that blog post — military commissions, international surveillance, drug laws, sentencing reform, Gitmo’s closing, the Afghanistan war, anti-terror policies — have not substantially changed one bit since mid-December.  So you can’t really say that those are the issues that moved the voters.  A sea changed occurred, and there’s one thing, one major issue, that did change during that time; the health care "reform" bill. 

According to Rasmussen, 56% of voters thought that this was the most important issue.  Brown brought up the issue of voting against it, and once he did, voters flocked to his side.  Now true, some did so because they don’t like it at all, and some did so because they thought it didn’t go far enough.  Rasmussen notes:

Forty-seven percent (47%) favor the health care legislation before Congress while 51% oppose it. However, the intensity was clearly with those who are opposed. Just 25% of voters in Massachusetts Strongly Favor the plan while 41% Strongly Oppose it.

Fifty percent (50%) say it would be better to pass no health care legislation at all rather than passing the bill before Congress.

But the point here is this is Massachusetts, after all, where Democrats far outnumber Republicans and where Ted Kennedy was in a safe Senate seat for a generation.  And they’ve elected a man who says he’ll vote against the health care "reform" bill.  Conservatives, mostly of the Tea Party variety, have been getting the word out on how awful this bill will be, and while the opinion polls have gone against it, now, more importantly, the voters have as well, pulling off what’s been called an epic upset. 

Will Democrats in Washington get the message?  We’ll see.

Information gleaned from Wikipedia should always be taken with a grain of salt.  As much as open-sourcing a knowledge base has certainly given the site a well-deserved reputation for being a first-stop in doing research, this situation points out (again) that bias can creep in, even with multiple hands contributing.

Lawrence Solomon at the National Post writes about a topic that WUWT readers have known about for a long time: How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles.

We’ve known for some time that Wikipedia can’t be trusted to provide unbiased climate information. Solomon starts off by talking about Climategate emails.

The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.

He then focuses on RealClimate.org co-founder William Connolley, who has “touched” 5,428 Wikipedia articles with his unique brand of RC centric editing….

It just seems that almost all the time, especially for highly-political issues, the censorship winds up leaning to the left.  This goes against what the Left says they stand up for; truth, free-speech, the marketplace of ideas, blah blah blah.  It’s just that when many of them are given power over ideas they do precisely what they accuse of Right of doing; censoring, silencing dissent, and all that.  Textbook projection.

But at least the "many eyes" principle, of having many editors attempt to ensure fairness and full disclosure, is working.  Now, at least.  It’s too bad that it took a major Canadian newspaper to finally get some traction in this particular case, and that the editors at Wikipedia were blind to it, but at least we might get some pullback from the bias.  Now, at least.

Even as the ObamaCare vote is delivered to us on Christmas Eve, HotAir provides a list of the payoffs… payoffs for votes, that is. From Investors.com,

Sen. Mary Landrieu was the new “Louisiana Purchase.” Sen. Ben Nelson got the federal government to pick up his state’s future Medicaid tab. Maybe we should just put Senate votes up on eBay.

Take the time to peruse the entire greedy list.

Understand, though, that this is simply politics as usual, and not the bipartisan change we were promised.

HT: VerumSerum

That was then…

"The big step by extremists will be an attempt to eliminate the filibuster."–former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, New York Times, March 29, 2005

…and this is now.

"We need to take on the way the Senate works. The filibuster, and the need for 60 votes to end debate, aren’t in the Constitution. . . . So it’s time to revise the rules."–former Enron adviser Krugman, New York Times, Dec. 18, 2009

Which James Taranto labels "his first-ever accurate prediction."  I’d call it evidence of how heavy a role politics plays into Krugman’s thoughts on economics.  He’s more political pundit than economist.

Via HotAir, Boxer makes it clear she considers a male’s access to viagra equivalent to that of a woman’s access to abortion. Excuse me, ma’am, but your weak comparison should be directed, following your line of thinking, to that of the pill, and not abortion.

Apparently we are heading to a New York show trial of a infamous Guantanamo Bay resident. Some years earlier, a famous essay by Hannah Arendt to whit, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which highlighted another show trial. In that former trial, to the discerning observer if not to the general audience, political ethics and the public/personal normative framing were highlighted. The prospects seem low, especially given the pre-trial protestations of an assurance of a guilty verdict by Mr Holder, of any such public debate and discussions about political ethics on the public stage. Earlier I queried an interlocutor in conversation over up-coming civil show trial what was his evaluation of the considerations involved in the detainment, processing, and treatment of illegal combatants. Read the rest of this entry

No, not as in golfing.  I’m going to be quite busy this week, so blog posts this week will consist mostly of a collection of links that I happen across.

John Mark Reynolds, writing at the Evangel blog, wonders about that prediction that Christians would become a fringe political force if they stuck with their position on same-sex marriage.  This after Maine, of all places, upheld traditional marriage.  Not mentioned is that the House of Representatives barely squeaked out a health care bill (passing it with only 2 votes to spare) only after a provision was added that prevented abortion from being covered by it.  Wasn’t that supposed to be a losing issue, too?

October, 2009 was the 3rd coldest October recorded in the US.  Can we officially chuck those computer climate models and just admit we don’t really know what’s going on with climate, and thus should refrain from making pronouncements on what is or isn’t changing it?

Racist graffiti, and Al Sharpton isn’t all over CNN denouncing it?  Oh, wait, it’s anti-white graffiti.  Well then, nothing to see here.

Attorney General Eric Holder is endorsing extending provisions of the Patriot Act including roving wiretaps.  It’s one thing to talk it down when you’re not in the hot seat.  It’s another thing entirely when it’s your responsibility, eh?

The European Union, as a whole, could sink underneath the waves of debt very soon, having total debt equaling 100% of its annual gross domestic product.  A special commission "discovered" that a major reason is the socialist pensions and healthcare that the government guarantees.  And we want to follow them into this whirlpool?

And finally, the legacy of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, and a musing about whether or not political correctness will allow a candid and honest public discussion, or if more people will die at the PC altar.

"Big Hollywood" documents the latest in a long line of videos showing children singing Obama’s praises.  The videos get more and more fawning, and the kids get younger, as you move down.  Unfortunately, some of the videos have been removed, but the transcripts are still there.  Words like:

Michelle wants her daughters to think their own things. She doesn’t want their colors to do it instead. The 44th President of the USA because he beat Senator John McCain. Obama in charge of the oval office. He told Bush and his cabinet to get off this. A – a-a-a-aay. Obama is President of the USA-aaaay. Tomorrow’s a new day – ay – ay- ay- ay. And we’re living our life.

And these 11(!) videos are just the latest they’ve been made aware of.  You expect this sort of thing out of China and North Korea.  (But, thanks to George W. Bush, not from Iraq anymore.)