That was then:

BARACK OBAMA: …When you rush these budgets that are a foot high and nobody has any idea what’s in them and nobody has read them.

RANDI RHODES: 14 pounds it was!

BARACK OBAMA:  Yeah. And it gets rushed through without any clear deliberation or debate then these kinds of things happen.  And I think that this is in some ways what happened to the Patriot Act. I mean you remember that there was no real debate about that. It was so quick after 9/11 that it was introduced that people felt very intimidated by the administration.

This is now.

Facing criticism from both sides of the aisle that he’s pushing too hard and fast on health care reform, President Obama on Wednesday defended his "rush" to get it done and said Congress must take advantage of this rare opportunity.

"The stars are aligned," Obama said in prime-time news conference, and the American people are depending on Congress to reach a compromise promptly. He wants a deal by Congress’ August recess.

"If you don’t set deadlines in this town, things don’t happen. The default position is inertia," the president said, singling out his critics for playing political "games" with health care reform.

Versus, say, playing political "games" with national defense (without which, health care soon becomes moot). 

The old phrase goes, "What if they gave a war and nobody came?"  Well, here’s another:  What if they gave a universal health care support rally…

Local MoveOn.org members had penciled in on today’s schedule a protest in front of Senator John Cornyn’s Spring Valley Road office, during which they had hoped to pressure the senator to support President Barack Obama’s public health care legislation.

…and a tax protest broke out?  (I know, not as catchy.)

But when Paula Anderson, a MoveOn.org member and spokeswoman, showed up at 11:30 a.m., she found another contingent had beat her to the proverbial punch: A large number of Dallas Tea Party members were already set up, voicing their opposition to the proposal.

Anderson was stunned: "We really did not expect them to show up." She estimated the crowd at about 130. "From our perspective we took names of everyone there, and we had about 30 people," she told Unfair Park. "And I would assume they maybe had 100."

The Tea Party movement ain’t going away so easily.

Those campaign promises are reaching their expiration dates quite quickly.  Back during the campaign, Obama ran hard against Hillary Clinton’s mandatory health insurance.  PoliFact.com has the quotes.

"Hillary Clinton’s attacking, but what’s she not telling you about her health care plan? It forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can’t afford it, and you pay a penalty if you don’t," said one of his television ads .

His mailings made similar claims, which we rated Half True . At one campaign stop, Clinton waived the mailers and declared, "Shame on you, Barack Obama!"

"Meet me in Ohio," she added. "Let’s have a debate about your tactics and your behavior in this campaign."

Obama was vigorous in his attacks on Clinton for including an indvidual [sic] mandate in her plan. Now that the Democrats in the House have included a mandate in health reform legislation, he’s fine with it. He admitted he changed position in the interview with CBS. Full Flop!

All that talk of Hope and Change is really just subject to political expediency.  If you believed what he said, what you need to hope for is that he doesn’t change.  (If you didn’t, well then, this is not a real surprise.)

Gee, you think so?

The possibility that the President’s overexposure is hurting his message is not the big news story. The big story is that it took the media so long to catch on.

Hat tip: Hot Air

Y’know, that whole "signing statement" thing wasn’t apparently so bad after all.  So says one man who used to decry the use of it.

Congressional Democrats warned President Barack Obama on Tuesday that he sounded too much like George W. Bush when he declared this summer that the White House can ignore legislation he thinks oversteps the Constitution.

In a letter to the president, four senior House members said they were "surprised" and "chagrined" by Obama’s statement in June accompanying a war spending bill that he would ignore restrictions placed on aid provided to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Obama said he wouldn’t allow the provisions to interfere with his authority as president to conduct foreign policy and negotiate with other governments.

The rebuff was reminiscent of Bush, who issued a record number of "signing statements" while in office. The statements put Congress on notice that the administration didn’t feel compelled to comply with provisions of legislation that it felt challenged the president’s authority as commander in chief.

See, it’s not that it’s a bad thing in and of itself.  It’s just that it sounds so much like…well, you know.

"During the previous administration, all of us were critical of the president’s assertion that he could pick and choose which aspects of congressional statutes he was required to enforce," the lawmakers wrote. "We were therefore chagrined to see you appear to express a similar attitude."

Let’s see if this matters to him.

From current Vice President Joe Biden,

“And folks look, AARP knows and the people with me here today know, the president knows, and I know, that the status quo is simply not acceptable,” Biden said at the event on Thursday in Alexandria, Va. “It’s totally unacceptable. And it’s completely unsustainable. Even if we wanted to keep it the way we have it now. It can’t do it financially.”

“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said.

“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

Now, the essential liberal complaint against Sarah Palin is that she is simply too ignorantly stupid to be our Vice President, much less President.

Remind me again… how is Joe Biden a better choice?

Update: watch for yourself. I’m reminded of when Orange County, California went bankrupt, in 1990s, and the proposed “solution” was to levy a special tax. You see, this is the way liberal socialists think… government will solve the problem if they have enough money.

Funny how Sonia Sotomayor, the “wise Latina”, doesn’t know if one has a right to self defense, doesn’t seem to think that owning a gun is an individual right, yet believes the Constitution magically guarantees women the right to kill their unborn child…

I was driving through West Virginia and Kentucky last weekend and saw a number of signs advertising that some particular road improvement project was being funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act otherwise known as the “stimulus plan” or by its more derisive name Porkulus.

About half the projects I saw on the road appeared to have already been completed. The other half were in various states of progress.

But I couldn’t help wonder about the money spent on the signs. Turns out I’m not the only one. Frankly, I can’t see why the money was spent on the signs. But then again, this is the federal government and, as usual, nothing they do makes sense.

Perhaps the better thing to have done was to forgo buying the signs and spend more money fixing the roads.

I’m just saying…..

Yesterday, Senator Orrin Hatch, who has voted on 11 Supreme Court nominees, had very good opening remarks in the Sotomayor confirmation hearing.  His whole speech is worth reading (or watching, if you prefer), but I’d like to highlight a section where he notes that Senator Obama seemed to have a different standard for judicial nominees than he has today.  Senator Hatch pointed this out.

I have also found guidance from what may seem to some as an unusual source. On June 8, 2005, then-Senator Barack Obama explained his opposition to the appeals court nomination of Janice Rogers Brown, an African-American woman with a truly compelling life story who then served as a Justice on the California Supreme Court. Senator Obama made three arguments that I find relevant today.

First, he argued that the test of a qualified judicial nominee is whether she can set aside her personal views and, as he put it, “decide each case on the facts and the merits alone….That is what our Founders intended….Judicial decisions ultimately have to be based on evidence and on facts. They have to be based on precedent and on law.”

Second, Senator Obama extensively reviewed Justice Brown’s speeches off the court for clues about what he called her “overarching judicial philosophy.” There is even more reason to do so today. This is, after all, a nomination to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Judge Sotomayor, if confirmed, will help change the very precedents that today bind her as a U.S. Circuit Judge. In other words, the judicial position to which she has been nominated is quite different than the judicial position she now occupies.

This makes evidence, outside of her appeals court decisions, regarding her approach to judging more, not less, important. Judge Sotomayor has obviously thought, spoken, and written much on these issues and I think we show respect to her in taking that entire record seriously.

Third, Senator Obama said that while a nominee’s race, gender, and life story are important, they cannot distract from the fundamental focus on the kind of judge she will be. He said then, as I have said today, that we should all be grateful for the opportunity that our liberty affords for Americans of different backgrounds.

We should applaud Judge Sotomayor’s achievements and service to her community, her profession, and her country. Yet Senator Obama called it “offensive and cynical” to suggest that a nominee’s race or gender can give her a pass for her substantive views. He proved it by voting twice to filibuster Judge Janice Rogers Brown’s nomination, and then by voting against her confirmation. I share his hope that we have arrived at a point in our country’s history where individuals can be examined and even criticized for their views, no matter what their race or gender. If those standards were appropriate when Senator Obama opposed Republican nominees, they should be appropriate now that President Obama is choosing his own nominees.

But today, President Obama says that personal empathy is an essential ingredient in judicial decisions. Today, we are urged to ignore Judge Sotomayor’s speeches altogether and focus only on her judicial decisions. I do not believe that we should do that.

Indeed, Sen. Hatch continues on to note other double standards that Senator Obama applied, based, one can only imagine, solely on the way the judge is expected to rule on particular cases.  Democrats have politicized this process (just ask Robert Bork or Clarence Thomas), but Republicans, like Senator Lindsey Graham, have been much more fair (just ask Ruth Ginsberg), and indeed, as he said, "Now, unless you have a complete meltdown, you’re going to get confirmed." 

When George W. Bush was elected, Republicans defended his policy decisions, in part, with the phrase, "elections mean things".  If the country votes in a President, they vote in his policies and, if the occasion presents itself, Supreme Court nominees.  And so Graham also said, "But President Obama won the election and I will respect that."  Not as a rubber stamp, but the President does get the benefit of the doubt.  Republicans are being consistent in this, and in doing so are trying to hold back or reverse the politicization of the process that Democrats have pushed.

While watching Fox News cover the hearings, as each speaker began their remarks, you saw some information about them; personal information (age, service in politics, etc.), what they’ve said about Sotomayor, and how they voted in past Supreme Court nominees.  It was interesting to see how many Republicans voted for every nominee they ever saw, including Hatch’s 11 Yes votes, but how so many Democrats haven’t yet voted Yes.  In confirming Sotomayor, the Republicans will once again lead by example, hoping perhaps that the Democrats will see this and act likewise when the situation is reversed.  History does not seem to indicate that this will happen, but you can always hope.

So Mr Obama wants a national healthcare plan. The right opposes this and the left is doing it’s best to shut down debate and shunt discussion aside, because the objections are strong and many. However, the right might be using the wrong tactic. Perhaps the best tactic is to embrace the dark-side.

Mr Obama points out that with a National Healthcare plan that people like himself, i.e., the wealthy, would as he did for his grandmother still be able to pay for the care of their loved ones directly out of their pocket. Yet this is very problematic for his vision of nationalized healthcare. For it provides the essential loophole the rest of us need.

The rest of us, that is the normal working stiffs while on the first glance don’t have the wherewithall to have the ready cash to pay for emergency healthcare do in fact have the same. For, we are currently paying for all of our healthcare. The solution goes something like this:

1. An enterprising group of ordinary middle class people, who realize they can’t pay for emergency medical care which isn’t or is poorly covered by government coverage (or for example to skip to the head of the queue like the wealthy will be doing) will do what free people have done from the start. They’ll organize (an activity oddly enough Contitutionally protected).
2. By organizing in groups, collectively people can, uhm, spread their risk. Each will make monthly contributions to a collective pool, managed financially by a small number of administrators, who will figure costs, apportion and manage benefits, and invest funds. In fact there is a word for such organizations, they were formerly known and health care insurance companies. You might even find employers adding supplemental health care as a benefit to attract qualified, skilled, and attentive labor. I’d even go so far as to suggest that health care companies currently in place might jump at this market.
3. Mr Obama suggested that you can keep your current insurance. But this is not in fact what will occur. Your current insurance will magically transmute itself to be just supplemental insurance. If Mr Obama and the left decides this is dirty pool, it will become black market dirty pool, and I for one see know reasonable argument for why a person could not participate in such a market. If Mr Obama can use his ready cash … any schmoe should be able to join a risk pool to effectively do the same.
4. There is in fact a big fat plus to this plan. Supplemental insurance of this sort and in this market is completely (so far as I know) unregulated. It’s new unplowed ground. Unregulated health care markets are in fact exactly what Mr Obama thinks his plan is avoiding and also (not?) oddly enough exactly what I happen to think the health care market needs. Health care needs wild wooly unregulated markets to spur innovation. The unanticipated unregualted supplemental insurance market might provide at least a small sampling of this very thing.
5. Thus perhaps the best thing for the right to do is cede the healthcare proposal but fight for realistic cost controls and appraisals. That the taxes for this boondogle will not get out of hand, which will in turn cause the government insurance to cover and provide for in actuallity very little in the way of health care in the absence of supplemental income. This is actually what the right argues for, very minimal bare coverage for all and abillity to pay provides the caps on health care for the rest.

So the only stumbling block for this argument is one I don’t see as of yet. Is there any argument that would prevent supplemental insurance from springing up? Realistically I don’t see any difference between Mr Obama paying for his grandmother’s care and a group of people, in free association, collecting to provide the same and spreading the risk.

From Politico (HT: Holycoast), former Governor Mark Sanford writes,

Immediately after all this unfolded last week I had thought I would resign – as I believe in the military model of leadership and when trust of any form is broken one lays down the sword. A long list of close friends have suggested otherwise – that for God to really work in my life I shouldn’t be getting off so lightly. While it would be personally easier to exit stage left, their point has been that my larger sin was the sin of pride. They contended that in many instances I may well have held the right position on limited government, spending or taxes – but that if my spirit wasn’t right in the presentation of those ideas to people in the General Assembly, or elsewhere, I could elicit the response that I had at many times indeed gotten from other state leaders.

Imagine this statement by a some guy in DC bucking for a job in government:

I am a member of a private organization of male professionals from the profit, nonprofit and social sectors.  The organization does not invidiously discriminate on the basis of sex. Women are involved in its activities — they participate in trips, host events and speak at functions — but to the best of my knowledge, a woman has never asked to be considered for membership.

Would this disqualify the fellow, especially in the eyes of Democrats?  "Oh yeah, right.  No woman has ever asked to become a member?  Do you expect us to believe that?"

Well, here’s the actual quote, in the context of the news article.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor on Monday defended her membership in an all-female networking club, telling senators preparing for her Supreme Court confirmation hearing that the group did not discriminate in an inappropriate way.

Judge Sotomayor made the remarks in a cover letter for 10 documents the White House submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The papers supplement a trove of documents and videos, along with a response to a questionnaire, that she turned over earlier this month.

Her remarks indicate that some senators have taken an interest in her membership in the group, Belizean Grove, which she mentioned in the questionnaire response.

“I am a member of the Belizean Grove, a private organization of female professionals from the profit, nonprofit and social sectors,” Judge Sotomayor wrote. “The organization does not invidiously discriminate on the basis of sex. Men are involved in its activities — they participate in trips, host events and speak at functions — but to the best of my knowledge, a man has never asked to be considered for membership.”

Maybe this is why.

According to the Belizean Grove’s Web site, the group is a “constellation of influential women” who are building “long-term, mutually beneficial relationships.” It was founded as a counterpart to the all-male Bohemian Grove, a legendary club of elite politicians, businessmen and other leaders.

The group’s roughly 115 “grovers,” as members call themselves, include ambassadors and top executives of Goldman Sachs, Victoria’s Secret and Harley-Davidson. They meet each year for an annual retreat in Belize or another Central American destination, as well as occasionally in New York and other cities for outings described as “a balance of fun, substantive programs and bonding.” The group’s Web site does not appear to mention any roles for men.

Something tells me Democrats are about to suddenly get very tolerant of gender-based private organizations.

America has had a difficult history when it comes to racial issues and often the government has done more harm than good according to an excellent new book by Judge Andrew Napolitano entitled Dred Scott’s Revenge. Click here to read my review of the book.

Dred Scott’s Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America By Andrew Napolitano / Thomas Nelson

Mr Obama and those in his coterie want to press for a major shift in our healthcare system to one which far more strictly controlled by the government. I think Mr Obama’s interest in healthcare in this manner is likely a charitable impulse for the 10% at the bottom combined alas with a disregard for the state of the middle 85% which will likely be substantially harmed by this shift and the realization that those at the very top (of which he is one) will be unaffected. The question for future elections will be how well will the Democratic party be able to re-write history and shift blame for the disaster that this will become. For if they fail that project then their predicted demographic demise of the GOP will not occur, but that a decade from now the two-party system which naturally arises in the American project will not include one which coins itself the “Democratic party”.

In the interest of completeness, is should be pointed out that the AMA hawking for market control of healthcare is a somewhat disingenuous plea. The AMA strictly controls their medical school graduating population into the various specializations in a centralized manner attempting to predict and fix the markets and quantities of various specialty (and generalist) numbers. Their plea for market forces is more in the nature of a complaint that power which had been theirs might be lost.

Today it was noted (by a liberal blogger no less) that approximately 10% of medical expenses go the mostly loudly demonized portion of the industry, i.e., the pharmaceutical companies. Given the effects of the advances that internal medicine has been able to achieve in the last few decades if that the result of 10% of our expenditure … there should be no grounds for complaints. Those touting “gains” in efficiencies of the proposed system fail to recognized the following (or at least have failed to counter them in anything I’ve read):

• To get a drastic gain in efficiency has to mean that today there are drastic inefficiencies. To this matter, a question should be asked. In your visits in hospitals and doctors offices do you see Doctors the nursing staff just doing busy work? Or are they at at task dealing with patients? In my experiences with medical staff, one sees busy doctors and the industry standard “waiting room” time is on account of emergency and other over-booking and under estimates of the time it takes to deal with individual patients. The point is, if doctors and nurses and other practitioners don’t have idle time and are actually working close to capacity … where’s this big gain in medical capacity going to come from?
• It is claimed that government involvement will streamline and make the paper work and billing matters more efficient and more streamlined. Why just stating this doesn’t cause those touting this notion’s head to explode with the cognitive dissonance is beyond me. Government. Increased efficiency. Aren’t those antithetical concepts? There is no project, no task, no aspect of life in the past 2000 years that government bureaucracy has added efficiency and smoothed out the wrinkles. Less paperwork and lower costs with more government involvement. Riiiight. Name just one time in the past where that transpired.
• If improvements in medical costs and quality of care are to be actually realized, it’s going to be when more and more of your medical interactions are in the form of something more like a internet subscription service, i.e., far fewer doctors managing a largely automated network. It’s going to take real innovation and paradigm shifts in how medicine is done. So let me ask, will entrenching our medical culture and industrial complex into a large government beaurocracy will make things more or less amenable to large changes? Less likely seems the realistic answer. If you think the answer is “more likely” … again I’ve failed to even see this issue addressed anywhere … so what is the argument to that.
• Finally, the insistence that increased administrative efficiency and methodology is where the solution to the so-called healthcare problem is to be found is harmful in that it causes thousands if not millions of people to be looking for the solutions in the wrong place.

Here are three fatal flaws with every “unified government run” healthcare proposal such as the ones that the Democrats are pushing.

"Buyer’s remorse" is a phenomenon where, once a purchaser gets a product home and uses it, they decide it’s not living up to its potential, the advertising hype, or their expectations (realistic or otherwise).  According to Rasmussen, looks like America is getting a case of "Voter’s remorse".

Voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats on six out of 10 key issues, including the top issue of the economy.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 45% now trust the GOP more to handle economic issues, while 39% trust Democrats more.

This is the first time in over two years of polling that the GOP has held the advantage on this issue. The parties were close in May, with the Democrats holding a modest 44% to 43% edge. The latest survey was taken just after General Motors announced it was going into bankruptcy as part of a deal brokered by the Obama administration that gives the government majority ownership of the failing automaker.

Voters not affiliated with either party now trust the GOP more to handle economic issues by a two-to-one margin.

If voters didn’t realize that a President and a Congress in the hands of Democrats was going to be a big-spending perfect storm, they were just reading the advertising hype before casting their ballots.  Republicans certainly tarnished their "fiscal conservative" image in the last 8 years, no doubt about it.  But claims of "It would be worse with Democrats" is ringing true right on cue. 

And how about that "culture of corruption" that the Democratic party has tried hard to pin on Republicans?

Republicans also now hold a six-point lead on the issue of government ethics and corruption, the second most important issue to all voters and the top issue among unaffiliated voters. That shows a large shift from May, when Democrats held an 11-point lead on the issue.

There are others, and it’s worth reading.  Again I will say that most polls (or as fellow Stone Mark refers to them as, "cricket races") are simply a measure of emotion, and it’s also true in this case.  Polls that ask whether or not the economy is getting better measure what people think is happening.  What is really happening may be completely opposite to that. The general public, myself included, don’t know enough about economics to make the answer anything but a hunch.  But this poll is asking who people trust, which they, in fact, are experts on.  If the winds blow a different way tomorrow, these numbers could in fact change again.  However, the trend right now is that folks see where we’re heading, and they don’t like it.

Neither do the folks in Europe, where EU Parliamentary elections finished up recently.  This election, following the global financial crisis, shows which way the world leans when the find themselves in an economic pickle; to the Right.  The love affair with the Left and the Socialists has grown cold — more voter’s remorse — especially in France, which started a move to the Right with Sarkozy and continued with a crushing defeat for the Socialists, losing almost 20% of its French seats.  They may cheer Obama on the Left, but then they go home and vote Right when the chips are down.