Various & sundry

Won't we be happy when we don't have Harry Reid to kick around anymore? Harry's latest pronouncements: "They should stop crying about reconciliation as if it's never been done before." Also, we need to pass a jobs bill so unemployed men will stop beating their women.

Jennifer Rubin writes on the status of Obamacare. Steny Hoyer expresses his doubts and Rep. Jason Altmire reads the writing on the wall:

“Is she [Pelosi] going to be able to hold everybody that was for it before?” Altmire asked. “What about the marginal members in the middle who got hammered over this vote and would love a second chance to perhaps go against it?”

Jen-Ru concludes:

Well, let’s see if a health-care summit will magically change the hearts and minds of voters and House Democrats. If not, Obama will learn the hard way that it matters what you are proposing, not how many times you propose it.

You can hardly blame him. Magic is what got him elected in the first place. But the sham summit, or shmummit, is perhaps more about face-saving than it is about passing a bill.

Byron York counts the votes in the House and doesn't find enough for passage, but "nobody knows" how many votes Pelosi will manage to extract.

Peter Wehner doubts that it will pass, but sees it as bad news for the Dems either way:

No one is arguing that not passing Obama’s signature domestic initiative would reflect well on the president. A failure of this magnitude will undoubtedly damage him. But in this instance, with the White House having acted so ineptly, failing to pass ObamaCare is the best of bad options. Obstinacy on behalf of a bad and unpopular idea is a road to political ruin.

In redoubling his efforts to pass health-care legislation, Obama will be rejected — not simply by Republicans and the public but also, I suspect, by members of his own party. This in turn will further weaken his political standing. He will have looked obsessively out of touch, selfish, and narcissistic. But in the highly unlikely event that Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Majority Leader Harry Reid succeed in passing health-care legislation through the reconciliation process — if Democrats in the House are foolish enough to hitch their hopes to this liberal troika — there will be an even more fearsome political price to pay.

*Updating to add this from Cato's Michael Cannon: ObamaCare 3.0: Higher Implicit Taxes, Quicker Death Spiral

In addition, by requiring insurers to cover all applicants without regard to illness, each of these health plans would remove any penalty on waiting until you are sick to purchase coverage. Therefore — even after accounting for all relevant taxes, subsidies, and penalties — these plans would create large financial incentives for healthy people to drop out of the market, which would cause premiums to rise for those who remain. That would in turn encourage more healthy people to drop out, which would cause premiums to rise further, and so on. Those perverse incentives are much worse under the Obama plan than under the House or Senate bills. Here are the maximum financial incentives to drop coverage that each plan would create for families of four:

• Senate bill: $8,000
• House bill: $7,800
• Obama plan: $9,900
  

By increasing the financial incentives to drop coverage, the Obama plan would cause private insurance markets to unravel even faster than the House and Senate bills would.

Read the rest.


Read Mark Steyn on the deadly serious consequences of mass, multi-generational diversity brainwashing:

For 30 years we have watched as politically correct fatuities swallowed the entire educational system, while we deluded ourselves that it was just a phase, something kids had to put up with as the price for getting a better job a couple years down the road. The idea that two generations could be soaked in this corrosive bilge and it would have no broader impact was always absurd. When the chief of staff of the United States Army has got the disease, you're in big (and probably terminal) trouble.

Read the whole thing.

A glossary of political terms from Victor Davis Hanson:

partisan bickering—a period when conservatives are unexpectedly gaining the upper hand.

gridlock—a time when liberal legislation polls less than 50% among the American people.

bipartisanship—triangulating Republican legislators who join liberals on key legislation.

filibuster—a sometimes necessary Senate remedy to thwart reactionary excess—in its perverted form, unnaturally turned on progressives.

centrist—a Republican who votes for Democratic-sponsored legislation; to be distinguished from an opportunist, who, as a Democrat, votes for Republican-sponsored legislation.

Lastly, John Kass may not be afraid of those Chicago wiseguys but he's not as tough as he seems. (Related post here.)

Linked at Michelle Malkin (buzzworthy)

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