See for yourself at Ben Smith, "The Mother of All Biden Moments" (via Memeorandum). And a response to Bob Herbert, from The Lonely Conservative, "Oh, If Only We Could Be as Classy as Joe F#&^ing Biden."
Natch, the nihilists are down with it, "What's the fucking deal?"
BFD Hat Tip: Zazzle.
RELATED IDIOCY: Bob Herbert, "An Absence of Class" (via Memeorandum).
With the strokes of 20 pens, President Obama signed his health care overhaul — the most sweeping social legislation enacted in decades — into law on Tuesday during a festive, at times raucous, White House ceremony.
“We have just now enshrined, as soon as I sign this bill, the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care,” Mr. Obama declared in the East Room, before an audience of more than 200 Democratic lawmakers, White House aides and others who rode a yearlong legislative roller-coaster ride that ended with Sunday night’s House passage of the bill. They interrupted him repeatedly with shouts and standing ovations.
Moments later, the president sat down at a table, and affixed his left-handed, curlicue signature, almost letter by letter, to the measure, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, using 20 pens that he intended to pass out to key lawmakers and others as mementoes.
He was surrounded by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other top Democratic leaders, as well as some special guests: 11-year-old Marcelas Owens of Seattle, who became an advocate for health care reform after his mother died without health insurance, and Connie Anderson, the sister of Natoma Canfield, the Ohio cancer survivor whose struggle to pay skyrocketing premiums became a touchstone of Mr. Obama’s campaign to overhaul the system.
Vicki Kennedy, the widow of the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who had been a driving force for health care legislation before his death last year, was also by Mr. Obama’s side. Mrs. Kennnedy wore a blue plastic bracelet around her wrist that said “TedStrong,” and appeared emotional after the ceremony.
“I know how happy he would be,” she said of her husband, adding, “It was so meaningful for him, in a very personal way.”
The footage is from last year in Alhambra.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, my good friend Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute focuses on the similarities between Obamacare and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney’s health-care plan. But she ignores their more profound differences.I just met Mitt Romney. I'm reading his book, and I endorse it heartily. But to be clear: I'm just as wary of Romney as the next guy. I hammered him repeatedly in the 2008 primaries and to this day I consider Romney a fairly unprincipled flip-flopper. I nevertheless have always thought of him as a basically good and decent man. And I'm frankly impressed with Romney's new "No Apology" tour (he's campaigning as the antithesis of President Obama, and I love his aggressiveness against healthcare).
Both include an exchange, a subsidy for the poor, and an incentive for individuals to become insured, the so-called individual mandate.
The difference is that Romney’s plan did not raise taxes on individuals or businesses, didn’t cut Medicare, didn’t include “public options” or raise spending by a trillion dollars, and it didn’t impose insurance price controls. Romney’s plan made no attempt to take over health care. The Massachusetts legislation was a scant 70 pages long, compared to Obamacare’s gargantuan 2,000-page maze of regulation.
Perhaps most importantly, Romney’s plan is a state plan, not a one-size-fits-all federal usurpation of a power constitutionally reserved to the states. States should be free to adopt reforms that work for them. They can borrow the best ideas from one another. The federal government’s role is to be flexible about how their share of health-care dollars may be spent.
What Barack Obama has ushered into the American political landscape is not good for our country; in the words of an ancient maxim, “what starts twisted, ends twisted.”
His health-care bill is unhealthy for America. It raises taxes, slashes the more private side of Medicare, installs price controls, and puts a new federal bureaucracy in charge of health care. It will create a new entitlement even as the ones we already have are bankrupt. For these reasons and more, the act should be repealed. That campaign begins today.
According to the ANSWER website:
We will ... be making dozens of coffins with flags representing the multinational victims of U.S. wars of aggression, and many people and organizations are bringing coffins that they are making themselves. You can help make and carry coffins in the march by arriving at Hollywood and Vine between 11am and 12 noon.
And here's the flyer and map for the event, from ANSWER L.A., "On the 7th Anniversary of the Iraq War: U.S. OUT OF AFGHANISTAN & IRAQ NOW! STOP THE WARS!":
I have more pictures too, but this report, long already, is the major record.
The House’s passage of health care legislation late Sunday night assures that whatever the ultimate cost, President Obama will go down in history as one of the handful of presidents who found a way to reshape the nation’s social welfare system.
After the bitterest of debates, Mr. Obama proved that he was willing to fight for something that moved him to his core. Skeptics had begun to wonder. But he showed that when he was finally committed to throwing all his political capital onto the table, he could win, if by the narrowest of margins.
Whether it was a historic achievement or political suicide for his party — perhaps both — he succeeded where President Bill Clinton failed in trying to remake American health care. President George W. Bush also failed to enact a landmark change in a domestic program, his second-term effort to create private accounts in the Social Security system.
At the core of Mr. Obama’s strategy stands a bet that the Republicans, in trying to portray the bill as veering toward socialism, overplayed their hand. Fueled by the antigovernment anger of the Tea Party movement, Republicans have staked much on the idea that they can protect the country by acting as what the Democrats gleefully call the “Party of No.”
Now, armed with a specific piece of legislation that offers concrete benefits to millions of people — and that promises to guarantee insurance for many who found it unaffordable or unattainable — the White House and Democrats believe they may have gained the upper hand.
“This only worked well for the Republican Party if it failed to pass,” David Axelrod, one of the president’s closest political advisers, said at the White House as he watched the vote count for the final bill reach 219 in favor. “They wanted to run against a caricature of it rather than the real bill. Now let them tell a child with a pre-existing condition, ‘We don’t think you should be covered.’ ”
But there is no doubt that in the course of this debate, Mr. Obama has lost something — and lost it for good. Gone is the promise on which he rode to victory less than a year and a half ago — the promise of a “postpartisan” Washington in which rationality and calm discourse replaced partisan bickering.
Never in modern memory has a major piece of legislation passed without a single Republican vote. Even President Lyndon B. Johnson got just shy of half of Republicans in the House to vote for Medicare in 1965, a piece of legislation that was denounced with many of the same words used to oppose this one. That may be the true measure of how much has changed in Washington in the ensuing 45 years, and how Mr. Obama’s own strategy is changing with the discovery that the approach to governing he had in mind simply will not work.
Plus, from Dan Balz, "Historic Win or Not, Democrats Could Pay a Price" (via Memeorandum):
As the final round of the battle over health-care reform begins Sunday, President Obama and the Democrats are in reach of a historic legislative achievement that has eluded presidents dating back a century. The question is at what cost.Some not-too-smart leftists think ObamaCare will help Democratic political fortunes. That'd be funny, if it wasn't so sad.
By almost any measure, enactment of comprehensive health-care legislation would rank as one of the most significant pieces of social welfare legislation in the country's history, a goal set as far back as the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and pursued since by many other presidents. But unlike Social Security or Medicare, Obama's health-care bill would pass over the Republican Party's unanimous opposition.
Even Republicans agree on the magnitude of what Obama could pull off, while disagreeing on the substance of the legislation. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said: "Obviously, he will have achieved as president something nobody else has done. So in that sense, it's historic." But he added, "It doesn't end the health-care debate -- it just changes it. And if it does pass, it would be a historic mistake."
The lengthy and rancorous debate has inflicted considerable damage on the president and his party. It helped spark the grass-roots "tea party" movement and generated angry town hall meetings last summer that led to some opponents painting Obama as a socialist and a communist for advocating a greater government role in the health-care industry. The issue now is whether final passage of the legislation -- Senate leaders say they will take up the reconciliation bill this week -- will cause more harm or begin a turnaround in the Democrats' fortunes heading toward the November midterm elections.
Check CNN's links if you're not following along at home. Wolf Blitzer is anchoring developments. Check some folks on Twitter as well, where you're getting as close to real time as you're going to get. The press conference is starting now, 1:05pm!
President Obama is well on his way toward engineering a dramatic shift in ... American foreign policy, based on his underlying attitudes.Romney also discusses President Obama's rejection of American exceptionalism and his embrace of the thesis of America's relative international decline. Romney wants nothing to do with such talk:
The first of these envisions America as a nation whose purpose is to arbitrate disputes rather than to advocate ideals, a country consciously seeking equidistance between allies and adversaries. We have never seen anything quite like that, really. And in positioning the United States in the way he has, President Obama has positioned himself as a figure transcending America instead of defending America.
The sentiment manifests itself in several different ways, including President Obama's American Apology Tour. Never before in American history has its president gone before so many foreign audiences to apologize for so many American misdeeds, both real and imagined. It is his ways of signaling to foreign countries and leaders that their dislike for America is something he understands and that is, at least in part, understandable. There are anti-American fires burning all across the globe; President Obama's words are like kindling to them.
I reject the view that America must decline. I believe in American exceptional ism. I am convinced that we can act together to strengthen the nation, to preserve global leadership, and to protect freedom where it exists and promote it where it does not ...That passage previews the direction of the book. Romney's got a plan to restore the American economy, the health care system, the schools, etc. The book's a brisk read, and in that sense it's way less autobiographical that Sarah Palin's, Going Rogue.
You think that blue button-down is Romney's favorite shirt?
Nancy Pelosi’s Slaughter House convenes at 9am. The chaplain opened with a prayer that had this line: “Shield us with your Holy Spirit, Lord…and drive away all that is evil.”Check the link.
Amen to that.
On the West Lawn of the Capitol, Tea Party protesters and health care takeover opponents meet at high noon to raise their voices against the rotten policy and rotten process that has led us to this foul moment.
Americans will also gather at demonstrations nationwide to show their disgust and disapproval of the corruption, coercion, and Constitution-butchering.
I’ll post as many reader notices, photos, etc. from across the country as I can. Kicking off the rundown ....
The United States does not meddle in Iran’s internal affairs. Our commitment – our responsibility – is to stand up for those rights that should be universal to all human beings. That includes the right to speak freely, to assemble without fear; the right to the equal administration of justice, and to express your views without facing retribution against you or your families.No, Barack Hussein Obama wouldn't want to disrupt the fun and games in Iran. From Pamela:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday evening met with a visibly angry Pro-Choice Caucus amid rumors from Democratic aides that the Speaker was working on a last-minute deal with Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) to give his abortion language a separate vote.RELATED: At NYT, "BlogTalk: Progressives, Public Option and Abortion." And check Memeorandum. And from "Hammering" Jane Hamsher, "NY NOW President Marcia Pappas to Women in Congress: Make History and Walk Out."
Leadership aides, including those in the Speaker’s office, would not comment, but a senior Democratic aide directly involved in the abortion debate said Pelosi appeared to have agreed to give Stupak a vote on an “enrollment resolution” offered by Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), a key Stupak ally.
Kaptur’s resolution contains the same abortion language that Stupak successfully attached at the 11th hour to the House healthcare bill in November. Were the resolution to pass the House, it would instruct the Senate clerk to change the healthcare bill to reflect Stupak’s more restrictive language to prohibit federal dollars from going toward abortion coverage.
Stupak late Friday said that he was still in talks with the Speaker on the possibility of such an enrollment resolution – which he and others have been floating as a possible solution this week.
“There's a proposal out there, and we want to see it in writing and massage it,” Stupak said. “We have nothing yet.”
If this bill passes, health care will cost far more than it does now, or ever did in the past. It will be more expensive for individuals and more expensive for businesses — and it will provide less service.Plus, at The Foundry, "The Aftermath of Obamacare: What America Will Look Like If The White House Gets Its Way."
For centuries, the American dream has been to work hard, enjoy a high quality of life and pass on a better tomorrow to your children. Right now we are at a crossroads, and the future of the American dream is in doubt.
We can take this country on a path where entrepreneurship and investment flourish; where market-driven health care will provide more coverage to more Americans at a lower cost, and where new jobs that pay well are created by the private sector.
Or we can follow the path of more government that gives Washington more control over our lives. Obamacare is just the first step down this road.
As you read this, the fate of Obamacare hangs in the balance. We must do all we can to kill this bill in the next two days.
Keep those calls to Congress coming, and do all you can to stop this monstrosity. The future of America depends on what we can do in the next 48 hours to kill this bill.
The RGA website is here.
WASHINGTON, DC (March 18, 2010) – The past two weeks has seen the “Take The Town Halls To Washington” initiative get nearly 1,000 people to DC to meet with approximately 30 Congressman. The event culminated in the rally at Taft Park near the Capitol which was sponsored by Tea Party Express. Over 1,500 people assembled to rally against the healthcare bill and then meet with their representatives. While the Capitol Police diverted the stage and sound for the park rally, grass roots activists innovated and used a park bench and bull horn to get their message to the attendees!RTWT at the link, c/o Nice Deb.
With the critical nature of a looming Congressional decision, a broad coalition of Tea Party organizations and leadership is launching the final push before a possible vote by the House. These events are being coordinated across the US and are aimed at communicating the frustration of the people while demanding the termination of this health bill legislation. While the DNC and the administration continue to obfuscate and confuse, this coalition is focused on getting activists involved prior to Pelosi’s maneuvering.
Letcher, a Steubenville native, said he has helped design nuclear-power plants, worked as a community organizer and taught at the college level. He has been politically active most of his adult life, usually on the "progressive-leftist" side.It's too bad that Professor Letcher's ill-informed on health policy. His home state of Ohio has one of the most extensive system of health clinics in the country (now helping fund his coverage) and the state has a universal health initiative that will provide insurance for all citizens by 2011. Folks aren't being denied coverage in Ohio. In fact, folks like Bob will be better off under their existing state and federal programs, for once ObamaCare kicks in he'll be a prime candidate for the death panels. No matter. Leftists don't care about patients. They care about totalitarian power.
He went on disability five years ago. Letcher is insured through the tax-funded Medicaid program but wants others to have health insurance, too.
Bob's a "progressive," of course, like Digby and her socialist allies, which means he can't think for himself. He's got to line up behind the crypto-Marxists now taking over the country. Indeed, even Representative Kilroy's exploiting old Bob to help ram down this unpopular monstrosity. And it's no wonder: She'll need all the sob stories she can get, considering this kind of opposition in her district:
BONUS: From Right Ohio, "OH-15: Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Also, Mary Jo Kilroy Defended an IRA Domestic Terrorist."
Also, a The Corner, "It's Now or Never":
If you want to make your voice heard on the health-care bill before the House votes on Sunday, you’d better do so quickly. To make things easier for you, here, organized in alphabetical order by state, are the 40 key Democratic members of Congress whom Jeff Anderson and Andy Wickersham identified in a Critical Condition post last week, together with their direct Capitol Hill office phone numbers. (I haven’t kept track of all the developments since then, but it would be useful to congratulate or berate your member, as you see fit, if he or she has firmly adopted a position.) ...Go to the post for the list of names and numbers.
Why has President Barak Obama decided to foment a crisis in US relations with Israel?More at the link.
Some commentators have claimed that it is Israel’s fault. As they tell it, the news that Israel has not banned Jewish construction in Jerusalem – after repeatedly refusing to ban such construction – drove Obama into a fit of uncontrolled rage from which he has yet to recover.
While popular, this claim makes no sense. Obama didn’t come to be called “No drama Obama” for nothing. It is not credible to argue that Jerusalem’s local planning board’s decision to approve the construction of 1,600 housing units in Ramat Shlomo drove cool Obama into a fit of wild rage at Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Obama himself claims that he has launched a political war against Israel in the interest of promoting peace. But this claim, too, does not stand up to scrutiny.
On Friday, Obama ordered Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to present Netanyahu with a four-part ultimatum.
First, Israel must cancel the approval of the housing units in Ramat Shlomo.
Second, Israel must prohibit all construction for Jews in Jerusalem neighborhoods built since 1967.
Third, Israel must make a gesture to the Palestinians to show them we want peace. The US suggests releasing hundreds of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli prisons.
Fourth, Israel must agree to negotiate all substantive issues, including the partition of Jerusalem (including the Jewish neighborhoods constructed since 1967 that are now home to more than a half million Israelis) and the immigration of millions of hostile foreign Arabs to Israel under the rubric of the so-called “right of return,” in the course of indirect, Obama administration-mediated negotiations with the Palestinians. To date, Israel has maintained that substantive discussions can only be conducted in direct negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian officials.
If Israel does not accept all four US demands, then the Obama administration will boycott Netanyahu and his senior ministers. In the first instance, this means that if Netanyahu comes to Washington next week for the AIPAC conference, no senior administration official will meet with him.
Obama’s ultimatum makes clear that mediating peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not a goal he is interested in achieving.
Obama’s new demands follow the months of American pressure that eventually coerced Netanyahu into announcing both his support for a Palestinian state and a 10-month ban on Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria. No previous Israeli government had ever been asked to make the latter concession.
Netanyahu was led to believe that in return for these concessions Obama would begin behaving like the credible mediator his predecessors were. But instead of acting like his predecessors, Obama has behaved like the Palestinians. Rather than reward Netanyahu for taking a risk for peace, Obama has, in the model of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, pocketed Netanyahu’s concessions and escalated his demands. This is not the behavior of a mediator. This is the behavior of an adversary.
With the US president treating Israel like an enemy, the Palestinians have no reason to agree to sit down and negotiate. Indeed, they have no choice but to declare war.
If you cannot trust government’s numbers, you cannot trust government’s words. This is the lesson of the House Democrats’ desperate promotion of a phony-baloney, Congressional Budget Office analysis of their latest health care takeover package.Cartoon Credit: William Warren, at Get Liberty (c/o Don Surber).
Democrat leaders leaked a solid-seeming price tag figure — $940 billion over 10 years – before the CBO released any official comment or report. Liberal blogs and mainstream news wires started parroting Democrat claims that their plan “would cut the deficit by $130 billion over the next decade, and $1.2 trillion in the second decade of the plan’s implementation” – again, before the CBO had released an iota of information. And hours before the House Rules Committee posted the long-awaited reconciliation bill.
House Majority Whip James Clyburn pronounced himself “giddy” over the supposed CBO scoring. Math-lover House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proclaimed: “I love numbers. They’re so precise.”
But “precise” does not mean “accurate.” And the most “precise” numbers can be utterly worthless. Which is basically what the CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf pointed out in his summary of the unofficial, preliminary analysis of Demcare ....
Mathematical corruption is ideological corruption. The health care battle – and the battle over truth in government accounting – is not just about health care. It’s about the lies and damned lies that will be used to ram through cap-and-trade, illegal alien amnesty, and endless more bailouts. As Pelosi vowed last week, “Kick open that door, and there will be other legislation to follow. We’ll take the country in a new direction.” Yep: Straight to a red-ink-stained hell in a handbasket.
Has there ever been a political spectacle like the final throes of ObamaCare? We can't recall one outside of a banana republic, or, more accurately, Woody Allen's 1971 classic "Bananas." Capitol Hill resembles nothing so much as that movie's farcical coup d'etat in San Marcos as Democrats try to assemble the partisan minimum of 216 House votes—if only for an hour or so at some point on Sunday—and no bribe is too costly, no deal too cynical, no last-minute rewrite too blatant ....See also, Janice Shaw Crouse, "ObamaCare is Tyranny, Not Legislation."
***
Even the political panic over the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program, amid an incipient financial collapse and a Presidential election, looks like regular order compared to this ObamaCare mayhem. That the White House and Mrs. Pelosi are still running into such resistance after a year of pleading reveals what an historic blunder ObamaCare really is.
This is what happens when a willful President and his party try to govern America from the ideological left, imposing a reckless expansion of the entitlement state that most Americans, and even dozens of Democrats in Congress, clearly despise.
