Remember when Obama’s career as a “Constitutional Scholar” was supposedly a signal qualification for his bid for the presidency?

As we career toward the Supreme’s – ahem, the “Death Panel’s” – decision on Obamacare, either does law professor Glenn Reynolds:

Perhaps if Obama had ever written any scholarly articles on the Commerce Clause, he’d have had a better understanding. But then, he never wrote any scholarly articles on anything. As former Obama colleague Richard Epstein said: “I like Obama but I reject the suggestion that he is an intellectual. He is an activist merely mimicking the mannerisms of an intellectual.”

Not that being an intellectual is especially a qualification for the Presidency either; career academic Woodrow Wilson was not only one of our most disastrous presidents ever, but one of the most disastrous leaders in world history, whose incompetence caused problems we’re still paying for in treasure and blood (although he’s criminally overrated by the same academy he sprang from).

But as to those who said Obama’s tenure as a “constitutional law professor” was some sort of dispositive qualification for office?  Baked wind.  A President needs to know the Constitution about as well as a good policeman.  He’s got people to do the detail work.

Although with any luck, Obama’s going to need some new ones tomorrow.

The SCOTUS kicked the can for the Obamacare ruling down the road to next week.

Predictions?

Just keep repeating to yourself, Democrats: “Single-payer is the only option!  Single-payer is the only option’!  Single-payer is the only option“.

Joe Doakes of Como Park writes:

Obamacare is in trouble at the Supreme Court. Earlier this week, NBC spent an hour on middle-aged single adults needing long-term care, but having no insurance (and Medicaid doesn’t cover them) so they’re hogging hospital beds at enormously higher cost. One woman actually got sent to a nursing home in Poland and now she won’t be able to see her grandkids. Yesterday, MPR had an interview with some official from Colorado – same topic, same plight.

Same solution . . . everybody must buy health insurance so we can treat these people properly.

Never heard a word about this problem until the Supreme Court arguments went poorly for the Home Team – now they’re flogging the fierce moral urgency to treat a few cases as justification for sweeping aside centuries of precedent. The noble ends justify any ignoble means, it seems.

Ditto “Stand Your Ground”:  the laws have been successful (or, perhaps better still, non-notable) throughout the US.  But the Martin / Zimmerman case gets saturation coverage for two months – just as “Fast and Furious” seems poised to cause Obama some electoral damage?

 And Liberals wonder why Conservatives think there is a liberal bias in the media. Ignore the tone and word choice in these stories, just look at the timing. Obamacare is in trouble, we’re flooded with sob stories. We’re not supposed to wonder at the timing? Dan Rather’s “fake but accurate” memos just happened to run exactly 2 months before the election? These stories just happened to run this week, by accident?

From Star Trek, The Next Generation:

Taurik: “Sir, I’m little puzzled. Why are we intentionally damaging the shuttlecraft ?”

Geordi: “We’re evaluating hull resiliency. Starfleet requires periodic testing.”

Taurik: “I see… I don’t believe I am familiar with that requirement.”

Geordi: “Probably because you are not a senior officer. Fire a shot over here.”

Taurik: “That would be consistent.”

Geordi: “Consistent with what?”

Taurik: “With making it appear that this shuttle had fled an attack.”

Geordi: “What makes you think that’s what we are doing?”

Taurik: “The pattern of fire you asked for is similar to what might result if the shuttle had fled an attacker while engaged in evasive maneuvers.”

Geordi: “It’s an amazing coincidence.”

Taurik: “Yes, sir. It is indeed. Shall we proceed with the testing?”

An amazing coincidence, indeed.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

I’m just trying to figure who it is that doesn’t believe the media is biased, who should still be allowed to drive a car on the public freeway.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I am willing to bet a crisp new $1.00 bill that Obamacare will be upheld in its entirety by the US Supreme Court.

The four liberal justices will say it’s fine – indeed, doesn’t go far enough.

The four conservative justices will say it’s abhorrent to the concept of enumerated powers and must be stuck down.

Anthony Kennedy will decide that ordinarily, the federal government can’t reach so broadly under its power to regulate interstate commerce. But he’ll find that the right to decide when and where to have a family is a Constitutional right and some people can’t afford birth control pills or abortions, so the entire nation can be forced to buy health care insurance in order to fund poor people’s birth control choices. In this one unique situation, the constitutional right to abortion is so important that any means the government uses to fund it, is justified.

5-4 to uphold.

Place your bets now.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

No action on that bet.

It’s waaaaaay too plausible.

Last week, when I wrote about the stirrings of backlash on the part of some Catholic activists and Bishops over the Obamacare requirement that Catholic hospitals provide contraception and abortions, I expressed my doubt that mainstream Catholics really cared that much.

I got a few Catholics sounding off in my comment section that sounded a little more bellicose than I expected.

Chad the Elder over at Fraters – who is, unlike me, Catholic – is a lot less sanguine:

Many Catholics seem all too willing to erect their own wall between church and state and like to pretend that their politics has nothing to do with the Catholic Church and vice versa. The problem is that when the government breaks through that barrier and injects itself into the affairs of the Church by attempting to force it to accept policies that violate core tenants of its beliefs, the illusion of this happy little coexistence is shattered.

Does it?

I’m not trying to be snotty, there – it’s a genuine question.

If people have little tangible investment in the practical results of religious freedom – if it’s more an intellectual and rhetorical parlor game than an immediate, vital part of their life – then will it “shatter” so much as “melt like stale jello?”

Well, at least it would be if the Church were more consistent and forceful in explaining exactly what is taking place and why it matters to American Catholics.

There’s that, too.  Leaving aside that the laity themselves, to my observation, seem to think it’s an issue well above their pay grade, I have a strong hunch that a good chunk of the Catholic hierarchy is lukewarm on upsetting the progressive applecart.

For whatever reason, Elder’s observations seem to be in tune with mine:

My experience may not be typical, but so far little word of this current controversy has surfaced in our parish on any given Sunday. A few months ago, there was an insert in the bulletin that touched on it. Since then, nothing. No homilies, no presentations, no mention in the weekly bulletin. The only thing related to politics that has merited attention has been on the marriage front, with updates on the Minnesota Marriage Amendment appearing in the last few bulletins. But nothing on the Obamacare rules which are a direct threat to the freedom of the Catholic Church to exercise its religious beliefs.

In order for there to be action, there needs to be a call for it first. I fear that too many Catholic leaders are still reluctant to sound it.

And while I’m assured by many Catholic friends that some of the post-John-Paul-2 clergy is more conservative, I have serious questions as to whether that’s filtered down to an awful lot of lay Catholics and their immediate leadership.  Chad’s observations don’t do much to dissuade me.

Of course, it’s similar in my own Presbyterian church (where, to be fair, the problem is opposite; an extremely liberal elected temporal leadership representing congregations that are frequently much more conservative.

Let’s ask some rhetorical questions.

1. If Code Pink got as exercised over torturing context as they did over torturing terrorists, would they protest against leftybloggers?
2. If liberal bloggers and media couldn’t express themselves in terms of framing the opposition, would they all go mute?
3. If liberal bloggers couldn’t argue from false premises – indeed, strawmen full of words and ideas that they jam forcibly (rhetorically) down their opponents’ throats, could they argue at all?
4. If the “loaded question without any evidence to lead one to the question” were a death-penalty offense, would the morgues overflow quickly with leftybloggers, or would they overflow very very quickly?

Apropos nothing [*], Eric Austen from “Outstate Report” writes in re a piece by Walter Scott Hudson that appeared in True North and, in so doing, hits all four of the above in a piece called “What Is This True North Contributor Suggesting? Denying Treatment To Those Unable To Pay?“.

For entertainment purposes, I’ll note (in red!) which of the four austen-tatious bits of rhetorical excess Austen is indulging in as we go through the article.  Keep score at home!

(Yep – the title itself counts as [1, 2, 3 and 4], a rare quad-fecta!)

All in all this post from contributor, Walter Scott Hudson, is standard conservative rhetoric about how bad Obamacare is and how awesome it is that one Appeals Court in the United States [3 – of course there’s “one” court; they dont’ travel or rule in packs!] struck down its individual mandate. Yet there is an instructive piece that everyone ought to read and digest because it speaks to the extremism that has become mainstream conservative thought:

If a conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and Eric Austen isn’t there to hear it, is the conservative still “extreme?”

Sure – but only when you accept Austen’s loaded, strawman-via-framing premises.

He quotes Hudson:

In other words, citizens must be forced to purchase health insurance to pay for services which hospitals are forced to provide. Force begets force.

Solving every problem – from developing a Java widget to repairing society – requires thought on two levels; “Policy” – the theories, principles and goals you set to solve the problem, and “mechanism”, the mechanics and blocking-and-tackling that actually implement the Policy.

As a matter of libertarian-conservative policy, forcing people and institutions to do things is bad.  The individual healthcare mandate has been spawning arguments for decades, long preceding Obama.

I know Walter Hudson. He’s a pretty libertarian guy, and it shows, as the quote continues:

This brings into question the whole notion of economic mandates. Clearly, despite the political class’s reverence for “compromise,” this is an either-or proposition. Either you believe people ought to be forced into economic transactions, or you don’t. The moment we accepted the premise that the needs of the sick and injured place some claim upon the property and labor of health care providers, we created the problem which the individual mandate is intended to solve.

Which refers to an iron-clad law of conservative policy; any government attempt to make something worth other than what people will naturally pay for it (in this case, free) has unintended (?) consequences.

Austen:

Is Hudson suggesting that we shouldn’t force hospitals to treat the sick and injured if they are unable to afford treatment? That’s certainly how it reads to me [1, 3, 4].

And it’s expecting a bit much to ask Austen to read anything a conservative writes in the spirit in which it’s intended.

He’s suggesting stating that the government’s attempt to force the availability of health care has the “unintended” consequence of making health care less affordable, and in turn “forcing” the government to coerce people into paying something other than they naturally would for health care -which, predictably, in turn, will cause other “unintended” consequences.

I’d also suspect Hudson knows there are better ways to treat the uninsured than compelling health care providers – some of them, anyway – to work for free.  And there, you’re getting into “mechanism”, which is another entire discussion.

Modern conservatives, mostly in an attempt to oppose anything this President does  [1, 2,3]…

Let’s stop to demand a little honesty from Austen, here; it’s not this President.  It’d be any President that sought to nationalize a sixth of the economy, whether it was John Kerry or Ralph Nader or Algore or Hillary Clinton.

I’m going to add a little emphasis to this next bit:

…have taken their economic “freedom” message to an extreme as evidenced by this post. They know[3] that without the individual mandate, bringing down health costs simply will not work in the free market UNLESS we make that market even more free and allow the denial of services to those who cannot afford them.

Rule of thumb: if you read any sentence that starts with an accusatory “they know that…”, demand to see evidence of clairvoyance.

Austen certainly can’t provide any.  Conservatives know that health care can be made affordable; it won’t be easy, and it’ll upset the applecarts of a few entitled classes along the way, but it can be done.  Aggressive use of self-managed care, health savings accounts, retail medicine, and de-emphasis on third-party money will bring down the cost; so will ditching some of the other – ta daaaa! – mandates that government has forced on providers (mandatory mental health coverage,

While it is certainly true that allowing the health industry to deny care to those unable to pay will bring down costs, I doubt very much that Americans would agree to such a society no matter how much “freedom” it brings[1].

No kidding!

But that’s not the society that Hudson – or any conservative – is asking people to agree to.

As a matter of principle – “policy” – we oppose mandates.  We do favor – indeed, require – some creative thinking on how to solve the health insurance problem.

And if the best the left can do is concoct sinister motivations from context-mangled hijackings of high-level policy statements, then perhaps it’s time we got our shot; we can’t do any worse than the crowd in Washington, Saint Paul and everywhere else.

(more…)

We really did.

“Socializing 1/7 of the economy”, we tried to tell the other 52-odd-% of you,”will screw up the economy even worse than it already is”.

And we were right:

Private-sector job creation initially recovered from the recession at a normal rate, leading to predictions last year of a “Recovery Summer.” Since April 2010, however, net private-sector job creation has stalled. Within two months of the passage of Obamacare, the job market stopped improving. This suggests that businesses are not exaggerating when they tell pollsters that the new health care law is holding back hiring. The law significantly raises business costs and creates considerable uncertainty about the future. To encourage hiring, Congress should repeal Obamacare.

Some of us are trying.  We really are.

I’ve only run into Linda Berglin a few times.  The long-time Legislative insider – nine years in the House, thirty more in the Senate – always seemed to me, an admittedly jaundiced observer, to be one of those legislators that sprouted roots in the Capitol.

Or, more accurately, sprouted roots in the majority caucus at the Capitol – where the power is.

Like Ellen Anderson last spring, Berglin has apparently tried life in the minority, and found it wanting.

State Sen. Linda Berglin announced Monday that she will leave the Legislature on Aug. 15, in the wake of her new job with Hennepin County.

The piece – from Rachel Stassen-Berger at the Strib’s Hot Dish blog – lets out one “moo” for which there is just not enough cow:

Berglin has served in the Legislature since 1972 and is one of the Capitol experts on the state’s health and human services system. She had a hand in shaping the system that created one of the healthiest states in the nation. For decades she has been respected and feared by both sides of the aisle and in the health care industry.

People like Rachel Stassen-Berger keep saying that like it’s a good thing.

Berglin was truly the mother of the Minnesota Department of Health and Human Services as we have known it for the past thirty years; a place with bounding, skyrocketing spending, the place that has truly given baseline-budgeting a bad name and turned it into Target Number One for the GOP’s reform movement this past session. HHS’ increases have always been in the double-digits, biennium over biennium, while Berglin was one of its key legislative benefactors.

And since Stassen-Berger chose to phrase her piece the way she did, I have to ask; did the bureaucracy that Berglin helped build “create” Minnesota as a healthy state, as opposed to Minnesota’s fairly healthy ethnic majority (Minnesota and the low-tax, low-“service”, Berglin-free Dakotas perennially vie for healthiest states in the union) and better-than-average standard of living?

Correlation does not equal causation.

Well, it’s all water under the bridge now.  Like her fellow legislative Ozymandias, Anderson, Berglin has decided the view from the basement – and being out of absolute power – doesn’t become her:

Since the last election, she was marginalized as Democrats lost the Minnesota Senate for the first time since she joined the Legislature…Senate Minority Leader Tom Bakk said Republicans and Dayton administration officials were discussing the final health and human services legislative proposal.

“The governor’s office called and said ‘[Senate Majority Leader] Amy Koch wants you out of the room,'” Bakk said. “Linda doesn’t know why. But she’s incredibly knowledgeable.”

And, more germanely, she was part of the DFL’s no-ideas, all-stalling approach to the “negotiations”.  She had no place in the discussion, because she was there to add absolutely nothing.

Still and all, with all that “incredible knowledge”, Hennepin County residents should be immortal soon.

Bon voyage, Sen. Berglin.

UPDATE:  A legislative insider messaged me: “It’s no coincidence that this was the first time in 30 years Berglin wasn’t involved in HHS negotiations and there was reform.”

Man left to die, lies in Brit hospital for nearly half a day before being dragged away like a sack of garbage:

Nurses casually stepped over a patient as he lay dying on a hospital floor.

Peter Thompson, 41, was left in a corridor for ten hours before someone noticed he had passed away.

In a final act of indignity, hospital auxiliaries pulled his lifeless body across the floor in a manner his family described as like ‘dragging a dead animal’.

Just keep repeating it to yourselves, Dems; socialized medicine rocks.

I’m not sure what bugs me more about this Doug Grow column; the fact that he deemed a bit of screeching DFL illogic newsworthy, or that he doesn’t seem to realize that it’s screechingly illogical at all.

He’s writing about the MN Senate debate over a Human Services bill which would change the way the state delivers health care to the poor, from a bureaucratic entitlement to a voucher system.

Grow:

Apparently, what’s good for the goose isn’t always good for the gander.

That little truth came to light during Tuesday’s Senate debate over health care for the poor.

Sen. David Hann, R-Eden Prairie, introduced one of the GOP’s plans for cutting Human Services costs by taking about 15,000 single adults out of MinnesotaCare and giving them vouchers so they can buy their own health insurance.

Hann sang the praises of the bill: It will save the state money. It will give the poor more choices. It will improve the health care of the poor. It will get government out of health care. It’s the American way!

No sarcasm clogging Grow’s keyboard there.  Nosirree Bob!  It’s the Twin Cities Media way!  All them poor folks is too dumb to take care of themselves!

But that’s not really the issue here:

Then, Sen. Barb Goodwin, DFL-Columbia Heights, rose to speak. She offered a simple amendment to this GOP plan.

She said her amendment would require legislators to test the plan for two years, before the poor were forced into it.

“I hear what a wonderful deal this is for people,” Goodwin said. “We can determine if this plan is working as it should.”

Amendment greeted with silence

For a moment, you could have heard a pin drop in the Senate chambers. What? Us on this plan?

When columnists try to play mind-readers, it’s pretty my much their own minds they end up reading.  Because I know that if I’d been sitting in that Senate chamber, I’d have been quiet, myself.  But not from taking offense at someone thinking I’d dream of being lumped in with the hoi-polloi.

No, it’d be because I’d be wondering…:

• …if Senator Goodwin gets the difference between people doing a job who get health insurance as part of their compensation – the legislators, in this case – and people who come to the taxpayers for help with getting health care?  If she recognizes a difference between someone who takes a job (yes, even an elected one) with full knowledge of what the health benefits are, just like most of us in the private sector do (with benefits that are admittedly not nearly as nice), and…
• …if she realizes how much of the private sector is moving in the direction of self-directed health care – where the consumer makes the key decisions about their own health care…
• …whether she appreciates the idea that vouchers, compared to the trough-slopping reality of most government entitlement programs, gives the recipient some dignity…
• …or, for that matter, giving public healthcare for the poor any chance of being sustainable at all…
• … or if any of that matters compared to her prevailing priority – keep the bureaucracy fat ‘n happy?

Doubt it’d be fit all that into a politic statement if I didn’t have the floor.

A rookie senator, Gretchen Hoffman, R-Vergas, stood, clearly offended by Goodwin’s amendment.

“We’re citizen legislators,” she said, adding that she’d waived her right to receive the health insurance benefits that most legislators receive.

After proclaiming her own goodness, she attacked the Goodwin amendment.

One wonders if Grow would ever call a DFLer a “Rookie”, or write off their defense as “proclaiming their goodness”.

“Political tomfoolery,” Hoffman said.

Again there was silence in the Senate. It had been years since anyone had heard the expression “tomfoolery.”

And later, Goodwin said that “tomfoolery” had never been applied to her before.

If “tomfoolery” means ‘incapable of carrying on a logical argument”, I’ll be it has.

Anyway, here’s what they’re arguing about;

Back up for a moment and look at the plan Hann sings the praises of but — as it turned out — wouldn’t want for himself.

Single working adults who have incomes of between 133 percent and 250 percent of poverty-level would no longer be covered by MinnesotaCare, the publicly subsidized health insurance program for the working poor that’s been in existence since 1990. Under MinnesotaCare, low-income working people pay premiums on a sliding scale based on ability to pay.

The Republican plan would force those earning between $14,400 and $30,000 off MinnesotaCare and into the “free” market. With the help of state vouchers, they could select the health insurance they want for themselves.

Hann says that by “allowing” these people to go into the free market, the state would save $100 million per biennium.

And since they’re “single, working” adults – unlike Grow, I’m using using scare quotes in place of an actual argument – it seems like a great compromise.  Grow’s, and Goodwin’s, only argument seems to be that Senators don’t want to trade their current plans for it.

By that “logic”, Goodwin and Grow should both shut up and go on welfare, including MNCare.

Socialized medicine in the UK is broken…and it took them sixty years to figure it out.

As the House moves to repeal the nationalization of health care, Britain plans to take a scalpel to its National Health Service, opening it up to competition and letting doctors and patients call the shots.

Geez. We hardly allow that now.

It was both a stunning admission and a damning indictment of socialized medicine when British Prime Minister David Cameron in effect admitted that the holy grail of nationalized health care, the British National Health Service (NHS), was broken and in need of fixing.

While critics of his plan are already saying it could lead to backdoor privatization of the NHS, Cameron stopped short of suggesting that is his aim. Founded in 1948, NHS could be called the “third rail” of British politics akin to our Social Security.

Which is what will happen to Obamacare if allowed to progress against the will of most Americans. It reminds me of one of my financial planning tenets: A luxury becomes a necessity twenty four hours later.

“We need modernization on both sides of the equation,” he said in his speech. “Modernization to do something about the demand for public health service, and modernization to make the supply of health care more efficient, which is about opening up the system, making it more competitive, cutting out waste and bureaucracy.”

ObamaCare promises exactly the opposite, increasing demand and coverage to the point of collapsing the system, taking decisions out of the hands of physicians who promise to quit in droves and putting it in the hands of a regulatory behemoth that decides who gets what care and when.

“Paging Doctor Dover.”

“Paging Doctor Ben Dover.”

Real Minnesotans will be protesting Dayton’s Medicare boondoggle – committing Minnesota to $200 million a year in permanent in entitlement spending in exchange for a one-time (maybe) shot of money from other taxpayers around the country.

Meet at 9AM at (at last word) Room 125 in the Rotunda.  The actual protest will be at 9:30 in the Governor’s lobby, where the boondoggle will be signed.

Wish I could be there.

“Debating [Obamacare], I don’t think that’s going to sit very well with the electorate”.

— Amy Walter, ABC News

Ms. Walter:  You are clearly from Planet Cambridge.

You do recall a bit of an election two months ago?  Biggest flip in 72 years in Congress – bigger than ’48, bigger than ’94, bigger than even ’74?

I think it’s going to “sit” just fine with the American people.

(Yeah,  of course I know – this is just part of the PR drumbeat that the mainstream media is going to put down to try to defend Obama.  Call it the “don’t believe what your eyes, ears and vote totals tell you, the truth is what we say it is”.  Kind of like the Humphrey Poll and the Minnesota Independent).

Governor Dayton, as his first “substantial” act as governor, is going to put the state on the hook for hundreds of millions in permanent entitlement spending in exchange for thirty pieces of silver a short-term federal subsidy.

Twila Brase of the Citizens Council for Health Freedom writes:

On Tuesday, January 4th Wednesday, Januaray 5th at 9:30 a.m. Governor Mark Dayton is holding a special Obamacare signing ceremony to implement the federal law’s Medicaid expansion program.

So why protest?

The Medicaid expansion program funded by $1.4 billion federal taxpayer dollars will cost the State (YOU) $188 million in state taxpayer dollars. Federal dollars eventually disappear leaving Minnesota on the hook for all the newly entitled. The program is expected to increase Minnesota’s Medicaid population by 21% (163,000 people)…Other states have sued to stop the Obamacare Medicaid expansion mandate…Governor Dayton plans to implement it.

If you listen to the media or the leftyblogs, they make it sound like the $1,4 Billion is going to answer a lot of long-term problems.  It’s not – and the DFL and Dayton want to turn the short-term windfall into another never-ending obligation.

Just like they did with every single “surplus” from 1990 to 2002.

The protest will be in the Rotunda Room 130 of the State Capitol, the governor’s Lobby.  Please try to meet in Room 123, right off the Rotunda, by 9:00AM.  .

…for attorneys and consultants that is.

As for the rest of you, not so much.

Barack Obama just finished a summit with twenty US CEO’s urging them to get off the sidelines, spend their hoards of cash and start hiring.

President Barack Obama pressed 20 corporate chief executives Wednesday to suggest policies that would spur them to “start investing in job creating enterprises.”

Hey Barry, I got an idea for you if they didn’t come up with it: ask congress to repeal what is left of your shitty health care reform bill.

Big employers faced with incorporating the first round of health-care changes next month are grappling with how to comply with the long list of new rules.

Many companies are hiring consultants to help sort though the mountain of new mandates, which include extending dependent coverage to children up to age 26, and may eventually result in covering more employees. Some are also considering changes to their plans—including pushing costs to workers.

Might they have instead invested these resources in job creating enterprises or hiring new employees?

Maybe, just maybe had you focused on jobs instead of ramming socialized health care down America’s throat you wouldn’t be in such a pickle. How’s that national unemployment rate going for you Barry? Are you excited about your chances in 2012?

Today the national unemployment rate hovers near where it began the year, just shy of 10 percent.

It’s funny how liberals do everything they can to short circuit capitalism and then ask the capitalists to clean up their mess.

And in the end, those they claim to serve end up paying the price via lost jobs, wages, or both.

I don’t begrudge your choice to smoke cigarettes as long as you:

1) Keep it out of my face.

2) Keep it out of my kids’ face.

3) Quit throwing them out of your god-damned window.

4) Pay your fair share: don’t expect me to pay higher life, disability or health insurance premiums. You should though.

5) Let me bum one off of you once a year or so for old times.

But seriously, if you don’t know smoking is dangerous by now, is it because the government hasn’t done an adequate job of edumacating you?

Apparently the government thinks you’re so damn stupid that the dangers can only be conveyed to you in pictures.

Corpses, cancer patients and diseased lungs are among the images the federal government plans for larger, graphic warning labels that would take up half of each pack of cigarettes sold in the United States.

Whether smokers addicted to nicotine will see them as a reason to quit remains a question.

Sounds like another shovel-ready project to me.

The share of Americans who smoke has fallen dramatically since 1970, from nearly 40 percent to about 20 percent, but the rate has stalled since about 2004. About 46 million adults in the U.S. smoke cigarettes.

In the same period, the average cost per pack has gone from 38 cents to $5.33. Much of those increases are from state and federal taxes.

It’s unclear why declines in smoking have stalled. Some experts have cited tobacco company discounts or lack of funding for programs to discourage smoking or to help smokers quit.

I would submit to you that there are a certain percentage of us that are going to smoke cigarettes.  They like to smoke. It aint illegal. They know it aint good for ’em. And they don’t give a rip.

In the mean time are we to assume the federal government intends to spend more and more of everyone’s tax dollars until there are no smokers left? Maybe we should just let evolution run its course.

They said that if I voted for John McCain, the government would trash our property rights like John Bonham trashing a hotel room.

And they were right:

Sheriffs in North Carolina want access to state computer records identifying anyone with prescriptions for powerful painkillers and other controlled substances.

The state sheriff’s association pushed the idea Tuesday, saying the move would help them make drug arrests and curb a growing problem of prescription drug abuse. But patient advocates say opening up people’s medicine cabinets to law enforcement would deal a devastating blow to privacy rights.

One of the purported cost savers in Obamacare is electronic medical records kept – eventually – in a national database.

And when the government controls your data, your data is only as safe as the least power-hungry or dishonest government official wants it to be.

They said (with a nod to Glenn Reynolds) that if we voted for John McCain, Americans would lose their health insurance coverage.

And they were right!

All but two health insurance companies have withdrawn from offering maternity benefits.

Only a handful of companies will still write “child only” health insurance plans.

As of this date, it is almost impossible to find a rate for children’s health insurance if they are under age 19 and you are looking for coverage to be effective on 9/23/10 or later.

Some companies have either withdrawn from offering major medical business or are dropping hints they will be out of that market in 18 months or less.

That’s right – the plans that many people went to to head off crises, while paying cash or using Health Savings Accounts for routine and smaller bills, now toast.

Many have already indicated higher premiums for the 4th quarter of 2010 and later, especially on children under age 19.

Companies are starting to push limited benefit plans as “more affordable” alternatives to true major medical insurance.

Several companies have introduced new plans with stripped down benefits in an attempt to make their product look more appealing.

Drug formulary’s are changing, so the drug that is covered under your plan now may not be covered in the future.

Doctor and hospital networks are shrinking in an effort to further control costs but also has the effect of limiting access to a wide range of medical providers.

Given all this, why is Obamacare so great for the consumer?

What happened to , “If you like the plan you have now you can keep it”?

What “happened” was it got “Hope And Changed”.

Actually, what’s happening is exactly what conservatives predicted; Obamacare’s overburden is forcing private insurance out of the market, so people – mindful of the “you must be insured” mandate – will have no choice but to go to the Feds.

It’s Single Payer by Coercion, basically.

(Via Peg)

Almost 2/3 Americans want an Obamacaretectomy:

Support for repeal of the new national health care plan has jumped to its highest level ever. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 63% of U.S. voters now favor repeal of the plan passed by congressional Democrats and signed into law by President Obama in March.

Prior to today, weekly polling had shown support for repeal ranging from 54% to 58%.

Currently, just 32% oppose repeal.

The new findings include 46% who Strongly Favor repeal of the health care bill and 25% who Strongly Oppose it.

“But Rasmussen is just like Fox News!”

Well, to the extent that their results lead Gallup by about a week or two, perhaps.

Insurance companies report that people, fresh from wondering when Obama would pay their mortgage and put gas in the car, are pawing after the free health care:

Questions reflecting confusion have flooded insurance companies, doctors’ offices, human resources departments and business groups.

“They’re saying, ‘Where do we get the free Obama care, and how do I sign up for that?’ ” said Carrie McLean, a licensed agent for eHealthInsurance.com. The California-based company sells coverage from 185 health insurance carriers in 50 states.

McLean said the call center had been inundated by uninsured consumers who were hoping that the overhaul would translate into instant, affordable coverage. That widespread misconception may have originated in part from distorted rhetoric about the legislation bubbling up from the hyper-partisan debate about it in Washington and some media outlets, such as when opponents denounced it as socialism.

Or it might be because that’s exactly how its proponents have been pitching it all along.

Attorney General Lori Swanson has declined the Governor’s request to join the states sueing to stop Obamacare:

She pointed out in her letter to him that Pawlenty can always file his own friend-of-the-court brief to side with the states fighting the law.

That prompted this response from Pawlenty spokesman Brian McClung: “Governor Pawlenty intends to participate in this litigation.” He refused to comment on whether the governor would file a friend-of-the-court brief supporting lawsuits filed by other states, hire his own lawyer or participate in some other way. “We are going to consider our options,” McClung said in an e-mail.

Hopefully that option includes finding someone to run for Attorney General to get the statist fossil Swanson out of there.

Yes, I said statist:

In rejecting the call for Minnesota to file a lawsuit, Swanson, in a written opinion, said Congress has wide latitude to pass laws to tax and spend and to regulate interstate commerce.

“Health care — which comprises over one-sixth of our country’s economy — substantially affects interstate commerce,” Swanson said. “The United States government has been involved for years in many aspects of health care, including Medicare and Medicaid.

“Interstate Commerce” has been the trojan horse that’s enabled the socialization and overregulation of far too much of our economies and lives, ever since FDR’s administration essentially repealed the Tenth Amendment seventy years ago.

Now we know what side Lori Swanson is on.

So we got any lawyers out there, MNGOP?

…so why does America think we lost…and lost big?

Nearly two-thirds of Americans say the health care overhaul signed into law last week costs too much and expands the government’s role in health care too far, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, underscoring an uphill selling job ahead for President Obama and congressional Democrats.

Is it the Pareto Principle? Are one-third of us smarter than the other two thirds? If so, is that how Amerika works now?

“They’re going to have to spend substantial time convincing people of the concrete benefits of this legislation.”

Isn’t that supposed to happen before a law is passed?

Interestingly, regarding the post-passage “violence” on the part of “opponents” to the bill, what say ye Amerika?

And when asked about incidents of vandalism and threats that followed the bill’s passage, Americans are more inclined to blame Democratic political tactics than critics’ harsh rhetoric. Forty-nine percent say Democratic tactics are “a major reason” for the incidents, while 46% blame criticism by conservative commentators and 43% the criticism of Republican leaders.

Is that tacit approval for the acts of defiance?

First the Obama administration blasts Wall Street for not following the rules…and also when they do. AT&T discharges it’s duty to shareholders by quantifying the hit they will be taking as a result of Obamacare.

This wholesale destruction of wealth and capital came with more than ample warning. Turning over every couch cushion to make their new entitlement look affordable under Beltway accounting rules, Democrats decided to raise taxes on companies that do the public service of offering prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. We and others warned this would lead to AT&T-like results, but like so many other ObamaCare objections Democrats waved them off as self-serving or “political.”

…when in fact what they are is simple math.

Bloomberg radio on XM reported this morning that that Jimmy II, palms sore from high fives all around, is hitting the road to sell his health care deform bill.

But sir! Isn’t it the law of the land now? Why does it need to be sold?

Again and again and again?

President Obama spent 14 months getting to this moment, but aides said Monday that he wouldn’t spend much time savoring it. He plans an aggressive campaign to clarify what the bill does and try to deflect a Republican counter-assault. And other policy goals he had postponed in favor of healthcare now jump to the front of the line.

We’ve heard that before.

Only a clinically delusional man could at this juncture think he can simultaneously campaign for his health care plan and move other priorities (it’s the economy stupid) back onto his desk.

Any expectations of bipartisanship or cooperation on the part of the now neutered Blue Dogs on any issue have dissolved in the caustic environment that is the residue of Madame Pelosi and President Obama’s pressure-cooker tactics. Nonetheless, it appears Obama has more to concern himself with than the GOP.

The President is facing an American counter-assault.

Republicans, right now, can feel they’re on the side of the voters, who polls show simply don’t like the overarching bill. A CNN poll Monday showed 59 percent of voters oppose the reform bill passed by the House late Sunday, compared with 39 percent who support it.

Iowa is only the first stop in what will be a concerted White House effort to explain a bill that many Americans don’t understand.

Mr. President; Mr. Emanuel, you arrogant, condescending pricks with all due respect, America understands a lot more…now.

In November they may have found dubious the GOP’s attempts to hang labels of extremism and socialism around then-candidate Obama’s neck, but sixteen months later an implicit “we told you so” is being met with nods of acknowledgment.

“If this is going to be turned into a real asset for Democrats, the president and others have to be out there in a continual effort to sell this plan,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. “Just letting it lie is not good. It’s got to be sold, sold actively and sold vigorously.”

…and that will be their downfall, if we haven’t already witnessed it.

How obtuse can one pollster be, let alone an entire administration – nay an entire political party – to not realize the obvious fact that the more this cluster has been sold, the lower it’s popularity has sunk?

“I don’t think there’s any place that it’s going to be helpful to them,” Jesmer said, scoffing at Democrats’ assertion that they will be able to turn the tide of public opinion. “They have been selling this thing for 13 months — all they’ve been doing is selling it.”

That is the sole reason the Senate vote was conducted on Christmas Eve and the House vote in a hurry-up huddle on Sunday night –  for fear sniveling, castrated Democratic lawmakers might escape to find themselves in a conversation with increasingly disapproving constituents.

The party hopes to make that case with a healthy dose of testimonials from Obama, who signs the bill Tuesday, then totes it on the road to Iowa on Thursday to sell it.