#rsrh In an ideal world, this post would start a duel.

Because in an ideal world a man would rather be killed or die than tolerate being called a would-be Communist apparatchik.

[UPDATE] I just read the letter – also, did you know that the courts have just ruled that “the government has no anti-corruption interest in limiting contributions to an independent expenditure group”?  Translation: a group that wants to simply let people know , say, that Henry Waxman and Bart Stupak aspire to the level of East German rubberstamp apparatchiks can now spend as much money as they like to do so.

Hint, hint.

It seems that Volkskammer Energy Chair Henry Waxman will be investigating various capitalist entities for right-deviationism, sabotage, creeping defeatism, and of course general counter-revolutionary behavior*:

Perhaps that explains why the Administration is now so touchy. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke took to the White House blog to write that while ObamaCare is great for business, “In the last few days, though, we have seen a couple of companies imply that reform will raise costs for them.” In a Thursday interview on CNBC, Mr. Locke said “for them to come out, I think is premature and irresponsible.”

Meanwhile, Henry Waxman and House Democrats announced yesterday that they will haul these companies in for an April 21 hearing because their judgment “appears to conflict with independent analyses, which show that the new law will expand coverage and bring down costs.”

In other words, shoot the messenger. Black-letter financial accounting rules require that corporations immediately restate their earnings to reflect the present value of their long-term health liabilities, including a higher tax burden. Should these companies have played chicken with the Securities and Exchange Commission to avoid this politically inconvenient reality? Democrats don’t like what their bill is doing in the real world, so they now want to intimidate CEOs into keeping quiet.

No doubt the crypto-fascist wreckers on the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board (and the capitalist running dogs of The National Review) will be the next brought in to answer to Parliamentarian Waxman, and his fellow-agents of the righteous anger of the People.

Moe Lane

PS: Hey, the Democrats can stop acting like this any time that they like.  Then I can stop, too.

*Otherwise known as ‘large companies required to announce large, immediate losses via increased taxation as a direct result of the new health care legislation.’  Why, the nerve of those… those… those capitalist stooges, and their primitive devotion to bourgeois truth and the technical letter of the law!

Crossposted to RedState.

‘This is a patient’s bill of rights on steroids’

In other words: artificially boosted, likely to be impotent, and a major health risk if you’re a kid.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) The AP did not so much bury the lede as it dismembered it and hid the pieces in separate locations, so we need to do some stitching:

Obama made better coverage for children a centerpiece of his health care remake, but it turns out the letter of the law provided a less-than-complete guarantee that kids with health problems would not be shut out of coverage.

Under the new law, insurance companies still would be able to refuse new coverage to children because of a pre-existing medical problem, said Karen Lightfoot, spokeswoman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, one of the main congressional panels that wrote the bill Obama signed into law Tuesday.

[snip]

Full protection for children would not come until 2014, said Kate Cyrul, a spokeswoman for the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, another panel that authored the legislation.

[snip]

Obama’s public statements have conveyed the impression that the new protections for kids were more sweeping and straightforward.

Also: Obama’s public statements have also conveyed the equally-false impression that the President has a clue about what’s actually in his signature legislation, but you can’t really expect the AP to write that out.  Although one gets the impression that the thought might have actually passed through the head of the writer.  Which would be an improvement, at least.

Anyway, you’d think that at this point the President would have the mother-wit to check the speeches that they hand to him.  He just doesn’t like to learn, does he?

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

PPP: Dems reshuffling deck chairs on HCR Titanic.

Let me preface this by saying that I have nothing against Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling: he’s a Democratic pollster, sure, but he doesn’t bury polls that are unhelpful to his side.  Which is smart of him – it makes him more credible when he tells me things that I don’t particularly want to hear – but there’s nothing wrong with having a credible pragmatic reason for being virtuous.  It’s sort of an added free bonus.

That being said, he really should have stuck a DOOM in here somewhere:

In both Bob Etheridge and Heath Shuler’s districts we asked whether voters would be more or less likely to vote for their representative if they supported the bill, then whether they would be more or less likely to vote for their representative if the bill passed regardless of how their actual representative voted.

In Etheridge’s district 47% of voters said they’d be less likely to vote for him this fall if he supported the bill. And 47% said they’d be less likely to vote for him this fall if the Democrats in Congress passed the bill, regardless of how Etheridge himself voted.

It’s a pretty similar story in Shuler’s district. 51% of voters said they’d be less likely to vote for him this fall if he was a ‘yes’ vote.’ But 46% also said they’d be less likely to vote for Shuler this fall if the bill passed, whether it did so with his support or not.

Continue reading PPP: Dems reshuffling deck chairs on HCR Titanic.

#rsrh Yeah, tomorrow’s the earliest that a #hcr bump…

will show up.  The stuff that comes out today is going to be polling before the Democrats finally passed the health care debacle; and the signing of said debacle won’t be until tomorrow.  Working on the assumption that this will translate into at least a temporary boost in popularity (safe guess), we should see a bump tomorrow, probably a bigger one on Wednesday, and… well.  Guessing how long the White House can milk a party-line vote on health care rationing is going to be a popular sport for Beltway types over the next few days.

As you might have guessed, I’m not expecting the bump to last for very long.

#rsrh Progressive to belatedly introduce public option bill.

Liberal caucus leader will introduce new public option bill” (H/T: @thebcast) A quick question:

Q. Out of curiosity, Rep. Woolsey: if you are so enthusiastic about a robust public option, then why didn’t you take advantage of reconciliation’s simple majority to ensure that it was inserted into the current health care bill?
A. YOU SHUT UP!!!!! YOU JUST SHUT UP NOW YOU EVIL RACIST REPUG SEXIST FASCIST HOMOPHOBIC DEMON REPUG FILTHY BADTHINKING REPUG HATER!!!11!!!!!!1!!1!

Ah. Of course.

Carry on.

Moe Lane

#rsrh House Democrats think #HCR discussion over.

The Corner (via Instapundit):

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Luke Russert just said that one member who voted for the legislation last night told him (this may be a slight paraphrase): I’m glad I don’t have to go back to my district and talk about this again.

Heh.
Ha.
Ha-hah.
Ha-ha-ha.
Ha-ha-hah-hAH!
HAHA-HA-HA-HA-HAAH!
MWBHWAH-HA-HAH-HA-HAHH!!!!!

Things we were told we couldn’t do.

Before we did them.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

OK, time to start rolling this monstrosity of a health care soon-to-be-law back… what’s that I’m being told? It can’t be done? We’re stuck with it forever? Can’t cut entitlements in this country, at all, at all? Well, that’s very interesting: being told that we can’t do something, that is. Shall I tell you some of the other things that I’ve been told, over the last year and a half? Continue reading Things we were told we couldn’t do.

Tom Garcia (R CAND, FL-24) on Democrats using FL-24 as a flail.

I think that it’s safe to say that Tom Garcia is unhappy about Suzanne Kosmas licking the hand that’s beating their district:

…Normally, I’d quibble about the ‘Marxist’ thing, mostly because the people staffing this administration aren’t smart enough to be Marxists (not a compliment: Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people*), but we’ll forgive the hyperbole this one time. After all, that fact that the President used FL-24’s space job situation as a flail with which to bring back safely into line a too-‘independent’ Congresswoman must stick in the man’s craw.

Anyway: donations here. Don’t get mad; get even.

Moe Lane

PS: Note that Garcia called Kosmas’ flip a day before it happened.

*How hard is it to farm? I mean, illiterate Copper-age Sumerians who plowed with sticks managed it! And yet those people couldn’t manage to keep an agricultural system running to save their lives. Often literally.

Crossposted to RedState.

Obamacare in the Age of Scrutiny.

Interesting what people can take from a picture. Case in point:

When Glenn put up a post using it, he focused on the brutal elegance of that sign message:”You vote for Obamacare, we vote for your opponent.”  Which, by the way: we will.  But what I took away from it was primarily the guy with the camera.

I’ve written this before, and now I’ll write it again: never go to a protest or political event without video recording equipment.  I usually recommend a Flip, but I discovered at CPAC that my Canon PowerShot SD1200IS is actually a perfectly suitable emergency video camera in its own right.  Or you can just use your cell phone.  Whatever it is, have something that you can use when circumstances warrant. Our opponents have not yet internalized the idea that every action and every word that they utter for the rest of their lives can be saved for posterity: be sure to take advantage of that.

And remember: if it wasn’t recorded, it didn’t happen.  That’s the drawback of having video recorders everywhere; it’s much harder to convince people that something occurred when there’s no footage available.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

President Obama pulls a Barbara Streisand?

Look, I am sure that he means well.

That’s a reference to Ms. Streisand’s classic mistake of using a cool-sounding Shakespeare ‘quote’ that she apparently found on the Internet without checking it to see whether it was, in fact, correct. Which it wasn’t; and that particular example is probably a major reason why Ms. Streisand has done us all the favor of not airing out her political opinions lately. Personally, I’m grateful.

But I digress.

At any rate, President Obama, while making what was apparently a rather lackluster rally speech* for his health care debacle, used this ‘Lincoln’ quote:

I have the great pleasure of having a really nice library at the White House. And I was tooling through some of the writings of some previous Presidents and I came upon this quote by Abraham Lincoln: “I am not bound to win, but I’m bound to be true. I’m not bound to succeed, but I’m bound to live up to what light I have.”

…which, as NRO Corner notes, is actually listed here as being incorrect.

Of course, this should be easy to check: all the President has to do is tell us what book he got it out of. Although I should note that Brainy Quote won’t count

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState. Continue reading President Obama pulls a Barbara Streisand?