"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler
Relieving the putrid aftertaste of Zombie Health Care blogging. Tax Prof Blog :
Hitler: A law professor — just like Glenn Reynolds!
Rielle Hunter in GQ and the secret John Edwards sex-tape details.
And if that’s not enough to cleanse your palate, via the ever-reliable Bob Belvedere, we bring you Continue reading Palate Cleansers →
7 p.m. ET: OK, last update of the night and then — I promise — we’ll go back to blogging about Kate Winslett’s cleavage or Rielle Hunter or something more interesting than the Zombie Health Care Cramdown That Won’t Die. Video of Paul Ryan via Hot Air:
The good news: They still don’t have the votes. The bad news: Obama doesn’t care:
If Obama refuses to look at public opinion polls, then how can he profess to know what the American people want? And if he doesn’t care about polls, then how come the White House is circulating polls on Capitol Hill asserting that support for health care legislation is rising?
UPDATE 6:26 p.m. ET: Nancy Pelosi reminds the national press corps that she thinks Americans are a bunch of idiots:
House speaker Nancy Pelosi held a news conference with children’s advocates at the Capitol on Monday to push for the Democrats’ sweeping health care legislation. . . .
In a brief question-and-answer session, a reporter asked Ms. Pelosi about assertions by Representative David Dreier of California, the senior Republican on the House rules committee, that Democrats were engaging in legislative gymnastics to complete the legislation.
“It’s about accountability of the insurance companies; it’s about affordability for the middle class,” Ms. Pelosi said. “It’s not about gymnastics alone — except if that’s part of the wellness program that we have for our children.”
Translation: “We’re going to ignore any criticism you might have. It’s about what I say it’s about, you stupid morons.”
UPDATE 5:57 p.m. ET: Rep. Mike McIntyre (D-NC) will vote NO. (Hat-tip: Virginia Right.) More cramdown blogging:
5:36 p.m. ET: I was just on the phone with Chris Cassone, and felt the need to explain that there are a zillion other things I’d rather be doing than blogging about the legislative progress of this damned health-care bill. (Ann Coulter in Vegas! ) But the Democrats are completely out of control, and I feel the obligation to pay attention — which is annoying, because there is nothing more boring than a Rules Committee mark-up hearing.
You know what this health-care cramdown is like? It’s like being trapped in the passenger seat of a Toyota doing 110 mph, driven by a dimwitted geezer who can’t find the brake pedal.
No wonder Democrats in swing states are running the other way.
UPDATE 4:52 p.m. ET: Philip Klein of the American Spectator:
As expected, the House Budget Committee just rubber stamped the “shell” health care bill with a 21 to 16 vote, sending it to the Rules committee, where all of the language will be stripped out and replaced with whatever deals Democrats have been negotiating behind closed doors. . . .
Two Democrats — Reps. Allen Boyd and Chet Edwards — voted against the bill and would have to be considered firm nos at this point.
That’s good news.
PREVIOUSLY: Rep. Paul Ryan on the Pelosi kabuki-dance: “This is an extraordinary and unprecendented abuse of the reconciliation process.”
Via Michelle Malkin who’s live-blogging the “Wreckonciliation.”
I was just on the radio for an hour with Ladd Ehlinger — his show is on WTKI 1450 AM in Huntsville, Ala. — talking about The 2,309-Page Scam That Will Live in Infamy.
Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic Monthly disengages from Sully:
Each time Andrew Sullivan writes negatively about Israel (which is to say, almost every day), my e-mail in-box becomes flooded with pleas that I respond. . . .
Yes, it’s upsetting that Andrew Sullivan . . . has become an anti-Israel propagandist. But it’s not my job to counter everything he says. He’s not particularly interested in hearing fact-based arguments that undermine whatever argument he happens to be making, in any case. . . .
(Yeah, ask Sarah Palin about that.)
So I’m unilaterally disengaging from this struggle. I pray, of course, that Andrew comes to see that his oversimplification of Middle East history and politics has caused real damage to real people, but it’s time for someone else to argue with him. . . .
I appreciate all of your letters (except those that begin “Dear Zionist Douchebag,” or, “Dear Self-Hating Jewboy Douchebag”), and I’ll figure out, as I go forward, what to do with this blog, but I don’t think that writing in anger is good for anyone. So here’s hoping that the Goldblog Unilateral Disengagement Plan goes better than the Gaza Disengagement Plan.
Goldberg actually came to my house a few weeks ago. He was doing some preliminary work on a possible article about the rise of the Tea Party movement and the populist revival within conservatism. He’s a nice guy with a good sense of humor, a pro-Israel, pro-America liberal who — like a lot of Jewish political journalists — has to fight against the persistent tendency of stereotyping.
It’s as if some editors say, “Oh, Jewish, huh? How about doing something about Middle East policy for us?”
Trust me when I say that, as a Southern evangelical Christian, I feel Goldberg’s pain over getting pigeonholed that way. It’s the journalistic equivalent of identity politics: The black reporter is supposed to write about race relations and poverty, the Jewish guy is supposed to cover the Middle East, the Catholic guy covers abortion, women are assigned to fashion, celebrity news and “women’s issues,” etc.
Excuse me for resenting this tendency. Too many years on the incest, moonshine and lynching beat, I guess . . .
by Smitty
I love the smell of buzzkill on a Monday. It smells like . . . nanny-statery.
This year’s cheese-rolling was due to take place on May 31. But Richard Jefferies, of the event’s organising committee, said: ‘We have had to cancel on the advice of the police and local authorities.
‘Last year 15,000 spectators tried to come to the event, by far the most we have ever seen, and we just could not cope.
‘As well as concerns about the safety of the crowd and the competitors, landowners were worried by the amount of damage done by people climbing over fences and that sort of thing.’
Good job. Way to avoid selling tickets and using the proceeds to fund local improvements.
They really need to get some people out there on 31May and just do it up right, even sans publicity. Illegitimi non carborundum, and all.
by Smitty
The signs were grim. Actually, there weren’t any. Possible explanations for this heinous tableau:
The increasing fragility of the cheesehead breed is, itself, a source of major concern to be tackled by future Federal legislation.
From my latest American Spectator column:
A perception that the GOP establishment routinely rigs primaries in favor of the well-financed and well-connected is widespread among grassroots conservatives. Disillusioned by the political equivalent of insider trading, some idealistic Republicans are tempted to walk away from active participation in GOP politics, which would leave the party infrastructure even more controlled by selfish cynics and professional operatives.
One man who doesn’t want to see that happen is Doug Hoffman, the “Ordinary American” candidate whose third-party campaign last year in New York’s 23rd District became a national crusade for conservatives fed up with Washington, including the Beltway GOP. “The legacy of my [2009] campaign is that many Americans who had never been involved before saw that they could get involved and make a difference,” Hoffman told me in a telephone interview last week, after announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination in this year’s mid-term election.
Strange as it may seem, some Republicans still haven’t gotten the message. There are rumors in New York that the national GOP establishment is trying to recruit Will Barclay to run against Hoffman. Scion of a wealthy family, Barclay is a state assemblyman whose father was appointed ambassador to El Salvador by President Bush. The chief argument for the younger Barclay’s candidacy, as one Hoffman-supporting conservative told me last week, can be summarized in three words: “Money, money, money.”
Can such an argument prevail in a year when Republicans hope to capture the populist energy of the Tea Party movement? Although Democratic attack ads last year branded Hoffman a millionaire indifferent to working-class interests, he grew up desperately poor and his rags-to-riches success story was one of the major selling points of his underdog campaign. If the Republican establishment shoves Hoffman aside in favor of Barclay, it would do more than reinforce the Democrats’ traditional class-warfare message that the GOP is the “party of the rich.” It would also send a message to the party’s conservative rank-and-file that their loyalty to Republicans is strictly a one-way street, never to be respected in any instance where grassroots preferences conflict with the political ambitions of party insiders. . . .
by Smitty
Nice Deb asks the Olbermann-driven question about insufficient diversity at coffee parties. ND seems unaware of the Alinsky rule (4?) about holding the opposition to their rules only applies to the opposition, which is the Tea Parties.
But there is an antidote to the lack of diversity: The Zo. PJTV has his Dallas appearance available for great justice:
Had Keith Olbermann hair #1 where it mattered, Keith would have Zo on his show. Then again, contemplating the shredding Keith would take, maybe not.
Philip Klein of the American Spectator:
Shortly before midnight on Sunday, Democrats released a 2,309 page health care bill that will start the process of reconciliation — but don’t let that fool you, it’s not the actual reconciliation bill with all the changes you’ve been reading about. Instead, as Rep. Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican member on the Budget Committee, explained to me last week, this is just the “shell” bill — the vehicle that Democrats need to get moving on health care. Once the bill gets approved (likely Monday), Democrats will send this phantom bill over to the Rules Committee, where it will be stripped, and then they’ll insert in all of the actual changes that they’ve negotiated. . . .
Got that? Here’s more:
The House Budget Committee on Sunday evening released text that will serve as the base legislation for the changes the House will seek to the Senate bill this week. . . . The measure posted online does not include the substantive changes to the Senate healthcare bill that House Democrats will seek. Those changes will be offered during the markups in the Budget and Rules committees, which the budget panel hopes to begin on Monday afternoon.
More at Michelle Malkin, Riehl World View, Da Tech Guy, Fire Andrea Mitchell, Another Black Conservative, Red State, Doug Ross, Sundries Shack, Melissa Clouthier and Memeorandum. Also see Paul Ryan’s op-ed column proposing a different vision of health-care reform.
This whole Pelosi procedure is nothing but a thumb in the eye of the Constitution. The House could merely have an up-or-down vote on the Senate version of the bill, but Pelosi doesn’t have enough votes to do that — she’d lose the votes of several Democrats who have principled objections to various measures in the Senate version — and so instead they’re going through this bizarre kabuki dance.
Nucking futz, and all of it, BTW, is because Scott Brown got elected in Massachusetts. Before Brown’s election, the Democrats had enough votes in the Senate to get cloture, so that a House-Senate conference committee could resolve the differences and the resulting final bill would be approved in both chambers.
But then Brown got elected as the “41st vote,” the Senate Democrats can’t get cloture now, and what we’ve seen for the past two months has been a desperate effort by Obama and Pelosi to escape the consequences of that election — essentially bypassing the Senate.
Anybody who thinks the Democrats are going to get away with this has got another think coming.
UPDATE: David Axelrod boasts:
“I am absolutely confident we are going to be successful,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
And Axelrod, who was a top strategist on Obama’s 2008 campaign, said he relished the prospect of Republicans campaigning on a repeal of the legislation in 2010. . . .
“Let’s have that fight,” he said. “Make my day.”
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Mr. Axelrod: The fight is not between you and the GOP. It is between you and the American people.
TUESDAY: STOP OBAMACARE 2.0! BE THERE!
(P.S.: Don’t compare this procedure to making sausage — that’s an insult to the fine sausage at Romano’s Market.)