“The 60 Votes Aren’t There Anymore”

That’s not my interpretation, that’s from the AP:

WASHINGTON – The 60 votes aren’t there any more.

With the Senate set to begin debate Monday on health care overhaul, the all-hands-on-deck Democratic coalition that allowed the bill to advance is fracturing already. Yet majority Democrats will need 60 votes again to finish.

Some Democratic senators say they’ll jump ship from the bill without tighter restrictions on abortion coverage. Others say they’ll go unless a government plan to compete with private insurance companies gets tossed overboard. Such concessions would enrage liberals, the heart and soul of the party.

There’s no clear course for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to steer legislation through Congress to President Barack Obama. You can’t make history unless you reach 60 votes, and don’t count on Republicans helping him.

We need to keep pressure on the Blue Dog Democrats not to be talked, bullied, or bribed into voting for this monstrosity.

What We Have To Look Forward To If ObamaCare Passes

More problems with government-run health care from, where else, one of the pioneers, the United Kingdom:

Poor nursing care, filthy wards and lack of leadership at Basildon and Thurrock University NHS Hospitals Foundation Trust led to the deaths of up to 400 patients a year.

Figures compiled by a health watchdog showed death rates at the Essex trust were a third higher than they should have been.

Among the worst failings discovered by the Care Quality Commission were a lack of basic nursing skills, curtains spattered with blood on wards, mould in vital equipment and patients being left in A&E for up to ten hours.

Ahh, but these two are the only ones having problems, right?

The watchdog report comes just months after an investigation into Mid-Staffordshire NHS foundation trust found similar problems, with up to 1,200 avoidable deaths.

Hmm. Okay, but we know that the folks who let this happen are going to be fired, of course.

The CQC report has now been passed on to Monitor, the organisation in charge of foundation hospital trusts.

Monitor has the power to replace the management at the trust but it is understood none of the board members have yet been threatened with losing their jobs.

Yep, that’s government-run health-care for ya. Needless deaths, but the bureaucrats who let it happen get to keep their job regardless.

Food For Thought This Thanksgiving

From one of the people who helps bring us this bountiful harvest: a farmer.

Nobody but we farmers celebrates a great crop like this one. The rest of America should celebrate, and be grateful for the abundance that agriculture provides.

When all the locals are combining grain here in northwest Missouri, there is so much dust in the air that it makes for beautiful sunsets. Sort of a purple haze over the Corn Belt. Makes us sneeze, as well. The fall air is clear, and the colors are sharp, shades of brown, gold, and grey. The fall days are long, lasting well into the night, as we hurry to get the crops from the field.

Our harvest crew includes my two brothers, my dad, mom, wife, sisters-in-law, son-in-law, daughter, and three nephews. We’re all dressed in overalls or blue jeans, heavy jackets, and baseball caps. The family resemblance is strong, and my brothers and nephews are big guys, so the overall effect is a bit spooky. Think of a Faulkner novel, substituting rusted-out pickup trucks for mules.

Read the whole thing.

SEALs Face Assault Charges For Bringing In Terrorist!

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, interrogative, over.

Navy SEALs have secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq — the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004. And three of the SEALs who captured him are now facing criminal charges, sources told FoxNews.com.

The three, all members of the Navy’s elite commando unit, have refused non-judicial punishment — called an admiral’s mast — and have requested a trial by court-martial.

Ahmed Hashim Abed, whom the military code-named “Objective Amber,” told investigators he was punched by his captors — and he had the bloody lip to prove it.

Now, instead of being lauded for bringing to justice a high-value target, three of the SEAL commandos, all enlisted, face assault charges and have retained lawyers.

Gee, I wonder if everything would have been okay if they’d read the guy the Miranda warnings first.

Now Reid’s Real Problems Begin

So, over the weekend, in another late-Saturday-night vote, the Senate approved a motion to open debate on their own version of the health care bill.

Lefties may think they’ve won, but in reality, the fight has barely begun.

The problem is simple… many Democratic Senators who voted to open debate may not vote later on to close debate (“cloture”), which also needs 60 votes. At least some of the moderate Democrats in the Senate voted to open debate primarily to attempt to modify the bill to make it more palatable to them. However, what the moderates want (a weakening of the “public option”) is anathema to the hard-core leftists in the Senate.

Thus, Reid is caught between the proverbial rock and hard place. If he doesn’t weaken the public option, the moderates may not vote for cloture. If he does, the leftists may not vote. And Reid can’t afford even one defection unless he can pick up a liberal Republican to counterbalance it, and that’s pretty unlikely.

So in actually succeeding in opening debate, Reid might have started the demise of the bill.

Hmmm…

November 2009:

“There are core strengths to the American economy that will put us in good stead over the long term,” Obama said.

September 2008:

As we noted in a story yesterday evening, the Obama campaign quickly jumped on John McCain’s statement yesterday that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” McCain made the comment on the same day that two major Wall Street institutions effectively collapsed, and the Obama campaign portrayed McCain’s response as evidence that the Republican nominee is “out of touch with what’s going in the lives of ordinary Americans.”

I guess Minitrue hasn’t gotten around to flushing that campaign ad down the memory hole yet.

Mary Landrieu’s 100 Million Pieces of Silver

ABC News:

On page 432 of the Reid bill, there is a section increasing federal Medicaid subsidies for “certain states recovering from a major disaster.”

The section spends two pages defining which “states” would qualify, saying, among other things, that it would be states that “during the preceding 7 fiscal years” have been declared a “major disaster area.”

I am told the section applies to exactly one state:  Louisiana, the home of moderate Democrat Mary Landrieu, who has been playing hard to get on the health care bill.

In other words, the bill spends two pages describing would could be written with a single world:  Louisiana.  (This may also help explain why the bill is long.)

Senator Harry Reid, who drafted the bill, cannot pass it without the support of Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu.

How much does it cost?  According to the Congressional Budget Office: $100 million.

Unfortunately, Sen. Landrieu was just re-elected in 2008, so it will be a while before she can be voted out of office.

2010 Isn’t Looking Good For Incumbents

Most non-political-wonks tend to “vote their pocketbooks,” which means this really doesn’t look good for the party in power right now (emphasis mine):

About 9.6 percent of borrowers were delinquent on their mortgage during the third quarter, according to the survey, and another 4.5 percent more were somewhere in the foreclosure process. Overall, about 14 percent of mortgage loans or 7.4 million households were delinquent or in the foreclosure process during the quarter, according to the group.

That is the highest level recorded by the survey, which has been conducted since 1972, and is up from about 10 percent of borrowers who were in trouble during the same period last year.

If unemployment rates peak by the middle of next year, foreclosures could reach their highest levels by the end of the year, Brinkmann said. But even after peaking, foreclosure rates are likely to remain elevated as borrowers in regions that have had steep price declines and now owe more than their home is worth continue to struggle, he said.

Looks like voters really won’t be in any mood to vote for incumbents of either party in November 2010. While that is bad for the GOP, it’s worse for the Democrats, because there are more Democrat incumbents, and there’s also more Democrats in vulnerable districts, including districts that voted for the Democrat for Congress but McCain for President.

2010 could really be a big GOP year… everything seems to be pointing in that direction, at least.

Lieberman Stands Firm On Filibuster Of Public Option

Gotta admire a politician who says what he means and means what he says:

Sen. Joe Lieberman’s threat to filibuster any health care bill with a public option could kill health reform this year — and embolden Democratic challengers who’d like to send him packing in 2012.

But Lieberman doesn’t seem worried.

“I don’t think about that stuff,” Lieberman told POLITICO this week. “I’m just — I’m being a legislator. After what I went through in 2006, there’s nothing much more that anybody [who] disagrees with me can try to do.”

It certainly looks like he’s not planning on backing down on this any time soon. That’s trouble for Harry Reid, because Lieberman’s firm stand is likely to embolden Democrats who aren’t too sure about the public option themselves.

Obama Calls Troops a “Pretty Good Photo-Op”

Washington Post:

Obama arrived on [Osan Air Base, South Korea] 3:19 p.m. local time (1 a.m. Eastern Standard Time) and received a rousing welcome from 1,500 troops in camouflage uniforms, many holding cameras or pointing cellphones to snap pictures.

“You guys make a pretty good photo op,” the president said.

Crass? Yep.

But it’s probably also accurate… Obama seems to think of everything in terms of how it can make him look good, and thus troops are best used for photo ops. He certainly doesn’t seem to think they’re worth using to stop the Islamoterrorists in Afghanistan.

Barack Obama “Beyond Radioactive” For 2010 Candidates

How many sitting presidents are described as “beyond radioactive“?

Many watchers of House politics are tempted to downplay the potential for real races in these districts after taking one look at immediate past election history. How could Republicans possibly threaten the likes of Skelton or Spratt, both of whom won more than 62 percent of the vote in 2008? Or Gordon, Tanner, or Boucher, all of whom were unopposed last year? But that was before they were saddled with a sitting Democratic president who is beyond radioactive in their districts. History is history.

Less than a year out from Election Day, it’s time to rethink who the vulnerable Democrats are. And if President Obama is the dominant issue of the 2010 midterms (and rarely has a midterm not been a referendum on the incumbent president), Democrats ought to be seriously concerned about districts where reliable surveys suggest voters are in open revolt against him. Democrats would rather not draw attention to their problems in these districts, but both parties recognize the sea change underway.

As I said before (before family issues and a bad head cold forced a temporary break from blogging), it didn’t have to be this way. If the Democrats had put the ideology on the back burner and looked at what was best for the country instead of what they thought would be best for the party, perhaps the Democratic Party wouldn’t be in this situation now.

Mincing No Words

That’s what Austin Bay is doing:

One word aptly describes Ft. Hood mass murderer Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan: traitor.

Traitor is a tough word. It doesn’t smudge and squish. “Traitor” draws a hard line, one that sharply divides essential life-determining values and marks a defining personal choice between the profound and the profane.

He’s got a point, too:

Hasan’s treachery is more like that of America’s most infamous traitor, the Revolutionary War’s Benedict Arnold. The fortuitous capture of a British spy foiled Arnold’s plot to betray the Continental Army position at West Point to the British. Arnold committed treason for money and rank in the British Army, and his treachery put American soldiers and the war effort at risk.

Hasan did a lot more than put American soldiers at risk, he actively gunned them down in cold blood.

“Traitor” seems to apply, doesn’t it?

Now This Is A Veterans’ Day Celebration

And it’s an idea I wish I’d thought of. Video clips of dogs welcoming their humans home.

Nothing says “welcome home” quite like a wagging tail and/or loud purr.

Here Comes The Buck-Passing

AP:

Finger-pointing erupted between federal agencies Tuesday over Fort Hood shooting suspect Nidal Hasan. Government officials said a Defense Department terrorism investigator looked into Hasan’s contacts with a radical imam months ago, but a military official denied prior knowledge of the Army psychiatrist’s contacts with any Muslim extremists.

The two government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case on the record, said the Washington-based joint terrorism task force overseen by the FBI was notified of communications between Hasan and a radical imam overseas, and the information was turned over to a Defense Criminal Investigative Service employee assigned to the task force. The communications were gathered by investigators beginning in December 2008 and continuing into early this year.

That Defense investigator wrote up an assessment of Hasan after reviewing the communications and the Army major’s personnel file, according to these officials. The assessment concluded Hasan did not merit further investigation — in large part because his communications with the imam were centered on a research paper about the effects of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and the investigator determined that Hasan was in fact working on such a paper, the officials said.

The disclosure came as questions swirled about whether opportunities were missed to head off the massacre in which 13 died and 29 were wounded last Thursday — a familiar, early stage in the investigation of headline-grabbing crimes when public officials involved in a case often speak anonymously as they try to shift any blame to rivals in other agencies.

This is entirely predictable. People who haven’t been doing their jobs right, and know that they haven’t, suddenly try to shift the blame to someone else when the fecal matter impacts the rotating blades. Of course, it never occurs to any of these folks (perhaps because they’re gubment drones) that if they’d do the job right in the first place, there’d be no need to shift the blame later.

The next stage is probably for lower-level functionaries to be blamed when it was really The Powers That Be at the various agencies that created the policies that the lower-level folks followed.

Unfortunately, real changes that would prevent something like Fort Hood from occurring again are probably not going to happen, because The Powers That Be won’t take the responsibility.

Happy Birthday, United States Marine Corps!

The first two battalions of United States Marines were formed 10 November 1775, and they’ve been kicking butt and taking names ever since–Marines have served in every single armed conflict America’s been a part of.

If you know a Marine (and I do), thank them today.

Semper Fidelis!

Pelosi’s Big Blunder

A lot has been written about the aftermath of Saturday’s vote, including by my fellow blogger here and NRO-nik Yuval Levin, so I guess it’s time I added my own $0.02 worth.

I’d like to use Yuval’s post as a jumping-off point. He points out, I think correctly, that the House vote makes it even harder for the Senate to pass anything. However, it also makes more problems for the Democrats.

This was clearly an unpopular vote… that’s the clear meaning of all the rallies and town halls, including 9/12 and the rally on the steps of the Capitol last Thursday. Let’s also remember that not all voters read blogs or research things online. Top that with anger at the Democrat Party as a whole, and you’ve got the perfect set-up for large numbers of people saying, “To heck with the whole party. I don’t care if my Democrat Representative did vote against it, we need to take the majority away from them and the Speakership away from Pelosi, so I am voting against him/her.” Thus, it’s highly likely that Pelosi has won a battle, but in such a way that she’s set herself up to lose the overall war.

It was also unnecessary. Not only is it unlikely to pass in the Senate, even without the House vote (Reid had said before the vote that it was likely the vote in the Sente would be pushed back into 2010, where it will be even harder to get it passed because of the election that year), but if Pelosi had even the slightest concept of good politics, she could have gone about it completely differently and probably succeeded.

Consider: If Pelosi had backed off of this takeover of the health-care system by the government for just a little while, put her ideology in a desk drawer somewhere, and gone on to policies that actually encourage job creation, it would have changed the playing field drastically. People would have been reassured about the Democrats (falsely reassured, but remember most people don’t pay the kind of attention to politics that bloggers and blog-readers do), and feeling better about the economy, so they might not have been so scared about this massive government power-grab.

Now, I admit, it’s a small chance, but a small chance is better than what Pelosi has now, which is practically no chance of it getting through the Senate, and an equally minuscule chance of a Democrat majority surviving to try again after 2010. People have made much of the Democrats’ willingness to sacrifice their House seats to enact statist health-care, but what about sacrificing for a maneuver that makes it all but impossible for it to be passed?

By pushing too hard, Her Speakerness has essentially buried the prospects for socialized medicine in this nation for the near future.

U.S. House Passes Health Care Reform Bill, Ignores Will Of American People

In a brazen act of defiance against over 50 percent of the American people, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her fellow leftist statists in the U.S. House of Representatives passed the monstrosity known as H.R. 3962 – Affordable Health Care for America Act [Article - House passes health care reform bill; Vote garners only one Republican].

The snag in the works was getting so-called “moderate” “Blue Dog” Democrats to vote for the “deficit neutral” bill. How did Pelosi get so-called “Blue Dog” Democrats to vote for passage of the bill? There was certainly some arm-twisting that was done by leftist Democrats and President Obama himself; however, by simply inserting a stipulation known as the “Stupak Amendment“, which limits, but does not eliminate coverage and funding for abortions, that’s all it took for so-called “moderate” Democrats to submit an “up” vote.

Never mind the insertion of items that don’t have anything to do with health care reform and that raise taxes on people whom President Obama promised would not be taxed. Never mind that over 50 percent of Americans do not want a public “option” or in other words, government-run health care [Rasmussen Report - Health Care Reform].

Self-serving, hyper-ambitious politicians on all levels of government do not care about the will of the American people. They do not genuinely care about the health and well-being of the American people. They have proven time and again that they are nothing but a group of haughty, arrogant, elitist power and money grabbers with an aristocratic sense of predestinate entitlement.

The next election cycle is only a year away. A lot can happen in a year and those who want to retain their positions of power will do their best (or worst) to pull the wool over their constituents’ eyes in an effort to get re-elected. They know that the memories of the people they claim to represent are short. They are banking on that knowledge because it is a successful time-tested strategy.

So-called health care reform is only one link in a longer chain of enslavement that leftist bosses are forging for America. They are only a couple of links away from completing that chain. After the chain is complete, it will be almost impossible to break it.

What will you do? Will you vote for or against the chain? The 2010 elections should give us an indication.

Poignant Poem for Veterans’ Day

A Canadian cartoonist whose cartoon I read daily (if you’re a geek, you’ll probably enjoy it too) has come up with a great early memorial for Veterans’ Day (in Canada, Remembrance Day). Check it out.

Government Bureaucracy, Squared

Some of you may remember the chart that the GOP put together showing the mess of bureaucracy that HR 32oo would have created. That’s the chart that the Democrats wanted to prohibit Republican Members of Congress from sending to their constitutents.

That chart has now been updated for Her Speakerness Pelosi’s latest monstrosity, HR 3962 (link in .pdf format). As one might expect, the new bill adds lots of new bureaucracies to what was already a horrible mess.

It’s not too late… call your Representatives and tell them that if they vote for this, you will not vote for them!

UPDATE: Courtesy of NRO’s Campaign Spot, here’s a handy-dandy list of 55 House Democrats who might be swayed. Give them a call (call the Capitol Switchboard at 202.224.3121 and ask for their office, since Her Speakerness is keeping them all in DC) and tell them a vote for this means you will donate to their opponent next year. Remember, Representatives are all elected every 2 years, so each and every one of those names on that list will be up for re-election or defeat next year.

Support The Wounded Troops

Especially in the wake of today’s tragic Fort Hood shooting, it’s appropriate to think of ways we could support our troops, most importantly those wounded in battle.

So, let me suggest donating to Soldiers’ Angels Project Valour-IT. These folks provide technology to help wounded service members… their “flagship” item is a voice-controlled laptop for those with arm or hand wounds, but they also provide other items that you can read about here.

In memory of my late father, who was an enlisted man in the Navy and Naval Reserves, I’ve signed us up for the Navy team during their Veterans’ Day Fundraiser. It’s just a friendly competition, all donations are available to members of any service. But please, open your hearts and wallets to these brave people who gave of themselves to protect us. Just click the picture below to go to the donation page.