They heard the American people. They just don't care.

When Democrats took over Congress in 2007, they increasingly did not send bills through the regular conference process. “We have to defer to the bigger picture,” explained Rep. Henry Waxman of California. So the children’s health insurance bill passed by the House that year was largely dumped in favor of the Senate’s version. House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel and other Democrats complained the House had been “cut off at the knees” but ultimately supported the bill. Legislation on lobbying reform and the 2007 energy bill were handled the same way — without appointing an actual conference.

Rather than appoint members to a public conference committee, those measures were “ping-ponged” — i.e. changes to reconcile the two versions were transmitted by messenger between the two houses as the final product was crafted behind closed doors solely by the leadership. Many Democrats grumbled at the secrecy. “We need to get back to the point where we use conference committees . . . and have serious dialogue,” said Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama at the time.

But -- I don't know if this is a real "but" or more kabuki -- a Pelosi ally and top Democrat says it's time to start the process over.

In the House, we fought hard to repeal McCarran-Ferguson, the antitrust exemption that insurance companies have enjoyed for years. We did that because we believed firmly that those Fortune 500 corporations should not enjoy special treatment.

Yet the Senate bill does not include that provision — despite assurances from some members that they will seek to add it. By ending that protection, we will be able to go after insurance companies with federal penalties for misleading advertising or dishonest business practices…

And of course, the Senate bill did not remove the onerous choice language intended to appeal to anti-abortion forcesÂ…

ItÂ’s time that we draw the line on this weak bill and ask the Senate to go back to the drawing board.

Read both Ed's and Allah's commentary to realize this ain't going to be stopped in the House. Most of the Blue Dog hold-outs are ready to vote yes, probably just to end the discussion and, they wrongly think, put this unpleasantness behind them.

The vote was tight as a tick last time, and a couple of votes have been lost, but the bulk of the Blue Dogs will sell out their supposed "principles" gladly to make nice-nice with their liberal donor base and hope that everyone's forgotten by November 2010.

PS, We won't forget. And we won't give you "credit" for your posturing for a month or two as giving a rat's ass what your non-San-Fransisco-big-money-donors think.

We are going to end your careers.

Posted by: Ace at 12:47 PM | Comments (80)
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I'm wasting all day filling up the sidebar with these, thought I'd throw it open. Usually good for fun.

Include as much of a hint as you want and then link the song. Usually a good idea to include category and era.

Posted by: Ace at 12:27 PM | Comments (188)
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And now you're gonna hear about it. You! DrewM. My mom says your historical references STINK!

We've all waited for this special time of year. We've nurtured our grudges and disappointments for twelve miserable months while the economy and the job market got snuffed, and our government brought the Curse of Maxine Waters to life by taking over everything from GM to the largest insurance company in America. We've had weeks of nasty back-room political arm-twisting to shove this mess called Health Care Reform to Obama's desk.

We are pissed, so lets air some grievances. I'll start. You people disappointed the hell out of me this year. Google your own doggone cheerleader pics why don't you? I put up a post a few weeks ago to give you all some place to comment on the games and it wasn't good enough because it didn't have a cheerleader. It was like watching Katrina refugees streaming out of New Orleans all over again.

Don't even get me started on Twitter. I got problems with you people too.

UPDATE FROM LAURAW: Yeah, this is the Festivus post. Festivus is a time to gather together your family, your friends, and your most precious Morons. And tell them all how they've disappointed you in the past year.

On a more serious note, 2009 fucking sucked in so many ways it's hard to even catalogue them. All the misfortunes visited upon family and friends, and even personal losses of both...I hope we're all never again so happy to put a year of life in the rearview mirror.

2010 just has to be better.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 11:22 AM | Comments (246)
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I wanted to put this off until as close to Christmas as possible, but since people are leaving work early (funny how you guys tend to read the site during working hours, but save non-working hours for your singleminded focus on porn and Knight Rider repeats), this is my last chance.

I think I link this every year.

Oh, and To Our Jewish Morons... Happy, um, Thursday.

No, sorry, missed Hannukah greeting this year. Happy Belated Hannukah.

Posted by: Ace at 11:16 AM | Comments (99)
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Kaus links this fine article at Reason.

"The budget," said Will Rodgers, "is like a mythical bean bag. Congress votes mythical beans into it, then reaches in and tries to pull real ones out." And the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the non-partisan office tasked with generating official price tags for legislation, is the agency responsible for helping Congress count those mythical beans. But as the health care debate has progressed throughout the year, Congressional Democrats have become far more adept at getting the CBO to count the beans just the way they want.

...

[The] Democrats became more skilled at manipulating the CBO's scoring process. Indeed, they have become so skilled at getting what they want out of the CBO that the office has taken to including strongly worded warnings that the various bills' real costs may not actually match their estimates.

In the House, Democrats shifted an expensive, unpaid-for "fix" to doctor's Medicare reimbursement rates over to a separate bill. And in the Senate, they backloaded the spending so that its full effects would not be felt in the 10-year window that CBO scores. In the latest Senate bill, 99 percent of the spending would occur in the last six years of the budget window.

Nor do the scores count the cost of state level Medicaid expansions—$25 billion in the Senate's bill—or of the private sector mandates it imposes, which, according to Michael Cannon, a health policy analyst at the Cato Institute, could add an additional $1.5 trillion to the total.

The bigger issue is that in budgeting, there are multiple realities available: The various scores put forth by the CBO are based on what might be called "legislative reality"—a fictional world in which there are no changes to current law except the bill under consideration, and new legislation is executed to the letter. That means CBO scores are not permitted to reflect political reality—the understanding that what a law says Congress will do in the future is not necessarily what Congress will actually do.

Knowing this, Democrats have concocted legislation that ignores the relevant facts of political reality and instead skews legislative reality, which is based not on honest expectations but on the promises made in legislation, in their favor.

Read the whole thing. The only thing the CBO can do about this is issue strong warnings that if the supposed legislation they're scoring is not followed strictly to the letter, and if Congress does not restrain itself from passing related spending packages in a supposedly "different" bill, the real-world costs will far exceed their "estimates."

Which is what they keep doing, actually -- the know the Democrats are playing games with the rules and compelling them to report lies as honest numbers.

Not that the media tells you this, of course. They just keep reporting "$132 billion in savings over ten years!" They keep forgetting to report the CBO's increasingly stern warnings that their scorings have less and less relationship to fiscal, or even physical, reality.

Posted by: Ace at 11:09 AM | Comments (13)
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It is embarrassing to link Hot Air again, but Ed's been on top of crap today so what can I do.

So. The Democrats sought to put aside the "savings" from cuts in Medicare that will almost certainly never occur into a trust fund to spend in the future in order to very partially shore up Medicare's solvency.

So, so far, we have imaginary dollars going to solve a real-life actuarially-certain problem.

But that's normal for Washington. Bear in mind doctor's fees were "cut" in 1997 to balance the budget and yet those cuts were delayed every year since then, and now, twelve years later, they're going to be delayed for ten more years in the doc-fix bill.

But okay: We have these imaginary dollars we can pretend to spend in the future.

Here's something -- since they're imaginary anyway, why not spend them twice?

Why not spend these imaginary dollars first on a trust fund to shore up Medicare's finances for the future, and also spend them to increase spending on current health care by spending these phatasmobucks on millions of new government clients?

Hey, why not?

CBO has been asked for additional information about the projected effects of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), incorporating the managerÂ’s amendment, on the federal budget and on the balance in the Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund, from which Medicare Part A benefits are paid. Specifically, CBO has been asked whether the reductions in projected Part A outlays and increases in projected HI revenues under the legislation can provide additional resources to pay future Medicare benefits while simultaneously providing resources to pay for new programs outside of Medicare. Â…

The key point is that the savings to the HI trust fund under the PPACA would be received by the government only once, so they cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending on other parts of the legislation or on other programs. Trust fund accounting shows the magnitude of the savings within the trust fund, and those savings indeed improve the solvency of that fund; however, that accounting ignores the burden that would be faced by the rest of the government later in redeeming the bonds held by the trust fund. Unified budget accounting shows that the majority of the HI trust fund savings would be used to pay for other spending under the PPACA and would not enhance the ability of the government to redeem the bonds credited to the trust fund to pay for future Medicare benefits. To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings as both improving the governmentÂ’s ability to pay future Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the governmentÂ’s fiscal position.

It should be noted the CBO is required to be stupid, by law. If Congress says they're going to rake in $600 billion in savings by cutting the popular Medicare program for the vote-diligent elderly, the CBO has to pretend to believe them, no matter how jackass it is.

That's a question of sincerity and honesty and likelihood -- and the CBO is restrained by law from making determinations on such questions.

However, this is a case of pure math. And in pure math, you cannot arbitrarily double a figure by supposing you can spend it twice in two completely different ways. This is a pack of lies the CBO is not legally barred from calling bullshit on.

So, there you go. There's your Hope and Change at work. The central funding mechanism of this plan is "savings" that will never occur, which are then spent twice on two entirely different groups of people.

Since we're spending fake-pretend phatasmobucks now -- can we use $33 billion per year to pay off developing countries to "go green" as Obama wants? Why is it that when it comes to something like that, he gets persnickety all of a sudden and demands we spend real money instead of these phantasmobucks?

I wouldn't mind if we were just spending phantasmobucks on phantasmal "problems." But no -- real money for that.

Video at the link. But here's a video from a future ObamaCare client, praising how well the system works.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:51 AM | Comments (26)
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Good stunt.

Part of the problem here is the press' hostility. This sort of thing would be covered endlessly by the media if it were the Democrats objecting. They and they alone get to set the national media agenda.

But it's the GOP, so no coverage.

Well... some minor coverage, now that the nutroots is objecting to Pelosi-Reid-Obama-Care. Like, now that leftists in good standing are objecting to the bill as a corporate sell-out, CBSNews can finally report on the bribes and kickbacks that have been going on for months.

Via Hot Air.

Posted by: Ace at 10:16 AM | Comments (48)
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Ah, I see. Health care was the most pressing issue facing the nation, demanding the full force of Obama's gassy, empty, feckless speechifying.

But now the polls insist that no, it's economy and jobs that are most important, so Obama will address that issue, turning all his considerable power to say nothing at all and at great length to those concerns.

"Hard pivot" on the soft soap:

The White House privately anticipates health care talks to slip into February — past President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address — and then plans to make a “very hard pivot” to a new jobs bill, according to senior administration officials.

Obama has been told that disputes over abortion and the tight schedule are highly likely to delay a final deal, a blow to the president who had hoped to trumpet a health care victory in his big speech to the nation. But he has also been told that House Democratic leaders seem inclined, at least for now, to largely accept the compromise worked out in the Senate, virtually assuring he will eventually get a deal.

Internally, White House aides are plunging into a 2010 plan calling for an early focus on creating jobs, especially in the energy sector, along with starting a conversation about deficit reduction measures, the administration officials said.

Both will be major themes for his first State of the Union speech, which will likely take place on Jan. 26 or Feb. 2. White House aides are in the early stages of planning for the national address, but Obama will not only trumpet what he has described as his “B-plus” performance in 2009 but also set the stage for the 2010 congressional campaigns.

That's exactly what the American people have been demanding -- a "focus," some "conversations," and "major themes" in a speech.

As someone who gets like 200 emails a day, I can't tell you how many people have written me to ask, angrily, "When will Barack Obama finally have a conversation about the deficit and talk up major themes about the economy?"

I tell you, people are angry. They are demanding conversations and major themes right now, and they will not be denied these crucial necessities any longer.

And also -- a "focus."

Every day emails from hurting people out of work pour into my email box, almost shouting their demands for "a focus."

"Great," they all say, "Obama says he's 'saved the economy,' but if that's true, where's my focus?"

Thank God he's finally woken up to reality and will finally address people's God-given American right to a focus, a conversation, and major themes.

Posted by: Ace at 09:26 AM | Comments (173)
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I mentioned this yesterday and now Byron York writes about it.

One thing people were asking about is "Why is Drudge saying the debt-limit vote will happen Christmas Eve if your source is saying January 20th?"

Short answer: The vote tomorrow is for a one-month stopgap to prevent default. They want to have the bigger, longer-term vote just before the SOTU.

The Senate has still not voted on a bill to raise the nation's debt ceiling. It has to do so by tomorrow, before lawmakers leave for the year. Democrats have taken hits for wanting to raise the limit by about $1.8 trillion; raising it by that amount would allow them to avoid another vote on raising the debt ceiling before next year's elections. They also hoped to hide the measure inside a conference report so that lawmakers would vote on a larger package of measures and would not have to cast a vote specifically in favor of such a huge increase. When they couldn't reach agreement on that, they came up with a plan for a two-month debt-ceiling agreement, which would at least mean they would not have to come up with a longer-term agreement until February.

That is important because Democrats want to hold the debt-ceiling vote after the president's State of the Union address, in which Obama is expected to emphasize fiscal responsibility and deficit control. Given Democratic spending in the last year, Obama will have a difficult time making the argument with a straight face, and Senate Democrats had hoped that pushing the debt ceiling vote until well beyond the speech would make the president's task a little easier. Thus the plan to pass a two-month debt ceiling bill before leaving for Christmas.

But back to the problem at hand: Reid wanted to leave town earlier than 7 p.m. So McConnell offered him a deal. The Senate comes back into session on January 20, just a few days before the State of the Union address. McConnell offered to hold the health care vote a few hours earlier on Christmas Eve if Reid would agree to take up the debt limit issue on January 20, and would further agree to hold a specific roll-call vote that day on raising the debt ceiling, and would further agree to consider, and vote on, five Republican amendments related to out-of-control federal spending.

In the debt debate -- the one Democrats didn't want to have -- GOP senators are expected to offer amendments to end the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, as well as amendments on a budget-cutting package, on a deficit-control commission and other spending-related items.

Ehhh... I guess it's something. It doesn't seem like a heck of a lot.

One thing that I think is true: If McConnell only cared about getting home for the holidays, I think he and the rest of the GOP caucus could have just left, and left the Democrats alone in the Senate to pass whatever they wanted with their 60 votes. A filibuster is no longer a positive thing the opposition needs to affirmatively take steps to achieve; it's passive, by rule. You need 60 votes to close debate and 51 to carry a motion and stuff.

You don't need 40 votes to maintain a filibuster. You just need 60 votes for cloture. In essence, a filibuster is always on by default, and you need the 60 votes to stop debate.

So, I guess, McConnell's personal travel plans were unaffected either way; if he wanted to bug out, he could have.

I think. I think. Not 100% sure but usually my mistakes get corrected quickly by readers so I should know better shortly.

This doesn't seem like much of a concession but then, I guess, McConnell also wasn't offering a huge thing in return, either.

Posted by: Ace at 08:50 AM | Comments (61)
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Obama's spin is that he didn't campaign on the public option but he sure did sound like he wanted one in the clip from earlier this year the group uses.

Go get them guys! Tell your progressive friends in the House to fight this sellout to the greedy insurance companies! Don't give in! Don't give up! Yes! You! Can!

Even the White House spokesmen at NBC admit Obama was opposed to an individual mandate throughout the campaign. He also promised to sign a bill that was deficit neutral (no one really believes any of that) or that there would be no new or increased taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000. So you know...he lies.

BTW-As of yesterday, President Present's administration won't say if it favors the House or Senate bill.

We all know that Obama favors the Senate bill for the simple reason it's the only one with a prayer of passing both houses. That's the bottom line in all of this...pass something. Then they can begin spinning it and try and work on the popularity of the bill. Right now the indecision and infighting is killing them. They simply need to get it off the front page.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:29 AM | Comments (49)
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