Rossputin.com Rational Thinking About Our World

[Please see the info below about the new Instant Messaging service I’ve implemented during the radio show!]

Please join me by listening to (and calling in to) this week’s Backbone Radio program from 5 PM to 8 PM  on 710 AM KNUS in Denver.

If you’re not in range of the radio waves, you should be able to listen to the show online by clicking HERE.

I’ll be joined by the always interesting Krista Kafer.

Of course we’ll be spending plenty of time talking about health care “reform” which is by far the biggest story of the week, the month, and the year.

But we’ll also cover other topics, both newsy and philosophical.

During the first hour, we’ll be joined by State Senator Greg Brophy who will give us a “lightning round” update on the state legislative session.  If you think our federal Congress is bad, you should hear what the Democrats in the state legislature are doing…

As a lead-in to our 6-o’clock guest, we’ll talk a bit about the difference between libertarian and conservative, and perhaps between “small-l” libertarian and “capital-L” Libertarian (i.e. representing a member of the Libertarian Pary.)

In the 6-o’clock hour, we’ll be joined by Rob McNealy, Libertarian candidate for Congress in Colorado’s 6th Congressional District, to talk about the news of the week, his position on key issues, and what it means to him to be a Libertarian.  (I note from perusing Rob’s site that he has some positions which might be considered closer to conservative than Libertarian…which is not meant as a criticism.)

And during the 7 PM hour, we will be joined by current 6th CD Congressman Mike Coffman to talk about health care and the remarkable dynamics of the House of Representatives as well as his take on the mood of the people and what the November elections are likely to bring.

I encourage listener participation so please call, e-mail, or instant message me, and join in the conversation.

The studio call-in number is 303-696-1971.  Add it to your speed dial!

I have implemented an instant messaging “widget” on my website at Rossputin.com, so if you go to my main blog page, you should see the IM form on the right. (For now, I only plan on turning it on during the show, not having it on every day.)  You can shoot me a message during the show and if it’s relevant I’ll respond on air.

Also, I will check e-mail during the show, so feel free to e-mail me at ross (at) 710knus.com (click on that text to open an e-mail to me!) and I’ll even try to keep an eye on my Twitter account so you can try “tweeting” to me…@Rossputin.  You can try THIS link if you’re logged in to Twitter, but I’m not an expert so I’m not sure it will work…

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) just announced that the House will NOT use the “deem and pass” scheme which seemed to be the path they had been on for several days.  He refused to say whether pushback from members of the Democratic Caucus was the reason for the change.

Hoyer said there would be two hours of debate before a vote on the reconciliation package followed immediately by a vote on the Senate bill.

If both were to pass, the Senate bill would go to the president to be signed into law and the reconciliation bill would go to the Senate…where it will face a barrage of Republican opposition and parliamentary attacks.

The change in plans is, unfortunately for the nation, a wise move for the Democrats because “deem and pass” would have faced serious court challenges despite the left’s trying to defend it by saying it’s been used plenty of times before.

If the House passes both bills and if Harry Reid can deliver 51 votes for the reconciliation package (as he is promising), whether that is the first version of reconciliation or some later version after whatever changes the Republicans are able to force, the next 8 months will be a non-stop show of Democrats talking about getting rid of “preexisting conditions exclusions for children” and Republicans talking about “gutting Medicare” and “massive tax hikes".   All health care, all the time.  Democrats believe they can talk the public into thinking the new law is good for them.  Republicans think the public will hate it even more than they do now once they realize how intrusive it is and how much it really is a government takeover of the health care system.

I think the Republicans will be right but the Democrats are “all in” at this point and have little to lose by trying their strategy.

In the meantime, the Capitol is teeming with Tea Party activists yelling “Kill the Bill".

At this point, what’s happened is that Democrats feel so certain they’re going to lose large numbers of seats in November that they’re telling their members “you might as well vote for this because you’re gonna lose anyway".

Here’s one theory on the real short-term goal of Pelosi and Obama:  They want to get enough Democrat support that they can pass the Senate Bill and their reconciliation package without having to use the “Slaughter Rule” to “deem” the Senate Bill passed rather than actually voting on it.

While Pelosi and Obama have been saying that people don’t care about “process", they know it’s not true.  They say that everyone knows a vote for the Slaughter Rule is the same as a vote for the Senate Bill.  But if their members knew that, they wouldn’t need the scheme.  For Democrat members of Congress, voting on the rule lets them think they might be able to fool just enough voters to get reelected.

But again, Pelosi and Obama know it isn’t true.  Americans won’t fall for it.  In a way, I think it’s smarter for the Dems to vote for the Senate bill and try to honestly defend ObamaCare than to try to hide behind a transparent procedural maneuver. I think the Democratic leadership knows that as well.

Thus, their goal is not to pass this bill by a one or two vote margin.  They want to have enough “Yes” votes so they can just vote on the Senate bill rather than on the Slaughter Rule which will have the secondary effect, after passing the government takeover of health care, of slaughtering Democrats in November even worse than the blood-letting they’re already going to take.

It must be noted that the situation will become even muddier if the House passes their bills or rule on Sunday because the reconciliation process could be even more complex and arcane than the hoops the House is jumping through.  Republicans are already working out plans to derail the ability to pass reconciliation as the House wants it.  And if they can force changes, it would have to go back to the House.  One huge question remains:  reconciliation must reconcile with existing law.  That means that Obama would need to sign the Senate bill into law, but the House does not like the Senate bill as-is.  If Obama signs the Senate bill into law and then reconciliation fails, America will be stuck with the Senate bill (which is an utter disaster but, if anything, probably better than the House’s reconciliation plans.)  But the House will be extremely displeased if that happens, and they may use the Slaughter rule simply to avoid that possible outcome.

It will be political theater of the highest order.

Finally, keep in mind that the Democrats are finally admitting publicly that a loss on health care “reform” will destroy the Obama presidency for the remaining 3 years for which we must be tortured by a president who hates capitalism, hates fundamental American values, and has no understanding of economics or the real world.  The Democrats’ true goal is to make sure this Manchurian Candidate’s agenda is still at least somewhat achievable and his legacy at least somewhat preserved.

Fox News just reported that Harry Reid says there will be a vote on a public option soon.  Now we know what Dennis Kucinich was promised for his vote.  There is no chance that a public option will pass, but the Dems will try anything and everything at this point to save Barack Obama.

As Congressman Paul Ryan noted on Fox News a few days ago, part of the Democrats’ strategy to pass health care “reform” is to overstate the number of votes they have, trying to particularly pressure freshman and sophomore congressmen to be “on the right side of history.”

I had an interesting conversation with Human Events reporter Connie Hair – she of the endless energy and commitment to her conservative principles – in which she made a few key points:

First, she told me that the Democrats reached out to Joseph Cao (R-LA), the only Republican to vote for the first House health care bill.  Cao has switched to “no” and they’re trying to get him back.  As Connie noted, “they wouldn’t be trying to get the Republican if they had enough Democrats.”

Second, there is pressure on Democrat congressmen from their governors, including from Democrat governors (click HERE to see letter from the Democrat governor of Tennessee to no-turned-yes Congressman Bart Gordon), who know that the health care “reform” bill will bankrupt financially-teetering states because of the mandates from Medicaid expansion.  This is the particular issue which was the subject of the Cornhusker Kickback. The Democrats’ proposed solution is to get rid of that payoff and give the same payoff to every state, essentially a massive expansion of the very entitlement that is bankrupting the federal government.

Third, it is all but impossible that the House’s reconciliation package will pass the Senate unaltered.  And if it gets altered by as much as a comma, it has to go back to the House where Democrats will have to “walk the plank again.”

Keep in mind that the Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that reconciliation in any form can only proceed after the Senate bill has been signed into law.  According to Connie, that ruling means that the House cannot make their approval of the bill conditional on the Senate’s agreeing to the House’s reconciliation package.  Therefore, if the House passes their “self-executing rule", the Senate health care bill will be signed into law. And that will probably not change as we could see weeks or months of political chaos during which the reconciliation package is sent back and forth between the Senate and the House, with Senate Republicans using every procedural tool available to them to strip out the illegal, i.e. non-budget related items, from the reconciliation package.

Connie also noted that Mark Levin is planning a constitutional challenge to anything that passes the House under the Slaughter Rule and that there is a good chance the DC Circuit would put a stay on the implementation of the Senate bill until they can hear and rule on the case.  And there’s a good chance that the Supreme Court hears the case.

In the meantime, especially if Republicans take back control of either chamber of Congress, the GOP can work to make sure that the plan is essentially defunded until it can be repealed under a Republican president in 2012.

As Fred Barnes recently noted, if the House passes health care “reform", it means we’re closer to the beginning than the end of the political chaos around the issue.

Back to the myth of inevitability, the blog Firedoglake.com is one of few on the left not buying into Pelosi’s claims that she has or will imminently have the votes.  That site still thinks the Dems are down about 7 votes.

Finally, almost nobody is reporting that while there have been some “no” votes switching to “yes", there have also been “yes” votes switching to no. In fact, Fox’s Carl Cameron reported midday on Friday that 6 yes votes have switched to no, with only 4 no switching to yes. This is, as Connie says, “the big unreported story of the past few days."  And that’s just how Pelosi wants it.

UPDATE: Hannity pushes back:
http://biggovernment.com/falliance/2010/03/19/freedom-alliance-responds-to-allegations-against-sean-hannity/

UPDATE 2: For Debbie Schlussel’s response to the Freedom Alliance, please see the end of this note.

In a remarkable piece of investigative reporting, blogger Debbie Schlussel tells us that Sean Hannity’s Freedom Concerts, which are supposedly raising money for injured veterans and the families of veterans killed in action, give an almost-criminally low percentage of its donations to these veterans or their families.  Instead, it spends the vast majority of the donations on expenses and salaries, on consultants and on private jets for Hannity and his family.

I’ve never been an enormous fan of Hannity’s even though I appreciate anyone who effectively promotes a message of liberty.  To me, he’s rather superficial and rarely seems to do innovative or ground-breaking work.  He’s a conservative populist and I generally don’t like populists but I always thought he was doing yeoman’s work with the millions of dollars he raised for dead or injured veterans and their families.

Now, even that reason to like Hannity appears to be gone.

It’s a remarkable story and I urge you to read it:
http://www.debbieschlussel.com/6938/sean-hannitys-freedom-concert-scam-only-7-of-charitys-money-went-to-injured-troops-kids-of-fallen-troops-g5s-g6s-for-vannity/

For those of you who don’t know Schlussel, she’s no liberal.  She’s run for office as a Republican and has received death threats for her hard-hitting attacks against radical Islam in the US.

————–

Debbie Schlussel’s response to Freedom Alliance’s post in their defense:

Please have a look at my Human Events article about the literally incredible revenue and “savings” assumptions on which the Democrats are basing their erroneous claims that ObamaCare will cut budget deficits or in any other way be good for the nation:

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=36104

I was going to write a note about how boneheaded the Senate’s attack on China (pushing to have them labeled as a “currency manipulator") is, but Michael Schumah has done such a good job that I’ll simply point you to his piece and add a couple more comments.

Schumah’s article: Pressing China on the Yuan Won’t Work

Please read it…it’s an excellent intellectual immunization against the siren-like call of economic ignoramuses.

I would also add that China’s policy causes them to accumulate dollars, with which they have been massive buyers of US government debt.  Some people worry about that giving China leverage over the US but I doubt that.  Debt holders are not voters, whether in international economics or in standard corporate finance.  Beyond the debt, we’ve learned recently that China is buying equity stakes (stock) in US companies.  Combined, China’s trade surplus with the US is giving them more reason than ever to support American economic success.  The argument that China will damage the US if they don’t get their way is like saying they’d be willing to incinerate billions of dollars.  If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Communist China, it’s that they’re more capitalist and more fiscally disciplined than our own government, at least over the past several years – including most of George W. Bush’s second term. And that’s all on top of the 800-pound gorilla of China needing the US export market to keep Chinese workers employed and prevent social unrest, something they fear greatly.

One of the main impacts of China’s debt purchases has been to keep long-term interest rates very low.  While one can make a legitimate case that long-term bonds have largely because of China been in their own bubble (prices up, rates down) and that the bubble was a cause of the real estate bubble and ensuing economic collapse, at this point it’s clear that the economy and the real estate market would be in even worse shape if long-term rates were higher.

If there’s anything the global economy can’t handle now, it’s a trade war between the US and China.  Our politicians are just stupid enough to lead us into one, though I predict they’ll back off before that happens.

As if the arguments against the Senators’ move isn’t enough, the list of Senators behind it should give anyone with the slightest clue about political economy grave doubts about the thinking behind this attack on China:

Charles E. Schumer (D-NY), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Sam Brownback (R-KS), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Evan Bayh (D-IN), Ben Cardin (D-MD), Robert Casey (D-PA), Russ Feingold (D-WI), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Carl Levin (D-MI), Jim Webb (D-VA), and Arlen Specter (D-PA).

Have you ever seen a more complete list of econo-morons and RINOs?  (It could only be more complete if it included John McCain, though McCain isn’t too bad on free trade most of the time.)

Update: Morgan Stanley’s excellent economist Stephen Roach also takes on the poorly-conceived attack on China, this time by the worst economist in the nation, Paul “My view depends on who the president is” Krugman.

As Obamacare hurtles toward possible (probable?) passage, national revulsion against the cost, intrusiveness, and impact of government-run health insurance poses a serious threat to the presidential ambitions of Mitt Romney.

Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, was responsible for implementing Commonwealth Care, the closest thing in the nation to Obamacare.

Massachusetts not only has the highest health insurance premiums in the nation, it also has the fastest rising premiums in the nation.  And Boston has, by far, the longest wait in the nation to see a doctor.

The plan is costing the state billions of dollars and is more than $100MM overbudget this year because the vast majority of new insured in Massachusetts pay little or nothing for their insurance.  They simply steal money from taxpayers to pay for it.  How does that “health care is a right” feel now?

Now the state is already cutting services and blocking or delaying insurance coverage for many of its residents – especially its poorest – in order to stem the fiscal hemmoraging caused by their version of ObamaCare.  No wonder Massachusetts voters believe by a large ratio that Commonwealth Care has damaged the quality of health care in the state.

Romney offers three main excuses for his support of one of the left’s major goals:  First, that his plan is substantially different from ObamaCare.  Second, that his successor, the soon-to-be-ex-governor Deval Patrick, implemented the plan differently from how Romney would have. Third, that these sorts of plans should be implemented at the state level and there is no appropriate federal role in health insurance.

Let’s discuss:

Romney’s claim that his plan is very different from Obama’s just doesn’t pass the giggle test.  As the Boston Herald notes “(T)he basic elements of Obamacare are all there: an individual mandate that nearly everyone buy insurance; subsidized insurance based on income; a non-insurance “tax” and employer mandates. The Cato Institute calls it a mirror-image of Obamacare."  (The rather thorough gutting of Commonwealth Care by Cato’s Michael Cannon can be found HERE, including noting that the system costs over $20,000 per year to insure a family of four.)

No doubt that Patrick made the system worse.  But if a doctor intentionally give a patient a bad disease, it’s hard to then place a lot of blame on a different doctor who doesn’t implement the best treatment.  What’s killing the patient is the fact that he was intentionally sickened.  As if to prove the point, the Massachusetts system is frequently called RomneyCare…not PatrickCare.

Where Romney has a grain of truth to his claims is his federalism argument.  He is right that in the spirit of states as laboratories of democracy, almost all legislation (i.e. all that isn’t authorized by the Constitution) should be at the state level.  But he has problems here, too.

First, someone who poisons a state can’t be called a hero for not poisoning the whole country.  Second, the fact of a Republican supporting a “mirror-image of Obamacare” gives cover to liberals who want to push this disaster on the nation; they can say “look how this prominent pro-business Republican thought it was a good idea.” Third, in the vein of “if you’re explaining, you’re losing", Romney’s argument is simply too subtle to be effective with a population of voters almost none of whom could explain the 9th and 10th Amendments to you.

In a sense, one could say that Romney did the nation a favor by passing Commonwealth Care so that only the people of his state would have to suffer while the rest of us could see socialized medicine’s consequences.  Unfortunately, most of the nation (and certainly most Democrats in Congress) have not paid attention to the RomneyCare woes.  Perhaps Americans aren’t smart enough to learn from the mistakes of others.  After all, if we were, lessons of Canada and Britain would have prevented the implementation of RomneyCare to begin with, not to mention the oncoming freight train of ObamaCare.

All of this is already turning into a major headache for Mitt Romney.  In the last few days, he’s been through some rough questioning by Fox News’ Chris Wallace (start around 1:10 mark in this video – also embedded below – in which Romney neatly makes every excuse), he’s been hit with an extremely critical WSJ opinion piece by the Galen Institute’s Grace-Marie Turner entitled “The Failure of RomneyCare“, and he’s seen his plan blasted by Massachusetts’ State Treasurer, Tim Cahill, as explained in James Antle’s “The Masscare Massacre“.  It’s interesting to note that Cahill, a former Democrat, is running for Governor as an independent – by running against socialized medicine in the most liberal state in the union.  The lesson of Scott Brown’s election isn’t lost on him even as it goes unnoticed or at least ignored by Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.

In political betting, Romney’s chances of being the Republican nominee for President in 2012 have been fairly steady around 24-25% for several months, with Sarah Palin just barely behind, trading around 23%.  Romney has a substantial advantage among the likely contenders because of his well-known expertise in business and his experience as an executive.  But to the extent that the economy stabilizes and health care increases in prominence as an issue, the public may come to wonder whether a career of many smart decisions is more important than Romney’s apparent failure on the biggest policy question in a generation.

H/T Phil Klein

Yesterday, the Gallup Organization’s daily tracking poll of presidential job approval showed a 47% disapproval to 46% approval for Tuesday, March 16th, representing the first time in that particular series that Obama had a net disapproval.

There has also been a consistent downtrend in the weekly job approval series.

Gallup’s chart of the series still shows approval ahead of disapproval by 1% as I write this because they chart a 3-day rolling average.  Still, if you’re a Republican or simply someone who opposes Obama’s megalomaniacal drive for a government takeover of everything, the trend is your friend.

I note data in the survey which will no doubt bring out the cries of “racism!” from Obama apologists and sycophants: Support among whites is at a new low of 39% whereas support by non-whites is at 70% (tied for the low).

Critically, support by independents is near a new low at 44%.  (43% was reported once back in September, though that number seemed strangely low at the time.) Another potentially troubling sign for Obama is crashing support among married people – support dropping further and faster than among single people.  As the US Census Department notes, married people are far more likely to vote than single people.  Finally, Obama’s approval level is inversely proportional to the age of the group being asked; he is most approved of by young people and least by old people.  Again, it’s a maxim in politics that one’s likelihood of voting is proportional to one’s age.  Another big problem for The One.

With these trends, it’s no wonder that Barack Obama is rushing as fast as possible to pass his socialist agenda.  With a little more decline in his approval ratings, even Democrats won’t have to fear opposing him.