Here’s a great clip of “some common sense” from your average taxpayer:

The Weekly Standard had this great line in last week’s Scrapbook:

H. L. Mencken defined Puritanism (unfairly but memorably) as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Obama Democrats are afflicted with Money Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be making a profit.

This is one powerful video:

James Taranto writes in today’s WSJ Best of the Web Today about the damning report publicized by The American Spectator two days ago, implicating Obama and Democrats in what is clearly a health care bill coverup—where they worked together to ram through and sign the bill before evidence of its true costs to consumers can come to light:

The Department of Health and Human Services is disputing a damning claim published Monday by The American Spectator. First the Spectator:

The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama’s health care “reform” law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius’s staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken.

“The reason we were given was that they did not want to influence the vote,” says an HHS source. “Which is actually the point of having a review like this, you would think.”

Now the HHS response, via Jake Tapper of ABC News:

“That story’s not true,” Richard Foster, the chief actuary for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told ABC News. . . .

“I have no idea how that rumor got started, but it’s completely unfounded,” he says.

Foster tells ABC News that he received a copy of the bill on March 18, and knew then that he wouldn’t be able to do a thorough analysis of it before the vote. He informed Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, about that fact in a letter on March 20.

“We could not have given anything to them the week before the bill was held,” as the Spectator item claimed, Foster said, because he didn’t receive the bill until March 18.

The House passed the Senate Democrats’ health care reform bill on Sunday night, March 21, as well as “fixes” to the bill.

Four days later, on March 25, Senate Democrats passed the fixes.

We’re not sure who’s right, except that Scott Ott is dead on:

Contrary to statements from Republican operatives, the Medicare actuary’s report on health care reform did NOT languish on HHS Sec. Kathleen Sebelius’ desk for a week before the bill passed.

It appears those GOP rascals are lying again, according to ABC’s Jake Tapper.

What really happened, is that Congress passed that bill before the actuary, Richard Foster, had time to analyze it. In fact, he had warned them he couldn’t get it done before the hastily-scheduled vote. . . .

So, President Obama didn’t hide the negative data until Democrats could ram the bill through, Democrats rammed the bill through so negative data would not appear until after passage.

The HHS actuary looks a lot better in Tapper’s account than in the Spectator’s, which is not surprising since Tapper’s account is based on an interview with the HHS actuary. But either way it is clear that the president and congressional Democrats worked actively to conceal just how bad ObamaCare was until after they had imposed it on the country.

This is apparently a pretty old video, but I only first saw it today and thought it was a great one. Enjoy Maxine Waters here as she accidentally lets the cat out of the Democrat’s agenda bag:

Considering the reputation of Massachusetts Democrats, this probably comes as no surprise. John McCormack, a reporter for the conservative Weekly Standard magazine (one which I highly recommend, by the way), was roughed up by a thug working for the Democrat candidate for Senator, Martha Coakley.

The icing on the cake is the fact that the AP covered up the fiasco in their story by reporting it as “reporter stumbles chasing hopeful for Kennedy seat”!

This could spell the end of Coakley’s campaign.

Here’s the video:

Yes, I know the headline of this post is hardly news to anyone, but how else do you describe it when a senator brazenly attempts to change a law multiple times with the sole objective of retaining political power for his party?

He first did it in 2004, when John Kerry, his fellow Democrat senator from Massachusetts, was running for president at the time. Kennedy didn’t like the prospect of Republican Mitt Romney, then governor, appointing Kerry’s replacement (predictably, a Republican), as the law at the time dictated.

So, what would a Kennedy do in this situation? Of course! He had the Massachusetts law changed to force elections should a senator vacate his office.

Well, if it his objectives weren’t transparent enough at the time, I think his latest efforts pretty much do the trick. Now that he is seriously sick with cancer and his seat could become vacated before the term is up, he’s worried that an election (as per the law that he pushed through himself!) might cost the Democrats their filibuster-proof majority in Congress. And, guess what: there just happens to be a Democrat in the governor’s office now! And, so, what would a Kennedy do in this situation? Yup, of course! He would try to change the law again, this time to revert the seat selection to the governor’s appointment, thus ensuring Democrat filibuster-proof control!

How clever! If only his partisan motives weren’t so appallingly transparent…

For the duration of the Bush years (or a good majority of them), the left had practically turned character assassination into an art form. Countless political cartoons depicting Bush as Hitler, countless citations of countless forms of demonization of Cheney, Gingrich, Limbaugh, and other Republican leaders.

This ploy has served the left well; cut off the head of a distinctive organism, as the Republican party was at one point, and keep the attack up from the grassroots level, giving the Republicans a vague and elusive target for retribution, and you can then watch the party powerlessly thrash around for a bit before finally dying.

PULLQUOTE:

Taking a page from the Democrat playbook, the right has been organizing from the grassroots: tea parties, town hall protests, blogs—all sending the Democrats scrambling for damage control with no real outlet for retribution

What they didn’t count on, though, was that this tactic could just as easily be used against them after the power shift. Had they learned from their own tactics, they would have seen how easy it is to target one individual, or a small handful of individuals, rather than a broad motley collaboration of individuals and groups. They would have then not put so much importance in one single individual or small handful of individuals, but rather left the power in their collective party, in their grassroots, in those individuals and organizations that made them what they are, like moveon.org, Daily Koz, etc., and in their ideas.

Instead, though, they allowed Obama to embody those ideas and to replace those individuals and organizations in terms of power and importance, thereby giving the opponents a new, suddenly cohesive and distinctive target. Now, all the right has to do is to make Obama look bad, or Pelosi, or Waxman… and the Democrat party’s lifeblood quickly starts to drain out uncontrollably. And, that is exactly what is happening now.

What’s more, these attacks have not been coming from a clear target; instead, taking a page from the Democrat playbook, the right has been organizing from the grassroots: tea parties, town hall protests, blogs—all sending the Democrats scrambling for damage control with no real outlet for retribution (the best they could come up with was to label these citizens exercising their patriotic right to protest as “an angry mob”).

This was written up really nicely yesterday in James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today, which was my inspiration for this post.

The quick rollout of the Democrats fear machine against legitimate protests taking place across the nation in astounding numbers is not something to take lightly or underestimate. This new scare tactic of the Democrats in trying to paint those opposed to their rush job on health care as part of “an angry mob” and people “carrying swastikas” is an extremely devious way of first dehumanizing concerned citizens, then trivializing their legitimate concerns, and finally stripping them of their liberties and their rights to protest and speak out against government policies with which they do not agree.

This new scare tactic of the Democrats in trying to paint those opposed to their rush job on health care as part of “an angry mob” and people “carrying swastikas” is an extremely devious way of first dehumanizing concerned citizens, then trivializing their legitimate concerns, and finally stripping them of their liberties and their rights to protest and speak out against government policies with which they do not agree.

This is not just one or two fringe liberals in the Democrat party doing this. This is an obviously concerted effort straight from the top, as even Obama has gotten into the act by urging citizens to report to the government when they see their fellow citizens engaging in these protests. I am not making that up. The White House posted this on its web site:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain e-mails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an e-mail or see something on the Web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

Perhaps the email address should have been kgb@whitehouse.gov, because this outrageous request by the government asking citizens to rat out this sort of “subversive activity” is unprecedented and reminiscent of Communist Russia.

Starting at the top and working its way down, you can clearly see this organized scare tactic response to the public outrage over Congress’s legislative impudence.

In addition to the White House’s rat-out-your-neighbor KGB hotline, Obama himself sent out the following scare tactic email, as reported by Politico:

In an unusual e-mail appeal, President Barack Obama is asking millions of his campaign supporters to commit to attending at least one community event on health care this month.

Obama writes that opponents of his health care plan are “filling the airwaves and the Internet with outrageous falsehoods to scare people into opposing change.”

“And some people, not surprisingly, are getting pretty nervous,” he warns. “So we’ve got to get out there, fight lies with truth and set the record straight.”

The e-mail shows up as being from “President Barack Obama,” with the subject line: “This is the moment.”

Continuing on down the line, you see it employed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) when she had this exchange:

Reporter: Do you think there’s a legitimate grassroots movement going on here?

Pelosi: I think they’re AstroTurf. You be the judge. They’re carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on health care.

You also see it employed by prominent Democrat senators, such as Idiot Barbara Boxer (D-CA), who had this to say on MSNBC’s “Hardball”:

I saw some of the clips of people storming these town hall meetings. The last time I saw well-dressed people doing this was when Al Gore asked me to go down to Florida when they were recounting the ballots, and I was confronted with the same type of people. They were there screaming and yelling, “Go back to California,” “Get out of here,” and all the rest of it–until I finally looked at them and I said, “You know what? Your hero Ronald Reagan is from California. You should show a little respect.” And then they quieted down.

So this is just all organized. Just go up on the Web site, Chris. You in the media have to take a look at what’s going on here. This is all planned. It’s to hurt our president, and it’s to change the Congress.

And, of course, you see it employed right in the belly of the beast, the DNC, who put out a television ad with the following script:

Narrator: The right-wing extremist Republican base is back.

Birther crackpot at town meeting: He is not an American citizen!

Narrator: They lost the election. They lost on the Recovery Act, the budget and children’s health care. They’ve lost the confidence of the American people after eight years of failed policies that ruined our economy and cost millions of jobs.

Now, desperate Republicans and their well-funded allies are organizing angry mobs, just like they did during the election. Their goal? Destroy President Obama, and stop the change Americans voted for overwhelmingly in November.

Unidentified voice of Sen. Jim DeMint: It will break him.

Unidentified voice of Rush Limbaugh: I hope he fails.

Narrator: This mob activity is straight from the playbook of high-level Republican political operatives. They have no plan for moving our country forward, so they’ve called out the mob.

Same birther crackpot at same town meeting: And I want to know, why are you people ignoring his birth certificate?

Narrator, as phone number of GOP Washington headquarters appears onscreen: Call the Republican Party. Tell them you’ve had enough of the mob.

As James Taranto, of the WSJ’s Best of the Web Today points out:

The ad does not identify the congressman whose town meeting was disrupted by the birther crackpot. It was Rep. Michael Castle of Delaware, a Republican. So the DNC expects us to believe that the RNC has “called out the mob” against its own members! Oh, and in fairness to the crackpot, we should note that she holds a tiny American flag and does not appear to display any swastikas or “symbols like that.”

Taranto sums it up nicely when he writes:

So, let’s review the arguments:

• Republicans are bad, they lost the last election, and they have partisan motives for wanting to stop ObamaCare.
• People who are angry about this are crackpots who display swastikas and other invidious symbols. Also, their anger is insincere, and they are shills of the RNC. They wear nice clothes, and this is not to their credit.
• Some of the arguments against ObamaCare are false, according to Obama.
• If ObamaCare is defeated, Obama would be hurt.

Is there any argument for ObamaCare? In all the material we reviewed for this item, only this, from the Obama email:

Every day we don’t act, Americans watch their premiums rise three times faster than wages, small businesses and families are pushed towards bankruptcy, and 14,000 people lose their coverage entirely. The cost of inaction is simply too much for the people of this nation to bear.

In other words, the “crisis” is so urgent that any thoughtful deliberation would entail intolerable delay. This is the same old argument that has already failed.

If this is the best the president can do, he deserves to lose resoundingly. If that hurts him, there’s always aspirin.

James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today has a great summary of all the heat the Democrat congressman are feeling now, coming home to their constituents, as well as a good take on the Democrats’ diversionary tactics in attempting to deal with all the heat:

Now you can see why President Obama was in such a rush to have his way with your health care. “Angry protesters shouted down Democrats at public events from Texas to Pennsylvania over the weekend, leaving the party only one real hope for getting its message out over recess: a backlash,” Politico reports:

In Austin, Texas, Rep. Lloyd Doggett was drowned out by a group of noisy, sign-waving demonstrators who shouted, “Just say no” as he tried to talk about health care reform.

In an e-mail to Politico Monday, Doggett called the group a “mob, sent by the local Republican and Libertarian parties” that “came not just to be heard but to deny others the right to be heard.”

In Morrisville, Pa., Rep. Patrick Murphy was forced to scrap plans for a one-on-one meet-the-congressman session when people in the crowd started shouting. Murphy switched to a town hall format mid-event and even then had to ask the audience at times to “be respectful.”

And at a health care event in Philadelphia, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius were repeatedly interrupted by booing and heckling. “We can shout at one another, or we can leave the stage,” Sebelius said at one point. “It’s up to you.”

“Town halls have become town hells,” Bush White House veteran Mark McKinnon tells the Web site. A Politico report from last Friday described town halls as a “once-staid forum that is rapidly turning into a house of horrors,” featuring “screaming constituents, protesters dragged out by the cops, congressmen fearful for their safety.”

“Democrats are trying to push back, casting the town hall disrupters as right-wing extremists affiliated with anti-tax ‘tea parties,’ ” Politico reports today:

“The last place Republicans ought to be moving their party is even more to the fringe of the political spectrum,” said Eric Schultz, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Added a senior Democratic strategist: “It may be out of necessity, but for Republicans, relying on the fringe elements of the party to be the face of opposition on health care is a dangerous game. The birthers and the tea party folks aren’t controllable, come off as angry and out of control and couldn’t care less about the issue at hand.”

It’s easy to understand why the Democrats are pursuing this rhetorical strategy, but it is a risky one. Yes, the birthers are wackos. The tea-party folks are . . . well, let us say highly enthusiastic. Angry mobs are at best an acquired taste.

But an awful lot of people have misgivings about ObamaCare. According to some polls, opponents already outnumber supporters. That means Democrats have a lot of persuading to do. Assume for the sake of argument that the Democrats make a persuasive case that Republicans are extreme and unhinged. Hell, assume for the sake of argument that Republicansare extreme and unhinged. Does this in any way advance the case for ObamaCare? Is there anyone in America who would turn his health care over to Washington just to spite the birthers?

As our economy continues to tank under Obama’s administration and his reckless spending, it looks like the Democrat-controlled Congress has decided to take a lesson from him and do some of their own lavish spending. Maybe they’re trying to “stimulate” the economy too, although the economy that they’re “stimulating” is the global one, since the exorbitant spending in question is on their personal “business” travel.

Yes, that’s right, the Wall Street Journal reports that the travel & entertainment expenses of Congress have gone up 50% since the Democrats have taken over Congress—and this in a time of economic crisis!

“Business travel” is quite the gray area when you’re a member of Congress, especially travel to foreign countries. After all, what exactly is the purpose of meeting with foreign diplomats when you represent two tenths of one percent of the population? And, is the primary reason for these trips actually business or is it mostly personal with a little business mixed in just to stick the taxpayers with the bill?

For example: Nancy Pelosi took a bunch of her Democrat cronies on a taxpayer-funded trip—taxpayer-funded because they were going to Kabul to meet with the troops. Sounds legitimate, right? Well, there’s actually more to the story: that one day in Kabul was actually the second leg of the trip, after eight days in Italy, where they spent $57,697 of our tax dollars on hotels and food!

When you stop to wonder what, as a Congresswoman from California, made it so necessary to spend eight days in Italy on the taxpayers’ dime, you can’t help but come up empty. And that’s when your mind starts to wander a bit and before you know it, you’re wondering why exactly they needed to go to Kabul anyway, when any fact-finding could be just as easily done (if not more easily done) using the congressional hearings that they love so much, where they call in the generals and grill them.

There’s a bit more whistle-blowing in that article, but that one story alone is enough to make anyone’s blood boil. So, while we’re all hurting from the economy and watching our investments and 401(k)s shrivel up to unprecedented lows, Congress is living large off our the increasing taxes that Obama is still raising on us!

I hope these clowns get what they deserve in the next elections.