As I write this (Monday evening) it appears that the Democrats are about 10 votes shy of what they need to ram ObamaCare through the House. There are continuing polls showing the passage of this dog is a political death warrant – there is, also, continuing happy talk from Obama and the DNC to the effect of, “don’t worry, we have polls which show people like certain things which may or may not be in the bill, so vote for it!”.

In the backrooms, we can only imagine what is going on – what sorts of lies and bribes and threats are being made against those who are wavering. In the end, I expect all this to work – a lot of the “blue dog” Democrats were elected in 2006 and 2008 precisely because they could be convinced to do what they were told. If a man or woman can be convinced to run as a “moderate Democrat” without understanding they are but mere tools to secure power for ultra-liberal Democrats, then we can’t rely upon them to remain clear eyed under pressure. Some will, most won’t; and the bill passes.

Officially the word is that once this is passed, people will swing behind it – and that, plus a supposedly improving economy, will save the day for Democrats in November. And, if any one does lose, there are always Administration sinecures available. Its all one, big happy family of Democrats in this scenario – which, for all we know, Obama and Pelosi actually believe. It flies in the face of easily ascertainable facts but, then again, all liberalism does – and yet it continues.

What this all boils down to is this: Democrats are pressing this because they believe it will work. Not just long term, but short term, as well. Convinced by their own, absurd talking points that they lost in 1994 because they failed to pass HillaryCare, Democrats are bound and determined not to repeat that “mistake”. They believe it will hold their losses to a minimum in November and, of course, secure generations of power for their side as the “benefits” of health care reform spread among the people. Never underestimate the ability of a ruling class to delude itself.

Now, if it all comes out that way – if Democrats lose no more than, say, 20 House and 3 Senate seats in November, then Obama and Co will be vindicated – and still holding majorities with which they’ll be able to endlessly expand on the 2010 reform – as well as pass other, equally controversial programs (if Democrats survive in 2010, it will be an unanswerable argument against any Democrat with cold feet regarding increasing socialism in the United States). But, what if it doesn’t?

Could it be that the very concept of government health care is opposed by the American people? Could it be that the people, awakened by the events of September 2008 and beyond now realize – once and for all – that government is the problem, not the solution? Could it be that we really are on the cusp of revolutionary change?

I’m convinced we are – and as Democrats seem bound and determined to press on, we might get a genuinely decisive election this fall. An election which will decide the course of our nation for the next 50 years. If the polls are correct and the TEA Party rallies are for real, then Democrats will be crushed in November – if Obama, Pelosi and DNC talking points are correct, then Democrats will have no more than typical first-mid-term losses.

Time will tell.

Balancing our budget: a necessity, and a rather easy thing to do. Think “2004”.

China’s corrupt oligarch’s seem to be itching for a show down with the US. I like this article as its the first one I’ve seen which understands that the analogy between US/China relations 2010 is the relations between Germany/UK in 1910. It’d be a terrible thing, if China presses the issue – they’d lose, and lose rather badly, but things like this can end up as WWIII.

Planned Parenthood, Girl Scouts – doing things which should get one arrested, but in liberal-land get one a government grant.

Post-racial Obama backs racial preferences. What? You’re surprised?

Interview with Karl Rove. You know, liberals, he’s smarter than Obama, Hillary and Pelosi put together.

American heroes. Lots and lots of them.

America hates patronizing dimwits who would spend their money and push them around, thus making liberalism very unpopular.

It seems that nothing the GOP can ever do will pry away the Jewish vote from the Democrat party. Fortunately, it looks like the Obama and his Democrats might give us a hand – Roger L. Simon notes:

For all of my looooong life, the Jews have been so deep in the pocket of the Democratic Party it would make Chris Matthews blush. Maybe… just maybe… (I know old habits die hard)…. thanks to Barack Obama, that is about to end. The well-put lede from this morning’s WSJ opinion piece details the situation:

In recent weeks, the Obama Administration has endorsed “healthy relations” between Iran and Syria, mildly rebuked Syrian President Bashar Assad for accusing the U.S. of “colonialism,” and publicly apologized to Moammar Gadhafi for treating him with less than appropriate deference after the Libyan called for “a jihad” against Switzerland.

When it comes to Israel, however, the Administration has no trouble rising to a high pitch of public indignation. On a visit to Israel last week, Vice President Joe Biden condemned an announcement by a mid-level Israeli official that the government had approved a planning stage—the fourth out of seven required—for the construction of 1,600 housing units in north Jerusalem. Assuming final approval, no ground will be broken on the project for at least three years.

The Obama administration has taken the admonition to “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer” to a new level. They want to make love with their enemies while taking their friends to the woodshed and beating the living daylights out of them….

So, will this change attitudes? It should. In plain terms, the Moslem Palestinians are showing themselves either incapable or unwilling to have a real agreement with Israel – and as they are also being repressive of the Christian Palestinian minority it is, perhaps, time to start calling for “three State” solution so that Christians won’t have their places of worship desecrated by Moslems. The bottom line is that there is no deal Israel can make which would effectively end the war – it doesn’t matter what Israel does, because the enemy won’t be satisfied.

Correct policy, then, requires that steps be taken to provide for the security of Israel – and these steps should be taken without reference to the alleged feelings of Moslem Palestinians. If at some future time there arises the ability to work out mutually acceptable deals, then that’ll be fine – but as it stands right now, Moslems are still honoring people who murdered innocent Israelis…this is not a fertile ground for peace.

If a person cares about Israel – about the safety of the Jewish people, that is – then no support can be given to the Obama Administration. Its just insane what they are doing. In the end, what Obama is doing is raising the hopes among the Islamists that we’ll force Israel to surrender, again – that this is, now, just one more step in the process of driving the Israelis in to the sea.

It becomes, again, a time for choosing – choose Obama and the existential threat to Israel; or choose to reject Obama, and continue support for our one, true ally in the Middle East. It will be interesting to see how this all comes out.

They tend to get rather insane about it:

…Ms. Maddow simply does not like the fact that Bart Stupak is a defender of the fundamental human Right to Life. She is mad that he will not back down from his position rooted in the objective truth, revealed by the Natural Law and confirmed by medical science that the child in the womb is one of us. She is a supporter of what is being called the “Right to Choose”, which simply means the protection with the Police Power of the State of those who engage in the killing of children in the womb…

…Rachel Maddow called Stupak´s principled defense of the Right to life “a stunt.” In one of her more emotional rants in this horrid report – rather than address the issues which Congressman Stupak and so many others are concerned about – she simply said “he´s lying.” She ended by calling his effort a “quixotic, nonsense crusade” and in a final childish insult asserted “Bart Stupak gets to go on TV, that´s why he´s doing it.”

Rachel Maddow is not alone in her venomous hatred of Congressman Stupak. She is joined by the National Organization for Women who have accused him of being “Un- American” and of “imposing” his Catholic faith on the Nation…

Nothing new, of course. To the Church of Liberalism, abortion is a sacrament and the goal of all good liberals is to get it federally funded and on demand. Why? I wish I really knew. For crying out loud, I can’t even really understand someone thinking abortion is ok – but to think its a moral good and thus deserves taxpayer support is so entirely outside of normal human experience that I can’t grasp it. I mean, is Maddow planning on having an abortion and doesn’t have the money to cover it?

There are so many other issues liberals can fight for, but all of them – sooner or later – get subordinated to abortion. Why was Ted Kennedy able to get away with his disgraceful treatment of women? He backed abortion rights. Why was Bill Clinton given a pass on his serial adultery? He kept vetoing the partial-birth abortion ban. On and on it goes – no matter what else happens, liberals are determined above all else on expanding abortion…and getting the taxpayer to eventually pay for it.

Ah, well: I guess there’s nothing we can do about them, as they are. We’ll just have to beat them at the polls so badly that we can start to roll back abortion, step by step. Once the beastly practice is gone, these fanatics will slip away – just as the defenders of slavery and segregation eventually gave up talking about them, once they were out of our political system. In the end, by ending abortion, we’ll be doing the pro-abortion people a favor – we’ll relieve them of having to defend an inhuman practice.

This article from the Wall Street Journal details some of the insane, dangerous actions taken by US attorneys who were claiming to represent enemy combatants at Gitmo:

On the evening of Jan. 26, 2006, military guards at Guantanamo Bay made an alarming discovery during a routine cell check. Lying on the bed of a Saudi detainee was an 18-page color brochure. The cover consisted of the now famous photograph of newly-arrived detainees dressed in orange jumpsuits—masked, bound and kneeling on the ground at Camp X-Ray—just four months after 9/11. Written entirely in Arabic, it also included pictures of what appeared to be detainee operations in Iraq. Major General Jay W. Hood, then the commander of Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, concurred with the guards that this represented a serious breach of security.

Maj. Gen. Hood asked his Islamic cultural adviser to translate. The cover read: “Cruel. Inhuman. Degrades Us All: Stop Torture and Ill-Treatment in the ‘War on Terror.'” It was published by Amnesty International in the United Kingdom and portrayed America and its allies as waging a campaign of torture against Muslims around the globe.

“One thread that runs through many of the testimonies from prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, and from Guantanamo,” the brochure read, “is that of anti-Arab, anti-Islamic, and other racist abuse.”…

…Maj. Gen. Hood’s immediate concern about the magazine’s “propaganda and misinformation” was the strong potential that it would incite detainees to act out against U.S. personnel in his facility. The Islamic cultural adviser agreed, telling Maj. Gen. Hood that “the tone of the magazine was highly inflammatory” and “would cause a negative reaction, especially amongst the more hard-core terrorist factions within the camp.”

This Amnesty International slander piece was sent to Gitmo by lawyers working for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a firm which was claiming to represent Gitmo detainees. Here’s the nutshell of it: these attorneys sent a document in to Gitmo which could incite acts of violence which would endanger both prisoners and guards as well as provide a blueprint for how to claim abuse where none existed. In order to make some sort of stupid, anti-American point, these lawyers endangered lives.

And now that some of these attorneys are working for the Obama Administration, there are claims that such actions are in the finest traditions of American legal practice! Dimwits who play with human blood are being congratulated for their “courage” in defending “unpopular” clients…as if their clients were actually unpopular in the social circles the attorneys lived and worked in.

This is just insane. The men in Gitmo are dedicated killers – merciless men who will kill anyone, anywhere, if they think it advances their sick cause, These aren’t people who need lawyers – they need psychiatrists. This is akin to trying to defend Charles Manson – except, worse, because Manson doesn’t have anyone on the outside to commit hideous acts in his name.

Its time we started looking at the world as it is, not through the eyes of ivory-tower, ignorant liberals. There are some people who have put themselves outside the protections of the law – they are called terrorists. When we capture them, they are to count their lucky stars if we don’t kill them – they are not to get attorneys to try and twist American law in to knots for the benefits of the enemies of all that is decent in the world.

Liberals brought us rampant drug use and global warming – now these two hallmarks of liberal progress are on a collision course:

Cocaine users were last night accused of helping to make global warming worse.

MPs on the home affairs select committee said the drug was devastating Colombian rainforests because trees are knocked down to grow coca plants.

Group chairman Keith Vaz said: “We were horrified to learn for every few lines of cocaine snorted in a London club, four square metres of rainforest is destroyed.”

Who knew that personal irresponsibility could cause problems? Some day liberals might even figure that extra-marital sex can be a tricky business, too. A whole bunch of liberalism gets called in to question here.

Unless, of course, liberals want to drop the whole global warming thing?

Ed Morrisey links to a new Ramirez cartoon sure to cause a lot of liberal heart ache.

But its just the truth.

The story:

… in his brief appearances in the 336-page report, Geithner’s main concern seems to be with preventing a panic over the diseased state of Lehman. Geithner not only acknowledges his efforts at concealment, but seems to believe they were the right thing to do:

In addition to the losses Lehman would incur by selling “sticky” assets at firesale prices, deleveraging also raised the additional problems of market perception and valuation.3187 As Secretary Timothy Geithner explained to the Examiner, selling “sticky” assets at discounts could hurt Lehman by revealing to the market that Lehman “had a lot of air in [its] marks” and thereby further draining confidence in the valuation of the assets that remained on Lehman’s balance sheet.3188

The first sentence is drawn from a November interview between Geithner and Valukas, the second from “Reducing Systemic Risk In A Dynamic Financial System,” a speech Geithner delivered in June 2008. To say dressing up Lehman’s bleeding sores was wrong, you need to acknowledge that a central bank should not engage in the suppression of information, and I’m pretty sure we lost that argument a long time ago.

Smith suspects (not without reason) that this mission to regulate the market’s feelings toward Lehman led Geithner to connive at what certainly looks to have been a fraud: the erroneous counting of “501 Repos” — assets Lehman sold with an agreement to repurchase — as straightforward sales. That is, the outside world thought these toxic assets were gone from Lehman’s books, when in fact they were merely festering. Smith has some interesting words about whether, and why, Lehman counterparties went along with this charade. (Likeliest answer: They were all betting on the come like the rest of America.) Geithner, typically, says he would have caught the problem if only we’d given him more power…

Enough to send Geithner to jail? No. Enough to warrant intense further investigation? Yes. Sufficient cause for Obama to fire him. Certainly. Will Geithner get fired?

Are you kidding? He was appointed after it was known he was a tax cheat. In a Chicago Administration, what Geithner did is just par for the course – he was protecting the big money men from their own, stupid mistakes. If he hadn’t protected them, they wouldn’t have any money, you see? If these banksters were now poor, they couldn’t donate to the Democrat party, fund various leftist causes and, of course, provide sinecures for retired Treasury Secretaries in the by and by. Asking Obama to get rid of Geithner is to ask him to go against business as usual…it’d be to ask him to be an agent of real change we could really believe in.

Ain’t gonna happen – unless Geithner becomes a direct, political liability for the mid-terms. Absent a risk to Democrat political power, there’s no chance he’ll be fired.

UNLV loses, but still looks to have a spot in March Madness.

The government monster just grows and grows – thanks to unionized government employees and politicians who can’t think of anything but spending.

In West Hollywood, only leftist women matter.

Texas schools, in a radical departure from accepted practice, might try to teach a bit of truth about American history. Liberals are furious. (H/T: Black and Right).

Michael Yon talks about the sheer difficulty in getting supplies to our forces in Afghanistan. Don’t forget to hit Yon’s tip jar – he’s entirely reader supported and one of the few we can rely upon for honest reporting about the war.

Anti-Defamation League is “shocked and stunned” at Obama’s actions against Israel. I’m “shocked and stunned” that the ADL is “shocked and stunned”. The guy attended a pro-PLO church for 20 years – you expected something different? That Emanuel, all by himself, would keep Obama’s Administration on an even keel?

The other day when I had that flat tire and all those people kindly offered to help me out? It was great and I’m touched by it, still…but, ya know, it could have been that my hair is nearly all white and I have veteran plates on my car…which means that I’m now the old guy that young guys offer to help…which is sort of a bummer, ya know?

If you live within a three hour’s drive of Washington, it is your duty – as a patriot – to get there on March 16th. If you’re one of our rich, capitalist exploiters of the masses/rapists of the environment, then you haven no excuse no matter where you are – fire up the private jet and get in there…and take a selection of bitter gun and Bible-clingers with you.

Take the day off from work, if you have to. The more people there, the better. As Dan Riehl puts it, “be heard or be herded”.

This is the People’s Surge against ObamaCare – and against the attempted leftist take over of America. Here is where we stop them cold – November is when we start to roll them back.