Photo of the Day: Anti-ObamaCare Rally Outside Evan Bayh's Downtown Indy Office

Sent by a reader, a picture of an anti-ObamaCare rally outside of Evan Bayh's Senate office earlier today in Indianapolis:

Commander in Chief Obama to U.S. Troops: “You Guys Make a Pretty Good Photo Op”

Classy.

From the Washington Post:

Obama arrived on the base 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.

Standing on a riser wearing a blue suit and red tie, with a cluster of troops and a large American flag behind him, Obama expressed "the gratitude of the American public" and said his meetings in four countries over eight days in Asia will help deliver a "safer, more prosperous world for all of us."

He got a huge cheer when he told them he was increasing military pay. "That's what you call an applause line," he said, before boarding his jet and taking off at 4:11 p.m.

All told, Obama spent all of 52 minutes with the troops to get a photo op out of them.

And he also hasn't made a decision about sending reinforcements to Afghanistan yet.

Oxley Senior in the Hospital

From the Courier-Journal:

INDIANAPOLIS – State Rep. Dennie Oxley, D-Taswell, missed the General Assembly’s Organization Day on Tuesday with an illness and is now hospitalized at Memorial Hospital and Health Care Center in Jasper.

Oxley, who is serving in his first two-year term at the Indiana House, was excused from Tuesday’s business after his wife called legislative leadership to say he was not feeling well, a spokesman for the Democratic caucus said.

Oxley, 59, was in the critical care unit at the hospital on Thursday. A family member – reached in the critical care waiting room – declined to release any information about his condition.

Please keep the elder Oxley in your prayers.

Republican Ties Democrat in California Gubernatorial Race, News at Eleven

From Poll Tracker:

Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman (R) has pulled into a tie with state Attorney General Jerry Brown (D) in a hypothetical general election match-up for California governor, according to a new poll by Rasmussen Reporters conducted Nov. 17.

Whitman and Brown each pull 41 percent of support among likely voters in the Democratic leaning state, the poll found. Three percent would support some other candidate and 14 percent are unsure. The margin of error was 4.5 percent.

Whitman trailed Brown 35 percent to 44 percent in the last Rasmussen poll.

EDIT: Typo in title.

Marlin Stutzman's First Ad

The Onion Rips the Patriots

Hilarious:

INDIANAPOLIS—As of press time, the New England Patriots, playing on the road against an undefeated Indianapolis team, are headed into halftime with an all-but-insurmountable 24-14 lead.

Barring an almost inconceivable and utterly out-of-character mistake by head coach Bill Belichick, the Patriots have virtually secured a week 10 win against their closest rivals for AFC dominance.

No Belichick-coached Patriots team has ever led by this much at halftime and gone on to lose the game.

"If we just keep playing smart Patriots football, I don't see any reason why we won't come out on top," Belichick told reporters, jogging to the locker room with his team as the second-quarter clock expired. "The only time they've been able to stop us is on on short-yardage passing plays, so if we're careful to execute and avoid any situation where we give Peyton Manning excellent field position, I'm extremely confident we'll leave here with a 'W.'"

"Really, very confident," the usually reticent Belichick added. "Very."

Under Belichick, the Patriots have come to be regarded as the team that is hardest to defeat when it carries a lead into halftime. No other coach is thought to share Belichick's calculating, almost mechanical ability to disregard emotion and analyze the situation on the field, and he is widely respected for always having confidence in his offensive or defensive unit to make the necessary play.

"We had hoped to get ahead quickly, but that just didn't pan out," said Colts head coach Jim Caldwell, whose eight-game winning streak is by any rational evaluation almost certainly over. "The Patriots are just too clever, and Bill [Belichick] is just too smart, too tough a customer."

"If you're going to wait for Bill Belichick to get overconfident and screw up, you're in for a long day," Caldwell added. "Just doesn't happen."

Thus far, both Brady's arm and the Patriots' receivers have been characteristically sharp. There have been few notable miscues, save a short two-yard pass to running back Kevin Faulk that was bobbled and dropped at the halftime two-minute warning, a mistake that was almost certainly noted by Patriots coaches and will be corrected for in second-half adjustments.

The Colts offense, however, with Manning's young receiving corps, has committed several significant errors. But the Indianapolis defense has fared even worse, and has only been able to stop pass plays of four yards or fewer, an insignificant advantage that a seasoned coach like Belichick will find easy to avoid.

"We have to do a better job in the second half, there's no question about that," Manning said while heading to the tunnel. "Problem is, the Pats simply never, ever, ever hand the game to you. You have to earn it. If we sit back and wait for them to screw up, we're sunk, plain and simple."

Sunday Night Football commentator Cris Collinsworth agreed, saying that the Patriots could basically ride Belichick's cool, conservative play-calling and their tremendously competent defense to victory.

"Even though the Colts scored first, Belichick has to be feeling good about the way his young defense is playing," Collinsworth said during his halftime breakdown of the game. "Holding Peyton Manning to just 14 points is no small feat. It must be great for them, knowing that their coach trusts them to make plays."

Sarah Palin Returns to Indiana

The cartoon might be more accurate if it showed them standing in line in the rain.

From the Courier-Journal:

Hundreds of people lined up Thursday at stores in Fort Wayne and Noblesville for a chance of meeting Sarah Palin.

Holding her 19-month-old son Trig, Palin climbed off a bus shortly before 6 p.m. at Hamilton Town Center in Noblesville, an Indianapolis suburb, to a crowd chanting her name as they waited in the rain.

"It's really good to be back here in Hoosier territory," she said.

Palin, the Republican candidate for vice president last year, is on a book-signing tour for “Going Rogue.”

About 700 people were in line at 7:30 a.m. Thursday at a Meijer store in Fort Wayne, waiting for Palin to show up at noon. Meanwhile, about 1,000 people waited at 7 a.m. at a Borders store in Noblesville. The first 1,000 people to buy copies of the book and line up were eligible for wristbands that entitled them to have Palin autograph their books.

Palin said she was excited to be back in Noblesville after last year's event at the nearby Verizon Wireless Music Center, where 24,000 people showed up during her vice presidential campaign.

Obama: Creating Jobs Not Goal of Jobs Summit

Well, then what would be the goal of this jobs summit, exactly?

AP:

President Barack Obama says creating jobs isn't the goal of a coming White House forum on jobs and economic growth.

The president told NBC News on Wednesday that the purpose of the Dec. 3 summit is to figure out how to encourage hiring by businesses still reluctant to do so.

The U.S. unemployment rate hit 10.2 percent last month, the highest in decades. Before departing on his trip through Asia, Obama said the high jobless rate is one of the biggest challenges for an economy that has begun to show signs of recovery.

Obama told NBC that the forum will give him and other administration officials a chance to talk to CEOs, small-business owners and other experts to find out what's going on.

I guess to some degree, it's heartening that Obama now realizes that businesses, not government, create jobs.

He only spent about eight hundred billion dollars of our money on the "stimulus" trying to have government create jobs.

That didn't work so well.

"A Junior Congressman from the 8th District of California"

A letter to the editor of the Corydon Democrat:

Hill lacks district's best interest

Lanesville, Ind.

Baron Hill's voted for the nationalization of our health care system in direct defiance of the will of the people of his district. Not only that, it is in complete odds with his responsibility to protect and defend the Constitution. This bill is the single biggest attack on personal liberty in the history of this Union.

Because he continues to vote in a manner that does not represent the best interest of his district, it is obvious to me — and it should be to all in Harrison County — that he should no longer continue to be our representative.

Regardless of the political party, the people of Harrison County and the Ninth District Indiana deserve a competent replacement in the 2010 elections, not a junior Congressman from the Eighth District of California.

Todd Turner
November 18, 2009

Senate Votes to Go Forward with David Hamilton Judicial Nomination

Obama will soon be conveying his thanks to Dick Lugar and Evan Bayh.

The Courier-Journal:

WASHINGTON -- The Senate voted Tuesday to overcome a GOP filibuster of the nomination of Indiana Judge David Hamilton to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The court is the last stop before the Supreme Court for cases from Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.

The Senate voted 70-29 to allow the nomination to be considered. All Democrats and the two independents who caucus with them voted to end the filibuster, as did 10 Republicans, including Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind.

The Senate must still have a final vote on Hamilton's nomination. It's unclear how much of the maximum 30 hours of debate Republicans will insist on.

Hamilton, a federal district judge for 15 years and chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, was President Barack Obama's first judicial appointment.

Because Hamilton had the support of both Lugar and Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, a Democrat, his nomination was expected to set a tone for less-contentious battles over judicial nominees. But conservatives criticized some of Hamilton's rulings and comments.

Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Hamilton's record is worse than that of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose nomination Sessions opposed but did not filibuster.

“I don't think I can vote for a nominee that thinks that they have a right to amend the Constitution,” Sessions said.

Sessions was referring to a 2003 speech in which Hamilton said judges write “footnotes to the Constitution.”

Hamilton said in his April confirmation hearing that his point was that judges are not trying to do something new, but must apply old principles and constitutional provisions to new situations.

Hamilton received the American Bar Association's top rating of “well qualified.” He's also supported by Geoffrey Slaughter, president of the Indiana Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.

“Like most Hoosiers, David Hamilton is not an ideologue,” said Bayh, who hired Hamilton as his legal counsel when Bayh was governor. “It's only in the upside-down, hyper-partisan world of Washington, D.C., that the humble son of an Indiana pastor can be turned into a partisan zealot hostile to religion.”

Sessions also criticized Hamilton's 2005 decision that prayers recited at the start of Indiana House of Representatives sessions must not mention Jesus Christ or advance any religion.

Lugar, who defended Hamilton's ruling, said the confirmation process is “often accompanied by oversimplifications and distortions that are disturbing.”

“I believe our confirmation decisions should not be based on partisan considerations,” Lugar said, “much less on how we hope or predict a given judicial nominee will rule on particular issues of public moment or controversy.”

Poll: Republicans Would Rather Lose with Conservatives than Win with Moderates

CNN:

The poll indicates that a slight majority, 51 percent, of Republicans would prefer to see the GOP in their area nominate candidates who agree with them on all the major the issues even if they have a poor chance of beating the Democratic candidate. Forty-three percent of Republicans say they would rather have candidates with whom they don’t agree on all the important issues but who can beat the Democrats.

Democrats polled seemed to place a slightly higher priority on electoral victory: 58 percent say that they would like their party to nominate candidates who can beat Republicans, even if they don’t agree with those candidates on all the issues. Fewer than 4 in 10 Democrats say they would rather see their party nominate candidates who agree with them on all major issues, but have a poor chance of beating the Republican candidate.

“One reason for the difference between the parties: the Democrats have a relatively even split on ideological grounds. Thirty-four percent of Democrats are liberal, 40 percent are moderates and less than one in four call themselves conservatives,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

By contrast, 73 percent of Republicans questioned in the poll say they are conservatives, with only 26 percent describing themselves as liberal or moderate Republicans.

The search for ideological purity is all well and good in terms of electoral success when you have a big majority, or when you're in the minority and the other party is really screwing things up. The rest of the time? Not so much.

The Republican Party is going to keep having structural issues. The Democratic Party is going to keep having structural issues. What papers over the structural issues, from time to time, are the general fortunes of the party at the ballot box. Electoral victory has an interesting way of (at least temporarily) hiding ideological divisions and other structural issues in a political party.

Al Gore's Ignorance of Basic Science

John Derbyshire:

Al Gore on Conan O'Brien's show the other day:

Conan: Now, what about ... you talk in the book about geothermal energy ...

Al: Yeah, yeah.

Conan: and that is, as I understand it, using the heat that's generated from the core of the earth ...

Al: Yeah.

Conan: ... to create energy, and it sounds to me like an evil plan by Lex Luthor to defeat Superman. Can you, can you tell me, is this a viable solution, geothermal energy?

Al: It definitely is, and it's a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy -- when they think about it at all -- in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, 'cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot ...

[Me] The geothermal gradient is usually quoted as 25-50 degrees Celsius per mile of depth in normal terrain (not, e.g., in the crater of Kilauea). Two kilometers down, therefore, (that's a mile and a quarter if you're not as science-y as Al) you'll have an average gain of 30-60 degrees -- exploitable for things like home heating, though not hot enough to make a nice pot of tea. The temperature at the earth's core, 4,000 miles down, is usually quoted as 5,000 degrees Celsius, though these guys claim it's much less, while some contrarian geophysicists have posted claims up to 9,000 degrees. The temperature at the surface of the Sun is around 6,000 degrees Celsius, while at the center, where nuclear fusion is going on bigtime, things get up over 10 million degrees.

If the temperature anywhere inside the earth was "several million degrees," we'd be a star.

Hat tip: Power Line.

Quote of the Day

"Look on the bright side: Even if KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] is acquitted, they can always lock him up for failing to buy health insurance."
- Jim Treacher

Obama's Greeting

The Amazing Bowing Obama

Finally, a Culturally Literate President

Todd Young to Hold Hunting Outing Fundraiser

From the mail bag:

A Day in the Field with Todd Young
Candidate, Indiana 9th Congressional District

Let’s Exercise our Second Amendment Rights
& Send a Sportsman to Washington!

Hosted by: Brandon Butler, Indiana based outdoor writer

Saturday, December 12th
8 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Lost River Game Farm
Orleans, IN

Each participant receives 4 pheasants, unlimited trap and skeet shooting, coffee with donuts and a catered lunch.
“Shoot as much as you want.”

Catered food from Smokin’ Jacks Rib Shack
Smokin’ Jack’s Famous Barbecued Pulled Pork and Pulled Chicken with baked beans and baked potatoes), cookies, iced tea and lemonade.

$250 per Person

Should make for a very interesting event.

The photos for the last "hunting outing" were noteworthy.

Interesting Observation about Redistricting

Presented for your consideration, two interesting items.

The first, a news article this past week from the Courier-Journal:

INDIANAPOLIS – The Indiana General Assembly would wash its hands of legislative and congressional redistricting, leaving the job instead to an independent commission, under a constitutional amendment Senate Republicans will propose.

The amendment could not take effect until after the next redistricting scheduled for 2011, following next year’s census.

But Senate President Pro Tem David Long, R-Fort Wayne, said Thursday his caucus will also push for changes that will make the maps lawmakers draw in 2011 more objective. Among the proposed guidelines: Making districts more compact and keeping like-communities within a district.

Second, a look at a recent Stanford study of redistricting from FiveThirtyEight:

Jonathan Rodden and Jowei Chen argue that Democrats are underrepresented in Congress and state legislatures because they tend to live in high-density areas. Geographically-compact districting plans will tend to pack Democratic voters into districts where they have 80% of the vote or whatever, thus wasting their votes. They do a voter- and precinct-level analysis of recent elections and find:

In contemporary Florida, partisans are arranged in geographic space in such a way that virtually any districting scheme favoring contiguity and compactness will generate substantial electoral bias in favor of the Republican Party. This result is driven largely by the partisan asymmetry in voters' residential patterns: Since the realignment of the party system, Democrats have tended to live in dense, homogeneous neighborhoods that aggregate into landslide Democratic districts, while Republicans live in more sparsely populated neighborhoods that aggregate into geographically larger and more politically heterogeneous districts. This phenomenon appears to substantially explain the pro-Republican bias observed in Florida's recent legislative elections.

So David Long's notion of wanting compact districts, wittingly or unwittingly, is a process likely (if this study is any indication) to result in a substantial electoral bias in favor of Republicans.

The reason for this is fairly intuitive. If the process mandates compact districts, the easiest place to form compact districts are in urban areas. Urban areas tend to be heavily Democratic. Rural and suburban areas, which are by definition less densely populated and thus much more difficult to make "compact," also tend to be more Republican.

Voters, in a sense, seem for socio-economic and demographic reasons utterly unrelated to politics to be gerrymandering themselves.

How To Divide a Party, In Three Easy Steps

Jay Cost outlines Obama's plan:

How To Divide a Party, In Three Easy Steps!

So, you've decided to become the leader of a big political party. Only one problem: it's too big! What to do?

Well, you've come to the right place. Here at the Horse Race Blog, we've developed a three-step guide to making that broad party a little more...narrow. Just follow these simple instructions and your majority party will be smaller and a little easier to handle in no time!

***

Step 1: Participate in a bitterly divisive nomination battle against a prominent opponent, making sure that you only win certain factions within the party. Leave your opponent to win other factions, even down to the very last contest. If possible, make condescending remarks about how bitter, clingy, and xenophobic some of those other factions in your own party are. This will ensure that they remain perpetually skeptical of your administration.

Having won the nomination, make no serious effort to unite this divided and fractured party. Do not nominate for vice-president somebody who is a prominent member of the opposing faction. For instance, if you're a Northern/urban candidate looking to alienate Southern/rural members of your party - make sure that the well-regarded governor of Tennessee does not find his way onto the ticket. Also, no unity tickets. Make your primary opponent swallow hard and endorse you, then give the veep nomination to somebody else.

If you complete Step 1 perfectly, you should see early signs of success. Namely, lifelong members of your party will vote for the opposition, perhaps for the first time ever. If they do this in an election that you win decisively anyway, all the better. That's how you know you're off to a good start.

Step 2: Design your cabinet so that there are few (if any) prominent members of the opposing faction installed in any important posts. If you followed Step 1 perfectly, it means your primary opponent is still out in the cold. You might have to nominate her to a prominent spot. That's less than ideal, but it is understandable. However, make no additional gestures to those other factions in the party.

That popular governor from Tennessee? He should be nowhere to be found. That senior statesmen from Georgia? Again, nowhere. How about that bipartisan bridge-builder from Louisiana? I don't know where he is, but he better not be at your cabinet meetings. After all, what you don't want are those hard feelings being softened because of the composition of your government.

Also, think big. It's important to be as broadly dismissive as possible. For instance, your cabinet should not only sample almost exclusively from the North, it should also draw heavily from urban areas. Bottom line: don't think one-dimensionally about your cabinet. It can be used to disgruntle multiple factions in your party at once!

Finally, it's smart to staff your West Wing with as many "hacks" from your campaign as possible. After all, these are the people who helped you split your party into two pieces in your quest to win the nomination. It's a good idea to keep them around, for there is a lot more work on that front left to do!

Step 3: These opposing factions in your party will now be thoroughly frustrated. Good work! It's time to kick it up a notch - by aggressively, relentlessly pursuing a legislative agenda that they obviously can't support.

Ideally, you'll want the leadership in the Congress to be chock full of fellow Northern/urban members. You can't control that yourself, but if you're so lucky as to have leaders equally committed to shrinking the size of your party - you can let them do most of the work. Take a back seat and just exhort them to follow their instincts. They'll know what to do!

Again, think multi-dimensionally. For instance, if the focus is on health care, encourage them to push through a massive expansion of government. That's bound to aggravate the South, which has never been too thrilled about the idea of a big federal government. But also, do not try to stop your urban allies if they push for a "robust" public option, which would be a particularly tough pill for rural members of Congress to swallow.

Other things like a massive government bureaucracy for "cap-and-trade," subsidization of the auto industries, and retaining your predecessor's bailout of (mostly Northern!) banks are all excellent ways to tweak those pesky Jacksonian "friends" of yours! Also, encourage those congressional leaders to help you blow a huge hole in the deficit, so that those Southern deficit hawks know that there's a new sheriff in town.

Ultimately, what you want are not simply defections for the major bills, but also defections on small ball procedural matters. That's a sign that your rank-and-file "allies" have realized that your legislative program is so unpopular in their districts that they must oppose you on every vote. Voting against the rule is halfway to joining the opposition, which means you're halfway to your goal!

***

Following these steps to the letter will ensure a nicely divided party heading into the midterm elections. Of course, the mainstream media will not notice this, as they will be obsessing over the comparatively insignificant divisions in the opposition. But take heart! You have now finished the hard work necessary for long term success: a smaller political party that is less able to build a majority coalition in years to come. Congratulations!

That's what you wanted, right?

Sounds like a plan to me.

He's with Them

Robert Kagan:

The New York Times reports that opposition protesters in Iran, in between beatings and tear-gassing from riot police and the regime’s hired thugs, have started a new chant: “Obama, Obama -- either you’re with them or you’re with us.”

In case you were wondering what the answer might be, the statement yesterday from White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said it all. Gibbs declared that Obama administration officials were following reports of the unrest and “hope greatly that violence will not spread.” This was a great moment in the annals of diplo-speak. No mention of who might be committing the violence, or who might be its victims. Violence, it seems, has the capacity to spread without any human involvement.

The point of the statement, of course, was to avoid saying anything that might offend the rulers in Tehran or give any encouragement to the regime’s opponents. The Obama administration is locked into its approach on Iran and is seemingly impervious to changing circumstances. It has never adjusted to the unexpected rise of a nationwide opposition to the regime and still tries to move forward as if there were no turmoil and unrest in Iran.

But the excuses for remaining silent about the opposition are running out. When the administration first adopted this studiously indifferent stance after the fraudulent election in June, officials insisted it was for the opposition’s own good. The opposition allegedly didn’t want American support, even rhetorical. Many bought this argument at the time, but it ought to be unsustainable now. The opposition clearly would like support from Obama.

The regime is using the Obama administration’s overweening desire to talk -- and refusal to take “no” for an answer -- as a way of deflecting any international pressure regarding its domestic crackdown. And the regime's strategy is succeeding. The longer the Obama administration plays this game, the more time the regime will have to crush its opponents while the West looks on in self-imposed impotence.

Unpleasant as it may be for the president to hear, his policy is objectively aiding the Tehran regime and harming the opposition in their ongoing struggle.

The chanters are right. The United States can either be with them or against them. Right now, President Obama is against them. But it’s not too late for him to switch sides.

Let us recall Obama's inaugural address:

To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society's ills on the West — know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

So when it comes to Iran, the question must now be asked of Obama:

What is he going to do if regimes like that in Iran don't unclench their fist while America's hand is extended?

Obama seems, at least by his behavior thus far, to believe that the hand should always be extended, even if the fist remains clenched.

The people of Iran are hoping that he changes.

Harry Reid's Monster

Medicare Menace

Another Baron Lie: Cutting Medicare

In response to an independent group running an ad in southern Indiana pointing out that Baron Hill has voted for legislation that will cut some $400 billion dollars in funding from Medicare, Baron decided it would be prudent for his office to put forward a statement.

This statement consists, essentially, of Baron claiming that the ad is untrue, citing someone that says it is untrue, and then launching into a bunch of talking points about how great the Pelosi health care bill really is.

But typical for Baron, the statement is itself a distortion. For example, Baron cites FactCheck.org as saying that the legislation does not cut Medicare. He even provides a quote from them to back it up.

The problem is that the quote is taken out of context. In multiple articles, FactCheck.org confirms that the legislation will indeed cut Medicare (though they frequently quibble with the amount of those cuts).

Baron's quote is taken from this FactCheck.org article. That article doesn't say that there won't be cuts in Medicare. It disagrees about the scope of the cuts, calling one characterization of the size of those cuts "simply rubbish" (the quote that Baron uses). At the same time, the article itself confirms that the legislation will cause Medicare cuts.

In fact, this is not the only FactCheck.org article that notes that the legislation Baron voted for will cause cuts to Medicare. This article says the same thing. Though (again) it disagrees with the scope of the cuts in question, it agrees that there will indeed be cuts in Medicare under the legislation that Baron voted for.

On top of FactCheck.org actually confirming the cuts to Medicare that Baron says they are calling "simply rubbish," other reputable sources have also recently noted that there will be cuts to Medicare.

Example in point, the nonpartisan Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (a government agency tasked with oversight of those programs), as reported in the Washington Post:

A plan to slash more than $500 billion from future Medicare spending -- one of the biggest sources of funding for President Obama's proposed overhaul of the nation's health-care system -- would sharply reduce benefits for some senior citizens and could jeopardize access to care for millions of others, according to a government evaluation released Saturday.

Congress could intervene to avoid such an outcome, but "so doing would likely result in significantly smaller actual savings" than is currently projected, according to the analysis by the chief actuary for the agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid. That would wipe out a big chunk of the financing for the health-care reform package, which is projected to cost $1.05 trillion over the next decade.

More generally, the report questions whether the country's network of doctors and hospitals would be able to cope with the effects of a reform package expected to add more than 30 million people to the ranks of the insured, many of them through Medicaid, the public health program for the poor.

In the face of greatly increased demand for services, providers are likely to charge higher fees or take patients with better-paying private insurance over Medicaid recipients, "exacerbating existing access problems" in that program, according to the report from Richard S. Foster of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

I eagerly await the statement from Baron Hill's office accusing the Washington Post of lying and trying to scare seniors by reporting on nonpartisan government studies.

The Hill has the link to the full report from the CMS.

Page 7 of that report estimates total Medicare cuts (euphemistically spun as "savings") to equal some $571 billion.

Politico also has an article on the CMS report:

Democrats have promised that health reform would reduce health care costs, but legislation the House passed last week would increase costs over the next decade by $289 billion. By 2019, health costs would rise to 21.1 percent of GDP compared to 20.8 under current law, according to an actuarial report prepared by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“With the exception of the proposed reductions in Medicare payment updates for institutional providers, the provisions of H.R. 3962 would not have a significant impact on future health care cost growth rates. In addition, the longer-term viability of the Medicare update reductions is doubtful,” the report said.

In other words, outside of Medicare payment cuts to hospitals, the bill doesn’t curb increasing health care costs. And even the Medicare payment cuts will be difficult to sustain.

The analysis is more bad news for Democrats, who are facing increasing criticism that their reforms don’t do enough to control costs.

Not only does the CMS report confirm that there will be cuts to Medicare, it says that the legislation that the House passed--and Baron voted for--won't even lower health care costs as promised.

So there's a mountain of evidence out there to disprove the tissue of lies issued in that statement from Baron Hill's Congressional office.

Did anyone in the local media in the 9th District look into the facts of the matter before reporting on it?

Heck no.

They basically just ran Baron's statement without questioning any of it.

Case in point, the New Albany Tribune and the Jeffersonville Evening News.

And yet people still wonder why folks in southern Indiana aren't aware of Baron Hill's actual record, why earned media is impossible for challenger candidates to come by, and why if you want the truth heard you have to buy TV time and radio ads, or send mail pieces.

The two comments to the article posted (as of right now) over at the News & Tribune are both rather enlightening:

Barkley Nash wrote:
Folks, listen up. If Rep Hill says it's not going to cost you any money you better hang on to your wallet like grim death. This Health Care Bill is going to bankrupt this country. Hill is just one of the lemmings that are following the lead of Piped Piper Pelosi.

And:

Jeff Adams wrote:
Just trying to figure this one out. This comes across as an editorial, not a news story. If it's supposed to be an editorial, it should have said so. The writer only quotes Rep. Hill and none any of his constituents.

An interesting take on the subject could have been how does Hill justify a healthcare vote which is so out-of-step with his constituents' opinions. Or does Hill believe this vote along with his vote for the carbon cap and trade bill earlier this year will hurt his chances in the 2010 race.

How about your writers leave their opinions to the opinion pages and just do what Sgt. Friday would say on Dragnet years ago, 'Just the facts, sir.' Unless, of course, they think he needs their help!

Sort of says it all.

Good News for the Unemployed! Obama Will Hold a Summit about Jobs!

This is just sure to make everything better!

Why, summits solve all sorts of problems.

It's the same thing Obama did when he got himself into a little flub over his Harvard professor friend getting arrested. He had a summit with the professor and the cop that arrested him. That summit accomplished absolutely nothing other than revealing that Obama used a focus group to determine his choice in beer.

I'm just sure that there's absolutely no reason that a similar summit can't work for jobs, right?

ABC News:

As he prepares to depart on a week long 4-country excursion to Asia, President Obama will make remarks this morning in which he will address the nation's 10.2% unemployment rate and call for a White House summit on job creation to be held in December, called the "Forum on Jobs and Economic Growth," administration officials tell ABC News.

Invitees will be economists, CEOs, academics, small business owners, financial experts, and labor leaders "to talk about the best options for continuing to grow the economy and put Americans back to work," an administration official says. This summit has been kicked around as an idea by members of the president's economic team as a way to foster more ideas for economic growth.

If you're one of the 10.2% of Americans who are unemployed, you can sleep easy tonight, secure in the knowledge that Barack Obama is on the case.

He's going to have a summit to think deep thoughts about your problems, just as soon as he gets back from Asia and finishes bowing to all of those foreign monarchs.

Obama to Strip Pro-Life Amendment From Health Care “Reform” Bill

David Axelrod, on one of the Sunday shows:

White House Senior Adviser David Axelrod suggested Sunday that President Obama will intervene to make sure a controversial amendment restricting federal funding for abortion coverage is stripped from final health care reform legislation.

In doing so, the president would be heeding the call of abortion rights supporters like Planned Parenthood that have called the White House their "strongest weapon" in keeping such restrictions out of the bill.

The abortion amendment was tacked on to the House health care bill and was a key factor in securing the votes of moderate Democrats before the bill was approved by a narrow margin last weekend. The amendment, authored by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., went beyond preventing the proposed government-run plan from covering abortion to restrict federal subsidies from going toward private plans that offer abortion coverage.

Axelrod said in an interview Sunday that the amendment changes the "status quo," something the president cannot abide.

"The president has said repeatedly, and he said in his speech to Congress, that he doesn't believe that this bill should change the status quo as it relates to the issue of abortion," Axelrod said. "This shouldn't be a debate about abortion. And he's going to work with Senate and the House to try and ensure that at the end of the day, the status quo is not changed ... I believe that there are discussions ongoing to how to adjust it accordingly."

Axelrod said the president believes that issue, as well as the ongoing dispute over what kind of government-run insurance plan, if any, should be included in the overhaul, "can and will be worked through before it reaches his desk."

Axelrod spoke on CNN's "State of the Union."

The president already said last week that he did not support the amendment.

The notion that the Stupak amendment upsets the "status quo" is a bunch of crap.

The Hyde Amendment, which has been around for over three decades (since 1976) has barred Federal dollars from funding abortions. The Stupak Amendment is basically a measure to ensure that the Hyde Amendment continues to apply should this government health care program become a reality.

Unsurprisingly, any restrictions on the unlimited abortion agenda don't exactly suit Obama, his liberal chief strategist or his liberal allies in Congress.

Nancy Pelosi: Jailing People Who Don't Buy Health Care Is “Very Fair”

The exchange:

Reporter: Do you think it’s fair to send people to jail who don’t buy health insurance?

Pelosi: ...The legislation is very fair in this respect.

Yeah.

Ace's reaction pretty much sums it up:

Back to this leftist insistence that we're all paranoid to even think this way, to even define "freedom" in an antique, right-wing fashion, meaning "stuff you are permitted to do or not do without penalty and coercion from the state:" It is especially risible to me, in gallows-humor way, that the left continues to call us lunatics for fretting about increasing state control and increasing state coercion and increasing state outlawing of previously-legal behavior and freedoms even as, in their very first bill out of the socialist box, they propose jailing Americans for engaging in unobjectionable behavior which no one ever before dreamt of being a crime.

Think about this.

The left says: You are crazy to claim your so-called freedoms are being taken away, and you are a lunatic to scream about an overly powerful state which will use violent coercion (no one goes to jail without the threat of violence if he doesn't, after all) to enforce its notions of the "economic good."

And with the next breath the left says: By the way, you shall either buy health care insurance or we will throw you in prison for two or three years.

I'm paranoid? Really? I am not fretting here about some remote and unlikely possibility. We are not speaking here of "slippery slopes" or in terms of "what comes next?"

We are instead objecting to a black-letter law spelled out for all to see in the very first piece of legislation you're proposing.

Right out of the box. The state here -- Pelosi, Reid, Obama -- are claiming that they can imprison people for behavior that has never before even been hinted as being a crime, on the theory that such behavior constitutes unpatriotic economic behavior which is detrimental to the state's balance sheets.

Think about what a broad, all-encompassing term "economics" is. 80% of our waking hours are spent in economic activity of one sort or another. The state here is asserting the right to imprison people for behavior they consider not actually morally reprehensible or harmful as other crimes are, but instead merely detrimental to the Great Push Forward, the state's master plan of economic health and well-being.

Right out of the box they propose sending people to jail for acting as economic subversives and economic traitors and yet I am, somehow, paranoid if I point out that the first step here is to reduce human freedom and increase state power.

And this is just a down-payment, remember. This is merely the first of many freedoms you previously believed sacrosanct to be lost. This is merely the first freedom they've realized, in advance, will have to be taken away. When their Rube Goldberg system of cross-subsidizations and stealth-rationing produces a slew of irrationalities and evasions they did not anticipate, we will have a welter of new crimes to correct all that human behavior they now find constitutes bad economic hygiene and must be outlawed.

But we're paranoid. We're lunatics. We're "extreme."

Used to be in this county when we proposed making an entire category of human behavior a crime, that was cause for debate. Civil libertarians on the left would join those on the right in wondering what has so changed in the past several years to require an entire new category of criminality, an entire sphere of human activity now removed from the column of "freedom" and moved to the column of "forbiddance."

But not this time. Fascism, as they say, tends to come with a smiling face, and there's hardly a face more surgically stretched into smiles than Nancy Pelosi's, quite chipper and blithe as she proposes that she will begin filling America's prisons with a whole new category of criminal, the economic saboteur.

And there is no argument about it, and no debate. We are creating an entirely new type of "crime" that could end up imprisoning millions (or -- very nearly as bad -- compelling behavior and restricting freedom due to threat of incarceration) and the entire left and the entire media (but I repeat myself) blows it off as no big deal.

It's just What Must Be Done. Omlette, eggs, some breaking required.

But I'm a paranoid and extremist to take notice of the fact that what was once my freedom in 2009 shall become a cause for imprisonment in 2010.

Mike Sodrel, in his 2008 campaign, told a parable about two lions. One lion lived free in the Serengeti. The other lived in a cage at the zoo. One lion hunted for its food and might get sick, but he roamed free and could do as he pleased. The other lion was fed regularly and had health care, but he was confined to a very limited space and had no freedom.

Which lion would you prefer to be?

Democrat Numbers Continue Plunge in Ohio

A follow up from last week on the situation next door in Ohio:

For the first time, Republican Rob Portman is inching ahead of the two Democrats in the 2010 race for Ohio’s U.S. Senate seat, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. Also for the first time, Ohio voters disapprove 50 – 45 percent of the job President Barack Obama is doing, down from his 53 – 42 percent approval September 16 and 49 – 44 percent approval July 7.

In still another first, voters are split 40 – 40 percent on who is doing a better job handling health care, the President or Congressional Republicans, the independent Quinnipiac University survey finds. In a September 16 survey on the same question, Obama was on top 49 – 28 percent.

Ohio voters disapprove 53 – 42 percent of the way the President is handling the economy and disapprove 57 – 36 percent of the way he is handling health care. In September, they approved of his handling of the economy 48 – 46 percent and split on his handling of health care 44 – 45 percent.

Hmmm. What could it mean?

The Dollar in Distress

The Curious Capitalist:

The U.S.: export juggernaut (if you don't count oil and China)

Here's the kind of interesting stuff you can learn reading this morning's monthly foreign trade report from the Census Bureau:

Overall U.S. trade deficit for September: $36.5 billion

Trade deficit in petroleum products: $20.5 billion

Trade deficit with China: $22.1 billion
Overall U.S. trade surplus if you exclude petroleum and China: $6.1 billion

I wonder how much of that trade deficit with China owes itself to PNTR (Permanent Normal Trade Relations, or permanent free trade) with China, which Baron voted for.

Just how much US manufacturing capability migrated to China because of PNTR? There was a time when free trade meant that country A made stuff and sold it to country B, not county A's companies moved their factories to country B (to make use of cheap labor) and sold stuff back to country A.

I'm not an economist (thank God), but I've always wondered whether the flight of manufacturing to China would have been so substantial if the Congress hadn't abrogated its responsibilities by establishing permanent free trade with China. It used to be that free trade with China (most-favored nation status, it was called) was voted upon periodically every few years.

The uncertainty of that status always being up for a vote probably served as an important factor in keeping at least some percentage of that manufacturing capacity here. How many businesses would move their factory to China if there was a chance that free trade with China might expire or Congress might not vote to renew it next year, or three years from now, or just someday?

A Racist Poll

Who Dey, Who Dey, Who Dey Think Gonna Beat Them Colts?

Answer: Not the New England Patriots.

That was good football. Best game of the year.

Indianapolis: 35
New England: 34