Health Wars (10/23/09)

It's confirmed: the entire Democrat leadership in both houses of Congress is so power-mad that it's laid waste to whatever brain cells they were born with.

Or, in other words, they're all "crazy":

The Constitution of the United States is officially irrelevant to Nancy Pelosi and Pat Leahy, and guaranteed most of the rest of their cauci.  Not that that's really NEWS, you understand, but just in case, I thought y'all needed to know.

The other obligatory comments are over here.

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Flash: Democrats have been lying about abortion being a lynchpin "medical service" of BarryCare all along!  Who knew?

Answer: the Assholiated Press, which means most likely the rest of the Obamedia as well - and, of course, the ObamaHouse.  The fact that it was buried eight paragraphs down hardly at all mitigates the astonishment that it was in their story at all:

The main point of contention is the proposed new federal subsidies that would help lower-income people purchase health care coverage from private plans — and potentially from a new government-sponsored plan — within a new purchasing exchange.

Currently a law called the Hyde amendment bars federal funding for abortion — except in cases of rape and incest or if the mother’s life would be endangered — and applies those restrictions to Medicaid, forcing states that cover abortion for low-income women to do so with their own money. Separate laws apply the restrictions to the federal employee health plan and military and other programs.

But the Democrats’ health overhaul bill would create a new stream of federal funding not covered by the restrictions.

Stupak says language specifying that someone obtaining an abortion must use her own money, not federal money from the subsidies, doesn’t go far enough because it’s impossible to clearly segregate funds in that way.

“Once you get the affordability credits (subsidies) in there, that’s public funding of abortion. We’re not going there,” Stupak said. “How do you get past the affordability credits is really the issue. And we can’t.”

BarryCare doesn't repeal the Hyde Amendment, in other words; it bypasses it.  It means all the ObamaHouse denials of BarryCare funding abortions vis-a-vie the HA not being touched are just so much dishonest handwaving designed to distract attention from the way they DID intend to fund them, which seems pretty obvious from the fact that the Dems have blocked every GOP amendment to eliminate abortion funding from any version of the bill.

And whaddaya know - the center of public opinion on abortion is SEVERAL PARSECS TO THE RIGHT of that stance.  Which will rev up Donks' worst nightmare - evangelicals - to join the rest of the rapidly reassembling Reagan majority coalition.

Is the GOP going to have to report in-kind contributions from this?

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Kind of a remake of Washington: Behind Closed Doors, only enormously more terrifying:

Also answers the question, "How many rhetorical questions can you cram into a minute and forty-six seconds?"

It's ominous, but it's also a defensive huddle.  When they tried a sneaky jam-down in July, they had one crucial advantage they lack now: the element of surprise.  There's no mystery at all about why Democrats are behind closed doors scheming with this atrocity now: Their leadership is trying to alchemize some way of reconciling all the bitter divisions within their cauci in order to cobble together some sort of legislation that can actually clear the sixty-vote cloture hurdle in the Senate.  And they're not succeeding:

Given that the current phase of the Democrats’ attempt to take over the US healthcare system is mostly behind closed doors, most of what we hear is going to be gossip and propaganda — statements and leaks designed to manipulate other politicians and the public.

For example, on the so-called “public option,” we have been fed news stories about how the House Dems have the votes for a “robust” government-run insurance plan, only to find out that they did not, that the Dems being whipped may not have known what the “robust public option” is, that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi then did a public whipping to shame Dems into supporting her — and that the count leaves some fifty to sixty Dems in the air (though the number could also be as low as seven or eight).

On the Senate side, we have been fed stories about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid warming to the idea of putting the “public option” into the merged bill going to the floor, with a state opt-out — with fifty-seven or fifty-eight Senators supporting it. But most accounts also have Senator Max Baucus moving into action, and complaints from Senators Ben Nelson, Olympia Snowe, Mary Landrieu and perhaps Evan Bayh following.

The bottom line?  Pay no heed to the psych-ops boasting to the lapdog Obapress; look at the votes that aren't happening, and what happens when they do.

That's not to say that the Democrat Poliburo can't still pull a rabbit out of its ass and pass BarryCare.  But it begs the question: If they could, why haven't they?