One hour and forty minutes after the White House issued their Easter deadline for ObamaCare to pass Congress, Democratic House Leaders conceded “they may not meet President Barack Obama’s challenge for swift action.”

Whenever the House Leadership moves a vote, it means they don’t have the votes. In Spanish, that’s mañana.

With the White House issuing a deadline and the Dem House leaders immediately and publicly saying, not so much, the White House looks silly and limp and powerless. They look even more out of touch and desperate than they did when President Obama announced that he will not quit with his self-appointed Captain Ahab role of hunting the great-health-care-white-whale.

But the best news (finally) is that a group of Democrats are willing to have News at 11 film them shooting ObamaCare in the head.

Read More →

The will to act, which looked so resolute among the Democratic leadership during the Dark Days of the The Great ObamaCare Wars of 2009 and 2010, has left the campsite, with rank and file sneaking away along the stream lines leading away from the Crusader’s tents.

What looked liked indomitable will to the rank and file faithful, now looks like willful blindness, strategic stupidity and tactical suicide.

It’s not that RedState, FireDogLake or experts like Charlie Cook could not see it. It’s that the Dem leadership in the White House, Senate and House refused to see it. Now, they are facing rank and file members who see it; and in moments of clarity, glimpses of their own self-destruction; caused by leaders who used the Dem naivety and blindness on health care to manipulate the rank and file into the electoral kill zone they now find themselves.

Now the witch-doctors of health reform are trying one more set of incantations and gyrations produced by trance-like stares into the abyss — who then emerge to proclaim that we must do what were going to do before Massachusetts — but this time with 51 votes in the Senate.

And no, they are not kidding. (Or listening.)

Now the witch-doctors and high priestesses are trying really hard to conjure up a potion strong enough to work on the Senate — but they find that reality has created a natural antidote — fear, which brings us back to the streamlines leading away from the thinning Crusader war party.

Read More →

Speaker Pelosi’s zero point zero House vote margin has eroded further during the week after the Red Tide flooded Central and Eastern Massachusetts.

Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D - OH) said: “The senate bill is so totally flawed that I don’t think it can get the votes in the House to pass. I certainly wouldn’t vote for it.” Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) said he will not vote for the Senate bill. Rep. Stupak says he has 10 to 12 yes votes who would be no votes, if Senator Nelson’s abortion funding language he got in return for the Nebraska Medicaid Kickback is in the bill. And the National Organization of Women publicly stated that they think no health care bill is better than either the House or the Senate bill.

The likelihood of Democrats who voted NO changing their votes to yes, after Massachusetts, is zero.

And as The Huffingon Post reported yesterday:

“If you look at the actual vote in the House, we had 220 [votes for health care]. And you look at the Republican vote [Rep. Joseph Cao of Louisiana]. He’s no longer on board. And [former] Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Florida) is gone. So we are now at 218. We have no margin for error…”

It has all, very publicly, very embarrassingly turned to dust. The Speaker cannot get 218 votes. Full stop.

Read More →

Notwithstanding all of the damage that health care has wrought the Democrats, AP is reporting the following statement this morning: “We have to get a bill passed,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

In what could be a clear reference to the psychological state of denial, in the same AP story just below the quote from the Speaker, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) said “People are at various levels of the seven stages of grief,” referring, of course, to the current state of ObamaCare.

The Speaker’s and the Trillion Dollar President’s state of denial is working really well for the GOP. Given the ingrained denial of both the Trillion Dollar President and the Speaker, I have prepared a simple, picture-book-blog to show what the Obama-Pelosi health care reform crazy train has wrought:

Read More →

UPDATE — About an hour after this post, Pelosi admits she does not have the votes to pass the unamended Senate bill on the House floor.

As soon as Senator McConnell objected to the appointment of the Conferees of on behalf of Senator DeMint, the Democrats in the House, each, individually, were given an unprecedented opportunity to influence the amendment that the House would vote on to change the Senate bill.

This meant that the very small margin of error on the House floor — which has since become one vote less because a Democratic House Member has left his seat — created huge leverage for each individual Democratic House Member. They are not used to this amount of leverage, nor are the Speaker and the other House leaders on health care used to dealing with Members with this amount of leverage.

So, the Speaker must listen to everyone’s demands. And the Republicans were left out, helping, I am certain, Brown win in Massachusetts. (Thank you Senator DeMint.)

Into this unstable political environment, enter Big Labor and the Progressive outside groups. They just took the Dems shortest route to passing their health reform law off the table — which is passing the Senate bill unamended so it can go directly to the President for his signature.

PlumLine’s Greg Sargent reports: “AFL-CIO legislative director Bill Samuel tells me in an interview that labor won’t support any efforts by the House to pass the Senate health bill in its current form.”

Add to this the Progressive’s efforts to illustrate that a portion of the 20% of Democrats who voted for Brown — they say 82% of the 20% — supported the public option, meaning Progressives had a key role to play in electing Brown because the Democrats in Washington walked away from the public option.

Read More →

“There is no plan B,” Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) said. “There are so many problems with the Senate bill from the House view that they wouldn’t get a 100 votes.”

“After being filled in on the House negotiations with the Senate, Stupak said, “we’re looking at each other like, yeah, well that’s that’s good, but … even if you reach agreement, can you have it done by tomorrow? Because you’re not going to have 60 votes come tomorrow. They filled us in and it was almost like there wasn’t an election in Massachusetts.”

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY): “On a substantive level, I think this health care package might be doomed and it might not be the worst thing in the world to step back and say we are going to return with jobs first or we are going to do something that more people have a basic handle on, and then maybe we will return and take a deep breath. We need to get our balance back.”

Read More →

Via Newsbusters, this is what the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Dem-only, cram-down health care strategy has wrought:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, there’s only one realistic option, and it’s a longshot. The idea that Democrats in the White House and Capitol Hill are working on right now is to convince enough House Democrats to simply pass the bill that passed the Senate, which is not exactly like the House bill — there are differences in abortion, there are differences in the way that taxation happens — but the argument to those Democrats will be, to the progressives: “It’s never going to get any better than this;” and to the conservatives and moderates who’ve already taken the tough vote, that they’re going to have the worst of both worlds if they get nothing for it.

But, Diane, that is a very long shot. I think most Democrats right now would agree with Congressman Barney Frank, a loyal supporter of the President, who said that health reform in this form is likely dead if Coakley loses.

Stephanopoulos is way outside the Dem perimeter on this one: “a long shot…a very long shot.”

And both George Stephanopoulos and Rep. Barney Frank are exactly correct — the Senate bill will not pass the House, even if it means nothing will pass — at least in this Congress. The Dems need to get to work on something other than health care — really, really need to — they are getting shredded by health care.

But Speaker Pelosi is still in cram-down, Dem-only mode.

And she is looking very un-Pelosi-like in this video where she orders the Light Brigade to keep charging — or is it the Jonestown Kool-Aid Brigade to keep drinking? (h/t sharonmcp).

When the lead paragraph in a story in the Boston Globe — owned by the New York Times — from a story titled “Obama here for Coakley, trailing a diminished aura,” reads:

“The feverish excitement that propelled Barack Obama and scores of other Democrats to victory in 2008 has all but evaporated, worrying party leaders who are struggling to invigorate the base before Tuesday’s Massachusetts Senate race and November’s critical midterm contests, pollsters and party activists said [emphasis added].”

even the hard-core Obama-lapdogs in the media can’t purposefully ignore the fact the public hates ObamaCare, or its negative political impact on the Democrats.

And President Obama and Speaker Pelosi and walking-dead-man-Reid are to blame.

Their cram-down is not working. The Dem-go-it-alone-on-health-care-strategy is not working.

The ignore-actually-actively-refuse-to-listen-to-the-public and keep pushing the political loser ObamaCare no-matter-what-and-no-matter-the-cost, is not working.

Read More →

Trende, who writes the horse race blog at RealClearPolitics is among the best in country, and here is his take on various polling data from the MA Senate race:

Consider: PPP (D) has her at 47%. The Globe/UNH poll has her at 53%. Rasmussen has her at 50%. Even internal Democratic polling — which usually represents the Democrat’s best-case scenario — has her leading state Senator Scott Brown 50%-36%. In other words, most of the variance comes from Brown’s numbers — which vary between 36% and 48% support — not Coakley’s. As I’ve noted before, when you see one candidate very stable and one candidate with a high degree of variance in their numbers, it means that the undecideds are trending toward the candidate with the higher variance. In other words, that candidate will tend to be toward the high end of their polling range.

This is where the “undecided rule” starts to come into play. It’s a political science rule that predicts that undecided voters will break heavily for the challenger.”

Sean Trende also discusses the new-internet age “undecided rule,” and up-dates it. Here is his bottom line:

“So if we look for a principle that survives this new age of saturation advertising and internet-driven intensity, we might say that when you have two well-known candidates, the undecided rule is probably inapplicable as a predictive device. But if there’s a disparity between the candidates, the undecideds will still tend to break toward the lesser-known candidate. There’s probably caveats and exceptions here, but I think that’s probably about right.

“So what does that tell us about the Massachusetts Senate race? We have a sitting Attorney General who came out of a contested primary, going up against a more-or-less completely unknown state Senator. She’s struggling to get above 50%. All of this points toward a very close final race — potentially much closer than a week ago when I guessed at a 54-46 spread. Again, this is also consistent with what we’re seeing in the variance in the Coakley/Brown numbers. Coakley should be worried.”

The Dems keep thinking that the health care jihad has no consequences. How wrong their jihadists in chiefs: Pelosi, Reid and Obama are.

Problems, or P to the sixth power, is what Speaker Pelosi faces.

She tells her caucus on a conference call not to believe reports that she has decided that the House will OK all the major positions of the Senate (read: cave to the Senate) — but in order to defeat the Senate position, she needs to show the White House and the Senate leadership, she does not have the votes in the House.

And she has no Dem Member of Congress who has corralled the votes with which she can point to as being the one who has them, while she does not. The Progressives are suffering from the fact they will not threaten to kill the bill if they do not get what they want. They have no Stupak, no DeMint, no Coburn.

Read More →