From the White House blog:the insurers’ monopoly is so strong that they can continue to jack up rates as much as they like – even if it means losing customers – and their profits will continue to soar under the status quo. . . ....

Let's get this straight, Syracuse is spelled correctly right in front of him, but Mr. Obama misspells it twice (see about 2:50 into this clip for the second discussion). When Dan Qualye was VP he misspelled "potato" when the card that he was given misspelled the word and he was attacked as an idiot. Here Obama misspells a word twice when it is wr...

The Hill Newspaper says that there are 37 firm or leaning "no" votes. If 38 Dems vote against the bill, it will be killed. So if all the "no" votes hold and one of the 49 undecideds vote "no," the bill will be stopped.John Fund has a list of the 8 Dems who are being lobbied hardest. Three are on the "no" list currently.Rick Boucher of Virginia -...

My new piece at Fox News starts this way:At the beginning of the week, the Congressional Budget Office gave House Speaker Nancy Pelosi their estimates of the how much the health care reconciliation bill will cost. But Pelosi decided to wait days to release those numbers. For Democrats anxious to pass the bill, the delay has been extremely frustrati...

Watch the latest news video at video.foxnews.comObama has a hard time directly answering Baier's questions....

The CBO scoring process has been manipulated in part because the Republicans haven't been able to get the CBO to estimate what some key parts of the health care bill are going to do to total costs. Whether on purpose or by accident it doesn't really matter. What is the impact of banning different insurance premiums based on pre-existing condition...

Hiding the true cost of Obamacare: Nationalized health care will mean fewer people are coveredObama's medical horror stories: Democrats denigrate the best health care system in the worldMisunderstanding free trade: Obama to thrust more government onto businesses...

Democrats think that they can just save money by reducing the rate that doctors and hospitals are reimbursed for services. This has lead to cost shifting, where private insurance has to pick up the losses imposed on medical care providers. Now this story from Washington state.Effective April 16, Walgreens drugstores across the state won't take an...

I think that these predictions are overly pessimistic. Possibly they are playing the expectations game, but while unemployment will likely stay above 9 percent, saying that it will be at 10 percent is too high.U.S. employers won’t hire enough workers this year to lower the jobless rate much below the level of 9.7 percent reached in February, thr...

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Obama spent a third of his talk on health care at Strongsville, Ohio on Natoma's case.I want to thank Connie -- I want to thank Connie, who introduced me. I want to thank her and her family for being here on behalf of her sister, Natoma. I don't know if everybody understood that Natoma is in the hospital right now, so Connie was filling in. It�...

Rasmussen Reports has a new survey out.Voter unhappiness with Congress has reached the highest level ever recorded by Rasmussen Reports as 71% now say the legislature is doing a poor job.That’s up ten points from the previous high of 61% reached a month ago.Only 10% of voters say Congress is doing a good or excellent job.Nearly half of Democratic...

From Politico:Rep. Chet Edwards, a Texas Democrat who remains a firm “no,” said he’s getting calls spurred by Organizing for America, the president’s unofficial outreach arm. He said he’s fine with constituents expressing their opinions — and even with the right of OFA to engage — but noted of the Obama organization, “It’s clear t...

Let me get this straight. Obama wants an up-or-down vote, but Congress wants to pass it without directly voting on the Senate version of the bill.The Dems in the House want to combine the votes on the Senate bill and the reconciliation bills into one vote, then have the president sign the Senate bill and send the reconciliation bill to the Senate....

Here is how the NY Times piece today starts off:STRONGSVILLE, Ohio — Declaring that “every argument has been made” on his health care overhaul, President Obama sought to seal the deal with Congress and the American people Monday by focusing on a single patient: a self-employed cleaning woman who dropped her costly insurance plan and just disc...

The Hill has all this back and forth over whether the Dems have the votes or not.“There’s tremendous anticipation, and certainly a lot of anxiety, but I believe we have the votes and that we will get this bill done this week,” Larson, the fourth-ranking House Democrat, said.But Larson’s statement immediately made him the highest-ranking opt...

I suppose that one could say that this will convince all those other people owing a dollar or two to pay up, but it still doesn't seem very cost efficient.It was every businessperson's nightmare.Arriving at Harv's Metro Car Wash in midtown Wednesday afternoon were two dark-suited IRS agents demanding payment of delinquent taxes. "They were deadly s...

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So much for Obama's promise to cut out special deals in the health care bill. There are so many deals already made that they can't do any more without interfering with the existing deals.House Democratic leaders are closing down their trading post on the health care bill. Party leaders are beginning to spread the word to rank-and-file lawmakers th...

Rep. Michele Bachmann asks the question here....

This appears to be a pretty big difference in rates between male and female prison staff having sex with prisoners -- more than a two-to-one difference.Inmate Michael Murphy usually started by seeking a small favor. That would often lead to a kiss or love letters. And in at least five cases, he convinced female prison employees to have sex with him...

Google seems more than a little selective on what it thinks is good and bad behavior.If Freedom is so important to Google, please explain why Google's search results in China are censored so as not to bring up any results concerning the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, sites supporting Tibet and Taiwan independence, the Falun Gong movement, and o...

It probably won't raise to the level of the infamous 1994 checking kiting scandal, but it is pretty outrageous.At least 10 House members are spending more than $1,000 a month in taxpayer money to lease cars.Rep. Emanuel Cleaver appears to be the biggest spender. In the last quarter of 2009, the Missouri Democrat doled out $2,900 a month to lease a ...

I don't know which is worse, the fact that a government agency is trying to indoctrinate kids about global warming or that there is a government agency that looks at the content of ads. In the case of government ads, if you are going to have to have them, why not have another government agency to check for accuracy? My first choice though is to g...

This quote pretty much summarizes it all:It would set firmer standards for success while lifting nearly all the measures that the Bush law uses to try to prod change at failing schools. . . .Critics have also singled out the law's heavy focus on standardized tests and its emphasis on reading and math over other subjects like science, history and ar...

This WSJ piece puts the current discussion in some perspective. It is quite possible that people are getting freaked out over drivers making mistakes.It took Audi 15 years to rebuild its U.S. sales to the level the company had achieved before the CBS show "60 Minutes" made sudden acceleration a household phrase in November 1986.The "60 Minutes" se...

Given all the police departments that sell guns, what are the odds that one police department would have this happen? It seems incredibly high to me. I also don't see the difference between a gun sold by a police department that gets used in a crime and a gun from any other sale. Does a gun become different just because that particular one is us...

Given the huge Democratic majority in the House, it is a sign of the bill's unpopularity that the is such strong bi-partisan opposition to it. With 38 no votes, this can be stopped. The Hill newspaper claims 35 are leaning "no." 72 are undecided (see list here). Can the 35 stick in there and can 3 of the 72 be turned? Sean Hannity's list makes...

Even very liberal radio show host, Mark Levine, says that Tom Hanks went too far: "I am not defending everything that Tom Hanks said."...

The notion that the House will not be accepting the Senate bill when it votes on it is a fiction.President Barack Obama says he wants projects helping specific states yanked from the health care bill Congress is writing. Democratic senators, being senators, beg to differ.The Senate-approved health measure lawmakers hope to send to Obama soon would ...

USA Today tries to make Michael Mann appear as sympathetic as possible, but the piece still lists out what environmentalists think have been the problems that they have faced since Climategate.• Citing doubts raised by the "climategate" e-mails, state governments in Texas, Virginia and Alabama filed legal challenges last month to stop the federal...

The Chavez government has accomplished a lot in 11 years. From Reuters:The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence (OVV), whose data is widely followed in the absence of official statistics, said the South American nation has one of the highest crime rates on the continent, with 54 homicides per 100,000 citizens in 2009.That rate is only surpassed in L...

I had noted privately that there was something pretty obvious about the reviews when I looked at them collected at Rotten Tomatoes. Here is a conspiracy theory about the Bush administration lying about WMD in Iraq to trick people into supporting the war. While trying to demonize a duplicitous Bush official as lying about the WMD, there is no ment...

Fox gets more of an audience than CNN, MSNBC, and HLN (and I assume also CNBC) combined. It doesn't matter if you look at day or prime time or whether you look at total viewers or the 25 to 54 demographic....

I guess that I don't accept the "without means available" to have an abortion claim. We are talking about a procedure that costs $450. A woman can pay for it in installments, and it seems hard to believe that there are many women who can't afford this. The subsidies that go to incomes several times above the poverty line are obviously not relate...