Democrats scramble to ram through health care takeover before facing Townhalls:

Democrats are racing the clock to pass health care reform ahead of a wave of Tea Party-driven town hall meetings planned for the spring recess — the kind of gatherings that nearly derailed the package last August.

But there’s a big difference this time around. Last summer, Democrats were encouraged to hold the town hall meetings, and they were blindsided by the backlash, which was recorded and promoted in countless YouTube clips. This time around, they  have a good idea of what’s coming — and they’re lying low.

“There’s not been the same push as there was in August to encourage members to do town halls,” said Stephanie Lundberg, spokeswoman for House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.

But that isn’t stopping Tea Party groups, as well as former House Republican Leader Dick Armey’s outfit, FreedomWorks, from holding their own meetings and trying to coax lawmakers into attending.

“We’re about to ratchet it up,” said Debbie Dooley, a Tea Party Patriots organizer and FreedomWorks volunteer outside Atlanta. “You’re about to see the passion that we saw during the August recess.”

I wouldn’t count on many of the weasels having their courage to face constituents and explain their betrayal.

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Thanks to Heritage:

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Who are the most conservative and liberal members in Congress? Every year National Journal scores the votes of all members to answer that question.  For 2009:

The 10 Most Liberal Senators

1. Sherrod Brown (tied 1st)
2. Roland Burris (tied 1st)
3. Ben Cardin (tied 1st)
4. Jack Reed (tied 1st)
5. Sheldon Whitehouse (tied 1st)
6. John Kerry
7. Frank Lautenberg
8. Barbara Mikulski
9. Chris Dodd
10. Dick Durbin

The 10 Most Conservative Senators

1. James Inhofe
2. Jim DeMint
3. Jim Bunning
4. Tom Coburn
5. James Risch
6. John Thune
7. John Ensign
8. Mitch McConnell
9. Richard Burr
10. Jeff Sessions

Read more

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The grand health care summit was supposed to trap Republicans.  Democrats would show the nation how intransigent and unreasonable those pesky obstructionists on the right were being as they prevented passage of free health care for all.  Instead, Republicans came prepared and ran substantive circles around the Democrats, who were too busy reading phony, heart-string pulling letters from “constituents” to talk about actual details of legislation.  The President seemed irritable and petty, and did little to help his case.

Despite accomplishing nothing, the President is determined to ram his unpopular bill through anyway.  All the talk is about reconciliation, which will avert a need for a 60 vote majority in the Senate, but the real story is in the House.  The Democrats just don’t have the votes right now.

Can that change? Certainly.  If House members realize their toast no matter what they do come November, they may just ram it through as one last thumb in the eye to the American people.  But right now, ObamaCare is looking like it needs to be fit for a coffin.

Does this mean any health care reform is dead?  Only if Democrats want it to mean that.  If they wake up, return hat in hand and have a real summit to discuss bipartisan solutions, some useful things can get done.  Don’t get me wrong, the best solutions are ones that Democrats will never consider, but there are productive things on which both sides can agree.   But that will mean Democrats have to first abandon their bad bill which no one wants.  I’m not holding my breath.

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When Democrats sang a different tune on Senate rules:

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One of the biggest applause lines at CPAC not involving a chalk board was when Rep. Mike Pence called for an end to all federal funding for Planned Parenthood.  It’s not just that the organization performs abortions, as other pro-life lines didn’t get the same level of enthusiastic response.  It’s that the organization is as morally and legally corrupt as ACORN.

Video via Blogger of the Year Ed Morrissey at HotAir:

The film was produced by Lila Rose and Live Action Films, who have now exposed criminal behavior at multiple Planned Parenthood locations.

This is the kind of raw journalism we need, like what James O’Keefe did with ACORN.  The traditional press won’t do it.  They refuse to expose the organization that make up the base of the Democratic Party. We have to do it ourselves. Kudos to these people for exposing such corruption of our taxpayer dollars.

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It’s not just exaggerated political rhetoric, the American left really does look fondly upon the blood-soaked socialist ideology:

The Gallup Poll reports that a majority of Democrats, 53%, have a “positive” image of socialism, which includes independents who lean toward the blue party.

Only 17 percent of Republican and GOP-leaners hold socialism in a positive light. In total, more than one-third of Americans, 36%, have a positive image of socialism.

The propaganda of state-run education is at least partly to blame.

So how much blood and misery must an ideology cause before the left abandons it?

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People respond to incentives:

Conservatives have been exchanging email for weeks about the shocking fact that Obama’s health care bill discriminates against marriage while financially favoring unmarried couples living together. This fact is finally getting national attention, at least in The Wall Street Journal and on Fox News.

Here is the cost in the House bill for an unmarried couple who each earn $25,000 a year (total: $50,000). When they both buy health insurance (which will be mandatory), the combined premiums they pay will be capped at $3,076 a year.

But if the couple gets married and has the same combined income of $50,000, they will pay annual premiums up to a cap of $5,160 a year. That means they have to fork over a marriage penalty of $2,084.

Being married does make someone more likely to vote Republican, so perhaps this is just another way to get Democrats reelected.

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This New Republic article from a couple days ago caught my attention.  In it, the author says that the Democrats are doomed, so they ought to go ahead and destroy America anyway, with the cap-and-trade bill being their Kamikaze vehicle of choice.  Ok, he didn’t quite say it like that, but that’s what it would mean.

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The left has for some time self-servingly wrung its hands about the state of the GOP as a supposed “regional” party. The basis for this claim was the defeat of northeastern liberals like Lincoln Chafee and the defection of others like Arlen Specter.  This meme was always short on intelligent thought, and now Scott Brown has exploded it.

As if the election of Republican governors in Virginia and New Jersey weren’t enough, Scott Brown has surged to the position of favorite in the race to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat.  Deep Blue Massachusetts may just elect a Republican to end the Democrats’ filibuster proof hold on the Senate.  How could a “regional” party like the GOP do this?

According to the learned wisdom of the liberal analysts, the party was just too fanatically conservative for the northeast.  Yet it was liberals who kept losing there.  The reality is that it is those very northeastern liberals who diluted the Republican brand by collaborating with Democrats to expand the size and scope of government.

Scott Brown may not be the strongest conservative,  nor a standard bearer of the Tea Party movement, but he didn’t make a race of it in MA by running as a Rockefeller Republican, either.  Instead, he ran as a fiscal conservative.  That’s the key to winning in the northeast and everywhere else for Republicans.  Don’t listen to the self-serving advice of the left.  Some regional compromises are okay, but sticking to core principles is what will reinvigorate the Republican party, in New England as well as the country as a whole.

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