“Mr. President, I’ll try to be brief.  There’s a lot to talk about.  I’d like to focus it though on the deficit, impact on the deficit, which we’re all talking about.  And I must tell you, maybe I’ve been around too long, but I am always reluctant, after being here 37 years, to tell people what the American people think.  I think it requires a little bit of humility to be able to know what the American people think.  But — and I don’t, I can’t swear I do.  I know what I think, I think I know what they think, but I’m not sure what they think.”  Vice President Joe Biden (winner of the Biden-Palin debate of 2008), Feburary 25, 2010.

Senator Foolish exposes himself.

Does he think old people should pay the same life insurance premiums as young people? Is that segregation?

Then there was this exchange.

Obama: I just want to focus on Medicare Advantage, because I haven’t seen an independent analyst look at this and say seniors are healthier for it, or taxpayers are better off for it. That’s what we’re talking about reforming. We’re not talking about cutting benefits under the Medicare program as is required under law. What we’re talking about is Medicare Advantage. And you know, it may be that some people here think that it’s working. I know that there’s some Republicans who are sitting at this table who don’t think it’s working. You can argue and say okay, let’s not do Medicare Advantage, and let’s not close the donut hole, for example. Or, you know, there may be other ways you want to spend that money. But I just want to establish whether we’ve got some agreement that the Medicare Advantage program, which is what we are proposing to reform, is actually not a good deal to taxpayers or for seniors, and certainly not a good deal for the 80% of seniors who aren’t in Medicare Advantage, because by the way, they’re paying an extra premium of about $90 bucks a year to subsidize the 20% who are in Medicare Advantage.

John McCain: I’ll just make one comment. Why in the world, then, would we carve out 800,000 people in Florida that would not be, have their Medicare Advantage cut? Now I proposed an amendment on the floor to say everybody would be treated the same. Now Mr. President, why should we carve out 800,000 people because they live in Florida to keep their Medicare Advantage program, and then want to do away with it?

Obama: I think you make a legitimate point.

Oh, where to begin? First, mister bow-tie Harvard man doesn’t even know how to pronounce Steve Jobs’s surname. Nor does he know that, far from needing handy brochures to explain those scary computers to a nation of computer-phobic dolts, the personal computer took off the instant that it became useful. For number crunchers, that was the moment VisiCalc went on sale.

The arrogance (and ignorance) of this man and Valerie Jarrett — who speaks for Obama — is galling, astonishing and amusing.

As for the tea party people, I saw clips of ordinary citizens at last summer’s townhall meetings who had read the House bill and could quote from it. How many of the Dem Cong who voted for it could say the same?

… a NYT article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg that’s mostly about Barack Obama’s lack of skill in getting members of Congress to do what he wants. It begins with a description of a January 15th meeting in the White House, in which Obama was “playing ‘marriage counselor’” with various members of Congress. Supposedly, “he coaxed, cajoled and prodded them,” but in the end people, including Obama, were frustrated and angry. Stolberg then analyzes Obama’s ability:

Ever since his days as a young community organizer in Chicago, Mr. Obama has held fast to the belief that by listening carefully and appealing to reason he can bring people together to get results, an approach that in Washington has often come up short.

He’s dealing with members of Congress, not local Chicago people. Why would his listen-and-reason approach translate easily to this new environment? Maybe he should have taken a little time to work in the Senate and get to know its ways and its characters before deciding he was ready to be President.

Mr. Obama has not been the sort to bludgeon his party into following his lead or to intimidate reluctant legislators. And while he has often succeeded by relying on Democratic leaders in Congress to do his bidding — the House and Senate, after all, both passed versions of the health legislation last year — it is not clear whether his gentle, consensus-building style will be enough.

Stolberg tries to burnish the Obama image, but read between the lines: The point there is that he hasn’t led. Stolberg quotes Representative Louise M. Slaughter, a New York Democrat: “If you are asking me if he dominates the room, I would have to say no.”

But his defenders and some historians say that perhaps more than any modern president since Lyndon B. Johnson, Mr. Obama has been aggressive in trying to work his will with Congress. During his 13-month-old presidency, he has had countless one-on-one meetings with lawmakers — a technique that some scholars and strategists say evokes memories of Johnson…

But he’s not much like Johnson. Johnson was quite a different sort of character, but he’d developed his skills by operating in the Senate for 12 years.

Is there any logic in the confusion of the Obama administration’s actions and statements on fighting the war on terror?

On the one hand, we had a two-year campaign (2007–08) of damning the Bush protocols, from renditions and military tribunals to Guantanamo and Predator strikes. Then, the Obama administration unleashed Eric Holder and John Brennan, who in highly partisan fashion attacked the anti-terrorism policies implemented from 2001–08 and reflected the themes voiced by Obama himself in his Al-Arabiya interview and Cairo speech, many of which were reified by the Mirandizing of the Christmas Day bomber and the announced civilian trial of KSM in New York.

But all that said, Obama never shut down Guantanamo; has not tried KSM in New York; has kept the wiretaps, intercepts, renditions, and tribunals he once castigated; has escalated the war in Afghanistan; and has kept the status-of-forces agreements that Bush negotiated with the Iraqis — and Joe Biden now claims that Bush’s Iraq agreements were Obama’s greatest success!

Most importantly, Obama has vastly increased the Predator assassination missions along the Afghan-Pakistani border. If one were to sort out the politics of all this, one would conclude that Obama’s cynical strategy looked something like this:

1) Run against Bush as the candidate of the Democratic party’s hard-Left, anti-war, pro-ACLU base.

2) When elected, pacify that same base with soaring multicultural-outreach rhetoric of the Cairo sort and grand gestures, such as promising to close Guantanamo, investigate former CIA interrogators, appoint a Muslim-American liaison to the Islamic world, and end waterboarding.

3) Meanwhile, up the fighting in Afghanistan and the Predator assassination missions to prevent another 9/11-style attack.

Bottom line?

a) Obama really does (privately) believe that radical Islamists wish to kill us, and apparently has decided the only effective means of combating them is to copy the Bush strategy but drop the “smoke ‘em out” rhetoric and substitute hope-and-change therapeutic banalities as we blow up suspected killers. The more conservatives rail about the KSM trial, the more Obama gains trust with the Left, and the more he can keep quietly killing suspected terrorists in Waziristan. (Dead men need no Miranda rights.)

b) So at home, Obama’s calculation is even more cynical: He assumes that left-wing hatred of Bush’s war on terror was never principled, but was always about partisan politics, and that left-wingers were far “angrier” about Bush’s waterboarding of three admitted terrorists than they ever will be about Obama’s assassinating suspected terrorists along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

c) Conservatives are then supposedly put in a bind: They may be angry that Obama demagogued the issue for two years as a candidate, and they may be upset that he so brazenly reversed course and emulated what he had demonized, and they may be mad about the hypocrisy of the hard Left — but they are also relieved that Obama is fighting terror and killing terrorists, and might even be impressed that he is doing so as a Nobel Peace laureate immune from the criticism that nearly destroyed Bush, and as someone who quietly executes suspected terrorists by remote control but worries publicly about confessed detainees in Bush’s gulag.

I think that sums up the present Obama policy, which is far more cynical than confusing. I have no idea whether it is sustainable.

…Among the variety of analyses upon which I base what I am about to say are some decidedly from the left, Wonk Room and Firedoglake, as well as CATO, ATR and the NY Times.

Put aside all the other criticisms, one thing becomes clear: The plan does nothing to control health care costs, and everything to increase those costs.

There are no market mechanisms to encourage consumers to price shop or to introduce price competition into the health care industry.

To the contrary, the plan continues the trend towards divorcing consumers from price decisions as to services and products; there also is no incentive to decrease demand because a large percentage of the population will receive government subsidies.

Yet because of the new insurance price control mechanism, the private insurance system will not be allowed to recoup the costs of such coverage.

This is a balloon which must burst, and it will several years down the road.

The result of the burst will be a collapse of the private insurance sector, and a government unable to pick up the pieces without severely rationed care (even if coverage remains expansive in theory, the care will not be available).

Obama’s plan (and so too the House and Senate versions) is the worst of all worlds. It is a replica of the housing bubble, thrill for the first few years, and then the bill becomes due without any way to pay for it.

Those who accuse former Bush administration officials of criminality for having supported enhanced interrogation techniques are nearly silent about the ongoing and vastly increased targeted assassinations ordered by the Obama administration, and I for one am confused by this standard of attack.

If a suspected jihadist on the Afghan Pakistan border were to be asked his choice, he might very well prefer to be apprehended, transported to Guantanamo, and harshly interrogated rather than blown to bits along with any family and friends who happen to be in his vicinity.

To make things simpler, water-boarding the confessed architect of the murder of 3,000 innocents, on a moral scale, seems less atrocious than executing suspected terrorists, as we are now doing. Since the easy denunciations of criminality are moral rather than legal — no one has actually convicted a John Yoo or a Dick Cheney of anything — surely we should hear something about these capital sentences handed down from the sky on those who, quite unlike KSM, are suspected, rather than confessed, killers.

This is not a question of either advocating the use of water-boarding or criticizing the Obama administration for its judge-jury-and-executioner Predator attacks against probably dangerous terrorists. It is simply a matter of curiosity about why in the former case there is loud moral outrage but in the latter, far harsher instance, relative silence.

Since we have transformed this War on Terror into a criminal-justice matter rather than a traditional conflict in which uniformed combat soldiers are pitted against non-uninformed combat soldiers on a global battlefield, it is not persuasive to say that in one case non-uniformed suspects are in our custody while, in the other, they are only in our cross-hairs. It is time critics made the case that targeted assassinations fall within the legitimate bounds of a war in which we are properly engaged, while the water-boarding of three confessed terrorists was morally unacceptable torture of no utility and contrary to any of our own past protocols concerning apprehended and non-uniformed belligerents. Otherwise, their exercise in moral outrage is blatantly selective and reduced to a partisan belief that the evil Bush and Cheney are guilty of crimes, while the contemplative Obama is simply struggling with a moral crux.

Unions vs. stimulation: The home “weatherization” jobs in the stimulus bill were subjected to Davis-Bacon wage regulations–a favorite of the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department–under which federal Labor Department officials establish “prevailing wage” rates that must be paid. Why do unions like this system? Because the ”prevailing wages” are determined in a way that guarantees they are usually more than the actual market wage, sometimes by large margins.  All that finagling takes a certain amount of bureaucracy, however–and time. ABC’s Jonathan Karl:

According to the GAO report, the Department of Labor spent most of last year trying to determine the prevailing wage is for weatherization work, a determination that had to be made for each of the more than 3,000 counties in the United States. [E.A.]

As a result, the Department of Energy apparently weatherized only 22,000 homes under the program. Another pre-existing program, which doesn’t have to comply with Davis-Bacon, appears to have weatherized about 100,000 homes, if my math is right.

That’s OK. It’s not as if speed was important last year in terms of putting people to work. … Oh wait, it was. [Insert now-embarrassing Obama quote here]

“If you allocate money to weatherize homes, the homeowner gets the benefit of lower energy bills. You right away put people back to work, many of whom in the construction industry and in the housing industry are out of work right now. They are immediately put to work doing something,” [E.A.]

Instead, a year was wasted on mindless, union-demanded bureaucratic attempts to disingenuously replicate the labor market. Did Obama not know this would happen when he allowed the stimulus to be Davis-Baconized, or did he not care? [Update--Choice #3: He knows and cares, but is too weak to stand up to the unions.]

In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president’s own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable.

Then came Ronald Reagan, and all that chatter disappeared.

The tyranny of entitlements? Reagan collaborated with Tip O’Neill, the legendary Democratic House speaker, to establish the Alan Greenspan commission that kept Social Security solvent for a quarter-century.

A corrupted system of taxation? Reagan worked with liberal Democrat Bill Bradley to craft a legislative miracle: tax reform that eliminated dozens of loopholes and slashed rates across the board — and fueled two decades of economic growth.

Later, a highly skilled Democratic president, Bill Clinton, successfully tackled another supposedly intractable problem: the culture of intergenerational dependency. He collaborated with another House speaker, Newt Gingrich, to produce the single most successful social reform of our time, the abolition of welfare as an entitlement.

It turned out that the country’s problems were not problems of structure but of leadership. Reagan and Clinton had it. Carter didn’t. Under a president with extensive executive experience, good political skills and an ideological compass in tune with the public, the country was indeed governable.

It’s 2010, and the first-year agenda of a popular and promising young president has gone down in flames. Barack Obama’s two signature initiatives — cap-and-trade and health-care reform — lie in ruins.

Desperate to explain away this scandalous state of affairs, liberal apologists haul out the old reliable from the Carter years: “America the Ungovernable.” So declared Newsweek. “Is America Ungovernable?” coyly asked the New Republic. Guess the answer.