The Discerning Texan

By common consent, the most memorable moment of Barack Obama’s otherwise listless press conference on “health care” were his robust remarks on the “racist” incident involving Prof. Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge police. The latter “acted stupidly,” pronounced the chief of state. The president of the United States may be reluctant to condemn Ayatollah Khamenei or Hugo Chávez or that guy in Honduras without examining all the nuances and footnotes, but sometimes there are outrages so heinous that even the famously nuanced must step up to the plate and speak truth to power. And thank God the leader of the free world had the guts to stand up and speak truth to municipal police sergeant James Crowley. ...

A public figure openly called for Palin to be raped during the campaign. Months after the losing campaign was over, a major comedian joked about the fictitious rape of one of her daughters. Immediately after the election, her church was burned. It's fairly difficult to reconcile this 'heat' as something conventional in politics. In fact, there might be some good reason to collectively indict Palin critics for their silent complicity.

This would go a long way to explain why many in the public seem more drawn to Palin after the resignation and the absurd media reactions to it. Keep in mind that these incidents remain unrepented public attacks. The media refused to offer much comment on the burning of Palin's church -- a silence which conveyed an implied endorsement of that attack. Imagine if Obama had lost the election and Jeremiah Wright's church had been burned. Where would the punditry be?

Given the peculiar failure of pundits to "understand" her July 3 statement, it is useful to return to the actual text of her statement. With such attention we can discover some of the possible confusion of pundits and reveal the largely ignored messages contained in Governor Palin's statement. Most interesting is the discussion about her children:

In fact, this decision comes after much consideration, and finally polling the most important people in my life -- my children (where the count was unanimous... well, in response to asking: ‘Want me to make a positive difference and fight for ALL our children's future from OUTSIDE the Governor's office?' It was four "yes's" and one "hell yeah!" The "hell yeah" sealed it - and someday I'll talk about the details of that... I think much of it had to do with the kids seeing their baby brother Trig mocked by some pretty mean-spirited adults recently.) Um, by the way, sure wish folks could ever, ever understand that we ALL could learn so much from someone like Trig -- I know he needs me, but I need him even more... what a child can offer to set priorities RIGHT -- that time is precious... the world needs more ‘Trigs', not fewer.

The mocking of a disabled child, Trig Palin, must stand out as one of the most uniquely cruel and despicable contemporary trends of American politics. Could this be what Bill Clinton envisioned when he asked the nation to bring to an end the politics of personal destruction in the 1990s? It is clear that the entire Palin family would like to broaden their advocacy beyond the borders of Alaska. What is also clear is that pulsing at the center of Media contempt toward Palin is not simply stated positions on abortion but real life actions that are so striking and meaningful that they enrage a pretentious political community feigning interest in "women's rights."

Sarah Palin has deeply disappointed her enemies. People who hate her guts feel she's really let them down by resigning.

She's like the ex-girlfriend they're SO over, never want to see again, have already forgotten about -- really, it's O-ver -- but they just can't stop talking about her.

Liberal: Ha, ha ... Sarah who? She's over, she's toast, a future Trivial Pursuit answer, nothing more.

Normal person: Whatever. How about the North Korean missiles?

Liberal: Can you believe she just resigned the governorship like that? What a quitter!

Normal person: Speaking of quitting, how's work?

Liberal: Did you hear she might get a TV show? There's no way Sarah Palin's getting a TV show! No way! I can't believe stupid Sarah Palin could get her own stupid TV show now. Well, I'm sure not gonna watch it -- that's for sure!

Normal person: Have you seen all the Michael Jackson coverage on TV?

Liberal: How does she think she can run for president in 2012 if she can't finish her term as governor of a Podunk state? She's finished.

Normal person: OK, then! You won't have to vote for her.

Liberal: I was never going to vote for her! But now I'm not going to vote for her twice. And I will never watch her TV show. I am so over her.

Reporters had already written their stories on Palin's press conference -- "rambling!" "incoherent!" -- before she even stepped to the podium.

Whatever you think of Palin, her argument for resigning was the opposite of "rambling" and "incoherent."

Palin's basketball analogy couldn't have been clearer, even to prissy liberal pundits who get uncomfortable when the subject turns to sports: She decided to destroy the other team's game plan, which has been to obsessively focus on her, by resigning.

That ugliness has made the California budget, like those in most of the other 49 states, less efficient and more bloated. Government spending, unlike spending in the private economy, is a zero-sum game—especially on the state level, since governors can’t print money. Every dollar spent gilding a pension is a dollar not spent funding an orphanage. Naturally, the same elite outlets that were busy blaming voters after the election spent even more time detailing the horrors of the “annihilating cuts,” as the Los Angeles Times called them in a news article, that were coming down the pike. (In early June, the paper invited readers to be shocked that a high school with 3,200 students would have to make do with just three guidance counselors.) Bloated pension costs and the increasingly inefficient provision of state services received a fraction of the coverage.

The federal government is now run by a president and Congress more responsive to union concerns than any in at least two decades. The same bloat currently bogging down statehouses and city halls is being duplicated in boomtown Washington, D.C. President Barack Obama even brought Andy Stern in to help warn Schwarzenegger that federal stimulus money would not be disbursed to California unless the governor rescinded some proposed state job cuts. Though that threat was later withdrawn, Schwarzenegger at press time was pushing for a measly work force reduction of 2 percent.

But there’s another interpretation of California’s rebellion, one with far sunnier implications for those of us who prefer our governments constrained. Faced with a political class that ignored bureaucratic inefficiency, that demanded higher taxes, that filled the newspapers with scare stories about people who will literally die as a result of budget cuts, the citizens of one of the bluest states in the nation collectively said we just don’t believe you anymore. If even California’s famous fruits and nuts can call the statists’ bluff, there may be hope for the rest of the country.

So how does the new, apparently leaner Kennedy-Dodd bill cut the subsidy costs?

Part of the answer is a scaling-back from an outlandishly expansive starting point. The original version of Kennedy-Dodd contemplated subsidizing households with incomes all the way up to 500 percent of the poverty line. Even House Democrats found that to be too much. So Kennedy-Dodd 2.0 now sets the income limit at 400 percent of poverty.

But, beyond the lower income threshold, Senate Democrats, including Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, have also discovered the budgetary virtues of heavy-handed government decrees. If you want to expand insurance coverage, you can simply make people sign up for a plan — whether they want to or not. And to keep costs down for the government, you subsidize only those who get insurance outside of the workplace — and then write rules that make it nearly impossible for anyone to fall into that category. Presto! Government-run health-care paid for with the hidden taxes of government mandates.

According to the Census Bureau, there are about 102 million Americans under age 65 living in households with incomes between 150 and 400 percent of the poverty line — the presumed target population for subsidized insurance in the Kennedy-Dodd bill. But CBO said only about 20 million people in 2014 would get the subsidies under the revised version of the legislation. That’s because the authors sought to create a so-called “firewall” to prevent most workers from getting insurance outside the workplace if their employer offered a plan. And, of course, the bill would also impose severe, per-worker penalties on any employer that didn’t offer approved coverage. Only workers who would have to pay more than 12.5 percent of their income for a job-based plan could opt to get their insurance through the subsidized insurance arrangements, which CBO apparently assumes will be a relatively small number of people.

What’s ironic is that mandating enrollment in job-based insurance is about the most regressive way possible to expand coverage. Despite the perceptions, employment-based health insurance is financed by workers, not firms. The premiums for coverage implicitly reduce the cash compensation workers take home. In most companies, workers pay the same implicit premium for health insurance regardless of their age or health status or salary. That means the cost of enrolling in job-based coverage falls more heavily on low-wage workers than higher-salaried employees, which is why such a large percentage of the uninsured are in households that have access to a plan but chose not to enroll.

Democrats used to be sympathetic to the financial strain these workers are under. But that was before CBO said their sympathy would be expensive. So now the emerging plan is to make tens of millions of Americans pay more than they do today for government-approved insurance organized by their employer. That’s really their only choice. If they don’t take it, they will face a large financial penalty. Great deal, huh?

Congressional Democrats are between a rock and a hard place. They desperately want to pass a bill they can label “universal coverage,” but they have no coherent plan for making health-care provision more efficient and less costly. Thus, expanding coverage with new federal subsidies for a large segment of the population in the current cost environment is prohibitively expensive. Presented with these facts, the lead Democratic Senators could have chosen to write a more sensible reform plan focused first on building a functioning marketplace in which cost-conscious consumers would drive out unnecessary costs. But, instead, they have decided to plow ahead with their “universal coverage” plan, only now they want to impose the high cost of it on struggling workers. Their only hope is that the bill will pass before the public discovers what they are up to.

Caveat: What follows is based on the notion that Palin will continue her political career, and is setting herself up for a run for the White House in 2012.

1. Start putting her national team together now. Recruit from the best and the brightest of real conservatism.

2. Ignore her enemies, both in the MSM, and in the liberal wing of the GOP. Define herself on her own terms. No more chat-fests with the likes of Katy Couric.

3. Set out to remake the GOP in her image. This means identifying strong conservative candidates for both the House and the Senate, then supporting them with fundraisers, public appearances, the expertise of her team, and clout with the party itself.

4. In the process, she should define herself by attacking Obama’s policies without ceasing, and offering real conservative solutions. This doesn’t mean “conservative lite,” or “new conservative” or whatever other euphemisms are currently being pushed for a “conservatism” that is actually liberalism in disguise. She should also make clear that she can work with that wing of the party, but doesn’t support, and will not try to advance, the dogmas of the “moderate conservative” hacks.

5. If she does this right, she can turn the election of 2010 into a referendum on the failed policies and agendas of Obama and the Democrats. If successful - that is, if she helps to greatly reduce or eliminate the Democrat majorities in Congress - she will have set herself up as the savior of the GOP, as the only politician to defeat Obama, and will thus foreclose challenges from other GOP figures.

6. Spend the next year after that building a huge war chest, honing her campaign and her own talents, and then take it directly to Obama himself from late 2011 on.

And here’s an interesting possible side effect: If Palin is successful in leading a GOP revolution in 2010, look for Hillary Clinton to resign in preparation for her own prexy bid as “the only Democrat who has a chance to beat Palin.”

The stimuli plans were supposed to be job plans. The auto/bank bailouts cum nationalizations were supposed to be about saving jobs, not 'Wall Street'. So given two record breaking stimuli within two years, why isn't America hiring?

America isn't hiring precisely because of government policy. Small business owners, who are usually the first into and the first out of the job pool, are standing by the fence and watching. They are paralyzed by regulatory uncertainty. If they hire someone who ends up doing poorly, will they be able to fire that person? Will they have to pay their health care bills after they've been terminated? If so, for how long? Who will pay for all these stimulus checks? If it will turn out to be small business, why would they hire instead of keeping costs low to prepare for the big tax bill? Where will the market move? Are you in the right business or are your clients in a politically disfavored industry? Are your clients in health care (being nationalized), autos (already nationalized), banking (somewhat nationalized) or any energy production process which uses carbon (pulverized)? Until you know, you don't grow, and until you grow your market, you don't grow your payroll.

Jobs aren't languishing despite the government's best efforts. They're languishing because of them.

And this from CNBC, no less! Has the pressure on Immelt by stockholders made a difference, or is Immelt just waiting for the opportunity to play hardball again.

One gets the feeling that the worm is turning; Rasmussen's latest polls show that I am not the only one feeling this way.