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Will Senate Democrats join the GOP in banning insurance coverage for sex offenders to pay for their Viagra?

Rising GOP star Rep. Paul Ryan explains what Obamacare will do to the economy, healthcare costs and insurance premiums.

Sky-rocketing health care costs are drowning families, businesses and governments in red ink - leaving millions priced out of the market and without coverage. This legislation - with its maze of mandates, dictates, controls, tax hikes and subsidies - pushes costs further in the wrong direction.

Premiums in the individual market would rise from 10% to 13% for families. Our debt and deficit crisis - driven by $76 trillion in unfunded liabilities - would accelerate from the creation of a brand new entitlement and an increase in the federal deficit by $662 billion, when the true costs are factored in. National health expenditures will increase by an additional $222 billion over the next decade, according the president's own chief actuary, and $2.4 trillion in the decade after the new entitlement is up and running.

I just happened to be speaking with Media Attorney Mike Malloy about another matter but I asked him how his former client H. Beatty Chadwick is doing.

Chadwick is the defrocked attorney who spent 14 years in Delaware County prison on contempt charges. Malloy was the lawyer who finally got him released

"He's fine," Malloy said. "I do hear from him."

He living in an apartment in Delaware doing the "odd (legal) job" for friends. But then most of his friends are either retired or deceased, said Malloy.

Meanwhile, according to Malloy, the "Battle Royale" continues over what ever happened to Chadwick's money. He says he lost in an overseas investment and his ex-wife's attorney said he stashed away so as not to share it with her.

Anyway, if he didn't lose the money - and there is plenty of evidence that he wasn't straight with the court about it - Chadwick gave up 14 years of freedom to hang on to it. Pretty amazing.

Tony Phyrillas watches Barack Obama break 7 campaign promises in two minutes. It's got to be some sort of record.

Let's go to the video.

Noemie Emory opines:

History was made Sunday in several ways. The bill passed is a historical change, and a massive expansion of government. It was also the first major bill to be passed against the will of the country, to be passed by only one part of one party, and in the face of a wave of public revulsion, expressed over 10 months in such different outlets as mass demonstrations, three big elections, and polls.

It was not only not bipartisan, but it was less than one party, in the sense that the great war of passage was the attempt by the leaders to force their members to vote in a way that outraged their constituents, by way of threats, ultimatums and bribes.

Read it all.

Who to believe about Obamacare and what it will do to the federal deficit: Obama or ReasonTV. You decide.

In an interesting column, David Harsanyi quotes Marquette law professor Richard M. Esenber:

"If Congress can require you to buy health insurance because of the ways in which your uncovered existence (affects) interstate commerce or because it can tax you in an effort to force you to do (any) old thing it wants you to, it is hard to see what -- save some other constitutional restriction -- it cannot require you to do -- or prohibit you from doing."

Sounds about right.

So because we're all in this together, responsible for one another, how about this:

We know obesity is a big health problem in this country. (The First Lady has made it her First Cause.) People who are morbidly overweight add billions to our health care costs every year with their various ailments, diseases and medical conditions. Shouldn't they be required to lose weight by law? Or pay a fine if they don't? Maybe a dollar a pound, per month? That sounds fair doesn't it.

Let's go to the Body Mass Index or BMI calculator (you can find one here

Let's see I am 6'0" and weigh about 215 pounds. According to my BMI, I am just .8 percent short of being officially "obese." I am definitely way overweight and therefore I am substantially increasing my risk of being a burden on our national healthcare system. But if I drop exactly 32 lbs. I just make it into the "normal" range.

And so I should either lose the weight or pay a fine to the government of $32 a month or another $384 a year for my government health insurance.

Figure out how overweight you are? And then calculate what you should be paying our government for your irresponsible behavior and unattractiveness.

Let the lawsuits begin, including one from our next would-be governor, A.G. Tom Corbett

Oprah settles defamation suit against African school headmistress. So we'll miss her star turn in a Philadelphia federal courtroom.

Bummer. I was gonna' bring my Flip Cam.

Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

If you want to further understand the health insurance problem facing America today read this.

Health insurers, and indeed Corporate America as a whole, are like monkeys who are caught by staking a glass jar to the ground with a shiny trinket inside. They won't let go so they can't get their hands out of the jar. That trinket is the ruinous and regressive $250 billion-a-year tax benefit for employer-provided insurance.

Corporate America isn't brave enough to argue against a direct subsidy to its employment costs, no matter how perverse its impact in insulating consumers from the true cost of their health care choices. Insurers are not brave enough to say: Give us a tax code that lets us go back to being insurers rather than a tax laundromat for the middle class's health-care spending...

A world-class hospital in India does heart surgery the equal of any heart surgery in America, but does so at one-tenth the cost (and increasingly attracts a world-wide clientele). The reason is not what you think: low-paid doctors and nurses. The reason is that competition works in medicine as it does in everything else when the patient cares about getting value for money. This is the great low-hanging fruit of health-care reform. It continues to hang.

Doctors Richard Amerling and Jane Orient say Obama is taking our healthcare system in exactly the wrong direction. The future of U.S. healthcare can be witnessed at your nearest state Department of Motor Vehicles office.

My print column is up.

Conservative firebrand Ann Coulter is headed to Canada to speak at three colleges. Some students are protesting her appearance and are saying she should be careful what she say lest she be found guilty of hate speech.

From the story:

Among Coulter's more contentious assertions is that the U.S. should invade Muslim countries and convert their people to Christianity. She has also suggested Canada is lucky the U.S. allows it "to exist on the same continent."

These aren't examples of hate speech. They're punch lines, especially the second one. But the campus speech fascists can't stand to hear anything of which they don't approve. Not content with simply not showing up, these censors like to shut people up and send them packing. If anything should be against the accepted practice at a university, it should be that.

Stupak gets only 700 grand for his vote, while others got hundreds of millions?

I don't see it.

UPDATE: But check this out:

Joe Biden drops the F-bomb in an open mike introducing the President of the United States.

At least he didn't say, "All black people must leave the White House now."

I just got off the phone with Dr. Richard Amerling of Beth Israel Hospital in NYC. His take on Obamacare can be found here.

He is also the author of the Physician's Declaration of Independence and a member of Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (APPS). He will figure prominently in tomorrow's print column. Stay tuned.

A federal judge has ordered al Qaeda recruiter freed from Gitmo.

Among Slahi's most notorious recruits were four of the September 11 conspirators, all of whom were members of the infamous Hamburg cell. Slahi’s role in recruiting the Hamburg cell for al Qaeda is explained on pages 165 and 166 of the 9/11 Commission’s final report. Slahi arranged for Ramzi Binalshibh, al Qaeda's point man for the 9/11 operation, and three of his cohorts to travel from Germany to Afghanistan so that they could train in al Qaeda's camps and swear allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Binalshibh's three friends were: Mohammed Atta, Marwan al Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah--the suicide pilots of American Airlines Flight 11, United Airlines Flight 175, and United Airlines Flight 93, respectively.

Hard to see even the Obama administration complying with this order. But that's what you get when you give federal judges the power to review national security cases.

I must have missed the episode of Cheers where the local police chief attempted to shut it down as a nuisance bar. But it went like this:

Norm gets drunk, passes out and Sam lets him sleep it off in the office. Cliff accidently leaves his mail pouch in a booth comes back for it and Norm, mistaking him for a burglar, blows his head off.

The police chief declares the joint a nuisance bar and attempts to shut it down but the Cheers crew Sam, Diane, Woody, Carla, Frasier and the rest rally to show politicians that Cheers is just a friendly watering hole where a tragedy occurred. Good humor and good judgment prevail. Plus, Sam quietly pays of one of the pols with an autographed baseball from his pitching days with the Red Sox.

Fade Out.

A must-read George Will column on what Obamacare does: It doesn't fix the healthcare system but it is a big win for the Democrats "dependency agenda."

On Sunday, as will happen every day for two decades, another 10,000 baby boomers became eligible for Social Security and Medicare. And Congress moved closer to piling a huge new middle-class entitlement onto the rickety structure of America's Ponzi welfare state. Congress has a one-word response to the demographic deluge and the scores of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities: "More."

There will be subsidized health insurance for families of four earning up to $88,200 a year, a ceiling certain to be raised, repeatedly. The accounting legerdemain spun to make this seem affordable -- e.g., cuts (to Medicare) and taxes (on high-value insurance plans) that will never happen-- is Enronesque.

Read the whole thing.

Peter Suderman at Reason exposes it:

Since the New Deal, American entitlements have consistently grown faster than projected in size, scope, and cost. Like unwanted houseguests, they cost money you don't have, and they can't be kicked out. Reform and repeal efforts are about as successful as kindergarten experiments with do-it-yourself haircuts. Indeed, the health care bill's very structure is a testament to this fact. Much of it is funded with changes designed to eliminate waste in Medicare and Medicaid—changes that could, or at least ought, to have been used to reform those programs, both of which are unsustainable. Yet the only way these changes were politically viable was if they were made in order to fund an all-new benefit. 

Check this out:



Then this:

Why can't public pension plans be more like private pension plans? They can. And should be. My Sunday print column is up.

More on the coming pension plan debacle here. It's even worse than you think.

Democratic Congressional candidate Bryan Lentz weighs in the passage of Obamacare:
“This is the type of common-sense starting point we need to lower costs for the consumer, improve the quality of care and help stabilize our economy.

Wrong. This bill will do none of the above. It will not lower healthcare costs. You don't order the insuring of 32 million new people with taxpayer money and lower the cost of healthcare. People without health insurance spend 30 to 50 percent less on healthcare than people with it. Putting more people into the system will NOT improve the quality of care. Just like you wouldn't improve the service at the local McDonalds by putting new 50,000 people in line in front of you. What you get is longer lines, worse service. And when you finally get to the head of the queue you might get a $1 double-cheese burger. But then you might not. They might be out and tell you to come back next month. As for it stabilizing the economy, WRONG. The government re-ordering one sixth of the U.S. economy won't have a stabilizing effect. It will have a DE-stablizing effect, especially in the short term. Businesses will still be trying to figure out the requirements and effect of the new law for months if not years to come. It still has to pass the Senate through reconciliation, we'll see what it looks like after that. There is nothing stabilizing about the government making promises and running up debt on future generations.

U.S. Rep. Joseph Sestak, D-7, said: 

“The health-care reform we passed today will put an end to insurance industry abuses, extend life-saving care to millions, strengthen Medicare, and cut the national deficit.”


Again, more Democratic spin. This monstrosity will NOT put an end to insurance industry "abuses," it will turn them into public utilities, in league with the federal government government to ration care. The bill takes money OUT of Medicare in order to pay to cover the 32 million new citizens. If that's strengthening, please "strengthen" our public schools by lowering our property taxes. This new entitlement will NOT cut the national deficit, it will be like very other entitlement ever passed (from Medicare to Social Security) and increase the deficit in the long run.

The public doesn't like this bill because they don't believe it will do what the Democrats say it will do. It will certainly not provide jobs, (except for the hiring of 16,000 more IRS agents to enforce it) improve health care or reduce the deficit before November.

Both Lentz and Sestak (and/or Specter) are going to have to run for office defending it and the process of political bribes, kickbacks and corruption that got it passed.

The debate has just begun.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Do Democrats realize that we really have crossed the Rubicon? In the future when the Republicans gain majorities (and they will), the liberal modus operandi will be the model—bare 51% majorities, reconciliation, the nuclear option, talk of deem and pass, not a single Democrat vote—all ends justifying the means in order to radically restructure vast swaths of American economic and social life. Is someone unhinged at the DNC? They just blew up any shred of bipartisan consensus when their President polls below 50%, the Democratically-controlled Congress below 20%, and health care reform less than 50%. Usually unpopular leaders and their unpopular ideas seek the shelter of minority rights and prerogatives. What will they do when they are in the minority—since they’ve entered the arena, boasted “let the games begin” and shouted “by any means necessary”?

WSJ predicts:

This week's votes don't end our health-care debates. By making medical care a subsidiary of Washington, they guarantee such debates will never end. And by ramming the vote through Congress on a narrow partisan majority, and against so much popular opposition, Democrats have taken responsibility for what comes next—to insurance premiums, government spending, doctor shortages and the quality of care. They are now the rulers of American medicine.

UPDATE: And Kim Strassall takes us inside the slaughter house

Perhaps the most remarkable Democratic accomplishment this week was to make the process of passing ObamaCare as politically toxic as the bill itself.

President Obama was elected by millions of Americans attracted to his promise to change Washington politics. These were voters furious with earmarks, insider deals and a lack of transparency. They were the many Americans who, even before this week, held Congress in historic low esteem. They'll remember this spectacle come November.

One giant step for Obamacare and one giant leap for Democrats... off a cliff.

UPDATE: Recount: 219 to 212. (Forget hanging chads. Many Democrats just hung themselves.)

Joe Sestak should answer the question. Prof. Mann should be investigated. And the Sunshine family now know about their pot o gold. My print column is up

A drug deal goes bad and a guy in killed in an Upper Darby "nuisance" bar. Chief Chitwood blames the LCB for not closing down the place sooner.

“This place is a shoot ’em up joint for drugs and weapons,” Chitwood said. “It really is a criminal enterprise.”

The owner of Cheers bar is a piece of work named Bob Herdelin. A former college basketball star and a Jersey shore real estate magnate, Herdelin made news a couple years ago when he tackled and helped apprehend a guy on the U.S. Marshal's most wanted list.

Despite his wealth, Herdelin prefers the company of the rough-and-tumble crowd in a bar where everbody knows his name.
The LCB has made it clear Herdelin's license will not be renewed.

Chitwood wants the LCB to be tougher when it comes to nuisance bars. That's understandable. But due process is due process.

More government than factory jobs in Indiana for the first time since the Civil War.

If not even a good, fiscally conservative governor like Mitch Daniels can stop growing percentage of government workers, what chance does the rest of the country have?

Here comes Obamacare charging through the Demon Pass. Make that "deem and pass."

Congressional Democrats don't gave the guts to vote on this unpopular horror in an up or down vote so their leaders will resort to gimmicks and tricks. They are not fooling anyone but themselves. And they will pay for it come this fall. But what do Obama and Pelosi care. She's in a safe district and he has two years to make voters forgot. Moderate Democrats in swing districts are being asked to jump out of an airplane without parachuttes. When they go "SPLAT!" Pelosi and Obama will them will observe "You can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs."

Like Rep. Jason "Humpty Dumpty" Altmire (D-Pa.)

Recent teen suicides have everybody talking here and elsewhere. But we should all remember a spate does not an epidemic make.

"All black people" asked to leave N.J. Wal-Mart. Sounds like a stupid prank.

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia all Asian students were asked to leave a local high school. Well, not asked. But that was all the way back in December. Things are probably fine there now.

The Sunshine family has unclaimed cash waiting for them. Broomall's Janet Greenberg, the state's Ambassador of Unclaimed Property, would like then to know it.

My print column is up.

Gunman Holds Up Aston Dollar Store. How much do you think he got?

Rich Lowry sees this week being a fitting end to the Democrats handling of healthcare:

The finale of the health-care debate couldn't be more fitting. House Democrats are considering passing an exotic parliamentary rule relieving them of the burden of voting for the underlying bill, which will be "deemed" passed.

So a bill sold under blatantly false pretenses and passed in the Senate on the strength of indefensible deals would become law in a final flourish of deceptive high-handedness. How appropriate for what would be the worst piece of federal domestic legislation since the fascistic, recovery-impairing National Recovery Act of 1933 or the Prohibition disaster of 1920.

On Obamafeld guess who plays Kramer.

I'm still not sure, is that Robert Gibbs as Newman?

March Madness leads to lower productivity in the workplace?

I may have to take two days off to think about this.

I have greatly enjoyed the recent give and take between Havertown gadfly Adrian Ashfield and Penn State Climate Big Wig Michael Mann. That Prof. Mann deigned to reply to Ashfield's criticisms in our pages was charming. That he figured the best defense was a good offense, was, I believe, a miscalculation.

Mann is at the center of the greatest scientific scandal of this generation: Climategate. And yet he has the nerve to claim Ashfield has made "false and defamatory" statements about him and his "work." Such words are usually used by lawyers in prelude to filing a libel suit. But they are just as easily thrown around by non-lawyers to intimidate their critics into shutting up.

Good luck with that, Mr. Mann.

The Commonwealth Foundation is calling for an independent investigation into Mann's behavior. As a tax-payer funded tenured professor and receiver of millions of dollars in federal research grants, Mann should be held accountable for his words, deeds and "science." His most famous "contribution" to global warming theory is the famous but now thoroughly discredited "Hockey Stick" graph.

As the Foundation points out:

The dramatic hockey stick received a great deal of attention and was featured in
the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report in 2001 as evidence of the significance of human influence on the climate. The graph came to symbolize the proof that global warming was manmade. But the hockey stick and its developer, Michael Mann,
soon began to draw some much-deserved scrutiny and criticism and, finally, a total discrediting.

When Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre requested from Mann the raw data used to construct the hockey stick, Mann at first provided some information but then refused further cooperation, claiming that he didn’t have time to respond to
“every frivolous note” from non-scientists, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Mann also tried to block a congressional request for his data, but finally acceded to after generating a wave of manufactured, partisan criticism directed at the congressional committee.

Investigations by the National Academy of Sciences and Congress left the hockey stick in tatters, particularly with respect to its representations of mean global temperatures for the period 1000-1600. When the IPCC released its Fourth
Assessment Report in 2007, the hockey stick graph was nowhere to be found.

In summary, Mann created the prominent hockey stick with dubious data and analysis, and then tried to block other scientists from reviewing his work. Mann also fueled a public relations campaign against those who had requested his data,
including McIntyre and Congress.

Why such a "scientist" is still receiving federal money is testament to political nature of his work.

None of this is to say that the global warming issue shouldn't be taken seriously. But when scientists behave badly, when they hide their data, when they massage it to get desired results, they are not being good scientists. These men need to be held accountable.

Observers are calling Penn State's laughably weak probe into Mann's behavior, a "white wash," and understandably so. The school has a serious conflict of interest, given that Mann still brings in millions of research dollars from a very generous federal government. As the Commonwealth Foundation says Mann should be investigated by an independent body created by the appropriate legislative committees.

The Commonwealth Foundation points out

... it was during Mann’s tenure at PSU (since
2005) that he stonewalled efforts to obtain and review the hockey stick data and
analysis, and has viciously attacked those making such inquiries.

The foundation gives plenty of examples of this. His response to Ashfield's letter in our paper is simply more evidence.

Ashfield has Mann's number - obviously so, given his blustery and obfuscating response. Its time the rest of the state (and the country) got it too.

MEANWHILE: Al Gore continues his Chicken Little routine.

Ross Douthat says with Green Zone and its "Bush Lied, People Died" meme, once again Hollywood gets the Iraq War wrong. Worse, it inartful and simplicitically partisan.