Video: Rep. Paul Ryan Says The House Still Does Not Have The Votes To Pass Obamacare

The thing is, while Ryan is correct that Pelosi is good at “muscling votes”, there’s a world of difference between the present, and last June when Cap and Tax passed the House.

Now, we’re living in post VA, NJ, and MA special elections, with  the President’s and Congress’s approval ratings at all time lows. I’m not sure she’s going to have the same amount of persuasive power, she did eight months ago. Especially in light of the fact that the electorate, besides not wanting the crap bill, is incensed about the corruption and back door deals that went into it.

Hat tip: Breitbart TV

MORE:

Via HotAir, another minor roadblock – a key Dem says reconciliation is off the table :

No wonder the Times was so pessimistic about reconciliation.  Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND), who runs the committee that would have to run a reconciliation push, says that the budgetary process can’t be used for ObamaCare.  It would only address the actual budgetary issues, which leaves a lot off the table.  The Budget Committee chair told CBS’ Face the Nation audience that reconciliation wasn’t designed for this purpose, nor is it appropriate for such sweeping legislation:

UPDATE:

He said/she said:

Pelosi says Obama has the votes to pass health reform

Pelosi, in an interview with ABC television’s “This Week” program, said Democrats would succeed in passing a bill despite concerted Republican efforts to derail Obama’s top domestic priority ahead of crucial mid-term elections.

“We’re here to do the job for the American people — to get them results that gives them not only health security, but economic security, because the health issue is an economic issue for America’s families,” she said.

President Barack Obama has the votes in the House of Representatives to force his flagship reform of US healthcare through without Republican support, House speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday.

UPDATE II:

Michelle Malkin is calling the DEms out on the bravo sierra:

This is the new strategy of the Dems — to keep repeating out loud that they have the support and they have the votes (even as they urge their members to commit health care hara-kiri and go down with the ship against the will of their constituents).

Pelosi is looking into her mirror and into the cameras and repeating: I have the votes.

They are counting on wearing down their opponents, catching them off-guard, and taking their silence as consent.

UPDATE III:

Why aren’t the Republicans using Robert Byrd’s  opposition to using  the reconciliation process to pass Obamacare? GJ Merits of The Substratum argues that the American people should hear that the architect of  reconciliation is strongly against using it to pass the bill, calling it a “tyrannical act”:

Senator Byrd best expresses why using Reconciliation to jam ObamaCare down America’s throat degrades the U.S. Senate and violates the spirit of our system of checks and balances. Why is Senator Byrd’s opinion so important in the matter? Because the Senator from West Virginia is one of the authors of the reconciliation process and a current serving U.S. Senator. He is also a Democrat. Let’s see what the Senator says about reconciliation and healthcare:

Using reconciliation to ram through complicated, far-reaching legislation is an abuse of the budget process. The writers of the Budget Act, and I am one, never intended for its reconciliation’s expedited procedures to be used this way. These procedures were narrowly tailored for deficit reduction. They were never intended to be used to pass tax cuts, or to create new Federal regimes. Additionally, reconciliation measures must comply with Section 313 of the Budget Act, known as the Byrd Rule, which means that whatever health legislation is reported from the Finance Committee or legislation from any other Committee that is shoe-horned into reconciliation will sunset after five years. Additionally, numerous other non-budgetary provisions of any such legislation will have to be omitted under reconciliation. This is a very messy way to achieve a goal like health care reform, and one that will make crafting the legislation more difficult…

…It is the one place in all of government where the rights of the numerical minority are protected. As long as the Senate preserves the right to debate and the right to amend we hold true to our role as the Framers envisioned. We were to be the cooling off place where proposals could be examined carefully and debated extensively, so that flaws might be discovered and changes might be made. Remember, Democrats will not always control this chamber, the House of Representatives or the White House. The worm will turn. Some day the other party will again be in the majority, and we will want minority rights to be shielded from the bear trap of the reconciliation process…

…While I support the admirable budget priorities outlined in this resolution, I cannot and will not condone legislation that puts political expediency ahead of the time-honored purpose of this institution.

Newsmax also reports the Senator as stating that using reconciliation in this manner is

an outrage that must be resisted.

See Also:

Jennifer Rubin, who thinks the jig is just about up:

Reconciliation has been the buzzword of late, but it is becoming apparent that it’s a dodge intended to keep the hopes of the liberal base alive and to force the House to go first, which then might produce some magic key to unlock health care. But if the Senate budget chair is forcefully calling foul on the process, what then is the point of the House vote? According to Conrad, whatever the House came up with will have to go back and be put through the normal legislative process, subject to the filibuster.

Well, as with so much else on ObamaCare, one has the sense that this is a charade. No bill, no clear process, no public support, and no House majority. Had the summit been the breakthrough moment the Obami had hoped for maybe a groundswell of support could have shaken the pieces loose and then sharp deal makers could have sifted among the debris and constructed an ObamaCare III or whatever they would have called it. But the summit was a bust for the Democrats, and we’re talking specifically about Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, who proved to be just as unlikeable and ineffective as many suspected.

There simply may not be any way for this unpopular  monstrosity to get though both houses, and it won’t be because the Dems didn’t try every trick in the book to try to ram it through.  In the end, the will of the American people will have triumphed over the tyrannical designs of the Obama Dems.

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Joke of The Day

The International Olympic Committee announced Monday that it has taken back the gold medal previously awarded to American skier Lindsey Vonn and given it to U.S. President Barack Obama.

Olympic officials said Obama deserved the medal more than Vonn because no one has ever gone downhill faster than he has.

Hat tip: Old Geezer

Joseph Stack, “Tea Party Terrorist”

Even though Joseph Stack had no tea party affiliations, many commentators in the MSM are determined to paint him as “the first tea party terrorist”, because he railed  against certain taxes he had to pay. Of course, there were some other nuances in his demented manifesto that these  people somehow missed, that were decidedly not teapartyish, as this totally unphotoshopped, recently discovered photo shows:

Ace is still pretty ticked off about it. His latest rant, here.

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Al Gore Speaks

Al Gore has been largely silent since the Climategate scandal broke last Fall,  surfacing  briefly to attend the doomed climate change summit in Copenhagen, some sparsely attended book signings, and at one point, a dramatic poetry reading from his  book.

But as the country experienced one of the coldest and snowiest winters in years, he was so sorely missed, his face was put on the back of a milk carton.

He finally surfaced again at an Apple Shareholder meeting, on Thursday, where a fellow shareholder called him a laughingstock and urged against his reelection to the board. Despite the controversy, he was reelected.

Earlier this week,  Investors Business Daily made note of Al Gore’s strange silence in the face of the collapse of his pet issue:

The godfather of climate hysteria is in hiding as another of his wild claims unravels — this one about global warming causing seas to swallow us up.

We’ve not seen or heard much of the former vice president, Oscar winner and Nobel Prize recipient recently as the case for disastrous man-made climate change collapses.

Perhaps he’s off reading how scientists were forced to withdraw a study on a projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding two “technical” mistakes that undermined the findings.

***

Two years ago, Justice Michael Burton of London’s High Court ruled Gore’s film could be shown in British schools only if material explaining its errors were included in the curriculum. Burton documented nine significant errors in Gore’s film and wrote that some of Gore’s claims arose from “alarmism and exaggeration.”

The first error Gore made, according to Burton, was in his apocalyptic vision of the devastation caused by a rise in sea levels caused by melting polar ice caps. Burton wrote that Gore’s predicted 20-foot rise could occur “only after, and over, millennia” and to suggest otherwise “is not in line with the scientific consensus.”

One by one, Gore’s prophecies of doom and those of the climate charlatans he inspired are being exposed as the work of con artists. From the CRU to the IPCC, the climate dominoes are falling one by one. His silence speaks volumes.

Well, Al Gore has officially ended his silence with this oped in (what else) The New York Times. If you were hoping for him to tone the alarmism down a notch in the wake of  Climategate, you’ll be sorely disappointed. This my friends, is what we call “doubling down on teh stupid”:

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Note – the exposition of  climate science fraud in what has been dubbed, “Climategate”, is deemed “recent attacks” by Gore… mmmkay…

But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

You know…I do worry about my children and some day, grandchildren’s futures…because of the criminal gang that has taken over the government. These  miscreants are happy to use junk science as their pretext to “fundamentally change” the United States (lower living standards, curtail freedoms, and tax us all into oblivion), ostensibly in order  to “protect civilization as we know it”.

The burden for me would be lifted if they were all voted out of office…I guess you could say we have a fundamental difference in opinion on this point, because  Al Gore says:

“Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them.”

See what I mean?

And see if you can guess who he could possibly be referring to, here:

“[C]hanges in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.”

Paging Glenn Beck…

I don’t remember calling Bush’s repeated attempts to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Socialist. But then…Bush isn’t a socialist. Al Gore on the other hand…..doth protest too much.

It goes on and on, in its utterly unconvincing fashion. Read it in full at your own risk…of falling asleep.

Hat tip: Newsbusters

UPDATE:

Al Gore claimed in the oped that the warmists have only made 2 minor errors. Bullcrap says Ace, who corrects him, here.

A Majority of Americans Say “Scrap the Bill” – Dems Determined to Ram it Through, Anyway

John Fund reports on the latest numbers in his  WSJ column, today:

When Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander opened the Republican response to President Obama’s remarks at yesterday’s health care summit, he asked Democrats to renounce the idea of using parliamentary maneuvers such as reconciliation to pass health care with a simple majority vote.

Mr. Obama tried to swat him down by claiming Americans wanted a straight up-or-down vote on his health care bill and don’t care about what methods are used to get it. “You know, this issue of reconciliation has been brought up. Again I think the American people aren’t always all that interested in procedures inside the Senate. I do think they want a vote on how we’re going to move this forward,” he told the 40-plus summit participants.

The “Americans want a straight up-or-down vote” line is apparently a talking point being pushed by the White House, as Axelrod said the same exact thing, yesterday. But polling is showing otherwise:

The only problem is the latest polls provide no support for his position. A new Gallup Poll finds that, by 52% to 39%, those surveyed oppose attempts by Democrats to circumvent a filibuster by passing health care by a simple majority vote. A separate poll by CNN found that only 25% of voters want Congress to pass a bill similar to the ones already voted on by the House and Senate. A full 48% want Congress to start over, and 25% want lawmakers to stop working on health care altogether.

That voters don’t understand “procedures inside the Senate” is also belied by the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, who attracted even Democrats to vote for him by promising to be the 41st vote to uphold a Senate filibuster of ObamaCare.

Frank Luntz’s Thursday focus group (divided equally between McCain and Obama voters)  showed unanimous opposition to the use of reconciliation to pass the bill.  A “Scrap the Bill” Facebook page has sprung up, which has already garnered 16,693 fans. You can sign an online petition calling on Democrats to scrap the bill and start over, here.

John Boehner made the case to scrap the bill during the health care summit:

Senator Tom Colburn said in the Republican weekly radio address:

“While we listened to one another, I’m concerned that the majority in Congress is still not listening to the American people on the subject of health care reform. By an overwhelming margin, the American people are telling us to scrap the current bills, which will lead to a government takeover of health care, and we should start over.

“Unfortunately, even before the summit took place the majority in Congress signaled its intent to reject our offers to work together. Instead they want to use procedural tricks and backroom deals to ram through a new bill that combines the worst aspects of the bills the Senate and House passed last year.

“The American people have rejected the majority’s plan for good reason. Their plan includes half a trillion dollars in new tax increases, a half a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare, job-killing penalties for employers, taxpayer funded abortion and new boards that will ration care to American citizens. At its core, their plan continues a government-centered approach that has made health care more expensive. Federal and state governments already control 60 percent of health care. If more government spending and control was the answer we could have fixed health care long ago.

Democrats don’t  care what the American people think, though. This isn’t really about us. It’s about them. This is a naked grab for power, and they know that their opportunity to control another large portion of the economy is within their grasp. The radicals who are leading the Dem party right now have no compunction about losing control of Congress in the short term. Andrew McCarthy explains their thinking:

The Democratic leadership has already internalized the inevitablility of taking its political lumps. That makes reconciliation truly scary. Since the Dems know they will have to ram this monstrosity through, they figure it might as well be as monstrous as they can get wavering Democrats to go along with. Clipping the leadership’s statist ambitions in order to peel off a few Republicans is not going to work. I’m glad Republicans have held firm, but let’s not be under any illusions about what that means. In the Democrat leadership, we are not dealing with conventional politicians for whom the goal of being reelected is paramount and will rein in their radicalism. They want socialized medicine and all it entails about government control even more than they want to win elections. After all, if the party of government transforms the relationship between the citizen and the state, its power over our lives will be vast even in those cycles when it is not in the majority. This is about power, and there is more to power than winning elections, especially if you’ve calculated that your opposition does not have the gumption to dismantle your ballooning welfare state.

Consequently, the next six weeks, like the next ten months, are going to be worse than we think. We’re wired to think that everyone plays by the ususal rules of politics — i.e., if the tide starts to change, the side against whom it has turned modifies its positions in order to stay viable in the next election. But what will happen here will be the opposite. You have a party with the numbers to do anything it puts its mind to, led by movement Leftitsts who see their window of opportunity is closing. We seem to expect them to moderate because that’s what everybody in their position does. But they won’t. They will put their heads down and go for as much transformation as they can get, figuring that once they get it, it will never be rolled back. The only question is whether there are enough Democrats who are conventional politicians and who care about being reelected, such that they will deny the leadership the numbers it needs. But I don’t think we should take much heart in this possibility. Those Democrats may well come to think they are going to lose anyway — that’s why so many of them are abandoning ship now. If that’s the case, their incentive will be to vote with the leadership.

And Dennis Prager on the same wavelength:

Most people on the Left are True Believers. This is critical to understand. They are willing to lose Congress; Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are prepared to lose both houses to get this through. Why? Because losing an election cycle means nothing compared to taking over more of the American economy.

I can give you an example from our side. There are many folks on our side who, if they could pass an amendment against abortion, would happily sacrifice both houses for a period of time. Understand that just as strongly as some are pro-life or religiously Christian or Jewish, that is how strongly many leftists believe in leftism. Leftism is a substitute religion. For the Left, the “health care” bill transcends politics. You are fighting people who will go down with the ship in order to transform this country to a leftist one. And an ever-expanding state is the Left’s central credo.

So the question becomes…what can the Republicans, and Americans who want to hang on to their freedom do to stop the Dems?

Republicans can use some “parliamentary maneuvers” of their own:

Republicans say they have found a loophole in the budget reconciliation process that could allow them to offer an indefinite number of amendments.

Though it has never been done, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) says he’s prepared to test the Senate’s stamina to block the Democrats from using the process to expedite changes to the healthcare bill.n
Experts on Senate procedural rules, from both parties, note that such a filibuster is possible. While reconciliation rules limit debate to 20 hours, senators lack similiarconstraints on amendments and could conceivably continue offering them until 60 members agree to cut the process off.

As for the American people…I say we keep doing what we’ve been doing. I predict that there will be some massive tea parties in our very near future.

Hat tip to Ed Morressey for McCarthy and Prager articles.

Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert Strangely Silent In Wake Of Patterico’s $100 Dollar Challenge

I can’t imagine why.

You see, if you follow Andrew Breitbart’s Twitter feed, (and if you don’t, you’re really missing out on some highly entertaining stuff), you know that Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert, and other bottom feeders on the left have been taunting Breitbart about what they think is a monumental  debunking of  James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles’ ACORN sting operation. They’re pretty sure they’ve got him on the ropes.

Eric Boehlert has written a number of Media Matters posts triumphantly exposing the massive “ACORN Pimp hoax”, based on (what he deems) the explosive revelation that James O’Keefe didn’t wear the pimp outfit you see below, during the stings , even though he wore them in the promos!!!111!:

Now, I followed and blogged about the ACORN sting operation since the very first video came out. I’m pretty sure I always knew that the theatrical pimp outfit was used for promotional purposes, and O’Keefe was not actually dressed that way in the ACORN offices. I’m not sure why I knew that, but…wait, yes I do – because it was too utterly ridiculous?—oh, and because the very first video shows him dressed in a normal button down shirt, and  trousers?

It was understood.

I’m not sure how  O’Keefe’s wardrobe invalidates what the videos make clear: that the ACORN workers in all but one of the stings were more than happy to assist a pimp and prostitute in  buying a house and in setting up a brothel filled with underage girls from El Salvador. Some of the  criminal activities the ACORN workers were cheerfully willing to facilitate: prostitution, organizing prostitution, bank fraud, filing false documents with the federal government, impairing the welfare of a minor,   immigration violations, and bringing women and minors over state lines for immoral purposes.

But, apparently because O’Keefe didn’t actually wear the outlandish outfit you see above during the stings, none of that matters? LOL.

Seriously, though…this is how Media Matters operates. They will endeavor to invalidate the larger truth of a story, based on one minor flaw, or error that they can sniff out, and then they blow it out of proportion.

Here’s is Patterico’s challenge:

I am offering Eric Boehlert of Media Matters the easiest $100 he ever made.

All he has to do to earn the $100: unequivocally state whether James O’Keefe pretended to be a pimp at ACORN offices. If Boehlert makes the statement publicly — with no weasel-words, no two-stepping, and no qualifications — I will PayPal him $100.

That’s all he has to do….but the only response, Patterico has gotten so far, is: “Leave me alone.” which is really sad, because I think Patterico is a pretty fair and reasonable guy.

I feel perfectly confident that he will never act to collect the C-note I am offering — even though it would require nothing more than typing a simple 8-10 word sentence. For example, this sentence would earn Boehlert $100:

James O’Keefe did not pose as a pimp at ACORN.

That’s $10 a word! Or Boehlert could earn himself a picture of Ben Franklin with this sentence:

James O’Keefe posed as a pimp at ACORN.

UPDATE: Patterico posts Boehlert’s latest lame  response, here.

Sheesh.  Can someone please tell the guys at Media Matters that their Alinsky tactics are old and busted?

See also, Big Fur Hat’s take on this:

Soon They’ll Be Wearing Training Bras