Thinking About That Supreme Court ObamaCare Decision Sure is Taxing

It was bad enough that the Miami Heat won the NBA championship, and now the bureaucratic monstrosity known as ObamaCare is the law of the land. Could anything be more depressing or disillusioning or disheartening?

We haven't blogged about it up until know because we kept hoping that there would be a follow-up announcement from the Supreme Court to the effect that "hey, we were just messing with you, America...of course ObamaCare is unconstitutional and null and void." But it is not to be.

Although ruling that the law imposing socialized medicine on the U.S.was unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause, Chief Justice Roberts inexplicably upheld the law by a 5-4 vote based on Congress' taxing powers in the decision released on Thursday morning.

Up until the Arizona immigration law decision, Roberts was in general doing a fine job on the court, but here he let American down in a massive way.

Regardless of all the hype, despite the Obama administration's empty promises, virtually everyone's insurance premiums will go up along with their taxes. And, government-run healthcare means government-rationed healthcare, which leads to, yes, death panels.

ObamaCare Supreme Court Prediction

Prediction time--Blogger Ben Hart thinks that Justice Ginsberg inadvertently spilled the beans, or the broccoli, that the high court has thrown out the individual mandate in ObamaCare, a.k.a. the absurdly named Affordable Care Act:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg did not mean to, but she appears to have said that the Supreme Court has, at a minimum, ruled that the individual mandate in ObamaCare is unconstitutional.

As reported by POLITICO, the liberal Justice told the American Constitutional Society on Friday, June 15 that the one remaining ObamaCare question the Court must decide is is whether the whole law must fall if the individual mandate is unconstitutional — “or may the mandate be chopped, like a head of broccoli, from the rest of it?”

But they would not need to decide this question if they had already ruled that the individual mandate passes Constitutional muster.

This suggests, at a minimum, that the individual mandate is gone.  But it may well be that the court has ruled that the entire ObamaCare law is, therefore, null and void because there is no severability clause...

The High Court's decision, regardlesss of how it goes, is expected to be released next week.

In the meantime, if you want to stay healthy, eat your broccoli.

Added: Per Intrade, there is almost an 80% chance that the individual mandate gets ruled unconstitutional.

Liberals Were For Judicial Activism Before They Were Against It

After ObamaCare fared poorly in last week's Supreme Court hearing, the sanctimonious left-wing media echo chamber is campaigning to intimidate the Supreme Court into going along with the unconstitutional, one-size-fits-all individual mandate.

(Separately, while no one knows how the Court will rule, some liberals are putting out the pathetic nonsense that the individual mandate's demise would help Obama's reelection.)

The left is even sounding a lot like Newt Gingrich, astutely observes The Wall Street Journal:

After last week's Supreme Court argument on ObamaCare, the political left seems to be suffering a nervous breakdown...The High Court's very "legitimacy" will be in question, as one editorial put it—a view repeated across the liberal commentariat...

Overturn any part of the law, the Justices are being told, and your reputations will be trashed. The invitations from Harvard and other precincts of the liberal establishment will dry up. And, by the way, you'll show you hate sick people—as if the Court's job is to determine health-care policy.

This is the left's echo of Newt Gingrich's threat earlier in the primary season to haul judges before Congress when it dislikes their rulings. Remember the political outrage over that one?

No doubt the Justices will ignore this transparent attempt at political intimidation, but someone should defend them against the claim that overturning the law would be "judicial activism." It's more accurate to say that failing to overturn the mandate would be dodging their duty to uphold core constitutional principles.

Gingrich took a lot of flak from both sides when he floated the idea of compelling judges by subpoena to explain some of their off-the-wall decisions. But what's wrong with that? Shouldn't judges be accountable--at least to the extent of public testimony?

To some degree, we have the same question about sports officials. Why can't a coach or player criticize a referee or umpire's call without getting hit with hefty fines? After all, there is no shortage of incompetent, outcome--effecting officiating in the pro leagues.It's the officiating, not the comments, that go to the heart of the integrity of the game.

What's more, why do sports broadcasters--including outspoken former players--rush to to pronounce every action by an official as a "good call." Do these broadcasters sign a blood oath of some sort to alibi for the "zebras"?

CNN: ObamaCare Train Wreck is Now a Plane Wreck

Following Day 3 of the U.S. Supreme Court hearing on ObamaCare, CNN's liberal--er, legal--analyst Jeffery Toobin once again says that the individual mandate is doomed.




 

Obama Was Against the Individual Mandate Before He Was For it

Remember all the hope-and-change malarkey from the 2008 campaign? Exhibit A: the health reform individual mandate:



In this video, the libertarians at Reason TV provide three additional bullet points for opposing socialized medicine:



 

CNN Disaster Coverage: ObamaCare "Train Wreck" at the Supreme Court

Day 2 of oral arguments in the ObamaCare case at the U.S. Supreme Court was a "train wreck" for the Obama administration according to CNN liberal, er, legal, analyst Jeffrey Toobin:



If Toobin is correct that the the court will declare the law unconstitutional, will the Justices merely block the individual mandate or throw out the entire 2,000+ page ObamaCare monstrosity ridiculously known as the Affordable Care Act given that the legislation has no severability clause?

 

Birth Control Mandate is Just the Beginning

You could be a stone-cold atheist or a fervent pro-choice secularist with low opinion of organized religion and still be outraged about the Obama administration's latest effort to trample on religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment. Now comes reports that the administration may revamp its birth control mandate policy after the uproar.

In an excellent editorial Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal warns Americans to get used to such  ObamaCare dictates that will be imposed by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services bureaucrats:

The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate pluralism and liberty....

Practicing this kind of compulsion is routine and noncontroversial within [HHS Secretary] Sebelius's ministry. That may explain why her staff didn't notice that the birth-control rule abridges the First Amendment's protections for religious freedom. Then again, maybe HHS thought the public had become inured to such edicts, which have arrived every few weeks since the Affordable Care Act passed...

HS tried to sell it as a compromise when it was announced, and in any case HHS would revive this coercion whenever it is politically convenient some time in Mr. Obama's second term. Religious liberty won't be protected from the entitlement state until ObamaCare is repealed.

 The Journal also notes that "The Catholic left was one of ObamaCare's great enablers."

Here is Next Media Animation's take on the controversy:



Regardless of your opinion of sometimes erratic Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, the former GOP presidential candidate, she was right on target when she said that government control of healthcare is the crown jewel of socialism.

Added: Heritage Foundation video "Religious Liberty: Obamacare's First Casualty."

Fail: Long-Term Obamacare

CLASS dismissed.

When analysts who weren't blinded by ideology warned that the long-term care provision of Obamacare--which is called the Community Living Assistance Services (CLASS) Act--was fiscally unsustainable, they were just steamrolled in the mad rush to get the dreadful bill passed. A Democrat senator even called it a Bernie Madoff-style "Ponzi scheme" (terminology that later got Rick Perry in hot water in connection with Social Security), yet voted for it anyway.

But it turns out the the administration is abandoning the program:

The Obama administration cut a major planned benefit from the 2010 health-care law on Friday, announcing that a program to offer Americans insurance for long-term care was simply unworkable.

Although the program had been dogged from the start by doubts about its feasibility, its elimination marks the first time the administration has backed away from a key piece of President Obama’s signature legislative achievement.

Byron York of the Washington Examiner explains:

Democrats structured the program to collect premiums for years before beginning to pay out benefits -- thus, it appeared to reduce the deficit when it would in fact greatly increase the deficit once it began making payments. As a voluntary program, it would become acutely unworkable if, as expected, only those in need of long term care signed up for it.

At National Review Online, Yuval Levin points out that "the the administration’s own [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] actuary said it would never work."

Levin adds that this is just one provision of the overall law that must be replaced by market-based insurance reforms:

This confirmation that Obamacare cannot in fact defy the laws of mathematics and accounting should serve as a warning regarding the implementation of the broader law, most of which would begin in 2014 if it is not repealed by then. The other major provisions of the statute are also grossly ill-designed. If it is permitted to take effect in full, the law will cause premiums to rise rapidly in the individual market and create major dislocation in the employer market, driving people into vastly overregulated exchanges that would push premiums higher still, and then initiate a program of subsidies whose only real answer to the mounting costs of coverage will be to pay them with public dollars and so inflate them further. It aims to spend a trillion dollars on subsidies to large insurance companies and the expansion of an unreformed Medicaid system, to micromanage the insurance industry in ways likely to make it even less efficient, to cut Medicare benefits without using the money to shore up the program or reduce the deficit, and to raise taxes on employment, investment, and medical research. CBO does not expect it to make a real dent in the inflation of health-care costs or to avert the fiscal implosion of Medicare. Instead, it will double down on price controls and centralized administration and make a real reform of our system much more difficult.

Again, can anyone explain why any rational lawmaker operating in good faith could have voted for this bureaucratic monstrosity?

HotAir.com elaborates that the Democrats knew all along that the CLASS Act was a financial disaster but "no one on the Democratic side was willing to halt it before the bill passed because their fiction about 'bending the cost curve' was too precious to ObamaCare salesmanship."

Surprise: Sarah Palin was Correct about Obamacare Death Panels

Conventional, western medicine tends to rely too much on expensive surgery and pharmaceutical drugs. With that said, in a free society no government bureaucrat should ever interfere with the relationship between doctor and patient, which is the likely outcome of government-run healthcare. Private insurance companies are hard enough to deal with, aren't they?

With that in mind, remember how Sarah Palin was ridiculed for raising the possibility of “death panels” in connection with Obamacare despite that fact that rationing is the likely outcome of socialized medicine.

But as the mainstream media has reported last week, the former Alaska governor has essentially been vindicated:

The National Academy of Sciences said Thursday that the federal government should explicitly consider cost as a factor in deciding what health benefits must be provided by insurance plans under President Obama’s health care overhaul, and it said the cost of any new benefits should be “offset by savings” elsewhere in the health care system.

Moreover, it said, in defining “essential health benefits,” the government should try to guarantee that the average premium would not exceed benchmarks that would be set by the secretary of health and human services. [New York Times]

---

An advisory panel of experts on Thursday recommended that the Obama administration emphasize affordability over breadth of coverage when it comes to implementing a key insurance provision of the 2010 health-care law.

Obama officials charged with stipulating what “essential benefits” many health plans will have to cover should make it a priority to keep premiums reasonable, even if that means allowing plans to be less comprehensive, counseled the committee of the National Academy of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM). [Washington Post]

Socialized medicine is in effect in the U.K. in the form of the failing, near-bankrupt National Health Service. Readers of the British press know that the equivalent of death panels have already been implemented there. This is what we have to look forward to if the Supreme Court and/or Congress allows Obamacare to fully become implemented.

Added: British physician Lesley Kirkpatrick describes in the Daily Mail the lengths to which she had to fight through the NHS bureaucracy to obtain treatment options after she herself was diagnosed with cancer.

I’d worked in the NHS all my life — and yes, I felt guilty. But being a patient made me see things differently. I felt alone, uncared for, and forced to make things happen myself....

I should be dead, but here I am still running 40 miles a week. and it’s all because I fought every step of the way. But I’m struck by the thought — what happens to patients who don’t have my medical training and determination?

NHS rationing is hurting the patients who need it, and the wrong areas are being cut. We have management and ethnicity surveys, while patients are denied proper scanning and fast responses.

And according to the London Telegraph, "The number of patients who waited longer than the recommended 18 weeks for NHS hospital treatment has risen by almost 50 per cent over the past year."

Atlanta Appeals Court Finds Obamacare Unconstitutional

Another setback for socialized medicine:

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday ruled that the health care reform law’s requirement that nearly all Americans buy insurance is unconstitutional, a striking blow to the legislation that increases the odds the Supreme Court will choose to review the law.

The suit was brought by 26 states — nearly all led by Republican governors and attorneys general — and the National Federation of Independent Business. The Department of Justice is expected to appeal.

The 2-1 ruling marks the first time a judge appointed by a Democrat has voted to strike down the mandate. Judge Frank Hull, who was nominated by former President Bill Clinton, joined Chief Judge Joel Dubina, who was appointed by George H.W. Bush, to strike down the mandate.

Since the original legislation has no severability clause (i.e., that would allow some parts of it to go forward but not others), the Supreme Court will ultimately have to decide whether the law can indeed stand without the individual mandate.

One practical issue apart from the constitutional questions (that is sometimes lost in the shuffle) is that the individual mandate would be one-size-fits-all (effectively prohibiting high deductible or cafeteria plans), thereby resulting in increased premiums for everyone.

Separately, the administration lost another round in federal court in connection with oil exploration rules:

A judge on Friday threw out Obama administration rules that sought to slow down expedited environmental review of oil and gas drilling on federal land. U.S. District Judge Nancy Freudenthal ruled in favor of a petroleum industry group, the Western Energy Alliance, in its lawsuit against the federal government, including Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. The ruling reinstates Bush-era expedited oil and gas drilling under provisions called categorical exclusions on federal lands nationwide, Freudenthal said.

Did Obama "Dream" Of His Mother's Health Insurance Woes?

Well, it wouldn't be the first time that proponents of socialized medicine made up insurance horror stories that didn't hold up under scrutiny.

Was it an urban myth that President Obama's other was denied cancer treatment coverage? Politico suggests that this might be the case:

President Barack Obama’s mother had no major problems with her health insurance coverage at the time she was dying of ovarian cancer in 1995, a new book about her life claims, raising questions about the accuracy of a story that Obama often told on the campaign trail in 2008.

New York Times reporter Janny Scott’s “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother” says that Ann Dunham’s health insurance covered most of the costs of her medical treatment, leaving her to pay the deductible and any uncovered expenses. Those came to several hundred dollars a month.

On her blog, Michelle Malkin described it as the "Expanding Catalogue of Obamacare Fables":

Personal anecdotes of dying family members battling evil insurance execs deflect attention from the cost, constitutionality and liberty-curtailing consequences of the law. The president’s Dunham sham-ecdote is just the latest entry in an ever-expanding catalogue of Obamacare fables...

Since Obamacare passed, the amount workers pay in health care premiums has soared an average of nearly 14 percent; thousands of businesses have sought waivers in search of relief from the law’s onerous mandates; medical device makers have slashed jobs and research; and the private individual health insurance market is in critical condition.

Again, in general dealing with an insurance company can be enough to make you sick even on a good day, but does anyone really believe that a featherbedding government bureaucracy will be an improvement?

Socialized Medicine: It is What it Is

As the entire right-of-center blogosphere has repeatedly warned, government intervention into the healthcare insurance system (with all its faults) will only make things far worse. Just look at the decrepit nature of the British national health service. The Washington Post notes that while Obama repeatedly insisted that Americans who like their current coverage would be able to keep it, this is apparently untrue even under the administrations own estimates. Investor's Business Daily explains:

Internal administration documents reveal that up to 51% of employers may have to relinquish their current health care coverage because of ObamaCare.

Small firms will be even likelier to lose existing plans.

The "midrange estimate is that 66% of small employer plans and 45% of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfathered status by the end of 2013," according to the document.

In the worst-case scenario, 69% of employers — 80% of smaller firms — would lose that status, exposing them to far more provisions under the new health law. ..

Draft copies of the document were reportedly leaked to House Republicans during the week and began circulating Friday morning. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., posted it on his Web site Friday afternoon...

In a statement, Posey said the document showed that the arguments in favor of ObamaCare were a "bait and switch."

The White House plans to spend $125 million on a propaganda campaign to convince properly skeptical Americans about the alleged benefits of heathcare reform, so called, "amid growing signs Democrats are failing to get political traction on the issue."

Sen. Brown: "Stop the Chicanery"

Remember Susan Powter, the hyper-aggressive fitness and diet guru from back in the day? Her signature catchphrase was "stop the insanity!" Well, U.S. Senator Scott Brown says, "stop the chicanery."

In the GOP weekly radio address captured on Youtube below, Sen. Brown says that the healthcare powergrab--i.e, ramming through the health-care bill, "whatever it takes, whatever the cost"--is defying the will of the American people. The president and his supporters still haven't gotten the message that the people do not want the government to seize control of the medical delivery system, the senator says.

Is The Democrat Party Turning Into Its Own Death Panel?

Say what you will about the alternatively misanthropic and entertaining Michael Savage, but he made a very perceptive point the other night. Politicians have always been corrupt, he said, but they occupied a parallel universe and pretty much left the rest of us alone--until now. With their sick (no pun intended) obsession with socialized medicine among other things, the Democrats now want to intrude in every aspect of our life. But Americans value personal freedom above all else.

As Shikha Dalmia writes at Forbes.com:

The only comic relief in the otherwise grim, yearlong ObamaCare saga has been the spectacle of progressive pundits scratching their heads to explain the bill's nose-diving popularity...

In fact, the real reason why ObamaCare is so unpopular is that it is proposing a giant expansion of the entitlement state precisely when this state everywhere is coming apart: here and abroad; at the federal level and the state; in the public sector and the private. Suggesting a giant government takeover of a sixth of the economy can't be a popular selling point in a country whose DNA has a programmed hostility to Big Government.

Even before President Obama rammed through his trillion-dollar-plus stimulus/bailout packages last year, there was a growing sentiment that the country's top priority ought to be tackling the entitlement programs whose liabilities are like a swelling aneurysm in the brain of the body politic waiting to rupture...

But why don't progressives get that this is terrible economic timing? Because this is the moment they have been waiting for since Lyndon Johnson enacted Medicare...There is no tactic too low to deploy--and no cause too sacred to abandon. If Americans are unenthused about universal coverage, screw 'em. If it is necessary to use reconciliation--meant strictly for budgetary matters--to ram the bill through Congress on a strictly partisan vote, then so be it. If filibuster rules that Democrats themselves restored in 1975 are now coming in the way, get rid of them....

But egged on by the progressive punditocracy, Democrats are behaving as if, once they jam ObamaCare through, nothing else matters. It's like they'll never have to worry about being the minority party in need of constitutional checks and balances.

Similarly, in the pages of the Washington Post, Democrat pollsters Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen tell their party that it needs to snap out of their delusion and wake up to the political reality:

Their blind persistence in the face of reality threatens to turn this political march of folly into an electoral rout in November....First, the battle for public opinion has been lost. Comprehensive health care has been lost. If it fails, as appears possible, Democrats will face the brunt of the electorate's reaction. If it passes, however, Democrats will face a far greater calamitous reaction at the polls. Wishing, praying or pretending will not change these outcomes.

Nothing has been more disconcerting than to watch Democratic politicians and their media supporters deceive themselves into believing that the public favors the Democrats' current health-care plan. Yes, most Americans believe, as we do, that real health-care reform is needed. And yes, certain proposals in the plan are supported by the public.

However, a solid majority of Americans opposes the massive health-reform plan. Four-fifths of those who oppose the plan strongly oppose it, according to Rasmussen polling this week, while only half of those who support the plan do so strongly. Many more Americans believe the legislation will worsen their health care, cost them more personally and add significantly to the national deficit. Never in our experience as pollsters can we recall such self-deluding misconstruction of survey data...

Second, the country is moving away from big government, with distrust growing more generally toward the role of government in our lives...

Voters are hardly enthralled with the GOP, but the Democrats are pursuing policies that are out of step with the way ordinary Americans think and feel about politics and government. Barring some change of approach, they will be punished severely at the polls.

Now, we vigorously opposed Republican efforts in the Bush administration to employ the "nuclear option" in judicial confirmations. We are similarly concerned by Democrats' efforts to manipulate passage of a health-care bill. Doing so in the face of constant majority opposition invites a backlash against the party at every level -- and at a time when it already faces the prospect of losing 30 or more House seats and eight or more Senate seats. For Democrats to begin turning around their political fortunes there has to be a frank acknowledgement that the comprehensive health-care initiative is a failure, regardless of whether it passes. There are enough Republican and Democratic proposals -- such as purchasing insurance across state lines, malpractice reform, incrementally increasing coverage, initiatives to hold down costs, covering preexisting conditions and ensuring portability -- that can win bipartisan support.

And in a new Gallup poll, unemployment and the economy in general (not healthcare) are the primary issues that Americans are worried about. 

Related posts:
Paglia: Limousine Liberals Driving Blind
Trial Lawyers Stonewalling Tort Reform
Culture Critic Does Some Truth Telling 
Something Fishy Going On
Community Organizing Suddenly Falls Out of Favor
Politicians: Healthcare For Me, But Not For Thee
Healthcare Reform: Trouble In Paradise
A Grand Social Experiment...
Socialized Medicine Making People Sick
"Freedom Fighter" Contemplates Life Without Lawyers
Government-Run Healthcare Unconstitutional?
Heathcare "Reform": A "Shovel Ready" Job?

Will The Machine Stall Scott Brown's Certification

Should Scott Brown win tomorrow's Massachusetts special election, Democrats may delay the legal "certification" of his victory. One problem with that scenario--it may be unconstitutional:

Appointed Senator Paul Kirk will lose his vote in the Senate after Tuesday’s election in Massachusetts of a new senator and cannot be the 60th vote for Democratic health care legislation, according to Republican attorneys.

Kirk has vowed to vote for the Democratic bill even if Republican Scott Brown is elected but not yet certified by state officials and officially seated in the Senate. Kirk’s vote is crucial because without the 60 votes necessary to stop a Republican filibuster, the bill will be defeated.

This would be a devastating loss for President Obama and congressional Democrats. The bill, dubbed ObamaCare, is the centerpiece of the president’s agenda. Brown has campaigned on becoming the 41st vote against ObamaCare.

But in the days after the election, it is Kirk’s status that matters, not Brown’s. Massachusetts law says that an appointed senator remains in office “until election and qualification of the person duly elected to fill the vacancy.” The vacancy occurred when Senator Edward Kennedy died in August. Kirk was picked as interim senator by Governor Deval Patrick.

Democrats in Massachusetts have talked about delaying Brown’s “certification,” should he defeat Democrat Martha Coakley on Tuesday. Their aim would be to allow Kirk to remain in the Senate and vote the health care bill.

But based on Massachusetts law, Senate precedent, and the U.S. Constitution, Republican attorneys said Kirk will no longer be a senator after election day, period. Brown meets the age, citizenship, and residency requirements in the Constitution to qualify for the Senate. “Qualification” does not require state “certification,” the lawyers said.

[WeeklyStandard.com]

Paglia: Limousine Liberals Driving Blind

We often wondered why the socialist-oriented, big government interventionists seem to think that they will be immune from the affects of their policies--as if they live in a space station orbiting the Earth rather than down here with the rest of us. In her latest online column, Professor Camille Paglia, a self-avowed Obama and Pelosi supporter, nails it:

As for the actual content of the House healthcare bill, horrors! Where to begin? That there are serious deficiencies and injustices in the U.S. healthcare system has been obvious for decades. To bring the poor and vulnerable into the fold has been a high ideal and an urgent goal for most Democrats. But this rigid, intrusive and grotesquely expensive bill is a nightmare. Holy Hygeia, why can't my fellow Democrats see that the creation of another huge, inefficient federal bureaucracy would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators? Massively expanding the number of healthcare consumers without making due provision for the production of more healthcare providers means that we're hurtling toward a staggering logjam of de facto rationing. Steel yourself for the deafening screams from the careerist professional class of limousine liberals when they get stranded for hours in the jammed, jostling anterooms of doctors' offices. They'll probably try to hire Caribbean nannies as ringers to do the waiting for them.

A second issue souring me on this bill is its failure to include the most common-sense clause to increase competition and drive down prices: portability of health insurance across state lines. What covert business interests is the Democratic leadership protecting by stopping consumers from shopping for policies nationwide? Finally, no healthcare bill is worth the paper it's printed on when the authors ostentatiously exempt themselves from its rules. The solipsistic members of Congress want us peons to be ground up in the communal machine, while they themselves gambol on in the flowering meadow of their own lavish federal health plan. Hypocrites!

And why are we even considering so gargantuan a social experiment when the nation is struggling to emerge from a severe recession? It's as if liberals are starry-eyed dreamers lacking the elementary ability to project or predict the chaotic and destabilizing practical consequences of their utopian fantasies.

Culture Critic Camille Paglia Does Some Truth Telling

Over the years, but especially recently, one phenomenon that has become profoundly obvious is that left-of-center polemicists tend to accuse right-of-center writers, bloggers and other counterparts of "lying."

But this trend has emerged a classic case of projection, because it is in general those on the left who engage in half-truths, distortions, disinformation or lack of information, taking things out of context, and perhaps what's worse, incuriously accepting at face value virtually any pronouncement from this administration.

We hesitate to use the word lie because that word has been thrown around so much in so many different quarters that it is almost devoid of meaning. [Even Judge Milian too often seems to accuse a litigant of lying when it might be just an instance where two individuals simply have a good-faith difference in perception.]

In her latest Salon essay primarily about the "sick" obsession of this administration, Congress, and what she calls the "liberal lemmings" of the mainstream media, to impose socialism on the medical delivery system, self-described Obama supporter (and Republican critic) Camille Paglia makes reference to the same trend:

Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web -- both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy -- I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism...

But affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible....

Throughout this fractious summer, I was dismayed not just at the self-defeating silence of Democrats at the gaping holes or evasions in the healthcare bills but also at the fogginess or insipidity of articles and Op-Eds about the controversy emanating from liberal mainstream media and Web sources. By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers. There was a glaring inability in most Democratic commentary to think ahead and forecast what would or could be the actual snarled consequences -- in terms of delays, denial of services, errors, miscommunications and gross invasions of privacy -- of a massive single-payer overhaul of the healthcare system in a nation as large and populous as ours. It was as if Democrats live in a utopian dream world, divorced from the daily demands and realities of organization and management.

By the way, tonight would be a good night to rent a DVD, check-in with the Dog Whisperer or Animal Cops if they're on, or engage in recreational reading, or participate in any "healthy" activity other than watching yet another tedious, narcissistic presidential address.

Besides, the lemmings in the mainstream media have already decided for you that this is the greatest speech ever delivered in recorded history.