The industry – specifically ExxonMobil, Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips and Royal Dutch Shell, founded a consortium called the Marine Well Containment Company (MWCC) for the purpose of satisfying that demand. And today, MWCC announced it has completed an interim well containment response system.

MWCC’s interim system can operate in water depths up to 8,000 feet and has storage and processing capacity for up to 60,000 barrels per day of liquids.  The capping stack has a maximum operating pressure of 15,000 pounds per square inch.  The equipment is located on the U.S. Gulf Coast and it can be at work within 24 hours of a spill.

“The Marine Well Containment Company has successfully developed a solution for rapid well containment response,” said Marty Massey, chief executive officer. “This milestone fulfills acommitment set forth by the four sponsor companies to deliver a rapid containment response capability within the first six months of launching the marine well containment project.”

US Representative Charles W. Boustany, Jr., (R-Southwest Louisiana) was effusive.

“The completion of the interim containment system is great news for the people of Louisiana, and for American energy production,” Boustany said. “With every advancement in the permitting process, we are one step closer to getting Louisiana workers back to their jobs and revitalizing our economy that was damaged first by the moratorium and now by the defacto moratorium on permitting. We still have much to do until American energy production has fully resumed. I will be there every step of the way to continue putting pressure on the Obama administration and aiding our workers in any way I can.”

“The fight is not over,” Boustany said. “The President has made no signal that he is a fan of American energy producers. In his budget this week, he vowed to tax energy producers, which will have an impact on every man and woman in this country. We will continue to fight the policies of this administration until the hard working folks in Louisiana and throughout the Gulf Coast are back to work.”

MWCC says it’s working on an expanded containment system for use in deepwater depths up to 10,000 feet which has the capacity to contain 100,000 barrels per day of liquid (and 200 million standard cubic feet per day of gas). The expanded system will include a 15 kpsi subsea containment assembly with a three rams stack, dedicated capture vessels and a dispersant injection system.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, whose director Michael Bromwich had a stormy meeting with Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) yesterday on the subject of his agency’s stonewalling of drilling permits, had taken the position on Monday that no containment system was available to satisfy its requirement for drilling to be reinstated. At a Feb. 14 energy conference, Bromwich had said…

“it has not been able to fully demonstrate it has the systems in place to respond to a blowout in deep-water,” Michael R. Bromwich said at an offshore energy conference in Houston. “It would be simply irresponsible” to allow deep-water drilling without knowing a blowout similar to the one that led to a massive oil spill last year can be controlled, he said.

It’s unclear whether Bromwich was simply unaware of MWCC’s work on the interim system when he made an announcement that the industry didn’t have one, or whether BOEMRE plans to reject the system.

Either possibility seems discouraging.

If Bromwich was ignorant of MWCC’s progress just three days before the completion of their project it would be evidence of his disengagement from the subject matter his agency is supposed to govern – and it would be consistent, for example, with Vitter’s mention yesterday that he wasn’t aware of a lawsuit filed by an offshore operator alleging the permitting slowdown is a breach of contract on offshore leases let by the Department of Interior.

And if Bromwich knew about the system unveiled today and still made the statements he made on Monday, it’s evidence that BOEMRE may simply be moving the goalposts in an effort to delay deepwater drilling permits as long as possible. His statement to Vitter that “it’s not my job to issue permits” for drilling in yesterday’s meeting would be given greater meaning if this latter possibility surrounding his Monday statement is true.

UPDATE: Jim Adams, president of the Offshore Marine Service Association – whose membership has been absolutely ravaged by the offshore moratorium and the current permit slowdown, had this to say…

The reason oil companies aren’t drilling is because the administration isn’t letting them. Though the administration claimed to have lifted its unlawful moratorium, in order to keep it in effect the Interior Department said Jan. 25 that it was refusing to issue deepwater exploration permits because energy companies hadn’t shown a capability to respond to a massive spill.

What is underreported is that neither Secretary Salazar nor Director Bromwich has ever provided these energy companies with specific language clarifying what the agency meant exactly when it said “demonstrate capacity to respond to a massive spill.” So while the Marine Well Containment Company has announced completion of an initial response system, it does not mean that BOEMRE will issue new permits for deepwater drilling.

Exploration in the Gulf is still paralyzed by this President’s de facto moratorium. With today’s announcement—a concept that started as a
voluntary initiative of several oil companies last year—we now have the delivery of the most expensive and comprehensive spill containment system in the world.~This, along with other safety initiatives implemented by the industry since Macondo, attests to the notion that deepwater drilling in the Gulf should be safer now than ever before.

As a reminder, more than 50,000 wells were drilled safely in the Gulf before the BP spill, and we have confidence that safe deepwater drilling can continue.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports BOEMRE’s response…

“We appreciate Marine Well Containment Company’s significant progress to address this issue,” Melissa Schwartz, a spokeswoman for the ocean energy bureau, said in a statement. “And we continue to encourage them to make their containment system available as quickly as possible to deepwater operators so that new, responsible oil and gas drilling in deepwater can proceed.”

That’s not quite good enough for House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Fred Upton…

“Completion of the well containment response system is welcome news for the families in the Gulf region who rely on energy production for their livelihoods, but who have remained sidelined since the spill. And ultimately, this is good news for all Americans. The more energy we can produce safely here at home, the more secure and energy-independent our nation will be,” said Upton.

“Last week the Energy and Commerce Committee heard testimony on the effects of Middle East events on U.S. energy markets. What we heard reaffirmed our belief that America needs an all-of-the-above energy policy that takes advantage of all the resources available to us and reduces our reliance on other parts of the world where uncertainty and upheaval can drive up prices and jeopardize access,” said Upton. “Industry rightly invested in this new tool to protect our coastlines and communities from the unlikely threat of a future spill. Now that we have the safety measures in place, it’s time for the Obama administration to let the Gulf get back to work.”

Crossposted from TheHayride.com

That’s a good thing, and a bad thing.

It’s good, because unlike his predecessor, who almost literally couldn’t show less leadership than she did following Hurricane Katrina and who let the entire response and recovery from the storm and the flood devolve into a political dirty bomb both for her and for the White House, Jindal has actually shown some capacity to make a plan and at least attempt to act on it. Jindal will always have his detractors and he’ll always draw criticism – we’re on his case ourselves because we’d like to see him pull a few levers and cause some pain for the White House in an effort to force the feds to get out of the way – but he’s neither paralyzed nor hysterical. He’s in a tough spot but he at least appears up to it so far.

But it’s also a bad thing. It’s bad, because Jindal is starting to draw national attention as (1) a 2012 presidential candidate, which is bad for a number of reasons we’ll have to discuss in a later update, and (2) worst of all, a guy who is showing up the president for his fecklessness and weak leadership.

And while Jindal’s profile is probably higher now than it’s been in the past – which will make him a few bucks when the gulf oil spill crisis is finally under control and his book is released – what that’s going to do is make him a target of this White House. The last time a Republican politician was out there showing up the Obama administration that politician’s name was Sarah Palin, and look how deep into the sewer they dipped in an effort to destroy her. Is there really any doubt that Jindal will get a similar treatment?

While a fresh round of examinations of Jindal’s conversion to Catholicism and his having attended an exorcism are excruciating enough, what concerns us isn’t that the Governor is going to get a media gang-rape. That would come as part and parcel of his testing the 2012 waters anyway. What concerns us is that Jindal’s plan to build sand berms around Louisiana’s coastline won’t ever get federal approval – because it wasn’t Obama’s idea and because a Republican he might be running against in 2012 came up with it. That’s a situation tailor-made for stonewalling, and it seems pretty clear that stonewalling is exactly what we’ve seen so far.

A couple of articles out there in the media have touched on this. First, lefty columnist Ruben Navarrette, writing for CNN.com, calls Jindal “passionate” and “presidential:”

Now, due to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and Obama’s lackluster response — which has irritated and even enraged some members of the president’s own party — Bobby has Barack on the ropes and he is coming across as more passionate and more presidential.

Jindal is demanding more involvement, more cooperation and more urgency from the federal government. Specifically, he wants Obama to use the power of his office to cut some of the bureaucratic red tape that seems to be tying up Louisiana’s request for permission to build sand barriers that might stop the flow of oil onto shore. It’s a simple request, and failing to honor it makes the White House look as if it is insensitive, incompetent or petty.

Why petty? Because before that one mediocre speech, Jindal — who had been widely talked about as a possible running mate for John McCain in 2008 — was often mentioned by political observers as a possible Republican vice presidential or even presidential nominee in 2012.

Is this White House so plotting and sinister that it would actually let political considerations — in this case, a reluctance to enhance the standing of a potential rival — interfere with its duty to protect and serve the people of this country? When it comes to politicians and the games they play, nothing surprises me. We’ll have to wait and see.

Navarrette goes on to drag out the new goofy accusation of the Left – namely that Jindal says he’s a small-government guy but he’s a hypocrite because he wants a big federal involvement in the oil spill. That’s a stupid argument to make; anyone who understands constitutional conservatism and the concept of limited government realizes that the discussion is about the proper scope of government and what its true role should be. In a situation like Katrina or the oil spill or an earthquake or a war, having a government capable of responding quickly and effectively is a perfectly desirable investment from a conservative point of view. It’s when you’re not in an emergency that you shouldn’t see the government.

Ultimately, the Left understands this philosophy and recognizes the majority of the country subscribes to it even if they do not – which is why with lefties, everything is a “crisis” from which the rationale and justification for government intrusion must come. Like in the case of health care, where the entire system had to be overhauled and the country had to be put on the road to a government-run system despite the fact that some 80 percent of Americans were fine with the access to the health-care system they already had.

This is a digression of sorts, but if Jindal’s profile continues to increase you can bet your last dollar you’ll see this bullet fired at him again and again – he’s a big-government conservative, he’s a hypocrite. Maybe it will stick, maybe it won’t, but there is no law which says a small-government conservative can’t look for a strong emergency response from the public sector.

Conservative talk host Hugh Hewitt, writing in the Washington Examiner yesterday, discusses the opposite side of the equation. Hewitt notes that Mr. Big Government, Barack Obama, can’t lift a finger to get anything accomplished with the sand berms:

Incredibly, the president’s team has cited the fear that too many berms would alter tidal movements, as though that theoretical worry trumps the very real oil headed toward shore. Bureaucrats also mumbled that too many berms might just shift the oil toward Mississippi –without explaining why berms couldn’t be built there, and without making any judgment over which part of the Gulf Coast shoreline is most fragile and thus most deserving of protection.

The story of the berms permit and the president’s ineptitude will be the focus of intense scrutiny for years, and if the 2 percent works, the weeks of delay before that beginning was allowed and the delay before the 98 percent followed will be a stain on the Obama presidency that lasts longer than the oil on the shore.

Which is one very powerful reason why Team Obama may be dragging its collective feet: They aren’t afraid it won’t work. They are scared to death it will, and that their incompetence in authorizing the effort will be as clear as the oceans around the ruptured pipe are dark.

Ultimately, the argument seems to be more about the effectiveness of government rather than the size. This is a problem for Obama, who’s showing that no improvements in effectiveness have been made since Katrina despite new management. But as Navarrette and Hewitt, coming from opposite ideological perspectives, seem to agree, it could also be a problem for us here in Louisiana.

It’s pathetic. Just pathetic.

When President Obama said at his press conference today that Jindal had received partial approval for the plan to dredge sand and build barrier islands, what he didn’t say is that his administration has approved one project.

You read that correctly. One.

The project is a sand berm at Scofield Island, which is in Jefferson Parish east of Grand Isle and west of the Mississippi River. The Louisiana National Guard has already been working on that area, using sandbags dropped from Black Hawk helicopters. They’d like to dredge sand instead, since that’s a much more efficient way to do it, and Adm. Thad Allen of the Coast Guard, who is the embattled Incident Commander in charge of this spill, has given the go-ahead for that to happen and have BP pick up the tab.

But the Scofield Island thing is it. If Louisiana wants, the state can do another five projects it has put on the table – two east of the Mississippi and three others to the west – on its own dime.

“There are a lot of doubts whether this is a valid oil spill response technique, given the length of construction and so forth,” said Allen in making the announcement Thursday at Port Fourchon. “But we’re not averse to attempting this as a prototype.”

Jindal’s quote is a little more diplomatic than you might think based on all this, though it’s clear he’s red-hot about it.

“We’re glad they didn’t turn us down, but had we been given approval earlier, we could have built nearly 10 miles of barriers 6 feet high already,” Jindal said. “We want them to approve the entire plan because our entire coastline is important.”

Jindal said the state would not begin construction on the other five island sections approved by the corps without a guarantee of money from BP or the federal Oil Spill Response Trust Fund.

“This is BP’s mess and they should pay to clean it up,” Jindal said. “We’re calling on them to get Scofield built as quickly as possible to show the world that this works, and then make BP pay for the rest of the sections.”

A map of the coastline, complete with places where the oil has come ashore, can be found here. From that map, you can see that what’s being asked for is not a 200-mile sand berm – there are lots of barrier islands already in place and what this is about is closing passes between those islands in most cases. The entire proposal would cost $350 million and take six to nine months, but it’s not a continuous line. It’s a bunch of small projects which combine into one big proposal.

And it’s been delayed for most of a month by federal bureaucrats who now say they’ll only pay for one small part of the project. And the President just took credit for this.

Reminds us of this:

Get more Gulf oil spill updates at TheHayride.com.

Cabinet officials, Senators and a Governor presented a conga line of condemnation against British Petroleum today, while also bolstering the government’s attempts to show that it was doing all it could to keep the oil company’s feet to the fire.

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said federal officials are working to hold BP PLC responsible for cleaning up the growing Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Napolitano said Monday that she’s heartsick about damage to Grand Isle, south of New Orleans, where thick oil has been washing up. She said the government will stay on BP until the cleanup gets done the right way.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said federal officials are not standing on the sidelines. Referncing BP, he said, “We will keep our boot on their neck until the job gets done.”

The two Secretaries appeared today with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and a delegation of Senators who viewed current efforts to stop the leak and protect the Gulf Coast.

Speaking at a press conference, they vented their anger toward BP, 34 days after the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion that killed 11 workers and unleashed a massive oil leak that still continues.

“BP not longer stands for British Petroleum. It stand for Beyond Patience,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill. “What we have heard from this administration and need to tell BP: Excuses don’t count. You caused this mess, now stop the damage and clean up the mess. It’s your responsibility.

“This administration will continue to put the pressure on BP to do what’s right to clean up the mess and pay for every dollar of it – not the taxpayers, but British Petroleum,” Durbin said.

So that’s what the gang from out of state says. What does Louisiana’s governor say? From a release of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s statements at the press conference, a transcript:

Governor Jindal said, “Over the past weeks, I have visited a different parish and city each day and met with local officials. We have often met to discuss resources we would need to protect the coast, and unfortunately, now our visits also include an on-the-ground assessment of the damage caused by this oil spill. For anyone who has seen this damage and the impact of the oil first-hand you cannot escape the fact that this spill fundamentally threatens our way of life in Louisiana.

“Yesterday, we went out on a boat to Cat Island in Plaquemines Parish and we saw islands covered in oil where our Brown Pelicans nest. Many of the birds we could see were oiled, some to the point where they could not fly. Wildlife and Fisheries tells us the most severely oil birds are likely not even visible because they will move to the inside center of the island. The Brown Pelican, of course, is our Louisiana state bird – and it was just recently removed from the Endangered Species List. The oil on those islands yesterday may kill off much of the island – in addition to damaging the bird population.

“Just a few days ago, we took a boat out to Pass a L’Outre and saw thick black and brown colored oil covering much of the perimeter of the marsh out there. Again – wildlife experts tell us this marsh may die in 5 to 7 days after the oil hits it.

“It is clear that the resources needed to protect our coast are not here. Boom, skimmers, vacuums, and jack up barges are all in short supply. Every day oil sits and waits for clean up more of our marsh dies.

“Yesterday, we met again with coastal parish leaders – just like we did when we formed our own detailed parish protection plans – because we know we have to take action and take matters into our own hands if we are going to win this fight to protect our coast.

“We met with parish leaders, emergency professionals and levee district officials to discuss strategies to fill the void we are currently seeing in response efforts to stop this oil. To be clear – our goal is to stop this oil before it gets into our marshes. The marsh is not a sandy beach. It is very difficult to clean up and environmental experts say trying to clean it up in some places could do even more harm than good.

“This means we have to stop this oil before it comes into our marsh. We have already initiated a number of strategies to do this, including: Tiger Dams, Hesco baskets, sand-bag drop operations, fresh-water diversions, sand-fill operations, and the proposal of our sand-boom plan. Because we cannot simply wait for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to approve the sand-booming plan, we redirected a dredge conducting restoration work on East Grand Terre – which is east of Grand Isle – to immediately begin constructing a sand berm as called for in the state’s barrier island plan.”

Dredging was already underway to restore the barrier island in East Grand Terre under the state’s coastal restoration program. This will help to remove oil offshore Louisiana’s mainland before it reaches Louisiana’s intricate coastal wetlands and estuary.

The Governor outlined the strategy he announced yesterday with coastal parish leaders.

Governor Jindal said, “Working with parish leaders yesterday, we came up with new, additional strategies designed to fill the current void in response efforts. We developed a strategy for state and parish officials to have better situational awareness of the oil’s movement within Louisiana’s coast and offshore areas.

“Wildlife and Fisheries has divided the coast into sections and will be patrolling these sectors continuously so that containment and cleanup efforts can be operationalized quickly. Their efforts will be supported by the National Guard and parish officials. We will communicate our findings to the Coast Guard and BP on a daily basis to ensure our coast is continuously monitored and quickly cleaned. We will report these findings publicly each day so media and the public can keep updated and BP is held accountable for their cleanup efforts.

“We also asked that the Coast Guard refocus their efforts so that they have greater command and control on the ground where action needs to be taken quickly to save our coast. We asked for the Coast Guard to forward-deploy personnel with decision-making authority in every basin area of the coast so they can work closely with parish officials there and see the impact of the oil first-hand so they are better able to have eyes on the problem and respond quickly.”

“We have been frustrated with the disjointed effort to date that has too often meant too little too late to stop the oil from hitting our coast. We need folks in each basin that can mobilize resources quickly to contain oil when it arrives, not wait 24 hours or 48 hours. BP is the Responsible Party but we need the federal government to make sure they are held accountable and that they are indeed responsible. Our way of life depends on it. The actions taken to respond to this oil today are determining the future of our state.”

The Governor noted that part of the strategy includes identifying additional resources to enable the state to continue to lean forward and protect the coast.

Governor Jindal said, “We have also identified additional equipment and personnel available from parishes, state agencies and levee districts that will help us take our own proactive measures to keep oil out of our of marshes. We plan to use this equipment to expand ongoing efforts by the National Guard to close gaps in our coastal areas. We already have 40 cuts identified and 14 prioritized. We are identifying additional cuts and we will work to expedite fill-in efforts wherever we can with equipment from the state and parishes pooled together. The National Guard is requesting Chinooks to help expedite these operations.”

The Governor also outlined the resources requested from the Coast Guard and BP to effectively respond to the oil spill.

Governor Jindal said, “On May 2nd we leaned forward and requested the resources that our parishes would need under a worst-case scenario response to this oil spill. In fact, the very next day, we announced all of our coastal parish detailed protection plans and detailed that we had formally requested three million feet of absorbent boom, five million feet of hard boom and 30 ‘jack up’ barges.

“Today is May 24th and we have received a total of 815,569 feet of hard boom to date. Not even a million feet. 680,249 feet of this total has been deployed and 135,320 feet of hard boom sits and waits to be deployed. In the last 24 hours, we have received only 5,040 feet of hard boom. We need more boom, we need more resources, we need the materials we have requested to fight this oil and keep it out of our marsh and off of our coast.

“We continue to wait on a decision on our dredging/sand-boom plan from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. We made modifications suggested by the Corps and answered every question they submitted in the same day. We have showed pictures of sand-boom in Fourchon actively holding oil back from traveling into the marsh. We know this strategy works and that is why we took matters into our own hands yesterday to do more of these sand-fills ourselves, while we wait on approval to dredge the larger areas.

“To date – just under 70 miles of our coast has been hit by oil. This is more than the sea shoreline of Maryland and Delaware combined. To be clear – We have only two options: we can stop the oil 15 to 20 miles off of our coast at sand booms or we can fight the battle of removing oil in our thousands of miles of fragmented wetlands that serve as a critical nursery for wildlife. Every day we are not given the authorization to move forward and create more of these sand-booms with dredging is another day where that choice is made for us and more and more miles of our shore are hit by oil.”

Maybe it’s us. But when Jindal is accused of running his mouth so as to look good for the cameras without actually doing something, doesn’t he look like a mere piker of a grandstander compared to the likes of Durbin, Napolitano and Salazar?

Originally posted at TheHayride.com.

Jindal originally proposed the $350 million project last week, with the concept that should oil reach the state’s coastal marshlands the cost of remediating the damage is exponentially higher than to scrub a sandy beach. Rebuilding barrier islands torn apart by coastal erosion, particularly from hurricane activity in the last decade, is the key to accomplishing Jindal’s aim. Much work along those lines has already been accomplished using available material, but to expand the effort will require dredging sand from nearby waterbottoms – and to do that the Governor will need the Army Corps of Engineers to sign off. Ironically, the Corps is saying it can’t give a thumbs-up until after an “environmental assessment” is performed.

Folks in the Bayou State have little patience with the COE in the first place given the negative effect it has had on the state’s coastline with failed levee projects that didn’t protect New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina and have also effectively wasted valuable river silt from the Mississippi rather than allow nature to distribute it into the marshes. So when projects like the one pictured above which are clearly effective in keeping oil from advancing are held up by government red tape, it’s bound to boil the water around here.

As such, in a release this morning 3rd District congressional candidate Jeff Landry (R-New Iberia), the frontrunner in the race to replace outgoing Democrat Charlie Melancon, has now joined Jindal and Sen. David Vitter in protesting the slow movement:

Jeff Landry, the leading Republican candidate in the field for Louisiana’s 3rd Congressional District seat called on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to “move at a much faster pace” in approving an emergency permit that was requested over a week ago by Governor Jindal and south Louisiana parish officials. The emergency permit would allow for the construction of sand dunes in order to stem the flow of oil into south Louisiana marshes from the ongoing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

“The Corps’ inability to see that time is of the essence here is quite stunning to me. Our hard working parish officials on the coast, along with Governor Jindal, made this request to the Corps over a week ago, and we still have silence from their end. At some point, you must quit studying and take action. Our wetlands and marshes are too valuable as a natural and economic resource to our fishermen, as well as the nation, to allow them to become contaminated by this oil without putting up the best defenses we can,” Landry said.

Landry adds, “Frankly, the delay from the Corps in issuing this permit to help protect Louisiana’s valuable coastline is unacceptable and downright disturbing. The Corps needs to approve the permit now so we can get on with the task of protecting our coast.”

The chorus is getting louder. “It’s much easier to clean oil out of sand than out of a marsh,” Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts told the Times-Picayune.

Certainly there’s a procedure to be followed within the federal government’s Byzantine structure, but wouldn’t true leadership at the presidential or cabinet level do what’s necessary to prevent marshland damage? Doesn’t this constitute an emergency situation? Isn’t this EXACTLY the type of thing President Obama’s predecessor was pilloried for allowing to happen?

The president seems awfully occupied with his efforts to romance the Mexican vote, as are his key cabinet members like Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano. Surely that’s a lot sexier project than OK’ing a proposal from a bunch of Louisiana folks who probably didn’t vote Democrat in the last election to push a bunch of dirt around, but most of what’s involved in leadership isn’t sexy and it doesn’t get votes.

The Establishment Media has poo-poohed the idea this is Obama’s Katrina. As time goes by the analogy is more and more appropriate from this perspective.

Follow updates on the Gulf oil spill at The Hayride.

One concern we have heard time and time again since this oil spill started about a month ago from folks in the oil business and connected industries is abject terror that The Left will use the Macondo blowout and spill as a lever from which to shut down offshore drilling. The rather classless cackling from many on that side of the aisle about the death of “Drill, Baby, Drill” has put a good number of conservatives, and a host of Louisiana business people terrified for their livelihoods as a result of the policy possibilities arising from the spill, on the defensive of late. And the moves made by the Obama administration to at least partially deny new offshore leases as well as stack the deck at MMS in ways sure to create hardships for new drilling give some heft to those concerns.

Which is why it’s worth mentioning that Rasmussen finds offshore drilling is still wildly popular with the American people.

The poll finds that 64 percent of respondents support offshore drilling. That’s a number which is up six points from 58 percent earlier this month, which might be explained by the fact that very little of the oversold disastrous effects of the spill have actually happened – which we would argue is a reflection on the efforts of BP and its contractors as well as the state and local responders in Louisiana and elsewhere, plus the Coast Guard. But it’s still eight points short of the 72 percent score offshore drilling received at the end of March when Obama gave his (somewhat dishonest) speech in favor of drilling.

The American people are under no delusions about drilling, though. Rasmussen finds that 67 percent recognize there is an environmental consequence to oil drilling. They’re in support anyway.

And the Obama administration doesn’t get good marks for its response to the spill. Just 33 percent say Obama’s performance on the spill has been a good one, while 34 percent give him a poor rating. Naturally, those numbers beat the pants off the corporate performance. Two weeks ago, BP and Transocean were getting relatively good marks – 29 percent said their response was good or excellent, against 28 percent poor. But that has changed, as just 20 percent gave thumbs up compared to 43 percent rating BP and Transocean in the “poor” category. Those Senate hearings took their toll, which was probably by design.

And 91 percent of those polled said they’ve been following news of the spill, which means they’ve been exposed to the worst of the sensationalized narratives the left-wing media has to offer.

In the event the Hard Left as represented by Soros stooges like Edward Markey or Hollywood Luddites like Sam Waterston wish to attempt to capitalize on the spill by advocating a ban on drilling as this fall’s elections draw near, they will face a rather unfriendly electorate which is far less malleable than they might believe. And that’s a relief to those of us who recognize that despite the need for a cleanup in the Gulf and improvements in techniques, equipment and processes in offshore drilling, we need more of it rather than less.

Posted as part of a running update on the Gulf oil spill at TheHayride.com.

But based on various agendas, it seems like that’s what’s going on. Beyond the reactions of left-wing journals, when those sources have reacted to this story at all, we notice that Allahpundit at HotAir.com and Michelle Malkin have both gone out of their way to disparage the idea that the attack had to do with politics.

The attack was political. But, and I think I’ve been clear on this and hopefully in this post I’ll be even clearer, while it was political it doesn’t appear that it was partisan. A distinction like that used to be fairly easily understood.

For those who don’t grasp the difference between political and partisan, it’s pretty simple. In our modern parlance, partisan means Republicans vs. Democrats. Political can include everything else. Like, for example, anarchist revolutionaries.

How do we know this attack was political? Well, three developments in the story of the beating of Allee Bautsch and Joe Brown last Friday in the French Quarter have served to make it almost patently obvious that Bautsch and Brown were attacked out of a political motive…

1. Louisiana GOP chairman Roger Villere told Hayride contributor Walter Abbott that he was chased by protestors outside of Brennan’s into a cab. Villere said that he couldn’t leave the restaurant through the front door when it was time to depart the fundraiser because the protestors had blocked that entrance; and when he and his group left through the kitchen to the back door, they were seen and pursued. Villere caught a cab in the nick of time and made a getaway.

2. The police report of the incident makes clear that when Bautsch and Brown left the restaurant an hour or so later, there were still protestors on hand. Those protestors immediately set to making catcalls to the couple, and as they headed for the car they immediately realized they were being pursued just like Villere had been. The fact that the demonstrators pursued both Villere AND Bautsch and Brown is a chilling one; it also calls into doubt any explanation for the attack other than a political motive. While the NOPD has obviously taken scrupulous pains not to make public statements to the effect that politics was involved, the police have also not ruled it out. Sgt. Nick Gernon of the 8th District, who is heading the investigation (I’ve been reliably informed that despite the widespread disparagement of the NOPD both in the New Orleans area and elsewhere, Gernon is a first-rate detective committed to running a thorough inquiry) has not spoken to the media to date so there is no reason to discount a political motive. And I could have predicted to you from the beginning of this saga that the NOPD was not going to announce a political motive publicly until suspects were identified and arrested; that NOPD Public Information Officer Bob Young let the cat out of the bag and made statements to the effect that politics was involved before hustling back to the status quo was a mere momentary departure from that expectation.

3. Bautsch’s mother Della Berning’s appearance with Megyn Kelly on Fox News, which Connie Hair of Human Events has transcribed, makes clear, as does the police report, that the catcalls and insults hurled at Bautsch and Brown were “all about money.” The police report quotes Brown as recalling one of them was “You think you’re f**ing special” and that there were comments as to how sharply attired the pair were. Let’s remember that both the protest of the Southern Republican Leadership Conference venue at the Hilton Riverside and the redirect to Brennan’s were organized by the Iron Rail Book Collective, whose nature we’ve documented ad nauseam here – the Iron Rail Gang are self-described anarchist revolutionaries, and as Mick Wright at the Tennessee Conservative blog does a devastating job of demonstrating through photo evidence found on the internet from the protests at both venues, they were quite explicit in manifesting that identity during the events in question. Not only that, the Iron Rail people initially bragged about “lots of confrontations” last Friday and how “New Orleans bared its teeth and snarled, and rich plutocrats shat themselves in fear” before the light of scrutiny was shone on them – at which time rather than issue pointed and explicit denials of any role in what happened to Bautsch and Brown, they took down Facebook pages and YouTube videos which documented their protests both at the Hilton and at Brennan’s.

I hardly think it’s necessary to spell this out, but a communist anarchist who makes disparaging remarks based on socioeconomic circumstances about someone he suspects to be a conservative Republican before descending upon said Republican and beating him or her savagely is doing so from a political motive. Economics + communism = politics. It’s not brain surgery. Particularly given that the anarchists’ propaganda both before and after the event was shot through with hateful references to Gov. Bobby Jindal’s “rich friends” and so on.

Given that we now know that people who were at the protest at Brennan’s pursued attendees at the fundraiser on two occasions and successfully attacked attendees once, one has to be incredibly suspicious that Daniel Mauch and Joanna Dubinsky would have “gone dark” the way they did. Perhaps it’s not an admission of guilt, but any cop will tell you that it’s classic guilty behavior. They might as well have fled in a white Bronco.

So obviously this attack was political. But that doesn’t mean it was the work of Democrats. There are other people in the world outside Republicans and Democrats. There are the white supremacists, skinheads and neo-Nazi types, for example. And while it’s a favorite tactic of Democrat political types to paint conservatives as ideological kin to those folks, there are scant few on the mainstream Right with any affinity or common cause at all to be had with that fringe element.

I would like very much to think that anarcho-communists such as those you’ll find at the Iron Rail Book Collective are analogous to the white supremacist crowd, in that conservatives can agree they don’t represent the views of or share any allegiance with the mainstream Left.

It appears fairly clear that last Friday, the Iron Rail Gang was able to bamboozle a few mainstream Democrats, namely some well-meaning but easily duped students and professors at the University of New Orleans, into attending their protest at the Hilton. After all, they roped in a brass band for a second line march on a Friday afternoon, and anyone with a knowledge of New Orleans and its traditions knows that a second line is a good way to draw a crowd in the Big Easy. That the protest was couched in the relatively mainstream policy ends of restoring budget cuts in higher education and rebuilding a public hospital knocked out of commission by Hurricane Katrina when Jindal has chosen a different path was a nice way for the anarchists to put a veneer of respectability on their event. If you’ll look at the PDF files of the flyers the Iron Rail people created for the event and hosted at their web site (see the single-sided one here and the double-sided one here), they look relatively inoffensive. The two-page flyer says that Jindal “and his Republican fat cats are destroying Louisiana healthcare: closing hospitals, firing workers,” which is red meat, but not particularly ominous.

But there was also an eight-page brochure the group put together that did not appear on the Facebook event page for the protest (since removed – there were 209 people who had RSVP’ed for the event and from that roster we found Mauch and Dubinsky), and that brochure was much more ominous. It listed several “Points of Unity,” among them being:

- The SRLC is not welcome in NOLA without a fuss
- Recognize healthcare as a basic human right
- Oppose police oppression, the prison-industrial complex, and the dominant culture of militarism
- Recognize the need for active resistance to confront all forms of oppression, respecting a diversity of tactics

The brochure also contained a map of the five hotels at which SRLC delegates were primarily staying, which is extremely disturbing, on the same page as this statement:

The SRLC is being held the same weekend as the French Quarter Festival. Centered at the Hilton Riverside Hotel at the confluence of Poydras St. and Convention Center Blvd, the SRLC will bring a multitude of unwelcomed outsiders during a traditionally New Orleanian celebration.

On page 6 of the brochure was the following:

Saturday, April 10 – all-day – Street Theatre & Direct Action
We welcome everyone, organizations and individuals alike, to take some time to send their own personal message to the SRLC and its attendees. Saturday is a day of direct action, a time for people to take to the streets, autonomously, and demonstrate their opposition to the policies and politics of the Republican party. While the focus of our Second Line will be about the destruction of health care, inequity and oppression in our city affect all aspects of our daily lives: education, employment, police, the prison-industrial complex, etc. To the streets! Show Jindal his harmful politics are not welcome in New Orleans. Our numbers are many, let our presence reflect our dissatisfaction with the status quo. The Republicans do not offer solutions. The people have the power. Let that be shown.

It must be said that very little happened on Saturday, though before he pulled it down Daniel Mauch posted on his Facebook page that he was open for more “mischief” and for those interested to call him. Page 6 of the brochure also said:

SRLC attendees will be spending most of their time in the CBD and the French Quarter. Show them that ignoring the health and well-being of the people for corporate profit will not go unnoticed.

Mauch, who talked to Tennessee Conservative’s Mick Wright for an hour outside of the Hilton, was in possession of a flyer announcing the “afterparty” protest at Brennan’s, which he gave to Wright while scrawling both the address of the Iron Rail Book Collective and the name of the YouTube account which once hosted the protestors’ video files. On those videos Dubinsky could be seen inviting the protestors at the Hilton to join her at Brennan’s. As said above, both have taken actions in the last 48-72 hours which can be construed as covering their online tracks.

It is in light of the above that one can conclude, perhaps to the exclusion of anything else, that the attacks on Bautsch and Brown which are documented in the police report and in Bautsch’s mother’s account originated from Brennan’s protestors. The protests at Brennan’s were much more hostile and intense than at the Hilton, where a larger group which included more mainstream types constituted the majority of the demonstrators. The brass band wasn’t playing at Brennan’s, either; this was no cute second-line march. The well-meaning folks at the first protest were obviously peeling off by the time the Brennan’s affair was winding down, and as such this thing wasn’t about ordinary Democrats.

As I said above, the group which needs intense scrutiny here are the anarchist revolutionaries of the Iron Rail Book Collective, who organized a party-like protest at the Hilton with the express purpose of distilling it into something much more sinister at Brennan’s. The attack came from demonstrators at that protest, and as such it was political. It only becomes partisan if, and I very fervently hope there is no reason to believe this would happen, the mainstream Left chooses to stand with, act as apologist for or condone the actions of anarchist revolutionaries.

But for those, including some on the Right, who insist upon distilling all matters political into the neat little buckets of elephants and donkeys this distinction is perhaps impossible to perceive. If that’s the case, and if the Right can’t distinguish Democrats from anarcho-communists while the Left sees Republicans as a worse political enemy than the students of The Coming Insurrection, we are in a lot more trouble than we think.

Originally posted at TheHayride.com

It was a beautiful Friday night in downtown New Orleans, the kind of warm, inviting spring evening the locals typically describe in answer to tourist complaints about the oppressive heat and humidity of a South Louisiana summer. And as the soft river breeze permeated the convention district, buoyant conservatives attending the 2010 Southern Republican Leadership Conference ambled in and out of the conference’s venue, the Hilton New Orleans Hotel Riverside.

The city had 4,000 attendees of SRLC in town, and untold thousands more for the French Quarter Fest, an up-and-coming music festival at which such acts as Kermit Ruffins, Rockin’ Dopsie, the Radiators and the Rebirth Brass Band were set to perform. The all-important New Orleans tourist industry, hit hard in recent years for a number of reasons, had a chance to take a large step forward with an eye toward landing major events to add to the 2012 Final Four – including the 2012 Republican Convention, for which a bid is being prepared.

It looked like a great weekend was on the horizon for the Big Easy, a town on its way back from the hell of Katrina some four and a half years in the past. The city had momentum and, relatively, unity – after all, its beloved New Orleans Saints had come from decades of ignominy to capture the Super Bowl. And Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu had captured an amazing 65 percent of the vote in the mayoral election first primary earlier in the spring, offering New Orleans hope that it would find improved leadership after eight long years under the incompetent and divisive Ray Nagin.

But in a pattern so often repeated in its history, what was supposed to be a showpiece weekend for New Orleans became anything but. Violence and controversy would come to overshadow what were otherwise a successful convention and music festival.

That Friday evening, a battle was being prepared. While the Republican Party was planning a $10,000-a-plate fundraiser at one of the city’s legendary French Quarter restaurants hosted by Governors Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Rick Perry of Texas, a group of students, community activists and Marxist revolutionaries plotted a half-mile “second line” march from Lafayette Park to the Hilton Riverside in an effort to protest Jindal’s planned budget cuts in healthcare and education amid the state’s billion-dollar deficit. And while the initial protest outside the convention venue was relatively tame and unremarkable aside from a torrent of profanity in both signs and intonations, more was to come.

The published plans for the protest called for the march to terminate at the Hilton. But some of the organizers had a different agenda, one which steered their group straight for the high-end Republican affair – and what increasingly appears to have resulted in one of the more shocking examples of political violence in recent American history.

The Jindal/Barbour/Perry fundraiser was set at Brennan’s, a famous Royal Street eatery. The contingent of left-wing protestors who made the trip from the Hilton became increasingly vocal and unpleasant upon arriving at the restaurant, to such an extent that even innocent passersby found themselves verbally assaulted.

And some three hours after the trio of Republican governors had departed, 25-year old Alexandra “Allee” Bautsch, a rising star on Jindal’s team in charge of fundraising efforts for his 2011 re-election campaign, and her boyfriend, 28-year old Joe Brown, left Brennan’s on the way to Brown’s car. Two blocks from the restaurant on St. Louis Street, the pair was accosted by a group of three to five men who made “derogatory” comments and, when Brown turned to face the assailants, he was beaten repeatedly – suffering a concussion and multiple injuries to his face. Bautsch fell during the melee, breaking her leg and requiring surgery, though it’s not yet known whether she was pushed or struck by the attackers.

While Hayride sources and others insist that Bautsch and Brown’s attackers bore some relationship to the Brennan’s protestors, Jindal administration spokesman Kyle Plotkin denies that the governor’s staff has any evidence to that effect so far. The investigation of the attack had, as of Monday afternoon, borne little fruit – the New Orleans Police, dealing with a weekend outbreak of violence that saw no less than 18 people shot in incidents unrelated to SRLC throughout the city from Friday to Monday, don’t appear to have many good leads as to who the assailants were in the Brennan’s case and are begging the public for help.

It’s possible the attack was unrelated to the protest outside Brennan’s. It’s also possible the attack was not politically motivated. But given that Bautsch, who lost her purse before she arrived at the hospital, had it and was using it as a pillow as she lay on the street awaiting medical assistance, it does not at this time appear to have been a mugging. The repeated blows suffered by Brown during the attack are inconsistent with a random crime; whoever attacked the pair did so with a purpose and were apparently unafraid of being caught in the act. The hallmarks of a hate crime appear to have been met.

The story is still developing. But while the investigation continues, it is worth noting that research into the organizers of the overall protest uncovers a rather malevolent group of self-described anarchists who are anything but shy about a desire to destroy the capitalist system a gathering of Republicans would wish to celebrate. The central organizers of the second-line march appear to have come from an anarchist commune of sorts called the Iron Rail Book Collective, which calls itself “committed to anarchist, anti-authoritarian, feminist, anti-racist, queer-positive and class-conscious politics, and to providing alternative literature and information to the people of New Orleans.” And members of Iron Rail have boasted of vandalizing banks, studying an infamous Marxist revolutionary guide called “The Coming Insurrection” and, over the weekend, causing “tons of direct confrontation. New Orleans bared its teeth and snarled, and the rich plutocrats shat themselves in fear.”

Given the existence of a revolutionary element at the heart of the protests and the character of the attack on Bautsch and Brown, the guess is that when the case is finally cracked, the word on the street indicating the Brennan’s beatdown was an example of political violence not unlike that suffered by Tea Party protestor Kenneth Gladney in St. Louis last year will be vindicated. And if that vindication comes, it may be time for the Left-dominated mainstream media – which has to date proven itself utterly incurious about the attack – to answer for creating a narrative suggesting that politically-motivated hatred and violence operates predominantly on only one side of the aisle.

In a 30-minute small press gathering at the Baton Rouge office of U.S. Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), House Energy and Commerce Committee ranking Republican Joe Barton (R-Texas) echoed sentiments expressed commonly by conservatives in Obama’s America – the nation is threatened by runaway deficit spending, bad legislation is causing immense problems in the economy and an abrupt shift to the right is coming in November.

But as one might suspect when a member of the Energy and Commerce committee speaks with Louisiana media, the subject of cap-and-trade legislation took center stage. And Barton wasn’t shy about his opinions on that issue.

“It should be dead,” Barton said of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, which narrowly passed in the House last year but has tepid support in the Senate. “Senator Graham is trying to help resurrect it in the other house, and I wish he wouldn’t be doing that. But I don’t think it matters. The bill wouldn’t pass in the House if the vote was today.”

Barton said he thought last week’s announcement that President Obama would support some offshore drilling might be an olive branch in an attempt to build support for Waxman-Markey, but he didn’t think it would matter much. “It’s just such a bad deal,” he said. Besides, “I’m happy he held a press conference on offshore drilling, but this administration has shown it’s reasonably good at holding press conferences to say the right things, only to have terrible follow-up at the cabinet level with processes that deliver on their statements.

“I want to see action like having MMS (the federal Minerals Management Service) change their protocols on exploration, expedite drilling and other such actions before I’m going to believe the president” on offshore drilling, said Barton.

Barton was asked what benefits Cap-and-Trade might have by David Jacobs of the Baton Rouge Business Report, with the specific reference being made to the fact that Entergy CEO J. Wayne Leonard had endorsed the proposal. Since Entergy has a large investment in nuclear power, as well as excess capacity in many of their markets, the scheme would likely positively affect the company’s bottom line in the short run.

That didn’t affect Barton’s opinion much, though he did allow that Leonard’s stance “disappoints me.”

“If you’re in a business where you’d make money under the new scheme, of course you’ll be for it. That doesn’t necessarily make for good public policy.”

Besides, Barton said, a cap-and-trade scheme would hurt a utility like Entergy in the long run because of the devastating effect it would have on industry, and manufacturing in particular.

“When manufacturing gets shut down, you’ll have less demand for energy,” he noted, and the shrinking demand associated with a bad economy eventually makes for a bleak outlook even for utility companies favored by Cap-And-Trade.

The Advocate’s Ted Griggs then asked about global warming, and seemed surprised to find that Barton disagreed with his premise that it was happening. “The question is, is it a problem? I think, in the case of carbon dioxide, it’s not. They’ve been trying to make the case CO2 is a problem for 20 years, and only in the most esoteric sense can they show any evidence it’s a danger to public health.”

Barton and Cassidy both noted the danger Waxman-Markey presents to the American economy. Barton said that when fully implemented, Waxman-Markey would force an 85 percent reduction in American carbon emissions, which would bring the country back to 1905 levels – and on a per-capita basis it would force levels commensurate with the 1865 economy. “I don’t think it’s possible for America to go back to that lifestyle,” Barton said. “If you implement the House bill, you de-industrialize America.”

Cassidy pointed out that “the bill does nothing to stop the offshoring of industry to other countries,” in particular Latin America, Asia and the Caribbean where American manufacturing jobs are already moving. Net carbon dioxide emissions wouldn’t likely be affected at all, and since CO2 circulates around the globe no local benefit would be forthcoming.

“Don’t bet the U.S. economy on this,” Barton said.

Later this spring Barton’s Energy and Commerce Committee will take up the issue of hydraulic fracturing, as the Congressman noted there were hearings on the ExxonMobil/XTO merger which covered the subject in some detail and a follow-up round is likely to be forthcoming.

“That’s no problem as far as I’m concerned,” Barton said. “I think industry and the states have an excellent case to make” for maintaining the status quo whereby state governments are the primary regulators of the practice.

Barton, who wrote the current law on “fracking,” warned that there would be an “absolute fight” in Congress if the Environmental Protection Agency were to get involved in regulating it. “I wish the EPA would spend more time to do things that actually help the environment,” he said. Barton pointed out that it’s a physical necessity to case an oil or natural gas well in steel and concrete just to generate the kind of pressure necessary to bring resource to the surface, and by doing so it becomes an impossibility for fracking to contaminate ground water – an assertion the EPA came to after a five-year study concluding in 2004. The scuttlebutt that another study might be in the works on the topic didn’t make Barton too happy.

“There are probably more fractured wells in my district (in metropolitan Dallas-Fort Worth, which is the center of the Barnett Shale play) than anywhere else in the country right now,” Barton said. “And I can tell you, if you want to shut down the natural gas industry in the Midwest and Northeast, where there is something like 500 trillion cubic feet of gas, there’s no better way to do it than to let the EPA pre-empt the states on regulation.”

Barton said current law will have to change for that to happen, and he doesn’t think it could pass.

“It’s not a fight the Democrats want,” he said. “But Henry Waxman’s district is Hollywood, and Ed Markey’s from suburban Boston, and there’s no drilling of any kind there. They just think energy kinda happens.”

Barton is optimistic that Republicans will make major gains in November’s mid-term elections, though he didn’t want to either predict the GOP would regain a majority in the House or Senate this fall. “It depends on hopw you define success,” he said. “If we re-take the House and make a major jump in the Senate, that would be success. But I don’t know what the minimum number is to say we succeeded.

“We’ve got to create a conservative coalition in Congress,” he said. “We’ve got to be able to impact the process – getting legislation passed and stopping bad law from moving forward.”

I’m not convinced either way. I think at some point the Democrats are going to run out of bribes and threats to sway the remaining holdouts – while they’ve got lots of goodies to throw around in that reconciliation bill which might grease a Matheson or Costa or even Altmire, the longer this goes on the more outrage the American people demonstrate about both how this is done and how bad the policy actually is; they’re already bleeding votes as a result of the bill’s unpopularity and if they can’t get to 216 soon this thing could collapse.

And of course, because this thing has devolved into a cross between a barroom brawl and the Battle of Stalingrad it has engrossed the American people and those around the world. We now find out that the president is abandoning foreign policy so as to direct the battle against the American people from Washington, putting off a scheduled trip to Australia (one of this country’s closest allies, which means it might be good that Obama won’t be insulting them this weekend) and Indonesia until June.

But at some point – we’re now being told that it’s going to be Sunday, but I’ll believe it when I see it – this round of the struggle for the soul of the country will end. In the event Nancy Pelosi and her “giddy” House Majority Whip James Clyburn manage to drag Obamacare across the finish line, what then?

Well, taxes go up immediately. And Medicare cuts kick in just prior to the election in November, which as Dick Morris notes will make for a large number of senior citizens waking up to find that doctors willing to treat them are few and far between; because the implications of those cuts are so draconian in what could likely be an electoral holocaust for the Democrats anyway upon this bill’s passage are so severe that the guess here is they’ll lose their nerve and put those cuts off.

Which means, of course, that a budget deficit which is going off at better than $200 billion a month right now probably gets even worse. Better to run up budget deficits, which haven’t hurt anybody electorally yet, than Grandpa not being able to find a croaker who will diagnose his lumbago on the up-and-up because of Medicare.

We could launch into a digressive tirade on the effect a spiraling budget deficit arising from a refusal by Congress to put Medicare cuts through in advance of the election, but we don’t need to do that here. Suffice it to say that China, inflation and bond ratings are all potential factors.

But let’s just say the deficit chickens don’t come home to roost as a result of the Medicare issue. Let’s assume the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress manage to avoid an economic reckoning from refusing to cut Medicare. Even the early steps in Obamacare are going to exacerbate the underlying weakness in the health care system which has been driving up costs all along – namely, we do not have enough doctors to service an aging population of 300 million Americans.

There are approximately 800,000 doctors practicing in America now, and Obamacare is going to run a great many of them out of the profession. A poll of 1,200 doctors which appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine this week found that if Obamacare was passed into law, 29 percent would retire or quit. And if a “public option” – which those in the medical profession understand is the fast lane to socialized medicine – is put in place, that 29 percent number jumps to 46 percent. The most recent poll was treated as a gargantuan surprise, at least where it was even reported (the mainstream media largely ignored it), but its findings were completely consistent with a poll of 1,376 doctors that Investors’ Business Daily had done back in August of last year. The IBD poll found a virtually identical number – 45 percent – of doctors would get out of the game if the August version of Obamacare were to go into law (that, incidentally, was the House version of the bill which more or less returns to life if the Reconciliation Bill the Democrats want to pass this weekend finds its way into law).

So of the 800,000 doctors practicing now, if these polls are to be believed, only about 560,000 will still be hanging around hospitals and clinics. The rest might be running for Congress – as Republicans – or maybe opening fee-for-services practices in places like Cozumel, Nassau and Tegucigalpa. Having your doctors – who are a strategic national resource, by the way – decide to go Galt en masse is going to cause prices for medicine to skyrocket, which will be reflected in health insurance premiums and a move toward rationing at the state and local level. Chaos in emergency rooms is a virtual certainty, state Medicaid programs will be hit even harder than they already are and private insurance carriers are likely to be drowning in red ink by October. If the Democrats think this process is a necessary friction along the way to creating a European-style system, they haven’t done their political homework. This thing passes, and they will own every bad result from then on – which is why their jury-rigging the implementation of Obamacare to get the 10-year budget score from the Congressional Budget Office they wanted is so incredibly dumb politically. They front-load the pain on this bill and offer none of the entitlements, so the public support for it doesn’t look like it will get any better than it is now, at least not before this fall’s elections or even before the 2012 elections.

In the meantime, the legal mess the Slaughter Rule on top of the individual mandates to purchase health insurance will bring to the table is going to reach full bloom very soon. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has put Pelosi on notice that he’ll be filing suit in the U.S. Eastern District of Virginia – which has a reputation for being a “rocket docket” for its rapidity in moving cases along – in an attempt to break Obamacare on constitutional grounds, both as a result of the individual mandates and the Article I, Section 7 deficiencies of the Slaughter Rule. Cuccinelli isn’t alone; in Idaho the governor has just signed a bill into law which mandates its attorney general to sue the federal government if individual mandates are part of the final Obamacare package.

And in Louisiana, Sen. A.G. Crowe has filed a bill which he said today he expects to pass both houses which would seek to nullify Obamacare on five constitutional bases not including Article I, Section 7. Crowe’s bill is driven by the individual mandates and the abortion issue as well as others.

In all, the Associated Press counts 37 states in various stages of drafting or enacting legislation to challenge Obamacare. As Idaho’s governor Brian Otter says, “The ivory tower folks will tell you, ‘No, they’re not going anywhere.’ But I’ll tell you what, you get 36 states, that’s a critical mass. That’s a constitutional mass.”

Before the states can get in on the act, radio host and constitutional scholar Mark Levin might well beat them to the punch. Levin, who runs a non-profit constitutional law outfit called the Landmark Legal Foundation, has prepared a lawsuit to challenge Obamacare on several constitutional grounds – most notably Article I, Section 7. As the American Spectator’s Jeffrey Lord writes, the text of the complaint is devastating:

Don’t let the dryness of this language fool you. Plainly stated, Levin is saying bluntly that a piece of major legislation, legislation that could reduce a huge chunk of the American economy to economic chaos, is being “passed” into law with only one House of Congress, the U.S. Senate, approving. And that the President of the United States intends to affix his signature, in a deliberate violation of the Constitution, to this “Senate Bill upon presentment to him.”

Levin accuses Obama and Holder of intending to deprive Americans of their Fifth Amendment guarantee to “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” He adds that, “Under color of law, the Defendants intend to collect taxes, remove and replace insurance benefits, and re-write health insurance contracts affecting Plaintiffs and Landmark’s employees.”

Also writing in the American Spectator, Peter Ferrara notes another potential consequence of Obamacare. This one takes place after the Republicans get hold of either the House or the Senate, or both. And it’s both a perfectly justifiable action and a very sad commentary on the state of our legislative framework. Ferrara suggests that if Pelosi uses Slaughter to deem the Senate bill into law, then a Republican House majority could simply deem the Senate bill as not having been passed…

If Democrats claim to have passed Obamacare through this Banana Republic methodology, the new Republican Congressional majorities elected this fall can and will “deem” Obamacare not to have passed. For no actual legislation with identical texts will then have passed both the House and the Senate, as the Constitution requires. The new Speaker of the House and the new Senate Majority Leader can and will instruct Congressional officers to remove the Obamacare provisions from the U.S. Code. The new House and Senate majorities can and will also refuse to fund any of the provisions of Obamacare, including the 100 new bureaucracies, boards, commissions and programs. Naturally, this will leave the state of the law unclear, and disputed, just like in a typical Banana Republic.

In short, absolute chaos. Chaos in the health care industry, including a breakdown of the medical profession and private insurance. Chaos in employment, as without any clear rules on what health care costs will be employers will be loath to hire new employees on anything other than a temporary or contract basis. Chaos in constitutional law, as the multitude of states revolting against Obamacare will likely break down the relationship between the federal government and state governments (this might well be a good thing in the long run, but it’s the last thing many states headed for bankruptcy need right now). And chaos in American politics, because when the Republicans begin exacting their revenge on Obama for the passage of this bill the stakes – already far too high for a healthy republic – will rise infinitely higher, as with each election the American people are going to be forced to choose between competing and incompatible models of health care delivery.

This is precisely why the founders of the Republic created a political system which made it nearly impossible to enact far-reaching social legislation without a broad consensus. They knew how destructive such legislation could be to the fabric of the country and its economy, not to mention individual liberty. One can only hope, when this disastrous episode is finally over, that the American people and their leaders will be moved to take a fresh look at our Founding Fathers and pay heed to the Constitution as it was originally written and their explanations as to why.

Cross-posted at TheHayride.com

PARKERSBURG, W.Va. (AP) — The retirement nest egg of an entire generation is stashed away in this small town along the Ohio River: $2.5 trillion in IOUs from the federal government, payable to the Social Security Administration.

It’s time to start cashing them in.

For more than two decades, Social Security collected more money in payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits – billions more each year.

Not anymore. This year, for the first time since the 1980s, when Congress last overhauled Social Security, the retirement program is projected to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes – nearly $29 billion more.

Sounds like a good time to start tapping the nest egg. Too bad the federal government already spent that money over the years on other programs, preferring to borrow from Social Security rather than foreign creditors. In return, the Treasury Department issued a stack of IOUs – in the form of Treasury bonds – which are kept in a nondescript office building just down the street from Parkersburg’s municipal offices.

Now the government will have to borrow even more money, much of it abroad, to start paying back the IOUs, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The government is projected to post a record $1.5 trillion budget deficit this year, followed by trillion dollar deficits for years to come.

Social Security’s shortfall will not affect current benefits. As long as the IOUs last, benefits will keep flowing. But experts say it is a warning sign that the program’s finances are deteriorating. Social Security is projected to drain its trust funds by 2037 unless Congress acts, and there’s concern that the looming crisis will lead to reduced benefits.

“This is not just a wake-up call, this is it. We’re here,” said Mary Johnson, a policy analyst with The Senior Citizens League, an advocacy group. “We are not going to be able to put it off any more.”

For more than two decades, regardless of which political party was in power, Congress has been accused of raiding the Social Security trust funds to pay for other programs, masking the size of the budget deficit.

Whatever you might think of the current system of American health care, the fact of the matter is that the federal government has no resources to provide a solution if one involves spending more money. Not whether the solution involves growing the deficit, mind you. SPENDING MORE MONEY. We have no more money to spend on ANYTHING. Not on Social Security, not on education, not on farm subsidies, not on welfare – and not on health care. We are BROKE. Social Security is BROKE. Medicare is BROKE. Medicaid is BROKE.

The federal government is broke.

Moody’s today is warning that the U.S. government is beginning to approach danger of losing its AAA bond rating. Should that happen the cost of continued borrowing will be astronomical; we’re already staring as much as $800 billion in interest alone per year in the foreseeable future in the face.

These are ruinous numbers. Existing entitlement programs are going to have to be ended – not because they’re bad policies (most of them are), but because America cannot afford them.

Why? Because the federal government is broke.

When you’re broke, you can’t spend any more money. You also can’t print any more money without destroying what is already a bad economy. And you can’t tax that bad economy any more than you’ve already done, because you won’t get any additional revenue out of it.

What you absolutely cannot do is take over an entire sector of the economy, either through nationalizing it or through turning insurance companies which make an average profit margin of less than four percent already into subsidized, heavily-regulated monopolies.

You just can’t do it. You don’t have the money.

President Obama and the Democrats say they’ll pay for Obamacare by cutting $500 billion in waste out of Medicare. There is waste in Medicare, waste which could easily have been ferreted out by past presidents by launching sting operations to smoke out fraudsters and then bury them under federal penitentiaries – or better yet, by turning Medicare into a voucher program empowering individual seniors to use the leverage of the market to come up with solutions which work best for them. Instead, Obama is cutting Medicare Advantage, a program which actually works and provides for better health for seniors. But from some of the president’s statements he doesn’t appear to want that – he’d rather just slip some of those seniors a pill and let them fade away so the government doesn’t have to pay for them anymore.

Here’s the problem, though. Kill off the seniors you’ve got, and you’ll find there are just a lot more of them on the way. American life expectancy continues to rise, and probably will for the foreseeable future unless Obamacare completely ruins the health care system.

But because Social Security is broke, and the American people know it, and also because the private retirement accounts of so many Americans were damaged when the stock market nose-dived in 2008, a great many of those seniors the president seems happy to write off will still be in the workforce – assuming their jobs don’t disappear as the economy continues to collapse. They’ll also continue working because the devaluing of the currency our current debt levels – and the growth in that debt Obama’s trillion-dollar deficits will produce – make inflation inevitable, and their retirement income won’t give them the buying power they’ll need to live. So denying them health care won’t save the expense the Democrats think; rather than writing off a bunch of retirees and laying claim to 55 percent of their estates through the Death tax, what they’ll actually be doing is destroying productivity by taking experienced workers out of the workforce.

But on top of this, Obama’s minions in the House purport to sweeten the noxious Senate bill by adding some 2,300 pages or more worth of “reconciliation” language, to include even more entitlements like a federal takeover of the student loan industry which is certain to generate runaway inflation in higher education (the current availability of Pell grants and subsidized student loans has already run costs through the roof) and likely break state governments’ ability to provide four-year educational degrees for average students. In no reasonable scenario can this action produce long-term savings, meaning the government is spending even more money that it doesn’t have when cutbacks on current student loan subsidies are what is required given the dire straits we’re in.

I could go on. The fact is, the resources do not exist for a larger federal role in health care, and it is the height of insanity for it to attempt to effect one.

After all, the federal government is broke.

Originally posted at TheHayride.com.

Studio executives tell Time Magazine, whose film critic though Green Zone was just swell, that they’ll be enthralled with only losing $110-120 million on the film.

That’s probably a very optimistic expectation.

The top-grossing film about the modern Middle East was The Kingdom, which was a shoot-em-up action vehicle starring Jamie Foxx that was more patriotic than political. That flick did just under $50 million at the box office. The rest of the gaggle – Syriana, In The Valley Of Elah, Lions For Lambs, Rendition, Stop-Loss and others – did far less. Even this year’s Best Picture award-winner The Hurt Locker, which is much less political than the bulk of the rest, sits at only $26 million, though by the time its numbers are finally tabulated it’s likely to have turned a profit off DVD sales.

Hollywood has lost an absolute fortune on Iraq War movies in the past seven years. Why? A number of reasons, but a primary one largely being that the American people simply don’t trust Hollywood on politics. The American people see Hollywood as a symbol of cultural decay far more than an elite to be emulated – and when dingbats and dopeheads like Lindsey Lohan, Alec Baldwin and Ed Begley, Jr. constantly harangue the public about left-wing politics in between rehab sessions, beating up the help and making sex tapes, the mood of the country toward its entertainment industry increasingly hardens. We’re simply not interested in what they have to say. We know they’re not smarter than we are, we know they’re no more educated than we are and we know they’re no more informed or in touch than we are. And we know they’re in over their heads when they try to tell us about big, real-life issues.

And since so many of the people of this country have family and/or friends engaged in the military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are simply in no mood to listen to their activities being criticized.

So we vote with our feet.

It’s not just Iraq – the fact is, The Hurt Locker is by all indications a perfectly balanced and even vaguely patriotic effort, though it still faces tough sledding among a public poisoned by previous Middle East war movies. Hollywood’s leftism as a whole has fouled a large segment of its market. Even some of the really good films in the last several years turn audiences off – a perfect example was Iron Man, an otherwise great movie which inexplicably wasn’t satisfied with Al Qaeda as villains and had to install above them an American businessman trying to make a buck as the ultimate bad guy. And of course there’s the latest version of this meme, Avatar, which took off-the-wall leftism over a cliff in going out of its way to insult the American private sector and its military. Talk to most people who have seen Avatar and you’ll hear amazement at the cinematography and creativity of its filmmaking, but few find the story a particularly intelligent or relevant one.

The 40 percent of America which is conservative is long past irritated at being preached to by what it sees as degenerate dunces. The 35 percent of the country which is moderate is now generally unimpressed as well. Thus when Hollywood makes “message” films, or even attempts to insert a message into what is supposed to be entertainment, all too often they’re in a position to reach only about 25 percent of the public which is liberal or on the far fringes of the political spectrum with enthusiastic support.

It’s bad business, and it’s symptomatic of an entertainment industry which long ago detached itself from the mainstream. Meanwhile, you have the example of Mel Gibson’s The Passion Of The Christ, which was an unapologetically traditional Christian film the film establishment laughed itself out of breath at – until the box-office numbers came in and Gibson blew away all expectations – showing that traditional, religious, center-right America will respond when it is presented with films coming from viewpoints with which it can identify. Great examples can be found in Nile Gardiner’s list of the Top 10 conservative films of all time, virtually all of which were smash hits at the box office. In fact, Movieguide.org has done a study indicating that pro-American, pro-capitalist and pro-religious films far outperform lefty movies even despite the box-office success of Avatar.

Ultimately, studio executives can count. Will the debacle of Green Zone finally sober the moviemakers into toning down their politics and focusing on entertainment? Don’t hold your breath. But eventually the market will force its players into compliance – and if Hollywood won’t address this issue, it might eventually lose its grip on the entertainment industry in an increasingly competitive global theater.

Is that what’s happening now?

Not exactly. First of all, inflation isn’t a major problem. It’s currently sitting at 2.6 percent, which isn’t a particularly problematic number. And despite all the bailouts and wads of government stimulus cash injected into the economy we’re not seeing a great deal of pent-up consumer demand being released, as was expected when stimulus dollars were spent. Call it a consumer confidence issue if you want, call it a public who for the most part perceives that we have enough cars and big-screen TV’s and would rather spend our excess income getting out of debt or call it far too many people unemployed or underemployed to spend any money. Call it whatever you want, but inflation isn’t choking off economic growth at this point – largely because there isn’t any growth to choke off.

But we are definitely beginning to see a rollover. Yesterday, BusinessInsider.com’s Clusterstock blog ran a graph from the Consumer Metrics Institute, which runs a Daily Growth Index out of “data for a range of major discretionary purchases such as cars, houses, durable goods, and vacations.”

And the Daily Growth Index, which had tanked in the second half of 2008, managed to bottom out and begin recovering last year – and particularly during the summer and early fall as a result of cash-for-clunkers and the new home buyer tax credit (which apparently James O’Keefe will be exposing as rife with waste and fraud soon). As you can see from the graph at left, the transactions the Consumer Metrics Institute has tabulated into the DGI have generally tracked quite well against the official quarterly GDP figures.

But the DGI has gone down the tubes of late. Growth has fallen and as of now we’re back in negative territory. Based on its data, we apparently are entering the second leg of the double-dip recession the doom-and-gloom economists have warned us about.

Clusterstock has another graph to show.

This one is the Aruoba-Diebold-Scotti business conditions index, put out by the Philadelphia Fed. And with it, you can see another example of a rollover and downturn.

The Philly Fed index blends a bunch of different indicators both of high frequency and low, plus stock and flow data. It counts weekly initial jobless claims; monthly payroll employment, industrial production, personal income less transfer payments, manufacturing and trade sales; and quarterly real GDP to create its numbers. And while it didn’t show a rollover into negative territory until about a month ago, it shows the economy moving south at what looks like an increasing clip.

If you look around, you’ll find graphs like this in a number of places. Perhaps we’re just seeing a seasonal belch and it’s no big deal. But perhaps we aren’t. And it’s fairly obvious that nothing coming out of either Washington or Wall Street is inspiring confidence that the economy is coming back.

So when graphs like these start popping up on all the financial blogs and economic sites, it’s troubling. Very troubling. We’re not out of the woods.

MacAoidh regularly blogs on Louisiana and national politics at TheHayride.

U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-Metairie), who is a member of both the Energy and Commerce committee (chaired by Henry Waxman) and more specifically the Energy and Environment subcommittee chaired by Edward Markey, had an excellent op/ed piece in the Shreveport Times Monday stressing that the efforts to impose federal control over the fracking technique put thousands of high-paying jobs in the lurch. It’s a well-written, passionate missive which captures the sense of frustration and outrage felt by many in and out of the state’s energy sector who understand the potential of the shale gas revolution to create an economic engine for Louisiana and the nation as a whole…

Instead of a comprehensive national energy policy that would create jobs, this administration and the liberals running Congress are trying to ram through a “cap and trade” national energy tax that would ship millions of jobs overseas and raise energy prices on American families. And these same people continue to threaten our energy security through attempts to put an end to critical technologies like fracturing.

Turning the regulation of fracturing over to the EPA is not only unnecessary but would represent nothing more than a one-size-fits-all power grab by those who oppose responsible, 21st-century American energy production. Louisiana, along with virtually every other energy-producing state, already has comprehensive laws in place to protect drinking water sources and ensure that shale gas production does not compromise the environment.

Because of these effective state protections — and the commitment from industry — fracturing has been used in more than 1 million wells throughout the U.S. without a single case of groundwater contamination. Not one in 60 years. The EPA confirmed this fact at a recent Senate hearing. And just weeks ago, a top EPA drinking-water official said, “State regulators are doing a good job overseeing hydrofracking, and there’s no evidence the process causes water contamination.”
Fracturing is not only a safe way of increasing our nation’s domestic energy supply, but it is a proven way to reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, create good American jobs and keep energy prices stable for struggling families, senior citizens and small businesses.

The American people deserve common-sense solutions that will help redirect our weakened economy. We should promote ideas that create jobs and harness — not stifle — the American ingenuity that has helped us become the greatest nation in the world.

Another member of Louisiana’s congressional delegation, U.S. Rep. John Fleming (R-Minden), took to the House floor last week to denounce Waxman and Markey’s efforts to intrude on fracking…

Scalise’s piece in the Times and Fleming’s speech on the House floor aren’t the only developments on the issue arising from the actions of Louisiana elected officials. House Concurrent Resolution 38, recently filed in advance of the coming Louisiana legislative session, reflects a bipartisan and statewide statement to Congress that Waxman and Markey should keep their hands off fracking and shale gas. The diversity of HCR 38′s authorship shows that Louisiana speaks with a strong and unified voice on the issue, and expectations are that it will pass both houses either unanimously or very near to it.

HCR 38′s authors include a couple of Republicans and five Democrats – Joe Harrison (R-Gray), Bobby Badon (D-Carencro), Robert Billiot (D-Westwego), Henry Burns (R-Haughton), Jerry Gisclair (D-Larose), Reed Henderson (D-Chalmette) and Karen Gaudet St. Germain (D-Plaquemine). It’s pretty strong stuff for a legislative resolution…

A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION
To memorialize the United States Congress to take such actions as are necessary to preserve and maintain the exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act for hydraulic fracturing.

WHEREAS, the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) was originally passed by congress in 1974 to protect public health by regulating the nation’s public drinking water supply; and

WHEREAS, since the 1974 enactment of the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has never interpreted hydraulic fracturing as constituting “underground injection” within the definitions of the SDWA; and

WHEREAS, in 2004, the EPA published a final report summarizing a study that evaluated the potential threat to underground drinking water sources from hydraulic fracturing of coal bed methane production wells and the EPA concluded that “the injection of hydraulic fracturing fluids into coal bed methane wells poses minimal threat” to underground sources of drinking water and that “additional or further study is not warranted at this time . . .”; and

WHEREAS, in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the United States Congress explicitly exempted hydraulic fracturing from the provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act; and

WHEREAS, the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC) conducted a survey of oil and gas producing states which found that there were no known cases of groundwater contamination associated with hydraulic fracturing; and

WHEREAS, hydraulic fracturing is currently, and has been for decades, a common practice used in exploration and production by the oil and gas industry in all IOGCC member states without groundwater damage; and

WHEREAS, approximately thirty-five thousand wells are hydraulically fractured in the United States annually, and close to a million wells have been hydraulically fractured in the United States since the technique’s inception, all with no known harm to groundwater; and

WHEREAS, the regulation of oil and gas exploration and production activities, including hydraulic fracturing, has traditionally been the responsibility of the states and the Safe Drinking Water Act was never intended to grant to the federal government authority to regulate oil and gas drilling and production operations, such as “hydraulic fracturing”, which is regulated under the Underground Injection Control program; and

WHEREAS, the individual member states of the IOGCC have adopted comprehensive laws and regulations to provide safe operations and to protect the nation’s drinking water sources, and have trained personnel to effectively regulate oil and gas exploration and production; and

WHEREAS, production of coal seam natural gas, natural gas from shale formations, and natural gas from tight conventional reservoirs is becoming increasingly important to our domestic natural gas supply and will be even more important in the future; and

WHEREAS, continued and expanded domestic production of natural gas will help ensure that the United States continues on the path to energy independence; and

WHEREAS, hydraulic fracturing plays a major role in the development of virtually all unconventional oil and gas resources and regulation of hydraulic fracturing as underground injection under the SDWA would impose significant administrative costs on the states and substantially increase the cost of drilling oil and gas wells with no resulting environmental benefits; and

WHEREAS, in addition to increasing the costs both to the producers of oil and gas resources and the states for regulation of hydraulic fracturing as underground injection under the SDWA, the costs to the consumer would also increase if hydraulic fracturing was limited or prohibited.

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Legislature of Louisiana does hereby memorialize the United States Congress to take such actions as are necessary to preserve and maintain the exemption from the Safe Drinking Water Act for hydraulic fracturing.

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that a copy of this Resolution be transmitted to the presiding officers of the Senate and the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States of America and to each member of the Louisiana congressional delegation.

Back to Congress – also on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and in fact also on the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee, is Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-Napoleonville) – who is running for the U.S. Senate and last week quit a position on the House Budget Committee for the express purpose of focusing on his work at Energy and Commerce.

A search of press releases on Melancon’s congressional website shows no comment on hydraulic fracturing in 2010. Or in 2009.

Gray’s rather impolite and certainly non-inclusive statements don’t represent much of a big-tent mentality. After all, we’re constantly regaled with admonishments about how the Republican Party needs to broaden its membership; one assumes the Democrats should do the same.

That Rogers happens to be African-American doesn’t factor into her exclusion. Rather, she’s being shunned because she comes from the Lyndon LaRouche camp and ran a primary campaign on impeaching President Obama and in so doing prosecute a war against the British Empire.

OK, she’s a nut. But so what? Being a lunatic or a moron has never been a disqualifier for nomination or even election as a Democrat, particularly in Congress. How else did Alan Grayson, Pete Stark, Maxine Waters, Dennis Kucinich or Sheila Jackson-Lee get as far as they’ve gotten?

Given the state of the Texas Democrat Party, perhaps they’d like some friendly advice from the other side – it’s important that you guys make an effort to be inclusive. You’ll never get anywhere insisting on ideological purity from all your candidates. After all, Miz Rogers was the people’s choice in the primary; shouldn’t she be given a chance to win by the state’s Democrat machine?

Rogers’ opponent particularly ought to suck it up and support her. Instead, Doug Blatt, the “mainstream Democrat” in the race, was very unpleasant and non-supportive in his concession speech…

“I’m sorry to inform you that we lost.

“The winner, Kesha Rogers, is already claiming on her web site that this means that voters in the 22nd District want to impeach the President.

“I can’t believe that most people who voted for her knew that she wants to do that.

“I do believe that most of them didn’t do any research about the candidates before voting.”

Insulting your base and calling them stupid only points out that you’re a party without ideas. It seems Texas Democrats are due for quite some time in the wilderness; a rump party run by old white men with expired philosophies which don’t resonate with younger, hipper voters.

Right?

“I make no apologies for seeking this provision. I don’t back-up an inch.”

So said Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu, who took to the Senate floor today in defense of the Louisiana Purchase – the $300 million deal described as a bribe or political prostitution by her detractors.

Landrieu offered a fiery, indignant speech reacting to more than two months of ridicule and opposition by political opponents for her negotiated vote, denying that she engaged in backroom dealing or that she sold out her vote.

“I don’t need this job badly enough — maybe some people do, I don’t — to throw the people of my state under the bus to protect myself politically,” she said.

“Nothing about this effort was secret — it was public from the very first meeting that happened at the governor’s mansion in January,” Landrieu continued. “It was a broadly supported delegation effort from the beginning. And it was never a condition of my support for the bill.

“There should be some concerns about specific arrangements that were made, or for specific promises of support. This was not one of them. And the record will show that.”

Landrieu’s contention from the beginning was that her action in demanding the $300 million in federal dollars to compensate the state for a funding glitch arising from imperfections in the federal Medicaid formula represented nothing more than doing the bidding of Louisiana’s governor, Bobby Jindal. It is true that Jindal began asking Landrieu and other members of the state’s Congressional delegation for an adjustment in the formula as early as January of 2009, so in that respect Landrieu has a point. However, the Senate health-care bill of which her constituents overwhelmingly disapprove was anything but the first opportunity to address the issue.

The Senator has taken a rather sharp edge against Jindal since the criticism of her dealmaking has arisen, and in today’s speech she was even sharper in expressing anger about his nonchalant reaction to the furor. “It takes guts (to be a leader). Some people have more of that than others,” she spat.

For his part, Jindal continued his policy of noncommittal statements toward Landrieu. He declined to address Landrieu’s comments and wouldn’t defend Landrieu’s Louisiana Purchase deal. He said the Senate health care bill is a bad deal for Louisiana and should be voted down regardless of Landrieu’s $300 million being included – as Jindal and his staff have pointed out, the state could be faced with as much as a billion dollars a year in additional Medicaid costs as a result of the federal government adding millions of lower-income Americans to the rolls and then dumping an unfunded mandate on the states. That ongoing unfunded mandate dwarfs Landrieu’s one-time $300 million score.

Jindal did call the current problem with the FMAP (Federal Medicaid Assistance Percentage) formula “the most serious challenge facing our state.”

“I think it is absolutely important for our delegation to continue to work, and our delegation must work across party lines and across chambers to get this done,” he said.

Following the speech, Landrieu told reporters that James O’Keefe, the conservative activist arrested at her New Orleans offices after attempting to do an expose on her staff’s refusal or inability to answer phone calls from angry constituents reacting to the Louisana Purchase, was not the reason she took to the Senate floor.

“What I said about the gentleman that’s rattling off is he should save his excuses for the judge. He’s going to need them.”

- Willie Sutton, on why he robbed banks (quote may be apochryphal)

Just when you thought the Obama administration had reached the pinnacle of brain-dead, asinine legislation with the idea of exempting unions from “Cadillac plan” taxes on employer-provided health insurance, along comes the biggest flea-bitten dog to date.

Yes, describing today’s rollout by the president of a $90 billion smash-and-grab of America’s bank vaults as the worst yet. Worse than Waxman-Markey, worse than the GM bailouts, worse than the stimulus and even worse than health care. This effervescent turd isn’t on the scale of some of those legislative packages, no doubt, but for sheer demogoguery and counterproductivity this one takes the prize.

Why? Let’s go through it.

“We want our money back,”Obama said today in introducing this monstrosity. “And we’re going to get it.”

That by itself is a bad signal. The president using a first-person possessive to describe TARP money is off-putting, and whoever loaded that phrase onto his teleprompter did him a disservice. At the least he could have said “the American people want their money back,” though on a day when the American people say they want Obama out of office by a 50-39 vote maybe the president is a little squeamish about trying to speak for us right now.

In such a case, the “we” might be more accurately seen as the Beltway Redistribution Society Obama chairs, and that’s a group which has no problem laying claim to anyone else’s money.

On to the particulars.

The president’s bill would create a “Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee” that would kick in against, as TheHill.com notes…

…roughly 50 financial firms each with at least $50 billion in assets, an administration official said on Wednesday. Of those, 35 would be U.S. firms, 15 would be subsidiaries of foreign-owned firms and 27 would be U.S. banks, the official said.??The 10 largest firms would likely account for 60 percent of the total fee revenue over the decade, the official said.

The fee is 15 basis points (0.15 percent) of each of these banks’ assets not including “core” capital, which assumedly excludes FDIC-insured deposits. This is expected to bring the government some $90 billion in revenue over 10 years – or better put, to take $90 billion out of the private economy over the next 10 years. Considering that banks tend to loan money out in a multiple of 10 against their assets, pulling $90 billion out of their asset portfolio with this tax is akin to shrinking the ability of the banking system to loan money by nearly a trillion dollars over the course of this decade.

The outright stupidity of this is so elementary it’s breathtaking. Virtually anyone can see that robbing banks of capital in a lousy economy is a destructive, idiotic policy.

So how does the president present this plan? Let’s go back to TheHill.com’s piece:

“The financial industry has even launched a massive lobbying campaign, locking arms with the opposition party to stand in the way of reforms to prevent another crisis,” Obama said.

“What I’d say to these executives is this: Instead of sending a phalanx of lobbyists to fight this proposal, or employing an army of lawyers and accountants to help evade the fee, I’d suggest you might want to consider simply meeting your responsibilities and I’d urge you to cover the costs of the rescue not by sticking it to your shareholders or your customers or fellow citizens with the bill, but by rolling back bonuses for top earners and executives.

“And more broadly, I am continuing to call on these firms to put greater effort into helping families stay in their homes, to provide small businesses with needed loans and to embrace, rather than fight, serious financial reform,” he added.

In other words, because private banks – most of which received TARP funds and paid them back at government-issued insurance rates – have now become profitable again and have therefore sought to reward their top managers who have been able to generate black ink again, it’s time to sock them in the mouth with increased taxes.

Those same banks are also supposed to do their civic duty and write down bad loans, when doing so directly affects their capital ratios, rather than exercise their First Amendment rights to petition the government against policies which would even more negatively affect their capital ratios. Let’s not even go into Obama’s suggestion that bankers have less of a right to attorneys than jihadists who carry explosives next to their scrotums in an effort to kill his countrymen over a major U.S. city.

“If these companies are in good enough shape to afford massive bonuses, they are surely in good enough shape to afford paying back every penny to taxpayers,” he added.

According to the Wall Street Journal, it seems pretty clear that the White House thinks this is an issue that can turn things around against a mounting Republican surge. “If you want to be on the side of the big banks, this is a great country. You’re free to do so,” said lead White House flack Robert Gibbs.

The fact is, whether you like the big banks or not is immaterial. Should they be giving bonuses to top managers? Probably not – but if they’ve paid TARP money back it is none of Mr. Obama’s damn business what those bank managers are making. The stockholders of those companies are more than capable of punishing them for paying out stupid bonuses, and their customers are more than capable of taking their deposits or credit accounts and going to some other bank if they don’t like what J.P. Morgan or Wells Fargo is paying their CEO. Demogoguing the issue of what somebody makes for a living in order that the federal government gives itself the power to punish companies for microeconomic choices they should be free to make whether it stings Obama’s nostrils or not is Hugo Chavez banana-republic dictatorship, not American rule of law.

Not to mention that virtually everybody knows the banks will pass this tax on to their consumers, making loans more expensive to pay off and hurting borrowers and depositors alike. None of which helps to grow the economy; the last thing the American people, who have already decided it’s time to rein in spending and ride out the storm, need is to see less disposable income in each paycheck. Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett made clear the administration knows this; she told ABC News that “…what I would say to them from a PR perspective is: How does it look to pass on those fees to your customers….”

Oh, but the banks aren’t loaning enough money, comes the response, and that’s why they need to get the stick.

Well, no kidding. And why do you think that’s the case?

First, it’s risky to loan money now. Who’s borrowing? Some guy who wants to build houses or shopping malls? Yeah, that’s a great credit risk right now. Some guy who wants to start a business? He’s got to be out of his mind in this economy. Some nice lady who wants to buy a house? How stable is her employment situation?

Second, while banks are making money these days they lost a colossal amount before the financial crisis bottomed out. You don’t take a major shot to the shorts like these guys took without it taking a while to rebuild. As such, even the banks which took TARP funds are still undercapitalized compared to where they were three or four years ago; it is completely unreasonable to assume that their lending capacity, much less their courage and willingness to put cash on the street, is going to be what it was then for some time.

Third, banks are scared to lend precisely because of idiotic spectacles like the president and his minions put on today. The investment community uses the term “political risk” in describing the downside of investing in banana republics like Kenya and Indonesia, and it understandably tries to hedge against the governments of those places walking away with large chunks of its capital through hook, crook or dictate once it’s invested.

Something similar is obviously going on now here in America. With Obama’s auto bailouts, in which BONDHOLDERS, including some of these selfsame financial institutions, were bent over and ravaged with vigor in flagrant defiance of established contract and bankruptcy law, following upon the total demogoguery and incompetence of TARP and the AIG situation, including how the government attempted to jury-rig legislation to get at a different set of executive bonuses, and now health care bills in which Democrat constituencies are treated as if they’re nobility while the rest of us are made to pay and pay, lenders are now seeing an America where the rules currently in place could be gone with the next set of deals cut behind closed doors in Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid’s offices.

Fourth, banks have figured out that they can borrow money from the Fed at virtually zero percent interest in return for buying Treasuries at a minimum three percent rate. Going back to Point One above, if you can make a profit with what is right now zero risk there is no reason whatsoever to engage in private-sector lending when private-sector borrowers are undercapitalized themselves and might default, leaving the lender with busted businesses or depressed real estate to show for a bad loan. In other words, this is a classic example of the government “crowding out” the private sector. If Obama wants to know why the banks aren’t lending to the people, maybe he should look to his own house.

But no, rather than fix the stupid, destructive and invasive policies already in place which are perverting the market and retarding economic growth, Obama has decided the beatings will continue until morale improves. Michelle Malkin says this entire fiasco was cooked up to hide the ball on the thoroughly corrupt and incompetent performance of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner when he was the chairman of the New York Fed and helped put together the worst excesses of the TARP program in the first place.

Geithner’s work to hide the identity of AIG’s counterparties, when those entities were quite apparently the real reason for the urgency of Bailout Nation in the first place, raises lots of suspicion. Some have surmised the roster of counterparties is going to include a whole lot of sovereign wealth funds from oil-exporting countries who don’t particularly like America, not to mention the ubiquitous George Soros, and that’s why it’s so important to keep their identities quiet to the American people. I don’t know whether any of that is true, but as Malkin says we may get a chance to find out when Geithner goes in for a Congressional rectal exam next week.

Perhaps Geithner will be asked why the real culprits in trashing the financial system, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, aren’t going to be hit with the bank tax despite their having taken colossal bailouts and paid out gangster-roll bonuses to their top people. Or perhaps he’ll be asked why the auto companies, whose bailouts actually represent the majority of the projected TARP losses, are included in this latest bit of legislative chicanery.

It probably doesn’t matter. It’s highly unlikely this idiotic bill will pass, despite the attempt by Obama and the Democrats to paint the GOP as the Party of Wall Street Banks in advance of the November elections. It would seem this is all by design; given the quality of governance the Democrats have given us in the past year they’re desperate to find an issue they can hang their hats on, and a Republican filibuster of the bank tax would, they clearly think, serve as just such a life raft. That’s why today we saw Obama use tougher language on bankers than he has ever used against Chavez, Ahmedinejad or Kim Jong-Il.

What we’re seeing is the true extent of Obama’s much-ballyhooed transparency. It only applies to his political ploys – not his governance.

See more at The Hayride.

From California comes an interesting bit of news on the Bush-era controversy surrounding embryonic stem cell research.

Remember stem cells? That was a red-hot issue in the previous decade, as it had all the hallmarks of the classic left-wing meme; the Luddite Christians standing in the way of a glorious scientific revolution due to their quaint and obsolete notions on abortion and their overheated morality.

The facts were inconvenient pebbles in the road of that discussion, as the Bush administration spent more money on stem cell research than all its predecessors combined; the president objected on moral grounds to the widespread use of embryonic stem cells, however, and asked that the focus of federally-funded stem cell research be on adult stem cells. Bush was pilloried as absolutist and neanderthal by the pro-abortion Left for his stance. Things got so bad that in the 2004 election that Democrat vice presidential candidate, recurring National Enquirer poster boy and general obnoxious cad John Edwards made the breathtaking accusation that but for Bush’s intransigence, paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve (since deceased) would walk again.

According to an Investors Business Daily piece this week, the former president had science, as well as morality, on his side.

While Bush was blocking federal National Institutes of Health funds from fueling embryonic stem cell research, an initiative in California – Proposition 71, otherwise known as the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative – was passed by a 59-41 referendum in 2004. Prop 71 established a massive $3 billion California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to push embryonic stem cell research. The plan had the backing of most of Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the new governor Arnold Schwarzenegger; it was opposed by the Catholic Church and the Christian Right – including that nutty Mel Gibson – and the usual pro-life groups decried as mouth-breathers by the Left.

Five-plus years later, the results are in. Adult stem cells can produce results, while embryonic stem cell research is a dead end. As the IBD article states:

Supporters of the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative, passed in 2004, held out hopes of imminent medical miracles that were being held up only by President Bush’s policy of not allowing federal funding of embryonic stem cell research (ESCR) beyond existing stem cell lines and which involved the destruction of embryos created for that purpose.

Five years later, ESCR has failed to deliver and backers of Prop 71 are admitting failure. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the state agency created to, as some have put it, restore science to its rightful place, is diverting funds from ESCR to research that has produced actual therapies and treatments: adult stem cell research. It not only has treated real people with real results; it also does not come with the moral baggage ESCR does.

And more…

Prop 71 had a 10-year mandate and by 2008, as miracle cures looked increasingly unlikely, a director was hired for the agency with a track record of bringing discoveries from the lab to the clinic. “If we went 10 years and had no clinical treatments, it would be a failure,” says the institute’s director, Alan Trounson, a stem cell pioneer from Australia. “We need to demonstrate that we are starting a whole new medical revolution.”

The institute is attempting to do that by funding adult stem cell research. Nearly $230 million was handed out this past October to 14 research teams. Notably, only four of those projects involve embryonic stem cells.

Another example of the forward progress with adult stem cells compared to the dead end with the embryonic variety came from yesterday’s Baton Rouge Advocate – TCA Cellular Therapy, LLC, a Covington-based firm, has won FDA approval for a clinical trial using adult stem cells to treat Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It’s one of 73 treatments currently being tested or utilized involving adult stem cells; at present there are none using the embryonic variety.

Going even further than the IBD article is Joe Carter at the First Things Blog, who essentially characterizes advocates of embryonic stem cell research as kissing cousins with the anthropogenic global warming crowd:

Advocates of ESCR preyed on the scientific and ethical illiteracy of the general public to support the massive funding of this speculative research. The complexity of the issue and the peculiar terminology used often prevented many citizens from developing a fully informed opinion on the matter. They relied on the “experts” and the ESCR supporters took full advantage of this trust by making claims that had no basis in reality. As Ronald D.G. McKay, a stem cell researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said in 2004 about the claims that ESCR could lead to cures for Alzheimer’s, “To start with, people need a fairy tale. Maybe that’s unfair, but they need a story line that’s relatively simple to understand.”

The lesson here is that taxpayer dollars get wasted and the political culture is poisoned when hucksterism is disguised as science – and then presented as the government-sponsored path to a Brave New World if only the religious or otherwise conservative crowd would shut up. It happened with embryonic stem cell research, it happened with anthropogenic global warming, it’s happened countless times before and it will happen again.

And you’re definitely not supposed to tell the members to “shut up.”

For all his positive qualities, and he’s not without some of those, Michael Steele has had an “interesting” past several months as chairman of the Republican National Committee. Little surprise, then, that a new site devoted to his ouster as the party’s lead dog has sprung up from the ether.

Baton Rouge blogger and Republican state committee member Ryan Booth, whose writings can be found at TheHayride.com, debuted DumpSteele.com this week. It’s a site devoted to a devastating indictment of Steele’s performance atop the RNC, an ongoing chronicle of his foibles, a strategy for removing Steele from his job and a full disclosure of the site’s origins and backing.

On the latter, Booth takes great pains to make clear this is not a front for some insidious conspiracy by those Steele beat for the RNC chair position last year. He was a supporter of former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell for the job in last year’s voting, but would prefer someone with a national profile, like Sarah Palin or Fred Thompson, to replace Steele. It’s an outsider’s crusade – something conservatives frustrated with the GOP’s inability to fuse a coalition with the Tea Party movement have been pining for while watching unremarkable fundraising numbers and the lack of a clear message coming out of the party in the past year.

Booth says the key to Steele’s ouster is gaining the support of the 168 RNC members, specifically the 112 (two-thirds) necessary to carry such a motion. Every state and territory has three – the state chairman, committeeman and committeewoman. He’ll be posting the names of each RNC member who publicly supports Steele’s removal on the site and contact information for each member in the coming days, while asking readers to contact the members from their state and asking that something be done to change the leadership at the top.

The RNC has four meetings a year, with the Winter Meeting being held Jan. 25 in Honolulu. That meeting isn’t expected to go well for Steele regardless of Dumpsteele.com’s existence. The members are expected to vote on a motion calling for Steele to end the book tour he’s begun in support of his book “Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda.” Steele is under a torrent of criticism from past RNC chairmen for what they see as his using his position for undue personal financial gain, a criticism Booth echoes, and his supporters on the RNC have attempted to defend the outspoken chairman by alleging that legendary RNC chairman and current Mississippi governor Haley Barbour also wrote a book during his time leading the party. Problem is, Barbour’s book was written on behalf of the National Policy Forum, a think tank he helped found, and all the proceeds of its sale were donated back to the group.

The site makes a very strong case for Steele’s ouster, and it’s a compelling read. It’s not something Steele wants anybody to see, particularly if he expects his fellow Republicans to “shut up.”

Here’s why it’s going to fail…

First, this business with the labor unions taking a powder on the provision taxing high-end health plans in the Senate version of Obamacare is very, very bad for the legislation. The unions have been a colossal player both in creating a Barack Obama presidency and supplying him with a governing Democrat majority, and also in pushing Obamacare last year – unions spent millions and millions and millions of dollars pushing the plan. On Monday, they weighed in with unmistakable language panning the Senate bill and demanding that rather than taxing “Cadillac” health care plans that unions have negotiated with management over the years, that the final bill includes a tax on incomes over $500,000 a year instead (which is what the House bill had).

Obama had an emergency meeting Monday night with the heads of several labor unions, in an effort to paper over the crisis. No agreement was reached, though union leaders like the AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka said the legislation is “too important for us to get this close and then say we quit.”

Trumka did say, in typical union-speak, that if he doesn’t get what he wants the Democrats will get crushed in this fall’s elections.

“Politicians who think that working people have it too good—too much health care, too much Social Security and Medicare, too much power on the job—are inviting a repeat of 1994,” Trumka said. “Our country cannot afford such a repeat.”

He’s not alone.

The head of the International Association of Firefighters, Harold A. Schaitberger, made similarly threatening remarks in a statement Monday. “The president’s support for the excise tax is a huge disappointment and cannot be ignored. If President Obama continues to support it and signs a bill that includes the excise tax on workers, we will hold him accountable,” said Schaitberger, who was not among the attendees at the White House meeting.

It’s a mess for the President and his minions on Capitol Hill. The labor unions are in a position to force either a switch to the millionaire tax in the House bill, which will engender major problems of its own, or to water down the Cadillac bill tax and in so doing blow a hole in the budget which endangers several Democrat votes in both the Senate and the House. It’s an almost intractable problem these guys have gotten themselves into.

Second, the bribes are a major problem. The outrage over Mary Landrieu’s Louisiana Purchase and Ben Nelson’s Cornhusker Kickback has brought opposition to this bill to a new level. And it gets worse; C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb blew open a major hole in the president’s rhetoric when he demanded that the negotiations over the bill be televised. When Lamb’s letter was followed by a video from Andrew Breitbart showing EIGHT separate occasions when Candidate Obama promised to put the healthcare negotiations on C-SPAN, it was a colossal embarrassment to all concerned. Members of Congress and Senators alike are now asking that Nelson’s Medicaid bribe either be wiped off the books or that all concerned get to wet their beaks, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has flip-flopped on healthcare and cut the president deep with a one-liner about Nebraska getting the corn and California the husk and there is even now a controversy about the fact that the Amish are exempt from the plan and there is enough sleaze here to peel off squeamish Democrats on multiple fronts before one even gets into the question of how Harry Reid’s stupid statements on race might affect his ability to generate a deal.

Third, the abortion issue is a nightmare for this bill. Bear in mind that the House version passed with only 220 votes, one of which was from Joseph Cao, the Republican from New Orleans who has said he won’t be a deciding vote in favor of final passage. Cao also is unlikely to vote for anything less than the Stupak Amendment which was watered down in the Senate bill. Strip him out, and the margin for error is almost nonexistent. As partisan Democrat pundit Bob Shrum opines on TheWeek.com:

(Abortion) roiled the debate from the start; but over the Christmas break, Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak, who voted for the House version of reform, issued a threat via the front page of the New York Times to oppose legislation that includes the Senate abortion compromise, which is less draconian than his own amendment. The original House bill passed by only five votes. Stupak claims he has 10 House members prepared to follow his lead and switch if the Senate language isn’t changed. In effect, he’s said he won’t settle for anything less than a system that, in the guise of denying public funding for abortion—something the Senate bill actually does—also prevents Americans from purchasing abortion coverage with their own money.

Stupak noted that his position was a product of his Roman Catholic faith. This is a simple-minded reading of the relationship between religion and the public sphere. As both Ted Kennedy and Mario Cuomo argued a generation ago—Kennedy in the lion’s den of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Baptist University, and Cuomo at the Catholic stronghold of Notre Dame—in a free and pluralistic society, not every command of faith can be written into secular law. Otherwise, for example, the Catholic bishops might be pushing to outlaw divorce—a cause for which they have lobbied in other countries.

Here in America, the bishops have been unable to persuade a majority to ban abortion. It’s not for lack of trying; they’ve become overt political actors—assailing John Kerry in the 2004 campaign and Joe Biden in 2008 because both are Catholics who refuse to subordinate their judgments on public policy to church doctrine.

This is a long way from the commitment John Kennedy, the first Catholic president, offered during his 1960 campaign—to “an America where no public official requests or accepts instructions…from…any…ecclesiastical source, where no religion seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly on the public acts of officials.” Half a century later, the bishops are attempting to achieve by indirection what they cannot achieve outright—a partial ban on a woman’s right to choose. Having abetted thousands of priests in molesting children, they’re now set on abusing health reform.

All this not only transgresses the line drawn by JFK in 1960; it’s also at odds with the social teachings I learned in Catholic school. The bishops would deny health coverage to more than 30 million Americans by blocking a compromise that plainly spends no taxpayer dollars for abortion services. Stupak echoes their hard line. If health reform goes down, he said, “it’s not the end of the world.” (Certainly not of his world; he won’t be giving up his own generous congressional health insurance coverage.)

Take those three fatal wounds waiting to happen, and the chance of actually steering this monstrosity through to final passage in the midst of an American public which hates this legislation like poison drops below levels even the Reids and Pelosis can handle. Politically this thing is a nightmare and November looms as an electoral holocaust for the party.

But it seems there’s an escape hatch up in Massachusetts. And this is how I think things will play out.

A couple of days ago, I would have said Scott Brown will scare the heck out of Democrats by coming so close to winning Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat. But that has changed. Brown is now more than just a long shot to beat Martha Coakley; a new Rasmussen poll has Brown moving within two points of Coakley after trailing by nine a week ago. That’s a major movement in a week for a previously unknown candidate, but it’s also a number which may be out of date already. Because since Rasmussen compiled the numbers on that poll, Brown raised over $1.3 million in a single day yesterday with an online “moneybomb” fundraiser, he beat the daylights out of Coakley in a televised debate and Coakley’s campaign committed the unpardonable sin of misspelling “Massachusettes” in a TV ad attacking Brown. And Rasmussen’s numbers aren’t stand-alone figures; according to an internal Democrat poll Coakley has dropped nine points in one week from plus-14 to plus-5.

The Coakley campaign is in panic mode, so much so that the candidate admits she’s frightened by Brown’s surge, and things have gotten so bad that they’re paying union members $50 to hold signs for Coakley even if those members are voting for Brown…

So unless something unforeseen happens, Brown is going to win this race. It’s going to be one of the most amazing electoral upsets in recent American history, and it will give the Republicans the 41 votes needed to block Obamacare in the Senate. There has, of course, been lots of discussion of late about the Democrats jimmying the vote counts so as not to seat Brown until it’s too late in the event he wins, but I don’t put that much stock in those reports because of the political damage they’ve already suffered as a result. Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick is up for re-election this fall and he’s anything but popular; Patrick probably can’t afford being part of a scheme to screw the people of the state out of their elected senator.

Besides, if a week from now the Democrats in the House and Senate still haven’t overcome all the obstacles to passing this bill, with the ever-mounting public pressure not to pass the thing hitting them daily, the temptation to get out and make excuses will be enormous. Brown beating Coakley and becoming the 41st vote gives the Democrats the out they’re looking for – this way, Nelson and Landrieu – and Bob Casey and Joe Lieberman and Bill Nelson and Blanche Lincoln, for that matter – can still vote for the bill without having to actually inflict it on the American people. And the Democrats will have the ability to go back to their base and blame the whole thing on Republican obstructionism, which is what they want to do anyway. After all, hey – it’s not their fault Ted Kennedy died, right?

Obamacare isn’t going to make it. Scott Brown is going to be both the dagger in its heart and the ready-made excuse not to revive the victim. And the Democrats are going to lament the death of the legislation with the wettest of crocodile tears as they demogogue the issue in front of their voters in an effort to stanch the bleeding this fall.

See more at The Hayride.