In the final grapple to get a health care reform bill across the finish line, House Democrats insisted that the bill was “paid for.” Much of  the money to pay for the bill would be found by reducing “fraud and waste,” which savings always sound good on the stump but often prove elusive in [...]

Mr. Waxman doesn’t like them:

Accounting basics:  when a company experiences what accountants call “a material adverse impact” on its expected future earnings, and those changes affect an item that is already on the balance sheet, the company is required to record the negative impact–”to take the charge against earnings”–as soon as it knows [...]

The chattering classes in the US want to have it both ways over the president’s health care victory. It is to be at once  “the most sweeping reform since the Great Society” era of the 1960s and nothing to get all het up about. You racist.

That 53% of the population inclined to wonder [...]

Time for a re-write:

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

President Obama was elected by millions of Americans attracted to his promise to change Washington politics. These were voters furious with earmarks, insider deals and a lack [...]

Yesterday apparently, while I was busily turning processed dinosaur detritus into Bernoullis, an unruly crowd made up entirely of racists and homophobes gathered on the Capitol lawn to protest the president’s health care reform plan.

I mean, what other motivation could there have been to oppose this unprecedented intrusion of government power into that [...]

The Speaker of the House’s preferred strategy on passing the Senate’s health care reform bill seems to be declining to vote on it:

Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) would rely on a procedural sleight of hand: The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for [...]

Even as congressional democrats evince doubts of their own, the president is crisscrossing the country in constant campaign mode. This week’s work is an attempt to convince an increasingly skeptical electorate  that the federal government has the intellectual chops to manage one-sixth of the gross domestic product. All he’s really asking for, he says, [...]

It’s not really about health care, argues Mark Steyn: It’s about government.

And it seems to me that we’ve had quite enough of that, thank you:

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts that Obama’s budget plans would generate deficits over the upcoming decade that would total $9.8 trillion. That’s $1.2 trillion more than predicted [...]

But maybe six will do.

Congressman Paul Ryan, R-WI.