redefinedgop:

Once again, I don’t think health care per se was ever really the issue. When pressed, no one in the administration seemed to know whether illegal aliens were covered. Few cared why young people do not divert some of their entertainment expenditures to a modest investment in private catastrophic coverage.

Warnings that Canadians already have their health care rationed, wait in long lines, and are denied timely and critical procedures also did not seem to matter. And no attention was paid to statistics suggesting that, if we exclude homicides and auto accidents, Americans live as long on average as anyone in the industrial world, and have better chances of surviving longer with heart disease and cancer. That the average American did not wish to radically alter his existing plan, and that he understood that the uninsured really did have access to health care, albeit in a wasteful manner at the emergency room, was likewise of no concern.

The issue again was larger, and involved a vast reinterpretation of how America receives health care. Whether more or fewer Americans would get better or worse access and cheaper or more expensive care, or whether the government can or cannot afford such new entitlements, oddly seemed largely secondary to the crux of the debate.

Instead, the notion that the state will assume control, in Canada-like fashion, and level the health-care playing field was the real concern. “They” (the few) will now have the same care as “we” (the many). Whether the result is worse or better for everyone involved is extraneous, since sameness is the overarching principle.

We can discern this same mandated egalitarianism beneath many of the administration’s recent policy initiatives. Obama is not a pragmatist, as he insisted, nor even a liberal, as charged.

Rather, he is a statist. The president believes that a select group of affluent, highly educated technocrats — cosmopolitan, noble-minded, and properly progressive — supported by a phalanx of whiz-kids fresh out of blue-chip universities with little or no experience in the marketplace, can direct our lives far better than we can ourselves. By “better” I do not mean in a fashion that, measured by disinterested criteria, makes us necessarily wealthier, happier, more productive, or freer.

Jake Tapper has more.

notthatkindagay:

Faced with a $666 million revenue shortfall through October 2012, council members crafted a plan, to be voted on Friday, that aims to raise $50 million annually in new revenue while making $103 million in annual spending cuts; these come on top of measures already proposed by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D). Noteworthy are the council’s actions to raise the gasoline tax by 3.5 cents, add 50 cents to the cost of a pack of cigarettes and increase parking fees for government workers. The budget crisis also caused the council to abolish all earmarks, a move no doubt hastened by publicity over Ward 8 council member Marion Barry’s dubious use of the practice.

This city.

Obama moves to D.C. and the budget shortfall is $666 million? I think Daniel may be on to something. Maybe the Mark of the Beast will be an Obama tattoo…. /sarcasm