What about Richard Blumenthal? Though he has caught some flack from leftist media types, he would have been drawn and quartered if he were a conservative. Republicans really don’t have it together yet, though. They let John Murtha’s old seat slip through their hands. It seems the public is breaking right so to speak. All Republicans have to do is be coherent and tenacious. In other words, they have to do a better job campaigning in November than I’ve done at blogging as of late. And that my friends is not a huge hurdle to clear.

From the leader of the opposition, at least, was expected a level of decorum. But instead, Rep. John Boehner, the Republican who wants to be the next speaker of the House, predicted “Armageddon,” and shouted “Hell, no!,” his perma-tan turning crimson in rage.

Most of these vignettes are isolated incidents — a few crazies going off in a vein-popping binge. But the Republican Party now has taken some of the worst elements of Tea Party anger and incorporated them into its own identity. They are ticked off, red-faced, frothing — and these are the men in suits.

…

Having welcomed Tea Party rage into their home, and vowing repeal, the Republicans have made a dangerous bargain. First, they are tying their fate to a fringe, one that includes a small faction of overt racists and unstable people. The Quinnipiac poll this week found only 13 percent of Americans say they are part of the Tea Party movement.

I suppose Egan should get some credit for acknowledging that the most distasteful of his examples are “isolated incidents.”  Like his characterization of John Boehner’s speech, the Times writer’s assessment of the GOP opposition is completely off the mark.  While Egan sees Republican opposition as a hurdle in front of the liberal quest for better health care through the strong arm of the federal government, much of the country sees that quest for what it is:  a fantasy.  More specifically, it will cost trillions of taxpayer dollars, further empower the federal government and likely damage the positive aspects of the current health care marketplace.

WSJ.com’s James Taranto takes on a supposed examination of the right-wing fringe contingent that’s taking over the Republican Party:

“Scary New GOP Poll,” reads the headline at The Daily Beast. In the article, “Wingnuts” author John Avlon declares that “Obama Derangement Syndrome–pathological hatred of the president posing as patriotism–has infected the Republican Party.” The poll, he claims, “demonstrates the cost of the campaign of fear and hate that has been pumped up in the service of hyper-partisanship over the past 15 months. We are playing with dynamite by demonizing our president and dividing the United States in the process.”

…

There’s another methodological problem, which points to the nexus between the science and the art of polling. The survey includes only people who actually answer the crazy questions asked. So if your reaction to the guy on the street at the top of this column was to step up your pace and get away from him (which corresponds to saying “this is nuts” and closing your browser window), your opinion would not affect the outcome–but if you happen to be a Republican, Harris’s methodology imputes to you a likelihood of holding crazy views.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the survey was designed to make Republicans, and only Republicans, look unhinged. The press release states: “The very large numbers of people who believe all these things of President Obama help to explain the size and strength of the Tea Party Movement.” This presupposes that the tea-party movement centers on crazy beliefs about Obama, a view that the poll provides no evidence to support.

For balance, such a poll might have included a series of crazy statements about polarizing Republican figures like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney or Sarah Palin. This would at least give some indication of whether Republicans have a greater propensity than Democrats to believe “scary” things.

For better or worse, there will always be people at each end of the political continuum with over-the-top views on certain matters.  What I see in the conflation of the right-wing fringe with the core of the GOP and, really, most who oppose ObamaCare, is an effort to discredit the legitimate arguments against a vast government intrusion by slandering those who are putting forth said arguments.  I mean, that’s a whole lot easier than actually debating the opposition directly, especially if one doesn’t have an answer for their opponents.  This entire left-wing slander initiative should be filed under “if you say it enough, most voters may believe it to be true.”

“We need to establish a set of metrics and benchmarks to measure the sector going forward, keeping a close eye on all of the Democrats’ claims,” Ryan says. “From cost to quality, we will need to be vigilant in making sure that their assertions are actually substantiated with facts, and I have every reason to believe they won’t be.” Repealing Obamacare should be the goal, he says, “but with the political plurality you need to do that — a new president, 60 senators, and a majority in the House — that is a pretty tall order.”

…

“Our offense will be hammering them for wrecking the health-care system, their demonization of the insurance companies, and their push for government control. That is the future fight,” Ryan predicts. “They’ve got a president here until 2013 and the votes in the Senate to support this for a few years, but it’s not over. As we work to repeal, we must recognize that we’re fighting a different and distorted progressivism. They want to hook people up to entitlements and delegate more power to unelected bureaucrats and technocrats to micromanage the economy — a government full of Peter Orzags. Yet their fatal conceit is also a rational gamble to establish a new culture of dependency.”

Obviously, I’m on board with all of this.  I’m happy to see that Ryan and I are on the same page, but that’s really no surprise.  It’s just the same old thing out of the “progressives.”  Ironically, progress isn’t part of their plan.  It’s important that all those who cringe at these types of government power grabs stay in the game, and prove, in the end, that this is not the course our great country should take.  There are ways to achieve real progress without an oppressive federal government actively involved in making personal decisions for its citizens.  Another state-sponsored Ponzi scheme will fail to yield the results which Democrats claim.  It’s now time to prove that this unfortunate piece of legislation was, in fact, a mistake.  Though many types of manipulation were utilized to sugarcoat Obamacare for the public, the truth is all that will be needed to bring it down.

You can give people health insurance or make them purchase it or whatever.  You can tax “the wealthiest among us” under the guise of helping those who are less fortunate.  However, you cannot improve actual health care by providing insurance.  It’s not the same thing, but, then again, this isn’t about saving people or improving the lives of American people.  This is more about a desire to shape the country into one where the educated elite decide what’s best for everyone.  One might call it a power grab.  Underestimating the intelligence of the general public is a mistake that leftists continually make.  The country is swinging back to the right.  My only hope is that we can undo some of the damage created by these misguided attempts at central planning.  Sadly, its this type of damage that conservatives have failed to remedy, and many times have contributed to, in the past.

There’s nothing “progressive” about nationalized health care.  It’s from an old old playbook.  One that should be burned and forgotten.

Though it looks like the Democrats are going to get the current bill through the House (Bart Stupak and others jumping on board as I write), they can’t sincerely say that it’s the only plan.  Democrats still have more to do to transform the bill to law.  We’ll see what happens.  Paul Ryan’s plan is solid and easily understood.  The addition of many moving parts isn’t necessarily a positive.  If you’ve seen Ryan in action, his tight grasp of the issues, especially ones concerning the budget, is obvious.  He’s the guy that Democrats don’t want to debate.

My opinion is that the Democrat plan is a huge mistake fiscally, and it will likely damage what works in our current health care system.  Despite what some liberal “strategists” are saying, the party looks to be in big trouble come election time.  It’s difficult to get the bulk of the American public to agree on much of anything, but Democrats have achieved public consensus in terms of health care.  The public’s disdain for their health care reform is quite apparent.

The more important, and unsurprising, conclusion that one can draw from the interview is that Obama isn’t going to get into any specifics about how this health care reform thing is going to achieve its stated goals.  It’s supposed to save money by extracting inefficiencies from the current system.  Amazingly, the federal government hasn’t been able to perform this magic on the postal service, Medicare, Social Security or the plethora of other endeavors ventured into by politicians.  It’s unbelievable that Democrats can tout this selling point with a straight face; it’s so absurd.

But wait, people currently suffering without insurance will have insurance.  The reason why many don’t have insurance is that it’s cost prohibitive.  The president can’t wave a magic wand and make health coverage cheaper while simultaneously increasing the quantity of care.  Someone must pay in some form or fashion.  There have to be people profiting by directly providing care (think doctors and nurses), and there also have to be bodies providing financial backing (think consumers via insurance companies and/or the federal government).  It would seem that the sensible thing to do would be to streamline the system, making it easier for patients to obtain care while cultivating a system that’s attractive for providers.  The Democrats’ answer is to squeeze insurance companies and empower the helping hand of big government to take from some to provide for others.  Despite what proponents of the current plan(s) state, adoption of a bill resembling what’s passed the Senate will lead to both more deficit spending and a permanent drag on the private sector due to the government trying to recoup expenses through taxes of all kinds.  With no natural rationing device like price, the government will have to find a way to ration services unless more health care professionals can be produced to meet the needs of all the new customers.

You just know that there has to be all kinds of taxes, fees, dictates, etc. in what’s probably several thousand pages of political gibberish.  It’s kind of like a credit card application.  There are likely some draconian fees in there if you can just find them.  It does appear that Democrats aren’t going to use the “Slaughter rule.”  The use of the aptly named procedural tactic would be the perfect topping on already unseemly cake.

Edmunds.com, the premier resource for online automotive information, has determined that Cash for Clunkers cost taxpayers $24,000 per vehicle sold.

Nearly 690,000 vehicles were sold during the Cash for Clunkers program, officially known as CARS, but Edmunds.com analysts calculated that only 125,000 of the sales were incremental. The rest of the sales would have happened anyway, regardless of the existence of the program.

Now, that’s not much bang for the taxpayer buck.  What about the homebuyer tax credit?  From the Brookings Institution:

So let’s assume that 15 percent of homebuyers will not receive the new tax credit, so there is no change in baseline sales for these people. Of the remaining 85 percent, let’s assume the median house sale price is $180,000 (compared to the $200,000 median price including the high earning buyers). Assuming a price elasticity of -0.65, this implies an increase of about 253,000 (= $15,000 / $180,000 * 0.65 * 0.85 * 5.5 million) additional sales at an estimated tax expenditure of $73.9 billion (= $15,000 * 4.928 million), implying a cost-per-additional-sale of about $292,000. Using NAHB’s implied price elasticity of -1.7, we get about 662,000 additional sales at an estimated tax expenditure of $80.0 billion, implying a cost-per-additional-sale of about $121,000.

If the goal of extending and expanding the homebuyer tax credit is to spur housing sales, an optimistic assessment is that we will spend $121,000 in tax revenue per additional housing sale. Again, this is a very poorly targeted subsidy.

I should note that neither Brookings nor Edmund’s are known as right-wing outfits.  Certainly, Brookings could be described as “left of center.”  Government programs like these only invite and exacerbate inefficiencies in the economy by utilizing artificial incentives to promote growth.  There will certainly be negative consequences to these actions in the future whether they’re eventually abandoned or not.  As the excerpts above effectively argue, these expansive government policies do more to waste tax dollars than promote growth.

Without a doubt, these massive companies play an integral role in the American financial landscape.  I would hate to see one of them fail.  Banks provide much of the infrastructure for the business transactions which occurr every second of everyday.  Because they’re so important, the federal government stands behind them with the FDIC and the extremely powerful Federal Reserve.  If, perhaps, the bulk of depositors of any commercial bank were to decide one day to withdraw their funds for whatever reason, the bank in question could not cover them without the help of the Federal Reserve.  As everyone knows, a bank’s not just an elaborate-looking safe.  It must take the funds deposited there and loan them to others (businesses, individuals, municipalities, etc.) in order to be profitable.  That’s sort of banking at it’s most basic level.  Banking, however, has evolved – some might prefer the term devolved – over the years.

In order to boost profitability, banks decided to deal in some riskier assets.  That’s where all the bad mortgages, many of them bundled together by other firms, come into play.  Based on the foolish assumption that housing values only went up, institutions loaned money to anyone with a pulse and aspirations of owning a home.  I suppose some banks originated some of these mortgages themselves and kept them on their books.  In many cases, firms made these risky debt obligations, packaged them up with some others, and sold them off.  Now you’ve got all this crap floating around.  However, since home prices are skyrocketing, the “bubble” mentality takes over.  Everybody wants a piece of the action, so they decide to buy some mortgages.  Worse yet, financial institutions are using them as collateral to borrow against.  Even worse, some firms are selling insurance (think AIG) in case of defaults.  The insurance, or credit defaults swaps (CDS), aren’t necessarily a bad thing except that A) AIG and others didn’t know what the hell they were insuring and B) insurance providers didn’t possess the assets necessary to cover them should a large portion go bad.  As we all know, house values did go down and many people couldn’t cover their mortgage payments and defaulted.

Why did I go through this very basic rehash of what happened  in the U.S. banking system over the past couple of years?  Well, it’s because all of this floating “crap” was/is the problem.  Funny thing too, the government played an integral role in promoting home ownership for people who weren’t creditworthy.  Another funny thing, they’re still doing it even after they had to completely take over what were once known as government sponsored mortgage accumulators, Fannie and Freddie.  This time they’re utilizing the FHA.  Maybe, the massive banking supermarkets are too large.  I really don’t know, but let’s not pretend their sizes are root of the problem.  If we had more small banks, but they all decided to take on risky mortgage backed securties, we’d still be in the midst of a collossal mess.

In other words, we need to deal with what these large banks are holding.  We need to decide the proper, least risky way to value the assets they do hold.  We need to decide if the promotion of home ownership is a government reponsibility.  Computer scientists use the phrase:  “garbage in, garbage out.”  You can compel financial institutions to write mortgages to people who can’t possibly pay them back under normal circumstances.  You can even use government sponsored entitites to provide a market for these bad loans, but eventually the chickens come home to roost.  And even if the chickens defaulted on their mortgage and have to roost elsewhere, someone’s eventually going to be holding a worthless piece of paper.

What makes these efforts notable is that they are not the lashing out of a frustrated political operation. They are calculated campaigns, designed to create bogeymen, to divide the opposition, to frighten players into compliance. The White House sees a once-in-a-generation opportunity on health care and climate. It is obsessed with winning these near-term battles, and will take no prisoners. It knows that CEOs are easily intimidated and (Fox News ratings aside) it is getting some of its way. Besides, roughing up conservatives gives the liberal blogosphere something to write about besides Guantanamo.

The Oval Office might be more concerned with the long term. It is 10 months in; more than three long years to go. The strategy to play dirty now and triangulate later is risky. One day, say when immigration reform comes due, the Chamber might come in handy. That is if the Chamber isn’t too far gone.

White House targets also aren’t dopes. The corporate community is realizing that playing nice doesn’t guarantee safety. The health executives signed up for reform, only to remain the president’s political piñatas. It surely grates that the unions—now running their own ads against ObamaCare—haven’t been targeted. If the choice is cooperate and get nailed, or oppose and possibly win, some might take that bet.

While these smear campaigns and freeze outs may yield fruit in terms of rallying the liberal base, I can’t see it doing any long-term good with the bulk of voters.  Ms. Strassel is completely correct in her speculation that the president will likely want, or need, the help of some of the very people he’s chosen to vilify.  It may be easy for Obama and company to say one thing one day and then completely change course the next, but the memories of most are at least a bit longer.  He’s won the presidency.  It’s time to do a little more presiding and a little less campaigning.  Of course, the fray between the Obama team and Fox might also serve as a smoke screen of sorts to divert the public’s attention from the proposed health care bill.

I will give a tip of the hat to the major network’s and CNN for standing up to the White House and thwarting their plan to keep Fox from interviewing the “pay czar”  while allowing the others in the media pool time with Mr. Feinberg.  Go here to read more on that.  Whether you like Fox or not, the actions of the White House in limiting them access are way out of line.  It’s a far cry from the openness espoused by President Obama during his presidential campaign.  At least, the other major media outlets seem to be recognizing this now.

If Fox can be frozen out, the same tactics can easily be applied to other networks and journalists.  Either they stand up now or risk being pawns of the Obama team for the duration of the next four years.  Cowhering from a bully generally doesn’t result in a viable outcome for the one being bullied.  I wish “progressives” felt more of a call to bully those who want to destroy the United States (Iran comes to mind) instead of focusing their scorched earth techniques on domestic opposition (and perceived opposition) to their ideology.  What’s so “progressive” about wanting to squash civil debate, anyway?