truenorthnewsandcommentary.com

While on business in Washington, D.C. today, I walked down Pennsylvania Avenue and peered into the White House.  How is President Obama going to posture his sure defeat of his health care agenda?     As a health care attorney I spend a lot of time with hospital leaders and health care policy makers.   In private conversations I am not hearing any of them say they see any real solutions to America’s  health care crisis in Obamacare.  (Of course, no one knows exactly what Obamacare really is – apparently it’s whatever Congress passes on health care insurance reform that the president will sign.)

My friend Hugh Hewitt writes today about Obama’s desperate attempt to rally the nation by rallying his loyalists in the media.  (Note in particular Hugh’s photo montage of the interviews – not something you’ll ever see in the New York or Los Angeles Times.)  An excerpt:

The reason behind President Obama’s frantic retail television yesterday has to be that every debate over Obamacare everywhere in the country has to be going just as mine did.  Proponents of Obamacare from the president down to Obamacare advocate in a two person discussion on a park bench are not just losing the argument.  They have lost it.  Decisively.  And no series of interviews, no matter how gentle the questions or advantageous the setting, are going to persuade anything close to a majority of Americans that it makes sense to trade in their health care for whatever it is that the president, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have behind Door Number 3.

Syndicated Radio Commentator Hugh Hewitt

Never before has a President of the United States so obviously tried to “work the media” as President Obama has on health care.  He began with an “Evening at the White House,” when Charlie Gibson was allowed to actually broadcast the ABC Evening News live from within the White House in exchange for an exclusive ABC “town hall” on health care that same evening.   This weekend, each major Sunday news program gladly welcomed the President — simultaneously!   His message was the same to each:  He was stumping to raise the deficit another trillion dollars to fund his vision of health care in America.

Hugh also sees through this broadcast blitz, and focuses on the growing urgency of Afghanistan in today’s post.  Take a look.

232 years ago today, 39 men signed the United States Constitution.  The National Constitution Center (photo at left) has a nice page commemorating the day.

In the Nineteenth Century the British Prime Minister Gladstone said, “The American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.”  I think he was right.

Here’s a photo of the statuary exhibit at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

Maggie Gallagher of the National Organization for Marriage has written a masterful and thorough article laying out the high-level strategic battle over traditional versus same-sex marriage in California and across the country.  The piece first appeared in National Review’s August 10 issue.    The Coalition for Marriage and Family has re-published Gallagher’s article here.   Those who have been following the issue will recognize just how spot-on Gallagher’s analysis is, and everyone who cares about the issue should read the entire article.  Here are some “teaser” paragraphs:

The headline on the story about a new CBS News/New York Times survey was interesting: “Poll: Support for Gay Marriage Dips.” How fast and how far had support for gay marriage had to drop before a mainstream-media headline acknowledged it, even as a “dip”?

Here’s the answer: 9 percentage points.

That’s right: In just a few short months, support for gay marriage in this poll plunged 9 percentage points, from its all-time high of 42 percent to 33 percent. . . .

Michael Barone, author of the Almanac of American Politics, writing in his syndicated column:

Barack Obama is from the university community of Hyde Park in Chicago. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is from San Francisco, and important House committee chairmen are from similar “gentry urban” locales — Henry Waxman from the West Side of Los Angeles, Charles Rangel from a district that includes not only Harlem but much of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Barney Frank from Newton, Mass., next door to Boston. Of the 21 top leadership members and chairmen, five come from districts carried by John McCain, but the average vote in the other 16 districts was 71 percent to 27 percent for Obama.

This video, just released today by the Republican Minority Leader, John Boehner, attacks President Obama’s health care reform agenda by using the president’s own ill-advised statements against him. He has been a terrible spokesman for his side and that is now coming back to haunt him:

Watch the videos below the break:

Watch this video of a joint “town hall” appearance by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Senator Arlen Specter, and see what happens when Specter talks about legislators making judgments “very fast.”

Do you think the public is unhappy with the way Congress and the Obama Administration are handling health care reform?

(HT: Instapundit, who has several more highly-recommended links.)