This excerpt gives you the flavor...

We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Yeah...that's one thing I really miss while I'm doing my shopping online.....salespeople.

The plodding ethics investigation in the House hasn't even progressed yet to the tax evasion and campaign donation charges against the man who formulates tax policy for all U.S. citizens, and the Times is leading the charge to stop the bleeding. From the center-left, Beinart says Rangel's infractions are "petty, compared to the vast, legalized corruption" of the campaign finance system. But that's kind of beside the point.

What most citizens will be looking at as they become more aware of the ethics charges against Rangel is how his treatment compares to the way they would be treated by the law (or by their employers) in a similar circumstance...(i.e. failure to pay taxes on income from rental property). It would be an understatement to say that Americans' patience with tax cheats in the government is wearing thin.

The Democrats have been able to rid themselves of the downward pull of two of their Big Three corruption-compromised congressmen, with Dodd retiring and Murtha dead. Ironically, that makes Rangel all the more conspicuous. Beinart thinks the Democrats should act, ("since Pelosi won't nudge Rangel, it's time for Obama to nudge Pelosi") before the political damage gets any worse.

I suppose we can wait another week before getting back to the "Holder Must Go" campaign.

The televised event, dreamt up by the White House to create the desired "atmospherics" for an attempt to push his health-care bill through Congress by Easter, underlined the reality that Obama is not a leader or even really a politician – he is a professor.

Professor Obama is convinced of his own intellectual superiority. When his pupils fail to realise that he knows what is good for them, he simply repeats himself in the expectation that the simpletons will eventually understand.

As the astute psephologist Michael Barone has pointed out, Obama can be understood in large part by reflecting on where he spent his adult life before arriving at the White House – Los Angeles, New York, Cambridge and Chicago.

For almost three decades, he lived in liberal campus communities where he was insulated from the real world by comfortable consensus and shared assumptions.

[...]

Obama is becoming something of a victim of his own oratorical success.

The more he talks, the less people listen. We have heard so much from him that his words carry less and less weight. It is the law of diminishing returns.

And for all the reasonableness of what he had to say and the familiar high-minded calls to rise above politics, everyone knew that Obama had already decided to embark on the ironically-named process of "reconciliation" to force the health-care bill through.

[...]

...if he does prevail on Congress to do his bidding, he'll essentially have resorted to using a legislative loophole to force through something that most Americans oppose – and this from the man who vowed to banish cynicism from the conduct of politics.

He can't seem to grasp that voters don't want an expansion of government to cover health care. It's not a failure to understand the professor but a disagreement with the fundamentals of the lesson he's dictating.

We hard-hearted small-government guys are often damned as selfish types who care nothing for the general welfare. But, as the Greek protests make plain, nothing makes an individual more selfish than the socially equitable communitarianism of big government: Once a chap’s enjoying the fruits of government health care, government-paid vacation, government-funded early retirement, and all the rest, he couldn’t give a hoot about the general societal interest; he’s got his, and to hell with everyone else. People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense.

My latest Buckeye Leaves column gets into the meltdown at Michigan among other off-the-field football topics.

It's time for all Democrats and Obama supporters to go on record for or against passing major systemic health legislation which has the support of just 25% of the American people, using procedural techniques not intended for the purpose.

Here's Michael Gerson in the Washington post, summing it up...

After a year of debate, Democratic leaders -- given every communications advantage and decisive control of every elected branch of government -- have not only lost legislative momentum, they have lost a national argument. Americans have taken every opportunity -- the town hall revolt, increasingly lopsided polling, a series of upset elections culminating in Massachusetts -- to shout their second thoughts. At this point, for Democratic leaders to insist on their current approach is to insist that Americans are not only misinformed but also dimwitted.

And the proposed form of this insistence -- enacting health reform through the quick, dirty shove of the reconciliation process -- would add coercion to arrogance.

Daniel Foster starts out his NRO piece with a brief summary of the new, re-hashed Obama health care proposal...

The White House this morning unveiled its health-care "compromise," a bill that at $950 billion is larger than its Senate predecessor and proposes broad new regulatory powers for the government to control health-care premiums.

The Obama plan increases subsidies for the purchase of individual insurance and expands funding for prescription medication in Medicare Part D. It replaces state-specific Medicaid deals such as the "Cornhusker Kickback" with increased Medicaid funding for all fifty states.

To fund these increases, the bill increases the Medicare payroll tax, applies it to unearned income such as capital gains, and expands cuts to Medicare Advantage. It also increases corporate taxes on the pharmaceutical industry by $10 billion and and raises penalties on businesses that don't offer insurance coverage.

As for the "Cadillac Tax," it expands exemption from unionized to all workers through 2018, and raises the threshold on taxable plans from $23,000 to $27,500.

The most significant addition to the plan is new regulations that would give the Secretary of Health and Human Services the power to review and potentially block insurance premium increases.

The CBO says they can't score the new proposal, since they haven't been provided sufficient detail by the White House

More from Grace-Marie Turner at NRO's Critical Condition blog.

The much-awaited health-care reform plan the White House released this morning is little more than an amalgamation of the taxing, spending, mandating, and regulating policies of the bills that passed the House and Senate last year.

Instead of offering a genuinely fresh approach, Mr. Obama split the difference between two bad bills that are hugely unpopular with the American people. He would continue to mandate that both individuals and employers pay for health insurance or face fines and penalties. He would expand Medicaid, the most dysfunctional health program in the country. And he would increase fees on insurers and other health companies — fees that will be passed along to consumers in the form of higher premiums.

The big new idea in the president’s plan is to federalize regulation of health insurance, creating a Health Insurance Rate Authority to conduct “reviews of unreasonable rate increases and other unfair practices of insurance plans.” This reflects the overall strategy to give more and more control over the health sector to Washington.

I stole the post title from this Matthew Continetti entry at the Weekly Standard blog

Obama's new, improved plan is more expensive than the Senate bill, does not address the concerns of pro-life House Democrats over the Senate's abortion language, maintains the tax exemption for the Democrats' union friends, and will effectively turn insurance companies into heavily regulated public utilities. Despite all this, it's highly possible these changes could win at least 50 votes in the Senate -- and with Joe Biden's tie-breaking vote, the bill could become law through the parliamentary measure known as reconciliation.

Seems there are 18 Senate Democrats on the record opposing an attempt to ram this bill through Congress using the reconciliation procedure.

For a better understanding of just what reconciliation is, and what Democrats face in trying to get Obamacare passed this way, check out this piece by Jeff Davis at a TNR blog, and also James Capretta, at NRO. UPDATE 2/23: New York Times Symposium on using reconciliation, featuring Ramesh Ponnuru, Megan McArdle, Norman Ornstein and others.

See also:

Michael Steele at Breitbart's Big Government

Heritage Foundation: A First Look...

House Minority Leader John Boehner Press Release

Contentions: The Latest Same Obamacare Bill

What we do know is that under ObamaCare’s latest incarnation, you really don’t get to keep your existing health-care plan. And we know that it seeks to federalize the regulation of the health-insurance industry. [...] And it seems that there are $136B worth of new taxes to be imposed on the people Obama said he’d never tax, namely those families making less than $250,000.

What we don’t know is why anyone who opposed the last version(s) of ObamaCare would accept this one. It is still a mammoth tax-and-spend bill and still seeks to federalize health care. If Nancy Pelosi has 218 votes for this, I’d be surprised. If Senate Democrats want to walk the plank for a retread of the bill that voters in Massachusetts sent Scott Brown to the Senate to oppose, I’d be surprised. But I suppose we’ll find out.

Five conservatives share their ideas for health care reform in Sunday's NYT.

UPDATE 2/23: Jeffrey H. Anderson - A Man With a Plan

Heritage: Can They Make Obamacare Worse? Yes They Can!

David Brooks - Into the Mire

Hot Air

WSJ Editors - Obamacare at Ramming Speed

Nearly every member of the 59-player spring roster (Branyan would make 60) is already here, even though position players aren't due to report until Wednesday and the first full-squad workout won't take place until Friday. "I'm excited," Acta said. "For me to show up a week before pitchers and catchers report and to see [Travis] Hafner, [Grady] Sizemore, [Shin-Soo] Choo and [Asdrubal] Cabrera on the field one week before they're supposed to be on the field excites me."

75-78 wins is about the limit of my optimism for the 2010 Indians. The pitching is just too young to expect anything better. But they have assembled a ton of very good young power pitchers, and Acta will put a pretty good hitting team on the field every day. A few of the young arms...Chris Perez, Justin Masterson and Carlos Carrasco will be around this season. Others names like Nick Hagadone, Hector Rondon, Jason Knapp and Alex White are coming.

It'll be fun to watch Brantley, LaPorta, Cabrera and Choo get a year better. You know what you're going to get from Jhonny Peralta, and hopefully by July you'll have Carlos Santana, one of the brightest young prospects in baseball, playing catcher. Sizemore and Hafner would both have to rebound physically and have big years for this team to overcome its shaky starting pitching and contend. The AL Central is mediocre, but probably not mediocre enough for that to happen.

In his Lazy Sunday column, Paul Cousineau takes a look at the shuffling at the top of the Indians' management team and how it affects the plans for 2011 and 2012. Having confidence about the future is a big part of being an Indians fan. A better day is always coming.

Paul links to Tribe Daily, where you'll find this nice Indians Spring Training preview.

I'm not terribly optimistic, though. Not only will they have to clean up the title for TV, but from the looks of it, everything else dad says too.

Jen Rubin:

The Justice Department has finally closed a sorry chapter in its history — the attempt to criminalize the work of Department lawyers who rendered legal judgment on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques in the wake of the worst terrorist attack in American history. The Office of Professional Responsibility, as the Washington Post report notes, had doggedly pursued John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who as Justice Department lawyers authored memos providing advice and direction on enhanced interrrogation methods including waterboarding. In a Friday information dump (which tells you it does not aid the cause of the administration and those seeking Yoo’s and Bybee’s punishment), we got a glimpse at two drafts of OPR’s report, its final report, and then the recommendation of David Margolis, a career lawyer and Associate Deputy Attorney General.

Margolis’s report is 69 pages long. Margolis essentially shreds the work of OPR, finding no basis for a referral of professional misconduct for either lawyer. It is noteworthy that all throughout, Margolis adopts many of the criticisms of OPR’s work that outgoing Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his deputy Mark Filip rendered before leaving office at the end of the Bush administration.

At times the work of OPR itself seems to have violated the professional standards it was charged with enforcing. Sloppiness abounds. Margolis finds, for example, that OPR applied the wrong legal standard, the “preponderance of evidence” rather than the more stringent clear and convincing evidence” standard that state bar proceedings would utilize. (p. 11) Margolis also concludes that OPR’s findings ”do not identify violation of a specific bar rule.” ( p. 12) Margolis further notes that OPR’s analysis and legal standard shifted from draft to draft. (pp.13, 15-16)

[...]

The bottom line: Margolis finds the work of Yoo and Bybee “contained some significant flaws,” but that “the number and significance of them can now be debated.” (p. 68) What is clear is that there is no basis — and never was — for stripping these lawyers of their professional licenses, let alone criminally prosecuting them as many on the Left demanded. What is equally clear is that the work of OPR was shoddy, itself suspect, and ultimately rejected on many of the same grounds that Mukasey, Filip, Yoo, and Bybee raised — after years of inquiry and after certainly imposing much emotional and financial burden on Yoo and Bybee.

The Green Death

Who is the worst killer in the long, ugly history of war and extermination? Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Not even close. A single book called Silent Spring killed far more people than all those fiends put together.

Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims (sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes. The Environmental Protection Agency held extensive hearings after the uproar produced by this book… and these hearings concluded that DDT should not be banned. A few months after the hearings ended, EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus over-ruled his own agency and banned DDT anyway, in what he later admitted was a “political” decision. Threats to withhold American foreign aid swiftly spread the ban across the world.

The resulting explosion of mosquito-borne malaria in Africa has claimed over sixty million lives. This was not a gradual process – a surge of infection and death happened almost immediately. The use of DDT reduces the spread of mosquito-borne malaria by fifty to eighty percent, so its discontinuation quickly produced an explosion of crippling and fatal illness. The same environmental movement which has been falsifying data, suppressing dissent, and reading tea leaves to support the global-warming fraud has studiously ignored this blood-drenched “hockey stick” for decades.

Read it all, of course, and see related links...

August, 2003 - Wizblog: Bureaucracy Kills

July, 2003 - Front Page Magazine - Rachel Carson's Ecological Genocide

April, 2004 - NYT Magazine: What the World Needs Now is DDT

July 2002 - The DDT Ban Turns 30

Atlanta Progressive News fires reporter for trying to be objective

The editor, explaining why the reporter was canned...“because he held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy at Atlanta Progressive News.”

Proudly making editorial policy indistinguishable from news policy...not exactly a novel practice, but something not usually admitted so forthrightly.

When you're right, you're right...so spin it all. It's the virtuous thing to do. The self-regard is breathtaking.