Listening to President Obama explain “his” health care plan, I can’t help but wonder if he actually believes his own words.

Maybe it’s been so long since the adoring press corps has held him accountable for his innumerable exaggerations, omissions and misstatements that he believes he can create a new reality simply by speaking it into existence.

However, for anyone who’s been paying attention, the President’s recent health care pep rally disguised as a press conference was littered with statements that just don’t square with reality: read more…

Once climate-change regulators strangle the economy and carbon-counters turn gas, oil and electricity into expensive luxuries, perhaps American farmers will recognize how “our friends” in Washington, D.C., sold us out in the name of political compromise.

Last week, Capitol Hill’s agriculture lobby had a choice:  withhold support from the Waxman-Markey climate control bill or agree to a compromise that provides cover to rural district Democrats who support it.

Without those rural votes, Waxman-Markey was bound for the shredder.  With those votes, it garnered just one more vote than the bare minimum needed for passage. read more…

Grappling with declining state revenues makes for some very unpleasant budget choices, as Governor Ritter and the Democrat majorities in the state legislature learned over the past 12 months.

It’s fair to criticize those choices, including the governor last year denying for several months that a problem existed.  Yet anyone who has shouldered the responsibility of balancing a budget during a recession understands that learning from your own mistakes is inevitable.

Learning, however, is essential — both to sound fiscal policy and to political credibility.  That’s why it was astonishing to hear Governor Ritter and leading Democrats dismiss the need for a special session of the legislature on the very day they acknowledged that the state will start the new fiscal year nearly $400 million in the hole. read more…

America’s health care system certainly has its share of problems — of which most emanate from politicians’ tinkering, tempting frustrated consumers with promises of better benefits at someone else’s expense.

So the prospect of President Obama and Congress remaking American health care in their own image should scare the pants off anyone who looks not merely at the existing problems but at government’s abysmal record as a problem-solver. read more…