Something like this, Krauthammer says:

In the end, Obama will have to settle for something very modest. And indeed it will be health-insurance reform.

To win back the vast constituency that has insurance, is happy with it, and is mightily resisting the fatal lures of Obamacare, the president will in the end simply impose heavy regulations on the insurance companies that will make what you already have secure, portable, and imperishable: no policy cancellations, no pre-existing condition requirements, perhaps even a cap on out-of-pocket expenses.

Nirvana. But wouldn’t this bankrupt the insurance companies? Of course it would. There will be only one way to make this work: Impose an individual mandate. Force the 18 million Americans between 18 and 34 who (often quite rationally) forgo health insurance to buy it. This will create a huge new pool of customers who rarely get sick but will be paying premiums every month. And those premiums will subsidize nirvana health insurance for older folks. Net result? Another huge transfer of wealth from the young to the old, the now-routine specialty of the baby boomers; an end to the dream of imposing European-style health care on the U.S.; and a president who before Christmas will wave his pen, proclaim victory, and watch as the newest conventional wisdom reaffirms his divinity.

An incredible series of events took place yesterday which resulted in abortion coverage being mandated in both the public option for government health insurance and (to less of a degree) for coverage of abortion in private insurance.

This amendment will now have to be voted on by the entire House after the August recess.

Jeff Emanuel has the details at Red State: 

Yesterday afternoon, House Energy and Commerce Committee member Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA) proposed an amendment to the House health care overhaul bill to allow for federal funding of elective abortion coverage for those enrolled in the “public option,” to mandate that every regional Health Insurance Exchange contain at least one private insurance plan that offers abortion coverage, and to permit taxpayer subsidies of those private insurance plans and others that cover elective abortion.

The Capps amendment passed 30-28, with E&C Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA), Capps, and 28 other Democrats voting in favor of mandating (and allowing taxpayer funding to be used to subsidize) abortion coverage.

Taxpayer dollars do not currently pay for, or subsidize, insurance plans that cover elective abortion services. This amendment, if the health overhaul bill to which it is attached is passed and signed into law, would alter that policy, using the tax dollars of every American - pro-life or pro-choice - to subsidize abortion coverage (and, by extension, abortion services).

A counter-amendment introduced by Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) was defeated only after Rep. Waxman decided he wanted to bring the counter-amendment back for "reconsideration" and a re-vote.

Bottom-line: now the health care plan not only allows for abortion coverage - it mandates them.

As Rich Lowry argues:

By all accounts, Barack Obama’s father, the Kenyan student studying in America, was cocksure and impressed with his own talents. The arrogance gene must be dominant. Obama clearly has it.

And that, more than any other factor, is driving his summertime swoon. Hubris made him reach for too much, too soon; brazenly overpromise about the effects of his program; overestimate his control of events; think the golden touch of his brilliant team could solve intractable problems; and believe his words could trump reality.

The Obama team is fiddling with his health-care talking points. But the verbiage is beside the point. What Obama needs is a little modesty. It’s easy to imagine an alternative history of a more cautious Obama administration that wouldn’t have stoked a voter backlash in all of six months.

At the end of his speech he noted that there were also disagreements, about which he had this to say:

"Just as we respect China's ancient and remarkable culture, its remarkable achievements, we also strongly believe that the religion and culture of all peoples must be respected and protected, and that all people should be free to speak their minds. And that includes ethnic and religious minorities in China, as surely as it includes minorities within the United States."

Once again, as he did in his June 4 Cairo speech, President Obama has given prominent mention to the issue of international religious freedom. This is a welcome and unexpected development, for which he and his advisers deserve credit. But thus far his words are just that -- "prominent mentions" without policy significance. Secretary Clinton did not touch on the issue of human rights, let alone religious freedom, in her speech to the plenary session or in her July 27 Wall St. Journal editorial with Tim Geithner. In her closing remarks July 28, all she could manage was an amemic: "In areas where we do not always agree, such as human rights, we had candid and respectful exchanges."

The danger here is twofold. First, the Obama admininstration risks having its paeans to religious freedom be viewed abroad -- and within Foggy Bottom -- as an ad hoc rhetorical device to appease domestic constituencies. So understood, U.S. international religious freedom policy can safely be ignored by American diplomats and our "strategic partners" overseas.

Second, the administration is treating the subject of religious freedom as if it had nothing to do with "the real world" of economics and politics. When she wrote of China's need to "take additional steps to lay the foundation for balanced and sustainable growth,"  Secretary Clinton might well have made a critical link: without religious freedom, neither China nor any other country with large numbers of religious believers is likely to achieve sustained economic growth and political stability. The administration would do well to consult the work of sociologists Brian Grim (available here or here with subscription) and Roger Finke, whose studies, derived in part from State Department reports, make this link clear.

In sum, the United States should move its policy of advancing international religious freedom into the mainstream. It is not a "nice to have" humanitarian issue to be shoved aside when more "strategic" imperatives (the environment and trade) loom. Religious liberty is intimately connected to all human affairs, including the defeat of those who, in the President's well-crafted words,  "would murder innocents." It should be treated as such. 

Apparently there are no welcome parades to be seen waiting for members of Congress upon their return home after this latest session:

Screaming constituents, protesters dragged out by the cops, congressmen fearful for their safety — welcome to the new town-hall-style meeting, the once-staid forum that is rapidly turning into a house of horrors for members of Congress.

On the eve of the August recess, members are reporting meetings that have gone terribly awry, marked by angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior. In at least one case, a congressman has stopped holding town hall events because the situation has spiraled so far out of control.

“I had felt they would be pointless,” Rep. Tim Bishop (D-N.Y.) told POLITICO, referring to his recent decision to suspend the events in his Long Island district. “There is no point in meeting with my constituents and [to] listen to them and have them listen to you if what is basically an unruly mob prevents you from having an intelligent conversation.”

In Bishop’s case, his decision came on the heels of a June 22 event he held in Setauket, N.Y., in which protesters dominated the meeting by shouting criticisms at the congressman for his positions on energy policy, health care and the bailout of the auto industry. (Politico)

Unruly mobs are one thing, but I would hope that reasonable constituents would still be allowed the opportunity of posing questions to their member of Congress.

Via Hot Air, disappointing behavior from the speaker of the house:

A day after formally delaying a vote on a healthcare bill and having to accept a further weakening of a public option to compete with private insurers, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) lashed out at the health insurance industry and urged her members to do the same during the August recess.

“They are the villains in this,” Pelosi said of private insurers. “They have been part of the problem in a major way. They are doing everything in their power to stop a public option from happening. And the public has to know that. They can disguise their arguments any way they want, but the fact is that they don’t want the competition.”…

.... “It’s almost immoral what they are doing,” added Pelosi, who stood outside her office long after her press conference ended to continue speaking to reporters, even as aides tried in vain to usher her inside. “Of course they’ve been immoral all along in how they have treated the people that they insure with pre-existing conditions, you know, the litany of it all.”

Speaker Pelosi is trying to shift the debate way from the problems inherent in the health care reform bill towards the problems in the private health care and insurance markets. But there is little disagreement about there being problems in the current system - there is great disagreement, however, about how to best fix these problems.

Oddly-enough, democrat leadership does not seem willing to include tort reform in their proposals for the American health care system, even as frivelous lawsuits are a huge source of waste, driving up the premiums and costs which Speaker Pelosi is so concerned about.

As a summary reminder, alleged injustices by insurance providers does not justify a new injustice of a flawed public option. If Americans aren't being well served today, they certainly do not deserve to be more exploited tomorrow.

A single-payer activist group convinced Barney Frank to talk to them:

The fact that he is an advocate of single-payer isn't all that surprising. After all, Barack Obama in 2003 admitted the same desire to see America embrace a single-payer model of health care. 

What we should pay attention to is that, in Barney Frank's estimation, a robust public option will necessarily lead to single-payer eventually.

Actually, such an outcome is almost guaranteed because the government does not have to play by the same rules as the private market, as our current expenditures demonstrate. 

The government public plan can operate at huge deficits, and while it supposedly is meant to  provide "competition" to the free market, it will in fact undercut and crowd out private plans, like Frank says.

Aside from specific ethical concerns one can have about the public option, this philosophical and practical objection must also be considered as we begin debating health care in this upcoming recess.

House minority whip Eric Cantor in today's Washington Post:

To say President Obama failed to follow through on this promise is an understatement. By appointing a virtual army of "czars" -- each wholly unaccountable to Congress yet tasked with spearheading major policy efforts for the White House -- in his first six months, the president has embarked on an end-run around the legislative branch of historic proportions.
To be sure, the appointment of a few special officers to play a constructive role in a given administration is nothing new. What is new is the elevation of so many czars, with so much authority on endless policy fronts. Vesting such broad authority in the hands of people not subjected to Senate confirmation and congressional oversight poses a grave threat to our system of checks and balances.

Which is ironic because Sen. Obama said on March 31, 2008:

"The biggest problems that we're facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all. And that's what I intend to reverse when I'm president of the United States."

Good lunch-time reading: NBC and the Wall Street Journal have released their latest public opinion poll, together with previous results to get a general sense of the trends. It's available in PDF here.

See also:  Gallup's "Benefits of Healthcare Reform a Tough Sell for Americans".

Supporters of same-sex marriage and benefits are attempting to chill the first-amendment rights of their opponents in the state of Washington

After Proposition 8 passed in California last year, those dissatisfied with the outcome (which prohibited same-sex marriage) found the records of those who supported Prop. 8 and published their names, addresses and donation amount on a Google Maps website. 

[Two quick notes: using Google Maps to ID private individuals probably violates their terms of service. And, ironically, the people who maintain the website hide behind a wall of anonymity themselves.]

But more disturbing still, there are multiple examples of this published information being used to harass and intimidate private citizens who supported Prop. 8, despite attempts by some to protect the identities of Prop. 8 supporters once they realized what was going on. This is a whole new ball game.

A similar situation is now playing out in the state of Washington:

Sponsors of a campaign to overturn Washington state's recent "everything but marriage" domestic partnership law are seeking to prevent disclosure of the names of those who signed a petition for a referendum.

Gary Randall of Protect Washington Families said his group filed a complaint Tuesday challenging the constitutionality of the state public disclosure law, contending that it chills protected First Amendment free speech.

The organization contends it is "reasonably probable" that petition signers "will be subjected to threats and harassment."

A political group called WhoSigned.Org has said it will publish online the names of people who signed petitions for Referendum 71, which would overturn the domestic partnership law. (AP)

Yesterday, a temporary injunction was secured:

"At a hearing on July 29, 2009, a United States District Court Judge entered an order preventing the Washington Secretary of State from publicly releasing copies of the Referendum 71 petition filed on Saturday. The order will remain in effect, granting temporary relief to more than 138,500 petition signers, pending a hearing scheduled for September 3, 2009 on the Plaintiffs’ request for a more permanent ruling. 

James Bopp, Jr., lead counsel for the Plaintiffs stated, “This is a sign that the Judge is taking this matter very seriously. Individuals must be allowed to debate the merits of Referendum 71 without having to worry about whether they will be harassed for offering an opinion."

Can you imagine, for a moment, the outrage that would be expressed in the mainstream if proponents of pro-life legislation threatened to publish the names and locations of people who voted, say, for a referendum that mandated taxpayer funding of abortion nationwide? And then followed-through with an orchestrated intimidation campaign of calls, boycotts, online harassment, and the like?

And yet little attention is being given to the private voters in California and Washington who are simply exercising their rights as American citizens to participate in democracy without fear of reprisal.

Of the many reasons to strongly object to the massive stimulus habit Congress has acquired, none seems more obvious than the wasteful federal spending on private organizations that undermine the fundamental values of a virtuous society.

Look at two examples of Speaker Nancy Pelosi is allowing federal money to be used in San Francisco:

- $50,000 to Frameline in San Francisco, California which describes its mission as: “Frameline's mission is to strengthen the diverse lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and further its visibility by supporting and promoting a broad array of cultural representations and artistic expression in film, video and other media arts.”

- $25,000 to CounterPulse in San Francisco, California, that just held a “Perverts Put Out” event on July 25th which urged one to “Join your fellow pervs for some explicit, twisted fun!"

And these are not even the most offensive projects being supported by federal money.

As Family Research Council says:

Other programs are too crude and embarrassing to even mention. But shouldn't that say something to the third most powerful leader in America? If these projects are too obscene to talk about, what business does the U.S. government have funding them? This isn't just waste--it's reckless, indecent garbage sponsored by Congress and paid for by you. If these are the priorities of America's new leadership, then we should definitely get a second opinion on their vision for an issue as significant as health care.

Government has absolutely no economic interest in supporting - at public cost - private enterprises which undermine social values.

The $75,000 in federal money used for the two projects mentioned above could have reasonably subsidized several struggling families in California, or provided tax relief to a dozen more.

So much for the promised "new era of responsibility":

Facing the first real rough patch of his presidency, President Obama and his supporters are once again resorting to a tried-and-true tactic: attacking George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

In his White House press conference last week, Mr. Obama referred to the Bush era at least nine times, three times lamenting that he "inherited" a $1.3 trillion debt that has set back his administration's efforts to fix the economy.

With the former president lying low in Dallas, largely focused on crafting his memoirs, Mr. Obama has increasingly attempted to exploit Mr. Bush when discussing the weak economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the difficulty closing the military prison at U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. (Washington Times)

While it is true that every new administration inherits problems from the previous one, the new administration campaigned on promises to fix the errors they saw in the Bush administration.

To continue describing these inherited difficulties as ongoing problems goes against the responsibility of the new administration to fix these problems, not blame and add to them.

From Let Freedom Ring:

Notsosure.org will ultimately grow to several videos with a related theme: voters and interested citizens who were drawn to Candidate Obama’s messages of “Hope” and “Change” are now beginning to have doubts about the policies proposed by President Obama. Politicized Healthcare is the first of these. Others will follow.

High production values, and at least some attempt to reach out to the other side of the health care reform debate (albeit by caricaturing their position somewhat):

ALERT:

APP founder Robert P. George will be on the Glenn Beck Program at 5:45PM EDT discussing Professor George's Constitutional Intepretation course and other topics.

Professor George's brief bio:

Robert George, J.D., D.Phil. is one of America's foremost scholars in the fields of constitutional law, ethics, and political philosophy. Dr. George has won numerous awards for his academic and civic work, including the Presidential Citizens Medal.

Dr. George is founder of the American Principles Project. He has served on the President's Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.

Another active day on APP. Here's a summary of topics covered:

• On rushing legislation, and having consistent principles
• Rethinking Economics by Samuel Gregg
• Info: Pew Forum presents a political portrait of Mormons
• Update: "Judiciary Committee OKs Sotomayor for high court"
• Overpopulation Video: The Making of a Myth
• Does Obama Support Vigorous Debate on Abortion? by Patrick Lee
• "Human Life Is More than a Distraction" by Kathryn Lopez

NewsBusters has uncovered an interview conducted by Barack Obama in 2004 where he complains about the Bush administration rushing legislation through Congress without giving the legislators time to read the bills or debate them.

It's an extraordinary complaint for the young Senator to make, considering that this is exactly what the democrat Congress is currently doing with such critical pieces of legislation such as Cap-and-Trade and Health Care "reform", at White house prompting and urging.

Here is the transcript which begins at the 55-second mark of the video below:

BARACK OBAMA: ...When you rush these budgets that are a foot high and nobody has any idea what's in them and nobody has read them.

RANDI RHODES: 14 pounds it was!

BARACK OBAMA:  Yeah. And it gets rushed through without any clear deliberation or debate then these kinds of things happen.  And I think that this is in some ways what happened to the Patriot Act. I mean you remember that there was no real debate about that. It was so quick after 9/11 that it was introduced that people felt very intimidated by the administration.

 

P. J. Gladnick, writing for NewsBusters, is quick to label this "hypocrisy", but in a less-incendiary way, I think we can clearly describe this as a prime example of why political principles must be consistent.

If, in other words, it hurts the democratic process to rush legislation through Congress without giving both sides time to read and debate what they are voting for, that principle should apply regardless of which party has the majority in power.

The fact that Obama, in his first months in office, is doing the same thing that he criticized the Bush administration of doing, simply reveals that both administrations, to varrying degrees, are failing to uphold simple democratic principles of fairness, transparency and true concern for the common good.

Both parties, in their respective roles, need to address these concerns and re-embrace these common-sense democratic principles.

[We should] maintain economics’ strong empirical-positive dimension, but blend it with a deeper appreciation for human complexity, and thus engender more humility about economics’ predictive power—a virtue all of us could use more of in our post-crisis era.

With a tip of the hat to Dan Gilgoff at USNews & World Report:

In the last year or two, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has dramatically expanded its role in national conservative/Republican politics. This is evidenced by Mitt Romney's presidential run (likely to be reprised in 2012), the LDS Church's leading role in passing California's Proposition 8, and talk of Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman as presidential timber.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has released a new portrait of American Mormons, who account for just 1.7 percent of the population but are a fast-growing tradition. It turns out that Mormons are even more Republican than white evangelicals. Check out this graph from Pew:

From the Associated Press:

The Senate Judiciary Committee has voted to approve Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor to be the first Hispanic justice.

The committee voted 13-6 Tuesday morning to send Sotomayor's nomination to the full Senate, where she's expected to be confirmed easily next week.
Just one Republican, South Carolina's Lindsey Graham, joined Democrats in voting for President Barack Obama's first high court nominee. The panel's chairman, Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy, called Sotomayor a restrained, fair and impartial judge who has not favored any one group of people over another. But the top Republican, Alabama's Jeff Sessions, said her speeches and some rulings revealed beliefs that conflict with the idea of blind justice and fidelity to the law.

The Population Research Institute has initiative an informative, humorous series of videos that deserve attention. They've also launched a companion website "Over Population Is a Myth" to back-up the claims made in the video:

Amazingly, many people still believe the world is overpopulated, which is one of the reasons why individuals support the proliferation of contraception and sterilization in our society, and even more-so oversees. 

In fact, human beings are a precious "commodity" and having more of them around is a good thing for the world.