And all the kings horses, and all the kings men, couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again…OK, we aren’t there, yet.

But the left is starting to flex its muscles and are beginning to be annoyed, and really concerned about all the compromises that have been made thus far.

The pro-abortion forces know that there is a good chance the bill will not go to conference, where the leadership can change it at will. The first thing that would go would be the abortion restrictions — but having a House-Senate conference is not a certainty. The fastest way to the President’s desk, is to send the Senate bill directly to the House for an up or down vote – if it passes.

As you, dear reader know, I do not think the bill will make it past the Senate floor, but many on both sides disagree — pessimistic opponents and rose-colored-glasses-wearing-proponents. I am mentioning the “ping-pong” strategy of skipping conference because the pro-abortion forces cannot take the risk that Senator Nelson’s demands make it into the bill and the bill goes to the House, without going to (as they see it) the cleansing conference.

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James Pethokoukis of Reuters is at it again, subversion-via-blog.

So in the little sit down with the President, the Chinese made clear they did not believe a word of the President’s promises about ObamaCare not adding to the deficit.

The Chinese asked uncomfortable questions about the cost of ObamaCare:

Guess what? It turns out the Chinese are kind of curious about how President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform plans would impact America’s huge fiscal deficit. Government officials are using his Asian trip as an opportunity to ask the White House questions. Detailed questions.

Boilerplate assurances that America won’t default on its debt or inflate the shortfall away are apparently not cutting it. Nor should they, when one owns nearly $2 trillion in assets denominated in the currency of a country about to double its national debt over the next decade.

Turns out that when you lie to everyone, no one believes you. Untrue claims that President Obama makes in the speeches to Joint Sessions of Congress about not adding to the deficit, making mystery cuts to Medicare, or not funding abortion, or not allowing illegal immigrants to gain access to his health care benefit, are actually listened to by other nations.

And the economic implications and the national security implications of a President who no one believes are profound, and none of them are good.

Sounds like the Chinese do not believe that a Democratic Congress and President Obama will do anything about the growing deficit. The only thing the Trillion-dollar President can do is spend more Trillions — first on the stimulus, then another trillion plus on health care. And because the world refuses to buy more of our debt, the Fed has printed (you guessed it) a trillion dollars in the last year to give to banks, with instructions to buy our T-Bills in our debt (rigged) “auctions.” This is how we are paying for our deficit, we are printing money. And our Trillion dollar President keeps spending.

The rational reaction of the Chinese (as opposed to the irrational action of spending a trillion dollars on health care) reminds me of a sign I saw at the 9/12 demonstration:

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For those attempting to figure out what is in the Senate ObamaCare bill, you are in the company of 99 U.S. Senators who have not seen the bill. At least that is what today’s New York Times is reporting:

“frustration has been growing among some lawmakers over the delay, especially as they are asked repeated questions about a bill they have not yet seen.

“I don’t think the bill text is being shown to anybody,” Mr. [Senator] Nelson said last week.”

According to CNN: “In fact, no one has seen the Senate bill.”

They a have a phrase out West for this — all hat, no cattle.

I call it a vapor bill — all hype, no bill.

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Scalpel!

Senator Reid’s very qualified and really one of the best press guys in the city, announced yesterday that Senator Reid has filed the paperwork so the he will be able to proceed to the cloture motion on the motion to proceed next week.

This means that if Senator Reid gets 60 votes, he can bring the House bill up before the Senate.

If he does not get 60 votes, no bill comes before the U.S. Senate. Or Senator Reid may do what he did on the Doc fix — the unpaid for $250 billion Medicare spending bill — bring it up so it can fail — and then go back to the backroom to negotiate. Pretty clear and simple, yes?

For more information about what the future for ObamaCare will be, here is today’s video interview with Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE) about his views of the Senate health care bill. Pay attention to the Senator’s quote “it’ll never get here.”

Then, turn off the sound, watch the interviewer and the Senator’s body language. What do you see?

Like wolves on a fresh killed deer, the liberals keep tearing up Democrats over Representative Stupak’s amendment, which forces pro-abortion Dems to vote for pro-life protections for the innocents.

This has sites like FireDogLake completely bent:

“Is there anyone who did not see this coming, besides the over hundred Democrats in the House who call themselves pro-choice? Ben Nelson (D-NE) is now demanding the Senate also include the Stupak amendment language. Did anyone really think the Senate’s conservative Democrats would let any part of the House bill be to the right of the Senate? If Nelson gets his way (and when hasn’t Nelson gotten his way this year?), so much for “don’t worry, Obama will fix it in conference.”

From Politico,

“Senator Nelson is strongly pro-life and was pleased the Stupak amendment passed with such strong support,” Thompson said in a statement. “He believes that no federal money—including subsidies or tax credits–should be used to buy insurance coverage for abortion. This is a very important issue to Senator Nelson and it is highly unlikely he would support a bill that doesn’t clearly prohibit federal dollars from going to abortion.”

“It is a good thing NARAL and Planned Parenthood did not put up a fight before the Stupak amendment was added to the House bill. It is always so much easier to push things to the left in the Senate. . . .

But NARAL and Planned Parenthood got rolled by Speaker Pelosi, and now pro-abortion Senators will be forced to make the same choice pro-abortion House Dems did, but this time, the NARALs and Planned Parenthoods of the world can’t just roll over and play dead, like they did for their pal the Speaker.

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Patients First goes after President Obama’s broken promises of transparency in the health care reform process:

Presidential candidate Obama promised time and again not to negotiate health care reform behind closed doors, to bring all parties together and to broadcast health care reform negotiations on C-SPAN.

It is truly unfortunate that President Obama did not keep those promises, but instead, chose to meet privately with health care executives, cut a deal with drug firms in secret, and outsourced the drafting of the Obamacare legislation to the extremely partisan, Democrat-controlled Congress.

First, let me apologize to RedState readers for taking so long to write and post this overdue piece, the time I allocated to write this was the same time the site was down for maintenance over the weekend.

Regardless, my predictions of winning the House floor vote were wrong.

Simply put, the pro-lfe amendment by Rep. Stupak moved enough Dems into the yes category — but the price paid by Speaker Pelosi was to throw the pro-abortion groups under the bus — and there is a new, titanium strong pro-life baseline consensus on public funding or facilitating the killing of innocent babies: the US House is at a !@#&!$&# NO on that.

Had Rep. Stupak’s amendment failed, the House bill would have failed.

No doubt, and the shock of seeing 64 Dem votes for Rep. Stupak’s don’t use public money to kill the innocents was a Maxell moment for both the Democratic and Republican House Leadership. No one predicted that high a Yes Dem vote.

The desperate position the Speaker must have been in to have to accept the Stupak amendment should not be understated. She and her pro-abortion pals understand that Stupak was a huge step down the path of America becoming a pro-life nation. They have imposed upon themselves and their ilk a negative precedent which cannot be undone.

Dropping the Stupak amendment in conference, should the bill pass the Senate, which I doubt — will mean the conference report will fail on the House floor.

Just think of the desperation of the Speaker, to be FORCED to accept this political price. She pivoted on abortion, and decided the Stupak amendment was worth the price to pass the bill.

For the Jamestown Kool-aid brigade of Dems who voted with the Speaker who are from Red States — you will die a hard and agonizing political death of your own making. Whatever rationale you used to vote for this politically and fiscally toxic bill $3 Trillion spending ObamaCare bill — you are wrong and you are TOAST. (Here is the Congressional Budget Office letter on the $3 Trillion in spending number.)

Most Accurate RedStater

One RedStater who was consistent and accurate on the House vote outcome in their comments on my blogs should be “called-out,” to use the President’s term:

Most accurate: bk. I really appreciate (just for the record) those who disagree with my posts and predictions, and am recognizing bk here for his or her insight and accuracy.

In fact, bk, when I wrote the Today’s House Vote, by the Numbers, the implications of the Stupak amendment and deal were simply not part of that post’s calculation, as you immediately both understood and pointed out.

Thank you for all the dissident commentators, as one myself, I appreciate disagreement with my posts.

The totals below, I am told by the Heritage Foundation, do NOT include the $250 billion extra spending on Medicare to buy off the American Medical Association for their support of the U.S. House bill.

The Democratic House Leadership has completely lost touch with fiscal reality.

The following is a cut and paste of a media statement by the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, Senator Gregg (R-NH):

Senator Gregg: Updated CBO Estimate of House Bill Pulls Back the Curtain on Majority’s Intent to Grow Government by $3 Trillion

Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee today commented on the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) more detailed cost estimate of the manager’s amendment to the House health reform bill.

Senator Gregg stated, “The CBO estimate released last night finally sheds light on the smoke and mirrors game the majority has been playing with the cost of their health care reform proposal. Over the first 10 years, this legislation builds in gross new spending of $1.7 trillion – and most of the new spending doesn’t even start until 2014. Once that spending is fully phased in, the House Democratic bill rings up at more than $3 trillion over ten years.

“Additionally, this bill cuts critical Medicare and Medicaid funding by $628 billion, accounts for nearly $1.2 trillion in tax and fee increases and will explode the scope of government by putting the nation’s health care system in the hands of Washington bureaucrats. The $3 trillion price tag defies common sense – we simply cannot add all this new spending to the government rolls and claim to control the deficit.

“If we continue to pile more and more debt on the next generation, they will never be able to get out from under it. The health care system needs reform, but this massive expansion of government, financed by our children and grandchildren, is the wrong way to proceed.”

They could have saved themselves, but instead, they followed a tortured inside-the-beltway logic that will be lost on the likely voter — I voted for it, to improve it. Uh-huh.

Did members cut spending? End funding of abortion? Enforce the prohibition against illegal immigrants getting the new health care benefit? Cut the $759 billion in new taxes? Curtail the gun health care database? Stop the Medicare cuts? No, oh. I see.

Sounds a whole lot like that famous line, “I voted for it, right before I voted against it.”

Blue Dogs and other Democratic Members of Congress are deluding themselves if they think they can state publicly they voted yes, to improve it. Or that a conference with the White House, the Senate and the House will produce a bill closer to the U.S. Senate’s version.

Instead, they are looking hard for excuses to do the wrong thing.

And if they are looking to end the unending political pain of the Speaker’s health care politics — then the way to end it is to end the bill, and vote no.

Otherwise, they will have to defend their vote in their election, and vote again on the Conference Report — if the bill makes it through the Senate, a very dubious proposition.

Instead, they will be walking the plank, the bill then dies in the Senate — and many of their number will then die in November, 2010.

In every election-changing close vote on legislation that passes in the U.S. House, there are two or three U.S. House Members who switch their vote at the last minute.

Usually, these are newbie House members, freshmen or sophomores who succumb to pressure from their leadership. They forget their own districts, and what they need to do to keep their jobs.

Thus, we are reminded of the case of Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky (D-PA) who famously switched her vote to give then President Clinton his tax increase.

It was her vote that passed the bill.

The vote by Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky (D-PA) was an expensive one: she lost the following year.

Here is how Wikepedia describes what happened:

“After defeating Republican Jon D. Fox in a close contest, she became a member of the 103rd Congress. However, she was not re-elected. Losing in 1994 to her 1992 opponent, she was one of 34 Democratic incumbents who were defeated in the Republican Revolution. Her defeat was blamed on her vote for President Bill Clinton’s controversial 1993 budget, for which she was the deciding vote. After the vote, Rep. Robert Walker (R-Pennsylvania) reportedly mocked her, jumping up and down and said “Goodbye, Marjorie” alluding to the fact that her deciding vote would cost her the seat.”

You can bet that any Democratic House member(s) who switches their vote to give Speaker Pelosi her health care victory will be targetted en masse, by the legions who are strongly opposed.

It will cost any last-minute-Democratic-House-vote-switching-member their seat. Of course, if the bill fails then there will be no Margolies-Mezvinsky Effect.

For those House Members who think they may collapse under leadership pressure, here is a tried and true method for avoiding that fate: hide. Vote and get off the House floor, turn off your cell phone and hide somewhere you can not be found. Not one of your usual haunts. And go alone, so you aren’t outed by your staff.

The news keeps getting tougher for the House Leadership in their irrational quest to pass their ObamaCare bill.

First, the Associated Press is reporting the bill will cost $1.2 Trillion without the doctor fix of $250 billion.

The new total will be $1.45 trillion — because the House Leadership intends to create a “self-executing rule” that would pull the doctor fix apart from the House ObamaCare bill — in order to keep the cost at $1.2 Trillion, then fuse the doc fix back into the ObamaCare bill after it passes the House.

It is like a magic trick, presto — $250 billion in new spending just appears in the bill after it passes.

Meanwhile, the new $1.45 billion ought to send the Blue Dogs scampering from the bill.

Then, of course, the House is finally grappling with two thermonuclear issues: abortion and immigration.

But, as numerous news reports state, the Democratic Leaders still do not have the votes for the bill — rumors abound, the most credible put the House vote count at less than 200 for the bill.

The more fundamental question is, why is the U.S. House voting before the U.S. Senate? House leadership has already moved the vote from Thursday to Friday, and are now talking about the vote being moved to Saturday or Monday of Tuesday of next week. House leaders should just punt the vote until after the Senate, and save their members — and themselves — the pain of voting.

Especially when the Senate is now talking post-Thanksgiving for its floor vote?

Why is the Speaker forcing its members to walk the plank again, prior to the Senate vote, especially when it is likely that the bill will never get off the Senate floor?

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I confess, it makes zero sense to me.

I’ve done the math and the political calculus keeps coming back a broken equation.

In general, if the strategic political forces are aligned properly, then the tactical level concerns resolve themselves. This mathematical rule in politics (it is very close to applied chaos theory) regularly produces victory for those applying the rule.

There are oh so very many outright political violations that irrationalism – an identifiable and documented strain of ideologies, among them, fascism — can only explain the behavior of the White House and the House and Senate leadership.

The following political actions are simply not rational:

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And who says Family Research Council doesn’t have a sense of humor…

The unsatisfied quenching of the Dem thirst for health care reform continued as the Senate Finance Committee received their vapor score for their vapor bill which had the net effect of discrediting the Congressional Budget Office. U.S. Rep. Shadegg renamed CBO the Cooked Books Office with a stinging post (as in, that’s gotta hurt):

Could you make your family budget look good in a ten-year analysis if you counted ten years of income but only seven of expenditures? That’s what the Congressional Budget Office did in their report on Senator Max Baucus’s health care bill.

Their subpar accounting includes revenue from tax increases and cuts to Medicare and Medicare Advantage starting in 2010. However, the bulk of expenditures begin in 2013, when many of the bill’s programs go into effect. It sounds like the CBO has started taking accounting tips from old Enron manuals. How can Democrats be taken seriously if they use ten years of revenue to pay for seven years of expenditures?

Heritage Foundation’s Brian Darling weighed in yesterday with his “Where’s the Health Bill?” post in Human Events:

As you read this, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and officials of the Obama administration are in a room at the Capitol rewriting health care policy. The American people aren’t invited. Only a few lobbyists, Obama czars and liberal Senators have even been allowed to see this bill.

The Senate is keeping this bill a secret because politicians were shaken by the August town hall meetings and the rage expressed by the American people toward the president’s version of health care reform. So, to minimize complaints now, the administration and Sen. Reid are making sure citizens are shut out of the process.

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While the cognoscenti of the Western financial world is attempting to spin the recent fall in the dollar as a stylish financial mystery play with a journalist based in the Middle East as its star, the Whodunit spin is a red herring: the facts are that the dollar is weak, and getting weaker.

The world is awash in dollars. There is a massive oversupply. We are electronically creating (printing in another era) hundreds of billions of dollars to buy our own T-Bills. Our deficit and spending has soared.

Kudlow, in his column, “Save the Greenback, Mr. President” explains that solution is to remove the excess dollars from the market and to stop “printing so much debt:”

for therapy, the Fed should begin moving excess cash from the economy….And they need to stop printing so much debt from Congress. All this massive spending and borrowing is killing us.

Instead, the Democrats in Congress and the White House are planning more spending: a second spending bill is on the table — ironically tagged as the second stimulus bill, which ought to stimulate the dollar tanking — and of course, President Obama’s $1 trillion health care spending boondoggle.

When town hall meetings are interrupted with shouts of “stop printing money” the jig is up. Note to the White House: in the age of the internet, you cannot hide printing $600 Billion a year from the world.

Until the Federal Reserve stops printing money to buy our own T-Bills, and the Democrats in Congress stop spending on new programs and we lower our deficit the dollar will continue to drop. End of story, no other outcome is possible.

Simply put, the Dems are killing the dollar.

The MSM would like the American public to believe that the Senate Finance Committee bill was scored by the Congressional Budget Office. After all, WaPo, the NYT and the WSJ reported:

WaPo: “The bill would cost $829 billion over the next decade.”

NYT: “The budget office analyzed the bill … its newly projected cost — $829 billion over 10 years.”

WSJ: “The latest Senate health bill will cost $829 billion over a decade.”

But it is a score of a vapor bill — a bill that has no legislative language — and so with much fanfare and pomp the CBO has delivered a Vapor Score of a Vapor Bill. CBO has stated publicly and repeatedly that it cannot accurately score any bill without the legislative language — which does not exist so CBO cannot have it.

Heritage tagged this correctly its Bait and Switch blog:

As the Politico reported yesterday: “While the media and lawmakers often shorthand a CBO letter as a “score” or “cost estimate,” today’s CBO letter is neither. Because the bill is still in “conceptual,” or layman’s terms, CBO’s letter today was a “preliminary analysis.” For it to be an official cost estimate, the bill has to be translated into legislative language.”

And here is a thought from Ryan Ellis at ATR, the reason the latest ObamaCare bill scores so low is because of all the taxes. Here is the list.

For a more wonky analysis of the Vapor Score, see the blog by Donald Marron, a former CBO economist here, and from which the quotes from the MSM above were taken.

How sustainable a political position does this sound like: You can’t see the Senate ObamaCare legislative language and we will not tell you how much it costs.

Here is how the San Francisco Examiner put it in their editorial:

When then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama promised not to sign major legislation until it had been posted on the Internet for public reading at least five days, trusting voters took him at his word.

Now they know better. Not only is the actual language of what is likely to become the main legislative vehicle for Obama’s signature health care reform not available on the Internet, it hasn’t been given to members of the key Senate committees or the Congressional Budget Office.

Welcome to the Imperial Senate whose leaders view the public with contempt and the elitist attitude that you should not see the legislative language because you cannot understand it. You should not know how Medicare is being cut, or how you are going to taxed, or how the bill change every health plan in the nation.

We know, and we don’t want you to know — is the Democrats position in the Senate. They are shredding that trust, they are stomping it into the ground and burning it in public.

What are the Democrats hiding in that legislative language? What is in it they do not want the public to see? If the health care debate has taught the American public anything, then its the devil is in the details. But the Senate Democratic leadership says: you don’t get to see the details. We, instead have this new thing called the Vapor Bill: don’t read it (we won’t let you) just support it.

Perhaps this is why political analyst Charlie Cook recently said about the Independent voters: “they hate Congress something awful.” If you don’t believe Charlie Cook, then maybe you will believe this nine-month tracking chart by Gallup.

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What it Means: Vapor bill: A bill which moves through the legislative process in one or more houses of the U.S. Congress without legislative language. The best example of a Vapor Bill is the Senate Health Care Reform bill, which has no legislative language, but has been amended in the Senate Finance Committee. The term Vapor Bill was derived from the word Vaporware, a term coined during the dot-com era to describe all-singing-all-dancing software that was not written yet.

Here is how Brian Darling of the Heritage Foundation describes the Vapor Bill:

President Barack Obama’s push for a sweeping health care overhaul is going to be voted upon in the Senate Finance Committee this week and nobody has read the actual bill yet. The Washington Post reported last Friday that “Senate Finance Committee Releases Its Final Text of Health-Care Bill,” yet you click on a link to the “Bill” referenced in the Post article and all you get is a 262 page description of the legislation. There still is no actual legislative language being given to Senators, Staff or the American Public. That is why many are calling it the “Vapor Bill.”

Why it Matters: A bill without legislative language cannot be accurately scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Its impact and effects cannot be judged, nor can it be accurately evaluated without the legislative language. The end of life counseling in the House bill was discovered by reading the bill — as were many other objectionable ideas and issues.

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised today the final health care bill will include a controversial public option insurance plan, contrary to recent indications by Democratic staffers that such provisions might be eliminated to make the reforms more palatable for moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats.

“We are going to have a public option before this bill goes to the president’s desk,” Reid said Thursday afternoon on a conference call with constituents.

But the Nevada Democrat, who is tasked with reconciling the competing Senate committee versions of the bill, yesterday told reporters the final bill would not be fashioned until the White House and leaders of the Finance and HELP committees had been consulted.

“Once that’s done, we’ll decide jointly as to what should be in that bill,” he said.

On Wednesday, the final bill hinges on consultation with Senate leadership and the President. Thursday, news surfaces that suggests Reid has consolidated the two Senate versions, and opted for the more progressive. There exists only two possible explanations. Harry Reid is either the single most productive member of Congress or he’s circumventing Democratic leaders—and the Ranking Republicans of the HELP and Finance committees—to advance his own agenda.

While Reid’s comments will likely embolden disaffected progressives, they promise to marginalize Democratic Senators Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu and Republican Senator Olympia Snowe.

Some Democratic leaders maintain there’s no “line in the sand” in the health care overhaul, signaling the potential for negotiations with Republicans. Still, Reid’s comments today represent the increasing vulnerability of Democrats to attacks from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party for rejecting the public option.

Highlighting this vulnerability, Daily Kos Founder Markos Moulitsas wrote on Twitter today, “Blanche Lincoln will soon wonder why no one is riding to her rescue, or [cares] about her possibly losing.”

Moderate Democrats must fall in line like Speaker Reid or risk losing deep-pocketed progressive donors and online advocates like Moulitsas.

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At times, like this one, a chart is better than a 1,000 words. (Scroll mouse over chart to enlarge it.)

This is the best version that I could upload, but here is a link to a .pdf version that is bigger and clearer.