"Pundits of both parties now fault Obama’s style of governance. Public protests express disapproval over out-of-control federal spending and borrowing, and the idea of state-run health care.  

"So fairly or not, it seems like a panicked President Obama is abruptly scrambling to do what he should have done over a year ago. 

"But the problem is that a now jaded public believes that Obama is changing both course and tone not because he wants to for the country, but because he is forced to for his own survival. 

"In other words, the 'hope and change' of last year’s messiah has devolved into this year’s 'whatever it takes' of a cynic."

"President Obama's health care plan is beginning to seem like Grigori Rasputin, the evil, crazy pre-revolutionary Russian monk who was poisoned and lived, was shot in the back and lived, was shot twice more and lived, was beaten up and lived, and was finally tied up and tossed in an icy river, where he lived long enough to try to get loose.

"This health plan has so far endured expert analyses telling us it could be economically ruinous without fixing much of what ails us. It has hung on during one of the most extraordinary outbursts of dissidence by ordinary citizens in recent history. 

"It has refused to die even when independents told pollsters they had had it with this wackiness, and even now, after three anti-statist elections and a slight but significant change in the Senate's balance of power, it is still being vigorously pushed."

"Two weeks ago, President Obama challenged Republican congressional leaders to join him in a nationally televised summit to discuss their respective proposals for health care reform. Republicans publicly wondered if Obama's proposal represented a refreshing new attempt by the chief executive to display genuine bipartisanship and whether they should trust him to come to the summit with a truly open mind. We now know the answer to both questions is a resounding 'No.' 

"Yesterday, Obama unveiled a 'new' health care proposal. It costs an eye-popping $950 billion (that's the White House's rosy estimate), and represents nothing more than a warmed-over version of the 2,500-plus-page Obamacare proposals passed last year by the Senate and House. Like its predecessors, this newest version features government price fixing of the rates health insurance companies can charge. It includes a sweetheart deal to protect unions' expensive health care plans from taxation imposed on nonunion health plans. And worst of all, it still forces all Americans to fork over a hefty chunk of their income for a government-approved health insurance product, under penalty of heavy fines or imprisonment."

"On February 19, Attorney General Eric Holder took part in the time-honored Washington tradition of dumping undesired news on Friday afternoons or evenings. After weeks of leaks, the Justice Department officially exonerated Bush-era lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the authors of the original legal opinions on the lawfulness of the CIA interrogation program, which are known pejoratively as the 'torture memos' to critics.

"This is bad news for Holder and certain other Obama appointees at Justice — it undermines the story they’ve been telling for years that the lawyers who found the CIA program lawful were sadistic criminals committed to torturing poor souls such as Khalid Sheik Muhammad — but it is a vindication of an important principle that, prior to the Holder reign, had been adhered to across administrations: honestly held legal and policy opinions are not cause for prosecution or professional discipline."

"... [T]he Democrats failed because, thinking the economic emergency would give them the political mandate and legislative window, they tried to impose a left-wing agenda on a center-right country. The people said no, expressing themselves first in spontaneous demonstrations, then in public opinion polls, then in elections -- Virginia, New Jersey and, most emphatically, Massachusetts.

"That's not a structural defect. That's a textbook demonstration of popular will expressing itself -- despite the special interests -- through the existing structures. In other words, the system worked."

"President Obama's appointment of Rashad Hussain, his deputy associate counsel, as special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the second largest inter-governmental organization after the United Nations, charged with safeguarding and protecting 'the interests of the Muslim world,' should be of serious concern to Congress and the American public. Especially since Hussain, a devout Muslim, has a history of participating in events connected with the Muslim Brotherhood, according to the Chicago Tribune, 'the world's most influential Islamic fundamentalist group' whose goal is to create Muslim states throughout the world."

"Americans need to stand up to Washington's intrusion into our private lives. What business of government is the number of times a citizen has been married or what he paid for electricity last month? For those who find such intrusion acceptable, I'd ask them whether they'd also find questions of their sex lives or their marriage fidelity equally acceptable.

"What to do? Unless a census taker can show me a constitutional requirement, the only information I plan to give are the number and names of the people in my household. The census taker might say, 'It's the law.' Thomas Jefferson said, 'Whensoever the General Government (Washington) assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.'"

"...[G]o ahead and chuckle over Mr. Biden's 'gaffes,' if you think he was on television to win an argument. But if you think his assignment was to use a Sunday-show duel to deflect attention from the Obama administration's two big backtrackings on terror, you might want to give Joe a little more credit."

 "...Democrats, only months ago, thought of themselves as masters of Washington and rulers of the political universe. A liberal transformation of America seemed to be within their grasp.  Now, the public having rejected their program, it has slipped away. Their descent into tricks and ploys and sham events--the stuff of uptight legislators and desperate presidents--has occurred with mind-boggling speed. And they have only themselves to blame."

"The best you can say about the effort is that it fits into the White House's universal answer to all of its problems: 'We just need to explain to these confused Americans how we've been right about everything.' To that end, the White House wants to use Republicans as a skeptical prop-audience in one last infomercial for the ShamWow of ObamaCare.

The worst you can say is that it's a cynical trap, designed to make the GOP look out of touch, ill-informed and ideological. Indeed, there's a bipartisan consensus growing in Washington that the whole thing is a setup. Obama is going to say 'nice doggie' to Republicans right up until the moment he smashes them with a rolled-up 2,000-page health care bill. "