This video pretty well captures the Summit *I* saw. Be sure to watch all the way to the end for the money quote from Gergen.

OPEN THREAD

According to the AFP (emphasis added):

Barack Obama was urged by his doctor Sunday to quit smoking for good after his first health check-up as US president found him otherwise in “excellent health” and “fit for duty.”

[...]

Under his recommendations, [Obama's personal physician Jeffrey] Kuhlman urged the president to “continue smoking cessation efforts” and noted Obama was medicating himself with nicotine supplements in a bid to kick the habit.

Obama, 48, has fought a public battle to give up smoking, and promised his wife he would quit when he ran for president — but has admitted succumbing to the occasional cigarette several times since moving into the White House.

File this news on a president who has signed into law new tobacco taxes ostensibly designed to price smokers out of their habit with other “do as I say, not as I do” Obama-isms like cranking up the heat in the Oval Office so high that “you could grow orchids in there” while declaring that Americans’ thermostats must remain below 72° so the rest of the world won’t hate us.

Here are my few brief, and probably socially unacceptable, words about a Congressman and Ex-Marine who passed away yesterday: John Murtha. In the interest of time, space, and not prolonging nausea, I won’t delve into this corrupt late Congressman’s role in ABSCAM, nor will I spend time lamenting, on behalf of the people of his district, the loss of the Pork King of Congress as their benefactor and representative.

I won’t even go too far into the Haditha Incident, in which Murtha (a military veteran who had long since cast his lot with those who believe that murder, atrocity, and shame are the rule of the military, not the exception) went onto national television, armed with nothing but a deep-seated hatred of America and her military (in place of, you know, facts), and accused several United States Marines of the cold-blooded murder of Iraqi civilians.

I want to use the little digital ink I’ll give the undeserving Murtha on a far worse issue.

Let’s journey back to February 2007. At this time, the U.S. was approaching its 4th anniversary in Iraq, the military death toll had passed 3,000, and Iraqi civilians were caught in the middle of a furious sectarian battle that had been kicked into overdrive by the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra.

General David Petraeus had just been tapped to take over Multinational Force-Iraq, and was ramping up a “surge” in troops there in preparation for the implementation of his counterinsurgency doctrine in the theater — a comprehensive overhaul of Iraq war strategy that would ultimately prove to be incredibly successful. Democrats in the House had just passed a non-binding resolution condemning the “surge” in troops (Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called this a “symbolic victory in the fight over the Iraq War,” despite the fact that the Senate version of the resolution fell 4 votes short of cloture. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said “It’s pretty clear that a resolution that in effect says that the general going out to take command of the arena shouldn’t have the resources he thinks he needs to be successful certainly emboldens the enemy and our adversaries”).

This was the setting for perhaps the most insidious move of Jack Murtha’s career, if not his life: the design and introduction of what he called a “Slow Bleed Strategy” designed to deprive soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in Iraq of the supplies — bullets, armor, etc. — they needed not only to push forward in Iraq, but to keep themselves alive while there. The rationale behind Murtha’s aptly — if appallingly — named Slow Bleed Strategy was that, if the supply chain to our troops in combat could be forced to dry up, enough of America’s warfighters would be killed in action that President Bush would have no choice but to “redeploy” our military men and women out of Iraq and back to America.

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The job done by Focus on the Family and the Tebows with their much-publicized Super Bowl advertisement was nothing short of masterful. In fact, I’m not sure that word describes the level of mastery Focus on the Family showed with their domination of the pro-abortion left through last night’s ad and the public relations battles leading up to it.

To fully understand what a massive PWNing of the Left this was, it’s necessary to briefly look back at the last couple weeks of hype and debate over this ad. When it was reported that Tim Tebow (who, despite being a dirty, jeanshorts-wearing Florida Gator, is a model citizen and upstanding individual) was appearing in a Focus on the Family commercial with his mother which was being aired for the purpose of encouraging people to Choose Life, the Leftists in the media (a redundancy, I know) and in the political sphere went into a frenzy.

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Let’s cut right to the chase: Scott Brown’s resounding defeat of Martha Coakley demonstrates many things. Chief among these is the vulnerability of every Democrat in the current election year, the impotence of the Democrats’ current leader and sitting President to sway public opinion in any vital race (Corzine, Deeds, Coakley….), and the true unpopularity of the health care monstrosity the Democratic supermajority has been fighting amongst itself to produce over the course of this last year.

More than one analyst has observed that Massachusetts’ current “progressive” health care system, put in place under Republican Governor Mitt Romney, gave state voters little reason to go to the polls to protect Obamacare. The reason for this, those analysts said, was that the Bay State, with its individual mandate and state connector-based system, stood to be least affected by the failure of the Democrats’ national health overhaul bill. However, it may be more correct to look at this move by Massachusetts voters — including a large number of Democrats — as a referendum on their own version of health care “reform,” which has turned into such a costly, access-precluding boondoggle in the years since its passage that even the most hard-hearted of Bay Staters did not wish to see it inflicted on the rest of America by the federal government.

Upon Senator-elect Scott Brown’s seating in the United States Senate, the one-party tyranny that has plagued Washington ever since this Congress was seated, and this President was sworn in, comes to a close. This does not, of course, mean that the Democrat agenda will have been stopped in its tracks; with Republicans like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and others in the Senate always willing to flip sides on an issue in the name of “compromise,” that will almost never be the case.

However, with their 60-vote supermajority having been lost, the ease with which Senate Democrats and President Obama will be able to pass their agenda in the future will be greatly reduced.

It is very telling that the solid year in which the Democratic Party had total, unassailable, unobstructable control of the entire apparatus of lawmaking and -enforcing power in Washington, the only tangible things they have to show for it are an expansion of SCHIP, a $787,000,000,000.00 boondoggle of a “stimulus” package that has failed to provably save one single job amidst the worst unemployment numbers in decades, and hundreds upon hundreds of hours logged griping and moaning about an “obstructionist” Republican superminority that couldn’t have stopped Democrats from doing one single thing in Congress has they wanted to.

That is a record voters are sure to remember come this November, particularly if Mr. Brown’s victory Tuesday night in the deep blue electoral sea that is Massachusetts is any indicator.

Please excuse the disorganization — and lack of paragraph phormat — in this post; it’s just a dump of a few things that have been bouncing around in my head since the Christmas attack (and, in some cases, longer).

For years, Democrats have told us that one of the biggest problems in America is that we’re not taken care of well enough by our government. From government health care, to Social Security, to further reduced minimum ages of mandatory government school attendance, to tighter restrictions on the rights of personal armament and self defense, the left has long sought — and continues to seek — to wrap every American in a governmental security blanket from which there can be no escape.

Thank goodness there were a few Americans on flight 253 from Amsterdam on Christmas Day who had the wherewithal, the independence, and the assertiveness to take down a wannabe killer instead of simply sitting idly by like lambs awaiting slaughter, unsure of what to do in the face of their government’s failure to prevent them from being put in such an awful situation.

Janet Napolitano’s “The System Worked” comment — which she repeated on multiple Sunday shows following the failed Christmas bombing — has to far surpass President Bush’s infamous “heckuva job, Brownie” as the most infamous statement of its type by an administration official in recent memory.

The fact that Napolitano said that in the first place isn’t actually all that surprising; after all, in a culture of total governmental dependence such as that the Left has been trying for so long to create in America, the only thing that need be offered after such a colossal breakdown is a verbal reassurance that the government actually is responsible for whatever it was that went right on that Christmas Day flight. However, the fact that she kept digging in and repeating the statement despite its obvious absurdity served to as just another example of this administration’s inability to “rethink” its own clearly impotent talking points and counterfactual claims (for other examples, see the repeated health care cost containment claims, or the latest “saved or created” job numbers from the abysmally failed “stimulus” package).

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Handed a top-to-bottom review of, and a revised strategy for, this long-ignored front in the Global War on Terror by the outgoing Bush administration, President Barack Obama stepped to the microphone in February and gave a platitudinous speech that echoed precisely what his predecessor had said in the last months of his own presidency. When that speech alone failed to miraculously make the war in Afghanistan simply go away, Obama spent months dithering over whether or not he should give another Afghan strategy speech (as American troops and Afghan civilians were dying at a rate higher than they had been at any point in the conflict).

Finally, when the problem again refused to just go away on its own, Obama succumbed to public demand that he actually say something about the troops, and the war, he has responsibility for in Afghanistan as America’s commander in chief. Fortunately, he had amazing resources (besides brilliant military brass like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal) to rely on in his decision-making process in the form of a host of lessons learned over the last six years in Iraq. With so recent an example of so much not to do in a war, Obama couldn’t help but learn from previous mistakes and make a sound decision on Afghanistan….right?

If only we were so lucky as to have a President who actually recognized that history existed before January 20, 2009 — something that he and his administration simply refuse to do (with the sole exception to that rule being the amazingly unprofessional and unpresidential non-stop banging of the “blame-everything-on-my-predecessor” drum).

Stepping to the microphone last night at West Point, President Barack Obama, Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces (and supposedly extraordinarily intelligent individual), laid out a strategy for Afghanistan that embraced every single thing that went wrong in Iraq over the last six years (particularly the bloody 2004-06 period), and that avoided implementing any of the tactics that actually made that western front in the GWOT the rousing success it is today.

Pull back to large bases and defend only major cities? Check. Send too few troops to protect themselves and the civilian population — let alone to successfully defeat the enemy while building necessary infrastructure and supporting a new, issue-plagued government? Check. (This is yet another major issue, as Afghanistan is geographically larger and more forbidding than Iraq, which is the size of California to Afghanistan’s Texas — not even mentioning the Hindu Kush mountains.) Fail to accompany that increase in troop levels with a workable change in strategy, designed to maximize those troops’ effectiveness and to accomplish a clearly defined mission (rather than simply sending over more American men and women to serve as cannon fodder)? Check. Fail to clearly define the mission in the first place, and to define victory in any way? Check. Demand that members of the indigenous population put themselves and their families at risk standing beside a force that they suspect will be abandoning them to severe repercussions in the near future? Check. Provide timelines to the enemy, so that they know how long it will be before the one superior fighting force in that nation will be departing, and leaving the country to them once again? Check.

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UPDATE: I’m receiving emails from folks who say an unsubscribe link was at the bottom of the Axelrod email they received. I’m also receiving more emails from people, including on Capitol Hill, who are saying they received Axelrod’s “viral” talking points memo despite never having signed up for White House emails in any way.

If there’s a part of this story that’s more troubling to me, it’s not the unsubscribe bit; CAN-SPAM likely doesn’t apply to government anyway, and I can always move Mr. Axelrod’s emails to my spam bucket on my own. Rather, the most troubling part here is the fact that the White House is apparently targeting people who have never offered their permission, or their contact information, to the White House in an increasingly desperate attempt to get somebody to listen to them.

Yesterday, the Obama White House launched a self-described “viral e-mail” that, according to ABC News, strategists and spokespersons hoped would “combat the viral e-mails that fly unchecked and under the radar, spreading all sorts of lies and distortions.”

The email, which is from Obama strategist David Axelrod and which has a subject line of “Something Worth Forwarding, is a lengthy (and wholly unremarkable)rehash of Obama administration/Organizing for America/Democrat National Committee talking points on the proposed health care overhaul.

The main content of this email is not really noteworthy in the least. What is noteworthy is the fact that Axelrod’s email appears to lack any way to opt out of future messages from info@messages.whitehouse.gov — a fact that, if Axelrod’s email is to be considered anything other than official government communication, may put it in violation of the federal CAN-SPAM Act.

The CAN-SPAM (”Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing”) Act, passed in 2003, requires emailers to “give recipients an opt-out method,” according to the Federal Trade Commission. Axelrod’s email did not do that.

Granted, the CAN-SPAM Act was written to protect people against commercial email spamming, not against a White House that sent an email without an opt-out feature to a list of people who never requested to be contacted by the Obama White House, and who never provided the administration with their email addresses.

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The “Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009,” the House health overhaul bill, creates the position of Health Choices Commissioner, or “Insurance Czar.”

The Insurance Czar would be appointed by the President to oversee the Health Choices Administration. This would be the 33rd federal ‘czar’ appointed by President Obama since his January 20, 2009 inauguration.

The appointee would be responsible for establishing and regulating geographically-based Health Insurance Exchanges, determining what benefits and coverages must be included in health insurance plans each year, and assessing fines on employers and individuals who do not provide or acquire health insurance.

The Insurance Czar would also be responsible for regulating private insurers’ marketing activities and use of funds, and for “promoting accountability” of insurance providers both within and outside of the Exchanges in “meeting Federal health insurance requirements.”

Additionally , the Insurance Czar would be privy to individuals’ tax return information, which he or she would use to determine who qualifies for federal subsidies to purchase insurance.

Source: HR 3200 §141-2

See it for yourself below, as Bill Burton, a spokesman for Barack Obama’s White House, says:

I don’t think that Speaker Pelosi was just claiming that people were wearing swastikas [at health care town hall meetings]; people are showing up to events with swastikas, dressed up as Hitler, with signs invoking Nazi Germany, so that’s not something that’s being made up.

Video:

The DC Examiner’s David Freddoso tried to run down this claim, and hit a stone wall:

White House spokesman Bill Burton’s statement on television earlier today that people are showing up at health care town halls dressed up as Hitler was outlandish enough that I had to call the White House and ask if there is anything to substantiate it.

As of this evening, the White House has offered no explanation for this bizarre claim.

By the way, the laugher line of Burton’s interview was the seven-word claim, “We’re trying to have a constructive debate.”

Calling your opponents a dangerous mob of swastika-wearing Hitlers and calling out SEIU thugs to beat them into submissive silence (not to mention setting up an informant tipline by which those who question Obama’s health plan in “casual conversation” can be turned in to the government) is one heck of a way to “have a constructive debate,” there, Bill. Well done.

UPDATE: According to The Hill, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has now taken to referring to those who question Obamacare as “evil-mongers.” Classy, Senator.

The debate over health care reform — what constitutes it and what public opinion of such reform really is — has become more polarizing as the summer has gone on. Below are five key liberal talking points about health care “reform” and an accompanying dose of truth their peddlers so desperately need to hear.

1. Republicans, who either believe the health care status quo is perfectly acceptable or are in the pockets of lobbyists who pay them to say so, are opposed to the very idea of reform and want to block any effort to fix our health care system.

This is, of course, entirely untrue. Anybody can look at the American health care system — which is and continues to be the best in the world — and spot areas that are in need of improvement. Left and right differ in their views of what those problems are and how they are best dealt with. Republicans and conservatives only oppose “reform” outright if the term is limited to meaning the government-centric overhaul that the president and congressional Democrats are pushing.

Actual reform — a reduction in the dependence on third-party payers, increase in patient choice, reduction of costs, increase in personal freedom and control of health care dollars, added portability of health coverage, and reduced governmental interference — is almost universally supported on the right.

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The “Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009″ imposes a “surtax,” or income tax increase, on all Americans making $280,000 a year or more.

Under the bill, those making $280,000 ($350,000 for couples) will have their taxes increased by 1 percentage point, those making $400,000 ($500,000 for couples) by 1.5 percentage points, and those making more than $800,000 ($1 million for couples) by 5.4 percentage points.

This would make the top marginal federal tax rate 40.4% – the highest it has been since the Clinton years. If President Obama keeps his promise to let the Bush tax cuts expire (which he reiterated at a Portsmouth, NH town hall on Tuesday) that top marginal rate will increase to 45% – the highest it has been since the Reagan tax cuts of 1986.

If a review in 2013 by the Congressional Budget Office determines the health care overhaul has failed to save at least $175 billion, the bill provides for an automatic doubling of the tax increases on the lower two of those three incomes.

Further, with state income taxes rising across the country, this surtax and automatic 2013 increase would put the top combined federal-state income tax rates in over half of all states at 50% or more.

Source: HR 3200 §59C

The New Testament book of Matthew contains a well-known allegorical tale known as the “Parable of the Ten Talents.” In this story, Jesus told of a man who entrusted his property to three servants while he was away. One servant was given five silver talents; another two; and a third one. The first two servants put that which their master had given them to good use, and doubled his money while he was away. The third servant, who had been given but one talent, buried the valuable quantity of silver to preserve it until his master returned, neither risking its safety nor putting it to good use while its owner was away.

Upon his return, the two servants who had taken that which he had entrusted them with and used it wisely during his absence presented their master with their earnings. He replied to each, “Well done, my good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things.”

The third servant, who had merely protected that portion of his master’s wealth with which he had been entrusted, presented the single talent upon the man’s return. Seeing this, the master flew into a rage, chastising the “wicked, lazy servant” for allowing cowardice and irresponsibility to prevent his putting the master’s money to good use and ordering the servant to surrender his talent to the servant who had proved his resourcefulness and trustworthiness by doubling his master’s five talents.

The moral of this New Testament parable – be a good steward of a little and you will be trusted with more, but poor stewardship will lose you the privilege of being trusted with anything in the future – is recalled to mind by the federal government’s current attempt to take over the American health care system. The 33 years Medicare has been in existence have provided the federal government with an opportunity to demonstrate what type of steward its legislators and bureaucrats will be of a national health care program millions of Americans are trusting for their coverage and care.

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The arrogance of Democratic lawgivers is plain to see any time they step in front of a camera or microphone, but never is it on such full display as when they actually have to deal with their constituents.

Take, for example, this video of Texas Democrat Sheila Jackson-Lee, who is willing to allow her constituents the honor of being in her presence, just so long as they don’t gripe too much about the fact that she’s talking on her freaking cell phone while one of them is raising a Constitutional and ethical concern about legislation she is supporting in her constituents’ name in Congress.

Go to the four minute mark on the video below and watch until you can’t take any more. [UPDATE]: We’ve shaved it down to the relevant parts: below is the new video. - Moe Lane

And they wonder — they honestly wonder — why people are outraged?

Amazing.

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Under the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee’s “Affordable Health Choices Act,” local governments can apply for “community transformation” grants to build jungle gyms, sidewalks, bicycle paths, and grocery stores, to install streetlights, and to establish new farmers’ markets.

The dollar amount of these grants, and of the total “community transformation” earmark program, is left to the discretion of the Obama administration.

Cities can also apply for “community makeover” grants, which can provide them with up to $10 per resident in taxpayer dollars for “beautifying streets.”

Sen. Tom Coburn, MD (R-OK) sponsored an amendment to the HELP Committee bill that would have prevented any funds it made available from being used “to build, develop, or maintain sidewalks, parks, bike paths, or street lights.” The amendment was defeated by party-line vote.

The “Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009,” the House of Representatives’ health overhaul legislation, also contains an earmark for these grants. The House bill sets the amount available for their funding at $1.6 billion.

Sources: “Affordable Health Choices Act,” Title III, Subtitle C
HR 3200, § 3151

I don’t know if I’ve seen a worse public speaker in my lifetime more lionized for his public speaking ability than President Barack Obama (D-IL). The homage paid to him by pundits and anchors across the country for his supposedly unique combination of intelligence and eloquence is shown almost by the day to be as misplaced as effusive praise for Vice President Joe Biden’s (D-Slave State) thoughtful, precise manner of speaking would be.

The difference is, you don’t see people tripping all over themselves to praise Biden’s wisdomousness (to use a term from “Friends), or calling for him to make more public appearances as a counter to dipping personal and proposal popularity numbers. You do — inexplicably — see that with Obama, the architect of so many gaffes just one national campaign into his career (and six months into his presidency) that he already rivals the eight years of President Bush in quotable foibles.

“Fifty-seven states”? “Good morning, Sunshine”? “Ten thousand dead - and entire town destroyed”? Give an asthmatic “a breathayzer–inhalater–er, inhaler”?

Now the latest: Today, in defense of his unwavering determination to establish a government-run health insurance entity to compete with existing private insurers (which his Congressional allies are firmly behind as a means to government-run health care as the only option), Obama made a classic argument for…keeping the government out of the market.

The video:

The quote:

If you think about it, uh…uh…uh, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine.

[pause]

Right? Th-The, uh, no, they are! I mean, i-it’s-it’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.

That statement was followed by a long pause, during which one can only assume Obama was struggling to keep up with what he had just said and wondering why he left his Binky home for this appearance (and, perhaps, was wishing Joe Biden was there to take some attention away from his abject blunder).

“UPS and FedEx are doing just fine.” Yes, they are — and their history shows what real competition between private entities can do for a market.

“It’s the Post Office that’s always having problems.” Again, absolutely true; the Post Office has any number of problems, and the only reasons it is still in existence despite providing a level of service and reliability that would drive a private entity out of business are its monopoly on mail delivery and the fact that, because it is government-run, it can lose an unlimited amount of money and remain both in business and in the competition.

There’s no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the Post Office’s existence in the package-delivery marketplace has had the effect of forcing FedEx and UPS to improve their service or to become more competitive.

This brings up a very important question: Why, with the coverage equivalents of FedEx and UPS already serving the American people (at least, as well as they can under a mound of cost-increasing regulation), would we have any desire to hand over our health care to the same crew of failures that runs the Post Office, which even the President concedes is a failure?

The latest report from Rasmussen shows only 42% of Americans now support Congressional Democrats’ and President Obama’s proposal for a government-centric overhaul of the American health care system.

This poll shows that the decline in support for the President’s plan, which began in earnest in late June, has continued unabated. Two months ago, support for the Obama/Kennedy/Pelosi health care overhaul stood at 50%; in July, it fell to 47%, and now, in August, it is 42%.

American opposition to allowing government to overhaul the health care system remains 53%, identical to the late July number.

According to the report:

Sixty-seven percent (67%) of those under 30 favor the plan while 56% of those over 65 are opposed. Among senior citizens, 46% are strongly opposed.

Predictably, 69% of Democrats favor the plan, while 79% of Republicans oppose it. Yet while 44% of Democratic voters strongly favor the reform effort, 70% of GOP voters are strongly opposed to it.

Most notable, however, is the opposition among voters not affiliated with either party. Sixty-two percent (62%) of unaffiliated voters oppose the health care plan, and 51% are strongly opposed. This marks an uptick in strong opposition among both Republicans and unaffiliateds, while the number of strongly supportive Democrats is unchanged.

With the popularity of his health overhaul still dropping like it has a millstone tied around its neck, it’s no wonder the President — whose only experience with opposition is engineering union-backed astroturf campaigns for the purpose of preaching “truth to power” — is so anxious to shut off debate, and to have his supporters (and union goons) punch opponents back “twice as hard.”

Further, it’s no wonder that Obama pressed so hard to have a health overhaul bill passed this summer, before the American people could find out what his proposal consisted of, and before Congress had to face those in whose hands their electoral fates lie.

It looks like it’s going to be a long, hot August for the President and his Democratic supermajority in Congress.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee’s “Affordable Health Choices Act” contains an “employer mandate,” or a legal requirement that all American businesses with 25 or more employees offer health insurance to their workers.

The penalty for failing to comply with this mandate to offer employees health insurance is a $750 fine per full time worker per year.

In 2008, employer-provided insurance policies averaged $4,704 a year for individuals and $12,680 for families, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation (p. 2 here). This means employers would be able to save $4,000 per worker (or $12,000 per family) by ending their employee health benefit programs and simply paying the federal government the fine.

Source: Senate HELP Committee bill fact sheet, pp. 7-8.

House Resolution 3200, the “Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009,” fulfills President Barack Obama’s promise that “If you like your health plan, you can keep it” – technically.

Under the Democrat-sponsored bill, existing insurance policies are “grandfathered” into the new, overhauled national health care system, meaning that you have the option to keep your health coverage plan and provider even if they don’t conform to the new standards set by the federal government.

However, beginning the year this bill takes effect, individuals who leave their current insurer for any reason – whether it be moving to a different state or changing to a different employer – will be forced to purchase a new government-approved private plan or to enroll in the government-run, taxpayer-funded “public option” for their health coverage, rather than being allowed to choose coverage similar to that which they had before the advent of Obamacare.

Update: Source: HR 3200, § 102

Bob Hahn’s comment to my earlier post about Organizing/Obama for America’s call for supporters to flood legislative offices in an effort to create the appearance of support for the very unpopular health overhaul proposal got me thinking. Here’s Bob’s comment:

What if nobody cares?

This is a pretty risky maneuver by the White House. If it doesn’t work — if supporters do not show up in large numbers — it will leave the Members of Congress shaken by the thought that all those angry opponents at the Town Halls are real. After all, if the Democrats can’t gin up Astroturf from their list, why should we believe that the Republicans can?

I’m not convinced that an email list of hopeychangey elect-the-first-black-guy idealists are going to be all that excited about health care. This could be an epic fail.

This got me thinking in a way I hadn’t before. Today’s Organizing/Obama for America call-for-astroturfers is telling on its own. However, what is more telling is the fact that this is the third time in the last four days OFA has sent an email to its supporters calling on them to turn out in support of President Obama’s government health care overhaul.

Let me say that again: This is the third time in four days that Barack Obama, community organizer extraordinaire, has called on his legions to turn out in support of his policies. The first of those emails was purportedly from Obama himself, calling on supporters to turn out at “thousands of events” across the country; the second and third were calls to telephone and visit, respectively, legislative offices around the nation in an effort to show support for his badly flagging health overhaul proposal.

Because these emails come with relative frequency, I didn’t fully appreciate the temporal proximity of those three emails — or what that meant — until Bob’s comment forced me to consider it. Now, though, it is clear as day: the Obama administration, and its network of paid community organizers and agitators, is growing incredibly desperate for two reasons.

First, Barack Obama and his allies are losing the organizing battle at every turn to ordinary Americans who aren’t even being directed or paid — just taking an active interest in their government’s actions!

Second, despite repeated calls to action (including a declaration by the President himself that the opportunity to shut down debate on an issue, and to out-organize ordinary American citizens, was “the moment our movement was built for”) — again, three in four days — the Great Community Organizer simply can’t get his supporters to turn out, or his astroturf in place.

One call for supporter action is ordinary (even if it is odd to have a President making that call, particularly when it is paired with an order to mobilize against another portion of the American citizenry). Two calls is a bit odd. Three in four days, though, is utter desperation.

Barack Obama and his astroturfing band of “community organizers” are losing this battle, and they are losing it despite employing every tool at their disposal, from “community organizing,” to mobilizing union thugs to physically harm dissidents, to attempting to silence political opponents by calling on Americans to turn in their fellow citizens to the government for political disagreement.

That’s one encouraging thought. The unencouraging counter to that, though, is this: what does a President whose only experience is as a community organizer, manufacturing outrage and threatening opponents with physical violence (and acting in accordance with the Chicago Way, do when all legal means at his fingertips of enacting his agenda fail? That is a question we may see answered sooner rather than later.