"[The swine flu] is a pandemic in name only. When the WHO declared it one in June, it was 11 weeks into the outbreak and swine flu had killed only 144 people worldwide. Yet the mildest pandemics of the 20th century killed at least a million people worldwide. How could the agency do it? Simple. It redefined 'pandemic' in April, just days before announcing the swine-flu outbreak, so that severity is no longer even a consideration.

"The President's Council therefore simply assumed swine flu would behave as a pandemic. Likewise for the media. And if the WHO proclaimed a Ford a Ferrari, would government commissions and the media simply assume Fords could travel 200 mph?"

"As I explained on my radio show, this spectacle is bigger than I am on several levels. There is a contempt in the news business, including the sportswriter community, for conservatives that reflects the blind hatred espoused by Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson. 'Racism' is too often their sledgehammer. And it is being used to try to keep citizens who don't share the left's agenda from participating in the full array of opportunities this nation otherwise affords each of us. It was on display many years ago in an effort to smear Clarence Thomas with racist stereotypes and keep him off the Supreme Court. More recently, it was employed against patriotic citizens who attended town-hall meetings and tea-party protests.

"These intimidation tactics are working and spreading, and they are a cancer on our society."

"If only the laws of the universe didn't make it impossible to conjure something out of nothing. In a magical world free of such encumbrances, Democrats would be spared the bother of hiding the inevitable costs of Obamacare.  The latest gambit of Democrats in the Senate and perhaps in the House is to take roughly $250 billion out of health-care reform - for Medicare payments to doctors - and spend it in a separate bill. This instantly makes Obamacare appear cheaper, although its impact on the federal budget will be precisely the same. This isn't even competent three-card monte. It's the logic of the spendthrift who has maxed out on his Visa and MasterCard but thinks it's frugal to put a new $6,000 Samsung 65-inch LCD flat-screen TV on his American Express card instead."

"The Senate is now considering a bill ... to create a European-style 'cap and trade' system for carbon dioxide emissions... International pressure on the United States to adopt such legislation ... will increase in December at climate talks in Copenhagen. That's bad news for taxpayers. The Obama administration reluctantly admitted last month that cap-and-trade would cost the average American family $1,761 a year. That is a rosy prediction. A Heritage Foundation analysis pegs the cost at an average of $2,979 a year and as much as $4,600 a year by 2035. Jobs will disappear, energy prices will skyrocket, and the American Dream will become an unattainable fantasy for many."

"The [health care] reform debate, which captivated public interest at town halls across the country in August, now enters a new phase as [five different] bills head toward votes on the House and Senate floors this fall.

"The [Senate] Finance Committee bill must be merged with a more liberal reform plan from the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee... Across the Capitol, three House bills are similarly being merged to send to the floor of that chamber."

"[T]he same Congress and president who want to stop the banks from taking too much risk cannot stop themselves from ever more deficits. Indeed, so intoxicated - nay, hypnotized! - by debt is the current government that it is not even proposing to try to cut back.

"Last week saw, at the same time: 1) the world shuddering about the debt-driven, weakening dollar ('The biggest story in the world economy is the continuing fall of the U.S. dollar, or at least it is everywhere outside of Washington, D.C., the place most responsible for its declining value,' Wall Street Journal) and, 2) Washington cheering Sen. Max Baucus' health bill spending levels ('Health Care Bill Gets Green Light in Cost Analysis,' New York Times).

"That's right. The federal government is 'giving the green light' for the country to drive to the poorhouse. And drive there, I would argue, by way of the lunatic asylum. Are they nuts?"

"We know from past experience that cost estimates of all government health care programs ... tend to understate actual costs. So the Baucus bill -- er, conceptual language -- if enacted is likely to expand government spending by more than the estimated $829 billion. And perhaps quite a bit more. 

"CBO estimaters are constrained by budget rules from guesstimating how costs will skyrocket because of political pressures. The rest of us are not. We can regard CBO's estimate of $829 billion in additional spending not as a ceiling but as a floor.  We can reasonably conclude that the Baucus bill -- or whatever similar measure Reid and Schumer concoct -- would vastly and permanently increase public sector spending and impose a crushing burden on the private sector in a weak economy. That burden would be particularly heavy on low earners forced to buy expensive policies or else pay stiff fines, with money they would otherwise receive as wages or salaries."

"Apparently Nobel prizes [are] now being awarded to anyone who is not George Bush."

"While the media and lawmakers often shorthand a CBO letter as a ‘score’ or ‘cost estimate,’ [the] CBO letter [on the Baucus bill] is neither. Because the bill is still in ‘conceptual,’ or layman’s terms, CBO’s letter ... was a ‘preliminary analysis.’  For it to be an official cost estimate, the bill has to be translated into legislative language.

“And CBO goes to great pains in its letter to make the distinction:

“‘CBO and JCT’s analysis is preliminary in large part because the Chairman’s mark, as amended, has not yet been embodied in legislative language,’ the letter says.”

"[T]he health care bill that the Senate Finance Committee likely will pass today does not contain any mechanism to keep illegals from receiving benefits. On a party-line vote, Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee rejected a proposed requirement that would require immigrants to prove their identity. Imagine Congress passing age restrictions on alcohol and not requiring merchants to check IDs. Such a law could be described in a word: toothless."