"Never before has the average American been treated to such a live-action view of the sordid politics necessary to push a deeply flawed bill to completion. It was dirty deals, open threats, broken promises and disregard for democracy that pulled ObamaCare to this point, and yesterday the same machinations pushed it across the finish line...

"President Obama was elected by millions of Americans attracted to his promise to change Washington politics. These were voters furious with earmarks, insider deals and a lack of transparency. They were the many Americans who, even before this week, held Congress in historic low esteem. They'll remember this spectacle come November."

"And so it ends, with a health-care vote expected this weekend. I wonder at what point the administration will realize it wasn't worth it — worth the discord, worth the diminution in popularity and prestige, worth the deepening of the great divide. What has been lost is so vivid, what has been gained so amorphous, blurry and likely illusory. Memo to future presidents:  Never stake your entire survival on the painful passing of a bad bill. Never take the country down the road to Demon Pass."

"America will be in a constant health-care war if ObamaCare is enacted. Passage wouldn't end the health-care debate. Rather, it would perpetuate ObamaCare as the dominant issue for decades to come, reshape politics, create an annual funding crisis in Congress, and generate a spate of angry lawsuits. Yet few in Washington seem aware of what lies ahead."

"The latest posting from the Treasury Department shows the National Debt has increased over $2 trillion since President Obama took office.

"The debt now stands at $12.6 trillion. On the day Mr. Obama took office it was $10.6 trillion.

"President George W. Bush still holds the record for the most debt run up on his watch: $4.9 trillion. But it took him over four years to rack up the first two trillion dollars in debt. It has taken Mr. Obama 421 days."

"The United States, like other developed nations, was on a glide path toward entitlement meltdown even before Barack Obama ascended. But his acceleration of the descent has been stupefying. If the health care/student loan behemoth passes, Democrats will have combined two of the greatest follies of recent decades."

"Whatever their sins, insurers are mainly intermediaries; they pass along the costs of the delivery system. In 2009, the largest 14 insurers had profits of roughly $9 billion; that approached 0.4 percent of total health spending of $2.472 trillion. This hardly explains high health costs. What people need to know is that Obama's plan evades health care's major problems and would worsen the budget outlook. It's a big new spending program when government hasn't paid for the spending programs it already has.

"'If not now, when? If not us, who?' Obama asks. The answer is: It's not now, and it's not 'us.' Pass or not, Obama's proposal is the illusion of 'reform,' not the real thing."

"No way around it, the politics of ObamaCare are bad. So bad that it lends credence to the belief that some in the White House and Congress are far more ideologically interested in establishing European-style health care than they are the public's will or their party's electoral success. The question now is how many congressional Democrats are going to follow them into a political black hole."

"Even before President Obama rammed through his trillion-dollar-plus stimulus/bailout packages last year, there was a growing sentiment that the country's top priority ought to be tackling the entitlement programs whose liabilities are like a swelling aneurysm in the brain of the body politic waiting to rupture. The combined unfunded liabilities of Medicare and Social Security -- the federal health care and the pension programs for the elderly -- are $107 trillion, seven times the current GDP. Meanwhile, Medicaid, the joint federal-state health insurance program, is consuming on average 21% of state budgets, their single biggest ticket item even before ObamaCare dumps another 16 million people into the program, expanding the Medicaid population by 25%. Beyond that, state and local governments have promised their employees a trillion dollars more in pension and other benefits than they have funds to deliver. 

"There are not enough taxpayers in the country or creditors in China capable of financing all these promises. Expanding this massive, multifarious entitlement state even more strikes most normal people as sheer lunacy -- especially now that it is visibly coming apart at the seams."

"The proposed increase in government spending creates problems for advocates of reform beyond the perceived impact on deficits and the economy. Fifty-nine percent of voters say that the biggest problem with the health-care system is the cost: They want reform that will bring down the cost of care. For these voters, the notion that you need to spend an additional trillion dollars doesn't make sense. If the program is supposed to save money, why does it cost anything at all?"

"Maybe the facts will come to his rescue, but I just figured I'd get on the record about Eric Massa. I think he's full of it. I don't believe his story and I don't believe that the ethics committee was going to railroad him for one 'salty' comment at a wedding. I am sure that Rahm leaned on Massa, even in the shower. I'm sure that the White House has leaned on lots of people. But I don't think Massa's entirely self-serving story passes the smell test.  So until I see some corroboration of his version, I'm not buying it."