The Associated Press reminds us that Obama's healthcare rhetoric included the promise that private insurance plans would remain an option under his proposed reforms that would also include a "public option."

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama seems to leave little room for doubt when he promises that his health care plan will let people keep the coverage they have. His vow sounds reassuring and gets applause, but no president could guarantee such a pledge.

Employers sponsor coverage for most families, and Obama's plan still leaves companies free to change their health plans in ways that workers may not like. Employers can even drop insurance altogether.

"No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people," Obama said Monday, addressing the American Medical Association. "If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what."

He didn't let up.

"If you like what you're getting, keep it," Obama said. "Nobody is forcing you to shift."

Lo and behold! IBD picked up the the House version of the new legislation . . . and what did they find?

It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.

When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.

It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of the bill clearly states:

"Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law."

So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.

From the beginning, opponents of the public option plan have warned that if the government gets into the business of offering subsidized health insurance coverage, the private insurance market will wither. Drawn by a public option that will be 30% to 40% cheaper than their current premiums because taxpayers will be funding it, employers will gladly scrap their private plans and go with Washington's coverage.

The nonpartisan Lewin Group estimated in April that 120 million or more Americans could lose their group coverage at work and end up in such a program. That would leave private carriers with 50 million or fewer customers. This could cause the market to, as Lewin Vice President John Sheils put it, "fizzle out altogether."

What wasn't known until now is that the bill itself will kill the market for private individual coverage by not letting any new policies be written after the public option becomes law.

The legislation is also likely to finish off health savings accounts, a goal that Democrats have had for years. They want to crush that alternative because nothing gives individuals more control over their medical care, and the government less, than HSAs.

With HSAs out of the way, a key obstacle to the left's expansion of the welfare state will be removed.

The public option won't be an option for many, but rather a mandate for buying government care. A free people should be outraged at this advance of soft tyranny.

Washington does not have the constitutional or moral authority to outlaw private markets in which parties voluntarily participate. It shouldn't be killing business opportunities, or limiting choices, or legislating major changes in Americans' lives.

It took just 16 pages of reading to find this naked attempt by the political powers to increase their reach. It's scary to think how many more breaches of liberty we'll come across in the final 1,002.

The strange thing about this is that a recent Rasmussen poll shows that 70% of Americans rated their present health insurance plan "good" or "excellent." So we will now spend $4 Trillion to displace 79 million Americans from their present coverage.

Equity Private at finem respice spots this news about Bill Gates and friends filing a patent for a method to stop hurricanes. TechFlash reports:

Microsoft's chairman is among the inventors listed on a new batch of patent applications that propose using large fleets of vessels to suppress hurricanes through various methods of mixing warm water from the surface of the ocean with colder water at greater depths. The idea is to decrease the surface temperature, reducing or eliminating the heat-driven condensation that fuels the giant storms.

I am reminded of Michael Crichton's writings in his prologue to Jurassic Park where he derides man's "intoxicating vanities" that would permit belief that man is capable of altering or harming the earth:

This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We've been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we're gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.

Dr. Crichton also rightfully observed that things environmental are not always as they seem:

Most people assume linearity in environmental processes, but the world is largely non-linear: it's a complex system. An important feature of complex systems is that we don’t know how they work. We don’t understand them except in a general way; we simply interact with them. Whenever we think we understand them, we learn we don’t. Sometimes spectacularly.

Equity Private was thinking the same way when she wrote this about "Gates' Folly."

It is difficult to connect with the concept that complex systems are... well... complex. That is, just pulling a lever or two on the "input" is not guaranteed to get you either the results you want, nor assure you won't get worse results in some other way. This is easy to recognize as the not-a-law "law of unintended consequences," but very difficult to apply critically to grand ideas by charismatic visionaries with a talent for public relations- the somewhat crass art that has become the central skill requirement in modern politics.

The deeper issue from my perspective is still one of conceit. "Hurricanes are caused by warm surface water. Let's just cool the surface water. Problem solved." Not quite, I suspect.

Who exactly would be liable for the sudden weather changes on the African West Coast?

The New York Times and the Obama media have begun piling on Sarah Palin with opinion hit pieces such as this, this, and this.

Low and behold, from an unexpected extreme liberal source comes an assessment of Governor Palin that only her stanch conservative supporters believe and understand totally. Ladies and Gentlemen: Straight from the Socialist Republic of San Francisco, I present the one, the only . . . "Da Mayor" Willie Brown!

The pundits are wrong. Conventional wisdom is wrong. Sarah Palin's decision to step down as Alaska governor was a brilliant move.

Palin has some of the best political instincts I have ever seen. She became a pop-culture superstar overnight when John McCain made her his veep pick, and she's still second only to President Obama among politicians the public is interested in. Even in liberal San Francisco, she'd be front-page news if she ever came to town.

But that kind of celebrity comes at a high price. What a lot of people don't know is that Palin entered Alaska politics as a reformer attacking the corruption of the state's Republican establishment. As such, she was the darling of the Democrats - until she hooked up with McCain.

After the election, with Palin back home but positioning herself for a 2012 presidential run, it was clear she would catch nothing but ridicule from Alaska's Democrats. It was not going to be pretty.

If Palin wants to play on the national field, she has to be free to move around. She has to be able to drop into Indiana, Ohio or Tennessee and help Republican candidates raise money. She has to be available for radio and TV.

She has to be like Gavin Newsom, free to roam around the country, safe in the knowledge that things will pretty much take care of themselves back home.

Instead, Palin faced the prospect of being constantly pinned down in a state that is a day and a half away from the rest of America. She would have been totally isolated in every sense of the word.

Now she can study up on issues where she is lacking and become a full-time political celebrity.

The pundits call her a quitter, but let's be honest - the pundits never liked her to begin with. Better to take one hit for stepping down and move on than to stay in Alaska and die a death by a thousand cuts.

Governor or not, Palin is still the biggest star in the Republican galaxy. After all, who else have they got?

Writer Emily Bazelon conducted an interview for the New York Times Magazine with Ruth Bader Ginzberg on "The Place of Women on the Court." The questions were carefully crafted to elicit only the liberal feminist view of the necessity for women on the Supreme Court and to discuss only the "woman's rights" aspect of Roe v. Wade. I am saddened to see that many reputable conservative bloggers used a partial quotation from the interview to the twist the meaning of the justice's remarks (see here, here, here, and here).

The interview questions were all pro-female and anti-male in nature obviously emphasizing female sexism. I cannot bring myself to recite all of the leading questions and the generally narcissistic responses from Ginzberg. The Roe v. Wade discussion unexpectedly elicited a mistaken view that Justice Ginzberg favored Eugenics otherwise known as Social Darwinism. The dialogue was as follows:

Q: If you were a lawyer again, what would you want to accomplish as a future feminist legal agenda?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Reproductive choice has to be straightened out. There will never be a woman of means without choice anymore. That just seems to me so obvious. The states that had changed their abortion laws before Roe [to make abortion legal] are not going to change back. So we have a policy that affects only poor women, and it can never be otherwise, and I don’t know why this hasn’t been said more often.

Q: Are you talking about the distances women have to travel because in parts of the country, abortion is essentially unavailable, because there are so few doctors and clinics that do the procedure? And also, the lack of Medicaid for abortions for poor women?

JUSTICE GINSBURG: Yes, the ruling about that surprised me. [Harris v. McRae — in 1980 the court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbids the use of Medicaid for abortions.] Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.

Obviously, her final sentence wiped away the eugenics part of her answer.

J.B. White at RattlerGatorBlog magically ties together two political leaders that he has deeply admired. Enjoy.

If you've read my blog for some period of time beyond the last few months you know that I love Sarah Palin. I still have a difficult time figuring out what's not to love. All of the critiques friends and pundits have delivered ultimately embarrass them far more than Sarah. So it is with her decision to step down. I received an excited call on Saturday while driving to Jacksonville asking if I had heard the news about Palin. No, I replied, worried that something tragic had happened to her.

She resigned!

Resigned, I asked? (Relief swept over me; something like, "Oh. Okay.") What happened, I asked?

Once the basic information was given to me, I immediately determined this was a savvy move -- regardless of what her ulterior motive might have been. I explained to my friend that the Democrats ginned up manufactured B.S. scandals during the last election cycle. I know, because I received repeated calls about this or that obviously ridiculous phony scandal. I wanted to ask my friend this: did he really believe they wouldn't continue to do the same? Did he doubt there was a set-up waiting for her within the realm of Alaska Democrat politics? With a very willing D.C. and New York media at the ready?

I get extremely upset by people who should know better participating in the outrageous sliming of this good woman. And my recollection is similar to John Hayward's and I acutely remember all of this because it reflected my conventional wisdom at the time and all of those around me, including my mentors:

From my endless archives, a few samples of how the major media wrote off Ronald Reagan repeatedly:

Newsweek, 1971, “Ronald Reagan’s Slow Fade,” ended with the judgment that “the somber truth is that Sacramento may mark the end of Ronald Reagan’s political road. . . By every normal measure, Ronald Reagan ought to be entitled to any political future he wants. A close aide said, 'The Presidency? Oh, he’s not interested. Four more years and I think you’ll see Ronald Reagan riding one of his horses off into the sunset.'” And see Stephen Roberts in the New York Times Magazine: “In 1976, the reasoning goes, Reagan would be 65, and too old to run.” “When a guy’s built on celluloid,” Democratic State Senator George Moscone said, “he goes up fast, but he burns out quickly.”

After the 1976 campaign, Newsweek offered a reprise, “Into the Sunset": "The concluding line of Reagan’s convention speech — 'There is no substitute for victory' — could also turn out to be a epitaph for his own political career."

And not to be left out, John Coyne wrote in some magazine called National Review that "Reagan seems somewhat out of step with the new political stirrings, a man very much of the Sixties. . . . For a decade he has been a central symbol of everything that is best in what we call the conservative movement, and if his approach and his ideas are obsolete, then so are those many of us who believe in him. And it’s never much fun to be a middle-aged anachronism."

Everyone should apply the appropriate discount to the Palin commentary and analysis they read today.

I'd like to tell all of Sarah Palin's enemies to put that in their "sho' nuff pipe" and smoke it till you gag, fool!