It has been over a year since President Obama announced his plans for comprehensive health reform.

Since the announcement, as Americans learned more and more about the Democrats’ health care bill, opposition to the left’s plans for big government health care have grown and grown.

It started with the explosion of outrage at town hall meetings over the bill’s cuts to Medicare to pay for new bureaucracies and programs.

It gained steam when Americans realized the frightening potential for “death panels” when you give government the power to deny care based on budgetary concerns.

And it reached critical mass when the corrupt manner in which the bill was being shoved through Congress was exposed to the American people.

However, despite all the polls showing that Americans want Congress to scrap the current bill and start over, it is now clear that Democratic leaders are bound and determined to ignore the will of the people.

The Exceptionalism Backlash

President Barack Obama learned from Bill Clinton's mistakes in 1993-94. He ran, relative to Clinton, a buttoned-up transition. He sought to avoid Clinton's tactical miscues on health care. And he steered clear of cultural land mines.

The backlash against Democrats in 1994 was famously attributed to "gays, guns and God." Obama has mostly avoided stoking opposition around that hot-button triad, but faces a backlash almost indistinguishable in feel and intensity. Why?

Big government became a cultural issue. The level of spending, the bailouts and the intervention in the economy contemplated in health-care reform and cap-and-trade created the fear that something elemental was changing in the country -- quickly, irrevocably, without notice.

"It's a free country."

That's a popular saying — and true in many ways. But for a free country, America does ban a lot of things that are perfectly peaceful and consensual. Why is that?

Here are some things you can't do in most states of the union: rent your body to someone for sex, sell your kidney, take recreational drugs. The list goes on. I'll discuss American prohibitions tomorrow night at 8 and 11 p.m. Eastern time (and again on Friday at 10) on my Fox Business program.

The prohibitionists say their rules are necessary for either the public's or the particular individual's own good. I'm skeptical. I think of what Albert Camus said: "The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants." Prohibition is force. I prefer persuasion. Government force has nasty unintended consequences.

I would think that our experience with alcohol prohibition would have taught America a lesson. Nearly everyone agrees it was a disaster. It didn't stop people from drinking, but it created new and vicious strains of organized crime. Drug prohibition does that now.

It was Father's Day, 1964, when the Phillies' Jim Bunning, a father of seven, took the mound against the Mets.

Ninety pitches later, Bunning had struck out 10 and allowed not one batter to reach first base. Twenty-seven up, 27 down. The first perfect game in 86 years in the National League, and the finest hour of the Hall of Famer's baseball career.

Beginning last week, Jim Bunning took the Senate floor for five straight days to object to Harry Reid's call for unanimous consent to waive through a $10 billion spending bill. First, the Kentucky senator demanded, show me how we're going to pay for it.

His own leadership abandoned Bunning. Susan Collins of Maine assured the Senate and country that Republicans did not back their colleague: "Senator Bunning's views do not represent a majority of the caucus. It's important that the American people understand that there is bipartisan support for extending these vital programs."

Rush Limbaugh recently mocked me because I do not call President Obama a socialist. Although I asked Obama to explain his "socialistic tenets" in my last interview with him, I have not branded him with the "S" word, because the label does not exactly apply to his governance thus far.

As defined in the American Heritage Dictionary, socialism is a social organization in which the means of distributing and producing goods is owned collectively. Last time I looked, my production of material was owned by my corporation; the government was not involved. Yes, the federal, state and local governments can tax me at will, and they do. But that's a constitutional mandate and part of our capitalistic system. So until Obama begins seizing condos, I cannot put the "S" word on his resume.

Nancy Pelosi's Last Charge

In keeping with his new spirit of compromise, President Barack Obama has offered a health-care bill staking out middle ground between House and Senate Democrats.

At $950 billion, it's more expensive than the Senate bill, but cheaper than the House bill, and mixes and matches sundry tax proposals. Obama has again proved himself a committed bipartisan leader -- if liberals from the House and liberals from the Senate are considered political parties.

Obama's true post-Massachusetts strategy now comes into focus. It wasn't to engage in good faith with Republicans. It wasn't to "pivot to jobs." It was to wait until the shock of losing Ted Kennedy's Senate seat faded enough that he could keep doing what he'd done previously.
Democrats are now in pursuit of a "catastrophic success" -- to borrow George W. Bush's phrase for the Iraq War -- on health care.

Today, the administration will put on another show for the American people. The nationalized healthcare naysayers have been summoned to the White House to give their ideas on healthcare reform. Yet, the President announced his newly packaged plan days ago. So what’s the point?

Is this a meeting to exchange ideas and move forward in a bipartisan manner or a meeting to say this is my plan, get on board or get out of the way?

The American people see this meeting for what it is. But, what I don’t understand is how this administration can continue to think that the people aren’t smart enough to see that for themselves. We keep hearing that the White House has an open door and that this is the most transparent Congress in the history of our country. The door may be ceremonially open, but the window to hear the people must be closed. The public has overwhelmingly rejected the idea that the government knows what is best for the rest of us.

Patrick Henry so eloquently stated: “The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of the rulers may be concealed from them.”

How long will it take for every last American to realize President Barack Obama is not about bipartisanship, reconciliation (other than as a process to cram his health care bill through Congress) and uniting Americans? As his latest gyrations on health care demonstrate, he will not be deterred in his quest to saddle Americans with socialized medicine, even if it greatly increases the likelihood he won't be re-elected.

Here we have Obama, frenetically busy with at least three of his hands, pushing different buttons and sending mixed signals. I guess being a self-perceived messiah means you don't have to worry about being flagrantly inconsistent, even on the same day or in the context of one speech.

He's invited Republicans to a bipartisan summit on health care, intending to create the illusion that he's interested in conservative ideas on the subject.

"I used to think it would take a great financial crisis to get both parties to the table, but we just had one," said G. William Hoagland, a former adviser to the Senate Republican leadership on fiscal policy.

"These days, I wonder if this country is even governable."

Quoted in The New York Times' lead story, "Party Gridlock Feeds New Fear of a Debt Crisis," Hoagland nailed it.

America faces a crisis of democracy.

At its heart is a fiscal crisis. After the 2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion, we are running a 2010 deficit of $1.6 trillion. Trillion-dollar deficits are projected through the Obama years, be they four or eight.

Long before 2016, however, holders of U.S. public debt will stop buying Treasury bills or start demanding higher interest rates to cover the growing risk of a default.

Stay with me, because you are not going to believe this column. This month in Chicago, an event will honor three men as "living legends." The men are Minister Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor of Barack Obama's church, and Father Michael Pfleger, a radical-left Catholic priest. The men will stand together, and thousands of spectators will pay to see them.

The press release announcing the program says, "Because of their legacy of educating, they are being honored as Living Legends for their unfailing work and dedication."

And who, exactly, selected the three men as honorees? Um, well, that would be the Rev. Jeremiah Wright!

That's right, the good reverend is honoring himself and his bomb-throwing pals — and charging up to $100 for a ticket. Who gets the proceeds? Again, that would be Wright.

Fewer than half of Americans support any of President Obama's feeble attempts at force feeding us his insane health care bills. Barry and his ultra-left wing punks on Capital Hill are determined to pass it anyway even though none have read the entire 2,000 plus page bill, fully comprehend what's in it, or care what carnage it will bring to our economy. The bill is so cumbersome and complex that no one can explain it in plain terms to Americans. Typical.

Obama and crew don't care that Americans don't want the federal government to take over health care. That's because they believe they are smarter than Americans and know what is best for us. They are elitists.

They will do anything to pass health care including paying off some senators with our tax dollars such as Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. The Chicago mob could learn a few tricks from Obama.

Not surprisingly, a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released last Friday revealed that 56 percent of Americans think the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to their rights and freedoms.

Particularly apropos here is the feds' health care violation of the 10th Amendment, which is part of our Bill of Rights and was ratified Dec. 15, 1791. The amendment says, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Thomas Jefferson explained the pre-eminence of this amendment in 1791: "I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground: That 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.'

It's still difficult to believe that last week, President Barack Obama actually celebrated Feb. 17 as the anniversary of his stimulus plan (aka the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009), in which Washington borrowed $862 billion on American taxpayers' credit. Celebrate the piling of roughly $1 trillion on the backs of our posterity? Call me clueless, but I never have considered easing present circumstances by going into a massive amount of debt as an answer to anyone's economic recovery and longevity.

But I bet there's one date the president definitely won't be celebrating: Feb. 27. This Saturday marks the anniversary (or first birthday) of the Tea Party movement.

To think that last year at this time, the mainstream media and Washington politicians were either completely overlooking them or labeling those patriot gatherings as extreme and wacky fringe resistances.

Case Reopened

Climate alarmists conjured a world where nothing was certain but death, taxes and catastrophic global warming. They used this presumed scientific certainty as a bludgeon against the skeptics they deemed "deniers," a word meant to have the noxious whiff of Holocaust denial.
All in the cause of hustling the world into a grand carbon-rationing scheme. Any questions about the evidence for the cataclysmic projections, any concerns about the costs and benefits were trumped by that fearsome scientific "consensus," which had "settled" the important questions.

A funny thing happened to this "consensus" on the way to its inevitable triumph, though. Its propagators have been forced to admit fallibility. For the cause of genuine science, this is a small step forward; for the cause of climate alarmism, it's a giant leap backward. The rush to "save the planet" cannot accommodate any doubt, or it loses the panicked momentum necessary for a retooling of modern economic life.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will leave office in November, but, unlike The Terminator, he will not be back.

According to a recent Field Poll, the governor's job approval rating stands at a paltry 27 percent, and 64 percent disapprove of the job he's doing. Also, 59 percent of Californians say Gov. Arnold will leave the state worse off than it was seven years ago, when then-Gov. Gray Davis was recalled; that is, directly thrown out of office by the voters.

Right now, the Golden State is spending $20 billion a year more than it takes in. Even Lehman Brothers could predict looming bankruptcy. In fact, Schwarzenegger flat-out says the state cannot pay its bills. So it is issuing IOUs. Wouldn't you like one of those?

The primary problem out here is massive entitlement spending and out-of-control pensions and disability benefits for state employees. The unions are so strong, they can kick sand in the governor's face any time they want. The golf courses are full of former state employees too impaired to work any longer.

The American political system is nicely balanced so that certain foul deeds — like throwing poor women off the welfare rolls, or cutting old people's pensions — are handed off to Democrats, who put on a better act, tears streaming down their faces as they protest that they must kill in order to be kind. So when, in January 2009, Obama gave an interview to the Washington Post shortly before he took over the White House, saying that it was high time to take an unsparing look at "entitlements," the warning shot rang clear loud. Once again, a Democratic president was signaling an intent to sell his most loyal supporters — working people of modest means — down the river, to hack away at basic social protections like Social Security and Medicare.