Transparency: Pelosi Style.

Miss Piggy at Rest

Pelosi's Pig in a Poke is the op-ed title with the airhead quote ""We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it," worthy of John Kerry or Joe Biden, or Obama sans teleprompter.

The corrupt farce AKA ObamaCare stumbles and lurches its way, hopefully toward oblivion, while the Dems start talking about extra-constitutional hi-jinks like "The Slaughter Option," named for the feckless denture queen of the Bronx, which would pass the Senate Bill through the House by "deeming" it appropriate. Sounds so absolutely desperate that it resembles the Enabling Act of 1933 [Godwin Alert!] which ushered in young Adolf with the nodding approval of war hero Hindenburg. Just call the Dems' recent outing of Massa and "temporary" demotion of Charlie Rangel a new politics of Magical Realism. Here's the WSJ's Taranto:

Pelosi is not alone in equating knowledge of the bill's contents to enactment of it. Consider the lead paragraph of this Associated Press dispatch about Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, who cast the deciding vote allowing passage of the Senate's version of ObamaCare;

A moderate Democrat insisted Tuesday she remained opposed to pushing a health care bill through the Senate with a simple majority vote, despite saying she wanted to see what was in the legislation[my emph].

These people are trying to sell us a pig in a poke. Actually, that's not quite right: They've failed to sell us a pig in a poke. At nearly every opportunity, voters have responded to the ObamaCare sales pitch by shouting "No!"--even going so far as to elect a Republican to the Senate from Massachusetts.

But if Pelosi and President Obama have their way, we will get their pig, and will we ever pay for it. Is it any wonder that, as the Associated Press reports, "Americans have come to detest Congress ever more deeply as it nears the end of a nasty fight over health care"?

Michael Barone is less cutting, but more thorough in his dissection of the Health Care corpse.

In fall 2009, Democrats could have pivoted on health care to craft a popular bill or a watered-down unpopular bill to be passed by a bipartisan safe-seat coalition. Instead, they plunged ahead and rammed through unpopular bills on party-line votes.

Pelosi got a 220-215 margin in the House in November after accepting an amendment by Rep. Bart Stupak that banned funding of abortions.

In the Senate in December, Majority Leader Harry Reid predictably had to pay a high price -- the Cornhusker kickback and the Louisiana purchase -- for the 59th and 60th votes. That's always the case when you need 60 out of 60.

Scott Brown's election in January in Massachusetts deprived Reid of his 60th vote. The only way forward for the Democrats is for the House to pass the Senate bill and then trust the Senate to fix it through the reconciliation process. Pelosi has had six weeks to get the votes for that and hasn't done so yet.

It's beginning to look like the goal of health care legislation was a bridge too far. There's a reason it's hard to pass unpopular legislation on party-line votes. It's not the Senate rules. It's called democracy.

David Broder closes the door on the horrific deficits being run up by Congress which passed a "pay-as-you-go" plan & then immediately junked it, leaving poor Jim Bunning as the lone honest man in the den of thieves, and for holding out on a "jobs bill" that Reid had reneged the p-a-y-g provision, was roundly scolded by the creepy Andrea Mitchells of DC. Broder mimics Cassandra:

The record of the Washington politicians is summarized in the report that came out of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) last week. That nonpartisan scorekeeper announced that it projects the cumulative national debt to increase in the next decade by $9.8 trillion.

That unimaginable (and indigestible) sum is more than a trillion dollars higher than the Obama administration's estimate. It means a lower future standard of living for Americans because of vastly increased debt.

As Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the senior Republican on the House Budget Committee, pointed out in his commentary on the CBO report, it projects the annual cost of interest on the debt to rise from $209 billion this year to $916 billion by 2020.

Most of that debt is now held overseas by nations such as China and Japan, so we are draining huge sums from ourselves and handing them to others to use in buying us up -- or competing against us.

That is the story that has been written and is still unfolding in Washington, with budgets shaped by both Democrats and Republicans. It is a saga of national ruin.

Our national fortune is being looted by the RICO syndicate called the House and Senate, with a lot of help from the president. And Broder points this out in straightforward prose:

While the federal government was handing out tax rebates and now is preparing to extend many of the Bush-era tax cuts, 13 states were raising personal income taxes, 17 were passing sales tax and various business tax increases and 22 were lifting excise taxes on tobacco, alcohol or gasoline.

California, with chronic budget problems, a Democratic-controlled Legislature and a Republican governor, bit the bullet and temporarily raised its income tax rate across the board and its sales tax by 1 percent and also lifted its vehicle tax.

All the states except Vermont operate with a constitutional requirement that they balance their budgets. But I was reminded again during the governors' conference how different the psychology is in the state capitals and in Washington.

Governors live in the real world, where budgets mean something more than a formula for shifting burdens to the next generation and where there is much less room for partisan game-playing.

So starting in 2020, we will be paying a $trillion each year to finance the pig in the poke that Queen Botox is keeping from our eyes until the bill passes. She will be dead physically as well as morally by then, perhaps, but her legacy and that of this sophomoric president will be hemorrhaging money overseas at the rate of $3billion a day.