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In the midst of my usual end-of-the-year rush, around Thanksgiving, I, as did most of us, started really contemplating what I'm thankful for.  As I've grown older, and become less concerned with what the Jolly Old Elf will leave for me under the tree, I've found this period of reflection and thankfulness makes Christmas and New Year's that much more special -- and I try to hold onto it, and extend it as far into the new year as possible.  It makes it further and further every year. So, this year, in addition to being thankful for Grace, health, family and freedom, I want to point out a few other things I'm truly thankful for.  Some of them might surprise you.

First and foremost, I'm thankful for the Democrats.  Yep, that's right: The Democrats.  Not just any old Democrats, mind you, but the really special ones: Nancy, Harry, Rahm, and most definitely Barack -- there are others, too, but I'm just hitting the highlights. 

Here's the way I see it:  It's human nature to take the things you have, and cherish, for granted -- until those things are threatened.  I think conservatives did that.  I know Republicans did.  But thanks to the Democrats -- conservatives, independents, and even most Republicans, have ignited with passion to defend the basic liberties we cherish in this country, and the constitutionally-mandated limitations on government that are being threatened.  It's not that we couldn't have ignited without the Democrats. It's that we wouldn't have.  Liberty is precious, but it requires vigilance.  The Democrats reawakened our vigilance, and for that, and for them, I'm thankful.

The second thing I'm thankful for is the citizen army that has raised its voice loud and clear -- at Tea Parties and townhalls, on Twitter and Facebook, on blogs and talk radio, with bumper stickers and t-shirts and homemade signs.  You knew that Republican and conservative leadership was in the mode of passive pontification, and nuanced DC-speak.  So you shouted.  And you kept shouting.  And I pray you will continue to shout, because the fight isn't even close to over.  For you, and for your voice, I'm thankful.

Finally, I'm thankful that the GOP has at least begun to take baby steps toward recognizing both the power of conservatives, and the potential of decent communications. I say baby steps, because that's all I see at the moment, and some of those baby steps have been a forced march.  But still, steps have been taken.  The redesign of gop.org is exactly as RedState commented:  Neither as good as the GOP thinks it is, nor as bad as the tech-marketing world thinks it is.  Regardless, it's  better than what was there.  It's going to live or die based on the content it was created to hold, and whether credibility can be built for the site as a go-to for important conservative content and action that's not available, better, elsewhere.   Reversethevote.org is a good baby step.  It could have used a stronger push.  They're learning. 

They seem to be hearing, too.  One has to believe they heard the vote in upstate New York (the forced march I spoke of.)  One has to believe they've heard townhallers and Tea Partiers who care about principles and conviction, rather than affiliation.  One has to believe they read polls.  One can only pray they know it's not them.  Because it's not.  It's all of us. Shouting.

Conservatives are speaking, but the nature of all grassroots movements, whether in marketing or politics, is that in order to be sustained, they need leadership and focus.  New media teaches us that leadership, however, doesn't work as well from the top down, and messaging's focus resonates when it comes up the ranks.  Not like we used to think.  I truly believe that the GOP, as dense as they have proven themselves to be, is beginning to get the idea that they cannot claim leadership of this movement without overhauling an antiquated battle plan, and listening -- at least a little -- to the voices that are shouting, all around them.  They're beginning to get the idea. I'm thankful for that.  Now, all I want for Christmas is to believe they'll truly get it -- before it gets away from them.

Merry Christmas.  bearinthewoods84@gmail.com

"Banker Guy" is the anonymous CEO of a mid-sized bank in a major city who occasionally lets us know what he thinks of the financial crisis and the response of Congress.  Here's his latest:

The Third Worst Law Passed by the House Ever

Dear Hugh,

After PelosiCare and Cap ‘n Tax the worst piece of legislation ever is H.R. 4173 or as I call it - Barney’s Barf. The bill passed Friday by a vote of 223 to 202 with only Democrats supporting it.

H.R. 4173 creates the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA).  The Director of this agency is appointed by the President and confirmed by Congress for a five year term.  The Director has no oversight and broad power and rule-making authority over about one fifth of our economy.  The Director can make rules without regard to the safety or soundness of financial institutions.  The Director can ban consumer financial products, determine how they are to be delivered, and regulate compensation of people who deliver those products.  The Director has subpoena power, can demand documents and oral testimony and issue cease and desist orders.

Further this law enables states to enact even tougher rules that must be obeyed by all banks doing business in that state.  So a multi-state institution will be forced to adhere to the most restrictive rules everywhere it does business or become extremely inefficient.

I believe this law will hurt consumers.  Meredith Whitney, a noted bank analyst, made this point on CNBC this week.  Given the regulation by the CFPA, many providers will reduce their offerings rather incur losses.  Reasonably priced credit and deposit products will be less available to many people.  It will be more costly to everyone, as overdrafts will not be paid and consumers will be charged by merchants and banks.  When overdrafts occur they are reported to credit bureaus and consumers will see their credit scores decline.  That will drive up credit costs and reduce credit availability. 

I know it is easy to dump on “greedy” bankers and some deserve the scorn, but the thousands of banks in local communities across America are honestly trying to help consumers and small businesses recover from the recession and create jobs.  The addition of these populist constraints to the existing pressure from regulators to reduce commercial real estate lending and increase capital, which also reduces lending, will further slow any recovery.

If I sound like I am frustrated, I am.  Most bankers I know are also very frustrated.  It is difficult to deal with the effects of the recession on so many of our customers, but to have the regulators and the politicians in Washington trouncing on also is no fun!

Hugh, please keep up the good work on defeating ObamaCare and Cap and Trade, but the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, a similar pox on business and our economy, also needs to be defeated in the Senate.

I can be contacted at BankerGuy2009@gmail.com.

HH: All right, back to domestic policy, speaking of trials, tribulations and troubles. Today, the office of the Actuary at the Department of Health and Human Services issued a massive report that concluded that the Obamacare in the Senate version would drive overall health care costs higher, that it would lead to Medicare benefit cuts, that the long term care insurance plan it includes would be a costly failure, that 33 million people would remain uninsured after it went into effect, and that cuts to doctors and hospitals proposed by the bill would put immediately one in five hospitals into the red. Other dire consequences, including a rise in overall health spending, more than if the Senate did nothing. Do you think this will do anything to stop the momentum behind the bill, Charles Krauthammer?

CK: Well, other than that, what you enumerate, it’s a great bill.

HH: (laughing)

CK: The Democrats are marching off a cliff here. You know, how many reports do you have to have? You get it from the Actuary here, as you say, all of these particulars, and we’ve got it from CBO again and again since the middle of June to prove a truism. There’s no free lunch. You want to increase the range, the scope of health care insurance by including 30 million people previously uninsured? It’s going to cost more. The idea that you’re going to expand it while you cut costs is absurd. The idea that you can cut half a trillion out of Medicare, and as Senator Baucus has said even today, will improve care, is simply nutty. We already know that doctors and hospitals are getting slaughtered by the low reimbursement in Medicare. And many of them are simply drowning as a result of the fact that they aren’t even earning enough to cover costs. You’re now going to reduce it by half a trillion more and you’re going to increase the quality of care? This is sort of common sense. And it seems to take a report after report to actually put it into numbers, and to make others acknowledge the obvious. But they are so invested in this, the Democrats, they have a political need to produce something, no matter how monstrous it is, and that’s where they’re headed, to produce anything, no matter how contradictory or impractical.

HH: 30 seconds, Charles, in all your years in Washington, D.C., have you ever had a sense that it has been ever before this kind of strange or out of control?

CK: No, not really. But I have to admit that as a journalist, that Obama and his partners in the House and the Senate are taking us over a cliff, but it is a hell of a ride. 

Hard to beat back to back to back interviews with Mark Steyn, James Lileks and Charles Krauthammer, but today's subject at the Hughniverse blog is an invitation to nominate additional regular guests for the program in 2010.  Lileks also has his latest "private label" column posted at his Hughniverse blog. 

Democratic Senators involved in crafting what Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) described as a “broad agreement” on health care policy appear to be at odds over both the policy proscriptions and the notion that they had even reached such a deal.

Though Reid announced late Tuesday that negotiations among a group of 10 liberal and moderate Democratic Senators had largely resolved the intraparty standoff over the public insurance option, participants in the group said their “agreement” had been mischaracterized and that they agreed only to send the proposal to the Congressional Budget Office for a cost estimate, saying more information was necessary before making any firm decisions.

Seniors especially have to hope that the new deal falls apart as it represents a savaging of Medicare.  The Obama-Pelosi-Reid assault on Medicare has three parts now.

First, Obamacare proposes to loot Medicare of about a half trillion dollars in benefits.

Second, Medicare payroll taxes are raised, but the new revenue isn't going to secure Medicare but to pay for new entitlements, thus crowding out a source of future funding for Medicare when it hits the rocks in a very few years.

And now, third, Democrats are proposing the expansion of the nearly insolvent Medicare program to millions of new enrollees 55 and older.  This enormous mistake will not only quickly drain the program of its remaining resources, it will accelerate the trend of doctors heading into concierge practices, abandoning the low-paying Medicare patients for the much more equitable payments provided by the dwindling number of privately covered patients.

All of the versions of Obamacare are assaults on seniors, but the latest version is a recipe for disaster for Medicare, and seniors know it.  The seniors' political punishment of all Democrats will come in 47 weeks, but right now they have to act to alert the few Democrats  on the fence that voting for this reckless scheme is political suicide.

Here are the five steps that everyone should take, but especially those already or soon to be covered by Medicare.

Readers should also take a moment to review the Democrats' plan on the debt limit --lifting it by nearly $2 trillion!-- which is every bit as reckless as their gamesmanship with Medicare.  This is another transparent political trick, one that will further undermine the dollar and lock in future inflation that will destroy the savings of seniors that are in fixed investments.

Two days ago, Rupert Murdoch wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the failures and future of journalism.  The very first thing that journalists must do to have their enterprizes survive, Murdoch wrote, is to "give people the news that they want." 

This doesn't mean the lowest common denominator of news such as sensational tabloid stories, but it most certainly does mean news about how their lives are going to be impacted by what D.C. does.  Right now I am devoting most of every show to Obamacare because the audience is very dialed in to how the Democrats' massive scheme will change their health care and thus the arc of their lives.  Incredibly, MSM is not covering this aspect of the story --is not talking to seniors or doctors or hospital execs.  Instead the Beltway-Manhattan media elite is covering it like a game of whether or not Harry Reid can get to 60 votes.  Not surprisingly Reid announces he is going to win and the MSM scurries off to report that Reid is on the verge of winning.  Almost nothing is being written about what the proposed deal will do to seniors' health care, just as the impact on the dollar of the massive hike in the debt ceiling is also largely unreported.

If Obamacare was fully and fairly explained, it would have been dead long ago, and the opinion polling shows that despite the best efforts of MSM to ignore the realities of the bill, it is deeply unpopular in the country and is triggering a massive blowback for Democrats, as it should.

Never have so many reporters produced so little in the way of accurate meaningful coverage of so important a bill.  Perhaps they are simply not up to the complexity of the story, but the failure of MSM to get the story straight ro the facts right or even to ask moderately difficult questions of so-called Democratic centrists like Indiana Senator Evan Bayh and Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey is remarkable.

New media will continue to report the reality of the Democrats' assault on older Americans, and all the AARP propaganda and MSM misdirection will not obscure the growing recognition that Obamacare is a massive bait-and-switch that is not going to help Americans get better medical care but will instead hasten the collapse of Medicare and the arrival of rationing.