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The Heritage Foundation, which played a vital part in building conservative support for Romneycare in Massachusetts, is setting the stage for Republican capitulation on healthcare. This is the second time in less than a year that Heritage will have been instrumental in organizing a conservative collapse in opposition to big government. The first time was when Heritage gave conservatives cover to support TARP, calling it “vital and acceptable.”

Now with healthcare, because Heritage is trying to be “helpful”, confusion is starting to crop up among Republicans in Congress at a very critical time in the healthcare debate. Capitulation and compromise are now on the table using a bastardized version of a Heritage proposal.

“The sparsely attended first announcement at Hutchison’s high school in La Marque [Monday] broke every rule of political campaign theater.  It drew maybe five or six dozen folks and the empty hall was amply recorded by the Austin American Statesman's Ken Herman which has been virally distributed all day [Tuesday]. 
 
Memo to the Hutchison campaign:  Announcements are made in small hotel venues where six dozen people look like they were crammed into the event.

“The preseason [for Senator Hutchison] has been rife with shakeouts in key staff positions, snipes at incumbent Rick Perry – over such topics as who was against Cash for Clunkers first – and garbled messages lacking a coherent framework…now that the game counts, it's time for crisp execution."

Two firms that received $343.3 million to handle advertising for Barack Obama's White House run last year have profited from his top priority as president by taking on his push for health-care overhaul.

One is AKPD Message and Media, the Chicago-based firm headed by David Axelrod until he left last Dec. 31 to serve as a senior adviser to the president. Axelrod was Obama’s top campaign strategist and is now helping sell the health-care plan. The other firm is Washington-based GMMB Campaign Group, where partner Jim Margolis was also an Obama strategist.

Bob was a good source for Ohio history.  From really Eisenhower forward, he had great lines of communication with the political players of Ohio -- and he knew Ohio was crucial for any Republican success -- so he studied Ohio. 

We would talk on the phone, and I was like any number of his sources.  He would just call and it was off-the-record or on background, and he would ask probing questions.  He knew the numbers, but he would also try to understand the human dimension associated with intrastate politics in Ohio.

Lewis abruptly turned to Geraldine, whom he had never met before.  "Now, Mrs. Novak," he said, "Surely you favor exemptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, don't you."  Geraldine detested political debate, and I'm sure she would rather have been anywhere else.  But she was asked a direct question and answered it:  "No, I don't." "You are not in favor of any exemptions?" Lewis persisted.  "No."  "Not even for the life of the mother?"  "No," she insisted.  A moment of silence followed, before an embarrassed Lewis told my wife:  "Well, that's your opinion, and stick to it."  Lewis had no idea my wife was a prolife activist doing volunteer work for the National Right to Life Committee.  I could not have been more proud of her courageous stand taken with a couple dozen pairs of eyes fixed on her.

Drew symbolized corporate executives, lawyers, lobbyists, and campaign consultants who were trying to plane down the new Republican Party's rough edges.  Geraldine typified new Republicans who were loyal to Reagan but not to Reagan's aides.  She had come to Washington twenty-four years earlier as a born-and-bred Texas Democrat, a twenty-three-year-old secretary on Lyndon B. Johnson's staff.  She had changed her registration to Republican mainly because of abortion.  If the Republican Party abandoned her on this issue, I knew she would abandon the Republican Party.  I'm not sure that Drew Lewis fully understood that.

This left wing campaign is being orchestrated by a group started by Obama’s Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones.

If they are successful, they will move beyond Beck to others.

Two of the companies, GEICO and Progressive, are run by liberals. But that’s not the case with all the others.

The best response is to remind all of these companies that there will be repercussions from our side if they are so willing to become pawns of the left.

An administration official said tonight that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius "misspoke" when she told CNN this morning that a government run health insurance option "is not an essential part" of reform.

July 19, 1994 - Bill Clinton addresses the summer meeting of the National Governors' Association in Boston. He stuns reporters and White House aides by declaring that his bottom-line demand for universal coverage can be satisfied by a "phased-in deliberate effort" to expand the ranks of the insured from the current 85 percent to "somewhere in the ballpark of ninety-five percent upwards." As if that is not enough, Clinton also says he is "open to any solution" on how to pay for more coverage and that "there may be some other way for an employer mandate to do this." Chaos quickly spreads as the White House scrambles to erase the impression that he has backed down.