It seems there is no bottom to the depths the House Democrat Leadership will plumb in search of a way to defeat American popular opinion and pass Obamacare.

The new low involves bypassing an actual House vote on the Senate Obamacare bill. It appears the Democrats simply don’t have the votes to pass the bill on an up-or-down basis, and the problem is getting worse as time goes forward.

There are far too many House Democrats who simply can’t stomach the Senate bill. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has to get to 216 “yes” votes on that bill, and right now she probably only barely has 200. Pelosi’s only real chance of making this happen is to satisfy the Democrat “no’s” that if they vote “yes” they’ll be able to get a supplemental bill through both houses that will fix the objectionable parts of the Senate bill.

This, of course, is a sucker play, because if the House passes the Senate bill the President can immediately sign it into law and any “fix” could be tossed into the dumpster. Those Democrat “no’s” understand this, and so do some of the “yes” votes who are now wavering.

What to do? Just pass a bill with all of the “fixes” included in it, say that it’s the Senate bill, and start the reconciliation process. The House would then “deem” the Senate bill passed in such a case.

House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter is prepping to help usher the healthcare overhaul through the House and potentially avoid a direct vote on the Senate overhaul bill, the chairwoman said Tuesday.

Slaughter is weighing preparing a rule that would consider the Senate bill passed once the House approves a corrections bill that would make changes to the Senate version.

Slaughter has not taken the plan to Speaker Pelosi as Democrats await CBO scores on the corrections bill. “Once the CBO gives us the score we’ll spring right on it,” she said. . . .

House members are concerned the Senate could fail to approve the corrections bill, making them nervous about passing the Senate bill with its much-maligned sweetheart deals for certain states.

“We’re well beyond that,” Pelosi said Tuesday, though she did not clarify.

Slaughter, you might remember, was the purveyor of this bauble at the Blair House Project a couple of weeks ago:

She’s also famous for her opinion of town hall meetings:

Slaughter, as head of the House Rules Committee, is in a position to define representative democracy as it relates to the passage of major legislation. Given her statements about democracy as it relates to town halls, is it really a surprise that she would endorse a plan to twist the definition of a bill’s passage into a balloon poodle?

The following is a copy of a letter sent by U.S. Sen. David Vitter to President Obama today…

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, D.C. 20500

Cc: NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco

Dear Mr. President and Administrator Lubchenco:

I write to express sincere opposition regarding the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force Interim Framework for Effective Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning (“Interim Framework”). Although I have long supported reasonable policy mechanisms to enhance interagency coordination on oceans policy issues, the Interim Framework gives the impression that the administration is seeking to implement fundamental changes to both the regulatory structure and statutory authorities that form the basis for nearly every aspect of oceans management and use.

The Gulf of Mexico retains significant economic, cultural, and social importance to the state of Louisiana. If the intention of the Interim Framework is to create a new government superstructure headed by the National Ocean Council at the expense of the role of the states, which have primary jurisdiction for resident fish and wildlife, I can assure you that the states, in particular the Gulf states, will have zero tolerance for and much indignation over such a gross expansion of federal authority.

I urge the administration to back away from any efforts to supersede or diminish existing federal and state laws that govern our ocean fisheries for both commercial and recreational use. The Interim Framework brazenly calls for a top-down federal approach to every aspect of ocean management, and would impact every sector and every conceivable ocean activity without input from all stakeholders.

I can assure you that continued pursuit of the Interim Framework will exacerbate current concerns with NOAA’s ability to effectively manage the oceans for all users as well as mistrust and resentment of the agency. I respectfully request immediate public access to all comments and recommendations NOAA has delivered to the Council on Environmental Quality, as a well as a list of all Executive Orders and statutory and regulatory authorities the administration is contemplating utilizing in implementing Marine Spatial Planning and the Interim Framework.

I hope that your administration can keep in mind that the role of the government is to effectively manage resources for all citizens to enjoy with input from all stakeholders, not to cut off access to resources, like prohibiting commercial and recreational fishing, at the behest of a handful of special interest groups.

That’s the Rasmussen Approval Index for President Obama today. Forty-three percent of respondents to Rasmussen’s polling over the last three days consider their opinion of the president to be Strong Disapproval, with just 22 percent constituting Strong Approvals.

Minus-21 is the worst rating Obama has had; he polled at that number on Dec. 22 of last year and Feb. 27 of this year. The 43 percent strong disapproval isn’t the worst it’s been, as it was as high as 46 percent on Dec. 23. But the 22 percent Strong Approval number ties the worst it’s ever been; Obama has had 22 percent strong support on several other polling releases.

Rasmussen’s polling has a lot of other interesting numbers. To wit…

• By a 57-25 margin, those polled think Obamacare will hurt the economy.
• Republicans lead Democrats by a 44-37 margin on the generic Congressional ballot.
• By a 34-29 count, respondents expect unemployment to be worse a year from now. Twenty-nine percent say it will be about the same. Among respondents looking for work, by a 53-15 margin the consensus is the job market is worse than it was a year ago. But 42 percent of government workers think the economy will be better a year from now. 

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and feed him for fifteen to life…

- Marc Bublitz

Yesterday, U.S. Rep. Charlie Melancon took a shot at tripping up his opponent in the upcoming U.S. Senate race, David Vitter.

If Melancon thought he was bringing out the big gun to knock down Vitter’s 24-point lead in the polls, though, what he ended up using looked more like a pea shooter.

The weapon? An ethics complaint. It seems that Vitter put out a campaign fundraising letter which had a logo on it that looked a little like the Senate seal, and this is arguably a violation of ethics rules. The logo has an eagle, but he’s facing in the opposite direction and he’s of a little different shape – Vitter likes eagles who look more like small forwards which Senate eagles are, shall we say, fullbackish.

That’s not good enough for Melancon’s sticklers, who say that Vitter hasn’t just broken Senate Standards of Conduct, but federal law as well. And they say they’re letting Vitter off easy by just reporting him to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and the Senate Select Committee on Ethics; they otherwise could make a federal case out of Vitter’s eagle.

“You can’t make the law look the other way by having the eagle look the other way,” said Melancon campaign attorney Brian Svoboda, who apparently smells blood.

“There’s a fine line between what’s legal and what’s not, and David Vitter often finds himself on the wrong side of the law,” Melancon’s campaign manager Bradley Beychok said. “But the law’s the law.”

OK, well, maybe they’re right. But Vitter’s campaign fired back with a pretty good argument.

“Funny, Charlie Melancon didn’t file an ethics complaint when Barack Obama used an eagle seal in his presidential campaign. Maybe it’s because Charlie endorsed Obama.”

And more: “Charlie Melancon’s arrogant allies who run this Congress don’t own the rights to the eagle any more than the NFL owns the rights to ‘Who Dat.’”

This is a tempest in a teapot. The long and short of it is that the War Of The Logos isn’t the way out of Melancon’s electoral wilderness; on a day when the Ouachita Citizen’s Sam Hanna is asking whether Melancon is wasting his time and when the Times-Picayune’s James Gill decries Melancon’s non-competitive campaign as a snoozer which threatens the viability of politics as Louisiana’s favorite blood sport you’d think Charlie’s people would be coming up with a better game-changer than the appearance of Vitter’s fundraising letters.

For example, Melancon could grow a set of pipes and say something about the outrageous kangaroo court his buddies on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are setting up to assault the shale gas industry. Or he could say something about the nutjobs his buddy Barack Obama has at the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force working on tearing down the sportfishing industry. But that would imply taking principled stands and doing some heavy lifting on the part of the folks who drive Louisiana’s economy; one reason Charlie is getting killed in the polls is that he’s been around long enough for the people of this state to realize those stakes are too high for a penny-ante player like he is.

So instead of a vision for how he can help Louisiana build a 21st century future, we instead get complaints about letterhead and sound bites from Charlie accosting people in restaurants at lunchtime. Little wonder Gill blames him for Louisiana politics getting boring.

The correct answer is “as little as possible.”

This one is so off-the-wall stupid we’re struggling to believe it’s even possible. But apparently it’s legitimate – the Obama administration could be on the verge of imposing a ban of some sort on recreational fishing.

That’s correct. Fishing.

This morning, ESPN Outdoors ran a piece outlining a situation in which the administration appears to be moving toward a “federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.” Apparently, there is such a thing as an Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, run out of the White House, and since June of last year they’ve been working on a scheme to regulate the abovementioned waterways so as to control virtually everything that happens within them.

That, says ESPN Outdoors reporter Robert Montgomery, includes whether Americans will be allowed to fish. According to the article…

“When the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) completed their successful campaign to convince the Ontario government to end one of the best scientifically managed big game hunts in North America (spring bear), the results of their agenda had severe economic impacts on small family businesses and the tourism economy of communities across northern and central Ontario,” said Phil Morlock, director of environmental affairs for Shimano.

“Now we see NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the administration planning the future of recreational fishing access in America based on a similar agenda of these same groups and other Big Green anti-use organizations, through an Executive Order by the President. The current U.S. direction with fishing is a direct parallel to what happened in Canada with hunting: The negative economic impacts on hard working American families and small businesses are being ignored.

“In spite of what we hear daily in the press about the President’s concern for jobs and the economy and contrary to what he stated in the June order creating this process, we have seen no evidence from NOAA or the task force that recreational fishing and related jobs are receiving any priority.”

According to the article, there have been a bevy of white papers and policy documents pouring forth from environmentalist nuts since Obama’s election and many of them describe “overfishing” while making no apparent distinction between commercial and recreational fishing. Angling groups and recreational boating groups have been screaming about the cozy atmosphere between the Obama administration and the green gang for months, and no one has paid them any attention. As a result, it is now expected that by the end of this month some sort of final report from the task force will spill out, with an Executive Order from the president implementing the recommendations in the report on “marine spatial planning” that will, as Montgomery puts it, amount to zoning laws that might outlaw recreational fishing in certain areas.

What is “marine spatial planning?” If you think that is a sinister-sounding piece of jargonistic bovine scatology, we agree. Looking at this Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force’s work product to find answers, things get even more unsettling. They’ve released an “interim framework” document in December, the outline of which is below:

A New Approach to How We Use and Protect the Ocean, Coast, and Great Lakes. The Interim Framework is designed to: decrease user conflicts; improve planning and regulatory efficiencies and decrease their associated costs and delays; and preserve critical ecosystem function and services.  The Interim Framework describes how such plans would be developed and implemented, and provides timeframes and steps for phased implementation of the framework.

Moves us Away From Sector-by-Sector and Statute-by-Statute Decision-Making. While many existing permitting processes include aspects of coordinated planning, most focus solely on a limited range of management tools and outcomes (e.g., oil and gas leases, fishery management plans, and marine protected areas).  Comprehensive marine spatial planning presents a more integrated, comprehensive, ecosystem-based, flexible, and proactive approach to planning and managing uses and activities.

Brings Federal, State, and Tribal Partners Together in an Unprecedented Manner to Jointly Plan for the Future.  The Interim Framework is not a top-down planning effort. Rather, it describes a new approach to Federal resource planning that is regionally based and developed cooperatively among Federal, State, tribal, and local authorities, and regional governance structures, through the establishment of nine regional planning bodies.

Places Science-Based Information at the Heart of Decision-Making.  Scientific data, information and knowledge, as well as relevant traditional knowledge, will be the underpinning of the regionally developed plans.

Emphasizes Stakeholder and Public Participation.  The planning process would be fully transparent and participatory – requiring frequent and robust stakeholder engagement throughout all steps of the process (i.e., development, adoption, implementation, adaptation and evaluation).

There’s a PDF file of this document available which goes into more detail, as on the first page it defines “Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning” as…

CMSP is a comprehensive, adaptive, integrated, ecosystem-based, and transparent spatial planning process, based on sound science, for analyzing current and anticipated uses of ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes areas. CMSP identifies areas most suitable for various types or classes of activities in order to reduce conflicts among uses, reduce environmental impacts, facilitate compatible uses, and preserve critical ecosystem services to meet economic, environmental, security, and social objectives. In practical terms, CMSP provides a public policy process for society to better determine how the ocean, coasts, and Great Lakes are sustainably used and protected now and for future generations.

It goes south from that paragraph of gobbledygook, and it basically goes on and on about the insufficiency of laws governing the different uses of bodies of water and the requirement for a “holistic” approach. Nine different federal bureaucratic agencies to create this “holistic” approach are proposed.

The Task Force in question has as one of its most important members National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration head Jane Lubchenco, who as Montgomery reports comes from a background as a honcho with the Environmental Defense Fund and the Pew Oceans Commission – two organizations eaten up with global warming advocacy and “holistic” environmentalism. Lubchenco recently made an imbecile of herself when asked about the Climategate disclosures and the unraveling of the anthropogenic global warming movement’s “science,” which she still ardently defends, and that should naturally make anyone suspicious of government bureaucrats armed with “incontrovertible” science from which regulatory paradise might spring.

In short, research into this issue yields more darkness than light, and this task force’s work product encompasses much more than just recreational fishing – its “holistic” approach to oceans, lakes and the like involves transportation, energy, commerce, aquaculture and all sorts of other perhaps more important sectors than recreational angling. The fact that fishing wasn’t even discussed as a separate case despite the loud opposition within that community should tell you how far gone the green gang and their allies in the administration are.

Following this idiocy to its logical progression gives one a truly frightening scenario. If the federal government is in a position to tell sport fishermen there are areas they can’t fish – or can’t fish without a highly-prized and thus politicized federal license – how far does this go?

Earlier today we referenced the Battle of Stalingrad as an analogy for the health-care struggle going on in Washington. That analogy reminded us of an interesting movie on the subject – Enemy At The Gates, with Jude Law, Joseph Fiennes, Bob Hoskins and Rachel Weisz – about the desperate Soviet effort to beat the Germans back in that pivotal battle.

Well, in that movie there’s a scene - or, more accurately, there isn’t a scene, since it was deleted from the film, in which Law, playing the role of expert sniper Vassily Zaitsev, tells Fiennes, whose character is a political commissar, how he learned marksmanship from his grandfather. It seems Zaitsev’s grandfather was carted off to the gulag for the crime of poaching wolves… 

Sure, you want to keep endangered species from being hunted out of existence. But when that’s not at issue it amounts to the kind of tyranny described in the scene for the government to attempt to control private citizens hunting and fishing. It’s an affront to the American way. And if the concerns expressed in Montgomery’s articles are valid (and research to date offers little reason to doubt them) when this task force’s final report tumbles out later this month, it ought to be a political and social scandal which buries Obama and his administration under a mountain of public outrage – starting with calls for the Soviet-sounding NOAA head’s name off her office door.

UPDATE: Just in case you think this thing is crazy, just take a look at NOAA’s current performance on commercial fishing in Massachusetts. They’re perfectly willing to put commercial fishermen out of business out of a fealty to junk science; how hard is it to believe that they’d interfere with sportfishing?

(Hat tip: Fishermen’s Blues, which  has done a comprehensive job of documenting the carnage the Obama administration has done to the commercial fishing business on the East Coast to date)

In an interesting turn of events, Congressman Bart Stupak (D-MI) appears ready to vote in favor of President Obama’s health care reform legislation, despite the absence of pro-life provisions in the bill. Congressman Stupak authored a pro-life amendment in the original House bill and was unwilling to vote for any legislation that lacked pro-life provisions.

Why would Congressman Stupak suddenly abandon his opposition to any legislation that did not exclude funding for abortions? Perhaps we should examine the alleged ethical skeletons in the Michigan Congressman’s closet that, like the recently driven off moderate Democrat Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY), could break his career.

According to an expose’ conducted by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, Congressman Stupak benefitted from a sweetheart housing deal. Apparently, he rented a residence for only $600 a month on C Street in Washington, D.C. from a fundamentalist religious group, The Family or The Fellowship. Far Leftists have already begun to attack Congressman Stupak for this, claiming that there is some connection between his pro-life beliefs and his housing arrangement. Maddow said:

“So the questions remain tonight. Was Bart Stupak paying The Family rent to live at C Street? Was The Family subsidizing Mr. Stupak‘s rent which seems to have been well below market rate? Why would The Family be subsidizing Stupak‘s rent if he wasn‘t, as he says, a member of the group, when The Family admits that they subsidize rent for their members? And why exactly is The Family claiming to have no ties to the house when tax and property records indicate that it clearly does?

Bottom line here, as Bart Stupak tries to shut down health reform for an anti-abortion stunt that won‘t succeed but will make him famous, who‘s been paying Bart Stupak‘s rent in Washington all these years? Has he reported it? And why won‘t he answer questions about it?”

Is it possible that Congressman Stupak is caving to the progressives in his party and voting for a government takeover of health care without his anti-abortion conditions included in hopes of avoiding a fate similar to Congressman Eric Massa, who complained that recent charges of misconduct were driven not by ethics, but instead, by retaliation for his refusal to vote for liberal health care reform? You decide.

Last night Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who continues to be drummed in the polls in his campaign to knock off Marco Rubio for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination, took to the airwaves on Greta Van Susteren’s show on Fox News. Crist came out swinging with attacks on Rubio – and it would seem he didn’t hit much.

Here’s a highlight…

Back waxing? Really?

Crist’s campaign has been so unimpressive compared to Rubio’s that the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which angered many conservatives by endorsing Crist early on in the campaign despite his embracing of the Obama stimulus plan last year, is now backing away. NRSC chairman John Cornyn (R-TX), who has taken a great deal of grief for the endorsement, put out the following statement yesterday:

“I looked around to see who was the most popular Republican in the state and somebody who was a good fundraiser, and that was Charlie Crist. And selfishly, given the limited resources we have and the national scope of our responsibilities here, I didn’t want to spend any money in Florida if we didn’t have to to help. So Charlie Crist seemed like the ideal candidate. This had nothing to do with Marco Rubio, who I subsequently met and have a lot of respect for,” Cornyn told reporters this morning.

“So I think our posture here is I endorsed Gov. Crist early on, really before this became a real contest. I’m not going to do anything to change that. I think I’m honor-bound to leave it as it is, but it doesn’t mean that we’re going to be spending any money in the primary,” Cornyn added. “It doesn’t mean we’re going to be saying anything bad about Marco Rubio. To the contrary, I think Marco Rubio, if he wins the nomination, will beat Kendrick Meek (D).”

Cornyn might be slow, but he’s not stupid. Public Policy Polling has a new poll out on the race today in which Rubio leads Crist by a staggering 60-28 margin. And Crist’s approval rating of 29 percent among Republicans is beginning to look like a death rattle.

Shouldn’t this man get out of the race and do what’s necessary to save his political career?

DickMorris.com offers this list of Representatives and Senators whose Healthcare vote might still be influenced by a barrage of phone calls.

Get involved, and make a few phone calls to express your wishes.