House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged her colleagues to back a major overhaul of U.S. health care even if it threatens their political careers, a call to arms that underscores the issue’s massive role in this election year.

Lawmakers sometimes must enact policies that, even if unpopular at the moment, will help the public, Pelosi said in an interview being broadcast Sunday the ABC News program “This Week.”
“We’re not here just to self-perpetuate our service in Congress,” she said. “We’re here to do the job for the American people.”

Let me be honest here, I do agree with the Speaker that the role of our elected representatives is to, “do the job for the American people” rather than get elected to Congress with the sole goal of being reelected to Congress. Where she is wrong, totally wrong, is that the direction she is heading is 180 degrees from what the American people want. She seems willing to ignore that even while acknowledging the political price.

Her comments to ABC, in the interview released Sunday, seemed to acknowledge the widely held view that Democrats will lose House seats this fall — maybe a lot. They now control the chamber 255 to 178, with two vacancies. Pelosi stopped well short of suggesting Democrats could lose their majority, but she called on members of her party to make a bold move on health care with no prospects of GOP help.

“Time is up,” she said. “We really have to go forth.”

Conservatives, and anyone who is opposed to the unaffordable cost and government control issues inherent in this plan, need to continue their opposition and education. The Speaker is wrong on this as well.

Pelosi told CNN that “in a matter of days” Democrats will have specific legislative language on health care to show to the public and to wavering lawmakers. She predicted voters will warm up to the bill once they understand its details.

“When we have a bill,” she said, “you can bake the pie, you can sell the pie. But you have to have a pie to sell.”

OK, I’m not sure where pie fits into all of this, but I am confident in this; rather than warming up to the bill once they understand the details, smart, aware Americans will run from this monstrosity when they understand the details. It is up to us to continue to educate and inform people about the economy ruining, choice killing, innovation suppressing details of the coming legislation.

The actual quote, according to WikiAnswers is: “Damn the torpedoes! Four bells! Captain Crayton, go ahead! Joucett, full speed!” Thus the title to this post.

Cross posted from bRight & Early.

UPDATE: It looks as if it worked. Things are a little bit different, but it’s all good. Time to spread the word again.

The poll results were treated as suspect mainly because some controversial questions were asked the results featured what many conservatives perceived as an unusually high percentage of flaky answers.

Comparing the two polls is an interesting exercise. While there are some questions that tracked relatively close to one another, some of the more controversial questions featured significantly different results. Those regarding President Obama are a good example.

In the Kos poll 39% of respondents answered “Yes” to the question, “Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not?” 32% answered “No”. (The Kos poll had the additional option of “Not Sure”)

In contrast, only 9 of the 78 bloggers (11%) who responded to that question answered “Yes.” The other 88% answered “No.”

It is de rigueur to paint the entire right as “birthers”, but look at the difference in response to the question “Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, or not?”

• Daily Kos “Yes” — 42%
• RWN “Yes” — 80%

Quite a difference.

On one Obama characteristic the two polls are much closer. “Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist?”

• Kos “Yes” — 63%
• RWN “Yes” — 89%

The accompanying comment by Kos blames the results on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. A better explanation might be the takeover of banks and auto companies, and the attempted takeover of the medical system.

One thing to note. The Kos poll was a phone poll of self-identified Republicans. John’s poll was of Right-of-Center bloggers, and he points out:

Now, right-of-center bloggers don’t match up exactly to the Republican base. They’re more knowledgeable, more libertarian, and less socially conservative than Republicans overall, but still, they seemed like a roughly representative group.

There are several questions on the Kos poll that John didn’t ask. Here’s one that I’m curious about:

Do you believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama?

The Kos Results:

• Yes 53
• No 14
• Not Sure 33

You can express your opinion in the poll embedded in the side bar*. Your comments are welcome as well.

*Note: This is cross posted from, and the poll can be found at, bRight&Early

It is unconscionable that $59 billion will be extracted from taxpayers and others to subsidize labor unions. The Obama administration and Congress are now planning on taking $15 billion more from hospitals and $10 billion more from pharmaceutical makers to cover part of this fortune. But there is no reason hospital and drug costs should go up to subsidize unions.

This transfer of wealth to unions has become part of a pattern. Over the last year, the unions have been given a long string of massive wealth transfers. Take the government forcing GM and Chrysler bondholders to forfeit their legal right to be the lead creditors so that auto unions could get large shareholdings in both companies through bankruptcy. Similarly, the stimulus package placed all sorts of restrictions on how the money could be spent, requiring that much of the spending go only to unionized workers.

With only about 12.4% of the American workforce unionized (16.1 million as of 2008), how will this massive, vote-buying wealth redistribution program to a distinct yet vociferous minority of U.S. workers play among the rest of the workforce when the next election rolls around?

The tin ears of Obama and the Demonrat Congressional leaders are only exceeded by their profound hubris. Regardless of what happens in the battle for Teddy Kennedy’s the people’s Senate seat in Massachusetts, the writing is on the wall: Americans will have none of this.

Brit Hume said on Fox News recently that, perhaps it would be the best thing for the Democrats if Scott Brown actually won the race and, by killing their filibuster-proof Senate majority, could allow the Republicans to shut down the most radical elements of their agenda such as ObamaCare and Cap and Trade. Perhaps some vulnerable Democrat seats might even be saved come November, bada bing. With all due respect to Mr. Hume, the train has already left the station, and it’s bearing a bold flag with a cruel serpent that reads DON’T TREAD ON ME.

Cross-posted from Moonbattery.

• Achievements — I still have to edit this a bit to make it more relevant to our site. Basically it confers achievements for completing certain activities on the site. This is just for fun.
• Twire — This allows you to tweet right from your profile here at The Regiment. You have to set this up for your account. It’s under your profile settings.

Let me know if there are any issues with these two new pieces of functionality, or with anything here on the site.

Intellectuals generate ideas and ideas matter, whether those ideas are right or wrong, and they matter far beyond the small segment of society who are intellectuals. Ideas affect the fate of whole nations and civilizations. Nowhere is that more true than in our own times, when some people make suicidal attacks to kill strangers who have done nothing to them, as on Sept. 11, 2001, because the attackers are consumed with a set of ideas – a vision – and driven by the emotions generated by those ideas and that vision.

Sowell offers Karl Marx as a prime example of someone whose ideas were not only pushed beyond their initial intent by despotic dictators, but also perpetuated by the aloof elitist intelligentsia of the day, all with dire consequences.

The ideas that Karl Marx created in the 19th century dominated the course of events over wide portions of the world in the 20th century. Whole generations suffered, and millions were killed, as a result of those ideas. This was not Marx’s intention, nor the intentions of many supporters of Marxist ideas in countries around the world. But it is what happened.

Some of the most distinguished intellectuals in the Western world in the 1930s gave ringing praise to the Soviet Union, while millions of people there were literally starved to death and vast numbers of others were being shipped off to slave labor camps.

Many of those same distinguished intellectuals of the 1930s were urging their own countries to disarm while Hitler was rapidly arming Germany for wars of conquest that would have, among other things, put many of those intellectuals in concentration camps – slated for extermination – if he had succeeded.

The 1930s were by no means unique. In too many other eras – including our own today – intellectuals of unquestionable brilliance have advocated similarly childish and dangerous notions. How and why such patterns have existed among intellectuals is a challenging question, whose answer can determine the fate of millions of other people.

Indeed, addressing the “how” and “why” appears to be the aim of Sowell’s latest effort.

Think back to those valiant thinkers who gave birth to a tiny nation through a bold dream, a brazen idea that they were willing to fight to the death for — an idea that was eventually realized as the greatest nation on earth. Woe are we who bear witness to the decimation of the Founders’ dream by countless progressives (Democrat and Republican) who, inspired by “brilliant intellectuals,” promulgate their own twisted notions of social democracy through social, economic and environmental statism.

Cross-posted from Moonbattery.