Our increasingly desperate President ratchets up the pressure

"Obama calls Dems to health reform chat."

That's one way of putting it, although we've never before heard such a frantic, bullying political strong-arm session referred in such an innocuous manner. We imagine MSDNCNBC's description of the session would be quite different if it were a Republican president engaged in such a similar "chat" with party holdouts.

Were tea and crumpets served at this lovely social event?

'The measure includes 'all the criteria I laid out' in a speech to a joint session of Congress earlier in the year, [President Obama] said. 'It is deficit-neutral,

An outright lie, as the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office keeps laboriously pointing out.

it bends the cost curve,

Artificially, by drastically cutting Medicare payments to health care providers, which will have the effect of driving even more of those doctors who still see such patients out of the industry, with the resulting effect of of creating extremely long lines to see the few incompetents and masochists who are left. Can anyone say "rationing?

it covers 30 million Americans who don't have health insurance

When Obama himself estimates that from 46 to 63 million people lack such coverage. Why, then, are the Democrats hell-bent upon wrecking the finest health-care system in the world, socializing one-fifth of our economy in the process, when their scheme won't even end up accomplishing their stated goal of covering everyone? It would be far easier (and cheaper) to just outright pay for private insurance for the uninsured, especially if the government were to exclude the people who have no wish to purchase insurance, those who self-insure and, of course, the millions of illegal immigrants in this country from being provided such coverage.

and it has extraordinary insurance reforms."

But nowhere in the proposed bill is found tort-reform, the lack of which is a large reason why health care costs keep rising so quickly.

And President Obama wonders why his wonderful, magical plan is meeting with so much resistance, both in Congress and among the peasantry.