On Capitol Hill, the Rules Committee is meeting this morning to run through some last minute amendments to the health care legislation. You can read those here. But they’re irrelevant — it’s clear the final standoff on Capitol Hill in the eleventh hour of the health care debate will be over Rep. Bart Stupak’s small band of fellow Democrats who oppose taxpayer funding for abortions.

The mere fact that Speaker Nancy Pelosi is conversing with Stupak behind closed doors at this late moment is a sign that she remains short of the vote total needed to pass the Senate bill, even after the imposition of the so-called “Slaughter strategy” to give political cover to members. There are still many concerns among Blue Dog Democrats that the bill in question will not sufficiently address the cost problems of the health care system, and the latest exchange with the Congressional Budget Office has done little to assuage their worries.

It is Stupak’s small coalition, which once numbered 12 but now seems closer to 3, who could decide the entire issue.

Apropos of nothing – Alexander Hamilton’s letter to his wife, prior to the duel.

This letter, my very dear Eliza, will not be delivered to you, unless I shall first have terminated my earthly career; to begin, as I humbly hope from redeeming grace and divine mercy, a happy immortality.

If it had been possible for me to have avoided the interview, my love for you and my precious children would have been alone a decise motive. But it was not possible, without sacrifices which would have rendered me unworthy of your esteem. I need not tell you of the pangs I feel, from the idea of quitting you and exposing you to the anguish which I know you would feel. Nor could I dwell on the topic lest it should unman me.

The consolations of Religion, my beloved, can alone support you; and these you have a right to enjoy. Fly to the bosom of your God and be comforted. With my last idea, I shall cherish the sweet hope of meeting you in a better world. Adieu best of wives and best of women. Embrace all my Darling Children for me.

Ever yours

AH

There ought to be no doubt by now but that the health care reform bill before the House is a deficient piece of legislation. About the only thing standing between the bill and final passage is Bart Stupak and his caucus of pro-life Democrats. If they waver, a bad bill passes. And the concern is that they may waver:

Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat who leads a group pressing for the tougher restrictions, is planning a press conference today to discuss his request for an abortion vote. His legislative director, Nick Choate, declined to comment.

An admission from the Congressional Budget Office: Factor in the “doc fix”, and one finds that $59 billion is added to the deficit over the next ten years.

Remind me why anyone is supposed to think that the health care reform bill before the House is the best bill that we can get.

Coffee & Markets will wait til Sunday (we want to see how things turn out), so here’s a brief podcast with a few thoughts from me on the eve of health care reform’s final vote: “Obama’s dedication to passing this spectacularly flawed and unpopular health care bill appears to be based on the assumption that the American people like a winner even if the victory comes at their expense.”

Related Links:

TNL: How Obamacare Will Reshape the Workforce
DC Examiner: Pro Reform Liberals Admit This Wasn’t a Battle Against Special Interests
Heritage: More Bad News in the House Health Care Bill
Keith Hennessey: Understanding the Health Care Bill
Jane Hamsher: 18 Myths About HCR Debunked
The Note: Rep. Frank Says HCR Could Still Fail
NRO: Obamacare’s IRS Connection
NEMJ: 46% of Family Doctors Forced Out of Medicine Under Obamacare
Fred Barnes: Health Care Wars Only Beginning

Now that the rift between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government has acquired the status of “crisis,” it is worth stepping back from the details of the spat and looking at the big picture. While the Ramat Shlomo announcement and its immediate aftermath were the immediate cause of the Obama administration’s ire, this was a crisis that was waiting to happen and was probably inevitable. The primary reason for this is the fundamental disconnect between Obama and Netanyahu, not only as personalities but, more importantly, in terms of their long term goals for Israel and the Middle East.

To a certain extent, Obama and Netanyahu deserve each other. As I have written before, they are, ironically, remarkably similar in many ways. They are both charismatic, articulate, extremely image conscious politicians whose capacity for visionary rhetoric often far outstrips their competence. Both have been accused of being essentially empty and shallow personalities, which is true in both cases to some extent, but ignores the fact that they are also ideologically driven idealists with very clear visions of the future they are striving toward.

I’ve been on record for about two years now to the effect that what happened this week was only a matter of time.

China doesn’t do free-market competition. To them, the whole concept of taking market share away from your competitors is against the natural order of the world. In every industry space, they’ll tend to pick a small handful of anointed winners, assign a relative market share to each one, and then everyone stays in his lane.

In search, the anointed ones include Baidu and Ali-Baba. The point of allowing Google into this market was so that the Chinese players could learn from them and improve their offerings. And it was clear from day one to everyone with eyes that when the Chinese entrants were ready, a pretext would be found to erase Google. That just happened.

I hear from Chinese correspondents that Baidu and Ali-Baba are now growing at rates that are simply astounding, so it’s not the case that the market there isn’t big enough for another large player.

There’s another space where I’m not making a prediction on the timing, but that you should watch: network routing.

Cisco was early to the China market. It’s...

Look how poorly Barbara Boxer polls against all of the Republican candidates seeking their party’s nomination for the U.S. Senate seat Boxer currently holds. She is barely beating Carly Fiorina and Chuck DeVore, and getting beaten by Tom Campbell. In each case, she is polling under 50%. Well under 50%.

For an incumbent, that’s horrible. For Republicans, that’s a reason to lick chops. It remains possible, of course, for Boxer to win at the end–California is a heavily Democratic state, after all–but the odds against her winning are looking longer and longer.

Democrats are ecstatic about the score given to the health care bill by the Congressional Budget Office. One wonders why, given a close analysis of the bill and the score. Let’s turn the mike over to Jeffrey Anderson:

For a variety of reasons, this tally doesn’t remotely reflect the bill’s real ten-year costs. First, it includes 2010 as the initial year. As most people are well aware, 2010 has now been underway for some time. Therefore, the CBO would normally count 2011 as the first year of its analysis, just as it counted 2010 as the first year when analyzing the initial House health bill in the middle of 2009. But under strict instructions from Democratic leaders, and over strong objections from Republicans, the CBO dutifully scored 2010 as the first year of the latest version of Obamacare. If the clock were started in 2011, the first full year that the bill could possibly be in effect, the CBO says that the bill’s ten-year costs would be $1.2 trillion.

The announcement this week that the feds have frozen funding for the much-maligned SBINet project, the Boeing-managed program launched in 2005, shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Costs have already doubled beyond what was originally anticipated, and it still isn’t working.

So far, only a 28-mile prototype of the virtual fence in Arizona has been delivered to the government, and not without snags. Previous GAO reports described cameras with limited ranges that failed in the desert heat and sensors that couldn’t identify nonthreatening movements caused by animals or the wind… Christopher Bronk, a fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University who has followed the virtual fence, said a key problem was that the project’s installations were too prominent, with highly visible stationary towers and bulky propane tanks that would-be crossers can spot from far away and therefore avoid.

This is a classic example of a good idea being completely mucked up by government restriction, contractors over-promising on delivering technology, and federal COTS policies. It’s time to start over from scratch.

At the very least, it appears to be worth a shot. As mentioned, unlike the case in Marshall Field, an actual Constitutional provision–Art. I, Sec. 7–is implicated. As Jonathan Adler notes, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals may be willing to analogize any challenge to the one that was issued in Public Citizen, thus causing it to rule the same way that it did in Public Citizen. But since the Supreme Court may well think differently, and since there is ample cause for it to think differently, a Constitutional challenge to the use of the “deem and pass” rule should very much be found to be on the table.

Of course, if we could just have a straight up-or-down vote in the House on health care reform, perhaps we could avoid any litigation altogether. But that apparently is not going to be a luxury we can enjoy, now is it?

So, there may be no vote on the health care package this weekend because House Democrats suddenly decided that they want to wait for the CBO score? I don’t know about anyone else, but I read this as meaning that the House Democratic leadership believes–the pledges of “yes” votes from the likes of Dennis Kucinich notwithstanding–that they don’t have the votes.