Read 'em and weep.

Brooks:
For the past year, small business owners have been screaming that they can’t hire people because they don’t know what the rules will be on health care, finance or energy. Democrats hear them, but those concerns take a back seat to other priorities.

Small business owners have been screaming about the health care bill that forces them to offer coverage or pay a $2,000-per-employee fine but doesn’t substantially control rising costs. Democrats hear their concerns, but push ahead because getting a health care bill is more important.
...

They’re going through the motions. They’ve stuffed the legislation with gimmicks and dodges designed to get a good score from the Congressional Budget Office but don’t genuinely control runaway spending.
...

The primary cost-control mechanism and long-term revenue source for the program is the tax on high-cost plans. But Democrats aren’t willing to levy this tax for eight years. The fiscal sustainability of the whole bill rests on the naïve hope that a future Congress will have the guts to accept a trillion-dollar tax when the current Congress wouldn’t accept an increase of a few billion.

There is the 10-6 dodge. One of the reasons the bill appears deficit-neutral in the first decade is that it begins collecting revenue right away but doesn’t have to pay for most benefits until 2014. That’s 10 years of revenues to pay for 6 years of benefits, something unlikely to happen again unless the country agrees to go without health care for four years every decade.

There is the Social Security dodge. The bill uses $52 billion in higher Social Security taxes to pay for health care expansion. But if Social Security taxes pay for health care, what pays for Social Security?
...
The Democrats have not been completely irresponsible. It’s just that as the health fight has gone on, their passion for coverage has swamped their less visceral commitment to reducing debt. The result is a bill that is fundamentally imbalanced.

This past year, we’ve seen how hard it is to even pass legislation that expands benefits. To actually reduce benefits and raise taxes, we’re going to need legislators who wake up in the morning passionate about fiscal sanity. The ones we have now are just making things worse.

Klein:
{A}t some point, we have to bet that Congress will be able to stick to cost controls. Otherwise, we're bankrupt one way or the other, and we may as well give people health-care coverage as the country rides out its final years of solvency.
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3) More evidence that health-care reform will become more popular if it passes.

4) I'll be on the Colbert Report tonight.

ADDED: And here's Herbert, rounding out the pack:

The Obama administration and Democrats in general are in trouble because they are not urgently and effectively addressing the issue that most Americans want them to: the frightening economic insecurity that has put a chokehold on millions of American families.

The economy shed 36,000 jobs last month, and that was trumpeted in the press as good news. Well, after your house has burned down I suppose it’s good news that the flames may finally be flickering out. But once you realize that it will take 11 million or more new jobs to get us back to where we were when the recession began, you begin to understand that we’re not really making any headway at all.

It’s also widely known by now that the official employment statistics drastically understate the problem. Once we take off the statistical rose-colored glasses, we’re left with the awful reality of millions upon millions of Americans who have lost — or are losing — their jobs, their homes, their small businesses, and their hopes for a brighter future.

Instead of focusing with unwavering intensity on this increasingly tragic situation, making it their top domestic priority, President Obama and the Democrats on Capitol Hill have spent astonishing amounts of time and energy, and most of their political capital, on an obsessive quest to pass a health care bill.

Health care reform is important. But what the public has wanted and still badly needs above all else from Mr. Obama and the Democrats are bold efforts to put people back to work. A major employment rebound is the only real way to alleviate the deep economic anxiety that has gripped so many Americans. Unaddressed, that anxiety inevitably evolves into dread and then anger.

But while the nation is desperate for jobs, jobs, jobs, the Democrats have spent most of the Obama era chanting health care, health care, health care.

The talk inside the Beltway, that super-incestuous, egomaniacal, reality-free zone, is that President Obama and the Democrats have a messaging or public relations problem. We’re being told — and even worse, Mr. Obama and the Democrats are being told — that their narrative is not getting through. In other words, the wonderfulness of all that they’ve done is somehow not being recognized by the slow-to-catch-on masses.

Nevermind the magnificent oratory; listening skills anyone?

A cynic might say what we really need now is a good world war to get us out of this economic fix. Students of history know, it wasn't the massive federal spending programs (big then, massive now) that led us out of the Great Depression. They helped, but it took the true wartime mentality and bloody fix of a world war to charge up America's economic engines again.

I pray to God that's not our big plan here, but "the more things change, the more they stay the same." And "if you don't learn from history, you're bound to repeat it", right?

Is there anybody in politics thinking about the American economy right now and looking out 10 to 20 years in the future? What will we make; what will we sell? Tourism, crappy films, and service industries can only take you so far afterall. And corporate America and the governments can only make work for so many at inflated salaries.

We've pretty much accepted, with our encouragement of the influx of our undocumented friends and neighbors, that a master-servant class relationship is ok again in America. Nevermind the wisdom of a gameplan that has you depending on your least educated, less rooted non-fellow countrymen for providing the most basic services. (I personally agree with MLK that such a mindset does as much to harm the master class as it does those serving....)

As the old Asia song goes: "But I can see that dark horizon looming ever close to view..." The smile has left your eyes, indeed.

MORE: Nevermind Sarah Palin; I want to know what newspapers, mags and tv shows the current Democratic administration tunes into to get their news. Don't they read this stuff and understand how things work: who needs to be leaned on, and most importantly who does not?

HINT: it's not the non-treating, by choice non-insureds asking for the blank taxpayer checks and running up the systematic costs of the game... No more bailouts for the big guys who calculated their numbers wrong. How will they ever learn? And no one-size-fits-all premiums not distinguishing between those health consumers who treat regularly and cost more, and those who practice preventative maintenance and don't run up thousands of dollars of bills to be passed along to others to share ... equally.

Rick Klein:

ABC’s Z. Byron Wolf reports: President Obama and Democrats launched a campaign to vilify insurance companies in the final stretch of their health reform effort. Republicans, meanwhile, pointed out that those very same insurance companies would get huge checks from the government if health reform is enacted.

“(Health Insurers) will keep on doing this for as long as they can get away with it. This is no secret,” the president said. “They're telling their investors this – ‘We are in the money. We are going to keep on making big profits even though a lot of folks are going to be put under hardship,’” the President told supporters at a stop in Pennsylvania today.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, meanwhile, wrote to insurance company executives demanding that they justify premium hikes.

Neither mentioned that the Senate health reform bill, which is the basis for Democrats' last best chance at comprehensive reform, would give the insurance companies millions of new customers required by law to buy health insurance. It would also require insurers to cover everyone, regardless of age, gender or pre-existing condition.

To help pay for the new insurance requirements the government would give to people money to buy insurance - $336 billion over the next ten years. That money, ultimately, would have to go to... drum roll... insurance companies.
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During the 2008 Presidential campaign, then-Senator Obama criticized a proposal by Sen. John McCain because it would send government help for people to buy insurance directly to insurance companies.

“But The New Tax Credit [For Health Insurance] He’s Proposing? That Wouldn’t Go To You. It Would Go Directly To Your Insurance Company – Not Your Bank Account," said Obama in October on the Campaign trail.

And yet that’s exactly what Democrats' proposal would do...

So why do Insurance companies, if they're set to receive more than $330 billion in government subsidies to insure people without insurance now oppose the Senate bill?

"Health plans proposed more than a year ago robust insurance market reforms and new consumer protections to guarantee coverage for pre-existing conditions. Much more needs to be done in the current legislation to address the skyrocketing cost of medical care, which is making health care coverage unaffordable for working families and small businesses," said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman from America's Health Insurance Plans, in a statement today.

He argued that health insurers should not be targeted by the President and their profits are lower by margin than other sectors in the health industry.

"For every dollar spent on health care in America, less than one penny goes towards health plan profits. The focus needs to be on the other 99 cents," he said.