When Rush Limbaugh apologized to Sandra Fluke after calling her a ‘slut’ for daring to argue that the government should force health insurance plans to include medicinally beneficial birth control pills in their plans, I thought this was a good thing.  If there’s one thing I’m much in favor of, it’s civility in the political discourse. Rush was uncivil in his comments, period. And unlike what some of my conservative friends believe, I don’t think apologizing for a mistake like that makes you weak. I actually think it shows that Rush isn’t a coward; instead, he mans up to his mistake. This is how things are handled in the real world. You make a mistake, you apologize for it, and that’s the end of it.

Well, that should have been the end of it. Instead, Ms. Fluke rejected the apology, saying it only came after advertisers started pulling support. Fine, that’s her prerogative.| MORE ›

Is Charles Krauthammer right? I’m not sure, but he sure does make a lot of sense:

Look, [today's budget vote] is a way to say that what Clinton had said – that Democrats look as if they’re going to immediately demagogue this is completely true,” Krauthammer said.| MORE ›

For over a decade, the fiscal conservative elements in the broader conservative movement have increasingly narrowed their message towards a pure tax-cutting model. Leaving aside the seemingly endless toxicity of the social conservative focus, the cut-taxes message has provided the dominant theme in conservative circles since the 1980s.| MORE ›

Although Democrats’ original health care plan was so horrible that you would assume that any alternative is per definition better, the Wall Street Journal explains that Max Baucus’ changes aren’t exactly the kind of plan America needs either:

The more we inspect Max Baucus’s health-care bill, the worse it looks. Today’s howler:| MORE ›

The dominant meme in the blogosphere the last couple of weeks has been to say that protests about health care reform are a unique and frightening development in American political discourse. It’s never been anything like this bad before! Or so we are told.

Unfortunately, not all memories are so short.| MORE ›

Fox News reported the other day that the Florida Senate recently passed a bill outlawing Florida physicians from asking patients whether or not they own a gun, unless there’s a legitimate reason for doing so. The Florida House of Representatives recently passed it as well:| MORE ›

GOP Leader John Boehner:

Posted by GOP Leader Press Office on November 5th, 2009

Health care reform should not be used as an opportunity to use federal funds to pay for elective abortions. Health reform should be an opportunity to protect human life – not end it.

Unfortunately, Speaker Pelosi’s 2,032-page government takeover of health care does just that.| MORE ›

The Washington Post published an op-ed yesterday written by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. Read it; it’s a good one.

Jindal believes that Republicans have to join the “battle of ideas” about health care reform. Reform, he says, is necessary.

He first gets a dig in at Democrats:

The debate on health care has moved on.| MORE ›

Despite Democrats’ assertions that resistance to their massive spending programs and plans to create a taxpayer-funded healthcare program have been artificially generated, Sam Bates of Lubbock county, Texas, knows what he thinks about liberals’ agenda and he doesn’t like it. 

A rancher, Bates took the figurative pen in hand and plowed the message “Say no to OBAMA” into the earth for all to see.| MORE ›

Via Volokh and Hotair comes the line that seems to sum up the problem with the current Democratic leadership and White House approach to health care:| MORE ›