Well, okay, it isn't so he can't -- but if it was, he would if he could, so there. You're all a bunch of haters and he hates you for it, and he wishes we lived back in the 1820s so he could shoot you all and save America from haters like you.

Meanwhile, here in Honolulu, the State House Judiciary and Finance committees are presently in their 41st hour of hearing testimony on SB 1, Relating to Marriage Equality, which would make Hawaii the 15th state to legalize same-gender marriage. A record 6,000 people have signed up to testify.

And in our legislature, nobody has been a more vociferous defender of the sanctity of traditional marriage this go-round than State Sen. Sam Slom (R-Bozo's Big Top), an ardent practitioner of the holy sacrament who's been married three times, and who's traded in each wife for a newer model.

So is Slom's current live-in girlfriend Malia Zimmerman, a right-wing journalist -- and one of the most dishonest, unscrupulous and conniving people I've ever met -- who left her husband and young son to take up with him. Together, they are truly Hawaii's Gruesome Twosome.

Whenever you've got Slom and Zimmerman as your spokespeople, you've got serious problems. Same-sex marriage is going to pass, and when it does, the wind will be taken out of the Christianistas' sails. Halleluyah!

It might not seem possible that President Obama could do more harm to his credibility and the public's faith in government than misleading Americans about health insurance reform. But he can. The president is now misleading the public about his deception.

In a speech last night to his political team, Obama said: "Now, if you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn't changed since the law passed."

No, no, no, no, no -- that's not what the Obama administration said. What they said was:

"That means that no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you'll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what." - President Obama, speech to the American Medical Association, June 15, 2009, during the debate over health insurance reform.

"And if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it.  No one will be able to take that away from you.  It hasn't happened yet.  It won't happen in the future." - Obama, remarks in Portland, April 1, 2010, after the bill was signed into law.

SNIP

On history's scale of deception, this one leaves a light footprint. Worse lies have been told by worse presidents, leading to more severe consequences, and you could argue that withholding a caveat is more a sin of omission. But this president is toying with a fragile commodity: his credibility. Once Americans stop believing in Obama, they will stop listening to him. They won't trust government to manage health care. And they will wonder what happened to reform-minded leader who promised never to lie to them.

Further, this is a country that has countenanced the shooting of street urchins as a depraved form of social control in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paolo and elsewhere. If Brazil's local governments are capable of doing that, it's hardly farfetched that its national government would spy on not only its own citizens, but those of its South American neighbors, too. Brazilians have a long and well-documented history of doing just that, and such behavior doesn't change over the course of just a few years' time, historically speaking.

Look, countries and people spy on one another all the time, friend and foe, in war and in peace. Espionage is rooted in our innate human drive for survival, by which we've sought to anticipate potential threats to ourselves and our families, and has been an ongoing practice on since mankind first started to organize socio-economically into clans, tribes and eventually, independent nation-states.

While the United States has the capacity to gather and process enormous amounts of data and intelligence on a global basis, which obviously sets us apart in terms of scale, I hope that we can please dispense with the notion that we are somehow the only ones engaging in espionage against both ourselves and other nominally friendly powers. We're not.

I'm neither saying nor arguing that our spying on our own selves and our friends is necessarily right, ethical or even excusable, given the fact that other countries do the same. I'd just like to see some reasonable discussion about how to resolve this important issue, without it devolving into emotional tit-for-tat, i.e., "they did it, too!" and "well, we did it worse!"

What's new about this?  Nothing.

I just have no idea why the frogs are so shocked that the scorpion will eventually use its stinger.  What is the tag line to that fable?  "Because that is my nature."  And what UHC did in California, other companies have done in other states - just pulled up stakes for more lucrative pastures.

"It's not a government takeover of medicine," he told the crowd. "It's the privatization of health care." In fact, Obamacare, he said, was largely based on past Republican initiatives. "If you took George H. W. Bush's health plan and removed the label, you'd think it was Obamacare."

Nor are progressives likely to press the point in present or future debates.  Unlike conservatives, who are right-wingers first and Republicans second, all too many progressives put loyalty to the Democratic Party -- most of whose politicians, including Obama, are not economic progressives -- above fidelity to a consistent progressive economic philosophy.  These partisan Democratic spinmeisters are now treating Obamacare, not as an essentially conservative program that is better than nothing, but as something it is not -- namely, a great victory of progressive public policy on the scale of Social Security and Medicare.

In doing so, progressive defenders of Obamacare may inadvertently be digging the graves of Social Security and Medicare.

If Obamacare -- built on means-testing, privatizing and decentralization to the states -- is treated by progressives as the greatest liberal public policy success in the last half-century, then how will progressives be able to argue against proposals by conservative Republicans and center-right neoliberal Democrats to means-test, privatize and decentralize Social Security and Medicare in the years ahead?

But that era is over.  So hopefully Dombrowski's gamble on a first time manager works out.