Just to prove that nobody else has the market cornered on being an idiot, Ohio Republican (sometimes) Senator George Voinovich opined on the problems of the GOP.  His idea?  Southerners.

"We got too many Jim DeMints (R-S.C.) and Tom Coburns (R-Ok.). It’s the southerners. They get on TV and go 'errrr, errrrr.' People hear them and say, ‘These people, they’re southerners. The party’s being taken over by southerners. What they hell they got to do with Ohio?’"

Well Senator, I'm not very familiar with how often any southern Republican senators have had - or attempted to have - anything to do with Ohio.  Nor would their constituents cotton to them spending a great deal of time on such subjects, I'm sure.

What I am pretty familiar with is election returns.  As in, Republican senate candidates tend to be supported by larger percentages of southern voters as opposed to other regions of the country.  Which means that one thing those southern Republican senators do know who to do is g-e-t e-le-c-t-ed.

And I suppose because they're able to meet the minimum threshhold of a successful candidate (ie., winning), that equates with "taking over the party", and becomes why candidates in other regions fail?

Hey, George...  Shut your yappin' and do a better job representing real Republicans in your own state.

The eagle-eyed sleuths at Investor’s Business Daily recently dug up a nefarious provision in the House’s 1,018-page health care bill that prohibits you from keeping your current private insurance if any changes are made to it.

On p. 16.

This, in a bill whose table of contents and “general definitions” run to p. 14.  So the House has written a bill whose key, most egregious proviso is hidden so poorly that the authors apparently assumed the public couldn’t be bothered to click two pages to get to it.

Evidently this was too much work for President Obama, whose response during a news conference on Monday at Children’s Hospital to a concerned caller from Maine asking if he was interpreting the stipulation correctly was, “You know, I have to say that I am not familiar with the provision you are talking about.”  What part of the bill is Obama familiar with—the cover?

But don’t worry—Obama says, “If you like your health plan, you can keep it.”  He sure doesn’t know any differently!

In Section 102—that is, the second part of the first section, two pages into the bill—ironically titled, “Protecting the Choice to Keep Current Coverage,” the bill puts the following limitation on those who wish to eschew government-approved options and keep their own coverage: “[T]he individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage [must] not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day of Y1.”  read more »