One thing Mr. Obama has learned about being president is that nobody ever cuts you an inch of slack.

When he went to Denmark to argue Chicago's case for the Olympics, he was criticized for using up all that aviation fuel and coming home empty-handed. Had he not gone, he would have been accused of not doing all he could to help out a great American city.

Another example: Now the gay rights movement is upset at him for not going up to Maine and making the pitch against repeal of that state's gay marriage law. They feel that it's just one more in a long string of Obama disappointments related to their cause.

They might want to remember that Obama always said he was against gay marriage. He prefers civil unions with all the rights pertaining thereto, to use the dry legalistic phrase. Gays have plenty to be disgruntled about--it looks like "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is still in place despite his assurances to the contrary--but Obama's silence on gay marriage should come as no surprise.

With so many other irons in the fire, Obama has had to perform some painful triage in order to get his top priorities accomplished. It's hard, understandably, for interest groups to accept that their top priorities may not be his. Maybe this is one of the reasons presidents serve four-year terms, to force a restless public to be patient.

If Obama still hasn't delivered by 2012, then those with a grievance have a remedy. I wish them the best of luck with the Republican To Be Named Later. So does Barack Obama, which is probably why he made the political calculation he did. It's cruel, but that's politics.

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It's all very clear-cut, really.

Since it seems that we are to be eternally cursed with health insurance companies, polls show that most Americans like the idea of a public option--a non-profit health insurer administered by the government--to act as real competition to keep their prices in line.

After all, since insurance companies are exempt from antitrust laws, and some have a virtual monopoly on their business in many states, they shouldn't have it both ways, should they?

Critics complain that the public option is a Trojan horse that will eventually usher in the dreaded single-payer government health plan, and be the death of private insurers. I'm not sure where the threat lies here: it's like saying that introducing penicillin will mean the death of venereal disease.

Anyway, it should please states-rights conservatives that the Democratic leadership is offering a state opt-out as a sweetener. This way, blue states can have their public option, and red states can--on principle--reject its subversive, godless, socialistic philosophical underpinnings if they want to.

Of course, if the red-staters begin to notice that the blue-staters' premiums are falling precipitously, there may be a reapportionment of legislators in the next statewide elections. Money always talks, and...well, you know the rest of the expression.

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It's all a secret plot, like fluoridation of our drinking water.

Now that the long-awaited swine flu vaccinations are finally being distributed, why am I not at the front of the line? Why should I and my family have to wait while some other, lesser mortal gets inoculated ahead of me?

First responders, shmirst responders. What about those willing to pay extra? What's more American than getting preferential treatment for greasing a few palms?

It's the long arm of paternalistic government again, telling us who can get medical care and who can't. It's Obamanistic socialism. I hear the feds paid for the vaccine. I have half a mind to refuse it, just because the serum might be a Communistic scheme to infect us all with an insane desire to sit down during the Pledge of Allegiance or something.

What's wrong with good old-fashioned free-enterprise-produced vaccine? Fine, so it might cost ten times as much. That would keep the hoi polloi out of it. I could get my shot sooner, which is exactly the way it should be.

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The White House handlers obviously believe that their strongest suit is the Pitchman-In-Chief, and they're playing their hand for all it's worth.

The Charismatic One, in an unprecedented tour de force, appeared on five morning yak shows on Sunday.

Then came the David Letterman appearance, another first for a sitting president.

While poll numbers show that the President himself remains personally popular, his programs continue to be decidedly less so, and there is a clear danger here that repeatedly putting him out there as the head shill is going to wear thin over time.

If there's one thing Americans hate, it's being exposed to the same old shtick over and over. This is why ads lose their effectiveness with overexposure.

For example, I'm sick of seeing that couple holding hands in those side-by-side bathtubs (obviously, I watch a lot of news programs), and wondering how on earth they managed to rig the plumbing for them when they're perched on some Grand Canyon pinnacle five thousand feet in the air, or why anybody would want to take a bath in separate tubs way up there in the first place.

I figure if they're going to insult my intelligence like that, then I'm not going to spend my hard-earned medical insurance dollars on their lousy pills.

See? This is the risk the White House runs.

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Things are starting to jell in Congress.

The final contours of health care reform are yet to be defined, but the fractious Democrats, possibly prodded by the President's speech, are beginning to see the advantages of passing some kind of bill, even if its contents don't completely mesh with their individual dreams.

Meanwhile, there are misgivings in Republican ranks. So far, just saying No has pleased the base, but while the base is well-organized, it's shrinking compared to the number of moderates who are being alienated by their behavior. The "You lie" comment didn't help make them look reasonable.

As I've said before, once a program is in place, people start to think of it as their birthright. Even if all the Democrats pass is a skeleton, it'll be enough to start hanging the Christmas ornaments on down the line. As Americans begin to enjoy (maybe) health care that for many was previously beyond their reach, and discover in the process that we haven't all started speaking Russian, they'll start looking at the GOP as the party that wanted to deny them the goodies.

Look at Social Security--which is certainly socialism--or Medicare, which is just what Obama wants for everybody, except limited to old people. Nobody dares even question those programs now.

The train's pulling out the station, and the Republicans are in danger of being left on the platform, looking in the wrong direction.

Can you hear that lonesome whistle blowin'?

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It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for meaningful health care reform to pass through this congress.

There are so many moving parts in this game of three-dimensional chess, so many special interests, so much money to be made and lost, that only someone with the legislative skills of a Ted Kennedy--or maybe a Tom Daschle--could have played it pitch-perfect.

Sadly, the American people seem to be forgotten in all the jockeying.

We have only our own ignorance to blame. If the majority of this country had any idea what the average citizen takes for granted in Europe, and for what cost, our members of congress would pass universal health care in a heartbeat, to the light of torches waving outside the U.S. Capitol windows.

But those of us who have some semblance of health care coverage desperately hang onto our miserable scraps, because it's all we know. Those who have nothing...hell, nobody listens to them, anyway.

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There are several ways to look at this.

You could say--if you were a starry-eyed believer in the Obama campaign speeches of a year ago--that the so-called "public option" was already a compromise from a pure single-payer plan, which is the holy grail for the left. So this is a compromise of a compromise, or in other words, a sellout.

Or, you could say that Barack Obama is a pragmatist, and that by abandoning one of the cornerstones of his health care reform plan, he is merely acknowledging reality. A partial loaf is better than nothing at all.

I can appreciate Obama's realpolitik, particularly since health reform has been staked out by all sides as a make-or-break issue for his presidency. If your entire credibility depends on getting something--anything--passed, it's better to pass an empty shell so that everyone can declare victory and maybe flesh things out later.

As we all know, government programs are virtually impossible to kill. They develop constituencies that tend to vote as self-protective blocs. They are much easier to fatten over time, like a Christmas goose. If you want to be cynical about it--and there is always a large component of cynicism in any White House's strategy--just getting the framework in place is enough to ensure a thriving, growing bureaucracy as well as mission creep.

Give it a decade or two, and even conservatives will be fighting to protect the National Health Care we have come to accept as an American birthright. Have you ever seen one turn down Medicare?

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We hear that Dick Cheney spent the last decade or so having nightmares about whether some rogue state would put nukes in the hands of anti-U.S. terrorists.

In order to prevent these nightmares from becoming reality, he was prepared to go to any lengths--torture, domestic spying, whatever--and to turn the U.S. Constitution into an irrelevant piece of parchment filled with flowery, archaic writing.

He needn't have worried, nor should the terrorists bother. We're likely to kill ourselves before they can get to us. The Big Mac and the Whopper are our ticking time bombs.

Maybe instead of tapping our phone calls, Cheney should have been inspecting our cholesterol counts.

If Americans could be weaned off greasy food and smoking, the resulting health benefits we'd enjoy would probably enable us to provide cradle-to-grave medical insurance for everyone in this country, without breaking the bank.

The Scandinavians manage to do this, but then again, a Norwegian's idea of a Happy Meal is a plate of smoked herring.

As they say in Oslo, "Fuggedaboudit."

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Fear has always been a potent motivator in American politics.

Fear of Communists lurking under the bed, fear of Liberals re-distributing our hard-earned money to welfare queens, fear of hippies undermining our kids' morals with their drugs and free love.

The Bush Administration was particularly adept at wielding the fear weapon: Remember how they used the climate after 9/11 to start wars and pass a raft of questionable legislation?

Fear of the unknown is a particularly useful tool. It’s what people can’t get their mind around that they find most terrifying, and what makes them most easily manipulated.

In the health care debate, the president and his people have fallen down on the job by failing to articulate what all Americans, the haves as well as the have-nots, have to gain from reform. By creating a vacuum of information, they’ve allowed special interests to define for the nation what change may mean in their own scary and self-serving way.

Like a herd of cattle, people can be spooked into stampeding if you manage to generate around them a fog of anxiety about an unknown peril; in this case, a fear of what they may lose, even though what they may now have is a lousy deal. The problem with a stampede is that once it begins, it’s difficult to control.

The stampede could go over a cliff, and then what would you have? Nobody left who can afford to buy your insurance, or your pharmaceuticals, or whatever else you may be peddling. Be very careful what you wish for.

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Parts of South Florida, particularly the Greater Boca Raton Metroplex, can be characterized as Beverly Hills Lite mixed with a generous dollop of Nassau County, Long Island.

This is why it came as no surprise when one of Boca's own institutions of higher learning, Florida Atlantic University, announced it was offering valet parking to students so they wouldn't have to traipse across the college parking lots in our punishing humidity and arrive in class with the frizzies. If you can look better by paying more, it's money well spent. That is the Boca Way, as well as the Hippocratic Oath for the plastic surgery industry.

It's also the South Florida way to do as much as you possibly can without leaving your car. If you must leave it, then make sure you minimize the number of steps you take to the greatest degree possible. This may even involve waiting for several minutes, burning fuel and blocking cars behind you, for that perfect spot to open up near the entrance to the fitness center--a place you are ostensibly going to in order to burn calories.

I say ostensibly, because we all know you're really going there to meet people, and you want to look your best when you arrive.

Any entrepreneur who can come up with a way to deliver a needed service to people as they wait in their car with the engine running is bound to succeed in South Florida.

Hence the business model I hereby offer up in my cartoon. I would love to see it become a reality.

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If someone were to post a detailed breakdown of the health care coverage congress has voted for itself at our expense, and the amount (or lack of same) congresspersons have to cough up in premiums and co-pays, then mobs armed with pitchforks, scythes and torches would be storming the Capitol doors.

There is really no word to describe the level of hypocrisy displayed by those who enjoy government-paid Cadillac health coverage for themselves and their families, yet who cry "socialism" at the mere breath of a government-offered program for the masses as an alternative to private coverage, or to no coverage at all.

For these parasites, there appears to be no fear of government bureaucracy interposing itself between patient and doctor. Maybe it's because they are the very bureaucracy that they so roundly condemn.

Evidently, the unwashed proletariat that sent them to Washington is not entitled to, or cannot be trusted with, the same type and level of care. In fact, they tell us we can't afford it. Maybe the point of letting them enjoy what we would like to have for ourselves is a way of lifting the burden of daily worry from their shoulders, so that they can be free to make intelligent and selfless decisions on our behalf.

On the other hand, giving them a taste of what we have to face might concentrate their thinking.

Won't happen.

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We're going about this all wrong.

We all know that Florida is always at the top on the lists of the bad stuff, and at the bottom of the lists of desirable stuff. For once, we should celebrate--rather than bemoan--our strengths.

Tourism is one of the legs of our economic stool, isn't it? (The others are development and agriculture, I think, although you'd never know it from our tomatoes, which often taste like they were shipped from a Siberian sawmill). Here we have the one attraction that people will travel all the way down here for, even in a recession, and Gov. Crist goes and signs a law making it harder to get.

Is this the kind of thinking you want out of your governor, much less your next U.S. Senator? After all, if they can't get their prescriptions filled here, they'll just go and get them someplace else, like Mexico. So, no harm done in the end. Plus, it helps keep our international trade balance in line.

We should be offering packages to our honored visitors. "Stay two nights in a Florida hotel, and we'll throw in a bus tour of the top pill mills in Broward and Palm Beach Counties. Reserve within the next 30 minutes and we'll send you home with a pet Burmese python."

We can even have a slogan: "Florida. You'll love us from your first dose."

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Common sense and good politics have always made awkward bedfellows--that is, at those times when they can even get into the same bed together.

In a perfect, non-political world, the best way to pay for health care insurance would be to tax the hell out of the things we consume that harm our health. We could pay for our own upkeep with our vices. As the social engineering took hold, and we began to consume less of these things, the revenue from them would, of course, drop.

But, by then, we'd be correspondingly healthier as a nation, and would have less overall need for medical services. Our race of super-healthy ubermenschen could march happily off into the future.

Well, that isn't the American way. Only a politician getting ready to retire anyway would be nuts enough to suggest something so sensible. Besides, this isn't Scandinavia. Rugged American individualism requires that we be free to eat, drink and smoke ourselves to death if we want to. It is our right, and if it isn't somewhere in the Constitution, then, by God, it should be.

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It shouldn't have to be this way.

It should be a given that our veterans go to the head of the line when it comes to federal expenditures. After all, there'd be no Federal Government to expend anything if they didn't put their lives on the line, time after time.

Instead, we get the national shame of the Walter Reed scandal (uncovered by Washington Post investigative reporting --a field which is in great danger these days--but that's another story) and VA hospitals with staffs so poorly trained that they spread horrific diseases through shoddy hygiene to people who deserve much better.

My guess is that the reason the pols pay lip service to our men and women in uniform without following through with the goods is that the volunteer military is a relatively small constituency. Back when we had a draft, the inconvenience and sacrifice were spread to many more families throughout the congressional districts, and besides, many pols had served themselves, thanks to that same draft. They could relate.

Now, as the number of veterans in Congress dwindles, there is no immediacy.
It's easy to forget our national obligation, except at election time or Veteran's Day, when talk is cheap.

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My cousin lives in Canada and works at a university, shelving books in the library. He told me the other day that he had to start taking a cholesterol-lowering drug. It's one of those name-brands you see advertised on TV all the time, sandwiched between the erectile dysfunction and gold investment commercials.

It really works, too. I was on it for a while, and my numbers looked great. The doctor was pleased.

Then my company changed health insurance plans, and under the new formula for drugs, the same pill was going to start costing me around $60 to $100 per month (for some reason, the price kept changing). My doctor switched me to a generic, which didn't work quite as well, but was a lot cheaper.

My cousin told me that under his plan, the Ontario Health Plan, he gets that drug for $3 a month.

Now, he pays more in taxes on his salary than I pay. But then, he doesn't have that big fat deduction for his health insurance premium that I have.

You can call his system "socialism" if you want. You can call ours "good old-fashioned American market-driven capitalism."

Either way, I call it dollars I don't have. At least my cousin gets something back.

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The health care industry is throwing words like "socialized" around to scare people into hanging onto the status quo, where there's money to be made.

There are two problems with this argument: First, the cold war ended twenty years ago, so "socialized" doesn't carry quite the menacing "Rooskies hiding under the bed" sting that it used to.

Second, we watch our Canadian and European friends make life decisions--like retirement--based on when it's best for them, rather than being forced to work until they can crawl across that bridge to Medicare.

Them ungodly socialistic types also rest easier when they lose their jobs, knowing that state benefits will kick in to protect them from starvation, and that their children can still see a doctor even if they're unemployed. Assuming that meeting these basic needs is what the state is primarily there for, then socialism doesn't look so bad, after all.

As for the "your taxes will skyrocket" argument, to me it's semantic. Taxes, health care premiums--either way, they get taken out of your paycheck. If, by calling them "taxes," they guarantee me and my family health care no matter what my employment status, then sign me up. Chances are they'll be less than the combination of premiums, co-pays, and "your provider charges more than the standard accepted rate for your region" dodges.

And finally, if single-payer "socialized" health care is so bad for us, why are the private insurers fighting hammer and tong to prevent that option from being passed into law? Could it be that we might get something closer to our money's worth?

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Not again!

Remember the Great Swine Flu scare of 1976? Poor old President Ford could never catch a break. Somebody died of swine flu in Vermont or somewhere, and the whole U.S. health system mobilized.

Millions of doses of swine flu vaccine were manufactured at taxpayer expense, thousands upon thousands of Americans were inoculated, and in the end more people died of reactions to the flu shots than from the original disease. The whole fiasco ended up as a political embarrassment.

I clearly remember drawing swine flu cartoons when I was just getting started at a small paper in Oklahoma that didn't even publish on Mondays (so that nobody would have to work on the Sabbath), and now, thirty-three years later, I find myself having to brush up on my hog anatomy all over again.

To quote Santayana, "Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it." There are two lessons to be taken from this: Don't stay too long in the same dead-end job, and let somebody else be the guinea pig for that flu shot before you take the plunge.

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Yes, everybody is justifiably indignant about the single woman who had all the babies, and whose self-indulgence is going to cost the State of California (which can ill afford it) millions for their delivery and upkeep.

You would think that the pro-life crowd was celebrating the miracle, and sending wads of money to help the poor woman take care of her brood, since she had the courage to go ahead, get implanted, and give birth without "getting rid of the problem." I must be missing something, because the cash doesn't appear to be rolling in.

It's strange the way some pro-lifers, at least the ones who use abortion as a political wedge issue, seem to lose interest in the welfare of children once they're born. Where do all the funds for pre- and post-natal care come from? The subsidies for the actual deliveries? Pre-K programs? College assistance? Day care? Hold on a second- those are programs Democrats tend to fight for.

And another thing, while I'm on the topic: Why does the "sanctity of life" not extend to our use of the death penalty? When I lived in Oklahoma, I met plenty of folks who saw no disconnect between fighting to save a fetus' life and clamoring for somebody to get fried.

I never could figure out exactly at what age a human being's life ceased to be sacred. Asking the experts just stirred up trouble.

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I admit this is a rather flip treatment of a serious problem. I ran it past a few colleagues when it was in rough form, asking if it was too silly. They all (women, by the way) gave me a variation on, "Silly works sometimes. It's funny enough to make it worthwhile, even if it's a little light on substance." Plus, I'd hit a wall on other ideas.

We can't be preachy ALL the time.

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With all the serious problems this state has, the Republican-dominated legislature always manages to find the time to address this subject in an election year. Gay marriage, in recent years, has become another reliable vote-getter. It's one of those amazing natural phenomena that the fate of the unborn and the sanctity of heterosexual marriage never seem to be under threat in years that end with odd numbers.

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