This just in from state Sen. Don Benton’s campaign for U.S. Senate:

Benton Calls Murray Out on Supporting Viagra for Sex Offenders

TUMWATER, WA – The Benton for U.S. Senate Campaign today announced they have posted an educational video on the web designed to show Washington State voters how their tax dollars are being spent in Washington, D.C. The recently passed healthcare reform bill, supported by Senator Patty Murray, included provisions for registered sex offenders to receive government assistance for prescription drugs such as Viagra.

Now I will be the first to admit that I haven’t read every page of …

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Some tidbits I ran across today:

Washington Post
By Douglas E. Schoen and Patrick H. Caddell
Friday, April 16

We are Democratic pollsters who argued against the health-care that the Obama administration chose to pursue. Instead, we advocated incremental health-care reform. With the passage of health reform, some harsh political realities have emerged.

Recent polling shows that despite lofty predictions that a broad-based Democratic constituency would be activated by the bill’s passage, the bill has been an incontrovertible disaster. The most recent Rasmussen Reports poll, released on April 12, shows that 58 percent of the electorate supports a repeal of the health-care reform bill – up from 54 percent two weeks earlier. Fueling this backlash is concern that health-care reform will drive up health costs and expand the role of government, and the belief that passage was achieved by fundamentally anti-democratic means. …

Put simply, there has been no bounce, for the president or his party, from passing health care. …

Democrats can avoid the electoral bloodbath we predicted before passage of the health-care bill, but in one way: through a bold commitment to fiscal discipline and targeted fiscal stimulus of the private sector and entrepreneurship.

And (this is about a lawsuit against the University of California headed for the Supreme Court):

Washington Post
By Newt Gingrich and Jim Garlow
Friday, April 16

Americans like to think of their college campuses as marketplaces of ideas where students have the opportunity to freely browse a host of competing beliefs, attitudes and philosophies. Unfortunately, today’s academic marketplace is more like a company store. A single, humanistic, decidedly leftist worldview is sold in too many classrooms . . . and the customer refuses delivery at his or her own risk.

And I found it fascinating that this discovery was based on the observation of six atoms:
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Our editorial today about the death threat against U.S. Sen. Patty Murray talked about the danger in letting angry rhetoric go too far.

Charles Alan Wilson of Selah is accused of leaving Murray 13 voicemail messages, including five in one day. Transcripts of the messages are included in the court record.

They are worth reading. This is not merely charged political hyperbole. It is the vile and crazed ranting of someone who clearly is advocating violence.

Hat tip to Publicola.

This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

Few Americans need reminding that violence has no place in politics. The alleged death threat against U.S. Sen. Patty Murray is a good occasion to talk about why.

A physical attack on an elected leader – be it Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford or former Seattle Mayor Paul Schell – has a criminal dimension beyond ordinary assault or murder. Violence is done against the human being, but violence is also done against democracy itself.

The assassination of an elected leader overturns the election that put him or her in office. In a broad sense, that’s treason – not treason against the leader in question, but betrayal of a constitutional system that guarantees a government founded on the will of the people as expressed in elections, not angry rallies. In America, elections are sacred. The alternatives are not pretty: coups, civil wars, revolutions and thugocracy.

Assaults on public figures may also be a form of terrorism – attacks on the innocent to achieve political or religious ends.

“Mere” threats of violence serve much the same purpose as outright attacks. In both cases, the goal is to intimidate political opponents or decapitate their leadership. Murray has plenty of company on the receiving end of intimidation. Several other members of Congress – including Rep. Eric Cantor, a Republican – have been so threatened. On Wednesday, the FBI arrested a San Francisco man in connection with threats he’d reportedly made against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
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This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

It helps to have friends in high places.

When President Obama signed the new health care reform package March 23, he was also – thanks to U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell – throwing a lifeline to Washington’s 23-year-old effort to give medical insurance to the working poor.

That brave and pioneering effort is known as the Basic Health Plan. Originally conceived by U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott when he was a member of the state Senate, it ultimately attracted broad Republican support. When the Legislature transformed it from a pilot project to a permanent program in 1993, the vote was unanimous in both House and Senate.

Considering that the BHP was a pricey social welfare program that captured no matching federal dollars, that unanimity was as close to a miracle as you find in state politics.

The reason for the bipartisan support is worth revisiting in the bitter national argument over the new federal law. GOP lawmakers originally bought into the Basic Health Plan because it reflected fundamental, traditional principles of personal responsibility.
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This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

Health care reform has been grilled in the flames of partisan passion since it came out of the freezer. Now state Attorney General Rob McKenna has jumped into the fire.

By joining other state attorneys general in challenging a key provision of the new national health care law, McKenna incurred the wrath of Democrats, won the praise of fellow Republicans, and aligned himself with the populist backlash against the landmark legislation.

While McKenna insists there was no political calculus behind the move – that it was strictly a matter of principle – the political context is blindingly obvious. He is widely regarded as a likely candidate for governor, which gives Democrats incentive to trash him.

It also gives him, as a moderate Republican, incentive to establish his credibility with harder-line conservatives in his party. Blindsiding Gov. Chris Gregoire on the lawsuit – and provoking her angry protests – couldn’t have hurt his standing with them.

But leave aside the politics for a moment. The multi-state lawsuit McKenna joined will wind up doing the cause of health care reform a favor.
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This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

The so-called Obamacare package now before the U.S. House of Representatives is neither socialism nor – by itself – a solution for what’s wrong with health care in America. We’d prefer to order a different bill, but this is the only one on the menu.

The claim that President Obama and Congress are enacting something like socialized medicine isn’t serious. Britain has socialized medicine: The system is owned by the state, and doctors are government employees.

Canada’s semi-socialized “single-payer” is a hybrid: The government is the insurer, but many doctors remain in private practice. Most liberal Democrats probably wanted something like Canada’s system, but they didn’t get it and they didn’t get even the consolation prize of a government-run “public option.”

The new “reconciliation” bill the House will vote on shortly would leave America’s private insurance industry in place, but with new regulations designed to cover the nation’s uninsured and help the insured keep their coverage. It’s not a conservative, market-oriented plan, but the American health care system has been a creature of heavy regulation for many decades.
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This editorial will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

This country needs health care reform. Medical coverage must be extended to the tens of millions of Americans who don’t have it. But the details matter, and so does the way Congress makes the key decisions.

It’s a bad sign that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is talking about using a procedural gimmick that would let House Democrats vote to pass a bill while pretending that they didn’t vote to pass it.

The scheme arises from the fact that Democrats in the House and Senate weren’t able to agree on the particulars of a reform package while the Democrats still held a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
Now the House must approve the Senate bill in its entirety in order to fast-track the issue to “reconciliation,” a process the Democrats want to use to produce a compromise bill not subject to filibuster.

Since so many Democrats don’t want their fingerprints on the Senate bill, Pelosi says she may smuggle it (our words, not hers) through a floor vote with a measure stating that it is “deemed” to have passed. The word – normally used more honestly – would presumably let lawmakers claim that deeming isn’t approving and they aren’t necessarily the ones who did the deeming.
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