Paul Ryan is desperately trying to resuscitate his failed plan to end Medicare by offering it as the replacement element in the long-sought “repeal and replace” strategy for the Affordable Care Act.

It’s not just an article of faith among many in the Republican Party that the government by some rule of nature/psychology/economics can’t be a solution. This idea has morphed into a commitment to make it impossible for government to properly function, preventing it from ever being a solution. The conservative philosophy about the role of government has transitioned into an active effort to realize a self-fulfilling anti-government prophesy, as the proposal for smaller single-issue bills and the RIENS Act demonstrate.

Wyoming’s two Republican senators, Mike Enzi and John Barrasso, are pushing for a rules change that would only allow an individual bill to deal with a single issue, in order to prevent the current practice of Congress passing massive omnibus bills. From Politico:

What company wouldn’t want to have the government let it sell a product for whatever price it wanted, have the government use its power to stop anyone else from selling the product, and have the government directly or indirectly pay for buying the product?

Senate Democrats want to pass the 9-11 health care bill. But the biggest enemy is not Republican votes, but the clock. Both Tom Coburn and Mike Enzi have signaled that they will force the maximum amount of time to block the bill. It’s fairly disgusting that time cannot be made during the holidays to care for rescue workers sickened through no fault of their own.

In the last few days, several bloggers – among them Jon Cohn and Ezra Klein — have written faulty defenses of the health care bill. They used theoretical, counterfactual alternatives in defense of the health care legislation they’ve supported, calling to mind Voltaire’s classic, Candide. In it, Voltaire heavily mocks the extreme optimism of Pangloss, who concludes all is good no matter how terrible things are because we live in “the best of all possible worlds.”

Massey CEO Don Blankenship is back in the news again, and so are the Senators from West Virginia. One still trying to make money and keep unions out of mines, the other fighting for better mine safety regulations. I’ll let you guess who’s who.

The White House obsession with criticizing the “professional left” comes from one harsh truth: that the left has been right on major issues from health care to the stimulus.

Tomorrow afternoon, Congress will once again take up new legislative proposals to improve coal mine safety. After decades of repeated mining disasters, countless unnecessary deaths and injuries, and continual demands for remedial action, can Congress finally get mining safety legislation right? The outward signs are not encouraging.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) today sent a letter to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius in reference to Jonathan Gruber’s failure to disclose his financial relationship with the Obama administration when he was testifying before the Senate Finance Committee. It appears that, at the time, Sen. Grassley was unaware Gruber had been given a lucrative, sole source contract by the HHS to do analysis of the “President’s health reform proposal.”