The Senate Parliamentarian’s Office was responding to questions posed by the Republican leadership. The answers were provided verbally, sources said.

House Democratic leaders have been searching for a way to ensure that any move they make to approve the Senate-passed $871 billion health care reform bill is followed by Senate action on a reconciliation package of adjustments to the original bill. One idea is to have the House and Senate act on reconciliation prior to House action on the Senate’s original health care bill.

Information Republicans say they have received from the Senate Parliamentarian’s Office eliminates that option

Statistically, the result isn't dramatically different from Obama's rating over the last several months. But it nevertheless demonstrates that the healthcare debate has taken a toll on Obama's approval numbers.

"It's bad for the country," Schmitt said. "This administration really does not believe in American exceptionalism."

A group like AIPAC enjoys power and recognition not because it controls or even represents the votes of Jews. AIPAC’s power rests on gentile ideas and support; if a politician gets loudly and publicly labeled anti-Israel by AIPAC and its allies that politician will get hammered in the next election because so many American gentiles want their politicians to support the Jewish state. AIPAC works like the NRA; it is the publicly accepted voice on an issue about which the public has strong views.

Politicians don’t fear the loss of National Rifle Association PAC money nearly as much as they fear the loss of millions of pro-gun votes at the next election. This, I think is why AIPAC is so powerful. To be convincingly labeled an anti-Israel politician is the kiss of death almost everywhere in the United States — just as to be anti-gun is the kiss of death. American gentiles consider AIPAC and those affiliated with and endorsed by it to be reliable guardians of pro-Israel policy; politicians don’t want to cross a force with this kind of hold on the public.

AIPAC has the power that it does because it has been in effect deputized by American pro-Israel gentiles to guard the frontiers of our Israel policy. Like the NRA and like the fabled Tobacco lobby of old, it is strong because the public accepts it as the watchdog on an issue it cares about. Lose that bond with the public, as the Tobacco lobby finally did, and the clout bleeds away — even if the lobby has all the money, all the organizers and all the connections that it previously had.

From the mid-1980s until 2000, thousands of incidents of sudden acceleration were reported in all makes and models of cars (and buses, tractors and golf carts). Then, as now, the incidents were relatively rare among car crashes generally, but they were nevertheless frequent and dangerous enough to upset automakers, drivers and the news media.

I looked into more than 150 cases of unintended acceleration in the 1980s, many of which became the subject of lawsuits against automakers. In those days, Audi, like Toyota today, received by far the most complaints. (I testified in court for Audi on many occasions. I have not worked for Toyota on unintended acceleration, though I did consult for the company seven years ago on another matter.)

In these cases, the problem typically happened when the driver first got into the car and started it. After turning on the ignition, the driver would intend to press lightly on the brake pedal while shifting from park to drive (or reverse), and suddenly the car would leap forward (or backward). Drivers said that continued pressing on the brake would not stop the car; it would keep going until it crashed. Drivers believed that something had gone wrong in the acceleration system, and that the brakes had failed.

But when engineers examined these vehicles post-crash, they found nothing that could account for what the drivers had reported. The trouble occurred in cars small and large, cheap and expensive, with and without cruise control or electronic engine controls, and with carburetors, fuel injection and even diesel engines. The only thing they had in common was an automatic transmission. An investigation by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration found no electro-mechanical defects to explain the problem. Nor did similar government studies in Canada and Japan or any number of private studies.

New employees would have four months from the start of employment to move into New Jersey, while anyone living out of state would have 21/2 years after the law takes effect to comply.

"It is very simple," Norcross said. "If you want a paycheck from New Jersey taxpayers, you should have to live here, pay your taxes here, and be part of your community."

The Senate language would prohibit illegal immigrants’ buying healthcare coverage from the proposed health exchanges. The House-passed bill isn’t as restrictive, but it does — like the Senate bill — bar illegal immigrants from receiving federal subsidies to buy health insurance.

Hispanic Democrats say they haven’t moved from their stance that they will not vote for a healthcare bill containing the Senate’s prohibitions.

Liberal and progressive organizations that helped propel him to the White House are turning on him now, little more than a year after he took office. Their collective discontent, on issues from health care to nuclear energy to the handling of terrorism suspects, could mean bad news for Democrats during this fall's congressional elections.

Polls show that liberals and blacks still approve of the job Obama's doing. That approval, however, doesn't necessarily mean they will make the effort to vote, and many of the activists and groups that worked to get people to the polls in 2008 say they're not inclined right now to help Democrats in the fall.

"The energized base which transformed the nation and elected our first black president (is) now disengaged," Democratic political strategist Donna Brazile says. "If this was September, I would hit the panic button."

Rep. Ike Skelton, one of 39 House Democrats who voted against the party's health care overhaul bill in December, also skipped the presidential stop in his home state. Mr. Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, was taking part in a House floor debate on the future of the war in Afghanistan.

In addition, Rep. Russ Carnahan, a Democrat from St. Louis and Mrs. Carnahan's brother, skipped the event, even though it was in his home district. [...]

The Missouri Republican Party mocked Mrs. Carnahan's absence, saying she certainly should have taken the opportunity to bask in the high-profile visit just eight months before the vote.

“They are here for this exercise and if we ever went to war, they would naturally come also,” Army Gen. Walter Sharp told reporters at Yongsan Garrison, the main U.S. military headquarters in central Seoul.

Two new experiments suggest there is something to this. Mazar and Zhong had 156 volunteers (University of Toronto students) visit online stores that carried mostly green products, or only a few. [...]

Volunteers who bought up to $25 worth of ecofriendly stuff from the green store shared less money ($1.76) than those who purchased from the conventional store ($2.18). (Just to be clear, the volunteers were not given a choice about which online store to patronize.) For the green buyers, altruism in the dictator game decreased. More alarming, when the green buyers were then given a chance to cheat on a computer game, and lie about it to the scientists in order to win more money—basically, to steal—they did. Buyers of conventional products did not. And in an honor system in which they took money from an envelope to pay themselves their winnings, the green buyers stole six times more than the conventional buyers did.

"In line with the halo associated with green consumerism…people act more altruistically after mere exposure to green products," Mazar and Zhong write in their upcoming paper. But they "act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products than after purchasing conventional products." Or, as Mazar put it to me, "we are more likely to transgress morally after we have bought ourselves some moral offsets" (analogous to carbon offsets: buy enough so you can drive that Hummer). It was especially striking that the moral balancing occurred in an area of life—being generous with money, cheating on a computer game—that has nothing to do with green behavior. "This suggests that if we want to change people's behavior for the better, we have to be sure it doesn't backfire," says Mazar—starting, perhaps, by eliminating the halo of self-congratulatory, smug virtuousness that surrounds green behavior.

It is quite an accomplishment. [...]

The final reason for Obama's failed argument on health reform is neither structural nor strategic. It is psychological. As the evidence mounted that the body politic was rejecting Obama's health system transplant, Obama faced a choice about the nature of his presidency. He could retreat toward incrementalism or insist on transformation. Obama had previewed his impatience with incrementalism during the campaign. Similar to his predecessor, George W. Bush, Obama turned hard against the Clinton model. "I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America," he said, "in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it."

A plurality of Democrats believe the health-care plan will increase the deficit and a majority say it will likely mean higher middle-class taxes. At a time when voters say that reducing the deficit is a higher priority than health-care reform, these numbers are hard to ignore.

The proposed increase in government spending creates problems for advocates of reform beyond the perceived impact on deficits and the economy. Fifty-nine percent of voters say that the biggest problem with the health-care system is the cost: They want reform that will bring down the cost of care. For these voters, the notion that you need to spend an additional trillion dollars doesn't make sense. If the program is supposed to save money, why does it cost anything at all?

On top of that, most voters expect that passage of the congressional plan will increase the cost of care at the same time it drives up government spending. Only 17% now believe it will reduce the cost of care.

The final piece of the puzzle is that the overwhelming majority of voters have insurance coverage, and 76% rate their own coverage as good or excellent. Half of these voters say it's likely that if the congressional health bill becomes law, they would be forced to switch insurance coverage—a prospect hardly anyone ever relishes. These numbers have barely moved for months: Nothing the president has said has reassured people on this point.

While Democrats are swinging, Republican leaders are backing away and letting Ryan take the hits.