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All politics are local; I feel encouraged that my Rep, Bart Gordon (D), voted against ObamaCare.

Only one single Republican no one's ever heard of voted for the bill...some loser from Louisiana, where there are many, many needy sorts who need and desire handouts [cough]Katrina[cough].

A list of Who voted against the bill.

Who voted for the Health Care Bill? Here are the House vote results on HR 3962. No Republican voted in favor except Rep Jospeh Cao of Louisiana as profiled on LALATE last night. 30 Democrats voted against it. 24 of the 39 were of the Blue Dog Coalition.

31 of 39 were from areas that voted McCain, not Obama, in the last election. And 14 of the 39 were freshmen. And of those 14 freshmen, they are from swing districts up at stake in 2010.

JHoward at Protein Wisdom linked Jerry Pournelle, one of my favorite authors, who wrote this before the bill passage late last night...

With Detroit a ruin and manufacturing industries on the ropes, small business is the only possible engine of recovery from what they don't call a Depression; so the Congress is going to add an 8% tax on employing people. We already have the longest period of increasing unemployment since the Great Depression; I presume we are going for a really big record setting period of increasing unemployment.

What incentives people have to invest and create new jobs in this environment is pretty murky now; with the health bill there will be fewer incentives to invest in new jobs in the US. The incentives are now to the job black market -- hire illegal immigrants who don't have to have health insurance -- or to export the job if that can possibly be done.

Meanwhile the credit index is way down: people aren't borrowing or lending, meaning investment is down. Moving money around in circles keeps Wall Street going, but next year the Bush tax cuts expire, meaning a new round of higher taxes to go with the new taxes of the health care and carbon taxes, and the new regulations. And with a trillion dollar deficit the incentive to add surtaxes is overwhelming, thus again confiscating money from the successful -- money that otherwise would have been invested. Perhaps the government can invest for us with a new TARP?

...

In other words: Have we seen the end of the good times? Tax rates go up, but government revenues keep going down. And down. Raising tax rates doesn't seem to make the government much more money. And unemployment goes up. And the beat goes on.

A new Great Depression is not inevitable, but each time there is another transfer of resources to the government, it becomes more likely. The trick to survival is to find niches where one can thrive or at least hang on in the midst of the downward spiral. Who is succeeding in today's Detroit? It would be worth studying those survivalists...

It's also worth considering vegetable gardens. I wish I were kidding.

The Democrat's "Greatest Social Engineering Program EVAH!" crows the NYT...

Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House voted to approve a $1.1 trillion, 10-year plan that Democrats said could be their defining social policy achievement.

Well, we can say that any fallout is hanging on the Democrats (that one Republican vote, the loser from Louisiana, can't really count towards 'bipartisanship').

Now, for the Senate.

Prediction: Democrats will crow and celebrate this for awhile, then the bill won't pass the Senate, at least not with the House's options intact.

We'll see.

“I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig, you get dirty; and besides, the pig likes it.” --George Bernard Shaw