For bankruptcy and socialism

With their plan to create a vast new federal health care bureaucracy in the face of the worst recession in generations -- a recession already exacerbated by unprecedented federal borrowing and spending -- Washington's "progressives" may have finally reached for their "bridge too far" -- if not their Waterloo.

No one's really sure what's in the latest so-called "health reform" bill -- Friday it turned out the latest version would raise to 3.8 percent a new job-killing tax on investment income, meaning "overall tax rates on income from interest, annuities and royalties would rise to as much as 43.4 percent," according to Bloomberg News. The new scheme would also impose a new 10 percent excise tax on indoor tanning services!

But the more that Americans have learned about what's in the bill, and the more they've seen of the corruption and chicanery being used to force it through, the larger the majority that's turned against it.

How can new taxes in a bill that was still being changed in the House on Friday win new approval in the Senate, where the Democrats now lack the 60 votes required to block a filibuster? They can't. But the radicals don't care. They've gone so far as to propose sending the bill to the White House anyway, merely pretending both houses have OK'd the same measure.

On Friday, both Democratic Congresswoman Shelley Berkley and freshman Nevada Rep. Dina Titus said they'd vote for this monstrosity.

Make no mistake: A vote for ObamaCare means these representatives have declined to stand with the Nevadans who sent them to Washington. Instead, the ladies will have lined up with the purple-shirted SEIU thugs who last August called black conservative activist Kenneth Gladney the "n" word and beat him to the ground outside a rigged "town hall" meeting in St. Louis for passing out yellow "Don't Tread on Me" flags.

Vote now and wait for things to quiet down? Court challenges both to the insurance mandates in this bill, and to the procedural trickery being used to force it through, will festoon the courts for months and years to come, even as our overseas trading partners increasingly balk at buying the promissory notes needed to fund this wobbling house of cards.

Rep. Titus and Rep. Berkley should reconsider.