Friday, November 6, 2009 Afternoon

Yesterday, reality pounded on the door of Congress, and nobody answered. Around 10,000 Tea Party followers came from around the country to the Capitol, to express their firm, loud opposition to a trillion-dollar-plus government takeover of America’s health care. One woman said she’d flown all the way from Colorado, just to remind Congress that the Constitution isn’t written on toilet paper. At one point, the crowd even chanted, “Can you hear us now?”

Inside, Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissed the protest as “the party of ‘no’ holding a rally to once again say, ‘no,’” and pressed on with plans to squeeze her health care reform bill through a vote by tomorrow. One anonymous Congressional Democrat told the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund that Pelosi is starting to resemble the obsessed British Colonel in “Bridge on the River Kwai.” She’s going to get that bridge put up, so matter how much it damages her own troops.

The GOP bill is much more oriented toward free markets and personal responsibility. It wouldn’t create government-run health care, put new mandates on business owners or force anyone to buy insurance. But it would cap damages in malpractice lawsuits, expand health saving accounts, let insurers sell policies across state lines to increase competition, and give incentives to states that keep the cost of insurance down. The CBO estimates that it would reduce the cost of health insurance, and cut the deficit by $68 billion over 10 years.

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The government-backed mortgage giant Fannie Mae announced a new way out for homeowners trying to avoid foreclosure. It’s called the “Deed for Lease” program. The title to your house would still revert to the lender, but you could sign a lease to stay there and pay rent instead of a mortgage. It would keep people from being without a home, and stop the slide in property values that happens when a neighborhood gets filled with empty repossessed houses. One drawback: you have to prove that you can afford to make the rent payments. If you bought more house that you could afford to buy, it could be more than you can afford to rent, too.

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Calvin Gosz of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, can’t find a job and is so desperate, he’s offering to sell the naming rights...to himself. He set up an eBay auction to change his name to Ronald McDonald, or whatever the winning bidder wants. The minimum is $5,000. So far, no bids. Oh, come on, Betty Crocker. You can afford it.