RARE HONESTY ABOUT OBAMACARE

From the Fort Collins Coloradian, this piece of honesty. Rep. Betsy Markey told a gathering of constituents in Fort Collins on Wednesday that some Medicare recipients will have to give up benefits. She said the status quo wasn't an option.

The Coloradian also included remarks by Charlie Cook in an AARP health care summit.

However, one of the nation's leading political analysts said it appears increasingly unlikely that the Democrats will be able to pass any sort of comprehensive reform this year.

The president over-reached by trying to push through major initiatives on health care and climate change in the midst of an economic catastrophe, said Charlie Cook, publisher of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

"The public trust in government to get this right may have been eroded enormously by what's happened in the last year" to the economy, Cook said Tuesday at a Denver health-care discussion organized by the American Association of Retired Persons. "Under the best of circumstances this would have been hard, but it's just a lot harder right now."

The Obama administration has committed strategic and tactical blunders on health-care reform that make it difficult, if not impossible, to pass any reform plan this year, Cook said.

"I think the mistakes they made weren't stupid mistakes, but just because they weren't stupid doesn't mean they weren't mistakes," he said.

Cook said a key mistake was leaving the drafting of the specific plan to Congress. He said that amounted to "outsourcing domestic policy" to congressional leadership.

"There are institutions that are hated more than Congress, but not many," Cook said.

Cook is not a fan of the Town Hall protests or protestors, judging from his August 11 column, "Town Halls in Danger." Of course, that was written before polls showed that the people most influenced by the protests were -- independents. CNN story.