Saying the Senate Health Care bill “pits working Americans who need health care for their families against working Americans struggling to keep health care for their families”, AFl-CIO president Richard Trumka is part of the large opposition from labor leaders to Obama’s plan. Union leaders are concerned about provisions that would tax many hard fought health care plans enjoyed by union workers. While the unions prefer House provisions that would tax “the wealthy”, the Senate version could trap union employees in it’s tax increases.

That health care bill may have trouble passing the Senate depending on the outcome of next week’s special election to fill the seat of former Senator Ted Kennedy – who passed away in August.

A Boston Globe survey released this weekend showed Ms. Coakley with a 15-point lead, but a survey by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling found the race a dead heat, with Mr. Brown up 48% to 47%. The scary prospect for Democrats is that the race is even this close on their home ideological turf, and turnout is always difficult to predict in special elections.

That’s especially true in midwinter and with a voting public that is increasingly opposed to the Democratic agenda in Washington. The Public Policy Poll found that likely Bay State voters oppose the Democratic health plans by 47% to 41% and that they give President Obama only 44% job approval. This in a state he carried by 26 points only 14 months ago. It also found Republicans much more motivated to vote than Democrats.

Mr. Brown, a state senator who is little known state-wide, has been running against Washington’s blowout spending and has called for a freeze on the wages of federal employees. “It’s not right that less-paid private sector workers suffering through a recession have to pay for expensive government salaries,” he says, noting Ms. Coakley’s many union endorsements.

Thomas Sowell has a piece up on RealClearPolitics today. Sowell takes a look at the cynicism of passing bad health care legislation simply to say you have passed “any” health care legislation.

Supporters of government health insurance call its passage “historic.” Past attempts to pass such legislation– going back for decades– failed repeatedly. But now both houses of Congress have passed government health care legislation and it is just a question of reconciling their respective bills and presenting President Obama with a political “victory.”

In short, this is not about improving the health of the American people. It is about passing something– anything– to keep the Obama administration from ending up with egg on its face by being unable to pass a bill, after so much hype and hoopla. Politically, looking impotent is a formula for disaster at election time. Far better to pass even bad legislation that will not actually go into effect until after the 2012 presidential election, so that the public will not know whether it makes medical care better or worse until it is too late for the voters to hold the administration accountable.

The utter cynicism of this has been apparent from the outset, in the rush to pass a health care bill in a hurry, in order to meet wholly arbitrary, self-imposed deadlines. First it was supposed to be passed before the August 2009 Congressional recess. Then it was supposed to be passed before Labor Day. When that didn’t happen, it was supposed to be rushed to passage before Christmas.

Sowell rightly points out that while the costs of this folly will be felt immediately, any possible benefit (though more likely the chaos of actual implementation) was held off until after the elections of 2012. Punting responsibility down the road while frontloading costs is the worst kind of arrogance.

There are some interesting reads today in the papers (can we call them that anymore since most are accessed online?). Obama continues to push Stimulus II, despite a cool reception from most. The Wall Street Journal covers his big gamble with your ante.

President Barack Obama pressed forward with an expansion of his $787 billion stimulus plan Tuesday, unveiling job-creation proposals that largely build on the initial package, including a hiring tax credit that his own party jettisoned as unworkable and some business owners deemed ineffective.

Meanwhile, the USA Today notes that supporters of the health care bill are jamming it full of all sorts of goodies.

As the “global warming” crowd gathers in Copenhagen to wring their hands and on the heels of the EPA declaring every single breath you exhale a “dangerous pollutant”, it’s good to see someone with sanity take a look at the track record of this same crowd. In Friday’s Forbes magazine, Gary Sutton penned a great piece titled “The Fiction of Climate Science: Why the Climatologists Get It Wrong.”

Many of you are too young to remember, but in 1975 our government pushed “the coming ice age.”

Random House dutifully printed “THE WEATHER CONSPIRACY … coming of the New Ice Age.” This may be the only book ever written by 18 authors. All 18 lived just a short sled ride from Washington, D.C. Newsweek fell in line and did a cover issue warning us of global cooling on April 28, 1975. And The New York Times, Aug. 14, 1976, reported “many signs that Earth may be headed for another ice age.”