"What worries me: time and time again," writes Brendan Skwire in the Philadelphia Weekly about the circuses that are currently passing for Democrats' town hall meetings on health care, "[is that] the needs of the stupid and disingenuous are not only treated as valid concerns, but as the greatest concerns."

Well, yes. This being the United States, one of the most gleefully anti-intellectual nations on Earth, stupid people aren't pathetic dolts to be pitied or perhaps sent to a reeducation camp. They're the shining example we're supposed to look up to. Obamacare, whatever it is or was going to be once the president saw fit to share it with the public, is dead.

That it would die a dog's death was predictable, so predictable that I predicted it a couple of months ago. "No one is going to call their congressman, much less march in the streets, to demand action for a half-measure — or, in this case, a quarter-measure," I wrote then. "Without public pressure to push back against drug and insurance company lobbyists, nothing will change." The latest Rasmussen Poll shows most Americans are against Obama's vague "public option," 53 percent to 42.