More doctors say “no” to Obamacare: “A coalition representing 240,000 physician specialists, like the American College of Surgeons and the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, said it ‘must oppose the bill as currently written.'” I wonder how many doctors are going to leave the AMA over its “expressed support for the legislation’s central elements.”

There is at least one major impediment to a health-care bill: “After months of trying to craft a 60-vote coalition based on the finer points of health care policy, Senate Democrats are growing increasingly worried that abortion will upend what had become a clear path to approving the overhaul bill.”

Uh oh: “Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus’ office confirmed late Friday night that the Montana Democrat was carrying on an affair with his state office director, Melodee Hanes, when he nominated her to be U.S. attorney in Montana. According to a source familiar with their relationship, Hanes and Baucus began their relationship in the summer of 2008 – nearly a year before Baucus and his wife, Wanda, divorced in April 2009.”

Mona Charen: “Barack Obama is demonstrating bottomless reservoirs of gracelessness. A full 13 months after his election, in the course of justifying the deployment of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, President Obama could not spare a word of praise for George W. Bush — not even when recounting the nation’s ‘unified’ response to 9/11. To the contrary, throughout his pained recitation of the choices we face in Afghanistan, he adverted at least half a dozen times to the supposed blunders of his predecessor.”

It seems as though the envoy-itis hasn’t worked out so well for the Obami foreign policy. But this bit of super spin about George Mitchell is quite amusing: “throughout a year of exhausting shuttle diplomacy to the Middle East and European capitals, he has not been able to achieve the major task Obama assigned him: getting Israelis and Palestinians back to the peace table.” Er, that’s one way of describing the most counterproductive year in Middle East diplomacy in decades, or maybe in history.

Meanwhile, Michael Goldfarb goes after the mealy-mouthed envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration. But the president is what matters here: “He pledged to put an end to the genocide there, and in early 2007 Biden even went so far as to call for deploying American troops to the country. As Obama’s first year comes to a close, his administration is indulging an envoy whose approach is defined by his desire to engage the war criminals who rule Sudan. Gration is Obama’s guy, and ultimately, he is implementing Obama’s policy.”

Obama drops seven points in a month in the CNN/Opinion Research poll; down to a 48-to-50% approval/disapproval rating. And that is among “American adults,” not all of whom are registered voters.

Charles Krauthammer on the “executive privilege” objection to the Obami’s social secretary’s testifying before Congress: “What is comical about this is it’s being invoked for a social secretary in a circumstance where, in the original Supreme Court rulings, it was intended for high officials with important state secrets. What was the state secret here — the nature of the flower arrangements at the head table? You know, it is as if somebody is invoking the Fifth Amendment in a dispute over a parking ticket.”

Roger Pilon of CATO explains the environmentalists’ dilemma: “At bottom, the greens face three basic problems. First, by no means is the science of global warming ‘settled’ — if anything, the fraud Climategate surfaced has settled that question. Second, even if global warming were a settled science, the contribution of human activity is anything but certain. And finally, most important, even if the answers to those two questions were clear, the costs — or benefits — of global warming are unknown, but the costs of the proposals promoted by the greens are astronomical.”