NOW THAT OBAMACARE is in its death throes, supporters are backpedaling furiously.

For much of the past year, President Obama lavished praise on a few select hospitals like the Mayo Clinic for delivering high-quality care at low costs, but a pointed analysis published Wednesday in an influential medical journal suggests that the president’s praise may be unwarranted.

Mr. Obama received his information about the hospitals from a widely cited analysis called the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, produced by the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. An article in The New Yorker magazine last year written by Dr. Atul Gawande that used the Dartmouth Atlas as its organizing principle became required reading in the White House last year.

But an analysis written in The New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Peter B. Bach, a physician and epidemiologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, suggests that much of the Dartmouth Atlas is flawed and that it should not be used to compare the relative efficiency of hospitals.

Even the authors of the Dartmouth Atlas are backing away. Dr. Elliott Fisher, director of the Center for Health Policy Research said that “he and his colleagues should not be held responsible for the misinterpretation of their data.”

IT’S THE UNCERTAINTY, STUPID

It’s obvious to me that the Obama administration has no grasp on what their ‘flavor of the day’ tax and regulatory proposals do to business decision making, but perhaps I can summarize for them:

“No investment means no hiring and no new tax revenues. It’s the uncertainty, stupid.”

Businesses won’t start breathing easy until one particular American loses his job on January 20, 2013.

HELP WANTED -- 'Arrogant Americans' need not apply.

What I find amusing is the faux outrage on the part of the Left. Had it been written as “Help Wanted – ‘Culturally-sensitive Americans’ only”, it would have been lauded as an example of the progressive vision.

MORE LIBERAL STUPIDITY.

Washington’s snowstorms were brought to you by global warming.

Washington’s snowstorms were brought to you by global weirding.

Harvard-educated, Oxford-educated. Journalists, both. I would add “idiots” but that would be redundant.

Try on the hair shirt first, big guys, before you go around fitting the rest of us. Friedman, you first.