He really is magic.

In the time it took President Obama to speak 510 words, 17 million previously uninsured people got a visit from the Aetna Fairy.

There are now more than 30 million American citizens who cannot get coverage.

The man giving the speech was an identical twin of the man who just spent the entire summer reciting the phrase “47 million uninsured Americans” as if it were a mantra given to him by his guru.

He’d scarcely begun when the “47″ became a “30″ and no one inside the “Cone of Unquestioning” noticed.

Other than the Hope and Change math, the speech was no different from the 6000 others the president has given on the topic in lieu of talking about the war or the economy in recent months (but this isn’t about him, remember). This one did have the added fun of watching Nancy Pelosi try to make her face move and Joe Biden concentrating on not picking his nose on camera.

The president did get in a dig at Sarah Palin, reinforcing her status as the most feared “irrelevant” woman in Obama’s America.

While the folks at MSNBC diapered themselves for a trip to their Happy Place (Barack and Nancy and Joe-oh my!), the rest of the country was treated to an unnecessary spectacle that was an insult to the intelligence of anyone who has ever been within sniffing distance of a critical thought process.

The facts that the president claimed “nobody disputes” are so disputable that even the AP jumped out of the Obama tank long enough to dispute some of them.

My favorite part of the bedtime story is the one about the public option being self-sufficient.

They argue that these private companies can’t fairly compete with the government, and they’d be right if taxpayers were subsidizing this public insurance option, but they won’t be. I’ve insisted that, like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums its collects.

But by avoiding some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits and excessive administrative costs and executive salaries, it could provide a good deal for consumers

How many head injuries do you have to suffer to believe that a government run agency will avoid “excessive administrative costs”?

And it is going to be collecting enough in premiums to be self-sufficient from people who, for the most part, couldn’t afford insurance in the first place?

There is no such thing as a self-sufficient government run entity.

These things can’t even come into existence without taxpayer money. President Obama may have called it a “not-for-profit public option” but he meant a “government run” option. The government only runs on one thing: your money.

I understand that many people are emotional and passionate about wanting health care reform. However, I don’t understand why that passion has to translate into delusion when it comes to basic math and the observable world of the federal government.

Eh, I worry too much. This president just insured 17 million people with the stroke of a speech writer’s pen.

Imagine the magic he could accomplish if we all stopped paying attention.