From last night’s Fox News All-Stars.

On the insurance industry report finding that the Baucus plan would raise premiums:

I think the report is obvious and intuitive. If you don’t have the young and healthy in the system, [if] you weaken the [individual] mandate, you can either have a huge increase in premiums on the rest of us or the insurance companies will go bust.
So there will be an increase in premiums. It’s typical of the administration that it attacks the messenger and [does] not address the message.
But I think the point that Steve and Juan have talked about — the CBO report — I think that was an extremely important political event. The report today will not have an effect on the debate in the long run, but the CBO was the first time that you got a favorable ruling which said that a plan in the Congress is not going to explode the deficit.
The problem is that it was — not intentionally — extremely misleading, and the reason is that the taxation that will support the [Baucus] plan starts almost immediately, but the benefits only kick in in three years.
That means that if you calculate over ten years, you’ve got ten years of revenues into the system, only seven years of expenditures, so of course you’re going to have a surplus.
But if you do it — if you look at each year after the benefits have kicked in, it [the Baucus plan] runs a deficit. So the CBO report, which is extremely helpful to Democrats and the administration, has inside of it a contradiction which hasn’t been exposed. And that is why I think it is misleading in this debate.

On the White House attacking Fox News:

This is a president who got so used to the hagiographic, enthralled coverage that he had last year that he can’t stand a network that, in the words of one analyst, is “insufficiently obsequious.”
We don’t have anchors here at Fox who get a thrill up their leg in the middle of an Obama speech. I don’t recall it ever having happened, at least while I was on the set.
The problem for the administration is I’m not sure how smart it is to attack Fox. There are a lot of independents the president has lost in public opinion. A lot of independents watch Fox and they know, as the average American knows, that there is a difference between the A-section and the editorials, between opinion shows and news shows like this one.
One example is that I think this show is incredibly scrupulous and analytic in looking at health-care reform. Your correspondents, like Jim Angle, have gone so far out into the weeds that we needed search-and-rescue to get him home alive.
So the administration is an administration that is losing confidence in itself and does not like opposition.
You know, last year — in the Bush years — dissent was the highest form of patriotism. And now it is a form of sedition.