t from Democrats, who charge it would "end Medicare as we know it." The Senate rejected it in a vote last week, but also unanimously struck down an alternative plan proposed by President Obama.  Democrats said they wanted to leave it off the table while Vice President Biden leads a bipartisan group of senators to come up with a new budget that would include cuts in spending that would satisfy lawmakers who don't want to increase the nation's borrowing limit without reducing government's size. "The one thing we can't do is nothing," McConnell said. "The president, to his credit, is at the table. ... We're going to negotiate the contours of the plan in these negotiations. I'm personally very comfortable with the way Paul Ryan would structure it in the out years, but we have a Democratic president. We're going to have to negotiate with him on the terms of changing Medicare so we can save Medicare." Appearing on the same program, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called on Republicans to abandon the House Medicare plan, noting an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that says it would require seniors to shoulder an increasingly large share of their health care costs. Schumer said there are only three options -- doing nothing, the Ryan plan or a Democratic vision that preserves benefits and changes "delivery systems," but does "not let providerse charity. Given the nature of the allegations against him, creating a safe house and fund for women and girls forced into prostitution in Guinea, the country where his alleged victim came from, would be an appropriate start. After all, Strauss-Kahn has been one of France’s most eminent leftist figures of compassion for the Poor and Downtrodden through his long-eminent life, and he had a lock on the presidential nomination of the Socialist Party next year. It wouldn’t be unprecedented, at least in this country, for a once all-powerful figure to dedicate themselves to raising large sums of money for deserving causes. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton couldn’t have had more different political philosophies and policies. But they have worked highly effectively together on a host of good causes, most notably for the victims of the great Haiti earthquake a year ago. European left wingers are fond of sneering at the supposedly crass and coarse lives and life styles of American leaders. Now Strauss-Kahn has a chance to measure up to them, or show them up, by refusing to accept that $250,000 and giving it to the poor and needy instead. Somehow I doubt that he’ll take it. F Scott Fitzgerald got it right again -- sort of: It isn’t the very rich who are different from you and me, as he famously told a somewhat skeptical Ernest Hemingway. As Hemingway sensibly replied, that’s just because the rich have more money. But the very powerful are different from you and me -- because they have power – and they know how to use it. There are plenty of powerful people who carry their dignitas, as the Romans put it, well. There are plenty of others who do not. Even on the Left. (Shock! Horror! Outrage!) I previously suggested in these columns that Strauss-Kahn may have deliberately set up the scandal himself just so that he could appeal to the Lunatic Left in next year’s French presidential election as a victim of that Evil American Fascist Genius Barack Obama and his Right Wing Conspiracy. In fact according to a recent CSA opinion poll 57 percent of the French public believe he was framed. But I may have overestimated DSK’s intellect and ambition. Perhaps he plotted the whole thing just to get himself forced out of the IMF so that he could pocket the cool quarter of a million. After all, weak as the dollar is, the euro is looking a lot worse these days. Let there be no mistake: If President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton wanted to, they could twist the knife on the IMF and stop Strauss-Kahn’s golden parachute dead in its tracks. The Letter of the Law – that escape route for lawyers and other swindlers since time immemorial -- is about as hollow as the Maginot Line in cases like this. What matters is moral outrage and the will to apply it. Moral censure won’t be applied of course. It never is. And Strauss-Kahn could ea