No Oil for Pacifists

Ronald Reagan, the great communicator, had this to say about imposition of socialism:

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.

Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it. We had an example of this. Under the Truman administration it was proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States, and, of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this.

Reagan is warning us not to trade our freedom for mediocrity. The left says we oppose socialism too, we are moderates we just want for the government to give regular people what they have a right to... like health care. Oh, yes, I see now.

What the left doesn't understand is why right thinking folks fear socialism and the loss of freedom, we fear collectivism, we fear government control of health care, government control of our lives. It is because surrendering power to the government begets fraud, waste and especially abuse. Abuse is a mild form of tyranny. We don't want abuse, tyranny, fraud or waste. We want to be free from those things.

Reagan the great communicator was a plain talker. Another plain talker, Vin Suprynowicz, is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, as well as the author of several books. Today we quote at length (it is an easy read) from his recent plain talk column on how Socialism begets tyranny.

Today, the socialists have taught most Americans to expect lots of things -- government schools, government fire and police protection -- are and should be "free." They're not. Everything has to be paid for. Is free health care "a right"? You can't have a right that imposes an obligation on anyone else... If I have a right to medical care, do I have a right to put a gun to the head of a doctor and threaten to shoot him if he won't treat me? Is it more moral for some third party do this for me?

A rich guy has more money than he needs and decides to spend $10,000 on cosmetic surgery he could easily live without. Across town we have a poor woman, a cripple (sorry: a "differently abled person") who could walk again if only that $10,000 were spent on her surgery instead.

Obviously, a wise and compassionate society would "encourage" the rich guy to forgo his elective cosmetic surgery and instead "contribute" the $10,000 toward medical care for the poor woman, whose life would be improved so much more if the allocation were shifted to benefit her instead of him.

But the darned greedy rich guy just won't go along with our plan, saying he's chosen to donate to other charities and has other plans for his wealth, like building some crummy factory that could supposedly "create some jobs." (Why, they're not even "green" jobs!) So of course we have to tax his $10,000 away from him to make a better use of it.

He then turns around and declares he won't pay any more taxes; he won't show any income from here on in, he'll just quit work and live off his investments.

Well, we can't have our wise and beneficent plan stymied by that kind of greedy hoarding and tax evasion, so we also tax the interest and dividends from his investments -- investments he made with after-tax dollars.

He tries to evade us again, by moving to Panama with all his money. Hold on there, bub. Can't have that. You're going to have to pay an "exit tax" and forfeit any assets you failed to "declare," assuming we let you leave at all. Gotta pay your fair share. Plan won't work if we allow folks to hoard scarce resources, to step out of line, to bribe doctors with cash payments. ...

But these wide-eyed "reformers" just can't imagine how Lenin's well-meaning socialism ever transformed into Stalin's massive slave camp, with people shot if they tried to escape over the barbed wire in the snow. It was all just a matter of bad personnel decisions, you see.

It's all set up with the best of intentions to allow us to ration scarce health care to benefit the poor woman who needs it most. How can it be fair to allow one person to grow rich enough to buy whatever he wants for himself and his family, while the unlucky poor person does without? It's not the unlucky poor person's fault she went to worthless government schools, bore children out of wedlock, lived in a crime-ridden project built by the government, raised young hoodlums without any male adult guidance, got into drugs ...

Have you no compassion? Can't you see the need to seize away the wealth from those who were simply lucky enough to land and hold jobs, to start businesses, to slave 70 hours a week to create new jobs for others while delaying gratification of many of their wants in order to save for their family's rainy days?

Why on earth should we assume that if we keep punishing hard work and frugality and savings, seizing money from the ever-smaller number of folks who exhibit those behaviors in order to hand it to those who keep blowing their welfare checks, this will somehow discourage hard work and savings and investment, while encouraging spend-it-now profligacy, with ever more hands out for another check come Monday?

People who suggest that just aren't being very nice.

Those who doubt that socialism begets tyranny -- see for example: Cuba, North Korea, the USSR, Angola, Poland, Germany, Vietnam, Laos, China, and well, pretty much every place it has been tried. Is it any wonder the list of formerly socialist nations is so much longer than the list of currently socialist nations?

Since we began with Reagan, let us finish with Reagan as well, on the subject of Capitalism instead:

All systems are capitalist. It's just a matter of who owns and controls the capital -- ancient king, dictator, or private individual. We should properly be looking at the contrast between a free market system where individuals have the right to live like kings if they have the ability to earn that right and government control of the market system such as we find today in socialist nations.

(H/T to the ubiquitous OBloodyHell on the Suprynowicz columns Check them all out here.)

From Carpe Diem:


source: Carpe Diem

Agreed.

From the Telegraph (U.K.):

Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.

Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 -- as is dictated by the computer models of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues -- but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.

He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists' agenda as their most iconic single cause. The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction -- until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the wind-sculpted ice they were standing on made such a striking image.

Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week's meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor's, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: "it was the position you've taken on global warming that brought opposition".

Dr Taylor was told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration -- a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents -- was "inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG".

But will the poor, poor, polar bears survive global cooling? Because there's been no significant change in global temperatures, polar ice or arctic climate:


source: Watts Up With That?

(via TigerHawk, Maggie's Farm)

The so-called main-stream media can only grind out the same old tune 'Its a Coup --Its a Military Coup' about Honduras, and the world apparently does some kind of knee-jerk monkey dance begging for 'Democratic Rule' to be restored.

However, the truth is that democracy rules apparently only in Honduras. Both the entire Honduran Supreme Court and the entire elected legislature acted unanimously. Etonomic.com has a great write up of the legal and political situation in Honduras which I feel compelled to quote at length. Emphasis mine.

In March of this year, Zelaya issued a presidential decree ordering that a fourth ballot box be included with the typical three used in this year’s Novemember elections... The Supreme Court of Honduras declared this fourth ballot box, and this means of creating a new Constitution, unequivocally unconstitutional.

Mr. Zelaya ordered the armed forces to carry out and secure the referendum. The heads of the armed forces refused pursuant to the law passed by the National Congress. Zelaya attempted to fire Gen. Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, the top commander. The Honduran Supreme Court ruled 5-0 on June 25th that the firing was unconstitutional and ordered the general’s reinstatement. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal, tasked by the Constitution to rule on the validity of elections, further ruled on June 25th that the refendum itself was illegal.

Zelaya then gathered a large mob together and marched on the location where the military was keeping the ballots that Chavez had shipped in. The mob seized the referendum ballots for Mr. Zelaya and Mr. Zelaya sought to continue the referendum. Finally, on the morning of the referendum – Sunday, June 28th – Mr. Zelaya’s residence was raided by the military and he was exiled from the country.

Subsequent to this action, the Supreme Court of Honduras stated that it had asked the military to exile Mr. Zelaya. Additionally, the National Congress voted to ratify the actions of the military in exiling Mr. Zelaya and to confirm the President of the National Congress as his successor, pursuant to Article 242 of the Constitution ... The vote to confirm [Micheletti] as successor to Mr. Zelaya was done by a show of hands in the National Congress and was UNANIMOUS. A pretty incredible fact considering that Zelaya’s Liberal Party is still in power. The vote was done on the premise that Mr. Zelaya had performed “repeated violations of the constitution and the law and disregard of orders and judgments of the institutions.”

On the status of Mr. Zelaya himself -- he is no longer a citizen of Honduras!

Article 42 of the Constitution declares that anyone who seeks to have the President continue as President or reelected as President automatically loses their Honduran citizenship. Ouch. Additionally, anyone who proposes reform to the four-year limitation in general loses their current position and cannot hold a public position for ten years. Ouch. These are clearly reflections of the historically dictatorial nature of Latin America. In other words, Zelaya was clearly trying to do both of these things and as such lost his citizenship and office. Note that both of these things occur automatically without any action on anyone’s parts.

The Washington Post Drops The Ball

Continuing our round-up, the WaPo published a coherent letter (from high profile attorney Miguel Estrada), highly critical of the WaPo opinion on the Honduran Situation:

Manuel Zelaya was duly elected four years ago on the ticket of the Liberal Party, the center-left party in Honduras. (I attended his inauguration as part of the United States' official delegation). Mr. Zelaya was never, and never pretended to be, center-right, as the editorial asserted. And Honduran voters presumably expected him to govern from the left, as indeed he did.

The voters presumably did not expect, however, that he would attempt to stay in office after the expiration of his term, in open defiance of the Honduran constitution and of rulings by the Honduran Supreme Court. Or that he would defy the country's Congress on these same matters. Or that he would fire those who refused to implement his illegal orders, again in defiance of Supreme Court rulings.

As the editorial correctly noted, the Honduran Congress -- led by Mr. Zelaya's own party -- overwhelmingly voted to remove Mr. Zelaya from office because of his malfeasance. It appointed a successor, again in apparent compliance with the country's constitution, as your editorial seemed to concede. How then could you advocate -- in the name of defending democracy, no less -- that the United States work to reinstate Mr. Zelaya? We in the United States also have a legal process for removing our president. We have used it twice, though never successfully. Were we successfully to impeach and remove a president, would we accept the judgment of, say, France directing that he be reinstated?

I'm not sure I really want to hear the WaPo answer to that question. (Emphasis mine.) Mr. Estrada continues a now familiar theme:

It is readily apparent why Mr. Chávez is, even now, attempting to rally his acolytes (and possibly troops) to restore Mr. Zelaya. It is less apparent why a Post editorial should urge our government to follow his lead. If we want to "defend democracy," we should side with the Honduran people who are rightfully insisting that their leaders honor their constitution, not that of Venezuela.

In addition to having been nominated to the federal appeals court in DC but was filibustered by the dems, Miguel Estrada was born and raised in Honduras. WaPo also published another letter critical of the WaPo, this one from a former Honduran Ambassador to the United States:

Honduran democratic institutions are working to protect the constitution from the political and social groups trying to shred it. They should be recognized for their commitment to the rule of law, not punished with non-recognition by the United States, the world's foremost democracy.

I am certain that the U.S. government will quickly realize that what happened in Honduras cannot be compared with past military coups in Latin America. Our new president, Roberto Micheletti, should be supported in his commitment to hold general elections in November and to hand over power to a newly elected government.

He might be certain, but I'm not so sure. However, I have to give the WaPo some credit for at least printing these letters. They need to retract their knee-jerk inaccurate op-ed piece and start asking the President why he is supporting a would-be-dictator. The Washington Post is still apparently too busy recovering from SalonGate to do something truly worthwhile.

The Honduran Miracle -- (but you didn't hear it from the MSM)

Dennis Prager, who I read in my home-town newspaper The Daily Breeze completes our round up today:

The courage of the pro-liberty forces in Honduras is almost miraculous. It is almost too good to be true, given Honduras' consequent isolation in the world.

The most amazing thing is that the American people have to read letters to the editor, out-of-the-way op-ed pieces, and in our tiny blog to find out about the miracle! Why is that? The President should be telling us about the miracle. Except, he isn't. So now we have to ask why is President Obama not telling us the whole story? Where is the 'do our business in the light of day' he promised? Is he too dancing to the MSM Hurdy Gurdy? Prager continues:

When did a military coup ever take place that was ordered by that country's supreme court, that was supported by the political party of the president who was overthrown, in which not one person was injured, let alone killed, and which replaced the ousted the president with the president of the country's congress, a member of the same party as the ousted president?

But none of this matters to the United Nations, which never met a left-wing tyrant it didn't find appealing. That is why the president of the U.N. General Assembly, a former Sandinista foreign minister, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, accompanied Zelaya in the airplane on Zelaya's first attempt to return to Honduras on July 5. (Brockmann, among his other radical moral positions, is so virulently anti-Israel that the Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations threatened not to attend the U.N. Holocaust Memorial Day event if Brockmann showed up.)

And none of this matters to the OAS, which just lifted its ban on Cuba's membership and which says nothing about Chavez's shutting down of Venezuela's opposition radio and television stations.

And none of this matters to the world's left-wing media. Thus, on July 1, a writer for the United Kingdom newspaper The Guardian penned this insight: "There is no excuse for this coup. The battle between Zelaya and his opponents pits a reform president who is supported by labor unions and social organizations against a Mafia-like, drug-ridden, corrupt political elite." To the Guardian writer, Zelaya was a "reform president."
Lenin's useful idiots never die out.

And the Los Angeles Times editorial page wrote: "Even though the Honduran Congress and military may believe they are defending the country against a would-be dictator, the ends don't justify the means."

Quite a great deal of foolishness in one sentence. That the Los Angeles Times does not believe that Zelaya is a would-be dictator is mind-numbing. As for the cliche that "the ends don't justify the means," in fact they quite often do. That is one of the ways in which we measure means. One assumes that while the Los Angeles Times believes that Americans should be law-abiding, it agrees with Rosa Parks having broken the law. The ends (fighting segregation) justified the means (breaking the law).

In Summary

Why are the left-stream-media organ grinders influencing opinion of world leaders? Or is it the other way around? Please call or write your newspaper and ask them why President Obama proposes to put the would-be-dictator Zelaya in charge of Honduras. Ask the media why they are not actually reporting what is going on in Honduras. Moreover, ask them why President Obama is hiding behind Hugo Chavez.

As long as we put up with this nonsense from the so-called MSM we will only have the option to listen to the same, repetitive clown college theme-song.

(H/T to reader and guest contributor OBloodyHell for bringing the excellent Etonomic.com article to my attention, and to reader Doug J. for the WaPo letters. Thanks.)

MORE: As pointed out by the Other McCain, Fausta continues to be the Honduran crisis reference of choice.

STILL MORE: Must see Senator DeMint questioning the giant disappointment of a nominee for the Assistant Secretary of State position, Mr. Valenzela. He flp-flops quite badly he first says (at 9:10) "This was a classic... ah ... ah military coup." and in the next breath "I wouldn't call it a military coup..." This, in addition to other blunders like "I'm not familiar with all the details..." I could do an entire article here exploring Mr. Valenzeula's nomination to find out who is grinding his hurdy-gurdy.

From Fox News:

Private for-profit clinics are a booming business in Canada -- a country often touted as a successful example of a universal health system.

Facing long waits and substandard care, private clinics are proving that Canadians are willing to pay for treatment.

"Any wait time was an enormous frustration for me and also pain. I just couldn't live my life the way I wanted to," says Canadian patient Christine Crossman, who was told she could wait up to a year for an MRI after injuring her hip during an exercise class. Warned she would have to wait for the scan, and then wait even longer for surgery, Crossman opted for a private clinic.

As the Obama administration prepares to launch its legislative effort to create a national health care system, many experts on both sides of the debate site Canada as a successful model.

But the Canadian system is not without its problems. Critics lament the shortage of doctors as patients flood the system, resulting in long waits for some treatment.

"No question, it was worth the money," said Crossman, who paid several hundred dollars and waited just a few days.

See also John Stossel.

CATO's Alan Reynolds in the July 2nd Wall Street Journal:

General Motors can survive bankruptcy far more easily than it can survive President Barack Obama's ambitious fuel economy standards, which mandate that all new vehicles average 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016.

The actual Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) results will depend on the mixture of fuel-thrifty and fuel-thirsty vehicles consumers choose to buy from each manufacturer -- not on what producers hope to sell. That means only those companies most successful in selling the smallest cars with the smallest engines will, in the future, be allowed to sell the more profitable larger pickups and SUVs and more powerful luxury and sports cars.

Sales of Toyota's Prius, Yaris, Corolla and Scion, for example, allow and encourage Toyota to market more Lexus 460s, Sequoia SUVs and Tundra pickups in the U.S. without incurring fines. Hyundai's success selling Accent and Elantra compacts allows it to sell 368-horsepower Genesis sedans. . .

General Motors is likely to become profitable only if it is allowed to specialize in what it does best -- namely, midsize and large sedans, sports cars, pickup trucks and SUVs. The company can't possibly afford to scrap billions of dollars of equipment used to produce its best vehicles simply to please politicians who would rather see GM start from scratch, wasting more taxpayer money on "retooling" to produce unwanted and unprofitable subcompacts and electric cars. The average mileage of GM's future cars won't matter if nobody buys them.

Politicians are addicted to CAFE standards because they create an illusion of doing something sometime in the future without voters experiencing the slightest inconvenience in the present. Tighter future CAFE rules will have no effect at all on the type of vehicles we choose to buy. Their only effect will be to compel us to buy larger and more powerful vehicles from foreign manufacturers. Americans will still buy Jaguars, but from an Indian firm, Tata, rather than Ford. They'll buy Hummers, but from a Chinese firm, Tengzhong, rather than GM. The whole game is a charade; symbolism without substance.

(via Planet Gore)

Kyle-Anne Shiver at the American Thinker has the right idea on Cap & Trade:

I'm all for cap ‘n trade; it's a nifty idea. Simply splendid. Positively stupendous. Brilliant beyond brilliant. I just have a different take on the whole notion. I prefer very stringent caps on taxes and spending, coupled with a 2010 trade-in of the entire U.S. Congress.

While these Roman throwbacks attempt to save the planet, pagan style, so they can set up their Darwinian nirvana on earth, the rest of us have enough sense not to try to make the state our church.

Pretty strong words for Congress Kyle-Anne has... and she tells it in a real folksy kind of way:

While we, in the other America, use reason to guide our decisions, Nancy Pelosi actually seems to think she's the reincarnation of some pagan goddess on a mission to save the planet. She's in the service of a president she says was sent to us at this time by God, a god who she apparently likens to Zeus. If she were referring to the real, one, eternal, all-powerful God, she would know that stealing the liberties of Americans under utterly false pretences are two of the real God's Big No-nos, and would have enough fear and trembling to stay clear of this pure abomination: Waxman-Markey.

Judging from the looks of Henry Waxman, it's doubtful that plastic surgery has had any ill-effects upon his brain. Waxman's senses have no doubt fallen victim to 34 straight years in the United States Congress. Having been serially elected by nincompoops from now-broke California, Waxman has been held to the accountability of a slug. But, as all wise Americans know, elections do have consequences and this entire Nation is about to reap the bad seeds sown for 3-1/2 decades by those witless Californians.

As if to underscore his own pagan godhood, Henry Waxman sat in a committee hearing in May and declared to the people of these United States that he didn't even know what was in his own bill.

"Well, I certainly don't claim to know everything that's in this bill. I know that we left it to, that we relied very heavily on the scientists, the IPCC and others, and the consensus that they have that there is a problem of Global Warming, that's having an impact and that uh that we need to try to reduce it by the amounts that they think we need to achieve in order to avoid some of the consequences. That's what I know, but I don't know the details."

If this guy were a Republican, that admission would have evoked a media frenzy the likes of which haven't been seen since Butterfield dropped the Nixon-tape bomb in the Watergate Hearings.

Never, in all my born days, would I have believed that a bunch of so-called public servants in this grand republic would have the unmitigated gall to pass thousand-page bills, with enormous ramifications for every man, woman and child in America - without even so much as reading them.

These Democrat legislators are the very same folks, who decried with vociferous vengeance, mortgage contracts that were not fully spelled out and easily decipherable by a 2nd grader. Yet, they shamelessly proffer bills, with far more intricacies than any mortgage contract, for instant passage. They might as well declare that a cabal of lobbyists wrote their legislation.

I'd say that is quite an astute observation. We apparently need a constitutional amendment to make Congress read their own bills before they vote on them. It also begs the question; do we need to have bills dumbed down for Congress to be able to read them?

MORE: Christopher Chantrill says that liberals currently in power know they are throwing us under a bus:

Democrats are honest enough to be ashamed of what they are doing. Why else would they pass their trillion dollar stimulus bill without serious hearings or even a copy of the bill available to read. The same is clearly true of the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House of Representatives, sight unseen, on June 26. As Stephen Spruiell & Kevin Williamson show on NRO Online, the Waxman-Markey bill is nothing more than subsidies, payoffs, corporate welfare and goodies for liberal activists. No wonder it had to be rushed through in the dead of night. It couldn't stand the light of day.

In the Waxman-Markey bill the grand principle of limiting carbon emissions through auctioned and marketable emission permits gets thrown under the bus in a crude special-interest feeding frenzy. What happened to saving the planet?

And buried in the bill are economic howlers that will freeze up the economy in the years ahead, write Spruill and Williamson:" Naturally, Big Labor gets its piece of the pie, too. Projects receiving grants and financing under Waxman-Markey provisions will be required to implement Davis-Bacon union-wage rules, making it hard for non-union firms to compete - and... Waxman-Markey forces union-wage rules all the way down to the plumbing-repair and light-bulb-changing level."

That will really help to revive the economy.

Wow you can smell the sarcasm from three states away. As reported here and elsewhere many times over, indeed it would revive the economy -- if you mean the economy of the Great Depression.

I've previously discussed a major factor explaining healthcare cost hikes--the elimination of incentives among patients to be cost-conscious. Here's a striking illustration (read right-to-left):


source: Goldwater Institute, via ABC's John Stossel, via Coyote Blog

As Stossel says:

It's basic economics that the less you have to pay for something, the more of it you'll use. And yet the "reformers" keep pushing for MORE health insurance.

Agreed.

(via Maggie's Farm)

Peter Huber in City Journal:

Like medieval priests, today’s carbon brokers will sell you an indulgence that forgives your carbon sins. It will run you about $500 for 5 tons of forgiveness--about how much the typical American needs every year. Or about $2,000 a year for a typical four-person household. Your broker will spend the money on such things as reducing methane emissions from hog farms in Brazil.

But if you really want to make a difference, you must send a check large enough to forgive the carbon emitted by four poor Brazilian households, too--because they’re not going to do it themselves. To cover all five households, then, send $4,000. And you probably forgot to send in a check last year, and you might forget again in the future, so you’d best make it an even $40,000, to take care of a decade right now. If you decline to write your own check while insisting that to save the world we must ditch the carbon, you are just burdening your already sooty soul with another ton of self-righteous hypocrisy. And you can’t possibly afford what it will cost to forgive that.

If making carbon this personal seems rude, then think globally instead. During the presidential race, Barack Obama was heard to remark that he would bankrupt the coal industry. No one can doubt Washington’s power to bankrupt almost anything--in the United States. But China is adding 100 gigawatts of coal-fired electrical capacity a year. That’s another whole United States’ worth of coal consumption added every three years, with no stopping point in sight. Much of the rest of the developing world is on a similar path.

Cut to the chase. We rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions--because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still.

We don’t control the global supply of carbon.

I've recommended Huber before--so read the whole thing.

(via Mona Charen on National Review)

I once thought comic singer Tom Lehrer had the lock on anti-German lines (try Wernher Von Braun and MLF Lullaby from his 1965 album That Was The Year That Was). But David Clay Large's Berlin (2001)--a history of the German capital--repeated (at 618) this Jay Leno quip from a 1990 Tonight Show:

I'm sure that you have heard that Germany has been reunited. The only question now, I guess, is when it will go on tour again.

From the July 3rd Wall Street Journal:


source: July 3rd WSJ at A9

As the article says:

Spending by lawmakers on taxpayer-financed trips abroad has risen sharply in recent years, a Wall Street Journal analysis of travel records shows, involving everything from war-zone visits to trips to exotic spots such as the Galápagos Islands.

The spending on overseas travel is up almost tenfold since 1995, and has nearly tripled since 2001, according to the Journal analysis of 60,000 travel records. Hundreds of lawmakers traveled overseas in 2008 at a cost of about $13 million. That's a 50% jump since Democrats took control of Congress two years ago.

The cost of so-called congressional delegations, known among lawmakers as "codels," has risen nearly 70% since 2005, when an influence-peddling scandal led to a ban on travel funded by lobbyists, according to the data.

(via PowerLine)

Some Americans lack health insurance. The Census Bureau counts 45.7 million in 2007, down from 47 million in '06--though I've previously suggested that such data are exaggerated both by counting some actually covered by Medicare and/or Medicaid and because such a "snapshot" includes many in brief periods between coverage.

Still, the President and Congressional Democrats are mooting "mandating" we all buy health insurance. Which makes Richard Martin's article in the July 4th St. Petersburg Times required reading:

Many people assume that the 47 million Americans who don't have health insurance [actually 45.7 million] simply can't afford it.

But the fact is, some don't want it.

Among the 47 million are 9.1 million who earn $75,000 or more a year and 11 million who declined coverage from their employers, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Employment Policies Institute. That also includes many who are young, single and healthy, plus a growing number who rely on alternative and faith-based therapies usually not covered by traditional insurance plans.

These are the voluntarily uninsured, people who may not welcome Washington's efforts to make sure that all Americans have some kind of coverage.

Talk of mandatory health insurance coverage is getting louder. On Thursday, Senate leaders announced that their legislation would require people to carry health insurance or face fines of more than $1,000.

Using the latest (August 2008) Census report, the uninsured include:

• 17.6 million in households earning $50,000 or more annually



• 9.1 million in households earning $75,000 or more per year



• 21.0 million with full-time jobs; and



• 18.3 million between the age of 18 and 34

Obviously, as I've observed some Americans deliberately forgo health insurance--including declining employer coverage--which may be an economically sensible choice. True, many states require drivers to have automobile insurance, but driving creates economic externalities because uninsured motorists could hit other cars or pedestrians. Health insurance is different, with far fewer externalities not already covered by existing government programs.

Don Surber asks, "Why should they be required to purchase health insurance just to subsidize the health insurance of everyone else?" The obvious answer: in the current Administration, that's a feature, not a bug.

Michael Barone:

I still think Republicans are going to have a hard time coming up with a strong presidential nominee in 2012, as I reflect on their difficulty in doing so in 2008. For as I look back on that Republican nominating contest, it seems to me that none of the Republican candidates had a good strategy for winning the nomination. And if a candidate does not win the nomination, it does not really matter how strong he (or she) would be in the general election.

(via Instapundit)

Last week, President Obama held a healthcare "townhall" in Northern Virginia. The "most dramatic moment" came when Obama took this question from the audience:

THE PRESIDENT: All right, this young lady right here -- since somebody was pointing at you, so I figured -- do we have a microphone for folks in the audience, so that everybody can hear the question? Okay. I think there's somebody coming from this direction. You can just hand her the mic.

Q Good afternoon, Mr. President. I'll try not to cry. I'm trying to figure out what I can do currently. My situation is I had renal cell carcinoma in '98 that was radiated, because my dad was dying of colon cancer at the time, and I was his health care server on his living will, so I could not be tied up having my kidney removed. So they did radiation procedures to kill the tumor then. And I had insurance and everything was taken out.

But basically because of the damage that the radiation did in things, I'm no longer able to work and I have no health insurance. Now I have a new tumor. I have no way to pay for it. Doctors will not see you without paying $100 or $150 to come into their office. I can get checked into a hospital -- under their program, they will run tests and release me, but that costs a lot of money.

So currently I basically -- Social Security will not give me disability because renal failure is no longer a qualifying factor under Social Security currently. I cannot get Medicaid from the state of Virginia because you have to be considered disabled through Social Security to qualify for Medicaid in the state of Virginia because I have no dependent children at home -- it's just me. I get food stamps, but that's it. And I'm just trying to figure out how I'm going to make it in nine years until I'm qualified to get my regular Social Security -- now that I have a new tumor and I have nowhere to turn.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, here, come on over here. First of all, we're going to find out what -- we'll get your information and we'll see what we can do to help you. I don't want you to feel all -- like you're alone. (Applause.)

You know, without knowing all the details I'm not going to give you an answer right now about exactly how we can help. We're going to find out what we can do within existing law. But -- what was your name again?

Q My name is Debbie.

THE PRESIDENT: Debbie. Debbie is a perfect example of somebody who we should, in a country this wealthy, be able to provide coverage for her health care problems. And what we don't want is a situation where Debbie gets worse and worse because she's not getting treatment, and then ends up having to go to the emergency room. As I said before, all of you will pay for it anyway; it's just you'll pay for it in terms of a hidden subsidy. And she's not getting the best care, and we're actually paying more than we would have if Debbie right now was getting treated on a regular basis by a physician who knew her history.

So, Debbie, you are Exhibit A. And we appreciate you sharing your story. We are going to try to find ways to help you immediately. But the long-term problem here is going to be how do we create a system in which Debbie is getting the preventive care that she needs and is able to get regular checkups, is able to get treatment in a way that is much more cost-efficient than the one that we've got right now. And I'm going to make a commitment that we're going to get that done this year.

Debbie's story is tragic, and this isn't intended to undermine the urgency of getting the care she needs. Moreover, I don't fault the White House for pre-selecting the townhall audience and questions, as Press Secretary Gibbs forthrightly admitted;¹ Obama's done that before. And Debbie's story further supports my long-standing suggestion: severing the tie between jobs and health insurance.

Still, my question: is it true that Debbie can't work? The Associated Press reports that Debbie "is a volunteer for Organizing for America, Obama's political operation within the Democratic National Committee." (That group was created in January 2009 as a successor to Obama's campaign organization, subject to "clear coordination" with the White House media arm, which explains Debbie's invite.) As blogger Riehl World View details, Debbie's been preparing for the healthcare townhall since at least April. Last December, Debbie moderated a healthcare townhall in her home town. She's also "a member of the Virginia Organizing Project, . . . and helped plan health care events and lobbied Congress on health care reform." Not resting after her star turn, Debbie's now working on another healthcare reform meeting scheduled later this month.

For a women with life-threatening cancer, Debbie has been amazingly active advocating the liberal agenda. Yes, the link between employment and insurance should be ended. Still, could Debbie simply be choosing to volunteer for liberalism rather than working and getting health insurance?

And will her televised hug trump the better public policy?
______________

¹ This offended liberal reporter Helen Thomas--go figure?--but the greater outrage was the New York Times downplaying the same conduct it highlighted under Bush; the WaPo was more honest. Also note the difference between former DNC chair Howard Dean slamming Senator McCain's orchestrated townhall last year and current DNC chair Tim Kaine blandly describing this meeting's audience as "packed with kids and parents, students and seniors." I doubt Kaine intended "packed" as an admission.

(via PowerLine, Sister Toldjah, Wikio, JustOneMinute, J's Cafe Nette)

I previously observed that the ratings rise at Fox News, and decline of CNN, utterly unbalanced CNN's co-founder Reese Schonfeld. But the recent report that Fox News is having its best year yet (all of the top 10 cable news shows are on Fox) makes Schonfeld seem rational compared with commenters at the Democratic Underground zoo (spelling in original):

discocrisco01:

We have to remember that a lot of people do not live in a progressive parts of the country. These people put strong faith into traditional values and lifestyles. Anything that disrupts and harm that affects them personally. They want their traditions and way of life preserved and will not make the necessary adjustments to cope with the change.

In reality, their way of life is not threaten. Our society is very tolerant and insular in nature. However, their perception of reality does not allow to see this reality

Out of fear, they resort to the elite leaders in the church, military, and private sector as keepers of the traditional society. These people are the type of people who value social confirmity and who do not tolerate dissent. These people are interested in keeping the established order and to keep out dissent. Out of this fear, they allow the elite instituions to stand because tradition cannot be questioned and they put a lot of effort to ensure that the preserved

The corporate establishment creates a manufactured youth culture in order to prevent dissent of the youth. The youth are obessed with sextexting, trying to get laid, playing video games, and other tasks instead of taking the time and really knowing the truth. It is our job to use Facebook and other social networking tools to provide the youth with the resources that they need to create dissent.

Zorra:

I suspect that RWers, having no lives, watch TV in greater numbers than the rest of us, in terms of both time spent watching TV, and in percentage of individuals/households that actually watch TV.

I mean, what would RWers do if they were not watching some inane TV show? Maybe go bowling? Go to an Aryan Nations meeting? Shoot up the local Post Office?

Yavin4:

Fox News Gets Higher Ratings Because They Deliver A Consevative Fantasy World Version of the News

Liberals don't live in a bubble fantasy world, and as such, they don't need Glen Beck or Sean or Billo to give them this conservo-facist-sexist-racist view of the world. This is also why AM radio does not work well for progressives.

Also, this is explains why progressives love blog sites, message boards, etc. We tend to like a community of highly intelligent people, well informed people wherein we can share information, ideas, and learn from the world as well as each other.

MasonJar:

Well, they obviously have solidified that 20% of dumb butts who turn off their brains if they have any. In a country of 350 million that is a sizeable number, but hopefully it is set in stone and will not grow.

judesedit:

More than likely biased polls. They still suck. And they still don't give the facts. They edit and twist everything to fit their WASPY agendas. Murdoch and the backers of FAKE NEWS could care less about the state of the country or the lives of its citizens. They just want control again, so they can keep fattening their pockets at the expense of real America. Unfortunately, they have "some" fooled into thinking they give a crap. My remote skips right over all of their bs shows. I want the facts. Real news. Which is why I check out a few online sites each day, and why I watch anything but the FAKE NEWS touted by their total hypocrites. Maybe one day soon their poor viewers will see the light and start realizing these "Christian", "patriotic", "family first", "homophobic" phonies aren't abstaining from anything but the truth. If you have the guts...do some research.

marshall:

Fox News's days are numbered

When the Fairness Doctrine is back in force there will be a whole new playing field.

Further evidence of Assistant Village Idiot's thesis.

(via NewsBusters)

St Peter's Church of England Primary School is in Chorley, a Lancashire town northwest of Manchester. As the name indicates, the school is affiliated with the Church of England (St Peter's in the same town). The school's website boasts:

We aim to nurture children within a Christian context so that they may develop into caring and responsible adults who understand their role in an ever changing world.

Apparently, the world's changing faster than ever, as evidenced in last week's Daily Mail:

A school told a child to remove a Christian cross she was wearing even though it lets Sikh children wear bangles as part of their religion.

Lauren Grimshaw-Brown was told to take off a necklace with a cross on it because of health and safety fears.

But the eight-year-old's furious mother has accused the school of double standards because they allow children following other faiths to wear jewellery on religious grounds.

The mother-of-two says Lauren and brother Callan, five, have always worn crosses at St Peter's CE School in Chorley, Lancashire.

"We're a Christian family and my children wear the necklaces underneath their tops," she said.

"On Thursday Lauren was told by a teacher to take it off because apparently they're not allowed to wear jewellery.

"I could understand it if it was a fashion accessory or a High School Musical necklace, but it's part of our faith."

Mrs Grimshaw-Brown complained directly to the headteacher, Helen Wright, who referred the matter to the school's chairman of governors, Father Atherton. He upheld the ban.

Mrs Grimshaw-Brown added: "I received a letter in my child's reading folder. It said that if she had been a Sikh child she would be allowed to wear bangles because it's part of their religion."

The school's "prospectus" states "Jewellery is not permitted unless it has religious significance."

The C of E's leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, has long seemed neither religious nor British. Indeed, he was initiated as a druid in 2002. No wonder a C of E school headmaster and chairman can't recognize a cross as religious.

(via Don Surber)

Happy Dependence Day Y'all

Everyone wants to know why Sarah Palin is resigning. All the speculation about her being pregnant, making a run in 2012, planning a coup, she quit for an offer of $50 an hour to go pick lettuce in Yuma for the whole season. yada, yada... does it help your hit count to say that stuff? I mean please -- my fellow bloggers are you that self-serving?

Did you read her statement? Did you watch her give her statement? It is all in there.

She says she is quitting because the baseless leftist attacks are costing the taxpayers money, the state time and her own personal resources are stretched:

Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt. The ethics law I championed became their weapon of choice. Over the past nine months I've been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations – such as holding a fish in a photograph, wearing a jacket with a logo on it, and answering reporters’ questions.

Every one – all 15 of the ethics complaints have been dismissed. We’ve won! But it hasn't been cheap - the State has wasted thousands of hours of your time and shelled out some two million of your dollars to respond to “opposition research”...And this political absurdity, the “politics of personal destruction” … Todd and I are looking at more than half a million dollars in legal bills in order to set the record straight. And what about the people who offer up these silly accusations? It doesn’t cost them a dime so they’re not going to stop draining public resources – spending other peoples’ money in their game.

It’s pretty insane – my staff and I spend most of our day dealing with this instead of progressing our state now. I know I promised no more “politics as usual,” but this isn’t what anyone had in mind for Alaska.

She has had enough of the petty bloodsport. Politics for her has become one ad-hominem attack after another. Palin says it is bad for Alaska. I agree. It is bad for all of America. The left can use the power of the press to destroy anyone now. Since it is bad for America, it is more proof that the left hates America. She says, basically, that she is joining Newt Gingrich as a conservative cheerleader:

I'll work hard for others who still believe in free enterprise and smaller government; strong national security for our country and support for our troops; energy independence; and for those who will protect freedom and equality and life... I'll work for and campaign for those proud to be American, and those who are inspired by our ideals and won't deride them.

I will support others who seek to serve, in or out of office, for the right reasons, and I don't care what party they're in or no party at all. Inside Alaska – or Outside Alaska.

Pretty simple plan, really. No surprises here.

So what is the leftosphere saying now?

They are all taking more cheap shots at her:

Washington Post: The WaPo cannot be kind to her: "This makes her look incapable of juggling multiple tasks at once." From "her incompetence at handling the press to her gratuitous spat with David Letterman, she has demonstrated a volatile temperament and an incapability to think strategically."

salon.com: Salon, without a hint of sarcasm, calls it a meltdown... "In an angry, rambling press conference that will rival Gov. Mark Sanford's as a stunning example of a bizarre public meltdown..." but also says "The tone and inflection were completely off." Typical hypocrisy.

Huffington Post: Some punk named Paul Begala who calls her a prostitute in his headline. Sarah Palin Turns Pro In one paragraph he compares Palin to four different men and says her faults are worse than all four on their worst day, combined.

Sarah Palin makes Mark Foley, the congressman who sent filthy emails to pages look almost normal. She makes David Vitter, the senator who was hanging out with hookers, look almost boring. She makes Larry Craig, caught hitting on a cop in a men's room, look almost stable. She makes John Ensign, the senator who was having an affair with a staffer, look almost humdrum (and compared to the rest of the GOP whack-jobs, he is). And she makes Mark Sanford, the governor with the Latin lover, look positively predictable.

He goes on to criticize her punctuation, capitalization and spelling. Hey, Begala, did you never hear -- the rule is you lose by default doing that. He ends calling her an idiot and a liar. Way to go, such a grown-up.

Here is my retort to Paul Begala: Paul Begala, in his finest hour, wishes he were 1/100th as great as Sarah Palin. Paul is a typical leftist. He is such a pathetic loser that he could never compete in a level playing field, never in the capitalistic world, so he has to be a socialist hit man, he tries only to bring down those that are better than he, so that he might start to look good.

Daily Kos: Of course, Daily Kos cannot pass up this, what looks like the last opportunity! They not only heap on the insults, they are now bragging about it.

First an attack: She gave an 'often rambling' speech. I read her speech -- I didn't find it to be 'often rambling' or even a little rambling.
Then the bragging: Palin's resignation represents a victory...
Then more attacks: Mrs. Palin sure matches the depth of content of the gentlemen cited before her words...NOT!
Then of course the back-slapping: 'how we did it'.

News Flash: None of the above critics have ever done anything with their lives other than make up these attacks.

Why All These Attacks?

What it boils down for Sarah Palin is that she does not say what the left wants her to say. As long as she says what she thinks -- they will crucify her, just as they scourged Miss California -- who took the same position as the President! They excoriated her for it. That group on the left, which attacks conservative women for having an opinion (and it appears to be pretty much everyone on the left) attack her because she is a woman. Sexism defines the Democratic Party, just as racism does. And we have to look no farther than Sotomayor for an example of both.

Sarah is a martyr, she was harassed, hounded and her political career assassinated by an endless needless vicious vitriolic baseless series of sexist attacks against her, her career, her person, her children, her husband, her gender, her time-management skills, her ambition, her background, beliefs and her God. Letterman's ignorant attack was just one of the most newsworthy.

My view: Sarah Palin (and I have read her biography) is a tremendously fine human being that did not seek the spotlight of politics, nor the position of power, but sought simply to do what is right, even it it meant putting up with the spotlight. She truly believes in smaller government, and working for the best interests of the people. A rarity indeed -- she is a saint.

My prediction : Sarah is going to write a book to pay off some debts and she is going to support the politics of smaller government away from the front lines. Much harder to hit her in that position. As to those who would ascribe White House ambition to her, or assert she should be written off, well 2012 is a long way away. I hear a mixed-race orphan is also considering a run at that time. Perhaps you might investigate that background a bit.

Viva Sarah!

Michael Goldfarb on the Weekly Standard blog June 29th:

In the course of Donald Morrison's review of Au Revoir to All That by Michael Steinberger, we learn that McDonald's is the largest private employer in all of France, which is sort of like being the largest provider of health insurance in North Korea, but nonetheless, it feels like a major triumph for American culture and cuisine. I once ate at the McDonald's right next to the Arc de Triomphe. My quarter pounder tasted like hegemony.

From long-time Iran observer Michael Ledeen about "Refusing to See Evil Clearly" on The Corner June 29th:

For those who wish to think clearly about Iran, there are two fundamental facts:

* the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran have been at war with us ever since the overthrow of the shah in early 1979;

* the savagery they have unleashed on the people of Iran is precisely what they want to do to us.

The Iranian leaders and their terror instruments, from Hezbollah to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have been killing Americans for 30 years, from the Marine barracks in Beirut in the 1980s to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan at the moment, where Iranian Revolutionary Guards forces are operating against Coalition forces. Both the history and the contemporary facts are abundantly documented.

The mullahs’ war is unrelentingly and barbarically waged. When they organize demonstrations of hatred against the United States, and lead chants of "death to America," they mean exactly that. It is not a slogan playing to a domestic audience (we have seen in recent days that the regime is enormously unpopular), but a statement of intent. They aim to kill us, humiliate us, and eventually dominate us. Just listen to President Ahmadinejad’s words to President Obama last Saturday:

You should know that if you continue [to criticize the repression] the response of the Iranian nation will be strong. . . . The response of the Iranian nation will be crushing. The response will cause remorse.

Such language is of a piece with stories alleging that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has ordered an all-out attack on American, British, French, and German targets wherever possible.

Meanwhile, the same forces deployed against us and our allies have taken to the streets to attack freedom-seeking Iranians. The same Revolutionary Guards who operate in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the usual foreign thugs and proxies (Der Spiegel reported five-thousand Hezbollah "fighters" had been sent into the streets of Tehran, and there are many other stories of sadistic Arabic speakers all over the country) have been beating, axing, shooting, stabbing, gassing, and clubbing unarmed peaceful protesters. As of late last week, Evin Prison in Tehran, long the regime’s Bastille, had run out of space for arrested citizens.

The brutality in Iran today foreshadows what the mullahs intend for us. It is what the world will look like if they prevail. Iran’s Middle East neighbors know this, and dread it (with the exception of Syria, which is playing Mussolini’s Italy to Khamenei’s Nazi Germany). Yet every American president from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama has convinced himself that we can reach a workable, long-term modus vivendi with the Islamic Republic. They refused to see the mullahs’ Iran for what it is: a ruthless and determined enemy, at war with the United States.

Agreed--and trusting in no-preconditions negotiations remains naive, as the Orlando Sentinel's Dana Summers depicted regarding a different dictator:

Victor Davis Hanson July 2nd on The Corner:

[T]he administration now is at odds with the sort of ideology and attitudes Obama himself espoused on the campaign trail.

They call for patience and for confidence in Iraq -- and not, in prior Obama-like fashion, dismiss our chances while demanding a strict and rather rapid timetable to get out.

They ask for understanding about renditions, tribunals, Guantanamo, intercepts, wiretaps, and Predator missile attacks as complex issues -- and not, in prior Obama-like fashion, dismiss these necessary tools as Constitution-shredding authoritarianism.

They ask for patience on jobs -- and not, in prior Obama-like fashion, pontificate about a "jobless recovery" when jobs and growth were far better.

They reassure us that missile defense is insurance against North Korean lunacy -- and not, in prior Obama-like fashion, dismiss such investment as needless militaristic provocation.

They ask for latitude about the definition of what is a tax, what defines unemployment, and how we calibrate deficits -- and not, in prior Obama-like fashion, blast obfuscation while promising "transparency."

They reassure that their planted questions, the favoritism shown some journalists, the refusal to release White House visit logs, and the arbitrary firing of inconvenient auditors are nothing new -- and not, in prior Obama-like fashion, charge government intimidation and suppression of thought.

They ignore corruption in the Democratic-controlled Congress, cater to lobbyists, are not bothered by the tax improprieties of their major cabinet appointments -- and do not, in prior Obama-like fashion, demand an end to executive malfeasance.

See also David Brooks in the June 30th New York Times on "Vince Lombardi Politics."

The U.K.'s Royal Society this week published a paper on future electric generation that minimizes carbon emissions and thus prevents rapid climate change. Its conclusion: energy prices are "too low."

A U.K. parliamentary climate change group echoes that analysis, says the BBC, quoting the group's vice chairman, Lord Redesdale:

We can either heat our homes and have hot baths, or fly but not both. There really does need to be much tougher policies on reducing carbon emissions from the homes.

President Obama sounds much the same, promoting similar results.

So a passionate Liberal Democrat and partisan Democrat liberal play-off a pliant media "rigging the debate" to push eco-paternalism. Each seems determined to impoverish its people, pointlessly, to "fix" an un-proven problem.

At least the "special relationship" bonding Britain and America persists: mother country and New World progeny are planning a double funeral.

(via Planet Gore, Wolf Howling, Conservative Grapevine, Doug Ross)

I am not sure where I am anymore, I damn sure am not in Kansas.

The Honduras Legislature expels El Presidente Zelaya after he tries a power grab. Now the so-called main stream media, the OAS, Spain, the EU and a bunch of left wingers are calling it a coup d'etat and characterizing it as an overthrow of power, referring to the leadership in Honduras as a 'provisional' government. It is anything but. The Honduran government, courts and legislature remain intact. Only Zelaya was removed from power.

I know what you are thinking. "Bob, if it is not a coup, then why did the OAS pass an extremely harshly worded ultimatum?" Here is one of the 'resolves':

To condemn vehemently the coup d’état staged this morning against the constitutionally-established Government of Honduras, and the arbitrary detention and expulsion from the country of the constitutional president José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, which has produced an unconstitutional alteration of the democratic order.

And, you are asking "If it wasn't a military coup, why are headlines shouting Coup d'Etat above the fold?"

I have no idea. I am stupefied. Because they can? The loons on the left wing blogs appear to be without reason as well. Rule of law is a foreign concept to them. Only a few bright spots in the MSM exist, a blogger on the HuffPo, this unbiased Bloomberg report, and a Washington Examiner editorial are several propoganda-free examples.

By a plain reading of the events in Honduras, its government expelled a traitor who reached for unconstitutional powers. This is the opposite of coup. The concepts of 'freedom', 'rule of law' and 'democracy' are the watchwords of the Honduran government.

Zelaya fired the head of the country's armed forces because he refused to participate in Zelaya's unconstitutional and illegal measures. That's like Nixon trying to fire Archibald Cox and having Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, the USSR, AP, UPI, CNN and MSNBC support him on it. From Fausta:

The Honduran Congress, led by members of Zelaya's own party, named a commission to investigate Zelaya. The Commission found that Zelaya acted against the mandates of legal and electoral laws, the Public Ministry, the National Congress, the Attorney General, and other institutions of the State. On Thursday the Attorney General requested that Congress impeach Zelaya. This is why Zelaya was removed from power: all branches of government and the country’s institutions recognized that he had broken the law.

I have to criticize the Honduran legislature here, because they expelled Zelaya, they should have arrested him. Now Zelaya is running around drumming up support in Costa Rica, Washington, with the Organization of American States and with the UN. He is providing the press with tremendous above-the-fold-fodder as he promises a dramatic return to claim power in Honduras.

Obama is doing his Dr. Jekyll /Mr. Hyde impersonation. On one hand he says in a White House Press Release "tensions and disputes must be resolved peacefully through dialogue free from any outside interference" and on the other hand the administration is backing the OAS resolution calling for unconditional return to power by Zelaya. Can you say cognitive dissonance? It makes my head hurt so much. He can't have it both ways, and the press should be calling him on it. Instead, I'm calling him on it with many others. Instead of supporting the OAS we should withdraw from the OAS on principle.

Somebody pass me the ruby slippers, I want to go home.

(H/T to Wolf Howling and Guest Contributor OBloodyHell)

From the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics:


source: BLS, comparative real GDP at 9

Start with Greg Mankiw--former Bush CEA chair and current Harvard econ prof--and his op-ed in the June 28th New York Times:

An important question about any public provider of health insurance is whether it would have access to taxpayer funds. If not, the public plan would have to stand on its own financially, as private plans do, covering all expenses with premiums from those who signed up for it.

But if such a plan were desirable and feasible, nothing would stop someone from setting it up right now. In essence, a public plan without taxpayer support would be yet another nonprofit company offering health insurance. The fundamental viability of the enterprise does not depend on whether the employees are called "nonprofit administrators" or "civil servants."

In practice, however, if a public option is available, it will probably enjoy taxpayer subsidies. Indeed, even if the initial legislation rejected them, such subsidies would be hard to avoid in the long run. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants created by federal law, were once private companies. Yet many investors believed -- correctly, as it turned out -- that the federal government would stand behind Fannie’s and Freddie’s debts, and this perception gave these companies access to cheap credit. Similarly, a public health insurance plan would enjoy the presumption of a government backstop.

Such explicit or implicit subsidies would prevent a public plan from providing honest competition for private suppliers of health insurance. Instead, the public plan would likely undercut private firms and get an undue share of the market.

See also the WSJ and Roger Kimball.

Economist/columnist Paul Krugman disputes the point, saying "the standard competitive market model just doesn’t work for health care: adverse selection and moral hazard are so central to the enterprise that nobody, nobody expects free-market principles to be enough." See also here.

Mankiw responds on his blog:

In my view, these comments are just off point. The Obama administration says it wants a public insurance plan that will compete on a level playing field with private plans (that is, without taxpayer subsidies). Is there any cogent economic analysis that suggests that such a policy addresses problems of adverse selection and moral hazard? None that I know. If it has to stand on its own financially, the public plan has no special advantage in addressing these issues.

In any event, it is not like the only alternatives available to us are a government-run health insurance plan or unregulated laissez faire. The most intriguing proposal in the current policy debate is the Wyden-Bennett bill (see this David Brooks column or this letter from CBO on the proposed legislation). That seems to be the best hope for truly bipartisan healthcare reform. At this point, given the legislative strategy of Congressional leadership, the hope is slim at best.

(via Maggie's Farm, Doug Ross)

I endorse and adopt Elizabeth Scalia's (a/k/a The Anchoress) excellent rules for commenters. As she says, "The intertubes may be a wild, wild west of sorts, but in this particular saloon, while you may put your feet on the tables, I do insist that you use the spittoons."

From the June 30th Washington Examiner:


source: Nate Beeler/June 30th Washington Examiner

Michael Leavitt, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from 2005-09, and Jeffrey Anderson, in the June 23rd Washington Times:

Because he doesn't support a "single-payer" system, the president implies he doesn't support "government-run health care." But if, through payment policies, the government decides what doctors we use, what drugs we can take, and how much is charged, the system is government-run. So we can agree that Mr. Obama technically isn't supporting a single-payer system. But he is supporting a government-run system that may well lead to a single payer.

Mr. Obama says that the "public option" would merely provide Americans with a new choice for health insurance: "If you like what you're getting, keep it. Nobody is forcing you to shift." In truth, however, millions of employers would choose the "public option" -- for their employees.

Given a choice between accepting the cost, risk and burden of continuing to provide insurance, or having the government take over that responsibility, millions of employers would bolt. And anyone who believes a public option plan wouldn't become a tax-subsidized plan hasn't been watching very closely for the past 50 years.

The president says his proposal will be "deficit-neutral in the next decade." Given its projected cost of $1.5 trillion over that decade - an amount greater than the annual gross domestic product (GDP) of Canada -- this is quite a claim.

Keep in mind that we're already running higher deficits -- even as a percentage of GDP -- than during the Great Depression. Only 55 percent of 2009 federal spending ($2.2 of $4.0 trillion) comes from tax revenue; the rest is borrowed money. Yet the creation of a massive new Medicare-like program won't increase deficits?

The president says this unlikely result will be made possible through miscellaneous tax increases and Medicare spending reductions, but he never specifies the cuts. As secretary of health and human services, I took a budget to Capitol Hill containing half the reductions the president says Congress must make, and I was politically stoned by those in his party and many in mine. With all due respect, Mr. President, name the cuts. Show us the money.

Most of Mr. Obama's claims would be impossible to believe even if there weren't such a clear track record to support disbelief. In the 1960s, President Johnson and the Democratic Congress both projected that Medicare would cost $12 billion in 1990. Its actual cost was $111 billion - 9 times the original estimate. The Medicare Hospital Trust Fund is now projected to become insolvent in 2016, three years earlier than last year's estimate.

BTW, at his June 23rd press conference, President Obama conceded that his plan would encourage flight from private insurance to a public-run plan, says ABC's Jake Tapper.

(via The Corner)

John Hawkins of Right Wing News posted this month's "temperature check" of right-of-center bloggers.

Whether or not you blame former Fed chair Alan Greenspan for the current crisis, economics wasn't his first career choice, says Joe Queenan in the June 29th Weekly Standard:

[F]ew Americans are aware that a career forecasting GDP and setting interest rates and tamping down the nation's money supply was not Greenspan's dream as a child. Rather, he dreamed of growing up to be a jazz musician.

Had those dreams borne fruit, the global financial system might never have been brought to its knees.

Here are the known facts. Midway through World War II Greenspan enrolled at Juilliard but soon dropped out and took a job with a roving dance band. His instrument of choice was the tenor saxophone.

The path from Mingus to Coltrane to Rand is--if true--the wildest coming-of-age tale ever. Trust me--read the whole thing.

On Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office revised its projections of the budget deficit under two scenarios (the lower of the two, called the "extended baseline," is the more realistic):


source: CBO "Long-Term Budget Outlook"

As CBO director Douglas Elmendorf explains:

Under current law, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path--meaning that federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run. Although great uncertainty surrounds long-term fiscal projections, rising costs for health care and the aging of the U.S. population will cause federal spending to increase rapidly under any plausible scenario. . .

For decades, spending on the federal government’s major health care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, has been growing faster than the economy (as has health care spending in the private sector). CBO projects that if current laws do not change, federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid combined will grow from almost 5 percent of GDP today to almost 10 percent by calendar year 2035 and to more than 17 percent of GDP by 2080. That projection means that in 2080, if there are no changes in policy, the federal government would be spending almost as much, as a share of the economy, on just its two major health care programs as it has spent on all of its programs and services in recent years. Constraining the costs of those health care programs will be a key to developing a sustainable fiscal policy.

Indeed, even without the prescription drug benefit, Medicare's costs-per-patient have risen faster than private sector health costs.

Further reasons to "fix Medicare first."

(via Pajamas Media's Jeffrey Anderson)

Glenn Smith at the far-left Firedoglake site says:

The gravity of America's health care crisis is the moral equivalent of the 19th Century's bloody conflict over slavery. This is not hyperbole.

Uh . . . um . . . step away from the keyboard.

Or consider this: President Obama refused to pledge that he and his family would accept limits on medical treatment, "[If] it's my family member, if it's my wife, if it's my children, if it's my grandmother, I always want them to get the very best care." Is such freedom slavery?

(via Maggie's Farm, Wizbang)

Assistant Village Idiot has an excellent series of posts (called "Sauron Himself Is But An Emissary") contrasting progressive and conservative thought process (most recent here). As the title's Tolkien reference suggests, AVI worries that "the progressive attachment to visions of a better world makes it hard for them to see others as merely wrong -- they have to ascribe pathology and evil motive to them." I agree -- and will in the future comment or post further on AVI's philosophical analysis.

But, along the way, I got distracted by one particular progressive pathology--their penchant for citing Europe's alleged economic success, touting constraints on the free market (i.e., more socialism) as the preferable path to minimizing poverty. Some recent examples:

• Russell Shorto extolling the Dutch welfare state in the April 29th New York Times magazine. (See also Ezra Klein in American Prospect.)



• Wyatt Cenac on Comedy Central's The Daily Show in late April mocking conservative complaints about Swedish socialism.



• The Center for Economic and Policy Research asserting in May that tight European labor-market regulation and high jobless benefits have led to lower unemployment as compared with laissez-faire U.S. policies.



• Landon Thomas commending in the May 13th New York Times the lessons Norway's economy could provide for U.S. policymakers.

I've already noted that--contrary to Landon Thomas--the May 20th New York Times reported that Norway just "slipped into recession." And the curious can surf to several rebuttals regarding the Netherlands (more here), Sweden (more here, here, here, and NOfP), EU labor/employment policies, and Norway.

But more broadly, AVI's narrative aptly is illustrated by the left's endless ability to fool itself into believing that Europe is more advanced and successful than America. What else could explain their repeated failure to convert economic statistics into purchasing power parity prior to comparison? In particular, this bypasses the effect of massive internal subsidies and eco straight-jackets on food prices Then there's the typical ignorance of standard-of-living measures like living space, leisure time, cars per capita as well as convenience.

Progressives prefer collectivism to capitalism and so imagine it's proven fact. But commerce, not redistribution, creates wealth--money is not a zero sum game. As MaxedOutMama says, "Economic efficiency MATTERS."

Yes, some conservatives take a theoretical commitment to individualism too far. Yet--in general--the substitution of pretty theories for testable practices is more prevalent on the left. AVI helpfully addresses "why." I got stuck on "how."

And I fear the consequences.

Eamon Javers on Politico:

Let’s be honest: Barack Obama is better than you are.

He’s a better father -- taking breaks from running the world to cheer on his daughters at soccer and basketball games.

He’s a better husband -- zipping his wife off for dinner in New York and Paris.

He’s got a better diet -- nibbling on vegetables from his homegrown garden to keep his love handles in check.

And he’s got a terrific jump shot.

You? Not so much.

Call it the politics of personal perfection. The Barack Obama brand is as much about being a personal example to the nation as it is about being a political figure.

(via Don Surber)

UPDATE: below

Blogger bobn still acquits Congress of responsibility for relaxing GSE lending standards because it avoided formal legislation by resorting to informal pressure--so-called "regulation by raised eyebrow." Beyond misreading history, bobn overlooks continuing practice:

Two Democratic lawmakers are calling on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to relax recently tightened standards for mortgages on new condominiums, saying they could threaten the viability of some developments and slow the housing-market recovery.

In March, Fannie Mae said it would no longer guarantee mortgages on condos in buildings where fewer than 70% of the units have been sold, up from 51%. Fannie Mae also won't purchase mortgages in buildings where 15% of owners are delinquent on condo association dues or where one owner has more than 10% of units, which the firm sees as signals that a building could run into financial trouble. Freddie Mac will implement similar policies next month.

In a letter to the chief executives of Fannie and Freddie, Reps. Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and Anthony Weiner (D., N.Y.) warned that the 70% sales threshold "may be too onerous" and could lead condo buyers to shun new developments. The legislators asked the companies to "make appropriate adjustments" to their underwriting standards for condos.

The political push illustrates the balancing act facing the two government-controlled mortgage-finance giants as they struggle to keep the housing market afloat without losing more money.

I don't get why "Congress is innocent" is important to bobn. But it remains naive form-over-substance.

MORE:

Read Wolf Howling's excellent summary.

(via Doug Ross)

As reported in Friday's Washington Post:

The Obama administration, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, is drafting an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that bypassing Congress could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.

After months of internal debate over how to close the facility in Cuba, White House officials are increasingly worried that reaching quick agreement with Congress on a new detention system may be impossible. Several officials said there is concern in the White House that the administration may not be able to close the facility by the president's January deadline.

Good.

Obama's stated reason for health care reform? He says we spend too much. "Rapidly escalating health care costs are crushing family, business, and government budgets."

How does he propose to fix that? By spending more. He asserts his health care program will only cost $1,000,000,000,000 over ten years. Only! (But now we know it will cost four times that much.) Nevertheless, Obama proposes $1,000,000,000,000 in taxes to pay for it.

Obama is going to cure rising costs by... wait for it... wait for it... spending more. Impossible you say? I agree. What the hell is he smoking?

Spending more to save money is a bad idea on its face.

Everyone knows that as demand goes up -- so does the price. Obama's cure is surely worse than the disease. The consensus among right thinkers -- exemplified by Krauthammer -- is Obama wants to leave his legacy by turning the country to socialism.

"Obama has a ruthless quest for power. He did not come to Washington to make something out of himself, but rather to change everything, including dismantling capitalism. He can’t be straightforward on his ambitions, as the public would not go along. He has a heavy hand and wants to ‘level the playing field’ with income redistribution and punishment of the achievers of society."

So, Obama wants to rule the world. What does he use as ammunition? He paints a picture of calamity -- Obama says there are 47,000,000 people without health insurance. He asserts this is a problem that he wants to solve.

Now, I disagree that is a problem. Going without insurance is not bad. In between high school and college, I went without insurance for several years. Didn't hurt me a bit. Then there are wackos that assert the health care issue is morally equivalent to the slavery issue:

The gravity of America's health care crisis is the moral equivalent of the 19th Century's bloody conflict over slavery... Today's health system condemns 50 million Americans to ill health and death while guaranteeing health care to the economic privileged. It cannot stand... About 18,000 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance... America has the economic ability to save 18,000 lives each year and end the suffering of millions of more who struggle with illness and disease. The only reason we don't do it is that insurance companies haven't yet figured out how to do it at a profit....Condemning Americans to premature death and ill health so some can earn profits is the moral equivalent of slavery. Some may find the comparison extreme, others distasteful. But history will record it as a fact.

For the record, the link he cites to support his 18,000 deaths, well it only support the notion that the deaths are 'premature', so his assertion that insurance will 'save lives' is a gross exaggeration, at best. Nevertheless, this is the type of broken thinking that socialists are using to increase government control of your life. The Sky Is Falling. The Government Must Do Something. Please Save Us Obama!!!

You know what is causing illness and death in this country? It isn't lack of insurance, that is for sure. The number one cause of disease in this country is self-inflicted. Poor physical condition caused by a lack of exercise and a diet that is high in fat, sugar, and low in nutrients and fiber.

More Disease Prevention: Way Better than More Cure

What if Obama really wanted to reform the US system of care? He would not administer more 'cure' he would follow the maxim -- an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I found this from Worlds Healthiest Foods Foundation, an Open Letter to Obama on healthcare:

Scientific studies continue to demonstrate that among all lifestyle factors, no single factor is more important to our health than the food we eat. A campaign educating Americans about the benefits of eating healthier-and how to make healthy eating choices-would be a highly effective and relatively inexpensive means of improving our health.

Because the concept of practicing a healthier way of eating is so amazingly simple, a campaign focusing on healthy eating can easily be overlooked as a means to resolve our healthcare problems. Yet, promoting the intake of nutrient-rich, health-promoting, and satisfying foods-such as delicious fresh fruits, vegetables, salads, whole grains, protein-rich beans, and omega-3 rich seafood-would prove to be one of the most powerful ways to affect positive change in our national health.

Indeed, obesity has increased tremendously, and may be linked to increased health care costs. Obesity is the ill of our wealthy over-indulgent society. Do you know why Obama won't propose a healthier way of eating? Because our national agriculture is rooted around two crops: soybeans and corn. These two crops are processed and re-processed to bring us high-energy and high-fat convenience foods. As George Mateljan puts it:

Implementing a campaign for eating healthier will automatically result in decreasing consumption of unhealthy foods-nutrient-poor refined foods that are high in trans-fats, sugar, and salt (such as cookies, sodas, snack bars, candies, and fast foods), and which do not satisfy your appetite for any length of time. These foods spike blood sugar levels, providing a short burst of energy, but do little to curb satiety. This means hunger quickly returns, and, for many people, the result is a vicious cycle of consuming more calorie-laden nutrient-poor foods, a formula that perpetuates our national obesity epidemic and the chronic preventable diseases associated with obesity: type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

Let us see what George has to say about the The Key Reasons for our Health care Crisis

Health care costs have risen from $3,468 per person in 1993 to $8,160 in 2008, and costs continue to rise. It is estimated that in the next 5 years, healthcare costs will increase almost another 50% to $13,100. These high costs might be justifiable if Americans benefited by being among the healthiest people in the world, but sadly, we are far less healthy than people living in countries where healthcare costs are much lower. Our current system attempts to manage end-stage disease; it does not promote health. We need to change not just the way in which disease-care costs are paid, but the care that is provided. To lower healthcare costs and make true health care available to all, we need to focus on health promotion and disease prevention, not on how to shift the costs of disease care.

About The George Mateljan Foundation for the World's Healthiest Foods. The Foundation is committed to providing the latest scientific information about the foods and nutrients needed for good health. George has specific methods to address the ills of a weathly society. George has further words how we Can Cut Healthcare Cost and Save Billions of Dollars in his Open Letter to Obama

Obesity: If obesity continues to increase at its current rate, analysts predict that by the year 2020, we will be spending 20% of all our healthcare dollars on obesity-related problems. We now know that excess fat, especially visceral fat, is not merely a storage depot for extra calories, but functions as an endocrine organ significantly increasing inflammation and the risk for chronic degenerative disease. The enormous impact of obesity is due to its promotion of other chronic preventable diseases, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancers. For example, experts estimate that one-half of all type 2 diabetes cases could be prevented simply by controlling obesity! If we could lower the rate of obesity (even by a modest amount) through a healthier way of eating campaign, researchers project that we could also lower cases of chronic preventable disease by about 15 million cases. That reduction in chronic preventable disease translates into $60 billion dollars less in treatment costs, and $254 billion dollars more in workplace productivity.

Heart disease: According to research experts, it would not take complicated dietary changes to trigger major reductions in heart disease rates and their associated healthcare costs. For example, if we could simply take the 2% of the calories the typical American is consuming in the form of trans-fat and replace this 2% with polyunsaturated fat, we could reduce our rate of coronary artery disease (CAD) by at least 8%, and probably by much more in the 25-30% range! Since healthcare costs related to CAD total nearly $200 billion per year, we're talking about a potential savings of $50 billion dollars from a single dietary change that swaps a small amount of polyunsaturated fat for trans-fat.

Diabetes: In 2002, an estimated $132 billion was spent on diabetes-related health problems, including about $40 billion on sick day costs and disability related to this chronic preventable disease, including blindness, amputation, heart disease, and early death. Since healthcare analysts predict that half of all diabetes cases could be prevented if obesity were prevented, approximately $40 billion in diabetes-related costs could be cut simply by the implementation of a healthier way of eating that corrected or prevented obesity. I don't have good estimates for the cost savings related to other dietary steps that can be taken to lower risk of type 2 diabetes, but I definitely know what these steps are.

Even without reversing the problem of obesity, I am confident that dietary changes to a healthier way of eating could save many lives and billions of dollars in healthcare costs related to diabetes, its treatment, and its impact on everyday productivity.

Cancer: The American Cancer Society estimates that we are spending over $100 billion each year on cancer-related costs, and there is some research to suggest that about one-third of all cancer deaths could be prevented by simply choosing to eat healthier food. Since $57 billion dollars are estimated to be lost each year following premature death from cancer, prevention of 33% of these deaths by a healthier way of eating alone would mean about $20 billion dollars in healthcare savings each year. In the case of colorectal cancer, it has been estimated that a healthier way of eating combined with exercise could prevent more cases than implementation of early screening.

What We Can Learn From Other Countries

• In Japan, health officials check the waistlines of citizens over 40, and those considered too fat undergo diet counseling. Failure to slim down can lead to fines.
• New Zealand has rules barring people it deems too fat from immigrating to the country.
• Germany plans to spend $47 million on healthy eating and sports programs and to set tougher nutritional standards for school lunches.
• Denmark limits the amount of artery-clogging trans-fatty acids in restaurant foods.
• In an effort to prevent overweight in schoolchildren, a community approach that started in two towns in France has now expanded to 200 towns in Europe under the name "Together let's prevent obesity in children." The program encourages children to eat better and exercise more by taking such measures as building sporting facilities and playgrounds, and offering cooking workshops.
• And of course, there are the Mediterranean countries where they are practicing a healthier way of eating, by enjoying traditional diets that feature whole unprocessed foods from nature. The Mediterranean diet, lauded for its contribution to health, features fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fish, olive oil, and red wine.
• No other countries in the world allow the advertising of prescription drugs to the public except the United States and New Zealand.

I'm not a fan of Obama anymore, but George Mateljan does a fair job of pretending to be a fan. He has a lot of ideas how we can substitute better nutrition as a preventative measure, rather than reward the medical establishment with more demand when they fail to prevent disease.

If Obama really cared about the heath of this nation and its citizens, he would start with promoting better nutrition and more exercise. He could encourage the educational system to emphasize nutrition in residency programs. He would do what the drug companies will never do -- prevent disease. He would do all of that, instead of reducing costs by spending more; which is an impossibly broken viewpoint.