Debra J. Saunders
Thursday, July 30, 2009
When the Senate passed a federal hate-crimes measure by a 63-28 earlier this month, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., proclaimed, "This legislation will help to address the serious and growing problem of hate crimes."
I'm baffled. Washington passed the first federal hate-crimes bill in 1968 and 45 states have enacted hate-crime laws. This latest bill, the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, expanded the list of hate crimes -- which originally focused on attacks based on the victims' race, color, religion or national origin -- to include those targeted because of their gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.
If hate-crime laws prevent hate crimes, shouldn't hate crimes be shrinking, not growing?
Forgive the question, because there's nothing glib about any crime of violence. The 1998 torture-murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard -- who was found tied to a fence, battered and shoeless in the cold -- was so cruel that it took Shepard three days to die.
Attorneys for one of Shepard's killers, Aaron McKinney, tried to introduce a "gay panic" defense, to explain why a crime that started as a robbery ended in death. The judge refused to allow the bogus defense and a jury found McKinney guilty of felony murder. To avoid the death penalty, his accomplice had pleaded guilty to the killing. Both are serving double life sentences.
It's hard to understand how a federal hate-crimes law could send a stronger message than life in prison. Or a stronger message than the response of security guards at the Holocaust Museum, who, after white supremacist James Von Brunn fatally shot guard Stephen T. Johns in June, shot Von Brunn in the face. With or without the Shepard act, Von Brunn could face the death penalty if convicted of first-degree murder.
Federal law allows for prosecutions only under narrow circumstances -- such as if a victim is at a public school, voting or serving as a juror. The Shepard act's most important expansion, however, is that it would allow the feds to prosecute hate crimes if, as supporter Attorney General Eric Holder testified, states lack the "capacity," "willingness" or "desire to prosecute these kinds of cases."
Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., claimed the measure he sponsored "closes the flagrant loopholes that for too long have prevented effective prosecution of these shocking crimes that terrorize entire groups of communities across America."
Yet Holder testified that he does not think "that there is a trend among the states or local jurisdictions in failing to go after these kinds of crimes."
So why change the federal law? After all, district attorneys are free to present bigotry as a motive at trial. When three white supremacists dragged James Byrd, 49, to death because he was a black man, Texas prosecutors won two death sentences and a life sentence for the 1998 crime.
Criminal Justice Legal Foundation President Michael Rushford noted that the problem with hate-crime laws is that they're "subjective." He believes prosecutors have a better chance prosecuting the crime -- not the motive. And these crimes are horrific enough.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
The Arrogant and the Ignorant
Cal Thomas
Thursday, July 30, 2009
BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND -- On my last visit to the UK three months ago, Members of Parliament were embroiled in a scandal involving outrageous expense claims for such things as moat cleaning, a baby crib and second homes that were sometimes occupied by friends and relatives, or not at all.
For the first time since 1695, a speaker of the House of Commons was forced to resign and Prime Minister Gordon Brown (who also had questionable expenses) saw several of his ministers quit. Brown and Tory leader David Cameron, whose Conservatives were also caught up in the scandal, though to a far lesser extent because they were mostly out of power, pledged to clean up the system. Instead, the just announced "clean up" makes the former expenses system look good -- or at least better -- a seemingly impossible feat.
Ignoring a nationwide outcry against politicians engaged in the expenses scandal, the Daily Telegraph reports that a small committee of MPs charged with reforming the system and restoring public trust, have introduced new rules that allow members to claim twice as much in expenses (up to 9,125 pounds, or a little more than $15,000US) as they had previously. And they don't have to provide receipts. Try getting away with that at your job.
The Daily Telegraph, which broke the initial expenses story, says the new rules were published on a Parliamentary Web page with no public debate and no announcement before members slipped out of town for their long summer holiday.
The new speaker, John Bercow, had campaigned to replace the former speaker, Michael Martin, by promising to reform "the system of Parliamentary expenses." And yet Bercow was on the committee that produced this new and more outrageous system.
What is it about politicians? Do they suffer from a genetic fault that produces such arrogance for the public and ignorance about who they are supposed to serve? So far, no one has had the gall to blame this monumental lapse of judgment on the swine flu epidemic that has gripped Britain, but give them time.
Under the new rules, which are actually not rules at all, MPs have total discretion concerning how the money is spent and they are not accountable to any Parliamentary body, much less the public.
Under the new system, as the Telegraph states, MPs Ann and Alan Keen, who are married, could claim the maximum expense amount per year on top of the generous expenses they are paid for mortgage interest, the local council tax and utility bills, not to mention a large housing allowance of 24,000 pounds (nearly $40,000US), which is a slight increase over last year. No wonder people want to become politicians. With deals like this, why would they mind raising taxes when the public not only has to pay its share, but part of a politician's share as well?
In a major understatement, the Daily Telegraph says, "The fact that such a substantial amount has been agreed by MPs without public debate is certain to anger voters further." Ya think? But these people apparently don't give a fig for what the public thinks or they would have reformed both themselves and the outrageous expenses system, which has angered the public and led to a sharp decline in public approval not only for Labour, but also for politicians in general. Maybe Shakespeare should have written that after "kill(ing) all the lawyers," someone should term-limit the politicians. "Stop them before they expense again!" would be a good rallying cry.
Following last spring's outing of MPs gone wild, Gordon Brown spoke of how "essential" it was to restore public confidence in government. Clearly, this latest fiasco will send what's left of that confidence into the loo.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND -- On my last visit to the UK three months ago, Members of Parliament were embroiled in a scandal involving outrageous expense claims for such things as moat cleaning, a baby crib and second homes that were sometimes occupied by friends and relatives, or not at all.
For the first time since 1695, a speaker of the House of Commons was forced to resign and Prime Minister Gordon Brown (who also had questionable expenses) saw several of his ministers quit. Brown and Tory leader David Cameron, whose Conservatives were also caught up in the scandal, though to a far lesser extent because they were mostly out of power, pledged to clean up the system. Instead, the just announced "clean up" makes the former expenses system look good -- or at least better -- a seemingly impossible feat.
Ignoring a nationwide outcry against politicians engaged in the expenses scandal, the Daily Telegraph reports that a small committee of MPs charged with reforming the system and restoring public trust, have introduced new rules that allow members to claim twice as much in expenses (up to 9,125 pounds, or a little more than $15,000US) as they had previously. And they don't have to provide receipts. Try getting away with that at your job.
The Daily Telegraph, which broke the initial expenses story, says the new rules were published on a Parliamentary Web page with no public debate and no announcement before members slipped out of town for their long summer holiday.
The new speaker, John Bercow, had campaigned to replace the former speaker, Michael Martin, by promising to reform "the system of Parliamentary expenses." And yet Bercow was on the committee that produced this new and more outrageous system.
What is it about politicians? Do they suffer from a genetic fault that produces such arrogance for the public and ignorance about who they are supposed to serve? So far, no one has had the gall to blame this monumental lapse of judgment on the swine flu epidemic that has gripped Britain, but give them time.
Under the new rules, which are actually not rules at all, MPs have total discretion concerning how the money is spent and they are not accountable to any Parliamentary body, much less the public.
Under the new system, as the Telegraph states, MPs Ann and Alan Keen, who are married, could claim the maximum expense amount per year on top of the generous expenses they are paid for mortgage interest, the local council tax and utility bills, not to mention a large housing allowance of 24,000 pounds (nearly $40,000US), which is a slight increase over last year. No wonder people want to become politicians. With deals like this, why would they mind raising taxes when the public not only has to pay its share, but part of a politician's share as well?
In a major understatement, the Daily Telegraph says, "The fact that such a substantial amount has been agreed by MPs without public debate is certain to anger voters further." Ya think? But these people apparently don't give a fig for what the public thinks or they would have reformed both themselves and the outrageous expenses system, which has angered the public and led to a sharp decline in public approval not only for Labour, but also for politicians in general. Maybe Shakespeare should have written that after "kill(ing) all the lawyers," someone should term-limit the politicians. "Stop them before they expense again!" would be a good rallying cry.
Following last spring's outing of MPs gone wild, Gordon Brown spoke of how "essential" it was to restore public confidence in government. Clearly, this latest fiasco will send what's left of that confidence into the loo.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Mr. Oblivious to Evidence
Obama should be the last man to talk about keeping others honest.
By Mona Charen
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
The final moments of President Obama’s press conference last week have gotten the most attention, and some of the president’s supporters have wondered whether his big-footed interference in the Harvard professor’s melodrama has overshadowed his push for health-care reform.
But the president’s response to Gatesgate actually sheds a lot of light on his approach to health care and other issues, for this reason: Obama adopts his positions before knowing what he is talking about. To be fair, Obama admitted as much, at least as far as Gates was concerned. “I don’t know all the facts,” he acknowledged, before launching into a lecture (later retracted) about the “stupidity” of the Cambridge police (while misrepresenting what had happened).
How could he not have known all the facts? Press secretary Robert Gibbs mentioned on Fox News Sunday that the Gates matter was one of the issues the White House press operation had briefed the president on before the press conference. Numerous accounts of the imbroglio were available online — though the president need only pick up the phone to get all the information he wants.
He didn’t want information. He preferred his comfortable, prejudiced view.
This is worth bearing in mind as the country takes a good, hard look at the president’s plans for health-care reform. On the day he announced support for embryonic-stem-cell research, Mr. Obama also signed an executive memorandum declaring that in the Obama administration, “We [will] make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.” And yet, his health-care proposals — or rather the congressional ideas he has endorsed — seem to skirt facts and evidence at every turn.
We are told, for example, that America needs a “public option” for health insurance to “keep the insurance companies honest.” How would that work? Would it be the same as keeping Ford honest by having the government own GM? In both cases, private companies who must make a profit and pay their expenses will be forced to compete with public entities not subject to market discipline.
Well, they counter, Medicare has been better at controlling administrative costs than private insurance companies. Economist Robert Book examined that claim and concluded that Medicare’s administrative costs per beneficiary are substantially higher than the administrative costs of private health plans. Democrats’ argument to the contrary is based on expressing administrative costs as a share of total costs. Book explains: “If X Insurance Co. insures a healthy 25-year-old and he makes zero claims in a year, then administrative costs are the only costs.” By contrast, Medicare’s population is (by definition) disproportionately elderly, disabled, or suffering end-of-life medical crises. In fact, Book argues, Medicare’s per-beneficiary costs are rising faster than those of private insurance companies. And Medicare’s costs have risen further and faster than any of the sunny estimates politicians have offered over the past 40 years. Medicare spending doubled every four years between 1966 and 1980. Without adding any further burdens, Medicare has unfunded future obligations of $36 trillion.
Another proposal contained in some of the Democrats’ legislation is government-approved health insurance. All private insurers would be required to provide certain benefits or be ineligible to “compete” with the public option. Has anyone in the Obama administration checked the facts on this? State governments throughout the nation have been piling mandates on insurance companies for the past 25 years. The Council for Affordable Health insurance keeps track. Forty-five states mandate alcohol- and drug-abuse treatment. Four require coverage for hormone-replacement therapy. Bone-density scans are required by 16 states. Contraceptives must be covered in 29 states, and in vitro fertilization in 15. Forty-four states mandate coverage of optometrist services; 18 require infant hearing screenings, and the list goes on. Every mandate increases the price of insurance and makes it progressively more difficult for the healthy uninsured to find no-frills, catastrophic coverage. It also increases the cost of each of those “covered” procedures, because when they are paid for by third parties instead of out-of-pocket by patients, patients become less cost-sensitive.
During the campaign, John McCain proposed to allow interstate shopping for health insurance, which would at least introduce an element of competition and cost-consciousness into the system. Obama ran ads deceptively claiming that this (and other proposals) would cause people to lose the coverage they already had.
Obama should be the last man to talk about keeping others honest.
By Mona Charen
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
The final moments of President Obama’s press conference last week have gotten the most attention, and some of the president’s supporters have wondered whether his big-footed interference in the Harvard professor’s melodrama has overshadowed his push for health-care reform.
But the president’s response to Gatesgate actually sheds a lot of light on his approach to health care and other issues, for this reason: Obama adopts his positions before knowing what he is talking about. To be fair, Obama admitted as much, at least as far as Gates was concerned. “I don’t know all the facts,” he acknowledged, before launching into a lecture (later retracted) about the “stupidity” of the Cambridge police (while misrepresenting what had happened).
How could he not have known all the facts? Press secretary Robert Gibbs mentioned on Fox News Sunday that the Gates matter was one of the issues the White House press operation had briefed the president on before the press conference. Numerous accounts of the imbroglio were available online — though the president need only pick up the phone to get all the information he wants.
He didn’t want information. He preferred his comfortable, prejudiced view.
This is worth bearing in mind as the country takes a good, hard look at the president’s plans for health-care reform. On the day he announced support for embryonic-stem-cell research, Mr. Obama also signed an executive memorandum declaring that in the Obama administration, “We [will] make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology.” And yet, his health-care proposals — or rather the congressional ideas he has endorsed — seem to skirt facts and evidence at every turn.
We are told, for example, that America needs a “public option” for health insurance to “keep the insurance companies honest.” How would that work? Would it be the same as keeping Ford honest by having the government own GM? In both cases, private companies who must make a profit and pay their expenses will be forced to compete with public entities not subject to market discipline.
Well, they counter, Medicare has been better at controlling administrative costs than private insurance companies. Economist Robert Book examined that claim and concluded that Medicare’s administrative costs per beneficiary are substantially higher than the administrative costs of private health plans. Democrats’ argument to the contrary is based on expressing administrative costs as a share of total costs. Book explains: “If X Insurance Co. insures a healthy 25-year-old and he makes zero claims in a year, then administrative costs are the only costs.” By contrast, Medicare’s population is (by definition) disproportionately elderly, disabled, or suffering end-of-life medical crises. In fact, Book argues, Medicare’s per-beneficiary costs are rising faster than those of private insurance companies. And Medicare’s costs have risen further and faster than any of the sunny estimates politicians have offered over the past 40 years. Medicare spending doubled every four years between 1966 and 1980. Without adding any further burdens, Medicare has unfunded future obligations of $36 trillion.
Another proposal contained in some of the Democrats’ legislation is government-approved health insurance. All private insurers would be required to provide certain benefits or be ineligible to “compete” with the public option. Has anyone in the Obama administration checked the facts on this? State governments throughout the nation have been piling mandates on insurance companies for the past 25 years. The Council for Affordable Health insurance keeps track. Forty-five states mandate alcohol- and drug-abuse treatment. Four require coverage for hormone-replacement therapy. Bone-density scans are required by 16 states. Contraceptives must be covered in 29 states, and in vitro fertilization in 15. Forty-four states mandate coverage of optometrist services; 18 require infant hearing screenings, and the list goes on. Every mandate increases the price of insurance and makes it progressively more difficult for the healthy uninsured to find no-frills, catastrophic coverage. It also increases the cost of each of those “covered” procedures, because when they are paid for by third parties instead of out-of-pocket by patients, patients become less cost-sensitive.
During the campaign, John McCain proposed to allow interstate shopping for health insurance, which would at least introduce an element of competition and cost-consciousness into the system. Obama ran ads deceptively claiming that this (and other proposals) would cause people to lose the coverage they already had.
Obama should be the last man to talk about keeping others honest.
10 Questions for Supporters of 'ObamaCare'
Dennis Prager
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
1. President Barack Obama repeatedly tells us that one reason national health care is needed is that we can no longer afford to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. But if Medicare and Medicaid are fiscally insolvent and gradually bankrupting our society, why is a government takeover of medical care for the rest of society a good idea? What large-scale government program has not eventually spiraled out of control, let alone stayed within its projected budget? Why should anyone believe that nationalizing health care would create the first major government program to "pay for itself," let alone get smaller rather than larger over time? Why not simply see how the Democrats can reform Medicare and Medicaid before nationalizing much of the rest of health care?
2. President Obama reiterated this past week that "no insurance company will be allowed to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition." This is an oft-repeated goal of the president's and the Democrats' health care plan. But if any individual can buy health insurance at any time, why would anyone buy health insurance while healthy? Why would I not simply wait until I got sick or injured to buy the insurance? If auto insurance were purchasable once one got into an accident, why would anyone purchase auto insurance before an accident? Will the Democrats next demand that life insurance companies sell life insurance to the terminally ill? The whole point of insurance is that the healthy buy it and thereby provide the funds to pay for the sick. Demanding that insurance companies provide insurance to everyone at any time spells the end of the concept of insurance. And if the answer is that the government will now make it illegal not to buy insurance, how will that be enforced? How will the government check on 300 million people?
3. Why do supporters of nationalized medicine so often substitute the word "care" for the word "insurance?" it is patently untrue that millions of Americans do not receive health care. Millions of Americans do not have health insurance but virtually every American (and non-American on American soil) receives health care.
4. No one denies that in order to come close to staying within its budget health care will be rationed. But what is the moral justification of having the state decide what medical care to ration?
5. According to Dr. David Gratzer, health care specialist at the Manhattan Institute, "While 20 years ago pharmaceuticals were largely developed in Europe, European price controls made drug development an American enterprise. Fifteen of the 20 top-selling drugs worldwide this year were birthed in the United States." Given how many lives -- in America and throughout the world – American pharmaceutical companies save, and given how expensive it is to develop any new drug, will the price controls on drugs envisaged in the Democrats' bill improve or impair Americans' health?
6. Do you really believe that private insurance could survive a "public option"? Or is this really a cover for the ideal of single-payer medical care? How could a private insurance company survive a "public option" given that private companies have to show a profit and government agencies do not have to – and given that a private enterprise must raise its own money to be solvent and a government option has access to others' money -- i.e., taxes?
7. Why will hospitals, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies do nearly as superb a job as they now do if their reimbursement from the government will be severely cut? Haven't the laws of human behavior and common sense been repealed here in arguing that while doctors, hospitals and drug companies will make significantly less money they will continue to provide the same level of uniquely excellent care?
8. Given how many needless procedures are ordered to avoid medical lawsuits and how much money doctors spend on medical malpractice insurance, shouldn't any meaningful "reform" of health care provide some remedy for frivolous malpractice lawsuits?
9. Given how weak the U.S. economy is, given how weak the U.S. dollar is, and given how much in debt the U.S. is in, why would anyone seek to have the U.S. spend another trillion dollars? Even if all the other questions here had legitimate answers, wouldn't the state of the U.S. economy alone argue against national health care at this time?
10. Contrary to the assertion of President Obama -- "we spend much more on health care than any other nation but aren't any healthier for it" -- we are healthier. We wait far less time for procedures and surgeries. Our life expectancy with virtually any major disease is longer. And if you do not count deaths from violent crime and automobile accidents, we also have the longest life expectancy. Do you think a government takeover of American medicine will enable this medical excellence to continue?
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
1. President Barack Obama repeatedly tells us that one reason national health care is needed is that we can no longer afford to pay for Medicare and Medicaid. But if Medicare and Medicaid are fiscally insolvent and gradually bankrupting our society, why is a government takeover of medical care for the rest of society a good idea? What large-scale government program has not eventually spiraled out of control, let alone stayed within its projected budget? Why should anyone believe that nationalizing health care would create the first major government program to "pay for itself," let alone get smaller rather than larger over time? Why not simply see how the Democrats can reform Medicare and Medicaid before nationalizing much of the rest of health care?
2. President Obama reiterated this past week that "no insurance company will be allowed to deny you coverage because of a pre-existing medical condition." This is an oft-repeated goal of the president's and the Democrats' health care plan. But if any individual can buy health insurance at any time, why would anyone buy health insurance while healthy? Why would I not simply wait until I got sick or injured to buy the insurance? If auto insurance were purchasable once one got into an accident, why would anyone purchase auto insurance before an accident? Will the Democrats next demand that life insurance companies sell life insurance to the terminally ill? The whole point of insurance is that the healthy buy it and thereby provide the funds to pay for the sick. Demanding that insurance companies provide insurance to everyone at any time spells the end of the concept of insurance. And if the answer is that the government will now make it illegal not to buy insurance, how will that be enforced? How will the government check on 300 million people?
3. Why do supporters of nationalized medicine so often substitute the word "care" for the word "insurance?" it is patently untrue that millions of Americans do not receive health care. Millions of Americans do not have health insurance but virtually every American (and non-American on American soil) receives health care.
4. No one denies that in order to come close to staying within its budget health care will be rationed. But what is the moral justification of having the state decide what medical care to ration?
5. According to Dr. David Gratzer, health care specialist at the Manhattan Institute, "While 20 years ago pharmaceuticals were largely developed in Europe, European price controls made drug development an American enterprise. Fifteen of the 20 top-selling drugs worldwide this year were birthed in the United States." Given how many lives -- in America and throughout the world – American pharmaceutical companies save, and given how expensive it is to develop any new drug, will the price controls on drugs envisaged in the Democrats' bill improve or impair Americans' health?
6. Do you really believe that private insurance could survive a "public option"? Or is this really a cover for the ideal of single-payer medical care? How could a private insurance company survive a "public option" given that private companies have to show a profit and government agencies do not have to – and given that a private enterprise must raise its own money to be solvent and a government option has access to others' money -- i.e., taxes?
7. Why will hospitals, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies do nearly as superb a job as they now do if their reimbursement from the government will be severely cut? Haven't the laws of human behavior and common sense been repealed here in arguing that while doctors, hospitals and drug companies will make significantly less money they will continue to provide the same level of uniquely excellent care?
8. Given how many needless procedures are ordered to avoid medical lawsuits and how much money doctors spend on medical malpractice insurance, shouldn't any meaningful "reform" of health care provide some remedy for frivolous malpractice lawsuits?
9. Given how weak the U.S. economy is, given how weak the U.S. dollar is, and given how much in debt the U.S. is in, why would anyone seek to have the U.S. spend another trillion dollars? Even if all the other questions here had legitimate answers, wouldn't the state of the U.S. economy alone argue against national health care at this time?
10. Contrary to the assertion of President Obama -- "we spend much more on health care than any other nation but aren't any healthier for it" -- we are healthier. We wait far less time for procedures and surgeries. Our life expectancy with virtually any major disease is longer. And if you do not count deaths from violent crime and automobile accidents, we also have the longest life expectancy. Do you think a government takeover of American medicine will enable this medical excellence to continue?
Monday, July 27, 2009
What Happened to Our Postracial President?
Obama has unwittingly made his real beliefs clear.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Monday, July 27, 2009
From time to time, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Clarence Thomas have naturally talked about growing up African-American under far less tolerant conditions than those we take for granted today. Yet their biggest contributions to American race relations have been their admirable abilities to transcend such racial intolerance — to make being black incidental, not essential, at least in public, to their sterling characters and impressive achievements.
They all paid a price for emphasizing individuality rather than adhering to identity politics. Those on the left often criticized them as somehow inauthentic, or not fully representative of the “real” black experience. Indeed, one of weirdest paradoxes of contemporary culture has been the tendency of wealthy white liberals to adjudicate who really speaks for the so-called African-American community — based on an authenticity that is often, in ironic fashion, based on the degree of perceived hostility to whites themselves.
Then came Barack Obama, and the nation as a whole entered an even stranger racial landscape. Unlike Powell, Rice, or Thomas, Obama was not born into, but rather piggy-backed onto, the African-American experience. He came of age well after the South’s oppressive Jim Crow culture began to wane. He grew up in a multiracial Hawaii that was always somewhat more relaxed, and was exempt from the tensions inside the continental United States. Obama was of half-white ancestry, and raised by white grandparents. Finally, Obama’s father was a Kenyan national and Muslim, not a descendant of American slaves, and so he lacked an African-American pedigree altogether. In other words, as Obama himself often insisted, our new president was in a way reminiscent of Tiger Woods: postracial — black, white, a little bit of everything, but beyond divisive self-identification with any one particular group or tribe.
Yet somehow one Barry Dunham/Obama — after Occidental, Columbia, Harvard, Chicago organizing, and the Reverend Wright’s Trinity Church — morphed into an authentic voice of the African-American collective experience. The rest is history. A black politician who once struggled to establish African-American credentials has now become our collective arbiter of race in a way former African-American national figures could hardly imagine.
Whether due to the utility of identity politics or simply to his own comfort with racial emphases, Obama has highlighted, rather than downplayed, his own mixed heritage in efforts to accentuate an African-American identity. We saw that in the Democratic primary, when his support from the black community was not at a mere 60/40 majority, or 70/30, but more often an astounding 95/5. His continued apologies for the racist Reverend Wright were as sincere as they were suicidal — until Wright’s increasingly lunatic racism was too overt to be any longer defended by a serious candidate for the presidency.
From time to time, a voice of near-antipathy in Obama erupted, as in his infamous “clingers” speech about the lower-middle-class supposed know-nothings of Pennsylvania, or in his dismissal of the grandmother who raised him as a “typical white person.” Before Michelle Obama grew silent, she managed to tell America that it was a “downright mean” country, where the bar was raised serially even on those as wealthy and privileged as the Obamas, and that, prior to her husband’s presidential campaign, she had not been especially proud of the United States — amplification of long-held views that can be seen as early as her Princeton undergraduate thesis.
No matter. The media and the liberal elite ignored these telltale signs, and instead were eager to accept the implicit pact that the soothing racial healer Barack Obama offered them. It was an unspoken understanding that might be paraphrased as something along the following lines: “Vote for me and I will offer you instant exemption from all prior racial guilt — and yet allow you to live your rather secluded lives as usual.”
In other words, the endowed professor, the corporate attorney, the green CEO, the endowment officer, and the high-school teacher could all continue to live in safe and separate neighborhoods, ensure their children went to mostly white and Asian schools (whether elite public or private), and through taxes for entitlements and abstract support for affirmative action still feel they were doing a great deal for race relations. As they saw it, they elected one comfortable and hip Barack Obama as their president — without living among, going to school with, or working alongside the Other.
But nemesis is not so understanding; it demands more of us than such cheap bromides. And Barack Obama’s prior racialism, as evidenced by two decades of attendance in, and subsidies to, the Reverend Wright’s racist church, leaves indelible scars. And so to paraphrase the reverend, the chickens are now coming home to roost for America.
The president’s apologies abroad focused on supposed American felonies, from slavery to the conquest of Native America to the dropping of the atomic bomb. Since there were many such lamentations, and they were not balanced by citing the gallantry of Shiloh or Gettysburg in ending slavery, or Guadalcanal to stop Japanese brutality, or Chosin to save South Korea, the impression was left that Barack Obama sees America quite differently from many, if not most, of its citizens — who understand our own sins as those shared with mankind, but our singular efforts at correcting them as unmatched abroad.
The Cairo speech was full of historical falsehoods, and a textbook example of moral equivalence, as Islamic felonies were juxtaposed alongside American misdemeanors in the fashion of the Platonic “noble lie.” Time and time again, in both implicit and explicit fashion, our president has made it clear that he does not believe in American exceptionalism — despite assuming quite an exceptional pulpit to weigh in on global matters.
Then we learned that Obama was not terribly disturbed to hear that his attorney general had lambasted the American people as “cowards” for not engaging in yet more national conversations on race — which in the past have not proven to be honest and painful discussions that touched on black responsibilities as well as civil rights. He tsk-tsked Judge Sotomayor’s racialist comments about the innate superiority of Latina judges over their white counterparts — although the unfortunate remark occurred at least five times, in both written and oral contexts, and was part of a brief speech in which she managed to reference herself as a Latina/Latino dozens of times.
Now President Obama has passed judgment on the Professor Gates tragicomedy by deriding the Cambridge police force for acting “stupidly” in arresting and then releasing his friend. It mattered little that Obama, the Harvard Law graduate, knew nothing about the details of the case. A picture taken at the scene, and eyewitness accounts of bystanders — and who knows what the yet-unreleased transcript of the recorded exchange with Professor Gates could reveal — all seemed to suggest that Gates overreacted to a legitimate request for an ID. Americans, white and black, may lament someone being arrested in his own house, but they also do not think it a wise idea to insult and ridicule armed police arriving at their homes after being summoned to an apparent burglary in progress.
Indeed, if anyone evoked race and profiled one by race, it was more likely the professor of race studies than the police. And for all the president’s referencing of the old standby toss-off line that minorities are disproportionately stopped by police, the nation was hardly likely to think that Gates — as one of the country’s highest-paid professors in the humanities, and as a personal friend to the African-American mayor of Cambridge, governor of Massachusetts, and president of the United States — was being railroaded.
In the jargon of postmodernism, the president asserted one racial narrative as truth, while most of multiracial America accepted quite another: that Professor’s Gates’s contacts and friendships gave him privileged treatment not accorded to others who scream and blow up at policemen, and that minority males are indeed tragically disproportionately stopped by police because they also, tragically, are more likely to commit felonies. The president’s ossified remark ignored real efforts on the part of police departments to hire African-American officers and chiefs, engage community leaders, and train police in racial sensitivity — all the while dealing with the fact that African-American males commit violent felonies in numbers that vastly exceed their presence in the general population.
None of us gets a pass once we evoke racial identity, not even the president of the United States, not even one of mixed racial heritage. Once we go down that road of racial self-aggrandizement, of seeing each other not by the content of our characters, but by the color of our skins, we invite nemesis — and there will be retribution. Because Barack Obama has consistently emphasized racial identity to further his own advantage, I fear others, both black and white, will be emboldened to follow his polarizing lead — in ways both novel and far more pernicious. We once trusted our uniquely qualified president to help lead us out of our racial morass, but so far he has only pushed us far deeper into it.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Monday, July 27, 2009
From time to time, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Clarence Thomas have naturally talked about growing up African-American under far less tolerant conditions than those we take for granted today. Yet their biggest contributions to American race relations have been their admirable abilities to transcend such racial intolerance — to make being black incidental, not essential, at least in public, to their sterling characters and impressive achievements.
They all paid a price for emphasizing individuality rather than adhering to identity politics. Those on the left often criticized them as somehow inauthentic, or not fully representative of the “real” black experience. Indeed, one of weirdest paradoxes of contemporary culture has been the tendency of wealthy white liberals to adjudicate who really speaks for the so-called African-American community — based on an authenticity that is often, in ironic fashion, based on the degree of perceived hostility to whites themselves.
Then came Barack Obama, and the nation as a whole entered an even stranger racial landscape. Unlike Powell, Rice, or Thomas, Obama was not born into, but rather piggy-backed onto, the African-American experience. He came of age well after the South’s oppressive Jim Crow culture began to wane. He grew up in a multiracial Hawaii that was always somewhat more relaxed, and was exempt from the tensions inside the continental United States. Obama was of half-white ancestry, and raised by white grandparents. Finally, Obama’s father was a Kenyan national and Muslim, not a descendant of American slaves, and so he lacked an African-American pedigree altogether. In other words, as Obama himself often insisted, our new president was in a way reminiscent of Tiger Woods: postracial — black, white, a little bit of everything, but beyond divisive self-identification with any one particular group or tribe.
Yet somehow one Barry Dunham/Obama — after Occidental, Columbia, Harvard, Chicago organizing, and the Reverend Wright’s Trinity Church — morphed into an authentic voice of the African-American collective experience. The rest is history. A black politician who once struggled to establish African-American credentials has now become our collective arbiter of race in a way former African-American national figures could hardly imagine.
Whether due to the utility of identity politics or simply to his own comfort with racial emphases, Obama has highlighted, rather than downplayed, his own mixed heritage in efforts to accentuate an African-American identity. We saw that in the Democratic primary, when his support from the black community was not at a mere 60/40 majority, or 70/30, but more often an astounding 95/5. His continued apologies for the racist Reverend Wright were as sincere as they were suicidal — until Wright’s increasingly lunatic racism was too overt to be any longer defended by a serious candidate for the presidency.
From time to time, a voice of near-antipathy in Obama erupted, as in his infamous “clingers” speech about the lower-middle-class supposed know-nothings of Pennsylvania, or in his dismissal of the grandmother who raised him as a “typical white person.” Before Michelle Obama grew silent, she managed to tell America that it was a “downright mean” country, where the bar was raised serially even on those as wealthy and privileged as the Obamas, and that, prior to her husband’s presidential campaign, she had not been especially proud of the United States — amplification of long-held views that can be seen as early as her Princeton undergraduate thesis.
No matter. The media and the liberal elite ignored these telltale signs, and instead were eager to accept the implicit pact that the soothing racial healer Barack Obama offered them. It was an unspoken understanding that might be paraphrased as something along the following lines: “Vote for me and I will offer you instant exemption from all prior racial guilt — and yet allow you to live your rather secluded lives as usual.”
In other words, the endowed professor, the corporate attorney, the green CEO, the endowment officer, and the high-school teacher could all continue to live in safe and separate neighborhoods, ensure their children went to mostly white and Asian schools (whether elite public or private), and through taxes for entitlements and abstract support for affirmative action still feel they were doing a great deal for race relations. As they saw it, they elected one comfortable and hip Barack Obama as their president — without living among, going to school with, or working alongside the Other.
But nemesis is not so understanding; it demands more of us than such cheap bromides. And Barack Obama’s prior racialism, as evidenced by two decades of attendance in, and subsidies to, the Reverend Wright’s racist church, leaves indelible scars. And so to paraphrase the reverend, the chickens are now coming home to roost for America.
The president’s apologies abroad focused on supposed American felonies, from slavery to the conquest of Native America to the dropping of the atomic bomb. Since there were many such lamentations, and they were not balanced by citing the gallantry of Shiloh or Gettysburg in ending slavery, or Guadalcanal to stop Japanese brutality, or Chosin to save South Korea, the impression was left that Barack Obama sees America quite differently from many, if not most, of its citizens — who understand our own sins as those shared with mankind, but our singular efforts at correcting them as unmatched abroad.
The Cairo speech was full of historical falsehoods, and a textbook example of moral equivalence, as Islamic felonies were juxtaposed alongside American misdemeanors in the fashion of the Platonic “noble lie.” Time and time again, in both implicit and explicit fashion, our president has made it clear that he does not believe in American exceptionalism — despite assuming quite an exceptional pulpit to weigh in on global matters.
Then we learned that Obama was not terribly disturbed to hear that his attorney general had lambasted the American people as “cowards” for not engaging in yet more national conversations on race — which in the past have not proven to be honest and painful discussions that touched on black responsibilities as well as civil rights. He tsk-tsked Judge Sotomayor’s racialist comments about the innate superiority of Latina judges over their white counterparts — although the unfortunate remark occurred at least five times, in both written and oral contexts, and was part of a brief speech in which she managed to reference herself as a Latina/Latino dozens of times.
Now President Obama has passed judgment on the Professor Gates tragicomedy by deriding the Cambridge police force for acting “stupidly” in arresting and then releasing his friend. It mattered little that Obama, the Harvard Law graduate, knew nothing about the details of the case. A picture taken at the scene, and eyewitness accounts of bystanders — and who knows what the yet-unreleased transcript of the recorded exchange with Professor Gates could reveal — all seemed to suggest that Gates overreacted to a legitimate request for an ID. Americans, white and black, may lament someone being arrested in his own house, but they also do not think it a wise idea to insult and ridicule armed police arriving at their homes after being summoned to an apparent burglary in progress.
Indeed, if anyone evoked race and profiled one by race, it was more likely the professor of race studies than the police. And for all the president’s referencing of the old standby toss-off line that minorities are disproportionately stopped by police, the nation was hardly likely to think that Gates — as one of the country’s highest-paid professors in the humanities, and as a personal friend to the African-American mayor of Cambridge, governor of Massachusetts, and president of the United States — was being railroaded.
In the jargon of postmodernism, the president asserted one racial narrative as truth, while most of multiracial America accepted quite another: that Professor’s Gates’s contacts and friendships gave him privileged treatment not accorded to others who scream and blow up at policemen, and that minority males are indeed tragically disproportionately stopped by police because they also, tragically, are more likely to commit felonies. The president’s ossified remark ignored real efforts on the part of police departments to hire African-American officers and chiefs, engage community leaders, and train police in racial sensitivity — all the while dealing with the fact that African-American males commit violent felonies in numbers that vastly exceed their presence in the general population.
None of us gets a pass once we evoke racial identity, not even the president of the United States, not even one of mixed racial heritage. Once we go down that road of racial self-aggrandizement, of seeing each other not by the content of our characters, but by the color of our skins, we invite nemesis — and there will be retribution. Because Barack Obama has consistently emphasized racial identity to further his own advantage, I fear others, both black and white, will be emboldened to follow his polarizing lead — in ways both novel and far more pernicious. We once trusted our uniquely qualified president to help lead us out of our racial morass, but so far he has only pushed us far deeper into it.
Burt the Plumber
Burt Prelutsky
Monday, July 27, 2009
During last year’s presidential campaign, Joe Wurzelbacher raised a lot of hackles in liberal circles when he got Barack Obama to admit he was in favor of the federal government redistributing America’s wealth.
It was a landmark moment. For one thing, it led Helen Jones-Kelley, Director of Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services, to doing her utmost to make the poor guy’s life miserable, thus conveying the message to Obama’s critics to keep their yaps shut if they knew what was good for them. At the same time, it taught Obama to keep his radical agenda as vague and simple-minded as “hope and change,” leaving it to America’s most ignorant and gullible voters to fill in the blanks any way they liked.
Well, I think it’s high time that we all became plumbers and started plumbing for answers. For instance, wouldn’t it have made more sense if the Democrats really wanted to stimulate the economy, and not just pass a lifetime’s worth of pork at one fell-swoop, to have given the trillion dollars back to those of us who coughed it up in the first place?
I mean, let us say, for the sake of argument, that a hundred million adults are in the U.S. legally and actually pay income taxes. If you divide that number into a trillion dollars, each one would wind up with $10,000. Now you can’t tell me that if every tax-paying adult in America suddenly received a check in that amount, it wouldn’t do more to cure America’s financial woes than paying for Harry Reid’s train or that tunnel that turtles are supposed to start using down in Florida. What’s next? An elevator for elderly alligators?
I would like to ask President Obama why the Trade and Cap bill that will double our energy bills while providing less and less energy for our industries? Why all the sweet talk for our sworn enemies and harsh words for our allies? Why the $250,000 date night in New York, not to mention the pricey sneakers and the $5,000 purse for the missus when most Americans are suffering through a financial malaise? Is it any wonder that a lot of us look at the two of you gadding about and see Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI?
Before I get to my next question, I have a confession to make. Henry Waxman and I have been friends for about 50 years, going back to our days at UCLA. Now it’s true we haven’t seen all that much of each other in the three decades since he went to Washington, and that the last time we spoke, a few years ago, we got into an argument because he said he and some of his colleagues planned to investigate FOX regarding biased news reporting. I told him I had no problem with that so long as they next investigated the New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, CNN, MSNBC and the three major networks. From the astonished look he gave me, you might have thought I had suddenly begun speaking Cantonese. It was at that moment that I first became aware that because all left-wingers are in lock-step on every conceivable issue, they actually believe that the mainstream media is totally honest and objective, and not the slightest bit partisan. It was an enlightening, albeit terrifying, insight.
All that being said, the question I would put to Henry is how he could possibly, with a straight face, say the following to Parade magazine: “President Obama recently said to us in a committee meeting that we could all lead better lives if we weren’t in public service; we could make more money, spend more time with our families. But sometimes, he said, you have an opportunity to do things that are important and make life better for millions. That’s why we’re all here.”
The fact of the matter is, the rest of us could lead better lives if those schmoes weren’t in public service. Even calling it “public service” is an exercise in propaganda. It makes it sound as if these weasels are busily washing the feet of lepers like Mother Teresa or housing the poor and crippled in their own homes. These are over-paid egomaniacs who are provided with huge staffs at no cost to themselves, who are forever going off on junkets to exotic locales under the guise of being fact-finding missions, and spend even less time on the job than tenured college professors.
I mean, a joke’s a joke, but how could Obama and Waxman believe for a second that people like Barney Frank, Barbara Boxer, Charles Rangel, John Murtha, Nancy Pelosi and the idiots on the Black Congressional Caucus could make a better living outside of politics? Half of these people would be trolls living under bridges if they ever lost an election. Who on earth would hire them? There are, after all, only so many circuses in America, and only so many elephants in those circuses, and only so many brooms to go around.
Finally, speaking of trolls, my question to Al Franken would be, in response to his stating at Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing that she is the most qualified Supreme Court nominee in 100 years, who did he have in mind? I checked, and back in 1909, the nine justices were David Brewer, William Day, Melville Fuller, John Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Joseph McKenna, William Moody, Rufus Peckham and Edward White. The only one I had ever heard of was Justice Holmes and it turns out he was a confirmed racist.
If Ms. Sotomayor is the best since then, Franken must be convinced that she is superior to, say, Benjamin Cardozo, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, Thurgood Marshall, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Earl Warren. Even I, who can’t stand listening to his whiney voice, would certainly enjoy hearing the fatuous junior senator from Minnesota explain that remark.
If, as I suspect, the reason for Franken’s hyperbole is simply because of Sotomayor’s race and gender, the two things that make her so doggone extra special in her own eyes -- at least up until the time she was being grilled by the Senate Judiciary Committee -- he shouldn’t have limited her greatness to a paltry hundred years. In fact, it’s almost insulting. After all, inasmuch as she’s the first female Hispanic nominee, he could have said she was the greatest in a billion or even, to use Obama’s favorite number, a trillion years.
Monday, July 27, 2009
During last year’s presidential campaign, Joe Wurzelbacher raised a lot of hackles in liberal circles when he got Barack Obama to admit he was in favor of the federal government redistributing America’s wealth.
It was a landmark moment. For one thing, it led Helen Jones-Kelley, Director of Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services, to doing her utmost to make the poor guy’s life miserable, thus conveying the message to Obama’s critics to keep their yaps shut if they knew what was good for them. At the same time, it taught Obama to keep his radical agenda as vague and simple-minded as “hope and change,” leaving it to America’s most ignorant and gullible voters to fill in the blanks any way they liked.
Well, I think it’s high time that we all became plumbers and started plumbing for answers. For instance, wouldn’t it have made more sense if the Democrats really wanted to stimulate the economy, and not just pass a lifetime’s worth of pork at one fell-swoop, to have given the trillion dollars back to those of us who coughed it up in the first place?
I mean, let us say, for the sake of argument, that a hundred million adults are in the U.S. legally and actually pay income taxes. If you divide that number into a trillion dollars, each one would wind up with $10,000. Now you can’t tell me that if every tax-paying adult in America suddenly received a check in that amount, it wouldn’t do more to cure America’s financial woes than paying for Harry Reid’s train or that tunnel that turtles are supposed to start using down in Florida. What’s next? An elevator for elderly alligators?
I would like to ask President Obama why the Trade and Cap bill that will double our energy bills while providing less and less energy for our industries? Why all the sweet talk for our sworn enemies and harsh words for our allies? Why the $250,000 date night in New York, not to mention the pricey sneakers and the $5,000 purse for the missus when most Americans are suffering through a financial malaise? Is it any wonder that a lot of us look at the two of you gadding about and see Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI?
Before I get to my next question, I have a confession to make. Henry Waxman and I have been friends for about 50 years, going back to our days at UCLA. Now it’s true we haven’t seen all that much of each other in the three decades since he went to Washington, and that the last time we spoke, a few years ago, we got into an argument because he said he and some of his colleagues planned to investigate FOX regarding biased news reporting. I told him I had no problem with that so long as they next investigated the New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, CNN, MSNBC and the three major networks. From the astonished look he gave me, you might have thought I had suddenly begun speaking Cantonese. It was at that moment that I first became aware that because all left-wingers are in lock-step on every conceivable issue, they actually believe that the mainstream media is totally honest and objective, and not the slightest bit partisan. It was an enlightening, albeit terrifying, insight.
All that being said, the question I would put to Henry is how he could possibly, with a straight face, say the following to Parade magazine: “President Obama recently said to us in a committee meeting that we could all lead better lives if we weren’t in public service; we could make more money, spend more time with our families. But sometimes, he said, you have an opportunity to do things that are important and make life better for millions. That’s why we’re all here.”
The fact of the matter is, the rest of us could lead better lives if those schmoes weren’t in public service. Even calling it “public service” is an exercise in propaganda. It makes it sound as if these weasels are busily washing the feet of lepers like Mother Teresa or housing the poor and crippled in their own homes. These are over-paid egomaniacs who are provided with huge staffs at no cost to themselves, who are forever going off on junkets to exotic locales under the guise of being fact-finding missions, and spend even less time on the job than tenured college professors.
I mean, a joke’s a joke, but how could Obama and Waxman believe for a second that people like Barney Frank, Barbara Boxer, Charles Rangel, John Murtha, Nancy Pelosi and the idiots on the Black Congressional Caucus could make a better living outside of politics? Half of these people would be trolls living under bridges if they ever lost an election. Who on earth would hire them? There are, after all, only so many circuses in America, and only so many elephants in those circuses, and only so many brooms to go around.
Finally, speaking of trolls, my question to Al Franken would be, in response to his stating at Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing that she is the most qualified Supreme Court nominee in 100 years, who did he have in mind? I checked, and back in 1909, the nine justices were David Brewer, William Day, Melville Fuller, John Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Joseph McKenna, William Moody, Rufus Peckham and Edward White. The only one I had ever heard of was Justice Holmes and it turns out he was a confirmed racist.
If Ms. Sotomayor is the best since then, Franken must be convinced that she is superior to, say, Benjamin Cardozo, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, Thurgood Marshall, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Earl Warren. Even I, who can’t stand listening to his whiney voice, would certainly enjoy hearing the fatuous junior senator from Minnesota explain that remark.
If, as I suspect, the reason for Franken’s hyperbole is simply because of Sotomayor’s race and gender, the two things that make her so doggone extra special in her own eyes -- at least up until the time she was being grilled by the Senate Judiciary Committee -- he shouldn’t have limited her greatness to a paltry hundred years. In fact, it’s almost insulting. After all, inasmuch as she’s the first female Hispanic nominee, he could have said she was the greatest in a billion or even, to use Obama’s favorite number, a trillion years.
What They Really Want
Bruce Bialosky
Monday, July 27, 2009
A business colleague of mine commented recently that he supported Communism. He stated it would be fine if he were at the top and thus in control of money and decisions. He mentioned Fidel Castro’s supposed $6 billion that he has in foreign bank accounts. This gentleman understands that not everyone has the same results under Communism.
I make this point to show that the goals of a communistic government were not to solve the problems of the masses as much as to shift control from the existing leaders to the new leaders of the country. The leaders of the former communist countries were not living under the same rules as those they were ruling.
This same principle applies to what we are experiencing in the debate about health insurance reform. The leaders of the movement who want the current bills in Congress to quickly pass are individuals who have a greater interest in shifting control of the health care system than they do in improving the health care system. As proof of this I would like to offer three simple points. Understanding these points makes clear what are the real objectives of the proposed reforms:
1. The fact that only a small portion of the uninsured will be covered by the new bill. Those campaigning for health insurance reform regularly cite that there are more than 45 million uninsured Americans. However, the plans in front of Congress will only insure about 15 million of those. Despite that there is no explanation of how the others will be covered.
2. The proponents say the plan saves money, but in reality it will cost $150 billion a year. It simply must baffle people that this reform is being pitched as getting health care costs under control, but it will increase the deficit by an estimated $150 billion per year over the next ten years. How does that add up? Actually, the head of the Congressional Budget Office (a Democrat) believes the negative impact will be higher. History tells us costs are underestimated at the inception of almost every new government program. When politicians state they are going to control costs by rooting out waste and fraud, you must begin to worry.
3. The proposed bill is 1018 pages. I just finished Ron Chernow’s book on Alexander Hamilton that was close to an 800 pages. It was challenging to read, but comprehensible. Take this book and put it in the terminology that was used in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and you have the bill approved by the House Committee. This is over a thousand pages of legalese that would definitely challenge almost all who read it -- if anyone would actually commit to do so. In his press conference this past week our President stated this was not about politics. How can a bill over 1,000 pages not be about politics? At the beginning of the press conference he listed goals for the reform of health care. Since almost none of those goals are in the existing bill, Mr. Obama clearly has not read this behemoth either.
Combine these three factors; it will cost us a tremendous amount of money to cover only a relatively small portion of the uninsured in a bill that very few if any comprehend. The average American begins to ask why we are doing this. The answer can only be one thing: the current leaders want to take over the health care system.
The people who are attempting to ram this albatross down our throats have little clue of our circumstances. Most of the drafters have never been an employer or even an employee. They are government wonks who crave power and think they know better than the rest of us. For example, Henry Waxman has spent virtually his entire career as a U.S. Congressman and State Assemblyman. He has had superior government-provided health insurance with little cost to him and thus no concerns. Yet he feels he is eminently qualified to draft and dictate a policy on this issue. In the Senate, Ted Kennedy who has no sense of the struggles of the common man is the main designer of their bill.
Our President asserts his desire to improve the health care system, but why has he allowed Congress to draft such a monstrosity? He may earnestly wish to improve the system, but the evidence stands against him. He can dance around the issue all he wants to, but common sense says this is a naked power grab.
For those who doubt this to be true, please refer to the July 15th editorial in Investor’s Business Daily which speaks to their reading of the bill. It only took them to page 16 to find a clause that would outlaw anyone from taking on a new private policy once the public option is established thus forcing everyone into government-run health care. Anyone can guess what the remainder of the bill will hold for us.
There is a group of people in Congress who are convinced that our health care should be run through the federal government. They have believed this for years and have been waiting for the right majority in Congress and the right person in the White House to enact this legislation. They have ached for this moment. If they are able to capitalize on the moment, we will never be able to turn back the clock.
Certainly since the time of the Truman Administration and maybe FDR Administration the Democrats have been attempting to nationalize health care. Until this time they have succeeded in having 50% of health care dollars running through government hands. This is an attempt in one bold stroke to move the other 50% under government control.
I am convinced however that the average American will see through this charade for what it is and make sure the reasonable members of our Congress put a knife in the heart of this ill-conceived plan. People understand that should this pass, they will get inferior care at a higher cost while the designers of this plan will get superior care at no cost at all to them.
Do not mistake the fact that real reforms are not necessary to help control the costs we all bear. Republicans have made suggestions for real reform among them portability, interstate insurance sales and tort reform. Effective health insurance reform can be crafted. It is just that this current reform will not provide the needed result.
As my business colleague said, Communism is great if you make the laws and control the money. Unfortunately, you and I are going to be waiting in line while the people who stuck us with this will be getting their doctors making house calls.
Monday, July 27, 2009
A business colleague of mine commented recently that he supported Communism. He stated it would be fine if he were at the top and thus in control of money and decisions. He mentioned Fidel Castro’s supposed $6 billion that he has in foreign bank accounts. This gentleman understands that not everyone has the same results under Communism.
I make this point to show that the goals of a communistic government were not to solve the problems of the masses as much as to shift control from the existing leaders to the new leaders of the country. The leaders of the former communist countries were not living under the same rules as those they were ruling.
This same principle applies to what we are experiencing in the debate about health insurance reform. The leaders of the movement who want the current bills in Congress to quickly pass are individuals who have a greater interest in shifting control of the health care system than they do in improving the health care system. As proof of this I would like to offer three simple points. Understanding these points makes clear what are the real objectives of the proposed reforms:
1. The fact that only a small portion of the uninsured will be covered by the new bill. Those campaigning for health insurance reform regularly cite that there are more than 45 million uninsured Americans. However, the plans in front of Congress will only insure about 15 million of those. Despite that there is no explanation of how the others will be covered.
2. The proponents say the plan saves money, but in reality it will cost $150 billion a year. It simply must baffle people that this reform is being pitched as getting health care costs under control, but it will increase the deficit by an estimated $150 billion per year over the next ten years. How does that add up? Actually, the head of the Congressional Budget Office (a Democrat) believes the negative impact will be higher. History tells us costs are underestimated at the inception of almost every new government program. When politicians state they are going to control costs by rooting out waste and fraud, you must begin to worry.
3. The proposed bill is 1018 pages. I just finished Ron Chernow’s book on Alexander Hamilton that was close to an 800 pages. It was challenging to read, but comprehensible. Take this book and put it in the terminology that was used in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and you have the bill approved by the House Committee. This is over a thousand pages of legalese that would definitely challenge almost all who read it -- if anyone would actually commit to do so. In his press conference this past week our President stated this was not about politics. How can a bill over 1,000 pages not be about politics? At the beginning of the press conference he listed goals for the reform of health care. Since almost none of those goals are in the existing bill, Mr. Obama clearly has not read this behemoth either.
Combine these three factors; it will cost us a tremendous amount of money to cover only a relatively small portion of the uninsured in a bill that very few if any comprehend. The average American begins to ask why we are doing this. The answer can only be one thing: the current leaders want to take over the health care system.
The people who are attempting to ram this albatross down our throats have little clue of our circumstances. Most of the drafters have never been an employer or even an employee. They are government wonks who crave power and think they know better than the rest of us. For example, Henry Waxman has spent virtually his entire career as a U.S. Congressman and State Assemblyman. He has had superior government-provided health insurance with little cost to him and thus no concerns. Yet he feels he is eminently qualified to draft and dictate a policy on this issue. In the Senate, Ted Kennedy who has no sense of the struggles of the common man is the main designer of their bill.
Our President asserts his desire to improve the health care system, but why has he allowed Congress to draft such a monstrosity? He may earnestly wish to improve the system, but the evidence stands against him. He can dance around the issue all he wants to, but common sense says this is a naked power grab.
For those who doubt this to be true, please refer to the July 15th editorial in Investor’s Business Daily which speaks to their reading of the bill. It only took them to page 16 to find a clause that would outlaw anyone from taking on a new private policy once the public option is established thus forcing everyone into government-run health care. Anyone can guess what the remainder of the bill will hold for us.
There is a group of people in Congress who are convinced that our health care should be run through the federal government. They have believed this for years and have been waiting for the right majority in Congress and the right person in the White House to enact this legislation. They have ached for this moment. If they are able to capitalize on the moment, we will never be able to turn back the clock.
Certainly since the time of the Truman Administration and maybe FDR Administration the Democrats have been attempting to nationalize health care. Until this time they have succeeded in having 50% of health care dollars running through government hands. This is an attempt in one bold stroke to move the other 50% under government control.
I am convinced however that the average American will see through this charade for what it is and make sure the reasonable members of our Congress put a knife in the heart of this ill-conceived plan. People understand that should this pass, they will get inferior care at a higher cost while the designers of this plan will get superior care at no cost at all to them.
Do not mistake the fact that real reforms are not necessary to help control the costs we all bear. Republicans have made suggestions for real reform among them portability, interstate insurance sales and tort reform. Effective health insurance reform can be crafted. It is just that this current reform will not provide the needed result.
As my business colleague said, Communism is great if you make the laws and control the money. Unfortunately, you and I are going to be waiting in line while the people who stuck us with this will be getting their doctors making house calls.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Why Aren't Americans Obeying Obama?
Austin Hill
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Why are Americans disobeying President Obama?
Because in the United States, most adults don’t think of themselves as helpless children, and we don’t regard out President as one to be “obeyed.”
We entrust tremendous power to our President (although that power is not ultimate or without limits). We may admire, esteem, respect, and place our hopes in the office of the President, if not the occupant of the office. And we “follow” our President, however willingly or unwillingly, as he leads the nation over the course of time.
But we don’t “obey.” In The United States, our President is one of us. So why is President Obama seemingly so indignant that Americans have dared to question, doubt, and even disagree with his plans to take-over the American medical profession, and the American healthcare industry?
I’m not merely observing that Obama is arrogant - there’s nothing new about big ego’s in the White House. Even our second President, John Adams, thought he was such an obvious choice for the Presidency that he didn’t even campaign during his re-election bid, and was outraged when Thomas Jefferson un-seated him.
But in roughly seven months, President Barack Obama has demonstrated an unquenchable need to control the lives of private citizens, and the workings of private sector society, and his indignation is aimed at those who would question this. Two American car companies, multiple banks and financial institutions, the rates of salaries paid to business executives, the entire American medical profession and health care industry, even content on the internet - - Obama will control it all. He knows best in all circumstances, and our role is to simply comply.
Perhaps President Obama’s quest for control has something to do with his upbringing and family lineage. He likes to point out how important it is that he has lived overseas, how he understands the horrible ways in which Americans are perceived abroad (especially within the Muslim world), and how he is able to transcend our narrow, American points of view. But could it be that, despite his diverse, multicultural perspective, President Obama lacks a distinctly American perspective that is common among the several hundred million of us imperfect, limited, narrow people who actually grew up here? Could it be that President Obama perceives the very office that he occupies as being something different than what so many of us slow-thinking Americans perceive it to be?
Although our President barely knew the man, his father Barack Hussein Obama Sr. was, nonetheless a communist in the government of Kenya. The President’s Dad once theorized that it would be fine for the government to tax the wealthiest citizens in his country at a rate of 100%, so long as the “greater good” was served. Mr. Obama was eventually fired from his job in the Kenyan government, largely because Kenya was in the process of privatizing its economy, and he was severely out-of-step with his associates. But his ideas were nonetheless his, and Mr. Obama had a clear preference for the heavy hand of government, over the allegedly “greedy,” “selfish” tendencies of business owners.
In my previous writings about this matter, readers have been quick to tell me how rude, insensitive, and “racist” I am. But how many American Presidents, how many American citizens, have come from this kind of legacy? If one’s personal heritage has any impact on one’s present-day existence, surely President Obama’s family heritage of communism has, in some fashion, informed his view of the world today.
And what about our President’s early upbringing? It certainly contrasts sharply with mine. During my first through fourth grade years in an American public school, I experienced President Richard Nixon win re-election in a landslide, Vice President Spiro Agnew resign in scandal, Gerald Ford appointed to the Vice Presidency as Agnew’s replacement, Richard Nixon resign in scandal, and Gerald Ford ascend to the Presidency. They were tumultuous times. Yet those transitions of power happened peaceably, without gunfire or military engagement, and all according the United States Constitution.
But President Obama spent ages 6-10 in Indonesia, under the Presidency of Suharto, the second President of Indonesia who clung to power for over thirty years (1967-1998). Suharto was an anti-communist, and definitely a friend to the West during the Cold War. Nonetheless, Suharto built a strong, centralized, militaristic government around himself, and fought-off multiple coup attempts from the Indonesian Communist Party. Suffice it to say that the young Barack Obama spent some early and formative years in an environment where communism was alive and well. Might his perspective on the world be a bit different from yours or mine?
Americans will probably never “obey” President Obama the way he might like us to. The real question is whether Congress will simply “obey” the President - or provide a “balance” to his quest for power.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Why are Americans disobeying President Obama?
Because in the United States, most adults don’t think of themselves as helpless children, and we don’t regard out President as one to be “obeyed.”
We entrust tremendous power to our President (although that power is not ultimate or without limits). We may admire, esteem, respect, and place our hopes in the office of the President, if not the occupant of the office. And we “follow” our President, however willingly or unwillingly, as he leads the nation over the course of time.
But we don’t “obey.” In The United States, our President is one of us. So why is President Obama seemingly so indignant that Americans have dared to question, doubt, and even disagree with his plans to take-over the American medical profession, and the American healthcare industry?
I’m not merely observing that Obama is arrogant - there’s nothing new about big ego’s in the White House. Even our second President, John Adams, thought he was such an obvious choice for the Presidency that he didn’t even campaign during his re-election bid, and was outraged when Thomas Jefferson un-seated him.
But in roughly seven months, President Barack Obama has demonstrated an unquenchable need to control the lives of private citizens, and the workings of private sector society, and his indignation is aimed at those who would question this. Two American car companies, multiple banks and financial institutions, the rates of salaries paid to business executives, the entire American medical profession and health care industry, even content on the internet - - Obama will control it all. He knows best in all circumstances, and our role is to simply comply.
Perhaps President Obama’s quest for control has something to do with his upbringing and family lineage. He likes to point out how important it is that he has lived overseas, how he understands the horrible ways in which Americans are perceived abroad (especially within the Muslim world), and how he is able to transcend our narrow, American points of view. But could it be that, despite his diverse, multicultural perspective, President Obama lacks a distinctly American perspective that is common among the several hundred million of us imperfect, limited, narrow people who actually grew up here? Could it be that President Obama perceives the very office that he occupies as being something different than what so many of us slow-thinking Americans perceive it to be?
Although our President barely knew the man, his father Barack Hussein Obama Sr. was, nonetheless a communist in the government of Kenya. The President’s Dad once theorized that it would be fine for the government to tax the wealthiest citizens in his country at a rate of 100%, so long as the “greater good” was served. Mr. Obama was eventually fired from his job in the Kenyan government, largely because Kenya was in the process of privatizing its economy, and he was severely out-of-step with his associates. But his ideas were nonetheless his, and Mr. Obama had a clear preference for the heavy hand of government, over the allegedly “greedy,” “selfish” tendencies of business owners.
In my previous writings about this matter, readers have been quick to tell me how rude, insensitive, and “racist” I am. But how many American Presidents, how many American citizens, have come from this kind of legacy? If one’s personal heritage has any impact on one’s present-day existence, surely President Obama’s family heritage of communism has, in some fashion, informed his view of the world today.
And what about our President’s early upbringing? It certainly contrasts sharply with mine. During my first through fourth grade years in an American public school, I experienced President Richard Nixon win re-election in a landslide, Vice President Spiro Agnew resign in scandal, Gerald Ford appointed to the Vice Presidency as Agnew’s replacement, Richard Nixon resign in scandal, and Gerald Ford ascend to the Presidency. They were tumultuous times. Yet those transitions of power happened peaceably, without gunfire or military engagement, and all according the United States Constitution.
But President Obama spent ages 6-10 in Indonesia, under the Presidency of Suharto, the second President of Indonesia who clung to power for over thirty years (1967-1998). Suharto was an anti-communist, and definitely a friend to the West during the Cold War. Nonetheless, Suharto built a strong, centralized, militaristic government around himself, and fought-off multiple coup attempts from the Indonesian Communist Party. Suffice it to say that the young Barack Obama spent some early and formative years in an environment where communism was alive and well. Might his perspective on the world be a bit different from yours or mine?
Americans will probably never “obey” President Obama the way he might like us to. The real question is whether Congress will simply “obey” the President - or provide a “balance” to his quest for power.
Dr. House And Mr. Obama
David R. Stokes
Sunday, July 26, 2009
If healthcare reform, Obama style, gets traction and becomes the new reality in America, one completely overlooked consequence will be that the highly-popular television show, HOUSE, will have to say “yes, we can” and go off the air. Or at-the-least, the program will have to be shortened to one act, focused completely on a waiting room and with the only dramatic tension being just which one test the team will choose to run.
If you are not a regular viewer, what you need to know is that the fictional Dr. Gregory House, played by British actor Hugh Laurie, is a medical genius. He heads up a team of brilliant diagnosticians at a New Jersey teaching hospital and each episode necessarily involves a quest, via many tests and approaches, to figure out what usually-obscure illness threatens the life of the patient du jour.
It’s Sherlock Holmes in an emergency room stuff – sort of a “what done it?”
A few years ago, I had some pain in my chest and went to a local emergency room. I was admitted to the hospital for some tests. They put me on a treadmill, wired me for sound, and later did this thing called a “chemical stress test.” That’s code for: “Injection of weapons grade uranium into patient to cause meltdown.” There was one more test they could have done. In fact, one doctor strongly recommended it. It is called cardiac catheterization. A doctor inserts a thin plastic tube into an artery or vein in the arm or leg. From there it can be advanced into the chambers of the heart or into the coronary arteries.
The test is really the gold standard when it comes to diagnosing a heart problem. It’s also apparently quite expensive. Alas, the good doctor who wanted to see it done was overruled by my HMO – I won’t mention the name of the company, let’s just say it sounds a little bit like “Permanent Czar.”
I passed all the tests – no heart problem – and headed home. But my wife and I had a nagging question: Would that heart catheterization test have been a smart thing to have?
Over the next several days I received calls and emails from friends all over the country and I began to notice an anecdotal trend. I heard testimony from people who had gone through what I had experienced, with all tests coming back fine, only to do the heart catheterization and find a serious arterial blockage requiring emergency surgery.
One such call was from my favorite liberal Democrat and good friend, Bob Beckel. He told the same story – test after test came back negative, then the heart cath and a trip to multiple by-pass land. He and others told me to pitch a fit with my czarist (Germanic form) health insurance company and keep doing so until they agreed to pay for the test. So I did.
Already-too-long story short, I had the heart catheterization test done four months after my hospitalization, and thankfully it also indicated that there was nothing wrong; except for the stress of having to go through that period, fighting all the way, to get what could and should have been done during my prior hospital stay. That would have saved time, maybe even a little money.
Now, here is my question: How is health care reform ala Obama going to do anything other than make it even harder to get such a test done?
Does anyone without a power-grab agenda seriously believe that government-run health care will make it more likely that an expensive test will be run after several others have indicated no problem? Calling Dr. House, Dr. Cuddy, Dr. House – I mean, really?
Many doctors already have to fight hospital administrators and health insurance companies en route to quality patient care. Just ask them. Will placing another level of authority over them, ceding more local turf to the feds, make things better?
Frankly, when I take a look at what health care could become in America if we don’t collectively say “No, we can’t,” I find myself pretty cool with my HMO. I know they get a bad rap, but if we don’t watch it, there will come a time when we look back and nostalgically refer to right now as “the good old days.”
Sure, some stuff is broken and needs to be fixed. Why not start with tort reform? Why are we not hearing about this from the White House and the Democrats in Congress?
Follow the money.
I actually think the whole issue is being framed incorrectly and therefore it is easily subject to misunderstanding, even manipulation. We don’t need health care reform. Our standard of care is pretty good. No, what people are really talking about is health coverage reform. But no plan on the table right now is able to even suggest the broadening of coverage to include those millions who don’t now have insurance, without compromising the quality of care.
We are at a crossroads on this issue as a culture. And many Americans – certainly many politicians – seem more than willing to trade our high standard of quality care for a model that dumbs it all down. We are on the verge of selling our national soul for a mess of perilous pottage, and in the end we will all suffer. Most of that suffering will be in long lines or crowded waiting rooms.
Has there ever been a situation in our history where increased government involvement in the actual running of something (not mere oversight, but managing the details day to day) has turned out to be a cost cutter? Anyone? Anyone?
Creating a system whereby a significant number of people can get a service for free that others must pay for does not tend to keep overall costs down. In fact, they skyrocket, placing an even greater burden on those who pay. It’s misguided compassion and inherently based on class-envy.
And don’t even get me started on the whole privacy-medical-records thing. Recently, I had a conversation with a family – military people – and they have been looking forward to a particular promotion. The problem was with a visit to the doctor a while back and the casual mentioning of “anxiety” to the physician. This led to the insertion of a comment on the computerized record that found its way to a decision maker on the promotion issue. Bottom line, the advance was nixed. Not because of any real issue, but because an annotation carelessly made, and subject to misinterpretation, became part of the record extant.
Welcome to your future if the Dems have their way with one fifth of the U.S. economy.
Finally, as I finish my health care rant, I can’t help but bring up the issue of evangelicals and Obama, at least in the context of so many younger ones lending him their support last fall. My conversations with many young-Obama-evangelicals suggested that the number one reason they were willing to, in effect, abandon vital conservative evangelical positions such as the pro-life issue, had to do with temporal concerns and compassion, particularly the idea of providing universal health care.
Now, six months into his administration, and as the details of his plan (or stealthy lack thereof) come into at least marginally better focus, I wonder if some of those hip “values” voters who bought into the mania have any remorse? And when his plans sink under the weight of their sheer audacity, will it have been worth it?
Maybe many will be dazed and confused and left to ponder life without utopian fixes and reflecting as Dr. House did in episode number 119: "It does tell us something. Though I have no idea what."
Sunday, July 26, 2009
If healthcare reform, Obama style, gets traction and becomes the new reality in America, one completely overlooked consequence will be that the highly-popular television show, HOUSE, will have to say “yes, we can” and go off the air. Or at-the-least, the program will have to be shortened to one act, focused completely on a waiting room and with the only dramatic tension being just which one test the team will choose to run.
If you are not a regular viewer, what you need to know is that the fictional Dr. Gregory House, played by British actor Hugh Laurie, is a medical genius. He heads up a team of brilliant diagnosticians at a New Jersey teaching hospital and each episode necessarily involves a quest, via many tests and approaches, to figure out what usually-obscure illness threatens the life of the patient du jour.
It’s Sherlock Holmes in an emergency room stuff – sort of a “what done it?”
A few years ago, I had some pain in my chest and went to a local emergency room. I was admitted to the hospital for some tests. They put me on a treadmill, wired me for sound, and later did this thing called a “chemical stress test.” That’s code for: “Injection of weapons grade uranium into patient to cause meltdown.” There was one more test they could have done. In fact, one doctor strongly recommended it. It is called cardiac catheterization. A doctor inserts a thin plastic tube into an artery or vein in the arm or leg. From there it can be advanced into the chambers of the heart or into the coronary arteries.
The test is really the gold standard when it comes to diagnosing a heart problem. It’s also apparently quite expensive. Alas, the good doctor who wanted to see it done was overruled by my HMO – I won’t mention the name of the company, let’s just say it sounds a little bit like “Permanent Czar.”
I passed all the tests – no heart problem – and headed home. But my wife and I had a nagging question: Would that heart catheterization test have been a smart thing to have?
Over the next several days I received calls and emails from friends all over the country and I began to notice an anecdotal trend. I heard testimony from people who had gone through what I had experienced, with all tests coming back fine, only to do the heart catheterization and find a serious arterial blockage requiring emergency surgery.
One such call was from my favorite liberal Democrat and good friend, Bob Beckel. He told the same story – test after test came back negative, then the heart cath and a trip to multiple by-pass land. He and others told me to pitch a fit with my czarist (Germanic form) health insurance company and keep doing so until they agreed to pay for the test. So I did.
Already-too-long story short, I had the heart catheterization test done four months after my hospitalization, and thankfully it also indicated that there was nothing wrong; except for the stress of having to go through that period, fighting all the way, to get what could and should have been done during my prior hospital stay. That would have saved time, maybe even a little money.
Now, here is my question: How is health care reform ala Obama going to do anything other than make it even harder to get such a test done?
Does anyone without a power-grab agenda seriously believe that government-run health care will make it more likely that an expensive test will be run after several others have indicated no problem? Calling Dr. House, Dr. Cuddy, Dr. House – I mean, really?
Many doctors already have to fight hospital administrators and health insurance companies en route to quality patient care. Just ask them. Will placing another level of authority over them, ceding more local turf to the feds, make things better?
Frankly, when I take a look at what health care could become in America if we don’t collectively say “No, we can’t,” I find myself pretty cool with my HMO. I know they get a bad rap, but if we don’t watch it, there will come a time when we look back and nostalgically refer to right now as “the good old days.”
Sure, some stuff is broken and needs to be fixed. Why not start with tort reform? Why are we not hearing about this from the White House and the Democrats in Congress?
Follow the money.
I actually think the whole issue is being framed incorrectly and therefore it is easily subject to misunderstanding, even manipulation. We don’t need health care reform. Our standard of care is pretty good. No, what people are really talking about is health coverage reform. But no plan on the table right now is able to even suggest the broadening of coverage to include those millions who don’t now have insurance, without compromising the quality of care.
We are at a crossroads on this issue as a culture. And many Americans – certainly many politicians – seem more than willing to trade our high standard of quality care for a model that dumbs it all down. We are on the verge of selling our national soul for a mess of perilous pottage, and in the end we will all suffer. Most of that suffering will be in long lines or crowded waiting rooms.
Has there ever been a situation in our history where increased government involvement in the actual running of something (not mere oversight, but managing the details day to day) has turned out to be a cost cutter? Anyone? Anyone?
Creating a system whereby a significant number of people can get a service for free that others must pay for does not tend to keep overall costs down. In fact, they skyrocket, placing an even greater burden on those who pay. It’s misguided compassion and inherently based on class-envy.
And don’t even get me started on the whole privacy-medical-records thing. Recently, I had a conversation with a family – military people – and they have been looking forward to a particular promotion. The problem was with a visit to the doctor a while back and the casual mentioning of “anxiety” to the physician. This led to the insertion of a comment on the computerized record that found its way to a decision maker on the promotion issue. Bottom line, the advance was nixed. Not because of any real issue, but because an annotation carelessly made, and subject to misinterpretation, became part of the record extant.
Welcome to your future if the Dems have their way with one fifth of the U.S. economy.
Finally, as I finish my health care rant, I can’t help but bring up the issue of evangelicals and Obama, at least in the context of so many younger ones lending him their support last fall. My conversations with many young-Obama-evangelicals suggested that the number one reason they were willing to, in effect, abandon vital conservative evangelical positions such as the pro-life issue, had to do with temporal concerns and compassion, particularly the idea of providing universal health care.
Now, six months into his administration, and as the details of his plan (or stealthy lack thereof) come into at least marginally better focus, I wonder if some of those hip “values” voters who bought into the mania have any remorse? And when his plans sink under the weight of their sheer audacity, will it have been worth it?
Maybe many will be dazed and confused and left to ponder life without utopian fixes and reflecting as Dr. House did in episode number 119: "It does tell us something. Though I have no idea what."
The states and the people vs. the U.S. of Centralization
Paul Jacob
Sunday, July 26, 2009
State Senator Randy Brogdon is running for the position of Oklahoma governor. A principled, issues-oriented candidate, he naturally has big plans for his state. But one of his most interesting ambitions is this: To join the elite ranks of governors Phil Bredesen (Tennessee) and Sarah Palin (Alaska), who are gubernatorial signatories to their state’s resolutions asserting state sovereignty.
Brogdon was one of the major players in Oklahoma’s senate backing of House Concurrent Resolution 1028, in May. He had previously supported a similar measure, with teeth, which the state’s governor had vetoed. The current resolution requires no further signature; it has already been sent to the U.S. president and Congress.
But from what I can tell Brogdon would like to put his John Hancock on such a declaration.
After all, Governor Palin made big news by signing her state’s resolution. Precisely what her signature signified became yet one more datum to dwell on after she had signed her own resignation. But the real significance of Alaska’s resolution is the same as in Tennessee and Oklahoma and the other states that have passed sovereignty resolutions:
Something is changing in our political culture.
All these resolutions have passed state legislatures. It’s not just lone “whacko” governors doing the deed. Deliberative bodies have decided these measures. Something big may be afoot.
What is it?
Opposition to bigness and “limitlessness” in the federal government.
Randy Brogdon expressed the idea well enough. He said that Oklahoma is telling folks in Washington, DC, “loud and clear to end all federal mandates that are beyond the scope of powers specifically outlined in the Constitution.” He specifically mentioned the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind and some provisions of Homeland Security as federal usurpations of state powers.
It all comes down to the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” It is upon this provision that these state sovereignty resolutions rest. This drive has been dubbed the Tenth Amendment Movement.
New Hampshire’s sovereignty resolution makes the case especially pointed:
And these resolutions are, at present, declarations of intent. But when shove comes to push us around, what will happen?
The biggest recent showdowns have occurred over medical marijuana. The people of states like California and Oregon (and many others), taking up their powers through petition and the citizen initiative, have instituted laws more lenient on one psychoactive drug than the federal government has, in effect legalizing cannabis for certain uses. The federal government retaliated, arresting citizens distributing the drug legally by state law. A number of these legal operators have been jailed in this individual rights/state powers/ federal usurpation war.
A related issue confronts the delegated power doctrine perhaps more directly, more explicitly as a principled issue of state prerogative. The issue is about medicine. Not puff-puff medicine, but socialized medicine.
While the Democratic-controlled Congress, under the leadership of the much-admired (but increasingly disappointing) President Barack Obama, is pushing for a meddlesome “universal coverage” medical policy package, a lot of people are becoming increasingly apprehensive. In Arizona, politicians are trying to do something about it.
Last year, an initiative proposition, Proposition 101 — the Freedom of Choice in Health Care Initiative — went down to a narrow defeat. The defeat was so narrow that proponents convinced the Arizona legislature to repackage the measure’s ideas into a referendum to be held next year, the Arizona Health Insurance Reform Amendment.
As I discussed in a recent Common Sense radio spot, this proposed constitutional amendment has some interesting features:
What I like about this measure, especially, is the twist it gives on the Tenth Amendment. The Tenth Amendment does not just defend states’ powers against federal government’s expanding powers. It defends the people’s powers, too. And what can those be?
Well, the Arizona measure began as an iniatiative and now goes to the general ballot as a legislative referral. It recognizes the people’s power to make law. It recognizes the people’s sovereignty. Just like the Tenth Amendment’s recognition of “powers . . . reserved . . . to the people.”
And it is placing this people power directly against the federal government.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
State Senator Randy Brogdon is running for the position of Oklahoma governor. A principled, issues-oriented candidate, he naturally has big plans for his state. But one of his most interesting ambitions is this: To join the elite ranks of governors Phil Bredesen (Tennessee) and Sarah Palin (Alaska), who are gubernatorial signatories to their state’s resolutions asserting state sovereignty.
Brogdon was one of the major players in Oklahoma’s senate backing of House Concurrent Resolution 1028, in May. He had previously supported a similar measure, with teeth, which the state’s governor had vetoed. The current resolution requires no further signature; it has already been sent to the U.S. president and Congress.
But from what I can tell Brogdon would like to put his John Hancock on such a declaration.
After all, Governor Palin made big news by signing her state’s resolution. Precisely what her signature signified became yet one more datum to dwell on after she had signed her own resignation. But the real significance of Alaska’s resolution is the same as in Tennessee and Oklahoma and the other states that have passed sovereignty resolutions:
Something is changing in our political culture.
All these resolutions have passed state legislatures. It’s not just lone “whacko” governors doing the deed. Deliberative bodies have decided these measures. Something big may be afoot.
What is it?
Opposition to bigness and “limitlessness” in the federal government.
Randy Brogdon expressed the idea well enough. He said that Oklahoma is telling folks in Washington, DC, “loud and clear to end all federal mandates that are beyond the scope of powers specifically outlined in the Constitution.” He specifically mentioned the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind and some provisions of Homeland Security as federal usurpations of state powers.
It all comes down to the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” It is upon this provision that these state sovereignty resolutions rest. This drive has been dubbed the Tenth Amendment Movement.
New Hampshire’s sovereignty resolution makes the case especially pointed:
[T]he several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General [federal] Government . . . and . . . whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force. . . .The trick, of course, will be to make the theoretically void the practically void. States rights, though argued from Jefferson’s time onward, have lost traction with the rise of the American nation state. Nowadays, of course, state and local governments find themselves relying on the federal government’s illegal largesse, so breaking free becomes especially difficult for politicians who like to spend money. For these and other reasons, federalism, with it the doctrine of delegated powers, is honored more often in the breach than in the act.
And these resolutions are, at present, declarations of intent. But when shove comes to push us around, what will happen?
The biggest recent showdowns have occurred over medical marijuana. The people of states like California and Oregon (and many others), taking up their powers through petition and the citizen initiative, have instituted laws more lenient on one psychoactive drug than the federal government has, in effect legalizing cannabis for certain uses. The federal government retaliated, arresting citizens distributing the drug legally by state law. A number of these legal operators have been jailed in this individual rights/state powers/ federal usurpation war.
A related issue confronts the delegated power doctrine perhaps more directly, more explicitly as a principled issue of state prerogative. The issue is about medicine. Not puff-puff medicine, but socialized medicine.
While the Democratic-controlled Congress, under the leadership of the much-admired (but increasingly disappointing) President Barack Obama, is pushing for a meddlesome “universal coverage” medical policy package, a lot of people are becoming increasingly apprehensive. In Arizona, politicians are trying to do something about it.
Last year, an initiative proposition, Proposition 101 — the Freedom of Choice in Health Care Initiative — went down to a narrow defeat. The defeat was so narrow that proponents convinced the Arizona legislature to repackage the measure’s ideas into a referendum to be held next year, the Arizona Health Insurance Reform Amendment.
As I discussed in a recent Common Sense radio spot, this proposed constitutional amendment has some interesting features:
The first plank states that “a law or rule shall not compel, directly or indirectly, any person, employer or health care provider to participate in any health care system." The second plank says that no one shall be fined for paying — or accepting payments — for otherwise lawful health care services.These fly in the face of our federal government’s current and demonstrated meddling intent.
What I like about this measure, especially, is the twist it gives on the Tenth Amendment. The Tenth Amendment does not just defend states’ powers against federal government’s expanding powers. It defends the people’s powers, too. And what can those be?
Well, the Arizona measure began as an iniatiative and now goes to the general ballot as a legislative referral. It recognizes the people’s power to make law. It recognizes the people’s sovereignty. Just like the Tenth Amendment’s recognition of “powers . . . reserved . . . to the people.”
And it is placing this people power directly against the federal government.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Promoting Racial Paranoia
In his comments Wednesday, Obama recycled long-discredited anti-cop fictions.
By Heather Mac Donald
Friday, July 24, 2009
Henry Louis Gates Jr. has threatened to make a documentary on “racial profiling” in the wake of his highly publicized arrest for disorderly conduct on July 16. It’s going to be a very long film, given the Harvard professor’s exceedingly expansive definition of what counts as biased policing. Unfortunately, Pres. Barack Obama’s take on police work is no more reality-based than Gates’s. Obama’s ill-considered lecture on the Gates arrest controversy during his Wednesday prime-time press conference was replete with ACLU misinformation about policing, misinformation that has been repeatedly refuted by the federal government itself.
But whereas Gates’s rantings about police bias might ultimately be dismissed as standard ivory-tower posturing, Obama has now put the presidential imprimatur on a set of untruths that will only fuel disrespect for the law and impede the police in their efforts to protect inner-city residents from crime. His belated recognition Thursday night that the arresting officer in the Cambridge incident was performing his duty hardly undoes the damage from his previous distortions.
Let’s acknowledge up front that Gates endured a bizarre and humiliating experience. Being escorted out of your home in handcuffs for what you perceive as no offense at all would feel like a grotesque invasion of privacy, due process, and property rights. Gates’s anger is therefore understandable. But just because an incident is — from one’s subjective perspective — unjustified does not make it racial. Gates was almost certainly not arrested because he was black, but quite possibly because he committed “contempt of cop,” an extralegal offense that can greatly affect the outcome of officer-civilian interactions.
Gates, however, sees race and racism in every aspect of this unfortunate episode, thus exemplifying the racial paranoia that can make police work so difficult. He accuses the witness who called in a possible burglary incident of “racial profiling” for merely describing what she saw. Here, in Gates’s own words, is what the caller observed: Gates and his “regular driver” from his “regular car service” were both on his front porch, “fiddl[ing] with the door.” (The New York Times recasts this delicious nugget from Gates’s limousine-liberal lifestyle as an interaction with a mere “taxi driver.”) Next, says Gates, “[m]y driver hit the door [which was jammed] with his shoulder and the door popped open.”
The caller’s 911 report, according to Gates, “said that that two big black men were trying to break in with backpacks on.” Such a description, provided undoubtedly under stress, is accurate enough under the circumstances. “My driver,” acknowledges Gates, “is a large black man.” But Gates calls it “the worst racial profiling I’ve ever heard of in my life.” Why? Simply because Gates himself is not “big.” But a rough description of individuals engaged in what to most observers would appear to be suspicious behavior, no matter the race of the individuals, is not “racial profiling,” it is simply ordinary crime reporting. Gates undoubtedly means to imply that the 911 caller, in her timorous white racism, sees every black man as “big,” but it is he who is engaged in racial stereotyping, not her.
Gates’s interpretation of the actions of the officer who answered the 911 call is just as narcissistic and deluded. As soon as the officer asked Gates to step onto the porch to speak with him, Gates started a long tirade against the officer’s racism, according to the police report. Nothing provides stronger corroboration of this allegation in the report than Gates’s own racially fevered account of the episode. There was nothing inappropriate, much less racist, in the officer’s request.
Confronting unknown suspects in dwellings and cars, where the officer cannot see the suspect’s full environment or hands, is the most dangerous activity that cops undertake. Six officers have been seriously wounded, two fatally, by suspects holed up in houses in Oakland and Jersey City this year; in 2007, an NYPD officer was shot dead by three thugs during a car stop. In the Cambridge burglary investigation, the officer was working by himself, without back-up. He had no idea whether he was confronting two armed suspects.
But Gates sees himself as the victim of police bias from the beginning of the interaction through its end. He shoehorns the incident into the standard racial-profiling narrative that the ACLU has honed to dishonest perfection over the years, in which the police allegedly grab any black man they can get their hands on just to make an arrest: “You can’t just presume I’m guilty and arrest me. . . . He just presumed that I was guilty and he presumed that I was guilty because I was black. There was no doubt about that. . . . I would hope that the police wouldn’t arrest the first black man that they saw.”
Gates seems not to understand that he was arrested for disorderly conduct, not for burglary. He was not “the first black man that [the officers] saw” committing what they viewed as disorderly conduct; he was the only man they saw committing disorderly conduct. If arresting a man for an offense committed in the officer’s presence constitutes “racial profiling,” then the most legally unimpeachable aspect of police work has been discredited.
It is certainly possible to debate whether Gates’s escalating verbal abuse of the investigating officer and refusal to cooperate with his requests rose to the level of criminal conduct. Most certainly, it lay within Sgt. James Crowley’s discretion not to make the arrest — and in retrospect, it would have been preferable if he had thanked Gates for his cooperation and walked away from the provocation. I would guess that Sergeant Crowley simply snapped under Gates’s taunts and chose to teach him a lesson for the informal offense of contempt of cop — an understandable, if less than ideal, reaction, but not a racist one. Crowley, even by Gates’s account, acted politely throughout the interaction.
Gates’s post-incident rantings were bad enough before President Obama made this otherwise trivial incident a matter of presidential attention. Obama does not seem to understand the power of his office. If he is going to weigh in on something as crucial to the health of cities as policing, he had better get his facts straight. But everything that he said about the Cambridge confrontation was untrue. He presents a highly telescoped version of the events that echoes Gates’s implication that he was arrested on the burglary charge: “The Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home,” Obama intoned. But Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct; his being in his own home is irrelevant.
Obama then decided he was going to give us a history lesson: “What I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”
This statement has many possible meanings, all of them untrue.
The ACLU and other anti-police activists have alleged for years that blacks are the victims of disproportionate and unjustified traffic stops, a charge that has become received wisdom among large swathes of the population. It happens to be contradicted by drivers themselves. The Bureau of Justice Statistics regularly polls tens of thousands of civilians about their contacts with the police. Virtually identical proportions of white, black, and Hispanic drivers — 9 percent — report being stopped by the police, though in 2005, the self-reported black stop rate — 8.1 percent — was nearly a percentage point lower than the self-reported white stop rate (8.9 percent). The stop rate for blacks is lower during the day, when officers can more readily see a driver’s race.
As for urban policing — where the police have victim identifications and contextual and behavioral cues to work with — blacks are stopped more, but only in comparison with their proportion of the entire population. Measured against their crime rate, they are understopped. New York City is perfectly typical of the black police-stop and crime rates. In the first three months of 2009, 52 percent of all people stopped for questioning by the police in New York City were black, though blacks are just 24 percent of the population. But according to the victims of and witnesses to crime, blacks commit about 68 percent of all violent crime in the city. Blacks commit 82 percent of all shootings and 72 percent of all robberies, whereas whites, who make up 35 percent of the city's population, commit about 5 percent of all violent crimes, 1 percent of shootings, and about 4 percent of robberies.
These figures are not police-generated; they come from the overwhelmingly minority victims of crime in their reports to the police. Such crime reports mean that when the police respond to community demands for protection against crime, information-based police deployment will send officers to minority neighborhoods where crime is highest. When the police respond to a call about a shooting, they will almost never be told that the shooter was white, and thus will not be searching for a white suspect.
National crime patterns are the same. Black males between the ages of 18 and 24 commit homicide at ten times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. Such vastly disproportionate crime rates must lead, if the police are going after crime in a color-blind fashion, to disproportionate stop and arrest rates. To criticize the police for crime-determined enforcement activity is to blame the messenger.
Obama has no one around him who could disabuse him of his ignorance about the police. Attorney General Eric Holder enthusiastically participated in the reign of unjustified federal consent decrees that the Justice Department slapped on police departments during the Clinton administration. Worrisomely, Obama gestures towards those days when he says that “we’re working with local law enforcement to improve policing techniques so that we’re eliminating potential bias,” as if Justice Department lawyers know a thing about “policing techniques.”
Obama’s prime-time recycling of advocate-generated myths about policing will only make inner-city neighborhoods more dangerous for their many law-abiding residents. No one benefits more from proactive policing than the poor, who have as much of a right to public safety as Cambridge residents. Officer Crowley was only doing his job, without any manifestation of racial bias. Now, if an officer investigates a 911 call in good faith, who knows if the president will say he acted “stupidly?” Why bother putting your reputation on the line? The blow to police morale from Obama’s gratuitous remarks is enormous.
Worse, Obama has only increased the racial paranoia that Gates put so vividly on display. Officers of all races say that the first thing out of a black driver’s mouth during a traffic stop for speeding or running a red light is often: “You only stopped me because I’m black,” a reaction ginned up by decades of anti-cop agitating and now bolstered by Obama’s recycled fictions. The advocate-fueled resentment of the police in inner-city neighborhoods makes crime fighting more difficult and more dangerous. Obama’s hope for reviving urban economies rests on a crucial precondition: that cities stay safe. He has just put that precondition in jeopardy.
By Heather Mac Donald
Friday, July 24, 2009
Henry Louis Gates Jr. has threatened to make a documentary on “racial profiling” in the wake of his highly publicized arrest for disorderly conduct on July 16. It’s going to be a very long film, given the Harvard professor’s exceedingly expansive definition of what counts as biased policing. Unfortunately, Pres. Barack Obama’s take on police work is no more reality-based than Gates’s. Obama’s ill-considered lecture on the Gates arrest controversy during his Wednesday prime-time press conference was replete with ACLU misinformation about policing, misinformation that has been repeatedly refuted by the federal government itself.
But whereas Gates’s rantings about police bias might ultimately be dismissed as standard ivory-tower posturing, Obama has now put the presidential imprimatur on a set of untruths that will only fuel disrespect for the law and impede the police in their efforts to protect inner-city residents from crime. His belated recognition Thursday night that the arresting officer in the Cambridge incident was performing his duty hardly undoes the damage from his previous distortions.
Let’s acknowledge up front that Gates endured a bizarre and humiliating experience. Being escorted out of your home in handcuffs for what you perceive as no offense at all would feel like a grotesque invasion of privacy, due process, and property rights. Gates’s anger is therefore understandable. But just because an incident is — from one’s subjective perspective — unjustified does not make it racial. Gates was almost certainly not arrested because he was black, but quite possibly because he committed “contempt of cop,” an extralegal offense that can greatly affect the outcome of officer-civilian interactions.
Gates, however, sees race and racism in every aspect of this unfortunate episode, thus exemplifying the racial paranoia that can make police work so difficult. He accuses the witness who called in a possible burglary incident of “racial profiling” for merely describing what she saw. Here, in Gates’s own words, is what the caller observed: Gates and his “regular driver” from his “regular car service” were both on his front porch, “fiddl[ing] with the door.” (The New York Times recasts this delicious nugget from Gates’s limousine-liberal lifestyle as an interaction with a mere “taxi driver.”) Next, says Gates, “[m]y driver hit the door [which was jammed] with his shoulder and the door popped open.”
The caller’s 911 report, according to Gates, “said that that two big black men were trying to break in with backpacks on.” Such a description, provided undoubtedly under stress, is accurate enough under the circumstances. “My driver,” acknowledges Gates, “is a large black man.” But Gates calls it “the worst racial profiling I’ve ever heard of in my life.” Why? Simply because Gates himself is not “big.” But a rough description of individuals engaged in what to most observers would appear to be suspicious behavior, no matter the race of the individuals, is not “racial profiling,” it is simply ordinary crime reporting. Gates undoubtedly means to imply that the 911 caller, in her timorous white racism, sees every black man as “big,” but it is he who is engaged in racial stereotyping, not her.
Gates’s interpretation of the actions of the officer who answered the 911 call is just as narcissistic and deluded. As soon as the officer asked Gates to step onto the porch to speak with him, Gates started a long tirade against the officer’s racism, according to the police report. Nothing provides stronger corroboration of this allegation in the report than Gates’s own racially fevered account of the episode. There was nothing inappropriate, much less racist, in the officer’s request.
Confronting unknown suspects in dwellings and cars, where the officer cannot see the suspect’s full environment or hands, is the most dangerous activity that cops undertake. Six officers have been seriously wounded, two fatally, by suspects holed up in houses in Oakland and Jersey City this year; in 2007, an NYPD officer was shot dead by three thugs during a car stop. In the Cambridge burglary investigation, the officer was working by himself, without back-up. He had no idea whether he was confronting two armed suspects.
But Gates sees himself as the victim of police bias from the beginning of the interaction through its end. He shoehorns the incident into the standard racial-profiling narrative that the ACLU has honed to dishonest perfection over the years, in which the police allegedly grab any black man they can get their hands on just to make an arrest: “You can’t just presume I’m guilty and arrest me. . . . He just presumed that I was guilty and he presumed that I was guilty because I was black. There was no doubt about that. . . . I would hope that the police wouldn’t arrest the first black man that they saw.”
Gates seems not to understand that he was arrested for disorderly conduct, not for burglary. He was not “the first black man that [the officers] saw” committing what they viewed as disorderly conduct; he was the only man they saw committing disorderly conduct. If arresting a man for an offense committed in the officer’s presence constitutes “racial profiling,” then the most legally unimpeachable aspect of police work has been discredited.
It is certainly possible to debate whether Gates’s escalating verbal abuse of the investigating officer and refusal to cooperate with his requests rose to the level of criminal conduct. Most certainly, it lay within Sgt. James Crowley’s discretion not to make the arrest — and in retrospect, it would have been preferable if he had thanked Gates for his cooperation and walked away from the provocation. I would guess that Sergeant Crowley simply snapped under Gates’s taunts and chose to teach him a lesson for the informal offense of contempt of cop — an understandable, if less than ideal, reaction, but not a racist one. Crowley, even by Gates’s account, acted politely throughout the interaction.
Gates’s post-incident rantings were bad enough before President Obama made this otherwise trivial incident a matter of presidential attention. Obama does not seem to understand the power of his office. If he is going to weigh in on something as crucial to the health of cities as policing, he had better get his facts straight. But everything that he said about the Cambridge confrontation was untrue. He presents a highly telescoped version of the events that echoes Gates’s implication that he was arrested on the burglary charge: “The Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home,” Obama intoned. But Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct; his being in his own home is irrelevant.
Obama then decided he was going to give us a history lesson: “What I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”
This statement has many possible meanings, all of them untrue.
The ACLU and other anti-police activists have alleged for years that blacks are the victims of disproportionate and unjustified traffic stops, a charge that has become received wisdom among large swathes of the population. It happens to be contradicted by drivers themselves. The Bureau of Justice Statistics regularly polls tens of thousands of civilians about their contacts with the police. Virtually identical proportions of white, black, and Hispanic drivers — 9 percent — report being stopped by the police, though in 2005, the self-reported black stop rate — 8.1 percent — was nearly a percentage point lower than the self-reported white stop rate (8.9 percent). The stop rate for blacks is lower during the day, when officers can more readily see a driver’s race.
As for urban policing — where the police have victim identifications and contextual and behavioral cues to work with — blacks are stopped more, but only in comparison with their proportion of the entire population. Measured against their crime rate, they are understopped. New York City is perfectly typical of the black police-stop and crime rates. In the first three months of 2009, 52 percent of all people stopped for questioning by the police in New York City were black, though blacks are just 24 percent of the population. But according to the victims of and witnesses to crime, blacks commit about 68 percent of all violent crime in the city. Blacks commit 82 percent of all shootings and 72 percent of all robberies, whereas whites, who make up 35 percent of the city's population, commit about 5 percent of all violent crimes, 1 percent of shootings, and about 4 percent of robberies.
These figures are not police-generated; they come from the overwhelmingly minority victims of crime in their reports to the police. Such crime reports mean that when the police respond to community demands for protection against crime, information-based police deployment will send officers to minority neighborhoods where crime is highest. When the police respond to a call about a shooting, they will almost never be told that the shooter was white, and thus will not be searching for a white suspect.
National crime patterns are the same. Black males between the ages of 18 and 24 commit homicide at ten times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. Such vastly disproportionate crime rates must lead, if the police are going after crime in a color-blind fashion, to disproportionate stop and arrest rates. To criticize the police for crime-determined enforcement activity is to blame the messenger.
Obama has no one around him who could disabuse him of his ignorance about the police. Attorney General Eric Holder enthusiastically participated in the reign of unjustified federal consent decrees that the Justice Department slapped on police departments during the Clinton administration. Worrisomely, Obama gestures towards those days when he says that “we’re working with local law enforcement to improve policing techniques so that we’re eliminating potential bias,” as if Justice Department lawyers know a thing about “policing techniques.”
Obama’s prime-time recycling of advocate-generated myths about policing will only make inner-city neighborhoods more dangerous for their many law-abiding residents. No one benefits more from proactive policing than the poor, who have as much of a right to public safety as Cambridge residents. Officer Crowley was only doing his job, without any manifestation of racial bias. Now, if an officer investigates a 911 call in good faith, who knows if the president will say he acted “stupidly?” Why bother putting your reputation on the line? The blow to police morale from Obama’s gratuitous remarks is enormous.
Worse, Obama has only increased the racial paranoia that Gates put so vividly on display. Officers of all races say that the first thing out of a black driver’s mouth during a traffic stop for speeding or running a red light is often: “You only stopped me because I’m black,” a reaction ginned up by decades of anti-cop agitating and now bolstered by Obama’s recycled fictions. The advocate-fueled resentment of the police in inner-city neighborhoods makes crime fighting more difficult and more dangerous. Obama’s hope for reviving urban economies rests on a crucial precondition: that cities stay safe. He has just put that precondition in jeopardy.
The Folly of Obamacare
It’s a bait and switch.
By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, July 24, 2009
Let us for a moment adopt the proposition that health care is in fact a “right,” as pretty much every liberal politician has told us for at least a generation.
Now let us consider how President Obama’s proposed health-care bill would work. Under his plan, an official body — staffed with government doctors, actuaries, economists, and other experts — will determine which health-care treatments, procedures, and remedies are cost-effective and which are not. Then it will decide which ones will get paid for and which won’t. Would a 70-year-old woman be able to get a hip replacement, or would that not be considered a wise allocation of resources? Would a 50-year-old man not be permitted an expensive test his doctor wants if the rules say the cheaper, less-thorough one is sufficient? The Democrats call this “cost-controls.” But for the patient and the doctor, it’s plain old rationing.
Now, imagine if the government had a body of experts charged with figuring out what your free-speech rights are, or your right to assemble, or worship. Mr. Jones, you can say X and Y, but not Z. Ms. Smith, you can freely assemble with Aleutians, Freemasons, and carpenters, but you may not meet in public with anyone from Cleveland or of Albanian descent. Mrs. Wilson, you may pray to Vishnu and Crom, but never to Allah or Buddha, and when you do pray, you cannot do so for longer than 20 minutes at a time, unless it is one of several designated holidays. Please see Extended Prayer Form 10–22B.
Of course, all of this would be ludicrous beyond words.
Which is the whole point. Health care cannot be a right, because rights cannot come from government. At best, they can be protected by government. The founders understood this, which is why our Bill of Rights is really a list of restrictions on the government in Washington. “Congress shall make no law . . . ” is how the First Amendment begins.
Now, this isn’t to say the government can’t or shouldn’t provide health care to everyone. You have no right to a highway or sewer system, but there’s nothing wrong with government providing such things. Indeed, the Constitution says that government should promote the “general welfare.” And people of good will can argue whether or how much government-provided or -subsidized health care fits under that mandate.
Historically, the American people are keen on any proposal that expands freedom and are skeptical about anything that constricts it. Generally, this means that advocates for every new program or policy — from welfare to gay marriage — try their darnedest to frame their case in terms of extending choice and freedom.
The interesting thing is that it seems Americans have discovered that talk of health care as a “right” doesn’t mean expanding their own freedom. It means, at best, expanding the options of others at the expense of the middle class and, naturally, “the rich.”
Polling by the centrist think tank Third Way finds that the pivotal question for Americans is, “What’s in it for me?” And it seems President Obama hasn’t answered that to their satisfaction. Sixty percent of Americans think Obama’s health care plan will help someone other than them.
Many liberals frequently confuse widespread support for “reform” with support for massive new government involvement in health care. But when concrete proposals come down the pike, the issue changes from hypothetical support for fixing the problem to, again, “What’s in it for me?”
That’s why in his press conference Wednesday night, President Obama used very conservative, even free-market language to sell a program that is actually still premised on the left-wing nostrum that health care is a “right.” His plan will create “a marketplace that promotes choice and competition.” He’s in this to “control costs” and bring down the deficit.
Now, Obama has come nowhere near meeting the burden of proof that the still inchoate and murky proposals in a still half-baked health-care bill will do anything of the sort. Indeed, so far the more persuasive argument — backed up by the Congressional Budget Office and others — is that Obamacare will cost a lot of money. And the only way it can actually “save” money is by rationing care. But Obama understands that he cannot sell his health-care reform in the language of the Left.
So, it’s a bait and switch. If anything, the overriding idea behind Obama’s approach seems to be to rush his “public plan” into law and expand its generosity over time. This is the tribute a center-left president must pay to a center-right country.
He’s in such a hurry because he senses Americans understand a bait and switch when they see one. On Monday he even proclaimed, “The time for talking is through.”
In fact, it almost sounds like he actually does want to ration free speech, too.
By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, July 24, 2009
Let us for a moment adopt the proposition that health care is in fact a “right,” as pretty much every liberal politician has told us for at least a generation.
Now let us consider how President Obama’s proposed health-care bill would work. Under his plan, an official body — staffed with government doctors, actuaries, economists, and other experts — will determine which health-care treatments, procedures, and remedies are cost-effective and which are not. Then it will decide which ones will get paid for and which won’t. Would a 70-year-old woman be able to get a hip replacement, or would that not be considered a wise allocation of resources? Would a 50-year-old man not be permitted an expensive test his doctor wants if the rules say the cheaper, less-thorough one is sufficient? The Democrats call this “cost-controls.” But for the patient and the doctor, it’s plain old rationing.
Now, imagine if the government had a body of experts charged with figuring out what your free-speech rights are, or your right to assemble, or worship. Mr. Jones, you can say X and Y, but not Z. Ms. Smith, you can freely assemble with Aleutians, Freemasons, and carpenters, but you may not meet in public with anyone from Cleveland or of Albanian descent. Mrs. Wilson, you may pray to Vishnu and Crom, but never to Allah or Buddha, and when you do pray, you cannot do so for longer than 20 minutes at a time, unless it is one of several designated holidays. Please see Extended Prayer Form 10–22B.
Of course, all of this would be ludicrous beyond words.
Which is the whole point. Health care cannot be a right, because rights cannot come from government. At best, they can be protected by government. The founders understood this, which is why our Bill of Rights is really a list of restrictions on the government in Washington. “Congress shall make no law . . . ” is how the First Amendment begins.
Now, this isn’t to say the government can’t or shouldn’t provide health care to everyone. You have no right to a highway or sewer system, but there’s nothing wrong with government providing such things. Indeed, the Constitution says that government should promote the “general welfare.” And people of good will can argue whether or how much government-provided or -subsidized health care fits under that mandate.
Historically, the American people are keen on any proposal that expands freedom and are skeptical about anything that constricts it. Generally, this means that advocates for every new program or policy — from welfare to gay marriage — try their darnedest to frame their case in terms of extending choice and freedom.
The interesting thing is that it seems Americans have discovered that talk of health care as a “right” doesn’t mean expanding their own freedom. It means, at best, expanding the options of others at the expense of the middle class and, naturally, “the rich.”
Polling by the centrist think tank Third Way finds that the pivotal question for Americans is, “What’s in it for me?” And it seems President Obama hasn’t answered that to their satisfaction. Sixty percent of Americans think Obama’s health care plan will help someone other than them.
Many liberals frequently confuse widespread support for “reform” with support for massive new government involvement in health care. But when concrete proposals come down the pike, the issue changes from hypothetical support for fixing the problem to, again, “What’s in it for me?”
That’s why in his press conference Wednesday night, President Obama used very conservative, even free-market language to sell a program that is actually still premised on the left-wing nostrum that health care is a “right.” His plan will create “a marketplace that promotes choice and competition.” He’s in this to “control costs” and bring down the deficit.
Now, Obama has come nowhere near meeting the burden of proof that the still inchoate and murky proposals in a still half-baked health-care bill will do anything of the sort. Indeed, so far the more persuasive argument — backed up by the Congressional Budget Office and others — is that Obamacare will cost a lot of money. And the only way it can actually “save” money is by rationing care. But Obama understands that he cannot sell his health-care reform in the language of the Left.
So, it’s a bait and switch. If anything, the overriding idea behind Obama’s approach seems to be to rush his “public plan” into law and expand its generosity over time. This is the tribute a center-left president must pay to a center-right country.
He’s in such a hurry because he senses Americans understand a bait and switch when they see one. On Monday he even proclaimed, “The time for talking is through.”
In fact, it almost sounds like he actually does want to ration free speech, too.
Obama's Opinion of U.S. Health Care is Just Sick
Donald Lambro
Friday, July 24, 2009
WASHINGTON -- President Obama has been a fierce and relentless critic of America's medical-care system. Indeed, it's hard to recall when, if ever, he has had anything good to say about our private healthcare system.
Throughout his presidential campaign and the first six months of his presidency, he has made a practice of attacking just about every sector of the healthcare business: Hospitals are inefficient, wasteful and inept. Insurance companies charge way too much and make obscene profits. The pharmaceutical industry overcharges for the drugs they produce, despite research costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of lives prolonged and saved.
His generic mantra is that our healthcare system is dysfunctional and that, despite all the modern medical tests and high-tech diagnostic breakthroughs, we're not any healthier than we were before.
Really? Has Obama missed the medical revolution that our healthcare system has undergone in recent decades? The wonder drugs that keep Americans alive and active; the less invasive microsurgery that shortens hospital stays, cuts costs and hastens recovery; the new PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans that spot cancers early enough to save lives; and the multiplicity of health-insurance plans for a wide variety of incomes.
How is it that Obama, who is not a doctor, can have such a dismal and critical view of America's healthcare system that is so sharply at odds with how our medical leaders see the present system?
Here's how three former American Medical Association presidents (Drs. Daniel H. Johnson Jr., Donald J. Palmisano and William G. Plested III) described America's health care last week in an article in The Washington Times: "We have the best health care system in the world. Most Americans live within an hour's drive of a world-class medical facility filled with expertly trained individuals and state-of-the-art technology delivering medical miracles every day."
Indeed, despite whatever imperfections and problems there are in our healthcare system, there is much more to celebrate than to criticize. More than 250 million Americans have health insurance, and every poll shows the overwhelming majority of them are satisfied with the coverage they have and the medical care they receive.
The medical advances over the past several decades have been historic. Consider heart-bypass techniques, the growing transplant technology and the anti-cholesterol, anti-stroke and anti-cancer drugs that have lengthened survivability rates.
But you won't hear this from the Obama White House, which is focused on denouncing the private marketplace system serviced by doctors and nurses and replacing it with a public monopoly controlled and run by the government and an army of federal bureaucrats.
At his news conference last week, Obama bemoaned once again the costly equipment and tests that hospitals and other medical facilities use to diagnose, treat or otherwise care for their patients -- saying they don't make Americans any healthier.
But these tests and medical scans are critically important to finding out the exact nature of illnesses and the best form of treatment. They do, in fact, help make millions of Americans healthier.
So why does Obama suggest otherwise? Cost is his main motivation because it is the critical part of the government takeover equation. Drive down costs through price-control regulations, and it may make their trillion-dollar-plus healthcare plans less expensive.
But how would such price controls, and the rationing that goes with it, affect the health care of all Americans? Obama answered that question in a revealing -- and I think disturbing -- remark at last week's news conference that suggested where Obamacare would take us: "Our proposals would change incentives so that doctors and nurses are free to give patients that best care, just not the most expensive care," he said.
But who decides what treatment is too expensive and thus should be denied? Under Obama's vision of government health care, the government, not doctors, would make that decision.
A pacemaker after age 85? Bypass at age 80? A cancer PET scan at nearly $6,000 a scan? These might not fit in with the government's price controls that are part and parcel of the legislation being considered in Congress right now.
"At some point in our lives, we're all patients, and the way to strengthen our system, to control both cost and quality, is to empower the patient," the three former AMA presidents said. "If the federal government is allowed to expand its role in medicine, our country will see the long waiting lines for care, patients will lose trust in their doctors, and the medical discovery and innovation that has saved and enhanced lives across the country will end."
America's healthcare industry has made great medical strides over the course of the past 10 decades, pushing the average life-expectancy rate from 47 years in 1900 to 77 years in 2000. Today, it is 75.15 for men and 80.97 for women and climbing.
No doubt some reforms need to be made, especially in applying marketplace incentives to expand healthcare coverage. But our private medical-care system on the whole has worked well.
Maybe now is the time to remember the age-old axiom, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Friday, July 24, 2009
WASHINGTON -- President Obama has been a fierce and relentless critic of America's medical-care system. Indeed, it's hard to recall when, if ever, he has had anything good to say about our private healthcare system.
Throughout his presidential campaign and the first six months of his presidency, he has made a practice of attacking just about every sector of the healthcare business: Hospitals are inefficient, wasteful and inept. Insurance companies charge way too much and make obscene profits. The pharmaceutical industry overcharges for the drugs they produce, despite research costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars and millions of lives prolonged and saved.
His generic mantra is that our healthcare system is dysfunctional and that, despite all the modern medical tests and high-tech diagnostic breakthroughs, we're not any healthier than we were before.
Really? Has Obama missed the medical revolution that our healthcare system has undergone in recent decades? The wonder drugs that keep Americans alive and active; the less invasive microsurgery that shortens hospital stays, cuts costs and hastens recovery; the new PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scans that spot cancers early enough to save lives; and the multiplicity of health-insurance plans for a wide variety of incomes.
How is it that Obama, who is not a doctor, can have such a dismal and critical view of America's healthcare system that is so sharply at odds with how our medical leaders see the present system?
Here's how three former American Medical Association presidents (Drs. Daniel H. Johnson Jr., Donald J. Palmisano and William G. Plested III) described America's health care last week in an article in The Washington Times: "We have the best health care system in the world. Most Americans live within an hour's drive of a world-class medical facility filled with expertly trained individuals and state-of-the-art technology delivering medical miracles every day."
Indeed, despite whatever imperfections and problems there are in our healthcare system, there is much more to celebrate than to criticize. More than 250 million Americans have health insurance, and every poll shows the overwhelming majority of them are satisfied with the coverage they have and the medical care they receive.
The medical advances over the past several decades have been historic. Consider heart-bypass techniques, the growing transplant technology and the anti-cholesterol, anti-stroke and anti-cancer drugs that have lengthened survivability rates.
But you won't hear this from the Obama White House, which is focused on denouncing the private marketplace system serviced by doctors and nurses and replacing it with a public monopoly controlled and run by the government and an army of federal bureaucrats.
At his news conference last week, Obama bemoaned once again the costly equipment and tests that hospitals and other medical facilities use to diagnose, treat or otherwise care for their patients -- saying they don't make Americans any healthier.
But these tests and medical scans are critically important to finding out the exact nature of illnesses and the best form of treatment. They do, in fact, help make millions of Americans healthier.
So why does Obama suggest otherwise? Cost is his main motivation because it is the critical part of the government takeover equation. Drive down costs through price-control regulations, and it may make their trillion-dollar-plus healthcare plans less expensive.
But how would such price controls, and the rationing that goes with it, affect the health care of all Americans? Obama answered that question in a revealing -- and I think disturbing -- remark at last week's news conference that suggested where Obamacare would take us: "Our proposals would change incentives so that doctors and nurses are free to give patients that best care, just not the most expensive care," he said.
But who decides what treatment is too expensive and thus should be denied? Under Obama's vision of government health care, the government, not doctors, would make that decision.
A pacemaker after age 85? Bypass at age 80? A cancer PET scan at nearly $6,000 a scan? These might not fit in with the government's price controls that are part and parcel of the legislation being considered in Congress right now.
"At some point in our lives, we're all patients, and the way to strengthen our system, to control both cost and quality, is to empower the patient," the three former AMA presidents said. "If the federal government is allowed to expand its role in medicine, our country will see the long waiting lines for care, patients will lose trust in their doctors, and the medical discovery and innovation that has saved and enhanced lives across the country will end."
America's healthcare industry has made great medical strides over the course of the past 10 decades, pushing the average life-expectancy rate from 47 years in 1900 to 77 years in 2000. Today, it is 75.15 for men and 80.97 for women and climbing.
No doubt some reforms need to be made, especially in applying marketplace incentives to expand healthcare coverage. But our private medical-care system on the whole has worked well.
Maybe now is the time to remember the age-old axiom, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Thursday, July 23, 2009
The Case Against Mortarboarding
Burt Prelutsky
Friday, July 24, 2009
I have received a number of e-mails over the years from disgruntled parents griping about the left-wing indoctrination their kids are forced to undergo at colleges and universities all over America. One minute, it seems the kids are sane, or at least as sane as one can expect of 18-year-olds, and the next thing you know they’re parroting the likes of Ward Churchill, William Ayers and Noam Chomsky, bad-mouthing America and yodeling the praises of such left-wing troglodytes as Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers and Barack Obama.
I feel their frustration. Even if the little nincompoops can’t do long division or write a coherent sentence, parents feel like child abusers if they don’t pony up the dough to send their kids off for what is laughingly referred to as higher education.
If I were running things, most high school grads would enter trade schools. America will always need nurses, plumbers, carpenters, glaziers and mechanics. What nobody needs is some 21-year-old schnook who’s wasted four years and most of his inheritance majoring in black, Hispanic or lesbian studies. And then, to make matters worse, because like the Scarecrow of Oz, they have a sheepskin, they’re actually convinced they’re smarter than their parents.
One of my readers, Penny Alfonso, of Glendale, California, shared a conversation she had with her daughter. “I told her I won’t pay the tuition for any classes that end in the word “studies”. I have also told her that while I have no right to tell her how to think, if she comes home hating America and spewing the lies of the leftists, I will tell her I love her, and that she has the right to believe whatever she wants to believe, but I don’t have to pay for it. In the 20 years of her life, if she’s learned nothing else, she has learned that I am completely serious about this.”
If more parents adopted this attitude, the state of education would improve in a hurry. The lefty professors want to mold young minds, but the administrators just want your money. So use your clout where it counts. Adopt Mrs. Alfonso’s declaration as a Bill of Parental Rights.
Of course, the other thing I would promote is an end to the tenure system. The original idea behind it was to protect professors from being fired because of their unpopular political beliefs, but in 2009, conservatives aren’t hired in the first place, so the only people whose jobs come with a lifetime guarantee are those addlebrained morons, safely ensconced in the Humanities, espousing liberal claptrap.
Somebody recently took me to task for referring to Michael Jackson as a pedophile. This yutz pointed out that Jackson had never been convicted in a court of law, as if that proved anything. The fact remains that the King of Pap had paid out millions of dollars in hush money to keep a case from going to trial. And, by his own admission, he admitted he enjoyed sleeping with young boys. Where I come from, if it waddles, swims and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.
Whenever people use that court of law argument to make a point, I know they’re desperate. Heck, O.J. Simpson and Al Capone were never convicted of murder, and Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Idi Amin and Kim Jong-il, have never even been convicted of jay-walking.
Something else I always find irksome is when Obama’s liberal groupies, along with a few conservative commentators, deny that the President is a left-wing ideologue. All of his schemes, from gobbling up car companies and banks to nationalizing health care and redistributing wealth, show his true colors. As I say, if it waddles, swims and quacks like a duck, feel free to pop it in the oven and serve it with string beans and sweet potatoes at Christmas.
Friday, July 24, 2009
I have received a number of e-mails over the years from disgruntled parents griping about the left-wing indoctrination their kids are forced to undergo at colleges and universities all over America. One minute, it seems the kids are sane, or at least as sane as one can expect of 18-year-olds, and the next thing you know they’re parroting the likes of Ward Churchill, William Ayers and Noam Chomsky, bad-mouthing America and yodeling the praises of such left-wing troglodytes as Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers and Barack Obama.
I feel their frustration. Even if the little nincompoops can’t do long division or write a coherent sentence, parents feel like child abusers if they don’t pony up the dough to send their kids off for what is laughingly referred to as higher education.
If I were running things, most high school grads would enter trade schools. America will always need nurses, plumbers, carpenters, glaziers and mechanics. What nobody needs is some 21-year-old schnook who’s wasted four years and most of his inheritance majoring in black, Hispanic or lesbian studies. And then, to make matters worse, because like the Scarecrow of Oz, they have a sheepskin, they’re actually convinced they’re smarter than their parents.
One of my readers, Penny Alfonso, of Glendale, California, shared a conversation she had with her daughter. “I told her I won’t pay the tuition for any classes that end in the word “studies”. I have also told her that while I have no right to tell her how to think, if she comes home hating America and spewing the lies of the leftists, I will tell her I love her, and that she has the right to believe whatever she wants to believe, but I don’t have to pay for it. In the 20 years of her life, if she’s learned nothing else, she has learned that I am completely serious about this.”
If more parents adopted this attitude, the state of education would improve in a hurry. The lefty professors want to mold young minds, but the administrators just want your money. So use your clout where it counts. Adopt Mrs. Alfonso’s declaration as a Bill of Parental Rights.
Of course, the other thing I would promote is an end to the tenure system. The original idea behind it was to protect professors from being fired because of their unpopular political beliefs, but in 2009, conservatives aren’t hired in the first place, so the only people whose jobs come with a lifetime guarantee are those addlebrained morons, safely ensconced in the Humanities, espousing liberal claptrap.
Somebody recently took me to task for referring to Michael Jackson as a pedophile. This yutz pointed out that Jackson had never been convicted in a court of law, as if that proved anything. The fact remains that the King of Pap had paid out millions of dollars in hush money to keep a case from going to trial. And, by his own admission, he admitted he enjoyed sleeping with young boys. Where I come from, if it waddles, swims and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.
Whenever people use that court of law argument to make a point, I know they’re desperate. Heck, O.J. Simpson and Al Capone were never convicted of murder, and Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Idi Amin and Kim Jong-il, have never even been convicted of jay-walking.
Something else I always find irksome is when Obama’s liberal groupies, along with a few conservative commentators, deny that the President is a left-wing ideologue. All of his schemes, from gobbling up car companies and banks to nationalizing health care and redistributing wealth, show his true colors. As I say, if it waddles, swims and quacks like a duck, feel free to pop it in the oven and serve it with string beans and sweet potatoes at Christmas.
Why Obamacare is Sinking
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, July 24, 2009
WASHINGTON -- What happened to Obamacare? Rhetoric met reality. As both candidate and president, the master rhetorician could conjure a world in which he bestows upon you health care nirvana: more coverage, less cost.
But you can't fake it in legislation. Once you commit your fantasies to words and numbers, the Congressional Budget Office comes along and declares that the emperor has no clothes.
President Obama premised the need for reform on the claim that medical costs are destroying the economy. True. But now we learn -- surprise! -- that universal coverage increases costs. The congressional Democrats' health care plans, says the CBO, increase costs in the range of $1 trillion plus.
In response, the president retreated to a demand that any bill he sign be revenue neutral. But that's classic misdirection: If the fierce urgency of health care reform is to radically reduce costs that are producing budget-destroying deficits, revenue neutrality (by definition) leaves us on precisely the same path to insolvency that Obama himself declares unsustainable.
The Democratic proposals are worse still. Because they do increase costs, revenue neutrality means countervailing tax increases. It's not just that it is crazily anti-stimulatory to saddle a deeply depressed economy with an income tax surcharge that falls squarely on small business and the investor class. It's that health care reform ends up diverting for its own purposes a source of revenue that might otherwise be used to close the yawning structural budget deficit that is such a threat to the economy and to the dollar.
These blindingly obvious contradictions are why the Democratic health plans are collapsing under their own weight -- at the hands of Democrats. It's Max Baucus, Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who called Obama unhelpful for ruling out taxing employer-provided health insurance as a way to pay for expanded coverage. It's the Blue Dog Democrats in the House who wince at skyrocketing health-reform costs just weeks after having swallowed hemlock for Obama on a ruinous cap-and-trade carbon tax.
The president is therefore understandably eager to make this a contest between progressive Democrats and reactionary Republicans. He seized on Republican Sen. Jim DeMint's comment that stopping Obama on health care would break his presidency to protest, with perfect disingenuousness, that "this isn't about me. This isn't about politics."
It's all about him. Health care is his signature reform. And he knows that if he produces nothing, he forfeits the mystique that both propelled him to the presidency and has sustained him through a difficult first six months. Which is why Obama's red lines are constantly shifting. Universal coverage? Maybe not. No middle-class tax hit? Well, perhaps, but only if they don't "primarily" bear the burden. Because it's about him, Obama is quite prepared to sign anything as long as it is titled "health care reform."
This is not about politics? Then why is it, to take but the most egregious example, that in this grand health care debate we hear not a word about one of the worst sources of waste in American medicine: the insane cost and arbitrary rewards of our malpractice system?
When a neurosurgeon pays $200,000 a year for malpractice insurance before he even turns on the light in his office or hires his first nurse, who do you think pays? Patients, in higher doctor fees to cover the insurance.
And with jackpot justice that awards one claimant zillions while others get nothing -- and one-third of everything goes to the lawyers -- where do you think that money comes from? The insurance companies, who then pass it on to you in higher premiums.
But the greatest waste is the hidden cost of defensive medicine: tests and procedures that doctors order for no good reason other than to protect themselves from lawsuit. Every doctor knows, as I did when I practiced years ago, how much unnecessary medical cost is incurred with an eye not on medicine but on the law.
Tort reform would yield tens of billions in savings. Yet you cannot find it in the Democratic bills. And Obama breathed not a word about it in the full hour of his health care news conference. Why? No mystery. The Democrats are parasitically dependent on huge donations from trial lawyers.
Didn't Obama promise a new politics that puts people over special interests? Sure. And now he promises expanded, portable, secure, higher-quality medical care -- at lower cost! The only thing he hasn't promised is to extirpate evil from the human heart. That legislation will be introduced next week.
Friday, July 24, 2009
WASHINGTON -- What happened to Obamacare? Rhetoric met reality. As both candidate and president, the master rhetorician could conjure a world in which he bestows upon you health care nirvana: more coverage, less cost.
But you can't fake it in legislation. Once you commit your fantasies to words and numbers, the Congressional Budget Office comes along and declares that the emperor has no clothes.
President Obama premised the need for reform on the claim that medical costs are destroying the economy. True. But now we learn -- surprise! -- that universal coverage increases costs. The congressional Democrats' health care plans, says the CBO, increase costs in the range of $1 trillion plus.
In response, the president retreated to a demand that any bill he sign be revenue neutral. But that's classic misdirection: If the fierce urgency of health care reform is to radically reduce costs that are producing budget-destroying deficits, revenue neutrality (by definition) leaves us on precisely the same path to insolvency that Obama himself declares unsustainable.
The Democratic proposals are worse still. Because they do increase costs, revenue neutrality means countervailing tax increases. It's not just that it is crazily anti-stimulatory to saddle a deeply depressed economy with an income tax surcharge that falls squarely on small business and the investor class. It's that health care reform ends up diverting for its own purposes a source of revenue that might otherwise be used to close the yawning structural budget deficit that is such a threat to the economy and to the dollar.
These blindingly obvious contradictions are why the Democratic health plans are collapsing under their own weight -- at the hands of Democrats. It's Max Baucus, Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who called Obama unhelpful for ruling out taxing employer-provided health insurance as a way to pay for expanded coverage. It's the Blue Dog Democrats in the House who wince at skyrocketing health-reform costs just weeks after having swallowed hemlock for Obama on a ruinous cap-and-trade carbon tax.
The president is therefore understandably eager to make this a contest between progressive Democrats and reactionary Republicans. He seized on Republican Sen. Jim DeMint's comment that stopping Obama on health care would break his presidency to protest, with perfect disingenuousness, that "this isn't about me. This isn't about politics."
It's all about him. Health care is his signature reform. And he knows that if he produces nothing, he forfeits the mystique that both propelled him to the presidency and has sustained him through a difficult first six months. Which is why Obama's red lines are constantly shifting. Universal coverage? Maybe not. No middle-class tax hit? Well, perhaps, but only if they don't "primarily" bear the burden. Because it's about him, Obama is quite prepared to sign anything as long as it is titled "health care reform."
This is not about politics? Then why is it, to take but the most egregious example, that in this grand health care debate we hear not a word about one of the worst sources of waste in American medicine: the insane cost and arbitrary rewards of our malpractice system?
When a neurosurgeon pays $200,000 a year for malpractice insurance before he even turns on the light in his office or hires his first nurse, who do you think pays? Patients, in higher doctor fees to cover the insurance.
And with jackpot justice that awards one claimant zillions while others get nothing -- and one-third of everything goes to the lawyers -- where do you think that money comes from? The insurance companies, who then pass it on to you in higher premiums.
But the greatest waste is the hidden cost of defensive medicine: tests and procedures that doctors order for no good reason other than to protect themselves from lawsuit. Every doctor knows, as I did when I practiced years ago, how much unnecessary medical cost is incurred with an eye not on medicine but on the law.
Tort reform would yield tens of billions in savings. Yet you cannot find it in the Democratic bills. And Obama breathed not a word about it in the full hour of his health care news conference. Why? No mystery. The Democrats are parasitically dependent on huge donations from trial lawyers.
Didn't Obama promise a new politics that puts people over special interests? Sure. And now he promises expanded, portable, secure, higher-quality medical care -- at lower cost! The only thing he hasn't promised is to extirpate evil from the human heart. That legislation will be introduced next week.
Cold Shoulder to Climate 'Urgency'
George Will
Thursday, July 23, 2009
WASHINGTON -- Unfortunately, China's president had to dash home to suppress ethnic riots. Had he stayed in Italy at the recent G-8 summit, he could have continued the Herculean task of disabusing Barack Obama of his amazingly durable belief, shared by the U.S. Congress, that China -- and India, Brazil, Mexico and other developing nations -- will sacrifice their modernization on the altar of climate change. China has a more pressing agenda, and not even suppressing riots tops the list.
China made this clear in June, when its vice premier said, opaquely, that China will "actively" participate in climate change talks on a basis of "common but differentiated responsibility." The meaning of that was made clear three days later, at a climate change conference in Bonn, where a Chinese spokesman reiterated that his country's priority is economic growth: "Given that, it is natural for China to have some increase in its emissions, so it is not possible for China in that context to accept a binding or compulsory target." That was redundant: In January, China announced that its continuing reliance on coal as its primary source of energy will require increasing coal production 30 percent in the next six years.
In Bonn, even thoroughly developed Japan promised only a 2 percent increase of its emission-reduction obligations under the 1997 Kyoto agreement. Japan's decision left Yvo de Boer, the slow learner who is the U.N.'s climate change czar, nonplussed: "For the first time in my two and a half years in this job, I don't know what to say."
Others did. They said: On to Italy! The Financial Times reported, "Officials are now pinning their hopes" on the G-8 summit.
Which has come and gone, the eight having vowed to cut emissions of greenhouse gases 80 percent by 2050, which is 41 years distant. As is 1968, which seems as remote as the Punic Wars, considering that more than half of all living Americans were born after 1966. If you do not want to do anything today, promise to do everything tomorrow, which is always a day away.
Still, sternly declaring that they will brook no nonsense from nature, the eight made a commitment -- but a nonbinding one -- that Earth's temperature shall not rise by more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over "preindustrial levels." That is the goal. Details to follow. Tomorrow.
Explaining such lethargy in the face of a supposed emergency, the G-8's host, Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, said the eight should not burden themselves as long as "5 billion people continue to behave as they have always behaved." Actually, the problem, for people who think it is a problem, is that the 5 billion in the developing world are behaving in a new way. After centuries of exclusion from economic growth, they are enjoying it, which is tiresome to would-be climate fixers in already prosperous nations.
The fixers say: On to Copenhagen! There, in December, the moveable feast of climate confabulations will continue. By which time China alone, at its current pace, probably will have brought on line 14 more coal-fired generating plants, each of them capable of providing all the electricity needed for a city the size of San Diego. And last Sunday, India told visiting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that there is "no case" for U.S. pressure on India to reduce carbon emissions.
The costs of weaning the U.S. economy off much of its reliance on carbon are uncertain, but certainly large. The climatic benefits of doing so are uncertain but, given the behavior of those pesky 5 billion, almost certainly small, perhaps minuscule, even immeasurable. Fortunately, skepticism about the evidence that supposedly supports current alarmism about climate change is growing, as is evidence that, whatever the truth about the problem turns out to be, U.S. actions cannot be significantly ameliorative.
When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called upon "young Americans" to "get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon," another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: "If you're 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you're graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade."
Which could explain why the Mall does not reverberate with youthful clamors about carbon. And why, regarding climate change, the U.S. government, rushing to impose unilateral cap-and-trade burdens on the sagging U.S. economy, looks increasingly like someone who bought a closetful of platform shoes and bell-bottom slacks just as disco was dying.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
WASHINGTON -- Unfortunately, China's president had to dash home to suppress ethnic riots. Had he stayed in Italy at the recent G-8 summit, he could have continued the Herculean task of disabusing Barack Obama of his amazingly durable belief, shared by the U.S. Congress, that China -- and India, Brazil, Mexico and other developing nations -- will sacrifice their modernization on the altar of climate change. China has a more pressing agenda, and not even suppressing riots tops the list.
China made this clear in June, when its vice premier said, opaquely, that China will "actively" participate in climate change talks on a basis of "common but differentiated responsibility." The meaning of that was made clear three days later, at a climate change conference in Bonn, where a Chinese spokesman reiterated that his country's priority is economic growth: "Given that, it is natural for China to have some increase in its emissions, so it is not possible for China in that context to accept a binding or compulsory target." That was redundant: In January, China announced that its continuing reliance on coal as its primary source of energy will require increasing coal production 30 percent in the next six years.
In Bonn, even thoroughly developed Japan promised only a 2 percent increase of its emission-reduction obligations under the 1997 Kyoto agreement. Japan's decision left Yvo de Boer, the slow learner who is the U.N.'s climate change czar, nonplussed: "For the first time in my two and a half years in this job, I don't know what to say."
Others did. They said: On to Italy! The Financial Times reported, "Officials are now pinning their hopes" on the G-8 summit.
Which has come and gone, the eight having vowed to cut emissions of greenhouse gases 80 percent by 2050, which is 41 years distant. As is 1968, which seems as remote as the Punic Wars, considering that more than half of all living Americans were born after 1966. If you do not want to do anything today, promise to do everything tomorrow, which is always a day away.
Still, sternly declaring that they will brook no nonsense from nature, the eight made a commitment -- but a nonbinding one -- that Earth's temperature shall not rise by more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over "preindustrial levels." That is the goal. Details to follow. Tomorrow.
Explaining such lethargy in the face of a supposed emergency, the G-8's host, Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, said the eight should not burden themselves as long as "5 billion people continue to behave as they have always behaved." Actually, the problem, for people who think it is a problem, is that the 5 billion in the developing world are behaving in a new way. After centuries of exclusion from economic growth, they are enjoying it, which is tiresome to would-be climate fixers in already prosperous nations.
The fixers say: On to Copenhagen! There, in December, the moveable feast of climate confabulations will continue. By which time China alone, at its current pace, probably will have brought on line 14 more coal-fired generating plants, each of them capable of providing all the electricity needed for a city the size of San Diego. And last Sunday, India told visiting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that there is "no case" for U.S. pressure on India to reduce carbon emissions.
The costs of weaning the U.S. economy off much of its reliance on carbon are uncertain, but certainly large. The climatic benefits of doing so are uncertain but, given the behavior of those pesky 5 billion, almost certainly small, perhaps minuscule, even immeasurable. Fortunately, skepticism about the evidence that supposedly supports current alarmism about climate change is growing, as is evidence that, whatever the truth about the problem turns out to be, U.S. actions cannot be significantly ameliorative.
When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called upon "young Americans" to "get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon," another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: "If you're 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you're graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade."
Which could explain why the Mall does not reverberate with youthful clamors about carbon. And why, regarding climate change, the U.S. government, rushing to impose unilateral cap-and-trade burdens on the sagging U.S. economy, looks increasingly like someone who bought a closetful of platform shoes and bell-bottom slacks just as disco was dying.
‘Never Again’ in North Korea? Think Again
Ask yourself: What if Buchenwald were a mouse click away?
By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Perhaps it would be better if we simply vowed to never again say “never again” when it comes to the sort of slaughter and institutionalized cruelty we associate with the Holocaust. Then again, taking the sting out of hypocrisy wouldn’t do much for the people of North Korea.
For decades now, we’ve known that what’s going on in North Korea is too terrible to contemplate. Even so, what once haunted us as an ill-defined and foreboding suspicion has clarified into the secure knowledge of broad and systemic evil.
A new report by the Korean Bar Association offers a horrifying portrait of the Hermit Kingdom’s mountaintop dungeons, which, notes the Washington Post’s Blaine Harden, have lasted twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps and twice as long as the Soviet gulag. The North Korean abattoir even survived the largely man-made famine of the 1990s, in which hundreds of thousands of people are believed to have starved to death. In the camps, guards are instructed that it is better to err on the side of rape and murder than on the side of mercy or kindness.
Because North Korea’s founding dictator, Kim Il Sung, declared, “Enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations,” even the grandchildren of “traitors” can be sentenced to a life of hard labor and slow death from exhaustion and malnutrition.
Samantha Power, an Obama administration National Security Council official, wrote a moving book about America’s inability or unwillingness to stop genocidal slaughter. In A Problem From Hell, Power surveyed the cumulative horrors of the 1990s — in Bosnia and Rwanda — and was forced to ask, “Did ‘never again’ simply mean ‘never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe between 1939 and 1945’?”
If the answer to Power’s sardonic question is yes, then America and the West should be proud of their record. If we mean that when faced in our own time with the reality of such organized evil we will heed the “never again” lesson, then we have a lot to be ashamed of.
In his recent visit to Buchenwald, the Nazi death camp, President Obama insisted that we must “bear witness” to the evil of the Holocaust. Such platitudes are the stuff of every president and potentate who visits such places. And that’s fine. It’s what we are supposed to say. But we are also supposed to mean it. After all, it’s easy to say we must bear witness to things that have already happened and promise to “never forget” the sins of others and our own good deeds.
But what of things figuratively happening under our noses and literally transpiring a click away on our computer screens? You can see the slave camps in North Korea — not quite live via satellite, but close enough — where the machinery of suffering chugs along 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Ask yourself: What if Buchenwald were a mouse click away?
Our collective, bipartisan failure to deal with the human suffering in North Korea is chalked up to the fact that Kim Jong Il’s nuclear program is a far more pressing concern than is the brutalization and murder of North Korean citizens.
That is hardly a trivial argument. But it’s looking less compelling every day. Republican and Democratic presidents alike have failed to disarm North Korea because it does not wish to be disarmed; it is a true extortion regime. Its existence is owed entirely to the fact that it has mastered geopolitical blackmail. In exchange for promises to do things it will never do, we give it aid along with as many second chances as it can carry.
Meanwhile, North Korean nuclear brinkmanship and ballistic saber rattling guarantee that outside governments will not exert an ounce of effort on the ongoing humanitarian crisis. “Talking to them about the camps is something that has not been possible,” David Straub, a senior State Department official under presidents George W. Bush and Clinton, told the Post. “They go nuts when you talk about it.” And so, we pretend it’s not happening.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compared North Korea to “small children and unruly teenagers . . . demanding attention.” She says we shouldn’t give them the attention — “They don’t deserve it; they are acting out.”
Seen through the window of nuclear diplomacy, Clinton’s neo-Bushian stance is entirely defensible. Seen through a moral prism, it’s at worst a horror and at best a profound failure to bear witness.
There are no easy or risk-free solutions. But maybe a good place to start would be for the U.S. government to act as if “never again” meant something — when it matters.
By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Perhaps it would be better if we simply vowed to never again say “never again” when it comes to the sort of slaughter and institutionalized cruelty we associate with the Holocaust. Then again, taking the sting out of hypocrisy wouldn’t do much for the people of North Korea.
For decades now, we’ve known that what’s going on in North Korea is too terrible to contemplate. Even so, what once haunted us as an ill-defined and foreboding suspicion has clarified into the secure knowledge of broad and systemic evil.
A new report by the Korean Bar Association offers a horrifying portrait of the Hermit Kingdom’s mountaintop dungeons, which, notes the Washington Post’s Blaine Harden, have lasted twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps and twice as long as the Soviet gulag. The North Korean abattoir even survived the largely man-made famine of the 1990s, in which hundreds of thousands of people are believed to have starved to death. In the camps, guards are instructed that it is better to err on the side of rape and murder than on the side of mercy or kindness.
Because North Korea’s founding dictator, Kim Il Sung, declared, “Enemies of class, whoever they are, their seed must be eliminated through three generations,” even the grandchildren of “traitors” can be sentenced to a life of hard labor and slow death from exhaustion and malnutrition.
Samantha Power, an Obama administration National Security Council official, wrote a moving book about America’s inability or unwillingness to stop genocidal slaughter. In A Problem From Hell, Power surveyed the cumulative horrors of the 1990s — in Bosnia and Rwanda — and was forced to ask, “Did ‘never again’ simply mean ‘never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe between 1939 and 1945’?”
If the answer to Power’s sardonic question is yes, then America and the West should be proud of their record. If we mean that when faced in our own time with the reality of such organized evil we will heed the “never again” lesson, then we have a lot to be ashamed of.
In his recent visit to Buchenwald, the Nazi death camp, President Obama insisted that we must “bear witness” to the evil of the Holocaust. Such platitudes are the stuff of every president and potentate who visits such places. And that’s fine. It’s what we are supposed to say. But we are also supposed to mean it. After all, it’s easy to say we must bear witness to things that have already happened and promise to “never forget” the sins of others and our own good deeds.
But what of things figuratively happening under our noses and literally transpiring a click away on our computer screens? You can see the slave camps in North Korea — not quite live via satellite, but close enough — where the machinery of suffering chugs along 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Ask yourself: What if Buchenwald were a mouse click away?
Our collective, bipartisan failure to deal with the human suffering in North Korea is chalked up to the fact that Kim Jong Il’s nuclear program is a far more pressing concern than is the brutalization and murder of North Korean citizens.
That is hardly a trivial argument. But it’s looking less compelling every day. Republican and Democratic presidents alike have failed to disarm North Korea because it does not wish to be disarmed; it is a true extortion regime. Its existence is owed entirely to the fact that it has mastered geopolitical blackmail. In exchange for promises to do things it will never do, we give it aid along with as many second chances as it can carry.
Meanwhile, North Korean nuclear brinkmanship and ballistic saber rattling guarantee that outside governments will not exert an ounce of effort on the ongoing humanitarian crisis. “Talking to them about the camps is something that has not been possible,” David Straub, a senior State Department official under presidents George W. Bush and Clinton, told the Post. “They go nuts when you talk about it.” And so, we pretend it’s not happening.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compared North Korea to “small children and unruly teenagers . . . demanding attention.” She says we shouldn’t give them the attention — “They don’t deserve it; they are acting out.”
Seen through the window of nuclear diplomacy, Clinton’s neo-Bushian stance is entirely defensible. Seen through a moral prism, it’s at worst a horror and at best a profound failure to bear witness.
There are no easy or risk-free solutions. But maybe a good place to start would be for the U.S. government to act as if “never again” meant something — when it matters.
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