Robin's Journey

Robin, a psychotherapist living in Berkeley, explains how she (I think she's a she) seemingly journeyed from the progressive left to conservatism in a relative twinkling of an eye. Actually, she tells us, it was a conversion that had been brewing all her life:

Now that I look back, I had the seeds of both a conservative and a liberal in me all along. On the liberal side: I was raised a secular Jew, and, for some God forsaken reason, most of us are Democrats. My upbringing lacked meaning and substance, which propelled my devotion to social causes. Of course, arriving in Berkeley in my 20's only hardened my liberal propensity.

I became a therapist, made friends with therapists, and spent tons of money having shrinks dissect my psyche. So my life was focused on problems, complaints, and kvetches. As Milton said, our minds can make a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell. My preoccupation with the darkness put me in a liberal state of mind.

But the conservative was alive and well in me too: My grandparents came from Russia with only the shirts on their backs. Yet they never complained about the hardships or expected any government help. My parents, in their own wacky way, were devoted, dutiful, and fiercely patriotic.

I was also victimized early on by do-gooder liberal politics (though I didn't put two and two together until last year). I attended public schools with forced busing that ignited tremendous animosity and racial violence. As an adult, I've been harassed and molested innumerable times on urban streets both east coast and west, and was mugged several years ago in broad daylight.

Unlike most liberals, I never blamed myself or the dominant culture. I placed culpability directly on the thugs and on those in authority who remained silent. Whenever my friends excused immoral behavior, I would get seriously ticked off.

Lastly, my personality has always had elements both left and right. Now that I think about it, it's been dizzying living in my brain. I'm a straight shooter and detest phoniness (conservative), though I wanted to be liked (liberal). I've never been a group think person and don't like to be controlled (right), but at the same time, I wanted to fit in (left).

Read the rest of her story at the link.

I'm sure there are lots of Robins out there, not just ideological Robins but also religious Robins. They're people who've abandoned the beliefs and principles of their parents and grandparents but who feel the aching emptiness that's left inside when God is expelled and one ersatz philosophy after another is stuffed into the bottomless pit that's left by His absence.

They know where their home is but they want to be liked, they want to fit in, they want to seem sophisticated, and the best way to achieve all that, they think, perhaps subliminally, is to be liberal both in their politics and in their religious views. Like Robin, some of them may eventually come to a point in their life where they realize it just doesn't work. Neither the political ideology nor the secularism can serve as a substitute for the Real Thing.

RLC

One Woman Stimulus Package

When President Obama talks about all the jobs his administration has created he's missing a good bet if he doesn't include the entourage his wife has amassed in the White House. Indeed, she may have created more jobs than he has.

According to Canada Free Press our first lady has employed an army of attendants, at your expense, far in excess of anything needed by any of her predecessors:

Michele Obama does not get paid to serve as the First Lady and she doesn't perform any official duties. But this hasn't deterred her from hiring an unprecedented number of staffers to cater to her every whim and to satisfy her every request in the midst of the Great Recession. Just think, Mary Lincoln was taken to task for purchasing china for the White House during the Civil War, and Mamie Eisenhower had to shell out the salary for her personal secretary.

How things have changed! If you're one of the tens of millions of Americans facing destitution, earning less than subsistence wages stocking the shelves at Wal-Mart or serving up McDonald cheeseburgers, you might want to keep in mind that the benefit package for these servants of Ms Obama are the same as members of the national security and defense departments and the bill for these assorted lackeys is paid by you:

• $172,000 - Sher, Susan (Chief of Staff)
• $140,000 - Frye, Jocelyn C. (Deputy Assistant to the President and Director or Policy and Projects for the First Lady)
• $113,000 - Rogers, Desiree G. (Special Assistant to the President and White House Social Secretary)
• $102,000 - Johnston, Camille Y. (Special Assistant to the President and Director of Communications for the First Lady)
• Winter, Melissa E. (Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff to the First Lady)
• $90,000 - Medina, David S. (Deputy Chief of Staff to the First Lady)
• $84,000 - Lelyveld, Catherine M. (Director and Press Secretary to the First Lady)
• $75,000 - Starkey, Frances M. (Director of Scheduling and Advance for the First Lady)
• $70,000 - Sanders, Trooper (Deputy Director of Policy and Projects for the First Lady)
• $65,000 - Burnough, Erinn J. (Deputy Director and Deputy Social Secretary)
Reinstein, Joseph B. (Deputy Director and Deputy Social Secretary)
• $62,000 - Goodman, Jennifer R. (Deputy Director of Scheduling and Events Coordinator for the First Lady)
• $60,000 - Fitts, Alan O. (Deputy Director of Advance and Trip Director for the First Lady)
• Lewis, Dana M. (Special Assistant and Personal Aide to the First Lady)
• $52,500 - Mustaphi, Semonti M. (Associate Director and Deputy Press Secretary to the First Lady)
• $50,000 - Jarvis, Kristen E. (Special assistant for Scheduling and Traveling Aide to the First Lady)
• $45,000 - Lechtenberg, Tyler A. (Associate Director of Correspondence for the First Lady)
• Tubman, Samantha (Deputy Associate Director, Social Office)
• $40,000 - Boswell, Joseph J. (Executive Asistant to the Chief of Staff to the First Lady)
• $36,000 - Armbruster, Sally M. (Staff Assistant to the Social Secretary)
• Bookey, Natalie (Staff Assistant)
• Jackson, Deilia A. (Deputy Associate Director of Correspondence for the First Lady)

The person who sent the link notes that this list doesn't include makeup artist Ingrid Grimes-Miles, 49, and "First Hairstylist" Johnny Wright, 31, both of whom traveled aboard Air Force One to Europe. He also asks why Ms Obama needs so much help, at taxpayer expense, when even Hillary, had only three employees, Jackie Kennedy one, Laura Bush one, and,prior to Mamie Eisenhower,social help was paid out of the President's own pocket.

Good question. Meanwhile, how are you making out with your mortgage payments this year?

RLC

Counter-Proposal (Pt. II)

The other day I mentioned Keith Hennessey's counter-proposal to the President's plan for health care reform. Here are the basics:

Do:

1. Repeal the current law tax exclusion for employer provided health insurance, and replace it with a $7,500 (single) / $15K (family) flat deduction for buying health insurance.

• The deduction is independent of the premium cost. If you buy a $5,000 individual policy, you get a $7,500 deduction. If you buy a $10,000 individual policy, you get the same $7,500 deduction.
• The overwhelming majority of premiums fall under these threshholds, so 100m+ people would pay lower taxes.
• The minority with premiums above these thresholds would pay higher taxes.
• In total the government does not collect more revenue, although the tax burden shifts to those with high-cost policies.
• Index the thresholds to inflation (CPI). This bites more tightly over time. I'd funnel the long-term increased revenues into some broad-based tax relief to stay revenue-neutral over time.

2. Allow the purchase of health insurance sold anywhere in the U.S.This would force States to compete for the right regulatory balance of consumer protection and premium cost. Rep. John Shadegg has a bill that does this.

3. Make health insurance portable. This requires relatively small tweaks to law, but insurers would need to develop new portable insurance plans that you could take with you from one job to the next. The policy change is easy. Getting employers and insurers to change their long-standing business models is hard.

4. Expand Health Savings Accounts. Allow higher contribution limits, and allow financially equivalent coinsurance structures driven by market demand. Continue to mandate an initial deductible and catastrophic protection. No benefit-specific exemptions as advocated by some.

5. Aggressively reform medical liability, aka "medical tort reform." Details TBD.

6. Aggressively slow Medicare and Medicaid spending growth, and use the savings for long-term deficit reduction. Details TBD.

Assume that my package would be significantly more aggressive ("deeper cuts," in the terms of opponents) than anything being discussed in Congress today.

Don't:

• Raise taxes
• Create a new government health entitlement
• Mandate the purchase of health insurance
• Mandate that employers provide health insurance to their employees
• Have government set private premiums
• Create a government-run health plan option
• Have the government mandate benefits
• Expand Medicaid

Results:

• Lower premiums, higher wages
• Portable health insurance reduces "job lock"
• +5 million insured (net)
• 100 million people will pay lower taxes
• 30m with expensive health plans pay higher taxes
• No net tax increase overall
• Reduces short-term and long-term deficit
• Fair to small business employees & self-employed
• Incentives and individual decisions "bend the cost curve down"
• More individual control & responsibility for medical decisions

Whether all of these measures could be done or not I don't know, but it does seem a little disingenuous for supporters of the Democrats' bills to say that the opposition offers no alternatives. Keep in mind, too, that this is just one of several proposals which have been offered as counters to the plans currently in committee.

Let us tip our hats to liberal Democrats for impressing upon us the need for action on health care, and for forcing the national conversation, but when it comes to actually concocting a remedy, let's leave that to people who know how to do it without destroying the system and bankrupting the country.

RLC

Fears Confirmed

It was bound to happen. Violence broke out at a town hall meeting yesterday, a black man was beaten by a group of thugs, and racist epithets filled the air. The talking heads have been fretting about this for days and exactly what they feared would happen has happened. Patterico has the details.

The only part of this ugly episode that did not conform to the expectations of the commentators is that the thugs were Obama supporters wearing SEIU shirts, the black man was a conservative selling "Don't Tread on Me" flags, and the racial epithets were employed by a black man who was among the attackers.

Somebody videoed part of the proceedings including the arrest of one of the union muggers:

I guess events don't always go according to the way our stereotypes would have them.

RLC

Birthers Right and Left

I thought this by Chip Bok was pretty funny:

RLC

Heroes

There's an amazing story of heroism on this video. It's the story of a Marine named Channing Moss who suffered an astonishing combat wound and the men who overcame their own fear and risked their lives to save his. It's very much worth watching.

Thanks to PowerLine for the link.

RLC

Deconstructing the Obama Poster

Philip Kennicott scrutinizes the Obama as Joker objet d'art for the Washington Post and comes to the startling conclusion that it is, in fact, a deeply racist composition. Well, of course. Why didn't we see that? Obama is black. The picture satirizes him. Ergo, the picture is racist. Even a schoolboy could have figured it out:

So why the anonymity? Perhaps because the poster is ultimately a racially charged image. By using the "urban" makeup of the Heath Ledger Joker, instead of the urbane makeup of the Jack Nicholson character, the poster connects Obama to something many of his detractors fear but can't openly discuss. He is black and he is identified with the inner city, a source of political instability in the 1960s and '70s, and a lingering bogeyman in political consciousness despite falling crime rates.

The Joker's makeup in "Dark Knight" -- the latest film in a long franchise that dramatizes fear of the urban world -- emphasized the wounded nature of the villain, the sense that he was both a product and source of violence. Although Ledger was white, and the Joker is white, this equation of the wounded and the wounding mirrors basic racial typology in America. Urban blacks -- the thinking goes -- don't just live in dangerous neighborhoods, they carry that danger with them like a virus. Scientific studies, which demonstrate the social consequences of living in neighborhoods with high rates of crime, get processed and misinterpreted in the popular unconscious, underscoring the idea. Violence breeds violence.

It is an ugly idea, operating covertly in that gray area that is always supposed to be opened up to honest examination whenever America has one of its "we need to talk this through" episodes. But it lingers, unspoken but powerful, leaving all too many people with the sense that exposure to crime creates an ineluctable propensity to crime.

Superimpose that idea, through the Joker's makeup, onto Obama's face, and you have subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument. Forget socialism, this poster is another attempt to accomplish an association between Obama and the unpredictable, seeming danger of urban life. It is another effort to establish what failed to jell in the debate about Obama's association with Chicago radical William Ayers and the controversy over the racially charged sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama, like the Joker and like the racial stereotype of the black man, carries within him an unknowable, volatile and dangerous marker of urban violence, which could erupt at any time. The charge of socialism is secondary to the basic message that Obama can't be trusted, not because he is a politician, but because he's black.

There you have it plain as can be. Now, some pitiably unsophisticated bloggers have objected to this sort of analysis by recalling that when Vanity Fair ran a similar picture of George Bush in July of 2008 no one offered such astute psychoanalysis as we have from Mr. Kennicott, and certainly no one alleged racism. But what the uneducated rabble in the blogosphere doesn't realize, as our trenchant critic notes, is that the Bush image used the Jack Nicholson Joker. The Obama rendering uses the Heath Ledger Joker, and that, don't you see, makes all the difference in the world. If you don't understand why well, then, you're just not tuned in to the exquisite subtleties of racial signaling and codes to the enviable degree Mr. Kennicott is.

I'm tempted to believe that this article is actually a hoax and that the writer is, in fact, constructing a clever parody of the left's tendency to find racism in every nook and cranny of our public life. If, however, he's serious his essay is surely the sort of thing that causes regular people who don't appreciate their betters to smirk at intellectuals and call them chuckleheads. No one knows who even did the Obama poster much less what he was trying to say in composing it, but then when you're an intellectual like Mr. Kennicott, whose erudition doubtless surpasses what most of us could ever dream to attain, you're freed from the constraints of logic and common sense that bind mere mortals. If you're a "thoughtful man," especially one who endorses and reinforces all the racial dogmas and shibboleths of the left, you're permitted to espouse in venues like the Washington Post pretty much whatever goofball ideas pop into your head.

RLC

Desperation

I'm not defending every person who has vented his or her anger at the recent town hall meetings. Some of the behavior, especially at the Steny Hoyer meeting, makes me wince, and I wish some of the more obstreperous folk would be a little more respectful and less obnoxious in expressing their frustrations. But, having said that, the Democrat National Committee ad that's been airing on tv the last couple of days impugning these people is really shameless.

The ad alleges that these irate folks are actually extremists who are being manipulated, orchestrated, and funded by "high level GOP operatives" and organizations. This is simply an absurd slander as Mary Katherine Ham documents at The Weekly Standard.

It turns out that the "high level Republican operative" who produced the memo that appears on the DNC ad is a libertarian who writes on Facebook to about twenty friends. The fact that he is a very minor figure in his state's politics, however, didn't hinder the DNC from producing a piece that deliberately gives viewers the impression that what's happening at town halls across the country is some sort of nationwide conspiracy organized and funded by nefarious and powerful Republican fat cats.

Here's the ad:

It's pretty ludicrous, actually, to label thousands of mostly senior citizens "extremists" because they refuse to go gently into Democrat health care nirvana. It's also a sign of desperation. Check out Ham's account at the link.

RLC

Only in America

For the last couple of years the United States, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), has been funding an effort to translate moderate Islamic writings into other languages so that more Muslims would be exposed to teachings, for example, that forbid suicide. This, it was thought, would help counter the more extremist Islamists and help diminish their appeal to the masses of Muslims.

It turns out, though, that lawyers at USAID have consulted their law books, read their tarot cards, held seances to commune with the Founding Fathers, and have concluded, incredibly, that this violates the prohibition of using public money to establish a religion. Really, I'm serious. Well, except for the tarot cards and seances.

Apparently, we are in violation of the Constitution if we use public money to try to help one version of Islam prevail over the more violent extreme version. I wonder if this means that tax-payer funded efforts to arrest and kill the radicals before they kill us are unconstitutional. I'm sure we could find a lawyer somewhere who would maintain that the war on terror violates both the establishment of religion clause and the free speech clause of the First Amendment.

Keith Pavlischek writes about it at First Things. It's no wonder people make jokes about lawyers.

RLC

How It Used to Be

Byron links us to a story of racial discrimination from the early forties that would be hard, perhaps, for many of today's young people to imagine. The writer, the daughter of the man who was the victim of what can only be described as some very stupid decisions made by men whose intellectual furniture apparently made such decisions inevitable, draws a number of conclusions about the episode that one wishes were more widely held. You'll like the story.

RLC

Taking The Pols to the Woodshed

I could hardly believe what I was hearing last night and this morning as various liberal talking heads had their righteous indignation at full throttle because a bunch of septuagenarians followed Barack Obama's advice to his supporters in the campaign to get in people's faces and argue. The golden-agers heeded the call of their president and have turned out at various town hall meetings to give their elected representatives a piece of their mind over health care reform.

Democrats were aghast that the tactics of the left would be so unfairly employed against them and have been alleging that people were bussed in from outside, that what happened at the meetings was "orchestrated," that it was "mob-rule," that the geezers were trying to "shut down debate," and so on, but this is mostly absurd. In all the video clips I saw of these town hall meetings the anger of the people was aroused because their representatives were telling them they had to rush health care reform through Congress without really reading what they were imposing on the American people. It certainly seems that it's the congressional leadership and the President who are trying to shut down debate.

Allahpundit highlights the irony. He writes:

• People who want Congress to take more time debating healthcare are shutting down debate.
• Pres. Obama says the time for talk on healthcare is over, but his critics are trying to shut down debate.
• Harassing and threatening the families of AIG employees is awesome; razzing Representatives and Senators is totally bogus!
• Asking Representatives and Senators to read bills before voting on them is killing democracy.
• Sen. Specter saying "we have to make judgments very fast" is awesome. Booing him for saying so is shutting off debate.
• Healthcare protesters are thugs shutting off debate; antiwar protesters are merely "rowdy."

Hot Air has some clips of these encounters with the grey-haired ladies and gents who have so terrorized and scandalized the disciples of Saul Alinsky, as does TCP. Michelle Malkin, meanwhile, posts clips to instruct us on how to do real political thuggery. The clips, of course, are all of various left-wing "protests."

If the folks at these town halls were excoriating Republicans over some Bush initiative you can bet your mortgage that the Democrats and liberal media would be praising them as outstanding examples of American citizenry, but since their ire is directed at the Democrats they're being insulted and minimized. It certainly seems that a lot of reporters and politicians are just psychologically incapable of objectivity and genetically prone to making themselves look and sound like dolts.

RLC

Saving Your Memory

A recent study has confirmed what many suspected: People who engage in activities that exercise the brain, such as reading, writing, and playing card games, may delay the rapid memory decline that occurs if they later develop dementia:

The study involved 488 people age 75 to 85 who did not have dementia at the start of the study. They were followed for an average of five years; during that time 101 of the people developed dementia.

At the beginning of the study, people reported how often they participated in six leisure activities that engage the brain: reading, writing, doing crossword puzzles, playing board or card games, having group discussions, and playing music. For each activity, daily participation was rated at seven points, several days a week was rated at four points, and weekly participation was rated at one point.

The average was seven points total for those who later developed dementia, meaning they took part in one of the six activities each day, on average. Ten people reported no activities, and 11 reported only one activity per week.

The researchers then looked at the point when memory loss started accelerating rapidly for the participants. They found that for every additional activity a person participated in, the onset of rapid memory loss was delayed by 0.18 years.

"The point of accelerated decline was delayed by 1.29 years for the person who participated in 11 activities per week compared to the person who participated in only four activities per week," said study author Charles B. Hall, PhD, of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, NY.

Further studies are needed to determine if increasing participation in these activities could prevent or delay dementia."

Few things are more terrifying to people as they age than the awareness that they're losing their memory. Keep reading, discussing and thinking. It's good medicine.

RLC

Good and Evil among the Lefties

Over at Evolution News and Views Michael Egnor is piqued by the fact that much of the secular left has been very hostile toward the appointment of Francis Collins to head the National Institute of Health, but totally mute on the appointment of John Holdren as the President's chief science advisor.

Collins has being severely criticized because, even though he's a highly accomplished scientist, he's also a devout Christian. Holdren is a totalitarian who holds extreme views, some would say genocidal views, about limiting human population. Here are a few that he has committed to print:

• People who "contribute to social deterioration" (i.e. undesirables) "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility" - in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• Women-particularly women of insufficient means due to poverty, nationality, marital status, or youth--could be forced to abort their children and undergo sterilization.
• Implementation of a system of "involuntary birth control," in which girls at puberty would be implanted with an infertility device and only could have it removed temporarily if they received permission from the government to have a baby.
• Undesirable populations could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into public drinking water or in staple foods.
• Single mothers and teen mothers who managed to have their children despite measures to prevent fertility should have their babies seized from them and given away to others to raise.
• A transnational "Planetary Regime" and a transnational police force should be assembled to enforce population control.

So why is Collins, a man who would find such views abhorrent, unacceptable to the secular left while Dr. Holdren, a man who would seemingly find himself quite at home in the company of Josef Mengele, is apparently just fine with them?

I don't think it overstates the case to surmise that, for at least some on the left, Christianity is the great evil while totalitarianism and genocide are actually necessary for the betterment of mankind. Read Egnor's analysis at the link.

RLC

Counter-Proposal (Pt. I)

Keith Hennessey is a former advisor to President Bush who writes on insurance matters at KeithHennesy.com In a pair of recent posts he offers first a critique of President Obama's health care reform proposals and second a compelling alternative, the essence of which is incorporated into the Ryan-Coburn proposal crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan and Senator Tom Coburn. Hennessey writes:

President Obama is correct that the underlying problem with health care is rising costs. Because of this problem, your paycheck grows more slowly, millions of Americans cannot afford to buy health insurance, and the escalating costs of Medicare and Medicaid will force enormous tax increases onto you and your children. The President wants to slow the growth of health care spending, and so do I. Congress has gone in the opposite direction. Rather than changing incentives to reduce the cost of health insurance, they are trying to shift those costs onto someone else: you. The facts are not in dispute. The bill being developed in the House of Representatives would mean:

• No reduction in the growth of average private health insurance premiums;
• More than $1 trillion of new government spending over the next decade;
• $239 billion more debt in the short run, with ever-increasing additions to the deficit forever; and
• More than $500 billion of tax increases, including higher income tax rates on successful small businesses.

The better approach, Hennessey argues, is to make health insurance companies compete for individual clients as do automobile insurance companies:

While others offer you the hollow promise of government-provided and underfunded health care security, I'm telling you that you're going to have to take more responsibility for decisions about your own health. A well-functioning system will offer financial incentives to keep yourself healthy, and to avoid risky behaviors that are the source of so much of the costs in today's system. You will have to spend more time talking with your doctor and making hard choices yourself, although that's far preferable to spending that time fighting with your insurer or with a government bureaucracy.

You will have to shop intelligently for health insurance and decide what tradeoffs make sense for your family situation. You will have lower insurance premiums but more financial responsibility for relatively minor medical costs, and you can have a tax-free reserve fund that you can spend wisely on everyday non-critical medical expenses.

It means more personal responsibility and control, and less dependence on the government. It means your health security comes from you buying insurance to protect your family against catastrophe, rather than hoping the government won't ration your care when it's needed. Others want to tell you that you have the right to have someone else pay for your health insurance. I think you have the responsibility to provide for your family's health security, and that it's government's job to set rules so that you have affordable options, and to subsidize the poorest who cannot afford basic catastrophic protection.

The right kind of health care reform means your wages will grow faster as insurance premium growth slows. It means portable health insurance that you can take with you from one job to another, so you don't get locked into your current job because you're afraid to lose your health insurance. It means that millions more Americans will be insured because premiums are less expensive and the uninsured can better afford to buy it, not because we are shifting those costs onto other hard-working Americans and small businesses through higher taxes. It means no increase in the short-term budget deficit. It means dramatic reductions in unsustainable long-term budget deficits, rather than the explosive deficit increases contained in the current legislation.

Hennesey's follow-up post in which he lays out what congress should and should not do about health care reform can be read here. This is very helpful stuff and everyone concerned about the current debate over health care should take the time to read it.

Thanks to Hot Air for the links.

RLC

Wasting Time

Are you the sort of person who feels guilty if you spend an hour doing nothing productive or edifying or are you the sort of person who wishes there were more hours in the day just so you'd have more time to squander? Whichever you are you'll enjoy Jonathan David Price's meditation on wasting time at First Principles. Here's Price's lede:

Do not say this to a philosopher but we have more time now than ever before. One would think that since modern men-and modern women too-have more time, they would think less of it. In fact, quite the opposite is true. The same applies to health and money. We are healthier and wealthier than ever, and these facts have neither calmed our fears nor added peace to our souls. Actually, we seem more anxious than ever about how we spend our time.

This newly-won time, occurring on weekends, evenings, and during paid vacations, is called "free time," and it is a byproduct of industrialization. Delayed marriage and fewer children may have also helped. The majority waste their free time without a second thought, egged on by television, video games, and personal billboards (a.k.a. social networking sites), which they may or may not feel vaguely guilty about. But there is another group-perhaps fifteen percent of Americans-that busies itself with doing and getting and self-betterment.

This cadre of overachievers has the opposite problem: it is terrible at wasting time. And even worse at wasting it well. Their days are planned, their evenings booked, futures fixed. From this group comes our leaders, teachers, businessmen, and preachers. Thus, if the likes of YouTube and the proverbial bear pit fill their lists of time wasters, it is commendable. The problem is that they consider leisure to be a waste of time as well. What Joseph Pieper called the basis of culture, leisure-activity outside the field of servile work, the retreat from the world to study it, reflect on it, worship its source, and return refreshed to serve it-is considered to be wasting time. In recent memory, even the everyday connotation of the word has changed to "doing nothing."

Further on he makes the point that when we waste money it doesn't seem so bad because we can always make more, but the time we waste can never be recovered. The question is what exactly is a "waste" of time?

I wonder if spending a couple of hours a day writing a blog qualifies as "wasting time." Maybe it depends on the blog. I'll have to think about that. Anyway, you'll like Price's essay.

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.

RLC

Noses Are Growing

When President Obama insists his health care reform plans would not eliminate private insurance he's being very disingenuous. He certainly wants to eliminate private insurance and have the government take over control of all health care in this country. This is video of Mr. Obama and others explaining that their ultimate goal is to do precisely that. He states clearly that his goal is to get to a single-payer system with the government as single payer:

Two things are disturbing about this: The prospect of government controlling such a huge part of our lives and Mr. Obama's complete lack of candor in his recent pronouncements about his true intentions. He has repeatedly tried to assure voters that he has no intention of getting rid of private insurance, but this is certainly at odds with what he said before his election. How does he expect people to believe him on anything he says if so many of his most important statements are calibrated to meet the demands of political exigency?

RLC

Chavez's Version of the Fairness Doctrine

The left continues its assault on basic freedoms in Venezuela:

More than a dozen of 34 radio stations ordered shut by the Venezuelan government went off the air on Saturday, part of President Hugo Chavez's drive to extend his socialist revolution to the media.

The association of radio broadcasters said 13 stations had stopped transmitting, following an announcement Friday night by government broadcasting watchdog Conatel that 34 radio outlets would be closed because they failed to comply with regulations.

Critics said the crackdown infringed on freedom of speech and that owners were not given the right to a proper defense.

"They're closing the space for dissidents in Venezuela," William Echeverria, head of the National Council of Journalists, told RCTV, a private cable TV station, which did not have its broadcasting license renewed in 2007.

Chavez defended the closures, calling them part of the government's effort to democratize the airwaves.

"This government has turned into a mutilator of rights," Juan Carlos Caldera, of the opposition political party Primero Justicia, said on Globovision TV.

Antonio Ledezma, the opposition mayor of Caracas, called on Venezuelans to protest the move in the streets.

Another 120 radio stations were being investigated for administrative irregularities and the radio frequency of stations being shut down would be transferred to new community broadcasters, Cabello had said.

No doubt the community broadcasters will be favorable to the Chavez regime. Meanwhile, here in the states proponents of the Fairness Doctrine are taking notes. They must envy the ease with which Venezuela has been able to silence its political opposition.

RLC

Best That They Can Do

In logic there's an informal fallacy called tu quoque, meaning, roughly, "you're one too." It occurs when someone seeks to deflect the force of an allegation or claim made by an opponent by asserting that the opponent or the opponent's allies are just as bad. The irrelevance of the reply is a tacit admission that the accused person, or his supporters, really has no defense against the charges. I thought of this while watching the video of Michelle Malkin's recent appearance on The View.

Ms Malkin has written a book on the extensive corruption in the Obama administration (Culture of Corruption) which won her an invitation to appear on the show. It was amusing that during her six or seven minute segment none of the liberals among the ladies at the table chose to defend the President or his administration against her indictments. Instead they were reduced to protesting that, well, the Bush administration was corrupt too, you know:

If this is the best defense the President's friends can mount against the very serious accusations Malkin amasses in her book then Mr. Obama is in quite a pickle.

Thanks to Hot Air for the tip.

RLC

Racial Profiling

If you think that racial profiling by cops is one of the great evils of our time read this. Written by a retired cop it explains how New York's finest do it every day. What's more, it makes the argument that cops shouldn't profile seem pretty simple-minded.

RLC

The Third Replicator

Writer and psychologist Susan Blackmore has an interesting article at New Scientist on the emergence of what she thinks is a third type of "replicator." The first type is the gene, the parcels of DNA that code for the structure and function of biological organisms. The second type is Richard Dawkins' "meme," which is an idea, or cluster of ideas, that get selected by cultures for various reasons and spread throughout the human population (We might ignore for the moment the fact that the concept of the meme has come to be widely dismissed by scientists).

Blackmore thinks there is a third type of replicator that is spreading across the globe threatening to run out of control - computer technology. She makes an interesting case and her article is worth a read, but the most interesting part of it to me is this:

Memes are a new kind of information - behaviours rather than DNA - copied by a new kind of machinery - brains rather than chemicals inside cells. This is a new evolutionary process because all of the three critical stages - copying, varying and selection - are done by those brains. So does the same apply to new technology? There is a new kind of information: electronically processed binary information rather than memes. There is also a new kind of copying machinery: computers and servers rather than brains.

If all three replicators are analogous to each other, and all three are expressions of information, and if information is known to be a product of minds, as it is with memes and technology, then is it not reasonable to infer that the gene may likewise be a product of mind? If evolution at the level of the meme and technological information is mind-driven, why would it be unreasonable or even unscientific to assume that evolution at the level of the gene is mind-driven? Just asking.

RLC

What We're Likely to Get

The WaPo's Charles Krauthammer puts on his prophet's cap and tells us what the upshot of Obamacare is likely to be. Here's his lede:

Yesterday, Barack Obama was God. Today, he's fallen from grace, the magic gone, his health-care reform dead. If you believed the first idiocy -- and half the mainstream media did -- you'll believe the second. Don't believe either.

Conventional wisdom always makes straight-line projections. They are always wrong. Yes, Obama's aura has diminished, in part because of overweening overexposure. But by year's end he will emerge with something he can call health-care reform. The Democrats in Congress will pass it because they must. Otherwise, they'll have slain their own savior in his first year in office.

But that bill will look nothing like the massive reform Obama originally intended.

Krauthammer thinks that "reforming" the health care system is indeed no longer a viable possibility, for reasons he adumbrates in his column, but he thinks that what the Democrats will be able to give him is reform of health insurance:

To win back the vast constituency that has insurance, is happy with it, and is mightily resisting the fatal lures of Obamacare, the president will in the end simply impose heavy regulations on the insurance companies that will make what you already have secure, portable and imperishable: no policy cancellations, no preexisting condition requirements, perhaps even a cap on out-of-pocket expenses.

Nirvana. But wouldn't this bankrupt the insurance companies? Of course it would. There will be only one way to make this work: Impose an individual mandate. Force the 18 million Americans between 18 and 34 who (often quite rationally) forgo health insurance to buy it. This will create a huge new pool of customers who rarely get sick but will be paying premiums every month. And those premiums will subsidize nirvana health insurance for older folks.

Net result? Another huge transfer of wealth from the young to the old, the now-routine specialty of the baby boomers; an end to the dream of imposing European-style health care on the United States; and a president who before Christmas will wave his pen, proclaim victory and watch as the newest conventional wisdom reaffirms his divinity.

In other words, insurance reform will come about by requiring that everyone have insurance. The liberal solution to the problem will be to take away more freedom. Wouldn't the better solution to insurance costs be to reform tort and get rid of onerous state and federal mandates that just multiply the cost of premiums for all policy-holders? Unfortunately, these measures would have the effect of impoverishing lawyers who are big donors to Democrat pols and reducing the control of government in the insurance industry. They're therefore as likely to survive congressional scrutiny as a fish is likely to survive being tossed onto the sands of the Sahara desert.

RLC

Looking for Racism in All the Wrong Places

Much of the national media was all atwitter over the fact that two white men and two black men were having a beer together at the White House the other night. The talking heads spent much of the evening and the next morning trying to discern the portents in this event for the future of race relations in this country. They reported assiduously on all the important details like which brand of beer the principals sipped, what role was played by each, whether the vice-president was allowed to say anything, etc.

Meanwhile, if they were really interested in reporting on a significant story about race and racism they should have followed the lead of the Washington Times. The Times has a report on one Jerry Jackson, a Democratic committee member in Philadelphia and New Black Panther who had been charged with intimidating voters in last November's election. It turns out that Mr. Jackson is not just an overzealous Obama supporter but a man infected with a deep-seated hatred for whites. The Times examines Mr. Jackson's Facebook page where they found Mr. Jackson expressing his racism with incredibly vile racial invective.

We wonder whether the media would be looking the other way if Mr. Jackson were a white Republican saying such hateful things about blacks. He's not, of course, so he gets ignored by the traditional media which can rarely find racism anywhere but among middle class whites. Blacks are allowed to be virulent racists, but if a cop investigates a possible break-in which turns out to involve black men then he and the woman who reported it are vilified as the worst sort of human beings.

Here are a few of the ponderings taken from Mr. Jackson's Facebook page:

• "BLACK POWER,BLACK LOVE,BLACK UNITY,BLACK MINDS,KILLIN CRAKKKAS"
• "F*** Whitey's Christmas"
• An image of an execution scene from the cult hit film "Pulp Fiction"
• A photo of a man holding a sign saying, "DEPORT WHITE PEOPLE"
• A derogatory anti-cop poster titled "BEWARE OF PIG"
• An image of Saddam Hussein before his execution
• A photo of a cop sitting next to a black child in a toy car. Beneath the image the phrase "Racial Profiling: It Starts Early"
• A photoshopped movie poster of the "Bourne Supremacy" is re-worded to say "The Bourne White Supremacy" A swastika is added to Matt Damon's cheek, and the scope of his firearm is photoshopped to look as if he is about to shoot a black man. The "n" word is used to describe who "Matt Damon hates" in this movie poster. The phrase, "They should have just stayed in Africa" is photoshopped at the top of the image.

Not only has Mr. Jackson apparently been given a pass by the media but the Obama Justice department chose not to prosecute him for his misconduct at the polls and, just as bad, the man was reappointed to work the polls in the upcoming primary in Philadelphia. I wonder what Professor Gates thinks about that.

If people want to have a conversation about race in this country let it start with the case of Mr. Jackson.

RLC

Spoof

Some people just have too much time on their hands:

Thanks to Politico.com.

RLC

Smiley-Face Fascism

We've often remarked that fascism is an ideological bacillus endemic not, as is commonly supposed, to the right but to the left. Indeed, fascism and conservatism are almost complete opposites of each other. Washington Timescolumnist Jeffrey Kuhner explains why, taking as his starting point Jonah Goldberg's fine book, Liberal Fascism. Kuhner writes:

Both Hitler and Mussolini were national socialists. They were militant pagans hostile to Christianity, religious orthodoxy and tradition. They believed in the cult of personality, mass propaganda and the pseudo-spiritual transformational nature of politics: charismatic leadership as a means of fulfilling people's deepest aspirations. They glorified the state, as well as the subordination of the individual and the family to the collective. They created a corporatist economy that combined big business, big labor and big government. They emphasized the nationalization of key industries, redistribution of wealth, massive public works projects and trade protectionism. They established a so-called "social safety net" through national health care, unemployment insurance and government pensions. They erected a cradle-to-grave welfare state.

Fascist social policy was so popular that President Franklin Roosevelt incorporated much of it in the New Deal.

Embarrassed by the horrors of World War II and Auschwitz, the West's liberal elite disowned Hitler and then falsely portrayed him as a reactionary right-winger.

Kuhner then goes on to show how President Obama's policies reflect many of the characteristics of fascism noted above. He hastens to point out that, to be sure, Obama is neither Hitler nor even Mussolini:

He is not a crypto-dictator. Nor does he believe in an authoritarian police state or territorial expansionism. But Hitler and Mussolini were men of a different age, time and national culture; their fascism was distinctly German and Italian.

Mr. Obama's fascism is uniquely American. His revolution is not of blood and iron, but of pork and bailouts. His fascism is a potent mix of incremental socialism, messianic liberalism and puritanical environmentalism. It is not the crude militarism of the jackboot but the sugar-coated, forced spoon-feeding of the nanny state.

Whether it's militaristic or no, smiley-face fascism is still coercive and freedom-denying. It's still totalitarian, and it's still fascism. Let's hope that our elected leaders recognize the road they're taking us down before it's too late. Let's hope, too, that they're not taking us down this road deliberately.

RLC

Cry Racism Some More

Let me see if I understand this. If you see two black men trying to break into a house you're a racist if you report to the police that two black men are trying to break into a house, even though knowing the race of the perps could be of value to the police in eliminating others as possible suspects.

At least that's apparently what we are to deduce from the experience of Lucia Whalen who, be it noted, did not mention the race of the men she was led to believe were trying to break into a home in her neighborhood:

The woman who dialed 911 to report a possible break-in at the home of black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. said Wednesday she was pained to be wrongly labeled a racist based on words she never said and hoped the recently released recording of the call would put the controversy to rest.

With a trembling voice, Lucia Whalen, 40, said she was out walking to lunch in Gates' Cambridge neighborhood near Harvard University when an elderly woman without a cell phone stopped her because she was concerned there was a possible burglary in progress.

Whalen was vilified as a racist on blogs after a police report said she described the possible burglars as "two black males with backpacks."

Tapes of the call released earlier this week revealed that Whalen did not mention race. When pressed by a dispatcher on whether the men were white, black or Hispanic, she said one of them might have been Hispanic.

"Now that the tapes are out, I hope people can see that I tried to be careful and honest with my words," Whalen said. "It never occurred to me that the way I reported what I saw be analyzed by an entire nation."

Even if Ms Whalen had reported that the men were black, which they were, why would that be racist? And why should the cretins who are subjecting her to threats and ridicule be angry with her? She's just a good person doing her civic duty and now she's being smeared by the lefty blogosphere, which excels at this sort of thing, for reporting the apparent crime.

I remember the much-cited story of Kitty Genovese who was murdered by a man on a city street back in the 1950s, and although dozens of people heard her calls for help, few actually did anything. They didn't want to get involved. I can imagine that from now on no one who witnesses a crime being committed by a black is going to want to get involved by reporting it for fear of being slandered for his/her efforts. Easier to just let society crumble than to suffer the abuse of those small minds who see racism lurking in every cultural crevice and those fetid souls who relish destroying and defaming whoever they can.

RLC

Re: <i>Taken</i>

Alas, no anti-torture absolutists chose to reply to my invitation to watch the movie Taken and explain why the Liam Neeson character was wrong, immoral, or unjustified to use torture in interrogating the men who had information on his daughter's whereabouts. A couple of readers did endorse Neeson's methods, however, and asserted that the circumstances of their use justified their employment. You can read their comments on the Feedback page.

RLC

Paramilitaries, Theirs and Ours

The New York Times has an article that reveals the horrors Iranian detainees swept up in the aftermath of the massive protests over voter fraud several weeks ago underwent. Eyewitness accounts of atrocities perpetrated by military and paramilitary groups like the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij that are outside the structure of civilian law enforcement are now leaking out:

Some prisoners say they watched fellow detainees being beaten to death by guards in overcrowded, stinking holding pens. Others say they had their fingernails ripped off or were forced to lick filthy toilet bowls.

The accounts of prison abuse in Iran's postelection crackdown - relayed by relatives and on opposition Web sites - have set off growing outrage among Iranians, including some prominent conservatives. More bruised corpses have been returned to families in recent days, and some hospital officials have told human rights workers that they have seen evidence that well over 100 protesters have died since the vote.

On Tuesday, the government released 140 prisoners in one of several conciliatory gestures aimed at deflecting further criticism. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issued a letter urging the head of the judiciary to show "Islamic mercy" to the detainees.

I'm glad Mr. Ahmadinejad is concerned about the welfare of the detainees, but I thought the fact that their murders numbered only in the hundreds was already a sign of "Islamic mercy."

Anyway, more details of the abuses - which make Abu Ghraib look like a Sandals resort - can be found at the link.

One of the especially disturbing revelations about the events in Iran is the role played by the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij. Why is this particularly disturbing? Because one of the things President Obama wants to do once he has passed the legislation that is currently before us - health care reform and cap and trade - is to establish a civilian security force that will rival the military in its training and funding. In other words, he envisions a paramilitary force at the government's disposal pretty much like the Iranian mullahs have at theirs:

I wonder if he plans on calling it the Basij. I guess we'll see.

RLC

Can't be Bothered

It seems like the only people in favor of the Democrats' plan for health care reform are people who haven't read the bill.

During a speech at a National Press Club luncheon, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), who has apparently decided himself not to read it, questioned the point of being expected to do so. He said:

"I love these [House] members, they get up and say, 'Read the bill.' What good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?"

Well, the point, of course, is that you're getting paid by the taxpayers to read it Mr. Conyers, and if you don't have time to do it then it is criminally reckless of you to vote for it. Indeed, anyone who does vote for such a revolutionary piece of legislation without having read it should be subject to impeachment for malfeasance.

Many of those who have read the 1000 page monstrosity tell us that it's a looming disaster. It will, according to many analysts, end private insurance, putting tens of thousands of people out of work. It will take medical decisions away from you and your doctor and place them in the hands of some anonymous bureaucrat in Washington. It will cause procedures like colonoscopies to be rationed so that rather than getting screened every three years screenings could be extended to, say, every six years, thereby increasing your risk of colon cancer. It will increase waiting times for procedures like MRIs and CAT scans from days to months. It will deny certain procedures like joint or heart valve replacements to people who are judged too old, too feeble, or too heavy. The bright, clean clinics and hospitals that make our stays reasonably pleasant today will likely be deemed superfluous and too costly to maintain. And all of these blessings will cost us trillions of dollars over the next two decades.

Before you and your colleagues kill the best medical care system on the planet, Mr. Conyers, please at least have the decency to learn what you're voting for.

RLC

Gangster Government

Rep. Michelle Bachman calls our attention in this video to the economic brutality and corruption involved in the closing of GM car dealerships across the land:

If you're politically connected, you can survive. If not, tough luck. If the Democrats behave this way with the people who own and work for car dealerships, how will they behave when government health care is the only game in town? How much bribery do you think there'll be as people seek to curry favor with congressmen in order to get moved up on the waiting list for a procedure? How much bribery will there be if cap and trade is passed and government bureaucrats control how much carbon a business can use and emit? When government runs things the opportunities for corruption will be massive.

If we want a model of what life will be like if the Democrats get their legislation passed, we might look toward the old Soviet Union. How's that for hope and change?

RLC

Disparate Impact

Shelby Steele, author of White Guilt and Affirmative Action Baby, has a column in the WaPo that I commend to anyone interested in the conversation about race in this country. As he does in his books Steele argues that affirmative action is not so much about helping blacks, it's more about relieving largely white institutions from the burden of guilt for past racial injustice. It's a way of gaining for themselves a kind of racial absolution. Steele writes, for instance, that:

It is important to remember that the original goal of affirmative action was to achieve two redemptions simultaneously. As society gave a preference to its former victims in employment and education, it hoped to redeem both those victims and itself. When America -- the world's oldest and most unequivocal democracy -- finally acknowledged in the 1960s its heartless betrayal of democracy where blacks were concerned, the loss of moral authority was profound. In their monochrome whiteness, the institutions of this society -- universities, government agencies, corporations -- became emblems of the very evil America had just acknowledged.

Affirmative action has always been more about the restoration of legitimacy to American institutions than the uplift of blacks and other minorities. For 30 years after its inception, no one even bothered to measure its effectiveness in minority progress. Advocates of racial preferences tried to prove that these policies actually helped minorities only after 1996, when California's Proposition 209 banned racial preferences in all state institutions, scaring supporters across the country.

But the research following from this scare has .... has completely failed to show that affirmative action ever closes the academic gap between minorities and whites. And failing in this, affirmative action also fails to help blacks achieve true equality with whites -- the ultimate measure of which is parity in skills and individual competence. Without this underlying parity there can never be true equality in employment, income levels, rates of home ownership, educational achievement and the rest.

In order to account for the elusive competitive parity latent racism and discrimination are assumed to be lurking insidiously in the nooks and crannies of society, always working to keep blacks from getting ahead. The proof that these malefactors are still in play is the occurrence of "disparate impact," an indicator not of black failure but of an indelible white racism.

We are headed now, it seems, into a legal thicket created by the incompatibility of two notions of equality: "disparate impact" and "equal protection under the law." The former is a legalism evolved from judicial interpretations of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; the latter is a constitutional guarantee. Disparate impact lets you presume that an entire class of people has been discriminated against if it has been disproportionately affected by some policy. If no blacks do well enough on a firefighters promotion exam to win advancement while many whites do (Ricci v. DeStefano), then this constitutes discrimination against blacks.

Disparate impact and racial preferences represent the law and policymaking of a guilty America, an America lacking the moral authority to live by the rigors of the Constitution's "equal protection" -- a guarantee that sees victims as individuals and requires hard evidence to prove discrimination. They are "white guilt" legalisms created after the '60s as fast tracks to moral authority. They apologize for presumed white wrongdoing and offer recompense to minorities before any actual discrimination has been documented. Yet these legalisms are much with us now. And it will no doubt take the courts a generation or more to disentangle all this apology from the law.

We blacks know oppression well, but today it is our inexperience with freedom that holds us back almost as relentlessly as oppression once did. Out of this inexperience, for example, we miss the fact that racial preferences and disparate impact can only help us -- even if they were effective -- with a problem we no longer have. The problem that black firefighters had in New Haven was not discrimination; it was the fact that not a single black did well enough on the exam to gain promotion.

Today's "black" problem is underdevelopment, not discrimination. Success in modernity will demand profound cultural changes -- changes in child-rearing, a restoration of marriage and family, a focus on academic rigor, a greater appreciation of entrepreneurialism and an embrace of individual development as the best road to group development.

I'd like to post Steele's complete column, but I refer you instead to the link. There's much more there that's worth considering.

RLC

Stunted Development

According to Strategy Page, as North Korea moves toward chaos with the imminent succession crisis looming when Kim Jong Il dies, South Korea and China are increasingly concerned about the primitiveness of the refugees that are making it out of that prison state:

South Koreans are growing increasingly anxious at the difficulties North Korean refugees are having in adapting to life in a prosperous democracy. There are over 17,000 refugees in South Korea now, and the children do not do well at school. Few get into a university. The adults do poorly in establishing prosperous careers. These refugees are among the most enterprising North Koreans, because of the planning they had to do, and risks they had to take, to get out of the country. But these people are obsessed with basic survival, not personal improvement and advancement, as in South Korea, and the rest of the world.

Sixty years of police state rule up north, plus the 1990s famine, has seriously crippled the initiative and ambition of the northerners. It appears that the North Koreans are much more psychologically damaged, than were the East Germans (and east Europeans in general) after their communist dictatorships collapsed in 1989. This just makes South Korea, and China, even more anxious about a collapse of the North Korean government, while would leave China and South Korea to deal with refugees, and picking up the pieces in general.

Meanwhile, those Norks who can are preparing to flee once the end comes:

Some senior officials are making escape plans, gathering portable wealth and cultivating connections in China that would be useful for a getaway. There is a growing consensus that Kim Jong Il will be gone within three years, and that after that, chaos.

The North Koreans have managed to stunt the development of three generations of their people by forcing them to live in a Marxist paradise. There's a lesson here for the rest of the world: The fewer freedoms a people have the more dehumanized they become.

RLC

No Reform Without Tort Reform

There's a very good column at NRO by Charles Krauthammer on the contradictions in President Obama's health care reform plans. It's these contradictions (some might call them deceptions) that are causing the plans to collapse in Congress and with them, perhaps, Mr. Obama's presidency. As we said last week, if he doesn't get health care he'll probably not get cap and trade or another stimulus bill, and if he doesn't get these he won't be able to accomplish much else over the next three years. He will, in effect, be a lame duck after less than a year in office.

Indeed, after the disastrous week he had last week (staying with the wrong side on Honduras, a weak press conference on health care reform, putting his foot in his mouth on the Gates arrest) it would not be surprising to see his approval ratings drop soon into the low forties.

Anyway, the most important part of Krauthammer's column, in my opinion, was the spotlight he cast on the vast distance between Mr. Obama's claim that his health care reform agenda is not about politics and the absence in any of the Democratic plans of tort 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, through higher doctors' 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 lawsuits. 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.

No plan that does nothing about the cost to health care consumers of malpractice insurance and defensive medicine can really be called "reform." If and when the Democrats address tort reform they should then proceed to clean out the $60 billion in fraud and waste in medicare and medicaid.

Read the rest of Krauthammer's column. It's worth the two minutes it'll take.

RLC

Colombia's War on Drugs

To get a sense of the sort of people our government has chosen to side with in the struggle for control of the Honduran presidency, read the article at Strategy Page on what's going on in Colombia between the Colombian government, the drug lords, and the leftist FARC rebels. Note the role played by Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez and the similarities between ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, Chavez, and Ecuadorean president Rafael Correia. Here's how the report begins:

The first six months of 2009 was a bad time for the drug gangs, and leftist rebels like FARC and ELN. In those six months, security forces launched over 10,000 raids, patrols and other operations against rebels and gangsters. This resulted in 834 battles, leading to the deaths of 307 rebels and their allies. Over 600 FARC camps were found and destroyed, and nearly 1,300 rebel attacks were disrupted. Some 4,000 rebels were disarmed (nearly 40 percent just from FARC). The army lost 75 troops, with another 279 wounded.

The increasing pressure on drug gangs along the Pacific and Caribbean coasts has led to increased exports of cocaine to Europe and the Middle East, via Africa. Some drug lords, like Daniel Rendon, responded to the increased pressure by offering his gunmen a $1,000 bonus for each policeman or soldier they kill. This sort of thing has happened before in South America, and usually results in more dead gangsters, and the police are less likely to try and capture armed criminals, fearing that the crooks are actually out looking for the bounty money. For Rendon, the bounty offer quickly led to his capture, and the demise of his bounty offer.

Government intel has uncovered a six month effort by FARC to get Russian made, SA-24, portable surface-to-air missiles from Venezuela. FARC has already received Swedish AT4 (bunker buster) portable rocket launchers from Venezuela, and some of these have been captured by the army.

Read the rest of this report at the link and bear in mind that our president and state department are on the same side of the Honduran imbroglio as those like Chavez and Correia who are supporting the rebels and the drug lords.

RLC

Birthers

Just because President Obama is trying to turn the U.S. into a third-world country doesn't mean that he was born in one. National Review Online editors think that we've had enough on the matter of whether Mr. Obama is constitutionally eligible to hold the office he's in, and I agree.

I don't have to see his original birth certificate, if such a document even exists, but it would be nice if we could have a peek at his academic records. I'm perfectly willing to believe Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii, but I'm really curious about whether he ever took a course in economics.

RLC

Myopic Agnosticism

We mentioned the other day Brad Pitt's claim that he was "probably 20 per cent atheist and 80 per cent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows. You'll either find out or not when you get there, until then there's no point thinking about it." Mr. Pitt is laboring under a misconception that's common in our culture that agnosticism is a completely different epistemic category than atheism.

That's not quite so. Atheism is the lack of belief in a God or gods. It comes in at least two varieties which I prefer to call "hard atheism" and "soft atheism." The hard atheist makes the bold and metaphysically indefensible claim that there is no God or gods. I say this is indefensible because it claims as truth something we can simply not know.

If there is a God presumably that is something that could be known, i.e. if God revealed Himself to us either in this life or the next, but if there is no God no one could ever discover the fact. So hard atheism is philosophically naive.

The soft atheist claims more modestly that God may exist but as yet he has seen insufficient evidence to warrant belief that He does. This is agnosticism, and it's a form of soft atheism because the agnostic lacks a belief in God but is, hypothetically at least, willing to entertain that God may exist.

When Pitt says there's not much point in thinking about whether God exists he's telling us that he lacks a belief in God but doesn't much care one way or the other. This is really a kind of soft atheism, probably very common in our secularized culture, that perhaps we could call short-sighted, or myopic, agnosticism.

RLC

Can't Have Both

Mark Krikorian writes at NRO's The Corner to fill us in on some of the new health care reform proposal's more unsavory provisions. Here's one:

Democrats have stopped even pretending to try to keep illegals from being covered by Obamacare - they rejected an amendment that would have required Obamacare applicants to be screened with the same eligibility-screening database as used for welfare applicants, thus guaranteeing that lots of illegal aliens would receive taxpayer-funded health care. Even legal immigration would be subsidized. Jim Edward's NRO piece exposed a fascinating wrinkle - you can sponsor an immigrant so long as your income is 25% above poverty, but Obamacare would expand Medicaid to those earning 50% above poverty. So, as Jim wrote, "The end result would be that someone poor enough to qualify for Medicaid would be able to sponsor new immigrants to the U.S. What are the chances that these newcomers sponsored by Medicaid recipients would be able to afford health insurance when their sponsors can't?"

Obviously, the Obamacare proposal is an abomination and Congress needs to throw it out and start from scratch. But whatever they come up with, the lesson for immigration is unchanged - in an era when we have massive transfers of taxpayer funds to the poor, whether through Medicaid or food stamps or public-education funding or whatever, you just can't keep importing more and more poor people. The libertarians will say the answer is to abolish all of these taxpayer-funded programs; but even if that's true, until we do abolish them, ongoing mass immigration is simply unjustifiable.

Either shut down illegal immigration or shut down the welfare state. As we're seeing in California you have to do one or the other. If we don't it won't be long before Americans are sneaking across the border to Mexico to try to find work.

RLC

Authenticity

After listening to so many African-American talking heads on cable news offer thoughtless, knee jerk endorsements of Professor Gates' tantrum and the President's foolish decision to inject himself into the matter of Gates' arrest, it's refreshing to listen to these black cops speak in support of officer Crowley:

If liberal America wants to see what race relations could be like in America if we'd just start seeing each other as people and not as identity groups they should watch this video.

RLC

<i>Taken </i> and Torture

I watched the movie Taken starring Liam Neeson the other night and wondered what those who think that torture is absolutely wrong would say about Neeson's character's behavior. Neeson plays a retired CIA operative named Bryan Mills whose daughter is kidnapped in Paris by Albanian sex slave traders.

Mills sets out after his daughter and her kidnappers, leaving mayhem and carnage in his wake, in a pursuit that strains credulity but nevertheless wins the viewer's forgiveness because it's, well, interesting. Along the way Mills resorts to some rather unorthodox means of interrogation and it was here that I wondered about the anti-torture absolutists.

Let us, just for the sake of discussion, imagine that a man's daughter had really been kidnapped and sold into sex slavery, and the man found it necessary, in order to find and rescue her, to use methods which would give Eric Holder and Barack Obama an attack of the vapors. Would the anti-torture absolutist maintain that the man did the wrong thing?

Now if you are such an absolutist, before you answer the question you have to subject yourself to the movie, otherwise you might not appreciate the dilemma Bryan Mills faced. So, have at it. Let me know if you blame Mills for using torture or if you think he was justified, but only if you've seen the movie first.

RLC

Bumper Sticker

Seen in Florida:

"You don't see Obama stickers on cars going to work."

Unfortunately, if we get cap and trade and the Democrat version of health reform, you won't see many cars going to work.

RLC

Throw Granny Off the Train

Betsy McCoughey at the New York Post fills us in on the disturbing views of two of President Obama's close medical advisors. The first is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Mr. Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Here's what Ms. McCoughey tells us about Dr. Emanuel. Read it carefully and think about the kind of world these men would lead us to:

Savings, [Dr. Emanuel] writes, will require changing how doctors think about their patients: Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, "as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others."

Yes, that's what patients want their doctors to do. But Emanuel wants doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and consider social justice, such as whether the money could be better spent on somebody else.

Many doctors are horrified by this notion; they'll tell you that a doctor's job is to achieve social justice one patient at a time.

Emanuel, however, believes that "communitarianism" should guide decisions on who gets care. He says medical care should be reserved for the non-disabled, not given to those "who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens . . . An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia."

Translation: Don't give much care to a grandmother with Parkinson's or a child with cerebral palsy.

He explicitly defends discrimination against older patients: "Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years."

The bills being rushed through Congress will be paid for largely by a $500 billion-plus cut in Medicare over 10 years. Knowing how unpopular the cuts will be, the president's budget director, Peter Orszag, urged Congress this week to delegate its own authority over Medicare to a new, presidentially-appointed bureaucracy that wouldn't be accountable to the public.

Since Medicare was founded in 1965, seniors' lives have been transformed by new medical treatments such as angioplasty, bypass surgery and hip and knee replacements. These innovations allow the elderly to lead active lives. But Emanuel criticizes Americans for being too "enamored with technology" and is determined to reduce access to it.

Dr. David Blumenthal, another key Obama adviser, agrees. He recommends slowing medical innovation to control health spending.

Blumenthal has long advocated government health-spending controls, though he concedes they're "associated with longer waits" and "reduced availability of new and expensive treatments and devices." But he calls it "debatable" whether the timely care Americans get is worth the cost. (Ask a cancer patient, and you'll get a different answer. Delay lowers your chances of survival.)

Obama appointed Blumenthal as national coordinator of health-information technology, a job that involves making sure doctors obey electronically delivered guidelines about what care the government deems appropriate and cost effective.

In the April 9 New England Journal of Medicine, Blumenthal predicted that many doctors would resist "embedded clinical decision support" -- a euphemism for computers telling doctors what to do.

Americans need to know what the president's health advisers have in mind for them. Emanuel sees even basic amenities as luxuries and says Americans expect too much: "Hospital rooms in the United States offer more privacy . . . physicians' offices are typically more conveniently located and have parking nearby and more attractive waiting rooms."

Evidently, convenience and comfort are amenities we should not expect in Dr. Emanuel's, and thus Barack Obama's, brave new world. Nor should we expect care for those beyond a certain age, the quality of their lives representing an expense the state shouldn't have to bear.

No one has leveled with the public about these dangerous views. Nor have most people heard about the arm-twisting, Chicago-style tactics being used to force support. In a Nov. 16, 2008, Health Care Watch column, Emanuel explained how business should be done: "Every favor to a constituency should be linked to support for the health-care reform agenda. If the automakers want a bailout, then they and their suppliers have to agree to support and lobby for the administration's health-reform effort."

Do we want a "reform" that empowers people like this to decide for us?

We've noted in the past that modern progressives are kissing cousins to 20th century totalitarian fascists. Drs. Emanuel and Blumenthal do nothing to dispel that notion. That President Obama is quietly surrounding himself with such men - Dr. John Holdren, his science czar, being another like-minded advisor - is not just disturbing, it's frightening.

RLC

Who Are the Uninsured?

The administration and its allies in the health care debate keep reminding us of the urgency of extending health insurance coverage to the 47 million people in this country who don't have it, but who are these people who are uninsured?

It turns out that most of them could be covered under existing plans, and many of the rest are illegal aliens and shouldn't be covered anyway.

Ramirez breaks it down for us:

See here for more data on the uninsured.

RLC

Presidential Prayer

President Obama has admitted something (besides that he's a smoker) certain to win him the enmity of liberals everywhere. After all, it was just such an admission by George Bush that got him clobbered by the secular left, so we can expect that these folks'll be similarly dismayed and scornful of Mr. Obama:

President Barack Obama says he's gone from praying nightly before going to bed to praying all the time because he has a "lot of stuff" on his plate and needs "guidance all the time."

Obama made the comments in an interview to air Thursday on ABC's "Nightline."

Obama says he thinks every president has been humbled by the number of issues they have had to deal with. He says he thinks they are quickly cured of the illusion that one person can solve all those problems.

When George Bush acknowledged his dependence upon prayer he was mercilessly ridiculed by some in the lefty media for thinking he had God's ear and that God might actually give him guidance. Surely, the sense of fairness and objectivity prized by such people will lead them to begin directing the same sort of scoffing and jeering at President Obama any day now.

Why are you laughing?

RLC

Common Sense

Susan Estrich is a liberal Democrat who has managed Democrat campaigns and served as an advisor to President Clinton and other Democrat politicians. She certainly has no political axe to grind so it's interesting that she would write this column, not because it brings a needed dose of common sense to the health care debate but because it makes President Obama seem kind of, well, irresponsible. Here's an excerpt:

The president is "not familiar" with the bill. No one can explain how it will work yet, as Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., told a contentious town meeting. There are various plans, and negotiations are still in the early stages. But whatever it is, we should be for it.

Am I missing something?

We're only talking about our health and our kids' health, the things my mother, may she rest in peace, told me a thousand times are the only things worth caring about. If you have your health, you have everything. And if you don't, what in the world matters more than the best health care in the world, which is found right here?

Not by everybody, mind you, and not cheaply, for anybody. No one's suggesting for a moment that there aren't major problems with both access and cost. But the best health care in the world is still here, and before we take steps that could make things much worse, I'd like to be very certain that they will indeed make things much better.

Read the rest of her essay at the link.

RLC

Minimally Conscious State

Some people have been saying this along, but now there's solid evidence to back it up. Not everyone who is in a coma is completely unaware of what's happening to them. More significantly, some who are diagnosed as comatose are able to feel pain but unable to communicate that fact. New Scientist has the story. Here's part of it:

If there's one thing worse than being in a coma, it's people thinking you are in one when you aren't. Yet a new comparison of methods for detecting consciousness suggests that around 40 per cent of people diagnosed as being in a vegetative state are in fact "minimally conscious".

In the worst case scenario, such misdiagnoses could influence the decision to allow a patient to die, even though they have some vestiges of consciousness. But crucially it may deprive patients of treatments to make them more comfortable, more likely to recover, or to allow them to communicate with family, say researchers.

In a vegetative state (VS), reflexes are intact and the patient can breathe unaided, but there is no awareness. A minimally conscious state (MCS) is a sort of twilight zone, only recently recognised, in which people may feel some physical pain, experience some emotion, and communicate to some extent. However, because consciousness is intermittent and incomplete in MCS, it can be sometimes very difficult to tell the difference between the two.

Of the 44 patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state by the clinicians, the researchers diagnosed 18, or 41 per cent, as being in a MCS according to the CRS-R.

"We may have become much too comfortable about our ability to detect consciousness," concludes Joseph Giacino who did the study at the JFK Rehabilitation Institute in New Jersey. "I think it's appropriate for there to be some level of alarm about this."

I think that's a considerable understatement. Remember the smug confidence bordering on arrogance of those who argued that Terry Schiavo could be starved and dehydrated to death without experiencing pain? I wonder what they're saying now.

RLC

The Curious Case of Brad Pitt

Hot Air links us to an interview with actor Brad Pitt at BILD.com. Pitt is being interviewed on the occasion of a release of an upcoming movie and seemingly out of the blue he's asked the following:

BILD: Have you found happiness in life?

Brad Pitt (nodding): Hm - yes. I am on the path I want to be on."

BILD: Do you believe in God?

Pitt (smiling): "No, no, no!"

BILD: Is your soul spiritual?

Pitt: "No, no, no! I'm probably 20 per cent atheist and 80 per cent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows. You'll either find out or not when you get there, until then there's no point thinking about it.

No point thinking about it? What could be more important to think about? I'm reminded of a couple of lines from Samuel Johnson:

"It is astonishing that any man can forbear enquiring seriously whether there is a God; whether God is just; whether this life is the only state of existence. These are the questions every reasonable person ought to consider with an attention suitable to their importance."

I guess when you're a movie star and you've made important films and dated important women you don't need to think about what it all amounts to so much. Blaise Pascal was intrigued by this uncurious approach to life and describes the strangeness of it in this ironical fashion:

"I know not who sent me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am terribly ignorant of everything...

I see the terrifying immensity of the universe which surrounds me, and find myself limited to one corner of this vast expanse...

All I know is that I must soon die, but what I understand least of all is this very death which I cannot escape. As I know not whence I come, so I know not whither I go. I only know that on leaving this world I fall for ever into nothingness or into the hands of a wrathful God, without knowing to which of these two states I shall be everlastingly consigned. Such is my condition, full of weakness and uncertainty.

From all this I conclude that I ought to spend every day of my life without seeking to know my fate. I might perhaps be able to find a solution to my doubts; but I cannot be bothered to do so, I will not take one step towards its discovery."

It sounds like Pascal is describing Mr. Pitt, but perhaps his cognitive faculties suffered so much damage in Fight Club that his curiosity about things that really matter has atrophied.

RLC

Graceless

The President seems intent on making himself look both small and obtuse in the matter of the arrest of professor Henry Louis Gates of Harvard. His comment was:

"With all the problems facing the nation, it doesn't make sense to arrest a guy in his own home if he's not causing a serious disturbance."

What do the problems facing the nation have to do with the arrest? Should the police stop doing their job just because the nation has problems? If all the problems were resolved would the arrest of professor Gates have then been in order? Was this an intelligent thing for the President to say?

Then White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, questioned about the flap as the president headed for two health care events in Cleveland, stressed that Obama "was not calling the officer stupid." He said Obama felt that "at a certain point the situation got far out of hand."

Well, Mr. Gibbs is splitting rhetorical hairs. The President of the United States said that the police, i.e. officer Crowley, acted stupidly. That's pretty much the same thing as calling him stupid, and it's certainly demeaning for an individual law enforcement official to be personally insulted on a nationally televised press conference by the most powerful man in the world.

Officer Crowley was insulted and President Obama was diminished. What on earth is the President of the United States doing calling a local policeman's actions stupid? Why did he feel that this was something, given all the problems the nation is facing, that he should comment upon at all? I can't imagine George Bush doing anything so graceless.

RLC