Bru's Bits

Senator Baucus's version of health care reform would dramatically increase marginal tax rates on ...

2009-10-13T21:27:00.004-04:00

the poor. Yes, the poor. As Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw notes, the Congressional Budget Office has issued a report indicating that Baucus's plan will increase the marginal income tax for those whose income is at the "poverty level" to those earning 400% of the poverty level "approximately 22 percentage points." Now, I am not a Harvard economics professor, but I am pretty sure that raising the marginal tax rate on the poor does not make any sense, either economically or politically.

Exit question: is this what most of President Obama's supporters had in mind when they voted for "Hope and Change?"

I'm back from vacation

2009-10-13T21:26:00.003-04:00

Okay, there is a lot out there for me to comment on, and I've had a lot of stuff going on at me real job. So please be patient as I get back up to speed. Thanks, Bru

Vacation time

2009-10-01T08:23:00.002-04:00

Mrs. Bru and I are leaving for vacation and will not have Internet access. I'll be back around October 11.

Overpaid, un-informed celebrities get schooled on health care reform

2009-09-30T16:42:00.006-04:00

Will Ferrell and a bunch of other "celebrities" I don't recognize did a satirical public service announcement in support of health care reform recently. Unfortunately for Will and the other "celebrities," the PSA was much more annoying than humorous:

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

As Ed Morrissey of Hot Air noted with this PSA came out, Will was paid $20,000,000 for the movie "Bewitched" in 2005 and, therefore, may not have much room to complain about other people being "overpaid."

Thankfully, someone came out with a spoof of the above video that is actually funny. And it calls out Will and the other celebrities for their un-informed, self-righteousness:

There is nothing that makes me smile like self-righteous people getting called out for their vapid positions.

President Obama makes the French look tough

2009-09-29T15:33:00.003-04:00

I never thought that I would see the day when an American president made the French look tough. Unfortunately, I have because French President Nicolas Sarkozy was not amuzed with the One's response to the most recent news on Iran's nuclear aspirations. The Wall Street Journal reports:

President Obama wants a unified front against Iran, and to that end he stood together with Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown in Pittsburgh on Friday morning to reveal the news about Tehran's secret facility to build bomb-grade fuel. But now we hear that the French and British leaders were quietly seething on stage, annoyed by America's handling of the announcement.
Both countries wanted to confront Iran a day earlier at the United Nations. Mr. Obama was, after all, chairing a Security Council session devoted to nonproliferation. The latest evidence of Iran's illegal moves toward acquiring a nuclear weapon was in hand. With the world's leaders gathered in New York, the timing and venue would be a dramatic way to rally international opinion.
President Sarkozy in particular pushed hard. He had been "frustrated" for months about Mr. Obama's reluctance to confront Iran, a senior French government official told us, and saw an opportunity to change momentum. But the Administration told the French that it didn't want to "spoil the image of success" for Mr. Obama's debut at the U.N. and his homily calling for a world without nuclear weapons, according to the Paris daily Le Monde. So the Iran bombshell was pushed back a day to Pittsburgh, where the G-20 were meeting to discuss economic policy.
Le Monde's diplomatic correspondent, Natalie Nougayrède, reports that a draft of Mr. Sarkozy's speech to the Security Council Thursday included a section on Iran's latest deception. Forced to scrap that bit, the French President let his frustration show with undiplomatic gusto in his formal remarks, laying into what he called the "dream" of disarmament. The address takes on added meaning now that we know the backroom discussions.
"We are right to talk about the future," Mr. Sarkozy said, referring to the U.S. resolution on strengthening arms control treaties. "But the present comes before the future, and the present includes two major nuclear crises," i.e., Iran and North Korea. "We live in the real world, not in a virtual one." No prize for guessing into which world the Frenchman puts Mr. Obama.
"We say that we must reduce," he went on. "President Obama himself has said that he dreams of a world without nuclear weapons. Before our very eyes, two countries are doing exactly the opposite at this very moment. Since 2005, Iran has violated five Security Council Resolutions ...."

Again, President Obama demonstrates that he is completely out of his depth and has no clue how the real world works or reacts. Perhaps this is why some members of the British media have started referring to him as "President Pantywaist."

Hillary Clinton told us of then candidate Obama's priorities last year

2009-09-28T13:24:00.003-04:00

In March 2008, Hillary Clinton ran the following ad during her presidential campaign. It specifically notes President Obama's lack of any real interest in the Afghanistan war and seems right on given General McCyrstal's statement that he has only talked to President Obama once in 70 days.

(H/T to Sweetness and Light for locating and posting the ad).

Here is the transcript for the ad on the off chance that someone scrubs it from You Tube:

Hillary For President“True”TV : 30
Announcer: Barack Obama says he has the judgment to be president. But as chairman of an oversight committee charged with the force of fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan–he was too busy running for president to hold even one hearing.
Barack Obama: “I became chairman of this committee, at the beginning of this campaign-at the beginning of 2007, so it is true that we haven’t had oversight hearings on Afghanistan.”
Announcer: Hillary Clinton will never be too busy to defend our national security-bringing our troops home from Iraq and pursing Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Hillary Clinton: “I’m Hillary Clinton and I approved this message.”

(Emphasis added).

Leadership and Priorities ...

2009-09-28T10:09:00.004-04:00

Two things that are in short supply with our current administration.

Let's see, we have Iran test firing long-range missiles that can reach Israel and announcing that it's got a second nuclear facility strategically buried under a military base near a holy city, our military leaders in Afghan are waiting for President Obama to act on their request 30,000 to 40,000 more troops because that war is going to hell in a hand basket, and our economy continues to suck with the unemployment rate for people ages 16 to 24 years old at over 50%.

So what is President Obama doing? He's heading to Copenhagen, Denmark later this week to schlep for Chicago's 2016 Olympic bid:

The president called Mayor Richard Daley, who left for Copenhagen Friday, at 6:55 a.m. Eastern time to say that he was indeed going to Denmark.
“President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama symbolize the hope, opportunity and inspiration that makes Chicago great, and we are honored to have two of our city’s most accomplished residents leading our delegation in Copenhagen,” Daley said in a statement.
“Who better to share with members of the International Olympic Committee the commitment and enthusiasm Chicago has for the Olympic and Paralympic Movement than the President and First Lady.”
Patrick Ryan, CEO of Chicago 2016 is equally enthused.
“There is no greater expression of the support our bid enjoys, from the highest levels of government and throughout our country, than to have President Obama join us in Copenhagen for the pinnacle moment in our bid,” Ryan said. “We are honored that President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama will be with us to extend a hand of friendship on behalf of our nation and the City of Chicago as we seek to welcome the world for the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games.”

At the same time, it appears that President Obama does not have time to discuss Afghanistan with General Stanley McCrystal, the man he handpicked to lead our war effort:

The military general credited for capturing Saddam Hussein and killing the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq says he has only spoken to President Obama once since taking command of Afghanistan.
“I’ve talked to the president, since I’ve been here, once on a VTC [video teleconferece],” General Stanley McChrystal told CBS reporter David Martin in a television interview that aired Sunday.
“You’ve talked to him once in 70 days?” Mr. Martin followed up.
“That is correct,” the general replied.

(Emphasis added).

Seriously?? I really just do not even know what to say at this point other than the President and his administration seem entirely out of their depth. And our country is the worse for it.

The First Lady should have slapped him

2009-09-25T10:17:00.004-04:00

It looks like Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi wanted a little something, something when President Obama introduced him to the First Lady at the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh yesterday. Given the stories about Mr. Berlusconi, I'm guessing that she would have preferred to slap him with her hand, especially given the look he gave her, and really, who would have blamed her. Certainly, not me.

Students sing the praises of our Dear Leader

2009-09-25T09:47:00.002-04:00

So this You Tube video caused a big dust up on the internets yesterday (yeah, sorry, I'm a day late):

Okay, I think it makes sense for schools to recognize the historic nature of President Obama's election and his accomplishments. But to have kids sing songs that glorify him and indoctrinate him to his political positions is neither good nor healthy; no, it is something you would expect to see in North Korea. Even the folks at MSNBC, which will never be accused of being a right-wing mouthpiece, recognized this point:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Also, when I first saw the video, I had just assumed that it was a lone teacher who had simply gone a little overboard. No, apparently, the kids sang this song at an official school function back in February, and the school district was okay with the song. Here is statement that the district released yesterday:

Dear Burlington Township Families:
Today we became aware of a video that was placed on the internet which has been reported in the media. The video is of a class of students singing a song about President Obama. The activity took place during Black History Month in 2009, which is recognized each February to honor the contributions of African Americans to our country. Our curriculum studies, honors and recognizes those who serve our country. The recording and distribution of the class activity were unauthorized.
If you have any further questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me or Dr. King, Principal of B. Bernice Young School, directly.
Sincerely,
Dr. Christopher M. Manno,
Superintendent of Schools

Again, teaching the kids about President Obama's historic election, good; indoctrinating them to his political beliefs, bad. It does not appear that Dr. Manno understands this point. I hope that the kids' parents do.

Light Blogging

2009-09-22T16:56:00.001-04:00

I apologize for the light blogging. I am at a CLE seminar and will not have regular access to my computer until Thursday morning.

The White House uses the National Endowment of the Arts for propaganda purposes

2009-09-21T16:56:00.000-04:00

Andrew Breitbart's Big Government and Big Hollywood websites have broken another story that the mainstream media seems bound and determined to ignore. It is a little complicated, but the story basically involves the White House using grants from the federally-funded National Endowment of the Arts to advance its legislative agenda, i.e., to produce propaganda supporting President Obama.

The story arose from an August 10 teleconference that Yosi Sergant, then Communications Director of the NEA, arranged, and Michael Skolnick, political director for hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons (an aside- do most hip-hop moguls have political directors?), chaired. Participants in the teleconference also included 21 artists and arts-related non-profit groups, including Patrick Courrielche, who recently received grants from the NEA, Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, and Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for Serve.Gov, which is part of the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency.

To his great credit, the call deeply offended Patrick Courrielche, and he details what happened in the call and how Sergent and the White House subsequently lied about the Administration's role in the call here. Courrielche also includes a full transcript and audio of the call. Here are some of the highlights from the major players named above.

Skolnick:

“I’ve been asked by folks in the White House and folks in the NEA … we had the idea that I would help bring together the artist community…”
“…the Hope poster obviously is a great example, but it’s clear as an independent art community as artists and thinkers and tastemakers and marketers and visionaries that are on this call, the role that we played during the campaign for the president…”
“…the President has a clear arts agenda and has been very supportive of using art and supporting art in creative ways to talk about some issues that we face here in our country, but also to engage people. And I think all of us who are on this phone call, you know, were selected for a reason.”
“And so I’m hoping that through this group, and the goal of all this, and the goal of this phone call, is through this group we can create a stronger community amongst ourselves to get involved in things we’re passionate about as we did during the campaign. But to continue to get involved in those things, to support some of the President’s initiatives, but also to do things that we are passionate about and to push the President and push his administration…"

Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement:

“I just first of all want to thank everyone for being on the call and just a deep deep appreciation for all the work you all put into the campaign for the 2+ years we all worked together.”
“We won.”
“I’m actually in the White House and working towards furthering this agenda, this very aggressive agenda.”
“We’re going to come at you with some specific asks here.”
“I hope you guys are ready.”

Sergent, then Communications Director of the NEA:

“I would encourage you to pick something, whether it’s health care, education, the environment, you know, there’s four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service.”
“And then my ask would be to apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative communities utilities and bring them to the table.”
“Again, I’m really, really honored to be working with you; the National Endowment for the Arts is really honored.”
“You’re going to see a lot more of us in the next four and hopefully eight years.”
“This is a community that knows how to make a stink.”
“…this is just the beginning. This is the first telephone call of a brand new conversation.”
“We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government. What that looks like legally?”
“So bear with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely…”
“I would encourage you to pick something whether it’s health care, education, the environment, you know, there’s four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service.”
“My ask would be to apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative community’s utilities and bring them to the table.”

Ben Shapiro, a recent Harvard Law grad, sets out what happened after the call and legal issues arising from the call:

On August 25, artist Patrick Courrielche told the story of a conference call he attended on August 10. That conference call was hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve. The goal of the conference call: “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.” The call would push “a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!”
If this sounds suspicious to you, that’s because it is. Never before has the NEA explicitly urged artists to tackle particular social issues like health care. But that is how this Administration works.
The people behind the conference call, Courrielche reported, were Yosi Sargent, Director of Communications for the National Endowment for the Arts; Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement; Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for United We Serve; Thomas Bates, Vice President of Civic
Engagement for Rock the Vote; and Michael Skolnik, Political Director for Russell Simmons. Sargent sent the actual email invitation. When The Washington Times called Sargent for confirmation, Sargent denied involvement with the email. He claimed that Skolnik had sent the invitation.
He lied.
The email came directly from Sargent – which is to say, from the NEA itself. Most astonishingly, the email contained a copy of a notice from United We Serve. That notice read: “A call has come in to our generation. A call from the top. A call from a house that is White. … President Obama is asking us to come together … Now is the time for us to answer this call.” Sargent has since been “reassigned” at the NEA.
Two days after the conference call, on August 12, 21 separate arts organizations came out and endorsed Obama’s health care plan.
...
All of this – particularly the government-sponsored conference call itself – is in blatant violation of the Anti-Lobbying Act (19 U.S. Code §1913), which explicitly provides: “No part of the money appropriated by any enactment of Congress shall, in the absence of express authorization by Congress, be used directly or indirectly to pay for any personal service, advertisement, telegram, telephone, letter, printed or written matter, or other device, intended or designed to influence in any manner a Member of Congress, a jurisdiction, or an official of any government, to favor, adopt, or oppose by vote or otherwise, any legislation, law, ratification, policy, or appropriation, whether before or after the introduction of any bill, measure or resolution proposing such legislation, law, ratification, policy or appropriation …”
Violation of this law, in turn, violates 31 U.S. Code §1352, which bans use of “funds appropriated by any Act [from being] expended by the recipient of a Federal contract, grant, loan, or cooperative agreement to pay any person for influencing or attempting to influence an officer or employee of any agency, a Member of Congress, an officer or employee of Congress, or an employee of a Member of Congress in connection with any Federal action …”
According to a government guide put out by the National Institutes of Health Ethics Program (which is a governmental agency: ethics.od.nih.gov), the Anti-Lobbying Act prevents government employees from engaging in “substantial ‘grass roots’ lobbying campaigns … expressly urging individuals to contact government officials in support of or opposition to legislation …. Provid[ing] administrative support for lobbing activities of private organizations …” Every provision was violated by this conference call, which urged artists to support the president’s agenda – and which connected potential voters to private lobbying organizations indirectly, as banned by the Act itself.
Violation of the Anti-Lobbying Act carries punishment: “Any person who makes an expenditure … shall be subject to a civil penalty of not less than $10,000 and not more than $100,000 for each such expenditure.” And that’s not all: “An imposition of a civil penalty under this subsection does not prevent the United States from seeking any other remedy that the United States may have for the same conduct that is the basis for the imposition of such civil penalty.” In other words, criminal prosecution is available here.

So you would think that the national news media would be concerned about a White House is potentially using the NEA's grant system for propaganda purposes. But no, not really.

I just ran searches for "Yosi Sergent" on the websites for CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, and CBS News and came up with a September 10 blog entry from Jack Tapper of ABC about this story. Tapper's entry ends with the following:

White House spokesman Shinn Inouye said the White House does not believe the incident reflects a politicization of NEA funding. “The United We Serve effort is an attempt to get Americans from all walks of life to answer the President’s call for people to get involved with their communities,” he said.

Serving their communities by advancing the President's legislative agenda??

All President Obama, all of the time

2009-09-18T11:55:00.003-04:00

Do you get the feeling that President Obama is always talking? Well, you're not alone. It is almost as if the President has confused speech making with the concept of leadership. They are not. And by constantly flooding the airwaves, the President is diluting the power of his bully pulpit because people are just getting tired of hearing him talk.

Some others have noticed the President's "omnipresence" as well. Here are some takes on President Obama's decision to appear on five Sunday talk shows and David Letterman next week to discuss health care:

Over at the Corner:

I see that President Obama is going to be featured on four or five (!) of the Sunday talk shows this weekend. It is simply unbelievable to me that none of the political experts in the White House has told or convinced the president that more yakking on his part on health care or anything else would be counterproductive, and that this is the time for him to sit back and be presidential, while the crass politicians in Congress fight things out.
But . . . no. Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, ACORN's gotta engage in fraud, and Obama's gotta talk. It's really that simple; and it is amazing, given how little this guy actually knows about economics, about foreign affairs, about, well, just about anything. This reminds me of a footnote, minor but revealing, from the 2004 Democratic National Convention, at which Obama was the keynote speaker. His rhetoric, as usual, was as empty as a dry well, even as it drew the crowd to its feet time and again. Obama was reported, after the speech and the thunderous reception that it received, to have said to someone, "You know, I can play in this league."
And so there we have it: Obama really believes at his core that empty rhetoric is the same as substance and judgement. I have to believe that it was then that he began to view himself as presidential timber. A small bit of vanity for a man; a giant looming danger for America and the cause of liberty.

And ABC's Jack Tapper:

Polls indicate that Americans say the more they hear about the president’s proposed overhaul, the less they like it. An ABC News/Washington Poll last week showed 54 percent of Americans feel that way. White House officials say that’s because Americans are hearing false attacks on Obama’s plan, not reality -- hence the PR blitz.
Republican strategist Kevin Madden says it’s too much.
“I think the worry is it’s gone beyond over exposure and now we have what I would call the ‘Obama omnipresence.’ You almost can’t escape this president,” Madden said on ABC News’ “Top Line.” “It goes beyond just cable news and it goes into whether or not you’re flipping on ESPN and you’re seeing him talk about basketball or you turn on the Lifetime channel and you hear what Michelle Obama is wearing this week. And I think that begins to wear on a lot of people.”

I agree. I wish the President would spend more time running the government we have instead of campaigning constantly to expand it.

ACORN: now even Leno is piling on

2009-09-18T10:35:00.004-04:00

I'm normally not a big fan of Jay Leno's comedy, but I like this clip. Of course, it may be the subject matter that I like and not his delivery.

Tevi Troy over at the Corner asks (jokingly, I think) whether the implosion of ACORN will rank as President Obama's biggest accomplishment:

When I served in government, it was well known that ACORN was receiving massive amounts of funding for questionable purposes. In fact, many a new political official would learn about the level of funding ACORN received and ask what could be done about this blatantly political subsidy. The grizzled green-eyeshade budget staffers would always shake their heads sadly at the new guy and say something like, "You'd better take that up with the Hill. ACORN is untouchable up there."
If nothing else, the election of ACORN ally Barack Obama as president shined some light on ACORN's practices and enormous federal funding for those activities, and it was that disinfecting sunshine that paved the path for the House vote to defund ACORN. ACORN, it seems, is now untouchable, but in the opposite way. All but the
absolutely safest Democrats have abandoned it. As the Wall Street Journal noted, even ACORN promoter Barney Frank was conveniently — and suddenly — absent for the House vote. At the end of four or eight years, I doubt that the Obama White
House will include the defunding of ACORN among their proudest accomplishments, but conservatives will probably place this at the top of the list.

President Obama caves to the Russians on missile defense.

2009-09-17T12:40:00.007-04:00

A brief break from health care reform and ACORN so that we can take a look at missile defense. According to the Wall Street Journal, President Obama has decided against placing missile defense installations in the Czech Republic and Poland:

The White House is scrapping a Bush-era plan for an Eastern European missile-defense shield, saying a redesigned defensive system would be cheaper, quicker and more effective against the threat from Iranian missiles.
…
Mr. Gates said the previous administration's plans will be changed, moving away from the installation of a missile-defense shield in the Czech Republic and Poland in
the near future. He said a second phase to begin in 2015 could result in missiles being placed on land in Eastern Europe.
The White house confirmed that it will ditch Bush plans to erect a missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, a move likely to mean greater cooperation with Russia.
Russia on Thursday welcomed the news but said it saw no reason to offer concessions in return. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev threatened last November to station tactical Iskander missiles on Poland's border if the U.S. system was deployed.
"The Bush plans on the missile defense as we knew them until now were nothing more than a provocation of security in the European region," said Dmitry Rogozin,
Russia's ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, in a phone interview.
Jan Fischer, the Czech Republic interim prime minister, said he got a phone call from Mr. Obama just after midnight Thursday about the plans.
The Polish government doesn't plan to make an immediate statement on its Thursday meeting with U.S. officials on the missile shield, Foreign Ministry spokesman Piotr Paszkowski said.

(Emphasis added).

Huh?? You inform the leader of a key ally that your hanging out to dry by calling him "just after midnight." Now, that is some strong leadership.

It also appears to be at odds with a speech that President Obama gave in Prague all the way back on April 5, 2009. At that time, President Obama said, in part:

So let me be clear: Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile activity poses a real threat, not just to the United States, but to Iran's neighbors and our allies. The Czech Republic and Poland have been courageous in agreeing to host a defense against these missiles. As long as the threat from Iran persists, we will go forward with a missile defense system that is cost-effective and proven. (Applause.) If the Iranian threat is eliminated, we will have a stronger basis for security, and the driving force for missile defense construction in Europe will be removed. (Applause.)

Words. Just words. And as an aside, I like how the White House Press Office lets us know when the crowd applauded during the speech. It makes me feel like I was actually there.

Oddly, some of our European friends do not seem to excited about this decision. Here is Niles Gardiner from London's Telegraph:

This is bad news for all who care about the US commitment to the transatlantic alliance and the defence of Europe as well as the United States. It represents the appalling appeasement of Russian aggression and a willingness to sacrifice American allies on the altar of political expediency. A deal with the Russians to cancel missile defence installations sends a clear message that even Washington can be intimidated by the Russian bear.
What signal does this send to Ukraine, Georgia and a host of other former Soviet satellites who look to America and NATO for protection from their powerful neighbour? The impending cancellation of Third Site is a shameful abandonment of America’s friends in eastern and central Europe, and a slap in the face for those who actually believed a key agreement with Washington was worth the paper it was written on.

Okay, you say, but you've never heard of Niles Gardiner and really don't care what he has to say on the subject. Fair enough, so I also offer Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Walesa:

Former Polish President and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Lech Wałesa, has spoken out about media reports that the US has scrapped plans to install a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic.
“Americans have always cared only about their interests, and all other [countries] have been used for their purposes. This is another example,” Mr Wałęsa told TVN24. “[Poles] need to review our view of America, we must first of all take care of our business,” he added.
“I could tell from what I saw, what kind of policies President Obama cultivates,” the former president added. “I simply don't like this policy, not because this shield was required [in Poland], but [because of] the way we were treated,” he concluded.

Finally, Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) has called the President's decision "deeply regrettable:"

"This deeply regrettable decision sends the wrong message to Tehran, Moscow, and
our European allies at a critical time in our effort to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program," Lieberman said. "Moreover, it means that we will have a less capable missile defense system to protect the United States and our European allies against the Iranian threat. The administration must take immediate and tangible action to reassure our allies in Central and Eastern Europe that we are committed to their security and independence."

Deeply regrettable indeed.

Update: I did not realize that today was the 70th Anniversary of the Soviet Union's invasion of Poland. Now, that is some unfortunate timing.

Newest ACORN video

2009-09-16T16:15:00.003-04:00

Well, Big Government just dropped part two of the San Bernardino ACORN tape. Interestingly, after yesterday's video was published, Tresa Kaelke (name not misspelled), the subject of the video, claimed that she played along because she "feared for her safety." As you probably guessed, that assertion seems pretty much false given part two of the video. In fact, the video seems targeted to refute this assertion:

Amazingly, ACORN has now acknowledged the obvious: it needs to get its s**t together. And it is suspending its operations to do so. Apparently, the videos aren't quite as doctored as ACORN had originally claimed.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has made this keen observation about ACORN's decision:

Humble is what follows after humiliation, in most cases, and that’s exactly what ACORN has suffered for the past week. Humble would have gone a long way toward moderating the public backlash against ACORN in the wake of these (now) “indefensible” actions by ACORN offices in Baltimore, New York City, Washington DC, and San Bernardino. Had they acknowledged the obvious from the very beginning, the rest of these exposés would have become anti-climactic.
Instead, Lewis played the race card, and now has egg on her face and that of the entire organization. ACORN definitely needs to clean house, and they should start with Lewis. She has become the Baghdad Bob of ACORN and has zero credibility after accusing everyone of being racists for their offense at taxpayer dollars going to an organization that offers advice on how to cheat the IRS.

Just a reminder, Barack Obama is ACORN, and ACORN is Barack Obama

2009-09-16T15:44:00.003-04:00

While ACORN is supposedly a non-partisan organization, its political action committee apparently is not. On February 21, 2008, ACORN's PAC officially endorsed Barack Obama's candidacy for president. The following are excerpts from a statement that was published on Obama's campaign website, which is now the Organizing for America website, in February 2008 and that remains on the site today:

Last night, Sen. Obama received the more than necessary two-thirds of the majority needed from our elected national leadership to secure the endorsement,” said Maude Hurd, ACORN’s National President. “Over the past months, we have worked with the leading candidates; ACORN’s members have deep appreciation and respect for Senators Clinton and Edwards and their work on behalf of our communities. What it came down to was that Senator Obama is the candidate who best understands and can affect change on the issues ACORN cares about like stopping foreclosures, enacting fair and comprehensive immigration reform, and building stronger and safer communities across America.”
…

In the past three weeks, Sen. Obama has met with ACORN leaders regarding foreclosure prevention solutions, including a roundtable discussion on Tuesday in San Antonio.
…
When Obama met with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of his history with ACORN and his beginnings in Illinois as a Project Vote organizer, a
nonprofit focused on voter rights and education. Senator Obama said, "I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That's what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That's the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

(Emphasis added).

Oddly, after ACORN's PAC endorsed then candidate Obama, his campaign paid ACORN subsidiary Citizens Services Inc. $800,000 in 2008 for get-out-the-vote efforts. From my perspective, it almost looks like Barack Obama is ACORN, and ACORN is Barack Obama. Perhaps it's time that someone look into the actual extent of that relationship.

Jon Stewart addresses the ACORN scandal ...

2009-09-16T11:08:00.002-04:00

and the news media's failure to cover the story as only he can:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

The Audacity of Hos

www.thedailyshow.com

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Healthcare Protests

No American should have to choose between health care and ...

2009-09-16T10:30:00.002-04:00

Why don't I trust President on reforming health care?

2009-09-16T08:23:00.004-04:00

Because he does not grasp the concept of "profit." Seriously, he really doesn't understand this concept. From Cuffy Meigs:

For the record, I recall understanding this basic economic concept back in the 3rd grade.

A comparison that I never thought I would see ...

2009-09-16T08:14:00.003-04:00

Barack Obama and April Lavigne via Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit:

THE INSTA-DAUGHTER, THE OTHER DAY: “Barack Obama since the campaign is like Avril Lavigne after she dumped The Matrix — still big, but without the magic.” She has a point. The Matrix production team did a great job of capitalizing on her substantial-but-limited talent while covering up the limits. After that, well . . . .

Oddly, I don't think I would have come up with this one on my own.

ACORN might want to prepare for the underside of President Obama's Bus

2009-09-15T17:18:00.000-04:00

ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, has a slight problem right now. Yesterday, the U.S. Senate voted 83-7 to cut off all federal funding to the organization.

What ?? You haven't heard of ACORN's problem? Don't worry, you are not alone, neither has Charlie Gibson, the lead anchor for ABC's World News Tonight.

By way of background, ACORN bills itself as "the nation’s largest grassroots community organization of low- and moderate-income people with over 400,000 member families organized into more than 1,200 neighborhood chapters in 110 cities across the country." According to its website, ACORN is engaged in the following activities on behalf of low and moderate-income people:

Community organizing: Each of the 1,200 local ACORN neighborhood chapters in 110 cities and 40 states brings neighbors together to work for stronger, safer and more just communities.
Issue campaigns: Each ACORN office carries out multiple issue campaigns. ACORN members across the country work to raise the minimum wage or enact living wage policies; eliminate predatory financial practices by mortgage lenders, payday lenders, and tax preparation companies; win the development of affordable housing and community benefits agreements; improve the quality of and funding for urban public schools; rebuild New Orleans; and pass a federal and state ACORN Working
Families Agenda, including paid sick leave for all full time workers. A recent study shows that our issue campaign victories have delivered approximately $15 billion in direct monetary benefits to our membership and constituency over the past 10 years.

Service delivery: ACORN and its allied organizations provide extensive services to our members and constituency. These include free tax preparation focusing on the Earned Income Tax Credit; screening for eligibility for federal and state benefit programs; and, through the ACORN Housing Corporation, first time homeowner mortgage counseling and foreclosure prevention assistance, and low income housing development.
Ballot initiatives: ACORN-backed ballot-initiative campaigns in 2006 helped raise the minimum wage in Ohio, Arizona, Missouri and Colorado, working with community-faith-labor coalitions on successful campaigns in each state.
Voter participation: Since 2004, ACORN has helped more than 1.7 million low- and moderate-income and minority citizens apply to register to vote.

So your saying to yourself, well, that's nice, Bru, but why would anyone get all that concerned about a non-partisan, social justice organization? Well, first, the Washington Examiner has reported that ACORN has received $53,000,000 in federal funding since 1994 and is eligible to receive up to $8,000,000,000 in funds from this year's stimulus package. So ACORN uses our money to help fund its activities. Second, while ACORN is supposedly "non-partisan," Barack Obama's presidential campaign paid ACORN's subsidiary Citizens Services Inc. $800,000 for "get-out-the-vote" activities last year. That strikes me as oddly partisan for a non-partisan group. And, third, its voter registration efforts have had some significant verification, er, fraud issues.

Now, a 20 year-old female and her 25 year-old male colleague, who were apparently concerned about ACORN's potential malfiesance with federal money, have added a fourth reason for you to care about ACORN. These two activist journalists went to ACORN's various local offices with a hidden video camera, posed as a prostitute and her pimp, explained that they were having trouble getting a mortgage to buy a house, said that they wanted to purchase the house to run a brothel with a bunch of underage girls that they were bringing up from El Salvador, said that they intended to use the proceeds from the brothel to help fund the pimp's future political campaigns, and asked for ACORN's help in getting a mortgage.

The results so far have been devastating. The two activist journalists have released a video a day (excluding the weekend) since last Thursday and posted them at a website they started with the help of Andrew Breitbart. They have also promised more videos in the days to come.

On Thursday of last week, these two videos were released on ACORN's Baltimore, Maryland office:

On Friday of last week, the two videos concerned ACORN's local Washington, D.C.:

Yesterday, the released videos were from ACORN's Brooklyn office:

I understand that today's video will concern an ACORN office in the Los Angeles area.

ACORN has responded by claiming that the videos are doctored lies and stating that they intend to sue the two who made them because Maryland law prohibits videotaping another person without that person's prior knowledge and consent. I think that ACORN might have some First Amendment issues with its potential lawsuit given that these videotapes address a matter of public concern. But we'll see.

Regardless, I cannot see the Democrats rushing to aid an organization with employees who will attempt to help individuals who claim to run a brothel stocked with underage girls from El Salvador. Indeed, Shannon Love (via Instapundit) has noted that these videotapes appear to establish that ACORN has systemic leadership problems:

[A] rule of thumb evolved after observing the failures of millions of computers. We learned that three separate computers would only suffer the same failure if the failure arose from a common source in the computers themselves. Just three machines out of millions told us we most likely had a systemic problem.
This brings me to the Acorn child prostitution scandal.
* One report from an Acorn office was a fluke. Any large organization, public or private of any creed can be infected by amoral individuals who will try to use the organization to commit illegal or unethical acts. No organization larger than a few dozen people can police the actions of every member, all the time.
* Two reports from two separate Acorn offices was just a disturbing coincidence. The same reasoning as above applies, because in a large organizations, just as in a large installed base of computers, it’s possible for two separate bad eggs carrying out the same acts to show up in the same organization.
* Three identical reports of the same failure from three separate offices indicates the criminality arises from the organization itself. It is highly unlikely that, out of the hundreds of Acorn offices around the nation, the journalist just happened to wander into the three offices whose managers wouldn’t blink an eye at helping to set up a brothel using children.
This degree of organizational systemic rot has to come from the head. I think that much is obvious. Something in Acorn’s organizational culture made these people feel that it was okay and expected for them to give the criminal advice that they did. Certainly, if Acorn had been a private for-profit company, three separate and wholly unrelated incidents would have been enough for leftists to demand the heads of the corporate officers.

Update, 9/15, 5:06 p.m.: And, now, it appears that we have reached a new level of crazy:

By the way, the two activist journalists who are publishing these videos in accordance with Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Alinsky is very popular among left-wing community organizers, his followers include President Obama, and his published these rules as a means to bring about a socialist revolution in the U.S.

Alinsky Rule #8 is: "Keep the pressure on. Never let up." The journalists behind this campaign against ACORN are following this rule by slowly releasing their videos, and they have promised more to come.

The 9/12 March on Washington, D.C.

2009-09-14T12:56:00.002-04:00

In case you were unaware, there was a big protest march in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, perhaps 1,000,000+ big. It appears that the protesters share my deep concern about the continuous, staggering growth in the federal government, including but not limited to its current spending binge. According to Bryon York of the Washington Examiner:

Some people were animated by a single issue -- health care, taxes, the Second Amendment. But in dozens of interviews with marchers, the picture that emerged was of people who believe things are racing out of control along a whole range of fronts in Washington, and that no one is representing their interests. Obama and the Democrats in Congress, they believe, are simply pushing too hard on too many things. It's unlikely that there would have been a rally this size just about the stimulus, or just about cap-and-trade, or just about the takeovers of the auto companies, or even health care. But put them all together, and there is an enormous and growing fear that Obama and his allies are rushing to wreck the system.

Reason.tv has put together this video about the protest that tries to capture the marchers' concerns. From the looks of it, the protesters were remarkably normal:

Indeed, while I have seen some commentators, such as Maureen Dowd, say that the protesters main motive is the color of President Obama's skin, his administration has correctly tried to put this assertion to rest:

A day after tens of thousands of conservatives gathered in Washington to protest the policies of the Obama administration, a top White House aide said that President Obama doesn’t think the protests and the growing conservative movement against Obama are motivated by racism.
“I don’t think the president believes that people are upset because of the color of his skin,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.
Pointing to the upcoming first anniversary of the collapse of investment banking giant Lehman Brothers, Gibbs said he thought the anger directed at the administration stems from the federal government’s unprecedented intervention in the private sector during the financial crisis that began last fall.

President Obama may have just started a trade war

2009-09-14T11:42:00.004-04:00

Well, good news everyone, President Obama may have started a trade war with China late on Friday afternoon. For some reason, his administration chose the end of a week when most newscasts were focused on remembering 9/11 to announce that they were placing a 35% tariff on Chinese tire imports. Thankfully, the Chinese were cool with this. Just kidding, they're actually a little pissed about this development.

According to Bloomberg, the Chinese responded by announcing their own investigation into "unfair subsidies" and dumping of U.S. poultry and automobiles in China. Hopefully, this trade dispute will remain limited in nature because, as the Bloomberg article notes, "[r]ising protectionism may hamper world trade and undermine the global economy’s recovery from recession."

Perhaps this would be a good time for President Obama to have a lesson or two in economics. To that end, I offer the economist and sometime actor Ben Stein, who explained in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, that the Great Depression did not really become "Great" until Congress passed the protectionist Hawley-Smoot (or Smoot-Hawley) Tariff Act, which increased tariffs on imports to the United States and led to a significant trade war in the late 1920s and early 30s:

So much to comment on, so little time

2009-09-14T10:27:00.003-04:00

Seriously, I don't even know where to begin. We have an apparent trade war with China, the factual misrepresentations that President Obama made in his health care speech last week, the anti-spending rally in DC on Saturday, the ongoing ACORN fiasco and numerous other issues. I will do my best to get to all of these as time allows today.

Words escape me

2009-09-11T11:13:00.002-04:00

Some folks with the U.S. Coast Guard somehow thought today would be a good day to hold a training exercise ... on the Potomac River ... between Washington, D.C. and Virginia ... near the Pentagon ... where President Obama was speaking at a 9/11 memorial service.

Seriously, have they forgotten what happened on this day at that spot?

I cannot believe 8 years have passed ...

2009-09-11T08:53:00.003-04:00

because the memories seem like yesterday. Those who were lost and those who were left behind are in my thoughts and prayers on this day and always.

The second impact from one block away. An act of evil and cowardice.

President Obama's Historic Health Care Speech

2009-09-10T19:50:00.005-04:00

Well, for the most part, President Obama's health care speech was a total snooze last night. For reasons I cannot comprehend, he called a joint session of Congress to basically repeat the stump speech on health care that he has given seemingly 100s of times previously. There was one exciting moment- when Rep. Joe Wilson (R.-SC) called President Obama a liar from the crowd after Obama claimed that illegal aliens would not be able to purchase health insurance coverage under "his" plan ("his" being in quotations marks because as I have noted previously, Obama has never put forward an actual plan, just a bunch of talking points, so I assume that he is referring to H.R. 3200, which has been passed out of the relevant committees in the House of Representatives).

Now, we can argue about whether or not our laws should allow illegal aliens to purchase health insurance coverage (hospitals have to provide them with medical care, so perhaps illegals should be allowed, and maybe encouraged, to purchase coverage). And we can also argue about whether Rep. Wilson breached the rules of civility with his comment. But what we can't argue about is the fact that President Obama lied when he said that illegals would not be allowed to purchase health insurance coverage if H.R. 3200 becomes law.

How can I make this comment? Because the Library of Congress's Congressional Research Service (think of them as Congress's own, private, non-partisan think tank) has reviewed H.R. 3200 and issued a report entitled (appropriately enough): Treatment of Noncitizens in H.R. 3200. Here is what the CRS says on page 2 of this report:

H.R. 3200 includes an individual mandate to have health insurance, with tax penalties for noncompliance. Individuals who do not maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for themselves and their children would be required to pay an additional tax. Some individuals, including nonresident aliens, would be exempt from the individual mandate. “Nonresident alien” is a term under tax but not immigration law. For federal tax purposes, alien individuals are classified as resident or nonresident aliens. In general, an individual is a nonresident alien unless he or she meets the qualifications under a residency test. Thus, legal permanent residents, and
noncitizens and unauthorized aliens who qualify as resident aliens (i.e., meet the substantial presence test), would be required under H.R. 3200 to have health insurance.
In addition, under H.R. 3200, a “Health Insurance Exchange” would begin operation in 2013 and would offer private plans alongside a public option. The Exchange would provide eligible individuals and small businesses with access to insurers’ plans, including the public option, in a comparable way. Individuals would only be eligible to enroll in an Exchange plan if they were not enrolled in other acceptable coverage (for example, from an employer, Medicare and generally Medicaid). H.R. 3200 does not contain any restrictions on noncitzens participating in the Exchange—whether the noncitizens are legally or illegally present, or in the United States temporarily or permanently. Nonetheless, only aliens who could be classified as resident aliens would be required under the bill to have health insurance.

So, yeah, regardless of what you think about this as a policy matter or a breach of decorum, Rep. Wilson was right last night: President Obama is a liar. Hmm, perhaps I should reconsider my decision to give him the benefit of the doubt when he tells me he has no interest in a government take over of the health care industry.

Update 5 p.m., 9/11/09: Hmm, here is some additional proof that Rep. Wilson may have had a point the other night. Time reports that the Senate has moved to close a loophole in the proposed legislation that would allow illegal aliens to obtain health insurance coverage (emphasis added):

The controversy over Republican Representative Joe Wilson's shouting "You lie!"
at the President over his claim that illegal immigrants wouldn't benefit from health-care reform apparently sparked some reconsideration of the relevant language. "We really thought we'd resolved this question of people who are here illegally, but as we reflected on the President's speech last night, we wanted to go back and drill down again," said Senator Kent Conrad, one of the Democrats in the talks after a meeting Thursday morning. Later that afternoon, Baucus said the group would add a proof-of-citizenship requirement for participation in the new health exchange — a move likely to inflame the left.

I'm back.

2009-09-10T19:49:00.000-04:00

Still not 100%, but feeling much better.

My whereabouts

2009-09-08T19:13:00.001-04:00

Sorry for the lack of posts, I am slowly recovering from the mother of all colds. I hope to be back in action tomorrow. Bru

We have our first 9/11 Truther in the White House!!

2009-09-03T23:47:00.007-04:00

Well, Van Jones, Obama's "Green Jobs Czar," denies that he believes in the Truther movement but does not deny that he signed a Truther petition to investigate evidence that the Bush administration was complicit in the attacks. As an extra bonus, I throw in this little tidbit:
the man is an admitted Communist. But that's no big deal since I am pretty sure that Franklin Roosevelt had a couple of those in his administration as well.

Via Jack Trapper of ABC News:

A top environmental official of the Obama administration issued a statement Thursday apologizing for past incendiary statement and denying that he ever agreed with a 2004 petition on which his name appears, a petition calling for congressional
hearings and an investigation by the New York Attorney General into "evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur."

Van Jones, the Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is Number 46 of the petitioners from the so-called "Truther" movement which suggests that people in the administration of President George W. Bush "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war."
In a statement issued Thursday evening Jones said of "the petition that was circulated today, I do not agree with this statement and it certainly does not reflect my views now or ever."
He did not explain how his name came to be on the petition. A source said Jones did not carefully review the language in the petition before agreeing to add his name.

Oddly, I would have thought that one of the first items on the FBI's background questionnaire for getting a job at the White House would be: "items on the FBI background questionnaire for a job at the White House would be: "Have you ever been associated with the 9/11 Truther Movement? If yes, please explain your association in detail." Apparently, not.

Update: Two items. First, Jonah Goldberg notes at the Corner blog how implausible the highlighted sentence above is given the circles that Jones has run in over the last several years:

Now, Van Jones clearly speaks to lefty audiences all the time. He organizes the lefty rabble. Fueling resentments is his calling. He goes to lefty confabs and learn-ins, he's comfortable shaking hands and finding common cause with coffee house Maoists and has no doubt saluted the entire parade of horribles that perambulate the furthest fringes of the flaky Left.
Now, the idea that he didn't know what 911Truth.org was when he signed the petitition is remotely, faintly, ever-so-slightly plausible if one is willing to give the man a lifetime supply of benefit-of-the-doubt. The idea that he didn't learn the truth after years slogging through these swamps, talking to Truthers, getting invitations and emails from Truthers, is just the most high-octane balderdash currently on offer.

Second, Jim Hoft, the Gateway Pundit, notes on his blog that, yes, Jones is lying about his past support of the Truther Movement:

Jones said the petition he signed in 2004 did not reflect his views and that he did not carefully review the language in the petition before agreeing to add his name..Not
true.
This article at Rense.com from 2002 links Van Jones to the 9-11 Truther movement at its infancy...
It looks like the well-oiled Axelrodian machine in the White House forgot about Google when they released their statment.Bummer.

Update II: Jack Tapper at ABC News continues to ask questions about Van Jones and his involvement in the 9/11 Truther Movement:

While an administration official told ABC News that controversial White House official Van Jones's signature on a 2004 petition suggesting that the Bush administration let 9/11 happen in order to justify war was because he did not carefully review the language in the petition, another link between Jones and the Truther movement has emerged.

This is becoming problematic for the Obama administration, which spent much time and energy belittling the fringe "Birther" movement of those alleging, despite myriad evidence, that President Obama was not born in the U.S.
Jones said in a statement yesterday that he did not agree with the 2004 Truther petition and it "does not reflect my views now or ever."
But in March 2002, a march in San Francisco was called to demand a congressional inquiry into 9/11. Jones was on the "organizing committee."
Stating that the 9/11"attacks are used to justify the bombing of Afghanistan, the administration is clearly more interested in controlling the oil resources of Central Asia than in 'ridding the world of terrorism or terrorists' which it has funded, trained, and used for decades through the C.I.A.," the marchers said they would "demand" answers to questions such as:
"What is the relationship between Bin Laden, his family and the Bush family and the Carlyle Group?
"Why were no fighter planes dispatched to intercept the four hijacked planes on September 11th, in violation of standard procedures?
"Who actually was in control of the 'hijacked planes'? …
"Did the CIA have foreknowledge of the attack, who tried to profit with put options on American, United, Merrill Lynch stock just before the attack?...
"What are Bush's and Cheney's connections to the drug industry?
"Why is the evidence being destroyed when an investigation of the World Trade Center collapse is needed?"
The White House had no immediate comment.
Supporting materials for the Truther questions, as provided by the committee, included articles such as "IF THE CIA AND THE GOVERNMENT WEREN'T INVOLVED IN THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS, WHAT WERE THEY DOING?"
-jpt

Power

2009-09-02T16:40:00.003-04:00

I received this email from President Obama's campaign/grassroots community organization, Organizing for America yesterday with the subject tag line "Power." And it is a dozy. The email actually claims that those who oppose Obamacare, er health insurance reform "have power:"

Friend --
Opponents of health insurance reform have power. Some reap huge profits from the status quo. Others take large campaign contributions from those who profit.
So they'll do anything to keep the current system in place. When fact-based arguments don't work, they attack President Obama with outlandish lies about a government takeover and euthanizing the elderly. And once that doesn't work, they'll go even further.
We don't know what they'll do next. What we do know is that we'll have to be prepared for anything -- ready to set the record straight, ready to make sure the media and Congress see the overwhelming support for reform, and ready to pass real reform this year.

Hmm, that's odd. I thought it was President Obama and the Democrats who "have power." Apparently, controlling the Executive Branch and both houses of Congress just isn't what it used to be.

The other laugher in this email is the claim opponents of Obamacare "take large campaign contributions from those who profit" under the current health care system." Uh, pot, kettle; kettle, pot. I mean President Obama did reach a deal with large pharmaceutical companies that will limit the cost savings that the government can extract from them under Medicare's prescription drug program, and, oddly, those companies are now spending $150,000,000 on advertising in support of Obamacare. (To put that figure in perspective, it is more than Senator McCain spent on advertising in last year's presidential campaign).

Of course, the President's deal with Big Pharma looks more of a quid pro quo than a contribution, but I am not sure that makes it any better.

Paul Krugman longs for the return of Nixon's rational policy prescriptions on health care

2009-09-01T15:09:00.004-04:00

In his column for Sunday's New York Times, Paul Krugman finds himself longing for Richard Nixon's rational policy prescriptions, at least as those prescriptions relate to health care reform:

In fact, surveying current politics, I find myself missing Richard Nixon.
No, I haven’t lost my mind. Nixon was surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch (ed. -Uh, Cheney was the Vice President and so did not control the executive branch; minor point).
But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system’s ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.
As many people have pointed out, Nixon’s proposal for health care reform looks a lot like Democratic proposals today. In fact, in some ways it was stronger. Right now, Republicans are balking at the idea of requiring that large employers offer health insurance to their workers; Nixon proposed requiring that all employers, not just large companies, offer insurance.
Nixon also embraced tighter regulation of insurers, calling on states to “approve specific plans, oversee rates, ensure adequate disclosure, require an annual audit and take other appropriate measures.” No illusions there about how the magic of the marketplace solves all problems.

Okay, I realize that Krugman is a Nobel Prize winning economist, and I am not, but I have to respectfully disagree with any column built on the proposition that Nixon was a man with rational economic policies. After all, Nixon imposed price and wage controls in the early 1970s that wrecked havoc on the economy and helped lead to the very thing he wanted to avoid - stagflation.

Moreover, Krugman makes a strawman argument when he implies that Nixon, unlike today's health care opponents, had "[n]o illusions ... about how the magic of the marketplace solves all problems." I am not aware of anyone who believes that the free market "solves all problems." Problems will always arise in any marketplace given the limitations of human knowledge. But unlike policies imposed by law, a marketplace free from government interference can self-correct once problems are identified. If only those in Washington understood this simple principle.

What it feels like to be a libertarian

2009-09-01T12:53:00.005-04:00

ABC reporter John Stossel has just offered his take on what it feels like to be a libertarian in today's world. Since I fancy myself a libertarian and because I am feeling lazy, I offer up his thoughts, which actually rest quite a bit on Georgetown Professor John Hasnas:

I share the Founders’ vision of limited government and the ability of people to voluntarily join with others to help their communities and themselves. I don’t agree with the conservatives who want government to play the role of morals policemen, and I don’t agree with the nanny state liberals. I’m a libertarian.
...
Georgetown University Professor John Hasnas has this take on what it feels like to be a libertarian these days:
It feels bad. Being a libertarian means living with an almost unendurable level of frustration. It means being subject to unending scorn and derision despite being inevitably proven correct by events.
Imagine spending two decades warning that government policy is leading to a major economic collapse, and then, when the collapse comes, watching the world conclude that markets do not work.
Imagine continually explaining that markets function because they have a built in corrective mechanism; that periodic contractions are necessary to weed out unproductive ventures; that continually loosening credit to avoid such corrections just puts off the day of reckoning and inevitably leads to a larger recession; that this is precisely what the government did during the 1920's that led to the great depression; and then, when the recession hits, seeing it offered as proof of the failure of laissez-faire capitalism.
Yup. It often feels bad. But so what? It’s our job to fight for freedom.

I agree with Stossel's conclusion and also recommend that you read Professor Hasnas entire take. It is insightful and depressing, especially the conclusion:

If you’d like a taste of what it feels like to be a libertarian, try telling people that the incoming Obama Administration is advocating precisely those aspects of FDR’s New Deal that prolonged the great depression for a decade; that propping up failed and failing ventures with government money in order to save jobs in the present merely shifts resources from relatively more to relatively less productive uses, impedes the corrective process, undermines the economic growth necessary for recovery, and increases unemployment in the long term; and that any "economic" stimulus package will inexorably be made to serve political rather than economic ends, and see what kind of reaction you get. And trust me, it won’t feel any better five or ten years from now when everything you have just said has been proven true and Obama, like FDR, is nonetheless revered as the savior of the country.

Given his declining poll numbers, I am hopeful that President Obama won't ultimately be revered as the savior of our country, but only time will tell.

my.barackobama.com calls those opposing health care reform the "THE HEIRS OF, YES: BIN LADEN"

2009-08-31T15:10:00.007-04:00

While taking a brief sojourn from work, I just came across a posting on the Gateway Pundit blog about a page at barackobama.com that calls me and all other opponents to the current version of "health care reform" the "THE HEIRS OF, YES: BIN LADEN." I have posted screen caps from the website below because they are just so stunning and frightening.

Here are some of the highlights, er, low lights from this page (emphasis mine):

2 PHONE CALLS ON 9/11 - Illinois! (Health Care Organizing Event)
STAY HOME FOR THIS EVENT! DO NOT GO ANYWHERE!Stay HOME:
---* The Event consists of ALL OF US Making Two Phone Calls on one particular, single day.
---* We call each of our State Senators (phone numbers are below) on that day.

What day? Our US Senators return to DC the Tues after Labor Day. That next FRIDAY, Sep 11, is Patriot Day, designated in memory of the nearly three thousand who died in the 9/11 attacks.

All 50 States are coordinating in this – as we fight back against our own Right-Wing Domestic Terrorists who are subverting the American Democratic Process, whipped to a frenzy by their Fox Propaganda Network ceaselessly re-seizing power for their treacherous leaders.

DO YOU WANT to ensure passage of the Public Plan? Since 75% of Americans support it, I guess it's time for us Seventy-Five Percenters to be heard [ed. - all current polling actually puts support for a public plan well below 50%]. Why Public Plan? = Because It’s American To Take Care Of Our Own!

And, according to a White House Advisor to the President with whom I spoke ten days ago at a DNC Panel, he said, "ON ONE DAY you 'burn-up' the Senate Switchboards - THE NEXT DAY you've got the Senator's attention". We will achieve that effect, on Friday, Patriot Day 9/11.

....

2 PHONE CALLS ON 9/11 – BE A TRUE PATRIOT – DEFEAT ANTI-DEMOCRATIC FORCES OF HATE WHO CONSPIRE TO REMAIN HEALTHY + WEALTHY WHILE THE PUBLIC LANGUISHES UNDER THE BURDEN OF OUR PRESENT HEALTH CARE SYSTEM [ed. -uh, about 80% of the public is happy with their health insurance coverage] –

...

That's it – simple – all you need is a calendar, an armchair and a phone, for us to have a good strong voice.Ask your friends if they want to join our Public Plan Call-A-Thon on 9/11: Patriot's Day

---* RECLAIM OUR LAND FROM THE HEIRS OF, YES: BIN LADEN *---* YOU KNOW IT'S TRUE *---

In case you haven't seen it in the News: Republican Representatives, Senators, GOP Party Leader, GOP Political Machine top personnel (e.g., Gingritch), etc etc etc --- they're ALL every one of them applauding and encouraging their zealot-horde by merrily referring to them as "Proud Right-Wing Terrorists". Google it - I'm not pulling your leg.

But don't hate them: Misguided citizens are easy-pickings for demagogues, whom they blindly follow because they’ve been trained all their lives not to question the dogma of their religion, so it’s natural for them NOT TO QUESTION what’s being spoon-fed to them by their FALSE PROPHETS who, themselves, shamelessly seek Worldly Glory.
They don’t apply the simple Test: “Am I being led closer to God, when I do what these folks say? – Or, am I on a Bullet-Train to the Devil, and I’m just a pawn to make these folks richer and more powerful?” Because, you know: the Faith one has in God, is different from faith one should have in Man. And you need to be even MORE skeptical, when one of ‘em says that God picked them for something or another. You can bet whatever they’re doing is making them more powerful/ more wealthy, and certainly less pious, no? Ooops, and following them is making YOU less pious too, in thought, and in deed. Yesseree, it’s a real thing to chew on.

Just remember: We Are The Super-Heroes Who Yes WE DID, and YES, WE SHALL commence administering Super-Hero Karate Chops, beginning now.

This page appears on Organizing for America's official website. OFA is part of the Democratic National Committee and utilizes President Obama's former presidential campaign website. That a website directly related to and utilized by our President would compare a significant portion of the United States' population to the man responsible for the deaths of approximately 3,000 innocent Americans on 9/11 and attempt to use that date for political gain is unconscionable and just sickening.

Moreover, it appears that this person does not truly understand the meaning of the term "demagogue." The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines it, in part, as "1 : a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power." From my vantage point, this definition directly applies to what the individual or individuals who posted this page are trying to accomplish- using false claims about the opponents of "health care reform" to secure the passage of a "public plan" that will increase the power of the federal government.

Uh, oh.

2009-08-31T12:40:00.003-04:00

Hitler just found out that Americans have resorted to calling people who disagree with their political views "Nazis," and he is not pleased with this development. He even uses some foul language when venting his frustrations on his senior staff:

Senator Ted Kennedy: traitor?

2009-08-28T13:19:00.003-04:00

Well, the Senator Kennedy remembrances continue. Here is David Shuster of MSNBC saying talking about how Senator Kennedy "didn't dabble in small personal attacks" unlike so many of today's politicians:

As Mark Finkelstein at http://www.newsbusters.org/ notes: "technically speaking, Shuster was right. Kennedy's leading of the assault on Robert Bork wasn't a 'petty' personal attack. It was a huge, and hugely unfair, one." You can find a clip of the Senator's attack here.

And Senator Kennedy had bigger fish to fry than engaging in simple "petty" personal attacks. For example, he attempted to work with Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov to unseat President Reagan in 1984. Peter Robinson reports the story at http://www.forbes.com/:

Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.
"On 9-10 May of this year," the May 14 memorandum explained, "Sen. Edward Kennedy's close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow." (Tunney was Kennedy's law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) "The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov."
Kennedy's message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. "The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations," the memorandum stated. "These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign."
...
Kennedy proved eager to deal with Andropov--the leader of the Soviet Union, a former director of the KGB and a principal mover in both the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring--at least in part to advance his own political prospects.
In 1992, Tim Sebastian published a story about the memorandum in the London Times. Here in the U.S., Sebastian's story received no attention. In his 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, historian Paul Kengor reprinted the memorandum in full. "The media," Kengor says, "ignored the revelation."
"The document," Kengor continues, "has stood the test of time. I scrutinized it more carefully than anything I've ever dealt with as a scholar. I showed the document to numerous authorities who deal with Soviet archival material. No one has debunked the memorandum or shown it to be a forgery. Kennedy's office did not deny it."

As the nation remembers Senator Kennedy, it should remember him in full.

The reason why tort reform is not part of health care reform

2009-08-27T22:21:00.003-04:00

It is undisputed that tort reform would significantly lower medical costs in the United States. As it is now, doctors routinely order tests and procedures that are unnecessary because of concerns that they may have missed something and could face a future medical malpractice claim. So maybe your asking yourself, gee, if it would lower costs, why wouldn't tort reform be included in health care reform? Well, Howard Dean has now provided us with the answer, and it is pretty unseemly.

Update: Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer commented on Howard Dean's admission about the failure to make tort reform part of health care reform:

Ted Kennedy has passed away; Mary Jo Kopechne was unavailable for comment

2009-08-27T20:14:00.005-04:00

I'm sorry, is that headline a little tasteless? Yes, probably. I realize that you are not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but to me, Ted Kennedy represents the worst of American politics. He was a man who lived above the law and who had a pliant press that covered his misdeeds.

He was also a man who twisted the facts and sought to personally destroy people for his own political gain. Senator Kennedy did this most famously in 1987 when he gave this speech on the floor of the Senate in opposing Judge Robert Bork's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Senator Kennedy could have employed reasoned arguments in objecting to Judge Bork's nomination. He chose, instead, to attack the man in a very personal and offensive manner. And yet, the mainstream media claim that it is only those on the right who engage in "the politics of personal destruction."

Carl Cannon, writing for Politics Daily, has a very good column about the mainstream media and its selective memory of Kennedy's misbehavior with respect to Mary Jo Kopechne and in other incidents:

The idea that Edward M. Kennedy could be a viable national politician – let alone a much-admired and lionized political figure – has convinced millions of everyday citizens and succeeding generations of conservative activists that among the elites of academia, politics, and the media two standards of behavior exist: One for liberal Democrats and another for conservative Republicans. Along with sweeping changes in immigration law, soaring oratory, and strengthening the nation's social safety net, this reservoir of class resentment is also part of Kennedy's legacy.
Liberals in the media pretend not to see this. Or rather, they blame those who feel aggrieved. This very morning, my old friend James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly employed the usual euphemisms about Kennedy's behavior in his post – and then launched a preemptive strike against anyone who might view Teddy's life with gimlet eyes. "A flawed man, who started unimpressively in life -- the college problems, the silver-spoon boy senator, everything involved with Chappaquiddick -- but redeemed himself, in the eyes of all but the committed haters, with his bravery and perseverance and commitment to the long haul," Fallows wrote.
I like Jim Fallows, and stand in awe of Kennedy's effectiveness as a politician myself. But hold on a minute: The "college problems" were serial cheating. The "silver-spoon" stuff, I suppose refers to, among other things, the speeding and reckless driving that ominously foreshadowed Chappaquiddick. And that phrase "redeeming himself in the eyes of all but the committed haters," well, the problem with that is that to many people, redemption implies that a sinner has come clean.
...
Not reporting a fatal traffic accident is a felony in most places. On Martha's Vineyard, if the driver is a Kennedy, it's not even a matter of official curiosity: The local police chief never even asked Kennedy why he waited nine hours to report what had happened. The state of Massachusetts, citing Kennedy's excessive speed on the bridge, suspended his license for six months. That was it.
...
In protesting Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon, Kennedy thundered, "Is there one system of justice for the average citizen and another system for the high and mighty?" These words, uttered five years after Chappaquiddick, are ubiquitous on conservative websites where they are offered up as evidence, not only of Kennedy's hypocrisy, but the mainstream media's as well.
Similarly, to movement conservatives, Kennedy's attack on Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork is offered up as a case study in the press's historic double standard. Immediately after Bork's July 1, 1987, nomination, Kennedy took to the Senate floor.
"Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions," he said. "Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is -- and is often the only -- protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy...."
It is an article of faith among conservatives that if a Republican senator had launched an attack this personal and vitriolic – not to mention wildly exaggerated – against a nominee named by a Democratic president that liberals would have gone ape and that the ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate would have made the intemperate conduct of the Republican senator the main issue. The point is that Ted Kennedy surely earned the accolades he is receiving today. He also earned the disapproval he is receiving among Americans who saw him only from a distance, who judged him by his words and deeds, and found him wanting.

If you would like to read what other ordinary Americans think of Ted Kennedy specifically and the Kennedys generally, you can go to abcnews.com where they have requested reader
comments.

Update: Uhh, after reading this from Mark Hemingway at National Review, I may try to revise my headline to make it more offensive. It's a partial transcription of former Newsweek foreign editor and Time editor-in-chief Ed Klein discussing Senator Kennedy on The Diane Rehm Show:

I don't know if you know this or not, but one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, "have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?" That is just the most amazing thing. It's not that he didn't feel remorse about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, but that he still always saw the other side of everything and the ridiculous side of things.

Okay, I hate to sound like the "fun police," but there is no "ridiculous side" to killing someone. And that Mr. Kennedy apparently did not appreciate this fact speaks volumes. Here is a link to where you can find the audio; the relevant portion is at 30:15. It is pretty stunning.

President Obama's Green Job Czars

2009-08-25T22:42:00.004-04:00

A couple of interesting little video segements on Van Jones, President Obama's "Green Jobs Czar." I find them a little disconcerting, but maybe it's just me:

Bru's Omnibus Post on the CIA Inspector General's Report on Interrogation Techniques

2009-08-25T20:53:00.006-04:00

Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday released this five-year old Inspector General report on the CIA's interrogation techniques with terrorist suspects. I have a lot of thoughts on the report. Maybe too many thoughts to put into one cogent post, but we'll see.

First, the philosophical. My favorite philosopher (yes, I have one; I majored in philosophy at DePauw University) John Stuart Mill once observed, "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is worse." I believe that his reasoning applies equally to torture. It is most definitely an ugly thing, a thing to be despised and hated. But if I thought that torturing a man like Khalid Shaykh Muhammad would provide me information that could potentially save thousands of innocents, I would do so without reservation. And I am heartened to know that there exist people who are or were willing to do the same on behalf of our country.

For those of you who may have forgotten, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks and several other terror attacks. Oh, and he also confessed to decapitating Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Some on the left are apoplectic about the fact that a CIA interrogator apparently threatened to kill Muhammad's wife and children (it is unclear to me whether they were actually in CIA custody) to get him to talk. Uh, the guy personally beheaded someone and planned the deaths of over 3,000 innocent people, so I doubt that this bluff did any long-term psychological damage to him. And even if it did, he masterminded the deaths of thousands of innocents and cut off a reporter's head.

Second, the practical. The report, while couched in very political terms, appears to indicate that the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques worked. Stephen Hayes, a fellow DePauw alum, provides a good summary over at the Weekly Standard's website about the effectiveness of the techniques:

Let’s review. Abu Zubaydah gave up some information before the use of EITs. But “since the use of the waterboard…Abu Zubaydah has appeared to be cooperative,” and gave up even more intelligence. Al Nashiri provided mostly historical information in the short time before EITs were employed. “However, following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning…” And “accomplished resistor” Khalid Shaykh Muhammad provided mostly useless information before the application of EITs. Afterwards, he “provided information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists” – so much information, in fact, that he was regarded as the “most prolific” intelligence source.
Reasonable people can – and do – disagree about the morality of using EITs. But only the most accomplished resister could continue to claim that they were not effective.

Third, the future. It seems to me that the next time we're attacked, we're going to have a significantly harder time getting people to come forward to do our necessary dirty work. Victoria Toensing, former Chief Counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, agrees:

“All volunteers step forward. We have a person in custody who is high-ranking al-Qaeda. He taunts that an attack on United States soil is imminent but laughs mockingly when we ask for specifics. We need interrogators.” Such was the threat in the summer of 2002 when the CIA asked the Justice Department for guidance on what its personnel could do to get such information from captured al-Qaeda
lieutenant Abu Zubdayah.
Since then, the lawyers who stepped forward to provide carefully structured counsel have been criminally investigated and told that, even if they are not prosecuted, their conduct will be turned over to their state bars. The interrogators who stepped forward were promised in early spring by President Obama that, even if they erred in judgment while protecting our country, the president would rather “move forward.” However, in late summer, they are under criminal scrutiny.
Even though an earlier investigation by career prosecutors reviewed the same conduct and refused prosecution of all but one contract employee who was brought to trial in 2007. Even though congressional leaders had knowledge of the interrogation techniques and made no attempt to stop them. Even though the conduct is more than six years old. Even though the CIA has taken administrative action against some of the personnel involved in the interrogations. Even though being just a target of a criminal investigation costs thousands of dollars in legal fees. Even though being just a target of a criminal investigation takes a horrendous mental toll. Even though the morale of the CIA will plunge to the depths it did in the wake of the Church Committee attacks. Even though the release of the names of those being scrutinized will make them terrorist targets for the rest of their lives. Even if they are cleared.
The next time our government employees are asked to step forward to get information of a possible, even probable, imminent attack, no one will. Even though ...

Fourth, the politics. The decision to release this information is all politics. It is meant to distract ordinary Americans from the fact that our government currently thinks it will add an additional $9,000,000,000,000 (I think that writing $9 trillion does not do justice to the magnitude of this number) to its debt over the next 10 years. And it is meant to distract President Obama's left-wing base from the fact that health care reform may well go down in flames. As "Doctor Zero" at hotair.com notes, there appears to be no thought about the long-term implications of the releasing this report:

The Obama Administration, aware that everyone outside of union bosses, and interest groups looking for billion-dollar ribeye steaks of taxpayer money, is having trouble remembering why they voted for Obama, has decided to drag CIA interrogators and Bush Administration officials into court, where they will be persecuted for their role in defending America from terrorist attacks. Apparently Obama and his accomplices decided to distract their liberal base from the fiery Hindenburg crash of socialized medicine, by offering them a relaxing cruise on the Titanic of leftist foreign policy. As with everything else the current Administration does, it’s a remarkably foolish move: dangerous for America, and self-destructive as a strategy.

President Reagan understood America in a way that President Obama does not

2009-08-25T08:14:00.003-04:00

Foud Ajami had a very good column yesterday that sought to explain the underlying problem with President Obama's administration. In it, Mr. Ajami provides an interesting contrast between President Obama and President Reagan, a man who truly understood what American is:

In one of the revealing moments of the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama rightly observed that the Reagan presidency was a transformational presidency in a way Clinton's wasn't. And by that Reagan precedent, that Reagan standard, the faults of the Obama presidency are laid bare. Ronald Reagan, it should be recalled, had been swept into office by a wave of dissatisfaction with Jimmy Carter and his failures. At the core of the Reagan mission was the recovery of the nation's esteem and self-regard. Reagan was an optimist. He was Hollywood glamour to be sure, but he was also Peoria, Ill. His faith in the country was boundless, and when he said it was "morning in America" he meant it; he believed in America's miracle and had seen it in his own life, in his rise from a child of the Depression to the summit of political power.
The failure of the Carter years was, in Reagan's view, the failure of the man at the helm and the policies he had pursued at home and abroad. At no time had Ronald Reagan believed that the American covenant had failed, that America should apologize for itself in the world beyond its shores. There was no narcissism in Reagan. It was stirring that the man who headed into the sunset of his life would bid his country farewell by reminding it that its best days were yet to come.
In contrast, there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold, the "Yes we can!" mantra is shallow, and at any rate, it is about the coming to power of a man, and a political class, invested in its own sense of smarts and wisdom, and its right to alter the social contract of the land. In this view, the country had lost its way and the new leader and the political class arrayed around him will bring it back to the right path.
Thus the moment of crisis would become an opportunity to push through a political economy of redistribution and a foreign policy of American penance. The independent voters were the first to break ranks. They hadn't underwritten this fundamental change in the American polity when they cast their votes for Mr. Obama.
American democracy has never been democracy by plebiscite, a process by which a leader is anointed, then the populace steps out of the way, and the anointed one puts his political program in place. In the American tradition, the "mandate of heaven" is gained and lost every day and people talk back to their leaders. They are not held in thrall by them. The leaders are not infallible or a breed apart. That way is the Third
World way, the way it plays out in Arab and Latin American politics.
Those protesters in those town-hall meetings have served notice that Mr. Obama's charismatic moment has passed. Once again, the belief in that American exception that set this nation apart from other lands is re-emerging. Health care is the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it is an unease with the way the verdict of the 2008 election was read by those who prevailed. It shall be seen whether the man swept into office in the moment of national panic will adjust to the nation's recovery of its self-confidence.

Man, I miss President Reagan. By the way, here is a little known fact about President Reagan- during his presidency, the first openly gay couple spent the night at the White House. He was a remarkably tolerant man when you consider that he was born in 1911, rose to political prominence in the 1960s, and started his presidential campaigning in the late 1970s:

In 1978, for example, Reagan vigorously opposed a California ballot initiative sponsored by religious conservatives that would have barred homosexuals from teaching in the public schools. The timing is significant because he was then preparing to run for president, a race in which he would need the support of conservatives and moderates very uncomfortable with homosexual teachers. As Cannon puts it, Reagan was “well aware that there were those who wanted him to duck the issue” but nevertheless “chose to state his convictions.”
Reagan penned an op-ed against the so-called Briggs Initiative in which he wrote,
“Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual's sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child's teachers do not really influence this.” This was a remarkably progressive thing for a politician, especially a conservative one about to run for president, to say in 1978. The Briggs Initiative was overwhelmingly defeated. Its sponsors blamed Reagan for the defeat.

I sometimes wonder why today's current Republican leaders seem to ignore this aspect of Reagan's legacy while attempting to invoke his legacy on every other matter.

The government's failure to learn from its past mistakes - a column about high-speed rail that applies to health care

2009-08-24T22:14:00.004-04:00

Robert Samuelson has an op-ed in today's Washington Post about the Obama administration's proposals on high-speed rail, which he labels "a dispiriting example of government's inability to learn from past mistakes." I find the column interesting because of its applicability to the present discussion on health care reform.

Indeed, the column would still be spot on if one substituted Mr. Samuelson's references to the Obama administration's proposals for providing subsidies to fund high-speed rail with references to its proposal to create a public health-care plan and his references to Amtrak with references to Medicare (note the links in the quotation do not work):

The Obama administration's enthusiasm for high-speed rail is a dispiriting example of government's inability to learn from past mistakes. Since 1971, the federal government has poured almost $35 billion in subsidies into Amtrak with few public benefits. At most, we've gotten negligible reductions -- invisible and statistically insignificant -- in congestion, oil use or greenhouse gases. What's mainly being provided is subsidized transportation for a small sliver of the population. In a country where 140 million people go to work every day, Amtrak has 78,000 daily passengers. A typical trip is subsidized by about $50.
Given this, you'd think even the dullest politician wouldn't expand rail subsidies, especially considering the almost $11 trillion in projected federal budget deficits between now and 2019. But no, the administration has made high-speed rail a top priority.
…
The White House promises fabulous benefits. High-speed rail "will loosen the congestion suffocating our highways and skyways," says Vice President Biden. A high-speed rail system would eliminate carbon dioxide emissions "equal to removing 1 million cars from our roads," adds the president. Relieve congestion. Fight global warming. Reduce oil imports. The vision is seductive. The audience is willing. Many Americans love trains and regard other countries' systems (say, Spain's rapid trains between Madrid and Barcelona, running at about 150 mph) as evidence of U.S. technological inferiority.
There's only one catch: The vision is a mirage. The costs of high-speed rail would be huge, and the public benefits meager. President Obama's network may never be built. It's doubtful private investors will advance the money, and once government officials acknowledge the full costs, they'll retreat. In a recent report, the Government Accountability Office cited a range of construction costs, from $22 million a mile to $132 million a mile. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser figures $50 million a mile might be a plausible average. A 250-mile system would cost $12.5 billion and 10 systems, $125 billion.
…
In a blog-posted analysis, Glaeser made generous assumptions for trains ("Personally, I almost always prefer trains to driving") and still found that costs vastly outweigh benefits. Consider Obama's claim about removing the equivalent of 1 million cars. Even if it came true (doubtful), it would represent less than one-half of 1 percent of the 254 million registered vehicles in 2007.
What works in Europe and Asia won't in the United States. Even abroad, passenger trains are subsidized. But the subsidies are more justifiable because geography and energy policies differ.
…
The mythology of high-speed rail is not just misinformed; it's antisocial. Governments at all levels are already overburdened. Compounding the burdens with new wasteful subsidies would squeeze spending for more vital needs -- schools, police and (ironically) mass transit. High-speed rail could divert funds from mass-transit systems that, according to a study by Randal O'Toole of the Cato Institute, have huge maintenance backlogs: $16 billion in Chicago; $17 billion in New York; $12.2 billion in Washington; $5.8 billion in San Francisco. Any high-speed rail system should be financed locally; states should decide their transportation priorities. All this seems familiar, because it's Amtrak writ large: the triumph of fantasy over fact. The same false arguments used to justify Amtrak (less congestion, pollution, etc.) are recycled. Evidence and experience count for little. Obama and Biden pander to popular prejudices instead of recognizing past failure. Boondoggles become respectable. A White House so frivolous in embracing dubious spending cannot be believed when it professes concern about future taxes and budget deficits.

Health care reform complications and contradictions - Updated

2009-08-21T11:34:00.006-04:00

Okay, I realize that I am beating health care reform (or health insurance reform or whatever else President Obama is calling it right now) to death. But this is the big policy dust up right now, so I will likely continue beating on reform until it either goes down in flames (as it looks like it might) or gets passed. So deal with it. Like the title says, I write about stuff that interests me and likely no one else. And given my limited readership, the title is probably more apt than I would like.

With that, back to the health care reform, Peggy Noonan has a column today that addresses the main problem with President Obama's attempt to pass it. In a nutshell, Obamacare is just too darn complicated for normal people to understand, and when normal people can't understand a government program, they won't ever trust it:

Every big idea that works is marked by simplicity, by clarity. You can understand it when you hear it, and you can explain it to people. Social Security: Retired workers receive a public pension to help them through old age. Medicare: People over 65 can receive taxpayer-funded health care. Welfare: If you have no money and cannot support yourself, we will help as you get back on your feet.
These things are clear. I understand them. You understand them. The president's health-care plan is not clear, and I mean that not only in the sense of "he hasn't told us his plan." I mean it in terms of the voodoo phrases, this gobbledygook, this secret language of government that no one understands—"single payer," "public option," "insurance marketplace exchange." No one understands what this stuff means, nobody normal.
And when normal people don't know what the words mean, they don't say to themselves, "I may not understand, but my trusty government surely does, and will treat me and mine with respect." They think, "I can't get what these people are talking about. They must be trying to get one past me. So I'll vote no."

I don't believe this explains every objection that "normal people" have with the current proposals on health care reform, but it surely explains a good number of them. And I think such complaints are legitimate.

I also believe, as I mentioned before, that a lot of the objections that "normal people" have with Obamacare are the inherent contradictions contained within his sales pitch. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal has noticed these contradictions as well:

So the health-care status quo needs top-to-bottom reform, except for the parts that "you" happen to like. Government won't interfere with patients and their physicians, considering that the new panel of experts who will make decisions intended to reduce tests and treatments doesn't count as government. But Medicare shows that government involvement isn't so bad, aside from the fact that spending is out of control—and that program needs top-to-bottom reform too.
Voters aren't stupid. The true reason ObamaCare is in trouble isn't because "folks aren't listening," but because they are.

Update- Well, someone was nice enough to leave a comment on this post last night, and I thought I should respond to it. Here is the comment:

Anonymous said...
Mr. Bru
How is this going to affect you and why are you so worried my dear boy? Are not there many in our great land who do not have access to coverage? You wanker!
August 21, 2009 11:12 PM

First, thanks for calling me a "wanker." That is such an underused term in the United States, much to my chagrin.

Second, I can think of several ways in which the proposed health care reforms will adversely affect me; here are two of the most critical impacts:

The Congressional Budget Office has determined that H.R. 3200, which the House of Representatives will likely vote on this fall, would add approximately $239,000,000,000 to the federal government's budget deficit over the next 10 years. I really think that our law makers should focus on ways to cut, not increase, federal spending given that the Obama Administration just announced a 10-year budget deficit $9,000,000,000,000 late on Friday and the Chinese are becoming increasing skittish about our government's ability to repay its debts.

In addition to the increased federal spending, several provisions in H.R. 3200 will raise the costs of health insurance coverage, not lower them as the President has repeatedly claimed. For example, this proposed legislation has provisions that require community rating (i.e., the insurer must determine its risks based upon the community in which you live rather than your actual health condition or the health condition of your employer's group), mandate that every health insurance policy provide certain types of coverage, place limits on deductibles, out-of-pocket expenses, and co-pays, prohibit cost-sharing for preventative care, and prohibit annual or lifetime caps on coverage. Except for the community rating requirement, all of these provisions will necessarily increase the costs of health insurance coverage, and if you are young and healthy, the community rating provision will increase your costs as well.

Third, in answer to your question about whether there exist many in our great land without access to health insurance, no, not really. President Obama and his supporters claim that their exist 47 million who lack access to health insurance, but here is a graphic portrayal of how that number actually breaks down:

Organizing for America sends out a health care reform email

2009-08-19T19:39:00.004-04:00

So I received an email today from Organizing for America about health care reform. In it, President Obama's community organizing group claims that the opponents of the current health care reform proposals are spreading lies and falsehoods:

It feels like a new lie about health insurance reform crops up each day. Government taking over all health care? Not true. Euthanasia for seniors? Couldn't be more false. Rationing of care? Reform will stop rationing, not
increase it.

But these purported "lies" don't really look like lies once you investigate them. For example, the President and his advisers have repeatedly said that they view the proposed government-run health plan as the means to eventually implement a single payer system through which the federal government will effectively control health care.

On euthanasia and rationing, while the current proposals will not actively kill sick, elderly citizens, they will limit their treatment options and ration care to them. Indeed, Nat Hentoff, a left-leaning, libertarian and renowned author, had a column today in which he wrote that he is "finally scared of a White House administration" because of these two issues:

President Obama's desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model) — as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill — decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It's already in the stimulus bill signed into law.
The members of that ultimate federal board will themselves not have examined or seen the patient in question. For another example of the growing, tumultuous resistance to "Dr. Obama," particularly among seniors, there is a July 29 Washington Times editorial citing a line from a report written by a key adviser to Obama on cost-efficient health care, prominent bioethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel (brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel).
Emanuel writes about rationing health care for older Americans that "allocation (of medical care) by age is not invidious discrimination." (The Lancet, January 2009) He calls this form of rationing — which is fundamental to Obamacare goals — "the complete lives system." You see, at 65 or older, you've had more life years than a 25-year-old. As such, the latter can be more deserving of cost-efficient health care than older folks.
No matter what Congress does when it returns from its recess, rationing is a basic part of Obama's eventual master health care plan. Here is what Obama said in an April 28 New York Times interview (quoted in Washington Times July 9 editorial) in which he describes a government end-of-life services guide for the citizenry as we get to a certain age, or are in a certain grave condition. Our government will undertake, he says, a "very difficult democratic conversation" about how "the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care" costs.
This end-of-life consultation has been stripped from the Senate Finance Committee
bill because of democracy-in-action town-hall outcries but remains in three House bills.
A specific end-of-life proposal is in draft Section 1233 of H.R. 3200, a House Democratic health care bill that is echoed in two others that also call for versions of "advance care planning consultation" every five years — or sooner if the patient is diagnosed with a progressive or terminal illness.
As the Washington Post's Charles Lane penetratingly explains (“Undue influence," Aug. 8): the government would pay doctors to discuss with Medicare patients explanations of "living wills and durable powers of attorney … and (provide) a list of national and state-specific resources to assist consumers and their families" on making advance-care planning (read end-of-life) decisions.
Significantly, Lane adds that, "The doctor 'shall' (that's an order) explain that Medicare pays for hospice care (hint, hint)."
But the Obama administration claims these fateful consultations are "purely voluntary." In response, Lane — who learned a lot about reading between the lines while the Washington Post's Supreme Court reporter — advises us:
"To me, 'purely voluntary' means 'not unless the patient requests one.'"
But Obamas' doctors will initiate these chats. "Patients," notes Lane, "may refuse without penalty, but many will bow to white-coated authority." And who will these doctors be? What criteria will such Obama advisers as Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel set for conductors of end-of-life services?
I was alerted to Lanes' crucial cautionary advice — for those of use who may be influenced to attend the Obamacare twilight consultations — by Wesley J. Smith, a continually invaluable reporter and analyst of, as he calls his most recent book, the "Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America" (Encounter Books).
As more Americans became increasingly troubled by this and other fearful elements of Dr. Obama's cost-efficient health care regimen, Smith adds this vital advice, no matter what legislation Obama finally signs into law:
"Remember that legislation itself is only half the problem with Obamacare. Whatever bill passes, hundreds of bureaucrats in the federal agencies will have years to promulgate scores of regulations to govern the details of the law.
"This is where the real mischief could be done because most regulatory actions are effectuated beneath the public radar. It is thus essential, as just one example, that any end-of-life counseling provision in the final bill be specified to be purely voluntary … and that the counseling be required by law to be neutral as to outcome. Otherwise, even if the legislation doesn't push in a specific direction — for instance, THE GOVERNMENT REFUSING TREATMENT — the regulations could."
(Emphasis added.)
Who'll let us know what's really being decided about our lives — and what is set into law? To begin with, Charles Lane, Wesley Smith and others whom I'll cite and add to as this chilling climax of the Obama presidency comes closer.
Condemning the furor at town-hall meetings around the country as "un-American," Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are blind to truly participatory democracy — as many individual Americans believe they are fighting, quite literally, for their lives.

Hmm, so who exactly is lying? The politicians and their cronies who talk in platitudes without reference to anything in the actual legislation? Or those who have read all or part of the proposed reforms and are expressing their concerns?

President Obama's advisors agree...

2009-08-19T16:51:00.003-04:00

that creating a government-run health plan (i.e., the "public plan") will lead us down the path to a single payer health care system. Yes, I remember that just last Tuesday President Obama stated that he has "not said [he] was a single payer supporter," but, as I indicated then, the President may have been lying.

The President, members of his administration, and several of his advisers and supporters have also claimed that the government-run plan is only meant to break up the monopoly that private insurers currently have and to inject some competition into the system. In doing so, of course, they ignore the definition of a monopoly. But it also appears that many of them may, like the President last week, be lying about the true motivation for creating a government-run plan. Indeed, as the clip below indicates, a lot of the President's officials, advisers, and supporters have been taped saying that creating a government-run plan is the first step in a process that will eventually lead to a single payer health care system:

So at this point, there appear to be two options: (1) either the proponents of health care reform are currently lying to the general public about their actual goals and what they hope to accomplish; or (2) all of the above-quotes were taken out of context. I will let you decide for yourself, but my experience suggests that (1) is the more likely of the two. And if that is the actual goal, then have they should gonads to say that on television or during public town hall meetings. They shouldn't try to hide behind some smokescreen about "injecting competition into the system." Smokescreens make it hard to have that open and honest debate that they claim to want.

A couple of funny video clips

2009-08-19T07:49:00.002-04:00

A couple of funny clips. The first is Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) talking down to his constituents at a town hall meeting. I'm not sure why, but that man is a walking sound bite machine:

And the second is Jon Stewart calling out President Obama for his apparent waffling on the public option. As Jon notes, say what you will about the Bush administration, at least they could stay on message:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Heal or No Heal - Medicine Brawl

http://www.thedailyshow.com/

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Healthcare Protests

A Portillo powder video to break up the health care debate.

2009-08-18T13:53:00.002-04:00

While checking Facebook during my lunch hour, I came across a new video that was filmed last week in Portillo, Chile. Portillo is one of the great ski resorts in the world, let alone South America, and it has been hit by a couple of epic storms that have dumped about 6 feet of snow in the last few days. The video brought back wonderful memories of my stay there three years ago. If you ever have the chance to go, I recommend that you take it. As the man in the video says, words fail Portillo as it is like no other place on earth. Enjoy:

Big Powder day in Portillo Chile with the Vail Resorts Epic Tour from Rex Lint on Vimeo.

The Inherent Contradiction of Obamacare

2009-08-18T08:29:00.004-04:00

There has been something that really bothered me about President Obama's sales job for Obamacare that I could not quite put my finger on. Now, with the help of the Internet, I have: it is the inherent contradiction of "if you like your doctor and your plan, you can keep them" vs. "the present system is unsustainable because your evil doctor does procedures purely for profit."

Umm, so what happens if everyone chooses to keep their doctor and their plan? I don't know the answer to that question, but I have a feeling it won't really be an issue if Obamacare passes because, eventually, you will have to drop your current coverage.

Below is the video that led me to my epiphany on the contradictions inherent in Obama's sales pitch:

Candor, Thuggery, and "Niceness"

2009-08-18T08:04:00.006-04:00

An interesting opinion piece from David Warren on the difference between candor (or "candour" because he is Canadian) as they relate to our current political discourse in the United States:

Candour is when you tell a truth that is disturbing, in language so unambiguous that persons in polite company will not want to hear you. It is a way to lose the respect of the genteel -- of those who are "respectable" in the shallowest sense. Rude language is quite unnecessary to this end: the hard truth itself, spoken plainly and publicly, will give sufficient offence.
Thuggery is unrelated to this. It consists not of candid argument but of naked intimidation. It may be done crassly -- for instance, by the union thugs who have begun to appear at U.S. townhall meetings, to confront opponents of the Democrats'
health-care agenda. Or it may be done smoothly, with the politically correct gesture, that conveys the threat of later reprisal against anyone who utters the contrary, "incorrect" thought. A good example would be the "flag@whitehouse.gov" e-mail address that was set up on the official White House website, to which Obama supporters across the country were invited to report "fishy" opposition to that health-care agenda.
And "niceness" is something else again, usually allied with hypocrisy. For one can be very selectively nice -- outraged, scandalized, breathtaken with surprise, when Richard Nixon was caught compiling an "enemies list." Yet perfectly indifferent when Barack Obama advertises for input to compile his.
How many "nice" people I know, who casually asserted that a certain George W. Bush was mentally retarded, resembled a monkey, and was guilty of war crimes. Suddenly the same people have "had it up to here" with squalid personal attacks on his successor.
Tell you the candid truth, I don't like "nice" people. Conversely, I have a sneaking regard for real political enemies who are prepared to state candidly what they are about. Which is why I mentioned Obama's long list of policy czars, above -- people like John Holdren (1970s advocate of forced abortions and mass sterilization) the new science czar, Van Jones (declared Communist) the new green jobs czar, Vivek Kundra (convicted shoplifter) the new infotech czar, Adolfo Carrion (pay-for-play scandals) the new urban subsidies czar, Nancy DePerle (lobbyist-to-regulator) the new health czar, Cass Sunstein (behaviourist and animal rights wacko) the new regulatory czar, and so on.
There are dozens of these, altogether. They are Obama's "shadow cabinet," with the advantage over his more presentable official cabinet that they can avoid congressional scrutiny in almost everything they do. They didn't need to face the Senate confirmation revelations that lost Obama so many of his earliest cabinet appointments. A mere Internet search for quotes reveals that many of them are capable of great candour, at least in the radical leftist environments from which most of them came.
The mainstream media focus is nevertheless not on them -- rich and easy pickings had they been Republican appointments -- but instead on Sarah Palin's appalling
characterization of Obama's health-care agenda as not merely "socialist" but "evil"; and on her use of the term "death panels" to describe proposed bureaucratic arrangements for deciding who should be entitled to medical treatment, and how to advise the old, seriously handicapped, and ill on euthanasia options.
Needless to say the proposals themselves had been couched in "feelgood" language, with public relations campaigns at the ready in case someone like Palin called a spade a spade. She did so in full knowledge of how that publicity machine would respond.

Hmm, maybe "Hope" and "Change" were just "nice" words meant to disguise President Obama's actual agenda.

Does President Obama understand that he is the President of all Americans?

2009-08-17T16:08:00.004-04:00

I am beginning to think that he does not. On Sunday, the New York Times published an op-ed that President Obama ghost-wrote, er, penned on health care reform. In it, the President states that: "This is a complicated and critical issue, and it deserves a serious debate." I agree.

Unfortunately, rather than engaging in debate, he proceeded to demagogue those whose only offense is to disagree with his positions on reform: "In the coming weeks, the cynics and the naysayers will continue to exploit fear and concerns for political gain. But for all the scare tactics out there, what’s truly scary — truly risky — is the prospect of doing nothing." To make matters worse, President Obama claimed that those who oppose his plans are making "wild misrepresentations that bear no resemblance to anything that anyone has actually proposed." Unfortunately, it is the President who has engaged in repeated misrepresentations while trying to sell his plans.

Peter Wehner, who writes for Commentary Magazine, takes President Obama to task for failure to lead:

The president is the Child of Light pitted against the Forces of Darkness. Here’s the thing, though: Obama, in possession of the largest megaphone in the world, is himself being simply dishonest and employing wild misrepresentations of the facts. By now the list is well known and seemingly grows by the week, to the point that it is getting difficult to track the assortment of false claims. But let’s try:
Obama promised his health-care overhaul would decrease costs; the CBO has shown how the various plans he has embraced would dramatically increase costs. Obama says that, under the plans he has blessed, everyone can keep their health-care plan; the CBO has shown us why that claim is untrue. Obama says preventive care saves money; once again, courtesy of the CBO, we know that assertion is false. The president says the AARP has endorsed ObamaCare; the AARP put out a statement to the effect that what Obama had said was “inaccurate” and that the White House had to issue a retraction. Obama claimed that after a meeting with representatives of insurance companies, drug companies, and hospitals, they committed to him that they would reduce costs by 1.5 percent per year; people who attended the meeting said that such a claim was untrue, which forced the White House to release a statement that the president “misspoke”—before it retracted its retraction, doing yet more damage to the truth.
Obama portrays his critics as tools of special interests—yet he has assembled as powerful a group of special interests on his behalf as you can imagine (the coalition that is supporting the White House’s health-care ad campaign includes the American Medical Association; Families USA; the Federation of American Hospitals; the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, known as PhRMA; and the Service Employees International Union).
In his Times op-ed, Obama—who promised to lead America in a civil and high-minded debate, one in which he would address respectfully those who have differences with him—also attacks the motivations of his critics, saying that “the cynics and the naysayers will continue to exploit fear and concerns for political gains.” And then he informs us that this is a “complicated and critical issue, and it deserves a serious debate.”
I agree, and like many other Americans, I wish the president would engage in such a debate. But he has chosen another path, one built largely on deception, and he is paying a very high political price for it. ObamaCare is being undone by a series of stubborn facts—facts the president can deny but cannot refute. The Congressional Budget Office, in an act of admirable courage and honesty, has ripped huge, gaping holes into the administration’s health-care hull. Yet Mr. Obama, rather than admitting the truth, is doubling down on his misinformation campaign. And in the process, he must cast himself in the role of the one honest man whom Diogenes went in search of. President Obama’s self-conceit is now edging toward self-parody.

Indeed, when those opposed to President Obama have attempted to engage in serious debate and offer alternative reform proposals, the left has not actually discussed or countered those proposals. Instead, it has simply discounted them as illegimate, pieces of right-wing propaganda.

For example, John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, wrote a reasoned op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last week that explained what that company had done with its health plan to counter rising medical costs. In it, he did not personally attack the President or those who are currently pushing reform. Instead, he offered potential proposals that he believes would lead to better medical care at lower costs.

The reaction on the left has been swift and personal. They denounce his proposals without discussion: "Of course his solutions are silly--they are simply right-wing talking points." And they attack him rather than addressing the substance of his argument: "I truly do not understand what is going through this cretin CEO's mind when he penned this op-ed. Does he not know that Americans are dying for lack of proper health care? Or does he not care?" Apparently, they did not get the President's message that this issue "deserves a serious debate."

White House realizes that encouraging snitching does not effectively advance its cause.

2009-08-17T13:09:00.002-04:00

A couple of weeks ago the White House asked for citizens to forward "fishy" emails on health care reform to flag@whitehouse.gov. Apparently, the White House has now realized that many American's viewed this as a request for people to snitch on those who disagreed with the White House on health care reform that was damaging their efforts, and it has disabled this email address:

Following a furor over how the data would be used, the White House has shut down an electronic tip box — flag@whitehouse.gov — that was set up to receive information on “fishy” claims about President Barack Obama’s health plan.
E-mails to that address now bounce back with the message: “The email address you just sent a message to is no longer in service. We are now accepting your feedback about health insurance reform via: http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck.”

Oddly, that website's contact form now contains the following instruction:

Please refrain from submitting any individual’s personal information, including
their email address, without their permission.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius "misspoke" on health care reform

2009-08-17T12:23:00.007-04:00

Kathleen Sebelius appeared on CNN's Sunday morning political show, State of the Union, and indicated that the so-called "public option" may not be an "essential part" of health care, er, health insurance reform. Of course, the White House, or at least one anonymous source within the White House, now says that Ms. Sebelius "misspoke" when she made this statement. Marc Ambinder reports:

An administration official said tonight that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius "misspoke" when she told CNN this morning that a government run health insurance option "is not an essential part" of reform. This official asked not to be identified in exchange for providing clarity about the intentions of the President. The official said that the White House did not intend to change its messaging and that Sebelius simply meant to echo the president, who has acknowledged that the public option is a tough sell in the Senate and is, at the same time, a must-pass for House Democrats, and is not, in the president's view, the most important element of the reform package.
A second official, Linda Douglass, director of health reform communications for the administration, said that President Obama believed that a public option was the best way to reduce costs and promote competition among insurance companies, that he had not backed away from that belief, and that he still wanted to see a public option in the final bill."Nothing has changed," she said. "The President has always said that what is essential that health insurance reform lower costs, ensure that there are affordable options for all Americans and increase choice and competition in the health insurance market. He believes that the public option is the best way to achieve these goals."
A third White House official, via e-mail, said that Sebelius didn't misspeak. "The media misplayed it," the third official said.

I talked to my White House "source" about this story, and he said that Sec. Sebelius may have become confused on the public option's status after she met Joe Biden for breakfast briefly before her television appearance yesterday morning. Apparently, the White House has now implemented certain protective measures to make sure that Joey does not have any further access to cabinet members.

Okay, I really don't have a White House source, but is there really another plausible explanation for how the Secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services could have "misspoke" on such a fundamental issue? Seriously, say what you will about President Bush's administration, but at least it did not have to repeatedly walk back statements that its officials made while attempting to advance President Bush's policy positions.

And I have a question for Mr. Ambinder's third White House source, who claimed that the media "misplayed" Sec. Sebelius's statement: um, how does accurately reporting Sec. Sebilius's own statement count as a "misplay?"

Cash for Clunkers, or why I don't want more federal government involvement in health care

2009-08-17T11:57:00.004-04:00

Shockingly, our federal government cannot handle the administrative burden caused by all of the claims that auto dealers have submitted under the Cash for Clunkers program. And apparently, some right-wing nut job, er, Democratic member of Congress, is not happy about it:

The federal government has only reimbursed auto dealers for 2 percent of the claims they've submitted through the popular "cash for clunkers" program, a Pennsylvania congressman said, calling on the Obama administration to help speed up the process.
Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., called for "immediate action" to address the problem in a statement Sunday, after writing a letter to President Obama Saturday expressing his concerns.
In the letter, Sestak said only 2 percent of claims have been paid and that four of every five applications have been "rejected for minor oversight."
In recent days, auto dealers across the country have been complaining that the reimbursement payments are slow to process. And they said some of their applications were being rejected because of apparent procedural issues. The statistics Sestak cited suggest those complaints are not based on isolated incidents.
Staffing could be one problem. According to sales data summarized by Transportation Department officials, dealers have submitted requests for rebates on 338,659 vehicles sold.
But while Congress just expanded the $1 billion program by $2 billion, the Department of Transportation says a staff of just 225 people is reviewing those claims.
Sestak wrote that he thinks 1,000 processors should be assigned to handle the claims. Sestak, who is challenging Sen. Arlen Specter in his state's Senate primary, wrote that auto dealers have contacted him to express their concern and ask for help.
"Failure to address delays with the cash for clunkers program will adversely harm auto dealers in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania and around the country -- undoubtedly forcing many out of business," he said in a statement.

So the federal government cannot properly staff and administer a new program that is limited in scope (by federal standards), but President Obama thinks it would be a good idea to create a government-run "public option" to handle the medical coverage of potentially millions of individuals. And he wonders why people are skeptical of his plans?

Nancy Pelosi on Disruptive Protestors - Then and Now

2009-08-14T10:56:00.003-04:00

Briebart.tv is currently playing a funny little video clip on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It shows her in 2006 telling anti-war protestors that she is "a fan of disruptors" and that their "advocacy is very American and very important" and contrasts that statement with her and Rep. Steny Hoyer's USA Today op-ed from earlier this week that called people making disruptive comments at town hall meetings "un-American." It's almost like these people don't know that digital recordings and the Internet exist.

Here is the video:

Website Similarities between the White House, Organizing for America, and SEIU

2009-08-13T16:18:00.003-04:00

I wrote on Monday about my concerns on the similarities shared by the official White House website's Reality Check page and health care reform advocacy sites of Organizing for America and the Service Employees International Union. I have now learned that the Democratic National Committee, which runs Organizing for American, Obama for American, which was candidate Obama's presidential campaign organization, and the SEIU are all clients of Blue State Digital. According to Blue State Digital, these organizations "have put the BSD Online Tools and BSD's design, technology, and strategy services at the center of their online constituency-building programs."

So while the White House, DNC, and SEIU each employ BSD to help run their websites, it is not clear whether these three groups are truly coordinating their web-based activities or whether their websites just have similar looks because they all separately work with BSD.

On an interesting related note, Major Garrett of Fox News had a dust up with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs today on whether the White House is sending out spam emails advocating for health care reform.

Note that Gibbs is quick to state that Organizing for America (or "OFA" as he calls it) and http://www.whitehouse.gov/ are separate and that he does not want Garrett to conflate the two so that someone might get the impression that White House employees are engaging in illegal political activities.

As to why people would get what look like unsolicited emails from the White House, there is an innocent explanation: the emails are simply being forwarded by someone outside of the White House. Allahpundit of hotair.com and Ace of Spades have both offered this as a potential explanation on their sites. Allah has also offered the following updates to his post:

Update: A reader just forwarded me an e-mail her brother got Monday night. It is indeed the Axelrod post at the White House site that I linked to; it has a White House heading and a White House “from” e-mail address. It doesn’t appear to have been forwarded to her brother from any third party. He claims he doesn’t remember signing up for any WH e-mails. For what it’s worth.
Update: A second reader just e-mailed to say that he got the Axelrod e-mail too — and it’s not the first one he’s gotten:
I received this email this morning. This is the second email I received from this address. I started receiving these after I sent an email to the
flag@whitehouse.gov address……
Is that what’s happening here? Conservatives are spamming the White House snitch line, only to find themselves signed up for White House e-mails? I thought Gibbsy told us they’re not collecting names or other identifying information from that account. Has anyone else who spammed the snitch line gotten any Axelrod e-mails?
Update: A third reader e-mails to say he’s spammed the snitch line half a dozen times and hasn’t gotten anything from Axelrod. Curiouser and curiouser. A third reader e-mails to say he’s spammed the snitch line half a dozen times and hasn’t gotten anything from Axelrod. Curiouser and curiouser.

I have also reported myself to the White House for spreading what it calls "disinformation" on health care reform but have not received any emails from Axelrod. The most innocent explanation that I can think of is that multiple White House employees have access to the flag@whitehouse.gov address, and one or more of them did not know the proper protocol and recorded some of the senders’ email addresses. While innocent, this would still be incompetent, but I have come to expect nothing less from this gang.

President Obama flubs his facts again

2009-08-12T23:47:00.005-04:00

President Obama awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom to tennis legend and women's rights advocate Billie Jean King today. As with his discussion of medical practices at yesterday's town hall, President Obama had a little trouble with his facts when highlighting Ms. King's tennis accomplishments:

Before presenting tennis legend Billie Jean King with the Medal of Freedom Wednesday, President Obama ticked off some ...
... of her accomplishments: 12 Grand Slam titles, 101 doubles titles, 67 singles titles.
“Pretty good, Billie Jean,” he quipped.
But he didn’t get any of it right, according to King herself.
“They didn’t get any of my facts right,” King lightheartedly noted afterward.
“Did you see all the – how many titles I won? I was cracking up.”
“Not even in the ballpark,” she continued.

Nope, not even close. Wikipedia states that Ms. King won a total of a 129 singles titles, not 67 as the President stated. And it only took me all of 5 seconds to find this information on the Internet. Surely, there is someone in President Obama's employ who has access to the Internet.

Like Camille Paglia, "I must confess my dismay bordering on horror at the amateurism of the White House apparatus ." Indeed, if you cannot get your facts straight when awarding someone the HIGHEST CIVILIAN HONOR in the United States, then I do not feel comfortable trusting your promises on what is and is not in your health care reform plan. Please understand that it is nothing personal. It's just that you have shown a lot of incompetence over the past few months.

President Obama is articulate and, well, ill-informed

2009-08-12T21:27:00.009-04:00

Okay, I think we all can agree that President Obama's performance at yesterday's town hall meeting in Portsmouth, New Hampshire did not win over any new converts to his cause of health care reform. Besides implying that his vaunted public option will work as well as the U.S. Postal Service and engaging in a bald-face lie about his prior support of a single payer system, President Obama accused doctors of amputating diabetics' limbs so that they could make more money:

Is it just me, or does President Obama seem to have a hard-on for doctors? I mean, he did previously accuse pediatricians of unnecessarily removing kids tonsils to make more money.

It appears that the American College of Surgeons might agree with this assessment. Here is what they had to say about President Obama's pontifications:

The American College of Surgeons is deeply disturbed over the uninformed public comments President Obama continues to make about the high-quality care provided by surgeons in the United States. When the President makes statements that are incorrect or not based in fact, we think he does a disservice to the American people at a time when they want clear, understandable facts about health care reform. We want to set the record straight.
-- Yesterday during a town hall meeting, President Obama got his facts completely wrong. He stated that a surgeon gets paid $50,000 for a leg amputation when, in fact, Medicare pays a surgeon between $740 and $1,140 for a leg amputation. This payment also includes the evaluation of the patient on the day of the operation
plus patient follow-up care that is provided for 90 days after the operation. Private insurers pay some variation of the Medicare reimbursement for this service.
-- Three weeks ago, the President suggested that a surgeon's decision to remove a child's tonsils is based on the desire to make a lot of money. That remark was ill-informed and dangerous, and we were dismayed by this characterization of the work surgeons do. Surgeons make decisions about recommending operations based on what's right for the patient.
We agree with the President that the best thing for patients with diabetes is to manage the disease proactively to avoid the bad consequences that can occur, including blindness, stroke, and amputation. But as is the case for a person who has been treated for cancer and still needs to have a tumor removed, or a person who is in a terrible car crash and needs access to a trauma surgeon, there are times when even a perfectly managed diabetic patient needs a surgeon. The President's remarks are truly alarming and run the risk of damaging the all-important trust between surgeons and their patients.
We assume that the President made these mistakes unintentionally, but we
would urge him to have his facts correct before making another inflammatory and
incorrect statement about surgeons and surgical care.

I really am not comforted when an organization made up of surgeons states that the President, whose biggest goal is to reform health care, is making "uninformed comments" about health care and has "got[ten] his facts completely wrong." Seriously, I used to worry that President Obama would lead us back to the days of President Carter. Now, I hope that is all the damage he does.

Obama - Hitler comparisons

2009-08-12T20:41:00.003-04:00

I keep hearing that those expressing their concerns about health care reform, er, health insurance reform are carrying swastikas and making nasty comparisons between Obama and Hitler. Indeed, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) even said that protesters showing up at town hall meetings were doing this:

The implied assertion in these statements is that those crazy people who are protesting the proposed reforms cannot be taken seriously because they are making outrageous comparisons.

First, while I don't doubt that there may be some fringe, nut jobs who are making this comparison, other than Democrats, like Rep. Pelosi, making unsubstantiated charges, I have not actually seen any health care protesters carrying swastikas outside of town hall meetings. If you have, please let me know.

Second, I do recall lots of folks on the left spending a good portion of the last administration making Bush-Hitler comparisons. And to the best of my knowledge, no one on the left complained about these comparisons or worried that their concerns about President Bush might be discounted because of the outrageous conduct of others on their side. To me, the failure of any Democrats or those with left-leaning beliefs to denounce Bush-Hitler comparisons makes their current protestations illegitimate. What is good for the goose is good for the gander. By allowing the Bush-Hitler comparisons a pass, Democrats cannot now complain that people on the right are making a similar complaint about President Obama.

On a personal level, I don't agree with the alleged Obama-Hitler comparison. Instead, Obama strikes me more as a modern day Woodrow Wilson. But the fact that someone might make the comparison does not truly offend me. Just like it really did not offend me when the Bush-Hitler comparisons were made. While the comparisons are demonstrably false and distasteful, people have the right to engage in political speech.

For what it is worth, here are some Youtube clips of my favorite Bush-Hitler Comparisons. And by favorite, I mean the most outlandish:

This one attempts to make historical comparisons between Bush and Hitler as it relates to terrorism and defending the "Homeland." It also talks about "Bin Laden" and "Al Queda's" "alleged demolition of the WTC towers:"

Here is Keith Olbermann ranting about President Bush. Seriously, does anyone take this man seriously:

Here is a Bush-Hitler comparison done by a 9/11 Truther. It shares some similarities with the first video, and all I can say to both of them is, "you're nuts."

President Obama may have lied today

2009-08-11T16:27:00.005-04:00

Today, President Obama said, "I have not said I was a single payer supporter."

Previously, President Obama said, "I happen to be a proponent of a single payer health care system."

Hmm, someone ought to email the White House because I think President Obama might be spreading some disinformation on health care reform.

Huh?? Did President Obama just invoke the U.S. Postal Service to sell his public health insurance option?

2009-08-11T15:43:00.005-04:00

Seriously??? Unfortunately, yes:

As an opponent to the current health care proposals, I ask that President Obama please repeat this statement as often as possible because I really don't think the public is clamoring for yet another federal program "that's always having problems."

Moreover, Ace of Spades notes that President Obama's analogy is flawed since UPS and FedEx are not allowed to compete against U.S.P.S. in the delivery of regular mail under U.S. law:

Um, that's part of the problem.
Even taking his quote for the claim it's meant to stand for: UPS and FedEx would be doing better. The trouble is, they're not permitted, by law, to compete with the Post Office regarding regular (that is, non-overnight) mail.
They are specifically excluded from that market.
They are "doing fine" in the market segment they're permitted to compete in.
However, if the law were changed and they were permitted to compete for regular mail delivery, they might not be "doing fine" in that market if the government competed unfairly in that arena, such as imposing general taxes on everyone to reduce the cost of postage, etc.
The government, on the other hand, continues to exist in this business at all only because the government grants itself a monopoly in the delivery of regular mail.
That's the only reason we still have a Post Office. Government fiat.
What a boneheaded remark. Yes, let's remind everyone of the shocking difference in
experience between the Post Office and FedEx or UPS.

Hmm, that's odd; these websites all look the same

2009-08-10T18:11:00.009-04:00

The White House established a new website today about health care reform that it calls "Reality Check." In it, the Administration attempts to refute various rumors that fear mongers and insurance industry plants have been spreading. Oddly, it looks remarkably similar to the Democratic National Committee's Organizing for America Health Care Action Center website, and the Service Employees International Union's health care website. This, of course, raises a couple of interesting questions:

1. Is the Administration using taxpayer funding to coordinate its message and official government websites with outside parties and special interest groups?

2. If so, is such conduct permissible under U.S. law?

I don't know the answers to either of these questions but will try to do some research on the issues in my copious free time. In the interim, it certainly looks as if the current administration does not care if it politicizes official government publications or Internet sites. I can only imagine what the outrage would have been on the left if President Bush had engaged in similar conduct.

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the SEIU, Mary Katharine Ham of the Weekly Standard has some background information.

More right-wing Nazis drowning out reasoned debate on health care

2009-08-10T15:02:00.003-04:00

Uh, no. Actually, it's a Democrat constituent who who attempted to ask a question of his elected Congressional representative, Rep. David Scott (D-GA), during an open question and answer session at a public meeting. Rep. Scott, with a subtleness that only an elected official can show, belittled his constituent's concerns. Why? Well, the constituent was obviously an insurance industry plant whose concerns about health care reform are manufactured:

Exit question: How long before some nut blames the "Jews" for manufacturing opposition to health care reform?

A good question about health care reform.

2009-08-10T14:52:00.003-04:00

Michael Kinsley asked a good question in his column in last Friday's Washington Post. His question is how can health insurance be considered "private" if the government dictates all of the terms under which an insurer can provide medical coverage:

If the government requires insurers to accept all customers and charge all the same price, regulates all aspects of their marketing to make sure they aren't discriminating, and then redistributes the profits to make sure that no company gets penalized unfairly, in what sense is the industry still "private"? And as long as the forces inherent in medicine -- such as your natural reluctance to haggle over price with the doctor who will be conducting your brain surgery tomorrow -- haven't disappeared, in what way will health care resemble a "free market"?
But thank goodness we won't have socialized medicine.

Under President Bush- dissent is the highest form of patriotism; now, not so much.

2009-08-10T09:55:00.004-04:00

Under President Bush, the left in this country repeatedly told everyone that dissent was patriotic. Indeed, Hillary Clinton offered this particular gem on the 2008 presidential campaign trail:

Now, not so much. Indeed, now, dissent, at least on health care reform, is distinctly un-American. From an op-ed in today's USA Today by Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Steny Hoyer (D-MD):

However, it is now evident that an ugly campaign is underway not merely to
misrepresent the health insurance reform legislation, but to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue. These tactics have included hanging in effigy one Democratic member of Congress in Maryland and protesters holding a sign displaying a tombstone with the name of another congressman in Texas, where protesters also shouted "Just say no!" drowning out those who wanted to hold a substantive discussion.
These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views — but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American. Drowning out the facts is how we failed at this task for decades.
...
This month, despite the disruptions, members of Congress will listen to their constituents back home and explain reform legislation. We are confident that our principles of affordable, quality health care will stand up to any and all critics.
Now — with Americans strongly supporting health insurance reform, with Congress reaching consensus on a plan, and with a president who ran and won on this specific promise of change — America is closer than ever to this century-deferred goal.

I agree with Ed Morrissey's retort on this:

I can’t think of three better reasons to get government out of health care than that it’s “complex,” “it touches every American life,” and “it drives our economy.” However, it’s now apparently un-American to say that it in public. Will Pelosi and Hoyer set up a tip line for un-American activities, such as flag@house.gov? Maybe they’ll just recreate the House Un-American Activities Committee to hold hearings and demand testimony. After all, that effort had such a glorious history of operating on the same principles Hoyer and Pelosi espouse here, which can be boiled down to “shut up and do what you’re told.”

Here is a video of some elderly, un-Americans who had the gall to attempt to drown out Rep. Hoyer at a recent town hall meeting and obscure the facts. Were they a little un-civil? Perhaps, but maybe it was because Rep. Hoyer repeatedly belittled his constituents and talked around their concerns, instead of actually addressing anything of substance.

Another rant on health care reform

2009-08-09T20:54:00.004-04:00

Yes, I am sure that these rants are getting tiresome, but the whole manner in which both the politicians and most of the media have dealt with any concerns expressed about health care reform have been disheartening to me. Instead of looking at the contents of the only bill that is currently out there- H.R. 3200, which the House of Representatives will likely vote on this fall- and what the likely effects of that bill might be, they have focused on whether these protests are "manufactured" and the various platitudes that President Obama offers when he is out on the campaign trail, er, giving speeches. Oh well, as I said, this blog is going to be about what interests me, so suck it.

And here is yet another person's rant on health care reform:

Community Organizer, er, President Barack Obama offers a statement to those who disagree with him:

2009-08-07T13:40:00.004-04:00

Shut the hell up!!! Well, not exactly, but pretty close.

A little more on the health care debate

2009-08-07T09:50:00.005-04:00

I am troubled by the Democratic Party's response to people who are expressing their concerns about the nature and pace of the proposed health care reform legislation. Instead of listening to people who simply want to express their concerns and get answers to their questions or trying to persuade these people about the merits of health care reform, the Democratic Party has decided to demonize them by claiming that those who do not agree with the proposed reforms are merely right-wing extremists in the employ of the Republican Party.

While I believe in less government, I also believe that most drugs should be legalized and that gay couples should be allowed to engage in civil unions so that they can have the same rights of inheritance and adoption that heterosexual couples (I say civil unions because I view "marriage" as a religious matter). So I am neither a member of the Republic Party nor in its employ. I am guessing that most of those who want to meet with their representatives in Congress to express their concerns about health care are also not in the Republican Party or its employ.

Consequently, the Democrat's response to the concerns of ordinary citizens will only serve to weaken respect for governmental institutions and lead to a greater sense of disenfranchisement. Peggy Noonan has a great column on this subject today in the Wall Street Journal. Some highlights:

The leftosphere and the liberal commentariat charged that the town hall meetings
weren’t authentic, the crowds were ginned up by insurance companies, lobbyists and the Republican National Committee. But you can’t get people to leave their homes and go to a meeting with a congressman (of all people) unless they are engaged to the point of passion. And what tends to agitate people most is the idea of loss—loss of money hard earned, loss of autonomy, loss of the few things that work in a great sweeping away of those that don’t.
People are not automatons. They show up only if they care.
What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in. And the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the United
States House of Representatives, accused the people at the meetings of “carrying swastikas and symbols like that.” (Apparently one protester held a hand-lettered
sign with a “no” slash over a swastika.) But they are not Nazis, they’re Americans. Some of them looked like they’d actually spent some time fighting Nazis.
Then came the Democratic Party charge that the people at the meetings were suspiciously well-dressed, in jackets and ties from Brooks Brothers. They must be Republican rent-a-mobs. Sen. Barbara Boxer said on MSNBC’s “Hardball” that people are “storming these town hall meetings,” that they were “well dressed”, that “this is all organized,” “all planned,” to “hurt our president.” Here she was projecting. For normal people, it’s not all about Barack Obama.
The Democratic National Committee chimed in with an incendiary Web video whose script reads, “The right wing extremist Republican base is back.” DNC communications director Brad Woodhouse issued a statement that said the Republicans “are inciting angry mobs of . . . right wing extremists” who are “not reflective of where the American people are.”
But most damagingly to political civility, and even our political tradition, was the new White House email address to which citizens are asked to report instances of “disinformation” in the health-care debate: If you receive an email or see something on the Web about health-care reform that seems “fishy,” you can send it to flag@whitehouse.gov. The White House said it was merely trying to fight "intentionally misleading” information.
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas on Wednesday wrote to the president saying he feared that citizens’ engagement could be “chilled” by the effort. He’s right, it could. He also accused the White House of compiling an “enemies list.” If so, they’re being awfully public about it, but as Byron York at the Washington Examiner pointed, the emails
collected could become a “dissident database.”
All of this is unnecessarily and unhelpfully divisive and provocative. They are mocking and menacing concerned citizens. This only makes a hot situation hotter. Is this what the president wants? It couldn’t be. But then in an odd way he sometimes seems not to have fully absorbed the awesome stature of his office. You really, if you’re president, can’t call an individual American stupid, if for no other reason than
that you’re too big. You cannot allow your allies to call people protesting a health-care plan “extremists” and “right wing,” or bought, or Nazi-like, either. They’re citizens. They’re concerned. They deserve respect.
The Democrats should not be attacking, they should be attempting to persuade, to argue for their case. After all, they have the big mic. Which is what the presidency is,
the big mic.
And frankly they ought to think about backing off. The president should call in his troops and his Congress and announce a rethinking. There are too many different bills, they’re all a thousand pages long, no one has time to read them, no one knows what’s going to be in the final one, the public is agitated, the nation’s in crisis, the timing is wrong, we’ll turn to it again—but not now. We’ll take a little longer, ponder every aspect, and make clear every complication.
You know what would happen if he did this? His numbers would go up. Even Congress’s would. Because they’d look responsive, deliberative and even wise. Discretion is the better part of valor.
Absent that, and let’s assume that won’t happen, the health-care protesters have to
make sure they don’t get too hot, or get out of hand. They haven’t so far, they’ve been burly and full of debate, with plenty of booing. This is democracy’s great barbaric yawp. But every day the meetings seem just a little angrier, and people who are afraid—who have been made afraid, and left to be afraid—can get swept up. As this column is written, there comes word that John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO has announced he’ll be sending in union members to the meetings to counter health care’s critics.
Somehow that doesn’t sound like a peace initiative.
It’s going to be a long August, isn’t it? Let’s hope the uncharted territory we’re in doesn’t turn dark.

Here is a copy of the Democratic Party ad that Peggy Noonan mentions in her column:

BTW, here is a video of an angry, right-wing mob. I think that Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) was lucky to come out unscathed:

John Whitehead, a constitutional lawyer who blogs on the liberal-leaning Huffington Post, also expressed his concerns about President Obama and the Democratic Party's position on those seeking to have their voices heard on health care reform. Here are some of the highlights from Mr. Whitehead's column:

Responding to the increasingly vocal protests of Americans who are concerned about the Obama administration's plans to overhaul health care, the DNC has released "Enough of the Mob," a web ad that attacks the constitutionally protected right to protest. "The Right-wing extremist Republican base is back," proclaims the ad. "Desperate Republicans and their well-funded allies are organizing angry mobs... This mob activity is straight from the playbook of high level Republican political operatives. They have no plan for moving our country forward, so they've called out the mob. Call the Republican Party. Tell them you've had enough of the mob."
President Obama has taken this chilling message one step further, actually encouraging Americans to report on those who are spreading "disinformation about health insurance reform." As the White House blog states, "These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can't keep track of all of them here at the White House, we're asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov." This is the official message coming out of the White House.
…
Months ago, I warned that the government would be targeting for surveillance those who disagree with the administration politically. Now we see it unfolding before our very eyes. The Obama administration is trying, none too subtly, to put down a resistance movement.
Thomas Jefferson, that revolutionary patriot who advocated rebellion every 20 years or so in order to remind the government that a spirit of resistance flourished among the people, must be turning over in his grave.
After all, the people who fomented the American Revolution did so using the same tactics as those protesting Obama's health care plan and the nation's mounting debt. They spoke out at rallies, distributed critical pamphlets, wrote scathing editorials and took to the streets in protest. They were rebelling against a government they saw as being excessive in its taxation and spending. For their efforts, they, too, were demonized and painted as an angry mob, extremists akin to terrorists, by the
ruler of the day, King George III.
It's a sad statement on the political bias of many within the civil liberties arena that few outside conservative circles have spoken out against these overt attempts to quell constitutionally protected speech. Had it been George Bush attempting something similar, the outcry among liberals would have been tremendous.
So where is the outrage?
No matter what your political persuasion may be, every American has a First Amendment right to speak their mind, gather together and protest against government programs with which they disagree. And there's a lot to be concerned about. For example, the secretive nature of Obama's administration and his seeming
disregard for civil liberties has some on both sides of the aisle asking what happened to the change they were promised. Congressional corruption is rampant: 17 lawmakers are currently under investigation for allegedly breaking ethical standards. Government spending is out of control: the House of Representatives actually approved nearly $200 million to buy themselves three deluxe jets. This list goes on and on.
It should be noted that much of the so-called mob's ire is being directed at lawmakers who are back home during Congress' summer recess. As one newspaper reported, "Concerns over the pace and breadth of health care reform have birthed a fiery wave of activism during the congressional recess as fearful citizens make their voices heard with resounding vigor."
Finally, Americans are taking the time to voice their concerns at town hall meetings and elsewhere, and that's as it should be.
This is democracy in action, and it's about time.

A video clip that pretty much somes up how I feel on health care reform

2009-08-05T21:29:00.003-04:00

Neil Cavuto gave a rant today that pretty much sums up how I feel on health care reform and the Democratic Party's response to criticism of their proposed plan, namely their endless demogaging of anyone who dare object to the plan or offer other policy alternatives. I could go on, but as I have said previously, I am lazy. So without further ado, here is Mr. Cavuto's rant:

Reminder- The White House wants patriotic citizens to snitch on health care reform dissidents

2009-08-05T13:49:00.009-04:00

I just finished my lunch break at work and wanted to remind everyone that the White House has asked that you snitch on people, like me, who disagree with President Obama and the Democratic party on health care reform. I wrote about this issue yesterday as an update to my post entitled "President Obama doesn't want government-run health care ... immediately" but fear the update may have gotten lost in the shuffle. So I am republishing the update below with various revisions and additions:

The White House has released a video concerning the clips of President Obama expressing his desire for a single payer system and stating that this system will require a transition period of 10 - 15 years [that I published in "President Obama doesn't want government-run health care ... immediately]. The White House video is embedded below in its entirety. In it, the White House makes two claims: 1) bloggers, such as myself, are dweebs with too much time on their hands who are "cherry picking" the President's words and taking "sentences and phrases out-of-context;" and 2) the President has repeatedly made clear that if you like your health insurance coverage you'll be able to keep it.

Yes, I will admit that I may have too much time on my hands. Luckily for the Obama administration, this will change on approximately January 12 when Mrs. Bru gives birth to our first child. But on the out-of-context claim, I think it is important to note what the White House does not do. It does not show the clips that dweebs like me are cherry-picking and then offer the full clips to demonstrate how President Obama's cherry-picked statements were manipulated. Perhaps, the White House does not do this because President Obama's statements were not taken out-of-context. Here is one of the President's complete statements on his desire for a single payer system:

h/t http://www.breibart.tv/.

Second, after having read the first 40-some pages of H.R. 3200, the White House is lying at worst and being disingenuous at best about his claim that, yeah, you'll be able to keep your current coverage. Initially, yes, you could probably keep your current health insurance coverage because: (1) the requirements set forth in the current legislation do not become effective until 2013 (See H.R. 3200, § 100(c)(25)); and (2) employer-sponsored health insurance plans, which are how most of us obtain our medical coverage, have a 5-year "grace period" before they have to meet the definition of a "qualified health benefits plan" and provide an "essential benefits package." (See H.R. 3200, §§ 102(b)(1)(A), 122).

The problem, of course, is after this transition period your employer's group health insurance plan will probably be canceled because it does not meet the requirements of a "qualified health benefits plan"or provide an "essential benefits package." And at that point? Well, this is just an educated guess (because I am not so much of a dweeb that I have had time to read all 1017 pages of H.R. 3200), but you'll likely have to transition to the public option because your employer will find that it is too expensive to offer a health plan that meets the requirements of H.R. 3200 and there will not be any private insurers who offer individual coverage. Oddly, this would occur in about 9 years, which coincidentally mirrors the 10 to 15-year transition period candidate Obama advocated.

In addition to calling people such as myself liars, the White House has asked that you snitch, er, report on our actions against health care reform:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

(Emphasis added). I remember a time, years ago, when dissent was the highest form of patriotism. Now, not so much.

Answering the White House's call, the good folks at http://www.reason.tv/, a libertarian website co-founded by Drew Carey, have performed their patriotic duty and ratted out one of their own:

Finally, Jack Tapper of ABC reports that White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs believes that my anger may be manufactured and that I may be one of those who just wants to maintain the "status quo." Trust me, my anger is real, and as I explained in another post, I believe that there do exist sensible reforms that can reduce health care costs, but the current proposals will significantly increase federal control of the health care system without lowering costs.

Nevertheless, the assertion that the anger on health care reform is "manufactured" has apparently become the new mantra of the Democratic Party. Here is Calif. Senator Barbara Box with a nice non-sequiter on how she knows the protesters are fake because they are all well-dressed:

To which, I can only respond, "huh?" (h/t Ed Morrissey of hotair.com). Not only does Senator Box not make any sense, I think she wrong about who is actually "manufacturing" anger on health care.

In actuality, it appears that a community organizer from the south side of Chicago, named Barack Obama, is the principle agitator on health care. You may also know this man as President Obama. In addition, to being the the leader of the Free World, Mr. Obama heads an advocacy group called Organizing for America. Here is the link to Organizing for America's "Health Care Action Center" website. On it, you can do some pretty neat things, such as: sending form emails to your friends and colleagues about your support for real health care reform; sending a form letter to the editor of your local newspaper about your support for real health care reform; and tweeting your senators about your support for real health care reform.

The Organizing for America website even includes a video of Mr. Obama in which he rails against naysayers like me who simply want to maintain the status quo on health care:

And now for something really important...

2009-08-05T08:09:00.004-04:00

Sadly, Paula Abdul has announced that she will not be returning for the 9th season of American Idol. According to eonline, Paula made the announcement last night on Twitter:

"With sadness in my heart, I've decided not to return to #IDOL. I'll miss nurturing all the new talent, but most of all...being a part of a show that I helped from day1become an international phenomenon," read two tweets posted shortly after 7:30 p.m.

I will miss Paula deeply this upcoming season, in part, because I knew that there was always a chance that she could have a "moment" on live television. Here is one of my favorite "moments" from Idol's 7th season:

Of course, as a teenager, I was a fan of Paula because of her musical talents:

The current health care "reform" legislation

2009-08-04T08:10:00.007-04:00

When it returns in August, the House of Representatives will be considering this health care "reform" turd, er, legislation, which is 1017 pages long. Supposedly, it is designed to lower our health insurance costs. I am admittedly no expert, but my general rule of thumb is that any turds, er, legislation over 1000 pages in length normally increase costs, not lower them.

Indeed, while I have only made it through the first 40-some pages of this turd, er, legislation, I have uncovered several provisions that will increase the costs of health insurance coverage. The provisions I have seen so far require community rating (i.e., the insurer must determine its risks based upon the community in which you live rather than your actual health condition or the health condition of your employer's group), mandate that every health insurance policy provide certain types of coverage, place limits on deductibles, out-of-pocket expenses, and co-pays, prohibit cost-sharing for preventative care, and prohibit annual or lifetime caps on coverage. Except for the community rating requirement, all of these provisions will necessarily increase the costs of health insurance coverage, and if you are young and healthy, the community rating provision will increase your costs as well.

If the goal is to actually reduce the costs of health care, Keith Hennessey, the former Director of the National Economic Council under President George W. Bush, has some proposed reforms that would actually work. In part, Mr. Hennessey would make the following changes:

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.

2. Index the thresholds to inflation (CPI).

3. Allow the purchase of health insurance sold anywhere in the U.S., which would force States to compete for the right regulatory balance of consumer protection and premium cost.

4. Make health insurance portable.

5. Expand Health Savings Accounts.

6. Continue to mandate an initial deductible and catastrophic protection.

7. Aggressively reform medical liability aka “medical tort reform.”

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

Everything is amazing; nobody is happy

2009-08-04T07:50:00.003-04:00

This is a clip of Louis CK's great rant on the Conan O'Brien about today's society, and how people don't appreciate how good things actually are. The clip is old and has been posted everywhere, but I am posting it here because the points that Louis CK makes are so valid. And it makes me laugh every time I watch it:

President Obama doesn't want government-run health care ... immediately.

2009-08-03T08:19:00.007-04:00

But, eventually, say in the next 10 years or so? Yes, that would work:

Remember, the government can't even run Cash for Clunkers. How well do you think it's going to run your colonoscopy?

Update: The White House has now released a video concerning the above clips of President Obama expressing his desire for a single payer system and stating that this system will require a transition period of 10 - 15 years. The video is embedded below in its entirety. In it, the White House makes two claims: 1) bloggers, such as myself, are dweebs with too much time on their hands who are "cherry picking" the President's words and taking "sentences and phrases out-of-context;" and 2) the President has repeatedly made clear that if you like your health insurance coverage you'll be able to keep it.

Yes, I will admit that I may have too much time on my hands. Luckily for the Obama administration, this will change on approximately January 12 when Mrs. Bru gives birth to our first child. But on the out-of-context claim, I think it is important to note what the White House does not do. It does not show the clips that dweebs like me are cherry-picking and then offer the full clips to demonstrate how President Obama's cherry-picked statements were manipulated. Perhaps, the White House does not do this because President Obama's statements were not taken out-of-context. Here is one of the President's complete statements on his desire for a single payer system:

h/t http://www.breibart.tv/.

Second, after having read the first 40-some pages of H.R. 3200, the White House is lying at worst and being disingenuous at best about his claim that, yeah, you'll be able to keep your current coverage. Initially, yes, you could probably keep your current health insurance coverage because: (1) the requirements set forth in the current legislation do not become effective until 2013 (See H.R. 3200, § 100(c)(25)); and (2) employer-sponsored health insurance plans, which are how most of us obtain our medical coverage, have a 5-year "grace period" before they have to meet the definition of a "qualified health benefits plan" and provide an "essential benefits package." (See H.R. 3200, §§ 102(b)(1)(A), 122).

The problem, of course, is after this transition period your employer's group health insurance plan will probably be canceled because it does not meet the requirements of a "qualified health benefits plan"or provide an "essential benefits package." And at that point? Well, this is just an educated guess (because I am not so much of a dweeb that I have had time to read all 1017 pages of H.R. 3200), but you'll likely have to transition to the public option because your employer will find that it is too expensive to offer a health plan that meets the requirements of H.R. 3200 and there will not be any private insurers who offer individual coverage. Oddly, this would occur in about 9 years, which coincidentally mirrors the 10 to 15-year transition period candidate Obama advocated.

Oh, and by the way, the White House asks that you please snitch on me if you think I am lying about health care reform:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

(Emphasis added). I remember a time, years ago, when dissent was the highest form of patriotism. Now, not so much.

Update II: Jack Tapper of ABC reports that White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs believes my anger may be manufactured and I may be one of those who just wants to maintain the "status quo." Trust me, my anger is real, and as I explained in another post, I believe that there do exist sensible reforms that can reduce health care costs, but the current proposals will significantly increase federal control of the health care system with out lowering costs.

Good, timely health care is expensive.

2009-08-03T08:13:00.003-04:00

Here is a good 20/20 piece from John Stossel on the Canadian health care system. It's a system that we really do not want to copy in this country:

A picture is worth a thousand words

2009-08-01T09:03:00.005-04:00

Odd, that "racist cop" Sgt. Crowley helped Professor Gates navigate the stairs while Gates's "good friend" President Obama walked ahead blissfully unaware of his friend's struggles. Odd, indeed.

Profits aren't evil; they are necessary and beneficial.

2009-07-31T07:59:00.004-04:00

Last week at his press conference, President Obama said that taking the profit motive out of health care would incentivize the private sector and "be a good thing."

Uh, if you take the profit motive out, then no one will want to provide health care. Profit motive is what runs the world; it is why businesses exist; it is why I go to work in the morning. And profits have all sorts of beneficial results. Indeed, Stephen Carter, a Yale law professor, had a great editorial on this subject yesterday in the Washington Post. The key portion (in my opinion):

Flash back three years. In 2006, Exxon Mobil announced the highest profit in the history of American corporate enterprise. Politicians and pundits stumbled over each other to call for an investigation and for some sort of confiscatory tax on the money the company earned. Profit, it seemed, was an evil, but large profit was even worse.
Today, the debate on the overhaul of the health-care system sparks a shiver of deja vu. The leitmotif of the conversation about the coming shape of health insurance is that the villain is the system of private insurance. "For-profit" firms come under constant attack from activists and members of Congress.
…
Profit is the enemy. America could be made pure, if only profit could be purged.
This attitude was wrong in 2006. It is wrong now. High profits are excellent news. When corporate earnings reach record levels, we should be celebrating. The only way a firm can make money is to sell people what they want at a price they are willing to pay. If a firm makes lots of money, lots of people are getting what they want. To the country, profit is a benefit. Record profit means record taxes paid. But put that aside. When profits are high, firms are able to reinvest, expand and hire. And profits accrue to the benefit of those who own stocks: overwhelmingly, pension funds and mutual funds. In other words, high corporate profits today signal better retirements tomorrow.

As they say, read the whole thing.

So a cop, a professor, the Vice President, and the President are having a beer...

2009-07-30T20:56:00.006-04:00

President Obama's Teleprompter has posted an interesting description of the beer police officer Sgt. Crowley and Professor Gates shared with our President and Vice President on its blog. It sounds like it may have been a little contentious:

So Big Guy, Skip, Joey B and I got together with Jim Crowley this evening for
Festivus's airing of grievances (since Big Guy celebrates Kwanza, he adheres to
the Festivus in August tradition). The difference this time was that we aired
national grievances about race, name-calling, and Big Guy's refusal to man up
and chug a full-bodied beer.
You'll see me in the picture over Crowley's right shoulder. I was there in case talk turned to the Boston Red Sox, and Big Guy needed to pull something out of thin air. The discussion went pretty much as planned, until the conversation turned to the Michael Vick situation. Crowley thinks Vick shouldn't be let back in the NFL, and Biden thinks Vick should be forgiven. Crowley was insistent and Biden told Crowley, "Hey, don't make a federal case out of it."
And Crowley said, "Well maybe I should."
Then Skip, who'd fallen asleep about a half hour earlier, woke up and said, "Wait,
I'm the one making a federal case."
Joe had lost interest and went to play on the swing set, Crowley left in a huff, and Big O and Skip went to Hell Burger for dinner to show they could eat blue collar food at white collar prices. Toes was pretty annoyed by all of this, since nothing was done today on health care, Russia, Iran, Syria or stimulus. So all in all, a good day for America.

Here is what I find most interesting about this whole brouhaha: the men who had the power in this incident were both African-American, President Obama and Skip Gates, and the man with everything to lose was white, Sgt. Crowley. Sometimes progress comes in weird forms.

Update: There is another police officer, Sgt. Leon Lashley, who was also at the scene of Gates's arrest. Interestingly, Sgt. Lashley is an African-American, who in sticking up for his friend Sgt. Crowley after the President said (without admittedly not knowing the facts) the Cambridge police acted stupidly has now been labeled an "Uncle Tom" by some. It would be nice if the races of two friends wasn't an issue for anyone. Unfortunately, that appears not to be the case, and Sgt. Lashley sent a letter to the President tonight:

Cash for Clunkers, or why I don't want government-run health care

2009-07-30T19:00:00.008-04:00

This article about our federal government's new Cash for Clunkers car-rebate program highlights one of several reasons why I don't want a government-run or single-payer health care system: the dealers who are participating in the program- and giving buyers $4,500 in cash or rebates on new cars- have no idea whether or when some mid-level bureaucrat will approve the reimbursement of that amount:

Scott Lambert, vice president of the Minnesota Auto Dealers Association, said he was "astounded" to learn at a meeting Tuesday representing about 150 Minnesota dealers that not one has had a deal approved.
"We had dealers representing 1,500 to 2,000 transactions," he said. "We asked how many had a deal approved yet, and not one hand went up." Lambert said the government has created a program that's "so big and cumbersome that it can't find a way to accept anything. We're sending in good, reliable deals."
It's nerve-racking for the dealers, he said, because they have given the customer $4,500 and now the dealers need to be reimbursed.

Moe Lane, of http://www.redstate.com/, notes "that the program started on July 1, they only published the actual rules Friday, and they’re still working out how to get the dealers their money."

Now, Cash for Clunkers is a temporary program that will run out by November 1 or whenever the government has given out a total of $1,000,000,000.00 in rebates, so it won't ultimately deter some aspiring, talented young car dealer for entering or staying in the car business. But a federally-controlled or single-payer health care system would presumably be permanent, and a half-ass, undependable payment system will drive potential, talented young doctors from the medical profession, at a time when several areas of the country are already experiences significant shortages in physicians.

On a separate note, Cash for Clunkers is billed as a "green program" that will help the environment. Can anyone explain to me how destroying functioning automobiles while encouraging the former owners of those cars to purchase newly-built vehicles helps the environment? It seems to me that the program actually promotes unnecessary waste since the car that are being destroyed would normally go into the used car or parts markets.

Update II- Cars for Clunkers: Well, this is not an encouraging development. The government just announced that it is suspending the program as of midnight tonight. Why? Well, there is a significant backlog in payments, and the government may have already exceeded the $1 billion allotted for this program:

A survey of 2,000 dealers by the National Automobile Dealers Association found about 25,000 deals had not yet approved by NHTSA, or nearly 13 trades per store. It raised concerns that with about 23,000 dealers taking part in the program, auto dealers may already have surpassed the 250,000 vehicle sales funded by the $1 billion program.

Update II- govt.-run health care: For those of you who think that the proposed "public plan" is simply meant to compete with private health insurers and is not designed to eventually become a government-run single payer plan, I offer you Representative Barney Frank (D-4th Dist. MA), Chairman of the House's Financial Services Committee:

Update III: Okay, Cash for Clunkers has now provided another reason for being against government-run health care: the federal government is not good at allocating resources or determining what market demand might be. The federal government is suspending this program, even though it was supposed to run through the end of October, because demand was much greater than anticipated and the program is already out of money: "The government suspended the explosively popular "cash for clunkers" program, fearing it would go broke before it could pay what it still owes dealers for a huge backlog of sales, according to congressional offices and a dealer group."

Timothy Geithner's Housing Crisis

2009-07-30T18:48:00.004-04:00

A very funny clip about the housing crisis and Timothy Geithner's role in it:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Home Crisis Investigation

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Joke of the Day

Obama as a racist.

2009-07-29T08:27:00.003-04:00

A follow up on my last post, in which I mentioned that I am not a big fan of Glenn Beck's Shtick- he apparently also called President Obama a racist yesterday. (Video is here). Umm, yeah, I think Obama is a terrible president for a myriad of reasons, but I have not seen any evidence that he is a racist. So why don't we just stick with disagreeing about Obama's policies and actual statements. You know, the things that we can verify.

Obama in his own words

2009-07-28T21:08:00.006-04:00

Okay, first, a disclaimer. I am not a Glenn Beck fan. His shtick is too over-the-top for me. But I also think that people in the press also unfairly malign the man and that he occasionally raises some very good points. One of those points is that while the press and his campaign generally cultivated the view during last year's presidential race that candidate Barack Obama was politically moderate, his roots, associates, and actual words showed him to be very left of the mainstream. I think the video below, if you filter out Beck's delivery, does a good job of highlighting some of that radicalism.

From my perspective, Obama's past words raise questions about his true intentions on a myriad of issues, such as health care. For example, why does he feel it is so imperative that Congress vote right now on legislation that is over 1000 pages long and that no member of Congress could possibly have read? Such a position seems inconsistent with ensuring that the legislation actually does what President Obama claims that he wants it to do, namely lowering costs and increasing access. Instead, his actions suggest, at least to me, that his interest lies in gaining power and not bettering the health care system.

Getting Ready for the President's Health Care Presser

2009-07-22T18:59:00.005-04:00

This made me laugh. It came from Jim Geraghty of National Review Online and is a "Strawman Bingo" card for the President's health care press conference tonight. I have no doubt that President Obama will fill the board pretty quickly.

On a related note, I keep hearing President Obama make various promises about what the current health care legislation will do: lower costs, increase coverage, allow you to keep your current plan, ya da, ya da, ya da. But how can he make these promises, when no one in his administration participated in drafting any of the current legislation before Congress, and President Obama has admitted he is unfamiliar with certain critical provisions in the current House bill? I don't think an honest person could. But that is just me.

Please don't die Mr. President.

2009-07-20T16:59:00.002-04:00

I won't lie to you. I am not a big fan of President Obama, especially as it relates to his handling of the economy and his views on health care and taxes. Even so, I say what follows with all sincerity: I pray to God every night for his health. Because, if he croaks, Joe Biden will become president, and then we will just be f*%ked.

I would like to think that the author of this NY Post opinion piece, which highlights Biden's propensity for gaffes, shares my views. My favorite parts:

The "gaffes," as we call unscripted thoughts, come delightfully often with Biden. The latest: Speaking before the AARP, Biden aarped up a peculiar formulation to explain the need to borrow 3.2 bejillion dollars in order to transform the American health care system, preferably by next week. He said people ask him "What are you talking about, you're telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt? The answer is yes, 'I'm telling you.'"
…
[H]ow does this fit with Biden's other summer misstatements? Let's take a quick review.
Iran. Earlier this month George Stephanopoulos asked Biden if the US would stand in the way of Israel decided it was time to take out Iran's nuke program. Said the Veep: "We cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do ... if they make a determination that they're existentially threatened and their survival is threatened by another country."
True. But wrong! The sensible thing is to say: "We are seriously concerned about Iran's nuclear ambitions, and strongly support serious efforts to be concerned, in coordination with allies whose serious efforts are concerned with -- hey, is that a mushroom cloud on CNN? Turn the sound up." Everyone knows Iran will give up the bomb, but in their own way: by putting it on a rocket and waving safe journey, Allah-speed. As the saying goes: If you love something, set it free. If the US isn't going to stop them, shouldn't Israel have the right to?
But that's not the official line, so YANK went the collar. Administration officials explained that the Vice President was using secret reverse-talking, and the allies remain committed to a sustained effort to frown and grip the podium while hoping there's no follow-up questions.
Swine Flu. Should we panic? "I would tell members of my family -- and I have -- I wouldn't go anywhere in confined places now," Biden said, adding, "When one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft." This statement was so true it was
retracted by the end of the day. When the experts -- i.e., cable-news reporters
on the medical beat -- start talking about Pig-Pandemic bringing down human
civilization, everyone's first reaction is to stay away from planes and trains. But a Leader is supposed to say something calming, like "if you're taking a flight full of feverish travelers back from Cancun, don't lick the tray tables."
The Economy. Also in early July, Biden said "We misread how bad the economy
was." This one is a bit different to explain away, since the administration billed itself as having super-genius comprehension of the problem and the necessary solutions. Now, many suspect, President Obama finds himself staring at a portrait of FDR, murmuring "Help me, Obi-Wan. You're my only hope."
What Biden meant to say, in his puckish way, that they misunderstood what an economy is, and how it works. Piling up a mountain of proposed taxes, mandates, regulations, do-nothing programs and pork unseen in such dimensions since Pink Floyd floated a dirigible pig over an outdoor concert might, in fact, prevent recovery.

My favorite Bidenism from those set forth above is his peculiar theory on the need to spend more money to avoid bankruptcy. It has been my experience that simply spending more money tends to increase, not decrease, the odds of a bankruptcy.

But the author missed the biggest Bidenism of all time. In a speech last week in Virginia, Biden claimed that that the stimulus was creating jobs "everywhere I go:"

"To those who say that our economic decisions 'have not produced jobs, have not
produced and simply have not worked' I say, take a look around," Biden will say
while visiting Cantor's home district.
"I say, 'Don't let your opposition to the Recovery Act blind you to its results. Come see what I see everywhere I go: workers rehired, factories reopened, cops on the street, teachers in the classroom, progress toward getting our economy back on the move.'"

Apparently, the Administration does not let Biden venture far from the metropolitan D.C. area because where I live, more workers are being laid off and factories closed.

Stimulus funds are literally paying for pork, plus some cheese and a dumb waiter.

2009-07-20T11:33:00.008-04:00

Okay, I am blatantly ripping this off from Drudge, who has links to all of these items on his front page right now. Again, I am sorta lazy. And the fact that our federal government is literally spending millions of dollars in stimulus funds on pork, as well as a dumb waiter and some processed cheese, is just too humorous to pass up. Here are project descriptions (as they appear on www.recovery.gov) and funding amounts for some projects that are receiving federal stimulus funding:

1. HAM, WATER ADDED, COOKED, FROZEN, SLICED, 2-LB, funding amount $2,531,600;

2. 2 POUND FROZEN HAM SLICED, funding amount $1,191,200;

3. RECOVERY ACT-PROJECT 630A4-08-406, REPLACE AND UPGRADE THE DUMBWAITER, funding amount $351,807;

4. MOZZARELLA CHEESE, funding amount $1,562,568;

5. PROCESS CHEESE, funding amount $5,708,260; and

6. CANNED PORK, funding amount $16,784,272.

In fairness, here is the US Department of Agriculture's response to Drudge. It notes that at least some of this "pork spending" is actually food that is being purchased for local food banks that serve the poor: "The Recovery Act funds referenced in press reports allowed states to purchase ham, cheese and dairy products for these food banks, soup kitchens and food pantries that provide assistance to people who otherwise do not have access to food."

Apparently, the USDA does not appreciate Drudge's sarcasm, or is it a sense of irony. I always get the two confused.

Most. Transparent. Administration. Ever. Or not.

2009-07-20T10:51:00.004-04:00

On the campaign trail last year, then candidate Obama promised that his administration would be the most transparent administration in the history of the United States. Now, he is president and apparently having second thoughts on his pledge. Instead of releasing updated budget numbers in mid-July as has traditionally happened, President Obama has made the brave and bold decision to delay releasing what will likely be a very, very bad report until after Congress leaves for its August break. Why, you might ask? Because releasing that data now would likely kill his dream of "reforming" health care. From the AP:

The administration's annual midsummer budget update is sure to show higher deficits and unemployment and slower growth than projected in President Barack
Obama's budget in February and update in May, and that could complicate his
efforts to get his signature health care and global-warming proposals through
Congress.
The release of the update — usually scheduled for mid-July — has been put off until the middle of next month, giving rise to speculation the White House is delaying the bad news at least until Congress leaves town Aug. 7 on its summer recess.
The administration is pressing for votes before then on its $1 trillion health care initiative, which lawmakers are arguing over how to finance. The White House budget director, Peter Orszag, said on Sunday that the administration believes the "chances are high" of getting a health care bill by then. But new analyses showing runaway costs are jeopardizing Senate passage.
"Instead of a dream, this routine report could be a nightmare," Tony Fratto, a former Treasury Department official and White House spokesman under President George W. Bush, said of the delayed budget update. "There are some things that can't be escaped."

Hope. And Change. Or not. By the way, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says that the current legislative proposal on health care would explode the already, exploding federal deficit: "According to CBO’s and JCT’s assessment, enacting H.R. 3200 would result in a
net increase in the federal budget deficit of $239 billion over the 2010-2019 period."

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air offers his analysis:

Obama cannot afford to have another report hit the street showing that he has miscalculated — again — the extent of the deficit, just as he proposes a deficit-busting program. The White House has instead iced the report to keep people from seeing just how badly Democratic spending has dented the budget, and how revenues have not recovered despite their predictions of growth by Q2. They want to hold off those numbers until Obama has a bill he can sign on his desk, by which time it will be too late.
Consider this: if those budget numbers looked good, would the White House postpone revealing them? Obama could use all the good news he can get at the moment, especially with two big-spending bills stalling in Congress. If the deficit looked better than their May predictions, or even if it looked the same, those numbers would have
already hit the front pages of newspapers across America and every network news
broadcast, with the message that the worst has passed.
This is a shell game, a 3-card Monty being played by the Obama administration. They are withholding data that rightfully belongs in the public square, so that the electorate can inform themselves of the nation’s fiscal standing before Congress votes to spend more of our grandchildren’s money. Perhaps the news media might remind Obama of this during his prime-time presser on Wednesday.

To the Moon.

2009-07-20T09:58:00.006-04:00

I reprint Meghan McArdle's post from this morning entitled One Small Step for Man... . Why? Well, one, I agree with her sentiment for the most part (see explanation below) and wonder why we have not sent astronauts to Mars or beyond. And, two, I feel sorta lazy. Here is Ms. McArdle's post:

If you're like me (and I know many of you are), you grew up reading the
science fiction of the 1940's and 1950's, promising a quick and rapid expansion
into the solar system, and not too long thereafter, the galaxy. Your young
mind tried, and failed, to fathom the vastness of the empty gulfs between the
stars. But there was one thing you knew: you wanted to go.
During the incomprehensibly lengthy interval between you and adulthood, man
would surely prepare itself to go to Mars and beyond, and you were going to be
among the pioneers.Four years before I was born, man
walked on the moon for the first time, the most magnificent single feat our
little tribe of East African Plains Apes has ever managed. Now we don't
even do that. What happened to the dream? Government mismanagement,
yes, but something more than that, too, some failure of imagination and
will. I hope that by the fiftieth anniversary some people, somewhere, will
have regained the momentum that pushed mankind into our first tenative baby step
towards the stars.

I too was born four years after the Apollo XI and shared the same sense of youthful amazement concerning space exploration. I think that we (or more specifically, the U.S. government and NASA) have failed to move beyond the moon or to even return to the moon because most of our governmental institutions, including NASA, no longer attract individuals who have the imagination and intelligence necessary to achieve such goals. Indeed, I think that humans will return to the moon and travel beyond in the coming years, but the new explorers will be private astronauts employed by companies such as Scaled Composites and its partner Virgin Galatic or SpaceX.

We Choose the Moon - Apollo XI 40th Anniversary

2009-07-17T09:58:00.004-04:00

The JFK Presidential Library has a very cool website that celebrates the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo XI lunar landing and the fulfillment of JFK's promise to land a man on the moon by the close of the 1960s. It is currently running a real-time interactive recreation of the mission and has great archival photos and videos. Very cool.

Comments on Sonia Sotomayor

2009-07-15T08:15:00.007-04:00

I don't know enough about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor to offer a truly informed opinion about whether or not she should be confirmed as a justice. But I have been troubled by some of her publicized statements, namely her repeated statement to the effect that a "wise Latina" would reach a better decision than a white man and her comment that federal appellate courts make public policy. Yesterday, she offered explanations on both of these issues.

As to the "wise Latina" comments, I find insufficient her ex post facto explanation that she made a bad play off of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's assertion that a wise old woman and a wise old man should be able to reach the same legal conclusion in the case. According to Sotomayor, "My play...fell flat. It was bad, because it left an impression that I believed that life experiences commanded a result in a case, but that's clearly not what I do as a judge." As Eva Rodriguez of the Washington Post notes, it strains credibility to believe that Sotomayor just realized that her words left the wrong impression because she made essentially the same comment in several speeches over multiple years. I agree with Rodriguez's conclusion that Sotomayor's "explanation came across as dodgy at best and disingenuous at worst."

Update: Senator Lindsey Graham apparently did not find Sotomayor's explanation of her "wise Latina" comment very convincing either:

Graham: Do you understand, maam, how if I said anything like that, and I justified it as saying I was trying to inspire someone, they would have my head?
Sotomayor: I can understand how it could be hurtful, particularly if read in isolation.
Graham: I don't know how you can justify — if I said that because of my experience as a Caucasian male I am a better person to represent the people of South Carolina, and my opponent was a minority, it would make national news, and it should. I am not going to judge you based on that one statement... I just hope you appreciate the world we live in, and how you can say something like that, meaning to inspire someone, and still have a chance to get on the Supreme Court. Others could not, if they had said anything remotely like that statement. Does that make sense to you?
Sotomayor: It does.
Graham: Some people deserve a second chance if they misspeak... If people come to that conclusion based on this hearing, then already some good has come out of this.

Hat tip to Jim Geraghty.

Further Update: Sotomayor's current explanation of her "wise Latina" appears to contradict at least one of her speeches that included that term:

JUDGE SONIA SOTOMAYOR, NOW: “The Words I Used, I Used Agreeing With The Sentiment That Justice Sandra Day O'Connor Was Attempting To Convey." (Judge Sotomayor, Remarks, Confirmation Hearing Of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, 7/14/09)
JUDGE SOTOMAYOR, THEN: “Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases
. . . .I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement . . . Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” (A Latina Judge’s Voice, 13 Berkeley La Raza L. J. 1 (2002), and “Raising the Bar,” talk to La Raza at Boalt Hall, October 26, 2001).

Additional hat tip to Mr. Geraghty.

Sotomayor's explanation of her public policy comments was much more convincing, and I believe it properly notes the different roles of the federal district courts and appellate courts. According to Sotomayor:

I was focusing on what district court judges do and what circuit court judges
do. And I noted that district court judges find the facts, and they apply the
facts to the individual case. And when they do that, they're holding, they're
finding doesn't bind anybody else. Appellate judges, however, establish
precedent. They decide what the law says in a particular situation. That
precedent has policy ramifications because it binds not just the litigants in
that case, it binds all litigants in similar cases, in cases that may be
influenced by that precedent.

Our economy is in the crapper and likely will be for some time

2009-07-14T17:01:00.004-04:00

Last month, I started to feel better about our economy's prospects. This month, not so much. Why the change in perspective? Well, I keep reading articles like this one by Mort Zuckerman, which is happily entitled, "The Economy Is Even Worse Than You Think." In it, Mr. Zuckerman provides a list of 10 items to support his article's title:

-June's [unemployment] total assumed 185,000 people at work who
probably were not. The government could not identify them; it made an assumption
about trends. But many of the mythical jobs are in industries that have
absolutely no job creation, e.g., finance. When the official numbers are
adjusted over the next several months, June will look worse.

- More companies are asking employees to take unpaid leave. These people
don't count on the unemployment roll.

- No fewer than 1.4 million people wanted or were available for work in the
last 12 months but were not counted. Why? Because they hadn't searched for work
in the four weeks preceding the survey.

- The number of workers taking part-time jobs due to the slack economy, a
kind of stealth underemployment, has doubled in this recession to about nine
million, or 5.8% of the work force. Add those whose hours have been cut to those
who cannot find a full-time job and the total unemployed rises to 16.5%, putting
the number of involuntarily idle in the range of 25 million.

- The average work week for rank-and-file employees in the private sector,
roughly 80% of the work force, slipped to 33 hours. That's 48 minutes a week
less than before the recession began, the lowest level since the government
began tracking such data 45 years ago. Full-time workers are being downgraded to
part time as businesses slash labor costs to remain above water, and factories
are operating at only 65% of capacity. If Americans were still clocking those
extra 48 minutes a week now, the same aggregate amount of work would get done
with 3.3 million fewer employees, which means that if it were not for the
shorter work week the jobless rate would be 11.7%, not 9.5% (which far exceeds
the 8% rate projected by the Obama administration).

- The average length of official unemployment increased to 24.5 weeks, the
longest since government began tracking this data in 1948. The number of
long-term unemployed (i.e., for 27 weeks or more) has now jumped to 4.4 million,
an all-time high.

- The average worker saw no wage gains in June, with average compensation
running flat at $18.53 an hour.

- The goods producing sector is losing the most jobs -- 223,000 in the last
report alone.

- The prospects for job creation are equally distressing. The likelihood is
that when economic activity picks up, employers will first choose to increase
hours for existing workers and bring part-time workers back to full time. Many
unemployed workers looking for jobs once the recovery begins will discover that
jobs as good as the ones they lost are almost impossible to find because many
layoffs have been permanent. Instead of shrinking operations, companies have
shut down whole business units or made sweeping structural changes in the way
they conduct business. General Motors and Chrysler, closed hundreds of
dealerships and reduced brands. Citigroup and Bank of America cut tens of
thousands of positions and exited many parts of the world of finance.

- Job losses may last well into 2010 to hit an unemployment peak close to
11%. That unemployment rate may be sustained for an extended period.

You should read the whole thing. It's good stuff. The kind of stuff that makes me want to curl up in my bed with a bottle of scotch.

The Health Care Debate: Cost Containment v. Innovation

2009-07-14T16:37:00.003-04:00

Glenn Reynolds, who is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and blogs at instapundit.com, wrote an interesting opinion piece on the current healthcare debate for the Washington Examiner a couple of days ago. His main concern is that a national healthcare plan will squash innovation in the name of cost containment:

President Obama talks about the importance of prevention in a way that suggests
that when people have heart attacks it's their own fault. But my wife, a longtime vegetarian and marathon runner, had a freak heart attack at the age of 37.
It wasn't from too many Big Macs. After some rough patches, she's now
doing well, thanks to an obscure and expensive anti-arrhythmic drug called
Tikosyn, and an implantable cardioverter/defibrillator. Not too long ago, she'd
have been largely bedridden. These medical innovations made the difference
between the life of a near-invalid and a life that's close to normal.
My mother had a hip replacement. Her hip didn't break - she basically wore it out
with exercise. When the pain got too bad, she got it replaced, and now she's moving around like before, only painlessly. Not too long ago, she would have been chairbound.
My father had prostate cancer; his doctor suggested waiting but on biopsy it turned out to be pretty aggressive. It was treated with radioactive "seed" implants. He's now been cancer-free for several years, without the side effects of earlier treatments -- or, worse, of cancer.
My daughter had endoscopic sinus surgery this spring. She had been sickly and
listless, complaining of constant migraine headaches, missing a lot of school, and generally looking more like a zombie than a teenager. Several doctors dismissed her problems, or prescribed antibiotics that didn't help much, until we found one who took the extra step.
A head CT scan done on a fancy new in-office machine showed a nasty festering infection, the surgeon cleaned it out, and now she's like a normal kid again. Before laparoscopy, her condition would probably have remained untreated, and she would have been another "sickly" kid. Better to be well.
The normal critique of socialized medicine is to point out that people have to wait a long time for these kinds of treatments in places like Britain. And that's certainly a valid critique. I'm sure my mom and daughter would still be waiting for their treatments, while my father and wife would probably be dead.
The key point, though, is that these treatments didn't just come out out of the blue. They were developed by drug companies and device makers who thought they had a good market for things that would make people feel better.
But under a national healthcare plan, the "market" will consist of whatever the bureaucrats are willing to buy. That means treatment for politically stylish diseases will get some money, but otherwise the main concern will be cost-control. More treatments, to bureaucrats, mean more costs.

Good news: The Pentagon is developing a robot that feeds, er, runs, on biomass

2009-07-14T15:44:00.009-04:00

I would file this one in the "cannot end well" category- The Pentagon is working with a company to develop battlefield robots that are powered by biomass.

Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that's right, "EATR" — "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable," reads the company's Web site.

Please note that the biomass the robot consumes to power itself will be "whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies." Much to my chagrine, the article does not say how the robot will differeniate between dead bodies and live ones. But it does mention that "Robotic Technology presents EATR as an essentially benign artificial creature that fills its belly through 'foraging,' despite the obvious military purpose." Essentially benign, except when you piss it off.

Hat tip to DrewM. at Ace of Spades, who suggests that "when Skynet becomes self-aware and we try and shut it off it will simply kill us faster so it can eat. Great." Not to worry though, Neo will eventually free humanity at the close of the 22nd century.

Depeche Mode is playing the Palms.

2009-07-14T15:26:00.008-04:00

Now, this would make for a great evening- Depeche Mode is playing the Palms in Vegas on August 22. Unfortunately, I will have to convince my wife that Vegas and pregnancy mix well together. Any thoughts on how best to approach her?

Getting to know me.

2009-07-14T14:56:00.005-04:00

Okay, since my blog is new and you may not know anything about me, I feel like I should tell you about myself. To that end, let me give you 15 random facts about me. All of the following items are true. I promise. (And, to those of you who are Facebook friends with me, yes, I did crib most of these from my Facebook page).

1. My wife and I purposely had our first date on February 15, 2006 even though neither of us had plans on Februrary 14. Our superior planning now allows us to skip the whole Valentine's Day thing.

2. We got married in June 2007 in Telluride, Colorado. We married ourselves on June 14 under Bridal Veil Falls (Colorado allows you to officiate your own wedding and still has common law marriage) and then had our "official" ceremony with our families and a few friends on June 16 on the back deck of the Hotel Columbia. Our parents don't know that the ceremony was just for their benefit. Please don't tell them (or let them that I have a blog on the internets). It would likely upset them.

3. My wife and I hiked the Grand Canyon during our honeymoon. It was an incredible, albeit not very romantic, experience. It was 133 degrees when we got to Phantom Ranch, where we camped at the bottom of the Canyon, and it was still over 100 degrees at 11 p.m. that night.

4. Our first child is due in mid-January 2010. We have tentatively named him "Bojangles." If you have any better suggestions, especially girl names, please feel free to share them.

5. I "auditioned" for the Chippendales with 5 other American college students on The Big Breakfast Show, a British morning television program that was sort of like a humorous Today Show, in the spring of 1993. We started drinking about a half hour before the show's van arrived to take us from our university down to the old mansion where the show was filmed in North London. The van picked us up at 5:30 a.m. Thankfully, the video of my audition is not yet one of the 300 or so clips from The Big Breakfast Show that is currently on You Tube. I will, of course, let you know if the video ever makes it to You Tube.

6. I shared a song book with Paula Yates, Bob Geldolf's (Boom Town Rats; Live Aid founder) now deceased ex-wife, during The Big Breakfast's closing sing-a-long that morning. I don't think I was the cause of their subsequent marital problems or the unfortunate heroin habit that she developed while dating Michael Hutchence (INXS), but I will never know for sure.

7. I have run 3 marathons- Chicago Marathon in 2002 and 2006 and the Marine Corps Marathon in 2008. I ran the first half of the 2006 Chicago Marathon and all of the Marine Corps Marathon with my wife. The Marine Corps Marathon is now one of my favorite memories with her.

8. My wife and I moved back to Fort Wayne live closer to our parents in March of last year and now live 10 minutes from both sets. We have actually enjoyed living this close to them and for reasons which I won't discuss here, it has been a been a blessing to be near them.

9. We have a dog named Chloe, who we think is part golden lab and part beagle, and a cat named Baxter, who is a Maine Coon. They actually came with my wife, and Baxter was not a fan of me for the first couple of years. I once woke up to Baxter chewing on my fingers. When I took them away, he shot me the look of death.

10. Our house is in the woods. We have a family of deer that goes through the yard every day. It is very peaceful unless Chloe notices them, in which case it becomes a half-hour bark fest.

11. I have skied since I was 6 years old, and my favorite place for skiing is Telluride. My family first skied in Telluride during the Christmas 1979 holiday when I was in second grade. On Christmas day that year, Telluride had 125 skiers. At the time, Telluride did not yet have any flushing toilets on the mountain, and I did not like their outhouses. I will let you guess how my day typically ended.

12. When I was 15, I got to ski for a day in Telluride with Franz Klammer, who won the gold medal in Downhill at the 1976 Winter Olympics. He was very cool and had the biggest thighs of anyone I have ever met.

13. My parents had my older sister Kim in 1967, me in 1971, and my little sister Lauren in 1986. When Lauren graduated from Florida State this past spring, my parents finally had their last child out of the house after 42 years. I am amazed by this fact, especially since my wife and I won't even celebrate our 42nd wedding anniversary until I am 78.

14. I went deer hunting for the first time this last fall with my father-in-law. I had a clean shot at a buck, but since he was standing where I had last seen my father-in-law, I didn't take the shot (I figured accidentally shooting my father-in-law with a 12 gauge shot gun would make family gatherings very awkward). By the time I had another clean shot at the buck, he was running full speed towards the woods, and I missed. Hopefully, my hunting will be a little more successful next fall.

15. I think that last year's election proved South Park correct- every election comes down to a giant douche and a turd sandwich. (This is a reference to an episode from 2004, in which Stan refuses to vote for a new school mascot because its options are a giant douche and a turd sandwich. In attempting to get Stan to vote, Stan's father says, "Son, every election comes down to a choice between a giant douche and a turd sandwich, but you still have a civic obligation to vote.") To avoid offending anyone more than I already have, I won't say who I thought was the giant douche and the turd sandwich, nor will I announce who got my vote.

Welcome to Bru's Bits

2009-07-10T16:25:00.008-04:00

During my senior year in high school, I wrote a weekly column for the school's newspaper called "Bru's Bits." Each column typically consisted of 5 or 6 pithy entries that covered school issues, politics, current events, and other random topics that interested me and likely no one else. In all honesty, Bru's Bits was filler so that my buddy, who served as the paper's front page editor, did not have to come up with a third "news" story every week. But it gave me a platform to express my thoughts and opinions on the news of the day at a time when such platforms were few and far between, an experience for which I have always been grateful.

Today, blogger.com, Facebook, and Twitter provide everyone with a platform to express their views and thoughts. Unfortunately, all existing blogs and Twitter feeds suffer from one critical flaw: they do not always cover topics that interest me (and likely no one else). To correct this flaw, I have decided to reincarnate my old column Bru's Bits, updated for today's electronic age.

We'll see how long this blog lasts. It's not my day job, and I could well get bored. In the meantime, sit back and enjoy. Or don't. Whatever, so long as the posts interest me.