Tuesday, August 18, 2009
I Don't Accept the Premise
I haven't read the health care bill, HR 3200. It's not because I don't care what's in it; rather, I oppose the bill because I don't accept the premise that it's needed or even constitutional. This debate is not about health care; it's about control. To let progressives frame the debate around a specific bill allows them to bypass the exposure and probable defeat of their larger agenda: government centralization and control. It's time we stop permitting progressive Trojan Horses through our nation's gates and start looking these gift horses in the mouth.
Our Constitution is very clear on a limited federal government. Providing health care and other social services on a federal level are not what our founders intended. In fact, they all spoke at great length about avoiding the tyranny of oppressively large government, emphasizing individual freedom & limitations on federal government.
This health care debate is the perfect place to make an ideological stand. We shouldn't invest ourselves entirely in a debate over the legislation, but should direct our efforts more broadly to question its intent. The health care bill must be defeated and not negotiated. Congress will offer us everything we want and more, so long as a bill for socialized health care gets signed into law. There are no sacred cows in HR 3200; the only thing that matters to progressive elites is the precedent of its passage. They will eventually, patronizingly capitulate to our demands to change the bill.
We will have been taken as fools who bought the snake oil because we won the haggle over price...
[Highly Recommended > ]
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GREAT BRITAIN: NHS IS PUTTING THE PATIENT LAST
While British health ministers have been quick to applaud the advantages of a "national" health system to fight the swine flu outbreak, the very centralized nature of the service cuts two ways, say researchers from Civitas, a British think tank.
They argue that the "customer" of the National Health Service (NHS) -- Great Britain's government-run health care model -- is the health secretary rather than the patient.
The report sees much in favor of attempting to introduce private provision within the state system and competition between NHS trusts to attract patients.
But this has been stymied by incessant interference from the Department of Health, says researchers:
- According to health service managers, a staggering total of 69 public bodies -- excluding the Department of Health and 10 regional strategic authorities -- currently regulate, inspect or demand information from NHS organizations.
- The nature of Great Britain's centrally funded system inevitably means that ministers are constantly intervening and setting targets because they see themselves as the taxpayers' guardian; thus, undermining the market mechanism.
- Among these commandments are "assume infallibility;" however its outcomes are worse than other universal health care systems and the NHS ranks low in international surveys.
- Another commandment is "isolate yourself" -- healthcare is conducted in separate "silos," particularly regarding communication between GPs and hospitals.
- A further commandment, "be inflexible," is met by hamstringing units with state control: staff pay is set centrally, capital expenditure is constrained, IT is a top-down program and availability of drugs, such as expensive cancer treatments, is centrally determined.
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Canada Considering Healthcare Overhaul With Private Insurance
[HT:SE]
As President Obama and his Democrat-controlled Congress try to force healthcare reform on an American population largely pleased with the current system, our neighbors to the north are actually considering improving their structure by -- wait for it!!! -- welcoming additional competition from private insurers.
Within hours of the Obama administration saying that it might consider a reform package without a government option, the Canadian Press inconveniently reported the following...
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Elite Meltdown
The face-off between the ruling party and the people continues to unfold...
The politicians continue to manufacture faux outrage at the American people for failing to 'understand' the nuances, the broad outline, of a 1,000 page plus bill that the politicians haven't even read.
The American people understand all too well, and the politicians false acting has been replaced by real outrage... [snip]
Peons from fly-over country are daring to challenge the carefully scripted and (deliberately?) misleading talking points. Talking points which, by the way, have been endorsed by the media. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are using the standard liberal tactic of diverting attention from the issue by demonizing the dissenter, in this case, the American people.
According to Pelosi and Reid, voicing objections to the federal government's take over of 17% of the formerly free market economy is 'un-American.' Harry Reid has gone a step further, tarring dissenter's as 'evil mongers'. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has blithely dismissed the burgeoning dissent by informing one and all that these 'townhalls are not representative of America.' Obama, meanwhile, is trying to divert the issue by blaming the 'headline hungry television networks', accusing them of 'enflaming an ugly backlash.', and have launched a new $12 million ad campaign [taxpayer paid] designed to soothe Americans into relying on the government instead of common sense... [snip]
The only problem is, Americans aren't buying it.
Americans have been deceived and beaten up by the government so many times lately, that, even thought they still love Obama, they're taking steps to distance themselves from what has become an increasingly dangerous relationship. Flowers, new cars, and soothing words are no longer effective. Even the race card isn't ringing their bells.
Liberals have finally succeeded in persuading Americans to look at the broad picture instead of inconvenient details.
The kicker is, as more Americans see the broad picture, they see the unprecedented devolution of power to the federal government. They see the loss of America's traditional reliance on individuals instead of government. They see the loss of personal liberty and freedom of choice.
And they don't like it...
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POLL:54% Say Passing No Healthcare Reform Better Than Passing Congressional Plan
Thirty-five percent (35%) of American voters say passage of the bill currently working its way through Congress would be better than not passing any health care reform legislation this year.
However, a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that most voters (54%) say no health care reform passed by Congress this year would be the better option.
Not surprisingly, there is a huge partisan divide on this issue. Sixty percent (60%) of Democrats say passing the legislation in Congress would be the best course of action. However, 80% of Republicans take the opposite view.
Among those not affiliated with either major party, 23% would like the Congressional reform to pass while 66% would rather the legislators take no action.
Voters who earn less than $20,000 a year are evenly divided but a majority of all other voters would prefer no action. Middle income voters, those who earn from $40,000 to $75,000 a year, are most strongly in favor of taking no action.
A plurality of voters under 30 say passage of the Congressional legislation is better. A majority of adults take the opposite view.
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Malley Stumbles Upon the Truth: Peace Isn’t Possible
At Camp David, Arafat turned down an astounding offer for a Palestinian state in nearly all the West Bank, Gaza, and part of Jerusalem that was put forward by then Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak with the encouragement of President Clinton. Malley pioneered the practice of dismissing this offer as insignificant and rationalizing Arafat’s refusal to take yes for an answer, as well as his decision to answer that peace deal with a terrorist war of attrition, known as the second intifada.
Malley’s version of the Camp David debacle ran contrary to the facts, but it has gradually gained ground, especially on the Left. By discrediting the Israeli proposal and thereby absolving the Palestinians of blame for Arafat’s unwillingness to make peace, Malley helped set the stage for a decade of anti-Israel vituperation.
Malley, who was listed for a time as an unofficial adviser to the Obama presidential campaign, is at it again today in an op-ed in the New York Times... [snip]
But they do stumble upon a key truth about the entire peace process—they understand that what the Palestinians want isn’t merely sovereignty in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. Jews want a Jewish state and are willing to let the Palestinians have their own state too in order to live in peace. The problem is that the core of Palestinian national identity is a desire not for a Palestinian state but for eradicating the Jewish one, which they view as illegitimate no matter where the borders are drawn. Agha and Malley write:
Even fewer Palestinians take issue with the categorical rebuff of [a Jewish state], as the recent Fatah congress in Bethlehem confirmed. In their eyes, to accept Israel as a Jewish state would legitimize the Zionist enterprise that brought about their tragedy. It would render the Palestinian national struggle at best meaningless, at worst criminal.
Yet instead of urging Palestinians to give up goals incompatible with peace, the authors merely say that the next step for peace processors is to go back to 1948 and revisit the issues of that era—i.e., whether there should be a Jewish state at all...
[If you've no true 'partner in peace', you're only left an adversary to be defeated.]
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Those 'other refugees' in Arab-Muslim lands
While "moderate" Fatah ended its convention with business as usual -- "Constant war against Israel," "No peace with Israel," mimicking its most "extreme" rival Hamas, and both of them moaning about the "refugees" of 61 years, the real refugees, the Jews in Arab lands living under Muslim oppression, are forced once again to run for their lives.
The latest are the tiny remnant of Jews remaining in Yemen, fleeing after continuous oppression including forcible pressures to convert to Islam led to kidnappings and murders. After the latest murder, the remaining Jews are going to Israel the Yemeni new agency Sana admits.
What Yemini news reports don't mention is, that unlike Arabs in Lebanon and other Arab lands, the fleeing Jews won't be refugees but welcomed as citizens of Israel... [snip]
But 61 years after Arabs[*], heeding their leaders' call to leave as they would soon return to a land purged of Jews, left what is now Israel, the Arabs are still refugees; their Arab/Muslim brethren refusing them citizenship.
Even Jordan, that artificial country whose population is mainly Arab/Muslim, restricts citizenship: by law, Jews cannot be citizens of and/or live in Jordan.
And no UN or human rights outcry...
[*Note: While most Arabs in Israel left to make way for the looming genocide, roughly a third didn't. They stayed and flourished - an astounding demonstration of Jewish tolerance {given the risks involved at a time of war} never reciprocated by Arabs.
**Note too: the so-called 'right of return' demanded by Arabs includes "their descendants". This is a transparent ploy to import unidentifiable Arabs, who've never lived there, into Israel and destroy it from within. The idea should be laughed at outright, but of course the UN...]
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[HT:PK]:
"The quickest way to end a war is to lose it".
.- George Orwell
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The Makeup of Human Rights Watch
Who Is Human Rights Watch’s Joe Stork?
He is, of course, the author of last week’s Human Rights Watch report, which claimed that IDF soldiers murdered white-flag-waving Palestinian civilians in cold blood. He is also the deputy director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa programs. We already knew from NGO Monitor that he has—to put it politely—a rather extremist history on all matters Israel.
But now there is a better accounting. Ben-Dror Yemini of the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv has a blockbuster article laying out the ugly truth of Stork’s history. The Hebrew is available here; below is a complete English translation.
That HRW would place in a senior position someone who has written in explicit support of terrorism against Israel, lauded the murder of Israeli athletes at Munich in 1972 as providing “an important boost in morale among Palestinians,” and stated that “Zionism may be defeated only by fighting imperialism” should be the final verdict on a cretinous organization’s already tattered credibility...
[But it won't be. Recommended > ]
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WHAT IS THE OPTIMUM SIZE OF GOVERNMENT
The optimal size of the government is a problem that has attracted the attention of researchers for decades. Arthur Laffer illustrated that there is tax revenue maximizing tax rate, and in a similar way other authors try to identify the government share of gross domestic product which maximized the GDP growth.
The Institute of Market Economics (IME) is adding to the literature with their new study that estimates the optimum size of government, the share of government spending that maximizes economic growth.
Previous studies have tried to determine and quantify the optimum size of government, recognizing that not all governments and societies are the same, and most have shown that the optimum size is between 12 and 30 percent of GDP. However, IME finds that the government sector should be no larger than 25 percent (and perhaps considerably smaller) to maximize GDP growth:
- All major governments, including the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy greatly exceed the 25 percent level. The average government sector for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries now exceeds 41 percent of GDP.
- In addition, the evidence indicates that the optimum level of government consumption of final goods and services as a share of GDP is 10.4 percent based on a panel data of 81 countries.
- However, due to model and data limitations, it is probably that the results are biased upwards, and the "true" optimum government level is even smaller than the existing empirical study indicates.
- Optimal government size is also, of course, influenced by the quality of a government.
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Clunky Economics
When asked who his favorite economist was, Ronald Reagan used to say Fredric Bastiat. Bastiat was a 19th-century economic philosopher from France, and while his numerous books are full of countless insights, he's probably best known for introducing the notion of the "seen and the unseen."
To explain this in easy-to-understand terms, Bastiat referenced a broken window. In this case, the "seen" was a shopkeeper's broken window that would create economic growth for the shopkeeper hiring a glazier to replace the window, with the glazier spending the money earned elsewhere. Break enough windows and suddenly a great deal of economic activity occurs.
The unseen, however, is the investment that doesn't occur so that windows can be fixed. Wouldn't the cost of repairing broken windows reduce the funds available to expand one's shop, not to mention reduce the shopkeeper's demand for products from other suppliers? Broken windows would stimulate glaziers, but the shift from consumption to building repairs would necessarily depress others.
Bastiat wanted his readers to consider the unseen...
[Like, say, promoting the destruction of perfectly good cars to boost the auto unions {under the guise of saving the planet, natch}. How many other goods aren't being bought with the money now allocated for new-car payments?]
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UN Sec-Gen Ban Ki-moon Goes Batty Over Climate Change, Upcoming Conference; Press Mostly Mum
Readers are advised to make peace with the Maker soon. If we are to believe the recent utterings of United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (pictured at right), humanity -- or at least humanity living life as we know it -- is not long for this earth.
The Sec-Gen's August 11 speech at the Global Economic Forum in Incheon, North Korea, was so over the top that it's likely the world's media kept its coverage of the event relatively muted to spare the poor man from worldwide embarrassment:
"If we fail to act, climate change will intensify droughts, floods and other natural disasters.
Water shortages will affect hundreds of millions of people. Malnutrition will engulf large parts of the developing world. Tensions will worsen. Social unrest – even violence – could follow...
The damage to national economies will be enormous. The human suffering will be incalculable...
We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet."
Despite this coming from the Secretary General of the United Nations, there is nothing about the speech that I could find in searches on "Ban Ki-Moon United Nations" (not typed in quotes) at the New York Times or the Washington Post. A search on the same string at AP.org at 3:30 p.m. came up empty.
An identical Google News search came back with a very light total of 42 results.
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[A: yes; that's why the press is covering for him. The most pervasive spin: omission.]
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Bill Ayers and the real threat to education
[HT:JB]
Imagine your child's teacher telling you his days in jail and violent protesting were formative to his teaching philosophy.
Most parents would have a serious discussion with the principal, at the minimum. But the teacher who brags about such beginnings is now a "Distinguished Professor of Education."
Despite his specialty as "Professor of Curriculum and Instruction," he trains future teachers to dispense with curricula and discipline, as well as tests and grades...
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NBC Launches Liberal Site For 'The' African-American Perspective On News
"There is not a Black America and a White America and a Latino America and an Asian America -- there's the United States of America."
-- Barack Obama, 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address.
"theGrio.com. The African-American perspective on news. Our lives, our world, our stories. theGrio.com. Part of NBC News."
-- promo for new NBC News website, August 9, 2009.
So much for post-racial America.
NBC News apparently believes that African-Americans can be pigeonholed. In NBC's view, there exists "the" African-American perspective on news.View video here.
[The grievance industry: "too big to fail".]
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SWEET LEMONADE KID $LAPPED WITH FINE
Clementine Lee, who lives just blocks from the Upper West Side Riverside Park, had dreamed of opening a lemonade stand since last year and took advantage of yesterday's beautiful weather to set up shop."It was such a hot day I figured people would want a cold drink,"
the aspiring juvenile juice mogul told The Post. But their day turned into the pits at 3 p.m. when a group of city workers iced their operation."They approached us nonchalantly but then surrounded us, ... They were very hostile as soon as they approached, saying 'Where's your permit? Where's your permit?' "
When her father they didn't have the right to sell on Parks property, the agents immediately slapped the dad and daughter with a summons for selling food without a license, which carries a maximum fine of $200.
Dozens of onlookers rallied to the pair's defense, shouting that the Parks officers were violating the Lees' civil rights, but the brokenhearted pair packed up and went home.
[Government is the problem - we need less of it.]
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We can't spare this woman: she fights
Moe Lane at Red State channels Abraham Lincoln in succinctly stating the value of Sarah Palin to the future of the Republic. His headline to a summary of Andy McCarthy's dissent to the NRO editorial slamming Palin's "death panel" comment is
Andrew McCarthy: I can't spare this woman. She fights.
I think McCarthy's dissent is excellent, too....Palin was right to argue her point aggressively. Largely because she did, a horrible provision is now out of this still horrible Obamacare proposal. To the contrary, if the argument had been made the way the editors counsel this morning, "end-of-life counseling" would still be in the bill. We might have impressed the Beltway with the high tone of our discourse and the suppleness of our reasoning, but we'd have lost the public.
The entire Republican establishment has lost a large section of the public for some time now. The elected officials did it by refusing to limit spending. The pundit class has done it by has largely showing themselves to be both obsessed with style over substance and forever ceding the shape of the debate to the Democrats and the mainstream media.
That's like playing Charlie Brown to Lucy, as it is proven that whenever it looks like conservatives have a winning argument, the Democrats and the media declare that attack off limits, unfair, racist, old news, etc., etc., etc.,
For an NRO editorial to dismiss the only politician who fights on despite taking hits because her highly effective arguments lack nuance is simply ridiculous.
To score a debate that has brought out thousands of demonstrators all around the nation like they were members of the Potomac High School debate club makes the NRO editorial board look every bit as jejune as Barack Obama.
[The largest grandees in that party all seem to belong to the fairer sex.]
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60 Minutes Chief: Dan Rather’s Work ‘Not Even Close to the Standards We Expect’
Sunday’s Los Angeles Times had an update on Dan Rather’s continuing lawsuit against CBS News over what Dan might call the “forged-memos-to-torpedo-Bush’s-re-election-in-2004 scandal.”
60 Minutes executive producer Jeff Fager described Rather’s work as deficient:“I hate to say it in public, but many of [his] stories were not even close to the standards we expect at 60 Minutes.”
Gold also said that Rather’s pursuit of CBS has brought to light the fact that the ex-Evening News anchor was turned down for jobs at: ABC, NBC, CNN, A&E, History, HBO, Discovery and National Geographic.
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