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“First, Do No Harm!” should be the first rule for all government regulators. Have any of the ‘experts’ in the Obama Administration thought about that? Do any of them have any idea what they’re doing? Everything that government touches becomes less efficient, less responsive, and more likely to be looted; why would bail outs be any different? Why would a disease caused by low interest rates and easy credit be cured by even lower interest rates and more easy credit?

Any alleged “right” of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right. — Ayn Rand

“Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” --Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, Query 19, 1781

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. --Thomas Jefferson

“Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors...and miss.” — Robert Heinlein [my favorite Science Fiction Author]

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” – H.L. Mencken

When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion; when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see money flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get richer by graft and pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you; when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice; you may know that your society is doomed. —Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged

Free trade is such a simple solution for so many of the world’s ills. It doesn’t require endless hours of debate in the United Nations ... or any other world-wide debating society. It requires only that one nation see the light and remove its restrictions. The results will be immediate and widespread. — W.M. Curtiss, “The Tariff Idea” [1952]

Video Humor: Tim Hawkins - The Government Can

ObamaCare

Obama’s health care plan will be written by a committee
whose Chairman doesn’t understand it,
whose Members haven’t read much of it,
passed by a Congress that hasn’t read it,
signed by a president who smokes cigarettes
[and who has read very little, if any, of it],
funded by a treasury chief who did not pay his taxes,
overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and
financed by a country that is nearly broke.
What possibly could go wrong?

The point is that there is no health care model, whether privately or publicly financed, that can offer unlimited access to medical services while containing costs. Ultimately, such a model arrives at a crossroads where it has to either limit access in an arbitrary way, or face uncontrolled cost increases.

— Shikha Dalmia, ‘The Myth of Free Market Health Care in America’

My own polls in San Pedro, California (the Los Angeles Harbor area), a very pro-union area (Longshoreman are dominant in our community), show much less popularity for Obama. Wasteful government spending and the immense deficit will harm business and adversely affect imports and exports (that’s what a Harbor does); our residents are about 70% negative and 25% positive for a net ‘approval’ index of –45%. He is NOT a popular guy in this neighborhood...but he still outpolls Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid (among those few who have ever heard of him), and Hillary (they still don’t like her). One of the most popular T-Shirts left over from the 2008 elections is:

but this one is catching up fast:

(Check’em out at www.ThoseShirts.com)

Look how many stupid, harmful, and evil things Obama and Pelosi and Reid have tried to do to us in only a few months: (1) the $787 million ‘gift’ from the taxpayers to every Democratic constituency; (2) trillions of dollars at risk for investment banks who pay tens of millions of dollars for their ‘talented’ employees who, in retrospect, never made any profits after all; (3) the bailout of the dying automobile companies, GM and Chrysler (and their unions), both of which have been dying for years; (4) ‘cap and trade’ climate change legislation (to solve a problem that does not even exist) which is really just another tax increase on the poor and the middle class; and (5) last but not least, the complete restructuring of the best health-care system in the world to match the abomination that exists in Canada or Great Britain (we are rated 37th only because a socialist organization is doing the rating and we do not have universal insurance coverage; we’re rated 1st in responsiveness and quality of care). No doubt there are other smaller transgressions. A year ago, it would have been hard for me to imagine that anyone could make Baby Bush look smart but Obama succeeds at that. Eight years of nepotism, followed by our first affirmative action president; this is what happens when ‘feel-good’ affirmative action takes precedence over experience and competence.

9/30/2009: The myth of the underpaid public employee
by Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe

THOUGH IT HASN'T BEEN TRUE for years, many people believe that government employees receive such lavish employment and retirement benefits in order to compensate for their meager paychecks. The reality is that their paychecks aren't meager at all: Government jobs pay more than those in the private sector, and the difference between the two is growing.

Consider the lucrative lot of the men and women who work for Uncle Sam. In 2008, according to data from the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis, the 1.9 million civilian employees of the federal government earned an average salary of $79,197. The average private employee, by contrast, earned just $49,935. The difference between them came to more than $29,000 -- a differential that has more than doubled since 2000.

Take account of total compensation -- wages plus benefits -- and the disparity is even more striking. In 2008, total federal civilian compensation averaged $119,982 -- more than twice the $59,908 in wages and benefits earned by the average private-sector employee. Chris Edwards, a scholar at the Cato Institute, has documented the steady widening of the gap: In 1960, federal workers averaged $1.24 for every $1 earned by a private employee. By 1980, the federal advantage was up to $151; in 2000 it was $1.66. Now it is $2 -- and climbing. When ranked alongside 72 industries that span the US economy, federal employees take home the seventh-highest average compensation. Among the workers they out-earn, Edwards shows, are those in such fields as computer systems design, chemical products, and legal services.

It isn't only at the federal level that the political class so handsomely takes care of its own. "State and local government workers get paid an average of $25.30 an hour, which is 33 percent higher that the private sector's $19," Forbes magazine reports. "Throw in pensions and other benefits and the gap widens to 42 percent." The Tax Foundation calculates that "non-wage compensation" for the average state and local government employee worked out to $12,362 in 2007. For the average employee in the private sector, the comparable figure was just $8,784.

Americans increasingly fall into one of two camps. Those who work for the government -- about 15 percent of the labor force -- tend to enjoy sumptuous perks, virtually indestructible job security, early retirement, and pensions that are guaranteed for life. The rest of us -- the vast majority -- work in the private economy, where millions of jobs can be wiped out by a recession, where defined-benefit pensions are disappearing, and where competition and downsizing are harsh facts of life.

[Read more]

9/30/2009: “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi berated town hall and tea party protesters this month, tearfully warning they’d incite violence. Well, there’s been violence all right, at Pittsburgh’s G-20. But it wasn’t the tea partiers. It takes gall to characterize ordinary Americans, freely exercising their rights of speech and assembly in civic forums, as ‘mobs’ while ignoring a pack of leftist thugs now smashing a U.S. city.

But that’s what Pelosi did, directing her righteous tocsin to the Norman Rockwell-like gatherings of Americans who opposed her expansion of government this past summer. ‘I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw ... I saw this myself in the late ‘70s in San Francisco,’ Pelosi said, choking up, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘This kind of rhetoric is just, is really frightening and it created a climate in which we, violence took place and ... I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made,’ she told a congressional forum Sept. 17 in a bid to silence peaceful protesters.

Scroll ahead one week to the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh: Some 1,000 hooded rioters descend on the city waving signs such as ‘Smash the G-20’ and ‘Eat the Rich.’ Many take ‘direct action’ to ‘challenge capitalism’ in what organizers brazenly call an ‘unpermitted protest.’ Unlike the town hall citizens, they didn’t ‘hurl’ statements -- just tire irons, bricks and rocks, in an effort to damage private businesses. ...

This kind of violence is nothing new. It was found in Seattle in 1999, where former Obama administration green czar Van Jones got himself arrested. It was repeated at other summits in Turin, Italy; Washington, D.C.; and London. These leftists detest capitalism, abhor private property -- and have ties to the Democratic Party.

The unwillingness of the Democratic establishment to defend free markets emboldens the rioters. In destroying private property and impeding trade, these anarchists prove their aims aren’t democratic. They resemble the mobs of Castro’s Cuba who engage in violence against citizens to enforce conformity. The outrage of it all raises questions about Pelosi’s real agenda in her one-sided criticism of tea partiers. By criticizing only tea partiers and ignoring rampant thugs, she seeks to repress peaceful dissent. With that setup, it’s no surprise that there’s a mudslide of violence now rolling down on us from an energized radical left.” --Investor’s Business Daily

9/30/2009: from the Patriot Post:

“Governments do not govern, but merely control the machinery of government, being themselves controlled by the hidden hand.” --English Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)

“The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it.” --American writer H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

“Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.” --American author Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)

9/29/2009: The Brainy Bunch by Thomas Sowell

[Dr. Sowell asks “...do we want to become the world’s largest banana republic?” That’s where Obama and his comrades are leading us.]

Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.

It was, after all, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brilliant “brains trust” advisers whose policies are now increasingly recognized as having prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s, while claiming credit for ending it. The Great Depression ended only when the Second World War put an end to many New Deal policies.

FDR himself said that “Dr. New Deal” had been replaced by “Dr. Win-the-War.” But those today who are for big spending like to credit wartime big spending for bringing the Great Depression to an end. They never ask the question as to why previous depressions had always ended on their own, much faster than the one under FDR, and without government intervention or massive government spending.

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant “whiz kids” tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.

Such people have been told all their lives how brilliant they are, until finally they feel forced to admit it, with all due modesty. But they not only tend to over-estimate their own brilliance, more fundamentally they tend to over-estimate how important brilliance itself is when dealing with real world problems.

Many crucial things in life are learned from experience, rather than from clever thoughts or clever words. Indeed, a gift for the clever phrasing so much admired by the media can be a fatal talent, especially for someone chosen to lead a government.

Make no mistake about it, Adolf Hitler was brilliant. His underlying beliefs may have been half-baked and his hatreds overwhelming, but he was a genius when it came to carrying out his plans politically, based on those beliefs and hatreds.

Starting from a position of Germany’s military weakness in the early 1930s, Hitler not only built up Germany’s war-making potential, he did so in ways that minimized the danger that his potential victims would match his military build-up with their own. He said whatever soothing words they wanted to hear that would spare them the cost of military deterrence and the pain of contemplating another war.

He played some of the most highly educated people of his time for fools-- not only foreign political leaders but also members of the intelligentsia. The editor of The Times of London filtered out reports that his own foreign correspondents in Germany sent him about the evils and dangers of the Nazis. In the United States, W.E.B. Du Bois-- with a Ph.D. from Harvard-- said that dictatorship in Germany was “absolutely necessary to get the state in order.”

In an age when facts seem to carry less weight than the visions of brilliant and charismatic leaders, it is more important than ever to look at the actual track records of those brilliant and charismatic leaders. After all, Hitler led Germany into military catastrophe and left much of the country in ruins.

Even in a country which suffered none of the wartime destruction that others suffered in the 20th century, Argentina began that century as one of the 10 richest nations in the world-- ahead of France and Germany-- and ended it as such an economic disaster that no one would even compare it to France or Germany.

Politically brilliant and charismatic leaders, promoting reckless government spending-- of whom Juan Peron was the most prominent, but by no means alone-- managed to create an economic disaster in a country with an abundance of natural resources and a country that was spared the stresses that wars inflicted on other nations in the 20th century.

Someone recently pointed out how much Barack Obama’s style and strategies resemble those of Latin American charismatic despots-- the takeover of industries by demagogues who never ran a business, the rousing rhetoric of resentment addressed to the masses and the personal cult of the leader promoted by the media. But do we want to become the world’s largest banana republic?

9/29/2009: Obama’s Globalism: We Are the World by David Limbaugh

Polite conservatives grow nervous when their less inhibited brethren suggest that President Barack Obama does not feel warm and fuzzy when contemplating pre-Obama-inauguration America. But considering the mounting evidence, the burden of proof has certainly shifted to the polite group to demonstrate otherwise.

Obama should not get off the hook in just one short news cycle for the shots he took at this nation in his shameful first speech to the United Nations General Assembly.

In his opening salvo, he said, “For those who question the character and cause of my nation, I ask you to look at the concrete actions we have taken in just nine months.” Then he proceeded to tick off those “concrete actions,” such as prohibiting torture -- as if to suggest that prior to his ascension, it had been official U.S. policy.

Note that he didn’t say, “For those who question America’s character, I cite to you our record of international philanthropy, benevolence, peacemaking and peacekeeping, liberating nations from brutal dictators, promoting democracy throughout the world, and leading the world in technological innovation and the very advancement of civilization.”

Instead, he made it clear that he shares the view of the world’s leftist critics that America has acted “unilaterally without regard for the interests of others,” “arrogant” and “sometimes dismissive.”

But if you nervous types still believe it is “over the top” to suggest Obama is not particularly fond of America’s founding principles and freedom tradition, could you at least concede that he disdains American exceptionalism and prefers that this nation not be the world’s sole superpower? Or that he believes Americans possess an immoral amount of the world’s wealth and is not especially protective of America’s national sovereignty?

Obama isn’t content merely engaging in a scheme to radically redistribute the income and wealth of Americans internally (to the tune of some $1 trillion from the top 30 percent of income earners to the lower 70 percent through his proposals on taxes, health care and the environment, according to the Tax Foundation). He also believes Americans should be compelled to redistribute their resources to the world’s poor, as well.

Is that over the top, too? Well, do you remember when Obama said the following in Chicago on Oct. 2, 2007? “In the 21st century, progress must mean more than a vote at the ballot box; it must mean freedom from fear and freedom from want. We cannot stand for the freedom of anarchy. Nor can we support the globalization of the empty stomach. We need new approaches to help people to help themselves. The United Nations has embraced the Millennium Development Goals, which aim to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015. When I’m president, they will be America’s goals. The Bush administration tried to keep the U.N. from proclaiming these goals; the Obama administration will double foreign assistance to $50 billion to lead the world to achieve them. In the 21st century, we cannot stand up before the world and say that there’s one set of rules for America and another for everyone else.”

True to his word, though barely reported, Obama made this statement in his U.N. speech: “We have fully embraced the Millennium Development Goals.” I’m not sure where he got the authority to make that unilateral declaration, but he nonetheless made it. I guess now that he’s president, he can sometimes just issue fiats instead of having to deal with the cumbersome legislative process -- such as when he had difficulty as senator getting his Global Poverty Act passed. That bill would have committed the U.S. to spending 0.7 percent of the U.S.’ gross domestic product on foreign aid, amounting to $845 billion more than the U.S. already spends.

So why do you suppose the evil Bush administration opposed the innocuous-sounding “Millennium Development Goals”?

Well, how about its multi-pronged assault on America’s national sovereignty? It commits participating nations to be bound by the International Criminal Court treaty; support regional disarmament measures for small arms and light weapons; and press for the full implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity, which Wikipedia describes as “an international legally binding treaty” that includes among its goals a “fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from genetic resources,” the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, described as “an international bill of rights for women,” and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which purports to be a “legally binding international instrument” that gives children the right to express their own opinions “freely in all matters affecting the child” and requires those opinions be given “due weight.”

The Millennium Declaration also affirms the U.N. as “the indispensable common house of the entire human family, through which we will seek to realize our universal aspirations for peace, cooperation and development.”

Indeed, under President Obama, “We Are the World.”

9/29/2009: Enlightened - and Joyful - Women by Rebecca Hagelin

The ugly face of female oppression is all around us. But the source might surprise you.

Females are favored on college campuses for scholarships and sports, so it’s not educational opportunity that we lack. In fact, female co-eds now dominate universities in both numbers and in special programs available to them.

With plenty of government grants for businesses run by women, we’ve got advantages there too. And there are innumerable labor laws that protect women in the workforce from discrimination.

It’s obviously not the modern American male that is oppressing women. A growing majority of men are so careful not to offend that many of them don’t even open doors or compliment women anymore. Many men are scared to treat women like ladies - let alone deny them opportunity - for fear that the bitter voice of feminism will rise up and call them bigots.

The culprit of today’s female oppression and unhappiness? That same bitter feminism that causes many men to no longer treat women as different and more refined than their own burly gender. A segment of women and those who drink their kool-aid are oppressing other women - and their major target is our daughters.

Visit virtually any college campus and you will find “women’s studies” classes that wave the flag of victimization and promote gender warfare. They are filled with hippie-generation professors who seek to convince female students that having children is beneath them, that men are the enemy, that their fulfillment lies in wallowing in self-pity.

Students are pressured to attend male-bashing plays like the “Vagina Monologues”. Females students who dare challenge the feminist mantra are treated with disdain by those in authority. Academia is often a world where young ladies are taught to reject their natural tendency toward femininity and to instead adopt a brusque, manly demeanor.

Oppressors of femininity also control much of the programming geared toward young women. Witness MTV and the prime-time line up where women are taught that the only way to advance in the world is to dominate and manipulate men through “sexual power”.

These sour attitudes and indoctrination are having an effect: A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research reveals that despite the tremendous prosperity and “advances” in women’s rights, “..women in the United States have become less happy, both absolutely and relative to men” than we were in the 1970’s.

If the trend continues to manipulate, cajole and convince young women that they really should be angry at the world, that they should deny their femininity, and that they are better off as the lonely, eternal victim than they are embraced by a husband and children who love them, we can expect ever more women to be very sad, indeed.

How To Save Your Family from the female oppressors? Support ladies who dare to challenge the status quo.

Take heart: feminine defenders are on the rise, and they need your help. This week marks the fifth anniversary of a new voice of reason sweeping America’s college campuses: Network of Enlightened Women (NeW).

Started by a University of Virginia co-ed, Karin Agness, NEW seeks to “encourage women to embrace their femininity and traditional values in order to ultimately reclaim their happiness.” Already in over a dozen states, Agness says, “New’s success is largely due to the empty claims of feminism and the need for a positive woman’s voice to rise up.”

This past week I witnessed the beautiful joy and keen minds of NeW members first-hand. I spoke at King’s College in the heart of New York City and was delighted to find smart, feminine, happy college women who celebrate the uniqueness and strength of their gender - and also admire and value men and chivalry. These young women reflect the same grace that I found in Miss Agness and the executive director of NeW, Holly Carter, whom I met several years ago, who are just the type of role models of femininity and intellect that young women need.

Anyone concerned about the oppression of women should visit www.EnlightenedWomen.org. Their blogs, articles, activities and positive outlook are enough to make you smile - and to encourage and equip you to fight feminist oppression wherever you encounter it.

9/29/2009: Rhetorical Tax Evasion

President Obama’s effort to deny that his mandate to buy insurance is a tax has taken another thumping, this time from fellow Democrats in the Senate Finance Committee.

Chairman Max Baucus’s bill includes the so-called individual mandate, along with what he calls a $1,900 “excise tax” if you don’t buy health insurance. (It had been as much as $3,800 but Democrats reduced the amount last week to minimize the political sticker shock.) And, lo, it turns out that if you don’t pay that tax, the IRS could punish you with a $25,000 fine or up to a year in jail, or both.

Under questioning last week, Tom Barthold, the chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, admitted that the individual mandate would become a part of the Internal Revenue Code and that failing to comply “could be criminal, yes, if it were considered an attempt to defraud.” Mr. Barthold noted in a follow-up letter that the willful failure to file would be a simple misdemeanor, punishable by the $25,000 fine or jail time under Section 7203.

So failure to pay the mandate would be enforced like tax evasion, but Mr. Obama still claims it isn’t a tax. “You can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase,” Mr. Obama insisted last week to ABC interviewer George Stephanopoulos. Accusing critics of dishonesty is becoming this President’s default argument, but is Mr. Barthold also part of the plot?

In the 1994 health-care debate, the Congressional Budget Office called the individual mandate “an unprecedented form of federal action.” This is because “The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States.”

This coercion will be even more onerous today because everyone will be forced to buy insurance that the new taxes and regulations of ObamaCare will make far more expensive. Too bad Mr. Obama’s rhetorical tax evasion can’t be punished by the IRS.

From the Los Angeles Times: Note that this is only one State...

1. 40% of all workers in Los Angeles County (Los Angeles County has 10.2 million people) are working for cash and not paying taxes. This is because they are predominantly illegal immigrants working without a green card.

2. 95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens.

3. 75% of people on the most wanted list in Los Angeles are illegal aliens.

4. Over 2/3 of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal, whose births were paid for by taxpayers.

5. Nearly 35% of all inmates in California detention centers are Mexican nationals here illegally.

6. Over 300,000 illegal aliens in Los Angeles County are living in garages.

7. The FBI reports half of all gang members in Los Angeles are most likely illegal aliens from south of the border.

8. Nearly 60% of all occupants of HUD properties are illegal.

9. 21 radio stations in Los Angeles are Spanish speaking.

10. In Los Angeles County 5.1 million people speak English, 3.9 million speak Spanish. (There are 10.2 million people in Los Angeles County)

[the first 10 are from the LA Times]

11. Less than 2% of illegal aliens are picking our crops, but 29% are on welfare.

12. Over 70% of the United States ‘annual population growth’ (and over 90% of California, Florida, and New York ) results from immigration. 29% of inmates in federal prisons are illegal aliens.

9/28/2009: from the Patriot Post: “Barack Obama took center stage at the United Nations on Wednesday and continued his ‘I’m sorry for America’ tour. Despite leading a nation that defends others, pays for others, promotes freedom for others, and shelters others, Obama once again talked about the past in order to make himself more accommodating and caring. Word to Obama and other left-wing ‘speak softly and carry a wet spaghetti noodle’ types.... his message was exactly what other nations want to hear. But it’s not because they want a kindler, gentler America to get along with. It’s because they want an America that will continue to pay the bills, continue to bail them out of emergencies, and let them run amok with their policies. Obama gave them everything they were looking for. ... Obama echoed previous world speeches by highlighting what he thinks is wrong with America: ‘I took office at a time when many around the world had come to view America with skepticism and distrust. Part of this was due to misperceptions and misinformation about my country. Part of this was due to opposition to specific policies, and a belief that on certain critical issues, America has acted unilaterally, without regard for the interests of others. And this has fed an almost reflexive anti-Americanism, which too often has served as an excuse for collective inaction.’ At this time, do you think that he addressed the ‘misperceptions and misinformation’ about America? Did he describe how America really is? No. Did he explain that America has not acted unilaterally? Of course not. ... When talking about Iraq, Obama did not mention how the Iraqis are now free from an oppressive dictator and holding democratic elections. Instead, he simply said, ‘In Iraq, we are responsibly ending a war.’ When talking about Afghanistan, he never mentioned the Taliban. Obama did, however, talk tough against one nation: Israel. ... I would be remiss not to mention that Obama did receive some praise for his speech. Cuban dictator Fidel Castro praised Obama for his efforts on ‘climate change.’ The news story notes that ‘the former Cuban leader on Wednesday called the American president’s speech at the United Nations “brave” and said no other American head of state would have had the courage to make similar remarks.’” --columnist Bobby Eberle

9/28/2009: Secret Agent Editors by James Taranto
The Obama scandals bring a new era of opacity at the New York Times.

[It seems the New York Times staff are biased, dishonest, brain-dead liberal comrades of Obama]

Clark Hoyt, “public editor” of the New York Times, has weighed in on his paper’s coverage of the Acorn scandal--or rather its lack thereof. Right off the bat, he delivers a half-truth:

On Sept. 12, an Associated Press article inside The Times reported that the Census Bureau had severed its ties to Acorn, the community organizing group. Robert Groves, the census director, was quoted as saying that Acorn, one of thousands of unpaid organizations promoting the 2010 census, had become “a distraction.”

What the article didn’t say--but what followers of Fox News and conservative commentators already knew--was that a video sting had caught Acorn workers counseling a bogus prostitute and pimp on how to set up a brothel staffed by under-age girls, avoid detection and cheat on taxes.

It is true, as we noted Sept. 14, that the AP article as published in the Times didn’t mention that Acorn had been caught in a sex-slavery sting. But that’s because the paper cut the latter half of the original dispatch, which did mention it. And there were other AP dispatches on the evening of Sept. 11, such as this one, that led with the sting. Somehow the Times managed to miss those.

Hoyt acknowledges that the Times continued missing the story:

For days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still. Its slow reflexes--closely following its slow response to a controversy that forced the resignation of Van Jones, a White House adviser--suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs. Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.

It’s hard to disagree with that. But Hoyt could have strengthened his argument by noting, as we did Friday, that the Times has followed exactly this pattern with the National Endowment for the Arts scandal: ignoring it altogether until the Obama administration took some remedial action, then reporting it only on an inside page. Oh well, maybe he’ll get around to it in a few more weeks.

When the Times waddled in with a report on the sex-slavery sting, it covered it as a political story. Hoyt rightly faults the paper for this:

Finally, on Sept. 16, nearly a week after the first video was posted, The Times took note of the controversy, under the headline, “Conservatives Draw Blood From Acorn, Favored Foe.” The article said that conservatives hoped to weaken the Obama administration by attacking its allies and appointees they viewed as leftist. The conservatives thought they had a “winning formula,” the article said, mobilizing people “to dig up dirt,” then trumpeting it on talk radio and television. . . .

I thought politics was emphasized too much, at the expense of questions about an organization whose employees in city after city participated in outlandish conversations about illegal and immoral activities.

Scrupulously fair, Hoyt did seek the other side of the story--the Times editors’ side:

Dean Baquet, the Washington bureau chief, said, “We did not ignore the Acorn story, so I don’t think it’s fair for people to say we blew it off.” . . .

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was “slow off the mark,” and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” . . .

Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias.

This seems totally predictable--but wait. On Sept. 10, we wrote (with respect to the Van Jones story) that we thought Hoyt would write something along the lines of: “The Times was a beat behind on this story. To some readers, this suggests liberal bias. I see no evidence of this.” We added: “We’ll buy Times public editor Clark Hoyt a drink if he doesn’t say something to that effect when he weighs in on the Jones story.”

But he didn’t say he doesn’t think the problem was liberal bias. In fact, given Hoyt’s history of pooh-poohing liberal bias in his own voice, we’d say he pointedly did not say so in this case. He said Jill Abramson (who, as co-author of “Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas,” doesn’t have a liberally biased bone in his body--ha ha) didn’t think the problem was liberal bias. This is a huge difference.

Clark, we owe you a drink. Just email us to collect.

Here, though, is the most priceless bit of the Hoyt column:

[Abramson] and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”

The Obama administration, as we noted Wednesday, was supposed to usher in a new era of transparency in government, Instead we find ourselves in a new era of opacity, not only in government but in the media. The New York Times now employs secret agent editors.

Hoyt writes, of the sex-slavery sting, that “most news organizations consider such tactics unethical--The Times specifically prohibits reporters from misrepresenting themselves or making secret recordings.” True enough. But even James O’Keefe told the Acorn employees his name. At least in that sense, he was more honest with his targets than the Times now is with its readers.

9/27/2009: You Commit Three Felonies a Day
Laws have become too vague and the concept of intent has disappeared.

When we think about the pace of change in technology, it’s usually to marvel at how computing power has become cheaper and faster or how many new digital ways we have to communicate. Unfortunately, this pace of change is increasingly clashing with some of the slower-moving parts of our culture.

Technology moves so quickly we can barely keep up, and our legal system moves so slowly it can’t keep up with itself. By design, the law is built up over time by court decisions, statutes and regulations. Sometimes even criminal laws are left vague, to be defined case by case. Technology exacerbates the problem of laws so open and vague that they are hard to abide by, to the point that we have all become potential criminals.

Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate calls his new book “Three Felonies a Day,” referring to the number of crimes he estimates the average American now unwittingly commits because of vague laws. New technology adds its own complexity, making innocent activity potentially criminal.

Mr. Silverglate describes several cases in which prosecutors didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand technology. This problem is compounded by a trend that has accelerated since the 1980s for prosecutors to abandon the principle that there can’t be a crime without criminal intent.

In 2001, a man named Bradford Councilman was charged in Massachusetts with violating the wiretap laws. He worked at a company that offered an online book-listing service and also acted as an Internet service provider to book dealers. As an ISP, the company routinely intercepted and copied emails as part of the process of shuttling them through the Web to recipients.

The federal wiretap laws, Mr. Silverglate writes, were “written before the dawn of the Internet, often amended, not always clear, and frequently lagging behind the whipcrack speed of technological change.” Prosecutors chose to interpret the ISP role of momentarily copying messages as they made their way through the system as akin to impermissibly listening in on communications. The case went through several rounds of litigation, with no judge making the obvious point that this is how ISPs operate. After six years, a jury found Mr. Councilman not guilty.

Other misunderstandings of the Web criminalize the exercise of First Amendment rights. A Saudi student in Idaho was charged in 2003 with offering “material support” to terrorists. He had operated Web sites for a Muslim charity that focused on normal religious training, but was prosecuted on the theory that if a user followed enough links off his site, he would find violent, anti-American comments on other sites. The Internet is a series of links, so if there’s liability for anything in an online chain, it would be hard to avoid prosecution.

Mr. Silverglate, a liberal who wrote a previous book taking the conservative position against political correctness on campuses, is a persistent, principled critic of overbroad statutes. This is a common problem in securities laws, which Congress leaves intentionally vague, encouraging regulators and prosecutors to try people even when the law is unclear. He reminds us of the long prosecution of Silicon Valley investment banker Frank Quattrone, which after five years resulted in a reversal of his criminal conviction on vague charges of obstruction of justice.

These miscarriages are avoidable. Under the English common law we inherited, a crime requires intent. This protection is disappearing in the U.S. As Mr. Silverglate writes, “Since the New Deal era, Congress has delegated to various administrative agencies the task of writing the regulations,” even as “Congress has demonstrated a growing dysfunction in crafting legislation that can in fact be understood.” Prosecutors identify defendants to go after instead of finding a law that was broken and figuring out who did it. Expect more such prosecutions as Washington adds regulations.

Sometimes legislators know when they make false distinctions based on technology. An “anti-cyberbullying” proposal is making its way through Congress, prompted by the tragic case of a 13-year-old girl driven to suicide by the mother of a neighbor posing as a teenage boy and posting abusive messages on MySpace. The law would prohibit using the Internet to “coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person.” Imagine a law that tried to apply this control of speech to letters, editorials or lobbying.

Mr. Silverglate, who will testify against the bill later this week, tells me he figures that “being emotionally distressed is just part of living in a free society.” New technologies like the Web, he concludes, “scare legislators because they don’t understand them and want to control them, even as they become a normal part of life.”

In a complex world of new technologies, there is more need than ever for clear rules of the road. Americans should expect that a crime requires bad intent and also that Congress and prosecutors will try to create clarity, not uncertainty. Our legal system has a lot of catching up to do to work smoothly with the rest of our lives.

9/27/2009: Health ‘Reform’ Is Income Redistribution
Let’s have an honest debate before we transfer more money from young to old.
by Michael O. Leavitt, Al Hubbard, and Keith Hennessey

While many Americans are upset by ObamaCare’s $1 trillion price tag, Congress is contemplating other changes with little analysis or debate. These changes would create a massively unfair form of income redistribution and create incentives for many not to buy health insurance at all.

Let’s start with basics: Insurance protects against the risk of something bad happening. When your house is on fire you no longer need protection against risk. You need a fireman and cash to rebuild your home. But suppose the government requires insurers to sell you fire “insurance” while your house is on fire and says you can pay the same premium as people whose houses are not on fire. The result would be that few homeowners would buy insurance until their houses were on fire.

The same could happen under health insurance reform. Here’s how: President Obama proposes to require insurers to sell policies to everyone no matter what their health status. By itself this requirement, called “guaranteed issue,” would just mean that insurers would charge predictably sick people the extremely high insurance premiums that reflect their future expected costs. But if Congress adds another requirement, called “community rating,” insurers’ ability to charge higher premiums for higher risks will be sharply limited.

Thus a healthy 25-year-old and a 55-year-old with cancer would pay nearly the same premium for a health policy. Mr. Obama and his allies emphasize the benefits for the 55-year old. But the 25-year-old, who may also have a lower income, would pay significantly more than needed to cover his expected costs.

Like the homeowner who waits until his house is on fire to buy insurance, younger, poorer, healthier workers will rationally choose to avoid paying high premiums now to subsidize insurance for someone else. After all, they can always get a policy if they get sick.

To avoid this outcome, most congressional Democrats and some Republicans would combine guaranteed issue and community rating with the requirement that all workers buy health insurance—that is, an “individual mandate.” This solves the incentive problem, and guarantees that both the healthy poor 25-year-old and the sick higher-income 55-year-old have heath insurance.

But the combination of a guaranteed issue, community rating and an individual mandate means that younger, healthier, lower-income earners would be forced to subsidize older, sicker, higher-income earners. And because these subsidies are buried within health-insurance premiums, the massive income redistribution is hidden from public view and not debated.

If Congress goes down this road, health insurance premiums will increase dramatically for the overwhelming majority of people. Even if Congress mandates that everyone have health insurance, many will choose to go without and pay the tax penalty. If you think people are dissatisfied with health care now, wait until they understand that Congress voted to mandate hidden premium increases and lower wages.

There are wiser and more equitable ways to ensure that every American has access to affordable health insurance. Policy experts and state policy makers have experimented with different solutions, including high risk pools and taxpayer-funded vouchers subsidized for those who are both poor and sick. Medicaid, charity care, and uncompensated care provided by hospitals cover some of these costs today.

These solutions are imperfect, but so are the reforms being proposed in Congress. Congress should be explicit about who will pay more under its plans.

Mr. Leavitt, former secretary of Health and Human Services (2005-2009), has served as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and a governor of Utah (1993-2003). Mr. Hubbard (2005-2007) and Mr. Hennessey (2008) served as directors of the White House National Economic Council.

9/26/2009: Dealing With a Difficult Diagnosis
How to treat the system’s ailments. by Thomas G. Donlan
(Barron’s: Monday, September 28, 2009)

With apologies to our many readers who are doctors and other experts, we offer a few immodest proposals for assuring universal and more efficient health care. With years of experience tearing down other people’s ideas, here we are saying what we favor. We define widely acknowledged ailments of the current system and offer some treatments that seem to us both just and practical. We are grateful to many readers for the suggestions, praises and excoriations they have supplied over the years in letters to the Mailbag column. We also welcome comment on these suggestions.

Ailments: A large number of uninsured Americans and illegal immigrants -- nearly 50 million by most accounts -- weigh heavily on the health-care system. When they are seriously ill, they get free or nearly free care in hospital emergency rooms, where federal laws requires they be treated even if they cannot pay. This is partly paid for through charges to government, private-insurance and premium payers, and partly through insufficient payments to doctors, hospitals, nursing homes and other providers. Care for uninsured people costs more than it should, because they wait until they have real emergencies before they seek care.

Treatments: Add up the total amount spent on uncompensated health care and levy a dedicated tax to pay for it. Make it a per-capita tax or a wage tax or a value-added tax, or call it a premium surcharge for the otherwise-uninsured, but be sure that every American sees the bill and helps to pay it. If the bill is so high that we scream, it will focus our attention so that reform makes financial sense. The money should be distributed without governments’ chiseling on payments to hospitals and doctors that provide it. Also, provide tax-supported continuing care for the otherwise-uninsured and -uninsurable at clinics run by states and charities. Divert such patients from hospital emergency rooms to the clinics.

Ailment: Americans fear changing jobs and losing insurance coverage, especially for a serious pre-existing condition, known or unknown.

Treatments: Disconnect employment from health insurance. Persons must obtain their own insurance, which must be guaranteed renewable for life. It would be best if parents are required to purchase insurance that begins to cover their children before birth -- before any condition can be discovered and labeled pre-existing. Employers should be permitted but not required to give employees tax-free contributions to their premiums, and people should be able to deduct their health-insurance expenses when they buy it on their own. During the transition to lifetime insurance, those who cannot afford their own insurance should get it through Medicaid as part of the welfare system; and there should be assigned-risk pools subsidized with federal or state funds.

Ailment: Insufficient opportunity to choose among different policy types and carriers.

Treatments: Unhook the insured from coverage choices mandated by state legislatures and employers. Allow purchase of insurance across state lines; disclose actuarial costs; regulate industry disclosure, not individual decisions about coverage. Liberate insurers to charge higher premiums to cover persons exhibiting risky behavior, such as smoking and motorcycle-riding. Create universal claims forms, using universal definitions and categories, so that claims administration ceases to be the fastest growing segment of the industry.

Ailment: The high price of privately paid health care.

Treatments: Replace first-dollar insurance coverage for routine care with Health Savings Accounts, a form of pre-paid care that allows people to ration their own care with their own money. Return insurance to actuarially sound protection against very expensive, unexpected events. Increase the supply of doctors and nurses by expanding government support for schools and scholarships. Encourage doctors and hospitals to compete with each other on price and service. Require doctors and hospitals to post prices; let them sell pre-paid care directly or through insurance companies or through employers. Accept that the U.S. is a rich country and that rich people spend more on health care; stop worrying about the share of GDP expended on health care and start worrying about the rate of growth of GDP.

Ailment: Doctors afraid of being sued practice expensive “defensive medicine,” ordering unnecessary tests and treatments. They also pay high premiums for malpractice insurance.

Treatments: Limit judgments and settlements for pain and suffering and for punitive damages. Let punitive-damage awards be paid to state funds for the medically indigent, not to victims compensated by receiving economic damages. Hire court-appointed medical professionals to serve as expert witnesses and to judge the questioned competence of doctors. Unfrock incompetent doctors in all states at the same time.

Ailment: Medicare and Medicaid, the two big government health-care programs, are growing so rapidly that they will overwhelm the federal budget within a few decades.

Treatments: Put Medicare and Medicaid out for eventual replacement by private insurance, with premiums paid by government only for those with a low income who need such charity. Give a credit for Medicare taxes previously paid, but gradually end the middle-class entitlement to welfare.

Ailment: Belief that health care is a human right that should not be measured or dispensed with reference to income, wealth, employment or any economic concept.

Treatment: Get over it on your own. A “right” to health care cannot be conferred by government, even with the consent of a majority of the governed. Health care is a service, best regulated by demand and supply, with quantities signaled by prices. The American system of representative government makes it possible to do the best we can with the resources and principles we have, even if we try everything else first. Fortunately, our physical resources are those of the wealthiest nation on earth, made so by an inheritance of philosophical principles, such as self-reliance, charity, voluntary association for civic improvement, free choice and free markets. We must apply them to health care. We can have universal health care only if we are willing to pay for it.

9/25/2009: I Intend to Protest Your Protest by Mike Adams

Members of the Muslim Student Association (MSA) at Michigan State University (MSU) didn’t know what they were getting into when they tried to suppress the free speech rights of Professor Indrek Wichman. On February 28, 2006 he read in the MSU student newspaper a call to protest the publication of the Muhammad cartoons. The article struck a raw nerve. He responded with the following:

Dear Moslem Association: As a professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MSU I intend to protest your protest. I am offended not by cartoons, but by more mundane things like beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on public buildings, suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests (the latest in Turkey!), burnings of Christian churches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, the rapes of Scandinavian girls and women (called “whores” in your culture), the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris France. This is what offends me, a soft-spoken person and academic, and many, many, many of my colleagues. I counsel you dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Moslems to be very aware of this as you proceed with your infantile “protests.” If you do not like the values of the West--see the 1st Amendment--you are free to leave. I hope for God’s sake that most of you choose that option. Please return to your ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans. Cordially, I. S. Wichman, Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

Some may say this reaction was a tad over-heated. But in a university environment, the more important question is: Were the statements accurate? It’s tough to argue with the validity of Professor Wichman’s factual assertions. And even tougher to demand that Wichman remain morally neutral regarding the examples of Muslim misconduct he cites.

For over three weeks Professor Wichman heard nothing about his email. But behind the scenes, the MSA had called in CAIR and had three separate meetings with the MSU provost. The MSA and CAIR both demanded that Wichman be censured, disciplined, enrolled in diversity and sensitivity training, and even “re-educated” on Islam.

To his credit, the MSU Provost did not cave in to the CAIR/MSA demands. On March 20, 2006 he wrote Wichman a letter saying that he strongly disagreed with the “intemperate tone” of his email. But he added that Wichman still had rights to free speech. From there, things got worse.

The MSU Provost told Wichman that if he continued to “harass” and “intimidate” the MSU MSA - while creating a “hostile intellectual climate” - then formal charges consistent with MSU anti-discrimination policy (ADP) would be filed by MSU against him.

On April 24, 2006 Wichman realized that the issue had not quietly gone away. He began receiving telephone calls and emails from local newspapers, AP, Reuters and other national and international outlets. CAIR and MSA, frustrated by the MSU Provost, had gone over his head and published a response, organized a press conference, and made a national/international press release.

CAIR and MSA’s public call upon MSU to take “disciplinary action” against Wichman’s “Islamophobic” email was a classic example of Muslim cowardice. Michigan’s CAIR Executive Director Mr. Dawud Walid said it was “unconscionable for a professor to use his university e-mail account to foster a hostile learning environment for Muslim students.” He added, “The University needs to take appropriate disciplinary action in this case to demonstrate through its actions that anti-Muslim bigotry will not be tolerated on campus.”

It should be noted that Mr. Walid has gone to court to argue for applying Sharia law in mid-Michigan. That serves to undercut significantly his stature as an opponent of bigotry towards minorities.

I sat down for a beer - I believe it was a Danish beer – with Indrek Wichman in April. When he said he meant to “protest the protest” of the MSA he really meant it. He helped form a conservative faculty group at MSU. The group serves to protest speech codes, invite conservative speakers to campus, and represent students and faculty whose rights are trampled by the MSU administration.

Indrek Wichman is not your typical college professor. He is a true First Amendment hero.

Meanwhile, Dawud Walid is still fighting to repeal the First Amendment and keep Muslims from being offended. He wants to replace it with Sharia law so Muslims can freely beat their wives and publicly execute homosexuals.

A 6-Month Evaluation of the Obama by Joe Albero

August 31, 2009 -- In November 2008 I wrote out my evaluation of the Obama candidacy and what it might mean to America. I filed this away, but sent it to family members and a few close friends and associates just so I’d be accountable for my real time observations. It’s now been 6 months since Obama’s inauguration. (In the business world, this is typically when a first job review would occur; so, I made a note to myself to revisit his performance on the 6-month anniversary.) Thus, I now commit to filing my mid-year evaluation of our new President. As well, I’ve put in the file (but not forwarded to anyone) a separate “background check” — the one the press should’ve done on the Obama candidacy prior to presenting him to the American public —in case this is ever of relevance as things unfold.

As concerned as I was by Obama’s candidacy when I wrote out my November pre-election reservations, truth be known, I didn’t much like McCain either. At the time, I still had hopes that Obama might “govern from the center.” Six months into it, however, I can say that he’s been considerably worse than my worst fears. Thus, I’m updating my evaluation — this time with the fervent hope that by the year-end I can be genuinely more optimistic.

I’ve concluded that not only was Barack Obama too inexperienced to be President, but he also appears to be incompetent as an executive, more-than-just-politician-level-dishonest and a bit of a narcissist (if not a fascist). He seems to have little understanding of American history, her dreams, or her tremendous potential for risk-taking, self-correction and innovation. He and Michelle have turned out to be quintessential Ivy League “Oppression Studies majors” with (carefully concealed) “attitudes.” Obama seems, above all, to be a Community Organizer with shakedown credentials and extraordinary speaking ability.

All of this should have been clear -- had we simply done serious background checks. (The following 4 items, at least, should have been clear to voters:

1. His surrogate father figure was Frank Marshall Davis, an avowed Communist.

2. Barack served as a committed trainer for Community Activist and Marxist Saul Alinsky.

3. He sat for nearly 2 decades at the feet of Jeremiah Wright, an angry, anti-American “Black Liberation Theologist”.

4. His first autobiography, Dreams from My Father, was almost certainly ghost-written by William Ayers, a Vietnam-era domestic terrorist. [This last assertion has now been supported by careful analysis of syntax, spelling and common errors].) If these unusual threads (standing alone) are discounted to the point of not being disqualifiers, those evaluating Barack Obama might have considered that he’d never:

i) held a job in the private sector,

ii) managed a payroll,

iii) led a turnaround or

iv) held any sort of executive position.

But, none of this mattered in the fall of 2008. After 6 months, I’m left wondering if power brokers on the Far Left of American politics aren’t pinching themselves at their success in creating a fictitious character the press ushered to market in a Bush-weary and “politically correct” America.

In his second (!) autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, Obama recognizes the advantage of his tabula rasa “creation” when he writes, “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” And, project we did! Thus, the former Barry Soetoro of Honolulu, Jakarta, Mombasa, Occidental, Columbia, Harvard and the mean streets of Chicago moved at light speed from being the first-term senator nobody had ever heard of to President of the United States. In the process, despite numerous efforts, no one has yet seen his birth certificate, his college transcripts, his application to Occidental (likely as a “foreign student”?), or the passport he used to travel in 1981 to Pakistan with buddy Wahid Hamid (likely an Indonesian one?).

For some reason, the Obama campaign has, so far, spent $750,000.00 keeping these records out of public view. So, it’s easy to wonder -- if they supported Obama’s putative CV(resume) -- why not make them available and put to rest all suspicions about provenance, training and politics?

My growing hunch is that there’s virtually no paper trail because the Obama biography has been largely a fabrication. There -- I’ve said what increasing numbers of people must be thinking, but are afraid to voice. But, whether or not Obama is more than a cleverly-marketed fiction, and whatever one thinks of his history, one thing is clear. He finally does have a record to evaluate. And, it’s not a confidence-inspiring one from my standpoint.

At best, Obama is an attractive symbol for America and a compelling communicator; but he’s

1. Not an executive. He’s shown an utter inability to focus, to set priorities and to consider 2nd and 3rd order or long-term consequences to his actions. Lack of focus on priorities is fatal as a CEO; (but, maybe less so for a political leader?)

2. Not a steward or fiduciary for America. Obama clearly does not see his primary job as one of overseeing the security and well-being of America during his tenure as its Chief Executive. He’s not only unwilling to stand up for America, but he also regularly seems to go out of his way to apologize for her history. This makes it apparent that he believes his most important job is to change America into what he and Michelle think it should have been had we not suffered the Founders’ flawed vision.

At worst, Obama’s aims seem truly radical (if stealth); his methods pure Alinsky; and his success derivative of obfuscating the truth, creating crises, and rushing changes into law that no one can possibly absorb under artificial deadlines — all aimed at limiting private property rights, changing the Constitution and forever altering our free market system.

For those who consider Obama’s training and background irrelevant, they can now evaluate him as a Commander-in-Chief and CEO from what he’s done over his first 6 months.

Among many other things, these evidences have come in the form of:

1. A $787 billion “stimulus” package (sold as preventing a “crisis from becoming catastrophe”)

2. The failure to focus on addressing the banking crisis as “Job One”

3. The migration of TARP funds to non-banking concerns, viz., auto industry

4 Announcing tax increases in the middle of a recession

5. Failure to identify projects to fund job creation (Thus, <10% of stimulus yet spent)

6. Announcing that there would be “no pork” or “earmarks” in the “stimulus” package in order to get it passed without review when there were nearly 10,000 buried in the unread bill (including a $9B high-speed rail line to Las Vegas for Harry Reid)

7. Bailouts of the banking and auto industries

8. The appointment of a 31-year-old to manage the recreation of the auto companies

9. The exalting of union claims above those of bondholders (violating a 200+ year history of contract law and property rights)

10. The appointment of 34 unvetted “czars” -- creating more than in the House of Romanov between 1762 and 1917!

11. The failure to appoint a Cabinet of tax-paying, competent Americans (reason for the move to the Czar system of administration?)

12. The appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court despite an apparent lack of qualifications and judicial temperament,

13. The dark-of-night passage of “Cap and Trade” legislation (300-page-long addendum inserted at 3 am the morning of the vote in the House)

14. The high pressure tactics to rush through a budget-busting $1.6 trillion takeover of healthcare.

15. Phony “townhall” meetings with a fake cross-section of Americans selling Obamacare on ABC.

16. “Lying” about budget deficits — projecting 4% GDP growth by year-end.

17. “Lying” about job losses — projecting that if Congress would just ram through the “stimulus” that job losses could be halted at 8% (currently on their way to 10% and rising).

18. “Lying” about the costs of nationalized healthcare -- (just as when politicians projected Medicare’s cost in 1990 to be $3 billion, its actual cost turned out in 1990 to $98 billion — 30 times as much)

19. “Lying” that new entitlement programs will provide lower costs, better care, no significant tax increases, more competition (as government joins the fray!?) and keeping current private options. Claiming “free” healthcare will make America more competitive is baffling. Everyone knows the above are lies; but no one seems ready to call them out.

20. Forcing the “stimulus” package on states to impinge on their “States Rights”

21. Failing to support the freedom-loving citizens in Honduras and Iran (and instead, giving comfort to their dictators) to say nothing of his ineffectiveness with North Korea and anti-Israeli pronouncements.

22. Allocating $4 billion of “stimulus” funds to ACORN, HIS voter fraud thugs.

23. Seeking to push through Union Card Check, the so-called “Fairness Doctrine,” and threats to take away 2nd amendment rights (see Eric Holder), etc.

24. Moving the heretofore non-partisan census into the Whitehouse under the direction of Rahm Emanuel.

Whatever one thinks of the results, the process of getting to them should bother all Americans. In the Obama (Mayor Daley?) style of governing, it’s not clear that Congress — who can’t possibly process thoughtfully the blizzard of legislation — really serves any useful purpose other than to provide Politburo-style cover. Not only does Congress no longer debate legislation, but Obama has effectively circumvented its oversight of the executive branch by his appointment of czars.

In contrast to the direction Obama is taking us all, the Economist recently pointed out that 53% of all of the jobs created in the U.S. were created in one state last year: Texas (the most free market of all State economies and the “last best hope” for secession). Meanwhile, in California, -- as a perfect preview to “Obama’s America” -- job losses are already well into double digits, the state faces a $25 billion budget deficit and is closing down services and considering bankruptcy.

I cannot predict what will happen to Obama’s popularity, as people wake up to the size and intractability of the deficits he’s promoting, the unavailability of credit for small businesses, or the increased tax rates on energy and payrolls provoking a continuing loss of jobs as small businesses shed employees due to skyrocketing costs.

But, is bad economic news bad for Obama? Sadly, the answer, if one studies the Alinsky formula for bloodless revolution, is “Heck no!” Indeed, high unemployment is necessary for the Obama Redistribution Plan. According to Alinsky, only with high unemployment will people look to the government for help (and then become dependent), allowing government to gain control over the factors of productions. If one considers that the Alinsky manual might be Obama’s “playbook,” one can’t help but want to evaluate how closely it’s being followed.

Thus, in evaluating Obama’s performance, it’s probably worth noting (for the 6-month record) the key elements of the Alinsky formula. Written in 1971 by Chicago Organizer, Saul Alinsky, under the title of Rules for Radicals, this manual for effective change became Young Barack Obama’s “bible.” David Alinsky, son the author said of our new President: “Barack Obama patterned himself after the Saul Alinsky model in everything he has done since arriving in South Chicago.”

Alinsky clearly stated its purpose: “Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.”

9/23/2009: Palin Addresses Asian Investors
Former Governor Touches on Budget Deficit, Health Care and China
by Jonathan Cheng and Alex Frangos

HONG KONG -- Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, in what was billed as her first public-speaking engagement outside North America, blamed the world financial crisis on government excesses and called for a new round of deregulation and tax cuts for U.S. businesses.

“We got into this mess because of government interference in the first place,” the former Republican U.S. vice presidential candidate said Wednesday at a conference sponsored by investment firm CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets. “We’re not interested in government fixes, we’re interested in freedom,” she added.

[Read More]

9/23/2009: Omnipresent Obama by Brent Bozell

Following his usual mantra that “to watch me is to love me,” Barack Obama appeared on five Sunday interview shows and since that wasn’t enough, then the David Letterman show on Monday night. He remains convinced that the more he plays dust speck in the national eye, the further he’ll get in passing his leftist agenda. He’s also confident our media won’t hold him accountable. They just hold him.

“I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to watch you work!” a beaming Letterman gushed to Obama. Even during that show, Letterman was still whacking away at George W. Bush as an idiot, unctuously currying favor with the new president. Letterman doesn’t pretend to be an objective journalist, of course. But can you recall him ever voicing his satisfaction with conservatives?

Perhaps the most amazing thing Obama did -- over and over -- on Sunday was to scold the media for making the national dialogue coarser by allowing his critics to have a voice on the networks. “Let’s face it, the easiest way to get on television right now is to be really rude,” he said.

Obama should be embarrassed. This is amateurish and silly (if I say so rudely). It’s also a broken record. When Reagan, Bush I and Bush II were in office, nasty demonstrators -- even rioters -- were celebrated by the left. But when Democrats take control (Clinton, Obama), any criticism becomes angry, hateful, and now racist.

Obama’s most ridiculous answer came as only one network host -- ABC’s George Stephanopoulos -- inquired (softly) about the ACORN scandal. “Frankly, it’s not something I’ve followed closely,” Obama claimed, adding he had not been aware that ACORN received much federal money.

This is ludicrous, a little like George Bush claiming he didn’t follow the Texas Rangers, or Dick Cheney declaring he didn’t know Halliburton received much federal money. John Fund laid out the whole history for the Wall Street Journal. In Illinois, Obama served as ACORN’s attorney and a top trainer at ACORN’s Chicago organizing conferences. In 1996, Obama filled out a questionnaire and put ACORN at the top of the list of his key supporters for his state Senate campaign.

Then, during the presidential campaign, Obama leaned on the group for support, but shamelessly lied to the press about the connection. In 2007, in a speech to ACORN’s leaders prior to their political arm’s endorsement of his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was effusive: “I’ve been fighting alongside of ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

This president is starting to lie with disturbing regularity. Obama’s campaign aides denied he had been an ACORN trainer until the New York Times found records to prove it. Team Obama quietly gave an ACORN subsidiary $832,000 for get-out-the-vote activities in key primary states. On their financial disclosure forms, they claimed the money was for “staging, sound, lighting.” It must have been one helluva stage. They only stopped lying after the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review revealed their true nature.

This wasn’t the only unpleasant line of questioning that most of the networks avoided. Only NBC’s David Gregory asked about the role of liability reform in cutting health care costs. “You’re not saying to the left they’ve got to accept malpractice reform, or caps on jury awards. You don’t even think that that contributes to the escalating cost of health care.”

Obama just ignored Gregory’s question. Despite his reputation in the Bush White House as a pushy nuisance in the briefing room, Gregory didn’t even attempt a weak follow-up with Obama. He changed the subject to Jimmy Carter suggesting opposition to Obama was racist.

Only CBS asked the president about his abandonment of a missile defense shield in central Europe. In his final question, Bob Schieffer pressed, “Shouldn’t you have tried to get something from the Russians in exchange for doing that?” As usual, Obama said he was doing everything smarter and more efficiently than Bush, and he also blurted that Russia “had always been paranoid” about missile defense.

NBC’s Gregory skipped that question to Obama, but then insisted on putting the screws to Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham minutes later: “I want you on the record on the missile defense change from the White House. The Defense Secretary wrote in The New York Times this morning, ‘Those who say we’re scrapping missile defense in Europe are either misinformed or misrepresenting what we are doing.’”

At this point, you just start laughing.

9/23/2009: Choosing The Right College by Thomas Sowell

...There is no such thing as a “best” college, any more than there is any such thing as a “best” wife or a “best” husband. Who would be best for a particular person depends on that person.

...Among the things you need to know about a particular college is whether it has a real curriculum or just a smorgasbord of courses, so that it is possible to graduate knowing nothing about history, economics or science, for example. Some of the most prestigious colleges in the country are places where you can graduate completely ignorant of such fundamental subjects.

What also matters is whether the intellectual atmosphere is one in which competing ideas are explored and debated, or one in which there is a prevailing orthodoxy of political correctness that a student can challenge only at the risk of being ridiculed by the professor, given a low grade or-- in some places-- suspended or expelled for violating a campus speech code by giving an honest opinion about things where an orthodoxy is imposed, such as issues involving “race, class and gender.”

In short, what is important is not choosing the “best” college, according to some statistics that conceal the arbitrary choices behind the objective-looking numbers. What is important is choosing the right college for you...

[Read More]

9/23/2009: Lying Propaganda by Walter E. Williams

Michael Moore’s new film, “Capitalism: A Love Story” will be released next month. I’ve neither seen nor read reviews of the film, except for a short piece in the London Telegraph (9/6/09) titled “Michael Moore film calls capitalism evil.” Aware of Michael Moore’s previous films, I know that it will be at best a misleading story about capitalism. So let’s do some defensive mental preparation, not about the film but what is and what is not capitalism.

Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private ownership and control over the means of production. The distribution of goods and services and their prices are mainly determined by competition in a free market. Under such a system the primary job of government is to protect private property, enforce contracts and ensure rule of law.

There has never been a pure free market capitalistic system just as there has never been a pure communist or socialist system, where there is government ownership of the means of production and each individual has equal access to society’s resources. However, we can rank economies as to whether they are closer to capitalism or closer to communism or socialism. If one ranked countries according to whether they were closer to the capitalistic end of the spectrum or the socialistic or communistic end, then ranked countries according to per capita GDP and finally rank countries according to Freedom House’s “Map of Freedom in the World,” he would find a pattern that is by no means a coincidence. The people in those countries closer to the capitalist end of the economic spectrum have far greater income and enjoy greater human rights protections than those toward the socialist and communist end.

According to the London Telegraph article, Moore’s film features priests who say capitalism is anti-Christian by failing to protect the poor. This is pure nonsense and revealed as such by asking, “If you’re an unborn spirit, condemned by God to a life of poverty but allowed to choose the country in which to be poor, would you choose a country near the communist end of the economic spectrum or the capitalist end?” If you chose the United States, you’d find that according to the government surveys, the typical “poor” American has cable or satellite TV, two color TVs, and a DVD player or VCR. He has air conditioning, a car, a microwave, a refrigerator, a stove, and a clothes washer and dryer, and whether he has health insurance or not, he is able to obtain medical care when needed. Try to find that in Cuba, Russia, China or North Korea. If we buy into the nonsense of Moore’s priests, the world’s poor people are incredibly stupid. Whether fleeing legally or illegally, their destination country is likely to be closer to capitalism than their departure country.

Most of our country’s serious problems can be laid at the feet of Congress and the White House and not at capitalism. Take the financial crisis. One-third of the $15 trillion of mortgages in existence in 2008 are owned, or securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, the Federal Housing and the Veterans Administration. Banks didn’t mind making risky loans and Wall Street buyers didn’t mind buying these repackaged loans because they assumed that they would be guaranteed by the federal government: read bailout by taxpayers. Under a capitalist system, financial institutions would not have been intimidated or encouraged into making risky loans and neither would they have been bailed out if they did so.

Social Security, Medicare and its coverage of prescription drugs have an unfunded liability that exceeds $100 trillion. When those roosters come home to roost, they will make the financial meltdown we’ve been though look like child’s play.

Not withstanding all of the demagoguery, it is capitalism not socialism is that made us a great country and its socialism that will be our undoing.

09/23/2009: Regulatory Reconstruction Moves to Congressional Front Burner

“The battle to pass regulatory reform legislation in the face of intense opposition launches in earnest Wednesday morning with a hearing featuring Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, who will once again champion a package of sweeping changes that only Congress has the power to make.” (Washington Post, Wednesday)

Like they know what they’re doing.

FEE Timely Classic

“The Pretense of Regulatory Knowledge“ by Sheldon Richman

9/22/2009: How Missouri Cut Junk Lawsuits By Matt Blunt
We showed how to do malpractice reform, if Congress wants a model.

There has been a lot of talk in Washington about cutting wasteful health-care spending, but it is troubling that such talk has not created a sense of urgency for national tort reform. It is especially frustrating because states have already shown that curbing junk lawsuits can cut costs, create jobs, and increase the quality of care available to patients.

I know this because that is exactly what happened in Missouri when, as governor, I helped to enact comprehensive reforms.

I took office in January 2005 at a time when runaway lawsuits were driving up the cost of doing business in my state and forcing doctors and other business owners to close their doors. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform keeps a list of states ranked according to their legal environment. At the time, Missouri ranked among the 10 worst.

“Venue-shopping,” a tactic that involves shifting a case to a friendly court regardless of where the injury occurred, was common. Defendants could be made to pay 100% of a judgment even if they were only 1% responsible for the injury. And caps on damages had been rendered meaningless by state court decisions.

This legal environment raised the cost of health care for everyone and imposed stiff costs on businesses. It also forced doctors to close their doors. For example, the eastern half of Jackson County, one of Missouri’s largest, lost its only neurosurgeons in 2003 due to high malpractice insurance costs. Many other parts of the state suffered from a lack of doctors able to deliver babies. One obstetrician who delivered more than 200 babies annually was forced to quit after his annual insurance premiums skyrocketed 82% in just one year. Making matters worse, few new doctors wanted to move to Missouri. One Kansas City area doctor sent letters to more than 400 physicians finishing their residencies and did not receive a single response back.

To counteract these problems we required that cases be heard in the county where the alleged injury occurred, and we changed the law so that defendants could only be forced to pay a full judgment if their fault exceeded 50%.

We put a $350,000 cap on noneconomic damages and created rules to prevent baseless cases from getting off of the ground. Previously, personal injury lawyers could file cases if they got a written affidavit from any qualified health-care provider claiming that there was negligence. We tightened that by requiring that the affidavit come from an active professional practicing substantially the same specialty as the defendant.

We also took another common-sense step. Doctors often express empathy to a suffering patient regardless of fault. Saying you are “sorry” for someone’s plight is a testament of good character, and should not be used against you in court. But tort lawyers were claiming that such statements were an admission of guilt. We stopped that abuse.

Tort reform works. Missouri’s medical malpractice claims are now at a 30-year low. Average payouts are about $50,000 below the 2005 average. Malpractice insurers are also turning a profit for the fifth year in a row—allowing other insurers to compete for business in Missouri. This will drive down costs, which will save government programs money as well as improve the system for patients. It will also leave doctors with more resources to invest in better care.

Since 2005, Missouri has moved up to 31st on the Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform’s list.

Because we passed tort reform, cut taxes and controlled state spending, Missouri’s economy is now in better shape than it would have been. During the four years I was in office, about 70,000 net new jobs were created in my state.

Texas has seen similar success from its 2003 tort reforms. The number of doctors applying for a license in that state has increased by 57% and doctors’ insurance rates have declined by an average of 27%. There are now more doctors in Texas providing care in previously underserved areas.

There is no reason that the success that Missouri, Texas and other states have experienced cannot be replicated nationally. States are demonstrating that tort reform lowers costs, expands access, and creates jobs. The time to get behind national tort reform is now.

Mr. Blunt, a Republican, is a former governor of Missouri.

9/22/2009: The Airport for No One
The Senate votes to keep funding Jack Murtha’s weekend landing strip.

Republicans had their Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska, and now Democrats seem intent on wrapping themselves firmly around Congressman Jack Murtha’s Airport for No One in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. So much for changing the culture of spending in Washington.

Last week 53 Senators—including 51 Democrats—voted down an amendment by Republican Jim DeMint of South Carolina to stop spending federal funds on the airport that Mr. Murtha built with more than $150 million in federal subsidies and earmarks over the last two decades. (The Republicans voting against Mr. DeMint were Kit Bond and George Voinovich, neither of whom is running for re-election.) The airport has three daily commercial flights, and those are to Washington, D.C. The federal subsidies average $100 for each of the fewer than 30 passengers who use the airport each day, which means it would be cheaper for taxpayers to buy a train ticket for Mr. Murtha and other Washington D.C.-bound travelers than to keep the airport open.

Pennsylvania’s two Senators, Democrats Arlen Specter and Robert P. Casey, Jr., denounced the DeMint amendment because it singled out one airport. Of course, so do Mr. Murtha’s earmarks. The Senators also argued that airport funding decisions should be left to the Federal Aviation Administration. But everyone knows that Mr. Murtha’s clout at the House Appropriations Committee trumps the FAA. Earlier this year the airport received $800,000 in federal stimulus money, which has been spent in part to pave a second runway, even though the first one is barely in use. Mr. Murtha also secured $8.5 million for a new radar system that’s never been used.

Mr. DeMint pleaded with his colleagues that “if we can’t cut funding for this project, we can’t cut anything in Washington” and that the Senate will have declared “there’s no such thing as waste, there’s no such thing as fraud and corruption.” He lost, but voters keeping score can add it to their mental tally of why we have a $1.6 trillion deficit.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A24

9/22/2009: Taxes, Depression, and Our Current Troubles By Arthur B. Laffer
Tariffs, rising state and federal taxes, and currency devaluation ruined the 1930s, and they could do the same today.

The 1930s has become the sole object lesson for today’s monetary policy. Over the past 12 months, the Federal Reserve has increased the monetary base (bank reserves plus currency in circulation) by well over 100%. While currency in circulation has grown slightly, there’s been an impressive 17-fold increase in bank reserves. The federal-funds target rate now stands at an all-time low range of zero to 25 basis points, with the 91-day Treasury bill yield equally low. All this has been done to avoid a liquidity crisis and a repeat of the mistakes that led to the Great Depression.

Even with this huge increase in the monetary base, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has reiterated his goal not to repeat the mistakes made back in the 1930s by tightening credit too soon, which he says would send the economy back into recession. The strong correlation between soaring unemployment and falling consumer prices in the early 1930s leads Mr. Bernanke to conclude that tight money caused both. To prevent a double dip, super easy monetary policy is the key.

While Fed policy was undoubtedly important, it was not the primary cause of the Great Depression or the economy’s relapse in 1937. The Smoot-Hawley tariff of June 1930 was the catalyst that got the whole process going. It was the largest single increase in taxes on trade during peacetime and precipitated massive retaliation by foreign governments on U.S. products. Huge federal and state tax increases in 1932 followed the initial decline in the economy thus doubling down on the impact of Smoot-Hawley. There were additional large tax increases in 1936 and 1937 that were the proximate cause of the economy’s relapse in 1937.

In 1930-31, during the Hoover administration and in the midst of an economic collapse, there was a very slight increase in tax rates on personal income at both the lowest and highest brackets. The corporate tax rate was also slightly increased to 12% from 11%. But beginning in 1932 the lowest personal income tax rate was raised to 4% from less than one-half of 1% while the highest rate was raised to 63% from 25%. (That’s not a misprint!) The corporate rate was raised to 13.75% from 12%. All sorts of Federal excise taxes too numerous to list were raised as well. The highest inheritance tax rate was also raised in 1932 to 45% from 20% and the gift tax was reinstituted with the highest rate set at 33.5%.

But the tax hikes didn’t stop there. In 1934, during the Roosevelt administration, the highest estate tax rate was raised to 60% from 45% and raised again to 70% in 1935. The highest gift tax rate was raised to 45% in 1934 from 33.5% in 1933 and raised again to 52.5% in 1935. The highest corporate tax rate was raised to 15% in 1936 with a surtax on undistributed profits up to 27%. In 1936 the highest personal income tax rate was raised yet again to 79% from 63%—a stifling 216% increase in four years. Finally, in 1937 a 1% employer and a 1% employee tax was placed on all wages up to $3,000.

Because of the number of states and their diversity I’m going to aggregate all state and local taxes and express them as a percentage of GDP. This measure of state tax policy truly understates the state and local tax contribution to the tragedy we call the Great Depression, but I’m sure the reader will get the picture. In 1929, state and local taxes were 7.2% of GDP and then rose to 8.5%, 9.7% and 12.3% for the years 1930, ‘31 and ‘32 respectively.

The damage caused by high taxation during the Great Depression is the real lesson we should learn. A government simply cannot tax a country into prosperity. If there were one warning I’d give to all who will listen, it is that U.S. federal and state tax policies are on an economic crash trajectory today just as they were in the 1930s. Net legislated state-tax increases as a percentage of previous year tax receipts are at 3.1%, their highest level since 1991; the Bush tax cuts are set to expire in 2011; and additional taxes to pay for health-care and the proposed cap-and-trade scheme are on the horizon.

In addition to all of these tax issues, the U.S. in the early 1930s was on a gold standard where paper currency was legally convertible into gold. Both circulated in the economy as money. At the outset of the Great Depression people distrusted banks but trusted paper currency and gold. They withdrew deposits from banks, which because of a fractional reserve system caused a drop in the money supply in spite of a rising monetary base. The Fed really had little power to control either bank reserves or interest rates.

The increase in the demand for paper currency and gold not only had a quantity effect on the money supply but it also put upward pressure on the price of gold, which meant that dollar prices of all goods and services had to fall for the relative price of gold to rise. The deflation of the early 1930s was not caused by tight money. It was the result of panic purchases of fixed-dollar priced gold. From the end of 1929 until early 1933 the Consumer Price Index fell by 27%.

By mid-1932 there were public fears of a change in the gold-dollar relationship. In their classic text, “A Monetary History of the United States,” economists Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz wrote, “Fears of devaluation were widespread and the public’s preference for gold was unmistakable.” Panic ensued and there was a rush to buy gold.

In early 1933, the federal government (not the Federal Reserve) declared a bank holiday prohibiting banks from paying out gold or dealing in foreign exchange. An executive order made it illegal for anyone to “hoard” gold and forced everyone to turn in their gold and gold certificates to the government at an exchange value of $20.67 per ounce of gold in return for paper currency and bank deposits. All gold clauses in contracts private and public were declared null and void and by the end of January 1934 the price of gold, most of which had been confiscated by the government, was raised to $35 per ounce. In other words, in less than one year the government confiscated as much gold as it could at $20.67 an ounce and then devalued the dollar in terms of gold by almost 60%. That’s one helluva tax.

The 1933-34 devaluation of the dollar caused the money supply to grow by over 60% from April 1933 to March 1937, and over that same period the monetary base grew by over 35% and adjusted reserves grew by about 100%. Monetary policy was about as easy as it could get. The consumer price index from early 1933 through mid-1937 rose by about 15% in spite of double-digit unemployment. And that’s the story.

The lessons here are pretty straightforward. Inflation can and did occur during a depression, and that inflation was strictly a monetary phenomenon.

My hope is that the people who are running our economy do look to the Great Depression as an object lesson. My fear is that they will misinterpret the evidence and attribute high unemployment and the initial decline in prices to tight money, while increasing taxes to combat budget deficits.

Mr. Laffer is the chairman of Laffer Associates and co-author of “The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy—If We Let It Happen” (Threshold, 2008).

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A25

9/16/2009: Acorn Runs Off the Rails by John Fund
‘We’re just community organizers, just like the president used to be.’

On Monday, the U.S. Senate voted 83-7 to strip Acorn, the premier community organizing group on the left, of more than $1.6 million in federal housing money meant to assist low-income people obtain loans and prepare tax forms. This dramatic step followed last Friday’s decision by the U.S. Census Bureau to sever its ties with the organization, one of several community groups it was partnering with to conduct the nation’s head count.

Both of these actions came after secretly recorded videos involving employees in Acorn’s Brooklyn, N.Y., Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Md. and San Bernardino, Calif. offices were televised on Fox News. The videos were recorded by two independent filmmakers who posed as a prostitute and a pimp and said they were planning to import underage women from El Salvador for the sex trade. They asked for and received advice on getting a housing loan and evading federal taxes.

In response, Acorn has so far fired four of the employees seen on the videos. But it claimed the videos were “doctored” and accused critics of a smear campaign and “racist coverage” of the incidents.

Such rhetoric in the past has deflected scrutiny of Acorn tactics, such as street demonstrations and boycotts against banks to force lower credit standards for home loans, which a congressional report found contributed to the subprime loan mess. But now Acorn may be finally running off the rails.

Last week, 11 of its workers were accused by Florida prosecutors of falsifying information on 888 voter registration forms. Last month, Acorn’s former Las Vegas, Nev., field director, Christopher Edwards, agreed to testify against the group in a case in which Las Vegas election officials say 48% of the voter registration forms the group turned in were “clearly fraudulent.” Acorn itself is charged with 13 counts of illegally using a quota system to compensate workers in an effort to boost the number of registrations. (Acorn has denied wrongdoing in all of these cases.)

A growing number of people once affiliated with Acorn want nothing more to do with the group. Marcel Reid, for example, was one of eight national Acorn board members who were removed last year after demanding an audit of the group’s books. She notes that Acorn received $7.4 million in contributions from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) between 2005 and 2008 but actively fights unionization efforts by its own employees. Ms. Reid also notes that Acorn was sanctioned by the National Labor Relations Board in 2003 for illegally firing workers trying to organize a union.

In 1995, Acorn unsuccessfully sued California to be exempt from the minimum wage, claiming that “the more that Acorn must pay each individual outreach worker . . . the fewer outreach workers it will be able to hire.” The decision to file that lawsuit was made by Wade Rathke, who founded Acorn in 1970 and was its long-time leader. He was forced by the group’s board to resign last year after it found that he’d engaged in a cover-up of a nearly $1 million embezzlement of Acorn funds by his brother Dale, then the group’s chief financial officer.

Mr. Rathke now the chief organizer of a New Orleans-based local of the SEIU, a key Acorn ally is out with a new book, “Citizen Wealth,” in which he touts a vision of “maximum eligible participation” by Americans in welfare programs as a way to force radical social change.

Regardless of the wisdom of that vision, it’s time to follow the lead of the Census Bureau and cut the government’s ties to the highly dubious characters surrounding Acorn. (The group has taken in more than $53 million in direct funding from the federal government since 1994, and substantially more indirectly through states and cities that receive federal block grants.)

Acorn’s allies in Congress have long stopped every move to rein it in. Rep. Steve King (R., Iowa), for example, has tried six times to get House floor votes restricting Acorn’s access to federal funds but has been blocked by Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hand-picked Rules Committee members. Some Democrats have grumbled. Michigan’s John Conyers, chair of the Judiciary Committee, urged a hearing be held on Acorn abuses in March, but later told the Washington Times “the powers that be decided against it.”

There is a chance the latest scandals will convince Democrats that Acorn is too toxic a political partner. And President Barack Obama, who once ran a voter-registration program for an Acorn partner (Project Vote) and then worked for Acorn as a lawyer on key cases, has every incentive to distance himself further from the organization.

Former Acorn board members tell me the group has always been confident it will be protected. After the Nevada voter-registration fraud indictment last May, Bonnie Greathouse, Acorn’s chief organizer in the state, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that “we’ve had bad publicity before” and survived. “People always come forward to our defense. We’re just community organizers, just like the president used to be.”

9/15/2009: Fables for Adults by Thomas Sowell

Many years ago, as a small child, I was told one of those old-fashioned fables for children. It was about a dog with a bone in his mouth, who was walking on a log across a stream.

The dog looked down into the water and saw his reflection. He thought it was another dog with a bone in his mouth-- and it seemed to him that the other dog’s bone was bigger than his. He decided that he was going to take the other dog’s bone away and opened his mouth to attack. The result was that his own bone fell into the water and was lost.

At the time, I didn’t like that story and wished they hadn’t told it to me. But the passing years and decades have made me realize how important that story was, because it was not really about dogs but about people.

Today we are living in a time when the President of the United States is telling us that he is going to help us take that other dog’s bone away-- and the end result is likely to be very much like what it was in that children’s fable.

Whether we are supposed to take that bone away from the doctors, the hospitals, the pharmaceutical companies or the insurance companies, the net result is likely to be the same-- most of us will end up with worse medical care than we have available today. We will have opened our mouth and dropped a very big bone into the water.

While I was told a story in my childhood to help me understand something about the real world, today adults are being told things to reduce them to childish thinking.

The most childish of all the things being said in the august setting of a joint session of Congress last week was that millions of people can be added to the government’s health insurance plan without increasing the federal deficit at all.

If the President of the United States could do that, it is hard to imagine what he would do as an encore. Walking on water would be an anticlimax.

What is equally childish is the notion that the great majority of Americans who have medical insurance, and who say they are satisfied with it, should be panicked and stampeded into supporting vast increases in the arbitrary power of Washington bureaucrats to take medical decisions out of the hands of their doctors-- all ostensibly because a minority of Americans do not have medical insurance.

There was a time, within living memory, when most Americans did not have health insurance-- and it was not the end of the world, as so many in politics and the media seem to be depicting it today.

As someone who lived through that era, and who spent decades without medical insurance, I find it hard to be panicked and stampeded into bigger and worse problems because some people do not have medical insurance, including many who could afford it if they chose to.

What did we do, back during the years when most Americans had no medical insurance? I did what most people did. I depended on a “single payer”-- myself. When I didn’t have the money, I paid off my medical bills in installments.

The birth of my first child was not covered by medical insurance. I paid off the bill, month by month, until the time finally came when I could tell my wife that the baby was now ours, free and clear.

In a country where everything imaginable is bought and paid for on credit, why is it suddenly a national crisis if some people cannot pay cash up front for medical treatment?

That is not the best way to do things for all people and all medical treatments, which is why most Americans today choose to have medical insurance. But millions of other people choose not to-- often young and healthy people, sometimes deadbeats who use emergency rooms and don’t pay at all.

Is this ideal? No. But if every deviation from the ideal is a reason to be panicked and stampeded into putting dangerous arbitrary powers into the hands of government, then go directly to totalitarianism, do not pass “Go”, do not collect $200.

And go ahead and drop your bone in the water, in hopes that you can get somebody else’s bigger bone.

9/15/2009: The Left Is Right -- Taxes Are a Moral Issue by Dennis Prager

One principle that all those on the left hold is that taxes constitute more than an economic issue; they are, first and foremost, a moral one. Economists on the left may argue for higher taxes on economic grounds but they and we know that at bottom, higher taxes, especially “taxing the rich,” is what they believe morality demands.

For example, there are obviously only two possible ways to reduce government deficits: reduce spending or increase taxes (or some combination of both). The left advocates the later; the right advocates the former. Left-wing spokesmen, such as New York Times economics columnist and Princeton University professor of economics Paul Krugman, may offer economic arguments for raising taxes in order to lower government deficits, but their real motivations are moral: reducing economic inequality (by redistributing income) and expanding government (because government is the most effective way to help all citizens).

Now, as it happens, not only is there is nothing wrong with being animated by moral concerns -- we should all be. The problem with the left’s advocacy of higher taxes is not that it is rooted in moral concerns. The problem -- actually the two problems -- are these:

First, higher taxes are rarely morally defensible. In fact, on purely moral grounds -- in other words, even if they did effectively reduce the deficit without paying an economic price for doing so -- they are usually not moral. More on this below.

Second, higher taxes are usually economically counterproductive. This does not matter to the left, however, because economic growth is not what most interests the left. Since Karl Marx, the left has always been far more interested in economic equality than in economic growth. It is true that liberals such as John F. Kennedy were more concerned with economic growth than with economic equality -- which is why he advocated lowering taxes -- but for much of the last century, unlike today, there was a major difference between liberal and left.

Now to return to the moral arguments, my difference with the left is not that I oppose morality dictating economic policy. I believe, in fact, that virtually all social policies should be rooted in moral concerns. My difference with the left is that I am convinced that moral considerations dictate lower, not higher, taxes.

It is too bad that libertarians and conservatives rarely take on the left on moral grounds because the left’s moral foundations are as weak as their economic foundations.

The very notion of an income tax is morally debatable. On what moral grounds can the state force a citizen essentially at gunpoint to give away his legally and morally earned money? Why isn’t taxation a form of legalized stealing? The obvious answer is that common sense dictates that citizens have the moral right, even the moral obligation, to vote to give money to, at the very least, enable a government to fund a police force, sustain a national defense, and help those incapable of helping themselves or of being helped by others.

But at some point beyond that, taxation becomes nothing more than legalized stealing. Obviously, people will differ over where exactly that point is, but no rational person disputes that such a point exists. No one could argue that a 100 percent tax -- even if it paid for every need every member of the society had -- was moral and not simply a form of theft.

So moral problem No.1 with taxation is the morality of forcing other people -- under threat of violence -- to give their money away.

A second moral problem is having some people give at a greater percentage rate than others. The biblical notion of tithing, for example, is entirely universal -- everyone gave a tenth what he had. No one was forced to give half while others gave a tenth.

A third moral problem is allowing those who pay no tax (such as the federal income tax) to vote on how much others will be forced to pay. It is quite difficult to morally defend the fact that about half of Americans pay no federal income tax, yet they determine how much the other half will be forced to pay.

A fourth moral problem is that the higher the taxes, the more decent people become cheaters. One of the leading religious ethicists of our time, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, author of two volumes of Jewish ethical law, told me years ago when he lived in Israel during the height of its socialism with its correspondingly high taxes that he witnessed the finest citizens, religious and secular alike, having to cheat on taxes or be rendered impoverished. I have never forgotten that.

I know no one in America today -- and I know extraordinarily honest and generous people, liberal and conservative -- who does not in some way “cheat” on taxes -- as, for example, reporting expenses as business expenses that are not really so. I place the word cheat within quotation marks because not all cheating is illegal. Some people figure out how to avoid paying what the law demands through completely legal, but ethically questionable, means.

At a certain level of taxation, virtually every honest person is reduced to cheating either legally or illegally.

A fifth moral problem is that the higher the tax rate, the lower the charity rate. This is universally true. The more people give to the state, the less they give to their neighbor -- and even to members of their family -- in need.

And sixth and only finally because of the limitations in size of a single column, the higher the taxes, the less people are inclined to work hard. Why should they? At a given point, people just conclude that work is for suckers.

And I haven’t even begun to discuss the economic failings of higher taxes.

So, next time someone on the left advocates higher taxes, remember two things: He or she is coming from a moral, not an economic, position. And the moral case against higher taxes is far more powerful than the moral case for them.

9/15/2009: Let’s Grade Wall Street Like Colleges
The more rating agencies the better.

...At a time when the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking for ways to improve the flawed credit ratings that contributed so much to our financial crisis, it might do well to stop anointing particular credit rating agencies. Forcing these firms to compete for customers the way the college guides do would give us better ratings—and fewer investors lulled into the complacency that comes from thinking Uncle Sam has done the due diligence. At least when it comes to ratings, the Groves of Academe have a thing or two to teach our captains of finance about competition...

[Read More]

9/14/2009: Angry, Polite ‘Mob’ Descends on D.C. By James Freeman
We’re mad as hell and hope you have a nice day!

WASHINGTON, D,C. -- The running joke at Saturday’s Taxpayer March on the Capitol was the claim by Democrats that those protesting against ObamaCare constitute a “mob.” Aside from the few kooks who can be expected to show up at any large gathering (especially when there’s media attention), participants were generally about as threatening as the lunchtime crowd at Cracker Barrel -- and just as old.

Health care is a huge day-to-day issue for the senior set. They certainly were over-represented on the West Front of the Capitol. In fact, if this is a radical movement, it might be the first in history to be led by retired people.

Attendees were angry about the expanding size of government, but also exceedingly polite about their anger. It would be hard to find a crowd of 75,000-plus that was more courteous. Many were not just retired, but retired specifically from the work of defending the country: So many veterans were in attendance that it almost seemed a U.S. military reunion.

Among the most popular T-shirts was one that announced: “I’ll keep my guns, freedom and money. You can keep the Change.” Other messages on posters, banners and T-shirts included the following:

“From tiny Acorns, mighty socialists grow.”

“The Constitution: The Other Document They Never Read.”

“I’m not your ATM.”

“We came unarmed (this time).”

And... “I am the Mob.”

Given how much the average retired person loves a long bus ride followed by standing around outside for hours at a time, the gathering on the Capitol lawn was an impressive one, even if it wasn’t in the same ballpark as some of the more historic gatherings. Then again, this group has seen a lot of U.S. history -- and apparently is convinced the threat from ObamaCare is indeed historic.

9/11/2009: Medicare for Dummies
Contradictions worthy of the Marx Brothers.

The thing about the bully pulpit is that Presidents can make the most fantastic claims and it takes days to sort the reality from the myths. So as a public service, let’s try to navigate the, er, remarkable Medicare discussion that President Obama delivered on Wednesday. It isn’t easy...

[Read More]

9/11/2009: The President’s Tort Two-Step
Special-interests and the health-care status quo.

On Wednesday the president told Congress “I will not stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are.” In fact, the administration is standing by to allow its most special, special interest to drive this debate. What the tort bar wants, the tort bar gets. Health insurers should be so lucky.

...Tort reform is a policy no-brainer. Experts on left and right agree that defensive medicine—ordering tests and procedures solely to protect against Joe Lawyer—adds enormously to health costs. The estimated dollar benefits of reform range from a conservative $65 billion a year to perhaps $200 billion. In context, Mr. Obama’s plan would cost about $100 billion annually. That the president won’t embrace even modest change that would do so much, so quickly, to lower costs, has left Americans suspicious of his real ambitions.

It’s also a political no-brainer. Americans are on board. Polls routinely show that between 70% and 80% of Americans believe the country suffers from excess litigation. The entire health community is on board. Republicans and swing-state Democrats are on board. State and local governments, which have struggled to clean up their own civil-justice systems, are on board. In a debate defined by flash points, this is a rare area of agreement.

The only folks not on board are a handful of powerful trial lawyers, and a handful of politicians who receive a generous cut of those lawyers’ contingency fees. The legal industry was the top contributor to the Democratic Party in the 2008 cycle, stumping up $47 million. The bill is now due, and Democrats are dutifully making a health-care down payment...

Over in the House the discussion isn’t about tort reform, but about tort opportunities. During the House Ways & Means markup of a health bill, Texas Democrat Lloyd Doggett ($1.5 million from lawyers) introduced language to allow freelance lawyers to sue any outfit (say, McDonald’s) that might contribute to Medicare costs. Only after Blue Dogs freaked out did the idea get dropped, though the trial bar has standing orders that Democrats make another run at it in any House-Senate conference...

[Read More]

9/13/2009: What ‘right’ to health care? by Jeff Jacoby (The Boston Globe)

‘For what my grandpa called the cause of his life,’ Max Allen said, ‘that every American will have decent quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege, we pray to the Lord.’ During Senator Edward Kennedy’s funeral in Boston’s Mission Church last month, his 12-year-old grandson offered an intercessory prayer:

Opinions differed on whether a funeral was the right place to importune the Almighty for universal health care. But that He is the source of fundamental rights is in fact a core American belief. The Declaration of Independence pronounces it a self-evident truth that human beings ‘are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights’ – rights that include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Health care isn’t on that list. Should it be?

A great deal depends on the answer, for the Declaration’s very next sentence affirms that the purpose of government is to ‘secure’ those rights against infringement. If access to health care is deemed a fundamental right, then the government must be obliged to guarantee that access to every citizen. Medical treatment would have to be available on an equal basis to anyone seeking it, regardless of age or physical condition or ability to pay. Washington could no more entrust the provision of health care to private markets than it does freedom of religion: Your religious liberty, after all, is not a commodity you must purchase – it is yours by right, no matter where you live or how much you are worth. Should the same be true of health care?

Ted Kennedy was hardly alone in saying so.

When Barack Obama was asked during one of the 2008 presidential debates whether health care is a right, a privilege, or a responsibility, he answered promptly: ‘I think it should be a right for every American.’ The 2008 Democratic National Platform avows in its opening paragraph that ‘affordable health care is a basic right.’ When the Harvard Community Health Plan commissioned a survey on the subject some years back, 90 percent of respondents said that everyone had the right to ‘the best possible health care -- as good as a millionaire.’

It is not hard to understand the urgent passion with which so many people approach the issue of health care. And it would take a remarkably cold heart to be indifferent to the desperation of those who need medical help but cannot afford it. But rights do not spring from passion or need. Wanting something does not entitle you to it -- not if someone else must provide or produce that something. [emphasis added] The rights delineated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are negative rights only -- they protect our autonomy, allowing us to peacefully live life and pursue happiness, neither coercing others nor being coerced by them.

My right to free speech or to own property does not give me a claim on anyone else’s time or labor or resources. But if I have a ‘right’ to health care, someone else must be compelled to provide or pay for that care. Compulsion comes in different forms -- higher taxes, lower fees, insurance mandates, health-care rationing, intrusive regulations -- but the bottom line is the same: a universal right to health care would leave society less free. [emphasis added]

It may sound noble to declare that health care is a fundamental human right and not a mere commodity to be left to the vagaries of the market. Of course, the same thing could be said about food or clothing -- also essential to human welfare -- yet not even Ted Kennedy would have suggested that Washington nationalize US food production or overhaul the clothing industry. [Be careful what you say; Harry Obama; Nancy Reid, and Barack Pelosi might try] It is precisely because food and clothing are seen as commodities, because we do leave their availability to the market, that they can be had in such abundance and diversity.

To be sure, some people will always need help. No decent person or society ignores the cries of the sick or hungry or poor. Happily, there is no better system for achieving the widest possible access to health care -- or any other good or service -- than the one that requires the least degree of political interference: the normal interplay of supply, demand, and competition. Health care is too important to be left to the marketplace? No, it is too important not to be.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

9/11/2009: SEC Attacked for ‘Colossal Failure’ Over Madoff
by Jenna Greene The National Law Journal

Inexperience. Incompetence. Laziness. [Sounds like the employment standards for all government employees] All were cited as reasons behind the Securities and Exchange Commission’s failure to detect Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion Ponzi scheme at a packed hearing Thursday before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

‘There can be no excuse for that colossal failure,’ said chairman Christopher Dodd, D-Conn. ‘How could this possibly have happened? And what can we do to minimize this ever happening again?’ [Read More]

9/11/2009: ObamaCare: Status Quo on Steroids
Healthcare reform that isn’t.

Let’s begin by noting that the so-called health-insurance companies deserve little sympathy. As they exist today, they are very much creatures of the State. In fact, there’s a sense in which it can be said that if we didn’t have health-insurance companies, we wouldn’t need them.

Economist William Niskanen writes, ‘We did not have a health care crisis in 1940 when few people had health insurance.’ In fact, that year only 10 percent of Americans had such insurance (henceforth imagine ironic quotation marks). But World War II was a bonanza for the industry, especially Blue Cross Blue Shield. Government economic controls prohibited firms from attracting or keeping workers with higher wages. So someone hit on the idea of supplementing wages with noncash compensation, specifically, health insurance. The government said okay and the rest is history. Employee insurance was untaxed, creating a bias toward employer-provided health plans. If an employer bought a $5,000 plan for a worker, that worker got the full $5,000 benefit. But if the employer paid the worker $5,000 in cash, the worker would pocket $5,000 minus federal and state taxes. He’d need more than $5,000 to buy a $5,000 policy.

The government intervened in another way. According to Niskanen, ‘[T]ax and regulatory preferences for the Blues displaced the older form of commercial indemnity policies with policies providing cost-based reimbursement.’ This act of social engineering — arrogant politicians and bureaucrats always think they know better than the collective wisdom stimulated by the free market — had huge (and presumably) unintended consequences that account for many of our current problems. Under the old-style indemnity plans (which individuals shopped and bought for themselves), contracting a catastrophic disease triggered a fixed insurance payment — to the policyholder – according to an agreed-on predetermined schedule. The money was hers. If she could find services that cost less than the insurance payment, she pocketed the difference. Of course, this provided an incentive to be cost-conscious in buying medical care. Homeowners’ and other types of insurance still works like this.

In contrast, under the Blue Cross Blue Shield model pushed by government — which began not as insurance but as a prepayment plan for doctors and hospitals — the policyholder never sees a dime. Treatment simply sets in motion a process in which the insurance company sends a check to a hospital, lab, or doctor. No treatment, no payment. The individual has no reason to shop around (there can be great variation in prices), or to question whether a test or procedure is necessary, or to even ask what anything costs. What’s the point? It would seem only to save the insurance company money.

The insurance companies take this into account when negotiating with providers and employers who buy coverage on behalf of their workers. A key problem here is the disconnect between cost and benefit (which would be aggravated by the Obama plan). In most cases employers pay for their workers’ coverage with money that otherwise would have largely gone into cash wages. To the workers, it looks like free (or pretty cheap) coverage. Because of competition among employers and the rigged tax laws, coverage has become more luxurious, including services for situations that are not even insurable. A good example is maternity benefits. Pregnancy is not a disease, is largely preventable, and usually results from a volitional act. From a true insurance perspective, it’s ridiculous to expect coverage. (It would be like insurance against gaining weight.) The same could be said for many other ‘conditions’ that are covered today. Well-baby care? Is that insurance against a baby’s being well? (Orwell was right: corrupt the language and one can get away with anything.)

State Mandates

To make matters worse, state governments have mandated that all ‘basic’ policies include coverage for situations that are either uninsurable or unlikely to affect most people. Most people shopping for insurance in a free market would never buy this coverage because it would unnecessarily increase their costs. If they decided later on that they wanted, say, chiropractic or acupuncture, they would pay for it out of savings.

Writing in The Freeman, John Seiler reported that the Congressional Budget Office estimated that ‘for every 1 percent increase in the cost of insurance, 200,000 to 300,000 people nationwide lose their insurance.’ He adds, ‘State mandates keep about one quarter of Americans from getting health insurance, according to John C. Goodman, president of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, a free-market think tank.’

In 2007 the average number of mandates in the United States was 36, with a high of 62 (Minnesota) and a low of 13 (Idaho). Might this have something to do with the size of the uninsured population? The Great Humanitarians in Washington seem strangely incurious about that.

You and I could evade the mandate plague somewhat if we were free to buy policies offered in low-mandate states. But — under the federal McCarran-Ferguson Act — we aren’t free. That 1945 decree shelters the states — and the insurance companies — from the interstate competition that might have reined in their regulatory regimes.

Do we have mandates because we are too dumb to know we need coverage for chiropractic, acupuncture, social workers, alcoholism and drug-abuse treatment, marriage counseling, hearing aids, toupees, contraceptives, and so on, ad infinitum? No. We have mandates because the providers of those products and services wined and dined enough state legislators to get these special-interest bills enacted. [emphasis added] The insurance companies don’t mind: They can recover the cost from people who don’t realize they are paying for the ‘free’ (or cheap) ‘services’ because they think their bosses are paying for the coverage.

State regulation also sets up barriers to entry in the insurance industry. As a result, each state is a walled fortress that protects established insurance companies from competition. This doesn’t make their profits spectacular (see this), but it creates safety and stability, which are worth something.

No Free Market

So no sympathy here for these state creatures of privilege and protection. We can safely guess that today’s companies look nothing like companies would look in a free insurance market. The federal and state governments — to some extent haphazardly — have almost completely determined the nature and shape of the industry, giving us a classic government-sponsored cartel.

But…

None of this justifies what President Obama and his ilk call healthcare ‘reform.’ They merely propose more of what we already have: more ‘free’ insurance for more people, more coverage for more uninsurable situations, lower out-of-pocket costs — all of which means less cost-consciousness and higher prices, which seeds the ground for price controls and rationing. In the name of creating competition, Obama would further suppress it, rather than dismantling the current anticompetitive regime.

The solution to the problems caused by what I’ve described above cannot be to encourage people to believe, childishly, that they have a right to health care — that is, a right to other people’s labor — or that resources are not scarce. Yet that is what Obama & Co. are doing. A core principle of their scheme is that no one could be turned down for insurance because they are already sick. That’s not insurance; it’s welfare, with the costs to all of us disguised and the politicians unaccountable.

The other night Obama also demanded that insurance companies cover preventive services — physical exams, colonoscopies, mammograms, etc. — for free. He also insists on low caps on out-of-pocket expenses and unlimited lifetime payouts.

But none of this is free. Someone will have to pay the doctors, clinics, and hospitals. Who? The answer is: the insurance companies. Where will they get the money?

One need not sympathize with the insurance companies to see that it it sheer demagoguery for Obama & Co. to rail sanctimoniously against them for not giving away their shareholders’ and employees’ money on demand. They’re businesses not charities. If the ‘reformers’ think they can run a better company, let them try – in the free market. (That company executives favor most of Obama’s plans tells us that forcing people to buy insurance is worth more to them than the coverage mandates.)

By all means, strip the insurance companies of the privileges governments now provide. Throw them into the free market and let them fend for themselves. Open the gates to new entrepreneurs and innovators. But do not expand the rotten system that increases and hides costs while leading people to believe that medical care is manna from heaven. Pandering to people’s wish for free services ought to get a politician — even a president — hooted off the stage.

Sheldon Richman is the editor of The Freeman and ‘In brief.’ He is a contributor to The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

9/10/2009: Forcing insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions is immoral

...Forcing the companies to cover already sick people would be wrong because it would not be true insurance. Insurance is about future risk and uncertainty, not about past or present actualities. Insuring against an existing illness would be like insuring against a house fire when the house is already aflame. That makes no sense... [Read all]

9/10/2009: Does Obama think Americans are so gullible?

President Obama’s address to Congress and the nation Wednesday evening was yet another illustration of his seemingly endless ability to soar to genuinely impressive rhetorical heights without ever landing back on truthful ground. Nothing better illustrates this than Obama’s medical malpractice ‘demonstration project’ gambit. Here’s the essential fact about federal demonstration projects – they are nothing more than a dodge, a deceitful way for Washington politicians to appear as if they are doing something concrete when in reality they’re tucking the idea at hand safely out of sight over in a corner. Obama might as well have said Wednesday night that he will appoint a presidential commission or have challenged Congress to create an emergency national task force on medical malpractice. The Democratic majority sitting in the House chamber would have stomped and clapped and yelled with equal delight, knowing the chief executive had just consigned medical malpractice caps to irrelevance, along with any GOP senator or representative gullible enough to think Obama was thus doing anything other than playing them for suckers.

So it was throughout this 47- minute nationally televised monument to presidential flimflam. Sometimes the prevarications were so obvious that even the president’s most ardent supporters – like the news staff of The New York Times - had to concede that he was playing fast and loose with the facts. For instance, the Times quoted Obama’s repeating of his familiar claim that ‘if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance, nothing in our plan requires you to change what you have.’

‘That is technically true,’ the Times carefully admitted, ‘but there is a real possibility that existing policies could change as a result of the legislation. The government, for instance, would set new standards, and employers that already offer insurance would have to bring their plans into compliance.’ In other words, when, as is inevitable, the cost of providing health insurance is more than the federal fine Obama seeks for not providing it, companies will drop their employee plans, forcing millions of people into the government-run health care system against their will.

Similarly, Obama claimed ‘most of this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing health care system, a system that is currently full of waste and abuse.’ If $675 billion equals ‘most’ of the $900 billion Obama says his proposal would cost, why wait to get those savings? Finally, there is abortion and illegal immigrants. Obama said ‘no federal dollars’ will fund abortions under his proposal and ‘the reforms I am proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.’ If Obama truly believes that, then he will have no objection when Democrats in Congress reverse their previous votes barring such provisions from the legislation when they were proposed by Republicans. In short, did the president sleep through August?

9/10/2009: The top seven outrageous partisan falsehoods from Obama’s speech

The ‘post-partisan’ candidate for ‘change’ has conducted his umpteenth ultra-partisan misinformation-fest on ObamaCare. The most egregious distortions and falsehoods are as follows...

7. ‘Unfortunately, in 34 states, 75 percent of the insurance market is controlled by five or fewer companies. In Alabama, almost 90 percent is controlled by just one company. And without competition, the price of insurance goes up and quality goes down...I just want to hold [insurance companies] accountable.’

The glaringly obvious (and cost-free) solution to insurance monopolies is to eliminate the government restrictions that make them unavoidable. This is a blatantly dishonest attempt to misrepresent a clearly government-created problem as not enough government. As usual, all that is actually needed here is to simply get government out of the way.

6. ‘...radio and cable talk show hosts [and] prominent politicians [have claimed] that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. Now, such a charge would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple.’

This is called a ‘straw man’ fallacy. It is a tactic in which you try to exaggerate your opponent’s argument so much that it begins to sound completely ridiculous, thereby making it effortless to knock down--like a straw man.

As even the Washington Post has acknowledged, the entirely legitimate concern here is with the creepy, needless involvement of a government bureaucracy—one that will, by all accounts, be desperately looking for ways to cut costs—in an area as personal and sensitive as ‘end-of-life’ counseling.

5. ‘There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms — the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.’

There is a reason Obama had to pause in the middle of this statement. Incensed at his unaccountable, continuous dishonesty, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) finally broke down and shouted out, ‘You lie!’

As I have already proven, ObamaCare will in fact cover illegal immigrants.

4. ‘My health care proposal has also been attacked by some who oppose reform as a ‘government takeover’ of the entire health care system.

First, ‘some who oppose reform?’ Please. This is called the ‘false choice’ fallacy. Anyone who opposes a total government takeover must be against doing anything at all. Embarrassingly weak.

And second, Obama is on the record admitting that the single-payer system (government takeover) is in fact the goal here. Additionally, I have also recently demonstrated not only that ObamaCare will put government in charge and eliminate choice, but also that it will deliberately destroy private exchanges.

3.’First, I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits -- either now or in the future. (Applause.) I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period.’

Two problems here. First, this is the same Barack ‘No Earmarks in This Bill’ Obama who told us that he doesn’t ‘like big government,’ swore that he would not compromise national defense by investigating the CIA, and promised that no one making less than $250,000 per year will see any tax increase ‘of any kind’...only to turn around and investigate the CIA, dramatically (and illegally) increase the size of government, and try to raise taxes on everything from cigarettes to health care benefits, to energy.

But beyond his endless credibility issues, there is the fact that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office flatly contradicts him, confirming instead that ObamaCare will in fact explode the deficit.

2.’...Medicare is another issue that’s been subjected to demagoguery and distortion during the course of this debate...The only thing this plan would eliminate is the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud, as well as unwarranted subsidies in Medicare that go to insurance companies...’

As I have also already demonstrated, ObamaCare would absolutely gut Medicare...by staggering amounts...far beyond what could ever be characterized as ‘eliminating waste.’

1. ‘Instead of honest debate, we’ve seen scare tactics...Too many have used this as an opportunity to score short-term political points...And out of this blizzard of charges and counter-charges, confusion has reigned.’

Pot, meet kettle. This is coming from the same guy who hysterically vilifies insurance companies and hilariously warned us that doctors were looking to perform unnecessary surgeries on us to make more money.

Incidentally, this backwards portrayal of civilized, open, and bi-partisan Democrats innocently reaching out to their unreasonable opponents who then lash out and refuse to work together is also provably, laughably erroneous.

Democrats have not allowed their opponents to even sit in on a single meeting on this issue since April. Indeed, since the beginning, they have stripped their opponents of basic minority rights that have existed almost as long as the republic. And while selling ObamaCare as a mere cost-cutting initiative, they have refused to even mention (in over a thousand pages of text) the elephant in the room--frivolous lawsuits. Why? Because trial lawyers are huge campaign contributors to Democrats.

Who’s being partisan here?

Americans do not want ObamaCare. They are overwhelmingly happy with what they have and want the one industry that still isn’t failing us left alone. As I have demonstrated before, Democrats are losing this debate not because of misinformation, but because their time-disproven ideas and reprehensible tactics cannot compete on a level playing field.

See the House Republican Conference analysis for more on Obama’s partisan falsehoods from this speech. And click here for more on Obama’s habitual lying on health care in general.

9/10/2009: Libertarians respond to President Obama’s health care speech
Remind voters about Republican-initiated government-run health care plans

WASHINGTON - In the wake of President Obama’s speech to Congress, America’s third-largest party wants to remind voters about Republican support for government-run health care plans.

William Redpath, chairman of the Libertarian National Committee (LNC) commented, ‘Make no mistake, the Libertarian Party is opposed to President Obama’s health care plans, and his speech last night has not budged us. But we also opposed Republican plans for big-government health care, many of which have been implemented in recent years.’

In 2003, President Bush and the Republican Congress enacted a Medicare prescription drug expansion. It was originally expected to cost $400 billion, but just two years later the cost was revised upward to $1.2 trillion.

In 2006, Republican Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney supported and signed a bill that required all residents to purchase health insurance, and increased state health insurance funding.

In 2007, Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry issued an executive order to force sixth-grade schoolgirls to receive HPV vaccinations.

This year, congressional Republicans put forward the ‘Patients’ Choice Act of 2009,’ which would increase federal government spending and control of health care in a variety of ways.

The Libertarian Party has put a poll on its home page to allow voters to choose which Republican plan is the most hypocritical.

Redpath said, ‘Republicans are living in glass houses when they complain about the President’s health care plans and the bills in the Democratic-controlled Congress.’

Redpath continued, ‘It’s time for President Obama to be intellectually honest, himself, and to stop inferring that his ideas of health care reform are the only ones out there. With neither of the major parties is there any serious discussion about letting individuals control their own health care dollars, moving away from employer-provided health insurance, and increasing competition among insurance companies by letting people purchase health insurance across state lines and among providers by taking a good, long look at medical education and licensure laws to allow potential providers to freely respond to health consumers’ needs.’

Redpath continued, ‘But, before the President and the Gang of 535 even do that, it would be refreshing to at least hear them debate whether the federal government is empowered to be in the middle of all of this. An honest reading of the Constitution might stimulate the right move -- punting this to the states and the people.’

The Libertarian Party favors a free market health care system. The party’s platform states, ‘We favor restoring and reviving a free market health care system. We recognize the freedom of individuals to determine the level of health insurance they want, the level of health care they want, the care providers they want, the medicines and treatments they will use and all other aspects of their medical care, including end-of-life decisions.’

For more information, or to arrange an interview, call LNC executive director Wes Benedict at 202-333-0008 ext. 222.

The LP is America’s third-largest political party, founded in 1971. The Libertarian Party stands for free markets and civil liberties. You can find more information on the Libertarian Party at our website.

9/9/2009: The President Elevates Sarah Palin to New Heights by David Horowitz

Barack Obama gave the most important speech of his presidency tonight and it was a partisan speech which — as Ed Shultz put it on MSNBC — said to Republicans we’re going to roll over you. We will see if this political calculation works or whether the Democrats driven by their ideological passions have over-reached and made another political miscalcuation which will bring their numbers even further to the ground. But perhaps the most remarkable moment of the speech — and certainly the most politically bone-headed was to single out Sarah Palin and call her a liar because she has dramatized the indisputable fact that when you have government controlled health care you have rationing and when you have rationing you inevitably create a government bureaucracy which will encourage and then force elderly and infirm people to premature deaths. Palin’s image of ‘death panels’ to capture what is the undeniable truth about the Democrats plans (Greta Van Susteren actually read on camera the passage from the bill which justifies Palin’s claim) was a politically brilliant stroke. In singling her out and defaming her tonight the president made her the symbol of the opposition to the steamroller he is driving. And that’s the fight she wants and anyone opposed to the Democrats’ socialized scheme should want too.

9/10/2009: Cash for Clunkers a ‘Success’ by Government ‘Standards’

Do the math. A vehicle at 15 mpg and 12,000 miles per year uses 800 gallons a year of gasoline. A vehicle at 25 mpg and 12,000 miles per year uses 480 gallons per year. So, the average clunker transaction will reduce US gasoline consumption by 320 gallons per year.

They claim 700,000 vehicles were sold under Cash 4 Clunkers, so thats 224 million gallons per year. That equates to a bit over 5.3 million barrels of oil. 5.3 million barrels of oil is about one days US consumption. And, 5.3 million barrels of oil costs about $400 million dollars at $75 per barrel.

So, we all (current and future taxpayers) spent $3 billion (actually more) to save the owners of the new vehicles (not most taxpayers) $400 million per year...and, assuming each trade-in was worth $1,000 (it probably was more), we destroyed 700,000 serviceable vehicles, worth at least $700 million in the process. How good a deal was that?

Any time you steal from the general population to give to a specific population, thew specific population can be counted on to support the theft. In other words, ‘When you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can count on Paul’s support.’ Examples of this are Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Food Stamps, Farm Subsidies, and countless other government welfare programs for individuals and corporations.

9/8/2009: Obama and the Bureaucratization of Health Care by Sarah Palin

The president’s proposals would give unelected officials life-and-death rationing powers.

Writing in the New York Times last month, President Barack Obama asked that Americans ‘talk with one another, and not over one another’ as our health-care debate moves forward.

I couldn’t agree more. Let’s engage the other side’s arguments, and let’s allow Americans to decide for themselves whether the Democrats’ health-care proposals should become governing law.

Some 45 years ago Ronald Reagan said that ‘no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds.’ Each of us knows that we have an obligation to care for the old, the young and the sick. We stand strongest when we stand with the weakest among us.

We also know that our current health-care system too often burdens individuals and businesses—particularly small businesses—with crippling expenses. And we know that allowing government health-care spending to continue at current rates will only add to our ever-expanding deficit.

How can we ensure that those who need medical care receive it while also reducing health-care costs? The answers offered by Democrats in Washington all rest on one principle: that increased government involvement can solve the problem. I fundamentally disagree.

Common sense tells us that the government’s attempts to solve large problems more often create new ones. Common sense also tells us that a top-down, one-size-fits-all plan will not improve the workings of a nationwide health-care system that accounts for one-sixth of our economy. And common sense tells us to be skeptical when President Obama promises that the Democrats’ proposals ‘will provide more stability and security to every American.’

With all due respect, Americans are used to this kind of sweeping promise from Washington. And we know from long experience that it’s a promise Washington can’t keep.

Let’s talk about specifics. In his Times op-ed, the president argues that the Democrats’ proposals ‘will finally bring skyrocketing health-care costs under control’ by ‘cutting... waste and inefficiency in federal health programs like Medicare and Medicaid and in unwarranted subsidies to insurance companies...’

First, ask yourself whether the government that brought us such ‘waste and inefficiency’ and ‘unwarranted subsidies’ in the first place can be believed when it says that this time it will get things right. The nonpartistan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) doesn’t think so: Its director, Douglas Elmendorf, told the Senate Budget Committee in July that ‘in the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount.’

Now look at one way Mr. Obama wants to eliminate inefficiency and waste: He’s asked Congress to create an Independent Medicare Advisory Council—an unelected, largely unaccountable group of experts charged with containing Medicare costs. In an interview with the New York Times in April, the president suggested that such a group, working outside of ‘normal political channels,’ should guide decisions regarding that ‘huge driver of cost... the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives...’

Given such statements, is it any wonder that many of the sick and elderly are concerned that the Democrats’ proposals will ultimately lead to rationing of their health care by—dare I say it—death panels? Establishment voices dismissed that phrase, but it rang true for many Americans. Working through ‘normal political channels,’ they made themselves heard, and as a result Congress will likely reject a wrong-headed proposal to authorize end-of-life counseling in this cost-cutting context. But the fact remains that the Democrats’ proposals would still empower unelected bureaucrats to make decisions affecting life or death health-care matters. Such government overreaching is what we’ve come to expect from this administration.

Speaking of government overreaching, how will the Democrats’ proposals affect the deficit? The CBO estimates that the current House proposal not only won’t reduce the deficit but will actually increase it by $239 billion over 10 years. Only in Washington could a plan that adds hundreds of billions to the deficit be hailed as a cost-cutting measure.

The economic effects won’t be limited to abstract deficit numbers; they’ll reach the wallets of everyday Americans. Should the Democrats’ proposals expand health-care coverage while failing to curb health-care inflation rates, smaller paychecks will result. A new study for Watson Wyatt Worldwide by Steven Nyce and Syl Schieber concludes that if the government expands health-care coverage while health-care inflation continues to rise ‘the higher costs would drive disposable wages downward across most of the earnings spectrum, although the declines would be steepest for lower-earning workers.’ Lower wages are the last thing Americans need in these difficult economic times.

Finally, President Obama argues in his op-ed that Democrats’ proposals ‘will provide every American with some basic consumer protections that will finally hold insurance companies accountable.’ Of course consumer protection sounds like a good idea. And it’s true that insurance companies can be unaccountable and unresponsive institutions—much like the federal government. That similarity makes this shift in focus seem like nothing more than an attempt to deflect attention away from the details of the Democrats’ proposals—proposals that will increase our deficit, decrease our paychecks, and increase the power of unaccountable government technocrats.

Instead of poll-driven ‘solutions,’ let’s talk about real health-care reform: market-oriented, patient-centered, and result-driven. As the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon and others have argued, such policies include giving all individuals the same tax benefits received by those who get coverage through their employers; providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage; reforming tort laws to potentially save billions each year in wasteful spending; and changing costly state regulations to allow people to buy insurance across state lines. Rather than another top-down government plan, let’s give Americans control over their own health care.

Democrats have never seriously considered such ideas, instead rushing through their own controversial proposals. After all, they don’t need Republicans to sign on: Democrats control the House, the Senate and the presidency. But if passed, the Democrats’ proposals will significantly alter a large sector of our economy. They will not improve our health care. They will not save us money. And, despite what the president says, they will not ‘provide more stability and security to every American.’

We often hear such overblown promises from Washington. With first principles in mind and with the facts in hand, tell them that this time we’re not buying it.

Ms. Palin, Sen. John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election, was governor of Alaska from December 2006 to July 2009.

9/8/2009: Swiss topple U.S. as most competitive economy: WEF
by Sven Egenter Sven Egenter

GENEVA (Reuters) – Switzerland knocked the United States off the position as the world’s most competitive economy as the crash of the U.S. banking system left it more exposed to some long-standing weaknesses, a report said on Tuesday.

The World Economic Forum’s global competitiveness report 2009/2010 showed economies with a large focus on financial services such as the U.S., Britain or Iceland were the losers of the crisis.

The U.S. as the world’s largest economy lost last year’s strong lead, slipping to number two for the first time since the introduction of the index in its current form in 2004.

‘We have been expecting for some time that it may lose its top-position. There are a number of imbalances that have been building up,’ said Jennifer Blanke, Head of the WEF’s Global Competitiveness Network.

‘There are problems on the financial market that we were not aware of before. These countries (like the U.S. and Britain) are getting penalized now,’ she said.

Trust in Swiss banks also declined. But in the assessment of banks’ soundness, the Alpine country still ranked 44th. U.S. banks fell to 108 -- right behind Tanzania -- and British banks to 126 in the ranking, now topped by Canada’s banks.

The WEF bases its assessment on a range of factors, key for any country to prosper. The index includes economic data such as growth but also health data or the number of internet users.

The study also factors in a survey among business leaders, assessing for example the government’s efficiency or the flexibility of the labor market.

The WEF applauded Switzerland for its capacity to innovate, sophisticated business culture, effective public services, excellent infrastructure and well-functioning goods markets.

The Swiss economy dipped into recession last year, too and had to bail out its largest bank UBS. But its economy is holding up better than many peers and most banks are relatively unscathed by the crisis, which drove U.S. banks into bankruptcy.

The WEF said the U.S. economy was still extremely productive but a number of escalating weaknesses were taking its toll.

Concerns were growing about the government’s ability to maintain distance to the private sector and doubts rose about the quality of firms’ auditing and reporting standards, it said.

BRAZIL LEAPS

Leading emerging markets Brazil, India and China improved their competitiveness despite the crisis, the report showed.

But Russia saw one of the steepest declines among the 133 countries assessed, falling back 12 places to 63, as worries about government efficiency and judicial independence rose, the WEF said.

After years of rapid improvement, which took it to place 29, China now had to tackle shortcomings in areas such as financial markets, technological readiness and education as it could no longer rely on cheap labor alone to generate growth.

India, ranked 49th, was in turn well positioned in complex fields such as innovation but had still to catch up on basics such as health or infrastructure, the WEF said.

Brazil leapt by 8 ranks to 56th, as measures to improve fiscal sustainability and to liberalize and open the economy showed effects, the report said.

Among the top-ten, Singapore moved up to third from fifth, swapping positions with Denmark, which fell behind fellow-Nordic country Sweden. Finland as 6th and Germany as 7th stayed put while Japan and Canada overtook the Netherlands.

The WEF study named African countries Zimbabwe and Burundi as the world’s least competitive economies.

In the case of Zimbabwe, the WEF noted the complete absence of property rights, corruption, basic government inefficiency as well as macroeconomic instability as fundamental flaws.

For the full report click on: http://www.weforum.org/gcr

9/8/2009: Obama and the Left
The lesson of the rise and fall of Van Jones.

The abrupt resignation of White House aide Van Jones, deep in the news hiatus of Labor Day weekend, will probably be forgotten in a few days. But it’s a story that still deserves elaboration for what it says about the political coalition that helped to elect President Obama and whose demands are leading him into a cul-de-sac.

As a candidate, Barack Obama was at pains to offer himself as a man of moderate policies, and especially of moderate temperament. He said he would listen to both the right and left, choosing the best of each depending on ‘what works.’ He sold himself as a center-left pragmatist. When his radical associations—Reverend Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers—came to light, Candidate Obama promptly disavowed them. Now comes Mr. Jones, with a long trail of extreme comments and left-wing organizing, who nonetheless became the White House adviser for ‘green jobs.’ This weekend he too was thrown under the bus.

However, Mr. Jones wasn’t some unknown crazy who insinuated himself with the Obama crowd under false pretenses. He has been a leading young light of the left-wing political movement for many years. His 2008 book—’The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems’—includes a foreword from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and was praised across the liberal establishment.

Mr. Jones was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which was established, funded and celebrated as the new intellectual vanguard of the Democratic Party. The center’s president is John Podesta, who was co-chair of Mr. Obama’s transition team and thus played a major role in recommending appointees throughout the Administration. The ascent of Mr. Jones within the liberal intelligentsia shows how much the Democratic Party has moved left since its ‘New Democrat’ triangulation of the Clinton years.

Mr. Jones’s incendiary comments about Republicans and his now famous association with a statement blaming the U.S. for 9/11 had to have been known in some White House precincts. He was praised and sponsored by Valerie Jarrett, who is one of the two or three most powerful White House aides and is a long-time personal friend of the President.

Our guess is that Mr. Jones landed in the White House precisely because his job didn’t require Senate confirmation, which would have subjected him to more scrutiny. This is also no doubt a reason that Mr. Obama has consolidated so much of his Administration’s governing authority inside the White House under various ‘czars.’ Mr. Jones was poised to play a prominent role in disbursing tens of billions of dollars of stimulus money. It was the ideal perch from which he could keep funding the left-wing networks from which he sprang, this time with taxpayer money.

This helps explain why the political left is so upset about Mr. Jones’s resignation. Listen to David Sirota, another left-wing think-tank denizen and activist, who wrote the following Sunday on the Huffington Post Web site:

‘Finally, the Jones announcement will inevitably create a chilling effect on the aspirations of other movement progressives. Van is a fantastic person who has done fantastic work. He’s kept his advocacy real and didn’t compromise his principles. And so when he was appointed to a high-level White House job, it seemed to validate that you could, in fact, keep it real and also advance in American politics and government. That is to say, his story seemed to prove that an outsider could also succeed on the inside—and that outside advocacy doesn’t automatically prohibit you from one day working on the inside.’

Mr. Sirota is speaking for many on the movement left who believe they helped to elect Mr. Obama and therefore deserve seats at the inner table of power. They are increasingly frustrated because they are discovering that Mr. Obama will happily employ ‘movement progressives,’ but only so long as their real views and motivations aren’t widely known or understood. How bitter it must be to discover that the Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck, who drove the debate about Mr. Jones, counts for more at this White House than Mr. Sirota.

No President is responsible for all of the views of his appointees, but the rise and fall of Mr. Jones is one more warning that Mr. Obama can’t succeed on his current course of governing from the left. He is running into political trouble not because his own message is unclear, or because his opposition is better organized. Mr. Obama is falling in the polls because last year he didn’t tell the American people that the ‘change’ they were asked to believe in included trillions of dollars in new spending, deferring to the most liberal Members of Congress, a government takeover of health care, and appointees with the views of Van Jones.

9/8/2009: Listening to a Liar by Thomas Sowell

The most important thing about what anyone says are not the words themselves but the credibility of the person who says them.

The words of convicted swindler Bernie Madoff were apparently quite convincing to many people who were regarded as knowledgeable and sophisticated. If you go by words, you can be led into anything.

No doubt millions of people will be listening to the words of President Barack Obama Wednesday night when he makes a televised address to a joint session of Congress on his medical care plans. But, if they think that the words he says are what matters, they can be led into something much worse than being swindled out of their money.

Culture of Corruption by Michelle Malkin FREE

One plain fact should outweigh all the words of Barack Obama and all the impressive trappings of the setting in which he says them: He tried to rush Congress into passing a massive government takeover of the nation’s medical care before the August recess-- for a program that would not take effect until 2013!

Whatever President Obama is, he is not stupid. If the urgency to pass the medical care legislation was to deal with a problem immediately, then why postpone the date when the legislation goes into effect for years-- more specifically, until the year after the next Presidential election?

If this is such an urgently needed program, why wait for years to put it into effect? And if the public is going to benefit from this, why not let them experience those benefits before the next Presidential election?

If it is not urgent that the legislation goes into effect immediately, then why don’t we have time to go through the normal process of holding Congressional hearings on the pros and cons, accompanied by public discussions of its innumerable provisions? What sense does it make to ‘hurry up and wait’ on something that is literally a matter of life and death?

If we do not believe that the President is stupid, then what do we believe? The only reasonable alternative seems to be that he wanted to get this massive government takeover of medical care passed into law before the public understood what was in it.

Moreover, he wanted to get re-elected in 2012 before the public experienced what its actual consequences would be.

Unfortunately, this way of doing things is all too typical of the way this administration has acted on a wide range of issues.

Consider the ‘stimulus’ legislation. Here the administration was successful in rushing a massive spending bill through Congress in just two days-- after which it sat on the President’s desk for three days, while he was away on vacation. But, like the medical care legislation, the ‘stimulus’ legislation takes effect slowly.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will be September 2010 before even three-quarters of the money will be spent. Some economists expect that it will not all be spent by the end of 2010.

What was the rush to pass it, then? It was not to get that money out into the economy as fast as possible. It was to get that money-- and the power that goes with it-- into the hands of the government. Power is what politics is all about.

The worst thing that could happen, from the standpoint of those seeking more government power over the economy, would be for the economy to begin recovering on its own while months were being spent debating the need for a ‘stimulus’ bill. As the President’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said, you can’t let a crisis ‘go to waste’ when ‘it’s an opportunity to do things you could not do before.’

There are lots of people in the Obama administration who want to do things that have not been done before-- and to do them before the public realizes what is happening.

The proliferation of White House ‘czars’ in charge of everything from financial issues to media issues is more of the same circumvention of the public and of the Constitution. Czars don’t have to be confirmed by the Senate, the way Cabinet members must be, even though czars may wield more power, so you may never know what these people are like, until it is too late.

What Barack Obama says Wednesday night is not nearly as important as what he has been doing-- and how he has been doing it.

9/7/2009: DON RICKLES ON DEMOCRATS (offense intended.....Ha!) Only Don Rickles could get away with saying this stuff, but it is funny (and accurate).
Don Rickles Roasts the Dems...

Hello, dummies! Oh my God, look at you. Anyone else hurt in the accident?

Seriously, Senator Reid has a face of a Saint - A Saint Bernard. Now I know why they call you the arithmetic man. You add partisanship, subtract pleasure, divide attention, and multiply ignorance. Reid is so physically unimposing, he makes Pee Wee Herman look like Mr. T. And Reid’s so dumb, he makes Speaker Pelosi look like an intellectual. Nevada is soooo screwed! If I were less polite, I’d say Reid makes Kevin Federline look successful.

Speaking of the Speaker... Nancy Pelosi, hubba, hubba! Hey baby, you must’ve been something before electricity. Seriously, the Speaker may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don’t let that fool you. She really is an idiot. Madame Speaker... want to make twelve bucks the hard way? Pelosi says she’s not partisan, but her constituents call her Madame Pelossilini.

Charlie Rangel... still alive and still robbing the taxpayers blind. What does that make, six decades of theft? Rangel’s the only man with a rent-controlled mansion. He’s the guy who writes our tax laws but forgot to pay taxes on $75 grand in rental income! So why isn’t he the Treasury Secretary? Rangel runs more scams than a Nigerian Banker.

Barney Frank - he’s a better actor than Fred Flintstone. Consider...he and Dodd caused the whole financial meltdown and they’re not only not serving time with Bubba and Rodney, they’re still heading up the financial system! Let’s all admit it... Barney Frank slobbers more than a sheepdog on Novocain. How did this guy get elected? Oh, that’s right.... he’s from Massachusetts. That’s the state that elects Mr. Charisma, John Kerry -- man of the people!

You know, if Senator Dodd were any more crooked, you could open wine bottles with him. Here’s a news flash, Dodd: when your local newspaper calls you a ‘lying weasel’, it may be time to retire. Dodd’s involved in more shady deals than the Clintons. Even Rangel looks up to him!

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, I really respect you... especially given your upbringing. All you’ve overcome... I heard your birth certificate is an apology from the condom factory. I don’t know what makes you so dumb, but it really works for you. Personally, I don’t think you’re a fool, but what’s my opinion compared to that of thousands of others? Gibbs does his best expositional work in the bathroom every morning.

As for President Obama, what can I say? They say President Obama’s arrogant and aloof, but I don’t agree. Now it’s true when you enter the room, you have to kiss his ring. I don’t mind, but he has it in his back pocket. His mind is open to new ideas -- so open that ideas simply pass through it. Obama lies so much, I was actually surprised to find out his first name really was Barack. Just don’t ask about his middle name! But Obama was able to set a record... he actually lied more in 60 days than Bill Clinton. As far as his administration -- what with the tax cheat and lobbyists -- well, in the words of Patches O’Houlihan, ‘It’s like watching a bunch of retards trying to hump a doorknob out there.’

With all due respect. FOR THOSE THAT VOTED FOR ‘HOPE AND CHANGE’... BEND OVER AND PREPARE TO RECEIVE YOUR BOUNTY.

9/7/2009: The Daily Reckoning presents: The government induced a whole new level of ‘buyers remorse’ this year, with the creation of the ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program. This week, the Mogambo takes a look at how this program will end up hurting those who can’t even pay their mortgages, let alone their new car payments. Read on...

Evicted from Your Brand New Clunker by The Mogambo Guru Tampa Bay, Florida

Roger Wiegand of Trader Tracks Newsletter finally says what I always figured: ‘Cash for Clunkers was a real clunker. One out of four auto buyers using this program is having buyer’s remorse as they just signed-up for so many new payments they cannot afford.’

Thanks, Roger! I always had a hard time believing in the unbelievable ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program, where the government astonishingly gives up to $4,500 to people who buy a new car!

This is a subject which is very interesting to me because I happen to be a guy who owned a whole series of clunker cars and trucks over the years because I couldn’t justify the expense of a new vehicle/a good vehicle/a better vehicle/a vehicle that wasn’t rusted/a vehicle where parts and pieces didn’t fall off/a vehicle that usually started because they were completely paid for, thus costing me exactly nothing per month in principal and interest payments, and which needed only the legally-required minimum of liability insurance.

In short, the cost of driving those old cars and trucks was almost zilch, which fitted my budget perfectly, as I thought I would need the extra money for dating, but which turned out not to be the case. In fact, I found that women usually disdained both me and my cars, and they would say hurtful things like, ‘Hey! It stinks in here! Or is that you?’ and, ‘At least clean out the old, moldy pizza boxes and chicken bones so I won’t be more disgusted than I am just sitting next to you!’ and yammer yammer yammer.

That is, however, when I learned one of the Immortal Lessons Of The Mogambo (ILOTM), which is that as long as you had a good set of brakes on your ratty old car, a case of cheap oil in the trunk, a long siphon hose and a girlfriend who had a nice car in which to ride around, you could get along pretty good!

Not ‘getting along’ as good as the federal government, however, which can (and did) just decide on a plan to sell a couple of trillions of dollars in new debt, whereupon the Federal Reserve will create the money, like when the Fed bought $30 billion of US government securities, directly increasing the money supply by the amount of the new debt! Now THAT’S what I call ‘getting along pretty good!’ Hahaha!

Now, suddenly, sad sack people like me, whose incomes are so low that we have to drive rusted-out, beat-up old clunkers that cost almost nothing to own or operate, that nobody would steal, which were completely paid for, for which you only needed the minimum of liability insurance, would suddenly decide to buy a very expensive, shiny new car and begin paying upwards of $400-$500 a month for the new car and the big new premiums for the required higher insurance coverage? Hmmmm!

Perhaps this is why Bloomberg reports that ‘Consumer spending in the US rose in July as Americans jammed auto showrooms to take advantage of the ‘cash for clunkers’ program while avoiding other purchases’! Yikes! Avoiding other purchases! This is NOT the kind of thing from which economic recoveries are made!

And to suddenly start paying all of that money, every month for the next seven years or so, is not to even mention the effort of always having to wash and wax the new car, which is hard, disagreeable work that you don’t get paid for, which is like being punished for having a new car!

So, the only explanation that makes sense is that since people can stop paying on their house but still live in it because the bank doesn’t want to evict them, people will start living in their cars and stop paying on them, too! What are the car companies going to do? Evict a family onto the street by repossessing the snazzy new car in which they are living? Hahahaha!

I say this because I read in The Financial Times that in the UK, ‘The number of people of working age living in a household where none of the adults work rose by 500,000 to 4.8m for the period April to June’, which is a huge number of people which is now ‘close to one in five households’, which I assume is a rough estimate of what is happening in the USA.

Instead of laughing in my usual mocking style to indicate the bizarre absurdity of an economic system where the unemployed are given financial incentives to buy new cars, let me instead merely urge you to buy gold, silver and oil with your every waking moment and your every last dime, whichever comes first, which says the same thing but with the ‘secret bonus feature’ of letting you make a Whole Lot Of Money (WLOM) when their prices rise, rise, rise, which is good because you are going to need a WLOM when inflation in consumer prices catches up with the inflation in the money supply that will accommodate the inflation in government spending, thanks to the loathsome Federal Reserve allowing and abetting the inflations by merely creating more money, which makes buying gold, silver and oil such an obvious choice that you say, ‘Whee! This investing stuff is easy!’

Until next time,
The Mogambo Guru for The Daily Reckoning

Editor’s Note: Richard Daughty is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group, serving the financial and medical communities, and the editor of The Mogambo Guru economic newsletter – an avocational exercise to heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it.

9/7/2009: It’s Labor Day, Not Union Day

Labor Day is a celebration of the efforts of America’s workers. However, the celebration is hollow for millions of American workers because of compulsory unionism.

Throughout the United States, over 12 million workers labor under contracts that require them to be a member of, or financially support, a union as a condition of employment.

Additionally, millions of more workers are required by law to accept union bosses’ so-called ‘representation,’ thereby losing the right to negotiate their own employment terms.

Big Labor thrives on this system of government-granted special privileges based on coercion. Compulsory unionism makes union bosses more unaccountable to rank-and-file workers, as their financial support is absolutely mandatory.

This arrangement breeds union boss corruption, extravagance, and abuse.

Despite the ‘feel-good’ rhetoric about standing up for workers’ rights, union bosses commonly target independent-minded workers who stand up to them and exercise their individual rights. Such retaliation often takes the form of harassment, firings, and even violence.

The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is fighting back for thousands of workers.

Compulsory union abuse involves a wide array of tactics. In one recent example, a Hartford, Connecticut-based employee named Patricia Pelletier of the Connecticut Student Loan Foundation became the target of a local union’s harassment campaign after being dissatisfied with the union’s presence in her workplace.

Simply for exercising her legal right to circulate an employee petition which allowed Pelletier and her coworkers to ultimately vote out the unwanted Communications Workers of America union local from their workplace, union operatives forged her signature on numerous magazine subscriptions and consumer product solicitations.

Pelletier’s home was then flooded with hundreds of unwanted magazines and advertisements. Not only was Pelletier forced to spend several hours each day canceling individual subscriptions, she was also billed for thousands of dollars by various companies which often turned her over to collection agencies. Union agents then raised the stakes by planting cocaine in Pelletier’s office in an effort to frame her.

With free legal help from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Pelletier filed a fraud and civil conspiracy suit, ultimately forcing a satisfactory settlement.

In over 200 cases nationwide, the National Right to Work Foundation is helping workers take a stand for their rights in the face of union boss intimidation, coercion, and even violence. These cases underscore the extreme lengths to which union operatives will go to retaliate against those who do not toe the union line — and are a direct result of compulsory unionism.

This Labor Day, big labor bosses will dish out their usual Labor Day propaganda about how awful our lives would supposedly be without them. The reality is that millions of workers and indeed our economy are continuing to suffer greatly under the scourge of compulsory unionism.

Yet, there are signs that folks are realizing the truth: cooperation is a healthy alternative to compulsion and is the best way to enhance individual liberty while achieving economic progress and raising workers’ living standards.

Labor Day should be about honoring the hardworking Americans who make our country’s economy prosper — not union bosses who rely on forced unionism privileges for personal and political gain.

Mark Mix is the president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.

9/7/2009: Medical Tourism Takes Flight
by Leslie P. Norton

A growing number of U.S. insurers are paying for patients to have medical procedures performed more cheaply overseas. And that’s raising the profile of a few companies you’ve probably never heard of. Video: Bangkok Bypass Surgery. [Read more]

9/6/2009: How American Health Care Killed My Father by David Goldhill

After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem.

[Some excerpts]

...Like every grieving family member, I looked for someone to blame for my father’s death. But my dad’s doctors weren’t incompetent—on the contrary, his hospital physicians were smart, thoughtful, and hard-working. Nor is he dead because of indifferent nursing—without exception, his nurses were dedicated and compassionate. Nor from financial limitations—he was a Medicare patient, and the issue of expense was never once raised. There were no greedy pharmaceutical companies, evil health insurers, or other popular villains in his particular tragedy.

Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-carecrisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value...

...The housing bubble offers some important lessons for health-care policy. The claim that something—whether housing or health care—is an undersupplied social good is commonly used to justify government intervention, and policy makers have long striven to make housing more affordable. But by making housing investments eligible for special tax benefits and subsidized borrowing rates, the government has stimulated not only the construction of more houses but also the willingness of people to borrow and spend more on houses than they otherwise would have. The result is now tragically clear.

As with housing, directing so much of society’s resources to health care is stimulating the provision of vastly more care. Along the way, it’s also distorting demand, raising prices, and making us all poorer by crowding out other, possibly more beneficial, uses for the resources now air-dropped onto the island of health care. Why do we view health care as disconnected from everything else? Why do we spend so much on it? And why, ultimately, do we get such inconsistent results? Any discussion of the ills within the system must begin with a hard look at the tax-advantaged comprehensive-insurance industry at its center...

Health Insurance Isn’t Health Care

How often have you heard a politician say that millions of Americans ‘have no health care,’ when he or she meant they have no health insurance? How has a method of financing health care become synonymous with care itself?

The reason for financing at least some of our health care with an insurance system is obvious. We all worry that a serious illness or an accident might one day require urgent, extensive care, imposing an extreme financial burden on us. In this sense, health-care insurance is just like all other forms of insurance—life, property, liability—where the many who face a risk share the cost incurred by the few who actually suffer a loss.

But health insurance is different from every other type of insurance. Health insurance is the primary payment mechanism not just for expenses that are unexpected and large, but for nearly all health-care expenses. We’ve become so used to health insurance that we don’t realize how absurd that is. We can’t imagine paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance, but we all assume that our regular checkups and dental cleanings will be covered at least partially by insurance. Most pregnancies are planned, and deliveries are predictable many months in advance, yet they’re financed the same way we finance fixing a car after a wreck—through an insurance claim...

...A wasteful insurance system; distorted incentives; a bias toward treatment; moral hazard; hidden costs and a lack of transparency; curbed competition; service to the wrong customer. These are the problems at the foundation of our health-care system, resulting in a slow rot and requiring more and more money just to keep the system from collapsing.

How would the health-care reform that’s now taking shape solve these core problems? The Obama administration and Congress are still working out the details, but it looks like this generation of ‘comprehensive’ reform will not address the underlying issues, any more than previous efforts did. Instead it will put yet more patches on the walls of an edifice that is fundamentally unsound—and then build that edifice higher.

...Like its predecessors, the Obama administration treats additional government funding as a solution to unaffordable health care, rather than its cause. The current reform will likely expand our government’s already massive role in health-care decision-making—all just to continue the illusion that someone else is paying for our care...

[Read more: it is well worth reading the entire article]

9/5/2009: Controlling Children’s Minds by Ken Klukowski

Most people have now heard that President Obama is going to address America’s school children on September 8. He’ll be speaking to them directly, without their parents there to serve as a filter.

Taken with an outrageous situation unfolding in New Hampshire, where a home-schooling mother has been ordered to put her daughter in public school because the daughter is too outspoken in her Christian beliefs, a terrifying truth emerges: If you can force a child into government schools, you can control that child’s mind.

[This is what Obama has learned from Bill Ayres and his fellow Commmunists]

On Tuesday, around the nation, millions of children will be in a setting where they’re expected to accept what adults tell them, and where they are required to obey.

Many teachers will carry out White House instructions (now officially modified) to give writing topics to their students. The original theme: How can I help President Obama? Children are also encouraged to read books about Obama, and even kindergarteners will be asked, ‘Why is it important that we listen to the president?’

Meanwhile, a new video is circulating entitled ‘I Pledge,’ wherein popular celebrities lend their voices, saying ‘I pledge’ this and that. While some of those pledges are harmless or even helpful, and others silly, some carry a far-left message.

The most disturbing part is when one speaker says, ‘I pledge to be of service to Barack Obama.’ In case you missed that, toward the end actress Demi Moore adds, ‘I pledge to be a servant to our president.’

Oh my word.

No citizen in a free country pledges to be a servant of the president. We pledge our allegiance to the flag and to the republic for which it stands, never to the president. He is our servant, not the other way around.

This is the kind of adoration given to dictatorial leaders in totalitarian regimes, unlike in America, where it’s our civic duty to question our leaders and hold them accountable.

And what is the most disturbing fact about this video? It’s being shown in some public schools.

For those who think they can simply keep their children out of government schools, there is an unfolding story that every parent should know. In New Hampshire, a family court judge has ordered a divorced mother, Brenda Voydatch, to place her home-schooled 10-year-old daughter in a public school. The girl’s academics are excellent, but the non-custodial father sought a court order to force her into public school.

Why? Because the court order expresses the judge’s concern that the daughter shares ‘her mother’s rigidity on questions of faith.’ In other words, the girl is a devout, evangelical Christian. The court wrote that she must be exposed to ‘multiple systems of belief,’ and so must attend a secular school.

Where, evidently, she will watch Barack Obama and write papers about how to help the president advance his leftist agenda.

To be fair, it must be noted that the divorced parents agreed to joint decision-making as part of their divorce. This is yet another example of how children all too often pay the price in domestic disputes.

But the court tipped its hand. If this were about meeting a child’s educational needs beyond academics, that might be another discussion. But the court references the girl’s Christian faith, and the mother’s faith, and cites that as a crucial factor in ordering the girl into a secular public school.

The court overstepped its bounds, violating both the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom and the rights of conscience of both the mother and daughter. The Alliance Defense Fund has taken this case to contest the order.

Controlling the learning environment allows you to control a child’s mind. When children are in school at a young and impressionable age, they know that they’re there to learn. They’re told by their parents to listen to the teachers, to do what the teacher says, to trust what they are told. In this environment, children can be taught to believe almost anything. Communist and fascist regimes have taken advantage of this for decades, indoctrinating children to become obedient servants to the government, to adore the head of state and to fanatically follow that leader.

This New Hampshire situation is frightening, especially in the context of public schools being told to channel in Barack Obama.

9/5/2009: Leader of None by Paul Driessen

‘Few challenges facing America – and the world – are more urgent than combating climate change,’ President Obama has asserted. ‘We will make it clear that America is ready to lead.’

The President and Al Gore are certainly ready to lead. But how many will follow?

Even in America, and certainly on the world stage, the two increasingly look like Don Quixote and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza. As they tilt for windmills, and against a ‘monstrous giant of infamous repute’ – climate disasters conjured up by computer models and Hollywood special effects masters – their erstwhile followers are making politically correct noises, but running for the hills.

The House of Representatives passed a 1400-page energy and climate bill – by a razor-thin margin, and only after Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman packed it with enough last-minute deals to protect favored congressional districts, buy votes, and curry favor with assorted special interests. Not one legislator actually read the bill – which would create a trillion-dollar cap-trade-and-tax industry, ensure that energy and food costs ‘necessarily skyrocket,’ kill jobs, and impose an all-intrusive Green Nanny State.

Republicans want to control what people do in their bedrooms, insists the old canard. Democrats, it appears, want to dictate what we do everywhere outside of our bedrooms. And Pancho Gore wants to become the world’s first global warming billionaire, by selling climate indulgences, aka carbon offsets.

The reaction has been predictable – by anyone except House and White House czars and czarinas.

Citizens are livid over yet another attempt to use a purported crisis to justify expanding the government and spending billions of tax dollars for alarmist research, activism and propaganda, just ahead of the Copenhagen climate conference. Global warming continues to rank dead-last in Pew Research and other polls that actually list it as an issue. Rasmussen puts the President’s approval ratings at 46% and falling. Zogby reports that 57% of Americans oppose cap-and-trade bills.

Manufacturing states, which get 60-98% of their electricity from coal, worry that the only thing they’ll export in ten years will be jobs. Democrat senators from those states worry that the energy and climate issue will be ‘toxic for them during midterm elections,’ says Politico magazine.

Even companies that had eagerly sought seats at the negotiating table are now gagging. ConocoPhillips, Caterpillar and others finally realize that cap-and-tax will severely penalize them and their customers.

Not even the climate is cooperating. Outside of Dallas, 2009 has brought some of coldest summer days on record across the US. Near freezing temperatures nipped at crops, and gas heaters were sine qua non at an August 29 outdoor wedding in Wisconsin. The Farmers Almanac predicts a brutal winter.

In Europe, every latitude has a platitude about saving the planet. But EU countries that agreed to slash greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels are well above their Kyoto Protocol targets – Austria by 30% and Spain by 37% as of 2008. And despite new commitments to cut emissions 40 years from now, you don’t need tarot cards or entrails to predict the more probable EU emissions future.

Germany plans to build 27 coal-fired electrical generating plants by 2020. Italy plans to double its reliance on coal in just five years. Europe as a whole will have 40 new coal-fired power plants by 2015, columnist Alan Caruba reports. The Polish Academy of Sciences has publicly challenged manmade global warming disaster hypotheses. And only 11% of Czech citizens believe rising carbon dioxide emissions caused global temperatures to climb 1975-1998 – and caused them to fall between 1940 and 1975, then to stabilize and finally decline again 1998-2009.

Australia just voted down punitive global warming legislation. New Zealand has put its emissions-bashing program in a deep freeze.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s top economic aid bluntly dismissed any talk of following President Obama’s quixotic lead. ‘We won’t sacrifice economic growth for the sake of emission reduction,’ he told reporters at the July 2009 G8 meeting.

Chinese and Indian leaders are equally adamant. China is playing a smart hand in this high-stakes climate poker game, drawing up plans to combat global warming sometime in the future, and gradually improve its energy efficiency and pollution control. However, it is building a new coal-fired power plant every week and putting millions of new cars on its growing network of highways.

So is India, which will double its coal-based electricity generation and produce millions of Tata and other affordable cars by 2020. ‘India will not accept any binding emission-reduction target, period,’ Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has stated. ‘This is a non-negotiable stand.’

India and China have a ‘complete convergence’ of views on these matters, Ramesh added. No wonder: 400 million Indians still do not have electricity; 500 million Chinese still do not.

No electricity means no refrigeration, to keep food and medicines from spoiling. It means no water purification, to reduce baby-killing intestinal diseases. No modern heating and air conditioning, to reduce hypothermia in winter, heat stroke in summer, and lung disease year-round. It means no lights or computers, no modern offices, factories, schools, shops, clinics or hospitals.

Fossil fuels are ‘gradually eliminating poverty in the Third world,’ observes UCLA economist Deepak Lal. Any call to curb carbon emissions would ‘condemn billions to continued poverty. While numerous Western do-gooders shed crocodile tears about the Third World’s poor, they are willing to prevent them from taking the only feasible current route out from this abject state’ – oil, gas, coal, nuclear and hydroelectric energy development. The situation is intolerable, unsustainable, lethal and immoral.

The only way India and China would agree to cut their emissions is if the United States cut its emissions 40% by 2020, says Ramesh – back to 1959 levels and pre-JFK living standards, when the US population was 179 million (versus 306 million today). No way will that happen. So Asian energy and economic development will continue apace. And rightly so, to ensure human rights and environmental justice.

All is not bleak, however, for Canute Obama’s impossible dream of controlling global temperatures.

British politicians remain committed to slashing CO2 emissions and replacing hydrocarbons with wind power. Unfortunately, the biggest UK wind projects have been abandoned or put on indefinite hold – and a growing demand/supply imbalance portends still higher energy prices, widespread power cuts, rolling blackouts and energy rationing, the Daily Telegraph reported on August 31. Brits may soon trade their stiff upper lips for contentious town hall meetings and ballot-box revolution.

The Democratic Party of Japan’s landslide victory in the August 30 election will likely create a new coalition government tilted strongly to the left. The DJP has pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 – though this will likely strangle economic growth and job creation, especially if one coalition partner’s opposition to nuclear power becomes DJP policy.

Then there is Africa, where leaders appear ready to support curbs on energy use – in exchange for up to $300 billion per year in additional foreign aid, ‘to cushion the impact of global warming.’ That will be nice for their private bank accounts, but less so for Africa’s 750 million people who still don’t have electricity.

Of course, the real goal was never to control the climate. It was always to control energy use, lives, jobs, economies, transportation and housing – and usher in a new era of global governance. The American people are increasingly saying they’re not ready to grant that power to Obama & Company.

9/4/2009: Without Tort Reform, It Isn’t Health Care Reform --It’s a Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Protection Act by Hugh Hewitt

President Obama wants everyone to believe that American health care is in a crisis, and he wants everyone to be willing to sacrifice in order to solve that crisis.

He wants senior citizens to pay more for Medicare but get fewer benefits. He wants them to ignore the rationing embedded in his proposals to cut hundreds of billions from the Medicare budget and to drastically increase the cost of Medicare Advantage.

President Obama wants seniors to sacrifice.

President Obama wants employers to pay more in health care premiums, and if they don’t provide health insurance for their employees, he wants them to pay penalty taxes. He doesn’t care that tens of thousands of small businesses are struggling to stay open and keep their employees employed. And he doesn’t care that the expiration of the Bush tax cuts will hit these businesses hard.

President Obama wants employers to sacrifice.

President Obama wants doctors and hospitals to sacrifice. He is demanding cuts in reimbursement rates to hundreds of thousands of doctors and deep cuts for hospitals as well. He doesn’t care that doctors’ incomes have been pressured by falling reimbursement rates for years, and that many hospitals are struggling with the emergency room costs of treating the uninsured.

President Obama wants doctors and hospitals to sacrifice.

President Obama wants Big Pharma and insurance companies to sacrifice. President Obama wants young healthy people who choose not to buy health insurance to sacrifice.

President Obama wants everyone to sacrifice. Well, not quite everyone.

There is one group that President Obama doesn’t mention, one group he doesn’t demand sacrifice for the greater good. President Obama is protecting the plaintiffs’ lawyers who sue doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies and reap billions in fees from the tort lottery.

Though the broken, out-of-control tort system drives the cost of medicine through the roof, President Obama hasn’t demanded any changes to that system, like a cap on pain and suffering damages, or a cap on lawyers’ fees, or an excise tax on plaintiffs’ contingency awards.

President Obama hasn’t even asked for a provision that would award wrongfully sued doctors and hospitals the cost of their defense.

President Obama hasn’t asked anything of the plaintiffs’ lawyers because those plaintiff lawyers contribute tens of millions of dollars to Democratic candidates. They have done so for years and they will continue to do so as long as the Democrats protect their business. They put a lot of money into the Obama campaign and the Democratic drive to take over Congress, and their investment is paying off handsomely.

The president and Congressional Democrats have been protecting the plaintiffs’ lawyers’ business all year long, even though their business is a chief driver of skyrocketing health care costs.

Next week’s speech by President Obama to the Congress will be full of the increasingly tiresome rhetoric of crisis and sacrifice.

But it won’t be talking about the plaintiffs’ lawyers and the costs they impose on us all.

And it certainly won’t be demanding serious reform of the tort system as part of the ‘reform’ of health care.

And therein is all you need to know about the merits of Obamacare. The president doesn’t believe American health care is in a crisis, because if he did, he’d call for the tort reform that every expert believes is necessary.

But he won’t. So we all know it is a giant exercise in hypocritical politics of the worst sort.

Obamacare deserves to die for a lot of reasons, but large among them is the sheer duplicity of demanding deep sacrifices of everyone except the plaintiffs’ lawyers who have grown rich beyond most people’s imaginations profiting off of the doctors and hospitals and pharmaceutical companies that work to keep Americans healthy.

Keep this in mind when you watch the president next week, if you even bother to watch.

9/4/2009: from kausfiles.com ‘Based on a line from Michael Kinsley: ‘I can’t help but feel that the reason the President doesn’t effectively rebut the ‘rationing’ argument is that he kind of believes we have to move toward rationing. But couldn’t he fake it?’

[Let’s say Obama does believe we need rationing of medical care. True believers in socialism do not and apparently cannot understand how markets work; they believe that they, the anointed ones, must therefore ration for us; they also believe that it is fair (no special privileges for the rich, even if the rich have worked much harder and smarter all their lives to earn those privileges). This intellectual weakness in socialists supports H. L. Menckin’s definition of a socialist, ‘A socialist is someone who has nothing and wants to share it with everyone.’]

‘If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.’ — Orson Scott Card

9/4/2009: from Best of the Web: Two Wire Services in One!

‘THE FACTS: Republicans are correct that only a small percentage of the $48 billion in transportation money has been spent. But red tape is a red herring. In fact, stimulus projects have to be ready to begin quickly. Projects that have yet to clear permitting, environmental review or other bureaucratic hurdles won’t get funded because they won’t meet the law’s deadlines.’--’fact check,’ Associated Press, July 10

‘Biden, Obama’s chief stimulus cheerleader, proudly pointed to more than 2,200 highway projects Thursday funded by the program, but didn’t mention the growing frustration among contractors that infrastructure money is only trickling out and thus far hasn’t delivered the needed boost in jobs.’--’fact check,’ Associated Press, Sept. 3

9/4/2009: from Best of the Web: Up With Business, Down With Big Business

John Carney of The Business Insider has an acute observation on the political failure of ObamaCare:

The Obama administration ‘expended great effort to line up the support of health-care insurers, pharmaceutical makers and care providers, believing that by keeping them around the table, they could win over Republicans and stop the kind of industry-led attacks that helped sink the Clinton plan,’ writes the Journal team.

It was supposed to be a simple formula. Win over the health care industry shepherd, and the Republican will follow like sheep. But it didn’t work.

What seems to have gone wrong can be described as a failure of the imagination: Obama’s administration just never believed Republicans would stand up for their limited government principles if that meant opposing business interests. They were apparently assuming that Republicans and conservatives could be won over by winning over ‘business interests,’ as if free market and anti-government positions were just rhetorical cover for policy making at the behest of business.

A useful distinction can be drawn here between business (commercial activity) and big business (large corporations or industries acting collectively to seek economic advantages from the political system). Those of us who adhere to free-market principles are pro-business, in that we think commerce is a good thing, but owe no allegiance to corporations or industries as such. If the president and his men are still confused, they could do worse than to read ‘Down With Big Business,’ a 1979 editorial written by the late Robert Bartley, editor of The Wall Street Journal.

9/3/2009: How Obama Blew Health Care Reform On A Bet The Republicans Were Hollow Men

The Obama administration may have blown its chance to reform health care in the United States by cynically cutting deals with special interests and ignoring public sentiment, according to an explosive Wall Street Journal story today.

It’s a profound piece of myth busting by the Journal. According to the story Obama likes to tell, he is engaged in a struggle against special interests to remake the health care system in a way that will benefit the American people. But there aren’t really any special interests opposing him. The drug companies, the health care providers, the health insurers all signed on to Obama’s plan long ago. They are actively lobbying for it.

[Read More]

9/4/2009: As our military leaves Iraq (if Obama really does bring them home as he promised) and as our military builds in Afghanistan, we will again see that liberal nation-building does not work. Bush claimed to understand that when he was first elected but either he lied (and wanted to finish Daddy’s war in Iraq) or changed his mind after 9/11/2001. Obama has claimed that Iraq was a mistake (I agree) and that Afghanistan is the ‘good war.’ This proves once again that he is an idiot (which I already knew because all ‘sincere’ Marxists are idiots—whereas most Marxists are just power hungry—Obama appears to be both). Afghanistan has been and will continue to be a disaster. This is the easiest prediction I have ever made. Under the best circumstances, liberals cannot fight wars. The war in Afghanistan is unwinnable and, politically, Afghanistan is ungovernable. —Dale F. Ogden

9/4/2009: Quote of the Day from the Future of Freedom Foundation:

‘The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.’ — Herbert Spencer, Essays [1891]

9/3/2009: from DownsizeDC.org Dispatch

Subject: Are free market prices and government rationing the same thing?

If you tell someone that government-controlled healthcare will lead to rationing, they may respond by saying, ‘Healthcare is already rationed, by prices. If you can’t afford a treatment, you can’t get it.’ This seems like a powerful argument, but it isn’t. Here’s why . . .

• Free market prices are flexible, negotiable, and respond to consumer choice
• Prices set by the government are inflexible, non-negotiable, and respond only to back-room lobbying, or to the whims of the bureaucrats who set the prices or do the rationing

Free market price send signals to produce more or less of things, according to consumer demands. By comparison, government rationing only reflects what the politicians want.

Is healthcare different? It is not. Healthcare responds to free market prices, or to government dictates, in exactly the same way as all other goods and services. Consider . . .

• America’s half-socialized health care system is already having trouble maintaining an adequate supply of primary care doctors. Many of them are quitting their practices because the prices they’re paid by government programs, or by government-distorted insurance policies, aren’t worth it.
• Meanwhile, America’s half-free-market health care system still leads the world in medical innovation. Americans have won 11 Nobel Prizes in Medicine in the last 10 years, 26 in the last 20 years, and 39 in the last 30 years. No other country even comes close to this. What’s left of free-market pricing in America is keeping the health care of the entire world afloat.
• Healthcare procedures not covered by government programs, or by government-distorted insurance policies, show us that true free market pricing could give us ever-improving care at ever-lower prices.

In addition . . .

• In a free market, if you can’t afford the cost of a treatment, and can’t find a cheaper alternative that’s nearly as good, your doctors may decide to lower the cost, or even provide the treatment pro bono
• But will doctors be as flexible and generous when healthcare decisions are dictated by the federal Comparative Effectiveness Board, and there are fewer doctors seeing more patients because prices no longer reflect market realities?

If free market prices are really the same as government rationing . . .

• Why have societies run by government rationing and price fixing always had shortages and long lines?
• Why did the Soviet Union fail?
• Why did China adopt a free market economy?
• Why did the post-WWII German Economic Miracle begin precisely when the German authorities abandoned government rationing, over the protests of the occupying powers (see our quotes of the day above)?

It’s a simple fact: human beings have experimented with government rationing and price-fixing over and over again, always getting the same catastrophic results. Must we do it yet again before we finally learn our lesson?

If anyone tells you free market prices and government rationing are the same thing, don’t let them get away with it. Don’t let the politicians get away with it either. Please keep telling them you don’t want their Big Government healthcare scheme.:

9/3/2009: from Best of the Web: ‘Possibly It Shortened Her Life, Too’

‘In a memoir being published this month, Senator Edward M. Kennedy called his behavior after the 1969 car accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne ‘inexcusable’ and said the events might have shortened the life of his ailing father, Joseph P. Kennedy.’--New York Times, Sept. 3

9/3/2009: Los Angeles forest fires could have been controlled

Highly flammable forest on the edge of Los Angeles was not back-burned this year, even though Federal authorities had submitted plans for the burn.

Critics of the US Forest Service have said a back-burn procedure might have avoided the wildfires now raging in the area.

The US Forest Service was in possession of permits to burn away the undergrowth on more than 1,700 acres of the Angeles National Forest, but less than 200 acres had been cleared by the time the Los Angeles fires broke out.

The agency has defended itself by saying weather and environmental rules limited the scope of the prescribed burns.

Some fire experts have now suggested that environmental protests may have contributed to the disaster, with undergrowth allowed to build up for as much as 40 years. [emphasis added]

The Los Angeles wildfires have destroyed 140,000 acres of forest over the past week; fed by tinder-dry vegetation.

The blaze has destroyed more than five dozen homes, killed two firefighters and forced thousands of people to flee.

9/2/2009: California’s Man-Made Drought
The green war against San Joaquin Valley farmers.

California has a new endangered species on its hands in the San Joaquin Valley—farmers. Thanks to environmental regulations designed to protect the likes of the three-inch long delta smelt, one of America’s premier agricultural regions is suffering in a drought made worse by federal regulations.

The state’s water emergency is unfolding thanks to the latest mishandling of the Endangered Species Act. Last December, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued what is known as a ‘biological opinion’ imposing water reductions on the San Joaquin Valley and environs to safeguard the federally protected hypomesus transpacificus, a.k.a., the delta smelt. As a result, tens of billions of gallons of water from mountains east and north of Sacramento have been channeled away from farmers and into the ocean, leaving hundreds of thousands of acres of arable land fallow or scorched. [Is this insane or what?]

[Read More]

9/2/2009: High Plains Drifters: Politicians Lucrative Protection Racket
by Fred S. McChesney (originally published January 1998)

The idea that politicians sell special favors to special interests is no longer new, although it still makes news. Throughout 1997, newspapers and television reported daily on John Huang, various Asian connections, and a suspicion (at the least) that the large sums greasing politicians’ hands were purchasing favors. Thus, allegedly, was American foreign-trade policy distorted and, according to Senator Fred Thompson, the 1996 election influenced. Dispensing the goodies is a bipartisan effort, of course. The support for ethanol subsidies by Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich indicated to many that the 1994 Republican conquest of Congress was unlikely to change much over time.

...When Vice President Gore sits in the White House with his Democratic National Committee credit card, making dozens of calls to prospective ‘contributors,’ is he dangling the prospect of special favors in return? Or might there be something else going on?

Cooperation or Exploitation?

Consider that contract is not the only basis on which parties interact in society. While contracts are mutually beneficial, things like theft and murder—also involving interaction between individuals—leave one side better off but the other worse off. Behavior, in other words, may be either cooperative or exploitative. Individuals seek voluntary bilateral transfers (contracts); they also guard against the possibility of involuntary unilateral transfers (theft).

...But a politician has an alternative for raising money: selling protection. He can agree not to do something that otherwise he says he would do, something that would reduce the wealth of the potential donor. The most obvious burden that can be threatened is a tax, but there are any number of others that a politician can propose and then withdraw for a price. A private citizen will be just as willing to pay for a special favor worth $1 million as he will to avoid a $1 million tax. (This assumes constant marginal utility of wealth; with declining marginal utility of wealth, a citizen will pay more to avoid the $1 million loss than for the $1 million gain.)

...Perhaps more important, the possibility of wealth being legislatively expropriated creates a disincentive to invest in the first place (or an incentive to invest in less valuable activities that are easier to shield from political threats). Each extortion episode thus leaves society poorer for the time lost and resources diverted from more productive endeavors.

...Of course, the political threats must be credible. If private individuals think a threat is just a bluff, they have no incentive to pay. Thus, politicians may sometimes be forced actually to legislate; as Gordon Tullock puts it, ‘politicians may sometimes have to enact legislation extracting private rents from owners who do not pay up, just as the Cosa Nostra occasionally burns down the buildings of those who fail to pay its protection levies.’ If payment ultimately is forthcoming, politicians can always repeal the legislation.

‘All right,’ one might say, ‘we should reduce or eliminate government’s ability credibly to threaten private individuals with pecuniary or other loss.’ True enough, perhaps, but this position effectively boils down to reducing the size of the state, of reducing its power to do almost everything it currently does. In particular, it would mean an end to most taxation and programs to transfer wealth, the essence of modern politics. However desirable, any such reduction amounts to arresting a trend in government growth that has been gaining momentum for over a century. If that engine cannot be stopped and thrown into reverse, those of us along for the ride must sometimes resign ourselves to protecting our well-being with our own wallets.

[Read the entire essay]

9/2/2009: The Fallacy of Equal Pay for Equal Work by Glenn Jacobs

We’ve all heard the phrase ‘equal pay for equal work.’ Many of those who habitually repeat this mantra may not realize that it is simply a variation of the discredited labor theory of value (LTV), which is generally associated with Marxian economics. According to the LTV, the value of a product is related to the labor needed to produce it. The LTV prevailed in classical economics until the Marginal Revolution in the late 1800s. The marginalists proved that value is not the result of a product’s inputs, but the result of the subjective judgment of individuals.

Unfortunately, it was the convoluted logic of the LTV that led President Obama to sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act on January 29. [Another Marxist Socialist Action from Obama, only 9 days after taking office; if it walks like a duck, and quacks...] The Ledbetter Act changes the statutory limitations period to sue an employer from 180 days from the date on which the employee’s pay was agreed on to 180 days from the issue of each new ‘discriminatory’ paycheck.

To better understand the implications of the laws prohibiting discriminatory pay, let us examine the nature of the relationship between an employer and an employee.

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, jobs are not the property of the employee. Unions will state that the positions which they hold are ‘their jobs’; protectionist anti–free-traders will claim that immigrants are stealing ‘American jobs.’ The fact is that the job is the property of the employer. There is a very simple way to logically prove this fact. If an employee worked for a single individual and that individual died would the employee still receive remuneration? Would the employee still have a job? Of course not; the job has died with the employer. But if, on the other hand, the employee died, the job would still exist.

[Read the entire essay]

9/1/2009: Suicide of the West? by Thomas Sowell

Britain’s release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi— the Libyan terrorist whose bomb blew up a plane over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, killing 270 people— is galling enough in itself. But it is even more profoundly troubling as a sign of a larger mood that has been growing in the Western democracies in our time.

In ways large and small, domestically and internationally, the West is surrendering on the installment plan to Islamic extremists.

The late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put his finger on the problem when he said: ‘The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.’

He wrote this long before Barack Obama became President of the United States. But this administration epitomizes the ‘concessions and smiles’ approach to countries that are our implacable enemies.

Western Europe has gone down that path before us but we now seem to be trying to catch up.

Still, the release of a mass-murdering terrorist, who went home to a hero’s welcome in Libya, shows that President Obama is not the only one who wants to move away from the idea of a ‘war on terror’— as if that will stop the terrorists’ war on us.

The ostensible reason for releasing al-Megrahi was compassion for a man terminally ill. It is ironic that this was said in Scotland, for exactly 250 years ago another Scotsman— Adam Smith— said, ‘Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.’

That lesson seems to have been forgotten in America as well, where so many people seem to have been far more concerned about whether we have been nice enough to the mass-murdering terrorists in our custody than those critics have ever been about the innocent people beheaded or blown up by the terrorists themselves.

Tragically, those with this strange inversion of values include the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder. Although President Obama has said that he does not want to revisit the past, this is only the latest example of how his administration’s actions are the direct opposite of his lofty words.

It is not just a question of looking backward.

The decision to second-guess CIA agents who extracted information to save American lives is even worse when you look forward.

Years from now, long after Barack Obama is gone, CIA agents dealing with hardened terrorists will have to worry about whether what they do to get information out of them to save American lives will make these agents themselves liable to prosecution that can destroy their careers and ruin their lives.

This is not simply an injustice to those who have tried to keep this country safe, it is a danger recklessly imposed on future Americans whose safety cannot always be guaranteed by sweet and gentle measures against hardened murderers.

Those who are pushing for legal action against CIA agents may talk about ‘upholding the law’ but they are doing no such thing. Neither the Constitution of the United States nor the Geneva Convention gives rights to terrorists who operate outside the law.

There was a time when everybody understood this. German soldiers who put on American military uniforms, in order to infiltrate American lines during the Battle of the Bulge were simply lined up against a wall and shot— and nobody wrung their hands over it. Nor did the U.S. Army try to conceal what they had done. The executions were filmed and the film has been shown on the History Channel.

So many ‘rights’ have been conjured up out of thin air that many people seem unaware that rights and obligations derive from explicit laws, not from politically correct pieties. If you don’t meet the terms of the Geneva Convention, then the Geneva Convention doesn’t protect you. If you are not an American citizen, then the rights guaranteed to American citizens do not apply to you.

That should be especially obvious if you are part of an international network bent on killing Americans. But bending over backward to be nice to our enemies is one of the many self-indulgences of those who engage in moral preening.

But getting other people killed so that you can feel puffed up about yourself is profoundly immoral. So is betraying the country you took an oath to protect.

To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at http://www.creators.com/. Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His Web site is http://www.tsowell.com.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM

9/1/2009: Assessing the media version of the Kennedy ‘legacy.’
By Christopher Hitchens

...The surviving family must have been thinking the same, as the whole Camelot replay rolled once again unchallenged across the national screen. But perhaps by now they take it as their due. Sure, the ‘tragedy’ of Chappaquiddick had its necessary moment, but even in those days Barbara Walters was doing her damage control, and it was amazing to see a clip of Walter Cronkite referring deadpan to the ‘driving accident’ that had kept Kennedy away from the Senate. It must take some ingenuity at the networks, even so, to simply airbrush the fascist sympathies and bootlegging background of Joseph Kennedy Sr., his sons’ murder campaigns in Cuba, the recruitment of the mafia for same, the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, the increasingly frantic and pathetic narco-addictions of JFK, the exploitation of unstable broads like Marilyn Monroe, and so much else besides.

In some ways, this banana-republic coverage was a disservice even to the recently departed. After all, it was in part the case that the youngest brother had lived down the criminal and narcissistic and power-mad background of his family. His best biographer, Adam Clymer, wrote, on the morning after he died, that it was arguably wrong to see a discontinuity in Kennedy’s career and that he had actually been a decent-enough legislator before abandoning any yearning for the White House after 1980. This may be true as far as it goes, but the obituaries would still have had to be somewhat different in tone, even given the servility of the journalistic profession, if Kennedy had died at the time of the Au Bar episode in Palm Beach, for instance, and had not decided to take some kind of a pull on himself and become a citizen again instead of a drone...

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9/1/2009: from the Daily Reckoning [an excellent ‘Eulogy’ for Edward Kennedy]

We were going to let Ted Kennedy go to his grave without mention here at The Daily Reckoning. The newspapers, television and radio shows have mentioned it enough. Even the foreign press has taken note of the event.

We might have let it go, but we have taken an oath: whenever we see a bubble we must pop it. And there is a bubble in Kennedy worship so big it threatens to blot out the sun. Today, we approach with a needle.

No writer has failed to mention that Mr. Kennedy was not the first of the clan die. The press cannot resist hero worship - especially when its heroes die young.

The Kennedy brothers could have lived comfortably all their lives on their father’s liquor money. Instead, they took up the banner of ‘public service’ and wrapped themselves in it so tightly it suffocated them all. The oldest of the band was killed in WWII. Ted Kennedy’s grave lies only 100 feet from his brother, Robert, killed in 1968 while running for president. And only another 100 feet from another brother who was shot down five years earlier. With that kind of curse on a family, you’d think the younger bro would have gone back into the liquor business. Instead, the younger held his head up...headed for glory...and drove off a bridge. The bridge probably saved him. Had he made it beyond the primaries, some nutcase would have certainly taken a shot at him.

The bridge incident would have sunk a lesser man - that is, one who lacked the name, family connections, lawyers, and money of Ted Kennedy. It probably would have sunk a more reflective, more sensitive man too. A man with a sharper conscience might have seen the girl’s face in his dreams and have been driven to drink...eventually drowning himself in his own guilt, like a character from a Russian novel. But Kennedy had the ability to rise above shame and put scandal behind him, with some helpful amnesia from the press. Chappaquiddick is reported in today’s press as though it were a personal triumph. A lesser man would have gone to jail for manslaughter; Kennedy went on to become the ‘lion of the Senate.’ He merely gave up his presidential aspirations and buckled down to the life of a Senate hack. The eulogies tell us that driving off the bridge, drunk, made him what he was: ‘the greatest legislator of all time,’ as the President put it.

No, we never shared the conservatives’ loathing for the man. We never met him. Had we known him personally, we probably would have found him as agreeable a drinking companion as anyone else. But we come neither to bury Ted Kennedy, nor to praise him...we merely poke fun at the world that idolizes him.

The fact that the Kennedys committed themselves to ‘public service’ seemed to make them part of the furniture of public life. Everywhere you looked, there they were. The newspapers loved them. Everyone knew what they looked like. Hairdressers knew their private lives. Taxi drivers suffered their personal tragedies as if they were one of the family.

But the Kennedys were more than just furniture. First, because they were not particularly useful...you couldn’t sit on them or dine on them. More importantly, when it came to decorating the republic, they were the ones who wanted to arrange the furniture.

All the obituaries hammered this point as if they were hardening steel: ‘He devoted his life to public causes...’ says one. ‘He fought for the poor and the downtrodden...’ says another.

He said so himself. In a letter to Pope Benedict XVI, Kennedy seemed to write his own obituary. He allowed as how he had ‘done his best to champion the rights of the poor and to open doors of economic opportunity. I’ve worked to welcome the immigrant, fight discrimination and expand access to health care and education...’

USA Today provides a typical illustration of the Senator’s magnanimity and generosity.

A woman with an autistic son asked the government for help. ‘The Haitian immigrant wrote to her senator, ‘the only one who can understand what it takes to raise a child with disabilities.’’ (Kennedy’s son lost a leg and his sister, Rosemary, was mentally disabled. This, according to USA Today, gave him ‘a connection with the public’s private pain.’)

‘Within three weeks,’ the news item continues, ‘they secured vocational and life skills training [for the son]...that allowed his mother to finally earn a college degree last year at age 58.

‘I have my life back and my son is no longer under by my care 24 hours a day...’

No...now he’s under someone else’s care! Kennedy redecorated. He moved the cost of caring for the poor fellow on to someone else.

And what does the mother do with her free time? She’s now a ‘community organizer.’ You can bet she’s organizing more transfers...of money from the people who earned it to the people who didn’t.

‘He was always reaching out,’ said Democratic strategist Donna Brazile. Yes, he was always re-arranging the furniture. And USA Today told us that he inspired a whole race of redecorators - people infected by a desire for ‘public service.’

‘Hundreds of lesser-known former Kennedy staffers and campaign volunteers...followed him into public service...The alumni of his office pepper the government...’

But what is the consequence of all this meddling? Is the nation better off for it? None of the obituaries we saw even raised the question. How do you know if something is genuinely a public service? Is it a public service when you take money from one person and give it to another? The press seems to think so. Is it a public service when you load up the nation with hundreds of billions worth of programs and pet projects?

Kennedy was a prolific proposer...a serial legislator...a Tom Friedman with a Senate seat. Surely some conservative think tank has totted up the cost of all his legislation. And surely it is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Where did the money come from? It had to come from somewhere. It has to come from people who had ideas and plans of their own...people who had put the couch under the window and the TV in front of the easy chair, just the way they wanted it. Were they really any better off when Kennedy moved things around? Was the republic stronger, healthier, more prosperous and more honest after the Kennedy brothers got through with it?

We leave you with the question.

As for Ted Kennedy, the man was a scalawag. But he was God’s scalawag; and all His creatures deserve our respect. And now that he’s in the dirt, God will do with him as He chooses. RIP.

9/1/2009: White House czar urged ‘resistance’ against U.S.

Main speaker at rally sponsored by organization associated with Revolutionary Communist Party

President Obama’s environmental adviser, Van Jones, was the main speaker at an anti-war rally that urged ‘resistance’ against the U.S. government, WND has learned.

The rally was sponsored by an organization associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party, which calls for the overthrow of the U.S. government and its replacement with a communist dictatorship.

[Read more]

9/1/2009: Martin Peretz on Obama’s Middle East delusions

New Republic editor Martin Peretz commenting at TNR.com on President Obama’s response to Scotland’s release of jailed terrorist Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi:

I have my theory about the inertness (perhaps that’s too kind a description) of the Obama response to this grotesque spectacle [of the released Libyan Pan-Am 103 bomber]: He is befuddled. His entire grand strategy rested on our ability to transform dozens of Libyas; his persuasive powers would make allies out of the rogue’s gallery of the Middle East. That was never an approach grounded in the hard realities of history or more than a surface understanding of his supposed interlocutors. It is a dream that should have died, once and for all, with the pep rally greeting al-Megrahi. But will this humiliation of Anglo-America change our policy? Unlike Obama, I have no illusions.

9/1/2009: September, a new month... Maybe this is the month that the stock market will crash; maybe I should sell all my stocks now and start shorting them again. Are we going to have a Black October? No one knows. But ‘Whatever must happen will happen. We just don’t know when.’ Time will tell. —Dale F. Ogden

Read Blogs from Prior Months

January 2009 February 2009 March 2009

April 2009 May 2009 June 2009

July 2009 Aug 2009 Sep 2009

Oct 2009 Nov 2009 Dec 2009

January 2008 February 2008 March 2008

April 2008 May 2008 June 2008

July 2008 August 2008 September 2008

October 2008 November 2008 December 2008

January 2008, December 2007 & November 2007

Other Old Stuff from dalefogden.net

Other Information about Dale F. Ogden

Dale F. Ogden & Associates
Actuaries & Management Consultants
www.usactuary.com

Dale F. Ogden, Libertarian, for
California Insurance Commissioner, 2006
www.dalefogden.org

Dale F. Ogden, Libertarian, for
California State Senate, 2004

Dale F. Ogden, Libertarian, for
California Insurance Commissioner, 2002

Dale F. Ogden, Libertarian, for
California State Assembly, 2000

Dale F. Ogden, Libertarian, for
California Insurance Commissioner, 1998