The nation is close to evenly split in its assessment of the president's policies to date, and there is great intensity on both sides of the debate with dwindling numbers in the middle.
If race were the only issue, there would be much less hyperventilation about Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s unpleasant run-in with the criminal justice system. After all, it would hardly be the first time a black man had unjustly been hauled to jail by a white police officer. The debate -- really more of a shouting match -- is also about power and entitlement.
I'm talking about President Obama, obviously, but also Citigroup Chairman Richard Parsons, entertainment mogul Oprah Winfrey, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor and many others -- a growing number of minorities with the kind of serious power that used to be reserved for whites only. In academia, the list begins with "Skip" Gates.
Apparently, there was something about the power relationship involved -- uppity, jet-setting black professor vs. regular-guy, working-class white cop -- that Crowley couldn't abide. Judging by the overheated commentary that followed, that same something, whatever it might be, also makes conservatives forget that they believe in individual rights and oppose intrusive state power.
Yet Gates' fit of pique somehow became cause for arrest. I can't prove that if the Big Cheese in question had been a famous, brilliant Harvard professor who happened to be white -- say, presidential adviser Larry Summers, who's on leave from the university -- the outcome would have been different. I'd put money on it, though. Anybody wanna bet?
And finally, Medicare has proven to be more popular than private insurance programs. So, for all the talk about hating big government, the big government seems to be doing something right, according to numerous polls. According to a Kaiser poll, 68 percent of respondents said they believed the Medicare program would put "your interests above their own" compared to 48 percent for private insurance.
I don’t know how many people understand the significance of Mr. Obama’s proposal to give MedPAC, the expert advisory board to Medicare, real power. But it’s a major step toward reducing the useless spending — the proliferation of procedures with no medical benefits — that bloats American health care costs.
Mr. Obama was especially good when he talked about controlling medical costs. And there’s a crucial lesson there — namely, that when it comes to reforming health care, compassion and cost-effectiveness go hand in hand.
Well, in the case of health care, one pill means continuing on our current path — a path along which health care premiums will continue to soar, the number of uninsured Americans will skyrocket and Medicare costs will break the federal budget. The other pill means reforming our system, guaranteeing health care for all Americans at the same time we make medicine more cost-effective.
"I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that [Gates case]. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact."
The president said he understands the sergeant who arrested Gates is an "outstanding police officer." But he added that with all that's going on in the country with health care and the economy and the wars abroad, "it doesn't make sense to arrest a guy in his own home if he's not causing a serious disturbance."
To most people, this was less a giant step for mankind than one of the low points in what has been justly described as a “slum of a decade,” but Hardball host Chris Matthews, a one-time speech writer for our 39th president, convened two ex-colleagues - Gerald Rafshoon and Hendrik Hertzberg (now at the New Yorker) - to commemorate and discuss the event.
“Today, the malaise speech is being revived as a totem of Mr. Carter’s unrecognized greatness,” as Hayward tells us. “Jimmy Carter was a visionary president! If only we had listened to him!”If only we hadn’t had to listen to Matthews’s idea that presidents always “appoint” their successors by being their opposites: Hoover “created” Franklin D. Roosevelt; Nixon created a “truth-teller” like Carter, and it took a catastrophe on the level of George Bush the younger to give us the radiant presence who rules us today.“You might say he begat Obama,” he babbled to Hertzberg, “It took Bush to make us see the importance of an Obama...What do you think about a...sophisticated Obama coming in after an incurious president like Bush?”Hertzberg, of course, would be up to the challenge. “We really required a comprehensive disaster...to make Americans ready to take this extraordinary and wonderful leap of faith that they took in electing this remarkable president that we now have,” he replied.
Historically, of course, it took a disaster like Carter to make Americans take a chance on a 69-year-old ex-movie actor who cured their “malaise” in short order. Since malaise appears poised to be making a comeback, perhaps this will happen again.
To today's centrist Democrats, this has become a distant memory, a history lesson they cannot grasp. The notion that actual individuals might have to pay to secure the national interest appalls them. In the House, the Blue Dogs doggedly oppose proposals to fund universal coverage by taxing the wealthiest 1 percent of the nation's households. Their deference to wealth -- whether the consequence of our system of funding elections or a byproduct of the Internet generation's experience of free access to information and entertainment -- is not to be trifled with.
The best thing going for the poor is the increase in their standard of living brought about by the energy of free enterprise. The only way they can ever escape from poverty is by obtaining a good education, and getting a decent job. Big Government is a miserable failure at the former, and an active threat to the latter - as can be seen from the obscene cap-and-trade bill, or Obama’s health care proposals. Nothing should be a higher priority for the poor than slashing the size of government and radically cutting taxes. The free markets are always hiring. When they slow down, it’s because they aren’t free.
Big Government is the most formidable engine of poverty the industrialized world has ever seen. The worst famines to sweep the twentieth century were caused by either incompetent or malevolent government, with the Holodomor famine in Ukraine being a particularly horrifying example. Millions of Ukrainians were starved to death in the Holodomor, as a deliberate matter of Soviet policy. The infamous Ethiopian famine of the mid-80s prompted a well-meaning response from the West, including the Live Aid concerts organized by Bob Geldof… but while hundreds of millions of dollars were raised, much of the aid money and relief supplies were simply stolen by the Ethiopian military junta. Collectivist governments around the world have produced uniformly terrible standards of living.I think everyone really knows that the poor are way better off in a market economy, but that makes no difference to Democrats. Their only concern is really about them being in power -- the poor are just pawns in that purpose and having them stay poor is fine with them.
On the surface this should be the moment the Blue Man basks in glory. The most urbane president since John Kennedy sits in the White House. A San Francisco liberal runs the House of Representatives while the key committees are controlled by representatives of Boston, Manhattan, Beverly Hills, and the Bay Area—bastions of the gentry.
Despite his famous no-blue-states-no-red-states-just-the-United-States statement, more than 90 percent of the top 300 administration officials come from states carried last year by President Obama. The inner cabinet—the key officials—hail almost entirely from a handful of cities, starting with Chicago but also including New York, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco area.
So we have BO pushing the "Chicago Model" of "pay to play" at a national level with the idea that all we really need to do as a nation is to move money between those that make it and those that support BO. "Don't play (or work) and don't pay" is sounding like the best model.
The Air Force brass wanted $4 billion in the fiscal year 2010 budget to build 20 more F-22s. Gates slashed the request to zero. The Senate Armed Services Committee voted, 13-11, to shift $1.7 billion from other programs in order to fund another seven planes. That's the line item that the full Senate excised this afternoon.
But today, beneath the optimistic rhetoric, lurks another possibility that no politician and few pundits want to admit: that the system is no longer up to the task and that the factors that once brought relief are no longer operable. There is the real possibility that this time we will not win but rather founder the way Japan has done since its economic catastrophe. There is the possibility that this time it is hopeless.
What those Fathers could not have anticipated was a political party dedicated to total obstructionism - dedicated to making certain that the government would fiddle while the nation burned. For this we have the Republicans to blame for their actions and the Democrats to blame for their inaction. As comedian Bill Maher recently put it, “The Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital.’’
... you can readily see that not even the Democrats’ 60 votes in the Senate are sufficient to move legislation even if there is a public outcry for action. According to polls, roughly 70 percent of Americans want a public option in healthcare. With that kind of support, the fact that it is even being debated is testament to how decrepit our system has become.
And so we are now a nation with great professions of faith that we will succeed but little real confidence that we will, a nation that focuses more on what can go wrong than on what can go right, a nation that can’t seem to get action. We are a timid nation with small dreams and even smaller plans - a nation that seems to have lost its capacity to do big things. We all know the nation is broken, but we may no longer have the will or the institutions to fix it.
I wonder how many Americans want to live to be 100? have true love? win the lottery? I'm thinking it is way over 70%, to that must be REALLY a testament to how broken our system is that we haven't guaranteed THOSE items!!! Every teen knows that the prime determinant of what we get is very much supposed to be what we want.
So we have a "timid" nation spending Trillions more than we have, taking over private business and rushing government programs through to gaurentee us everything from the right climate to the right healthcare. It is clear that the only thing that can "save us" is to get rid of the Republicans. Can't we abolish old age, sickness and baldness while we are at it? What could POSSIBLY limit folks that can say "yes we can!"???
In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a "wedding" ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard - essentially raped by her "husband."
A new all-purpose political truism entered the language: "If this nation can put a man on the moon, then it should be able to ..." Cure cancer, stop crime, end poverty. All it would take, many seemed to think at the time, was the same kind of money and commitment that the US had lavished on Apollo.
The shuttle is now too dangerous, too fragile and too expensive. Seven more flights and then it is retired, going -- like the Spruce Goose and the Concorde -- into the museum of Things Too Beautiful And Complicated To Survive.
America's manned space program is in shambles. Fourteen months from today, for the first time since 1962, the U.S. will be incapable not just of sending a man to the moon but of sending anyone into Earth orbit. We'll be totally grounded. We'll have to beg a ride from the Russians or perhaps even the Chinese.
But the barbed adjectives didn’t match the muted performance on display before the Judiciary Committee. Like the president who picked her, Sotomayor has been a model of professorial rationality. Besides, it’s delicious watching Republicans go after Democrats for being too emotional and irrational given the G.O.P. shame spiral.
W. and Dick Cheney made all their bad decisions about Iraq, W.M.D.’s, domestic surveillance, torture, rendition and secret hit squads from the gut, based on false intuitions, fear, paranoia and revenge.
Sarah Palin is the definition of irrational, a volatile and scattered country-music queen without the music. Her Republican fans defend her lack of application and intellect, happy to settle for her emotional electricity.
Senator Graham said Sotomayor would be confirmed unless she had “a meltdown” — a word applied mostly to women and toddlers until Mark Sanford proudly took ownership of it when he was judged about the wisdom of his Latina woman.
And then there’s the Supreme Court, of course, which gave up its claim to rational neutrality when the justices appointed by Republican presidents — including Bush Sr. — ignored what was fair to make a sentimental choice and throw the 2000 election to W.Oh those horrid Republicans. Have they trotted out some staffer willing to claim that Sonia sexually harassed them? Have they elected any bomb throwers as bad as Ann Coulter to give them 60 votes in the Senate (Franken)? How about racist titles? "Black Man's Last Stand"??
Faced with that warped case of supreme empathy, no wonder Sotomayor is so eager to follow the law.
The problem with trying to equalize is that you can usually only equalize downward. If the government were to spend some of its stimulus money trying to raise my basketball ability level to that of Michael Jordan, it would be an even bigger waste of money than most of the other things that Washington does.While it is certainly true that if there is any economic freedom at all, we can't all be at the top, it is also unfortunately true that the vast majority of us CAN end up at the BOTTOM in a failing totalitarian system. When we make the grossly unnatural condition of "equality" an objective, rather than the broad set of naturally selected objectives -- falling in love, raising a family, having a nice dinner with a good beverage, gaining knowledge, earning what we individually think is a "decent income" -- given each of our radically different ideas of what sorts of gratification delays, time/effort trade offs, etc go into that, it is highly likely that our "equality optimized system" ends up being radically less productive than the one that was "individually optimized".
Most activities do not exist for the sake of equality. They exist to serve their own purposes-- and those purposes are undermined, sometimes fatally, when equality becomes the goal.
For the past half-century, federal spending has averaged about 20 percent of GDP, federal taxes about 18 percent of GDP, and the budget deficit 2 percent of GDP. The CBO's projection for 2020 -- which assumes the economy has returned to "full employment" -- puts spending at 26 percent of GDP, taxes at a bit less than 19 percent of GDP, and a deficit above 7 percent of GDP. Future spending and deficit figures continue to grow.When dealing with Democrats, the "belief factor" is always interesting. Bush Sr said "no new taxes" and broke his promise so I voted for that crazy Perot and got Slick Willie. The odd thing with Democrats is that even their consituency assumes that they are lying -- BO says he is not in favor of Gay marriage, yet most of his constituents say "he really is, he is just saying that he isn't to get elected". He now claims to NOT be in favor of single payer, but he said he was in the past, and his supporters say he is -- he is just acting like he isn't to fool the conservative rubes into supporting BOcare which will lead to single payer.
One point that Sowell doesn't go into is what I call the issue of "Learjet health". Why do we fly my 70 something aunt from N Wisconsin to Mayo TWICE on a helicopter? I can't afford it, she can't afford it -- why do we nationally think we can afford it? Is it "nice" that we ALL are getting the absolute "top flight healthcare"? I guess -- but then complaining about cost doesn't really seem to be very rational.Politicians may talk about "bringing down the cost of medical care," but they seldom even attempt to bring down the costs. What they bring down is the price-- which is to say, they refuse to pay the costs.
Anybody can refuse to pay any cost. But don't be surprised if you get less when you pay less. None of this is rocket science. But it does require us to stop and think before jumping on a bandwagon.
The great haste with which the latest government expansion into medical care is being rushed through Congress suggests that the politicians don't want us to stop and think. That makes sense, from their point of view, but not from ours.
What had begun as a system of large-scale insurance had simply become a system of taxation, with today's contributions being used to pay today's benefits, rather than to accumulate a fund for future use. This "pay-as-you-go" approach had replaced the principle of thrift with the practice of entitlement ... but this approach is rooted in a false conception of how human beings behave. It destroys at the individual level, the link between contributions and benefits. In other words, between effort and reward. Whenever that happens on a massive scale and for a long period of time, the final result is disaster.
Glendower:
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur:
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
Glendower:
Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command
The devil
Hotspur:
And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil—
By telling the truth. Tell truth and shame the devil.
As soon as the Obama administration-in-waiting announced its stimulus
plan — this was before Inauguration Day — some of us worried that the
plan would prove inadequate. And we also worried that it might be hard,
as a political matter, to come back for another round.
But there’s a difference between defending what you’ve done so far and
being defensive. It was disturbing when President Obama walked back Mr.
Biden’s admission that the administration “misread” the economy,
declaring that “there’s nothing we would have done differently.” There
was a whiff of the Bush infallibility complex in that remark, a hint
that the current administration might share some of its predecessor’s
inability to admit mistakes. And that’s an attitude neither Mr. Obama
nor the country can afford.
It’s just like when Obama, the One Who Must Be Obeyed, said his family
was off-limits so everyone left them alone. But they never left mine
alone. Thank goodness for that though because we hate being out of the
limelight! It was a blast to see Bristol with my grandbaby Tripp on the
cover of People as the ambassadress of abstinence!
Today, something unsettlingly similar to McNamara's eerie assuredness pervades the Washington in which he died. The spirit is: Have confidence, everybody, because we have, or soon will have, everything -- really everything -- under control.
The apogee of McNamara's professional life, in the first half of the 1960s, coincided, not coincidentally, with the apogee of the belief that behavioralism had finally made possible a science of politics. Behavioralism held -- holds; it is a hardy perennial -- that the social and natural sciences are not so different, both being devoted to the discovery of law-like regularities that govern the behavior of atoms, hamsters, humans, whatever.
Once God is dead, then the hope is that man, via "science" can "settle things" -- as in "settled science" (an oxymoron) for Global Warming, "Quantization of risk" in the markets and all manner of other "science" in every pursuit of mankind. It used to be that when things failed, it was "God's will" -- in today's randomized atheist world, the answer of the profane to the divine seems to be "Shit happens". We have come a "long way".
So paradoxically, we live in an unordered, purposeless, random universe, yet through some fantastic accident, we are "blessed" with the masterful brilliance of BO who somehow possesses all the right "answers" to the unordered "questions" of our troubled world.
McNamara, like many who leave high office, never left the capital of this nation that believes people learn from history, and that therefore history is linear and progressive. But the capital, gripped once again by the audacious hope of mastering everything, would be wise to entertain a shadow of a doubt about that.
Do the masters of the randomly created ordered universe have doubts? How could they? If they did, there might possibly be a God beyond them, and that just won't do at any cost!
If the stimulus passed, the White House vowed, unemployment would peak at 8%. Today, it's 9.5% — and rising.
"The truth is, we and everyone else misread the economy," said
Biden. He used that phrase — "the truth is," or something similar — at
least three times in a talk with ABC's George Stephanopolous. But the
"truth is" something quite different.Many voices — including ours — were raised in opposition to the
stimulus when it was debated. We didn't "misread" the economy. We knew
from history that, left alone, it would get better without government
meddling.
How many times did we hear that the Surge was a failure before a single extra soldier had been sent over? Hundreds at least. How much do we hear from the MSM about the "stimulus" being a failure? Virtually nothing, and when we do, the statements are usually that "it probably wasn't big enough, we need another one".
Gee, "EVERYONE misread the economy" ... no, they didn't -- BO and the MSM misread the economy.
"The moon will essentially walk around underneath the orbiter," says Garvin. "With the detail we get in the photographs, every picture will be like a mini-landing." That includes photos of the Apollo sites, all half-dozen of which should have their portraits snapped. If NASA gets lucky, Garvin believes the first such images could be in hand by the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, on July 20.
Then suddenly you get the call from Washington. You know it'll mean Secret Service, and speechwriters, and minders vetting your wardrobe. But nobody said it would mean a mainstream network comedy host doing statutory rape gags about your 14-year old daughter. You've got a special-needs kid and a son in Iraq and a daughter who's given you your first grandchild in less than ideal circumstances. That would be enough for most of us. But the special-needs kid and the daughter and most everyone else you love are a national joke, and the PC enforcers are entirely cool with it.
Most of those who sneer at Sarah Palin have no desire to live her life. But why not try to - what's the word? - "empathize"? If you like Wasilla and hunting and snowmachining and moose stew and politics, is the last worth giving up everything else in the hopes that one day David Letterman and Maureen Dowd might decide Trig and Bristol and the rest are sufficiently non-risible to enable you to prosper in their world? And, putting aside the odds, would you really like to be the person you'd have to turn into under that scenario?
National office will dwindle down to the unhealthily singleminded (Clinton, Obama), the timeserving emirs of Incumbistan (Biden, McCain) and dynastic heirs (Bush). Our loss.