Columnists as Campaigners

Op-Ed Columnist - Costs and Compassion - NYTimes.com

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.

Well, the significance is that a federal beauracratic board will tell you what works and what doesn't work, BUT, since BO and the Democrats refuse to bite the hand of the trial lawyers that feed them, the Doctor will be between the "rock" of the MedPAC board telling him "that test doesn't have a high enough effectiveness, so we won't pay" and the subsequent malpractice lawyer saying "are you aware that had you done test X there is an x% chance that the condition would have been found and little Susy would have been saved?". Damned if you do, damned if you don't ... something which government excels at!

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.

But wait, the CBO says that BOcare will cost a TRILLION MORE than what we have now. I guess that "talk" is "especially good" when it is served up with a huge helping of chutzpa from Krugman's perspective. TALKING about less while spending a Trillion MORE is somehow acceptable, even though the Nobel Prize winning economist says "compassion and cost-effectiveness go hand in hand". Indeed -- an extra Trillion in economy wrecking deficits while a government agency cherry picks procedures on the basis of campaign contributions or phases of the moon doesn't sound all that compassionate to me.

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.

How can one win a Nobel prize and think that sloppily? Really? There are ONLY two choices. 1). Do nothing 2). Do whatever it is that BO finally figures out that he wants (if he ever figures it out)? In this vast nation with 300 million people, there are ONLY TWO choices!!!  Wow, if you believe that, then you most likely voted for BO, and until you turn your brain on, there isn't much to discuss.

Leading by Stupidity

Obama Defends Cambridge Police Criticism in Henry Louis Gates Arrest - ABC News

"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."

As the immortal Forest Gump said, "Stupid is as stupid does". Where is that old "truth to power" deal now? Just try to imagine if we had a BLACK cop arresting a WHITE Harvard Law professor, "bringing the cops mother into it", and then have a WHITE President ganging up on the lowly black cop on national TV! (of course, the white president would have to be a Republican, cuz the MSM isn't much for criticizing democrats, no matter what they do.

BO and Gates should maybe look in the mirror -- tenured Harvard proffessor and President of the US are actually pretty high positions. Now if anyone still had any ideas that BO was just "caught up in the moment", this link is from TODAY ... he is defending his stupidity and adding to it.

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."

Say what? Every day normal Americans ought to be looking at "healthcare, the economy and the wars abroad" as they do their daily work, and THAT ought to be taken into consideration by a police officer responding to a burglary call??

BO needs to keep that teleprompter turned on and stick to ONLY what rolls across it!! That kind of thinking borders on complete insanity!!

Anniversary of Malaise

Noemie Emery: In praise of malaise Opinion Articles - Noemie Emery | Editorials on Top News Stories | Washington Examiner

As having had to live through the decade, I like the assessment in this paragraph:

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.

One can't get much more apt than "a slum of a decade"  as an epitaph for the '70s for at someone who "came of age" in that decade with HS graduation, college and getting into the work force as I did. Thank God for Reagan!!! The pain of the '70s was salved by the glory of the '80s.

This is a thought provoking analysis:

“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.

I might say that from my perspective "it takes a rise of the power of the MSM to create a true disaster" ... Nixon was no worse than LBJ or certainly not FDR on skullduggery ... it is just that Nixon was hated by the MSM so he had to be destroyed. Bush was hated by the MSM and although they did their best to destroy him, they didn't succeed -- which made them REALLY hate him! The "disaster" of the Bush years was primarily in both houses of congress going to the Democrats in '06 -- the slide started immediately thereafter.

BO has us set up for the kind of long term disaster of FDR proportions -- one hates to consider that we may end up hoping for WWIII to bring about an end to the BO  travails as WWII did for FDR.

 

Even "Moderate" Democrats Are Too Conservative

Harold Meyerson - The Blue Dogs' Can't-Do Attitude and the Health-Care Debate - washingtonpost.com

When your side has a 60 vote Senate advantage, it is hard to dodge responsibility for governing. When you are liberal, your idea of government is "Gimme That Thing ... and make someone else pay".

Who ought to pay? Well, that "wealthiest 1% of course".

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.

People that are lucky enough to have multi-decade successful careers, stable marriages, good investments, good health, successful private businesses or other such "good things" SOMETIMES get to the point were they get to that "1%" when they are in their late 40s or 50s. Since they got to that point, they paid high tax rates all the way through their lives and get to pay the full cost (and part of the cost of a few others) of their kids education in college along with full cost on anything else that is "income adjusted". That was SUPPOSED to be "the American dream". Many decades of hard work gave one the CHANCE to get A FEW EARNING YEARS in that upper level of income.

Now it is evil to get there, so there ought to be huge tax penalties that treat the folks that managed to succeed as some sort of a "redistributionist pinata"

I don't think so. Making high income is very hard. Cutting ones income is very easy. Nobody that got to the top 1% is stupid enough to send in well over half of the money they earn to the feds so it can be spent on the "pork of the day". If those awful "Blue Dogs" lose and Mr Meyerson "wins", then what we are going to see is an  "easy chair revolt".

Engine Of Poverty

The Greenroom » Forum Archive » The Engine of Poverty

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.

Here here. Good little restatement of the obvious.

Hopeful Suicide

Op-Ed Columnist - Liberal Suicide March - NYTimes.com

Being a supposedly conservative NYT reporter is sort of like being a moderate Catholic at the Vatican. While he may be LESS liberal than most of the NYT folks, that isn't exactly saying much. Therefore, he tends to follow the "left and right are treated pretty equally" view, so it is easy to see how he might think that the left is over reaching just like he thinks the right did in the early '90s.

Of course, the right "over reached" with such far out righty items as prescription drug benefits, Sarbannes Oxley, Hurricane Katrina (man, those righties are powerful) and "compassionate conservatism". For a couple of years those "steamroller righties" happened to have a whole couple seat majority in the Senate and couldn't get Miguel Estrada, a latino judge appointed to the federal bench because he was "too conservative".

The standard for "over reaching" toward the right sort of looks like a tepid move leftward, where I tend to disagree with Brooks that even federally taking over a bunch of banks, GM, running up multi-trillion deficits, cap and trading the economy to oblivion and converting health care to a political playground is even going to come CLOSE to be being as much of a leftware over reach as the Republicans supposedly made.

Bush was so "moderate" he approached being a RINO ... BO is so far left it really gets difficult to see where his views would differ from a socialist. MIGHT he be "over reaching" -- sure, but with the MSM all in his corner, it is going to take a lot of pain before the sheep figure out that "there has to be a better way"!

Engine Of Poverty

The Greenroom » Forum Archive » The Engine of Poverty

Read it all, here is a teaser:

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.

Blue State Meltdown

The Blue-State Meltdown and the Collapse of the Chicago Model — The American, A Magazine of Ideas

Not that the MSM likes to focus on it much, but the states that are in the most trouble are the most liberal ones. Our founding fathers wanted "13 laboratories" in which we could test the various theories of government and decide what worked and what failed. We have done our best to water that down with Federal rules and money transfers, but we have never been completely successful. The "Blue States" are in the worst shape of all because in case anyone missed Japan, the USSR, Western Europe, Cuba, and Chile, "socialism doesn't work".

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.

How long until the American people get wise to this? I have no idea -- but there isn't much need to worry about it. Just watch the Blue States melt, no doubt followed by the whole country, and EVENTUALLY I bet more folks will realize that "the rich" aren't the complete patsies that BO and company has made them out to be.

F-22, The Importance of Symbols

The remarkable vote to kill the F-22 and what it means for America's military future. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine

I like fighter planes, I have no idea how bad we need F-22's. Neither BO or Slate would be on my list of sources that I would want to go to for the specific advantages of the F-22 system, but one thing that I do have at least a reasonable grasp of is relative amounts of money.

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.

So we saved something between $1.7 and $4 Billion. Our federal budget is approaching $4 Trillion. $4B is 1% of $400B and .01% of $4 Trillion. Folks that are angry because the multiple trillions spent on "stimulus" money "wasn't big enough"! are giddy because someone decided to not spend $.01% of the budget on a set of new fighter planes.

Symbols are very meaningful.

The Lure of the Single Party

Hope, caught up in a sea of obstruction - The Boston Globe

For the majority of Democrats, trapped in the permanent adolescence of "I want it all and I want it NOW at zero effort to me", Republicans are as permanently backward as parents who claimed that resources were limited, curfews were for your own good and tomorrow and "never" were not the same thing. This whole article should be a must read for folks that still have just a smidgeon of connection to reality.

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.

Wow, the last time I remember it being "hopeless" was when Carter was in the White House. So why is it "hopeless" this time? Well, because we still have those damnable Republicans! That's why!!

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.’’

Yes, anyone that isn't in complete agreement with multi-trillion dollar deficits, government takeover of major industries and a foreign policy of apology to all  is insane! At least we can see that the "moderates" at the Boston Globe want to have an intelligent discussion on merits!

... 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!"???

Meaning of Military Deaths

We had five soldiers from MN die this past week in either Iraq or Afghanistan. I listen to MPR all the time, so I've had a reasonable number of opportunities to hear of the tragedy of losing our soldiers.

Today was an interesting departure for MPR. The person they talked to was a military person that had formerly had the job of informing families, so the focus was on the value of the sacrifice and the importance that the military places on dealing with the families.

Over the previous years when Bush was president, the standard MN military deaths reporting on MPR involved interviews with the family and friends of the lost soldiers and almost always included the obligatory voice saying something about "optional war", "we were lied to", "he went into the guard never expecting to be deployed", "this is a senseless loss", etc.

I'm often struck with how significant the more subtle bias differences are. The vast majority of people that I know of a somewhat moderate to conservative leaning either never would or no longer listen to MPR -- they simply get irate as to the level of bias inherent in the reporting model.

My sense is that with the increase in media forms, capacity and diversity, Americans less and less listen to each other. Many Americans pine away for the days of Walter Cronkite -- yesterday MPR devoted the noon program to an hour on him. The idea was "EVERYONE trusted Walter", and that was a GOOD THING. One man should tell millions what to think as long as he is a left winger!

Naturally, the points that were covered in the interview were that he was one of the first on Watergate, he decided the Vietnam war was going to be lost in '68, and it was interesting to hear him talk about "favorite presidents of his life", FDR and Kennedy. He didn't want to go to "worst", but it was pretty obvious "Reagan and Carter". Carter because he was a failure, Reagan because he successfully "rolled back the new deal" in Cronkite's words. Strange -- last I checked both Social Security and Medicare faired quite well under Reagan (HUGE tax increases) and it was under CLINTON that welfare reform happened. But I digress.

The point is that from MPR and the general MSM view, their ought NOT be "competing political views" -- we ought to all "listen to and believe Uncle Walter". We ought to all use our "freedom" to "freely" believe the same thing.

How does that happen? In general, subtly -- each little story about soldiers dying, the economy, natural disasters, etc is "crafted" ... naturally by the views of the reporters, not a "conspiracy" to fit into the narrative of their world view. All humans have a world view narrative, and we all have "confirmation bias" to accept that which fits our view and to reject that which does not.

So must we all just live with our own stories, not being able to understand each other and believing that there is no truth? In my opinion, not if we are willing to accept the wisdom of the ages and to fight the confirmation bias by being able to cogently argue as many points of view as we can. I think the best we as humans can do for knowledge is "approximation", but that means that some approximations are FAR closer to reality and truth than others and there is ALWAYS room to improve your own approximation!

Our tendencies are the same -- and will NEVER be completely modified, because we are all human, but it may be possible to temper them by at least being able to listen to both sides and ideally to be able to argue either side reasonably well.

Jail-order Brides

Jail-order Brides - Mark Steyn - The Corner on National Review Online

No question Bush is evil, and we all know how "chilling" the US "Christian Right" is with all their hypocrisy and "peeking into bedrooms". No reason that the US should have anything bad to say about Muslim nations.

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."

I'm thinking that if BO just sits down and has a chat with these people they will be quick to see things our way -- unlike those evil Christians and Republicans which have a tendency to be intransigent.

Captured Soldier Afraid?

U.S. soldier captured by Taliban: 'I'm afraid' - CNN.com

The US media needs to get to this guy right away. Doesn't he know we have closed Gitmo? Doesn't he know we have sworn off any interrogation techniques more stringent than saying "pretty please"? Most of all, doesn't he know that we now have the worlds most competent and respected leader in charge of the US forces, the incomparable his holiness BO, potentate of the masses?

Most of all, his captors know that if anything untoward was to happen to him, BO would be VERY UNHAPPY! Nobody wants to make BO unhappy, he may look stern and say bad things about you in a speech. That would be too much for anyone in Al Quaeda to bear, so I'm certain they will treat this guy fairly and humanely.

What else would we expect from them? They aren't like "Republicans" or anything evil!

Apollo, Murray and Cox

I had to read a nice thick detailed Apollo book in the past week as my way of celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing tomorrow. Excellent book, it ought to be on the top of the list for anyone interested in the engineering, planning, procedures and management that were responsible for one of the milestones of human history. Vietnam, Kennedy, MLK and much more will be forgotten, but "Man Walks on Moon" is one of those milestones for humanity that will be remembered as long as humans exist.

The book is loaded with detail and anecdotes about the people that dedicated a decade or more of their lives to the quest for the moon. The challenges of getting the F1 engines in the mammoth Saturn V to be stable ... 2 tons of LOX and a ton of kerosene into each of the 5 F1s in each second producing 1.5 million lbs of thrust each.

A lot of details on some folks that had a lot of responsibility but were far from household names -- Joe Shea being one. He took a lot of personal responsibility for the building of the Command Module, and strangely, would have been in the capsule below the astronauts feet if they could have gotten a com plug for him the night that Apollo 1 burned. He was devastated by the loss of the crew and always felt personally responsible, but he lived on with the pain and had a pretty successful life.

There is a lot of focus on the decision to do "Lunar Orbit Rendezvous", which was originally seen as "off the wall risky", but eventually came to be seen as the only reasonable way to do it.

Most of all, I'm struck by the fact that we haven't been back to the moon since '72. I liked this quote:

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.

First of all, we are no longer "this nation". The nation that put men on the moon had values, courage, faith and a spirit that is WAY different from the nation that we have become today. Could THIS nation put a man on the moon? I'm not so sure.

Of course, even if we could, going to the moon is primarily an ENGINEERING PROBLEM, and while it is a difficult problem, it can be done with known technology. It isn't primarily a "science problem", or a "social problem". Curing cancer requires massive invention, and there is a non-zero chance it is "impossible" (to do it and have a living patient with a reasonable quality of life).

The hubris of "if we can send a man to the moon ..." is unbelievable. Stop crime or end poverty? What would that mean? We don't even know what it would mean to do those things, let alone have any starting point as to how they might actually be achieved. It is very likely that the "cure" might end up being worse than the problem.

The moon was hanging in space for all of human history. We ALWAYS "knew what it meant" to go there. Once we had put unmanned landers on it, it was certainly "possible" to send a man there -- THEN, the issue was one of "merely" time, money, commitment, and the willingness to risk (and lose) human lives in the pursuit of the goal.

It is most often those who have accomplished the least that have the most to say about "if we can send a man to the moon ...", or "it seems to me it OUGHT to be done thus and so ...". Sadly, we now have a president that has accomplished nothing in his life save a couple good speeches and yet has huge confidence in his ability to do nearly anything. Knowing your limits as well as your abilities engenders "confidence". Being supremely confident you have no limits is hubris.

We once were a nation with the confidence to go to the moon, today we are a nation with the hu bris to believe that "we" (well, maybe the rich, the smart, the dedicated) could "do anything" -- if they would just get down to it.

We Came We Saw, We Lost Interest (Moon, Shuttle)

RealClearPolitics - The Moon We Left Behind

Just read it all. I'm half through "Apollo" by Murry and Cox that I'll Blog on later, but the lament of 40 lost years of the American and human spirit of exploration and conquest is a sad tale. In remembering and reading the histories of that era, we get some sense of the focus and passion that we lost.

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.